4
Nature's Children

I believe I do not err in assuming our agreement in the conception of an original ideal state of man, a condition without government and without force, an unmediated condition as the child of God, in which there was neither lordship nor service, neither law nor penalty, nor sin nor relation after the flesh; no distinction of classes, no work, no property: nothing but equality, brotherhood, and moral perfectitude.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Where there is so little crime, it may be inferred that the morality of the inhabitants is the cause; certain it is that there is less falsehood and theft [among the Paharis of the Simla hills] than in any quarter of Asia. There is a degree of simplicity too amongst these people . . . that induces an idea of a certain degree of morality existing, but when we take into consideration some of the customs peculiar to them, our belief is shaken. It must be remarked, however, the people consider them no crime whatever, and in consequence we ought to view them more leniently. It may not be so much vice as ignorance.
—Captain Charles P. Kennedy, political agent for the Simla Hill States, quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Simla and the Simla Hill States under British Protection 1815-1835

Although the British may have preferred to establish their hill stations in areas lacking the imprint of Indians, almost all the highland locales where hill stations arose were already occupied when the first colonial authorities arrived. The cultivators, herders, and hunter-gatherers who inhabited these hills posed a problem for the British. How was it possible to claim that these places stood apart from the rest of India if they were in fact populated by Indians? The presence of the indigenous hill folk demanded an accounting, an exegesis that would make them knowable and appropriable to the peculiar requirements of the hill stations.

In the vast quasi-Linnaean taxonomy that characterized the colonial ethnographic endeavor in India, the British often placed the peoples of the highland frontiers under the heading of "martial races," with courage, virility, and pugnacity among their distinguishing features. The Gurkhas exemplified the type. These were not desirable qualities, however, for peoples

who dwelt within the shadows of the hill stations: it would not do to have British sanctuaries surrounded by fierce warriors. If the highlands were to seem untouched by history and uncontaminated by society, if they were to evoke an Edenic tranquility, then it was essential that their inhabitants be seen to embody a corresponding character, a purity and simplicity that bore some semblance to the qualities exemplified by Adam and Eve. These were the lineaments of the noble savage, and this archetypal creature became the model for representations of the hill stations' aboriginals.

A comparative examination of British representations of the Paharis of Simla, the Lepchas of Darjeeling, and the Todas of Ootacamund reveals just how determined the British were to cast the hill folk as noble savages. These three peoples stood about as far apart from one another as any in British India. The triangulated gap that separated them was measurable not merely in miles but in language, religion, kinship practices, and a great many other standard markers of ethnic identity. Virtually the only feature they shared was the historical contingency of occupying certain highland tracts where the British wished to establish hill stations. Yet such slender grounds of convergence provided the basis for colonial representations of these three peoples in the nineteenth century. The Paharis, Lepchas, and Todas came to be seen in remarkably similar terms, their presumed autochthony lending verity to the claims made for the Edenic qualities of their habitats. The singular importance of hill stations to the expatriate rulers of the raj explains why and how the indigenes of these areas came to be defined, confined, reduced, and ultimately recast.

The inhabitants of the hills around Simla were part of a culturally distinct population known as Paharis, who populated the lower Himalayas between Nepal and Kashmir. Although they were Hindus, their customs regarding caste restrictions, the role of women, diet, and certain other matters diverged in significant respects from the "Great Tradition" of Hinduism. In the view of one scholar, the distinctive demands of the highland ecosystem played a determining role in Pahari peasant life, causing it to be more egalitarian and communal in character than was peasant life elsewhere in India.^[1]

Early British travelers to Simla and the surrounding hill country were quick to observe that Pahari society and culture were distinctive. They gave

[1] Ramachandra Guha, The Unquiet Woods: Ecological Change and Peasant Resistance in the Himalaya (Berkeley, 1989), ch. 1. Also see Gerald D. Berreman, Hindus of the Himalayas (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1963).

special attention to what they regarded as especially colorful or unusual practices, such as the lulling of Pahari infants to sleep by placing their heads in cold mountain streams. The quaint temples and exotic festivals, the rumored prevalence of polyandry and infanticide, the limited number of castes and caste prohibitions, and the females' freedom from purdah also attracted interest. These seemingly random observations and judgments were part of a persistent endeavor to contrast the Paharis with the population of the plains, a distinction that was generally meant to advantage the Paharis.

The British, to be sure, were far from enamored with every feature of Pahari society. They were especially offended by the practice of polyandry and its frequent corollary, female infanticide. James Fraser, one of the first British travelers in the region, voiced feelings shared by most subsequent commentators when he pronounced these practices "disgusting." He also dismissed the inhabitants of the lower hills as "contemptible in size, mean in aspect, cringing in address; their intellect appears degraded, and their ignorance almost brutal." However, his views grew more favorable as he trekked further into the interior. He spoke admiringly of the inhabitants of the highlands as modest, able, and hard-working peasants, and he judged them superior in many respects to his own Scottish highland countrymen. These observations led him to suggest that a sort of geographical determinism operated on the native character: "the farther removed from the plains, the heat, and the more accessible parts of the country, the higher does the highlander seem to rise in activity of mind and body."^[2] The distinction between high and low, vertical and horizontal, hills and plains was an enduring point of departure for discussions of the people who occupied the slopes around Simla.

For the Victorians, an essential aspect of any ethnographic commentary was an assessment of moral temper, which manifested itself above all in religious belief. Despite the fact that the Paharis shared their faith with their brethren on the plains below, their version of Hinduism was deemed less corrupting. "The religion of the Puharies is a simple form of Hindooism, free from some of its worst features as followed in the plains," explained one observer.^[3] The caste-bound inequities and ritual-enmeshed superstitions generally associated with Hindu communities were thought

[2] James Baillie Fraser, Journal of a Tour through Part of the Snowy Range of the Himala Mountains and to the Sources of the Rivers Jumna and Ganges (London, 1920), 70, 67, 209, 204.

[3] "Mountaineer," A Summer Ramble in the Himalayas (London, 1860), 187.

not to exist among the Paharis, who were seen as living close to nature in simple egalitarian communities. John Lowrie, the secretary of the Board of Foreign Missions for the Presbyterian Church, attributed what he regarded as the uncommon moral integrity of the inhabitants of the Simla hills to their freedom from "artificial distinctions." He explained:

In the manners of the Hill people there is a frank and independent bearing, which is much more pleasant than the sycophancy and servility towards superiors so common throughout India. They seem to be very ingenuous. They might be characterized as a simple-minded people, who are little encumbered with artificial distinctions of wealth and rank. Their chiefs have commonly but little power. . . . Hence, there is among them the absence both of the polish of address, and of the specious but deceitful ingenuity of mind, which are found among the subjects of more powerful and wealthy native rulers. This absence of artificial usage may be partly owing, also, to the fact, that there are few persons among them of overgrown wealth.^[4]

Lowrie believed that the Paharis' simple social order made them promising candidates for conversion, an expectation destined for disappointment.

