8
The Intrusion of the Other
You are dividing the world up into two hostile camps, which I may tell you, is a grievous error, most reprehensible!
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain
He led the horses below the main road into the lower Simla bazar—the crowded rabbit-warren that climbs up from the valley to the Town Hall at an angle of forty-five. A man who knows his way there can defy all the police of India's summer capital; so cunningly does verandah communicate with verandah, alley-way with alley-way, and bolt-hole with bolt-hole. Here live all those who minister to the wants of the glad city—jhampanis who pull the pretty ladies' rickshaws by night and gamble till the dawn; grocers, oil-sellers, curio-vendors, firewood-dealers, priests, pickpockets, and native employees of the Government.
—Rudyard Kipling, Kim
What sustained the hill stations was their image of aloofness. It was no less essential to their public than to their private purposes that they present themselves as exclusively European enclaves, isolated from the pressures and perils of India and its inhabitants. Yet the British were not alone: they were surrounded by Indians. One of the paradoxes of the hill stations is that their success as places where the British imagined it possible to get away from Indians depended on the contributions of Indians.
From the start, the development of highland sanitaria generated enormous demands for native labor. Roads and bridges had to be constructed, land cleared and dwellings erected, provisions produced and marketed, visitors and their baggage brought up, fodder and fuel and water provided, and a myriad of domestic drudgeries carried out. These tasks the British relied upon Indians to do, and in large numbers: hill station censuses suggest that at least ten Indians were necessary to support each European. Much of the initial labor force came from the surrounding hills, coerced in many cases to work without pay. The demand gradually spread to more distant parts of the country, necessitating an elaborate network that carried a stream of male migrant workers to and from the hill stations. A wide array of people amassed each season within the confines of the station bazaars (Figure 12).
Figure 12.
View of the main bazaar at Darjeeling. From Eastern Bengal State Railway,
From the Hooghly to the Himalayas (Bombay, 1913).
The British found the intrusion of these people highly problematic. They came in such large numbers from such varied origins that it was almost impossible to "know" and manage them. They clustered in crude, crowded quarters along narrow, labyrinthian lanes that were all but impenetrable to municipal authorities. These densely packed tenements came to be seen as reservoirs of disease, cradles of crime, wellsprings of subversion. Kipling's description of the Simla bazaar as a "rabbit-warren" where a man could easily "defy" the police suggests the sense of disorder and danger they evoked. The British were presented with an ongoing dilemma: how to maintain the labor that made their lives in the hill stations so pleasant without eroding the psychic and social walls that set them apart from the rest of India and that helped them sustain a common identity and purpose.
The British had sought to incorporate the indigenous inhabitants of the hills within their pristine vision of these areas by imagining them as noble savages, whose supposed innocence and intimacy with nature made them emblematic of the Edenic qualities of their highland surroundings. To preserve this image, the Todas of the Nilgiris were exempted from employment in the colonial economy. Most other hill peoples, however, soon found themselves enmeshed in the multifarious demands for labor that arose when the British arrived—and often quite literally as they arrived. Lord Amherst required the services of a thousand hill men to carry his entourage and their effects to Simla in 1827. Lord Auckland needed more than fifteen hundred to take him up to the hill station in 1838 and double that number to return him to the plains at the end of the season. A decade later, at least nine thousand local men were conscripted to transport Lord Dalhousie and his party, and later still the figure had risen to fifteen thousand and more.[1] Nearly every European who went to a hill station in the early years relied on local peoples for porterage services. It was not uncommon for a visitor to employ fifty or more men to carry the clothing, crockery, and other effects needed for a season's stay in the hills. A traveler en route to Mussoorie recalled encountering a party of twenty-four coolies
[1] H. Montgomery Hyde, Simla and the Simla Hill States under British Protection 1815-1835 (Lahore, 1961), 39; Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters from India (1930; reprint, London, 1984), 105, 176; Sir William Lee-Warner, The Life of the Marquis of Dalhousie , vol. 1 (London, 1904), 270; Sir George Russell Clerk Collection, 60-68ff., MSS. Eur.D. 53 8/6, IOL.
struggling to haul a piano up the road to the station.[2] While these numbers were small in comparison with the armies of porters involved in the seasonal migrations of governors-general, the total volume of labor required for the movement of visitors and their goods to and from the hills must have been huge.
Porterage may have constituted the largest sector of employment for the peoples who inhabited the environs of the hill stations, but it was hardly the only one. The opening of the stations to regular traffic depended on the construction of roads through rugged mountain terrain, and most of the muscle for this enormously labor-intensive enterprise came from neighboring villages. Major John Briggs, resident of Satara, used eight hundred local men in 1825 to build a road to Mahabaleshwar. Simla's first road was constructed by laborers conscripted from the surrounding hill states. In Darjeeling, some twelve hundred local men were set to work on the roads by Captain G. S. Lloyd in 1839.[3] Public-works projects of various sorts required large quantities of labor in and around hill stations.
So too did the service economy. The seasonal influx of visitors created a heavy demand for domestic servants, including khitmatgars (butlers or head waiters), khansamahs (cooks), malis (gardeners), dhobis (washermen), bheestis (water carriers), jhampanis (coolies who carried sedan chairs and later pulled rickshaws), mehtars (sweepers), and others. While many visitors brought personal servants with them from the plains, all but a few depended on local peoples for menial tasks. According to Charles Dilke, a "small family" in Simla required the services of "three body servants, two cooks, one butler, two grooms, two gardeners, two messengers, two nurses, two washermen, two water-carriers, thirteen jampan-men, one sweeper, one lamp-cleaner, and one boy . . . or thirty-five in all." When the Times war correspondent William Howard Russell and a friend rented a house in Simla, they felt obliged to employ thirty servants, including ten wood-cutters. Even transport within the station had surprisingly large labor ramifications. Mrs. Robert Moss King marveled at the sight of two hundred
[2] "Mountaineer," A Summer Ramble in the Himalayas (London, 1860), 8. Mrs. Robert Moss King was one of those who required the labor of fifty coolies to move her baggage to and from Landour, and this figure does not include those who carried her piano. The Diary of a Civilian's Wife in India 1877-1882 , vol. 2 (London, 1884), 45, 94.
