5
Home in the Hills

We practice a pretty high degree of retirement from the world, we up here.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Simla is in a peculiar sense not merely the official residence of the Viceroy during the hot weather, but his country home. For here he divests himself if not of the cares of office—this is I fear never possible in India—at least of some of the trappings of State; and amid your beautiful mountains he may almost succeed in mistaking himself for an Anglo-Indian Horace retiring from the noise and smoke of Rome to the peace of the Tiburine hills.
—Lord Curzon, speech to the Simla Municipal Committee, 6 April 1899, Simla Municipal Proceedings, vol. 10, 1899, HPSA

The appeal of hill stations was rooted in their promise of escape from the refractory world of colonial India. While British representations of the climate, the landscape, and the inhabitants of these highland sites hinged on this oppositional relationship to the plains, its lines of demarcation were delineated in the very fabric of social life in the hill stations. The sheer remoteness of the highlands guaranteed that the British in India could construct there a community that resembled the one whence they had come. In the hill stations they were not obliged to assume the official guises or to follow the codes that regulated their behavior among a colonized population. Instead they could shed their imperial mien and stretch their psychic limbs in the comforting familiarity of an environment that replicated the social institutions and the cultural norms of their homeland. The hill stations afforded a public site for the pursuit of private interests, a site where the British could re-create some semblance of a bourgeois civic life.

The creation of hill stations was therefore as much a matter of memories and desires as of bricks and mortar. If these communities were made from roads and railways, shops and markets, houses and hotels, they were also born of words and patterns and intentions, of the names and designs that gave meaning to the physical features of the built environment, of the habits and customs that characterized the daily workings of the social

environment, of the manifold means by which the men and women who came together in them sought to infuse their habitat with significance.

Most firsthand accounts of visits to hill stations begin with the journey from the plains. This journey often had some of the emotional resonance of a religious pilgrimage, and, indeed, it was oddly analogous to Hindu pilgrimages to Hardwar and other holy sites in the Himalayas. The author of the first book to advertised the charms of Naini Tal as a hill sanitarium wrote under the telling pseudonym "Pilgrim." "As we ascend," wrote a missionary, "we seem to find the air purer and purer. . . . So, we thought, our souls may climb height after height."^[1] Travelers detailed their elaborate logistical preparations, their various misadventures on the road, their nervous passages through the dense malarial forests that ran along the base of the hills, and their breathless ascents into the clouds, with every bend in the trail marked, or so it seemed, by changes of terrain, of flora, and of perspective: "Every step taken, every corner passed, every fresh altitude attained, unfolds to the astonished eye fresh beauties and marvels of nature."^[2] Above all, the rise in elevation brought with it a fall in temperature. "I don't think there is anything in life," remarked one Englishman in India, "which is such a relief and such a physical delight as going from the heat of the plains in the hot weather up into the mountains, gradually feeling it getting cooler." Kipling captured the change with characteristic vividness. "[The journey] began in heat and discomfort, by rail and road. It ended in the cool evening, with a wood fire in one's bedroom."^[3] The British signaled the shift from one realm to another by exchanging their light tropical attire for the warm woolens of their homeland.

The inaccessibility of most hill sites contributed to their allure as retreats from the trials of the colonial experience. Until the second half of the nineteenth century, hill stations could be reached only by a long, arduous journey accomplished entirely by means of human and animal labor. Invalids and other visitors had to travel hundreds of miles by horse, cart

[1] "Pilgrim" [P. Barron], Notes of Wanderings in the Himmala (Agra, 1844); Margaret B. Denning, Mosaics from India (Chicago, 1902), 198.

[2] F. Drew Gay, The Prince of Wales; or, From Pall Mall to the Punjaub (Detroit, 1878), 357, describing the journey to Simla.

[3] Quoted in Charles Allen, Plain Tales from the Raj (London, 1976), 152; Rudyard Kipling, Something of Myself and Other Autobiographical Writings , ed. Thomas Pinney (Cambridge, 1990), 35.

(known as a tonga or gharry), or boat where possible, then wind their way up the mountain slopes on the backs of ponies or bearers (commonly referred to as coolies), who carried their charges in conveyances known as doolies (litters), jampans (sedan chairs), and palanquins (which Richard Burton aptly described as a kind of coffin suspended on poles). The mountain roads were often little more than bridle paths that washed out in the monsoon rains. It took one early visitor more than a month to get to Darjeeling from Benares, and many of his Indian bearers fled along the way. By the mid-1840s, however, it was possible to reach Darjeeling from Calcutta in five days of hard travel.^[4] The Nilgiris were at least four days' journey from Madras in the same period—an improvement over the week it took Thomas Macaulay to make the same journey in 1834.^[5] Maha-baleshwar, favored by Bombay residents for its accessibility, required a seventy-mile voyage down the coast, another thirty miles upriver, then thirty-five miles of slow slogging by land, or a shorter sea voyage followed by a seventy-six-mile land journey.^[6] The most daunting journey of all, however, was the epic march by the governor-general and his staff from the government house in Calcutta to the summer residence at Simla, which covered over a thousand miles, took more than a month, and involved an army of Indian retainers.^[7]

The hill stations became more accessible with the railway-construction boom that started in the 1850s. The opening of the rail line from Calcutta to Raniganj in 1855 reduced the laborious cart journey to Darjeeling by 120 miles, and the East Bengal State Railway pushed steadily northward in the following decades. Even so, an 1873 trip to Darjeeling was an eight-day ordeal for the artist Edward Lear, whose cart broke down and whose coolies fled.^[8] By 1881, however, a narrow-gauge rail line had reached Darjeeling itself, making it the first hill station to become directly linked by rail to the plains. As a result, a Calcutta resident could arrive in Darjeeling in as little as twenty-one hours by the end of the century and in less than fourteen hours by the 1940s.

[4] J. T. Pearson, "A Note on Darjeeling," 1839, reprinted in Fred Pinn, The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters 1839 (Calcutta: Oxford University Press, 1986), 1-4; The Dorjeeling Guide (Calcutta, 1845), 14.

[5] W. Francis, The Nilgiris (Madras, 1908), 228-29; Thomas Babington Macaulay, Letters , ed. Thomas Pinney, vol. 3 (Cambridge, 1976), 44-45.

[6] Mahableshwur Guide (Bombay, 1875), 11.

[7] See the description of this journey by Emily Eden, Up the Country: Letters from India (1930; reprint, London, 1984).

[8] Edward Lear, Indian Journal , ed. Ray Murphy (London, 1953), 56-62.

The railway shortened the journey to Simla and other western Himalayan stations as well. From 1869 travelers were able to take a train to Ambala junction, where they caught a coach for a thirty-eight-mile journey to Kalka, a dusty village at the foot of the hills, and then transferred to pony or jampan for the winding fifty-six-mile journey up to the station. The railroad reached Kalka in 1891, and after a decade-long endeavor that involved cutting over a hundred tunnels through the hills, it came to Simla in 1903. Elsewhere in the region, the completion of a branch line to Kathgodam in 1881 reduced to twenty-two miles the cart journey to Naini Tal, and the opening of the Hardwar-Dehra Dun Railway in 1900 made Mussoorie "perhaps the most accessible hill station in Northern India"—at least until the line to Simla was completed several years later.^[9] Perhaps the least accessible station in the northwest was Dalhousie, which was located 117 miles from the nearest rail line.

In southern India, the railhead at Mettupalayam, at the foot of the Nilgiris, reduced travel from Madras to Ootacamund to little more than two days by the 1860s. The journey was shortened even further by the construction of a narrow-gauge line from Mettupalayam to Coonoor in 1899; it was extended to Ootacamund a few years later. In the Bombay region, the Great Indian Peninsular Railway came within seven miles of Matheran as early as 1854, and Sir Adamji Peerbhoy personally financed the construction of a light rail across the intervening distance in 1907. Mahabaleshwar remained a good deal more difficult to reach, but by the mid-1880s visitors could take the West Deccan Railway from Poona to Wather junction, which reduced to thirty-nine miles the trek by cart or horse.

