by Vanessa Able
Spirited chronicler of the Raj, Kipling was staunchly opposed to Indian independence, believing the British colonizers should dig in despite popular feeling to the contrary, and carry out their white man’s burden, or whatever it was they needed to do. Born in Mumbai and weaned in the local language of his nanny, he was sent back to the UK for his schooling and returned to Bombay at 16, with a pubescent moustache that apparently scandalized his mother. He got a job at the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore and stayed on for as long as he could bear the chronic heat and disease, which was a total of seven years. Despite the brevity of his time in India, he always considered himself fundamentally Indian, and spent his later life in the UK regretting the ‘blasted Henglish drizzle’35 and yearning for the east.
In following the Great Trunk Road, I was also on the heels of the nineteenth-century Brits who were just as lily-livered as I was when temperatures pushed past 40 and ‘the ’eat would make your bloomin’ eyebrows crawl’.36 When the hot season swept across the administrative centres in the plains, the likes of Kolkata, Delhi and Lucknow were emptied of their colonial governors, generals and civil servants, who nearly all bolted up to the highlands for some thermal respite and the eyebrow-raising extra-curricular activities that invariably followed a gathering of bored, affluent people many miles from home. Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Dalhousie, Nainital and McLeod Ganj were among the settlements in the foothills of the Himalayas that became Little Britain for the duration of the summer months. In fact, life in the hills soon grew so attractive that Sir John Lawrence, Viceroy of India from 1864–69, resolved to shift the entire colonial administration 1,000 miles from Calcutta to Shimla, a decision that resulted in a highly controversial budget-busting biannual footslog.
More than 60 years after the administration had disbanded, I found it difficult to ascertain how people in India now felt towards the British, and how the Raj was viewed in retrospect. As a Brit in India, I found it difficult to forget my Englishness completely and was never entirely sure whether, beneath the smiles and resolute hospitality, the Indians I met were harbouring a more inimical sentiment towards me based on the implications of my nationality. That there were hard feelings regarding the arrival of the East India Company and its associated acts of violence and political usurpation was clear; but there were traces of the Raj apparent in everyday life that India must have consciously chosen not to obliterate: the railways, the education system, some monumental buildings and an administrative infrastructure that had mostly descended into a slothful bureaucracy still functioning on many outdated laws. Queasy triumphal monuments the likes of the Victoria Memorial in Kolkata just left me feeling embarrassed, while macabre memorials like the Jallianwala Bagh in Amritsar, which marks the 1919 massacre of hundreds of Indians by the British Army, no doubt rendered the average visiting Limey flushed of cheek and low of profile.
One of the objectives of a liberal art school education like the one I enjoyed in London at the turn of the millennium was the harsh assessment of colonialism and its associated creative forms, for the most part led by Edward Saïd’s Orientalism as the trailblazing text. In this highly analytical light, it was always hard to be able to see any artwork springing from foreign inspiration – or in fact any person who had ever left the UK and gone abroad, be it to Kathmandu or the Costa del Sol – as anything less than a patronizing and subjugating force. It was a paranoia I carried with me in backpacks and suitcases throughout my travels; every time I encountered something strange or unknown, like ant curry or temple pornography, my every politically correct instinct would kick in to over-judge my actions and attitudes in the face of this ‘Other’. It’s a tiring state of mind to sustain and after some time I found I was Othered out. Too much self-conscious not-finding-the-east-an-alluring-den-of-preconditioned-western-notions-of-exoticism was wearing me dry. Like old imperialist duffer Kipling, I too would sell my granny for a few days anywhere east of the Suez; it was that simple.
Whether my reasons for this passion arose from ingrained societal conditioning, or whether I just dug India, was open to interpretation. But in the meantime, I could only honestly say that I found India and its relationship to England fascinating. From raj-mances like Passage to India and The Far Pavilions to London’s own Little India in Southall, things Anglo-Indian or Indo-English were generally a source of great pleasure to me. So the extra appeal of the prospect of a journey up to the hills and the summer playgrounds of the Raj was that I might find something there to lessen the gap of unfamiliarity between my host country and myself.
