/ARTS WEEKLY/INDIA: Spirit of the Raj Lives on in Himalayan Village

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Rahul Bedi

SIMLA, India, Jan 28 2004 (IPS) - The spirit of the English ‘sahibs’ and their equally snobbish ‘memsahibs’, as European women were called in colonial times, still haunts the Raj’s once charming summer capital Simla, over half a century after the British left India.

Raj nostalgia pervades this once chic, remote overgrown Himalayan village, 350 kilometres north of New Delhi that rivaled Paris, Berlin and Moscow in importance in the 19th and 20th centuries and to where hundreds of tourists now flock especially during the New Year.

From its founding in 1864 to India’s independence in 1947, successive viceroys controlled a fourth of humanity. For seven months every year from Simla they managed an empire stretching from West Asia to Burma in the east and took decisions that influenced events worldwide.

Important events like the Anglo-Afghan wars, Young Husband’s expedition into Tibet and crucial military decisions during the two great wars were some of the many taken along Simla’s misty slopes.

The town’s bakeries and majestic, baronial hotels, once owned by Europeans, still serve roast lamb, baked potatoes and bread pudding, offer Pimms and Mint Juleps and Planters Punch cocktails.

Its many public schools, where chapel service is compulsory and whose students sport uniforms that even English schoolchildren no long wear today, are trying, albeit feebly, to cling to the colonial legacy in the swiftly changed environment that is overwhelmed by India’s unchecked, urban squalor.

A stroll down Simla’s main promenade The Mall, captivatingly portrayed by Rudyard Kipling in ‘Plain Tales from the Hills’ as the social watering hole of the colonial administration’s elite and where his hero Kim spent his formative, vagabond years, reveals the modern-day ‘Raj’ in a town that some years ago was renamed Shimla.

On display are Simla’s teeming holidaymakers and the deleterious debris that accompanies them, to the ungainly cement structures topped by rusting corrugated sheets crammed into tiered hillsides, all resembling a massive shanty township.

Once washed clean each morning by wizened mountain men with goatskin water bags tied to their backs till well after independence, the pedestrian-only meandering Mall also had a posse of smartly dressed policemen who politely ‘directed’ walkers to stick to the left side of the road to avoid congestion.

A dress code was informally enforced on the fashionable street and a senior English police officer who stayed on in service after independence was severely reprimanded by his Indian superior for venturing onto it in an open-necked shirt. Tweeds, blazers, flannels and ties were the preferred garb and none dared to violate these sartorial restrictions.

But 56 years after independence, such order and decorum are a distant memory. Rubbish litters The Mall, while rich and influential people manage special permits to drive up and down it, blaring horns that send unsuspecting pedestrians scattering.

" Simla has lost its inimitable charm, finesse and style," artist Harsh Chander Rai lamented. It has become a physical and social wilderness. he ruefully added, regretting the disappearance of coffee shops and amiable gentry to meet for ”engaging and intellectually stimulating conversation”.

Popular fast food parlours and eateries selling inedible hamburgers, inflammable ‘curry’ pizzas and equally hot Chinese food have replaced the Mall’s genteel tearooms, which once boasted of starched linen, wafer-thin cucumber sandwiches, delicately flavoured Darjeeling tea and wooden dance floors.

Tiny cubicles selling cheap cotton and nylon clothing and vacation-town glitz have sprung up in place of large, posh haberdashery stores and others offering an extravagant range of riding gear, foodstuff, reading material, furniture and objets d’art. At one time, these rivaled products available in London and Paris in style and grandeur.

Even Simla’s renowned bespoke Chinese shoemakers, who arrived at the beginning of the last century, bemoan the ”crass commercialisation” that forces them to display factory-made shoes imported from the plains and to convert parts of their shops into beauty parlours and fast food cubicles.

”The British taught us all about shoes,” Patrick Hugh of Hugh & Sons, which opened on The Mall in 1919, said. Nobody orders footwear any more and we are forced to seek other means of livelihood, he added.

Noisy video arcades and hundreds of hotels and boarding houses, some housed in buildings over a century old, have erupted with cheap neon signs and ugly hoardings, contributing to the severe water shortage.

Piles of unattended garbage lie scattered around, especially during summer, when Simla’s population doubles to 300,000 as hordes of people, like the British earlier, flee the searing hot plains for cooler climes.

But mountainsides denuded of lush forests by corrupt contractors have also played havoc with the weather, making it hotter in summer and rendering uncertain, Simla’s normally dependable snowfall.

"Once regal Simla with its stately homes owned by maharajas, obvious style and understated elegance has become a noisy, concrete jungle where the greenery is fast disappearing and the ambience already has,” said Rajiv Sud, owner of Maria Brothers antique bookshop.

”Simla’s architectural degradation began after independence when the grand English cottages and hill estates were subdivided to accommodate refugees fleeing Pakistan after independence and has continued ever since,” historian Raja Bhasin said.

This onslaught, hastened by Simla becoming the capital of Himachal Pradesh state in 1972, led to incompatible land and property use, ecological degradation including rapid deforestation, and a breakdown of civic amenities.

Built in the image of English seaside towns, similar ‘hill stations’ created by the colonials across northern and southern India as a welcome escape from the heat – where gossip over a seasonal dalliance would never reach home – have suffered a fate worse than Simla.

But efforts are afoot to recapture Simla’s ‘Raj and nature’ elegance by the luxurious Cecil Hotel on the city’s outskirts and its even grander sister establishment, the Wildflower Hall, 15 km away and 1,000 feet higher in well-preserved Mashobra.

" Most people come here yearning for the Raj. We try and give it to them,” Wildflower Hall’s activities manger Manoj Biswas said, adding that one of such service provided is a personal valet with each room.