Shimla’s Burma chapter
We seldom come across a place that has acted as the capital of not one, not two, but three crucial territories simultaneously. Yet, there was a time when the Himalayan hill station of ‘Simla’ (now Shimla) served as the political centre of imperial India, colonial Punjab, as well as colonial Burma. While Simla’s relationship with the first and second is fairly well known, its affinity with the third is largely forgotten.
Even though it was in the 1940s that the hill capital directly came to ‘host’ Burma, the link goes back to the 19th century, when the British Empire and Burma’s Konbaung dynasty collided thrice during British India’s longest and most expensive war. Numerous negotiations of the third and final war (1885-87) were done in Simla. This was also a time when the imperial authorities gained access to the famous ‘Burma teak’, and exploited the invaluable material to embellish several Simla buildings, most famously the Viceregal Lodge (now the Indian Institute of Advanced Study), as well as for carving out the Speaker’s chair at the erstwhile Council Chamber, now Himachal Pradesh’s Vidhan Sabha.
It was, however, the notion of ‘exile’ that peculiarly yoked the two places together during the thick of the Second World War. Quite tellingly, political exile already had precedents in the larger landscape of colonialism. Not only was the last Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar sent to Burma’s Rangoon in 1858, the last king of Burma, Thibaw Min, was also expelled to the Indian port city of Ratnagiri in 1885. And with the 1942 Japanese invasion of colonial Burma, its government was exiled to Simla, from where it operated for three years until 1945.
Shifting from the Far East to the Himalayan heights brought its own set of issues, as the government-in-exile suffered humiliation and disdain in Simla. The historians Christopher Bayly and Tim Harper capture the scenario by remarking that “into this precipitous ant hill ventured, like unloved poor relations, what remained of the government of Burma”. And at the centre of this political storm was the Governor, the Anglo-Irish diplomat Reginald Dorman Smith, who was joined by Burmese officials such as Tin Tut, Thein Pe and Sir Paw Tun, all with varying degrees of allegiances and support for the ruling British.
A few years ago, at London’s British Library, I chanced upon a rare set of exchanges between the exiled government and the Burma Office at London, where the former requests the latter for supplying it with adequate infrastructure in Simla, including “well-furnished houses”. Most amusing was the response to Dorman Smith’s plea for using a motor car in the town, that smacked of the exclusivity preserved for the hill capital’s established customs. It read: “The question of motor car is a delicate one, since it is difficult to say why one would be necessary. The Viceroy, Commander-in-Chief and the Governor of Punjab are the only people permitted to use a motor car in Simla and I would have thought the Governor of Burma could well travel by rickshaw like everyone else.” In a subsequent response, the case is outrightly dismissed with the admonition: “I see no reason why the Governor should have a motor car at Simla.”
Even as the Empire’s hold weakened with the raging war and the escalating spirit of nationalism, Dorman Smith instituted a kind of academic seminar in Simla for the three years of exile to reappraise the whole history of the British rule in the country. In 1944, he even organised the ‘Simla Conference’ with Anglo-Burmese leaders to discuss the colony’s politics (this was a year before the well-known 1945 ‘Simla Conference’ between Lord Wavell and Indian leaders). In lighter moments, the Governor and his wife would find comfort in their pet dogs, while someone like Thein Pe — the leading spokesman of the leftist movement in Burma — spent much of his time sleeping and watching films in the warm cinemas of Simla.
One could find several other personnel linked both to Simla and Burma’s soil. From the last Indian Viceroy Lord Mountbatten, who oversaw the recapture of Burma from the Japanese in 1945, to Spencer Harcourt Butler, who served as Burma’s Governor from 1923-27 and after whom was named a famous school in Simla, the list is rich with details. Even after Independence, the link was revived in the form of Aung San Suu Kyi’s fellowship at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study in 1986. As the daughter of Aung San, the Father of Modern Burma (now Myanmar), Suu Kyi researched Burmese literature and culture, and would later label her Simla days as her best ones ever.
It is, however, in the very ‘Indian’ personalities of the late doctor-couple, Dr BR Nanda and Dr L Nanda, that I found the surprising coda to Simla’s Burma chapter. Married in 1943, these Simla-based personalities were the most sought-after medical practitioners of their time, and served as the official doctors to the exiled Burmese Government, while also acting as doctors for local rajas, schools and common citizens. Both shared the same clinic and even the same table, with Mrs Nanda donning the significant role of the Chief Medical Recruiting Officer for the Burmese Government.
I came to learn about this remarkable duo from their son, the 81-year-old JR Nanda. Often spotted in a Pahari cap and shawl, the junior ‘Nandaji’ preserves his parents’ memories in as fine a manner as he conserves his 1896 colonial-era home ‘Hawkesford’, which his parents purchased in 1950. Nandaji rightly feels proud about the fact that his mother was the first female doctor to be allowed private practice by the British in the region, while his father, along with being a physician, was also reputed as Simla’s ‘walking encyclopaedia’— a tag that the son carries further.
Sitting in his cedar-furnished, double-storeyed home whose design was inspired by the wingspan of a hawk, Nandaji has often indulged me with his family’s private papers and photographs. And it was in these records that I came across his father’s handwritten impressions of Simla during the Second World War, that almost entirely deal with the Burmese government-in-exile, and reveal the Senior Nanda’s associations with Dorman Smith and Tin Tut (the Chief Secretary and Adviser to the Governor).
The doctor highlights that the Burmese offices ran from different buildings under the imperial government. He was amazed by a “group of Anglo-Burmese ladies whose attire I had never seen before”. The Junior Mr Nanda recalls one such lady as well, a certain Miss Fook Chong, who didn’t wish to return to Burma and started a Grammar School on the Ridge, where he studied as a child from 1947-48.
When Burma was recaptured by the British and it was time to leave, Tin Tut requested Dr BR Nanda to accompany him to the colony — a proposal he politely declined. Along with his wife, Dr Nanda continued to serve the people of Shimla and Himachal for over half a century. Both of them passed away in the late 1990s, but their humble table from their clinic in Lower Bazar still stands regally under a high Victorian arch at Hawkesford. A garlanded photograph of the aged couple hangs just above, with a paperweight, inkstand and a letterhead sitting below. On the right is a wall clock which, according to Nandaji, stopped working at exactly the moment his father passed away, three years after his life partner, bringing to a conclusion an era of ministrations never to return, from Simla’s Burma to Shimla.
— The writer is a historian, artist and cultural critic from Shimla
