Lions, peacocks & urns… Vanishing ornamental legacies of Shimla

Siddharth Pandey

The erstwhile summer capital of the British Raj continues to impress visitors and residents alike with its famous colonial-era buildings, but simultaneously hides in plain sight a wealth of structural intricacies. These hold a distinctive aesthetic power to stop the viewer in her tracks. It’s a reminder of an era when craftsmanship was inseparable from the general ethos of building practice. Ornamentation was upheld as integral to the look and feel of the overall structure, instead of being treated as a superfluous activity or as an ill-conceived afterthought.

Built during the course of around 150 years, Shimla’s pre-Independence heritage thrums with a remarkable panoply of such features that not only decorated the cottages and castles of the whites, but also marked their presence in local habitations. From stylised flora and fauna to carved and sculpted accoutrements, the hill town’s gamut of ornamentations spans a diverse array of expressions which are best appreciated while walking.

It was during one such walk more than a decade ago that my attention was drawn towards a pair of peacocks elegantly crowning a wooden arched window in the town’s Lower Bazaar. While earlier amblings had well acquainted me with the capital’s most recognisable landmarks (from the Christ Church to Viceregal Lodge), sighting a set of these mirroring figures amidst the hullabaloo of packed streets opened a somewhat different world. For, it was with these birds that I began realising how beauty could be found in the most ordinary of spaces, no matter how crammed these might be.

Historians have observed that in the absence of a well-conceived urban plan for native Indians serving the Raj, Lower Bazaar invariably developed a higgledy-piggledy character over time. Devoid of the orderliness instantly noticeable in dwellings reserved for the Europeans, the bazaar spread unevenly in a series of huts and shacks down the hill slope. And yet, for all its unkempt demeanour, the region still allowed the ordinary Indian to work his way through skill and creativity, chiselling out wooden fenestrations and facades with the finest of flourishes. A closer look at these small houses and shops thus reveals a plethora of stylistic details that not only ripple across the exteriors, but also enter the interiors through leaved and petalled pillars, once a staple element of native buildings.

Other humble contraptions further attest to the ubiquitous need for aesthetically invigorating imagery. The most fondly remembered of these are the 3-foot-tall ‘water hydrants’, which the old-timers especially refer to, whilst sharing their memories of walking on the Mall Road — Shimla’s celebrated tarmac. Strategically placed across its length, with some even dotting the lanes of Lower Bazaar, these short, metallic, pillar-like apparatuses originally bore a lion-face on their front that ejected drinking water with the aid of a side-pedal. These simultaneously doubled up as fire hydrants via another lever, poking from the opposite side, thus drawing two functions together within an ingeniously conceived technology.

“We used to drink water from a lion’s face, no less,” goes every zealously related memory of hydrant-use. Speaking of a time — usually until the 1970s — when these devices were still operational, Shimla’s residents enthusiastically emphasise that drinking from any other source (except the few little baoris) was as unthinkable as the notion of packaged ‘bottled water’ (popularised only during the Eighties and afterwards). While serving their prized roles, the hydrants provided well-earned respites from long strolls through a medium that could always be marvelled at, both for its functionality and its expertly hewed materiality. The fact that these were no ordinary taps but specially manufactured inventions sporting an ‘S.W.W.’ sign, accentuated the sense of collective pride. Standing for ‘Simla Water Works’, the abbreviation under the lion face endowed the hydrants with an indelible home-grown lure, whose rewards could best be borne by a skilful application of hands.

Perhaps the most easily viewable decorative features could be attributed to the miscellany of window styles that endlessly got experimented with during the colonial era. From bay and bow types to rose and oriel frames, and from dormer juttings to sash glasses, openings in architecture were often a special point to practice stylistic variety. Once combined with other components such as the intricately-carved bargeboards, brackets, foliations, finials, gables and conical towers, the window would inevitably acquire an added majestic appeal, lending just the perfect visual balance to the equation between the inside and outside.