Simla's founder, Captain Charles Kennedy, also believed that the rustic simplicity of the Paharis connoted moral innocence. However, rather than wonder about their prospects for conversion, he meditated on the relationship between morality and sexual behavior. In a continuation of the epigraph that opens this chapter, Kennedy observed: "No horror is expressed at the violation of female chastity. Shame hardly exists in some of the remoter States."^[5] Edging toward a kind of cultural relativism, he suggested that conduct which elicited opprobrium from civilized Englishmen had more innocent connotations for simple Paharis. Kennedy was not alone in his preoccupation with the sexual morality of the hill folk. "More free in manner than the natives of the plains, they are at the same time far less indolent; and I am persuaded that, however lightly they may weigh the crime and shame of the forfeiture of chastity, their natural tendencies are comparatively pure," professed a priggish Captain George Thomas. "I have seen some beautiful and sinless little hill girls of grace and air so innocent, so pure, so cherub-like, that it seemed impossible that they should become sensual—impossible that they should have within them the seeds of lasciviousness and guilt."^[6]

[4] John C. Lowrie, Two Years in Upper India (New York, 1850), 221.

[5] Quoted in H. Montgomery Hyde, Simla and the Simla Hill States under British Protection 1815-1835 (Lahore, 1961), 23-24.

[6] Capt. George Powell Thomas, Views of Simla (London, c. 1846), 7.

In the final analysis, however, the quality that the British found most compelling about the Paharis was not their supposed guiltless sexuality nor their inferred receptivity to Christian doctrine but their seemingly placid, peaceful character, which became particularly important after 1857. Despite a scare during the early days of the rebellion, Simla and the surrounding countryside remained tranquil and served as a refuge for British women and children. Consequently, the inhabitants of the area found understandable favor with the British. The Times war correspondent William Howard Russell, who came to Simla to recuperate from the rigors of following the military campaign, found the native inhabitants "a very interesting race, with greater intelligence and gentleness than those of the plains."^[7] A late-nineteenth-century district gazetteer for Simla described the Pahari as a "simple-minded, orderly people, quiet and peaceful in their pursuits, truthful in character, and submissive to authority." Lest the significance of this final clause be lost on his readers, he added, "They hardly require to be ruled."^[8]

Despite some shifts of perspective over time, British representations of the Simla Paharis remained consistent in certain fundamental respects. The predominant theme was that they were an open, naive, harmless populace, perhaps misguided in some of their social practices but graced with the vestiges of a more pristine moral order. Emily Eden expressed this view with characteristic vividness: "I imagine half these people must be a sort of vulgar Adams and Eves—not so refined, but nearly as innocent."^[9] Such representations had less to do with ethnographic accuracy than with the evocation of a mythic charter. They reappeared in even sharper form in the commentary on the aboriginal inhabitants of Darjeeling and Ootacamund.

The occupants of the slopes around Darjeeling in the eastern Himalayas shared little except the experience of colonial subjugation with their Simla counterparts in the western Himalayas. They were mainly monogamous, not polyandrous; Buddhists, not Hindus; and bound to the legacy of Mongolian Asia, not the plains of the Ganges. But the British portrayed them in much the same terms.

[7] William Howard Russell, My Diary in India , vol. 2 (London, 1860), 94.

[8] Punjab Government, Gazetteer of the Simla District, 1888-89 (Calcutta, n.d.), 43.

[9] Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters from India (1930; reprint, London, 1984), 162.

These mountain dwellers were known as the Lepchas.^[10] They quickly acquired a reputation among the British as an honest, happy, gentle, candid people. Despite frequent complaints about their reluctance to wash and to work, many visitors were charmed by their seemingly innocent contentment. The naturalist Joseph Hooker described them as "amiable and obliging, frank, humorous, and polite, without the servility of the Hindoos." "They are a cheerful, and apparently contented people," declared the Calcutta Review , "with few wants and little or no anxiety." According to the author of the first gazetteer for the region, the Lepchas were "a fine, frank race, naturally open hearted and free handed," although a subordinate clause added ominously that "they do not seem to improve on being brought into contact with civilization."^[11]

Some of the earliest commentaries on the Lepchas were among the most telling. Darjeeling's founding father, Dr. Arthur Campbell, described them in an article for the Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal as cheerful, curious, honest, and gentle. "The marked contrast in these respects with the listless, uninquiring native of the plains, renders association with them a source of much pleasure to Europeans." The Bengal Hurkaru praised them for being "wholly exempted from the prejudices of caste, and that inveteracy in superstitious customs which characterizes Hindoo idolatry."^[12] Similarly, a Captain Herbert, who had investigated Darjeeling as a site for a European sanitarium, wrote in the 1830s:

[A]ll who saw them would prefer their open and expressive countenances to the look of cunning, suspicion or apathy that marks the more regular features of the Hindoostanee. . . . They are the most good humoured, active, curious yet simple people, that [I have] ever met with, . . . bold and free in their manners, yet perfectly respectful, curious to a degree characteristic of the Europeans, sociable, obliging, cheerful, and of imperturbable good humour, with the most perfect simplicity, and complete freedom from guile . . . being superior in moral character and social qualities to the

[10] The most recent studies of the Lepchas are Veena Bhasin, Ecology, Culture and Change: Tribals of Sikkim Himalayas (New Delhi, 1989); and R. N. Thakur, Himalayan Lepchas (New Delhi, 1988).

[11] Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals , vol. 1 (London, 1854), 129; Darjeeling , pamphlet reprinted from the Calcutta Review , no. 55 (1857): 27; W. W. Hunter, A Statistical Account of Bengal , vol. 10: Districts of Darjiling and Jalpaiguri, and State of Kuch Behar (London, 1876), 47.

[12] A. Campbell, "Note on the Lepchas of Sikkim," Journal of the Asiatic Society of Bengal 92 (1840): 386; Bengal Hurkaru , 1 February 1839, quoted in Fred Pinn, The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters 1839 (Calcutta, 1986), 32.

people of the plains . . . free from all those degrading superstitions and absurd and injurious prejudices.^[13]

Once again a description of hill folk draws its force from a Manichaean contrast. The natives of Darjeeling, like their analogues in Simla, represented a moral antithesis to the intractable and unfathomable subjects who occupied the plains.

