9
Arrivals and Departures

What I do see is the last feeble stirring of the instinct of self-preservation, the last remnant at the command of a condemned world-system. The catastrophe will and must come—it advances on every hand and in every way.
—Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

Half-an-hour by air . . . and then an hour's chug in the airport bus . . . had made the old hill station an attractive proposition for people who found an all night train and a six hour one back a high price to pay for a weekend in more invigorating air. . . . [It] attracted more people up than ever before: people in government, in commerce, the idle rich, the busy executives, and now even film stars and directors.
—Paul Scott, Staying On

The colonial hill stations reached the apex of their reputations as social and political centers for the British expatriate community at the turn of the century. By this time they had come to occupy positions of unprecedented importance in the public and private lives of the British in India. Simla could claim that it, rather than Calcutta, was the real capital of the raj. Its preeminence as a site of political power was evidenced by the presence there of the viceroy, the commander-in-chief, the members of the viceroy's council, and the battalions of bureaucrats who conducted the business of state. Similarly, Ootacamund, Darjeeling, Naini Tal, and Shillong had come into their own as regional seats of government, while a great many other stations operated as local political or military headquarters. The turn of the century also saw the hill stations consolidate their positions as centers of British social life. With the extension of the railway to the vicinity of most hill stations and the direct linkage of some of the most important ones by narrow-gauge track, it had become convenient for a great many of the British residents of India to take their holidays in the hills and to enroll their children in the educational institutions that clustered there. Schools, social and recreational clubs, and civic organizations prospered as never before, providing the inhabitants of the hill stations with social environments so welcoming and evocative of metropolitan models that they seemed utterly removed from the strange and uncomfortable realities of life on the plains.

Yet the hill stations' rise to prominence also set in motion some of the forces that led to their subsequent fall from British favor. Their reputations as enclaves where the colonizers could renew their sense of themselves as the agents of Western culture and imperial rule soon began to erode because of the presence of upper- and middle-class Indians whose own identities and destinies were increasingly bound up in the imperial system. These people sought access to the political power and social privilege that radiated from the highlands. Unlike the multitudes of common laborers whose places in the hill stations were sharply circumscribed, they could not easily be kept outside the physical and psychic walls that the British had built to protect themselves. Princes and professionals presented a far more complex predicament for the British because they sought to inhabit the same social space that the British themselves occupied.

Certain members of this Indian elite, moreover, were nationalist activists, and their attraction to the hills was shot through with antagonism toward the imperial power concentrated there. Consider two of India's most prominent nationalist families, the Boses and the Nehrus. The brothers Sarat and Subhas Chandra Bose were frequent visitors to Darjeeling in their youth, and they retained ties to the area throughout their careers. Yet the house that Sarat purchased in 1923 as a summer retreat for the family was located not in Darjeeling but in the smaller and less overweening satellite station of Kurseong.^[1] Similarly, Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal's father, had a seasonal residence in Mussoorie, another hill station without political resonance. Jawaharlal himself frequently took his family there for summer visits, and Mussoorie is where his daughter Indira spent a good part of her early life. Yet Jawaharlal also shared the antagonism that most Indian nationalists felt toward Simla and other hill headquarters. According to one of his biographers, Simla was "a town which he hated for its atmosphere of officialdom."^[2] What Nehru and his nationalist colleagues found most objectionable about the concentration of imperial power in these remote resorts was that it allowed an autocratic regime to stand aloof and apart from its subjects. Even though their political attacks on these highland strongholds stood in ambivalent juxtaposition to their emulation of the rulers' seasonal sojourns in the hills, both actions had equally dire effects on the hill stations' reputations as ethnic enclaves whose inhabitants could

[1] Leonard A. Gordon, Brothers against the Raj (New York, 1990), 46.

[2] See Sarvepalli Gopal, Jawaharlal Nehru: A Biography , vol. 1 (Cambridge, Mass., 1976), 303, 41, 61.

feel confident of the unassailability of their position. The British saw their creations become riddled with the paradoxes of success: the hill stations' popularity as centers of British social activity made them increasingly popular sites for holidays by a Westernized Indian middle class, while their prominence as centers of British political power made them increasingly potent symbols of tyranny for an energetic Indian nationalist movement. As a result, they soon ceased to serve as British sanctums, as special sites set apart from the rest of India where the public and private spheres could recover their dialectical balance.

This was by no means the only reason that the hill stations lost their special standing in the imperial system. The greater ease and shrinking cost of travel to Europe, the Indianization of the government services, and various other factors contributed to their swift decline as centers of colonial influence in the twentieth century. The hill stations had become so intimately enmeshed in the structure and operation of the raj that their geographical isolation could no longer protect them from the storms that had begun to buffet the British and would eventually sweep them out of India.

The Indianization of the hill stations began long before India obtained independence in 1947. Its origins can be traced to the late nineteenth century, when the number of prosperous, professional, Westernized Indians began to reach the critical mass that would make them a conscious and influential class within colonial society. These people posed the greatest threat to the insular world the British had established for themselves in the hills.

The first hill stations to experience significant encroachment from middle-class Indians were those in the vicinity of Bombay, the boom city of modern India. Bombay's economy took off when the outbreak of the American Civil War created a demand for cotton from the city's hinterland and when the opening of the Suez Canal in 1867 established it as the gateway to India for British shipping. Indigenous commercial elites, most notably the Parsis, moved quickly to establish their predominance in the export trades and industries that sprang up around Bombay, and they soon played the same role that British firms played in Calcutta and Madras. The Parsis also acquired a great deal of property, much of it in the European areas, where they leased houses to British tenants. Their economic success eroded ethnic boundaries, allowing much more social intercourse with the British

than occurred in other parts of India.^[3] By the late nineteenth century, many of these newly prosperous Indians were following the British to Mahabaleshwar, Matheran, and the lesser hill stations of the region.