[3] Perin Bharucha, Mahabaleswar: The Club 1881-1981 (Bombay, c. 1981), 23; Marquess of Dalhousie, Private Letters of the Marquess of Dalhousie , ed. J.G.A. Baird (Edinburgh and London, 1910), 181; H. Hosten, "The Centenary of Darjeeling," Bengal: Past and Present 39 pt. 2, no. 78 (April-June 1930): 118.
dandies (hammocklike vehicles), six hundred coolies (to carry the dandies), one hundred ponies, and one hundred syces (grooms) crammed together outside the Anglican church in Mussoorie on Sunday.[4]
How was this labor obtained? In the early years, much of it was coerced, especially for hard and heavy work like road building and porterage. The most notorious instances occurred in the western Himalayas, where the British got manpower through the system of begar, or forced labor.[5] While local chiefs had long imposed a corvée on their Pahari subjects, the British pushed this practice far past its traditional limits. They impressed thousands of peasants at a time, often expecting them to feed and shelter themselves for the weeks or even months that their services were required: the result was that "many perish on the road; but that is considered as a matter of very little consequence."[6] As the political agent for the Simla hill states, Captain Charles Kennedy was responsible for collecting the labor needed to take governors-general and other dignitaries to and from Simla. He claimed that begar, in accord with custom, was used simply for purposes of state, ignoring the fact that the scale of the British requirements exceeded anything demanded by indigenous rulers.[7] His assurances were in any case untrue. Victor Jacquemont reported that Kennedy had constructed his own home with forced labor: "some hundreds of mountaineers were summoned, who felled the trees around, squared them rudely, and, assisted by workmen from the plains, in one month constructed a spacious house."[8] And he did little to prevent visitors to the area from impressing local inhabitants as porters, wood cutters, water gatherers, and the like. Further east, the assistant commissioner at Dehra Dun was besieged by complaints from early visitors to Mussoorie because "I would not force the inhabitants of the Doon to carry loads up the hill," which he feared would lead to "the desertion of the province by those forced." Such fears were well-founded. When subsequent officials sanctioned the seizure of local inhabitants for porterage, they responded in the time-worn fashion of peasants—they
[4] Charles Wentworth Dilke, Greater Britain , vol. 2 (London, 1869), 242; William Howard Russell, My Diary in India , vol. 2 (London, 1860), 96, 101; King, Diary of a Civilian's Wife , vol. 1, 144.
[5] For a discussion of begar, see Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley, 1989), 25-26.
[6] Russell, My Diary in India , vol. 2, 161-62.
[7] Kennedy to W. H. Macnaghten, 12 Sept. 1832, no. 25, Political Proceedings, Foreign Dept., INA.
[8] Victor Jacquemont, Letters from India , vol. 1 (London, 1834), 226.
simply abandoned their villages.[9] Reactions such as these helped to persuade authorities of the need to place restrictions on the use of begar, which one memorandum bluntly described as "a species of extortion, almost amounting to plunder."[10] By midcentury, porterage services to and from the major hill stations had become commercialized, and private parties could no longer impress local people as they liked. They continued to do so, however, in outlying areas. A few years after Dalhousie was occupied in 1860, a local official reported that the routes leading to the station were "being steadily depopulated and impoverished through the people losing heart at the frequent and heavy exactions upon their time and labour which the yearly recurring 'season' entails." The problem continued through the end of the century at this remote hill station, and a guidebook published in 1898 felt obliged to warn its readers that "travellers requiring coolies should never impress them themselves."[11] Furthermore, the use of begar for official purposes did not come to an end until 1921.[12]
While begar was limited to the western Himalayas, other forms of forced labor were employed elsewhere in the highlands, especially during the early years of colonial rule. Sometimes, for example, convicts were put to work on roads and other public-works projects. More often neighboring zamindars and rajas were prevailed upon to provide unpaid manpower. The British resorted to these practices for reasons that went beyond the crudely extortionistic desire to obtain the cheapest labor available. They were convinced that mountain peoples, most of whom operated within the tight orbit of subsistence economies, were not susceptible to the attractions of work for wages. Captain Lloyd complained that the Lepchas of Darjeeling knew nothing of money and were "unaccustomed to the idea of working
[9] E. J. Shore to Adjutant General of the Army, 4 Aug. 1828, in Municipal Department, Jan. 1905-A, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL; G.R.C. Williams, Historical and Statistical Memoir of Dehra Doon (Roorkee, 1874), 196. For an insightful examination of peasant strategies of resistance, see Michael Adas, "From Avoidance to Confrontation: Peasant Protest in Precolonial and Colonial Southeast Asia," in Colonialism and Culture , ed. Nicholas B. Dirks (Ann Arbor, 1992), 89-126.
[10] Memorandum dated 25 Aug. 1841, E/4/767, India and Bengal Dispatches, IOL. Also see Macnaughten to Committee for Improvement of Simla, 17 Sept. 1832, no. 26, Political Proceedings, Foreign Dept., INA.
[11] Extract from Chumba diary of superintendent of Chumba, May 1865, no. 273, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, Political Branch (A), INA; Capt. J. B. Hutchinson, Guide to Dalhousie and the Neighbouring Hills , 2d ed., rev. H. A. Rose (Lahore, 1898), 9.
[12] Vipin Pubby, Simla Then and Now: Summer Capital of the Raj (New Delhi, 1988), 88.
for hire."[13] Few of the hill peoples, however, were as fully detached from market forces as the British imagined them to be, and they became less so as the British established summer retreats in their midst. The problem for the British was that there were other, more attractive avenues of entry into the colonial economy than wage labor. Hill stations created a voracious demand for foodstuffs, fodder, and fuel. The peasants who inhabited the surrounding hills were often perfectly placed to meet this demand. Many of them turned to market gardening as station bazaars sprang up. Others collected firewood and grasses from surrounding woodlands for sale in the stations. Agricultural production increased as farmers worked their fields more intensively, expanded the acreage they put under cultivation, and adopted higher-yielding, more marketable crops such as the potato.[14]
Some of the more enterprising local inhabitants became petty traders. The author of the Naini Tal district gazetteer observed:
The increasing importance of the hill stations in Kumaun has affected the pattis [villages] which lie near the rail and along the chief routes in a very perceptible manner. The number of roadside shops and small bazars which have sprung up in recent years . . . is ample evidence of this. The people themselves are losing the characteristics of the hillman. . . . They are adverse to, and above, carrying loads.[15]
Similar developments in the vicinity of other hill stations led observers to note the increased prosperity of the local peasant population.[16] Thus, the market forces in the hill stations created countervailing trends, one pressing toward proletarianization, the other providing an alternative to it.
If the British wished to close this avenue of escape, they had to restrict the peasants' access to land. One place where authorities did precisely that was Mahabaleshwar. In 1853 a five-mile-wide forest reserve was
[13] Quoted in H. V. Bayley, Dorje-ling (Calcutta, 1838), 52. Also see Lloyd's correspondence in nos. 129-133, 3 April 1839, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, INA.
[14] According to the provincial gazetteer, the cultivated areas of the districts of Naini Tal and Garhwal increased 50 percent from 1872 to 1902 and from 1864 to 1896 respectively, and the cultivated area in the district of Almora increased 22 percent from 1872 to 1902. Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series: United Provinces of Agra and Oudh , vol. 2 (reprint, New Delhi, 1984), 252, 268, 282.
[15] H. R. Neville, Naini Tal: A Gazetteer, Being Volume XXXIV of the District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh (Allahabad, 1904), 117.
[16] Mrs. A. K. Oliver, The Hill Station of Matheran (Bombay, 1905), 125; H. G. Walton, Dehra Dun: A Gazetteer, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh , vol. 1 (Allahabad, 1911), 68.
established around the station, eliminating cultivation on some two-thirds of the plateau's land surface. Local inhabitants who had hitherto grown crops for their own subsistence and the local market suddenly found themselves alienated from the land and forced to find wage employment. The district gazetteer frankly admitted that the upheaval "caused considerable hardship to a population then purely agricultural," observing that "manual labour while more precarious demanded more continuous and severe exertion than agriculture." It added that the changes experienced by the local population "involved a loss of social position carrying with it feelings of degradation only to be removed in process of time."[17] This honest appraisal of the impact of land alienation in Mahabaleshwar made it quite clear why the peasants surrounding other hill stations clung so ardently to their agrarian existence.
