Till memory began to turn fickle when she was in her 90s, my mother Ponamma Rangachari would, on rare occasions, dip into moments and events of her richly textured life, and turn them into gentle nuggets of oral history. Her reminiscences were drawn from layers of memory, full of the minutiae of nearly 100 years of living at the crossroads of history both political and social, and always touched in the retelling by her wry sense of humour, her nuanced detailing of the foibles of the rich and the powerful, and her sharp observation of the nitty-gritty of unfolding events, all of which gave a touch of delicious flavour and intimacy to the patina of lost times.
Among my favourite stories was ‘Simla Days’ or her sojourn in Simla during the high noon of the Raj, when she and her daughters would accompany my father, then a brilliant young up-and-coming civil servant, in the slow juggernaut of the imperial government’s move — lock, stock and barrel — from New Delhi to Simla, which nestled in the Himalayas and was designated the summer capital in 1935. The organised annual upheaval of the change of capital that entailed the transfer of the entire government administrative machinery to Simla and back was perhaps the only such move made in India’s history (if one excludes Mohammad Bin Tughlaq’s botched attempt to move from Dilli to Daulatabad). It was
The move, done so that the burra sahibs could administer in more salubrious climes, would be accompanied by mountains of files, despatch boxes, Remington typewriters, office furniture and seals, writing pads, paperweights, and more, along with armies of chowkidars, aabdars , peons, khansamas , cooks, durzies and so on. Then would follow the sahibs and memsahibs with trunkfuls of summer suits, frocks and hats, plus their children, ayahs, croquet sets, pet cats, dogs and so on, off to board the Kalka-Simla train.
The Kalka-Shimla train today.
My parents were part of the brown sahib brigade, altogether a less conspicuous and pampered group. My mother’s description of Solan station, the first stop in the journey, could be straight out of a Charles Allen book. “Among the noise and hurly-burly of coolies and the locals,” she’d say, “were quiet imperial islands with English children in pretty hats and buttoned-up coats sitting in their ‘doolies’ in splendid isolation, watched over by Tamil ayahs with the right amount of hauteur in their demeanour.”
Station scenes
No detail missed her eye, from the bhishties watering the spring roses at the station to the impeccably groomed Rajapalayam hounds and Dobermans straining at the leash, the English ladies in enormous ostrich feather hats, and the odd Indian lady with the newfangled ‘bobbed’ hair considered ‘fast’ back then. The air rent with cries of ‘Mussalman Chai’ and ‘Hindu Chai’ served in terracotta containers for one anna a cup.
“For the white officers,” my mouther said, “the tea ceremony would be somewhat more elaborate. Precisely half an hour before the Kalka-Simla steamed off, turbaned bearers would emerge from the station building, balancing elegant silver teapots and other items of chota hazri to be served to the gora sahibs in their compartments.”
Simla society in those enchanted six months from March to September revolved around the beautiful flower-lined mall with its spectacular views, on which the high and the mighty, the lionised and the ‘who’s who’ of India ‘ate the air’ during evening walks, the space taken up by the Brits, both literally and metaphorically. “The Indian officers, even of the same rank, would walk a little more quietly,” my mother would say ruefully, but she was then in her 20s and caught up in the excitement of it all. She was thrilled to see the legendary Amrita Sher-Gil often taking a turn, mysterious, beautiful and aloof. There’d be maharajas and nawabs of various shades and gun salutes, dazzling in their glittering sarpeches with their equally dazzling chiffon-clad wives and their retinues.
Viceroy Lord Linlithgow in Simla, 1944.
“But what I remember most,” said my mother “was the simplicity of the Raja of Kollengode (in Kerala), dressed in cotton, who was always followed by servants carrying huge copper vessels of gangajal . This was to quench His Highness’ thirst during his daily peregrinations in the mall”. Many men of rank and substance walked the mall too, stopping by to greet my parents. Among them she remembered V.P. Menon, member of the Viceroy’s Council.
Keeping up with the Joneses
There were gentle digs at her compatriots. “Some of the Indian officers’ wives,” she chuckled, had clubbed together to send tiffin boxes to their husbands in Gorton Castle, impregnable fortress of Raj bureaucracy. Khadanand, the specially chosen peon, was given brass nameplates of their husbands with strict instructions to pin on his turban the name of the officer to whom the tiffin box was being taken, and to change the nameplate as he went about distributing the lunch boxes. Alas, their attempt to keep up with the Joneses collapsed on the very first day with a huge mix-up that had Mr. X, staunch vegetarian, staring angrily at fish instead of curd rice! When accosted, Khadanand blamed not himself but the fish, the tight turban that prevented him from thinking, the tiffin carrier itself, and his parents who had kept him unlettered, so how could he read the nameplates?
My mother vividly remembered walks down Cart Road with its wonderful mews, and meandering down pretty lanes where “English cottages would suddenly appear on the spur of a hill, deep in a rhododendron-spangled valley or in the middle of a pretty mountain stream, all set in gardens ablaze with roses and cornflower, sweet peas, pansies, and lady’s lace, phlox and antirrhinums and fields of yellow and red poppies.” But with World War II picking up in Europe, Felix von Goldstein’s music no longer wafted gently from the great houses of Simla, nor did conversations revolve around “great names, gossip, pageantry and tamashas in the verandahs” as Kipling described earlier Simla seasons. Grim news of the war was coming in, gloom pervaded everywhere, and everyone, including my mother, had a sense of an era coming to an end.
As indeed it was. In 1941, Lord Wavell, the new Viceroy, ordered a stop to the annual transfer of capitals. And my mother’s idyllic Simla Days came to an end, along with a slice of Raj history.
A history buff , specially of India's stories, the writer loves to travel back and forth 3,000 years.
