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Archiver > INDIA > 2004-04 > 1080986873


From: "Nicholas Balmer" <>
Subject: Re: "dungah" Re: More Re: [India-L] Emam, Zuffer,
Date: Sat, 3 Apr 2004 11:08:19 +0100
References: <Law10-F357kVwyrXWWK00023751@hotmail.com> <005401c417fd$d4297cf0$8b64013d@pentium4> <002501c418df$785ad990$d3116651@Nicholas> <01d601c41947$48984e50$d565013d@pentium4>


Hello Harshawardhan,

Thank you for your note. Many of us find it hard to visualise the distances
in India. Looking on my 1820's map, Nagpur looks quite close to Dharwar, but
when you put it in kilometres, it is a tremendous distance. In Europe it is
the distance I travel from near Cambridge to my in laws home in western
Hungary.

There were many "bridges of boats" in all of the wars. I have long been
fascinated by military bridging. I have an excellent book called "One More
River to Cross" by JH Joiner, published by Pen & Sword in 2001, which is
mainly about 20th Century British military bridges. However it has like a
lot about bridges in India. On page 22, it says that Sir Arthur Wellesley
(later Duke of Wellington) ordered up a bridge of boats from the Bombay
Government in 1796 to use to attack Scindia.

However it never arrived, having been delivered late, and having been bogged
down on the road. Wellesley drew up instructions to locally build his own
bridging chain. The pontoons were basketwork, 10 ft in diameter, and 2ft
3in deep.

As a young man my ancestor had been in the south of India just after these
campaigns were fought, so it is possibly why he thought of these boats. But
I would imagine that there must have been a local tradition of building
these boats, because I find it hard to see how you could build such large
vessels in such a short time as three days. Just to go and find the skins
and tree branches to weave together would have been hard.

In India in about 1980 I saw several very large civilian pontoon bridges in
every day use, but they were all steel pontoons. If I recall correctly, one
was at Benares.

However a few months earlier I found a fabulous wooden one over a river in
Pakistan near Nowshera. It was carrying modern trucks, but was exactly like
the ones you might expect to see in a 19th century photograph. I managed to
get pictures, but was chased off by local police, when I walked over it.

Listers going to India or Pakistan should be very careful about attempting
to take pictures of either bridges however old they look, or even obsolete
forts like Chitral, or Attock as these tend still to be seen as strategic
assets, and you are liable to be frog marched into the nearest guardroom.

Regards

Nick Balmer


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