Sanjeev Bhaskar: My father’s Indian Summers

I first visited Shimla when I was seven years old and there was something immediately familiar and strangely comforting about the place. On the face of it, this modest little “hill station” acting as a prelude to the Himalayas was still in bustling, tropical India but its slanted roofs and alpine vistas were more reminiscent of a European town. Perhaps it was the names of local landmarks: Mall Road, the Gaiety Theatre, Cart Road, the iconic cream-coloured Christ Church and the deliciously named Scandal Point. Or maybe it was just because it was the first place in India that I had to wear a woolly hat and scarf.

In the late 19th century, the British developed this small town into first a sanatorium for heat-malaised men of the Raj and then the summer capital, from where the “Jewel in the Crown” was marshalled and then, in the 20th century, dismantled. It was also where my teenage father arrived, having survived the horrors of partition in 1947. While waiting for his first job, he volunteered as a dispatch clerk for Bennett and Colman, still, today, the publishers of the Times of India.

His memories of this period are vivid. His morning run would be to the top of Mount Jakhu, where a temple still stands, surrounded by wily and opportunistic monkeys. (My dad came home once to find a monkey in his bedroom with a pair of pants on its head.) He recalled with sparkling alacrity trekking with mates to hot springs through leopard-infested jungles, braving local stories of voodoo witches preying on young men; of seeing the Kendals perform Shakespeare at the Gaiety and of staring through the windows of the Cecil Hotel (where discussions about the creation of independent India and a newly formed Pakistan were held) and wondering what type of person stayed at such a luxurious place.

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It was also where he got to know an Englishman for the first time. Frederick Austin (or possibly Austin Frederick) worked for the newspaper and was bereft at having to leave India. My dad remembers him as a gentleman with old school manners, literary with a developed sense of fair play: a “typical Englishman” as he put it. Austin invited my father to visit him if he ever came to England.

My journeys to Shimla, as I grew up, were always from Delhi. A long bus journey to Kalka in the plains, and then the fabulous narrow gauge railway, through a hundred tunnels and countless bridges, amid awesome sights and scenery. It still feels timelessly romantic.

It’s difficult for me now to separate my warm feelings for Shimla as a tourist destination from my paternal connections to it. I know those early days couldn’t have been easy for my father. His family had lost everything and arrived in India as refugees from Gujranwala, now in Pakistan. They had moved from comfort and familiarity to poverty and disarray within the space of a fortnight (the notice given to those who lived close to either side of the newly drawn, arguably arbitrary border). Many, like my father, were pushed into areas with which they had no real connection or history. It’s no wonder that so many of these uprooted souls chose to uproot themselves again by emigrating to Britain.

My father’s view of Britain and the British was partly formed by what he experienced in Shimla. As a young man needing to provide for a widowed mother, he had to take any job he could. Fate decreed it was to be in this unpretentious hill town and it turned out to be, literally, a breath of fresh air. My father persisted with those views of the virtuous English gentleman long after he arrived in Britain in 1956. Indeed he constantly imparted them to me as I grew up. It is an ideal that I still aspire to, desperately cling to and look for in my fellow Brits.

I’ve been back to Shimla a few times. Some years ago, for a BBC documentary, I explored my father’s past and the intrigues of the British and the run up to partition. Many of the sites marking colonialism still stand in India today, representing an impressive ability to accept one’s history by absorbing it, rather than defacing and rewriting it. As is logically the case, not all Indians were saints and not all the British were sinners. There is a unique complexity to the relationship between India and Britain. Master and servant at one time, certainly, but there was a bond that made it more than acceptable for people like my parents to choose to dwell in the land of their former oppressors.

More recently, I had the surreal and wonderful experience of appearing in Indian Summers, the Channel 4 series set in Shimla in the 1930s – the last of the Raj’s heydays, perhaps. The weirdest part was filming it in Malaysia, owing to the paucity of appropriate buildings and infrastructure in Shimla itself. It didn’t feel like the Shimla I knew until I watched the first episode back and spotted the Christ Church at the top of the Mall. Suddenly, all those warm connections came flooding back. But so did a couple of questions.

Whatever happened to Mr Frederick/Austin? My Dad made contact with him in the early 60s. He was still lost without India and, like a character from Indian Summers, yearned to return to Shimla and to an Indian woman he had fallen in love with and left 20 years earlier. He was also keen for my father to meet his daughter Rita, who worked for the UN in Geneva. The trail stops there on that mini-drama. And 60 years after he wondered what kind of a person could stay at the Cecil hotel, it turned out the answer was: his son.

Indian Summers, Sundays, 9pm, Channel 4.