Travel Post: The Romance of Shimla

This is a photo diary of Shimla, a hill station in the Himalayas I visited this summer(You can read about my entire trip here)...The place is seeped with history, and walking down the streets or the Mall Road, it is difficult not to imagine that you are still in the days of the British Raj.

The writing here is an excerpt from the book 'Plain Tales from the Raj', a copy of which I found in a second-hand book-store and have cherished ever-since!

"The hills of Shimla provided a brief respite from the heat of the plains.Shimla was the summer capital of India, the whole government moved up to the hills! Wives moved up mainly because of the heat down below, and of course other wives weren't going to stay, so they all went. There were parties, theater, and they all had a pretty gay time."

"It is difficult to convey how enormously romantic the atmosphere was in Shimla. The warm starlit nights and the bright, huge moon, those towering hills and mountains stretching away, silence, and strange, exotic smells. "

" Affairs and liaisons were commonplace. Bored wives, Flirtatious Army-men, and Young girls looking for husbands formed most of the society. Most of them were pretty harmless, and very seldom were there serious scandals. "

The church, built on a high point, was the place where Sunday Mass was conducted. There are still pews for the Viceroy and the Commander General, in the very front row, marked with gold!

"Shimla was plastered on the sides of one of the lower ranges of the Himalayas. You found yourself, always, on one of the ledges, one ledge above the other, nothing but narrow paths everywhere and these appalling drops. "

Iris Portal, who was a girl during that time, recalls:

"In the two summers I spent at Shimla I never thought about doing anything but amusing myself. It was excessively gay. My record was twenty six nights dancing, at the end of which I could hardly keep awake!

You had to ride everywhere in Shimla. So one used to ride out to lunch and to race meetings in one's best dress hitched round one's waist with a blanket tied around, and a big, floppy hat.

We were always meeting the same people. Everyone knew rather too much about everyone else's affairs, and it would be the staple topic of conversation-what was going on, who was going out with so-and-so. If there was a very big party you always knew about it and if you hadn't been invited you took that very seriously indeed."

I went there this summer, eager to see all this for myself. And I was not disappointed. As I walked down the streets, clicking the pictures, I was completely transported to another era. The era of moonlit picnics, high teas, and summer romances.  Because really, nothing much has changed. Except the crowds, perhaps.

But that's everywhere.


Love,
Shubhi!