Nearly every hill station in India was within fifty miles of a railway junction by the end of the century. These improvements in transportation inevitably brought an increase in visitors and residents. Hill stations consisted of relatively small, intimate communities through the first half of the nineteenth century. Even Simla, Mussoorie, and Ootacamund, the largest of the hill stations with the widest range of patrons, had little more than a hundred European dwellings each in the early 1840s, while Darjeeling had just thirty or so and Mahabaleshwar perhaps a dozen. The advent of the railway, as some contemporaries anticipated, emphatically quickened the pace of development.^[10] In Darjeeling, the number of

[9] Resolution, 28 December 1905, Municipal Department, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL.

[10] See, for instance, Hyde Clarke, Colonization, Defence and Railways in Our Indian Empire (London, 1857), esp. ch. 1.

European houses more than doubled within three years of the opening of the Darjeeling-Himalayan Railway.^[11] Simla's housing figures grew to 290 in 1866, 350 in 1870, and, with the completion of the Ambala-Kalka line, 550 in 1898. Ootacamund's numbers rose to 230 in 1868 and 328 in 1897; Mahabaleshwar's climbed from 48 in 1860 to 81 in 1875 to 98 in 1884; Mussoorie's leaped from 141 in 1862 to 354 in 1881.^[12]

Before the railways were built, sojourns in hill stations were restricted almost entirely to residents of nearby districts or to those who were able to leave their permanent posts for six months or more for either official or medical reasons. The railway, by substantially reducing both the time and the cost of travel, opened the way to a significant increase in the number of people who spent three months or less in a hill station. One measure of this development was the growth in short-term accommodations: in Ootacamund, for instance, the number of hotels and boarding houses increased from two in 1857 to eleven in 1886.^[13]

Statistical data about summer visitors are limited since the imperial census was conducted in February, when hill-station populations were at their lowest. Simla, however, conducted its own summer census at irregular intervals, and the juxtaposition to winter-census figures is illuminating. The imperial census of 1881 gave the total population of Simla as 13,258, a 53 percent increase over the 8,672 counted in an 1875 census. A summer census for 1878, however, found 17,440 inhabitants, 32 percent higher than the winter count of 1881. The winter population actually declined in 1891 and did not grow again until after the turn of the century: the figures were 13,034 for 1891, 13,960 for 1901, 18,934 for 1911, and 26,149 for 1921. The summer population, however, grew steadily from 24,179 in: 1889 to 33,174 in 1898, 36,002 in 1911, and 45,510 in 1921. These figures ranged from 74

[11] R. D. O'Brien, Darjeeling, the Sanitarium of Bengal; and Its Surroundings (Calcutta, 1883), 25.

[12] The figures for Simla come from Punjab Government, Gazetteer of the Simla District, 1888-89 (Calcutta, n.d.), 108; W. H. Carey, A Guide to Simla with a Descriptive Account of the Neighbouring Sanitaria (Calcutta, 1870), 34-41; and Report of the Simla Extension Committee, 1898 (Simla, 1898), list of houses accompanying Map 3. For Ootacamund, see Sir Frederick Price, Ootcacamund: A History (Madras, 1908), app. C; Capt. J. Ouchterlony, Geographical and Statistical Memoir of a Survey of the Neilgherry Mountains (Madras, 1868), 51; and The Visitors' Handbook of the Nilgiris (Madras, 1897), 74-78. For Mussoorie, Edwin T. Atkinson, The Himalayan Gazetteer (1882; reprint, Delhi, 1973), 598. For Mahabaleshwar, Gazetteer of the Bombay Presidency , vol. 19: Satara (Bombay, 1885), 502; and Mahableshwur Guide , 12.

[13] Robert Baikie, The Neilgherries , 2d ed. (Calcutta, 1857), 29; A Guide to the Neilgherries (Madras, 1886), 80-81.

percent to 137 percent higher than equivalent winter figures. The overwhelming majority of these people were, of course, Indians. An analysis limited to the European population is complicated by the fact that the imperial census, unlike the summer census, counted Christians, a somewhat larger figure than the number of Europeans. Even so, the disparity was striking. The summer census of 1889 counted 3,400 Europeans, compared with 1,484 Christians in the 1891 imperial census. Simla had 4,126 Europeans in the summer of 1898 versus 1,471 Christians in the winter of 1901, 4,153 versus 2,415 in 1911, and 5,126 versus 3,181 in 1921.^[14] No other hill station has such an extensive run of census information, but those pockets of data available elsewhere suggest that the disparity between summer and winter figures for other stations was even greater than it was for Simla, which enjoyed a substantial year-round bureaucratic presence.^[15]

Proximity to a railroad, however, was not sufficient in and of itself to account for the growth of a hill station. Panchgani was eleven miles closer to the West Deccan Railway than Mahabaleshwar, and it had better weather, yet it remained a satellite station with far fewer inhabitants than its neighbor. In fact, virtually every hill station in the Bombay presidency had better access to rail transportation than Mahabaleshwar, but only Matheran approached it in size and popularity. Similar incongruities can be found elsewhere. Yercaud, for instance, remained a small and sleepy hamlet in the Shevaroy Hills even after the railway came within fourteen miles of it. The point, then, is that even though a railway provided the means for a hill station to increase substantially in size, other factors mediated this effect.

Some hill stations benefited from the development of a European-managed agricultural sector in their vicinity. For Darjeeling, the introduction of tea in the 1850s provided an enormous boost to development. By 1895, 186 tea estates covered 48,692 acres across the district, injecting large amounts of capital into Darjeeling as well as into its neighbors Kurseong and Kalimpong. Planters became important parts of the European

[14] These statistics are drawn from Punjab Government, Gazetteer of the Simla District, 1888-89 , 108; Punjab District Gazetteers, Simla District Statistical Tables, 1936 , vol. 6B (Lahore, 1936), Table 7; Annual Reports of the Simla Municipality, 1889-90 and 1911-12, and Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 179/1933/123/1921/II, HPSA.

[15] For example, a summer census conducted in Dalhousie and Murree in 1911 showed that the summer population of Dalhousie was five times as large as its winter population, while the population of Murree was ten times as large! See Report on the Summer Census of Dalhousie, 1911 (Lahore, 1912); and Report on the Summer Census of Murree, 1911 (Lahore, 1912).

communities in each of these hill stations.^[16] A further economic stimulus for the region came with the introduction of cinchona, the South American tree or shrub from whose bark the antimalarial drug quinine was extracted. The colonial state established the first cinchona plantation in the early 1860s, and its success prompted a rapid expansion in production in subsequent decades.

Coffee and cinchona estates, followed by tea toward the end of the century, played a similar role in Ootacamund and its satellites in the Nilgiris. The first coffee plantation was established at Coonoor in 1838, and the industry reached its peak in 1879 with twenty-five thousand acres in production. As disease and international competition undermined the coffee market toward the end of the nineteenth century, many planters turned to tea, which increased from about three or four thousand acres in 1897 to twenty-two thousand acres by 1940. The government was again responsible for getting the cinchona industry started; by 1891 it had planted 1,800,000 cinchona trees. But a significant number of private planters also took up the crop. An 1886 directory listed well over three hundred estates in the Nilgiris engaged in the production of coffee, tea, cinchona, and other products.^[17] Further south, Kodaikanal became an entrepot for coffee and plantain growers, and the tea gardens of Assam provided an important boost to the economy of Shillong. Some of the smaller hill stations, notably Munnar, Ponmudi, and Yercaud, owed virtually their entire existence to the presence of planters.

Other hill stations, however, had little or no agricultural industry to sustain them, particularly those resorts located in the western Himalayas and the Bombay presidency. Efforts were made to introduce tea and sericulture to the areas around Mussoorie, Almora, Naini Tal, and Dharamsala, but most of these ventures did not flourish. Sal and other trees located in the foothills of the Himalayas became targets for commercial exploitation, especially to supply railway sleeper ties and charcoal, but the ruthless clear-cutting of these nonrenewable resources provided little in the way of economic gain to the stations of the western Himalayas. What would later

[16] Arthur Jules Dash, Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling (Alipore, 1947), 114.

