Nainital

The Kumaon hills passed to the British East India Company in 1815, after the Anglo-Nepalese War, but the hill station was founded only in 1841, when P. Barron, a sugar trader from Shahjahanpur, built the first European house, Pilgrim Lodge, and wrote warmly of the site. Within a few years houses and a church, St John in the Wilderness (1846), had grown up on the slopes. The site was sacred long before that: in Hindu tradition it is one of the places where parts of the goddess Sati's body fell to earth, in this case her eye, which is what 'Nain' means, and a temple to Naina Devi stood by the water.

Nainital became the summer seat of the government of the North-Western Provinces, later the United Provinces, and the administration moved up from the plains every hot season. Boarding schools followed, and the town grew up the hillsides. On 18 September 1880 the hillside above the northern end gave way and buried the Victoria Hotel, the assembly rooms and the original Naina Devi temple, and 151 people were buried. The flats, the open ground at Mallital, were laid out on the site, a new temple was built, and storm-water drains and stricter building rules followed.

After independence the summer government left, but the schools, the High Court of the new state of Uttarakhand (established at Nainital in 2000) and tourism from Delhi and the plains took its place. The town is now one of the most visited resorts in northern India, and its problems are those of success: water shortages, traffic, unstable slopes built over, and a lake whose level and water quality have been a public worry for years.

Nainital is Kumaoni at its roots: the hill people of this part of Uttarakhand speak Kumaoni, a Pahari language, as well as Hindi, and their calendar of fairs, folk songs and dances survives under the resort. The Nanda Devi Mela, held each September on Nandashtami in the Naina Devi temple complex, is the main expression of it. Kumaoni Holi, sung rather than merely played, runs for weeks before the spring festival. The town also has a mosque, a gurdwara and several churches, among them St John in the Wilderness of 1846 and a Jama Masjid built in 1882 in Mallital.

The colonial inheritance is unusually visible. Sherwood College and St Joseph's College, founded in 1869 and 1888, are among India's best-known boarding schools, and the term-time rhythm of the schools, with their chapel bells and games on the flats, gives the town a life apart from the holiday trade. Jim Corbett, born here in 1875 and schooled here, is the local hero: the hunter of man-eating tigers who became a conservationist and writer. The Governor's residence, completed in 1899, is the grandest relic of the summer-capital years.

Sport is rowing and sailing: the Nainital Yacht Club, housed in the Boat House Club, sails a fleet of Half Rater yachts, and the annual Kingfisher regatta is held in the third week of June. For most visitors, though, the culture of Nainital is the Indian family holiday: the evening promenade along the Mall, a boat ride in a hired rowing boat, pony rides, candles and woollens bought in the bazaars, and a photograph against the snows from Snow View.

The town itself had about 41,000 residents at the 2011 census, and the number of people in it swells in the holiday season. Almost everyone depends on visitors: hotels and guesthouses, restaurants, boatmen, pony handlers, taxi drivers and shopkeepers in the two bazaars, with the schools, the High Court and the district administration providing the steady, year-round employment. The Uttarakhand High Court brings lawyers and clerks from across the state; Nainital district's headquarters is here too, though Haldwani, in the plains below, is the district's largest city.

Residents live on the slopes above the lake, in Mallital and Tallital and on the slopes of Sher-ka-Danda and Ayarpatta, where houses are stacked up stairways rather than streets. Mornings start with the temple bells and the schools' assemblies; the lake is quiet until the boats go out mid-morning, the Mall fills from the afternoon, and on winter nights the town empties and closes early. Water is the constant issue: wells beside the lake supply the town, and silting has made the lake markedly shallower.

The pressures of building on a landslide-prone hillside are the other daily reality. Many settlements around the lake stand in landslide areas, and the Balia Nala ravine below Tallital, where the lake drains out, has needed repairs and slope stabilisation. Plans to protect the lake have called for less traffic on the Mall and a ban on large new buildings in the town.

Kumaoni food is plain, filling hill cooking, built on millets, lentils and whatever grows on terraced fields. Bhatt ki churkani is a thick soup of black soybeans; aloo ke gutke are potatoes fried with cumin, chilli and coriander, eaten with bhang ki chutney, a tangy sauce of roasted hemp seeds; kafuli is a thick dish of leafy greens; and madua, finger millet, goes into dark rotis served with ghee. Gahat, horse gram, is cooked into dal and into ras, eaten with rice as ras bhaat. Most of this is home food rather than restaurant food, but a few places in the Bara Bazaar and along the Mall serve Kumaoni thalis.

The sweets travel better. Bal mithai, a fudge of roasted khoya coated in tiny white sugar balls, was invented in Almora's Lal Bazaar and is sold in sweet shops across the town. Winter brings roasted peanuts, hot gulab jamun and bun- omelettes from the Mall's stalls, and momos are among the cheapest hot meals.

The restaurants along the Mall Road, many of them decades old, cook for the Delhi and Punjabi holiday trade: butter chicken, tandoori platters, chole bhature, Indian-Chinese noodles and Manchurian, and bakery cakes with tea in the afternoon. Tea itself is the everyday drink, and there are tea plantations at Ghorakhal near Bhimtal.