INDIA WAS not for the fainthearted. Those who arrived in the cool season were agreeably surprised by the sunshine and pleasant temperatures, such a contrast to the Stygian gloom of British winters. But all three presidency towns—Madras, Calcutta, and Bombay—were low, swampy, and pestilential. For much of the year the heat was well-nigh unbearable; even the monsoons did little to moderate it, adding only an enervating humidity and rampant mold. Flowers and people alike wilted after the first freshness of dawn, and life was lived from sunrise to sunset in the semidarkness of shuttered rooms. For the first centuries of East India Company presence, there was little escape except to garden houses in the suburbs—airier but scarcely cooler—or, all too often, to the peace of the churchyard. “Sing a song of sixpence,” went the ditty,
Purchased with our lives,
Decent English gentlemen
Roasting with their wives,
In the plains of India,
Where like flies they die.1
Over time the British adapted their architecture, adding verandahs to shade their houses from the relentless sun. The surrounding garden, however, was too hot to venture into during the daylight hours of summer. For whatever reason, Europeans never imitated the plan of the Indian haveli which François Bernier had found so deliciously cool, “with its courtyard, gardens, trees, basins of water, small jets d’eau,” and terraces where the whole family might sleep at night.2 A few of the more Indianized Delhi officials did adopt the Mughal tehkhana, an underground room or set of rooms in which one could repose until the late afternoon made them too hot and stuffy. More commonly they borrowed the use of screens of fragrant grass on outer doors, constantly soaked in scented water to catch what breezes there might be. In addition, punkahs hung from the ceilings. These were simply fans writ large: rectangular pieces of cloth, pulled to and fro by servants, typically via a string attached to the big toe. A visitor summed up life in the burning plains through the long summer months: “The fair fresh Western faces become paler, and more pale, as they lie gasping under the monotonous swing of the punkah, dreading heat-apoplexy, should the weary ‘punkah-wallah’ fall asleep (as he is only too likely to do).”3
A more ambitious contrivance was the thermantidote, first invented about 1830. “Awful to behold,” the thermantidote was an enormous machine made of wood and standing some seven feet high, four or five feet across, and nine or ten in length, with small wheels to make it more maneuverable. When set up on the verandah, it forced air into the window of a house through a funnel by means of four large metal fans attached to an iron axle and turned constantly by two men. On its way into the house the air passed through tattis, mats of woven grass. These in turn required relays of coolies handing up water in earthen pots to other coolies on top of the machine seeing to it that the tattis were kept dripping wet. “By this means all the air that passes into the body of the machine through the wetted khas-khas [grass] is rendered cool and fit to be forced into the house by action of the fans in their circular course.” “You have no idea,” Fanny Parks adds approvingly, “how fragrant, delicious and refreshing is the scent of the fresh khas-khas.”4
Unique to Bombay was the custom of building temporary residences on the Esplanade facing the sea during the hot season: rows of bungalows made of bamboo and plaster, lined with “strained dungaree” (a “coarse kind of unbleached cloth” dyed a pale straw color) and shaded by flowering creepers and luxuriant shrubs from the midday sun. Offices were placed near the bungalows and the whole enclosed in a “pretty compound, filled with fine plants, arranged in tubs, round the trellised verandahs.” In the tubs the shrubs flourished in spite of the sea air, “usually considered too inimical to the labours of the horticulturists.” This was hardly camping out. As Marianne Postans, an upcountry official’s wife, commented with satisfaction, “Elegance combines with comfort, in making these pretty abodes truly pleasant; and a fine-toned piano, and a good billiard table, are the usual addition to varied articles of luxury and convenience.” With the “sweet perfume” of the flowers and the fresh sea breezes of evening, what more could one wish for? Alas, as the rains approached these structures had to be pulled down and stored, sending their inhabitants reluctantly back to the confines of the fort as the Esplanade disappeared under a sheet of water.5
But things were changing. Fanny Parks was of the first generation that could flee the heat and dust of the plains to the hills where, as Kim’s Lama put it, “the air and water are fresh and cool.”6 The East India Company’s more aggressive expansion toward the end of the eighteenth century had several major consequences. First of all, it opened up for exploration and exploitation new regions of which the British had been only dimly aware. Second, it required a much greater military and civilian presence, with attendant concerns about how they were to survive in the hostile climate of the tropics. In the early decades of the nineteenth century these conquests coincided with a burst of scientific interest in epidemiology and the health-restoring benefits of higher altitudes. Just when disease-ridden soldiers and enervated officials most needed them, the higher altitudes were providentially at hand, from the Himalayas in the north to the Nilgiris in the south. To go to the hills was, as one subaltern put it, like “passing through the Valley of Death to Paradise.”7 Here a very different India beckoned, an India where familiar flowers bloomed, where nights were cool and sallow complexions regained a rosy glow. One could almost imagine one was at home.
All told there were some eighty hill stations in India, ranging in altitude between 2,500 and 8,000 feet. The best known were those in the foothills of the Himalayas (Simla, Naini Tal, Mussoorie-Landour, Dalhousie, Muree, Darjeeling) and in the Nilgiris (Ootacamund, Coonor), but there were also Matheran and Mahabaleshwar in the Western Ghats, inland from Bombay; Mount Abu in the Aravalli Mountains of southern Rajasthan; Shillong in Assam; and others sprinkled in the Deccan and southeast. The lower ones offered fresher air, cooler temperatures, and more pleasing prospects than the plains, but they were still within the malaria belt, which extended to 4,500–5,000 feet.
As more upland regions came under British control through conquest and treaty, Company officials were charged with finding suitable locations for sanatoria, especially for the British military, whose morbidity and mortality rates were alarming. The devastating epidemic of cholera that swept across the continent in from 1817 to 1821 added to the urgency of the quest. Lacking an understanding of the etiology of tropical diseases, medical opinion at first simply designated heat as the cause, so that the obvious remedy was removal to cooler climates. Theories became more nuanced when experience showed that not all diseases responded to a spell in the hills—indeed, overcrowding and poor sanitation in time spawned outbreaks of cholera, dysentery, and typhoid in the hill stations themselves—but in general it became accepted wisdom that almost everyone benefited from the tonic effect of an escape from the “burning plains.”
If this was true for soldiers and bureaucrats, missionaries, and planters, it was equally so for women, who began to arrive in India in increasing numbers once the East India Company lost its power to restrict immigration in 1833.8 After her first night in Mahabaleshwar, the hill station for Bombay, Lady Falkland, wife of the governor, enthused: “You think you have received a new set of bones: you get up refreshed and your feet seem to run away with you.”9 Fanny Parks was just as ecstatic as she journeyed to Landour through forests of rhododendron, her attendants filling her lap with wildflowers along the way: “The delicious air, so pure, so bracing, so unlike any air I had breathed for fifteen years—with what delight I inhaled it! It seemed to promise health and strength and spirits. . . . I felt a buoyancy of spirit, like that enjoyed by a child.”10 Her father, Major Edward Archer, had felt the same delight when he first ventured into the hills, declaring that those flocking to the hills in search of health “fully believe Hygeia herself has taken up her abode among them.”11 The effect on children was, if anything, more salutary. “It is incredible,” Sir Joseph Hooker observed, “what a few weeks of that mountain air does for the Indian-born children of European parents: they are taken there sickly, pallid or yellow, soft and flabby, to become transformed into models of rude health and activity.”12 To Fanny Parks the children in Mussoorie looked “as well and as strong as any children in England”; indeed, she went so far as to declare the climate in the hills to be “far superior to that of England.”13
Most of the hill stations were founded in the 1820s and 1830s by military or civilian employees of the East India Company. By the second half of the nineteenth century Europeans retreated to the hills for a sizeable portion of the year and continued to do so until the eve of the Second World War. Inevitably stations soon arranged themselves in a pecking order: the highest altitudes were the preserve of the social and official elite, while the boxwallahs recuperated at lower levels, along with the soldiery in adjacent cantonments. Dominating all was Simla, the summer capital of the Raj. Others hosted provincial governments: Ootacamund, Madras; Naini Tal, the United Provinces; Mahabaleshwar, Bombay; Murree, Rawalpindi; Darjeeling, the lieutenant-governor of Calcutta and his staff. Low down on the totem pole was Yercaud in the Shevari Hills of the Eastern Ghats. For all its lovely views and equable climate, to say nothing of its proximity to Madras and Salem, it became all too exclusively identified with the coffee planters of the region.14 Within the British population of each station there was also a keen awareness of who was who, the Order of Precedence serving as Holy Writ for social relations. “Like oil and water, Simla’s social classes did not mix.”15 Altitude reflected social status: thus the viceroy and commander-in-chief inhabited the peaks of Simla. The same was true of most other stations. Kodaikanal, founded in the mid-1840s by American missionaries in Madurai, was the sole exception, with its more egalitarian society. Appropriately, too, the roof of its first church was made entirely of flattened Huntley and Palmer biscuit tins, in contrast to the stately Anglican spires in other stations.16
Stations of the Himalayas
Gods have always been partial to mountains; witness Sinai and Olympus. Long before the British first set foot in them, the Himalayas were revered as the dwelling place of the greatest of the Hindu deities; it was Devbhumi, the Land of the Gods, claimed “by a host of divine characters from the mythic past.”17 At Mount Kailash, Siva lived with his consort, Parvati, daughter of Himalaya, king of the mountains. At Gangotsi Glacier in Garhwal, the goddess Ganga was brought to earth as a result of the pious austerities performed by the sage Bhagirath. Lord Siva received the full force of the river in his matted locks so that Ganga would not fall directly on the earth and destroy it.18 For Indians, the mountains are still linked to the heavenly hosts: “This is the hill where Shiva danced,” or “This lake was made by Arjuna’s arrow.”19 Sacred sites such as Hardwar attract millions of pilgrims all year round to bathe in the Ganges where it emerges from the Himalayas. In the same manner, pilgrims flock to the Amarnath Cave in Kashmir every summer to worship at the giant ice lingam of Siva. “Who goes to the Hills,” runs a Hindu proverb, “goes to his mother.”20
