Almora

01From Champawat to the ridge

The Chands ruled Kumaon first from Champawat, near the Kali. In 1563 Kalyan Chand moved the capital west to a saddle-shaped ridge between the Kosi and the Suyal and laid out a new town, called Rajapur in the copper plates of the time. His son Rudra Chand went to Lahore to meet Akbar in 1587. The kings built the Malla Mahal palace on the ridge, and after victories over Garhwal and Doti Udyot Chand raised temples in the town in 1688; one of them, the Parbateshwar, became the present Nanda Devi temple when the goddess’s image was moved there under British rule. The Nanda Devi mela in Bhadrapad is still the town’s great festival.

02Rohillas, Gorkhas, British

In 1744 the Rohilla chief Ali Mohammed Khan came up through Bhimtal and took Almora; his men stayed seven months, broke images in the temples and left only after a payment of three lakh rupees. The court never fully recovered. Early in 1790 a Gorkha army crossed the Kali and took the town, and the last Chand raja fled to the plains. Gorkha rule lasted until the war with the East India Company; on 26 April 1815 Almora fell to the British, and the Treaty of Sugauli in 1816 made Kumaon British territory. Under the Company and then the Crown, Almora became a cantonment and a hill station, and in 1871 the Almora Akhbar began here, one of the first Hindi papers of the hills.

03Vivekananda in the hills

Swami Vivekananda first came to Almora in 1890, walking as a wandering monk; at Kakrighat on the Kosi, on the way, he sat in meditation under a pipal and spoke afterwards of the oneness of the universe and the atom. He came back in 1897 after his return from the West, and again in 1898 with disciples, Sister Nivedita among them. In 1898 the Ramakrishna order’s journal Prabuddha Bharata was brought to Almora before moving on to Mayavati. Kasar Devi, on the ridge north of the town, where he also meditated, drew seekers for a century after. Jageshwar, with more than a hundred temples, lies 35 km away, and the Sun temple of Katarmal across the Kosi.

The life of this place