2010 September 6
by Prakash
Having earned the fame as “Apple State”, Himachal Pradesh is poised to claim the distinction of being a fruit state not only in the country but worldwide. But very few people really know how apple came in India and whose effort have provided us with the sweet and delicious apple we eat now days. Samual Evan Stokes was the person who introduced apple crop in the hills around Shimla.
Samual came to India with a doctor couple -Mr and Mrs Carleton – who were working with the Leprosy Mission of India. He wanted to work for mission in India For his decision he faced a lot of opposition from his family because he was heir to the family’s prosperous business of elevators. But young Stokes was determined and his family relented to let him follow his heart and Samuel landed in Bombay on the February 26, 1904. His voluntary work with the Leprosy Mission started in Sabatoo (what was then Punjab). But the extreme weather conditions forced Samual to take rest at Kotgarh church and recuperate. There, he explored the surrounding hills and the trail that was the old Hindustan-Tibet road. And soon he found himself in love with nature. He decided to spend rest of his life at Thanedar, called the “Mistress of the Northern Hills” by Rudyard Kipling. l He married a Rajput-Christian woman called Agnes on September 12, 1912
Though Captain R C Scot of the British army had introduced the Newton Pippin, King of Pippin and the Cox’s Orange Pippin apples to the Kullu valley in 1870, but they were strains of the English sour apples that were not popular because of their taste. During those days, sweet apples were imported from Japan to meet the demand of the Indian market.
It was during a visit to America in 1915 that Samuel Stokes heard about the new strain of apples patented by the Stark Brothers nursery in Louisiana called the Red Delicious. He bought a few saplings and planted them at his Barobagh orchard in Thanedar in the winter of 1916. Five years later his mother sent him a consignment of saplings of the Stark Brothers Golden Delicious Apples as a Christmas gift. The first apples bore fruit a few years later and were sold in 1926.
They were an instant hit. The divinely sweet taste and the inviting colour had the Indian market going crazy over them. Their popularity even spurred locals into planting Apples, rather than their usual crops of potato and plums. Soon the demand for the Kotgarh apples sky-rocketed and orchards cropped up all over the valley of what is today’s Himachal Pradesh, to meet this demand.
It is from these first few saplings that the sweet delicious Apples of Shimla and the Golden Delicious of Kinnaur became popular and Himachal Pradesh grew to become one of the largest producers of the fruit.
www.tribuneindia.com | HimachalPlus Wednesday, August 11, 2010, Chandigarh, India
by Shriniwas Joshi
Himachal is known as ‘the apple state’. The apple came here in 1870 when Captain Lee raised an orchard at Bandrol village in the Kullu valley. It was followed by Col Roreich, Captain Bannon and Johnson, who brought up orchards at Naggar, Raison and Manali, respectively. Alexander Coots, in 1887, nurtured ‘Hillock Head’, an apple orchard on the exotic varieties, at Mashobra in Shimla district. Samuel Nicholas Stokes, later Satyanand Stokes, a resident of Philadelphia (USA), raised a delicious variety of apples at Kotgarh in 1918. Maharishi Charak has mentioned it as sinchitphalaka in his treatise in the 2nd Century and in about 1100 AD. Dalhana describes ‘a ber as big as a fist and very sweet’ grown in the northern region of Kashmir, which suggests of an apple.
Amir Khusrau speaks of apple in about 1300 AD, which was given attention to by the Mughals.
Apple to India, therefore, is not a gift of the West as is generally believed. I also want to break another myth that apple was the fruit of Eve’s temptation in the Garden of Eden. It may or may not, because the Bible says, “(she took) the fruit of the tree which was in the midst of the garden”. Even the Adam’s apple in every man’s throat signifies the piece of forbidden fruit (not apple surely) stuck in Adam’s throat.
The names of Himachali apples have a foreign touch. The first and the costliest are the delicious varieties – red, royal and richard. Red was earlier called Hawkeye but when Stark nurseries of the USA bought it from the farmer Jesse Hiatt of Iowa state, it was named red delicious. Baldwin with reddish skin grows in Kullu and is slightly sour. It is very popular in New England, New York. There is a monument to this apple in Massachusetts that reads: “This monument marks the site of the first Baldwin apple tree found growing wild near here. It fell in the gale of 1815.
The apple, first known as the butters, woodpecker or pecker apple, was named after Col. Loammi Baldwin of Woburn.” Ben Davis in Kullu is known as Kali Devi and it is not known whether it has any relation with the original Ben Davis, which was popular during the 19th century in the USA.