But if the Indians of the plains dotted the mountains with temples, they had no desire to live there, leaving the craggy fastnesses and deep valleys to indigenous “tribals.” The Mughals, on the other hand, found the heat of the plains as unbearable as the British did. The answer to their prayers was Kashmir, first visited by Emperor Akbar in 1589. Akbar made of Kashmir what he once called his private garden. He and his successors delighted in its natural beauty but at the same time embellished it with matchless gardens: Shalimar, Achibal, Verinag. They laid out gardens along the route to Srinagar to camp in during the long journey, and then all about the shores of Dal Lake, glorying in the cascading streams from the melting snows of spring and summer, the verdant meadows, the infinite possibilities for terracing that abounded, “their water-courses dropping from level to level down rippled concrete falls”—so unlike the flat vastnesses of the Gangetic plain (see Pl. 9). Akbar’s son Jahangir adored Kashmir beyond all other places on earth, proclaiming that “he would rather lose all his empire than Kachmire.” In his memoirs, he referred to Kashmir as “a perennial garden,” noting that “red roses, violets, and narcissi grow wild; there are fields after fields of all kinds of flowers.”21 Indeed, his passion for plants and flowers recalled that of his great-grandfather, Babur; he gladly left the governing of his realm to his beloved wife, Nur Mahal, so that he could devote himself to the study of nature and the planning of gardens. A count taken during his reign showed more than seven hundred in Kashmir alone.22
“Who has not heard of the Vale of Cashmere, / With its roses the brightest that earth ever gave, / Its temples, and grottoes, and fountains as clear / As the love-lighted eyes that hang over the wave?”23 The romance of Kashmir had stirred the imagination of the British through Thomas Moore’s Lalla Rookh not long before they began to look seriously at hill stations. The poem purports to tell the story of a Mughal princess who falls in love with a Persian poet while journeying to meet her betrothed. “If woman can make the worst wilderness dear,” wrote Moore, “Think! Think! what a Heaven she can make of Kashmir.”24 With or without woman, Kashmir has continued to represent Paradise on earth. While generations of Anglo-Indians made their individual pilgrimages to Kashmir, they could not appropriate it as they did land elsewhere in the Himalayas, for the simple reason that they did not control it. The province had been ceded to the British after the First Sikh War in 1843, but they immediately sold it to Gulab Singh, the Raja of Jammu, for £750,000. The move was criticized on strategic grounds but had other repercussions as well. The ruler and his successors refused to allow the British full legal title to land, so that although they might flock to Gulmarg, Srinagar, and Sonamurg (“surely the most beautiful place in the world”), they did not invest the same resources in Kashmir as in other stations. They managed, however, to circumvent the ban on owning land by taking to its lakes in houseboats, serviceable but “evidently derived . . . from Oxford college barges, or the boats of City livery companies.”25
For the Mughals, the lure of Kashmir was its mountain valleys and lakes and meadows for their garden retreats. In contrast, the British chose to settle on the ridges and hilltops themselves. Simla, Lord Dufferin acknowledged, was “an absurd place situated on the narrow saddle of one of a hundred mountainous ridges that rise around us in labyrinthine complexity like the waves of a confused and troubled sea.”26 No doubt, higher was deemed better in terms of health, but Europeans were also responding to an aesthetic revolution, the emotional appeal of the Sublime. And nothing inspired emotions of sublimity—the combination of terror and beauty—more than mountains.27 Ascending from the plains to Simla, Lady Amherst allowed that “one must become accustom’d to look down precipices—without terror or giddiness—before admiration can be join’d to perfect ease.”28 Describing the scenery between Landour and Mussoorie, Fanny Parks notes that while the setting of the former on the southern side of the hill “is of a tamer cast,” reminiscent of the “back of the Isle of Wight,” travel to the northern side is another matter altogether:
A wildness and grandeur, unknown on the southern side, is all around you; the valleys fearfully deep, the pathway narrow, and is some parts so bad, only one foot in breadth is left for a pony. At first I felt a cold shudder pass over me as I rode in such places. . . . A pathway three feet in width at its utmost breadth is a handsome road in the Hills; a perpendicular rock on one side, and a precipice, perhaps three or four hundred feet deep, may be on the other. . . . If looking over a precipice makes you giddy, shut your eyes and give your gūnth [mountain pony] the rein, and you will be sure to find yourself safe on the other side. . . . I was delighted with the wildness of the scenery—it equalled my expectations.29
Not so many years earlier the poet Thomas Gray had declared that “Mont Cenis . . . carries the permission mountains have of being frightful rather too far,”30 but by the early decades of the nineteenth century travel in the Alps had become quite safe, depriving the Sublime of its delicious frissons of terror. This was not yet the case in the Himalayas. Many were the tales of both man and beast falling to their deaths from the narrow paths Parks describes or crushed by avalanches of crumbling rocks. The mountain tracks her father followed in the mountains beyond Simla were vertiginous in the extreme. The reward, however, was scenery of the most sublime sort imaginable. But when Archer turned to his “Mahomedan” servant at one particularly enthralling sight, asking if the view was not grander than anything he had ever seen, the servant (who had evidently been to England) replied, “Oh no! Vauxhall beats it hollow, as did the illumination in London, when the English took Buonaparte!” Chastened, the major allowed that “this sounded so strange as to make me come down a peg from the height to which my enthusiasm had elevated me.”31 Beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder.
The drawback was that hill stations were a very long way from the cities of the plains—Simla, for example, was over a thousand miles from Calcutta— and demanded an arduous and uncomfortable journey. Before the age of railroads, travelers might ride part of the way on horses, camels, or elephants; but once in the mountains, these animals were not very surefooted, and one had to rely on mountain ponies or be tortured in conveyances such as palanquins, jampans, or doolies, all variants of covered litters carried by relays of coolies.
“Hill station” may seem too benign a term to apply to settlements perched on narrow ridges seven or eight thousand feet high. Fanny Parks, however, made a distinction between “Hills” and “Snowy Ranges.” “In any other country,” she conceded, “these hills would be called mountains; but, being near the foot of the Himalaya that in the distance tower over them, they have obtained the title of the ‘Hills.’” The term “Hills” in contradistinction to “Plains” seems to have been in common use even earlier: Lady Amherst refers to “the Hills” in her journal even as she was making her way thither in 1827, one of the first to do so. A half century later Lady Dufferin also separated the “brown rippling hills near at hand” from the “rolling sea of mountains” that lay some fifty miles beyond. Nor could Edward Lear resist a punning distinction between the “Low Malaya” and the “true High Malaya.” Dane Kennedy is not convinced. He argues that “mountain” conjured up altogether too “sublime,” too unsettling an image for repose and recuperation. Labeling the Himalayan settlements “hill stations” was a way to domesticate them, an agenda that was eventually furthered by appropriating and Anglicizing the environment.32 Perhaps. But when Emily Eden remarks after a few days in Simla, “altogether the Himalayas are sweet pretty little hills,” one feels she is making the same distinction as Amherst, Parks, and Dufferin (and Lear). Indeed, a day or two later she reports in tones of almost Jane Austen–like irony that it has snowed and then hailed, “and is now thundering, in a cracking, sharp way that would be awful, only its sublimity is destroyed by the working of the carpenters and blacksmiths, who are shaping curtain rods and rings all round the house.”33 She was quite capable of coping with the Sublime.
In 1827, only three years after the first house had been built in Simla, Lord Amherst trekked to what would become the de facto (and later de jure) summer capital of India. It was here that the governor-general uttered his unforgettable words, “The Emperor of China and I govern half the human race and yet we find time for breakfast.”34 Governing his portion of the human race from a Calcutta that was unbearably hot for six months of the year was a trial, however, and Amherst’s almost fortuitous retreat to Simla after a long tour of the plains set in motion what was to become an annual ritual of removal that was finally made official in 1864. The irony was that, as Lord Lytton remarked, Simla was not actually British territory: “The whole Government of India is the tenant of its smallest feudatories.”35 And as this government expanded, the migration involved increasing numbers of civilians and military. Where it had taken seventeen hundred coolies to drag the baggage for Lord Amherst’s suite of six hundred up the steep mountain track (not counting the accompanying regiment and bodyguard), just over a decade later the procession had swelled prodigiously when Lord Auckland and his sisters, Emily and Fanny Eden, made the journey, with an entourage of over ten thousand, along with 850 baggage camels, several hundred horses and bullocks, and 140 elephants—“ten miles of beasts of burden” to meet the needs of nine Europeans, as Emily put it.36
Indeed, her account of their quasi-royal progress is not so different from that of François Bernier, a French physician at the Mughal court, who accompanied Aurangzeb from Lahore to Kashmir in 1665. The Mughal emperor moved with two camps, one always a day in advance of the other; if Bernier is to be believed, each required sixty elephants, two hundred camels, a hundred mules, and a hundred human porters for the ruler, his seraglio, and courtiers. In addition he was attended by 35,000 cavalry and more than 10,000 infantry and artillery men.37 Europeans for their part quickly learned to settle into Simla with equal comfort, albeit without seraglios. Above the elephant and camel line, locally “recruited” coolies toiled miserably up the vertiginous paths, bearing on their sweating backs not only tons of dispatch boxes and files—the paraphernalia of empire—but also musical instruments (Lady Lytton brought her new Broadwood piano out from England), trunks full of theatrical costumes for amateur theatricals, crates of provisions, crockery, rugs, and curtains, baskets of linens, favorite armchairs, chandeliers, aspidistras, and faithful spaniels in traveling boxes, along with their mistresses in jampans. It was all, commented one official, “romantic but rather horrifying.”38
By the 1840s cart roads were being built, followed by a burst of railroad construction soon after midcentury. Nevertheless, narrow-gauge passenger trains did not make their way to Darjeeling until 1881, to Simla until 1903. The ascent of the 5,000 feet from Kalka to Simla involved 103 tunnels, a succession of tight curves, and two miles of dizzying viaducts.39 Emily Eden had anticipated the railroad’s arrival when she published her memoir in 1866 and was not happy with the prospect. Already nostalgic for the “barbaric gold and pearl” of the past, she lamented that thanks to the “curse of railroads” the “splendour of a Governor General’s progress is at an end” and that “these contrasts of public grandeur and private discomfort will probably be seen no more, on a scale of such magnitude.” Henceforth the governor-general will be just another “first-class passenger with a carpet bag.”40 Not quite. “Splendour” could also ride the rails in British India.
