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Magazine
The hills are slowly dying
RUKUN ADVANI
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It's a sobering thought that a combination of bacteria and the Brits gave the country its hill stations. Ironically, they will soon be sucked dry by Indians themselves.
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COURTESY: RESORTS OF THE RAJ PUBLISHED BY MAPIN
APPARENTLY India is the only country in the world with hill stations. This is not, of course, because other countries don't have little towns perched on their mountains, but because "hill station" is by definition an Indian refuge from the heat of its plains, with a colonial history behind it. You can't escape to a hill station in Austria or Scotland, for example, because they only have ski resorts and tourist Shangri-la's. Moreover, in such countries there isn't the huge topographical and climatic contrast between mountains and plains that you need for the very concept of a hill station to exist: even if you manage to spot a plain in Scotland larger than a football field, it won't be an unbearable, low, lying stretch from which you need to run, specially in summer. Theoretically, the U.S. could have hill stations, but it has a good substitute: air conditioners.
The hill station's raison d'etre, created by the British, is the climatic disaster zone below it. Historians of colonialism who blame everything on the Brits don't like to think too hard about how valuable this creation is when wangling themselves summer sojourns in Shimla. Comfortable havens can be uncomfortable facts of history: alongside the English language, the British legacy that middle-class Indians most crave is a mountainous ivory tower removed from the depravity of May and the insanity of June at sea level. Equally, the discomfiting truth that Hindu nationalists cannot face is that one corner of every middle-class Indian heart is forever England, which is clear from the widespread Indian desire to acquire the English language and escape for decent stretches, if not forever, to the West. Or, failing that, to the West's local equivalents, its hilltop boltholes.
British hill stations were, and largely remain, India's geographical equivalents of the social elites they attracted. They also continue to serve a much larger psychological function which links British desires and times with our own. If you managed to find refuge in hill stations, they seemed like quiet havens of sanity, which, despite their ever-burgeoning populations, removed you from the clamorous urban hell of mainstream India. This was so in 1903, this is so in 2003. There is no clear distinction between the summertime desires of colonial upper classes and those of postcolonial brown-skinned elites. The Vishwa Hindu Parishad wants Ayodhya; most Hindus actually only want Nainital and Kodaikanal. These places are nearer nirvana.
Now it's summer, when affluent India's neo-colonial yearnings for escape make this clearer than over the rest of the year. If Ayodhya were situated 6500 feet above sea level, even I would be tempted to become a card-carrying member of the VHP. But everyone who has any money has put it into a hotel instead of a temple and is running in the opposite direction from Lord Rama's birthplace, mostly uphill to a hill station, recognising no doubt that that's the right way to heaven. One historian, Nora Mitchell, has listed as many as 96 of these hill stations; another historian, Dane Kennedy, thinks there were 65. But if, like me, you want an infinite period of temporary relief from middle India and its revolting political culture — and therefore want yourself and your dog to exclusively own the whole country's pine-scented air for all time — you tend to get the feeling that your particular hilltop must be the only one there is in the country since the whole of effing India seems to be on your tail.
This is specially so if you're on your way to Shimla, which, like Bangalore, was once classifiable as a hill station and has now degenerated into a water-scarce, messed-up state capital. Right now, every Indian seems to be on his way there. Consequently, one of the things that doesn't quite run uphill, but which huffs and puffs painfully up like a dragon with severe arthritis, is the hill train that runs from Kalka to Shimla, lugging the ascending hordes. The tracks on which this toy train daily labours, winding its way through 103 tunnels, were finally completed precisely a hundred years ago, in 1903, so this may be a good time to finally call it a day, stop that wretchedly slow train, and thus prevent more Indians flooding Shimla and killing it. Permanent residents of Shimla, like those of Bangalore, are certainly keen on some solution to the urban overgrowth that has stifled their homes. They are, of course, doomed. In this era of illiberal, plebeian democracy, there is little space for the preservation of architectural heritage, only room for multi-storeyed `development'.
By the start of the last century, colonial India's hill stations were strung out all over the subcontinent. The primary requirements then, as now, were escape from the weather lower down, and respite from the presence of India's human multitudes as well as its mosquitoes — the difference between the two being broadly irrelevant. Given this attitude, the solution was altitude: the Brits found that the ideal elevation for getaways lay between 6000 and 7500 feet, and in north India the larger hill settlements came up around these heights.
Some hill stations had exalted government status. Shimla was the permanent official home of the British army commander, apart from being summer capital for the viceroy. How nice it must have been to be the army commander, living all year in Shimla and chivvying the boys down below to kill a few natives now and then, all via the telegraph. ("Oh, jolly good, old chap, by jove, massacre a few more, there's a good fellow!" I have to confess that, watching some of the plastic-littering, women-leering vulgarians who visit our hill stations now, my own feelings are often no different from the army commander's.)
Darjeeling, Nainital and Ootacamund had smaller government establishments, but they too were host to viceroys and governors. Then there were hill stations like Mussoorie, Kodaikanal, Almora and Matheran, less infested with bureaucrats, which functioned as private resting spots. They all had malls and bandstands and clock towers and churches. Then there were the smallest hill stations, which had a few hotels and no babus: Yercaud had coffee planters; Ranikhet had retired folk, Mukteshwar a veterinary research institute, Bhowali a sanatorium.
Many of these hill stations began life as long ago as the 1820s, when early British settlers first sought nests in attractive locations. One of the events that gave impetus to hill settlements was a huge outbreak of cholera in the plains between 1818 and 1821. Another was the belief in the hills as a restorative against tuberculosis, a third the inability of mosquitoes to breed beyond a certain altitude.
It's a sobering thought that a combination of bloodsuckers — bacteria and the Brits — gave us our hill stations. Ironically, the blood is now being sucked out the other way: India's hill stations will soon be sucked dry by a new variety of bloodsuckers. Us.
Rukun Advani is the author of Beethoven Among the Cows and runs Permanent Black, a publishing house based in Ranikhet.
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