Kipling's India by Stephen McClarence in the Telegraph...
As the 150th anniversary of the birth of Kipling approaches, Stephen McClarence heads to Shimla, the former summer capital for the British in India, to follow in the writer’s footsteps
Seven thousand feet up in the Himalayas, Raaja Bhasin is leading a guided tour of Shimla’s Gaiety Theatre. This, he says, pointing through a doorway, is the room where the Viceroy used to host suppers in the days when Shimla, most famous of India’s hill stations, was the summer capital of the British Raj. This, he says, is the newly restored Victorian auditorium, all green and gold, seating just 310 and exquisite with plaster cherubs.
And here are framed photographs of long-past productions by the Amateur Dramatic Club: Miss Muspratt Williams and Miss Wogan Bronne in The Yeomen of the Guard; Mr Otto and Capt Coffin in The Adventure of Lady Ursula; Mr Crookshank and Mrs Barrows in A Country Mouse. “Britishers come and say: 'That’s my great grandmother there,’ ” says Bhasin, an authority on Shimla and historical consultant for Channel 4’s IndianSummers, which is set there.
Sadly there are no pictures of the most famous person to tread the Gaiety’s boards: Rudyard Kipling, the writer who perhaps more than anyone moulded British perceptions of India, in all its imperialism and exoticism, for half a century. December 30 marks the 150th anniversary of his birth – in Bombay (now Mumbai) – and I am on the trail of the man and his books.
The British governors of India convene at Simla Photo: GETTY
For several years, as a young newspaper reporter, he covered “the season” in Shimla – or Simla as this eyrie of the Empire was called in the days when the British fled the scorching summer plains and ruled one-fifth of humanity from it for half the year. Kipling’s brief involved, he said, “as much riding, waltzing, dining out and concerts in a week as I should get at home in a lifetime”. It gave him plenty of material for Plain Tales from the Hills, his sometimes wry, sometimes tragic, stories about the idiosyncrasies of British India and the uneasy relationship between rulers and ruled.
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"He acted in a farce at the newly opened Gaiety Theatre; to no great acclaim. The Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, found his performance 'horrid and vulgar'. It wasn’t the last time such criticism was thrown at Kipling"
Easing himself into Shimla society in 1887, he acted in a farce at the newly opened Gaiety Theatre; to no great acclaim. The Viceroy, Lord Dufferin, found his performance “horrid and vulgar”.
It wasn’t the last time such criticism was thrown at Kipling. George Orwell described him as “a jingo imperialist, morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting”, Oscar Wilde called him (rather ambiguously) “our first authority on the second-rate”, and many others have questioned his populism and his paternalistic belief that the British Empire (if well-run) was “a good thing”. To set against that, Kim, partly set in Shimla, was Nehru’s favourite novel.
I am staying at the Oberoi Cecil, Shimla, which is furnished in luxury-Raj style and has its own Kipling connection: it is built on the site of The Tendrils, one of his homes. Many of its rooms offer panoramic views over the mountains, with ranges silhouetted against each other.
The Viceregal Lodge Photo: ALAMY
Shimla has expanded hugely since Kipling’s day; with its many modern buildings, it’s no longer a half-timbered Haslemere in the Himalayas. His “crowded rabbit warren” of bazaars, which inspired some of Kim’s most magical passages, now cascade down the hillsides, with monkeys clattering over the corrugated iron roofs. Here Kipling met A M Jacob, a mysterious, almost mystical jewellery and curio dealer who inspired the character of Lurgan Sahib and his room “full of things that smelt like all the temples of all the East”.
Over two days of crisp winter sunshine, I find plenty of charm, particularly along The Mall, still the town’s social focus, and around the central piazza on The Ridge with its holiday atmosphere: horse-riding, balloons, candyfloss and much promenading.
A temple in Shimla Photo: AP/FOTOLIA
At one end is primrose-yellow Christ Church, looking airlifted straight from the Cotswolds and retaining a potent Raj atmosphere. Memorials remember Assistant Adjutant-Generals, Commissary-Generals-in-Chief and Directors General of Ordnance. Screwed to the front pews, a small brightly polished brass plaque announces proprietorially: “H E The Viceroy”.
