1
The Hill Stations of British India

Located on peaks that loom like sentinels over heat-shimmering plains, hill stations remain among the most curious monuments to the British colonial presence in India.^[1] Their origins can be traced to the effort in the early nineteenth century to establish sanitaria within the subcontinent where European invalids could recover from the heat and disease of the tropics. But hill stations soon assumed an importance that far exceeded their initial therapeutic attraction. To these cloud-enshrouded sanctuaries the British expatriate elite came for seasonal relief not merely from the physical toll of a harsh climate but from the social and psychological toll of an alien culture. Here they established closed communities of their own kind in a setting of their own design. As self-styled guardians of the raj, however, they also sought to supervise their subjects from these commanding heights. Here they established political headquarters and military cantonments, centers of power from whence they issued and executed orders with an Olympian air of omnipotence. Hill stations, in effect, served both as sites of refuge and as sites for surveillance. These were places where the British endeavored at one and the same time to engage with and to disengage from the dominion they ruled. This paradox and its implications for the imperial endeavor give the hill stations their significance.

Hill stations generally have been seen as places where the British went to play. These were the colonial equivalents of Bath or Brighton, cliquish resorts where rakish officers, vampish ladies, ambitious bureaucrats, and bored housewives engaged in endless parties and gossip. Rudyard Kipling did a great deal to engrave this image in the popular mind with his stories about Simla in Plain Tales from the Hills . Yet his portrait drew upon perceptions and suspicions that were already widespread among his contemporaries. Despite residents' protestations, the air of scandal settled

[1] As evidence of the continued popularity of hill stations, see the guidebook by Gillian Wright, The Hill Stations of India (Lincolnwood, Ill., 1991).

around Simla soon after its rise to prominence, and it lingers there still.^[2] Other hill stations loomed less large in the public eye, but they too established reputations for sportiveness. Here the British appeared to do as they pleased, unrestrained by the demands and debilities that the imperial order inflicted on them in the plains.

For all its hyperbole, this image of the hill station was in certain crucial respects an accurate one. Above all, it conveyed the fact that hill stations sought to isolate their seasonal residents from India's harsher features, to offer them a comforting haven for rest and recreation. This image may explain the general neglect of hill stations by historians: apart from Kiplingesque depictions of Simla and its counterparts in popular narratives of British India, the subject has been all but shrugged aside, dismissed in the historiography of the period as peripheral to the broader issues shaping the colonial experience.^[3] One must turn to social scientists, and especially cultural geographers, to find a serious corpus of scholarship on hill stations in India (and other parts of Asia).^[4] Their work has tended to stress the

[2] J. G. Farrell's The Hill Station (London, 1987), a historical novel left unfinished by the author's untimely death, paints a portrait of Simla society that Kipling would have found familiar.

[3] Most of the historical literature on Indian hill stations has a distinctly nostalgic flavor. See, for instance, Mollie Panter-Downes, Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill Station in India (New York, 1967); James Lunt, "Simla: The British in India," History Today 18, no. 9 (Sept. 1968): 599-605; Michael Edwardes, Bound to Exile: The Victorians in India (New York, 1970), chs. 8, 17; Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj (London, 1976), ch. 12; Pat Barr and Ray Desmond, Simla: A Hill Station in British India (New York, 1978); Jan Morris with Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (Oxford, 1983), 198-202; Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660-1947 (Harmondsworth, 1987), ch. 5; Vipin Pubby, Simla Then and Now: Summer Capital of the Raj (New Delhi, 1988); Jahar Sen, Darjeeling: A Favoured Retreat (New Delhi, 1989); Raja Bhasin, Simla: The Summer Capital of British India (New Delhi, 1992); and Ruskin Bond and Ganesh Saili, Mussoorie and Landour: Days of Wine and Roses (New Delhi, 1992). Significantly, none of these titles are the work of academic historians.

[4] A seminal introduction to the subject by cultural geographers is J. E. Spencer and W. L. Thomas, "The Hill Stations and Summer Resorts of the Orient," Geographical Review 38, no. 4 (Oct. 1948): 637-51. The best more recent works are Monika Bührlein, Nuwara Eliya: "Hill Station" und Zentraler Ort im Hochland der Insel Ceylon (Sri Lanka) (Stuttgart, 1991); and Nora Mitchell, "The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal," University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 141, 1972. Other studies include Mary Shaw, "Some South India Hill Stations," Scottish Geographical Magazine 59, no. 3 (Jan. 1944): 81-87, and 60, no. 3 (Dec. 1944): 80-85; W. Senftleben, "Some Aspects of the Indian Hill Stations: A Contribution towards a Geography of Tourist Traffic," Philippine Geographical Journal 17, no. 1 (Jan.-March 1973): 21-29; Anthony D. King, "Culture, Social Power and Environment: The Hill Station in Colonial Urban Development," Social

