While the influx of pilgrims and tourists may have changed some parts of Himachal Pradesh, other parts have resisted the destabilising influences of highways. But will this still hold true as the network of roads expands to further exploit the state´s natural wealth?
Gods, sages and renegades apart, the hills were traditionally a forbidding place for plains folk. It was the British who, escaping from the hot, dusty, diseased ´India´, began to dot the Himalayan landscape with hill stations. Sanaloriums, cantonments and exclusive retreats sprang up on the cooler slopes, amidst the fragrance of pine and cedar. The annual migration to the Himalaya of people who mattered, or were too ill to matter, assumed the nature of a ritual. To spend the summer in the hills was no ordinary privilege. Even the humble babu who followed the sahib with files revelled in the second-hand importance that it gave him. Shimla, the summer residence of the Viceroy, became particularly important as a centre of British social and political activity — not to mention the decisions of imperial significance that were taken inside its (in-roofed chalets.
So to Shimla was brought the cart road, all the way from Kalka, and upon it carts began to ply. The railroad followed. The British were, and could afford to be, snobbish. Civil and municipal laws were strictly enforced to keep the influence of the natives away from this little Scotland in India. With their departure the inevitable happened — up the cart road and the railroad rushed the dusty plains of India.
This has been repeated in several other hill resorts of Himachal such as Kasauli, Dalhousie and Mc Leodganj, where the Gora Sahibs resided in summer and to which broad roads were built at enormous public expense. It is to these old British townships that the Maruti-owning, middle-class families now rush during the summer closing of schools in the plains. Within a very short time, a large number of buildings have been converted into hotels. In Shimla, some of the old structures that have managed to escape the insatiable hunger of the bureaucracy for accomodation, or the ravages of fire, are now ill-maintained government hotels and guest-houses. Wild Rower Hall, at Mahsobra, (one-time residence of Lord Kitchener, then Commander-in-Chief of the Indian Army) is one such building. From the ashes of Peter of (home to several viceroys), which was lost to a fire some years ago, has risen a monstrosity with pretensions to being a luxury resort.