HIGH IN THE NILGIRI HILLS OF southern India, Sandhya Kumar climbs a steep library stepladder and, from the eighth shelf up, pulls out two vast volumes, as big as gravestones. Proudly, she shows me the title page: The History of Java by Sir Stamford Raffles, first edition, 1817, fabulously rare.
Across the aisle is an 1858 edition of Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice. Elsewhere in the Nilgiri Library in Ooty, the former British hill station now renamed Udhagamandalam, are some 40,000 books (almost all in English) covering the whole history of British India.
“Foreigners are amazed by our collection,” Mrs Kumar, the library manager, says. “They say there are books here that would be put in glass cases in their countries.”
Among those that the library, opened in 1858, does keep in a glass case is Ooty Preserved by Mollie Panter-Downes, the British novelist and journalist whose centenary is this year. She is best remembered for 850 or so pieces written for The New Yorker and for her engaging short stories, recently championed by Persephone Books, but Ooty Preserved is the real collector’s item.
She visited “Snooty Ooty”, 7,000ft up in the Nilgiris, in 1966 to seek out the last of the Brits, the ageing sahibs and memsahibs in their tweeds and topees who had stayed on after Indian independence in 1947 and who, with ever more fraying gentility, tried to pretend that nothing had changed.
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The book, an understated classic of travel literature, portrays “a little patch of England” that seemed “a quintessence of a vanished epoch”. Panter-Downes mingles with the stayers-on, by this time perhaps three dozen of them, as they buy their Rose’s Lime Juice and Wensleydale cheese. She visits their cottages and bungalows, with their “elusive flavour of the Swiss chalet and the cuckoo clock”. She potters around the graveyard of the Cotswold-like St Stephen’s Church, “among the vast 19th-century tombs, shaped like huge travelling trunks with domed lids, which would be unpacked, their occupants surely felt, at the Resurrection”.
It is a captivating book, wry and wistful, full of a sense of lives in Chekhovian exile, and makes a fascinating companion to Paul Scott’s novel Staying On. It has such a delicate English air that it could be a portrait of an English market town, full of complex social relations, gossip, and porridge and boiled eggs for breakfast.
Forty years on, the Brits that she met are long gone and their influence has faded from most of Ooty, whose dusty, polluted centre is now indistinguishable from a thousand other Indian towns.
But an English atmosphere still lingers along the country lanes that criss-cross the hilly outskirts, with high hedgerows that could be Shropshire. Up on its hill, the exclusive Ooty Club remains an immaculately-maintained monument to Empire, with tigers and jackals snarling from the walls, and framed photographs of Churchill and the Queen Trooping the Colour in the mid-1950s.
Its library is spick-and-span, a contrast to most Indian club libraries, where mould and mildew have taken their toll of H. G. Wells, H. E. Bates and E. F. Benson, and where Warwick Deepings by the yard (un- issued since 1947) linger as testaments to 20th century middlebrow taste.
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Over coffee, Mrs Fay Vohra, a lively animal welfare campaigner in her sixties, recalls the British whom Panter-Downes met.
“Miss Guthrie was still alive then,” she says. “And Mrs Wells and Mrs Turner and the two Misses Chaves. And Mrs Wildgoose. She used to park her car in the middle of the road. She said: ‘The police won’t do anything. They know I’m from England.’ It was usually the ladies, not the gentlemen, who were left.”
Mrs Vohra bought her copy of Ooty Preserved at Higginbothams Bookshop, where Izaak Walton and Mrs Gaskell share shelves with Stephen King and Wilbur Smith. It also stocks First Steps in Tamil, published in 1922 and still in print. Designed for colonial planters and administrators, it offers instant translations of such useful conversational phrases as “he talks thickly, as one who has a cold” and “the water in the rice pots boils with a gurgling sound”.
The manager, Chokalingan Krishnamurthy, recalls the “British days”, when children’s annuals and Noddy books were imported at Christmas. He spreads out the clothbound 1921 map of Ooty that he uses to help Westerners find their ancestors’ bungalows: Woodbriar Cottage, Hampton Lodge, Inglenook, Westward Ho! and Abbotsford.
One of the few Ootyites still to remember meeting Panter-Downes is Kalpathay Krishnan, a 70-year-old advocate and past president of the Nilgiri Library. “I am in the book, but unfortunately not named,” he says, turning to page 96, where he appears as “a young lawyer. “It’s a pity she didn’t put my name in. I would have become immortal.”
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At twilight in his garden of hibiscus, salvia and arum lilies, he reflects on the stayers-on: “I admired their wisdom. If they had gone back to England, they wouldn’t have had even a servant to clear up for them. Many had to stay because they couldn’t afford to go back.”
What would Mollie Panter-Downes have made of the town today? “I think Ooty Preserved would become Ooty Withered. Though we still have some nice places.”
One is the Gothic redbrick Nilgiri Library. Jeffrey Archer and Ken Follett may now be high on its issue list, but Queen Victoria still pouts imperiously over the fireplace and in the chapel-like reading room newspapers are still to be read at solid Victorian lecterns. Upstairs, in the sepia-shaded reference room, where Ruskin and Raffles await their readers, the shelves are stacked with 1840s copies of the India Sporting Review and a 1905 The Life of the Marquis of Dufferin and Ava, shipped out by a bookseller in Pall Mall.
The crows caw outside and the sun sets on the leather bindings and the gold gothic script on the shelves: Geography and Travels, General Fiction and Fine Arts, Physical Science and Useful Arts. One corner of Ooty is still preserved.
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Ooty Preserved is available second hand from www.abebooks.co.uk and elsewhere