The switch to wage employment occurred elsewhere, though rarely in such an abrupt fashion. Revenue settlements put pressure on poorer peasants to find outside sources of income. The introduction of government cinchona plantations and the spread of commercial tea and coffee estates on the slopes surrounding hill stations pushed people off their land, often leaving them with little alternative but to seek employment with the very enterprises that were responsible for their loss. The creation of forest reserves and tree plantations closed large blocks of highland territory to the native inhabitants who had traditionally depended on them for grazing, fuel, fodder, game, and other resources. Lepchas, Paharis, and various others were victimized by these measures.[18]
Over time, then, a significant number of hill peoples did filter into local labor markets. The young, who had few opportunities or obligations within their villages, and the poor, who had little or no property to sustain their needs, probably made up the majority of these workers. Droughts and other natural disasters periodically pushed others onto the scene. Most likely viewed their entry into the labor market as a temporary expedient. "Occasionally," observed the author of the Dehra Dun district gazetteer, "one or more superfluous members of a large family takes service either in a hill
[17] Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency , vol. 19: Satara (Bombay, 1885), 497.
[18] One result was incendiarism and other forms of resistance, as Ramachandra Guha and Madhav Gadgil show in "State Forestry and Social Conflict in British India," Past and Present 123 (May 1989): 141-77. Also see Guha's Unquiet Woods and "Saboteurs in the Forest: Colonialism and Peasant Resistance in the Indian Himalaya," in Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance , ed. Forrest D. Colburn (New York and London, 1989), 64-92.
station or in the forest department, but the motive is simply to earn enough money to pay the revenue or the rent as the case may be."[19]
This pattern of seeking wage employment to supplement an agrarian existence made hill peoples troublesome for the British. They were seen as undisciplined and unreliable workers. They did not exert themselves as hard as their employers believed they should, and they could not be counted on to stick to their jobs through the season. Those engaged in domestic service were thought to be especially troublesome. A typical outburst condemned them as "a very bad class; dirty in person and habits, addicted to excessive drinking, thievish, and insolent."[20] The steady stream of complaints about their work habits, their wage demands, and their readiness to return to their villages indicates that they retained some degree of control over their own labor. They also retained a large reservoir of suspicion concerning British intentions, particularly in the regions where begar had been imposed on the population. They often fled their jobs when census takers, vaccination teams, and other representatives of imperial authority arrived on the scene, and they were susceptible to the chilling, recurrent rumor that the British abducted Indians to extract oil from their brains or bodies for use as medicine for ailing viceroys and other dignitaries. This rumor emptied the western Himalayan hill stations of their local labor forces on numerous occasions.[21]
The economic relationship between the hill stations and the inhabitants of the surrounding slopes was a complicated one, and this summary account cannot do justice to the wide variations in practices from place to place. But two generalizations seem warranted. First, most of the peasants who lived in the shadows of hill stations managed to escape the harness of
[19] Walton, Dehra Dun , 68.
[20] E. F. Burton, An Indian Olio (London, 1888), 138. See also E. B. Peacock, A Guide to Murree and Its Neighbourhood (Lahore, 1883), 9; W. H. Carey, comp., A Guide to Simla with a Descriptive Account of the Neighbouring Sanitaria (Calcutta, 1870), 18; The Visitors' Handbook of the Nilgiris (Madras, 1897), 61; and Newman's Guide to Darjeeling and Neighbourhood (Calcutta, 1900), 29. Richard F. Burton was one of those whose confrontations with Ootacamund's servants brought him before the local magistrate, an experience he angrily recounts in Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851; reprint, Berkeley, 1991), 306-8.
[21] Constance F. Gordon Cumming, In the Himalayas and on the Indian Plains (London, 1884), 484-85; Hyde, Simla and the Simla Hill States , 19; "Mountaineer," A Summer Ramble , 8-9. British efforts to send plague victims to hospitals stirred similar rumors in Bombay and Poona (now Pune) at the end of the century, reports David Arnold, Colonizing the Body: State Medicine and Epidemic Disease in Nineteenth-Century India (Berkeley, 1993), 220-21.
proletarianization as a primary or permanent mode of production. Second, their escape increased the local demand for labor from other sources.
A panoply of Indians followed the British up to the hill stations. Khitmatgars, khansamahs, ayahs, syces, and other servants accompanied their masters on their seasonal sojourns. Stonemasons, carpenters, and artisans of other sorts journeyed from the plains to offer their skills to Europeans. Merchants and shopkeepers made the most of the economic opportunities that arose where the British congregated by importing goods and opening shops.
A dearth of census data makes it difficult to determine the rate of Indian migration to the hill stations in the first half of the nineteenth century, though anecdotal evidence indicates that the influx began early and involved significant numbers. The Indian population of Panchgani, for example, nearly doubled in size within seven years of the arrival of the first European settler.[22] A reliable run of population statistics does exist for the larger hill stations by the latter part of the century, and these figures demonstrate the scale of the influx by Indians from other regions. In the Punjab, for example, the census of 1881 found that the hill stations there had grown far more quickly since the previous census (1868) than any other towns in the province, with Simla expanding by 74 percent and Murree by a whopping 84 percent over the intervening thirteen years. The population of the Nilgiris more than doubled between 1871 and 1901, and in the course of the 1890s alone, Ootacamund and Coonoor grew by 22 percent and 20 percent, respectively, compared with an average of 7 percent in the rest of the presidency. Darjeeling's population mushroomed from around 3,000 in 1871 to nearly 17,000 in 1901, and the entire district (including Kalimpong and Kurseong) experienced the most rapid rate of growth on record for nineteenth-century Bengal, expanding from 10,000 in 1850 to nearly 250,000 in 1901. By 1900, roughly half or more of the inhabitants of the Simla, Nilgiri, and Darjeeling districts had been born elsewhere.[23]
The overwhelming majority of the Indians in the hill stations were adult males engaged in seasonal migrant labor. That few brought wives or
[22] John Chesson, "Hill Sanitaria of Western India: Panchgunny," Bombay Miscellany 4 (1862): 337.