[17] A Guide to the Neilgherries , 36-53. Concerning plantation agriculture in the Nilgiris, see Francis, The Nilgiris , ch. 4; Kaku J. Tanna, Plantations in the Nilgiris: A Synoptic History (n.p., c. 1969), passim; and Lucile H. Brockway, Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens (New York, 1979), 114-21.

become a successful fruit industry in the region was still in its infancy in the nineteenth century. The hill stations around Bombay and through most of central India also lacked natural conditions suited to commercial agriculture. Government efforts to establish cinchona plantations in the vicinities of Mahabaleshwar and Pachmarhi failed miserably, and scarcely any private planters were to be found in these areas. Hill stations could sometimes count on local peasant production. Most highland peasants, however, were engaged in little more than subsistence farming when the British arrived, and even though they often responded to the demands of the European enclaves in their midst, the scale of their enterprise prohibited it from being a significant impetus to the growth of these enclaves. And, apart from agriculture, the only productive enterprise that arose in association with the hill stations was brewing. The cool temperatures, clean water, and captive market provided by British troops in hill cantonments prompted the establishment of fifteen or more breweries in highland locations across India. Yet only the smallest hill stations gained any measurable boost from these enterprises.

Most hill stations were economically parasitic.^[18] They drew upon two main sources of subsistence: state support and private investment. Without the willingness of the British raj to grant annual subsidies to the hill stations and to transfer much of the machinery of government to their precincts, many of them could never have grown as they did. The leading example is Simla, which depended profoundly on its role as the summer capital of India, as Pamela Kanwar has amply demonstrated.^[19] Apart from its attractions to those with the freedom to escape the summer heat of the plains, who came as often for its heady social and political climate as for its natural one, Simla had no raison d'être. The same was true of Mahabaleshwar, Mount Abu, Naini Tal, and several other summer headquarters for officialdom. In fact, the essential impetus to the development even of those hill stations that operated as important entrepots of agricultural production, such as Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and Shillong, was their political standing. The hill stations whose survival was most fully dependent on the state, however, were those that served primarily as cantonments for British troops: without the military presence, most of them might never have come into being at all.

[18] This point has been made by S. Robert Aiken, "Early Penang Hill Station," Geographical Review 77, no. 4 (Oct. 1987), 434; and Anthony D. King, Colonial Urban Development: Culture, Social Power and Environment (London, 1976), 158.

[19] Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla (Delhi, 1990).

Even those hill stations that had no official purpose usually received financial subsidies from the colonial state. In 1861, for example, the government of India approved annual grants both for Bombay's summer headquarters, Mahabaleshwar, and for the entirely unofficial Matheran.^[20] While the size of these subsidies varied over time and from place to place, nearly all hill stations received some form of state assistance for municipal improvements and other needs.

For most hill stations, however, and particularly for the unofficial ones like Mussoorie, Matheran, and Kodaikanal, the most important source of revenue was the residents themselves. Once hill stations became legally recognized municipalities, which Mussoorie did in 1842, followed by Darjeeling in 1850, Simla in 1852, Mahabaleshwar in 1865, and Ootacamund in 1866, they could levy fees and taxes, which they did with alacrity. They instituted taxes on houses and other buildings, taxes on land, taxes on market stalls, taxes on servants, taxes on rickshaws, carts, and other vehicles, taxes on horses, mules, cows, and dogs, taxes on slaughtered animals, conservancy taxes, fees for gathering firewood and grasses in municipal forests, fines for breaking municipal ordinances, and levies (known as octroi) on goods entering municipal boundaries. Simla and the other large hill stations were among the most heavily taxed municipalities in India.^[21] The revenues collected were used to maintain water supplies, roads, and other public services, to inspect and regulate housing and sanitary conditions in the overcrowded bazaars, to construct town halls and other public facilities, and in general to provide the civic amenities that made the hill stations so attractive.

The visitors drawn by those amenities accounted for much of the prosperity of the hill stations. They injected an incalculable supply of capital into the local economies. Their investments in land and houses accelerated the pace of private construction. Their expenditures on provisions and accommodations supported a vast entourage of shopkeepers, servants, and others. The seasonal influx of these visitors supplied the economic life blood of the hill stations.

From the start, station property was recognized as an attractive investment. Authorities were frequently unprepared to control the initial scramble for land, leaving the indigenous inhabitants easy marks for theft and extortion. Some of the first Englishmen to occupy Mussoorie used their

[20] Mahabaleshwar received Rs. 10,000 per annum and Matheran Rs. 5,000. Times of India , 10 October 1861, p. 3.

[21] Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 125.

servants as intermediaries to coerce villagers into alienating their land. An early promoter of Naini Tal tempted a local headman onto his boat, took him to the middle of the lake, and threatened to throw him overboard unless he signed a deed handing over rights to the land.^[22] The government of Madras received numerous reports in the 1820s and 1830s of Europeans grabbing land in the Nilgiris without compensating indigenous inhabitants. While John Sullivan, the collector for Coimbatore, took up the cause of the Todas, whose property rights he held to be primordial, he also managed by 1829 to accumulate five times as much land around Ootacamund as all other European proprietors put together.^[23]

Sooner or later, authorities intervened in this free-for-all, although the local peasantry seldom benefited. Tentatively, and with a good many detours along the way, the colonial state established policies to supervise land alienation, regularize the size of building plots, and impose annual quit rents.^[24] This codification of the property market did nothing to depress it. As the demand for accommodations increased, individuals with the capital to build or buy houses for the rental market often made handsome profits. What one contemporary observed in Mussoorie was true elsewhere: "nearly all the houses belong[ed] to officers in the civil and military service" who acted as absentee landlords, relying on local estate agents to lease and manage their properties.^[25] A report on the Nilgiris complained that "the only permanent Europeans who could conveniently have rendered any service to the public by encouraging agriculture . . . have found it so much more profitable to build houses to let to Invalids."^[26] Particularly

[22] F. J. Shore, assistant commissioner, Dehra Dun, to Adjutant General of Army, 4 August 1828, Municipal Department, Jan. 1905-A, Proceedings of the Government of the United Provinces, IOL; "Pilgrim," Notes of Wanderings , quoted in Gillian Wright, The Hill Stations of India (Lincolnwood, Ill., 1991),131-32.

[23] Price, Ootacamund , 23. A summary of the correspondence on the alienation of Nilgiri land to Europeans can be found in Guide to the Records of the Nilgiris District from 1827 to 1835 (Madras, 1934), vol. 4183.

[24] In both Darjeeling and Ootacamund, however, efforts to restrict the size of building plots—to one hundred square yards in Darjeeling and two square acres in Ootacamund—succumbed to pressures from local speculators. See E/4/773, 1 March 1843, India and Bengal Dispatches, IOL; and Judith Theresa Kenny, "Constructing an Imperial Hill Station: The Representation of British Authority in Ootacamund" (Ph.D. diss., Syracuse University, 1990), 128. The vagaries of land-tenure policies in the Nilgiris are detailed by H. B. Grigg, A Manual of the Nilagiri District (Madras, 1880), 344-60.

[25] "Mountaineer," A Summer Ramble in the Himalayas (London, 1860), 14-15.

[26] E/4/939, 10 November 1830, Madras Dispatches, IOL.

in the early years, some investors acquired extensive holdings in hill stations. An 1829 map of Ootacamund showed that two army captains owned a third of the station properties. In Darjeeling, a single individual had acquired thirty-two of the eighty-one building plots sold by 1848. At about this time, a Major S. B. Goad owned thirty-three houses in Simla, and two other officers owned at least fifteen each. An 1883 guide to Murree, a station founded at midcentury, showed that 42 of its 164 houses were in the hands of a single person.^[27] Like any form of speculation, these investments were subject to risk. In the early years of Yercaud, "land was greedily bought up for building sites, the then would-be residents making pretty sure that there were grand days of development in store for Yercaud; but alas! through the cart road being doomed, the brilliant prospects of this charming place were blighted."^[28] Despite such setbacks, the market in highland properties was usually bullish. The steady growth in the number of visitors to hill stations meant that the demand for accommodations was more often than not greater than the supply, which pushed rents and prices to ever higher levels and pumped capital through the local economy at ever accelerating rates.

