Bhowali

Passersby like me know the little town of Bhowali in the Nainital district of Kumaon as a great market place for fruits. On our journeys north, we’ve stopped here every time (not a mean task, considering the crowded and narrow roads) to pick up a few days’ stock of fruits. This time The Family decided to take photos. I’d never really paid attention to the place before, but her photos revealed an interesting town.

Her most distant view, the one you see in the header photo, showed a picturesque town laid out on the slopes of a hill. I’ve always been too focused on the road to notice how nice it looks from far. The approach from Bhimtal passes by a school on the outskirts of the town. The road there is so crowded that my attention is always on it, instead of the view you have on one side. This diptych looked very familiar to me, but I’ve never had time to examine the different buildings and notice that everything except the school is hunkered down against winters.

The construction on the outskirts is all concrete and steel, but in the center of the town these old style buildings still stand. The oldest tradition here is wood and stone. There’s quite a bit of it in evidence in the center. The closed box balconies on the upper floor are common across the hills, but these are in a typically Kumaoni style. The cast iron and corrugated metal sheet next to it is a colonial style popular from the late 19th to the middle 20th century. That is perhaps the time when Bhowali grew from a village into a little market town on a cross road.

One of the buildings that The Family had captured was very interesting. It had boxed balconies in the traditional style, but the line of the roof and the fretwork decoration was colonial. Such a lovely construction deserves to be better preserved. The houses lining the main roads through the town are all built to have shops on the ground floor and living space above. I liked the modern door behind the balcony on the first floor above where the group of women have taken a break from their Diwali shopping. All towns in this district have walls with art work of the kind that you see in the last photo. I liked that boy not really interested in minding the stall with Diwali pottery.