Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India

Abstract

Nostalgia for home is quite natural among expatriates. The English country life recreated in the hill stations of India, however, was elaborated on by the greater prestige of an imperial people. This paper examines the hill station as a landscape type tied to nineteenth‐century discourses of imperialism and climate. Both discourses serve as evidence of a belief in racial difference and, thereby, the imperial hill station reflected and reinforced a framework of meaning that influenced European views of the non‐western world in general. Because the hill station was seen as a resource to be protected for use by the British ruler, the standards used in colonial settlement planning are framed in these discourses of privilege and difference. Primary attention is given to the high imperial age from 1870 to 1914 when construction activity was greatest. Ootacamund, the summer capital of the Madras presidency in southern India, serves as the case study for evaluating this landscape type.

On the colonial frontier: gender, exploration and plant‐hunting on Mount Victoria in early 20th‐century Burma

“…In early 1911, Wheeler‐Cuffe declared to her mother that Winifred MacNabb, wife of the Deputy Commissioner, had invited her ‘to spend part of the hot weather up on Mt Victoria, the highest mountain in Burma … I'd sooner go there than to a “civilized” place’ . She was referring to the high altitude hill stations, popular destinations during the hot season for colonials in the British Raj, with Maymyo, outside of Mandalay, being the Burmese summer capital (Bhattacharya ; Kenny ). While Mount Victoria in the Chin Hills is not actually the highest peak in Burma at over 3000 metres, it was considered at the time to be among the highest in the land.…”

Intersecting Discourses on Tropicality and Disease Causation: Representations of Réunion's Mosquito-borne Epidemics in the Scientific Literature

“…11 From 1901 the British used malaria prevention as a rationale for racial residential segregation in their tropical colonies. For example, tropical 'native peoples' in Sierra Leone were separated from their rulers by a distance believed to be greater than that which could be covered by a mosquito (Frenkel and Western, 1988), and the hill station retreats from diseased locals (and mosquitoes) in India were similarly construed (Kenny, 1995). and diseased 'Other', then they were maintained by a need to restrict public health expenditure in widely dispersed, costly environments.…”

‘Happy is the bride the rain falls on’:1 climate, health and ‘the woman question’ in nineteenth‐century missionary documentation

“…The hotter lowland or ‘plains’ areas were regarded as being particularly perilous, while the most favoured locations for Europeans in India at the time were cooler upland areas. For this reason, Kenny (1995, 694) estimates that 80 settlements or hill stations were built by the British to serve as mountain refuges from the hot plains 12 . These distinctions between the hills and plains can be recognized in the application details of Sophie Slater.…”

“…12 12 Interestingly Kenny (1995, 696) highlights how hill stations also allowed the imperial elites to effectively distance themselves from their subaltern subjects on the plains. …”