To generalize about the economic growth of the hill stations is a risky business given the wide variations from place to place. Some stations had easy railway connections to the plains, while others remained hard to reach. Some became successful entrepots for plantation agriculture, while others had little commercial connection with the area around them. Some relied heavily on the subsidies that came from their positions as official headquarters, while others existed entirely independently of the state. For all of them, however, the principal impetus for development came not from the resources of their immediate surroundings but from the resources introduced from the plains through the patronage of the British, in both their public and their private capacities. Thus, these highland havens arose for reasons that were intimately connected with the rest of India. They were bound up with the responsibilities and the risks that the British shouldered as members of an elite ruling over an alien land. To use the terminology of immigration historians, the "push" of the plains was more important than the "pull" of the hills in accounting for the rise of the hill stations.

[27] Price, Ootacamund , map between 222 and 223; Clarke, Colonization , 40-42; Carey, A Guide to Simla ; E. B. Peacock, A Guide to Murree and Its Neighbourhood (Lahore, 1883).

[28] Francesca H. Wilson, The Shevaroys (Madras, 1888), 29.

This impetus had a strikingly antipodal influence on the physical and social forms that would come to distinguish these highland resorts.

An American visitor to Ootacamund in the late nineteenth century found it to be "the least like a town of any I ever saw or heard of, for it is so effectually scattered, over so many hills, that as a town it has no individuality whatever."^[29] Like the other hill stations of British India, Ootacamund grew in a highly irregular way, with its houses and shops springing up in seemingly random fashion along a maze of lanes. This pattern contrasts with the carefully planned and tightly regulated spatial environment that Anthony King identifies as the distinguishing feature of colonial urbanism.^[30] The typical European sector of a colonial city, according to King, was composed of a geometric network of large, closed compounds; this arrangement created an enclave that discouraged penetration by and interaction with the indigenous inhabitants of the city. These purposes were not germane to the hill stations in their early years. For this reason, as much as because of the irregularity of the terrain and because of the many private interests engaged in the construction of houses, they did not follow the normal pattern of colonial urbanism in India. Some measure of planning can be discerned in the separation of European and Indian residential areas (evident in the terminological distinction between "wards" and "bazaars"), but until the late nineteenth century this separation often had less to do with official edicts than with economic forces and ethnic instincts, and it was in any case widely contravened by the persistence of Indian bazaars at the geographical heart of many hill stations. Because the hill stations seemed so far removed from the colonial experience, the British simply felt less need to impose the rigid spatial order that distinguished urbanism on the plains.

This lack of order should not be taken to mean, however, that hill stations lacked civic coherence. From their improvised origins a subtle pattern of development emerged, and its model was the English village. The sinuous lines and simple organization of the home country's rustic villages, venerated as cradles of the nation's virtues, were replicated in the hill stations. At the symbolic center of nearly every English village stood the

[29] William T. Hornaday, Two Years in the Jungle: The Experience of a Hunter and Naturalist in India, Ceylon, the Malay Peninsula and Borneo (New York, 1908), 96.

[30] King, Colonial Urban Development .

Figure 6.
St. Stephen's Church, Ootacamund. From Sir Frederick Price, Ootacamund: A History (Madras, 1908).

Anglican church, and so it did in nearly every Indian hill station. The Victorian Gothic solidity of these sanctified structures, situated on prominent sites in each station, bespoke the shared values that bound European residents and visitors together. "A beautiful Gothic church is one of the first picturesque objects that greets the eye of the traveller who visits the Neilgherries," declared an early publicist for Ootacamund, where St. Stephen's Church was constructed in 1831 (Figure 6). "The church at Simla is the central point at which all diverging lines seem to meet," wrote the novelist Constance Cumming, who added a telling detail: "here for once mosques and temples have retired into the background."^[31] Simla's Anglican house of worship was Christ Church (founded 1844-52), a name that also graced its counterparts in Mussoorie (1836) and Mahabaleshwar (1842). In Darjeeling, the Anglican church was known as St. Andrew's

[31] Major William Murray, An Account of the Neilgherries, or, Blue Mountains of Coimbatore, in Southern India (London, 1834), 10; Constance F. Gordon Cumming, From the Hebrides to the Himalayas , vol. 2 (London, 1876), 121.

(1843, rebuilt 1882); in Naini Tal and Dharamsala, St. John-in-the-Wilderness (1846 and 1852, respectively); in Coonoor and Shillong, All Saints (1851 and date unknown). In Matheran, it was christened St. Paul's (1858-60), and like many of its sister institutions, its site was "one of the highest and most central on the hill."^[32] There were exceptions: Kodaikanal was founded by American missionaries, and the Anglican church arose belatedly and therefore at a rather peripheral location. In most hill stations, however, the Anglican church was the first and foremost civic structure to appear, and it served as the moral and morphological hub of the community.

The hill station's central avenue invariably emanated from the Anglican church. Government buildings such as the postal and telegraph office, the collector's office, and the civil court tended to be located along this thoroughfare, as were banks and other prominent businesses. Particularly in the Himalayan hill stations, where the terrain restrained vehicular traffic, this main street was known as the "Mall," a distinctive term that both suggested its pedestrian nature and evoked associations with elegant precincts at home (Figure 7). Intersecting the Mall at various points were a bewildering array of other lanes that snaked their way across the undulating topography of the station. Rarely were these lanes identified by name since inhabitants were presumed to possess the same cozy familiarity with their surroundings that the village folk at home did. This practice frequently created problems for newcomers to the larger hill stations. Ootacamund's municipal council felt obliged in 1894 to put up street signs on major intersections to orient visitors. In Simla, however, a tourist guide published in 1925 complained that "one of the chief shortcomings in the administration of the town . . . [is] the almost entire absence of street and road names."^[33] Other than the Mall or its equivalent, the only route familiar to everyone was the Cart Road, a utilitarian name for a utilitarian road that served as the main artery for people and goods going to and from the station. The Cart Road usually was located at the lower reaches of the hill station, where its constant din would not disturb the serenity of British householders.

[32] A. F. Bellasis, An Account of the Hill Station of Matheran, near Bombay (Bombay, 1869), 13.

[33] Ootacamund Municipal Report for 1893-94, 11, Municipal G.O. #1244, TNSA; F. Beresford Harrop, Thacker's New Guide to Simla (Simla, 1925), 57. Also see Pamela Kanwar, "The Changing Image of Simla," Urban History Association Occasional Papers Series 10, 1989, 4.

Figure 7.
The Mall at Simla, with the General Post Office in the background.
Courtesy of the British Library, Oriental and India Office Collections.

The same motive that caused most of the stations' lanes to go unnamed led to a profusion of typically English names for the dwellings to which they gave access. William Howard Russell, the Times war correspondent, noticed the "English bungalows, with names painted on the gateways, 'Laburnum Lodge,' 'Prospect,' 'The Elms,' and such like home reminiscences" as he passed through the satellite station of Kasauli on his way to Simla, where he again noted the phenomenon. Far to the south, a Madras staff corp officer observed that the houses in Coonoor and Ootacamund had "villa names, such as 'Sunnyside,' 'Rosebank,' 'Fairlawns,' etc."^[34] In every hill station, residents posted signboards to identify and personalize their houses, half-hidden behind the transplanted foliage. To christen dwellings invested them "with social and cultural meaning," King observes.^[35] The sorts of names

[34] William Howard Russell, My Diary in India , vol. 2 (London, 1860), 88, 92; E. F. Burton, An Indian Olio (London, 1888), 129.

