A Place Within

by M G Vassanji

  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?

  I am here on a fellowship at Shimla’s Indian Institute of Advanced Study, an extraordinarily generous offer to a foreigner. The Institute’s one previous experience with a foreigner, I have been informed, was not positive. Yet here I am, where I will live and work, and gaze upon the gods’ mountains to my heart’s content; I am anonymous, for most people assume that I am from another part of India, this diverse subcontinent. I am as strange or familiar as anyone else.

  We have been given the Postmaster Flat, a two-bedroom residence at the head of the long and steep winding driveway from the Gurkha Gate, and right above the defunct fire hall. This is presumably where the viceroy’s postmaster lived; I imagine the variety of post that must have passed through his—or his workers’—hands, Christmas packages, books and magazines, preserves, detailed letters in longhand linking Britain to India, including those of the apparently good-natured Lady Emily Eden to which we have now become privy. We’ve arrived in March, the winter is over; mornings are cool but sunny and bright, the nights cold and clear, speckled impeccably with stars. The comforts of the viceroy’s summer residence, however, are far from stately and barely adequate. Interiors are not well heated. The furniture is decidedly ancient, hailing from the Raj era or not much later, though some of the best antiques, we are told, were pilfered by previous residents—more well-placed ones, one supposes, than the poor scholars. The bathroom ceramic fixtures still bear the brand names of once extant British companies, the fireplaces everywhere are defunct, the carpets threadbare. But no sign of a threadbare budget can take away from the thrill of our escape.

  Our flat opens at the back onto a paved path, beyond which is a small green lawn edged with flower beds and with a shady oak tree at its centre; across the lawn from us is the Guest House, a broad, plain, two-storey white building. The upper floor accommodates occasional guests and the lower floor consists of a kitchen and a dining room on one side and a clubby lounge and television room on the other, with heavy drapes and furnished in the English drawing-room style. In the dining room, whose French doors open into the lawn, the scholars, who have been accommodated in houses and flats in the surrounding area, and who hail from various parts of India, those from the south typically in the warmest clothes, come to have their meals at tables covered with neat white cloths. In the morning at breakfast, a warm sunlight bathes the tranquility outside.

  The front door of our flat opens to a flight of wooden stairs descending to the driveway and the main building of the former Viceregal Lodge—now the Institute—in its ample grounds. The Institute can also be approached directly from the Guest House by descending a steep flight of stone stairs at the far corner of the lawn.

  The Viceregal Lodge is perhaps the most visited site in Shimla. It stands majestically alone, like a temple atop a hill, its beautiful gardens and lawns ideal for family or honeymoon photographs, an emblem of the Raj and historically linked to its conclusion. Indeed its prohibitive, almost alien, reserve gives it the distinctive look of a colonial object. Whatever the humiliations of the Raj, some of its reminders are treated fondly and proudly. Especially on weekends, a steady stream of tourist cars comes racing up the driveway spitting gravel, and foreign backpackers march all the way from the Mall to have a look around, sit in the sun, take a tour of the buildings.

  The viceroy’s residence was commissioned by Lord Dufferin, who had come to India having served previously as the governor general of Canada. The architect was Henry Irwin of the Public Works Department, though the overall conception seems to have been that of Lord Dufferin, who was obsessed with the construction, visiting the site regularly, often with bewildered visitors in tow, and always ready with suggestions. The design, with its Dutch gables, exterior ornamentation, mullioned windows, and cupola, has been described as “English Renaissance,” though the stonework details and second-floor balconies might suggest the excessive and baroque. The grey stone for the exterior was carted all the way from Kalka. It would not measure up to the best of English country houses, and English visitors generally loved to condemn it, but in its setting and with its history it is a striking place, reminder of a Shangri-La that was.

  The entrance faces the south and is reached from the driveway. Through the doors, to the right, a curving staircase goes up to the bedrooms on the second floor and the viceroy’s, now the director’s, office on the third. To the left is a seminar room and a corridor that leads past a gallery of photographs of eminent people to what once was the ballroom and drawing room and an adjoining dining room. These are now all parts of the library, one of the most extensive in the country, with the advantage that it’s never crowded.

  During the Raj, this was a bustling place in the Season, with a vigorous social and administrative life and hundreds of servants and officials. The population of the town apparently tripled in the summer, from a little over ten thousand in the colder season, and the English had a strict hierarchy of social status among themselves. Not everybody could be invited to a ball at the viceroy’s residence. Housing the academic Institute now, it is a quiet place we have come to, ideal for some, a nightmare of loneliness to others, and surely an escape to those not used to so much personal space. The town, the Mall, actually, remains busy during the day but is a long walk away.

  In this retreat we are not quite aware how the days and weeks pass; we simply allow ourselves to be. We take long walks out the Gurkha Gate to the Mall and, behind the Institute in the opposite direction, to the local market area and bus depot known as Boileau Ganj. Everywhere, we climb up and down the hills; during our very first outing, we realized that the baby stroller we’ve brought for our three-year-old is useless—the paths are not continuously smooth and often too steep. Sometimes we cook in the Postmaster’s kitchen, other times we eat with the fellows in the Guest House dining room, whose phoolka, puffed-up chappatis, we find difficult to reproduce. Early in the morning every day, with a knock at our back door comes a tray of “wake-up tea.” It’s worth getting up just for that. Inevitably, too, we have made some friends: a Bengali couple who have a son in Virginia; a Hyderabadi couple, he having just edited a collection of Partition stories; Bhishm Sahni, a Hindi writer, and his wife; a young man in a blazer, a nostalgic Oxonian. We’ve travelled by taxi down to Amritsar in Punjab, which is my wife’s father’s birthplace, a memorable visit. And we’ve been to Chail, a charming resort higher up in the hills that boasts two clay tennis courts and a cricket ground, reputedly the world’s highest, though it seemed that there were more monkeys than people in the town. My older son has taken to cricket, and hunting for a lost ball in the bushes with him has brought
back memories of my own childhood; it’s also given us rashes from poison ivy. Other times he catches up on school work. The three-year-old charms everyone, thriving on chappati and “rice pudding” (kheer), at the sight of which he’ll push away his chappati. Inevitably he eats the family’s entire ration of dessert. A thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle, occupying one half of the large, ancient dining table, is approaching completion, everyone in the family contributing.

  Finally, however, they have to return to Toronto, and I am alone, and there are intensely lonely quiet periods and yet also rewarding ones, as I sit, read, and write, and contemplate the vistas before me, strangely content in my solitude.

  The rains have come, and with it the scorpions. The spiders are immense but harmless. They scurry in and out with amazing speed from behind the door posts.