Dharamshala

The slopes below the Dhauladhar were part of the Katoch kingdom of Kangra, whose fort stands a short way south and whose rulers claimed one of the oldest dynasties in the region. The Sikh empire took the valley in the early 19th century, and after the Anglo-Sikh wars it passed to the British, who made it the headquarters of Kangra district in 1855 and a cantonment soon after. The name dharamshala refers to a rest house for pilgrims, and the town grew around one.

Dharamshala became a small British hill station with a church in the woods, St John in the Wilderness, where the viceroy Lord Elgin was buried in 1863. There was talk of making it the summer capital of British India, but the Kangra earthquake of 4 April 1905 destroyed much of the valley and killed around 20,000 people, wrecking the station and ending its ambitions. It remained a quiet administrative town for half a century.

The town's modern identity dates from 1960, when the government of India offered the upper settlement of McLeod Ganj to the 14th Dalai Lama, who had fled Tibet the previous year, and to the Tibetan administration in exile. Monasteries, schools, a medical institute and craft centres followed, and a refugee population settled on the hillside. Foreign visitors came for Buddhist teaching and stayed for the mountains. In 2017 Himachal Pradesh named Dharamshala its second, winter capital, and state offices moved into the lower town.

Dharamshala is best understood as two communities sharing a mountainside. The Kangra valley is Hindu and Pahari-speaking, with its own temple fairs, nati dancing, and the Kangra school of miniature painting, which flourished in the 18th century and gave its name to the wider Pahari school. Village life below the town still turns on rice and tea terraces, the Shiva temples of Baijnath and Bhagsu, and long family ties to the Indian army.

Above it, McLeod Ganj functions as the cultural capital of the Tibetan diaspora. Monks and nuns in maroon robes, the pilgrim circuit around the main temple, debating courtyards, thangka painting and appliqué workshops, Tibetan-language schools and the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts all belong to an effort to keep a culture intact away from its homeland. Losar, Tibetan New Year, and the commemorations each March are the fixed points of its year.

A third layer is the international one: students of Buddhism, yoga and meditation, volunteers teaching English, and travellers who came for a week and stayed a season. The mix gives the upper town cafés, bookshops and noticeboards in several languages. Visitors are expected to behave with restraint around religious life — walking clockwise, keeping quiet in temples and asking before photographing anyone in robes.

The municipal town has grown quickly and now counts about 53,000 residents, spread between the lower administrative centre, McLeod Ganj and the villages between them, with a substantial Tibetan community among them. Government work, tourism, education and the institutions of the exile administration are the main employers, along with farming and tea growing further down the valley.

Daily rhythms differ by altitude. The lower town runs on office hours, bus timetables and the bazaar; the upper town runs on monastic schedules, tour groups arriving mid-morning and cafés that stay open late in season. Schools, including Tibetan boarding schools, draw children from across the region, and many young people from the valley leave for Chandigarh, Delhi or the Gulf for work.

The pressures are familiar in Himalayan towns: building on steep ground, water supply under strain in the dry months, traffic on a road never designed for it, and waste disposal. The earthquake risk is taken seriously in a valley that remembers 1905. State offices arriving with winter-capital status have brought new building to the lower town, while McLeod Ganj remains built around the institutions of the exile community.

Tibetan cooking is what most visitors come for. Momos, dumplings of minced meat or vegetables, are steamed, fried or served in soup; thukpa and thenthuk are noodle soups, the second with hand-pulled pieces of dough; tingmo is a plain steamed bread eaten with stews. Butter tea, churned with salt, is an acquired taste, and sweet milky Tibetan tea is the alternative. Laphing, a cold spicy mung-bean noodle, is sold from small counters in the upper town, and bakeries run by the community make brown bread, apple pie and cheesecake, a legacy of decades of foreign visitors.

The Kangra valley's own food is quieter and harder to find in restaurants. The dham, cooked for weddings and temple feasts, is a sequence of rice with madra of chickpeas or kidney beans in yoghurt, sour lentil preparations and a sweet rice dish; siddu, a steamed stuffed bread eaten with ghee, is a hill winter staple. Rajma with rice, maize roti and local red rice appear on valley tables.

Kangra tea, grown on plantations around Palampur since the 1850s, is the district's best-known product, lighter than Assam and sold loose in the bazaars. Street food in Kotwali Bazaar runs to samosas, pakoras and jalebi, and in McLeod Ganj to fresh juices, thukpa from a pot and chai from glasses on the square.