A Place Within (20 page)

Shimla: A Spell in the Mountains

I saw

the mountains of the sages

where the wind mangles eagles

(A girl and an old woman, skin and bones carry bundles bigger than those peaks)

OCTAVIO PAZ
, “Himachal Pradesh
(1)”

The Sahibs’ Resort in the Hills

“Look, Hajji, is yonder the city of Simla? Allah, what a city!”

“My father’s brother…could recall when there were but two houses in it.”

RUDYARD KIPLING,
Kim

T
HE
H
OWRAH
M
AIL ARRIVES
at the Old Delhi railway station late in the night, at about 11 p.m., from Calcutta, bound for Chandigarh and Kalka in the state of Haryana. This is a brief stopover, and inside the second-class carriages passengers stir in their bunks to cast wary eyes upon their luggage as we board and find our places by the dim overhead lights. There are four of us, two adults and two wilting children. The journey ahead is seven hours, roughly, and Kalka is the last stop on the plains, from where we’ll catch an ongoing train for Shimla in the Himalayan foothills. The jolt and clang of the train stopping wakes us up in Kalka, a station vastly smaller than Delhi, and it’s a short walk across the platform to the narrow-gauge tracks from where the famous “toy trains” depart for Shimla, formerly called Simla, the romantic hill town in the western Himalayas famous as the summer capital of the British Raj.

There follows (past a few construction eyesores), a slow, winding train ride through a succession of tunnels and hairpin bends with spectacular views of the mountains and valleys. Mysterious snow-covered peaks in the distance; little towns, a hut or two hugging the hills; an ascetic on the road; tall pine trees rising straight
up from the valley depths just outside the window. This could be a dream. As children, we had heard of Simla, but only in the title of a famous Bombay film. How far, this pristine mountain beauty of the gods, from the tropical paradise of our childhood, the hills and plains, the wildlife, and the solitary snow-peaked mountain of Africa which also was a god. We pass cluttered little stations where passengers get on and off, where samosas and chai can be bought. The sun is bright and hard, and the mood inside the compartment is happy, even jubilant, for many of the travellers are tourist families escaped from the sweltering plains, crowded lives in crowded cities, monotonous landscapes. On the way we are treated to a dance number from the current Shahrukh Khan hit movie, performed by two schoolgirls and much to the delight of everyone. The men like to take turns to stand on the steps of the open doorways and face the bracing headwind and take in the sights in comparative solitude; in the tunnels the youths shout to hear themselves, and when the train bends on itself the young lean out to view its entire length while held onto tightly by a parent. Our little one is asleep.

Before the railway, access to Shimla was by a road; people went on foot or horse or mule, their luggage had to be carried on the backs of coolies or pulled up on carts. All the teak used for the prominent buildings of the town, all the furniture and all the needs of the residents were brought up this way. The narrow-gauge sixty-mile railway was completed only in 1903, its extra-duty rails going through about a hundred tunnels, bending sharply across the hills to make the climb, and running over high viaducts before reaching its final destination.

The first stop in Shimla is the small Summerhill station, the name indicative of the strong British presence here once upon a time, its memory kept alive decades later by the retention of quaint English place names as a tourist attraction. A steep climb leads up from the platform to the yellow blocks of the Himachal Pradesh University high above. After this brief pause the train hauls off to its final destination, the more substantial Shimla station hardly ten minutes ahead. It’s a little past eleven in the morning as we draw in. As coolies crowd the doorways, a friendly face hastens forward, someone I had first met on the Puri Express to Bhubaneswar during my first Indian visit a few years before. How it opened up India to me, that train ride which might not have been, but for an airline strike. Now I am back, this time to spend four months at the Institute in the hills.

A short way up from the station lies the main Mall Road, at one end of which is Shimla’s Institute, and at the other end its Mall. Coolies are already trotting up, bent-backed, carrying passengers’ luggage to their destinations, for not all roads are accessible to motor vehicles. A car, however, awaits us and takes us directly uphill to our destination, past the wooden Gurkha Gate, the name so thrilling with associations.

Himachal Pradesh, long a part of Punjab, became a state of the Indian union in 1971. Bordering several territories, including
Kashmir and Tibet, it is mostly a rural place in the mountains, the land of the gods, as its residents like to call it, with many ancient temples and untainted folk traditions. There are no major cities in the state, the largest town is Shimla. Travelling can be arduous if not downright perilous on the roads; planes go to some places but flights often have to be cancelled due to weather.

A spur on the western Himalayas called the Ridge is the high point of the town, behind which is the Mall, the fashionable shopping strip not more than a quarter-mile long, further down from which the rest of Shimla lies spilled out on the lower ridges and slopes. Progressively, one hears, the town is getting crowded, with people, with cars and buses. But it started out very modestly.

Shimla is said to have been discovered by the British soon after the so-called Anglo-Gurkha War of 1814 to 1815 between the increasingly powerful and upstart Gurkhas of Nepal, who after their defeat at the hands of the Sikhs had started overrunning local kingdoms, and the British who wanted to control them. A treaty was signed between the two parties to end that war, and thereafter Gurkhas became the legendary elite soldiers of the British Indian Army. In 1817, two Scottish officers stopped at Shimla, describing it as “a middling sized village where a fakir is situated to give water to travellers,” and “a name given to a few miserable cultivators’ huts.” One wishes they had been a little more curious or precise. What, after all, is a fakir—a yogi or a Sufi? Perhaps they only meant an old man.