At the other side of town is his old home: the Viceregal Lodge. Lodge? This is a vast baronial barn, with a teak-panelled entrance hall big enough to accommodate most common-or-garden stately homes. Once full of tiger-skin rugs and brocaded chairs, it’s now an academic institute, but guided tours take visitors around some of the rooms to stare at the table where India’s independence was hammered out. The British employed 800 staff here, including 40 gardeners. An official still hovers to blow a whistle whenever anyone dares step on the lawn.
The Gaiety Theatre Photo: ALAMY
I stroll back to The Ridge, passing retired military-looking men, spruce in tweed caps and sports jackets, dark-blue blazers and cravats. In this Brigadoon for brigadiers, they sometimes meet in the dim, muggy Indian Coffee House, where white-uniformed waiters with Nehru caps serve “finger chips”, mutton noodles and “jelly with cream”.
The elite club based at the Gaiety Theatre still maintains strict standards. Lounge suits and leather shoes must be worn after 7pm, though “turtle necks with jackets may be worn in winter”. On the terrace, the ultra-urbane Raaja Bhasin discusses Kipling.
Where, I wonder, might a visitor to Shimla sense his lingering presence? “You might feel it just walking along The Mall, where he did so much of his people-watching, even though the rickshaws have gone,” he says. “But the general attitude to him in today’s India is that it’s all part of history, that we should leave it at that and move on.”
"The elite club based at the Gaiety Theatre still maintains strict standards. Lounge suits and leather shoes must be worn after 7pm"
I do indeed move on – to Mumbai. Kipling’s Yorkshire-born father, John Lockwood Kipling, was an architectural sculptor who became the first principal of the Jeejeebhoy School of Art in the centre of the city, and settled in a whitewashed bungalow where Rudyard was born and spent his first five years.
The bungalow was demolished and replaced by an elegan t but now-empty timber building with a trim veranda. Plans have been announced to convert it into a Kipling-themed tourist attraction.
Memories of the author linger across the ever-bustling city of Mumbai. Kipling was christened in St Thomas Cathedral, within which visitors look upon walls that are crammed with grieving marble memorials to servants of the Empire who “fell sacrifice to the climate” or were “treacherously deprived of life”.
Mumbai's Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus Photo: AP/FOTOLIA
At Crawford Market, piled high with fruit and vegetables, cross-legged stallholders supervise perfect pyramids of tomatoes and artfully displayed potatoes. Lockwood designed the market’s busy friezes of Indian rural life and a fountain decorated with a harmonious jungle of carved animals and birds. It’s often slung with drying washing.
The surrounding area is the heart of Victorian Bombay, with the university, whose bells used to play Home Sweet Home and Rule Britannia, and the Victoria (railway) Terminus, renamed Chhatrapati Shivaji Terminus but still most commonly called V T. As India’s answer to St Pancras, it has three million passengers a day.
Crawford Market Photo: AP/FOTOLIA
Mumbai is a far cry from my final port of call: the state of Madhya Pradesh and Kanha National Park, the setting often cited as the inspiration for the landscapes in Kipling’s Jungle Books (still widely read – and watched – by Indian schoolchildren).
In truth Kipling never visited this part of India and based his jungle descriptions on other books, photographs and conversations. But it’s the spirit that counts and any excuse to visit Kanha’s 750 square miles is a good one.
My base is Banjaar Tola, a luxury “tented camp” run by Taj Safaris. My suite, with its treetop-level veranda overlooking a river, is to tents what Chatsworth is to detached houses.
Most guests come to see tigers: the Shere Khan of the Jungle Books. Hunting reduced India’s tiger population from an estimated 100,000 at the start of the 20th century to 1,400 by 2008. The latest estimate, however, is more than 2,200, and 80 of them may be at Kanha.
Hunting reduced India's tiger population to 1,400 by 2008 Photo: AP/FOTOLIA
“Once every guy wanted to possess a tiger skin; it was a symbol of power and bravery,” says Nagendra Singh Hada, Taj Safaris’ general manager. Now, he says, the trophy is spotting one.