[23] Denzil Ibbetson, Report on the Census of the Panjab, Taken on February 1881 , vol. 1 (Calcutta, 1883), Tables A, C, F; W. Francis, The Nilgiris (Madras, 1908), 123-24; L. S. S. O'Malley, Darjeeling (Calcutta, 1907), 35-36.
children with them was one of the most striking features of the hill stations' demography. In Simla, the ratio of Indian men to women was about five to one for the summer months (slightly less in the winter) and the ratio of adults to children was much the same.[24] Emily Eden observed that there were "very few children ever to be seen in [the bazaar]. Natives who come to open shops, etc., never bring their families, from the impossibility of moving women in a sufficiently private manner."[25] While Eden may have been right in pointing to purdah as a factor in accounting for the absence of women, economic constraints almost certainly predominated in the considerations of most migrants.[26] They simply could not afford to move their families to Simla or to house them once they arrived. The absence of women was noted in other hill stations as well. "The traders and domestic servants are unable to afford the expense of the journey for their families, who have consequently to remain down in the plains," the report of the 1911 summer census for Dalhousie stated. The male/female ratio for that station's Indian population was 100/30. In Murree, the same conditions applied, and there the male/female ratio was 100/28. The disparity was a bit less stark in Darjeeling, where there were roughly twice as many men as women. In Ootacamund and Coonoor, "native traders, servants, coolies, and other temporary residents . . . are not, to any great extent, accompanied by their women." The Nilgiris as a whole had a "smaller proportion of females to males than any other [district] in the Presidency."[27] It is highly unlikely that there was a single hill station where Indian males did not outnumber females by a wide margin.
[24] Summer-census data showed the female portion of the Indian population to be 19.2 percent for 1869, 19.3 percent for 1889, 22.0 percent for 1898, and 20.6 percent for 1904. The winter census of 1868 found that females constituted 27.1 percent of the population; the 1891 winter census showed them to constitute 23.4 percent. Only 17 percent of the Indian population in the 1898 census were children. See Annual Report of the Simla Municipality, 1904-5, 18, HPSA; and Report of the Simla Extension Committee, 1898 (Simla, 1898), annexture A(2).
[25] Eden, Up the Country , 301.
[26] The Indians who could most easily afford to bring their families to Simla were the Bengali government clerks, who received a rent subsidy and a family maintenance allowance in the late nineteenth century. Yet 82 of the 158 Indian clerks who accompanied the government to Simla in 1889-90 left their families behind in Calcutta. Appendix to Simla Allowance Committee Report, 17, in Dispatch #19, 1890, L/PJ/6/276/723, Public and Judicial Dept., IOL.
[27] Report on the Summer Census of Dalhousie, 1911 (Lahore, 1912), 6-7; Report on the Summer Census of Murree, 1911 (Lahore, 1912), 5; Darjeeling District Gazetteer, Statistics, 1901-02 (Calcutta, 1905), 2-3; H. B. Grigg, A Manual of the Nilagiri District (Madras, 1880), 29; Francis, Nilgiris , 124.
The British could find some comfort in this demographic disequilibrium. A population that consisted predominantly of adult males lacked the biological means to perpetuate itself, to beget the progeny that would secure it an enduring place in the stations where it labored. This was a problem the British understood quite well, of course, since it plagued their own presence in India. Only in the hill stations had they managed to establish the demographic balance between men and women—adults and children—that resembled that of normal reproductive communities. The absence of a similar balance among the Indians acquired all the more significance from this contrast. In effect, the colonial demographics of gender and age had been turned on their heads in the hill stations. This made it easier for the British to convince themselves that the Indian inhabitants of the hill stations were mere transients, alien and evanescent parties who had no claim to these places. "This station is not a native town," insisted a public health official who sought the removal of most menial laborers from Simla. Similarly, the Ootacamund Municipal Council declared in 1877 that the station "should be regarded as an English and not a native town . . . [since] the whole native population is directly or indirectly dependent on the presence of the European community."[28]
Where did these laborers come from? Each hill station drew its migrant population from many sources, and the larger the station, the larger the hinterland that supplied its needs. Different sectors of employment tended to attract different clusters of people from different regions and different castes, classes, and religions. The forces that drove these people to seek employment in the hill stations were equally varied. While a full appreciation of the complex contours of these movements of migrant labor must await further research at the local and regional level, their general patterns can be discerned. The influence of those patterns on British uses of the hill stations is what concerns us here.
The Indian population of Simla was composed overwhelmingly of outsiders to the district during the summer season, and a substantial minority were outsiders to the province of Punjab as a whole.[29] Pamela Kanwar's study provides a richly detailed analysis of this remarkably varied, highly
[28] W. A. C. Roe, "Report on the Sanitary Inspection of the Municipal Town of Simla," 10 May 1894, 5, Simla Municipal Proceedings, vol. 6, 1893-94, HPSA. Ootacamund Municipal Council quoted in Judith Theresa Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990), 173.
[29] The summer census of 1921 showed that only 20 percent of the station's Indian population had been born within Simla district, and nearly 30 percent had
been born outside of Punjab province. See Summer Census of Simla, 1921, Table IIA, in Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 179/1933/123/1921/II, HPSA.
balkanized population.[30] Among the lowliest inhabitants were the sweepers, who consisted largely of untouchables from the Jullundur and Hoshiarpur districts to the west of the Simla hill states. Poverty-stricken peasants from these districts as well as the Kangra hills north of Simla filled the ranks of the rickshaw-coolie force. Most of the porters who carried heavy loads through the station, as well as many construction workers, came from Kashmir and Ladakh. Taken together, the porters, rickshaw coolies, sweepers, and other low-skilled laborers made up about 20 percent of the employed Indian population, according to the summer census of 1904.[31] Another 25 percent or so of the population consisted of shopkeepers and other merchants, petty artisans, and a small contingent of professionals. Soods from Kangra and, to a lesser extent, the Punjab plains dominated this sector of employment. They counted among their numbers lawyers and doctors, moneylenders, timber contractors, forest lessees, and traders in various goods. They owned the greater part of the lower bazaar, as well as properties elsewhere in the station. Other groups found niches in commerce as well, including Jain shopkeepers, Sikh building contractors and tailors, Kashmiri shawl and dried-fruit merchants, and Punjabi Muslim butchers. Another 12 percent of the Indian working population consisted of government clerks, most of whom were Bengalis until the government began to recruit Punjabis in significant numbers in the early twentieth century. Finally, servants were the largest single occupational category among the Indian population of Simla, constituting 37 percent. This category probably included the chaprassis (office messengers) who carried out menial tasks for government agencies. They came for the most part from the neighboring hill states. Unfortunately, we know a good deal less about the large number of domestic servants in private homes. Anecdotal sources suggest that they were an extremely mixed group, with local peoples dominating the lower ranks, especially as bheestis and mehtars, while the more skilled employees, such as khansamahs and khitmatgars, often came with their employers from sundry parts of northern India.
"The people of the Nilgiris consist . . . very largely of immigrants," observed the author of the 1908 district gazetteer.[32] Ootacamund's pop-
[30] Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla (Delhi, 1990), esp. chs. 9-12.
[31] The 1904 census data on occupations come from the Annual Report of the Simla Municipality, 1904-5, 19, HPSA.
