Indian graffiti

The vanishing act in Shimla

The lingering image of the week is not Pervez Musharraf in his black sherwani reciting the oath as president. It is, on the contrary, Tourism and Culture Minister Ananth Kumar and Ratan Tata posing in front of a Taj Mahal portrait at the ceremony to hand over the monument to the widely respected corporate group for maintenance. There will, of course, be the usual sniggers.

That the Taj Mahal would do more for the sagging brand equity of the group (two of its major brands, tea and hotels, are called Taj) than any inspiring speeches its chairman may have been delivering to its shareholders lately. Or that it is a reward for proximity to this government. The sniggers will get surer as in weeks to come the group is handed over Air-India, the prize it has been seeking for years now.

But having seen some evidence first-hand of the way our heritage is being raped, pillaged and incinerated, we had better distance ourselves from this corporate rivalry business a bit and, for once, applaud a minister’s foresight in taking so radical a measure. Surely, the Oberois have done no harm to Humayun’s Tomb in Delhi, nor has the Apeejay group been using Jantar Mantar to dump garbage from its Park Hotel across the road. Anybody who’s seen Archaeological Survey of India drive piles through monuments like the Sun Temple at Konark, or countless monuments become public lavatories (including Hampi), would welcome this realism. At least someone in government is willing to admit that it doesn’t always know best and to seek out the corporates, or others outside the sarkari circles, for help.

But, while we still care a bit about the big monuments, this country has heritage scattered all over its plains, deserts and, notably, hills. As in the small retreat of Mashobra, just 13 km north of Shimla, which, in the colonial days, was the hangout of so many princely families who moved here to their summer palaces just as the Raj shifted to its summer capital.

Inside the maharaja’s lair

No one had an abode as lavish as the then Maharaja of Faridkot did, though he was known mainly for his curiously penny-pinching ways — he would give nothing to his children but spent crores buying fancy cars, aircraft, horses, jewellery. If his motive was to build, through these acquisitions, a heritage and a legacy, he obviously wasn’t well advised because you now see it — or what remains of it — rotting, up for grabs in a string of palaces and garages around the village of Tallai, 2 km down the road from Mashobra. The palace sits atop the most magnificent spot in the entire hill range, in a place so quiet you can hear individual leaves on the apple trees rustle in the gentlest breeze. Ordinary folk can’t even get close to it — the chowkidar and mongrels both look forbidding. But I was in good company.

The Badal family comes from Faridkot and I could hide behind Sukhbir Singh Badal who obviously rues so badly the fact that the beauties that belonged to his district now lie rotting in Mashobra. In padlocked garages, you can count six Rolls Royce, two Bentleys, four Jaguars, each with no more than a few hundred miles on the odometer. There are brand new Indian Chiefs and Harley Davidsons in crates and, you have to see them to believe me, in one narrow, endless garage four factory-painted Scout armoured personnel carriers (APCs) of the US army (WWII vintage). Behind the car garage is the grave of the maharaja’s favourite horse.

He died committing all his properties and possessions to a trust rather than to his daughters — one of whom lives in desolation in the rotting palace. For years the “knowledgeable” folk from Chandigarh, Shimla and Delhi made quiet visits to the property, ripping it of antique furniture, carpets and jewellery.

As you peep through the dust-caked windows of the maharaja’s library, you can well imagine the treasure the place would have contained. I spotted an original edition of Moby Dick, a silver lamp-stand half-covered in the rubble, an exquisite Persian carpet eaten by moths and fungus. There is even an underground strongroom, now protected by padlocks bandaged in court seals, that is reputed to contain piles of jewellery and seven quintals of gold.

What is it about us Indians that makes us such great defilers of monuments, nature and sites?

Then come to his second palace, or whatever is left of it, on the next hill. It was consumed by a fire three months back. All that is left is the silica fire-place. You can cry walking over the still fresh rubble, twisted stained glass crunching under your soles, and then find evidence of the maharaja’s miserliness — letters exchanged with the phone department in 1952 resulting in a Rs 30 refund! The wise men of Mashobra would tell you there is a pattern to the pillage and the burning. First the properties are gutted of all their furniture and artefacts, probably under collusion, and then a mysterious fire destroys everything. So no questions would be asked later.

Two palaces, the cars, the motorcycles and the APCs still survive but obviously not for long, unless some Ananth Kumar grabs what is left, declares it national heritage and then hands it over to someone who would scrub it and then protect it. I promise you it will be a real sight even if the maharaja never actually moved his most remarkable possessions, crated WWII airplanes, and another 20-odd antique cars, from Faridkot to the hills.

