The rebellion started in Meerut when Bengal army soldiers shot their British officers, moved to Delhi, drew in the aging Mughal emperor Bahadur Shah Zafar as their figurehead, and eventually spread along the Gangetic plain. The rebellion was put down ferociously but not swiftly. It took the British more than a year to fully quell it. The costs were dreadful, and reprisals on both sides viciously brutal. Zafar’s heirs—his two sons and grandson—were killed in cold blood, and the last Mughal emperor was exiled to Rangoon, where he died as a prisoner and was buried in an unmarked grave. In the aftermath, mutual distrust increased along with separation, racial isolation, and British feelings of superiority.
The rebellion, Dalrymple wrote, “marked the end of both the East India Company and the Mughal dynasty, the two principal forces that had shaped Indian history over the previous three hundred years, and replaced both with undisguised imperial rule by the British government.”14
It was a decisive moment in the British rule of India. In 1874, the East India Company, “formidable rival of states and empires, with power to acquire territory, coin money, command fortresses and troops, form alliances, make war or peace, and exercise both civil and criminal jurisdiction,”15 was effectively dissolved, and the British Crown assumed all of the Company’s responsibilities and administration of the country. The metamorphosis from commercial traders—boxwallahs!—to imperialists was official. The governor-general was now viceroy, and within a couple of decades, Queen Victoria would become Empress of India. “We don’t rule this country anymore,” Ronald Merrick says in Paul Scott’s The Raj Quartet. “We preside over it in accordance with a book of rules written by people back home.”16 He wasn’t exaggerating. In 1901 less than a thousand British officials of the Indian Civil Service (ICS) administered, with unshakable self-confidence, the affairs of more than 300 million people. They were backed by 60,000 British troops and 120,000 Indian troops,17 not to mention the tens—or hundreds—of thousands of Indians who supported the ICS and ran the day-to-day operations of the country and did the main work of the administration.
After the uprising, the British in India, went the convention, had to remain above India (and Indians) and not become a part of it (or equals among them). The narrator in Kipling’s story “Beyond the Pale” baldly states the prevailing opinion: “A man should, whatever happens, keep to his own caste, race and breed.”18 In the years that followed the rebellion, Dalrymple noted, “There was almost complete apartheid, an almost religious belief in racial differences, and little friendship or marriage across strictly policed racial and religious boundaries.”19
As the eminent Indian intellectual Gurcharan Das commented, the British, for the most part, “did not interfere with our ancient traditions and our religion.” They were generally religiously tolerant of their Hindu and Muslim subjects, and India preserved its spiritual heritage, customs, and monuments. Past invaders—Aryans, Turks, Afghans, and Mughals—“merged and became Indian.” The Brits were different. “They did not merge with us and remained aloof to the end.”20
Hill stations were a physical rendering of such aloofness.
The British “could start from scratch” on distant hilltops to be “celestially withdrawn from the Indian millions on the plains below,” live “a few months in the year entirely for themselves,”21 and “pretend that India had receded from their lives.”22
The stations, built for Europeans, developed as oases of European civilization in the form of idyllic English or Scottish villages: churches with Gothic edifices, stained glass, and bell towers, bandstands for concerts with strident military tunes, the mall—limited to pedestrians and horses—for strolling, and, most notably in Shimla, a lively amateur theatrical season. Half-timbered, Tudor-style bungalows with low roofs and porches perched precariously on hillsides and offered stunning views. Owners christened them with names such as Willowdale, Springbrook, and Briar and surrounded them with roses and ornamental plants often raised from British seed. These flowering beds formed “a cordon sanitaire to keep India at bay.”23 For “Britishers,” hill stations were a fundamental part of life during the colonial era.
But hill stations were not intended to be tourist resorts as they are today. Rather, they were built as sanitariums for East India Company employees to rest and recuperate. With excruciating summer temperatures on India’s plains and tropical maladies cutting short the life span of British soldiers, whose numbers increased greatly after the uprising of 1857, Britain began building convalescent settlements in the mountains in the second half of the nineteenth century. Within a couple of decades, some eighty hill stations, from the grand (Shimla, Ooty, Darjeeling) to the less noted (Yercaud in Tamil Nadu, Almora and Ranikhet in Uttar Pradesh), were spread across the subcontinent.24
Ranging from four thousand to eight thousand feet in elevation, their initial attraction was a less oppressive climate that offered a chance to regain health and recoup one’s old vigor. Heat was a frequent source of problems, although not infrequently exacerbated by inadequate clothing. Soldiers were still dressing in woolens and colorful Napoleonic-era uniforms with heavy ornamental insignia more suitable for a Central European battlefield than the scorching plains of the Indian subcontinent. The diet contained often excessively and unsuitably heavy food and too many bottles of fortified Madeira from Portugal. “We blame India for all our ailments, forgetting to accommodate our habits to its climate,” The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook, the domestic bible for the British in India that ran through at least ten editions between 1888 and 1921, sternly admonished,25 mindful that it took far too long for flannels to be replaced by cotton undergarments and girdles left in the closet.
At first modest, hill stations grew into a pure and distilled expression of the Britishness of the Empire26 and potent colonial emblems. From 1864 until 1947, the summer capital of British India was an improbably small and inaccessible mountain resort. “From Shimla were directed the affairs of 308 million people—two and a half times the population, by Gibbon’s estimate, of the Roman Empire at its climax,” Morris noted.27 Or, at the time, about one-fifth of mankind.
Shimla might have been comfortable, even somewhat familiar, but it took weeks to reach from the capital. Until 1911, when the newly crowned King-Emperor George V transferred it to Delhi, the capital of British India was Calcutta, some twelve hundred miles from Shimla. But when the heat arrived, as Kipling wrote:
… the Rulers in that City by the Sea
Turned to flee—
Fled, with each returning Spring-tide, from its ills
To the Hills.28
The level of British organization and the depth of desire, even desperation, to flee the heat culminated with the yearly move of the entire central government apparatus piece by piece from the capital into the hills when the hot weather arrived, and then back down again when it receded.29 The caravan of bullock carts, camels, and elephants, syces (grooms) and scribes, guards, memsahibs and children, cooks and ayahs making their way slowly to the hills was befitting of kings and conquerors on the move. “Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps,” Geoffrey Moorhouse noted, “had nothing on the British Raj ascending to its summer retreat.”30