The object of these long treks was not only to breathe the fresh air of the hills—the “Terrestrial Paradise”—but also to create “little islands of Englishness” where colonials could feel at home as they never could submerged in the sea of India below.41 Ascending from the plains, “all Nature seemed changed.”42 Suddenly familiar plants and trees evoked wave after wave of delicious nostalgia. Charles Metcalfe, “King of Delhi,” recorded the ecstasy of his encounter with Kasauli and its surroundings in 1827: “Nature is here in luxurious fecundity—the hills are covered with trees and shrubs and flowers—what delights us Indians most is to see the earliest acquaintances of our Infancy, on which we have not before set eyes since we quitted England—daisies, buttercups, nettles, dandelions, etc. strawberries, raspberries, roses, growing wild, with larkspur, columbine, violets etc. and the oak too, the leaf different from ours, but the acorn the same.” To Metcalfe it seemed a sin to pluck them, to “shorten the period of their brief existence.” And he added, “There is a sentiment in Persian Poetry which has always struck me as beautiful, ‘The Stone and the Plant which you imagine silent, have voices which reach to the Ear of Heaven.’”43 A contemporary wrote of the “emotions at once gratifying and regretful” awakened by the sight of European shrubs and trees, by wild cherry and pear and modest violets rearing their heads: “such humble instruments as simple wild flowers—these make the heart yearn with tenfold eagerness to retrace the distance between it and the objects of its earliest and best remembrance.”44
Later visitors to the Himalayas might have lacked the Orientalist culture of Metcalfe’s generation of “Indians” but echoed his refrain, reveling in the flora of the hills, at once familiar and yet more glorious than at home. There were violets, dog-roses, lily of the valley, even English holly; primroses, cowslips three feet high, “an exquisitely blue miniature species [of polyanthus], whose blossoms sparkle like sapphires on the turf”; there were gentians beginning to unfold “their deep azure bells, aconites to rear their tall blue spikes, and fritillaries and Meconopsis burst into flower.” Botanizing in the foothills of the Himalayas en route to Darjeeling, Joseph Hooker came upon brambles, violets, wild strawberries, and geranium, “flowers . . . so notoriously the harbingers of a European spring that their presence carries one home at once.”45 When the fog lifted over Simla, Emily Eden found the hills “all blue and green and covered with flowers,” and she wrote, “I have felt nothing like it, I mean nothing so English, since I was on the terrace at Eastcombe.”46
New arrivals recognized with equal pleasure flowers growing wild, such as begonias and cannas, that they had known only as hothouse flowers at home.47 Most of all they were struck by the profusion and size of rhododendrons. “Such beautiful rhodedendrons [sic],” Fanny Parks exclaimed. “They are forest trees, not shrubs as you have them in England.” Indeed, she was surprised to find that they were commonly referred to as “flower wood” and burned as fuel.48 In April, when they were at their height, the hills were blanketed with scarlet blossoms, “shaded with deep crimson.” Framing them in their dark foliage were the snowy peaks of the higher mountains and the brilliant blue of the sky—“anything more dazzling . . . you cannot imagine.” Sadly, their glory was short-lived. By May the blossoms were beginning to “fall like a shower of fire, and alight on the richest carpet of maiden-hair fern, and blue dog-violets, which everywhere clothe these hanging woods, so that you can scarcely set your foot on the earth without crushing a tuft of such treasures as would enchant the heart of an English gardener.”49
Lady Canning, much more of an adventurer than most of her sister Englishwomen, traveled far beyond Simla to the border of Tibet by Lord Dalhousie’s “road”—a narrow defile carved out of steep mountainsides that rose to 15,480 feet with terrifying drops below—and could report on the different rhododendrons growing at different altitudes. The scarlet variety was universal between 6,500 and 10,000 feet; higher up, she came upon “very fine large spotted pink” ones and, later, beautiful large lilac and white trees. The Alpine rhododendron, she noted, was bright yellow, not pink, in these mountains. Edward Lear, fortunate to be in Simla as the rhododendrons reached their peak, was “bewilder[ed]” by the beauty of hill after hill aflame with crimson blossom, a “mass of ineffable colour . . . like nothing one ever saw or imagined.” And everywhere: splendid deodars, identical to the cedars of Lebanon, and ilex woods.50 There were also wild roses, encircling thirty-foot pines “in robes of the whitest blossoms,” inspiring one military man to liken them to “so many maidens of the forest in their bridal garments.” It was, as he declared, Europe, not Asia.51
If getting English flowers to grow in the plains required the patience of Job, it was almost child’s play in the hills. Every bungalow had its garden, however minute, as part of the effort to re-create the life of home. “We pass our lives in gardening,” wrote Emily Eden in 1838. Since virtually all of the spring plants of the Simla area were similar to those in Europe, one did not have to go far for bulbs.52 “We ride down into the valleys and make the syces dig up wild tulips and lilies, and they are grown so eager about it that they dash up the hill the instant they see a promising looking plant and dig it up.” The strawberries were as fine as any in England. In early June she declared that she “never saw anything so pretty as the shrubs are just now,” with “both pink and white roses in large masses.” Indeed, her garden almost reconciled her to being in India, although there were setbacks, such as the time that a “mighty storm” brought devastation to all she had created—and worst of all to her double dahlia in colors of “rhubarb and magnesia”—the only double dahlia in India, she boasted.53 A half-century later, gathering wild ferns and replanting them in rockeries below their windows became for Lady Dufferin and the entire viceregal family a “new mania” as they discovered the unwonted pleasures of getting dirt under their fingernails and shooing off servants all too eager to help.54
The problem with Himalayan hill stations, however, was that they teetered precariously on ridges with scarcely any level ground. One writer has characterized Simla as a “mixture of Surrey and Tibet,” the “knot where half a dozen ridges of high ground meet, a starfish or an octopus of narrow ridges.”55 On her first visit, Lady Curzon was struck by the sight of “houses slipping off the hills and clinging like barnacles to the hill-tops.”56 Bungalows were set on little shelves hewn out of the hillside along steep, narrow paths. They might gamely carry names redolent of olde England—Victoria Lodge, Ladyhill, Richmond Villa, Primrose Cottage, Strawberry Hill—and aspire to a rustic half-timbering-cum-Gothic architecture, but the terrain was altogether different. Houses were mostly cramped, with small rooms, dark, dank and leaky during the rainy season. This made it all the more important to orient the living areas and garden so as to maximize sunlight. In Simla, Sir Edward Buck advised an east-northeast aspect since it “suits English plants better than any other, and seems to be equally good for English men and women and especially for children.”57
Hill gardeners, then, had to deal with their often minute portion of the shelf plus the khud, the precipice that dropped off from it. The writer M. M. Kaye remembers that many houses had room for at most a front drive barely wide enough for a rickshaw, with a small lawn to one side with a single flowerbed, supplemented by flower pots hanging from the verandah.58 A garden in Landour was a very tiny one, and yet “our estate is a large one, for it goes down the khud on both sides for a long way, and is only spoilt for our use by lying at an inconvenient angle of 70°.” The khud sported its own flora, in this case daylilies and blue iris as spring blossoms, with dahlias to follow in the autumn, along with a host of ferns and other plants unfamiliar to the English eye.59 Sara Duncan declared that her khud had its own “demon and can’t be tamed.” Even the rhododendron, ablaze on its incline in the spring, was unwelcome because in this clime it overshadowed everything else.60
Duncan was lucky, however, in having more level space than most for her garden. While she may be arch on occasion, with references to her colonial official husband as Tiglath-Pileser and friends as Thalia and Thisbe, her book offers an invaluable season-by-season account, “a novel of manners,” she calls it, whose characters are ants and earwigs and above all flowers, “an artificial little community . . . eight thousand feet out of the world.” She begins in April, the time of the annual migration from the plains, and runs until November, when things are packed away for the descent. To be sure, it is her mali who actually tends the garden, but she is very much in charge (and snips off wilted blossoms). What cannot be found native to Simla and environs, she obtains from Mr. Johnson, whom everyone goes to for seeds and bulbs as well as advice. One of the few flowers that are not available—one that has been “left at home . . . in the general emigration of English flowers”—is the peony, somewhat to her regret. For it is indeed an English garden that Duncan sets out to replicate in her bit of “shelf,” although she admits to importing goldenrod from Canada.
In April, May, and June, pansies reign in her garden and everywhere in town (“they seem to like the official atmosphere”). There are also daffodils and thick borders of blue forget-me-nots along the drive, sweet peas, honeysuckle, wisteria, hollyhocks, petunias, and coreopsis. As the pansies begin to peter out, stocks come into bloom; snapdragons, tall field daisies, and mignonette thrive. Then, as the dry season reaches its height, the roses burst into bloom, climbing all over the house and spreading into the borders: “I don’t believe there is another shelf in Simla that holds so many.” Once the roses are out, all other flowers pale in comparison, and Duncan does not even try to tone down her paeans to their glory.
The monsoon rains begin about mid-June and last until September. They are not at all like “the gentle thing” that falls in England but “untamed, torrential.” They wash the soil away and it must be replaced, basketful by basketful. Most people sit out the rainy season, leaving their gardens to the slugs, but Duncan this year has ventured on a “rains garden.” There is an uncomfortable fortnight when the dry-weather plants turn leggy; then the rain-loving plants come into their own: “The verandah is odorous with lilies,” both Japanese and day; tall stalks of tuberoses shoot up among the rose bushes; clumps of cannas “lord it at chosen corners on each side of the drive”; lobelia, salvia, fuchsias, sunflowers, nasturtiums, and even Michaelmas daisies among the (imported) goldenrod. She prefers flowers in the ground, rather than in the pots and hanging baskets beloved of many expatriate gardeners, so they can “move [their] feet and stir about at night, and take [their] share in the joys of the community.” Nevertheless, she makes an exception for the hydrangea: “Put him in the ground and at once he grows woody and branchy and leafy, imagining perhaps,” she adds somewhat surprisingly, “that he is intended to become a shrub.” Dahlias crop up everywhere (Emily Eden’s double dahlias are no longer exceptional) in the garden and on the khud-sides all over town. The dahlia took possession of Simla the same year as the government of India did (1830), she announces, and “mixes itself up with finance and foreign relations,” growing promiscuously about the various government offices and along the roadways, painting “our little mountain town with the colours of fantasy and of freedom.”61
Even Duncan, however, finds the unbridled promiscuity of the rainy season unnerving. “The jungle triumphs . . . , it overwhelms the place. Even on the shelf it is hard enough to cope with, creeping up, licking and lipping the garden through the paling, but out upon the public khud-sides it is unchecked and insatiable. We hate the jungle.” Newcomers may rhapsodize about the “glorious freedom of the wilderness,” but veterans see it as an intimation of Bacchus running amok on the hillside, seducing English flowers from the “paths of propriety” to the temptations of “unregulated living.”62 Perhaps it was a metaphor for India itself, pursuing the British even to their mountain retreats.
