Shimla

Before the British arrived, the slope now covered by Shimla held a few scattered hamlets in territory disputed between local hill chiefs and Gorkha forces from Nepal. The Anglo-Nepalese War of 1814–16 ended Gorkha control, and British officers convalescing in the cool air began building houses on the ridge from 1822. The name comes from Shyamala Devi, a form of the goddess Kali.

The settlement grew with astonishing speed for a place with no level ground. Officials escaping the heat of Calcutta and later Delhi made it a seasonal government town, and in 1864 it was declared the summer capital of British India: for several months each year the viceroy, the army command and whole departments of state moved here, governing a subcontinent from a hillside reached by mule track and, after 1903, by a narrow-gauge railway of tunnels and curves. Church, theatre, town hall, clubs and a long row of mock-Tudor shops gave the Mall the look it still has.

Shimla stayed at the centre of events into the 20th century. The Simla Conference of 1945 met at the Viceregal Lodge to discuss India's future, and talks there preceded partition in 1947. After independence the town served briefly as capital of East Punjab, became the capital of Himachal Pradesh when the state was formed in 1971, and in 1972 hosted the Simla Agreement between India and Pakistan. Tourism and government have shaped it since, filling the hillsides with concrete far beyond the old colonial core.

Shimla is two towns layered on one ridge. One is the inherited hill station of churches, bandstands, bookshops and evening promenades, kept up partly for visitors and partly out of habit. The other is a Pahari hill town whose people speak Himachali dialects, keep village ties in the Shimla and Kullu districts, and mark the year by temple fairs, local deities carried in palanquins, and harvest festivals.

The Gaiety Theatre gives the town an unusual theatrical tradition for its size, with amateur and touring productions in Hindi and English, and the Ridge is used for state functions, festivals and political rallies alike. Writers and artists have long settled in the district — the novelist Ruskin Bond's hill-station world lies in the same mountains — and the Himachal State Museum's Pahari miniature paintings show the refined court art that these valleys produced.

Manners are unhurried and formal by Indian city standards. People greet with namaste, shoes come off at doorways and temples, and elders are addressed with respect. Education matters here: Himachal Pradesh has among the higher literacy rates in India, and Shimla's schools and university draw families from across the state. The evening walk along the Mall, wrapped against the cold with an ice cream or a paper cone of roasted peanuts, is the town's most reliable ritual.

About 170,000 people live in the city itself, with many more in the surrounding district. It is a government town first: the state secretariat, the high court, the university and the schools employ a large share of residents, and tourism supports most of the rest through hotels, taxis and shops. Apple orchards in the surrounding hills are the other pillar of the local economy, and the fruit season in autumn fills the roads with trucks heading to the plains.

The city's shape governs daily life. Almost nothing is flat, so routines are built around steps, lifts, the ropeway and long walks; deliveries are still made by porters carrying loads on their backs. Most residents live away from the Mall, in Sanjauli, Chhota Shimla, Kasumpti and the settlements spreading along the eastern ridges, which have grown far faster than the infrastructure beneath them.

Water is the town's chronic problem. Built for a few thousand people, Shimla now supports a population and a tourist load many times larger, and a serious water crisis in the summer of 2018 forced rationing and appeals for visitors to stay away. Unstable slopes are the other worry, with heavy monsoon rain in recent years causing landslides and building collapses in the district. Winters can bring snow heavy enough to cut roads and power for days.

Everyday eating in Shimla is North Indian — dal, rajma with rice, chole bhature, paratha breakfasts and endless masala chai — with the hill's own cooking behind it. The Himachali festive meal, the dham, is served sitting on the floor and eaten from leaf plates: rice with madra, chickpeas or beans simmered in yoghurt, sour lentil preparations and a sweet rice dish to finish, cooked by hereditary cooks called botis. Siddu, a steamed leavened bread stuffed with ground walnuts or poppy seed and eaten with ghee, is the winter speciality of the Shimla and Kullu hills.

Tibetan and Nepali food has become part of the town's ordinary diet. Momo dumplings and thukpa noodle soup are sold from stalls in the bazaars and small cafés on the Mall, cheap and hot in cold weather. Street food runs to chana, spiced chickpeas eaten from paper bowls, samosas, fried fish in winter and roasted maize and peanuts sold along the Ridge.

The apple is the district's emblem. Orchards planted in the early 20th century around Kotgarh made Himachal Pradesh one of India's main apple-growing states, and the fruit turns up as juice, cider, jam and the local sweet cider vinegar. Bakeries along the Mall keep a colonial habit alive with cakes, buns and plum cake at Christmas, and the Indian Coffee House on the Mall still serves filter coffee and dosa in a room little changed for decades.