Some of the best examples occur in the Cooper Block of the famous Cecil Hotel, the Punjab Circuit House (or Cedar Lodge) overlooking the Chief Minister’s residence Oakover, and the exquisite sprawl of Nabha Estate lying in the shadow of Tara Devi Hill. All of these windows and facades are united by their clever, nostalgic nods to European Alpine architecture. For a moment or two, beholding them does indeed give the impression of stepping into a Swiss or German countryside, but never quite removed from Himalayan terrain. So smoothly do cross-cultural ornamental aesthetics intertwine to ascribe the town an aura that is entirely its own.

But if there was a decorative article that could match the rarity of the peacock pair, it would be the lushly embellished blue urn, poised high towards the western end of the Mall. Although a fairly common ornament in European and plain-based colonial architecture, urns in Shimla are far fewer and, therefore, easy to be missed. Till date, I have only been able to spot two of them atop a building in the town centre, and another one in an alcove at Cecil Annexe, opposite Cecil Hotel. While the first duo displays a fairly regular design of cemented vases, it is the second singular pot sitting high, proud, and somewhat melancholic, that hums with an indescribable mystique.

Set symmetrically, the semi-circular niche holds possibly the most fragile object from the town’s history which is completely exposed to weather. Balanced on a little mound one-third its height and topped with a knobbed lid, this urn vividly recalls the blue-and-white pottery of Eurasia, especially its Indian variant from Jaipur, even though its provenance is unknown. The pot’s half-visible surface is brilliantly patterned in shades of azure and cerulean, and only recently I deciphered three unknown mythical figures splayed across its curves with a zoomed-in camera. However, the urn derives its beauty not just through the blue-hued designs, but also through its precarious vantage. If ever a fantasy novel was to be set in Shimla, the final magical object would ideally be discovered within its hidden chamber.

Architectural ornaments, then, effortlessly bridge the gap between reality and imagination. But in his widely cited 1910 lecture ‘Ornament and Crime’, the influential Austrian-Czechoslovak architect-thinker Adolf Loos came down heavily on decoration of any kind in daily life and buildings. Adornment was an anathema to him, and he was indubitably clear about the fact that “ornament does not increase the pleasures of life”; rather, it only wastes manpower and health. While Loos had his reasons to arrive at this peculiar viewpoint, his myopic understanding of human culture couldn’t be more erroneous. If anything, the wide array of Shimla’s examples robustly illustrate how the carefully cultivated ornamentation of yore not only imparted a certain grace and charm to the diverse dwellings, but more importantly, a unique dignity as well.

And yet, over the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, Loos’ vision for stripped-down, bare-looking buildings got only more and more realised. As Indian commentator Santosh Desai recently argued, “Modern buildings strive to stamp out individuality and character. The chrome-and-glass look that has come to signify modernity closes upon itself and leaves nothing for the viewer to grasp. There is no relief to be had. All buildings look the same.” Like every other Indian town and city, this is true of Shimla too. With no respite in sight, the haphazard vision of that relentlessly bandied idea called ‘development’ continues unabated, and hardly gives holistic attention to preserving old structures, let alone their decorative aspects.

For now, the peacock pair has stopped singing, as a tastelessly-done cemented structure recently took the place of the original accommodation sporting the birds. Likewise, several other buildings displaying those subtly crafted windows have also been consigned to the pages of history. For their part, the lion-faced hydrants have long lost their roar too, and the few attempts to revive their glory either through replication or repair have been hopelessly shoddy and unsustainable (to put it mildly). As for the blue urn, it tries its best to remain resilient and is still in its assigned abode. Yet, one can’t help but notice the silent chipping away of its tiles, scratch by scratch as it were, under the vagaries of weather and, more crucially, ignorance. If only we could reorient our gaze by slowing our pace, and give these ornaments the regard that they so richly deserve.

— The writer is a historian, artist and cultural critic from Shimla