In 1822, a certain Political Officer to the Hill States called Captain Charles Kennedy constructed in Shimla a two-storey summer house that came to be called the Kennedy House. The locale soon gained a reputation for its beauty—the pine-covered hills, the rhododendron forests, the oak and the fruit trees, the bracing mountain air—and European visitors began to arrive here to escape the punishing summer heat of the plains. By 1824, as the town’s dedicated historian Raja Bhasin informs us,

European gentlemen, chiefly invalids from the plains, had, with the permission of [local] chiefs, established themselves in this locality, building houses on sites granted them rent-free, and with no other stipulation than that they should refrain from the slaughter of kine [cows] and from the felling of trees, unless with the previous permission of the proprietors of the land.

In 1830, the governor general of India, Lord Bentinck, formally acquired four thousand acres of the Shimla hill, purchasing it from two local rulers. A residence for the governor general was soon constructed, and it was called Bentinck Castle. The following three governors general, however, were housed in a residence called Auckland House.

In a mere few years since the arrival of Captain Kennedy, so established had Shimla become as a little English town that in 1831 a French naturalist passing through described it as “the resort of the rich, the idle and the invalid.” Shimla air was considered good for the liver and good for the soul, it cleared the plains dust out of the brain. For the English, life in Shimla was even more ideal than the typical one of a sahib, for it reminded them so much of England, including the dampness and the rains, though the monsoons were of shorter duration than in the plains and therefore more endurable. There were of course numerous servants to take care of them, and liveried coolies took them up and down hills in hand-pulled rickshaws. Wild strawberries and raspberries grew beside the paths, deer strolled in the nearby woods, and there were leopards, bears, and golden eagles for the men to shoot at. We read of pony rides and parties, gardens and fancy fairs, dancing and fireworks, daily promenades on the Jakhoo road. In 1839, Emily Eden, sister of the governor general, would write,

Twenty years ago no European had ever been here, and there we were, with the band playing the “Puritani” and “Masaniello,” and
eating salmon from Scotland and sardines from the Mediterranean, and observing that St. Cloup’s
potage à la Julienne
was perhaps better than his other soups, and that some of the ladies’ sleeves were too tight.

And, Miss Eden said, “I have felt nothing like it, I mean nothing so English, since I was on the terrace at Eastcombe, except perhaps the week we were at the Cape.” Her letters provide some of the most detailed and enthusiastic descriptions of English life in Shimla during its early days.

In the British Raj (as the British presence in India was called after 1858, with a viceroy replacing the governor general), Shimla became the “summer capital of the Supreme Government [of India], of the Punjab Government and of the army headquarters.” Every summer, officials of the Raj arrived to run the country from these misty heights. The viceregal residence initially was a place called Peterhoff, perhaps half a mile up the road from the Kennedy House. Further up, a short distance away on Observatory Hill, construction began on a new, larger, made-to-order Viceregal Lodge, into which the viceroy and vicereine of the time, Lord and Lady Dufferin, moved in 1888. All three great houses lay on a single road along a ridge, ending at the Mall.

A young reporter called Rudyard Kipling would show up in the summers of 1883 to 1888, to report on the “Season”—the goings-on at this summer capital and resort of the colonial elite—for Lahore’s
Civil and Military Gazette
. “That in itself is fairly lively work,” he wrote in a letter, “…[and] entails as much riding, waltzing, dining out and concerts in a week as I should get at home in a lifetime.” He published
Kim
in 1901. The railway had not yet been built, and the journey young Kim makes from Kalka to Shimla with the horse trader and British secret agent, the Pathan Mahbub Ali, is on horseback. But the landscape Kim sees on the way, breathtaking to any mortal visitor from the plains, gets rather short shrift.
Kipling’s interest is characters, and some of them are wonderfully drawn, or caricatured. Shimla’s Lower Bazar, consisting of a series of parallel crowded streets that go winding down the slope from the Mall and are reachable from it via steep steps, gets a few quick but colourful strokes.

He led the horses below the main road into the lower Simla bazar—the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five. A man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India’s summer capital, so cunningly does veranda communicate with veranda, alley-way with alley-way, and bolt-hole with bolt-hole. Here live those who minister to the wants of a glad city—jhampanis who pull the pretty ladies’ ’rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn; grocers, oil-sellers, curio-vendors, firewood-dealers, priests, pickpockets, and native employees of the Government…. Here, too, Mahbub Alirented a room.

The Lower Bazar is where much of the local shopping for essentials still gets done.

After Independence, the Viceregal Lodge was taken over as the summer residence of the president of India, one of whom, S. Radhakrishnan, the well-known philosopher, handed it over for use by the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, which still occupies it. The fate of Peterhoff, outside the gates and down the hill, on the other hand, was to house the Punjab High Court, and it was here that the trial of Mahatma Gandhi’s assassin, Nathu Ram Godse, took place in 1948 to 1949. It burnt to the ground in 1981, and in 1991 a luxury hotel was built in its place. Kennedy House, the last of the three great houses of yore, is the site of the state legislative assembly.

We’ve been charmed suddenly into another world, both strange and beautiful, where everything suggests the small, the quaint, the different: different from the hectic India of the plains, from which we’ve literally been lifted up; and different from the tightly ordered, mechanical Toronto. Here the air is to breathe, the trees to touch, the ground to walk upon, the sky to gaze and marvel at. Time has slowed down. How has this privilege been possible?