Out of Society

Abstract

Simla, 7,000 feet up in the lower Himalayas, the ‘hills’ of Kipling’s Plain Tales, was the summer capital both of the government of India and of the government of the Punjab in Kipling’s day. It had begun as a tiny local summer station for officers and their families in the early 1820s. The governor-general had spent a summer there in 1827, and thereafter it became the accepted residence of the government during the hot weather. In 1864 its de facto position as summer capital was made official. The cemetery Kipling describes long antedated the period of the town’s imperial glamour.