[35] Anthony D. King, "Culture, Social Power and Environment: The Hill Station in Colonial Urban Development," Social Action 26, no. 3 (July-Sept. 1976): 208-9.

applied to hill-station residences evoked images of the quiet comfort of English country life, with its distinctive vegetation (Apple Lodge, Fernwood, Myrtle Cottage), familiar landmarks (Blackheath, Hampton Villa, Glenrock), and time-worn institutions (the Manor, the Priory, Kenilworth Hall). Equally revealing was the widespread practice of referring to these places in general terms as "cottages" rather than "bungalows." Whereas bungalow , a hybrid term of Bengali origin, was the standard word for European houses virtually everywhere else in India, cottage was the preferred term in hill stations precisely because it had no colonial associations and suggested instead the quaint abodes of rural England.^[36]

The hill-station cottage differed from the plains bungalow not just in name but in form. Although the simple rectangular bungalow with its single story and verandah skirt was transposed to the hills in the early years, it soon lost favor. The rugged terrain of the highlands inhibited the lavish use of level space, and the cool climate negated its environmental appeal. Richard Burton, who visited Ootacamund in 1847, regarded the bungalow, "surrounded by a long low verandah, perfectly useless in such a climate, and only calculated to render the interior of the domiciles as dim and gloomy as can be conceived." Where the bungalow continued to exist, as it did in Mussoorie, it was a frequent object of scorn. "Most houses [in Mussoorie] are planned on the type of the plains bungalow which is for the hills a most unsuitable type," admonished the district gazetteer. It was not, however, simply aesthetic or climatic considerations that made bungalows unsuitable for the hills: their spatial structure was designed to segregate residents from the surrounding environment, with the ubiquitous verandah serving as the boundary between the interior world of the European and the exterior world of India. The bungalow, in effect, was an expression of the colonial condition, and most observers did not consider it appropriate for the different social environment the British sought to create in the hill stations.^[37]

[36] For the importance of the cottage to Victorian aesthetics, see George H. Ford, "Felicitous Space: The Cottage Controversy," in Nature and the Victorian Imagination , ed. U. C. Knoepflmacher and G. B. Tennyson (Berkeley, 1977), 29-48. The bungalow's Indian origin is examined in Anthony D. King, The Bungalow: The Production of a Global Culture (London, 1984), ch. 1.

[37] Richard F. Burton, Goa, and the Blue Mountains (1851; reprint, Berkeley, 1991), 288; H. G. Walton, Dehra Dun: A Gazetteer, District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh , vol. 1 (Allahabad, 1911), 245. My analysis of the bungalow is drawn from King, The Bungalow , ch. 1; and King, Colonial Urban Development , 132-48. The absence of verandahs in Simla is noted by Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India 1608-1937 (London, 1938), 232.

The cottage was considered appropriate for the hill station because it replicated the general features of the English country home. Those features were easily recognized by visitors to the hills. "With their small windows, sloping roofs, and many chimneys," applauded one writer, "[hill-station houses] put one in mind of English cottages." Another sketched the scene at Yercaud: "On the summits, . . . amid pretty clumps of trees which the woodman's axe has spared, are scattered cottages very English in appearance, with tile or zinc-covered roofs, and walls overgrown with beautiful many-coloured creepers and blushing fuchsias." On a grander level, the Simla residence of Lord Auckland, the governor-general, was described by his sister, Emily Eden, as "a cheerful middle-size English country-house."^[38] The emotional impact of these evocative highland dwellings is apparent in Lady Wilson's remarks about her arrival at the small hill station of Sakesar in Sind:

Blessings on the man who dreamt of Sakesar and made it an English home. . . . You can't imagine the kind of material pleasure one has in material things that simply look English. The roof of this house enchants me, merely because it slants instead of being flat: the ceilings, because they are much lower than those at Shahpur and are plastered. . . . The woodwork is actually varnished: the bow windows are really windows, not doors: the fireplaces are all in the right place; . . . we are as cosy as cosy could be.^[39]

"It was in the hill-stations," Jan Morris believes, "that the British in India achieved the most distinctive of their vernacular styles."^[40] With private rather that public initiative driving the construction of houses in the hills, the architectural designs of these dwellings reflected the personal fancies of their builders. And what fancies they were! "Himalayan Swiss-Gothic" is Morris's term for the style that came to predominate in the Himalayan stations by the mid-nineteenth century. It was distinguished by multistoried structures with chimneys thrusting up from steep roof lines, numerous gables and terraces cutting against the vertical grain, and ornately carved fretwork framing the eaves, windows, and doors; the result

[38] Edmund C. P. Hull, The European in India; or, Anglo-Indian's Vade-Mecum (London, 1872), 58; Burton, An Indian Olio , 118; Eden, Up the Country , 128.

[39] Lady Wilson, Letters from India (1911; reprint, London, 1984), 46.

[40] Jan Morris with Simon Winchester, Stones of Empire: The Buildings of the Raj (Oxford, 1983), 52. Hill-station architecture is also discussed by Philip Davies, Splendours of the Raj: British Architecture in India 1660-1947 (Harmondsworth, 1987), ch. 5; and Mark Bence-Jones, Palaces of the Raj (London, 1973), chs. 8, 11.

looked like a cross between a Victorian garden villa and a Swiss chalet. Joseph Hooker's disparagement of a rest house near Darjeeling for its "miserable attempt to unite the Swiss cottage with the suburban gothic" was exceptional. Most visitors admired the style. The Calcutta Review praised the "Swiss-cottage-like houses . . . with their well-trimmed gardens" gracing the ridges of Darjeeling. Cumming was charmed by Simla residences, which "are a good deal like Swiss chalets , having verandahs upstairs and down. Moreover, they are generally two storeys high; a style of building which, as we had hardly seen a staircase since leaving Calcutta, astonished the servants considerably." The chalet style also spread to the hill stations of central and southern India. It "pervades much of the architecture of Ootacamund," an architectural historian has noted, and a missionary visitor described Coonoor as "crowned with the prettiest Swiss-looking houses."^[41] The hill stations in the south, however, remained wedded to the single-storied structure to a far greater extent than their Himalayan counterparts—perhaps because the terrain tended to be less precipitous—and the pediments and columns of classicism played a larger role. A prominent example is the long, low house with its classical facade that Sir William Rumbold built in 1830 and that the Ootacamund Club later occupied, expanded, and remodeled. Other European influences infiltrated hill stations as well, notably the somber Scottish baronial, best exemplified by the Viceregal Lodge in Simla, and the half-timbered Tudor style, which became especially popular in Shillong after the devastating earthquake of 1897 demonstrated the dangers of masonry structures. Still, Swiss Gothic remained the dominant motif for hill-station architecture.

What was the significance of this architectural eclecticism? A distinguishing feature of Victorian architecture in Britain was its taste for the Gothic, Tudor, Scottish baronial, and other historically resonant styles, and it is not surprising that the same taste constituted part of the cultural baggage the British brought with them to the hill stations, where they added the similarly transplanted Swiss chalet style to their repertoire. But the contrast with architectural practices elsewhere in British India suggests that this importation of European designs was not entirely instinctive and indiscriminate. As we have seen, the Bengali bungalow was widely adopted and modified by the British for their residential use on the Indian plains.

[41] Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals , vol. 1 (London, 1854), 11; Darjeeling , pamphlet reprinted from Calcutta Review , no. 55 (1857): 5; Cumming, From the Hebrides , vol. 1, 114; Davies, Splendours of the Raj , 130; Mrs. Murray Mitchell, In Southern India (London, 1885), 347.

Moreover, even though the public buildings of the raj emulated the architecture in the metropole through the mid-nineteenth century, this practice began to change with the spread of the hybrid Indo-Saracenic style, which incorporated Islamic influences into a distinctively imperial architecture.^[42] In the hill stations, however, this traffic with exotic traditions was intentionally shunned. The British turned exclusively to European models when they erected and embellished their highland cottages, and they did so not only to re-create something of the physical appearance of their homeland but to recover elements of its moral meaning as well. What is sometimes seen as the aesthetic failure of Victorian architecture—its melange of Gothic and other revivalist styles—had a deliberate, didactic intent: it sought to improve the character and conduct of society by creating structures that communicated through their lineage and design certain ethical and social messages.^[43] The same purpose informed the architectural choices made in the hill stations. The Swiss Gothic, in particular, combined a Christian sense of virtue and steadfastness with alpine allusions to aloofness and the sublime. Furthermore, the architectural eclecticism of highland cottages helped to restore to seasonal residents a sense of their individual identities, which the colonial pressures for solidarity tended to submerge elsewhere in India. Edward J. Buck and Sir Frederick Price, the colonial historians of Simla and of Ootacamund, devoted large parts of their works to the histories of particular houses—their origins, their owners, their designs, their renovations—in effect, everything that set them apart and made them unique. Embedded in the contrast between the highly individuated cottages that lay scattered along the ridges of the hill stations and the uniform Public Works Department bungalows that sat in their serried rows on the plains was a world of social meaning.