For many observers, an equally compelling contrast could be drawn between the Lepchas and their mountain neighbors, the Nepalese and the Bhutanese. While the Nepalese and Bhutanese were seen as aggressive, industrious, and warlike, the Lepchas were, in the oft-repeated words of Hooker, "timid, peaceful, and no brawler[s]."^[14] It is quite clear that the British found much to admire in the "virile" Gurkhas of Nepal and the Bhutanese, at least after they had been pacified by force of arms. But the Lepchas, with their supposed "cowardly disposition," were vastly preferable as neighbors.^[15]

The Lepchas were believed to live in intimate accord with their forest environment, possessing a remarkable knowledge of its flora and fauna, and they were highly prized as guides into the Himalayan interior. Various writers described them as "born naturalists." Major L. A. Waddell, who relied on Lepchas to guide his party through parts of the Himalayas in the 1890s, believed that they "represent the state of primitive man when he subsisted by hunting, fishing, and gathering wild fruits and digging roots," which left them with "absolutely no true conception of private property" but possessing a rare bond with nature that endowed them with a simple nobility as "true son[s] of the forest."^[16] Samuel Bourne, the great photographer of mid-nineteenth-century India, took a pair of portraits of two Lepchas that gave visual expression to this view. The images show a Lepcha man and woman, each bare-legged and plainly dressed, situated in a rugged outdoor setting and facing the camera with direct, frank gazes. "Just as European royalty was often photographed with one foot elevated, resting on a cushion or stool," observes the Bourne scholar Arthur Ollman, "so too are these tribal individuals seen, right foot placed on a rock. They sit

[13] Quoted in H. V. Bayley, Dorje-ling (Calcutta, 1838), 50.

[14] Hooker, Himalayan Journals , vol. 1, 128.

[15] Newman's Guide to Darjeeling and Neighbourhood , 6th ed. (Calcutta, 1919), 81.

[16] L. A. Waddell, Among the Himalayas (1899; reprint, Delhi, 1979), 91-92, 105, 77-78.

at the center of the image, slightly higher than the camera, again adding dignity to their fine posture."^[17]

The most fervent advocate of this idealized view of the Lepchas was General George Byres Mainwaring of the Bengal Army, who is said to have married a Lepcha woman. Mainwaring devoted decades of his life to the study of the Lepcha language. He described the Lepchas as "the free sons of the forest, the hearty yeomen of the land, the lords of the soil," who "dwelt in pretty cottages" and "roamed through the forest inhaling health." When he called their homeland "the very garden of Eden," he was not speaking metaphorically. Indeed, the paramount purpose of his linguistic labors was to prove that the Lepcha tongue was the source from which all other languages had derived. "The language . . . is unquestionably far anterior to the Hebrew or Sanskrit. It is preeminently an Ursprache , being probably, and I think, I may, without fear of misrepresentation, state it to be, the oldest language extant. . . . [I]t possesses and plainly evinces the principle and motive on which all language is constructed."^[18] This weird tributary of Sir William Jones's linguistic genealogy gave Mainwaring a reputation as the leading expert on the Lepchas in the late nineteenth century.^[19]

Of all the peoples who inhabited the highland sites where hill stations were established, the Todas of the Nilgiris most clearly evoked for the British the primitive and the pristine. One of the earliest reports described them as "a very remarkable people," and this judgment held sway for nearly all subsequent colonial observers.^[20] Their intriguing presence inspired a large ethnographic literature, perhaps the earliest and most extensive devoted to any group of Indians in the nineteenth century.^[21] Visitors as diverse as the explorer Richard Burton and the theosophist Madame H. P. Blavatsky published accounts of the Todas, and W. H. R. Rivers's weighty book on the

[17] Arthur Ollman, Samuel Bourne: Images of India (Carmel, Calif., 1983), 20.

[18] Col. G. B. Mainwaring, A Grammar of the Rong (Lepcha) Language (1876; reprint, Delhi, 1985), xiii, ix, xix-xx.

[19] See, for instance, the remarks of Florence Donaldson, Lepcha Land (London, 1900), 40.

[20] Reginald Orton, "Medical Report on the Nilgherry Mountains," [1821], 92, F/4/711/19407, Board's Collection, IOL.

[21] Paul Hockings, A Bibliography for the Nilgiri Hills of Southern India , rev. ed., 2 vols. (New Haven, 1978), provides a thorough guide to this literature.

subject is widely regarded as one of the classics of modern anthropological scholarship.^[22]

The Todas were pastoralists who grazed their cattle exclusively on the Nilgiri plateau.^[23] They practiced polyandry and female infanticide, and they firmly resisted Western efforts to convert them to Christianity and to incorporate them into the colonial economy. These traits might have been enough under other circumstances to condemn them in the eyes of the British, but a special set of factors worked in their favor. The Todas' striking appearance, demeanor, and customs intrigued and attracted visitors to the Nilgiris. They were described as a statuesque people, which supposedly set them apart from other Indians in the south. The Toda men's full beards and the women's long, unbound hair reinforced this reputation for difference. They wore long togalike gowns, lived in dwellings of distinctive half-barrel design, spoke a Dravidian dialect so singular that it was widely thought to be an entirely separate language, and centered their religious life on a novel dairy cult.^[24] Although more recent scholarship dismisses the notion, nineteenth-century observers believed that the Todas were "the lords of the soil" and pointed to what they interpreted as the payment of tribute by the other inhabitants of the area as evidence.^[25]

Little wonder, then, that speculation arose about the Todas' origins. "The appearance of the Todas . . . is very prepossessing," wrote Captain Henry Harkness in the first book to appear about them. "Generally above the common height, athletic, and well made, their bold bearing, and open and expressive countenances, lead immediately to the conclusion that they

[22] Richard F. Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851; reprint, Berkeley, 1991); H. P. Blavatsky, The People of the Blue Mountains (1893; reprint, Wheaton, Ill., 1930); W.H.R. Rivers, The Todas (London, 1906). For an interesting assessment of Rivers's work, see R. L. Rooksby, "W.H.R. Rivers and the Todas," South Asia 1 (Aug. 1971): 109-21.

[23] An excellent study is Anthony R. Walker, The Toda of South India: A New Look (Delhi, 1986). An abbreviated version appears as "Toda Society between Tradition and Modernity," in Blue Mountains: The Ethnography and Biogeography of a South Indian Region , ed. Paul Hockings (Delhi, 1989), 186-205.

[24] The first work to challenge seriously the exceptionalism that characterized most literature on the Todas, restoring them instead to their South Indian context, was James Wilkinson Breeks, An Account of the Primitive Tribes and Monuments of the Nilagiris (London, 1873), ch. 2.