Matheran was near enough to Bombay—fifty-four miles by railway—for it to become a weekend retreat for that city's well-to-do residents. Founded at midcentury by Hugh Malet, the collector of Thana district, it was initially very much a British station: no more than sixteen of the first sixty-six applicants for building sites were non-Europeans.^[4] By the 1880s, however, substantial numbers of Indian businessmen and professionals had begun to enjoy visits to Matheran. These included Bombay's most prominent industrialist, J. N. Tata, who acquired a weekend home in the station (as well as estates at Panchgani and Ootacamund).^[5] One English visitor during this decade reported that a number of "handsome houses" had been built by Parsis and Jews, and that "crowds of [Parsis] are continually to be met with at the various [scenic] points."^[6] According to Mrs. A. K. Oliver, a resident of Matheran, Indians from Bombay began to buy property and build houses at the station on a significant scale around 1893, and the outbreak of plague in Bombay in 1896 provided an additional impetus for its better-off residents to seek shelter in the hills. By 1905, more than ninety of the station's European-ward dwellings were Indian-owned, while Europeans owned just ten or eleven, which replicated the pattern of property ownership in Bombay. Two of the five hotels that had catered to Europeans in 1882 now served Parsis, and the remaining three were all Indian-owned; furthermore, all of the newer hotels served Indian clients, including one for Muslims, one for Hindus, and two more for Parsis.^[7] A guidebook published a few years later claimed that just two cottages remained in European hands, though this figure seems improbably low.^[8] By the late 1930s, Europeans owned perhaps 14 of the more than 190 private houses now spread across the station: nearly all the rest were held by Indians from Bombay. Parsis continued to hold sway, with more than a

[3] Norma Evenson, The Indian Metropolis: A View toward the West (New Haven, 1989), 36-37.

[4] A. F. Bellasis, An Account of the Hill Station of Matharan, near Bombay (Bombay, 1869), 7.

[5] F. R. Harris, Jamsetji Nusserwanji Tata (London, 1925), 63, 74, 284.

[6] Francesca H. Wilson, My Trip to Matheran (Madras, 1888), 40.

[7] Mrs. A. K. Oliver, The Hill Station of Matheran (Bombay, 1905), 19, 108, and list of houses on 221-27.

[8] J. T. Lewis, The Rugby Guide to Matheran (Poona, c. 1908), 9.

hundred properties in their possession, but the Hindu presence had grown, as evidenced by the 40-plus houses they owned and the five hotels (out of twelve) and three sanitaria (out of seven) that catered to Hindus.^[9] The British had not abandoned Matheran altogether: enough of them leased houses and rented rooms for the season to sustain an exclusively European gymkhana. But Indians predominated, providing the station with much of its social and civic identity. Framjee Mehta founded a local biweekly newspaper in 1892; Sir Bomanji Dhunjibhoy established a race course in 1892-93; Damodhar Gordhandass sponsored a library in 1897; Byramjee Jeejeebhoy financed a hospital in 1902; Sir Adamji Peerbhoy constructed the light rail to the station in 1907. All of the members of the municipal board were Indians by the 1930s, if not earlier.^[10] Matheran had become Indianized.

Mahabaleshwar followed much the same course. Even though it was far less convenient to the residents of Bombay than Matheran and retained a far more stable British clientele because of its status as the seasonal headquarters of the Bombay government, it too saw the wholesale transfer of property and institutions into the hands of Indians. By 1903, Britons owned no more than 9 houses in the station, while Indians owned 128. Many of the Indian-owned houses were rented to Europeans for the season, but the majority were occupied by the proprietors themselves or their relatives and friends. Again, Bombay was the principal home of these Indians, though others came from Ahmedabad, Hyderabad, Jodhpur, and elsewhere.^[11] And, again, they enriched the community with their philanthropic activities: Sir Morarji Gokuldas, a Bombay merchant, financed the construction of a hospital; Framji Nasserwanji Patel of Bombay provided a dharmsala for travelers; Seth Purushottam Mawji, a wealthy Bhattia from Bombay, built a Hindu sanitarium.^[12] One measure of their influence upon the station's character was the evolution of membership in the Mahabaleshwar Club. When founded in 1881, the club had prohibited Indians from entry as members, but it began to admit some princes as honorary members around

[9] Hansraj Parmanand, Key to Matheran , 2d ed. (Bombay, 1935), 55; Vishnu Bhikaji Dabake, Hand Book to Matheran , 3d ed. (Poona, 1938), 24-30, 97, and list of houses on 137-54.

[10] Parmanand, Key to Matheran , 98; Oliver, The Hill Station of Matheran , 34, 40, 86.

[11] J.W.P. Muir-MacKenzie, chief secretary to Government of Bombay, to Government of India, no. 38, 27 May 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.

[12] N. M. Dastur, Pocket Book of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani , 3d ed. (Poona, 1944), 107-9.

the turn of the century, and restrictions were loosened further because of financial exigencies during and after World War I. By 1924, an Indian was on the club's governing committee, and Gulam Hussain Hidayattallah, a soda-water manufacturer, became the first Indian president of the club in 1933.^[13] Nothing spoke more eloquently of the ethnic transformation of Mahabaleshwar than the Indians' capture of its club, that most exclusive and hidebound of British colonial institutions.