[32] Francis, Nilgiris , 124.
ulation grew from 12,335 to 18,596 and Coonoor's from 4,778 to 8,525 between 1881 and 1901. The district's tea, coffee, and cinchona estates attracted thousands more. The great majority of these immigrants came from the immediately surrounding regions—Coimbatore, Malabar, Canara, and Mysore—but there were people "from every part almost of India," according to one knowledgeable source.[33] As a result, the Nilgiris was the "most polyglot area in the Presidency," with some 30-40 percent of the population who spoke either Tamil or Badaga, and smaller portions for whom Telegu, Canarese, Malayalam, Hindustani, and, of course, the local Kurumba, Kota, and Toda were the native tongues.[34] Different groups occupied different niches in the local economy. Most of the government employees and professionals of various sorts were said to be Vellalas, a rather amorphous caste that dominated government service throughout Tamil India. Vellalas also constituted a significant portion of the shopkeeper population, which also included Muslims from Malabar and a caste of traders and artisans known as Chettis. The most prominent businessmen, however, were Parsis from Bombay, who first appeared in the Nilgiris in the mid-1820s. Although their numbers were small, they had their own burial ground, and they owned a great deal of property in Ootacamund and Coonoor. As was the case in Simla, the servant sector seemed to encompass a variety of peoples, both indigenous and immigrant. Many servants, as well as laborers on the coffee and tea estates, were identified as Paraiyans, an agricultural laborer caste from Coimbatore and other Tamil districts.[35]
Although Darjeeling has been described as a "Babel of tribes and nations,"[36] suggesting the sort of ethnic diversity that characterized the other large hill stations, this phrase is rather misleading. Darjeeling was, in fact, dominated by immigrants from Nepal. Dr. Arthur Campbell estimated that the district had no more than one thousand inhabitants when he became superintendent in 1839, and he encouraged Nepali settlers to take up so-called waste land since the station's growing demand for foodstuffs was not being met by the Lepchas, with their predilection for jhum (shifting cultivation). Nepalis also came to Darjeeling to enlist at its army recruiting station.[37] It was the founding of the tea industry in the mid-1850s, how-
[33] Capt. J. Ouchterlony, Geographical and Statistical Memoir of a Survey of the Neilgherry Mountains (Madras, 1868), 69.
[34] Francis, Nilgiris , 124.
[35] Grigg, Manual , 33-34.
[36] O'Malley, Darjeeling , 41.
[37] See Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals , vol. 1 (London, 1854), 118-19.
Figure 13.
Coolie carrying a chest of Darjeeling tea.
From Darjeeling and Its Mountain Railway (Calcutta, 1921).
ever, that brought the inflow of Nepalis to full flood. By 1874, there were 113 tea gardens in the area, employing 19,424 workers, and at the end of the century the labor force had risen to 64,000, a third of the district's entire population (Figure 13). Nearly all of these tea workers—96 percent, according to the 1941 census—were Nepalis. In the district's hill subdivisions
as a whole the Nepalis constituted over 86 percent of the population. This "pushing, thriving race," as the British were fond of calling them, had come to dominate the district.[38] In the township of Darjeeling itself, however, the population was rather more heterogeneous, as it was in Kalimpong and Kurseong as well. The rickshaw and dandy coolies were said to be mostly Bhutia and Lepcha men, and their women were prized as ayahs. One guidebook told its readers, in a telling turn of phrase, that the Bhutias and Lepchas, "when caught young , make excellent cooks and khitmutgars, and they have the advantage of having no caste prejudices, and of being able to turn their hands to any kind of work."[39] Tibetans dominated the trans-Himalayan trade. Most of the merchants, professionals, and other middle-class Indians were Marwaris, Biharis, and Bengalis. The occupations of bheesti, dhobi, and tailor were also dominated by people from the plains, and the butchers were generally Muslim immigrants. Still, some two-thirds of the station's population were Nepalis, who found employment as servants, bearers, syces, carpenters, blacksmiths, and small traders.[40]
Nepalis also moved in significant numbers further east to Shillong. A Gurkha garrison was stationed there in the mid-nineteenth century and the first Assamese tea estates recruited Nepali laborers. Shillong, however, attracted a much wider range of peoples than Darjeeling did. The indigenous Khasis, who worked as porters, carpenters, masons, domestic servants, graziers, and market gardeners, made up about half the population of the station. The other half consisted primarily of Bengali government clerks and professionals, Bihari dhobis and small traders, Marwari merchants, Assamese servants, and Nepali porters and graziers. The tea industry, meanwhile, increasingly turned to Chotanagpur and other parts of central India to supply its labor needs, and some of these peoples filtered into the bazaar wards of Shillong as well. The population of the hill station quadrupled between 1878 and 1901, increasing from 2,149 to 8,384. What
[38] W. W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal , vol. 10: Districts of Darjiling and Jalpaiguri, and State of Kuch Behar (London, 1876), 53, 165; O'Malley, Darjeeling , 74-75; Arthur Jules Dash, Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling (Alipore, 1947), 63-64. For a general examination of the Nepalis in Darjeeling, see Tanka B. Subba, Dynamics of a Hill Society (Delhi, 1989).
[39] R. D. O'Brien, Darjeeling, the Sanitarium of Bengal; and Its Surroundings (Calcutta, 1883), 27 (my emphasis). This statement recurred in later guidebooks.
[40] In addition to ibid., see Newman's Guide to Darjeeling , 30; G. Hutton Taylor, Thacker's Guide Book to Darjeeling and Its Neighbourhood (Calcutta, 1899), 28; and G. S. Bomwetsch, Before the Glory of the Snows: A Hand Book to Darjeeling (Calcutta, 1899), 25-27. A detailed breakdown of the population of Darjeeling in 1941 is supplied in Dash, Bengal District Gazetteers , 84.
had been the home of a few dozen Khasi tribesmen at midcentury had become a crowded and remarkably cosmopolitan town by the century's end.[41]
The preceding examples demonstrate that at least the major hill stations acquired a very different demographic and ethnic shape than the British had intended for them. Far from remaining small and intimate enclaves isolated from the influences of India and Indians, the hill stations became bustling centers of commerce, service, and administration, bursting at the seams with Indians from far and wide. How could the essential Englishness of these places persist in the midst of such multitudes? How could the presumption that they stood apart from India and its peoples survive the presence of so many and such varied Indians? The British sought to sustain the enclavist flavor of their hill stations through the manipulation of space, sanitation, and social behavior.
Although the massive influx of seasonal laborers to the hill stations produced dreadfully overcrowded and unsanitary conditions, the British were initially reluctant to acknowledge, much less confront, this problem, clinging instead to the illusion that their highland retreats were pristine and unpolluted. It was especially easy for the British to ignore the conditions in the bazaars since so few of them ever entered those areas, but the neglect of sanitation requirements extended quite literally into their own backyards. "Very few private houses in Simla," reported municipal officials in 1877-78, "were provided with latrines for the use of servants and natives living in the compounds, many had only mere mat or wooden enclosures, and all were of such faulty construction as to be most offensive."[42] Individual employers simply assumed that their servants would fend for themselves, as they generally did on the plains. The Ootacamund municipality's request for homeowners to erect latrines for their servants was a "dead letter" when the Madras sanitary commissioner conducted an investigation in 1868, and as a result "there is a general foecal taint to the atmosphere" due to defecation in the surrounding undergrowth. Conditions were hardly better in the station's main bazaar, where not a single latrine existed for
[41] See H. C. Sarkar, Guide to Shillong (Calcutta, n.d.); K. D. Saha, "The Study of Community-wide Distribution and the Growth of Population in Shillong," in Cultural Profile of Shillong , ed. B. B. Goswami (Calcutta, 1979), 4-31; and M. L. Bose, Social History of Assam (New Delhi, 1989).
