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A peek inside Mussoorie’s iconic hotel, the Savoy
An interview with Kshitij Sharma who has made an award-winning documentary
‘If we liked noise we wouldn’t be here, if you like noise, you shouldn’t be here’ reads a plaque stuck on one of the deodars, on a road curving up to the famous Mussoorie hotel, the Savoy.
Once the haunt of British officers and then of the world’s elite, including Britain’s Queen Mary, the Shah of Iran and the Dalai Lama, the hotel is synonymous with this 19th-century mountain town that still knows how to take its pleasures and do so discreetly.
Filmmaker Kshitij Sharma was privy to its many secrets, courtesy an encounter with author Ganesh Saili, the town’s most famous chronicler. In Savoy: Saga of an Icon, Sharma’s film, he takes the viewer through the Savoy’s rooms, its roof, its grand façade, which has featured in films as varied and vintage as Mehboob Khan’s Son of India, the Shammi Kapoor thriller Teesri Manzil, and Shahid Kapoor’s recent Kabir Singh.
Sharma, a former All India Radio announcer and actor, has made five films, features and documentaries. Savoy, his sixth, has just won the best documentary award at the Miami Independent Film Festival. It will next be screened in January, at the Jaipur International Film Festival. An interview with the filmmaker:
What made you want to make a film on The Savoy?
My mother is from Dehradun, so an annual trip to Mussoorie was a given. From a very young age, I had the tendency of going exploring on my own. It was on one such exploration that I discovered the Savoy. Its glory days were over but the majestic facade caught my attention. Years later, I walked in as a guest for the first time, with friends. Thereafter, it became an annual summer affair. We would wander the empty corridors, marvel at its ageing yet resilient grandeur, search for stories of its past while filling in the blanks with cooked-up stories of our own.
The Savoy has a welcome band…
It is also the only hotel I know of that has its own post office, ceremonial band, changing of the guard ceremony every evening, a 300-year-old deodar tree on its front lawns, and a bar dedicated to writers. For more than 100 years, it has been witness to not just the town’s but the nation’s history, with the who’s who of the world of politics and entertainment walking in and out of its gates. My film is a love letter to this iconic hotel.
The film is as much about the Savoy as it is about the author Ganesh Saili.
The real story behind the hotel had always eluded me. The staff and locals responded with disinterest; books with misinformation. All that changed when I met Ganesh Saili for the first time. I spent hours talking to him about the history of the hotel and the town and I felt this majestic hotel and this unparalleled narrator needed to come together in one frame.
There are a lot of crazy stories… including one about Ruskin Bond ‘burning it down’?
Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili have chronicled their Savoy escapades in many of their writings. Once, to keep themselves warm during the biting cold, they got adventurous and tried to rekindle wood in an old fireplace and things didn’t really go as planned. From almost accidentally burning down the place to getting chased by a bear in the hallways, they have done it all.