The Viceregal Lodge: Heyday of the Raj
Over the years, the wildflowers that had so delighted early visitors to the hills became scarcer and scarcer; gone were the days when Emily Eden could create a garden overnight simply by transplanting from the wild. By the turn of the century, “hardly a wild flower can be found in the vicinity of the station woods, chiefly owing to the fact that for many years past jampanis [the litter bearers] have constantly stripped the hill sides to decorate Simla dining tables.”63 As Simla grew from the tiny station of the 1830s to the seat of the government of India for half the year or more, the population swelled. Emily Eden had put the European summer population of Simla at 150 in 1838; a half-century later, the summer census counted 3,400 Europeans.64 Within the limits imposed by topography, estates became grander and often vied with one another for the elegance of their architecture and of their gardens.
Barnes Court set the tone. More like an old English country house than any other in Simla, with its “nostalgic Half-timbering,” it was built on a spur so that it had fine views in three directions. Unlike many Simla houses, it had a level stretch of lawn and terraced gardens and pretty walks “in the English style, its trees cunningly disposed.”65 Over time, it received its share of distinguished guests, including governors-general and commanders-in-chief; eventually it became the residence of the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab and later the state guest house, Even more ambitious was Rothney Castle, acquired in 1867 by Allan Octavian Hume, officially Secretary for Agriculture to the Government of India and unofficially ornithologist, Theosophist, and founder of the Indian National Congress. Once Hume took up Theosophy, with its insistence on the sanctity of all life, he had to instruct those supplying him with bird specimens that they could no longer shoot them. The religion did not enjoin its adepts to asceticism, however, and Hume was free to realize his ambition of turning Rothney into a showplace. He spent some two lakhs (200,000) of rupees of his personal fortune to convert the house into a “veritable palace” where he hosted large dinner parties and balls. Madame Blavatsky, the high priestess of Theosophy, was a frequent guest, happy to escape the broiling heat of Madras and bask in the adulation of her followers. To create a garden worthy of the house, Hume brought out a European gardener and added a conservatory. The result was a “perpetual horticultural exhibition,” gardens so magnificent that visitors were more than willing to brave the laborious climb to the castle.66
Local gossip had it that Hume poured enormous sums of money into Rothney Castle, fully expecting to sell it to the government to serve as official residence for the viceroy, but apparently the ascent was too torturous for all but the stoutest of heart. Although governors-general and, later, viceroys had been summering in Simla off and on for decades, they had no permanent quarters and had to settle for what was on offer. In the early days this was less of a problem. Once they improvised curtains, put down the carpets, chandeliers, and wall shades they had brought from Calcutta, and installed their French chef, Lord Auckland and his sisters were content with what Emily described as “very like a cheerful middle-sized English country-house.” To be sure they had to hastily construct huts for their 120 servants, watch the beaten earth roof for leaks during the monsoon season, and contend with the plague of fleas ushered in by the rains. But all in all she pronounced the seven months they spent in Simla in 1838 a time “as good as it is possible to pass in India—no trouble, no heat, and if the Himalayas were only a continuation of Primrose Hill or Penge Common, I should have no objection to pass the rest of my life on them.”67
When the annual exodus to Simla was officially—if reluctantly—sanctioned by the home government, the problem of appropriate housing became more acute. By the 1870s the viceroy’s entourage had swollen and the number of servants doubled; balls and dinners had to accommodate many more than the cozy—all too cozy—society of Lord Auckland’s day. Faute de mieux, they fell back on Peterhof, a hilltop pile rented from the Raja of Sirmur, which served as the viceregal residence from the 1860s until 1888. It was rumored to have been on the site of an old cemetery and inspired little affection. Indeed, it seemed to embody the odd mixture of opulence and tawdriness peculiar to the Raj. The roof leaked, plaster fell from the ceiling in the monsoons, and the lack of plumbing condemned inhabitants to the much-detested “thunderbox.” Lord Lytton dismissed Peterhof as “a hideous little bungalow, horribly out of repair and wretchedly uncomfortable,” in fact, “a cow stable.” More charitably, his wife likened it to “a large rectory,” while Lord Ripon’s private chaplain referred to it as a “shooting box.” Eventually there were suspicions that the hill upon which it sat might slip away. Still, many a gala was held under the festive shamiana, a flat-roofed tent on the lawn outside the mansion.68
Viceroys came and went every few years, and much as they might grumble and plead for a house to match their imperial state, they did little about it until Lord and Lady Dufferin arrived in 1884. Lady Dufferin dismissed Peterhof as little more than a cottage, quite suitable for a family leading a domestic life but “very unfit for a Viceregal establishment,” so small were its drawing rooms and apartments and so cramped its grounds. “Altogether,” she added, “it is the funniest place! At the back of the house you have about a yard to spare before you tumble down a precipice, and in front there is just room for one tennis court before you go over another. The A.-D.-C.s are all slipping off the hill in various little bungalows, and go through most perilous adventures to come to dinner.”69 Her husband had long fantasized about building a dream castle somewhere—in his native Ireland, in his previous postings to Canada, Russia, and Turkey—but had always been frustrated by a lack of resources, either personal or public. Now, with the blessing of Lord Randolph Churchill, the secretary of state, he built his enchanted palace atop Observatory Hill, a few hundred yards from Peterhof and appropriately the highest point in Simla (Fig. 23). Appropriately, too, this symbol of empire stood astride the great subcontinental divide: a glass of water thrown out on one side of the house would end up in the Bay of Bengal and on the other in the Indian Ocean.70
Fig. 23. Viceregal Lodge, Simla
[Postcard, author’s collection]
Like the later Lord Curzon, Dufferin was very much a hands-on potentate, determined to oversee every aspect of his Elizabethan “stronghold.” It was designed by the architect Henry Irwin with a nod to the historicism of the later nineteenth century but without any of the orientalizing tendencies of the Indo-Saracenic style so prevalent in contemporary India. There was much to oversee. First of all, the crest of Observatory Hill had to be sheared off to provide a level plateau; next, large amounts of concrete poured over the crushed shale to provide a secure footing. The stone originally chosen for the walls proved too porous, so that quarries farther down had to be requisitioned for the tons of material carried up by trains of bullock carts; stone cutters balked at the demands made on them over the cold winter. During the season, Lord Dufferin liked nothing better than to offer guided tours of the work site. His wife describes one such inspection, clambering over scaffolding and teetering over “yawning chasms.” She marveled at the employment of young Indian women “in necklaces, bracelets, earrings, tight cotton trousers, turbans with long veils handing down their backs, and a large earthenware basin of mortar on their heads.” They walk, she noted, “with the carriage of empresses, and seem as much at ease on top of the roof as on the ground floor.”71
When the Dufferins arrived for their last season in Simla, they were dismayed at “how unpromising” it all looked, and yet by late July they were able to move in. But this was the middle of the monsoon season, which sorely tested the house: “The rain falls in the most vicious manner, with the plain intent of entering our new house and of discovering every weak place in it.” It also washed away the carriage roads leading to Observatory Hill and obscured the lovely views that were the glory of the Viceregal Lodge.72 Nevertheless, the Dufferins delighted in showing off the wonders of the building, with its stately entrance hall, its ballroom that could hold eight hundred, and—mirabile visu— electric lights powered by a generator that had been dragged up the hill. It was the first house in Simla to boast electricity, but when the first ball was held many ladies found to their dismay that their gowns, “so bewitching by lamp- and candle-light, now appeared distinctly shabby.”73 Unusual, too, was the large, white-tiled kitchen in the basement (not a distant cookhouse as in Calcutta) and the facilities for the dhobis or laundrymen. Now, instead of squatting “on the brink of a cold stream there to flog and batter our wretched garments against the hard stones until they think them clean,” they “will be condemned to warm water and soap, to mangles and ironing and drying rooms.”74
Not everyone shared the Dufferins’ enthusiasm for the Viceregal Lodge. The India Office, under new management, was staggered by the cost—over a hundred thousand pounds to build and a huge budget for annual upkeep as well (a satirist declared it “a joy and an expense forever”).75 Critics compared it uncharitably to a Scotch hydro, to Pentonville Prison, to St. Pancras Station. One early twentieth-century visitor remarked: “The hall had an almost loveable naïve ugliness as, I think had the whole of Vice-Regal Lodge, apart from the outside which glories in a spa-like monstrosity. Those who built it had no doubts about the suitability of an enlarged English country-house . . . being set down in India.”76 Future viceroys and their consorts also found much fault with it. “A Minneapolis millionaire would revel in it,” commented Lady Curzon, who knew whereof she spoke since she was herself the daughter of a Chicago millionaire. Only Edward Buck seems to have noticed that the builders of the Lodge neglected to orient the dwelling rooms east-northeast as local knowledge dictated, but there wasn’t much that could be done about that.