Many of the leading hill stations and some of the lesser ones claimed a founding father, a prominent individual whose foresight and initiative were credited with setting the community on a stable footing. John Sullivan was recognized as the central figure in the establishment of Ootacamund; Captain Charles Kennedy and Dr. Arthur Campbell acquired similar reputations in Simla and Darjeeling. Others included Dr. James Murray of

[42] The role of Indo-Saracenic architecture is examined by Thomas R. Metcalf, An Imperial Vision: Indian Architecture and Britain's Raj (Berkeley, 1989).

[43] See James A. Schmiechen, "The Victorians, the Historians, and the Idea of Modernism," American Historical Review 93, no. 2 (April 1988): 287-316.

Mahabaleshwar, Hugh Malet of Matheran, John Chesson of Panchgani, and Vere Leving of Kodaikanal. Each was a functionary of the colonial state, but their role in the hill stations seemed rather more like that of the amiable country squire. Their doors were always open to guests, and they formed a proprietary interest in the land, its people, its wildlife, and its potential for agricultural development. Captain Kennedy was celebrated for his bounteous table. The French traveler Victor Jacquemont described huge dinners accompanied by hock, claret, champagne, port, sherry, and madeira: "I do not recollect having tasted water for the last seven days," he purred.^[44] Kennedy also exhibited a paternalistic interest in the Paharis who cultivated the land around Simla, introducing to them potatoes and other unfamiliar crops. An equally imposing presence was Ootacamund's Sullivan, who sought to protect the land rights of the Toda peoples and foster the agricultural prospects of the Nilgiris. He owned a two hundred-acre experimental farm, where he is said to have introduced oats, wheat, barley, beets, turnips, radishes, cabbages, potatoes, strawberries, peaches, apples, roses, violets, and other plants to the region.^[45] Similarly, Dr. Campbell was an active horticulturist who made the Lloyd Botanical Garden an important institution and who is credited with establishing the tea industry in Darjeeling. He also published the first ethnographic report on the native Lepchas. A contemporary's assessment of his contribution to the creation of Darjeeling conveys something of the reputation that each of these founding fathers achieved: "Whatever has been done here has been done by Dr. Campbell alone. He found Darjeeling an inaccessible tract of forest, with a very scanty population; by his exertions an excellent sanitarium has been established."^[46] This imperialist panegyric, while it ignores the many other figures and forces that played roles in the rise of particular hill stations, does point to the fact that the enlightened paternalism of men like Kennedy and Sullivan and Campbell provided their fledgling communities with the social gravity that attracted people and stimulated production.

Even after these providential patriarchs had died or departed, their hill stations retained some of the quiet country flavor they had created. The

[44] Victor Jacquemont, Letters from India , vol. 1 (London, 1834), 228.

[45] Paul Hockings, "John Sullivan of Ootacamund," Journal of Indian History Golden Jubilee Volume , ed. T. K. Ravindran (Trivandrum, 1973), 867. Also see Paul Hockings, "British Society in the Company, Crown and Congress Eras," in Blue Mountains: The Ethnography and Biogeography of a South Indian Region , ed. Paul Hockings (Delhi, 1989), 338.

[46] Selections from the Records of the Bengal Government , no. 17: Report on Darjeeling , by W. B. Jackson (Calcutta, 1854), 7-8.

most popular pastimes during the early years were horticulture and hunting, and those visitors who cared for neither activity often found the days exceedingly long. "I was never so dull in my life," groaned Macaulay as he entered the fourth month of his stay in Ootacamund in 1834. His sentiments were echoed thirteen years later by the splenetic Burton, who came to Ootacamund to recuperate from an apparent bout with cholera: "You dress like an Englishman, and lead a quiet gentlemanly life—doing nothing."^[47] For others, however, the simple, rustic, tranquil atmosphere was irresistible.

As hill stations attracted larger, more restless populations in the wake of the railway, they developed more lively and labyrinthine social traits. Visitors in the late nineteenth century were often struck by the highly ritualized character of social life in the hill stations. An elaborate code of etiquette governed everything from forms of introduction to rules of seating at dinner parties. Only in the great port cities of Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay and a few of the larger civil stations in the interior did social conventions ever approach this level of punctiliousness: for residents of civil stations and cantonments elsewhere in India the rules of deportment was far less mannered. One feature of hill-station life that was frequently mentioned by visitors was the custom of calling. Within a few days of their arrival, newcomers to the community were expected to place their cards in the "not-at-home" boxes posted at the front of houses; but they were not to call on the residents themselves, who thereby retained the freedom to invite those callers they wished to meet.^[48] The model for this practice could be found in Victorian high society; Leonore Davidoff has shown that its primary purpose in Britain was to provide a mechanism for facilitating introductions and regulating interactions among an increasingly large and mobile urban elite.^[49] Although the social circumstances in colonial India were certainly different, the objectives underlying the etiquette of calling were much the same. The custom lubricated the process by which a highly transitory population was transformed into a cohesive yet hierarchically

[47] Macaulay, Letters , 76; Burton, Goa , 289. Burton went on to complain about the absence of a hunt, a race course, a theater, a concert room, a tennis court, or a decent library. Nearly all these deficiencies would be rectified in later years.

[48] See the descriptions by Kate Platt, The Home and Health in India and the Tropical Colonies (London, 1923), 52; Hull, The European in India , 174; Russell, My Diary in India , vol. 2, 128; and Wilson, Letters from India , 80.

[49] Leonore Davidoff, The Best Circles: Women and Society in Victorian England (Totowa, N.J., 1973), ch. 3. The transfer of calling and other social rituals to the colonial sphere is briefly but perceptively considered by Margaret Strobel, European Women and the Second British Empire (Bloomington, 1991), 9-15.

differentiated community. In short, calling was a remarkably functional means for residents of hill stations to welcome new arrivals and steer them into the social circles regarded as appropriate to their background and status.

Almost as soon as they arrived, newcomers were drawn into a network of organizations that enlarged their circle of acquaintances and deepened their sense of civic identity. Religious institutions provided one element of this identity; and it was observed that the churches in hill stations were better attended than those elsewhere in the subcontinent.^[50] In addition to the Church of England, Catholic and nonconformist denominations provided their laity with places to worship. Religion, however, was a less pivotal preoccupation for most visitors to the hills than recreation. The hill stations provided their clients with a wide array of social institutions to keep them entertained. These included assembly halls, residential clubs, gymkhanas, subscription libraries, Masonic lodges, sports and recreational clubs, and, in several of the larger stations, theaters. Ootacamund was renowned by the latter part of the nineteenth century as a center of sociality—a renown that rested on the presence of the venerable Ootacamund Club, the later and less exclusive Nilgiri Club, the Gymkhana Club (which was preceded by separate clubs for boating, polo, cricket, golf, and trap, as well as archery, badminton, and croquet—the ABC Club), the Ootacamund Hunt Club (which hosted the largest gathering of horses and hounds in India), Hobart Park (the site of annual horse races), the Nilgiri Library (housed in a handsome Gothic building), the magnificent Botanical Gardens, the Assembly Rooms (for balls and amateur theatricals), and a Freemason lodge. Another hill station that acquired renown for its recreational activities was Gulmarg in Kashmir. By the early twentieth century, little more than a few decades after its founding, Gulmarg was attracting six to seven hundred summer visitors, who had access to a club, theater, ballroom, golf course, two polo grounds, cricket ground, four tennis courts, and two croquet grounds.^[51] Even the smallest hill stations were usually able to boast of a club, a library, and some form of organized sport. It was the larger stations, however, that were most heavily dependent upon clubs and other institutional mechanisms to weave newcomers into their social fabric.

The daily pattern of life in the civil hill stations acquired a character very different from that found elsewhere in the subcontinent. As contemporary

[50] "Kumaon and Its Hill-Stations," Calcutta Review 26 (Jan.-June 1856), 396.

