Passage through India – Shimla in the Himalayas

“Shimla may have been called the summer capital, but for all practical purposes this was the real Capital of India as the Government of India stayed there for the better part of the year moving down to Calcutta and later to New Delhi only during the winter months.  As the summer capital of the British Raj, Shimla came to be known as ‘the workshop of the Empire’.” – Ashok Kumar, “A Journey into the Past”

The hotel in Shimla was very nice but built of several levels and terraces which made it rather confusing.  We approved our room and then I returned up several steps of stairs to the bar to order a beer.

When I got there I was gasping for breath and I wondered if I was having a medical incident but as it turned out it was all down to the altitude.  We were now two thousand, two hundred metres above sea level (about a quarter of the way to the top of nearby Mount Everest) and that is about two thousand, one hundred and fifty metres higher than where we live almost at sea level in Grimsby on the east coast of the UK.

From the top floor of the hotel there was a magnificent view over the Himalayas…

For our day in Shimla we were joined today by local guide and expert Sanjay Jadhur who met us at the former British Viceroy’s Lodge at the top of the city in the Observatory Hills.

It was designed by the British architect Henry Irwin and built in the Jacobean style, drew inspiration from the architectural style of the English Renaissance but also reflects elements of the castles of the Scottish Highlands. The building is of light blue-grey stone masonry with tiled pitch roofing. The interior  is noted for elaborate woodwork, teak was brought from Burma and was supplemented by local cedar wood and walnut.

It is a very grand building but it has to be said but it didn’t impress renowned architect Edwin Lutyens who  said of it – “If one was told that monkeys had built it, one could only say, ‘What wonderful monkeys — they must be shot in case they do it again.’ “

Shimla is spread across seven hills in the northwest Himalayas among lush valleys and forests of oak, rhododendron and pine is the capital of Himachal Pradesh that was once the summer capital of colonial India and even today there is still more than a hint of the Raj about it.

An interesting visit, wonderful gardens and great views followed by a brief tour of the interior of the Lodge, not a lot of it, just a couple of rooms where there was a photographic display of the final days of Empire and a gathering of all concerned to thrash out the details of withdrawal, independence and partition.  What struck me was that there were no photographs of Mountbatten or the British delegation which I thought was rather odd.

What had become obvious over the last two weeks was that in India there is little respect or regard for the British Empire or for Earl Mountbatten, who it seems made a dreadful mess of his most important job, but nevertheless he was an important player throughout 1947 so I was surprised to find no reference to him at all in the galleries.

Next up was a visit to a Hindu Temple, I forgot to note the name but I think it was the Sankat Mochan temple somewhere close to the centre of the city.

Now, I don’t want to be disrespectful here but a visit to a Hindu Temple is not especially thrilling I have to say.  A Muslim Mosque isn’t very thrilling either because they are plain and boring but a Hindu Temple is quite the opposite with an accumulation of random bric-a-brac and gaudy decoration like visiting an aged relatives house who has collected a load of junk over the years and leaves out proudly on display to impress visitors.

I suppose it would help to have an understanding of the Hindu faith but unfortunately my knowledge is a complete blank on this one.

Leaving the Temple we moved on to the heart of the colonial city, the Ridge and the Mall and this was a real shock.  We had come to see the real India but here suddenly we were in the heartlands of Tory Britain, this was like Chester, Stratford-upon-Avon or Weybridge in Surrey because this is where the British ex-pats built a town where they felt at home, where they recreated town life in Great Britain.

We walked past a  mock-Tudor post office to one side then on past the slate-roofed, slightly Welsh looking Town Hall, to reach the town square at the end of The Ridge and a Tudor style library and Victorian Gothic Christian Church with its very English village appearance.  Suddenly we were in the Cotswolds.   There was even a mechanical street sweeper lurking in a corner ready to deal with a shred of litter.  It is almost like a theme park and it reminded me immediately of Walt Disney EPCOT World Showcase where there is the recreation of an English town much like this.

Here is EPCOT…

And then a street of  shops and cafes that would not have been out of place anywhere in middle England, it was all rather odd, we had a sandwich lunch which was almost English but not quite and then collectively turned down the offer to go shopping for an hour or so and opted instead to return to the hotel to squander away the remainder of the afternoon, reflect on our India experience and prepare for the journey back the next day to Delhi and our final evening.

Passage through India – Himalayan Queen to Shimla

“It is not about the destination, it is about the journey” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

It was a pleasant evening in Chandigrah, a nice hotel as I recall and another curry.  This morning our luggage was loaded onto two jeeps and after they had driven us to the railway station at Kalka they went on ahead because today we were taking the ‘Toy Train’ to Shimla in the foothills of the Himalayas.

