Simla Then And Now by Vipin Pubby

Simla
Then And Now
Vipin Pubby
Indus Publishing, New Delhi
IRs 140, 1988
Review  by Sudhirendar Sharma
Shimla (the spelling in vogue) occupies a unique place in the history of ihe Subcontinent. If Britishers feel nostalgic about the hill station, Indians remember having been governed from the "500th floor", as M.K. Gandhi once remarked. Shimla became the workshop of the Raj in 1850 when the summer capital was shifted from Calcutta to this Himachal town.
Not all colonists liked the move. Lord Dufferin wrote to Lady Dartrey in 1885, "We have now come up to Shimla, an absurd place situated on the narrow saddle of one of the hundred mountainous ridges that rise around us in labyrinthine complexity." It was from Shirnla´s lofty heights, that Governor General Lord Amherst was able to say imperiously, "The Emperor of China and I govern half the human race and yet find time to eat breakfast."
Vipin Pubby has done extensive research on Shimla and has tried to capture the mood from !805 onwards. Enough Britishers have written about the (own, but few Indians have bothered to look at the town where so much of Indian history was made. Pubby fills the gap adequately.
The author obviously spent many hours in musty archives searching for the material to better describe the transition of Shimla from obscure hamlet to summer capital lo declining has-been tourist resort. The colonialists made the place worth living for the "well bred". Important conferences were held here, such as the Tripartite Conference of 1913-14, which drew the McMahon Line. The founder of the Congress, A.O. Hume, laid down the foundations of his nationalistic thinking while in Shimla. On his farewell, Hume said, "There was no nation on the face of earth that could rival India in its kindness and courtesy."
But just down the slope, the British were using the natives as forced labour to carry their belongings up from the roadhead at Kalka. Shimla was "power and glory", but it was also "picnic and adultry". For these distinctions, the town attracted its share of criticism.
Having achieved its zenith in the early decades of this century, Shimla began to slide even as the imperial government began to stagger, starting in the 1930s. This was the time when Gandhi, Nehru, Patel, Mountbatten and others held extended consultations here. The period also saw the struggle against forced labour, spearheaded by an American, Samuel Evan Stokes — the man who introduced apples to Himachal and made its future.
As the Raj wound down, the town quickly lost its glamour. Migrants from Pakistan were settled in Shimla by the Punjab government. Very soon, Himachal politicians demanded and received statehood, and Shimla became the capital. At least in aesthetic and ecological terms, however, its decline continued. Pubby recounts the uncontrolled growth of the town, rampant felling of trees, and neglect of sanitary facilities. Whole sections of the town, such as the Lakkar Bazaar area, began to sink.
While the high and the mighty no longer stop by, Shimla remains a tourist haven. Hotels, lodges and restaurants have sprouted everywhere, unplanned. The permanent population on this narrow ridgetop has topped one lakh and the decay is there for all to see. The words of an Englishman uttered decades ago are still relevant: "The whole town gave the impression of having been transported from Surrey in a badly packed parcel and accidentally dropped in Tibet."
Pubby does full justice to "Shimla Then" but misses much of "Shimla Now". While the period of the British Raj is very well recorded, the post independence narration reads much like a sketchy tourist guide.
Sudhirendar Sharma is with the Energy and Environment. Group in New Delhi.