The ruling family of Sikkim was largely Tibetan, while its subjects were mostly Lepchas and other tribes, a cause of internal friction. When the rajah had a Lepcha leader assassinated, many of the leader’s followers fled west into Nepal. Aided by the Gorkhas, they commenced a series of raids on Sikkim.2 The dispute drew the attention of the East India Company, which, following a treaty article, was bound to arbitrate any conflict between Sikkim and its neighbors. The Company dispatched Captain George Lloyd, a forty-year-old commander of a nearby army camp, and J. W. Grant, an explorer and the commercial resident of Malda (a village on the plains about halfway to Calcutta, now called English Bazar), who were familiar with the terrain.
During their 1829 trip, the two men spent six days at “the old Goorka station called Dorjeling,” the first Europeans to do so. No doubt they were besotted by the spot’s beauty and views. On seeing the chain of mountains that stand to the north of Darjeeling, “the observer is struck with the precision and sharpness of their outlines,” wrote Joseph Hooker in his Himalayan Journals, “and still more with the wonderful play of colours on their snowy flanks, from the glowing hues reflected in orange, gold and ruby, from clouds illumined by the sinking or rising sun, to the ghastly pallor that succeeds with twilight, when the red seems to give place to its complementary colour, green.”3
The governor-general of India, Lord Bentinck—not long in his position and still a few years away from forming the Tea Committee—pressed for more on the region’s suitability as a sanitarium. The East India Company had begun establishing hill station retreats, with healthy mountain climates and clean air, for their men to recuperate from the heat and ill effects of the tropical climate. (Air was considered to be the source of numerous diseases, from cholera to malaria, whose name derives from the Italian mal’aria, “bad air.”) Delhi and the Punjab had Shimla (Simla) and Mussoorie nearby, Madras had Ootacamund (affectionately known as Ooty) in the Nilgiri mountains, to the southeast of Bombay rose the hills of Poona, and soon the company would lease Mt. Abu in Rajasthan from its princely owner. But soldiers stationed in Calcutta and around Bengal had no convenient Company settlement to escape the heat.
After Lloyd and Grant wrote encouragingly of the area’s potential in their report, Bentinck sent Grant back, along with the deputy surveyor-general of India, Captain James Herbert, a trained geologist with considerable Himalayan experience, to fully assess the site’s suitability. Grant’s 1830 report suggested Darjeeling was ideally situated for a sanitarium but also, importantly, offered a vantage point to keep watch on the Lepchas and Nepalese, control over a key pass to Nepal, and access to trade with Sikkim and Tibet.
A formal request was made to the Rajah of Sikkim for the land that same year. Lloyd assumed it would be easy to obtain cession, but the petition was denied.4
The Company instructed Lloyd to acquire it “on the first convenient occasion.”5 Another border dispute erupted in 1834, and the British went to mediate again. This time they wanted the Darjeeling tract in exchange. The rajah was reluctant and offered alternatives. Lloyd continued to insist, and finally the rajah relented. By then, though, the British had told their agent to stop negotiating. Lloyd ignored instructions, secured the land, and only later informed his superiors.
Dated February 1, 1835, the deed is brief:
The Governor-General [Lord Bentinck] having expressed his desire for the possession of the hills of Darjeeling on account of its cool climate, for the purpose of enabling the servants of his Government, suffering from sickness, to avail themselves of its advantages, I, the Sikkimputtee Rajah, out of friendship for the said Governor-General, hereby present Darjeeling to the East India Company, that is, all the land south of the Great Ranjeet river, east of the Balasur, Kahail and Little Runjeet rivers, and west of the Rungno and Mahanadi rivers.6
What had been a request for land to house a sanitarium became a generous 138-square-mile tract, an unconditional gift. In exchange, the rajah received one rifle, one double-barreled shotgun, twenty yards of red broadcloth, and two pairs of shawls, one of superior quality, the other inferior. A few years later the government granted the rajah an allowance of Rs 3,000 per annum for compensation, then doubled it to Rs 6,000.
Once in East India Company hands, Lloyd returned to the site in November 1836, along with an assistant surgeon, to spend the winter and spring studying the area and its climate in detail. The Company hoped to avoid a fate similar to that of another hill station recently built in Assam at Cherrapunji, which turned out to be the wettest place on earth.*
The men submitted their final report in June 1837, and the Company decided to proceed with the considerable challenge of establishing a town. The hills were steep and spurred, cleaved by precipitous valleys with few level spots, and largely covered with nearly impassable growth. “All is still forest and so thick that one can hardly crawl through it,” wrote one settler in the early 1840s.7 Everything had to be brought up from the plains on bullock carts, then carried by porters along the series of chorbatos (paths) that ran through the dense, primeval forests.8 Tigers and leopards roamed the hills, with small bears, Himalayan wolves, and numerous species of highly venomous snakes. Malaria-carrying mosquitoes came out at dusk, monkeys pillaged the maize fields at night, and during the wet months leeches became endemic. Perhaps the biggest torment on the way to and from Darjeeling were tiny, robust black flies called peepsa (or pipsa; Simulium indicum), which managed to get through the finest mesh nets.9 Their bites caused swelling, intolerable itching, and no small number of workers brought in from the plains to flee the area.
The Darjeeling tract, Lloyd wrote in an early report, had no villages and only twenty to thirty houses. Though sparsely inhabited, the land—home to the Lepcha people—was not uninhabited.
When the British arrived, the Lepcha still practiced a type of migratory agriculture called jhum. Just before the rainy season, they would burn a tract of forest, making room to plant and also releasing nutrients in the ash. Once rain fell, and the ash had soaked into the earth, they planted. After intensely farming a plot for three years, with the land exhausted from a rapid string of different crops, they abandoned the site and repeated the process elsewhere. Firing season made for spectacular displays, as Hooker—one of the first to document Lepcha agricultural traditions in detail—recorded:
The voices of the birds and insects being hushed, nothing is audible but the harsh roar of the rivers, and occasionally, rising far above it, that of the forest fires. At night we were literally surrounded by them; some smoldering, like shale-heaps at a colliery, others fitfully bursting forth, whilst others again stalked along with a steadily increasing and enlarging flame, shooting out great tongues of fire, which spared nothing as they advanced with irresistible might. Their triumph is in reaching a great bamboo clump, when the noise of the flames drowns that of the torrents, and as the great stem-joints burst from the expansion of confined air, the report is as that of a salvo from a park of artillery. At Dorjiling the blaze is visible, and the deadened reports of the bamboos bursting is heard throughout the night; but in the valley, and within a mile of the scene of destruction, the effect is the most grand, being heightened by the glare reflected from the masses of mist which hover above.10