Still, the Lodge did capture the magnificent views of the distant mountains. It was set, as the editor of the Civil and Military Gazette declared, “amid a panorama of beauty which almost takes the breath away.”77 The views were complemented by gardens of a spaciousness never possible at Peterhof. And, rare for precipitous Simla, it had real lawns (although not nearly as extensive as those of Naini Tal’s Government House—officials tended to be competitive on the subject of lawns).78 Lord Lansdowne, who followed close on the heels of the Dufferins, brought in an English gardener to landscape the grounds, planting appropriate trees and shrubs and laying out flowerbeds and terraces, all quite suitable for Lady Lansdowne’s garden parties and afternoon teas. In Lord Curzon’s view, the grounds were the only thing that made the Lodge bearable. He extended the lawns, and added an avenue of limes and a rose pergola, the latter a typical feature of late Victorian estates.79 Lady Minto was credited with the rose garden and herbaceous borders. Thacker’s New Guide to Simla (1925) noted approvingly that the grounds were beautifully laid out. “To the west are terraces well turfed, prettily planted with ornamental shrubs and flower beds around the margin of beautifully kept lawns.”80 After the rains the borders were resplendent with hollyhocks, cornflowers, dahlias, salvias, buddleias galore. “I have a gardener,” Lady Reading noted with satisfaction, “who does not object to cutting, so my sitting-room looks a picture with masses of Madonna lilies and huge bunches of every other shade of blossom.” Needless to say, her gardener was assisted by an army of malis to “plant, hoe, and water a patch of hillside into an English-looking garden”—with ten or more at any one time to keep the monkeys from vandalizing the herbaceous borders.81
If the rulers of India retreated to Simla to escape from the plains, they found in time that they also needed a retreat from Simla and its endless round of official duties, garden parties, balls and dinners, charity functions, gymkhanas at Annandale, and so on—just browsing through Lady Dufferin’s diary leaves one vicariously exhausted, and she was only the viceroy’s wife! For those who could afford it, Mashobra, some six miles from Simla, was the ideal weekend destination. It lay on a ridge stretching away to Mahasu on the slopes above Simla. Boasting some of the finest woodlands in the region, Mashobra escaped the heat and dusty roads of Simla during May and June before the rains settled in; in late September and October, the climate was “superb.” Lord Elgin acquired the “Retreat” at Mashobra in 1896 and other viceroys followed suit, appreciating the more “earthy” character of the house, which, although hardly a simple cottage, was built in the local vernacular of wooden beams packed with stone and a mortar of clay or baked lime (Fig. 24). Even during the monsoon, Lady Reading took pleasure in the “undergrowth of maiden-hair fern, fresh green ferns and masses of wild flowers, wild lily of the valley, baby orchids, etc.” The return to Simla on a Monday morning was no less a “delight, the rickshaw ride down-hill all the way, the wonderful views over the hills and mountains a continual joy.”82
Fig. 24. The Retreat at Mashobra, near Simla. Samuel Bourne, 1860
[The British Library Board, Photo 15/1(53)]
Mashobra was also a favored haunt of Lord Curzon’s nemesis, General Kitchener, commander-in-chief of the Indian Army. While Curzon was perforce contenting himself with minor improvements to the Viceregal Lodge— removing the heavy embossed wall coverings, installing in the dining room a replica of the carved screen from the imperial throne in the Forbidden City, and expanding the gardens—Kitchener was remodeling Snowdon, his half-timbered mansion on the far side of Jakko Hill, far more dramatically. “Lord Kitchener has carried his genius for organization into Snowdon, which is transformed beyond recognition,” gushed Lady Wilson. New hall, new dining room, new library, all filled with objets d’art; a music room adorned with trophies of war and of the chase; a fine collection of rare old china and a “specially beautiful Japanese picture painted on silk, calculated to make any one break the tenth commandment”; and a lovely garden with terraces and rose gardens and fruit trees. Local gossip had it that he could be seen pottering about the roses early in the morning, clad in bright blue pyjamas.83
But it was at Wildflower Hall in Mashobra that Kitchener most fully indulged his passion for gardening. At an elevation of 8,000 feet, the estate commanded magnificent views of the snowy ranges beyond Simla. Earlier, the hero of Omdurman had created Eden on an island in the Nile facing one of the cataracts; later he won prizes for his orchids at the Calcutta flower show. Now it was the turn of the mountains. He had the tops shaved off two hills to open up the views. After church on Sundays he would station himself in the garden, directing the workmen planting trees, flowers, and herbaceous borders. His efforts were chronicled by the Englishman, a Calcutta newspaper: “It is an open secret that the Commander-in-Chief is an enthusiastic gardener: indeed, it is said that he is never happier than when improving the grounds at Mahasu [site of Wildflower Hall]. . . . The only fault apparently that Lord K. has to find is that shrubs and flowers do not grow quickly enough.”84
Not eager to rub elbows with Kitchener at leisure as well as at work, Lord Curzon escaped in the opposite direction, to Naldera. Simla had never been to his liking and became all the more distasteful for having to be shared not only with the commander-in-chief, with whom he was engaged in a power struggle over the role of the military, but also with the lieutenant-governor of the Punjab, living in baronial splendor at Barnes Court, with whom he had also quarreled. A beautiful glade tucked among the deodars with stretches of grass “like English downs,” Naldera overlooked the Sutlej River. It was the only place in the hills Curzon truly loved—so much so that he gave the name to one of his daughters. Here he had a nine-hole golf course laid out, but he also often carried out his administrative duties for days on end from a huge tent pitched nearby, which he much preferred to the Viceregal Lodge. He was able to communicate between the two, it was said, by means of heliographs sending signals in Morse code between the two points by means of flashes of sunlight.85
Simla took itself very seriously, but other Himalayan stations could rival it for climate, natural and cultivated beauty, and Englishness. By rights, Darjeeling probably should have been chosen as the imperial summer capital. Charlotte Canning certainly thought so. Not only was it far closer to Calcutta, but it also offered spectacular views of some of the world’s highest mountains. By the late 1850s, more than half the journey from Calcutta could be made by rail. But Darjeeling had two main defects: Simla had gotten off to a head start and snared the elite of officialdom, leaving Darjeeling primarily to—horror of horrors—boxwallahs and tea-planters. Moreover, to reach Darjeeling, as we have seen, travelers had to cross the terai, characterized all too accurately by Lady Canning as “a jungle, pestilential at some seasons.”86
Dehra Dun also had its partisans. It lay in the beautiful Doon Valley, encircled by the Ganges to the east, the Yamuna to the west, and mountains to the north and south. Easier of access than Simla, it had a pleasant climate most of the year. It stands in the middle of the plain, “like a lovely English village, each house surrounded with rose hedges, and bowery, billowy greenness.” There was scarcely a house without a cluster of tall bamboo; collectively these formed a long avenue through the town, swaying in the breeze “like gigantic clusters of ostrich feathers.” And, growing in clusters around the little church in the middle of the village, the hibiscus mutabilis, a rose that changed color over the morning from pure white to deep crimson.87 Lady Reading, too, was enraptured by one of Dehra’s gardens: “a riot of sweetpeas, verbena, cornflowers, hollyhocks,” with, somewhat incongruously, a band of Gorkhas playing on the lawn.88 Small wonder that it was Lord Hardinge’s favorite spot in India or that many Britons, unable to face the thought of returning to their homeland, chose to retire there.89
For the few months when Dehra Dun was uncomfortably hot, residents could climb the twenty-six miles up to Mussoorie-Landour, four thousand feet higher. Although Edward Lear found Mussoorie too much like an English watering place for his taste, the views out over the Doon valley, he wrote, “are lovely, and recall Italy and Claude’s pictures.” The winding Yamuna River in the distance reminded him of the Thames at Richmond, the vegetation, however, a mixture of Indian and European.90 Fanny Parks had found old friends in Mussoorie—oaks in bud, raspberries, clematis, woodbine delighting her “with its fragrance, and the remembrance of days of old.” Later in the season the yellow broom was in full flower, putting her “in mind of the country by the seaside at Christchurch, Hampshire, where the broom is in such luxuriance.”91
At the height of the Raj, Mussoorie was smaller than Simla, and decidedly less claustrophobic, physically and socially. As Lady Dufferin noted, it had the great advantage of lying on an outside spur of the Himalayas, at the edge of the mountains, so that it did not feel cut off from the world: “You can’t imagine what a delightful sense of freedom this gives, because you don’t know what it is to be encaged in the very heart of the Himalayas for the greater part of the year.”92 Further, while viceroys might drop in occasionally, there was no official presence, making for an infinitely less stuffy atmosphere. While all the hill stations were gossipy places, Mussoorie acquired in time the raciest reputation of all as a place for assignations, still more enticing when the railroad made it a possible weekend destination from Delhi. Coincidentally or not, it also was alleged to have even more—thoroughly English—ghosts than other hill stations.93
Ootacamund: “The Sweet Half-English
Neilgherry Air”
There were difficulties in replicating idyllic English villages atop narrow Himalayan ridges, with houses confined to whatever bits of level ground could be carved out and gardens dropping away to nothingness. Colonel Waddell might insist that “many of the walks [around Darjeeling] are very pleasant and resemble English lanes,”94 but for most it was a stretch to project scenes of the English or even the Scottish countryside onto the Himalayas. Lady Dufferin was perhaps closer to the mark when she first set eyes on Simla: “The only place that I have ever imagined at all like this spot is Mount Ararat with the Ark balanced on the top of it, and I am sure that when the rains come I shall feel still more like Mrs. Noah.”95 As indeed she did during the unusually wet spring and summer of 1885.