Hill stations in other parts of India were somewhat slower to undergo a similar metamorphosis, but many of them had begun to show the first signs of Indianization by the turn of the century. "There can be no doubt," reported an unhappy H. H. Risley, secretary to the home department of the government of India, in 1902, "that there is an increasing tendency on the part of wealthy natives to spend the hot weather in the hills."^[14] The wealthiest of these individuals were the rulers of the princely states, and they forged a prominent place for themselves in the hill stations—so much so, as we have seen, that the government began to curtail their presence in Simla after 1890. By buying up a great deal of property and hosting large parties in their ostentatious residences, the princes parlayed their wealth and status into social intimacy with the stations' European inhabitants. In the early 1880s the maharaja of Cooch Behar invested part of his huge fortune in the construction of some of Darjeeling's "best and neatest" villas, and by the middle of the decade he was said to hold the titles to nearly half of the homes in the station (Figure 14). (The Bengal government purchased one of his handsomest estates for use as the lieutenant-governor's summer residence.) He also had four homes in Simla and at least one in Ootacamund.^[15] In Naini Tal, the nawab of Rampur owned "a large area of the best part of the station," and the nawab of Dacca occupied what was considered the best house in Shillong.^[16] "Mussoorie seems from the first to have been deemed an eligible residence for native princes," remarked one guidebook to the station. Those who sojourned there for the season in-

[13] Perin Bharucha, Mahabaleswar: The Club 1881-1981 (Bombay, c. 1981), 77—90.

[14] Memorandum by H. H. Risley, no. 68, 17 Oct. 1902, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.

[15] R. D. O'Brien, Darjeeling, the Sanitarium of Bengal; and Its Surroundings (Calcutta, 1883), 25; F. B. Peacock to H. M. Durand, 12 Sept. 1886, no. 432, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, Secret-I, INA.

[16] J.S.C. Davis, commissioner of Kumaun Division, to Government of United Provinces, 16 Feb. 1903, and F. J. Monahan, secretary to chief commissioner of Assam, to Government of India, 3 March 1903, nos. 35, 34, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.

Figure 14.
A maharaja's mansion in Darjeeling. Photograph by the author.

cluded the maharaja of Kapurthala, who lived in the lavish Chateau Kapurthala, and the maharaja of Nepal, whose Fairlawn Palace was the largest house in the station. In addition, two exiles, Yakub Khan, the ex-amir of Afghanistan, and Maharaja Dhulip Singh, son of Ranjit Singh, resided in Mussoorie the year round.^[17] Far to the south, the maharaja of Mysore, the nizam of Hyderabad, the maharaja of Vizianagram, and the gaekwar of Baroda bought or built some of the largest and most luxurious estates in Ootacamund.^[18] And so many of Rajasthan's rulers acquired summer residences in Mount Abu—the rajas of Jodhpur, Jaipur, Dholpur, Alwar, Sikar, Bharatpur, Bikaner, Kishengarh, Bundi, Jaisalmer, Kotha, Udaipur, Tonk, Sirohi, and Khetri were identified as property owners in a 1919 directory of the station—that the British could hardly help but view themselves as tourists in a regal retreat. There was no point in trying to keep Indian princes out of the local Rajasthan Club since its very existence was due to their contributions.^[19]

If the princes drove the initial wedge into these highland enclaves of Britons, the Indian bourgeoisie split them wide open through the sheer

[17] T. Kinney, The Echo Guide to Mussoorie (Mussoorie, 1908), 11. Also see A. W. Cornelius, Dehra Dun—Mussoorie—Landour Guide (n.p., 1947), 48.

[18] Sir Frederick Price, Ootacamund: A History (Madras, 1908), ch. 18.

[19] Hiralal Dayabhai Nanavati, Mount Abu (Bombay, 1919), 23, Appendix. Also see Charles Allen and Sharanda Dwivedi, Lives of the Indian Princes (London, 1984), 158.

force of their numbers. A prosperous, self-conscious Indian middle class first began to come into its own in the latter half of the nineteenth century, and while the great nursery of its commercial elite was Bombay, congeries of lawyers, doctors, civil servants, merchants, and other Westernized Indians appeared in regional entrepots across the subcontinent. The hills attracted them in increasing numbers. "I find," remarked a British member of the Legislative Council at one of its sessions, "that Indians who are possessed of any means—members of the Bar and those who conduct businesses—are just as anxious to get away to cooler climates [as the British]."^[20]

Calcutta was home to the oldest and largest congregation of Westernized Indian professionals, and toward the end of the century increasing numbers of them began to go to the hills for holidays. Like the European inhabitants of Calcutta, they turned to Darjeeling as the most accessible and attractive hill station in the region. Kipling's snide remark about "the Babus . . . stealing to Darjeeling" in his poem "A Tale of Two Cities" evidenced its growing popularity. A more substantive sign of its appeal was the opening in 1887 of the Lowis Jubilee Sanitarium, a health resort that catered exclusively to Indian clients. Built on land donated by the maharaja of Cooch Behar with funds contributed by Maharaja Gobindo Lal Roy, this imposing facility had rooms to accommodate well over one hundred patients, and admission figures for 1910 indicated that about half of them hailed from Calcutta.^[21] Other institutional evidence of a growing middle-class Indian presence included a branch of the Brahmo Samaj (founded 1880) and a Hindu public hall (1891, rebuilt 1907). "The influx of native visitors to the station of Darjeeling in recent years had been considerable," reported the chief secretary for the Bengal government in 1903. "They generally go to boarding-houses, or the Lowis Sanitarium . . . , or they rent existing houses."^[22] Doorga Pooja, the chief Hindu festival in Bengal, became an especially popular occasion for a visit to Darjeeling, which was "at its gayest" during those ten days in September and October.^[23]

[20] Extract from Proceedings of Indian Legislative Council, 12 March 1917, no. 136, April 1917, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public-B, INA.

[21] E. C. Dozey, A Concise History of the Darjeeling District since 1835 (Calcutta, 1922), 131-32; George P. Robertson, Darjeeling Route Guide (Darjeeling, 1913), 16.

