10
Conclusion

This book has sought to show that the view from the hill stations reveals far more about the British colonial experience on the subcontinent than either the British themselves or their historians have suggested or supposed. Despite their reputations as isolated retreats, the hill stations were profoundly implicated in the imperial endeavor. Their engagement in that endeavor is most readily apparent in the role they played as centers of political and military power. Largely because of their physical remoteness, hill stations became highly prized in the second half of the nineteenth century as headquarters for the imperial government, the provincial governments, and the command structure of the army, while a growing portion of the British troops stationed in India found themselves billeted in highland cantonments as well. Less noticeable but no less important to the purposes of the raj was the fact that the physical and ideological reproduction of those who ruled the subcontinent tended to take place in the hill stations. By concentrating their women and children in these mountain enclaves, the British were able to replicate the domestic, educational, and social institutions of their homeland with startling exactitude. Here they endeavored to restore a sense of common identity and imperial purpose to their lives and to pass these convictions on to their offspring. Paradoxically, then, the hill stations' contribution to the colonial project derived in the final analysis from their aura of aloofness from the rest of the subcontinent. No wonder so many observers have failed to acknowledge their complicity in the system that sustained British predominance. Their popularity derived from the notion that they had none.

What are the implications of the reintegration of the hill stations into the social history of the British in India? To answer this question, we need to trace the trajectory this history has taken. The first generation of historians to study the British colonial community tended to portray it as socially cohesive, composed mainly of upper-middle-class officials interspersed with scattered pockets of planters and merchants.^[1] Perhaps the

[1] See R. Pearson, Eastern Interlude: A Social History of the European Community in Calcutta (Calcutta, 1933); Dennis Kincaid, British Social Life in India

1608-1937 (London, 1938); Philip Woodruff, The Men Who Ruled India , vol. 1: The Founders ; vol. 2: The Guardians (1953; reprint, New York, 1964); Percival Spear, The Nabobs (1963; reprint, Calcutta, 1991). A more recent example of this approach is the work of Michael Edwardes, especially Bound to Exile: The Victorians in India (New York, 1970).

culminating example of this approach, with its stress on the homogeneity and high social standing of the colonizers, was Francis Hutchins's graceful synthesis, The Illusion of Permanence , which referred to the ruling race as a "middle class aristocracy."^[2]

This interpretation has been demolished by more recent scholarship. Probing past the easy generalizations that derived from exclusive emphasis on the mandarins of the Indian Civil Service, a second generation of historians has shown that the British Indian population was far less homogeneous than previously supposed: it was in fact fractured into many occupational, ethnic, and other groups with disparate interests and concerns.^[3] The widest fissure was the one between officials and nonofficials, but the lines of stratification were far more complex and extensive than that binarism can connote. Merchants, missionaries, planters, railway workers, soldiers, and various other groups clung to their own distinct subcultures, each existing conspicuously apart from the others.^[4] Women too operated within a world of their own, segregated from the activities and opportunities available to men.^[5] British society in India was not merely highly

[2] Francis G. Hutchins, The Illusion of Permanence: British Imperialism in India (Princeton, 1967).

[3] The work of Bernard S. Cohn, most notably the 1962 essay, "The British in Benares: A Nineteenth Century Colonial Society," reprinted in his An Anthropologist among the Historians and Other Essays (Delhi, 1987), is important to this shift of perspective.

[4] See David Arnold, "White Colonization and Labour in Nineteenth-Century India," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 9, no. 2 (Jan. 1983): 133-58; Kenneth Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class under the Raj: Imperial Attitudes and Policies and Their Critics, 1793-1905 (New York, 1980); P. J. Marshall, "The Whites of British India, 1780-1830: A Failed Colonial Society?" International History Review 12, no. 1 (Feb. 1990): 26-44; P. J. Marshall, "British Immigration into India in the Nineteenth Century," in European Expansion and Migration: Essays on the International Migration from Africa, Asia, and Europe , ed. P. C. Emmer and M. Morner (New York, 1992), 179-96; Raymond K. Renford, The Non-official British in India to 1920 (Delhi, 1987); and Zoe Yalland, Traders and Nabobs: The British in Cawnpore 1765-1857 (Salisbury, Wiltshire, 1987).

[5] See, for example, Pat Barr, The Dust in the Balance: British Women in India 1905-1945 (London, 1989); Pat Barr, The Memsahibs: The Women of Victorian India (London, 1976); Nupur Chaudhuri, "Memsahibs and Motherhood in Nineteenth-Century Colonial India," Victorian Studies 31, no. 4 (summer 1988): 517-35; Margaret MacMillan, Women of the Raj (London, 1988); and Barbara N. Ramusack, "Cultural Missionaries, Maternal Imperialists, Feminist Allies: British

Women Activists in India, 1865-1945," Women's Studies International Forum 13 , no. 4 (1990): 309-21.