[51] Sir Francis Younghusband, Kashmir (London, 1911), 98.

prints and photographs show, hill-station sojourners usually exchanged their tropical attire for wardrobes from "home." Heavy woolens and flannels replaced light cottons; top hats and bowlers and bonnets replaced the otherwise ubiquitous solar topis. Residents also reverted to the mealtimes observed by the upper-middle class in England.^[52] Rather than rise at dawn or even earlier to enjoy the cool of the morning and conduct the bulk of the day's business, as the British were wont to do on the plains, they tended to start the day at midmorning and, with the exception of those who had bureaucratic duties to fulfill, looked forward to uninterrupted leisure during their waking hours. From around noon until 2 P.M., they made social calls or hosted "at homes," an activity that elsewhere in India was reserved for the cool morning hours. They devoted the latter part of the afternoon to quiet relaxation indoors or visits to nearby sites, such as viewpoints and waterfalls, where picnics were popular. At dusk, residents gathered at the Mall to "take the air" and exchange greetings. In the larger stations, at least, evenings were the busiest times, bringing dinner parties, balls, theatrical performances, and other social gatherings that continued until the early hours of the morning.

As a result, hill stations acquired a reputation for merriment and fellowship unmatched in British India. Even the small stations, with their sedate and informal atmospheres, had a surprisingly rich array of social events. In Yercaud's "sociable" small community, activities included "breakfasts, luncheons, pic-nics on an extensive scale, and afternoon tea parties. Sometimes a dinner party, dance, or 'variety entertainments' varies the programme of such amusements."^[53] However, the large, multipurpose stations acquired the grandest reputations and the liveliest societies, with Simla again at the forefront. "All are bent on enjoying themselves, and champagne flows on every side," remarked the artist Val Prinsep, who stayed at Simla during the 1876-77 season. A major reason the social atmosphere of this modern Capua, as it was sometimes called, reached such a fevered pitch was the presence of the viceroy and his retinue. During one season at Simla in the 1880s, Lord and Lady Dufferin hosted twelve large dinners (each for as many as fifty people), twenty-nine small dinners (with six to fifteen people each), a state ball, a fancy ball, a children's fancy ball, six dances (some 250 people each), two garden parties, two evening parties, and a charity fete. In addition, they attended innumerable races, dinners, balls, fairs, concerts, and theatrical performances. When Lady Dufferin

[52] Platt, Home and Health in India , 47.

[53] Wilson, The Shevaroys , 74.

concluded that "the atmosphere of the place is one of pleasure-seeking," she spoke from experience.^[54] The Dufferins' social calendar was scarcely distinguishable from that of other viceregal couples. The pace became so frenetic that the viceroys of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries sought occasional respite at a weekend chateau at Mashobra, a suburb six miles from the center of Simla.

For most contemporaries, the closest parallel to the hill stations seemed to be the "watering places" of England: spa towns like Bath, Buxton, Cheltenham, Tunbridge Wells, and Malvern, and seaside resorts like Brighton, Margate, Scarborough, and Weymouth.^[55] The British in India frequently compared the hill stations to these domestic resort towns. When the decision about whether to establish a sanitarium in Darjeeling hung in the balance in 1839, a Calcutta newspaper proclaimed: "Dorjeling MUST and WILL be our Brighton." Similarly, the earliest advocate of a sanitarium at Mahabaleshwar underscored his case by observing that "we have no Bath or Cheltenham, as at home, where freedom from care and enjoyment of a large and gay society generally performs those cures which are attributed to the virtues of their far famed springs."^[56] Evocations of these domestic resorts recurred as succeeding generations of English men and women visited the hill stations. Macaulay thought Ootacamund "has now very much the look of a rising English watering place"; a visitor to Murree remarked on its resemblance to "an English watering-place"; and Prinsep witheringly termed Simla "an English watering-place gone mad." Others were more specific with their comparisons. Mussoorie, according to a veteran of the Indian Army medical service, was "known as the Margate

[54] Val C. Prinsep, Imperial India: An Artist's Journals , 2d ed. (London, 1879), 261; Marchioness of Dufferin and Ava, Our Viceregal Life in India: Selections from My Journal 1884-1888 (London, 1890), 99, 305, passim.

[55] For a sampling of the literature on this subject, see Edmund W. Gilbert, "The Growth of Inland and Seaside Health Resorts in England," Scottish Geographical Magazine 55, no. 1 (Jan. 1939): 16-35; Edmund W. Gilbert, Brighton: Old Ocean's Bauble (London, 1954); Simona Pakenham, Cheltenham (London, 1971); David Gadd, Georgian Summer: Bath in the Eighteenth Century (Ridge Park, N.J., 1972); P. J. Corfield, The Impact of English Towns 1700-1800 (Oxford, 1982), ch. 4; and Phyllis Hembry, The English Spa 1560-1815 (Rutherford, N.J., 1990).

[56] Bengal Hurkaru , 12 September 1839, reprinted in Fred Pinn, The Road to Destiny: Darjeeling Letters 1839 (Calcutta, 1986), 215; Peter Lodwick, letter to the Bombay Courier , 1 May 1824, reprinted in Perin Bharucha, Mahabaleswar: The Club 1881-1981 (Bombay, c. 1981), app. A. The TBengal Hurkaru article went on to state that Darjeeling's "air will be like that of Brighton, remove or lessen 'the ills that flesh is heir to'—Doubtless a Viceregal Pavilion will soon be erected at the 'Bright Spot,' and fashion gather round it."

of the Himalayas"; Coonoor was described by Lear as "not unlike Bournemouth"; and Cumming thought Simla bore "much the same relation . . . to Calcutta that Brighton does to London."^[57]

This comparison bears further scrutiny, for hill stations fulfilled many of the social functions that the seaside resorts and spa towns served in Britain. Both originated as health sanitaria, offering therapeutic benefits to invalids. Both became popular centers of rest and recreation, attracting a large number of the social elite. Both operated on a seasonal basis, their greatest influx occurring in the summer months. Both offered an abundance of recreational facilities (assembly rooms, libraries, clubs, theaters) and activities (dinners, balls, promenades, races) to lubricate the wheels of social intercourse. Both attracted, among others, young men on the make, young women in search of marriage partners, widows and pensioners, and children attending boarding schools.

A particularly intriguing parallel derives from the role played by heads of state. Most of the great English watering places acquired their reputations as a result of visits by members of the royal family, whose appearance, especially if it became a regular event, served as an endorsement of the spa or seaside resort.^[58] For the British in India, the closest thing to royalty were the governors-general and governors, and their actions similarly affected the fortunes of hill stations. "No private family can form a sanitarium," observed Isabel Burton, who visited Matheran and Mahabaleshwar with her husband, Richard, in 1876. "Some great official must go there with all his staff; then bungalows, and inns, and necessaries, and lastly comforts, begin to grow."^[59] This observation was not entirely accurate: heads of state visited hill stations only after their establishment, and some stations never saw a governor or other great official. But it is true that the reputation of virtually every prominent hill station was boosted by the early appearance of a head of state. (Darjeeling, at risk from hostile neighbors until 1866, was the main exception.) Ootacamund hosted a visit by the governor of Madras, Sir Thomas Munro, in 1826; Simla welcomed the governor-general of India, Lord Amherst, in 1827; Mahabaleshwar did the same for

[57] Macaulay, Letters , 59; Letters from India and Kashmir (London, 1874), 213; Prinsep, Imperial India , 262; Col. Robert J. Blackham, Scalpel, Sword and Stretcher (London, 1931), 87; Lear, Indian Journal , 195; Cumming, From the Hebrides , vol. 2, 119.

[58] Gilbert, "The Growth of . . . Health Resorts," 27; P. J. Waller, Town, City, and Nation: England 1850-1914 (Oxford, 1983), 133.

[59] Isabel Burton, AEI: Arabia Egypt India, A Narrative of Travel (London and Belfast, 1879), 279.

the governor of Bombay, Sir John Malcolm, in 1828. In each case, the position of the sanitarium was significantly enhanced. These initial state visitors translated their enthusiasm for the place into government support, and the continuance of that support was ensured by visits to the stations by subsequent heads of state. Moreover, they acted as magnets for others, who were drawn by the social and political resonance of these quasi-royal courts. By contrast, those hill stations that seldom if ever received heads of states tended to languish in obscurity.