A similar variety known as Black Ben Davis was grown in Arkansas and Virginia and, I believe, our Kali Devi is that variety. Golden delicious is a variety that I like but does not fetch much price in the market – probably because its flesh is yellow and not red. Granny Smith or Granny Ramsey Smith green apple originated in Australia in 1868. These are green, crisp, juicy and tart apples. It is grown both in Shimla and Kullu.
Jonathan is a medium-sized sweet apple with a touch of acid and has a tough but smooth skin. It is used as pollinator for the delicious varieties of apples. A popular 19th century apple, very widely grown in Europe at the time, and versatile for culinary and dessert uses is King of the Pippins, which is grown in Himachal too. McIntosh red is ready by late July or early August in Himachal. It is the superior eating apple and, in America, it finds place in children’s lunch boxes for it carries a reputation of being a healthy snack. It is native to Canada. Red gold apple is shiny red, medium in size, juicy and has light yellow flesh. Its drawback is that its size reduces as the age of the plant advances.
Red June is the first to come in the market and so fetches a good price. Yellow Newton or Ras -Pippin is a late variety. It earned its name from the story of the apple, Newton’s head, and their chance encounter that yielded the theory of gravity. As the name suggests, it is very juicy but its popularity among the apple growers is waning. There are many more varieties but I have discusses the important ones of, as Thoreau described it, the noblest of fruits called apple.
Tailpiece
An apple a day keeps the doctor away but an onion a day keeps everybody away.
It is fascinating to watch the growth of an apple from bud to mature fruit.
Buds
Dormant apple buds begin to swell in the early spring. The buds show a silver, fuzzy tissue then a green tip develops. This is the beginning of leaves; the leaves start growing, and as they fold back, they are called “mouse ears.” After a few days, closed, hairy flower buds become visible.
Continue reading »
- by Raaja Bhasin
In the late 1920s, my father as a small boy took the train from Lahore to Shimla with his uncle, Bihari Lal who had become an admirer and something of a friend to an American who had settled in Kotgarh, one of the poorest pockets in the Shimla tract. Beyond Shimla, the Hindustan Tibet Road as it existed then was adapted only for horses, pack animals and plain old foot-slogging.
It took them three days to get to Kotgarh from Shimla where Bihari Lal was helping the Quaker from Philadelphia, Samuel Evans Stokes set up a school. The journey now takes a couple of hours along a road along which huge lorries cart equipment to Nathpa- Jakhri, one of the largest hydro-electricity projects in the world that is located in the valley of the Satluj river that flows in the valley below.
The journey of Samuel Evans Stokes was a far longer one. It was in the years that my father moved up the dusty path to Kotgarh that the apple plants which Stokes had imported from the United States were taking root. While the school which had taken uncle and nephew there in the first place died quietly without a fuss, the ‘Delicious’ varieties of apple which had been developed by the Stark Brothers of Louisiana went on the transform the economy and much of the landscape.
Today, the apple-based economy of the contiguous villages of Thanedar and Kotgarh have given it one of the highest per-capita incomes in Asia. Around these villages, signs of the time may be there – hoardings that announce the latest cell-phone plan or advertise call-centres and air-hostess training institutes. But while they may be there, they do not dominate the landscape nor do they hustle people off to explain why a CD drive cannot function as a coffee-cup holder to a caller from the American mid-west. If modernity is there, these places still speak of tradition – and as an example, the odds are that you will see most of the women still wearing rejtas, long flowing –almost Victorian – gowns and dhatus, headdresses.
Born on 16th August 1882, the son of a Quaker millionaire from Philadelphia, Stokes arrived in India on 26th February 1904. He was coming to help in a leprosy home that had been established at Subathu in the foothills below Shimla, the ‘summer capital’ of British India. He had barely settled in when in April, 1905 a devastating earthquake rocked the area and nearby Kangra was severely hit.
Entire towns were levelled and things were much worse in the isolated villages. Samuel Stokes moved there to help in whatever way he could. The administration assigned him the work of going from village to village to assess the losses and indemnify the affected persons. Though assured of payment of personal expenses, his conscience could not accept this and he did not take a paisa for this arduous work.
Sapped of strength, from Kangra, Stokes moved to Kotgarh beyond Shimla and to the end of his days, this was to be his home. Long before he built that remarkable house ‘Harmony Hall’ at Thanedar, above Kotgarh – and named after the family home in New Jersey – Stokes, howsoever briefly, even lived in a cave.