Action 26, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1976): 195-213; Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London, 1976), ch. 7; Robert R. Reed, "City of Pines: The Origins of Baguio as a Colonial Hill Station and Regional Capital," Center for South and Southeast Asia Studies Research Monograph 13, Berkeley, Calif., 1976; Robert R. Reed, "Remarks on the Colonial Genesis of the Hill Station in Southeast Asia with Particular Reference to the Cities of Buitenzorg (Bogor) and Baguio," Asian Profile 4, no. 6 (Dec. 1976): 545-91; Robert R. Reed, "The Colonial Genesis of Hill Stations: The Genting Exception," Geographical Review 69 , no. 4 (Oct. 1979): 463-68; Jan Pieper, Die Anglo-Indische Station oder die Kolonialisierung des Götterberges (Bonn, 1977), 183-95; S. Robert Aiken, "Early Penang Hill Station," Geographical Review 77, no. 4 (Oct. 1987): 421-39; and Judith Theresa Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990); and Nutan Tyagi, Hill Resorts of U.P. Himalaya: A Geographical Study (New Delhi, 1991).

distinctive form and function of the hill station, a perspective that reaffirms this impression of the stations' exceptionalism. These scholars have shown that the hill station was a variant neither of the traditional Asian city nor of the modern colonial/postcolonial metropolis, both of which thrived by incorporating a combination of commerce, industry, and state institutions. Rather the hill station was a unique urban entity, a seasonal site for the recreational activities of a highly transitory expatriate population, whose memories of a distant homeland it lovingly evoked. Hence, the replication of particular features of the natural and social environment of Britain was central to the hill station's distinctive identity. As one geographer has put it, hill stations "offered isolated, exclusive milieus where sojourners could feel at home."^[5]

Both the morphological patterns of the hill stations and the social practices of their British inhabitants furthered this nostalgic intent. In their physical configurations, hill stations had far more affinities with the quaint villages of a romanticized England than with the stark cantonments of a regimented India. Rather than transpose the grid patterns of civil and military stations on the plains to these mountain settings, the British embraced the sinuous contours of the rugged landscape and constructed their cottages along the crests of ridges and around the shores of lakes without apparent premeditation or planning. They hedged the stations' meandering avenues and footpaths with trees and flowers indigenous to their homeland and cultivated English fruit orchards and vegetable gardens in their backyards. Their houses were more often gabled Gothic villas, half-timbered Tudor cottages, gingerbread-ornamented Swiss chalets, and other European architectural imports than the familiar, verandah-enclosed,

[5] Aiken, "Early Penang Hill Station," 421.

Public Works bungalows that billeted the British across the rest of the subcontinent. And always at the heart of the stations stood that essential symbol of traditional English values, the Anglican church.

Form followed function: the lives led in the hills replicated the social experiences of the upper middle classes at home. A seemingly endless series of social calls, teas, strolls, picnics, dinners, balls, fetes, races, amateur theatricals, and other festivities dominated the daily routine of residents. While much the same array of social activities occurred wherever the British congregated in India, nowhere else did the pursuit of relaxation and recreation attain such preeminence. The parallels to the spa towns and seaside resorts of England were striking. Visitors came to recuperate from tenacious ills, to relax in a congenial climate, to relish a myriad of leisure activities, and above all to interact with others whose social status and cultural norms mirrored their own. They unpacked and donned their woolens, made their social calls and hosted their "at-homes," exchanged their pleasantries on their promenades along the Mall, and all the while did their best to reinhabit in mind and in manner a world they had left behind.

And yet the fact remains that hill stations were a part of the imperial system—that is, a part of the apparatus that allowed the British to rule India—and a far more integral part than their nostalgic guises suggested. They served as vital centers of political and military power, especially after the 1857 revolt. Pamela Kanwar's study of Simla demonstrates quite clearly that the history of this quintessential hill station was profoundly shaped by its political role as the so-called summer capital of India.^[6] While official recognition of its status came in the 1860s, it had already served as the summer residence of governors-general for several decades. By the late nineteenth century, viceroys and their councils were spending at least twice as many months each year in Simla as they were in Calcutta, the historic capital of the raj. This gravitation to the hills occurred at the regional level as well. The governments of Bengal, Bombay, Madras, Assam, United Provinces, and Central Provinces acquired the hill stations of Darjeeling, Mahabaleshwar, Ootacamund, Shillong, Naini Tal, and Pachmarhi as their summer headquarters, and the viceroy shared Simla with the Punjab government. Indeed, nearly every branch of officialdom that had access to a hill station endeavored to spend more of its time and transfer more of its operations there. Military as well as civil authorities established highland

[6] Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla (Delhi, 1990). Similarly, the political significance of Ootacamund is analyzed by Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station."

headquarters. Simla became the official residence of the commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. The army's northern command was headquartered in Murree, the Bengal command in Naini Tal, and the southern command in Wellington. Many smaller stations were military cantonments, occupied almost exclusively by troops. Thus, all but a few hill stations in British India had some sort of official imprimatur.

