Three Yarkandi merchants who visited Simla (now Shimla) in 1847 noted with astonishment the presence of a large British settlement on this narrow and isolated ridge that should have more rightly housed a few shepherds’ huts. The incongruity of this sight and the personalities and events that shaped its existence are what this deeply researched and evocatively written book is all about. Raaja Bhasin’s recreation of the life and times of the British summer capital reveals that the insulated and rather fantastic world that they created was the inevitable product of a ruling elite that sought to create a microcosm of “home” in an alien land, drawing comfort from its created familiarities and frivolities. Simla was where the British ran away from India and its burdens, and really let their hair down. Emily Eden, sister of Lord Auckland, wrote of her new home in 1838 that “this is to be the best part of India… Altogether it is very like a cheerful middle-sized English country house”, where even the rain felt like rain in England.
Mr Bhasin’s history, drawing on numerous first-person accounts of Imperial Simla written by a range of inhabitants – including Viceroys, women, army men and newspaper accounts – as well as his own meticulous research, is a vivid portrayal of a bygone era whose traceries, both visible and ephemeral, can be discerned in the Shimla of today with the help of this book. The book is divided into thematic chapters that manage to shed light on not just a diverse range of personalities through their interactions with the town and its people, both “native” and British, but also provide a valuable lens through which to view the larger political dynamics of British rule.
One chapter, for example, deals with the establishment of the Kalka-Simla railway which enabled the settlement of the town and the annual migration of the ruling elite which lasted from April to October. Built over 68 miles of arduous terrain, from an elevation of 640 metres to 2,060 metres, the railroad was an engineering feat requiring 102 tunnels, 800 bridges, and immense retaining walls; it is said that the stone used for the bridges and walls could circle all of India. Its building was fraught with difficulties and accompanying urban legends, like the story of Bhalku, a villager who is believed to have flawlessly envisioned the track to be followed by the railroad in his sleep. Bhalku claimed that this knowledge was transmitted to him by his devta through the intermediary of his head lice, which he kept well fed for the purpose by regularly pouring sugar and flour over his head.
Monkeys were seemingly a ready topic of conversation then as now, and the young Rudyard Kipling composed a poem to the “artless Bandar” loose upon the mountainside of Simla which also provides humorous insight into Simla society:
“I follow no man’s carriage, and no, never in my life
Have I flirted at Peliti’s with another Bandar’s wife.”
Simla was home to numerous eccentric personalities as well as the most famous names in the colonial British firmament, from General Dyer to Lord Curzon. Simla’s British society according to one contemporary chronicler, “resembles the solar system. There is the Sun, round which revolve the planets and their satellites … which are classified according to their magnitude, and their orbits declared in a ‘precedence table’.” This “solar system” was nothing if not detailed according to another tongue-in-cheek commentator, encompassing all from the head monkey-shooer to the apprentice monkey-shooer.
Some of the book’s most interesting details are, not surprisingly, about Simla’s hectic round of social activities which revolved around the amateur theatrics of the Gaiety Theatre and the fetes and gymkhanas held at Annandale. Participating in these events was a way to get up the social ladder for ambitious young men, as well as a valuable forum for India-wide matchmaking. While the Gaiety was the preserve of the British (and some bejewelled Indian rulers), a few Indian groups were let in towards the end of the season. One account mentions a Bengali adaptation of Hamlet, in which “Hamlet’s father was a Rajah of Cashmere, who was ‘cremated off’.” Gymkhanas at Annandale were frequent distractions from the pressures of rule, with the band playing “Puritani” while guests ate salmon from Scotland and potage a la Julienne, played polo and croquet, and had egg-and-spoon races. Lord Curzon and Younghusband put the finishing touches to the plan to bring Tibet under the Empire at one such fete.
Mr Bhasin discusses how the move of the capital was criticised by many for its enormous expense and the blinders it provided from the business of ruling, particularly after 1857. Nonetheless, Mr Bhasin’s narrative manages to illuminate how Simla became a vital junction for the British in India and provided a sense of home for the powers that ruled a fifth of humanity from its remote pine-scented forests, and he does this by seamlessly combining a variety of anecdotal and historical references in a consistently readable manner.
SIMLA
The Summer Capital of British India
Raaja Bhasin
Rupa Publications
488 pages; Rs 395