At breakfast, our host Ravi greeted us with, “I’ve just had four chillums in my friend’s house..!” before walking unsteadily over to our table to sit down. It was a Malana twist on the, Good morning how are you? to be expected outside of a region famous for its sold-by-the-gram attractions. Ravi told us that about half the men in Malana regularly smoked the village’s hash. Perhaps his assessment was in error: At his Top View Guesthouse, the other half never seemed to show.


Malana has successfully marketed intolerance. Non-caste and low-caste persons must wait outside the village for an invitation to enter, pay for anything they buy in the shop by placing money on the ground, and generally creep around on village paths being careful to touch neither the villagers themselves nor any of the sacred objects. There’s a twenty Euro fine for transgression. It’s the Be A Dalit For A Day tour, with an alpine setting and complimentary spliff before a Nutella pancake and a sound sleep.

Ravi was an outsider who had picked up his own collection of thousand rupee fines but loved the superb mountain perch and – not least – the chance to to make big profits selling on Malana’s famous product. As a user beginning his day with four chillums at nine, he is also firmly dependent on that product himself. By the middle of morning, with a warm sun showering life on the green valley, some of Ravi’s village mates would toddle up the slope to out hilltop guesthouse. Our small terrace area became an island of socialising, and those who shared the smokes seemed to follow his lines of thought on the world, on India and probably even Malana.

Four of us had hiked up to Malana the day before. We shared a taxi from Jari, dropped at the commencement of a path climbing for an hour and a half.. Now the hydro-power project is there, the relative isolation of Malana has been whittled away. . There are still impressive views to peaks at the head of the Parvati valley, but the HEP plant’s roads, ponds and sluiceways intrude on feelings of a mountain fastness, which must have been superb before. Not knowing if we were right proceeding, we halted at the first building we saw – the village primary school. Soon we were latched onto by a “fixer” and shown to the lodges. We found the top, Malana View GH had easily the most impressive position.

Not everyone in Malana was unfriendly. The younger people had had more exposure to visitors, and some of the women gave cautious, Mona Lisa smiles around the Jamlu temple, which we were forbidden to approach or touch.

In the aftermath of 2007′s disastrous fire, I saw both the good and the bad. On the positive side, houses have been rebuilt using the traditional wood and stone construction typical of Himachal. However, they were roofed on a budget: shiny zinc corrugated sheets now top the half-traditional dwellings.