This shift in the bureaucratic axis of the imperial state from the plains to the hills did not go unnoticed by contemporaries. In the late nineteenth century it stirred up a storm of criticism both in India and in England. The commercial and professional elites of Calcutta, Madras, and other Indian metropolises organized rallies and submitted petitions protesting their diminishing access to officialdom in its highland retreats. The secretary of state for India and members of Parliament repeatedly demanded that the central and provincial governments justify the financial and political costs of their annual migrations to the hills. Later, Indian nationalists pointed to the practice as evidence of the aloofness and arrogance of British rule. The viceroy and his officials fought off these attacks with all the skill and tenacity that an entrenched bureaucracy possesses, marshaling a shrewd combination of arguments and inertia to resist any withdrawal from the hill stations. And they had at their backs other critics who urged that all British functions and functionaries relocate to the hills. These individuals envisioned the hill stations as the seedbeds for self-sustaining colonies where civil servants, soldiers, pensioners, and other Europeans could conduct their affairs entirely removed from the plains. All the parties in this debate about hill stations understood that it was a wrangle over access to the state, a struggle for power.

How was it possible for hill stations to serve at once as an integral fixture of British rule in India and as an aloof haven from its entanglements? How could the state and the individual extract such profoundly different uses from the same places? Implicit in these divergent functions lay a dichotomy between the public and the private that coursed through the center of Victorian culture. As social historians have frequently noted, the British at home led bifurcated lives, characterized by the gendered distinction between a male-dominated public sphere of politics and production and a female-dominated private sphere of domesticity and reproduction.^[7] Indeed,

[7] See, for example, Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall, Family Fortunes: Men and Women of the English Middle Class 1780-1850 (London, 1987), esp. 13, 32-33; and Dorothy O. Helly and Susan M. Reverby, eds., Gendered Domains: Rethinking Public and Private in Women's History (Ithaca, 1992), Introduction.

it has been suggested by Jürgen Habermas and others that the rise of a public sphere—and, by implication, its private counterpart—was at the core of the development of bourgeois society in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe.^[8] In India, where the British suffered heightened concern about the ways that private actions undermined public authority and public power corrupted private judgment, the boundaries between the two spheres were even more sharply drawn. It was considered essential, for instance, that the colonial official assume a public demeanor that disguised the private self. And yet the public and the private did not exist in complete isolation from one another. On the contrary, the two were complementary since each infused the other with meaning.^[9] If the Victorians regarded the public and the private as opposing poles of social experience, they nevertheless understood that these polarities stood in dialectical balance. The private and the public, the personal and the political, the individual and the social made up a highly charged grid of currents and countercurrents, and at the points where they intersected community and civic identity were formed. Nowhere within the raj was this intersection of dialectical forces more apparent than in the hill stations.

For the British who lived and worked in India, these highland sites presented a rare opportunity to reproduce the social conditions that gave their homeland its distinctive dynamic. Elsewhere on the subcontinent, the prospects for a bourgeois public sphere as Habermas construes it were limited by the constraints imposed on the British as representatives of the imperial state: these constraints placed them at odds with the civil society that developed among their Indian subjects, whose activities they viewed with suspicion, and it exposed them to those subjects' critical scrutiny, placing their private lives on public display. The authoritarian obligations of power over an alien populace subverted the conditions under which the dialectical interplay between the public and private spheres could take place. Only the hill stations provided a public space where the British could

[8] See Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society , trans. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere (Cambridge, Mass., 1992). Efforts have been made to apply the Habermasian understanding of the public sphere to the colonial experience, notably in a special issue of South Asia 14, no. 1 (1991), edited by Sandria Freitag, and at a conference on "The European Public Sphere and Its Alternatives under Colonialism," held at the University of Chicago in October 1993.