[25] As far as I have been able to determine, the earliest use of this phrase to describe the Todas' relationship with their neighbors appears in a letter by Evan McPherson, superintendent of the Neilgherry roads, to John Sullivan, 12 June 1820, PP, Papers Relative to the Formation of a Sanitarium on the Neilgherries for European Troops , Session 729, XLI, 1850, 4.

must be of a different race to their neighbours of the same hue; and the question naturally arises, who can they be?"^[26] Conjecture variously identified them as the descendants of Jews, Arabs, Scythians, Druids, Romans, even Polynesians. Captain John Ouchterlony believed that "their aquiline nose, receding forehead, and rounded profile, combined with their black bushy beards and eyebrows, give them so decidedly Jewish an aspect, that no beholder can fail to be impressed with the idea that they must, in some way, . . . be connected with one of the lost and wandering tribes of the ancient Israelites."^[27] Such speculation soon created its own reality, as one early commentator inadvertently discovered:

The countenances of a few are strikingly Jewish, which is remarked by almost every stranger. I found several of them possessed of Jewish names, and began to flatter myself that I had discovered a colony of the scattered tribes of God's ancient people. But, on communicating my supposed discovery to a friend, I hardly thanked him, at the moment, for dispelling the illusion, by informing me, that he had given them these names, as he found it difficult to pronounce the barbarous appellations by which they are called.^[28]

Regrettably, the implications of this disclosure did not fully register with the author. He went on to suggest that the Todas were the forgotten remnants of a Roman colony.

With so many amateur ethnographers engaged in madcap postulations, it became increasingly apparent to the more sober students of the Toda that the endeavor to determine these people's past led to the fabrication of fantasies. A full century before academic anthropologists had begun to question the foundations of ethnographic authority, the German missionary Friedrich Metz noted that the Todas "soon detect what information the latter [Europeans] desire to obtain and make their replies accordingly. . . . [I]t is now a matter of difficulty to obtain from them any account of their previous history, upon the truth of which implicit reliance can be placed."^[29]

[26] Capt. Henry Harkness, A Description of a Singular Aboriginal Race Inhabiting the Summit of the Neilgherry Hills (London, 1832), 6-7.

[27] Capt. J. Ouchterlony, Geographical and Statistical Memoir of a Survey of the Neilgherry Mountains (Madras, 1868), 52. This report was first drafted in 1847, and it is repeated almost verbatim by Duncan MacPherson, Reports on Mountain and Marine Sanitaria (Madras, 1862), 24.

[28] James Hough, Letters on the Climate, Inhabitants, Productions, etc. of the Neilgherries, or Blue Mountains of Coimbatoor (London, 1829), 63.

[29] F. Metz, The Tribes Inhabiting the Neilgherry Hills , 2d ed. (Mangalore, 1864), 13.

Yet, as several works inform us, ethnography often has as much to do with poetics as it does with science.^[30] Poetics played a substantial role in the speculations that the British entertained about the ancestry of the Toda. These speculations supplied a genealogical point of reference, a kind of Burke's Peerage for primitives, that certified the high symbolic standing of the Todas in the eyes of the British. References to their nobility and dignity of bearing abounded. The 1880 district gazetteer for the Nilgiris observed that there was "something in the fearless manners and independent bearing of the Todas, which makes them very attractive." A subsequent gazetteer stressed their "attractively dignified and fearless manners when conversing with Europeans." A guidebook to Ootacamund spoke of them as an "aristocracy," and the term "lords of the land" was repeatedly applied to them. Indeed, the first Europeans to reside in the Nilgiris were so taken by the Todas' hereditary claims to the land that they voluntarily paid them compensation for their building stands, while John Sullivan, the founder of Ootacamund, pressed the government (without success) to grant them proprietary rights over virtually the entire expanse of the Nilgiris, even though this advocacy ignored the rights of other inhabitants of the hills, as well as the fact that the Todas did not share British notions of land ownership.^[31]

When the British expressed admiration for the noble mien of the Todas, they had in mind a quality so plainly bound to nature and so primitive in its purity that it posed no challenge to their own sense of superiority, vested as it was in the claims of civilization. Thus, commentators moved effortlessly from assertions about the natural dignity of the Todas to avowals of their submissive affection for Europeans. One of the first medical officers to investigate the Nilgiris claimed that his two Toda assistants "became so much attached to Mr. Stoddart and myself that they actually shed tears on our departure."^[32] Others offered their assurances that the Todas were a modest and harmless people whose presence merely added an Arcadian flavor to the highland environment.

[30] See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, eds., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1986); and Clifford Geertz, Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, 1988).

[31] H. B. Grigg, A Manual of the Nilagiri District (Madras, 1880), 186; W. Francis, The Nilgiris (Madras, 1908), 138; Geofry [pseud.], Ooty and Her Sisters, or Our Hill Stations in South India (Madras, 1881), 116; Walker, Toda , 243, 245. A useful summary of early British policy regarding Toda land rights can be found in Guide to the Records of the Nilgiris District from 1827 to 1835 (Madras, 1934).

[32] Reginald Orton, [1821], 93, in F/4/711/19407, Board's Collection, IOL.

This impression was reinforced by the numerous pictorial representations of the Todas. They repeatedly appeared in the early prints of the Nilgiris as an integral part of the pastoral landscape, noble figures herding their cattle on rolling green slopes. With their full beards, long tresses, and togalike gowns, they took on for the British a classical or biblical appearance. The frontispiece to Harkness's book offers an especially revealing image: a bucolic family group consisting of a toga-draped patriarch standing behind his seated wife and naked child under the shade of a tree. Here the polyandrous Toda family has been transformed into the West's archetypal nuclear household, the Christian holy family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph (Figure 4). As if to go one better, William Marshall included in his late-nineteenth-century study of the Todas a photograph of an elderly Toda couple with the caption "Adam and Eve."^[33]

The main intent of this characterization was to set the Toda in stark contrast to the stereotypical Indian of the plains. "This remarkable race differ in almost every essential respect from the other tribes of the natives of Hindustan," declared Captain Ouchterlony, who stressed that their appearance "attest[s] that they can be sprung from no effeminate eastern race." Reverend James Hough found the Toda "remarkably frank in their deportment; and their entire freedom from Hindoo servility is very engaging to the Englishman, and cannot fail to remind him of the 'bold peasantry' of a still dearer land." Major Walter Campbell's hunting memoirs included a conversation between two English sportsmen about the Todas: " 'Are not these a fine race of men?' remarked Mansfield. . . . 'How different is their manner from that of the effeminate Hindoos! You see they are perfectly respectful . . . but there is nothing cringing or timid in their mode of doing so.'"^[34]

Various commentators found the Toda women of particular interest. Unconstrained by purdah, they "have no shyness or reserve," remarked Captain Robert Mignan, an early visitor to the Nilgiris. Campbell's sportsmen regarded the Toda female's "easy, natural, yet graceful carriage [as] that of a true child of nature, ignorant of crime, and happy in her ignorance." These women "have a self-possession with strangers quite unknown among

[33] William E. Marshall, A Phrenologist amongst the Todas (London, 1873), Plate 16. More recently, a reminiscence about Ootacamund included the remark that "the most casual observer cannot fail to be struck by [the Toda's] extraordinary resemblance to the traditional pictures of Christ." J. Chartres Molony, "An Indian Hill Station," Blackwood's Magazine 247, no. 1495 (May 1940): 628.

