Rickshaws in Shimla and a murder case

Sometime in the early 1980s, we had taken cycle rickshaws while returning from a late night movie in Chandigarh’s Sector 17. When we reached Madhya Marg, the central avenue, en route to the university campus, someone called out: “Let’s have a race.” Spontaneously, about half a dozen rickshaws disgorged their passengers. The rickshaw men, who had probably encountered similar situations before, stepped down without demur and for the moment became customers. With great fanfare and loud cries, hands on handles, feet on pedals, off we went. Within a short distance, that flourish turned to a whimper accompanied by a chorus of wheezes and coughs.

The question, without an answer, was passed around, “How do they do it?”

In the hills, given the terrain, rickshaws, till they were banned by a court order in the 1960s, were pulled by two men, pushed by another two and often had a fifth running alongside to help, or to serve as a replacement. In the absence of motor vehicles, these served as the primary means of transport in Shimla and several houses had their own rickshaws and liveried pullers — jampanis, as they were called.

The story is told of a rather large lady being propelled up a steep slope where on the final leg, one jampani cried out: “MacMunn, MacMunn, poora das mun!” (MacMunn, MacMunn, weighs all of 10 mun). A mun or maund was around 37 kg. The lady in question would have been Emily, wife of Lieutenant General Sir George MacMunn, Quartermaster-General whose jampanis were known as Faith, Hope and Charity. ‘Faith’ was the man at the back, for, Faith can move mountains!

Behind the gilded facade of colonial cities was another world. This was a dingy, if not dark, underside that polished the surface and gave it its gloss. For Shimla, this luminescence came in the shape of the resources of an entire subcontinent and in the labour of hundreds of workers. Some came from the neighbouring hill states, others from Ladakh, or territories of the North West Frontier Province, now in Pakistan.

The Pathans became known for their hardiness, and as the daredevil drivers of tongas with their ‘hard held ponies’ that plied on the Kalka-Shimla road till the arrival of the railway in 1903. Kashmiris and Ladakhis handled odd jobs. From the surrounding hills, women came to work as aayas, nursemaids and men as rickshaw-pullers. The ayas and some other domestic servants were marginally better off than the others. At least for the period of their employment, they had food and a roof over their heads. Among the worst off were the rickshaw-men and in 1931, Shimla had 476 rickshaws and 2,863 licensed rickshaw-men — implying that a substantial portion of the town’s population was of rickshaw-pullers. They lived in abysmal conditions, often on a rack above the rickshaws that they plied. There was minimal or no access to clean water or the amenities of basic hygiene.

It was only in the years close to Independence that better living conditions were made available in the shape of ‘labour hostels and rickshaw sheds’; a couple of these structures survive.

In the same years, in the context of a small cottage with a grandiose name, a wag remarked that it ‘…would be in keeping with the Shimla practice of calling little things by big names’. The trend seems to have spilled over post Independence and a house en route to Barnes’ Court, today’s Raj Bhavan, has pressed on to metamorphose from ‘Yates’ Place’ to ‘Yates’ Palace’. In 1925, this was occupied by the head of the army canteen board, Mansel-Pleydell. On September 3 that year, Mansel-Pleydell was hosting a dinner and the rickshaws were lined outside his house, while their pullers whiled away their time as they waited for their passengers.

A man named Jageshar was asleep under a covering when Mansel-Pleydell came out to summon the men. Jageshar got entangled in whatever he had over him and this enraged Mansel-Pleydell, who kicked him repeatedly and pushed him around till the man collapsed. Among the terrified and mute witnesses was the hapless man’s cousin, who later carried Jageshar to the nearby police station at Chhota Shimla and asked for his statement to be recorded. As the man on duty did not do so, their chaudhri, headman, ran up to the house of Rai Bahadur Mohan Lal — all these places were within a few hundred metres of each other. Mohan Lal was an influential councillor and a close associate of Gandhiji. It was only on Mohan Lal’s insistence that a case was registered at the Sadar Thana, the main police station below the Lower Bazaar. Meanwhile, Jageshar died of broken ribs and a ruptured spleen.

Despite pressure to hush up the affair, the matter went to trial and the Press picked up the story and reported it almost blow by blow. Mansel-Pleydell was convicted and sentenced to a fine and rigorous imprisonment of a year-and-a-half. In years when all-too-common assaults on ‘natives’ could no longer be pushed under the carpet, his appeal to the High Court was dismissed and he committed suicide in prison.

— The writer is a Shimla-based author