segmented; it was intensely hierarchical, as visitors to the subcontinent repeatedly observed. The Indian Civil Service held pride of place in this hierarchy, but this did not prevent it from being riven with its own internal struggles over status. And high officialdom's disdain for the uncovenanted classes, the boxwallahs, and others evidenced a deeply rooted inegalitarian ethos. ^[6] Hutchins's claims for the middle-class character of the British Indian population have been challenged by growing evidence of a surprisingly large pool of poor whites. A series of studies has focused attention on various groups on the margins of British society—vagrants, orphans, prostitutes, the insane, and, pushed to the social periphery by their mixed racial origins, the Anglo-Indians or Eurasians. As David Arnold has noted, "There was a glaring incongruity between the imperialist ideal of an ethnically discrete ruling class and the presence of large numbers of poor whites."^[7]

While this scholarship has deepened our understanding of British Indian society in important ways, it has also provoked new questions that cannot be answered through the pursuit of particularism and diversity. What prevented these varied and often mutually antagonistic groups from spinning off into entirely separate paths? Where were the centripetal forces that kept them within a common orbit? How, in other words, did the diverse clusters of Britons in India sustain the sense of social cohesion necessary for the preservation of their powers and privileges as colonizers? Rather than confront these questions, most scholars have simply taken it as a given that an overarching and immutable affinity existed among Britons as Britons or, more generally, among Europeans as Europeans. This view simply assumes what should in fact be demonstrated. Britishness and Europeanness are socially and historically constructed identities, and their specific meanings and boundaries are contingent on the circumstances within which they arise. Those circumstances were quite different in the colonial world than they were in Europe itself. This point has been made with great cogency by Ann Stoler, who insists that the notion of what it

[6] See Bradford Spangenberg, British Bureaucracy in India: Status, Policy and the I.C.S. in the Late 19th Century (New Delhi, 1976).

[7] David Arnold, "European Orphans and Vagrants in India in the Nineteenth Century," Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History 7, no. 2 (Jan. 1979): 104. Also see Ballhatchet, Race, Sex and Class ; Waltraud Ernst, Mad Tales from the Raj: The European Insane in British India, 1800-1858 (London, 1991); and Richard Symonds, "Eurasians under British Rule," in Oxford University Papers on India , vol. 1, pt. 2 (Delhi, 1987), 28-42.

meant to be European in the colonies was never predetermined but, instead, was subject to unstable, socially constructed configurations.^[8] Class, race, and other cultural markers of difference in the colonial world shifted with economic and political circumstances. Thus, the cohesion of European colonizers cannot be taken for granted: it arose from distinctive challenges and through deliberate means.

The main argument of this book is that hill stations were at the heart of the British effort to define and defend the boundaries that set them apart from Indians and that sustained their identity as agents of a superior culture. To be sure, a great many other mechanisms furthered this end: newcomers were socialized to the normative codes of colonial society through clubland's powers to enforce conformity; vagrants, prostitutes, and other social deviants were removed from the scene through incarceration or deportation; whites in general were taught to appreciate the precariousness of their position and the importance of racial solidarity through reminders about the events of 1857. While all these practices contributed to the cohesion of the British Indian population, none had as much influence as the retreat to the hill stations. The role of these enclaves in rendering what it meant to be a Briton in India was a vital one.

In the hill stations the British could replicate the bourgeois civic culture that characterized the social world they had left behind in Britain. At the heart of this culture was the dialectical interplay between the public and private spheres. The public sphere was the male-dominated world of politics, policy, and production; the private sphere was the female-dominated world of family, faith, and reproduction. The articulation of the two spheres gave British society its distinctive identity. But the public/private dichotomy did not hold up well when transferred to the colonial context. The authoritarian demands of imperial rule gave predominance to the public exhibition of power, imposing an inordinately masculine, official cast on the British presence in India. The raj left little room for women, for families, for a private sphere in general, and their attenuation inhibited the civic culture that was so important to the formation of a common identity among the agents of imperialism. Only the hill stations made it possible for such an identity to be conceived, nurtured, and perpetuated within the confines

[8] Ann Laura Stoler, "Rethinking Colonial Categories: European Communities and the Boundaries of Rule," Comparative Studies in Society and History 13, no. 1 (1989): 134-61; Ann Laura Stoler, "Making Empire Respectable: The Politics of Race and Sexual Morality in 20th-Century Colonial Cultures," American Ethnologist 16, no. 4 (Nov. 1989), 634-59.

of the colonial experience. Only the hill stations created the conditions where the balance between public and private could be restored and a sense of community could be sustained.

The construction of a community is first and foremost an act of imagination, requiring the formulation of those qualities that distinguish "us" from "them." Just such an act occurred when the British began to turn their attention to India's mountains. Their decision to establish health sanitaria in the highlands was a significant step in the delineation of difference, which they articulated in the medico-climatic terms that most European expatriates could appreciate at a visceral level. The hills were cool, the plains hot; the hills were healthy, the plains disease-ridden; the hills were therefore safe, the plains dangerous. The British accentuated this contrast by evoking the aesthetics of the picturesque and the sublime in their representations of the highlands. They privileged the sites where their hill stations arose as places of beauty and splendor, places that resembled favorite landscapes back home. They made the resemblance compelling by radically reshaping the habitat of the hill stations—establishing artificial bodies of water and introducing exotic plants and animals—thereby imposing their aesthetic preferences on the physical environment. They even managed to incorporate the indigenous peoples within the framework of their efforts to create a contrast with the plains. They cast the Todas of the Nilgiris and their counterparts around other hill stations in the role of noble savages, whose supposed innocence, quiescence, and intimacy with nature could be taken as tokens of the secluded and Edenic character of the places they inhabited. Through these and other devices, the British were able to invent the hill stations as settings where they could renew their sense of themselves as members of a common community.