The effort was far more convincing in the open, grass-covered Nilgiri Hills of southern India. Here one could find landscapes to feed the most voracious nostalgia. Ootacamund, known as Ooty by the “abbreviating Saxon,” was most commonly likened to the South Downs of Sussex.96 Many were the other candidates, however: “Hertfordshire lanes, Devonshire Downs, Westmoreland lakes, Scotch trout streams and Lusitanian views” (Lord Lytton); “the vegetation of Windsor Forest or Blenheim spread over the mountains of Cumberland” (Macaulay). During the rainy season the points of comparison were equally British, albeit not always favorable. Richard Burton, on sick leave from the army in 1847, found the combination of monsoon weather and dull society nearly intolerable: “What a detestable place this Ootacamund is during the rains! From morning to night, and from night to morning, gigantic piles of heavy wet clouds, which look as if the aerial sprites were amusing themselves by heaping misty black Pelions upon thundering purple Ossas. . . . When there is no drizzle there is a Scotch mist: when the mist clears away, it is succeeded by a London fog.”97 Lord Lytton, on the other hand, found the rain reinforced his view of Ooty as “a paradise”: “The afternoon was rainy and the road muddy, but such beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud.”98
Ooty was the most important of several stations in the Nilgiris or “Blue Mountains.” The name was attributed by some to the blue haze that often blankets them, by others to a shrubby blue wildflower, Strobilanthes callosa, which blooms only every few years. Sir Thomas Munro, governor of Madras, had the good fortune to arrive at such a moment: “[It] makes them look,” he wrote, “as if they were covered with heath [heather]”—possibly a case of wishful thinking, since the bloom is paler than the purple of true heather. Ooty itself lay on a rolling plateau whose highest peaks were over 8,000 feet, near the line of demarcation of the two monsoons from east and west.99 The founding father of the settlement was the Collector of Coimbatore, John Sullivan. Quickly following up on the glowing report of two of his scouts, he made a tour of the region in 1819, accompanied by a French naturalist. The naturalist, who had felt himself “aux portes du tombeau” down in the plains, underwent a miraculous cure in the mountains, which seemed to confirm everyone’s view that this would be an ideal place to recover one’s health. Dr. Baikie, medical resident at the station in the early 1830s, pronounced its climate “the most perfectly European of any point in the hills,” generally less affected by the vicissitudes of the monsoons, than any other. If proof were needed that the climate of the Nilgiris were ideally adapted to “our constitution,” Baikie declared, “it would be sufficient to look at the European children, whose rosy chubby cheeks, sparkling eyes, and buoyant spirits, form a pleasant contrast with the pale, languid, irritable-looking little wretches one is so often doomed to see dying by inches in the low country.” Burton acknowledged the truth of such observations but couldn’t resist observing St. Stephen’s churchyard: “so extensive, so well stocked, that it makes one shudder to look at it.”100
Within a year or two of first reconnoitering the hills, Sullivan settled himself and his family in Ooty, spending more time speculating in real estate than on his official duties, much to the annoyance of his superiors. Under his supervision, the station took off more rapidly than Simla. It was nearer both Madras and Bombay (although refugees from the two presidencies made a point of not mixing), and once Sullivan had put local convicts to work cutting a road (he felt certain there was no place in the wilderness they would want to escape to), it was relatively accessible: from Madras, depending on the route chosen, it was between 332 and 393 miles; from Bombay, one sailed down the coast to Calicut (the sea voyage itself being recommended for invalids) and then traveled inland some 150 miles. The most agreeable route from Madras ran through Vellore, Bangalore, and Mysore, but one was warned not to pass the night in the broad belt of jungle along the way. Unless officials were already on tour in the south, it was too long a trip for comfort from Calcutta, since it involved a long passage at sea down the length of the east coast and doubling stormy Cape Comorin, but Governor-General Lord Dalhousie made it nevertheless. “Broken by the death of his wife, overwork and ill-health,” Dalhousie came to the Nilgiris for a prolonged stay in 1855, favoring Rota Hall, with its beautiful views of the Blue Mountains and gardens fragrant with Datura brugmantia.101
It was not by chance that Ooty came to look so English. In this landscape of open, grass-covered downs, Brits were able to “complete the curious illusion of England-in-India”102 far more easily than in the Himalayas (see Pl. 10). Sullivan himself set the tone. The estates he and his associates carved out in the hills were called Grasmere Lodge, Kenilworth, Woodcock Hall, Apple Cottage; what passed for the town center was grandly named Charing Cross; and the “loch” created by damming a rivulet had an extension christened Windermere. A great lover of gardening, Sullivan laid out a garden wherever he built a house. At his own expense he imported a gardener from England who brought the first seeds for apples, peaches, strawberries, raspberries, and hollyhocks. Others imported a range of English and Scottish flowers, and oaks and firs, and experimented with them at different altitudes and different exposures in the hills. An account of 1832 refers to a garden at Ooty where the “fragrance of roses, heliotrope, mignonette, geraniums and violets . . . filled the air.” Roses, too, were soon a staple, with newer varieties constantly replacing the older stock. Poppies were originally grown for opium by Badaga villagers lower down the slopes, but after this was prohibited in 1854, they were found only in European gardens.103
Sullivan was also eager to promote the cultivation of European vegetables in Ooty and its environs: potatoes, turnips, radishes, tomatoes, string beans, artichokes, lettuce, Brussels sprouts. Within a year or two of settling there, he had applied for and won government permission to appropriate more than nineteen hundred acres, ostensibly for agricultural experimentation; in fact, it seems to have been mainly a way to take up the land for his own uses. Nevertheless, various plans for agricultural development were mooted in the following years. In the 1840s the botanist Robert Wight was sent out by the Madras government to study crops appropriate to the temperate climate of the hills, especially the possibilities for growing European produce: “Despite the joys of Indian fruit and veg (mangoes and okra) it seems that expatriates still pined for strawberries and lettuce.”104
A scheme had been floated in the 1830s to import small farmers and mechanics from England to cultivate the land, and two European gardeners were charged with ordering quantities of seed and fruit trees from England and Persia. The directors of the East India Company vetoed the settlement idea and cancelled most of the order. More realistic was a plan to offer land to British officers who wished to retire to India and devote themselves to farming according to “the British system of husbandry.” In fact, the Nilgiris did become such a favorite retirement spot that by the turn of the century it seemed to resemble nothing so much as Guy de Maupassant’s description of an Algerian village inhabited solely by generals. For officers who had spent a lifetime in the subcontinent and lost all touch with the homeland, it was far preferable to Cheltenham or Tunbridge Wells—both England and India. They left it to others, however, to turn the grassy meadows into potato fields and tea plantations, choosing instead to cultivate roses and sweet peas and begonias in anticipation of the annual flower show in the Botanical Garden.105
Not surprisingly, English flowers thrived spectacularly in the Nilgiris (as did dandelions, docks, and thistles, which had stowed away with imported seeds). Baikie reported a heliotrope bush ten feet high and thirty feet in circumference, while Charlotte Canning marveled at specimens twenty feet in diameter. Geraniums grew as hedges. A Mr. Rhode sowed gorse bushes broadcast on the downs. His house, The Cedars, built about 1860, was considered the “most English-looking” house in Ooty, both inside and out, and surrounded by beautifully planted grounds. When Macaulay, no lover of things Indian—or of nature, for that matter—visited the station, he found himself smitten with the place: it had “very much the look of a rising English watering place,” with his cottage “buried in laburnums, or something very like them, and geraniums which grow in the open air.” In 1848 a public botanical garden was created, laid out and supervised by a gardener who had trained under Joseph Paxton at Chatsworth. Visiting a decade later, Lady Canning was impressed with what he had accomplished on a small budget. She especially admired new varieties of fuchsias, heliotropes, and verbena eleven feet high—“as large as the largest shrub of lauristinus.” Several decades later, when a permanent summer residence for the governor of Madras was at last built after years of renting one house or another, its primary virtue was a location just above these gardens, together with grassy lawns, terraced beds, and rose nursery. The building itself, so lovingly modeled by the Duke of Buckingham after his own ancestral pile at Stowe, “may, without libeling it,” Price allowed, “be called distinctly ugly.”106
Lady Canning preferred Coonoor, the hill station on the southern escarpment of the Nilgiris, for its dramatic views. Here, she wrote Queen Victoria, “I have a view across the valley of hills, with woods of evergreen and rocky precipices,” and beyond, “a glimpse of the burning plain, just enough to remind me of what I have left.” To her, the country was like the “Highlands on a gigantic scale.” But although she welcomed the familiar sights, the rose-covered cottages with their beautiful gardens, and appreciated the unwonted joy of wearing warm clothes, she was drawn especially to “the gorgeous foliage and tangle of creepers, sometimes like curtains of great green leaves looped up with coils of ropes.” She loved to drive down several thousand feet “into damp regions full of beautiful plants.” The one cottage in Ooty that met with her approval was Woodcot, built on a ridge by Colonel Cotton of the Madras Engineers. Mrs. Cotton, she noted, “is very English & came late to India & knows how to appreciate the things new to her instead of wanting what is not to be had, & her garden & collection of orchids show this.” The comment reveals as much about Charlotte Canning as about Mrs. Cotton.107
Had there been more Mrs. Cottons and Lady Cannings, Edward Lear would have been a great deal happier. Between Canning’s visit to the Nilgiris in 1858 and his own more than fifteen years later, the population had mushroomed. This trend was accentuated when the Presidency of Madras’s summer exodus was regularized in 1870 and the whole government took to the hills. What with cricket grounds, gymkhanas, libraries, hunt clubs (“If you wish to enjoy deer-stalking in perfection, and without restraint, go to the Neilgherry Hills”),108 and garden parties at the governor’s residence, the ambiance became suffocatingly English (see Pl. 11). Lear found Coonoor, with its croquet ground and all too British houses, “totally undrawable as Indian scenery—it is not unlike Bournemouth here and there, but with different foliage.” Ooty was no better. While the walk around the lake might be beautiful, it was bordered by English furze, and roses abounded everywhere. Only the view from the rock known as Lady Canning’s Seat inspired enthusiasm. Other than this, the “impossible picturesqueness”—the exotic, the unfamiliar, the colorful—that he sought was not to be found in the hill stations of India.109 Had Lear come a decade or two later, his sharp eye might have detected that from the terrace of Government House in Ooty, the slope of Mount Dodabetta bore an “astonishing and uncanny” likeness to the English Prime Minister, Lord Salisbury.110 Not picturesque, hardly exotic, but interesting.
