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The Shahi Theater is the latest single-screen cinema in Shimla, the hill station of the Himalayas that was the summer retreat of British India.
Featuring a rumored former projector and an elegant balcony, the Shahi Theater is the latest single-screen cinema in Shimla, the hill station of the Himalayas that was the summer retreat of British India.
But like many movie houses across the country that were already struggling to keep afloat, the pandemic may be the latest death of an old-fashioned house.
It was originally built as a theater in British times, when the entire colonial administration was disbanded by the harsh summer heat of the plains due to the cool mountain climate of the north.
The current owner Sahil Sharma said his grandfather bought the building and turned it into a cinema after the British left in 1947, at a time when the other three theaters in the town were too expensive for ordinary people.
“We still had British heritage at the time, because people couldn’t go without good formal clothes in the evenings,” Sharmak told AFP.
“So ordinary and poor people didn’t have a cinema to call their own.”
Shimla was a popular destination in the golden decades after independence and people who would take prime ministers and celebrities to local cinemas to watch the latest Bollywood movies.
“I was in 1972 when the daughter of the Pakistani president saw a movie,” recalls Ashok Kapoor, 69, who began working at the Ritz cinema when he was a teenager when he started working in film and became a director.
It was there, Kapoor says, that leaders in India and Pakistan were meeting elsewhere in Shimla after a brief conflict between the two countries last year during the Bangladesh war of independence to ease tensions.
In this photo taken on August 29, 2020, an employee washes the seats at the Shahi Theater in Shimla [Money Sharma/AFP]
Satish Kumar, another old hand who has worked at Shahi for 50 years, says the lively black market for tickets used to supply the queues that spread around the block.
But, he added, the business “has been very bad in recent years.”
Shimla has lost its former charm as its population has grown and the town has spread over the hills, while the main street – The Mall – retains its shop windows from the colonial era.
In recent decades, filmmakers have moved to out-of-town multiplexes with greater air conditioning, surround sound, and film selection.
The trend has been repeated across the country as hundreds of single-screen cinemas have closed their doors to budget crowds in recent years.
Last year only two cinemas remained in Shimla but when India entered the national coronavirus blockade, the Ritz also collapsed.
The cinemas were allowed to reopen in October last year, but had to close again in April after a vicious flurry of COVID cases that reduced the previous year’s occurrence.
“We’re not sure about our future after the crown,” says Sharma, who believes that pandemic-affected viewers have changed the film’s habits to online streaming.
“We don’t know if people still want to come to the movies.”
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