Scottish Freemasonry in India did not stay in the port cities. Look down the old roll and you find lodges chartered in places you would not think could sustain one.
In 1867, Lodge Barton No. 475 at Lonavla, then a hill station called Lanouli. In 1892, Lodge Charity No. 783 at Bandikui in Rajputana, a railway town. In 1901, Lodge Cataract at Gokak Falls in Belgaum district. In 1902, Lodge Heather No. 928 in the tea estates of the High Ranges above Cochin, at Munnar.
Munnar is the one that stops me. In 1902 that was a very long way from anywhere. Getting there was so awkward that a Grand Master who made a point of visiting every lodge in his jurisdiction managed all of them except two. Heather was one of the two he could not reach.
Why they existed
Lodges follow work.
Where the British built something that required men to live together in a small place for years, a lodge tended to appear. A junction on the railway. A hydroelectric scheme at a waterfall. A hill station. Tea estates in the High Ranges. These were postings rather than homes. The men sent to them were a long way from the society they knew.
A lodge in such a place is doing something quite specific. It is the only regular gathering where a planter, an engineer and a station official sit as equals with something to do together besides drink. Read that way, a lodge at Gokak Falls is not eccentric. It is close to inevitable.
They lasted
The remarkable thing is not that they were founded. It is how long several of them went on.
Lodge Barton at Lonavla kept its centenary in 1967, with the Grand Master Mason of Scotland travelling out to conduct the rededication. Lodge Heather at Munnar kept its centenary in February 2002, with a rededication followed by a candle-lit banquet at the High Range Club and visiting brethren who had come from Scottish lodges in Malaysia. The Gokak lodge marked its centenary in November 2000 with four hundred brethren, wives and guests, the band of the Maratha Light Infantry Regimental Centre and a special malt whisky distilled for the occasion by two members at their own distillery and labelled with the lodge name. That is thought to be the first time such a thing was done in India.
A hundred years after the British engineers who founded them had gone home, Indian brethren were still opening those lodges.
And some did not
The other half of the story is in Calcutta.
Lodge St James in the East surrendered its charter in 1966. Lodge Calcutta Kilwinning and Lodge Doric surrendered theirs in 1974. Lodge Albyn followed in 1975. The reason recorded in each case is the same and it is not dramatic: lack of support. Senior brethren left for Britain, nobody came in behind them and eventually there were not enough men to open the lodge.
By 1975 the whole of the Eastern District was down to five lodges. In 1992 it was merged into the Western one and India became a single Scottish District.
Lodge Universal Peace was not closed but moved, from Calcutta to Secunderabad in 1996, which tells you the same thing in a gentler way.
What I take from it
A lodge in a tea estate a hundred miles from a city survived for a century. Four lodges in one of the largest cities in India did not.
Difficulty of access, remoteness, small numbers: none of these killed a lodge. What killed lodges was the moment the men who kept them going stopped being replaced.
Nobody in Munnar in 1902 could have known which of these lodges would still be meeting in 2002. What they could control was whether the next man was brought in and taught properly. That is still the only part any of us controls.
Historical detail draws on the History of Scottish Freemasonry in India prepared by Bro. Bomi S. Mehta, Rt. Wor. District Grand Master of the District Grand Lodge of India 1997 to 2007, published on the website of the District Grand Lodge of India (Scottish Constitution).