Modern Shimla is no cosy retreat in the mountains but a city of considerable scale, home to 150,000, spread out over five hills and liberally sprinkled with concrete apartment blocks.
On the steep street outside the station there is a chaos of drivers, passengers and vehicles manoeuvring in an impossibly small space. Once away from this bottleneck our taxi crawls slowly round the side of the hill and along the Mall until we reach the Cecil Hotel.
This famous Shimla landmark has been extensively and, I should imagine, expensively, restored.
The room is lovely and, as darkness falls, I just want to throw open the balcony doors and taste the freshest air since we left the mountain valleys of the Karakoram.
As soon as I do so my telephone rings and I’m politely but firmly requested not to, as monkeys will get into my room. Monkeys are a big problem, they assure me. Big enough to install sensors in my tall, tempting balcony doors to sound an alarm whenever I open them.
Day Thirty Four : Shimla
Wake to grey skies and rain. Filming delayed till the weather clears. Retire to the best bed on the journey so far and read the Dalai Lama’s book The Art of Happiness. We have been granted an audience with him in a few days’ time and I began the book a little out of duty. Now I find I’m getting a lot out of it. There is something infectious about his optimism, an optimism which comes from confronting rather than avoiding the unacceptable and acknowledging, understanding and demystifying it.
An hour later the clouds have passed over and I can see a crystal clear sky beyond my monkey-besieged windows.
I can see the enemy clearly. They move in family groups along the wall opposite, scratching themselves and ambling rather cockily along, until some commotion breaks out and they race in all directions, shrieking and snarling.
I gaze out in frustration, feeling an unlikely empathy with those mega popstars, besieged in hotel rooms by their fans.
From being just a summer hideaway, Shimla grew to become the nerve centre of Britain’s Indian empire for eight months of the year and in 1888 a building considered appropriate for this role was completed. The Vice-Regal Lodge is an extraordinary edifice. Built at the top of a hill and the peak of Victorian self-confidence, it is authority made manifest, superiority set in stone. The British relationship with India changed in the 1860s, after the bloodshed of the Indian Mutiny, or the first War of Independence, as most Indians call it. What had been a loosely commercial enterprise, a sort of mercantile laissez-faire, began to be seen as a moral obligation. Previously relaxed relations between British and Indians were discouraged. Better communications meant that wives and families could come out to India, ending inter-marriage with locals. The army was strengthened and concentrated in well-armed cantonments.
‘Keeping India at bay’, is how my friend Raaja sums up this new imperial vision, as we walk in the gardens of the Lodge this morning. In his view, the sombre grey walls that rise above us represented a deliberate attempt by the British to recreate the island mentality in India. The Vice-Regal Lodge stood not just for power, but for permanence.
Permanence lasted less than 60 years and to add insult to injury many of the most important talks that led to the departure of the British took place behind these grandiose faux-baronial walls. All the founders and future leaders of India and Pakistan at one time trooped in below the lions rampant that stand guard above the carved stone portals.
‘Gandhi disliked it,’ says Raaja. ‘While everybody else came in rickshaws, two men pushing and two men pulling, Gandhi walked.’
Mountbatten, the man charged with giving India its independence, met the leaders of the Princely States here, reminding himself of who the most important ones were by using the mnemonic ‘Hot kippers make good breakfast’. Hyderabad, Kashmir, Mysore, Gwalior and Baroda.
The fact that the monumental Vice-Regal Lodge still stands is hardly surprising. It would probably need some controlled nuclear device to take down these massive walls, but the fact that it is so well maintained, with gardeners sweeping immaculate lawns and carefully raking the gravel on the forecourt, says a lot about the attitude of the Indians after independence.
‘There was no wholesale desecration of imperial buildings in Shimla,’ says Raaja. ‘Everything was left pretty much as it was.’
The Vice-Regal Lodge has been reborn as an Institute for South-East Asian Affairs. The Ballroom is now a library. Functional shelf stacks fill a floor that in its heyday had hundreds of dancers swirling across it, themed perhaps in Chinese or Regency fancy dress. Though chandeliers still hang from its ceiling, the spot where the orchestra played is now marked by a large sign that reads ‘Silence’.
An index board showing where books can be located still uses vice-regal descriptions like State Lounge and Fan Room. Social Sciences can be found in the Ballroom, the Tibetan Collection in the Pantry, and copies of The Muslim World and American Scientist sit side by side in the Dining Hall.
Modesty and earnestness has replaced display and grandeur. Entertainment has given way to enlightenment. This bastion of British certainty has become a place of enquiry, curiosity and debate. Three very Indian preoccupations.
The imposing site on which Shimla is built can best be seen from the Ridge, a long, thin, open area that stands at the narrowest point of the bluff. It’s a watershed, with rivers on one side running east to the Bay of Bengal, and on the other, west into the Arabian Sea.
This afternoon it’s thronged with holiday strollers eating pizza and ice cream. Though the milling tourists are almost entirely Indian, the centre of the town still lives up to its description as ‘a little bit of Cheltenham in India’. Statues of Mahatma and Indira Gandhi are overshadowed by the tall Gothic Revival tower of Christ Church dominating one end of the Ridge, looking yellow, blotchy and feverish with plants pushing up out of holes in its red, corrugated-iron roof. A little way down the hill is the Arts and Crafts Style Town Hall, about the only building in town with a slate roof (Raaja tells me that corrugated iron is preferred because monkeys pull the tiles out).
A flight of steps leads down from the Ridge to another Cheltenham-ish landmark, the Gaiety Theatre. It was built about the same time as the Vice-Regal Lodge, as a home for a thriving amateur dramatic club in Shimla, which gave its first performance in 1838. With few women around at that time, the female roles had to be taken by army officers, one of whom refused to shave his moustache off for a love scene.
A heavy stone exterior gives little indication of the little gem of an auditorium inside. Horseshoe shaped and decorated with carved wood and plaster of Paris stucco, it has a dress circle supported by slender columns with gold-leaf capitals. The stage, spacious for a theatre that only seats 200, has been graced by Kipling, Baden-Powell, who later founded the Boy Scouts, and more recently Felicity Kendall and legendary Indian stars like the singer K. L. Saighal and the Bollywood actor Anupam Kher.
Our visit has coincided with a performance of an early play by Michael Frayn, called Chinamen. With huge successes running currently on Broadway and in the West End, I imagine this is quite a coup for them, and have taken the trouble to ring Michael and solicit a message of support for the cast.
The director, Mrs Neelam Dewan, thanks me profusely for this, as she had been given a copy of the play without a front page and didn’t know who the author was.
She seems a little harassed. Last night’s performance had been spoiled by mass amnesia on the part of the actors.