My route north involved following the GTR as far as the town of Rampur and then turning off up the NH25 towards Lucknow, where I would spend my last night in the flatlands before entering the Kumaon Hills. My chosen first stop, Nainital – which had the reputation among middle-class Indians as a top-notch holiday destination – was a place originally established by Europeans in the mid-1800s, particularly English traders, officers and officials who began to use the spot as a health spa and retreat from the south. The dizzying zigzag climb up the initial foothills was accompanied by a gust of mountain air, the first current in weeks that didn’t threaten to roast everything in the car down to plastic-upholstered flesh-and-blood frazzle. The cool breeze penetrated the circuits of my brain, giving new life to each cerebral compartment as it dissolved through the grey matter. I felt my body and mind slowly decompress and return to a temperature in which they could function normally, while all thoughts of conspiracy, fires, Naxals and possible identity-thief monks flew out of the window and into the mountain skies. The resulting sensation was blissful. But my joy at having finally made it to the mountains was also tainted: as we slowly ascended the road up to Nainital, I huffed emphatically as I mulled over the new gash that ran along the left side of Abhilasha’s front bumper.
The mishap had occurred in Rampur as I was turning off the Great Trunk Road. From what I could ascertain, the town was primarily known for its indigenous Rampuri Chaaku, a switchblade knife made famous by Bollywood baddies, and one whose prospects were on the line since the government had introduced a ban on carrying blades longer than four-and-a-half inches. I found out from an article in the Economic Times that although sales of the Chaaku had plummeted, according to one vendor, the wolf of a commercial nosedive was being kept from the door by ‘small businessmen’ and members of the Central Reserve Police Force, who were, apparently, his best customers.
Unfortunately, neither the NH2 nor the NH25 bypassed any of the town’s more impressive monuments like the fort and Raza library that were built by the Rohilla Nawabs, a tribe of Pashtuns that have ruled in the area since the early eighteenth century. Instead, Abhilasha and I crawled through streets that became narrower and more congested as we approached the centre. At one point, we came to a stop at a railway crossing where, after a wait of several minutes punctuated by the anti-climactic passing of an emphysemic locomotive at walking speed, we found ourselves in the middle of a swarm of vehicles shoe-horned into every free inch of road in front of the barrier. What started as a couple of rickshaws, Tempos and a few two-wheelers soon became an outright crowd of drivers inching forward into any available space until they were literally rubbing elbows with their neighbours.
What concerned me as I waited at the crossing was that traffic on both sides of the barriers had spread to take up both lanes. What’s going to happen, I thought with a degree of trepidation, when the barriers are raised? It was like the reenactment of an ancient battle; we were two armies standing at a face-off, the no-man’s land of a railway track between us about to serve as a bloody battleground when the gates came up.
The railway warning lights started to blink and the barrier slowly lifted as the first line of attack – the infantry, composed mostly of bicycles and motorcycles – went forward and managed to weave expertly between their counterparts coming from the opposite direction. I was in the second line – the cavalry – along with the three-wheelers and motorbikes transporting heavy loads. Not so nimble on
our feet as our predecessors, we encountered a plug of congestion going head to head with our opposite numbers. Angry horns were released into the air in mournful bellows while the vehicles shimmied left and right in a bid to get past one another. It was mayhem of the highest order, and so it came as no surprise that in the midst of the struggle, my steed sustained an injury from an enemy rickshaw. It happened in a split second: one moment I was trying to steer Abhilasha to the left of a minivan crammed with pigtailed schoolgirls who, judging from their screams and waves, were delighted to be fighting alongside a yellow Nano, and the next I felt the hardened rasp of metal on metal as an oncoming rickshaw cut a little too close to Abhilasha’s anterior.