[9] Dena Goodman makes this point with regard to European society in "Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime," History and Theory 31, no. 1 (1992): 1-20.

simultaneously pursue their private interests. They provided a public space where the absolutist pretensions of imperial authority could be set aside and the necessity to conform to colonial normative codes could be tempered by the desire to satisfy personal needs. In this public sphere a bourgeois individualist sensibility could be cultivated and the subjective self expressed. Here sociability held sway, debate and gossip flowed freely, and men and women engaged in the personal transactions that became the principal bridge between the separate spheres.

The hill stations' distinctive social function is especially evident when the individuals who pursued private pleasures in these mountain settings are viewed in the aggregate. Whereas the British population of India as a whole consisted overwhelmingly of men, this was not the case in the hill stations (with the exception of the military cantonments). Here the number of women usually equaled and sometimes exceeded the number of men, and children constituted a substantial presence as well. Thus, hill-station communities came closer to the gender and age distributions found in society at home than almost any other clusters of Britons in India. By contrast, the Indian populace of the hill stations lacked the demographic balance it possessed across the rest of the subcontinent. Most of these Indians were adult males who had come in search of work from other areas, where their wives and children and parents remained. In effect, hill stations turned the comparative demographics of colonial India upside down: the Indians were the ones who became fractionated sojourners torn from their social fabric, while the British were the ones who developed relatively stable and sustainable communities. It is no coincidence, therefore, that the main transitions and transactions in the life cycle of the British Indian population frequently took place in the hill stations. These were the preferred places within the subcontinent for women to bear their children, for children to be educated, for young adults to meet and marry, for ambitious officials to make the contacts that furthered their careers, for pensioners to enjoy their retirement, and for invalids to seek their health or meet their death. Taken together, these activities constituted most aspects of the social reproduction of the ruling race.

Thus, what is often seen as the frivolous and fantasylike atmosphere of hill stations was entirely functional to the operation of the raj. With their physical evocation of the tranquil English village and their social replication of respectable English behavior, hill stations helped to imbue their inhabitants with an unmistakable sense of themselves as agents of a superior culture, charged with the responsibility to ensure that the fidelity and determination that had taken them to India did not deteriorate in this

physically and morally corrupting land. Those relentless rounds of teas and picnics and dinners served to remind their participants, most of them seasonal refugees from the alien climate and culture of the plains, that they shared a common social identity based on strict standards of conduct and consciousness. As Anthony King has observed, hill stations existed to "maintain the social structure and social behaviour of the British colonial community in India."^[10] Private intentions were thereby interwoven with public purposes. Hill stations offered enclaves where the British could restore the physical and psychic energies they needed for their imperial tasks, replicate the social and cultural environments that embodied the values they sought to project, and regulate and reproduce the individual agents who were vital to the continuance of their rule. Paradoxically, then, it was precisely because hill stations were physically removed from the contestation on the Indian plains and were unabashedly imitative of a nostalgically remembered homeland that they played a significant role in the maintenance of the British presence in India. Illusion was essential to their design and operation. Their service to the raj and its rulers ultimately derived from the degree to which they seemed a part of England and apart from India.

The problem with this artifice of isolation and memory is that its defiance of distance could not be sustained. To their dismay, the British watched as the boundaries intended to differentiate the hill stations from the rest of India inexorably eroded under the influx of Indians. They themselves were inadvertently responsible for this outcome since their own presence made these locales accessible from the plains and attractive to its peoples. The British sahibs and memsahibs who made the seasonal pilgrimage to the hills depended on Indian porters, servants, shopkeepers, and others to sustain their comfortable existence: an average of ten or more Indians were employed directly or indirectly in the service of each Briton. Hence, as the hill stations grew more popular as retreats for the British, they also grew more attractive as centers of employment for Indians, most of them migrants from precisely the places that the British were seeking to escape. It must be acknowledged that many Britons were well prepared as a result of the stratifications of class within their home society to ignore the presence of menials, to look past them as if they were invisible, and they used this social skill to sustain an illusion of isolation despite the presence of the domestic servants who inhabited their homes and of the shopkeepers, porters, artisans, and others who occupied the overcrowded station bazaars.

[10] King, "Culture, Social Power and Environment," 196.

Yet the sheer scale of the Indian influx eventually forced itself on the consciousness of the British. It manifested itself most often as anxieties about sanitation and disease—a familiar trope for racial fear. As a result, public health measures became common tools for the repair of racial boundaries. Even more subversive to the sanctity of the hill stations were the maharajas, lawyers, merchants, and other upper- and middle-class Indians who began to encroach on these ethnic enclaves in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Unlike migrant workers, these seeming upstarts possessed the financial resources and cultural standards to demand access to the residential and recreational quarters occupied by the British, to claim the right to participate in the social life of the stations. They intruded into the most intimate and exclusive corners of the space that the British had cleared for their own exclusive use. And yet the responsibility for their appearance on the scene once again lay with the British: if they had not invested so much of their social and political capital in these places, Indians of wealth and influence would not have found them so irresistible. The eventual outcome of these unintended processes was the incorporation of the hill stations within the compass of the Indian realm and their consequent destruction as special spheres of British bourgeois life.