[22] W. C. Macpherson to Government of India, no. 41, 22 Aug. 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.

[23] G. Hutton Taylor, Thacker's Guide Book to Darjeeling and Its Neighbourhood (Calcutta, 1899), 63.

Calcutta had also long supplied most of the Indian clerks who participated in the migration of the government to Simla, and although these bureaucrats knew their place in the station's hierarchy, they forged a relationship between the two capitals that eased the way for less subordinate migrants from Calcutta, including bankers, businessmen, lawyers, and other professionals. One manifestation of their presence was the Kali Bari, a religious and social center founded by Bengali clerks in the mid-nineteenth century, which expanded in the 1890s to serve an enlarged clientele and expanded yet again in the early 1930s, when it occupied a massive concrete structure near the heart of Simla that contained a public hall large enough to accommodate eight hundred people.^[24]

By the turn of the century, however, the Punjab had probably become the principal source of Indian visitors to Simla. The deputy commissioner for Lahore observed that "well-to-do natives in Lahore are now more and more acquiring the habit of going to the hill station that is the headquarters of Government, i.e., Simla," just as the commissioner of the Delhi division noticed "an increasing number of native gentlemen [who] are coming to regard the escape from the heat of the plains as a necessity."^[25] And a Parsi who visited Simla in 1925 reported that "many well-to-do Punjabis . . . own bungalows on the hill where they come for a change."^[26]

The confluence of these two streams of visitors gave an increasingly Indian cast to the summer capital of the raj. Even though British authorities had forced the princes to reduce their property holdings in Simla, which had numbered 34 in 1885 (including 14 owned by the raja of Nahan), the total tally of station ward houses in the hands of Indians both titled and untitled actually rose to 102 by 1903.^[27] Between 1898 and 1912, 66 houses were bought by Indians. Most continued to harbor British tenants, but local officials charted a growing tendency for Indians to occupy the places they purchased: twenty-eight did so in 1906, fifty in 1912.^[28] Other Indian

[24] Sudhir Chandra Sen, The Simla Kali Bari (Simla, 1932); Pamela Kanwar, Imperial Simla (Delhi, 1990), 166.

[25] Letters from C. H. Atkins and T. Gordon Walker, no. 39, 9 Feb. and 28 April 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA.

[26] D. S. Bastavala, Simla (Bombay, 1925), 125.

[27] Correspondence and memoranda, Sept. 1886, nos. 432, 433, Foreign Dept. Proceedings, Secret-I, INA; H.S.P. Davies to Commissioner, Delhi Division, no. 39, 15 April 1903, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA. Kanwar (Imperial Simla , 141) mistakenly cites the number of station ward houses owned by Indians in 1907 as twenty-nine—this was in fact the number occupied by Indians in that year.

[28] Memorandum, 12 July 1912, Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 8/53/52/1912-26/I, HPSA.

visitors leased houses for the season or stayed in boardinghouses and hotels, and by the 1920s several of these hotels catered exclusively to orthodox Hindus and Muslims.^[29] The interwar years brought an increasing number of Indians who occupied mid-level ranks in the Indian Civil Service or served as representatives in the Legislative Assembly, and they expected to reside in the same style and comfort as their British counterparts. Certainly this seems to have been the case for Ved Mehta's father, a public health official who took his family to Simla every summer.^[30] Even the princes could not be kept away from the station, despite official disapproval. In what appears to have been a fairly typical year, the maji sahiba of Bharatpur, the maharaja of Dholpur, the Maharaja Rewa, the raj rana of Jhalawar, the Maharaja Bikaner, the nahrawan of Dangardar, the raja of Dewas, the maharawal of Dungarpur, the Maharaja Alwar, and the maharaja of Benares all obtained permission to spend part or all of the 1913 season in Simla, where they invariably leased houses in the station ward.^[31]

Information about property ownership provides a revealing glimpse of the Indian influence in other hill stations as well. While these figures do not indicate how many Indians actually resided in the stations, they do measure the extent to which the homes the British had built as refuges for themselves had been transferred into Indian hands. An Ootacamund directory for 1897 identified Indians as the owners of 120 of the 328 properties listed in its pages. In Naini Tal, 120 of the 280 houses in the station ward were owned by Indians in 1903. The more remote hill stations, and especially those that housed military garrisons, attracted less interest from Indian investors. Murree, located in the far northwestern corner of India, remained firmly in the grasp of British landlords, who owned 148 of the station's 180 houses in 1903. The equally remote Dalhousie was even more British, with just 12 of its 117 houses in Indian hands at the turn of the century (including 4 held by the raja of Chamba and two by the raja of Kashmir.) However, 12 of the 32 houses in Nathiagali, a tiny station near Abbottabad on the northwest frontier, were owned by Indians, 9 of them by two bankers from Abbottabad who presumably saw the property as an attractive investment.^[32]

[29] F. Beresford Harrop, Thacker's New Guide to Simla (Simla, 1925), 60.

[30] Ved Mehta, Daddyji (New York, 1972), 152.

[31] List of ruling princes or chiefs who visited Simla in 1913, Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 8/53/52/1912-26/I, HPSA.

[32] The Ootacamund data are derived from a property listing in The Visitors' Handbook of the Nilgiris (Madras, 1897), 74-78. The figures for Naini Tal, Murree, and Nathiagali come from letters by J.S.C. Davis, J. G. Silcock, and Lt.-Col. H. A.

Deane, respectively, nos. 35, 37, 39, Jan. 1904, Home Dept. Proceedings, Public Branch (A), INA. The Dalhousie figures come from Report of the Commission Appointed to Deal with the Transfer of the Punjab Government to the Hill Station of Dalhousie (Simla, 1902), app. E. A detailed listing of Indian owners in Naini Tal can be found in C. W. Murphy, A Guide to Naini Tal and Kumaun (Allahabad, 1906), app. 14. They included one individual, Rai K. Sah Bahadur, who owned eighteen houses.