Ironically, however, Ootacamund was being Australianized as fast as it was being Anglicized. Lear had noted in his journal that there were “trees everywhere, which is not what I was led to expect.” What he did not realize was that the once open hills were now overrun with invasive eucalyptus, melanoxylon (blackwood), and wattle, the kudzu of the Nilgiris. In 1826 Sir Thomas Munro had described the ride from Kotaghery to Ooty as “beyond comparison, the most romantic I ever made.” Before reaching John Sullivan’s house the party halted on the highest ridge and marveled at the scene below: “The face of the country is covered with the finest verdure, and is undulated in every form. It is composed of numberless green knolls of every shape and size, from an artificial mound to a hill or mountain. They are as smooth as the lawns in an English park, and there is hardly one of them which has not, on one side or other, a mass of dark wood, terminating suddenly as if it had been planted.”111
In succeeding years, however, the “masses of dark wood,” or sholas (forests of stunted evergreens), were felled for firewood. They were replaced by imported species from Tasmania and Australia, an unhappy example of arboreal globalization. By the end of the century one was hard put to it to find vestiges of pristine beauty, so completely had the invaders colonized lake shore and hillside. On page after page, Frederick Price, historian laureate of Ooty, rails against their disfiguring presence: “The green grassy slopes and pretty sholas of the valley have . . . disappeared. The former are now nearly everywhere covered with the dark and dreary gum tree [eucalyptus], and the equally depressing melanoxylon [blackwood]—in many cases so thickly that the houses erected on them are hidden.” The wattle, an acacia, has grown so densely that it forms a thick scrub. Some of this planting was sponsored by the government itself; in other cases, large tracts of land were turned over to speculators for commercial plantations.112 To add insult to injury, Sullivan’s lake had become polluted early on. Burton mocked those who compared it to Lake Como or to the original Windermere: its waters were even then (in 1847) muddy, on its northern bank was a “dirty, irregular bazaar,” and it was cut up by three embankments (later a railroad embankment further reduced its size).113
Shangri-La
What a bittersweet pleasure it was to “throw yourself upon the soft turf bank, and [pluck] the first daisy . . . you ever saw out of England.”114 Even the splenetic Burton was disarmed by simple reminders of the flora of home. When the swaggering, pig-sticking soldier from Sind looked beyond the muddy lake and filthy bazaar to the glories of the Nilgiri Hills, mockery gives way to poetic ecstasy. He describes the “beauties of the view: “On both sides of the water, turfy peaks and woody eminences, here sinking into shallow valleys, there falling into steep ravines, the whole covered with a tapestry of brilliant green, delight your eye. . . . The back-ground of distant hill and mountain, borrowing from the intervening atmosphere the blue and hazy tint for which these regions are celebrated, contrasts well with the emerald hue around.”115
Burton’s account does not ignore, as so many did, the two contrasting realities of the hill stations. Much as the British tried to insulate themselves from India, to create “landscapes of memory,”116 the “native” bazaar was as much a part of hill life as the Mall. Life in the hills was just as dependent on Indians as it was in the plains, both the “tribals” native to these regions and the servants brought with them, often miserable in the cold. It has been estimated that, all things considered, it required ten Indians to support one European in the life to which he or she had become accustomed.117 At the other end of the social scale, elite Indians followed the British to the hills in increasing numbers. In comparatively egalitarian Kodaikanal, they built bungalows, planted lovely gardens, played tennis, and joined in the season’s activities. The Maharaja of Mysore settled into Fernhill in Ooty, while several Indian princes had residences in Mussoorie. Wealthy Parsees were especially prominent in the hill stations near Bombay and, being meat eaters and wine drinkers, found ready acceptance among the otherwise self-segregating British.118
Burton makes all too clear how claustrophobic the little society of the hill stations could be—not for nothing would Ootacamund become known as “snooty Ooty.” An official wife compared life in the smaller stations to “being on a long voyage on a ship, with little news from the outer world.”119 In a station such as Simla at the apex of the political pyramid, it was not only the endless round of social events with the same people but also the jockeying for position and influence in the status-bound world of the “little tin gods.” Even in the matter of planning dinners and garden parties, Lady Lawrence complained, “it is impossible to hear yourself speak because of the grinding of axes and gnashing of teeth.”120
To many, it was preposterous even to think of governing India from remote hilltops for seven or eight months of the year—Gandhi referred to it as “government working from the 500th floor,” while an American seconded to the British during World War I declared that officials were “as inaccessible as Mahadeva on Mount Kailash.”121 And yet it happened, informally or formally, for more than a century. Emily Eden could be as aloof as the best of them, but in a letter of May 1839 she offers a remarkably astute commentary on Simla:
Twenty years ago no European had ever been here, and there we were, with the band playing the “Puritani” and “Masaniello.” and eating salmon from Scotland, and sardines from the Mediterranean, and observing that St. Cloup’s [their French chef] potage à la Julienne was perhaps better than his other soups, and that some of the ladies’ sleeves were too tight according to the overland fashions for March, &c; and all this in the face of those high hills, some of which have remained untrodden since creation, and we, 105 Europeans, being surrounded by at least 3,000 mountaineers, who, wrapped in their hill blankets, look on at what we call our polite amusements and bowed to the ground if a European came near them. I sometimes wonder they do not cut all our heads off, and say nothing more about it.122
One is bound to share Eden’s wonder that the Raj was able to pull this off. And in the end, it was not British heads that rolled. . . .
While not all could dine on imported delicacies prepared by a French chef, with a band playing in the background, even more lowly Brits could aspire to something like the comforts of home in the hills. Just as the Romans replicated an alien way of life in England with their villas and baths and gardens, the British, too, built cottages with homey names and homey gardens. Indeed, the Mughals provide a closer analogy than the Romans, with their palaces and gardens in the verdant valleys of Kashmir, with its terraced hills full of fragrant flowers and fruits and sunlit water cascading to the lakes below. Was the annual exodus to the hills of the viceroy, council, commander-in-chief, and supporting bureaucrats more preposterous than that of the entire Mughal court with army in tow to distant Kashmir?
The British for their part were intent on re-creating the “England of our dreams” to an extent impossible in the lowlands.123 But it was an exaggerated Englishness, an Englishness with “Cheltenham trappings,” with “shooting sticks and riding whips in the shop windows; in the net-curtained bungalows named ‘Pine Breezes’ and ‘Fairview’; in the crumbles and custards on the boarding-house menus.” And it was all “counterfeit,” in William Dalrymple’s judgment: “Simla was and always has been an idealized picture-postcard memory of England, all teashops, village churches and cottage gardens—the romanticized creation of addled exiles driven half-mad by the Delhi heat. It looked as if it had been built from paintings on the tops of tins of short-bread. You kept asking yourself: what on earth was this strange half-timbered English village doing here in the middle of the Himalayas?”124 To the novelist Mukul Kesevan, it was not really so strange; it existed as “not-India,” not the “flat, hot, dusty, brown, diseased and overcrowded” India to which “the sahib gave his life in heroic service.”125 Why would he not feel entitled to an escape to the familiar?
But not everything about the hill stations was counterfeit, nor was the eagerness to see the landscape through England-colored glasses pure self-delusion. One should not make light of the joy with which the exile comes unexpectedly upon flowers of home growing in the wild. “I shall never forget this day,” wrote Sir William Lloyd, one of the earliest travelers to the Simla hills (1821), when he came upon “the fir, the oak, the apricot, the pear, the cherry, together with wild roses, raspberries, thistles, dandelions, nettles, daisies, and many others,” for they reminded him “of home, the days of my boyhood, my mother, and the happiest of varied recollections.” Lloyd makes clear that it “was not, however, the effect of the prospects, for they were unlike those amongst the Welsh hills, but it was because I recognized a great number of trees and flowers common there.”126 It was not a matter of mistaking the Himalayas for the Welsh hills; the scenery was different but the vegetation similar. In a sense the flora had a metonymic effect, a part inspiring thoughts of the whole, a single flower or tree conjuring the totality of home. Sometimes the evocations are totally unexpected, as when Sara Duncan remarks of the “refreshment to exile [of] the cold, sharp fragrance of chrysanthemums” of her fall garden: “It brings back, straight back, the glistening pavement of Kensington High Street on a wet November night, and the dear, dense smell of London and a sense of the delight that can be bought for sixpence there.”127
Cultivated gardens were also different in the hills. Where it was a constant battle to get English flowers to grow in the wilting heat of the plains, one could revel in all the familiar blossoms and scents, even if it was sometimes hard to find level ground or keep the khud at bay in steeper stations such as Simla. One thinks of Mabel Layton’s garden in Pankot. Rose cottage, the garden, and Mabel form almost a single entity. “Her days are spent in celebration of the natural cycle of seed, growth, flower, decay, seed.” The roses were of English stock, but flourished in her care.128 Mabel and Pankot are fictional, but Paul Scott knew his English gardeners well. Babur and Jahangir, too, would have recognized in her a kindred spirit.