Hill stations sprang up all across British India during the course of the nineteenth century. As one would expect, the largest number arose in the Himalayas, especially in the important area to the west of Nepal, but the British found suitable sites in other parts of the subcontinent as well. The principal requirements for the establishment of a hill station were an elevation high enough to provide respite from the summer heat and a location remote enough to provide isolation from the indigenous multitudes. Matheran, located some fifty miles east of Bombay, may have had the lowest elevation (2,500 feet) of the well-known hill stations, and none of the highland regions in central India provided sites much above 4,000 feet. Wherever possible, however, the British preferred elevations of about 6,000-7,500 feet, which was well above the habitat of malarial mosquitoes. Hill stations ranged across India from Mount Abu in the west to Shillong in the east and from Murree in the north to Kodaikanal in the south.

Exactly how many hill stations were established in British India is difficult to say. Some, such as Cherrapunji in Assam, were essentially stillborn, abandoned in that particular case because the station's annual rainfall exceeded five hundred inches. Others, like Sakesar in Sind, never grew beyond a few bungalows, modest retreats for the few Europeans

stationed in the immediate vicinity. An accurate count is made even more difficult because of ambiguities about how a hill station should be defined. Is Alwaye, a hamlet located at an elevation of six hundred feet in the southwestern corner of the subcontinent, a hill station? Nora Mitchell, who has carried out the most detailed geographical study of the subject, thinks so. She identifies close to eighty Indian hill stations that existed during the colonial era.^[11] Her list includes not only Alwaye but cities such as Bangalore, Coimbatore, and Poona, which stretch the notion of a hill station beyond what seem to me to be sensible limits. (Her list also excludes the hill stations located in present-day Pakistan, notably Murree.) My own estimate of the number of hill stations in British India is around sixty-five, but sufficient questions can be raised about particular places to make a definitive list all but impossible.

In any case, a precise count of the hill stations is less important than a general appreciation of their distinctive traits. Hill stations were seasonally variable settlements in the cooler elevations of the highlands where the British sought rest and recreation. The sites were in most cases inhabited by relatively few native peoples, though local rajas often held claim to the land. Formal transfer into British hands by treaty or sale or subterfuge was an essential preliminary to the development of hill stations. The only notable exceptions were the Kashmiri stations, which remained under the authority of the maharaja of Kashmir. Perhaps for this reason Gulmarg and its sister stations never became politically important despite the enormous natural appeal of their surroundings. The British had to have full legal rights to the land for them to invest the resources necessary to establish the multitude of social, educational, and political institutions that gave the larger hill stations their importance to the raj.

If all hill stations shared the same basic characteristics, they differed greatly in size, function, and clientele. Mitchell has proposed the following five categories: the official multifunctional hill station, the private multi-functional hill station, the single-purpose hill station, the minor hill station, and the satellite hill station. Among the stations that fall in the first category are Simla, Darjeeling, Naini Tal, and Ootacamund: they were government headquarters as well as social, recreational, and educational centers for the British. Kodaikanal, Matheran, and Mussoorie are examples of stations in the second category: they served much the same array of

[11] Mitchell, "The Indian Hill-Station," 87. A total of ninety-six hill stations are listed by Mitchell, but perhaps twenty of these (the exact number is difficult to determine from the categories employed in the accompanying map) were founded after independence.

social functions as the first group but did not possess any official purpose. The three remaining categories are a good deal more difficult to distinguish from one another: many stations could be described with equal justice as minor, single-purpose, and satellites of larger stations. Rather than quibble over these somewhat nebulous distinctions, it may be more useful to classify the smaller hill stations by the clientele they accommodated. Most were cantonments for British troops—at least twenty-five stations existed almost exclusively for this purpose. Others held enclaves of missionaries, planters, pensioners, railway workers, and so on. Dharmkot, for instance, was dominated by Presbyterian missionaries, Yercaud by coffee planters, Lonavala by employees of the Bombay railway system, and Madhupur by retired civil servants. The occupational-cum-class attributes of their patrons was the measure most often applied by the British themselves to distinguish one hill station from another.