[34] Ouchterlony, Geographical and Statistical Memoir , 51; Hough, Letters , 65; Major Walter Campbell, The Old Forest Ranger; or, Wild Sports in India (London, 1863), 42.

Figure 4.
The Toda family portrayed in Henry Harkness's 1832 book bears a striking resemblance
to popular representations of the Christian holy family of Jesus, Mary, and Joseph.
From Capt. Henry Harkness, A Description of a Singular Aboriginal Race
Inhabiting the Summit of the Neilgherry Hills (London, 1832).

the Hindus of the plains," observed an American missionary. "They are ready to chat with the stranger, and have smiles almost constantly on their faces." Others also contrasted the frank and friendly demeanor of the Toda women with that of their counterparts on the plains.^[35] There was, as we shall see, a sexual subtext to these comments, but their main purpose was to draw a distinction that privileged these hill people.

This discourse tended to pass over the fact that the Todas were not the only nor even the most numerous occupants of the Nilgiris when the British arrived. They lived amid large and important communities of Badagas, Kotas, Kurumbas, and Irulas, and all of these peoples existed in social and economic symbiosis. This relationship was rarely mentioned by the British, who thereby managed to minimize the similarities that Anthony Walker has noted between Nilgiri society and the pattern of multicaste social organization found elsewhere in rural India.^[36] Most visitors to the Nilgiris shared the view voiced by a Madras staff corps officer: "The other inhabitants are not interesting, and may be dismissed in very few words."^[37] Insofar as the British gave any attention to the Todas' neighbors, they regarded them as rank inferiors to the Todas, markedly lower in the great chain of being, and readily differentiated by distinctive flaws. The Badagas were "gentle and industrious" cultivators "but timid and ignorant" because of their obedience to Hinduism; the Kotas were "intelligent and hardworking" artisans but morally marred by "their filthy custom of eating carrion"; the Kurumbas were "very uncouth, and wild and squalid in appearance"; and the Irulas, who occupied the lower slopes of the plateau, also occupied the moral depths, "but little removed from . . . utter uncivilization."^[38] None challenged the social eminence of the Toda. Hence the British persistently mistook Toda traffic with their neighbors as a form of tribute—a misapprehension that aided British efforts to establish the ancient credentials of the Todas.

The Todas, then, took on an especially evocative network of associations in the British mind. Even so, they shared many features with the indi-

[35] Capt. Robert Mignan, Notes Extracted from a Private Journal, Written during a Tour through a Part of Malabar, and among the Neilgherries (Bombay, 1834), 128; Campbell, Old Forest Ranger , 43; Rev. John W. Dulles, Life in India; or Madras, the Neilgherries, and Calcutta (Philadelphia, 1855), 446. Also see Harkness, Description , 8.

[36] Walker, Toda , 22.

[37] E. F. Burton, An Indian Olio (London, 1888), 141.

[38] The statements about the Badagas and the Kurumbas come from Grigg, Manual , 224, 209; the Kota comment appears in A Guide to Ootacamund and Its Neighbourhood (Madras, 1889), 14; and the defamation of the Irula is from Harkness, Description , 29. Remarks in this vein are abundant in the literature.

genous peoples of Simla and Darjeeling: all were simple, guileless, noble beings, nurtured in the healthy embrace of nature, untouched by the depravity that pervaded the social and religious life of the Indian masses. These hill dwellers harbored no surprises and posed no threats of the sort that made their counterparts on the plains seem so duplicitous and dangerous. The translucence of their moral purity left them fully exposed to view. The colonizer's gaze could fix upon these people with confidence that its reading of their character and conduct was essentially unimpeded by the encrustations of debased customs. What it saw was what it wished to see—the corporeal embodiment of an Edenic innocence.

This romanticized vision of the hill stations' native inhabitants had a further virtue: it allowed most British commentators to view their own effect on these peoples as part of an inexorable evolutionary process. It was the fate of the innocent savage, they thought, to slide into moral and physical decay when brought into contact with the outside world. By attributing the ample evidence of dislocation and decline among the Todas and other hill peoples to the operation of natural law, the British contrived both to affirm the Elysian character of these subjects and to establish themselves as the ineluctable agents of civilization, the unhappy effect of which they regarded with self-conscious diffidence.

As early as the 1820s, Hough saw signs of "the deterioration of [the Todas'] character," citing their adulteration of milk that they sold and "other dishonest expedients." Later observers lamented the prevalence of alcoholism, beggary, prostitution, and venereal disease among the Todas. "Of late years," noted the author of an ethnographic study of the Todas published in 1868, "they have taken to drink Arrack, and most of their women have been debauched by Europeans, who, it is sad to observe, have introduced diseases to which these innocent tribes were at one time perfect strangers, and which, as they have no means of curing, is slowly . . . sapping their once hardy and vigorous constitutions."^[39] Burton was even more stinging in his assessment of the impact of the West:

The "noble unsophisticated Todas," as they were once called have been morally ruined by collision with Europeans and their dissolute attendants. They have lost their honesty: truth is become almost unknown to

[39] Hough, Letters , 79; John Shortt, An Account of the Tribes on the Neilgherries (Madras, 1868), 8. Mignan stated that syphilis was the most prevalent disease among the Todas when he visited the Nilgiris in the early 1830s (Notes Extracted from a Private Journal , 131).

them; chastity, sobriety, and temperance, fell flat before the strong temptations of rupees, foreign luxuries, and ardent spirits. Covetousness is now the mountaineer's ruling passion: the Toda is an inveterate, indefatigable beggar, whose cry . . . "give me a present!" no matter what,— money, brandy, cigars, or snuff—will follow you for miles over hill and dale: as a pickpocket, he displays considerable ingenuity; and no Moses or Levi was ever a more confirmed, determined, grasping, usurer. His wife and daughters have become vile as the very refuse of the bazaar. And what can he show in return for the loss of his innocence and happiness? . . . From the slow but sure effects of strange diseases, the race is rapidly deteriorating—few of the giant figures that abound in the remote hills, are to be found near our cantonments—and it is more than probable that, like other wild tribes, which the progress of civilization has swept away from the face of the earth, the Toda will, ere long, cease to have "a local habitation and a name" among the people of the East.^[40]

Many shared Burton's pessimistic verdict. Although contradicted by nineteenth-century census figures,^[41] the Todas were believed to be a "dying race," disappearing because of the combined effects of alcohol, syphilis, and their own polyandrous practices. "[I]t seems certain," declared Mignan, "that the Todas, like their buffaloes, are destined to disappear from the face of the earth."^[42] This conviction accounts for much of the attention the Todas received from British ethnographers. For instance, Marshall, a Bengal Army officer and amateur phrenologist, obtained a furlough from his regiment so that he could study the Todas before they died out.^[43]

A similar fate was thought to await the Lepchas. As Darjeeling became a popular resort and the center of a thriving tea industry, it attracted large numbers of laborers from the neighboring mountain states of Nepal and Bhutan, as well as from the plains below. Aggressive in their pursuit of economic opportunity, these immigrants came to be seen as a threat to the indigenous Lepchas. "[B]efore the advance of cultivation and with the disappearance of the forest to make way for crops and cattle the Lepcha is in great danger of dying out, being driven away from his ancestral glades by the prosaic Nepali and other materialistic Himalayan

[40] Burton, Goa , 351-52.

