Space and Place in Shimla: the cart road to the mall (1.1)

Here is a thought that was running through my head in the Sauna today. The average visitor to Shimla city arrives at the elevator, takes it up to the mall, after doing some shopping goes to take a picture by Christ Church and if they are adventurous enough then pants up Jakhoo hill to the temple where they fall easy prey to the canny monkeys. There is a both a spatial and temporal element then to the visit which builds towards the Hanuman Mandir and begins with standing outside of the temple in the car park while waiting for the lift. There is also a movement from the cart road, which is unquestionably of man, to the relatively peaceful, Jakhoo hill whose deodars and monkeys suggest that we are entering more into the realm of nature. Now i myself hate over simplistic nature/culture oppositions, but it seems that there is something in the experience and the understanding of divinity here that makes use of those oppositions. To push it a little further, the first temple that you experience by the lift is incredibly noisy, the road with its horns and roaring still intrudes despite the attempts of teh priests to drown it out by using loud hailers, the temple is built into the side of the hill and behind a car park, so it has no view of the forest or the slope bellow, the way that rubbish thrown from above gathers there and clogs the stream intensifies the feeling of being at the bottom of something. Here then the first impression of Shimla is of a place in which man is wholly dominant. Man and the machinery of course of the lift, the loud hailer, the cars and busses the flashing neon lights and the discards of man’s excess. Yet amongst all this is the temple reminding us that even here, amidst all this, we are not far from the Divine. It is possible to see something of the Divine and to come to know something of the Divine even in this space.