As temperatures soar, the roads to Shimla start filling up. Just as the British used to do under the Raj, Indians still flee the heat of the plains for the cool of the mountains.
Perched 7,000ft up the Himalayas, the town offers the sweet relief of cool, misty weather in contrast with dust-filled Delhi where, during the Raj, it was impossible to ride or play croquet and where memsahibs struggled not to “glow” under the scorching sun.
The British took up the entire machinery of imperial government from the capital of Calcutta to Shimla, which was known as the summer capital. It was a stupendous parade of horse carriages, elephants and sedan chairs. At the front were viceroys, military attachés and thousands of civil servants and clerks with boxes full of files.
Bringing up the rear on the 1,200-mile journey were the women with children and domestic staff. Later, the journey was made easier by trains.
The Indian mass migration up to Shimla is more pedestrian. Cars line up bumper-to-bumper on the ribbon-like winding roads. Angry tourists fume as they spend hours on the last 90km stretch from Parwanoo to the final destination.
If, perchance, trucks carrying apples (the state of Himachal Pradesh is famous for its orchards) collide and the fruit tumbles out, it can take even longer.
India plans to end the logjams by building a cable car network to take tourists from Parwanoo to Shimla on a ropeway that will stretch for 40km above the forests and rhododendron-covered hills at an elevation of some 1,800 metres.
The world’s longest urban cable car network is Mi Teleferico in La Paz, Bolivia, which stretches to 33.8km.
When the Shimla network is ready in five years, it will cut the travel time from several hours to 1.5 hours and carry about 900 passengers in each direction every hour.
In mountainous areas where the roads built by the British cannot cope with the number of vehicles on them, cable car networks are increasingly being favoured as a solution. But even then, they do not offer all-year transportation because high wind speeds and snow can pose problems.
“Anything that can ease the congestion will help us all,” said Vinit Negi, the manager of a café in Shimla. “In May and June, God forbid anyone has a medical emergency because the traffic jams go on for miles all the way down the mountain.”
Once they make it to Shimla, tourists enjoy trekking, visiting temples and the imposing Viceregal Lodge, and touring the Gaiety Theatre.
Over the years Shimla has retained some quaint colonial touches, but it has become impossibly built up. If you stand on a ridge and look down, every inch of the mountainside has been covered with houses. It’s like a vertical urban conglomeration.
At the height of the tourist season in May and June, walking down Mall Road, built by the British, feels like Oxford Street on Christmas Eve.
During the Raj, Mall Road was a quiet thoroughfare but it had the exuberant buzz of a town that was the party capital of the Raj for several months.
Away from their normal social moorings, the British used to have a riot. Accounts of the time speak of endless cocktail parties, hunts, polo, theatre, races, and many a steamy liaison between young memsahibs looking for a husband and dashing military officers.
In fact, a landmark called Scandal Point marks the spot where a British woman — said to be the daughter of a viceroy — eloped with the Maharaja of Patiala.
Rudyard Kipling, who visited Shimla often as a young newspaper reporter covering the “season”, said it involved “as much riding, waltzing, dining out and concerts in a week as I should get at home in a lifetime”.
