The stories Himachali houses tell

Over a decade ago, when I first visited Sunnymead Estate in a leafy corner of Shimla, I had no idea of the abiding fascination it would spark in me. Here was a setting straight out of a fairy tale, whose cynosure, the double-storeyed gabled house, started pulling me towards its finely restored precincts every now and then.

Dating back to the turn of the 19th century, Sunnymead deftly wove the Himalayan ‘dhajji’ style of wattle-and-daub construction with European aesthetics, like many other buildings of yore. But its singularity lay in the ways in which it personalised the notion of everyday living, especially via objects, interior designing, and legacies of gardening and cooking passed down generations.

It was with this home that I truly realised how the tag of ‘heritage’ couldn’t only be reserved for big, public buildings. It was applicable to smaller, more intimate edifices as well, where oldness and aliveness went hand in hand. On the occasion of World Heritage Day on April 18, as I recall my early years of education, I am struck by the near-complete absence of such houses in history classes. Barring a few cursory references to the efficiency of Harappan homes in the ancient subcontinent, the already limited conversation on buildings primarily revolved around famous monuments and memorials.

My growing-up years in Himachal, however, introduced me to much humbler structures that followed the lay of the land, and staked similar claims on the gravity of history and the weightage of heritage. Early on, I observed how the state’s pre-colonial and colonial settlements ensconced a material culture that flitted between the local and global. And from such materiality emanated an emotional sphere of belonging and beauty, where human owners and non-human actors played complementary roles.

“When my great-grand-uncle Jawahar Kishan Kitchlu made this home, he wanted the inside and the outside to be in a constant conversation with each other,” quips Madhavi Sanghamitra Bhatia, the spirited owner of Sunnymead. To realise this aim, Kitchlu brought a bespoke chandelier from Italy to adorn the living room, whose design was inspired by his garden’s roses. Curtains carrying the prints of those roses further enabled such dialogue to occur effortlessly.

Down the century, Madhavi herself has inherited this sensibility, and seamlessly navigates the worlds of nature and culture through her enviable knowledge of gardening, even as she carefully utilises the estate’s flora for her lauded recipes. Meanwhile, the upper storey of the house infuses new life into the material salvaged from the town’s old buildings by making it a part of the restored architecture, and as a whole, the property today occupies the privileged position of one of India’s top five homestays.

Many other houses of Shimla have similar yet unique stories to tell. At Abbeyfeale, on the opposite side of the town, we find some of the last remaining samples of diamond-shaped painted glass windows. The multi-hued, cross-cut panels endow the house with a distinctively charming aura, and go back to the middle of the 19th century when the building was raised.

As the sun’s rays pour through these panes, the owner, Prof Meenakshi F Paul, recollects the many mornings she spent as a child suffused in that light, being introduced to the British culinary custom of eating ‘elevenses’ (a mixture of cucumber sandwiches, cakes and coffee).

Today, kettles and cutlery carrying ‘made in Britain’ and ‘made in America’ marks decorate Abbeyfeale’s heavy wooden cabinets, while slam books belonging to older residents invoke the names and addresses of friends and family from pre-Partition India.

Then there are elements that take the practice of ‘personalising heritage’ many steps further. At Hawkesford, named so due to its design inspired by the wingspan of a hawk, the owner JR Nanda proudly displays a paper-embosser from the colonial era. Still working in perfect condition, the tool was used for decades to mark the header of a page (often a letter or memo) with the name of the house.

As I run my fingers over the intricate ‘ridges’ that ‘Hawkesford Simla’ forms on paper, I feel history coming alive. My mind also returns to the drawing room at Sunnymead, that preserves a copy of a book by the British architect RA “Bungalow” Briggs. It is in this book that we find the inspirational template for the house itself, and through both these objects, the idea of heritage assumes an idiosyncratic character by enfolding the energy and soul of the respective homes in an inimitable manner.

It would be erroneous, though, to attribute such particularised intimacy only to colonial-era homes. Himachal’s establishments that hark back to a pre-colonial style of living also reveal a materially-rich rural world. In the mud, stone and wood houses of the Kangra valley, for example, a panoply of objects points to a carefully curated, age-old form of living — large bamboo caskets for storing grain (later replaced by aluminum drums), mortar and pestle crafted out of stone (often embedded within the earth itself), ‘jaali-waali’ cupboards for storing food in cool air (predecessors of refrigerators), and chillums, hookahs and rope-beds called ‘khaats’ or ‘chaarpais’.

Well-to-do households would boast of courtyards and intricately designed windows that occasionally carried murals inspired from daily life and mythology. Form and function also met in the architectural feature of ‘alcoves’ that would punctuate both the interiors and exteriors, gently illumining the inhabited spaces in the pre-electricity days.

While a few boutique hotels and government-led projects have tried to showcase the cultural value of such aspects in recent years, a lot more needs to be done in order to robustly regard houses as ‘heritage’. Since we generally lack museums that narrate histories of private dwellings as a means of understanding life-that-was, these homes offer some of the best opportunities to rethink the past from a felt, experiential perspective. As the French philosopher Gaston Bachelard once noted, “Memories of the outside world will never have the same tonality as those of home, and by recalling these memories, we add to our store of dreams; we are never real historians, but always near poets.”

The houses of Himachal diversely tap into this very medley of history and poetry, and therein lies their true value as heritage.

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