The Raj in high places

Empire in the Hills
Queeny Pradhan
Oxford University Press
427 pages; Rs 995

Back in the mid-19th century, an English journalist called John Lang had written, amongst other things, about hill stations
and how the British lived there. The sahebs were not pleased.

In 2012, Rajika Bhandari wrote a book about dak bungalows and circuit houses that the British had built to rest their weary bodies while on tour (The Raj on the Move). These hostelries were useful for conducting illicit liaisons but Ms Bhandari did not mention that.  

But unlike Ms Bhandari’s and Mr Lang’s light offerings, Queenie Pradhan’s is a very serious book. Sadly, however, the scholarship seems wasted as it is about a very trivial subject, namely, how the English, after they fully conquered India in 1820, suddenly realised what a hot country it was, especially in the summer.

Without wasting much time, they started looking for places to run off to between April and October. Thus were the “hill stations” born. Shimla was the first to emerge in the 1820s. Gradually many other siblings came along.

The author has written about four of them – Shimla, Darjeeling, Ooty and Mount Abu – in her PhD thesis submitted to the Jawaharlal Nehru University. It is a very scholarly study of the subject.

But it is not a book you will want to carry with you if you are going on a holiday to one of these “hill stations” because it is so heavy and costly. But it is certainly worth reading in an air-conditioned office room or library.

Sad exile

What emerges as a sub-text in this rich-on-detail book is a tale of sadness. Here these fellows were, far away from home, wondering if they’d ever get back alive and so on.

Long-forgotten and eminently forgettable Britons flit through its pages. We are once again reminded, as a by-product and without rancour or outrage, about British brigandage — we came, we saw, we took. The kabja gangs of Lahore can take heart.

As Ms Pradhan points out there were no or little local resources available for building. Almost everything had to come from the plains.

But perhaps because this was written as a PhD thesis, the author has made no effort to capture the drama that must have gone into the development of these spots — you know, Britons being bitten by wild animals, catching malaria, dying of dysentery and so on. Percival Spear’s classic The Nabobs comes to mind in that context. The paperback edition costs more than Rs 5,000 now.  

Ms Pradhan has, however, devoted an entire chapter to the health concerns in these places. The natives, rich and poor, were a problem. Their hygiene left much to be desired.

To help the British in various types of distress, hospitals were built — different ones for the rich and the poor and the natives, naturally. Poor whites were lumped with the natives. Neither liked it but what to do?

That said, it must also be acknowledged that the British did bring modern health and modern education to places that had none. That was a major plus point of British rule in the hills which had been neglected hitherto by the Indian rulers.

Social life

This is the most interesting chapter in the book, in spite of its listlessness. If you read between the lines, you get a sense of why Indians and Britons hit it off so well. Both believe in social divisions and hierarchies.

The British created these Little Englands replete with its absurdities of class and ritual. The pecking order was almost the same as now — government types at the top of the pole, followed by the military, the Anglo-Indians, the boxwallahs, the wogs and the rest.

The only thing to have changed in independent India is that the wogs come after the government types. But they are called liberals now, Anglo-Saxons in brown skins.

These wogs were held in high esteem to begin with, says the author, but towards the end of the 19th century they became objects of derision. The Bengalis came in for special contempt and one Englishmen described them as suffering from a “moral lisp,” whatever that meant. Several doggerels were also made up to deride them.

In the end though, these “hill stations” were not very much more than a set of naturally air-conditioned rooms. As Curzon, that arch imperialist, once put it, “India may be governed from Shimla or Calcutta, but it is administered from the plains”.

Today we can say with equal certainty, India may be governed from Delhi but it is administered from the states.