[42] Annual Report of the Simla Municipality, 1877-78, 27, HPSA.
an estimated three to four thousand inhabitants. Open sewers flowed into the lake, which supplied drinking water for much of the population.[43] Other large hill stations faced similar sanitation problems.
It is hardly surprising, then, that typhoid fever, cholera, and other diseases of human contamination broke out with increasing frequency in the hill stations in the latter part of the nineteenth century. Once it became obvious that the lack of sanitation facilities for Indians posed a health threat to Europeans, authorities began to act. As a result of the Bengal Presidency Act X of 1842 and the India-wide Act XXVI of 1850, hill stations were able to establish municipal governments with powers to impose conservancy regulations.[44] The new municipalities built public latrines, regulated private privies, dug sewer systems, and established safe water supplies. By the late nineteenth century, Kanwar notes that Simla had the same number of municipal health inspectors and sweepers as did Allahabad, which was twice its size.[45] Yet the expanding populations of the hill stations continued to overwhelm efforts to keep them clean. One irritated health official in Simla described the situation:
[A] very large number of the lower classes of Natives yearly flock into this station and with them may come epidemic disease of all kinds; in fact . . . all details sink into insignificance compared with the ever-increasing coolie population. . . . [E]very idler, every cooly out of work at his home, every servant who cannot obtain employment swarm into Simla every season hoping for a job.[46]
A 1905 study found that Simla's most crowded bazaar averaged 17.4 residents per house, the highest population density in the Punjab. Sanitary-inspection reports from Naini Tal and Mussoorie at the turn of the century declared that dreadful overcrowding had made these stations "hotbed[s] of disease." Shillong's health officer warned that "congested localities are becoming a growing menace to the public health of this hill-station."[47]
[43] J. L. Ranking, Report upon the Sanitary Condition of Ootacamund (Madras, 1868), 6, 18.
[44] Hugh Tinker, The Foundations of Local Self-Government in India, Pakistan and Burma (New York, 1968), 28-29.
[45] Pamela Kanwar, "The Changing Image of Simla," Urban History Association Occasional Papers Series 10, 1989, 5.
[46] Roe, "Report on the Sanitary Inspection," 5.
[47] Report of the Simla Sanitary Investigation Committee (Simla, 1905), 11. For Naini Tal, see correspondence in Municipal Department, March 1904-A and Sept. 1908-A, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL. For Mussoorie, see reports on sanitary conditions in Municipal Department, Dec.
1905 A, Feb. 1906-A, and June 1906-A, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL. For Shillong, see Sarkar, Guide to Shillong , 47.
Scholars have shown that British municipal policies regarding sanitation and disease often served as a rationale for colonial urban segregation.[48] John Cell argues that this was not the case in India, as opposed to Africa, but his definition of segregation—"the conscious manipulation of physical space on the part of the dominant group in order to achieve or maintain a psychological gap between itself and a group it intends to keep in an inferior place"—does in fact correspond to the aims of public health authorities and other officials in the hill stations.[49] Repeated efforts were made to regulate the boundaries between European and Indian zones and to remove bazaars from sites that impinged too directly upon neighboring European areas. When a fire destroyed Matheran's market in 1865, authorities used the opportunity to remove it from the center of the station, arguing that it threatened to contaminate the lake, the station's source of drinking water. In 1893-94, the market was moved once again, this time to the very edge of the plateau, where its "rubbish can without difficulty be thrown into the Ravine away from human habitation."[50] In Simla, a similar initiative occurred when the outbreak of cholera in 1875 provided officials with the pretext to prohibit Indians from rebuilding shops and homes lost to fire on the Upper Mall, which became as a consequence reserved for European-owned stores. The Simla Improvement Committee of 1877 sought an even more radical excision of the Indian community. Disturbed by the way "the native town has sprung up and extended to the very heart of the station," it advocated the demolition of the entire lower bazaar, which was "saturating the site with filth and polluting its limited water-supply."[51] This plan proved impossible to carry out, and in 1907 the bazaar's "insanitary excrescences upon the European quarter" again
[48] See Maynard W. Swanson, "The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1911-1909," Journal of African History 18, no. 3 (1977): 387-410; Philip D. Curtin, "Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa," American Historical Review 90, no. 3 (June 1985): 594-613; and John W. Cell, "Anglo-Indian Medical Theory and the Origins of Segregation in West Africa," American Historical Review 91, no. 2 (April 1986): 307-35.
[49] Cell, "Anglo-Indian Medical Theory," 307.
[50] Oliver, The Hill Station of Matheran , 28-29.
[51] Simla Improvement Scheme Report of 1877, in Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 103/1150/1/1877/I, and Annual Report of the Simla Municipality, 1877-78, 29, HPSA.
occupied the attention of a municipal improvement committee.[52] While authorities could not make the lower bazaar disappear, they could at least ensure that it did not encroach on European areas by delineating the precise boundaries beyond which it could not grow—a policy that had the natural effect of increasing the population density of the bazaar and thus its health problems.[53] Much the same sequence of events occurred in Mussoorie. There the anxieties over pollution and disease reached such a fever pitch in 1905 that the army prohibited a regimental band from returning to the station for the summer season until conditions had improved. The solution proposed by a medical inspector and a committee of investigation was the removal of the main bazaar, although again it proved easier to cordon it off than raze it.[54]
In Ootacamund, however, authorities did manage to move a substantial portion of the bazaar population to peripheral sites. Distress about sanitation in the station had inspired calls to "re-build the native town in a less central" location as early as the 1860s.[55] The appearance of plague in 1903 provided the pretext for undertaking the drastic measures that health officials had long been urging.[56] Armed with broad powers under newly instituted plague regulations, authorities began to demolish portions of the main bazaar and the adjacent Mettucherry and Agaraharam quarters, as well as to prohibit further construction in these areas. By 1911, 158 Indian houses had been cleared away as a plague-prevention measure, and another 298 were razed to make way for the railway. Thousands of people were displaced from their homes, and while some were relocated in the Kandal bazaar at the western outskirts of the station, the net effect of this so-called slum clearance was increased overcrowding. Municipal authorities knew that the "clearing of congested areas does not in itself reduce but increases overcrowding if no provision is made for the occupants of the condemned houses," and they conceded that "no remedy has been discovered for this
[52] Report of the Simla Improvement Committee (Simla, 1907), 17.
[53] See Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 58-60, 137-38.
[54] See Inspection Report on Sanitary Conditions in Mussoorie by Major J. Chaytor-White, 30 Aug. 1905, Municipal Department, Dec. 1905-A, and Report of Committee on Sanitation of Mussoorie, 28 Dec. 1905, Municipal Department, June 1906-A, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL.
[55] Report of A. Wedderburn, president of the Municipal Committee of Ootacamund, in Ranking, Report , app. A.