Here, he married a local Christian girl, Agnes and worked ceaselessly to uplift the local people from the host of problems that beset them – including the custom of ‘begar’ where labour would be pressed in service for little or no remuneration and often worked under inhuman conditions. He took recourse to ‘passive resistance’ which had been used by his Quaker ancestors in the past for the sake of their ideals.
Backed by the whole of Kotgarh which bravely responded to his call, the government ultimately gave in and the system of ‘begar’ was abolished. Stokes’ action on behalf of the hill people commended him to Mahatma Gandhi who wrote in Young India: “No Indian is giving such battle to the Government as Mr. Stokes. He has veritably become the guide, philosopher and friend of the hill men.”
Soon after the repressive Rowlatt Acts were passed in 1919, Stokes became an active associate of Mahatma Gandhi and was even jailed for his role in India’s struggle for freedom. This gave him the distinction of being the only American to be imprisoned in the cause of India’s freedom.
In 1921, in his booklet National Self-Realisation, Stokes wrote: “Our immediate object is to make the Government of this land representative of the will of the people.” In the same booklet he wrote: “…ultimately Complete Swaraj, independent of the British Empire is the only goal for India.” For another one of Stokes’ booklets, Awakening India, Gandhi Ji wrote the foreword. Characteristically, he sought his own guidance and way with religion and it was in these years that Stokes converted to Hinduism and changed his name to Satyanand.
Harmony Hall, Stokes’ old home, still stands on top of the hill, surrounded by the apple orchards that he first planted. This unusual piece of architecture speaks worlds for the man that built it. This draws from the local style of interlocking horizontal wooden beams packed with dressed stone, and is combined with elements of the ‘western’ architectural experience – high chimney-stacks and large windows; in more ways than one, two entirely different backgrounds that were merged into a single entity.
Kotgarh valley is famous for its world class quality apples. The apple cultivation of the place was initiated by Satyanand Stokes who was an American missionary.
Samuel Evans Stokes, an American Missionary landed in Kotgarh in 1904 as a young man of 22 to spread the message of Christ and also with the objective of helping the hill people. He worked at the leper home in the Shimla hills of Himachal Pradesh for two years. Then becoming disillusioned with the missionary way of life, he severed links with missionary organisations and became a sort of a hermit, giving up all material comforts and living for some time in a cave.
Samuel Evans Stokes was involved with the spreading of Christianity however the beauty and the culture of Kotgarh had an effect on him and he converted to Hinduism and took a Hindu name Satyanand Stokes and made Barobag his abode. He found the climate and soil conclusive to apple cultivation (the apple production was at its peak in America) and in 1919 he planted trees on his 200 acres and they began bearing apples in 1925.The natives took to growing apples soon and today it has spread all over the Shimla hills. The Apple boom in Kotgarh improved the economy of the place.
He is the only American to have served in the All-India Congress Committee of the Indian National Congress. He passed away on 14 May 1946, having spent more than 43 years of his life in the country which he had come to change but which changed him instead.
Up & Away (Source :Outlook Magazine | Jun 08, 2009)
Climate change has severely affected Himachal Pradesh’s famous Thanedar-Kotgarh apple belt and other mid-altitude apple-growing areas
This year’s apple crop is expected to be 30-50% less, due to rising temperatures, lack of snowfall and rain
Studies have established that from 1973-1990 to 2000-2007, average winter temperatures have gone up by 3 degrees centigrade and snowfall has decreased from 190 cm to 95 cm
Apple farmers are now turning to mangoes, pomegranate, flowers
Apple cultivation is now shifting to the higher altitudes of Lahaul-Spiti and Kinnaur districts, though arable land there is limited
***
“The Golden Delicious is a very fine apple indeed and I am working to make Kotgarh the headquarter of this fruit in India…”
—Excerpt from a letter from Satyanand Stokes to his mother in the US in 1930
“We haven’t had a white Christmas in the Shimla hills for quite a few years now. And for the last six months, not a flake of snow has fallen in these parts,” says a despondent Prakash Thakur in Himachal Pradesh’s famed apple-producing belt of Kotgarh. It has taken a while for people here to realise that the climate is changing, the hills are warming up like never before. The days of heavy snowfall are all but gone, except in the higher reaches, and this has resulted in a slow shift of Himachal Pradesh’s apple belt to even higher altitudes.