Further evidence of the hill stations' appeal to the Indian elite can be found in the many guidebooks written by and for Indians in the period prior to independence. I have examined nearly a dozen of these publications, and others surely existed.^[33] Those that have survived include guidebooks to Darjeeling, Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani, Matheran, Mount Abu, Shillong, and Simla. Some of these publications went through multiple editions, and several appeared in Gujarati and Marathi as well as English-language versions.

One can glean from these guidebooks some useful insights into the hill stations' attractions to Indians. They resembled British-authored guidebooks in most respects. Their main purpose was the same—to provide practical information about transportation, accommodations, recreational activities, and the like. Yet they also sought to describe their subjects in ways that would appeal to their readers, and these efforts resulted in strikingly familiar images. They portrayed hill stations above all as refuges from the trials and tribulations of everyday life on the plains. Their therapeutic benefits were touted to the tubercular, the diabetic, the anemic, and other invalids. One author gives a testimonial to his rapid recovery from bouts of diarrhea and cholera in the salubrious environment of Matheran. Another informs his readers that "whenever I wanted to recoup my health" he escaped to Mahabaleshwar.^[34] These guidebooks also praised the hill stations for the psychic relief they provided. Matheran was described as a place where a person "can forget all the troubles and responsibilities of his every-day life and plunge himself headlong into the delightful heaven of the peace of Nature."^[35] The aesthetic appeal of the hill

[33] The publications I refer to are Bastavala, Simla ; K. C. Bhanja, Darjeeling at a Glance (Darjeeling, 1942); K. C. Bhanja, Wonders of Darjeeling and the Sikkim Himalaya (n.p., 1943); Sarabhai Choksi, Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani Guide (Bombay, n.d.); Dabake, Hand Book to Matheran ; Dastur, Pocket Book of Mahabaleshwar and Panchgani ; Om Prakash Gupta, Mount Abu: The Olympus of Rajasthan (Ajmer, 1939); Nanavati, Mount Abu ; Rao Bahadur D. B. Parasnis, Mahabaleshwar (Bombay, 1916); Parmanand, Key to Matheran ; H. C. Sarkar, Guide to Shillong (Calcutta, n.d.).

[34] Parmanand, Key to Matheran , Preface; Choksi, Mahableshwar , 3.

[35] Dabake, Hand Book to Matheran , 1.

stations received a great deal of attention, as in this overwrought passage about the natural wonders of Darjeeling: "the voice of the silence from afar will whisper into your ears and your fancy will lift you up on its wings and carry you to a region of heavenly ecstacy conjuring up an unspeakable sense of the infinite glory of the Great Unseen Hand behind."^[36] The same scenic "points" that the British admired for their picturesque beauty were also recommended in these works. Indeed, little distinguished Indian-authored guidebooks from their British-authored counterparts. This can be attributed in part to the fact that they were meant to appeal to British as well as Indian buyers, and also perhaps because they took British guidebooks as models. But it would be a mistake to dismiss these works as merely imitative, evoking images that had no resonance with their Indian readers. If they touched on many of the same topics and themes as the British-authored guidebooks, the primary reason must be that their Indian audience had many of the same reasons for going to the hills as did the British. They too were concerned about their physical well-being as well as eager to escape the hurly-burly of the workaday world, to enjoy the cool temperatures and mountain scenery, and to revel in the stations' social and recreational activities.

Needless to say, none of these motives evoked any empathy from the British. They viewed their not-so-secret sharers with distrust, disdain, and aversion. They were distressed by what they considered the violation by these newcomers of their social space. Far more than the stations' masses of porters, servants, and other laborers, the Indian upper and middle classes penetrated into the physical and social heart of the hill stations. Their occupation of houses in the station wards, their involvement in municipal affairs, their entry into gymkhanas and other social organizations, and even their presence on the malls for evening strolls all shattered the British illusion that the hill stations offered a realm apart from the rest of India, a refuge from its vexations and its terrors. Once that illusion was gone, it was only a matter of time before the British began to pack their bags and leave.

The first signs that the hill stations had begun to lose their special aura appeared shortly after the turn of the century. In Simla the completion of the railway line from Kalka was expected to produce a substantial increase

[36] Bhanja, Darjeeling at a Glance , 28.

in the station's population.^[37] Lord Curzon used predictions of overcrowding as a justification for his abortive effort to move the summer headquarters of the Punjab government from Simla to Dalhousie.^[38] But the arrival of the railway in 1903 did not bring the influx of visitors anticipated by authorities. On the contrary, the number of people—particularly European women—actually declined. The author of the report on the 1911 summer census attributed this fact to "the tendency among married Europeans . . . more and more to send their wives home [to Britain] for the summer, as that is considered cheaper and is of course more convenient."^[39]

Ootacamund, like Simla, should have seen its fortunes improve with the arrival of the railroad shortly after the turn of the century. But in 1903 the appearance in the station of the plague, which killed 262 of its poorer residents in the first year alone, scared off many potential visitors.^[40] Nor did matters improve once the epidemic had died down. The 1908-9 municipal report for Ootacamund noted "the vacancy of a comparatively large number of European houses during the last season," and subsequent reports described even higher vacancy rates. The shortening of the official "season" was offered as an explanation for this loss of visitors.^[41] However, Ootacamund's sister station, Coonoor, which had no official status, reported a similar rise in vacancies, as did the equally unofficial Kodaikanal, further to the south.^[42]

Still another indication that the hill stations had entered an era of slippage were the troubles that began to afflict the hill schools. After enjoying unprecedented growth in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, some of the hill schools suddenly found themselves facing an unexpected decline in enrollments and revenues. In 1900, Mussoorie's Boys' School closed its doors for financial reasons, and the same year the Bishop Cotton School in Simla and St. Paul's School in Darjeeling turned to the state for financial assistance; the Diocesan School in Naini Tal did the same two years later. These were among the best known educational establish-

[37] Report of the Simla Extension Committee, 1898 (Simla, 1898), 2.