[41] See the data in Walker, Toda , app. 2.

[42] Mignan, Notes Extracted from a Private Journal , 133. Also see Rev. B. Schmid, "Remarks on the Origin and Languages of the Aborigines of the Nilgiris," Journal of the Bombay Branch of the Royal Asiatic Society 3, Pt. 1, no. 12 (Jan. 1849): 52; Metz, Tribes , 15; and Letters from India and Kashmir (London, 1874), 49.

[43] Marshall, Phrenologist , v.

tribes."^[44] General Mainwaring argued that what made the depredations of the Nepalese and Bhutanese possible were the actions of the British themselves. "The advent of the Europeans was the first real blow the Lepchas received; their downfall quickly followed." He traced this decline to the imposition of taxation, the demand for labor, and the growth of Darjeeling. In a parallel to the Toda case, the debasement of the Lepcha women was a fatal blow: "The women also, naturally exceedingly gentle and modest, became the victims of the licentious:—the fall of the Lepchas was complete."^[45] Various observers worried about an apparent decline in fertility among the Lepchas and lamented their growing practice of intermarriage with immigrants. They are "losing their identity by the extensive absorption of their women into the Bhotiya and Limboo tribes, with whom they freely intermarry," explained Waddell.^[46] All of this commentary suggested that the Lepchas, like the Todas, were a "dying race." According to the author of an 1883 guidebook to Darjeeling, they would soon "be as extinct as the Dodo."^[47]

The Paharis, with their much more sizable population and territory, never gave cause for concern about their physical survival. Their moral health, however, did worry the British. "I am told that honesty was the distinguishing characteristic in former times of the Paharis," wrote Fanny Parks at midcentury, "but intercourse with civilized Europeans has greatly demoralized the mountaineers."^[48] The destructive effects of the West on the inhabitants of the Simla hills preoccupied others, including Rudyard Kipling, who addressed the issue in one of his most poignant short stories, "Lispeth."

The story concerns a beautiful young Pahari girl from the hills near Simla who is raised by Moravian missionaries after her parents die of cholera. Comparing her to "the original Diana of the Romans," with "a

[44] Percy Brown, Tours in Sikhim and the Darjeeling District (Calcutta, 1917), 4.

[45] Mainwaring, Grammar , xii, xiii.

[46] Waddell, Among the Himalayas , 293.

[47] R. D. O'Brien, Darjeeling, the Sanitarium of Bengal; and Its Surroundings (Calcutta, 1883), 67. A census conducted in 1892 demonstrated "that there is a fallacy in the common idea that the Lepchas are decreasing in number because of British occupation." J. G. Ritchie, "Darjeeling District Census Report," 15 March 1892, 10, in V/15/37, Census Reports, IOL. Despite this evidence, the myth of the Lepchas as a dying race has persisted up to recent times. See comments by K. C. Bhanja, Wonders of Darjeeling and the Sikkim Himalaya (n.p., 1943), 29; and John Morris, Eating the Indian Air (London, 1968), 261.

[48] Fanny Parks, Wanderings of a Pilgrim, in Search of the Picturesque , vol. 2 (London, 1850), 259.

pale, ivory colour" and "a Greek face," Kipling evokes the same sort of ancestral associations that surrounded the Todas and Lepchas, and with much the same intent: he seeks to elicit his readers' sympathies by suggesting that Lispeth possesses a pedigree that sets her apart from other Indians. Because she has converted to Christianity, her own people shun her, and when she saves a young Englishman who has fallen from a cliff, she decides that he shall become her husband. In her simplicity and innocence, she cannot comprehend the racial boundaries that mark the colonial order. Thus, when the missionary couple who have raised her conspire with the young man to shatter her hopes of matrimony, Lispeth abandons the mission and returns to the people of her birth, becoming an embittered, abused, alcoholic "creature" whose beauty soon fades. For the chaplain's wife, these events simply demonstrate that " 'Lispeth was always at heart an infidel,' " but Kipling clearly intends a different message. He wants Lispeth to be seen as the exemplar of a people sequestered by their hills from the corrupting influences—the sins—of the outside world. The serpent in this garden is the European, specifically the missionary couple whose contradictory impulses to inculcate notions of Christian brotherhood while defending the privileges of their race destroy her. Kipling panders in this story to the British Indian community's widespread distrust of missionaries, who were accused of fostering expectations of equality on the part of indigenous peoples that were bound to cause disappointment and discontent. At the same time, however, he offers a far more sweeping commentary on the relationship between the British and the inhabitants of the hills. Lispeth serves as the symbol of a paradisiacal people who are too simple, too gentle, too fragile to survive the encounter with the West. Their character informs their fate: their destruction is the natural outcome of their role as noble savages.^[49]

The British, however, did not merely lament the precipitate destruction of these people. By the late nineteenth century, authorities sought to alleviate the full force of the colonial impact through a policy of protection and preservation that paralleled their efforts to mitigate the havoc wrought on the physical environment of the hills. This enterprise was part of a general drive in the final decades of the century to preserve and revive the vestiges of a supposedly untarnished traditional India, whether it was manifested in an imperiled architecture, craft, custom, or people them-

[49] Rudyard Kipling, "Lispeth," in Plain Tales from the Hills (London, 1987), 33-37. Lispeth is resurrected by Kipling in Kim ; now the powerful matriarch of a village, she assists Kim in his efforts to thwart three Russian agents.