I issued a gush of barbarian obscenities. My instinct was to get out of the car, mid-skirmish, and demand that the fellow give me at least the details of his insurance company, if not full payment for the paint job his act of recklessness now necessitated. No sooner had I reconsidered in the dim light of the possibility of a Rampuri Chaaku being brought out to help with negotiations than my three-wheeled aggressor had scarpered into the fray, nixing all likelihood of being held accountable for his crimes. I cursed him again.
I didn’t pause to examine Abhilasha’s injuries until we finally stopped for the night in the car park outside Nainital’s main mosque. Her scratch was not a pretty sight, and was more than a dab of TCP and a plaster would be able to solve. A series of black, brown and, interestingly, green scratches emanated from the edge of the bodywork above her left front wheel all the way across to her lower reflector. It was a sad sight, a wound of war, but it started me thinking about the significance of the fact that I was being shown no quarter by my fellow drivers.
The truth was that Abhilasha was my invisibility cloak; she was the perfect avatar in which I as a foreigner could really get stuck into the fray of an Indian way of life that would otherwise never be open to me. When I walked down the street, I stuck out like a sore thumb: people stared at me, pointed and even sometimes laughed, albeit all good-naturedly (I hoped). Out in public without Abhilasha to disguise my foreignness, I was always myself the Other, the exception, and would never really be able to witness India in situ as if I wasn’t there. But driving in a car that for the most part concealed my identity allowed me to do just that; it let me hide inside a hunk of yellow metal and take my place among the warring factions of traffic on an equal level with every other combatant.
I’m not going to pull any punches: Nainital was a peculiar place. I had so far navigated over 8,000 km around India, stopping in 25 or so different towns, and nothing I had seen could have prepared me for this verdant, clean, quiet, Alpine whistle stop built around a pear-shaped lake and surrounded by rolling hills whose peaks afforded an amazing view of the snow-capped Himalayas in the distance. There was something really uncanny in the sheer spotlessness and order of the place, in the dozens of holidaying families sporting Western-style leisurewear and blinding white trainers, clutching cameras and bags of candyfloss and taking potshots at water-filled balloons in makeshift shooting galleries, or sipping cappuccinos on the terrace of the Coffee Day by the lake.
Mangesh Karandikar, the Mumbai professor who had been following my blog, wrote to tell me he and his wife had taken their honeymoon there, and indeed I spotted many a doe-eyed couple rowing a boat on the lake or strolling shyly along the woodland paths at the top of a white-knuckle cable-car ride. If it weren’t for the exhausted stray dog and her six puppies who staidly occupied the entranceway to my hotel, warranting a little leap every time I went in and out, as well as the occasional waft from the tandoori restaurant next door (which served some of the best chicken tikka I’d had to date), I could easily believe that Abhilasha and I had been teleported to a small village somewhere near Geneva.
Shimla, on the other hand, was more akin to home, invoking somewhere like Hereford on a murky February afternoon: a series of neo-Gothic spires and Tudor-style timber beams stood out under a sky so dark and drizzly as to have me immediately snivelling into a hankie. The first Brits to arrive in Shimla – civil servants, army personnel and governors-general – came in the 1820s and began to build summer homes and holiday cottages under the heavy grey, but relatively exhilarating, pseudo-English skies. The little Himalayan town that looked like it was slip-sliding slowly down the mountain had, during its days as the Empire’s summer capital, been a hotspot of Victorian society. Infamy and transgression bred like wildfire in this most potent and fertile summertime Petri dish, a soap opera of love affairs and indiscretions that provided abundant fodder for the young Kipling, who wrote a series of stories and poems inspired by the goings-on he witnessed during the several summers spent there in the 1880s when he could get leave from his paper in Lahore.
In his biography, Kipling referred to his time spent in Shimla as ‘pure joy’; it was, he wrote, ‘another new world. There the hierarchy lived, and one saw and heard the machinery of administration stripped bare.’ Verses such as ‘Delilah’, ‘Pink Dominoes’ and ‘The Betrothed’ laid out tales of extra-marital affairs, political intrigue and dreams of an oriental harem, while stories like ‘The Other Man’ and ‘Cupid’s Arrows’ painted a world of lawn tennis, croquet and archery in which affairs of the heart were as wretched and complex as any latter-day television show. The last traces of the bygone improprieties have been preserved only by name at Scandal Point in the town centre, after an infamous incident when the King of Patiala made off with the daughter of the Viceroy, much to the shock of the upper crust in exile.
