URB Scribbles

Image from Wikipedia Talking of McLeod Ganj, what greater testimony of a colonial hangover could there be if not the name itself! URBScribbles tells a story here of McLeod Ganj’s glorious colonial past and a fading memory of the same. The administrative habit of the colonisers to name places for the colonised subjects after their own names was, so to say, their way of letting the world know that something has been discovered and brought down to terms. That vast stretches of nondescript land in greater parts of the world are waiting to be discovered, labeled, categorised and formalised by the “white men”. And this in itself was one way of justifying the “white man's burden”. Named after a British Lieutenant Governor of Punjab, Donald Friell McLeod, McLeod Ganj sustains the colonial heritage in its very name. In the post-independence drive of restructuring and finding a new identity for itself, the newly born nation-state made quick attempts to rename many old p...

If there was nothing special about McLeod Ganj or say Dharmashala, the place would not have featured in the writings of so many writers. It would have not featured in the to-do list of numerous travelers. It would have not been a destination for so many bloggers including your very own URBScribbles of course.  Be it John Avedon’s magnum opus In Exile from the Land of Snows, Isabel Hilton’s In Search of the Panchen Lama, Thomas Merton’s Asian Journey, Salman Rushdie’s The Ground Beneath her Feet, Pankaj Mishra’s The Romantics, or Rohinton Mistry’s Running Water and A Fine Balance, Dharamshala finds mention in a way or other.  URBScribbles too has been traveling to the place for years now to decipher the unexplainable pull that the place has on him. By November 2018, URBScribbles has made some six visits to upper Dharamshala i.e., McLeod Ganj, still ignorant about the condiments of its enigmatic flavour and still unaware to the fullest of its enthral...