[38] See Curzon's dispatch to Lord Hamilton, 24 Sept. 1903, L/PJ/6/650/2252, Public and Judicial Dept., IOL.

[39] Report on the Summer Census of Simla 1911 (Lahore, 1912), 7, 5. Also see Report of the Simla Improvement Committee (Simla, 1907), 4.

[40] Ootacamund Municipal Report for 1903-4, 11, Municipal G.O. #1847, TNSA.

[41] Ootacamund Municipal Reports for 1908-9, 5; 1909-10, 4; 1911-21, 3, 8, Municipal G.O. #1076, #1438, #1676, TNSA.

[42] Coonoor Municipal Report for 1919-10, Municipal G.O. #1015, TNSA; Kodaikanal Municipal Report for 1910-11, Municipal G.O. #1008, TNSA.

ments in the country, and their financial difficulties spurred the government into convening a committee of investigation in 1904. The committee observed that the schools at greatest risk were mainly Anglican institutions patterned after English public schools and intended for male students from the better strata of British society in India, and its report warned that the perpetuation of "distinctively English traditions" in India depended on the survival of these hill schools.^[43] The crisis was traced to two sources. First, the reduction in the costs of passage to Britain and the expansion in the number of home educational institutions made it feasible for a larger portion of the British population in India to ship their sons off for schooling. Second, an increase in the competition for entry into the elite imperial service made enrollment in a domestic British public school all but obligatory, while at the same time the opportunities for employment in the less prestigious provincial service were shrinking as more and more positions in departments such as public works, surveying, police, opium, salt, and post and telegraph went to Indians, who had been granted the opportunity to compete for these posts in 1886. This development was especially damaging to the hill schools since they had built their reputations in large measure on their ability to guide their graduates into the provincial service. The future appeared bleak. One witness after another told the committee that greater numbers of boys were going to Britain for their education every year, and none could see any way to stem the exodus. (Because girls had far fewer career expectations or opportunities, they had less reason to be sent to British schools, and hence the Indian institutions that catered to them remained relatively stable.) The private secretary to the archbishop of Agra neatly summarized the various forces at work when he remarked that "more parents now than formerly send their children to England, because the difficulties of travel and expense are not now so great and because the golden days are now gone when a boy even imperfectly educated could get a good appointment in India."^[44] These trends were ominous not only for the hill schools but for the hill stations where they were located.

Equally ominous was the announcement at the imperial durbar of 1911 that the capital of India would be transferred from Calcutta to Delhi. Seldom is mention made of the fact that the decision to move the seat of

[43] Committee upon the Financial Condition of Hill Schools for Europeans in Northern India, vol. 1: Report (Simla, 1904), 5.

[44] Committee upon the Financial Condition of Hill Schools for Europeans in Northern India, vol. 2: Evidence and Appendices (Calcutta, 1905), 38-39.

government to Delhi was as much a blow to Simla as it was to Calcutta.^[45] Not only did the decision end any chance that Simla itself might become the official capital of India, but it also undermined the prospects that it would remain the unofficial nerve center of the raj. Once the grandiose capital complex at New Delhi reached completion, the government of India would be obliged to transfer its agencies and operations to those new quarters, thereby emptying Simla of its trappings of officialdom. And once Simla's political position began to wane, the regional governments would find it increasingly difficult to continue their annual migrations to the hills. None of these repercussions would be felt before the interwar era, but Simla and the other stations that headquartered various branches of government found themselves operating on borrowed time after 1911.

The outbreak of World War I gave a temporary boost to the hill stations' fortunes. A great many schoolchildren, women, and others who would otherwise have gone back to Britain for various reasons were forced to remain in India during the duration of the war, and a substantial portion of these involuntary exiles congregated in the hill stations. Simla's local authorities reported overcrowding in the European as well as Indian wards of the station.^[46] The story was much the same in other hill stations. A local gazetteer reports that Mussoorie "during the war had bumper years. Europeans were unable to send their families to Europe and hotels and boarding-houses reaped a rich harvest. Many new shops were built and tradesmen earned huge profits."^[47]

Once the war ended, however, the pent-up demand for passages back to Britain led to the rapid exodus of wartime residents from the hill stations, and the upheavals of the subsequent years did little to encourage others to fill the void. The postwar reductions in military forces resulted in fewer officers in the hills, while the increased pace of Indianization produced a further contraction in the number of British personnel—both military and civil—who spent the summer season in a hill station. The rise of the new capital in New Delhi and the complaints of Indian nationalists caused the imperial and provincial governments to scale back the size of their annual migrations to the hills and the length of their stays. The government of Madras, for example, reduced its season in Ootacamund from six to three

[45] For example, Robert Grant Irving, Indian Summer: Lutyens, Baker, and Imperial Delhi (New Haven, 1981), scarcely mentions Simla.

[46] Annual Report of the Simla Municipality, 1917-18, 2, HPSA.

[47] District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh: Supplementary Notes and Statistics , vol. 1: Dehra Dun District (Allahabad, 1924), 8.

months in the late 1920s.^[48] Perhaps the most dramatic blow to the hill stations came with the Lee Commission's recommendation in 1925 to provide passage subsidies for officials who wished to travel to Britain for their annual leaves.^[49] Previously, members of the Indian services had been able to return to Britain only on the extended furloughs they received once every four years or so. The Lee Commission liberalized this policy, recognizing that improvements in transportation now made it possible to get "home" and back in the course of a typical two-month annual leave. Most hill stations' inordinate reliance on their official status and official clients began to tell against them.