Abhilasha made her own ungracious debut when she failed to ascend the road to our hotel, the Spars Lodge, an ostensibly hand-made MDF-and-glass effort perched on an outcrop just above the local Oberoi and ahead of the distant Summer Hill that had been Mahatma Gandhi’s residence when he came to Shimla (trips that were made for diplomatic reasons, I presumed, and not to join the locals in partying like it was 1939). The problem was a sharp-gradient driveway made impracticable by the weight of my luggage. Several embarrassing attempts at revving Abhilasha up to combustion point before letting go of the clutch and trying to catapult us up the hill ended in an ignominious stutter and extinction of the engine, and the annoying realization that I would have to take my bags out of the car and walk them up if I was to get to the hotel before midnight. It might not have been so bad if this hadn’t taken place right in front of the gilded doors of the Oberoi, formerly Wildflower Hall, one-time residence of Lord Kitchener. What would the Viceroy think?
Wandering the famous Mall, imagining the high-society shopping extravaganza here that pre-dated the candyfloss stalls and other trappings of tourism that came with Shimla’s current top-notch holiday-spot status, was a strange experience of juxtaposing worlds. On the outside, Shimla looked uncannily like England. The lemon-yellow Christchurch Cathedral in the main square just across from the Tudorbethan – that’s a real architectural term, by the way – Municipal Corporation building posed patiently for photographs, with the disgruntled air of an edifice wondering why the hell it wasn’t in Penrith. A cuppa at the brilliantly old-school Indian Coffee Workers’ Co-op Society was followed by a desire for an early dinner spurred on by the sight of a Domino’s Pizza further up the mall. I resisted the stodgy-looking Peppy Paneer Cheese Burst Crust in favour of dining at a neon blue–lit restaurant that proffered southern-fried chicken and margaritas. Hardly the apex of cool, but here in the place that resembled home, I wanted the comfort food to match. The oily, sugary reality of the culinary experience, however, was a different matter, and within hours I was making hurried tracks to the toilet in my room at the Spars.
I dubbed those hours of intestinal upheaval the Night of Gandhi’s Revenge; I imagined the ghost of the nation’s father looking down on me with consternation from his place at Summer Hill as I munched on greasy chicken washed down with bogus Mexican hooch in the midst of a living memorial to the frivolities of his beloved country’s colonial occupiers. The resulting emergency evacuation of the contents of my bowels came as little
surprise, given the circumstances.
However, I was adamant that a sleepless night spent with bum to porcelain – well, plastic actually; this wasn’t the Oberoi – would not impede our progress. We still had several thousand kilometres to go to get back to Mumbai and just under three weeks in which to do it. There was no time to be spent moping around feeling sorry for myself and the chicken that had so rapidly passed through me. Coupled with a head cold and an impending sense of all-over muscle ache, I knew the eight-hour drive through the mountains from Shimla to my next stop, McLeod Ganj, was going to be riddled with loo stops and bellyaches.
And so it went: after a few kilometres, a deep bubbling growl in the abdominal region had me screeching to a halt at the nearest petrol station, heading for the outhouse and holding my nose. One particular stop at an Indian Oil outpost a couple of hours beyond Shimla necessitated having to shout down an irate monkey – an actual Rhesus monkey – who had occupied the station’s only cubicle and was drinking from the toilet bowl. It was a sad scene, bereft of the poise and glamour of a Merchant Ivory production.
I arrived in McLeod Ganj after eight or so hours spent negotiating mountain bends and trying to keep myself sensible by singing loudly and occasionally talking to an imaginary primate whom I briefly hallucinated in the passenger seat on a particularly sharp bend somewhere near Palampur.