Small stations sometimes clustered around large official ones, producing a pattern of association that echoed the stratification within the British colonial community at large. Simla had at least six satellite stations in its orbit: Dagshai, Jutogh, and Kasauli were military cantonments, though Kasauli also had a sizable civilian population by the late nineteenth century; Solon was a military convalescent station and site of a large brewery; Sabathu was a military convalescent station and sanitarium for American Presbyterian missionaries; and Sonawar was the home of the Lawrence Military Asylum for the children of British soldiers. Other satellite stations could be found around Dalhousie, Darjeeling, Naini Tal, and Ootacamund. This pattern was most pronounced in the northwest, where strategic interests and other considerations caused the British to maintain a large civil and military presence in highland stations. Elsewhere the clustering of hill stations was less noticeable: official multipurpose stations like Pachmarhi and Shillong stood alone, and Mahabaleshwar had just one neighbor that could be considered a satellite—Panchgani. Although Mitchell organizes all of the Indian hill stations into clusters, most of these groupings are merely geographical, not functional.

A clear chronological pattern can be discerned in the development of hill stations, a pattern shaped by a variable mixture of political, social, military, medical, and technological factors. Monika Bührlein identifies three stages in the evolution of the Ceylonese hill station of Nuwara Eliya—sanitarium to high refuge (1819-72), high refuge to hill station (1872-96), and hill station to town (1892-1948).^[12] While the particulars of this periodization

[12] Bührlein, Nuwara Eliya , passim.

may be distinctive to Nuwara Eliya, a similar sequence of stages applied to the hill stations on the subcontinent. The first settlements appeared in the early 1820s, following the consolidation by the British of those massive territorial gains that came from the regional wars of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The defeat of the kingdom of Nepal in 1815 opened the door to the Himalayas, where Simla, Mussoorie, and Almora soon arose in the northwest, followed a decade later by Darjeeling in the northeast. From the start, these highland sites attracted visitors in search of rest and relaxation, but they also served as forward positions in the strategic reconnaissance of neighboring states and as launching pads for commercial probes into central Asia. Mahabaleshwar was founded within a decade of the defeat in 1818 of the Peshwa, which concluded the war against the Marathas. The establishment of Cherrapunji was made possible by the acquisition of Assam in 1824. In the south, the relationship between the conquest of territory and the establishment of sanitaria was less direct. It took nearly thirty years after the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1792 for the British to explore and settle southern India's highest mountains, the Nilgiris. Once again, however, the crucial decade was the 1820s. This chronological coincidence was partly just that, but one factor that transcended the particularisms of each region was the great cholera pandemic of 1817-21, probably the first of its kind to sweep across the entire subcontinent. Striking at a time when the British were establishing a large and enduring presence in India, this traumatic event accentuated their fear of the tropical environment and their desire for a haven from its scourges.

It was above all as sanitaria, then, that the first hill stations had their origins and acquired their reputations. Most of the residents and visitors in the early years were civil and military officials from neighboring lowlands who sought a general restoration of spirits or recovery from specific infirmities. The founding fathers of highland settlements were invariably British East India Company servants, but they acted as often without as with the encouragement and support of the government. Soon, however, places like Simla, Mahabaleshwar, and Ootacamund received visits from governors and governors-general, and the development of hill stations became a matter of state policy. Roads were cleared by labor corps or convicts, bungalows were built with official monies, convalescent depots were established for invalid troops, and medical data were collected by government physicians. Most civil and military authorities were soon convinced of the therapeutic value of hill stations. Their support provided the sanction around midcentury for a second round of initiatives to locate

sites for hill stations. For those stations whose precise date of origin can be determined, nearly twice as many (twenty-three versus twelve) were founded in the 1840s and 1850s as in the 1820s and 1830s. They included multipurpose stations like Mount Abu, Dalhousie, Dharamsala, Kodaikanal, Matheran, Murree, Naini Tal, and Panchgani, and others intended exclusively as garrison or convalescent depots for troops, such as Dagshai, Jalapahar, Jutogh, Kasauli, Sanawar, Senchal, and Wellington. Although the disaster in Afghanistan in 1844 and the victory against the Sikhs in 1849 provided both strategic motives and opportunities for the founding of hill stations near the northwest frontier, elsewhere the main impetus lay in the search for places to rest and recuperate from the arduous life on the plains.

The second half of the nineteenth century was the age of consolidation for hill stations. Far fewer new stations were founded in this period (seven in the 1860s, one in the 1870s, five in the 1880s, and one in the 1890s, according to my incomplete census), but existing stations became larger and more important to the British in India. The railway-construction boom that began in the 1850s and continued through the end of the century made a number of hill stations more accessible to more visitors from more areas than before, thereby strengthening their viability as seasonal resorts. The railway also gave a crucial boost to planters, who began to establish tea, coffee, and cinchona estates on the slopes surrounding many hill stations in the latter half of the century. While subject to the vagaries of the international market, these enterprises provided the hill stations that served as their entrepots with a further impetus for growth.

