In Kasar Devi, Uttarakhand: A Luxury Boutique Hotel That Dissolves Into The Landscape

"Would you like a Shih Tzu puppy?" asked the affable young man working for Pawan Hans upon my arrival at Dehradun Airport — he was overwhelmed with a litter of five-week-old puppies. (Pawan Hans, a government-run helicopter service, operates flights to remote parts of India.)

The offer was unusual, but since I already live with three dogs, I declined. Besides, my mind was more on the Kasar Devi Temple. I was reaching it by chopper to a band-aid-sized airport at Almora, the closest town. 

Lifting from Dehradun, fields and forests unfurled beneath me, silver rivers wreathed through scattered villages. Hills rose and folded into deep green valleys, terraced with gold and dusty emerald shades of leaf cover. Near Almora, pines thickened, the air sharpened, snow-hatted mountains appeared like joinery between earth and sky.

At The Kumaon. Photo: The Kumaon

A dirt track led me to The Kumaon, a ten-bedroom luxury boutique hotel founded by Dr Vikrom Mathur, an eminent environmentalist with a doctorate from Oxford University; he helms Transitions Research, a cutting-edge think tank in North Goa. Mathur and his business partners commissioned Colombo-based Zowa Architects, the studio co-founded by Jineshi Samaraweera and Pradeep Kodikara, to create a property — also my home through my visit — that is a masterclass in sensitive, site-responsive architecture. 

Special to The Kumaon is how its form dissolves into the landscape. Low-key luxe rooms with private terraces overlook layered natural courtyards, the creation palette chiefly locally sourced stone, bamboo — and poured concrete. Rooms and galleries effortlessly frame glorious views of Himalayan caps. Kodikara and Samaraweera ran with the baton of Sri Lanka modernism and pitched camp in the Himalayas to create a design language that is its own singular thing.

Leopards are a regular here. Photo: The Kumaon

On my evening walk, through oaks and myrtles, the terrain burned with a powerful, noble quality. A leopard had recently attacked a cow, which the villagers had buried where it was found. A few stones marked the gravesite; even at a site of loss, sacred air persisted. In the distance, rhododendrons bloomed — red, wild, and true — and a scent of lichen, rain-soaked earth, dry leaves; something timeless.

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Driving through narrow, circuitous roads to the temple, I passed stores stocked with local honey and nettle tea, boutiques that worked with women's collectives to make woollen toys for children, and cafés with million-dollar views but ugly furniture, selling sad slices of apple crumble. A renaissance on the slopes brought in Russian and Israeli tourists by the truckload (quite literally — big groups rattling along in open trucks). 

Dr Mathur accompanied me to Kasar Devi, telling me how he first came here as a child, enchanted by the small town of Almora and the decency of the locals, but mostly by the jungle further up, surrounding the ancient temples of Jageshwar. Here cedars stand in tall stillness, like monks absorbed in prayer; the hill fox urges cries of panic among ghostly-looking langurs. A Himalayan whistling thrush propels a song, a silvery question in the cold. The Kumaon had been his long-cherished dream — to create a refuge here for his children, and in doing so, he had created an elegant haven for other explorers as well.

Kasar Devi Temple, a stone's throw from The Kumaon. Photo: Ananya Bhattacharya

Presently, the car pulled up before a few food stalls at the base of Kasar Devi. The ascension to the temple — a long, high path — is flanked with pines, and it feels as if they are carrying you away from the familiar world. Now Dr Mathur pointed to a cave where Swami Vivekananda once sat in meditation. It was under the main temple, and here the great sage had experienced currents of power he described as "rare and potent."

DH Lawrence came not long after, chasing the hard, clean light that might cauterise his fevers. I imagined Allen Ginsberg standing on a nearby promontory, verse foaming in his mind. Lama Anagarika Govinda wrote of this village in The Way of the White Clouds — less a settlement and more a flame that burned down the unnecessary to hold the essential.

Swami Vivekananda visited the Kasar Devi temple in 1890, and meditated in a cave nearby. Photo: Ananya Bhattacharya

Long before scientists discovered that the ridge falls within a rare electromagnetic field — an energetic equal only to Stonehenge and Machu Picchu — the sages had already intuited what instruments would later confirm: that some places are more awake than others. You experience it here not in grand visions but in subtle adjustments of the body — the mind opening, as a window might to a gust; sediment in the heart settles.

The temple does not ask to be entered. It enters you, quietly, before you notice, to remake you from within. At one point, I wondered — what was my story here? Man Visits Temple! But seekers before me had come not because Kasar Devi was their destination. They had come here, as I had — because we had been lost. But none of us imagined that this might be a homecoming.

On a clear day, the Himalayan caps from The Kumaon. Photo: The Kumaon

Below the temple, a rock appears suspended in the air. I sat there to gaze at the setting sun. A scorpion emerged from the dirt. In Egypt, the scorpion was never a threat; it was a sentinel, associated with the goddess Serqet; it stood at the crossroads of breath and afterlife, shielding souls from poison and secret harm. According to Jung, it represented the shadow self — to meet a scorpion was to encounter what was buried: hunger, fear, doubt, the terrible lusts. 

As the scorpion disappeared, my eye met the horizon, which seemed to have no end. I wondered if someone was going to adopt that Shih Tzu puppy. May I should have? That, perhaps, would have been the story.

(Siddharth Dhanvant Shanghvi is the bestselling author of The Last Song of Dusk and other books. His works have been translated into twelve languages.)

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