Towards a Domestic Gothic Tradition: Shimla through Post-Colonial Lens

Abstract

Originating in the Pre-Romantic era, the Gothic as a literary genre expanded significantly with colonial expansion. Finding themselves amongst the presumably exotic natives and their supernatural beliefs, the European writers found fertile grounds to extend the genre of the Gothic. For its comprehensiveness and entirety, the Gothic relies on the landscape against which the story is set. It is, then, an array of landscapes, ranging from architectural to the natural, holding the uncanny themes and meanings secure. One such place that evoked strong reminiscences of the “uncanniness” of the traditional Gothic, particularly in the context of the landscape, was Shimla, the summer capital of British India.

Till date, the hills of Shimla are studded with Gothic architectural buildings and the haunts of British ghosts. The paper, under a literary lens, explores the British Gothic as it unravelled itself in Shimla. An attempt shall be made to trace the development of the Gothic, in Shimla, from its initiation by the British writer Rudyard Kipling in his short stories “The Phantom Rickshaw”, “By Word of Mouth” and “The House of Suddhoo.” to the adaptation of a predominantly English Gothic aesthetics by an Indian, Minakshi Chaudhry, in select short stories taken from The Ghost Stories of Shimla Hills and finally the emergence of the Indian Gothic in Anita Krishan’s Ghosts of the Silent Hills. The paper shall analyse the adopting, adapting and abrogating of the Western elements of the Gothic genre, thereby reflecting the cultural beliefs and traditions of the Hillfolk consequently creating a new subset of the genre.