selves. John Lockwood Kipling, Rudyard's father, was one of the leading figures in this enterprise, and it is worth noting that he devoted some of his labors to preserve the hill temples and indigenous decorative arts of Simla.^[50] The small princely hill states that surrounded Simla provided some measure of protection against the European impact, and British officials in the late nineteenth century made a conscious effort to ensure that they remained reservoirs of traditional Pahari culture. In Darjeeling district, concerns about the survival of the Lepchas led to the passage of a statute that sought to protect them against the dispossession of their last five acres of land, and General Mainwaring undertook his quixotic endeavor to save the Lepcha language. The maharaja of neighboring Sikkim was persuaded to establish within his state a special Lepcha reserve, which became a magnet for anthropologists in search of uncontaminated aboriginals.^[51] The most extensive campaign to protect an indigenous people occurred, however, in the Nilgiris, where a system of land reserves was established for the Todas. The government sought to stem the Todas' presumed decline by prohibiting them from selling or leasing these lands, which an 1882 ruling declared to be communally owned. Regulations also controlled land usage, including a ban on cultivation until 1893. In effect, as Walker has observed, British officials attempted to confine the Todas within the boundaries of their traditional pastoral economy, insulating them from all change.^[52]

These institutional efforts reflected a larger public interest in what might be termed the picturesque primitive. The growth of tourism in the mid to late nineteenth century propelled this ethnographic curiosity. A popular activity among newcomers to the hill stations was an excursion to view the local inhabitants in their exotic costumes and habitats. The encounter was certified by the purchase of postcards and photographs, handicrafts, and

[50] See Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (Berkeley, 1989); and Mahrukh Tarapor, "John Lockwood Kipling and British Art Education in India," Victorian Studies 24, no. 1 (autumn 1980): 53-81. For John Lockwood Kipling's interest in the crafts of Simla, see Punjab Government, Gazetteer of the Simla District, 1888-89 , 69-71.

[51] See Geoffrey Gorer, Himalayan Village: An Account of the Lepchas of Sikkim (London, 1938); John Morris, Living with Lepchas (London, 1938); Bhasin, Ecology, Culture and Change .

[52] Walker, Toda , 245-53. Also see Edgar Thurston, Anthropology of the Todas and Kotas of the Nilgiri Hills (Madras, 1896), 183-84; and David G. Mandelbaum, "Culture Change among the Nilgiri Tribes," in Beyond the Frontier: Social Process and Culture Change , ed. Paul Bohannan and Fred Plog (Garden City, N.Y., 1967), 203.

other locally manufactured curios (Figure 5). It became obligatory for tourists in the Nilgiris, for instance, to visit those Toda munds , or hamlets, that stood within easy walking distance of hotels in Ootacamund and its sister hill station, Coonoor. When dignitaries visited the region, Todas were often rounded up for inspection. "I have arranged for ten specimen males and ten females to be at the place where my carriage will await you and while you are having a little refreshment in a tent you will be able to look at them," the governor of Madras wrote to Lord Curzon in 1902.^[53] In Simla, it became de rigueur for newcomers to attend the annual Sipi festival, which the rana of neighboring Koti hosted in a glade at Mahasu, a hamlet several miles from Simla where some officials had homes. Here visitors could view Paharis bedecked in their finest costumes and engaged in folk dances, archery competitions, the sale of handicrafts, and other activities that reminded Simla's first historian, Edward Buck, of "an old English rural gathering." Beginning with Lord Mayo, every viceroy made a point of attending the Sipi festival, which came to be "observed as a public holiday by the official world of Simla."^[54] In Darjeeling, visitors were encouraged to venture about a mile from their hotels to "a quaint and picturesque village inhabited by Bhutias and Lepchas." Even more popular with tourists was Darjeeling's Sunday bazaar, where plenty of Lepchas and other colorful ethnic "types" could be observed and where local curios such as prayer wheels, amulets, and skull drums could be purchased.^[55] In those hill stations where the native populace was insufficiently colorful, traders from afar sometimes offered a satisfactory substitute. Although by the late nineteenth century the population around Mussoorie, for instance, had little to offer tourists with a taste for the unfamiliar, one visitor there described her delight when during a stroll she encountered an old Tibetan woman wearing an unusual necklace, which she persuaded her to sell. "The natural good manners of these natives are striking," she enthused, instinctively regarding this traveler from Tibet as more "native" than the

[53] Quoted in Judith Theresa Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990), 275-76. Also see Sir Mountstuart E. Grant Duff, Notes of an Indian Journey (London, 1876), 204.

[54] Edward J. Buck, Simla Past and Present , 2d ed. (1925; reprint, Simla, 1989), 244, 243. Also see Raja Bhasin, Simla: The Summer Capital of British India (New Delhi, 1992), 184; and the personal account of the festival by Col. Robert J. Blackham, Scalpel, Sword and Stretcher (London, 1931), 193.

[55] See W. S. Caine, Picturesque India: A Handbook for European Travellers (London, 1890), 356; and J. D. Rees, Lord Connemara's Tours in India (London, 1892), 216.

Figure 5.
A dignified Lepcha man gazes at the viewer in this photograph from a tourist
guidebook. From Darjeeling and Its Mountain Railway (Calcutta, 1921).

neglected inhabitants of the region.^[56] To visit a Toda mund , a Buddhist monastery, or a Hindu hill temple, to dig among the burial "cairns" in the Nilgiris, to attend the village festivals near Simla, or to discover curios in the Darjeeling bazaar became just as much a part of the tourist itinerary as to take in the favored views of snow-capped peaks, heat-shimmering plains, and mist-enshrouded waterfalls.

If it is true that representations of the indigenes of Simla, Darjeeling, and Ootacamund were shaped by the special significance these highland sites held for the British, then one would expect the native peoples who inhabited the environs of other hill stations to be represented in similar fashion. A brief review of several other cases confirms this supposition.

The hills around Matheran, a popular sanitarium within easy reach of the residents of Bombay, were inhabited by several tribes—the Thakars, the Katkaris, and the Dhangars. The Dhangars were a pastoral people who, in the view of the British, had many of the same features as the Todas. They were said to possess a similar pride and noble bearing, and to overshadow their highland neighbors much as the Todas overshadowed the Badagas and the Kotas. They were described as "superior in physique to any other forest tribe," and their physiognomy was seen as a physical manifestation of their superiority of character: "their expression is frank and open, the features more refined, the nose more aquiline than is usual in the aborigines of India. The forehead is broad, and the eyes deep set, with a bright good humoured look in them."^[57] Their reputations as children of nature made them popular guides for tours through the hills.^[58] The Dhangars, in short, became the embodiment of the noble savage.

On the other side of the subcontinent, the Khasi people of Assam took on a similar celebrity in relationship to Shillong. Initially, however, the Khasis' armed resistance to British colonial rule caused them to be cast as "sulky intractable fellows," as Hooker put it.^[59] Once pacified, a process completed some time before Shillong was founded in 1864, they acquired

[56] Mrs. Robert Moss King, The Diary of a Civilian's Wife in India. 1877-1882 , vol. 1 (London, 1884), 146.

[57] Mrs. A. K. Oliver, The Hill Station of Matheran (Bombay, 1905), 116. Also see J. Y. Smith, Matheran Hills: Its People, Plants, and Animals (Edinburgh, 1871), passim; and Isabel Burton, AEI: Arabia Egypt India, A Narrative of Travel (London and Belfast, 1879), 285-89.