The social prestige of the hill stations also increased in the latter half of the nineteenth century. During this period, Simla, Darjeeling, Mussoorie, Ootacamund, and other hill stations established themselves as the places where people of influence and ambition congregated. They acquired the reputations for parties and scandals that Kipling memorialized. They attracted growing numbers of British women and children for lengthy stays. And they attained something close to a monopoly over the schooling of European children in India. In short, they took on the principal role in the social reproduction of the British ruling elite. In so doing, they fulfilled the task with which they had been charged—to provide a milieu that mirrored England's in its bourgeois public and private spheres.

It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the hill stations also established themselves as places of political importance in this period. One indicator of their growing prominence was the 1850 statute that permitted hill

stations to form municipal governments with the authority to tax and regulate their communities. The great turning point, however, was the 1857 revolt, which deepened British anxieties about their security on the plains and heightened their appreciation of the safety of the hills. As a result, civil and military authorities began to shift their headquarters to hill stations wherever feasible and for however long possible. Simla obtained official recognition as the summer capital of the raj in 1864, when the secretary of state for India allowed the imperial council to accompany the viceroy on his annual migration to the hills. By the early 1870s, most of the provincial governments had obtained sanction to establish seasonal headquarters in hill stations. Moreover, the army moved a significant portion of its command operations and British troops into the fastness of the highlands.

Hill stations reached their zenith in the late nineteenth century. The political importance of the official stations was underscored by the inauguration of large and costly public-building projects. Simla's physical appearance was transformed in the 1880s by the construction of the grandiose Viceregal Lodge and an array of other government buildings. Governors' or lieutenant governors' mansions were established in Darjeeling in 1879, Ootacamund in 1880, Mahabaleshwar in 1886, and Naini Tal in 1896. A profusion of clock towers, bandstands, fountains, and statues evidenced a heightened civic pride and prosperity even among the smaller hill stations. As railways extended feeder lines into remote areas, journeys to the hills became increasingly easy and inexpensive, and narrow-gauge lines were completed to Darjeeling in 1881, Ootacamund in 1902, Simla in 1903, and Matheran in 1907. Most hill stations had attained unprecedented popularity by the turn of the century.

Yet these same developments set in motion the forces that would undermine the bourgeois civic character of the hill stations; these forces intruded into the spaces where the British had hitherto been able to establish an exclusive and unfettered social presence characterized by the free interplay between public and private spheres. By the late nineteenth century the plebeian population of servants, porters, shopkeepers, and others had begun to expand beyond the physical capacities of its confined quarters, and the ensuing overcrowded housing, contaminated water, and other manifestations of degraded living and working conditions soon could no longer be ignored by British residents. Nor could the British ignore the entry of increasing numbers of middle- and upper-class Indians into the hill stations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. They made their

presence felt through the purchase and occupation of property in the European wards of the stations and by the proliferation of hotels, clubs, and other social institutions that catered to their class. The hill stations in the vicinity of Bombay were the first to attract prosperous Indians on a significant scale, but the phenomenon quickly spread across the subcontinent. This influx introduced an entirely new dynamic to the hill stations, exposing British social life to the scrutiny of autonomous outsiders and undermining the unique conditions that sustained the articulation of the bourgeois public and private spheres.

Consequently, as Indians became more visible and influential in the hill stations, the British became less so. The end of World War I was an important turning point. The war had confined an exceptionally large number of Europeans to the hill stations, and with its end many of them took the earliest opportunity to book passages to Britain so that children could be placed in boarding schools and families could be seen for the first time in years. What might have been little more than a temporary setback for the hill stations proved much more far-lasting in the context of contiguous developments. The reduction of shipping fares and the recommendations of the Lee Commission (1925) made it possible for an increasing number of Britons in India to take their holidays in England rather than in the hills. The Indianization of the uncovenanted services made it difficult for hill-station schools to maintain their enrollments since they had built their reputations on preparing the sons of domiciled Europeans for government careers. The protests by nationalists and the postwar construction of the new capital in Delhi undermined Simla's position as the center of power of the British raj, and its diminution implied the same for those other hill stations that acted as summer headquarters for provincial governments. By the 1930s, the imperial and provincial governments had severely reduced or entirely terminated their annual migrations to the hills. As the British found fewer reasons to go to hill stations, property values fell, with only Indians coming forth as buyers. A temporary revival in the hill stations' fortunes occurred when the outbreak of World War II isolated the British in India once again, but they had already ceased to serve as genuine centers of political and social power for the colonial elite. In this respect, they merely mirrored the overall pattern of decline and disengagement that characterized the final decades of the British raj.

