A Vidya Sansthana Trust initiative in collaboration with Mahasu Art Foundation, Mandhol (HP), and White Temple

Alongside its work in digitally documenting India’s heritage post offices, Vidya Sansthana Trust partnered with the Mahasu Art Foundation, Mandhol, Himachal Pradesh, and White Temple to run a multi-layered Art Residency exploring what the post office means to the people who have lived alongside it. The residency brought together canvas, classroom, and community — inviting students to paint, schoolchildren to imagine, and Shimla’s own residents to remember.

Canvas at the Post Office: UG/PG Student Residency
At the heart of the residency, undergraduate and postgraduate students studying in Shimla came together to paint on a single, powerful theme: the importance of the post office and the memories it holds in their own lives. Working directly on canvas, students translated personal recollections — childhood visits with parents, letters awaited, postcards sent, the ritual of queues and stamps — into paintings that capture the post office not just as a colonial-era monument, but as a living thread in everyday life. The exercise encouraged young artists to look at a familiar civic building with fresh eyes, treating it as both a subject of art history and a repository of personal memory.

Carrying the Idea into Schools
The residency extended beyond college studios and into the schools of Shimla, where younger students were introduced to the same central idea — what does the post office mean to them and their families? Through guided art-making sessions, schoolchildren explored their own associations with the post office, often shaped by stories passed down from parents and grandparents rather than direct memory, offering a fresh, next-generation perspective on an institution that has quietly shaped the town’s daily life for over a century.

Oral Histories: Listening to Shimla
The final, and perhaps most enduring, strand of the residency was an oral history recording initiative, capturing first-hand memories from those who have lived closest to the post office’s daily rhythms. The team recorded conversations with local shopkeepers near the GPO, whose businesses have stood alongside the post office for years, and with retired personnel residing in Shimla — including, where possible, those who once worked within the postal system itself. These recordings preserve recollections of a changing town: the old rituals of collecting mail, the sound of a red flag signalling the arrival of the post, and the quiet, everyday role the post office has played in Shimla’s community life. Together with the paintings and school workshops, these oral histories form a living archive — memory captured in image and in voice — that complements the project’s photogrammetric and architectural documentation of the building itself.