Bangalore: The Pensioners’ Paradise
There was for some, however, an alternative to the bifurcated existence between plains in the winter, hills in the summer. Situated at an altitude of almost 3,000 feet in the midst of the Mysore tableland, Bangalore offered such a salubrious climate that it soon became the most important cantonment in peninsular India, with a corresponding expansion of the civil presence and all the support population that this implied. For nine months of the year, it was a “spot of England in India,” or, as another writer puts it, “India without its scorching sun and Europe without its snow.” Here, as one official gloated, one could play cricket on the parade ground for eight months of the year without ill effects.129 Even in the summer months, one could pull on a shawl of a cool evening and enjoy lovely walks in the garden. With possibly a modicum of exaggeration, a French historian had pronounced “the plains of Mysore . . . the most beautiful habitation that nature has to offer to mankind upon earth.” Once the British took these plains in hand and made Bangalore a capital in their own image, nature was, if anything, improved upon. Approaching the city of an evening in 1839, the Reverend William Arthur exclaimed over “hedgerows skirting the broad, regular roads, English-looking gates, lights shining from between clumps of trees, the white fronts of houses glistening in the brilliant moonlight, and the stir of buggies hurrying hither and thither.”130
The city had fallen into British hands with the final defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799. It had begun life in 1537 as the fortress city of Kempe Gowda, a local military chief tributary to the Vijayanagar Empire of South India. In time it was conquered by Haidar Ali and supplied the “sinews of war”—cannons, guns, and swords—for the armies of Mysore. It had also developed into a center of agricultural commerce and silk production under Haidar and his son Tipu. Soon after the conquest Francis Buchanan made an extensive survey of the territories newly won and found them exceedingly promising.131 Bangalore, he noted, drew commerce from far and wide. Within a few years, too, the British realized that it was a far healthier place for a military camp than the old fort at Srirangapatnam, a pestilential island in the Cauvery River near Mysore where soldiers were dying like flies, and shifted their forces accordingly. It was, Henrietta Clive declared, a “country . . . well worth the pains of taking it.” Settled into Tipu’s palace, with its lovely garden full of “sweet roses,” a year after the British victory, she had every reason for patriotic self-congratulation (and every reason to be glad she was not one of Tipu’s poor wives when she learned how miserably they had been treated).132
Fig. 25. Bungalow, Bangalore
[From Janet Pott, Old Bungalows in Bangalore, 1977]
Because the colonial city took shape only in the nineteenth century, well after the heyday of the Company nabobs, Bangalore skipped the garden house phase, passing directly into bungalow-imperial. Indeed, Bangalore’s bungalows became celebrated throughout India for their whimsical ornamentation, cultivating forms of the Picturesque long after it had gone out of style in England. Classical and Gothic details “combined in wonderful flights of imaginative fancy”: crenellated gables and towers, fretwork canopies known as “monkey-tops,” and carved bargeboards over doors and windows. As the city grew, land became scarcer and the size of compounds smaller, adding pressure to expand upward from the one-story ur-model (Fig. 25). This allowed for even greater flights of fancy in the matter of crested roofs and embellished turrets. Edward Lear’s entire Indian trip was a quest for the Picturesque, but even he found Bangalore’s “queer houses . . . odd indeed.” Still, for us they have something of the same charm in microcosm as Bombay’s Victoria Terminus in macrocosm. And when cascades of brilliant bougainvillea bedecked the trelliswork, the result was a “fairy-tale atmosphere, a Gothick Arcadia.”133
A floral Arcadia, too—a “garden paradise,” as one visitor put it—thanks to the relatively temperate climate. Coming to Bangalore in 1839 after several lethargic years in Madras, Julia Maitland felt like Sleeping Beauty waking at last. “The early mornings especially are as pleasant as anything I can imagine,” she declared. “They have all the sweetness and freshness of an English summer. The air smells of hay and flowers, instead of ditches, dust, fried oil, curry, and onions, which are the best of the Madras smells. There are superb dahlias growing in the gardens, and to-day I saw a real staring full-blown hollyhock, which was like meeting an old friend from England, instead of the tuberoses, pomegranates, &c., I have been accustomed to see for the last two years. We have apples, pears, and peaches. . . . The English children are quite fat and rosy, and wear shoes and stockings.”134
Whatever his feelings about Bangalore’s architecture, Lear, too, found its flowers delightful. Here, as in the hills, English flowers thrived, although one did have to be on guard against the pernicious ague that lurked in damp recesses at certain seasons. The elegant bungalow facades opened onto spacious lawns, with leafy shrubs and flowers blooming throughout the year— and, inevitably, ranks of potted plants edging the house and marching up onto the verandah. As a young cavalry officer stationed in Bangalore early in the twentieth century, Winston Churchill and two chums took a palatial bungalow “wreathed in purple bougainvillia. It stood in a compound of some two acres with a garden of “about a hundred and fifty splendid standard roses: Maréchal Niel, La France, Gloire de Dijon, etc.,” set out, no doubt by someone who knew his roses. Churchill, incidentally, is still conspicuously visible on the blacklist at the Bangalore Club for nonpayment of dues.135
And not just English flowers, but English vegetables. The success of private gardeners growing European fruits and vegetables hitherto unknown in India stimulated a boom in market gardens supplying not only the local British population but also eager consumers as far away as Madras and Pondicherry. In fact, a hereditary community of gardeners long settled in Bangalore, the Vahnikula Kshatriya, showed a remarkable ability to adapt to the demands of cantonment and civil station. Ironically, much of the land and tanks appropriated for the expanding city had once belonged to them. They continued to grow flowers as well as fruits, vegetables, and spices in their plantations on the margins of the city, even exporting seeds and plants to England. The same community was instrumental in landscaping the city’s many gardens and parks.136
It was their land, too, that was probably the source of Cubbon Park, named for Sir Mark Cubbon, who presided over Bangalore’s coming of age from 1834 to 1861. The most extensive of Bangalore’s numerous parks, it was “a lush grassy expanse with flower beds, shady bowers and flowering trees,” covering some 320 acres and linking the cantonment and city—or separating the two. In due time it acquired a bandstand, statues of Queen Victoria, King Edward VII, and Jaya Chamarajendra Wodeyar, Maharajah of Mysore, and a Children’s Park. Strolling across the lawns of a Sunday, listening to the military band, embraced by the reassuring presence of the queen, one might for a moment imagine oneself back home in summertime—that is, until one looked at the trees and acknowledged there was not a single English species in the lot: champaks, gulmohurs, jacaranda, frangipani, neem, sandal, and ashoka, African tulip, beautiful trees from all over the world except the northern climes.137
Near the western or city end of the park stood the Residency, a majestic white Palladian structure set in the midst of a “vast, undulating, and imperial garden” of ninety-two acres and lovingly tended by a succession of commissioners from Cubbon onward. Until its acreage was gnawed away for a number of public buildings, it rivaled the Lal Bagh in its splendid plantings, many of them in fact borrowings from the botanical garden. At its peak it even claimed a collection of 3,400 potted plants. As originally laid out, a central path marked by rows of royal palms led to the front portico, flanked on either side by green lawns, rose gardens, and arches covered with creepers. The path encircled a round pool with a central fountain spraying up into a fan palm. On the periphery of the formal garden there was an orchard of fruit trees and a kitchen garden. At some point a replica of an Ashoka Pillar was positioned at the entrance to the Residency and an artificial waterfall created to suggest the terraced watercourses of the Shalimar Gardens of the Mughals, both intended, perhaps, to reclaim its Indian heritage.138
For many of Bangalore’s garden enthusiasts, however, the Lal Bagh was the real Mecca, especially since the Residency was off-limits to ordinary citizens. Combining a wealth of indigenous and exotic trees and plants, it was renowned for its annual flower shows (see chapter 4). The Reverend Norman Macleod left a rapturous account of such a show around 1870, reminding us that vegetables can evoke as intense emotions of nostalgia as flowers:
Our home feeling was greatly intensified by attending a flower show. . . . The most remarkable and interesting spectacles to me were the splendid vegetables of every kind, including potatoes which would have delighted an Irishmen; leeks and onions worthy of being remembered like those of Egypt; cabbages, turnips, cauliflowers, peas, beans, such as England could hardly equal; splendid fruit—apples, peaches, oranges, figs, and pomegranates, the display culminating in a magnificent array of flowers, none of which pleased me more than the beautiful roses, so redolent of home! Such were the sights of a winter’s day in Bangalore.139
The area around the Lal Bagh became an important center of the nursery trade, drawing serious gardeners from all over India.140
English flowers, English vegetables, English church spires, English parks, non-English weather—is it any wonder that Bangalore was a plum posting for British military and civilian personnel alike? “Going into Bangalore from the districts is looked upon in the light of a trip to Paris, or a run up to town in England,” wrote Commissioner Bowring.141 No wonder, too, that the city became a paradise for Anglo-Indian pensioners from all over India. Not everyone could face “living out old age at Cheltenham or in the Asia Minor of South Kensington,” in a homeland that became more alien with every year away. At home they were highly unlikely to have enormous houses, fine carriages, and a regiment of uniformed servants not only for themselves but even for their horses and dogs. And the climate: on coming ashore in Plymouth in mid-May after seventeen years in India, Fanny Parks was stung by the bitter sleet beating on her face. Everything looked “so wretchedly mean,” the ladies’ fashions so ugly and dull, the British Museum’s collection of Hindu “idols” so pitiful—“and as for Ganesh, they never beheld such an one as mine, even in a dream.” Parks might well have lamented with the Urdu poet the loss of “the garden and my nest.” All that redeemed England in her eyes was the wonder of the new steam trains and the Devon hedgerows in their mantel of primroses, heatherbells, and wild hyacinths. Emily Eden encountered a woman who had been living in India for fifty years save for a year in England four years earlier: “She thought it a horrid country, and came out again. She is now 84, and is now going home, ‘to give England another chance.’”142
There were more of those disinclined to give England a second chance than one might have imagined. Such was the canal engineer George Faulkner, a “man of a type perhaps little known in England, but far from uncommon in India, the Englishman to whom India has become a second mother-country, and who,” claimed a fellow official, “would be unhappy and totally misunderstood and out of place in England.” And yet Faulkner was so English in manners and feelings that although he had been in India for forty years, he spoke barely a dozen words of any Indian language, “grew the most beautiful flowers, planned and laid out the most lovely gardens”—in what style his chronicler does not say but we can guess—and was quite content to pursue his vocation and indulge his inventive genius in India. What was more, all of his seven children had been sent to England (and Paris, in the case of his daughters) for their education and all had returned to the picturesque seaside town of Cuttack in Orissa, where their hard-drinking, Ruskin-loving, “old Viking” of a father ran his hydraulic workshop like an oriental despot, to the despair of the Public Works Department.143
Men like Faulkner often chose to spend the evening of their lives in Bangalore, where a number of new suburbs beckoned. After a lifetime in the employ of the telegraph, the post office, and the Great Indian Peninsular Railway, John Hawkins, for example, retired to the city in 1909. For him it was the “salubrity and cheapness” that drew him, but for his wife it was the chance to indulge her three hobbies: poultry, cattle (i.e., buffalo), and flowers. Twenty years later he described their garden to his grandson as including fourteen large mango trees, much attacked by servants, squirrels, and crows. But it was the flower garden that was “a great source of pleasure to us,” he wrote. “It is grandma’s realm entirely. We have lovely dahlias in bloom now [August], also goldenrod, chrysanthemums, geraniums and hibiscus.” He elaborated on the various species of the hibiscus family. Photographs of the multigabled brick house show a profusion of shrubs and flowers and, of course, a fine lawn.144 As the old bungalows passed more and more into Indian hands, the new owners often carried on Bangalore’s love affair with gardens until they, too, were overtaken by the ceaseless remaking of the city into its present incarnation as the Silicon Valley of India.145
Fig. 26. Carpet bedding in the Lal Bagh, Bangalore.
Curzon Collection, photographer unknown
[The British Library Board, Photo 430/4(7)]
The history of Bangalore has a stolidly British, middle-class continuity to it. After the excitement of Haidar and Tipu that preceded its anglicization, Bangalore evolved peacefully, almost uneventfully throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries; even the tumultuous events of 1857–58 created scarcely a ripple in its Deccan calm. It was the epitome of a British colonial enclave, a city of parks and gardens, domestic, public, and market. The parks commemorated founding fathers such as Sir Mark Cubbon while the gardens proclaimed a sense of order and ease, replicating English tastes and English nostalgia, even for those pensioners who had no intention of returning to the chilly mists of their native country and even when they incorporated plants that were foreign to it (Fig. 26). As with the hill stations, Bangalore represented one end of the spectrum: the happy congruence of geography and climate that enabled the British to re-create their England as a garden in India. So successful were they, so much was it an improvement on the original, that frequently they never wanted to leave.