| Imperial
Echoes
Returning to the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling after
25 years, photographer Martin Parr is delighted to find it
still redolent of the long-gone days of the Raj...
– Emma Hagestadt
Martin Parr first stayed at the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling
25 years ago. After revisiting the hotel and the nearby Tea
Planters Club to capture the last vestiges of Anglo India,
he is happy to report that nothing much has changed. It’s
really how you imaging a hotel in the 1930s’, he says,
brandishing a picture of the hotel’s parlour complete
with fringed lampshades, Axminster carpets and a framed portrait
of the Queen. Ina hill station originally built to look like
the suburbs of Guildford, it’s easy to see why this
Surrey born documentarist might feel at home.
Originally a boarding house for English Tea Planters, Windamere
was turned into an Edwardian-style hotel in 1939. ow owned
by the Tenduf-la family, a quixotic clan with links to Sikkim
and Tibet, it is patronized, Parr says, largely by tourists
and wealthy Calcuttans’.
Parr has long been preoccupied with Englishness. Although
he thinks of himself as a romantic, his photographs immortalizing
Tory summer fetes and Scarborough sun worshippers often suggest
mockery than affection. |