Evidence of deterioration proliferated. Simla's property values plummeted after 1919, according to its resident historian Edward Buck.^[50] "So many people are away on leave," wrote Lady Reading, wife of the viceroy, in 1924; "they tell me over 150 houses [in Simla] are empty this season. Formerly all the wives came up here from the Plains in the hot weather, but now they mostly go home for the children's summer holidays."^[51] The gazetteer for Darjeeling observed that "in common with other hill stations in India its tourist traffic has suffered from the cheapening and acceleration of travel to Europe and its European educational development from the tendency of parents who can afford it to send their children to Europe at an early age to receive education."^[52] An especially vivid description of decline came from the 1934 supplement to the Dehra Dun district gazetteer:

Mussoorie has considerably declined in prosperity since 1920 owing to the great decrease in the number of Europeans who visit it or make it a place for retirement. Many houses lie vacant every season and, except in May and September, the hotels are usually half empty. The Happy Valley Club, which is referred to in the Gazetteer of 1911 as being "all too small", is to be closed next year; the race course and polo ground have been derelict for some years; the Himalaya Club was closed even before 1920, as were the two breweries; and the Castle Hill Estate of the Survey of India was vacated in 1932. The Municipal Hall . . . leaks badly, is hardly

[48] Madras District Gazetteers, Statistical Appendix for the Nilagiri District (Madras, 1928), 79.

[49] Vipin Pubby, Simla Then and Now: Summer Capital of the Raj (New Delhi, 1988), 93.

[50] Edward J. Buck, Simla Past and Present , 2d ed. (1925; reprint, Simla, 1989), 111.

[51] Iris Butler, The Viceroy's Wife: Letters of Alice, Countess of Reading, from India, 1921-25 (London, 1969), 139. For a fuller account of Simla's postwar decline, see Kanwar, Imperial Simla , ch. 17.

[52] Arthur Jules Dash, Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling (Alipore, 1947), 42.

habitable and is now never used for "balls, theatricals and other entertainments." The Evelyn Hall nursing home (the best of several) is to close this year, and nearly all the English shops have disappeared or passed to Indian purchasers.^[53]

Population statistics confirm these bleak impressions. The total population of Simla fell from a winter census total of 26,149 in 1921 to 18,144 in 1931, and the Christian population (our only indicator of European inhabitants) from 3,181 to 1,239.^[54] Another Punjab district hill station, Dalhousie, experienced a far more precipitous drop in its total population—from a winter count of 2,405 in the 1921 imperial census to a count of 1,030 in the 1931 census.^[55] Darjeeling's population remained relatively stable, but it slipped nonetheless from 22,258 to 21,185 over the decade 1921-1931.^[56] The total population of Ootacamund actually grew, but the Europeans, who had numbered 4,627 in 1911, declined to 3,525 in 1921 and 3,246 a decade later.^[57] Among the hill stations of the United Provinces, Naini Tal's population fell 5 percent between 1921 and 1931, Chakrata's 6 percent, Lansdowne's 13 percent, and Mussoorie's a precipitous 40 percent.^[58] We can assume that the populations of the hill stations continued to decline through the rest of the 1930s, although the statistical evidence is distorted by the fact that the next census occurred in 1941, when another world war again inflated the stations' populations.

By the late 1930s most provincial governments had entirely given up their annual migrations to the hills, and the imperial government slashed its stay in Simla from six to two months in 1939. With hill stations no longer able to depend on official patronage, municipal officials scrambled to attract other visitors to ensure their stations' survival. When the government of the United Provinces abandoned Naini Tal as its summer

[53] District Gazetteers of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh: Supplementary Notes and Statistics up to 1931-2 , vol. 1D: Dehra Dun District (Allahabad, 1934), 4. Also see the remarks in Capt. O.E.S. Powers, Dehra Dun Past and Present: Guide and Directory to Dehra and the Doon District (Dehra Dun, 1929), p. 31.

[54] Punjab District Gazetteers, Simla District Statistical Tables, 1936 , vol. 6B (Lahore, 1936), Table 7.

[55] Punjab District Gazetteers, Gurdaspur District Statistical Tables, 1936 , vol. 14B (Lahore, 1936), Table 7.

[56] Dash, Bengal District Gazetteers: Darjeeling , 53.

[57] 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), 351.

[58] Nutan Tyagi, Hill Resorts of U.P. Himalaya: A Geographical Study (New Delhi, 1991), 136.

headquarters, for example, the municipal board responded by establishing a publicity and development department that issued an illustrated tourist guide and other notices to advertise the charms of the station. The department's Indian director claimed an increase in tourist traffic in 1939.^[59] But who were these tourists? Few of them were likely to have been Britons. Simla officials, who contemplated instituting a promotional campaign similar to Naini Tal's, were told by the sales manager for the North Western Railway that the most promising potential clients were middle-class Indians:

Experience with our rail-cum-road schemes from Bengal, Bombay, United Provinces, Central India and the Punjab to Kashmir indicate that there is a new class of visitors increasing in numbers annually who visit hill stations. This class consists almost entirely of respectable Indian gentlemen and their families recruited from the professional classes, i.e., doctors, school, teachers, students, small landlords and successful businessmen.^[60]

The problems facing the hill schools led to a similar shift in the composition of their student bodies. Headmasters responded to the continued exodus of European pupils by opening the doors of their schools to the sons of Indian parents who were prepared to pay the boarding fees. In the European schools of the Bengal presidency, for example, the ratio of European to Indian students shrank from 5:1 in 1926-27 to 3:1 in 1931-32. Many school administrators were prepared to reduce the ratio even further, but the government imposed a cap on the proportion of Indian pupils in European schools.^[61]

Thus, the Indian upper and middle classes' incursions into the hill stations were in a certain sense as much a consequence as a cause of British flight. They filled the vacuum left by the British, purchasing British property, occupying British cottages, enrolling their children in British schools. And in so doing they made the hill stations their own.