[56] For a fascinating study of the varied social and political ramifications of the plague in imperial India, see David Arnold, "Touching the Body: Perspectives on the Indian Plague," in Selected Subaltern Studies , ed. Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (New York, 1988), 391-426, which appears in revised form as ch. 5 of Arnold's Colonizing the Body .
[overcrowding]."[57] From their perspective, however, the operation had succeeded in its main task of driving large numbers of Indians out of the central part of the station and establishing a cordon sanitaire around those who remained.[58]
The outbreak of plague at the end of the nineteenth century was used to sanction another policy for controlling the influx of Indians to the hill stations.[59] In Simla the British opened medical-inspection posts on the main routes into the station in 1899. The most important of these posts was at Tara Devi, one of the final stops on the train journey to Simla. All third-class passengers were required to disembark for a physical examination that seemed designed to humiliate them. Those suspected of carrying contagions were turned away; the rest were fumigated and their belongings disinfected. The post continued to operate long after the epidemic had subsided. In 1926, vehement protests from Indians persuaded the Punjab's director of public health to close the inspection post, which he condemned as "that medieval anachronism," but others missed its powers, and it reopened in 1930. It was widely thought to have been used to prevent nationalist agitators from entering Simla.[60]
Sanitation policies and other public health measures were not the only means by which the British sought to regulate the Indians in their midst. In 1883, the Darjeeling Municipal Porter's Act was enacted in response to what local authorities described as "insolent, clamorous and turbulent" behavior and "extortionate" fee demands by the stations' porters. The act regulated porters' rates, required them to obtain licenses and wear brass identity badges, and imposed penalties on those who deserted or otherwise failed to fulfill their terms of service. Similar legislation was introduced in Simla, Mussoorie, and other Himalayan hill stations.[61] The conduct and
[57] Ootacamund Municipal Report for 1911-12, 7-8, Municipal G.O. #1676, TNSA.
[58] Ootacamund Municipal Reports for 1903-4, 1906-7, 1908-9, and 1911-12, Municipal G.O. #1847, #1686, #1076, #1676, TNSA. Also see Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station," 222-29.
[59] Arnold, Colonizing the Body , 208.
[60] Inspection Report of Simla, 1926, and Simla Inspection Note, 1930, in Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 1/2/4/1925-28/IV and 1/2/4/1929-35/V, HPSA; Raja Bhasin, Simla: The Summer Capital of British India (New Delhi, 1992), 87-88; Pubby, Simla Then and Now , 92.
[61] "Report on Working of Act V (Darjeeling Porter's Act)," 16 March 1885, Municipal Branch, Municipal Dept., Proceedings of the Lieutenant Governor of Bengal, WBSA. Also see Municipal Branch Proceedings for June 1883, Aug. 1884, and Oct. 1899, WBSA; and O'Brien, Darjeeling , 8-9, 27-28. For Simla's adoption of the Darjeeling Act, see President, Municipal Council, to Deputy Commissioner,
Simla, March 1892, Simla Municipal Proceedings, vol. 5, HPSA. For Mussoorie, see Rules for Regulation of Porters and Jhampanis, Aug. 1912, Municipal Department, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL.
composition of Indian migrants were influenced in other ways as well. Most hill stations expelled beggars and other vagrants as a matter of course. The Simla municipality introduced a bylaw in 1891 that prohibited all porters, except those carrying the baggage of European visitors, from appearing on the Mall from 4 to 8 P.M. between the months of April and October—when, in other words, the Mall was most heavily frequented by Europeans. Similar rules were adopted in Naini Tal. Public-works projects also reduced contact between Indians and Europeans. In Darjeeling, for example, a new road was constructed in 1886 so that Europeans could visit the Lloyd Botanic Gardens without having to pass through the bazaar. Simla went even further, cutting a tunnel under the Mall in 1905 to divert coolie traffic from the notice of Europeans.[62] Whatever other purposes these road projects and labor regulations and sanitation measures were intended to serve, each had the effect of making the Indians' presence less visible and vexatious to the British.
Above all, however, the use of topography made the Indian inhabitants of the hill stations "invisible." The British understood the symbolic significance of altitude. As one of them put it, "Nothing is more likely to maintain British prestige than the occupation of commanding ground by the British race."[63] Invariably, the British took the high ground for themselves, consigning the Indians to the lower elevations, where they were usually out of sight and out of mind. This practice was especially apparent in the Himalayas, where the precipitous terrain favored the strict segregation of Briton and Indian across a vertical plane. But it could be seen in other hill stations as well. In Shillong, "the hills in the neighbourhood of the Government offices . . . have been reserved for the European population."[64] Even the highland plateaus of peninsular India often had sufficient variations in elevation for racial boundaries to follow their contours. The
[62] Simla Municipal By-law, Section 144, Act XX of 1891, Simla Municipal Proceedings, vol. 6, 1893-94; C. W. Murphy, A Guide to Naini Tal and Kumaun (Allahabad, 1906), Appendix; "Annual Report of Royal Botanic Gardens for Year 1885-86," 3, July 1886, Medical Branch, Municipal Dept., Proceedings of the Lieutenant-Governor of Bengal, WBSA; Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 63-64.
[63] Selections from the Records of the Government of India (Military Department) , no. 2: Report on the Extent and Nature of the Sanitary Establishments for European Troops in India (Calcutta, 1861-62), 153.
[64] Sarkar, Guide to Shillong , 47.
British justified this use of topography, as they did so many other measures to separate themselves from Indians, on sanitary grounds:
The natural separateness of the European from the Native part of the town . . . is of supreme importance from a sanitary point of view. Above, the air is fresh and pure, and cannot be contaminated by that below. The undulating surface and slopes of the hills carry away in their surface drainage all decaying matter and there is no chance for stagnation. So distinct are the two localities, that they bear but slight relationship [to one another].[65]
To reduce the relationship between the European and Indian sectors of the hill stations to its sparest utilitarian essentials was precisely the point behind the use of altitude in site selection. The entire social structure of a hill station was often embedded in its topography like successive layers of geological strata, as Nora Mitchell and others have noted.[66] In Simla, the government deliberately reinforced this association by providing senior officials with fine houses upon the ridge, English and Anglo-Indian clerks with cottages along the slopes, and Indian clerks with rooms in dormitories further below.[67] The process occurred with less deliberation in other hill stations, but the results were much the same. As one medical official put it with reference to Ootacamund, the British lived "away from, and out of sight of, the native town."[68]
As long as the Indians remained sequestered in the bazaar wards at the lower reaches of the hill stations, the British could to some degree retain their illusion of seclusion. As one visitor remarked about the Simla bazaar, "This is a place where no Europeans ever dream of going."[69] They had no reason to do so, given the physical and social structure of the hill stations. But when Indians began to infiltrate the station wards that the British themselves inhabited, this illusion experienced intolerable strains.
[65] J. S. C. Eagan, The Nilgiri Guide and Directory (Mysore, 1911), 146-47.
[66] Nora Mitchell, "The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal," University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 141, 1972, 5. Also see Nutan Tyagi, Hill Resorts of U.P. Himalaya: A Geographical Study (New Delhi, 1991), 116, 130.
[67] Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 56.