Himachal Pradesh’s apple boom is credited to Satyanand Stokes, an American missionary (he later converted to Hinduism) who first introduced high-quality apples in the state’s mid-altitude hills in the 1920s. From a small orchard in the Thanedar-Kotgarh belt, Stokes demonstrated how high-quality apples could be produced at altitudes of 4,000-6,000 feet. Since then, Himachal Pradesh has been synonymous with apples, producing Rs 1,500 crore worth of apples each year. Stokes’s daughter-in-law, Vidya Stokes, a former minister of the state, now manages most of the family’s orchards.
“The last few years have been quite bad and people have slowly begun to cultivate other fruit,” she told Outlook. “But climate change has hit us the hardest this year. I expect production below 6,000 feet to be down almost 50 per cent because our orchards have had virtually no moisture this year.”
So what really is happening?
At the Y.S. Parmar University of Horticulture & Forestry near Solan, Dr K.S. Verma and his team of scientists have been studying changing climate patterns in Himachal Pradesh over the last 40 years. They took the average temperatures from 1973-90 and called it the baseline. “After comparing temperatures from 2000-2007 with the baseline, we found that in the mid-hills, winter temperatures have increased between 2.5 to three degrees centigrade. And with each degree of increase, the apple belt shifts upward by about 300 metres,” says Dr Verma. As for snowfall, which provides the vital chilling essential for apple cultivation, it’s down from 190 cm during the baseline years to 95 cm now. And while it used to snow in the mid-hills from November to April, now, snowfall is confined to January-February and only above 6,000 feet. This deprives the crop of sufficient moisture and chilling hours.
“This year has hit us the worst. Production below 6,000 feet is likely to go down by almost 50 per cent.” Vidya Stokes, Ex-minister, cultivator
Ideally, apple trees require temperatures below 7 degrees C for at least 1,500 hours during the growing season to yield a good crop. “If this trend continues, we might see apples vanishing from Himachal Pradesh, unless intervention in the form of low-altitude varieties of apples is made,” Verma says.
Meanwhile, farmers are trying—as best as they can—to adapt to climate change. The best apples from Himachal now come from the high-altitude districts of Kinnaur and Lahaul-Spiti At altitudes of 8,000-9,000 feet, where nothing much grew some years ago, apple cultivation is transforming the socio-economic profile of the tribal residents. Many of them used to live a hardscrabble existence, but things are now changing for them. Tsering, a marginal farmer in Kaza in Lahaul-Spiti, says, “Everyone who has any land at all is now planting apple trees. The extremely cold climate is most conducive to apples, and our apples fetch a good price in the markets of Delhi and Shimla because they have longer shelf life.”
Meanwhile, in the traditional apple-growing areas of Kotgarh, Jubbal, Kullu and Kotkhai, where the fruit has brought unprecedented prosperity to the people over the last 50 years, there is a measure of envy at the shift in prosperity to the high-altitude tribal belt. “They are today where we were 30 years ago. They are the new apple kings—extremely prosperous, with huge properties in Shimla and Chandigarh,” says Chet Ram Chauhan of Pamlai village, who has pulled out his son from a job in Shimla to help him in the orchards. “Earlier, we did not need to put in much effort for a good crop. A good snow cover ensured that our orchards got ample moisture and chilling through the slow melting of snow. But now, with little rain and even less snow, we are frantically trying to irrigate our orchards artificially, and anyone who can afford it is digging ponds to store rainwater,” Chauhan says.
At the bottom of the hill is Samathla village (altitude 4,000 feet) where Gopal Mehta has cut down his apple orchards and is now growing mangoes on the terraced fields. He has another orchard above 6,000 feet where he still has apples, but even there, worried about being overtaken by bad news, he’s replacing apple trees with cherries. Most apple orchards below 4,500 feet, where production has fallen drastically in the last few years, are being replaced by apricots, peaches, pomegranate and, in places like Bajaura in Kullu, with vegetables and flowers.
Warmer temperatures also mean more pests and a heavy dose of pesticide for the crop. This increases input costs, besides lowering soil fertility. As Verma points out, “Production is also coming down because increased use of pesticide is killing bees and insects so essential for pollination of apple blossom.” But these problems are virtually non-existent in the cold heights. Apples from here come late in October and November, are virtually free of pesticides, and are of good quality. Since it is a cold desert landscape, farmers manage to provide irrigation from channels carrying snow melt from even higher reaches. But though this provides an opportunity for exploitation of newer areas, the fact is that the high altitudes have very little arable soil and areas that can be brought under cultivation are limited.
Apple-growing in Himachal Pradesh is certainly in a churn. The next few years will see more high-altitude areas coming under apple cultivation. But what will happen once the mountain tops, too, become too warm?
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
KOTGARH.in Fan Page
Recent Comments