Remember, you first read it here PYROMANIA is a popular sport in Shimla. Checking back on the Faridkot palace fire I asked Ashwini Sharma, The Indian Express correspondent in Shimla, for details on some of the other famous fires. He emailed a list that makes an 8-kilobyte file. The Wildflower Hall at Mashobra (now rebuilt and developed into a remarkable five-star resort by the Oberois) was fully burnt in 1993. A magisterial inquiry indicted the Himachal Tourism Corporation for negligence that led to the destruction of the masterpiece Ripon built and Kitchener used as his residence. But nobody was punished. Then the list goes on: Peterhoff complex (Raj Bhawan, where Godse’s trial was held), Snowdon Hospital, Walker’s (army) Hospital, Western Command Building (from where the British controlled the War in most of Asia), Kennedy House, Kennedy Cottage, General Post Office, Central School, Jesus & Mary Convent, Himachal Dham, DC’s Office, Davicos, Grand Hotel. In all, 62 colonial heritage buildings have been burnt to ashes in Shimla in three decades. If anybody’s been held accountable for any of these, I do not know.

I do know, however, that the most magnificent of these still somehow survives. The former Viceregal Lodge in Shimla was built by Lord Dufferin in 1884 over 110 acres in the English Renaissance (Elizabethan) style and was the venue of many momentous decisions from the transfer of power to the Shimla Accord. The table on which Bhutto and Mrs Gandhi signed the accord still sits in a hall, mostly unknown to lakhs of visitors who come to Shimla every year. There are separate bedrooms for the Viceroy and the Vicereine, with the usual moulded upholstery and rotting furniture. After Independence, it became the Rashtrapati Niwas but Dr Radhakrishnan, in his wisdom, turned it over to the education ministry to house the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies.

Two decades back, working for the same newspaper, I had done a series of stories on scandals in the institute which involved, among other things, some scholars and officials ripping the giant curtains to make cushions in their homes besides, in one rather harmless case, making out on the Viceroy’s king-sized bed. But you can see worse happening now. Electric room heaters stick out of temporary sockets in corridors and rooms. The British thought they had built a fire-proof building. Shimla will soon prove them wrong. We columnists love to use the expression “when this happens remember where you read it first”. When the Viceregal Lodge gets carbonised in yet another inevitable Shimla fire, even I’d be perfectly entitled to an I-told-you-so.

The Gandhis missed this one

If you want to cure yourself of this depression, or any other, come to a place named so unimaginatively it sounds deliberate, the Catchment Area. The 1015-acre patch of the greenest forest ever lies just off the Hindustan-Tibet Road, 10 km from Shimla. You need a permit from the District Forest Officer to get there which is a good thing as very few people actually manage to get in.

It belonged, originally, to the Raja of Koti but the government acquired it in 1952 and declared it a protected forest. The forest department claims that for 150 years not a tree has been felled here and once you are deep inside you can see why it is not a tall claim. This is the richest, deepest, thickest, purest pine forest you have seen — it is reputed to be the thickest in Asia — full of ancient deodars, white oaks, chir and blue pines.

An utterly unforgiving, kutcha, narrow, 8 km road takes you to a quaint rest house in the heart of the forest where endless walking trails begin. It is supposed to be home to a lot of wildlife. We only saw some hawks and the happiest langurs ever. Himachal Pradesh has actually done something to save its forests. In 1990, for example, it banned the felling of trees to make boxes for packing its apples. But since the farmers need the boxes, it gave them cash subsidy for importing wood from neighbouring states. Is the chief minister of Uttaranchal reading?

One walk takes you to an old 13-lakh gallon British-made reservoir fed by numerous rainwater streams that meander in from the forest. The water is then decanted into Shimla under the force of nothing else than gravity. A simple, old engineering marvel and the reason why this most magnificent of forests is called Catchment Area. But maybe it’s just as well that nobody’s noticed this or this would have also been named after some Nehru or Gandhi, as most of the real estate has been on top of Kufri up the same highway, and then serial-raped by gangs of ‘Puppies’ who come driving, honking, playing dhik-chak music at full volume, spilling beer and worse, riding ponies, yaks, feeding leftovers to stray dogs and some truly miserable animals — including two snow leopards — still said to be surviving in the Kufri zoo.

Good old sarkari restrictions have saved this forest, yet the desi traveller has left his fingerprints. On a tree-trunk deep inside even this forest you can read an “I love so-and-so” message. What is it about us Indians that makes us such great defilers of monuments, nature and sites? Surely, this is not a trait you can blame on the Puppy culture. For decades we’ve been defiling monuments with our names and those of our loved ones. Even in the ancient Persepolis near Shiraz in Iran, you find countless inscriptions – all by Indians – informing posterity that they’d been there. Alexander the Great sacked the city first and lately we Indians have been working hard at it. The graffiti goes back to World War I when some Indian regiments travelled through the region. On a recent visit to Persepolis (during the prime minister’s Iran visit), I took down some names of such worthies. But I am not listing them here out of respect for men who are probably dead by now. But there must be some reason why we Indians want so desperately to make a mark at the very sight of a wall. Sometimes we do it by peeing, sometimes with graffiti. Maybe Dr Murli Manohar Joshi could add this also to his new school curricula on Indian culture.