From the moment the first houses appeared on the ridges of the Himalayas and other highland sites, the British were faced with the task of defining and delimiting the boundaries of their community. The debate over the colonization of the highlands with pensioners, artisans, and other undercapitalized settlers was part of that process, and its outcome pointed to some of the parameters of sodality. But so too did the decision to establish the Lawrence Asylums and similar institutions in the hills for the education of orphans and other poor white children. What made the inclusion of the colonists undesirable made the inclusion of the children imperative. Nor were the young the only ones on the lower margins of white society to gain entry to the highlands. We should not forget the large numbers of British soldiers who were stationed in hill cantonments. Although Rudyard Kipling and others created the impression that the hill stations were monopolized

by civil servants and army officials and their wives, they did in fact draw a surprisingly varied clientele. Merchants, missionaries, and other nonofficials enjoyed occasional sojourns in the highlands, particularly after the advance of the railway across the subcontinent reduced the time and cost of travel. These visitors may not have gone to the hills as frequently as government officials and their families, nor stayed quite as long, but neither were they strangers to them. They may also have preferred the smaller, cheaper, humbler stations over the famous ones where the "heaven-born" congregated, but this preference was consistent with the segmentary, hierarchical nature of British colonial society. Indeed, the tendency for different groups to gravitate to different hill stations was one of the ways by which the social hierarchy was maintained. But the more telling point is that the only elements among the British population who were not welcome in one hill station or another were those marginalized whites who were not welcome in India at all.

As a result, the various hill stations contributed to the construction of the colonial community even as they catered to different sectors of it. In nearly all the stations the British created environments that reminded residents and visitors of the homeland and heritage that bound them together. "You might be up there in the hills almost as much separated from the natives as in England," remarked an official in one variation of an oft-repeated claim.^[9] The geographical isolation of the hill stations induced a sense of psychological distance from the colonized populace, offering an escape from anxieties about disease, degeneration, and rebellion. Each station resembled an English village or spa town, complete with a neo-Gothic church at its center, a pedestrian mall for evening strolls, and a medley of charming cottages framed in flowers. The social climate imitated metropolitan patterns of behaviour, with an emphasis on etiquette and an enthusiasm for parties, picnics, and other entertainments that lubricated the wheels of social interaction. The demographic disequilibrium of the colonizer community was circumvented by drawing large numbers of women to the hill stations, where they helped to construct a bourgeois private sphere with its emphasis on love and matrimony, its attention to children and family, and its general atmosphere of domesticity. The ideological commitment to the colonial endeavor was transferred from one generation to the next through the proliferation of educational institutions

[9] John Abraham Francis Hawkins, in PP, Second Report from the Select Committee on Colonization and Settlement (India) (1858), Session 1857-58, VII, pt. 1, 129.

modeled after English public schools, which provided children who could not or would not leave India with the skills and values appropriate to their place in the colonial order. Birth, education, courtship, marriage, retirement, death: most of the major transitions in the life-cycle of the colonizers occurred with far greater frequency in the hill stations than elsewhere in India. These were the places where the British in India went to cultivate a shared identity as a ruling race and to perpetuate its properties over time.

For this ruling race, the exigencies of ruling were no less important than the affinities of race, and here too the hill stations attained an importance out of all proportion to their reputations. They presented the British with the tempting prospect of governing the colonial state without interference from the governed. The imperial government's gradual shift of operations to Simla in the latter part of the nineteenth century and the equivalent seasonal transfer of the provincial governments to Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and other hill stations was a concerted effort to attain this ethereal political condition. Combined with the movement of large segments of the Indian Army's headquarters and troops to the hills, this relocation of power was intended to prolong the colonial enterprise. The British sought in this way to secure a vantage point from which they could oversee their subjects while remaining unassailable by them.

In the final analysis, of course, they failed. And their failure too can be written in the history of the hill stations. Even these remote and exclusive enclaves were not immune to the forces that overturned the raj. On the contrary, they exemplified some of the contradictions at the very core of the British endeavor. They were meant to provide a refuge from contact with the Indian masses, but they depended on the Indian masses for their construction and maintenance. They were meant to provide a setting in which the government could exercise its authority dispassionately, but they isolated the government from the public's interests and aroused the people's passionate ire. They were meant to be places where the British could define themselves according to an exclusive set of cultural values and practices, but they attracted a Westernized Indian elite whose adoption of some of the same values and practices subverted British claims of exclusivity. Thus, the hill stations must be considered not only in terms of the social history of the British, but of the Indians as well. The testimony to this fact is that they have not just survived but thrived since independence.