At Kalka station we passed a small group of women labourers with picks and shovels and this brought to mind all of the other women workers that we had seen over this past two weeks.

Just an observation here but it seems  to me that women get to do all the crappy jobs in India whilst the men sit around and watch.  Nearly sixty-five percent of agricultural labourers are women, at Jaipur we had seen women carrying heavy brick loads on their heads whilst men supervised, along the railway tracks women were digging trenches whilst men waited to drop the cables in, what little street cleaning is done is performed by women whilst others work the refuse sights for pickings.  Women in India do tough jobs without any of the employment protection rights that are enjoyed in the West.  And another thing, it is rare to see a woman driver because less than fifteen percent of drivers in India are women.

So we waited for the ‘Toy Train’ and I was expecting something like one of the little trains of Wales…

… but approaching the platform was a powerful diesel beast about half the size of the express trains that we had become used to with eight carriages.  This was the ‘Himalayan Queen’.  Small yes, but a proper train nevertheless.

We watched enviously as the first class carriages that we wouldn’t be using passed us by  because SAGA had cut a few corners here and only purchased second class tickets.  

My research tells me that there are six trains that use the Kalka to Shimla line and if there was a league table then the ‘Himalayan Queen’ would be at the bottom.  The carriage was small and cramped with hard wooden benches which were not really wide enough to comfortably accommodate two people sitting side by side.  There was a toilet facility but you really wouldn’t want to use it and strict bladder control was going to be not just advisable but absolutely essential.

We departed Kalka station about twenty minutes late and the train meandered through the outskirts of the town before quickly entering the forested foothills of the Himalayas. Immediately the train climbed steadily, the tracks constantly twisting and turning, clinging to the side of the mountains like velcro, with few straight stretches of track even as long as the train.

More twists than Chubby Checker…

The train line had been constructed at the turn of the twentieth century as a means of getting British officials and administrators away for the summer.  They didn’t enjoy the heat of Calcutta or Delhi and so made their way to the town of Shimla high in the mountains where the weather was far more to their liking

The sixty mile long line is two foot six gauge (regular lines are five foot six), has one hundred and two tunnels and eight hundred and sixty-four bridges. The constant curves and grades are very tight which means that trains take around five hours to complete the journey with an average speed of a very sedate fifteen miles an hour.

An advantage of the ‘Himalayan Queen’ second class was that the carriage doors were left open even while the train was moving so it was possible now and again to take the risk and lean out to take pictures.  As we passed slowly through stations vendors jumped on and off the moving train like acrobats and walked through the carriages selling food and snacks.

The train made a couple of stops at the larger stations on route and at about half way pulled into Barog.  Barog is the place where the longest tunnel of the line is situated.   In times past trains used to stop here for a considerable time so that passengers could have their breakfast here and today there were vendors on the platform selling street food (well, platform food) and selling tea and coffee.

I nearly had a bit of bother here.  We were told that we could get off here and stretch our legs and I assumed that this would be for twenty minutes or so and went for a stroll along the platform.  I was at the back of the train when there was a shrill blast of the whistle to announce departure, Kim was shouting at me to tell me the train was leaving already and I had to sprint the length of the train to return to our carriage near the front.  That was a near miss I can tell you.

As we climbed through the clouds and the occasional wisps of mist there were intermittent grand views and I say intermittent because for much of the journey the track side vegetation was thick and impenetrable.  The train persevered through sun-dappled glades at the pace of a woodland walk and the occasional break through the trees into areas of bright green terraces and a village here and there with brightly coloured houses tumbling down the precipitous hillsides.

Despite the discomfort we enjoyed the five hour ride but we were all relieved (some of us needed relief) when the engine brought the train to a stop at Shimla station.

It was much busier than I was anticipating and the traffic was slow and queuing, sometimes not so patiently.  And guess what…

We were reunited with the drivers and the jeeps and then made very slow progress through the cramped and narrow streets until we arrived at our hotel, set in an elevated position overlooking a valley and the brightly coloured city and in the distance we could see the snow capped Himalayas soaring into the sky. 

This was a good spot.  I liked Shimla already.

Passage through India – Wagah Border Pantomime and Partition

Leaving the Golden Temple we proceeded now to the Wagah India /Pakistan border.

We were going to see the  Beating Retreat Ceremony which has been a daily military event since 1959. The ceremony takes place every evening just before sunset at the border crossing which came into being when the Radcliffe line was drawn, separating India and Pakistan, and dividing the Province of Punjab into eastern and western sections. The eastern part went to India and the western part into Pakistan.