[58] Grant Duff, Notes , 25-26.

[59] Hooker, Himalayan Journals , vol. 2, 274.

a more attractive reputation. Their Mongoloid appearance, matriarchal institutions, Mon-Khmer language, and other distinguishing characteristics attracted the interest of numerous ethnographers and comparative philologists and set them apart from neighboring peoples. The leading colonial study of the Khasis described them as a "simple and straightforward people" who "are cheerful in disposition, and are light-hearted in nature, and, unlike the plains people, seem to thoroughly appreciate a joke." Moreover, they "are fond of nature," a trait "not found usually in the people of India." Their women "are especially cheerful, and pass the time of day and bandy jokes with passers-by with quite an absence of reserve."^[60] These remarks could just as well have referred to the Todas, the Lepchas, or the Paharis, and they established a similarly favorable dichotomy between the Khasis and the peoples of the plains.

It is perhaps less surprising to hear echoes of the commentary about the Simla hill folk in the discourse from other hill stations of the western Himalayas. After all, Paharis populated these places too. But the association between Paharis and a particular body of attributes was not as consistent as might be supposed. The self-styled founder of the hill station at Naini Tal did describe its inhabitants in terms reminiscent of remarks about Simla's indigenes. The "rational simplicity" of Hindu worship among the local hill people, he insisted, "compared with the noise and pomp, the obscenities and abominations of the same religion in the lower provinces, . . . leaves on the mind a pleasing impression of the Brahminical faith." The villages in the region bear "a striking resemblance to the nice cottages of industrious peasants in England," and their occupants possess "habits of industry, cleanliness, and simple pastoral manners."^[61] Readers contemplating a visit to Naini Tal could scarcely find a more reassuring assessment of its inhabitants. Yet the adjacent hills also became an important recruiting ground for the military. For many years young Pahari males from the neighboring Tehri Garhwal State and Garhwal district (which was joined with Naini Tal district in the Kumaun division) served with distinction in the famous Gurkha regiments. Their martial reputation led to the creation of a separate Garhwali regiment in 1890, which achieved note as the 39th Garhwal Rifles.^[62] This bifocal image of the Paharis of Kumaun—peaceful peasants in one context and fierce warriors in

[60] Major P.R.T. Gurdon, The Khasis (London, 1907), 8, 4, 5.

[61] "Pilgrim" [P. Barron], Notes of Wanderings in the Himmala (Agra, 1844), 65, 105.

[62] Philip Mason, A Matter of Honor (New York, 1974), 384.

another—demonstrates the particularistic processes entailed in the representation of the ethnographic other.

The British characterizations of the Paharis, the Lepchas, the Todas, and the various other peoples who inhabited the environs of hill stations were a particular aspect of the larger ontological endeavor known as orientalism. Its principal purpose was to make the unknown knowable and to use that knowledge with instrumental intent. In a remarkable series of essays, Bernard Cohn has shown how British authorities in India came to construct a knowledge of the peoples they governed that served their imperial purposes. The representation and reification of Indian castes, religions, laws, languages, and rituals were accomplished through census surveys, ethnographic inquiries, and other state-sponsored projects. In their endeavor to classify, codify, and normalize these unfamiliar subjects, the British saw themselves in the role of "curators of a vast outdoor museum."^[63] The image calls to mind the museum curator in the opening pages of Kim , whose fund of knowledge about the subcontinent left the lama in awe. Like all curators, the British in India were obliged to devise a taxonomy for their bewildering collection. This system drew its inspiration from Europe's intellectual heritage, introducing Western notions of rationality, hierarchy, evolution, race, class, progress, modernity, and much else. It had the consequence, argues Cohn, of appropriating indigenous peoples, practices, and beliefs within the "discursive formation" of the West, "converting Indian forms of knowledge into European objects."^[64]

What purposes were served by constructing this great colonial museum of ethnography? Edward Said has insisted that the central object was power, that the orientalists sought the means "for dominating, restructuring, and having authority over the Orient."^[65] While there seems little question that the colonial state and its Western servants saw the accumulation of knowl-

[63] Bernard S. Cohn, "The Past in the Present: India as Museum of Mankind," unpublished paper, 14. Also see Bernard S. Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," in Subaltern Studies , vol. 4, ed. Ranajit Guha (Delhi, 1985), 276-329; Bernard S. Cohn, "Law and the Colonial State in India," in History and Power in the Study of Law , ed. June Starr and Jane F. Collier (Ithaca, 1989), 131-52; Bernard S. Cohn, "The Census, Social Stratification and Objectification in South Asia," Folk 26 (1984): 25-49; and Bernard S. Cohn, "Representing Authority in Victorian India," in The Invention of Tradition , ed. Eric Hobsbawm and Terence Ranger (Cambridge, 1982), 165-209.

[64] Cohn, "The Command of Language and the Language of Command," 283.

[65] Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York, 1979), 3.

edge about India as vital to the maintenance of authority, a different set of preoccupations were operative as well. Ronald Inden has identified two schools of Indian orientalism, or Indology: both posed India as Europe's opposite, but one emphasized the positivist, empiricist, materialist concerns relevant to matters of power, while the other stressed romantic, spiritualist, and idealist considerations. A distinguishing characteristic of the romantic school, as works on ethnographic photography in British India and Western representations of Tibet have demonstrated, has been the projection of European dreams and desires onto an idealized object often existing at the furthest reaches of the Orient.^[66] British representations of the indigenous inhabitants of the hill stations arose within this idealist context.

The recurrent emphasis given to the gulf between the hills and the plains was essential to the ethnographic image of the peoples who inhabited the hills. This binary opposition was part of what Said has termed the "imaginative geography" of orientalism.^[67] Boundaries were drawn that assured the officials and others who patronized the hill stations that these enclaves and their aboriginals were a world apart from the harrying subcontinent with its confusing, contentious, and subversive hordes. The tropes that accrued around the Todas, the Lepchas, and their counterparts elsewhere stressed the moral innocence of the noble savage, the rustic simplicity of the pastoral life, the primitive egalitarianism of the peasant village, and the legitimizing aura of a classical or biblical genealogy. The purpose of these tropes was clear—to fashion an image of these peoples as the noble guardians of Edenic sanctuaries.

[66] Ronald Inden, "Orientalist Constructions of India," Modern Asian Studies 20, no. 3 (July 1986): 401-46; Christopher Pinney, "Classification and Fantasy in the Photographic Construction of Caste and Tribe," Visual Anthropology 3 (1990): 259-88; Peter Bishop, The Myth of Shangri-La: Tibet, Travel Writing and the Western Creation of Sacred Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, 1989).

[67] Said, Orientalism , 49-73.