[68] Major R. Bryson, "Nilgiri Sanitaria," in Eagan, The Nilgiri Guide , 81.
[69] Constance F. Gordon Cumming, From the Hebrides to the Himalayas , vol. 2 (London, 1876), 122.
The first Indians to establish a palpable presence in those areas of the hill stations that the British held for themselves were the princes. Drawn by the political might and prestige that accrued to the larger stations when they became the summer headquarters of government, a number of wealthy princes began to take up seasonal residence there in the late nineteenth century. They expected the kinds of accommodations that could be obtained only in the station wards. By 1885, thirteen princes had purchased thirty-four of the finest houses in Simla, and others had acquired properties in Darjeeling, Ootacamund, Naini Tal, and elsewhere.[70] While many of these purchases were made as investments, with the houses leased to British tenants, more and more Indian princes took to the hills for their own pleasure.
British residents did not entirely object to the princes' entry onto the local scene. The lavish parties they hosted were welcomed, and they injected considerable capital into local civic and social projects. Their exotic splendor gave some color to hill-station society. One prominent official argued that it was a good thing that they were "brought more and more into social intercourse with the higher European community" since it would "promote a good understanding between European and Native." He compared the princes to "noblemen 'coming up to town' during 'the season' or for short periods when 'the Court' was there."[71]
Most officials, however, were disturbed by the influx of princes to the hill stations and particularly to Simla. After nervously tracking the princes' property purchases in the station for several years, the government moved to halt their encroachments. In 1890 the nizam of Hyderabad was prevented from purchasing the estate known as Snowden when its owner, Lord Roberts, the outgoing commander-in-chief of the army, put it up for sale. Lord Lansdowne, the viceroy responsible for prohibiting the transaction, issued an edict the following year that enjoined the princes from making further property purchases or visits to Simla without permission from the government.[72] Predictably, a sanitary rationale was offered for this regulation: the large entourages that accompanied the princes endangered the health of surrounding residents because of their deplorable hygiene. The secretary of the Simla municipality complained that "the hordes of ragamuffins who follow these Princes cause no end of trouble to our conser-
[70] Memorandum regarding Simla houses, in file on acquisition by native chiefs of land in British territory, Sept. 1886, nos. 431-33, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, Secret-I, INA.
[71] Minute by Sir Theodore Hope, in ibid.
[72] See Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 95-98.
vancy officers."[73] By pointing their fingers at the princes' retainers rather than at the princes themselves, the British sought to disguise their true concerns. But what really distressed Lansdowne and others was the simple fact that Indians were penetrating a British preserve—indeed, arguably their most important social and political preserve in India. It made little difference that the Indians who did this penetrating were princes. "My own idea is that the presence of these Chiefs at hill stations is distinctly undesirable," Lansdowne told the governor of Madras, "and that we ought to discourage it in every way."[74] And discourage it they did. Although the princes continued to come to the summer capital in substantial numbers, the government closely monitored their visits and often vetoed their attempts to purchase property, thereby ensuring that their presence was kept within carefully regulated limits.[75]
The princes, however, were not the only Indians to worry the British with their encroachments: a growing number of well-to-do commoners were entering the hill stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries as well. In 1902, Lord Curzon was outraged to learn that a Bengali zamindar had purchased a house in Simla. He demanded that action be taken "to exclude outsiders who have no lots or concern in the place, and who are best kept at a distance." His desire to place restrictions on the influx of nonprincely Indians was shared by other officials. One wrote that he had no objections to Indians who obtained property in the hill stations for investment purposes, but "what we want to prevent is the purchase of houses by wealthy natives who buy in order that they may live in them themselves." Another dusted off an old charge:
[T]he social and sanitary conditions of the stations will be affected by the presence of a large number of natives living more or less in the European fashion, and gathering around them an increasing number of relatives and retainers. This is the state of things which we wish to guard against while there is still time.[76]
These calls to action were especially significant because they were not restricted to Simla, as earlier orders had been: top officials feared for hill
[73] Newspaper clipping (unidentified) in Sir George Russell Clerk Collection, 68-69, MSS. Eur.D. 538/6, IOL.
[74] Lansdowne to Wenlock, 24 June 1891, quoted in Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station," 263.
[75] See the annual reports on the visits of ruling princes to Simla in Simla Muncipal Corporation Records, 8/53/52/1912-26/I, HPSA.
[76] See memoranda by Lord Curzon, H. S. Barnes, and H. H. Risley in no. 68, Dec. 1902, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.
stations as a whole. The government of India polled all the provincial governments for their opinions on limiting the acquisition of property by wealthy Indians in the hill stations. Most favored imposing restrictions. Their replies detailed Indians' recent encroachments in Mahabaleshwar, Mussoorie, Naini Tal, Ootacamund, and elsewhere in tones of trepidation. The lieutenant-governor of the Punjab expressed a widely shared view when he declared that "there is a wide distinction between the European and the native. A Hill Station is a necessary health resort for the former or for his family. It is not so for the latter."[77] But if the "natives" did not observe this distinction, could they be made to do so? This was the crux of the government's dilemma. It had been possible to impose restrictions on the entry of the princes to the hill stations because their formal status as rulers of semi-autonomous states meant that they had no legal right to enter British-ruled territory or acquire property there without the permission of the government of India. But the raj had no such legal authority over its own Indian subjects. It was suggested by one official that the government sidestep the issue by arguing that its intent was to ensure adequate housing for civil servants not to prohibit the transfer of property to Indians.[78] But how then to explain the racially restrictive nature of its actions? Denzil Ibbetson cut to the heart of the matter when he declared that "we must make up our minds . . . whether we are prepared to avow that our main object is to exclude undesirable native occupants from hill stations." He and other advisers eventually persuaded Curzon that to do so would "arouse a storm of fury in the Native Press."[79] Thus, the effort to prohibit entry to the hill stations on explicitly racial grounds was reluctantly abandoned.
This debate within the upper echelons of the Indian government is significant for two reasons. First, it demonstrates that the British regarded the hill stations as their exclusive preserves, set apart from the rest of India and marked by boundaries that Indians had no right to penetrate. While Simla sometimes seemed to stand in a class all its own, its position with regard to the maintenance of a racial cordon sanitaire was simply the most acute example of a conundrum that affected all hill stations. Moreover, it was the hill stations alone that occupied the attention of officials in this
[77] A. H. Diack, chief secretary to Punjab Government, to the Government of India, in no. 39, 1 June 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.
[78] Minute by A. Williams in no. 41, 10 Dec. 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.
[79] Minute by Ibbetson, in no. 41, 12 Dec. 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.
debate. No one suggested that Indians of wealth and title should be prohibited from inhabiting those districts of Calcutta or Madras or Bombay or other cities on the plains where the British congregated.
Second, this debate failed to accomplish what nearly all of its participants acknowledged as their goal: a policy that would protect the hill stations from further encroachments by Indians who sought to inhabit the areas that the British regarded as their own. Indians with titles, with wealth, and with Western values advanced upon the hill stations in increasing numbers after the turn of the century, and their presence transformed these mountain enclaves in profoundly important ways.