This is the only official road link on what is called the Grand Trunk Road  between the two countries and which crosses what is the political fault line which is the Indian Pakistan border and which passes through a colossal , rather ugly concrete border with heavy metal gates.

So we arrived early, way too early in my opinion and now we had to sit and wait, sit and wait, sit and wait.  In all that time all that happened was that a family was allowed through from the Pakistan side to the Indian side and they stood for a while with their suitcases blinking and looking bewildered wondering what to do next.  Were they being ejected, had their visas been approved?  They didn’t seem to know.   Eventually they realised that the crowds of excited people were not there to welcome them to India and they moved  slowly on.

I may have mentioned earlier about the visa application process which was quite difficult and asked several times about any connections relating to Pakistan and as I watched them step  tentatively  from one side to the next it all suddenly seemed to make some belated sense.

Eventually after something about twice as as long as the last Ice Age the show got started.

The ceremony started with a lot of singing and dancing and grand theatre and then a storming parade by the security forces from both the sides with a lot of bravado and strutting about. It reminded me of Monty Python Ministry of Silly Walks, soldiers pretending to be Can’Can dancers at the Moulin Rouge and it ended in a contrived coordinated lowering of the two nations’ flags. One soldier stands at attention on each side of the gate.

As the sun sets, the iron gates at the border were opened and the two flags are lowered simultaneously. The flags are folded and the ceremony ended with a retreat that involved a rather reluctant and seemingly difficult handshake between soldiers from either side followed by the theatrical closing of the gates once again.

All rather odd.  India hates Pakistan, Pakistan hates India.  India loves Pakistan, Pakistan loves India.  In under eighty years there have been four wars/spats between the two, 1947/8, 1965, 1971 and most recently 1999. It is like two people who live together but can’t get on and live together,  How can a foreign visitor make any sense of that I wonder?

The tension spills over into sport.  India and Pakistan are two of the greatest cricket teams in the World but they don’t play each other except at neutral venues.  Since Partition only one Hindu has ever represented Pakistan and only seventeen Muslims have represented India despite the fact that India has the third highest Muslim population in the World.  Pakistan cricketers are excluded from the Indian Premier League for political and religious reasons.  How absurd is that?

It was all a complete pantomime.  Ridiculous really but to be fair I didn’t understand the relevance of it.  A bit of trivia for you,  the word ‘pak’ means pure in Persian and ”istan’ means land of so Pakistan is literally ‘land of purity’.  That is a very bold claim.

I asked Tour Guide Rahi about it and he was certain that Partition was entirely the fault of the British, their policy of divide and rule that set Muslim against Hindu and led to the events of 1947 which must surely go down as one of the major humanitarian tragedies of the twentieth century when hundreds of thousands of people were displaced and slaughtered for not even a very good reason.

India and Pakistan were separated in 1947 as the British withdrew from India.  It suits to blame the British and their admittedly clueless, clumsy and uninformed division of the sub-continent but surely others were equally complicit in a defiant statement of intent firmly set against compromise.  Viceroy Mountbatten gave up the attempt, referred it back to London and it all ended up going tits up.

I personally didn’t enjoy it, I thought the visit a complete waste of time, I had known about the tension between India and Pakistan but I would have preferred to have visited the Partition Museum but that seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary.  I would have preferred to return to the Golden Temple at Sunset but that too seemed to get quietly dropped from the itinerary so had to stick instead with the pantomime ceremony right through to the end.

I would most especially liked to go and see a cricket match between India and Pakistan.  No chance of that of course.

What happened to these main players?  Ghandi of course was assassinated in 1948,  Earl Mountbatten suffered the same fate in 1979, blown up by an IRA bomb, Jinnah was a chain smoker (fifty a day, or one every fifteen minutes based on a twelve hour day because you can’t smoke when you are asleep because you will set fire to the bed) and died of lung disease in 1948, Nehru lived until 1964 and died of a heart attack.

Cyril Radcliffe who drew the line which became the border was so saddened by the violence and death that his line had caused that he refused to draw his salary (£3,000 in 1947 or about £145,000 in 2024 values) and returned to England where he was created a Lord.  Some things never change and reward for failure is one of them.  He lived a long life until 1977.

When it was all over (thank goodness) we returned to the hotel, relaxed for a while before going to the dining room for another curry.  I had now had more curry in one week than I had had in the last ten years, maybe twenty years.

Tomorrow there was a long coach journey ahead across the Punjab from Amritsar to Chandrigarh but on the plus side there was a later start.