Dak bungalows and Darra

Living in Kashmir 1979-80 : A Year of People, Places and Memories

Dak Bungalows

The dak bungalow, as far as I am able to ascertain, was a peculiarly British invention, modest, utilitarian, and a reminder of the Raj at its most practical. They were built from the 1840s onwards as official rest houses for travelling government officials and postmen making their rounds across the subcontinent. These single-storey structures offered little in the way of luxury. There were a couple of bedrooms and a verandah out the front. Often there was a cook attached to supply food for weary travellers.

My mother-in-law and I encountered one of these survivors on our journey through Rajasthan and the heartland of Mughal India. We had set off from Delhi with the grandeur of Agra ahead of us, the Taj Mahal shimmering, ghostly and perfect. Then the great red sandstone ramparts of Agra Fort rising from the banks of the Yamuna. 

The second day took us to Fatehpur Sikri, where Akbar's abandoned capital lay spread across the ridge in eerie silence. Its carved sandstone courts and audience halls were  preserved as though the court had simply walked away one afternoon and never returned. From there we pressed on to Jaipur, the Pink City, spending a day wandering the Amber Fort with its mirrored halls, pausing before the lacy stone screen of the Hawa Mahal, and viewing the Jal Mahal as it appeared to float improbably on its lake.

Somewhere on this journey, the precise location has since slipped from my memory, we spent a night in a dak bungalow that had been quietly adapted for the tourist trade. It was exactly as one might have expected: modest rooms, facilities that offered function but little more. The price was remarkably reasonable. There was something rather satisfying about sleeping in a building designed for itinerants, a reminder that travellers have always passed through, paused, and moved on.

Darra Adam Khel, 1980

There are places that lodge themselves in the memory not because they are beautiful, but because they are unlike anything else encountered. Darra, as it was known was one such place.

Situated south of Peshawar in Pakistan's north-west frontier provinces, Darra wore its reputation openly. Since the establishment of a small gun factory there in 1857, this dusty place of workshops had grown into the world's largest black market in firearms, where weapons of every description were crafted entirely by hand in minimal, oil-smelling workshops.

Card purchased depicting Frontier Gun Makers

Visiting in 1980, the work was plain to see, gunsmiths were bent over their benches, fashioning barrels and stocks with tools that seemed barely changed from the previous century. We photographed a workshop, the craftsmen, the abundance of weaponry displayed with the casual confidence of men who had nothing to hide. But it was in the streets that unsettled my nerves. Guns were tested there and then, the crack of a report splitting the air without warning. The testing of firearms in a public thoroughfare has a way of concentrating the mind. 

We did not linger.

1980 Gun makers in the streets of Darra - water damaged photo

One shopfront we did not enter, though its hand-painted sign required no explanation. In Darra there was a directness in commerce. Arms and drugs.

Hashish store photo taken 1980 when visiting Darra

This post first appeared on earlieryears.blogspot.com by CRGalvin