The influence wielded by heads of state highlights an important feature of hill-station society—its replication of the hierarchical order within British Indian society. Although all hill stations fulfilled the same general role as enclaves for Europeans in search of rest and recreation, they attracted different clientele and acquired different reputations. The broadest line of division lay between civil and military stations. Those that served primarily as cantonments for British troops had a different social character from those that attracted a substantial civilian population. The predominance of a lower-class, largely Celtic, exclusively male soldiery, housed in barracks and subject to army discipline, set the cantonments a world apart from the civil stations, and it should come as no surprise that the social chasm between them was nearly always reinforced by physical distance. The only notable exception to this rule was Landour, a military station founded in 1827 a mere mile from Mussoorie (and five hundred feet above it): the growth of the two communities soon obliterated the distance between them, creating the hyphenated Mussoorie-Landour. Thereafter, the British took care to chose sites for hill cantonments that were some distance from existing civil stations and usually at lower elevations. The most striking example is the string of military stations (Kasauli, Dagshai, Sabathu, Solon, Jutogh) that guarded the route from the plains to Simla. Except for places like Dalhousie and Murree, which began as cantonments but attracted a significant civilian population as well, the military hill stations had much the same social status relative to the civil ones as British soldiers did relative to British civilians in India. They ranked among the least desirable of the hill stations, their appeal limited by their function.^[60]

A second fracture point ran between those large hill stations that attracted a regional or even imperial range of patrons and the small stations that served a particular clientele or simply drew their visitors from the

[60] Bakloh, a hill cantonment that served as the regimental headquarters for the 4th Gurkha Rifles, is vividly described by John Masters, an officer with the regiment, in his autobiography, Bugles and a Tiger (New York, 1968).

immediate surroundings. Among the many hill stations that operated in relative obscurity were Nandi Hill, a summer retreat for officials from Bangalore; Lonavala, a sanitarium in the Bombay area for employees of the Great Indian Peninsular Railway; Dharmkot, a small station near Dalhousie that served as the summer headquarters of the American United Presbyterian Mission; and Yercaud, inhabited by a miscellany of local planters, missionaries, and officials from Salem district. By contrast, even in their early years Simla and Mussoorie attracted sojourners from northern India, and Ootacamund did the same for the peninsular region. By the late nineteenth century, the drawing power of these three stations extended across the subcontinent and beyond, while Mahabaleshwar, Naini Tal, and particularly Darjeeling had become nearly as popular. Mount Abu, Coonoor, Dalhousie, Kodaikanal, Matheran, Murree, and Shillong made up a second tier of stations whose reputations began to spread across their regions in the latter part of the century. The wider their compass of visitors, the more spirited and cosmopolitan their social life, which set them ever further apart from the tranquil provincialism of the smaller stations. The contrast was implicit in a guidebook's description of Dharamsala as "a quiet station. . . . There is no unhealthy excitement; the very atmosphere is one of calm; no scandal, and no dissipation stronger than black coffee and milk-punch."^[61] Embedded in these differences in social behavior lay differences in social rank. The less affluent elements of the British population in India were seldom able to afford the travel fares, the high rents, and the other costs connected with visits to renowned but distant hill stations. A report published in 1870 described Darjeeling as "a sealed book" for Calcutta residents with small to moderate means, which were defined as Rs. 500-600 or less a month.^[62] It was estimated at the end of the nineteenth century that an income of Rs. 1,500 a month was required to stay in Simla, placing it beyond the means of most nonofficials.^[63] The cost of living created an effective barrier against the influx of people of lesser rank to other large stations as well. They turned instead to smaller stations within their vicinity or did without a stay in a hill station altogether.

Finally, a social schism existed between those large hill stations that had a significant official presence and those that did not. Simla's role as the

[61] J. Fitzgerald-Lee, Guide to Dharmsala and the Kangra Valley (Lahore, 1899), 14.

[62] C. Palmer, W. G. Murray, and V. Ball, Report on the Hill of Mahendragiri (Calcutta, 1870), 1-2.

[63] Kanwar, Imperial Simla , 4.

summer capital of India gave it a reputation as the "home of the heaven-born," "the abode of the little tin gods," a place so overladen with officialdom that it left little room for people seeking a simple summer of leisure.^[64] Its main rival among the hill stations of the northwest was Mussoorie, which drew much of its appeal from the fact that it was "a purely civil station. . . . There are no 'brass hats' to interfere with the young officer on pleasure bent."^[65] A similar split existed between Mahabaleshwar and Matheran. "Matheran is not fashionable," Isabel Burton observed. "It is affected by the commercial classes from Saturday till Monday. It is Margate, whilst Mahabaleshwar . . . [is] Brighton." There, she complained, "society is always on duty." In the opinion of another visitor, "One of [Matheran's] great charms is the absence of officialdom."^[66] Further south, Ootacamund's status as the summer headquarters of the Madras government gave it a reputation as "snooty Ooty." Those uncomfortable with its official character patronized nearby Coonoor. The social relationship between the two hill stations was evident in their exchange of insults: "Coonoor calls Ooty stiff, and Ooty calls Coonoor vulgar."^[67] At the heart of these rivalries lay the intensifying tensions between the official and nonofficial halves of the British population in India, tensions that broke into the open with the controversy over the Ilbert bill in 1882 and the subsequent formation of the European and Anglo-Indian Defence Association.^[68] The social fissures that separated Britons from one another in India could be seen in the different clientele of different hill stations. Widely known distinctions among stations' reputations demonstrated that both class and race were among the criteria for acceptance in these highland communities.

Recalling the days he spent in Simla as an official of the imperial government, Sir Walter Lawrence remarked that, "delightful as it was, it was

[64] Edward J. Buck, Simla Past and Present , 2d ed. (1925; reprint, Simla, 1989), 94.

[65] Blackham, Scalpel , 87. Also see the remarks in Guide to Mussoorie (Mussoorie, c. 1907), 1; and John Lang, Wanderings in India: And Other Sketches of Life in Hindostan (London, 1859), 402.

[66] Isabel Burton, The Life of Captain Sir Richard F. Burton , vol. 2 (London, 1893), 82; Burton, AEI , 285; Francesca H. Wilson, My Trip to Matheran (Madras, 1888), 34.

[67] "Civilian," The Civilian's South India (London, 1921), 168.

[68] See Raymond K. Renford, The Non-official British in India to 1920 (Delhi, 1987), esp. ch. 5.

not India."^[69] There can be little doubt that this opinion was widely shared by Britons who patronized the hill stations. They had good reasons for insisting that these places were "not India." Not only were they physically removed from the rest of the subcontinent in their rugged mountain settings; they were socially and culturally aloof from it as well. The British did their best to re-create some of the favored features of their homeland in these highland retreats. From their villagelike morphologies, with quaint cottages scattered along the maze of lanes that converged at a point graced by the Gothic eminence of an Anglican church, to their spalike societies, with the protocol of calls and balls and other customs imposing a framework within which a floating population of visitors devoted themselves to the pursuit of leisure, the hill stations came to bear a striking resemblance to those aspects of metropolitan culture their patrons found especially comforting in their exile. In short, hill stations exuded a heady nostalgia. For those who inhaled this hallucinogen, the effect was immediately enticing.

There is no reason, however, for scholars to be overcome by this nostalgic atmosphere. The purpose of nostalgia is to shift attention away from the circumstances that give rise to it. In the case that concerns us, those circumstances were the experiences of our subjects in India, not their memories of Britain. They came to the hills because of the dangers and the dilemmas they faced on the plains as the rulers of an alien land and people, and they sought to make the hill stations special enclaves set apart from the "real" India. Our task is to reclaim these stations for the colonial experience. By recognizing nostalgia for what it was—an attempt to restore to visitors the sense of cultural identity and common purpose that extended immersion in the alien environment of the plains tended to erode—we can move toward a fuller appreciation of how integral hill stations were to the British endeavor in India.

[69] Sir Walter Roper Lawrence, The India We Served (London, 1928), 83.