With that in mind, I set off on a jeep safari with Sadhvi Singh, an engaging 24-year-old naturalist. As we drive along tracks through dense forest of sal trees and bamboo, Sadhvi reckons we have a one-in-three chance of spotting a tiger. That would be nice, I say, but I’m quite happy just seeing some of the other animals and the 200 species of birds. “You’re not tiger-centric then,” she laughs.
We have a wonderfully calm afternoon, unstressed by any imperative to see a tiger. Nor do I see one next morning, when at 6.30am a grey scarf of mist swirls over the forest and dew clings to spiders’ webs. There is a frisson of excitement when Sadhvi spots tiger tracks and we join a convoy of jeeps playing hide and seek with an animal that may or may not be there. No joy, but the dew on the spiders’ webs has been enough.
Imperial imprints
Chennai
This sprawling south Indian city – formerly called Madras – was where 17th-century Britons started out with the East India Company. Monuments to some of the earliest settlers fill St Mary’s, the oldest Anglican church in Asia. Nearby Fort Museum houses letters by Robert Clive and mementoes of sundry viceroys.
Lucknow
The stark ruins of the Residency, the compound where 3,000 Europeans were besieged for five months in 1857 at the height of the Indian Mutiny (or First War of Independence), are a sobering testament to colonialism. The school where Kim, hero of Kipling’s book, was educated, is based on elite La Martiniere College.
Kolkata
The Victoria Memorial is a vast white marble shrine to Britain’s imperial legacy, a sort of Raj Mahal. It is dominated by a statue of Queen Victoria, with its galleries designed to stir the patriotic soul. The contrasting pathos of young colonial lives cut short by a hostile climate is encapsulated at Park Street Cemetery.
The Victoria Memorial Photo: AP/FOTOLIA
Darjeeling
Despite increasing congestion, Darjeeling retains much of its old hill station atmosphere around Chowrasta, its busy central square, where the Oxford Book Store offers hours of fruitful browsing. Nostalgists will enjoy the Planters’ Club and the celebrated Windamere Hotel, where the rituals of the Raj are lovingly preserved.
Delhi
New Delhi’s grand governmental buildings and tree-lined boulevards were the flamboyant final flourish of the Raj. Inaugurated in 1931 as India’s new capital, it became a memorial to British rule less than 20 years later when India won independence. Statues of George V and his courtiers were trundled up to ghostly Coronation Park to contemplate the irony.
Essentials
Cox & Kings (0207 873 5000; coxandkings.co.uk) offers a 10-night private tour from £3,295 pp including flights, transfers, return train travel from Delhi to Shimla, breakfasts and stays at the ITC Grand Maratha in Mumbai, Taj Banjaar Tola in Kanha (full-board and jeep safaris), the ITC Maurya in Delhi and the Oberoi Cecil, Shimla.
Many tourist itineraries to Shimla reach the hill station on the Kalka-Shimla “Toy Train”. Two British tourists were killed in a derailment on the line in September. Services have now resumed.
For travel to London for flights from Heathrow, seeeastmidlandstrains.co.uk(services from Sheffield, Nottingham and Leicester) and railbookers.com for train services from other parts of the UK.
Telegraph Tour
India with William Dalrymple
Following three sell-out trips, we are delighted to launch new dates for this tour from Old Delhi in the company of William Dalrymple to the tranquil lakes of Udaipur, via maharajah palaces, sandstone cities and the Taj Mahal at sunrise. This journey offers a privileged insight into an extraordinary country.
Tour details
From £2,495pp, including flights and four- and five-star accommodation
Run by India specialist, Cox & Kings
Feb 24-March 6, March 16-27, Sept 28- Oct 9, Oct 19-30, Nov 16-27 (all 2016)
Call 03332 340496 or visit telegraph.co.uk/indiatour
Run by India specialist, Cox & Kings
Feb 24-March 6, March 16-27, Sept 28- Oct 9, Oct 19-30, Nov 16-27 (all 2016)
Call 03332 340496 or visit telegraph.co.uk/indiatour
Rudyard Kipling Photo: GETTY
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