The outbreak of the European war in 1939 once again forced the British who were in India to remain there for the duration of the hostilities, and once again the hill stations experienced a corresponding boost in business. Several of the hill stations acquired even more prominence when Japan began its military advance across southeast Asia: Simla became the head-

[59] G. G. Gupta to Chairman, Simla Municipal Board, 29 April 1939, Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 105/1176/31/1939, HPSA.

[60] C. D. Jordan to Secretary, Municipal Committee, 12 Sept. 1939, Simla Municipal Corporation Records, 105/1176/31/1939, HPSA.

[61] Austin A. D'Souza, Anglo-Indian Education: A Study of Its Origins and Growth in Bengal up to 1960 (Delhi, 1976), 180.

quarters for the exiled Burmese government and Darjeeling the headquarters for the exiled Malayan government, while British refugees from Burma filled Shillong, and Pachmarhi became a center for jungle-warfare training. But the transitory nature of this revival was apparent to all who cared to contemplate it. British rule over India was near its end, and with it came the end of the British presence in the hill stations. So fully had the British relationship to these highland enclaves become woven within the fabric of the imperial system that its unraveling became the unraveling of the hill stations as well.

For the British, then, the mountains lost their magic in the first half of the twentieth century. Their mantle of inviolability was pierced, and the pressures forcing the raj into retreat rushed in. Yet, far from sweeping the hill stations to their destruction, these forces became a source of renewal. The mountains cast their spell over an incoming coterie of arrivistes, a Westernized, indigenous elite who laid claim to the imperial realm's inheritance. Thus, the end of British rule did not entail the end of the hill stations.

Independence did, to be sure, bring substantial changes to the hill stations. The British left. Even those who decided to stay on—typified by Colonel Tusker Smalley and his wife Lucy, the characters so wonderfully realized by Paul Scott in Staying On^[62] —are with rare exception now dead or gone. The Indians took over, and they have since made these highland resorts conform to their needs and desires. The populations of many hill stations have doubled and even tripled in the last decades of the twentieth century. Millions of summer visitors squeeze into the stations' malls and shops and hotels during the summer season, most of them arriving by bus and auto for excursions that last no more than a few days.^[63] Modern, multistoried concrete structures increasingly crowd out quainter colonial buildings, which gradually fall into ruin. Simla, Darjeeling, Shillong, Ootacamund, and other hill stations have become busy entrepots for regional trade, their main roadways clogged with people and goods and vehicles. Congestion has created environmental and health

[62] Paul Scott, Staying On (New York, 1977).

[63] Nora Mitchell, "The Indian Hill-Station: Kodaikanal," University of Chicago Department of Geography Research Paper 141, 1972, ch. 5; Tyagi, Hill Resorts , passim.

problems of far greater seriousness than those the British faced.^[64] Western tourists who seek the remnants of a colonial past in these places are likely to leave dissatisfied.^[65]

Yet the hill stations remain in spirit much as they were before. Indians go to the highlands for many of the same reasons the British did. They seek relief from the heat of the plains. They seek relaxation, diversion, communion with nature, and escape from the pressures of their daily lives. And they seek these things in ways that bear a striking similarity to the ways of their colonial predecessors. They congregate on the malls. They boat on the lakes. They stroll to the "points" and "vistas" that offer sanctioned views of surrounding scenery. They behave at times in ways that would be regarded as scandalous in their own communities. In Bharati Mukherjee's The Tiger's Daughter , several young Indian women from Calcutta agree to participate in a beauty contest in a Darjeeling hotel, a form of exhibitionism they never would have contemplated in Calcutta.^[66] While this incident is fictional, it suggests the degree to which the highland resorts retain something of their colonial reputation for provoking risqué or unconventional conduct. Their associations with romance in Indian films and their popularity as places for honeymooners are further signs that hill stations are seen as places where individuals can procure the emotional freedom that eludes them elsewhere. They remain avenues of escape from the conventions and constraints placed on social behaviour in the plains. They remain sites of alterity.

An appreciation of the hill station by a modern Tamil author calls "the notion of creating townships on mountains for the sake of coolness, health and happiness . . . a gift from the Britisher. Though it is not a straight and direct gift, we may be thankful to the giver all the same."^[67] If the hill station was in fact a "gift," the Indians who accepted it did so in much the same spirit that the British offered it. Above all, they accepted it as a place apart from the influences of the plains, a refuge from its troubles. This is the dominant theme, for example, of Anita Desai's Fire on the Mountain , which takes place in the hill station of Kasauli. The novel's central character is a woman who seeks escape in the hills from an unhappy past, who "had

[64] "The Downhill Stations," India Today , June 15, 1989, 42-45.

[65] Graeme D. Westlake, An Introduction to the Hill Stations of India (New Delhi, 1993), pt. 2.

[66] Bharati Mukherjee, The Tiger's Daughter (New York, 1971), pt. 4.

[67] M. S. Kalyanasundaram, Indian Hill Stations (Madras, 1961), 10.

been glad to leave it all behind, in the plains."^[68] What she comes to realize by the end of the story is that she cannot leave it behind. The world she wants no part of eventually intrudes itself into her highland haven, shattering her hard-won sense of security. The British, by the end of their stay in India, would have understood.

[68] Anita Desai, Fire on the Mountain (London, 1981), 30.