It must be reiterated that it was not the hill stations themselves that collapsed but rather the colonial purposes they served. Although the

stations suffered through a difficult period of adjustment as British power waned, most of them survived the transition to independence and found renewal as holiday resorts for Indians. Indeed, the genesis of their post-colonial configuration can be clearly detected in the tensions and traumas they experienced in the first half of the twentieth century.

This book traces the trajectory of the colonial hill stations' rise and fall against the backdrop of British India. While set within a broadly chronological framework, the study is thematically organized. The early chapters examine the attitudes, assumptions, and intentions that underlay the establishment and development of the hill stations. British responses to and representations of these highland sites took the particular forms they did because of the position the British found themselves in as the expatriate rulers of a strange and perilous land. Chapter Two places the medical rationale for the establishment of the hill stations in the context of the larger colonial discourse about the imperilment of Europeans in the tropical environment. The highland landscape is the subject of Chapter Three, which shows that the British interpreted and altered the environment around them to conform to a picturesque aesthetic that evoked memories of their homeland. Chapter Four traces a similar pattern in the British response to the highlands' native inhabitants, whom the British saw as noble savages set apart by their innocence and simplicity from the peoples of the plains.

The private and the public worlds of the hill stations are the subjects of the middle chapters. Chapter Five suggests that hill stations bore a morphological resemblance to English villages and that their residents conducted themselves in much the same manner as the patrons of English spa towns and seaside resorts: these nostalgic simulacra served to restore a sense of cultural identity and communal purpose to people otherwise immersed in an alien environment. These objectives were reinforced by the remarkably high proportion of British inhabitants who were women and children. Chapter Six argues that their presence helped to establish hill stations as nurseries for the ruling race, special places where the biological and ideological reproduction of the agents of empire could be carried out. The public realm of power is the subject of Chapter Seven. It charts the transfer of political and military authority from the plains to the hills and examines the heated debate this transfer aroused. These developments occurred in the aftermath of the 1857 revolt, and they suggest that British

authorities had become convinced that they could rule India best when physically removed from its peoples.

The final chapters explore the forces that undermined the imperial purposes of hill stations. The massive influx of Indian laborers to the hill stations and the problems they posed for the British efforts to maintain their sense of distance from the rest of India are discussed in Chapter Eight. Chapter Nine charts the increasing popularity of hill stations with upper- and middle-class Indians and the contiguous decline in their popularity with the British. If the Indianization of the hill stations is a mark of the dramatic changes in power relations that evidenced imperial decline, it is also an indicator of substantial continuities of purpose between the colonial and postcolonial elites. The Conclusion summarizes the main arguments and draws out their implications for our understanding of the colonial project.

As should be clear by this point, this book is not an exercise in nostalgia for a bygone imperial era.^[13] Such sentiments have been plentiful in the popular literature on the raj, and especially on the hill stations.^[14] The reason should be obvious: the hill stations seemed so far removed from the harsher realities of colonialism that authors striving to cast the British experience in the most entertaining and evocative light possible have found them attractive settings. I seek to show that this impression of the hill stations is entirely though not unwittingly wrong, that these places were in fact profoundly engaged in the complex and refractory processes of colonialism, but the dialectical terms of their engagement allowed those who enjoyed their pleasures and those who told their tales to see them otherwise. The hill stations offer a unique vantage point from which to view the structure and operation of the raj as it developed over the course of the nineteenth century.

I have evoked Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain in my title, and drawn passages from his book as epigraphs for my chapters, not to dress up this book with cultural pretensions, but to point to pertinent parallels between the Alpine realm imagined by Mann and the Indian realms invented by the British. Like the secluded tuberculosis sanitarium that serves as the unlikely site for the novel's wide-ranging debate about the issues

[13] For a thoughtful commentary on this subject, see Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist Nostalgia," Representations 26 (spring 1989), 107-22.

[14] An example is Graeme D. Westlake, An Introduction to the Hill Stations of India (New Delhi, 1993).

confronting European society, the hill stations of India were venues of unexpected importance to the issues confronting colonial society. The distance from the bustling and contentious world of the Indian plains did not divorce the British who frequented the hills from the concerns of the raj, though that was often their desire and their critics' fear. Rather, it presented them with a milieu peculiarly well suited for reexamining, reanimating, and refashioning themselves in their roles as agents of imperial power.