Hill station

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A hill station is a type of hill town, mostly in colonial Asia, but also in colonial Africa (albeit rarely), founded by European colonialists as a refuge from the summer heat. As historian Dane Kennedy observes about the Indian context, "the hill station (...) was seen as an exclusive British preserve: here it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider".<ref name="cdlib1996">Kennedy, Dane. The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj. Berkeley: University of California Press, c1996 1996. | http://ark.cdlib.org/ark:/13030/ft396nb1sf/</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> The term is still used in present day, particularly in India, which has the largest number of hill stations; most are situated at an altitude of approximately Template:Convert.

History

In South Asia

Nandi Hills is an 11th-century hill station that was developed by the Ganga dynasty in present-day Karnataka, India.<ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite book</ref>Template:Citation needed Tipu Sultan (1751–1799) notably used it as a summer retreat.<ref>Template:Cite book</ref>

Hill stations in British India were established for a variety of reasons. One of the first reasons in the early 1800s was to act as sanitoria for the ailing family members of British officials.<ref name="Kennedy1996">Template:Cite book</ref> After the rebellion of 1857, the British "sought further distance from what they saw as a disease-ridden land by [escaping] to the Himalayas in the north". Other factors included anxieties about the dangers of life in India, among them "fear of degeneration brought on by too long residence in a debilitating land". The hill stations were meant to reproduce the home country, illustrated in Lord Lytton's statement about Ootacamund in the 1870s as having "such beautiful English rain, such delicious English mud."<ref name="MetcalfMetcalf2002">Template:Cite book</ref> Shimla was officially made the "summer capital of India" in the 1860s and hill stations "served as vital centres of political and military power, especially after the 1857 revolt."<ref name="kennedyDane">Template:Cite book</ref><ref name="Vipin1996">Template:Cite book</ref>

As noted by Indian historian Vinay Lal, hill stations in India also served "as spaces for the colonial structuring of a segregational and ontological divide between Indians and Europeans, and as institutional sites of imperial power."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite news</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref><ref>Template:Cite web</ref> William Dalrymple wrote that "[t]he viceroy was the spider at the heart of Simla's web: From his chambers in Viceregal Lodge, he pulled the strings of an empire that stretched from Rangoon in the east to Aden in the west."<ref>Template:Cite news</ref> Meanwhile Judith T Kenny observed that the hill station was "a landscape type tied to nineteenth-century discourses of imperialism and climate. Both discourses serve as evidence of a belief in racial difference and, thereby, the imperial hill station reflected and reinforced a framework of meaning that influenced European views of the non-western world in general."<ref>Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill Station in India | Judith T. Kenny | https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1467-8306.1995.tb01821.x</ref> Speaking about the development of hill stations like Mussoorie, Shekhar Pathak, historian of Himalayan cultures, noted that "the needs of this (European) elite created colonies in Dehradun of Indians to cater to them."<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> This "exclusive, clean, and secure social space – known as an enclave – for white Europeans ... evolved to become the seats of government and foci of elite social activity", and created racial distinctions which perpetuated British colonial power and oppression, as Nandini Bhattacharya notes.<ref>Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India | Nandini Bhattacharya | https://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/UPO9781846317835/upso-9781846318290-chapter-2</ref><ref>Bhattacharya N. (2013). Leisure, economy and colonial urbanism: Darjeeling, 1835–1930. Urban history, 40(3), 442–461. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963926813000394</ref> Dane Kennedy observed that "the hill station, then, was seen as an exclusive British preserve: here it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider".<ref name="cdlib1996"/>

Kennedy, following Monika Bührlein, identifies three stages in the evolution of hill stations in India: high refuge, high refuge to hill station, and hill station to town. The first settlements started in the 1820s, primarily as sanitoria. In the 1840s and 1850s, there was a wave of new hill stations, with the main impetus being "places to rest and recuperate from the arduous life on the plains". In the second half of the 19th century, there was a period of consolidation, with few new hill stations. In the final phase, "hill stations reached their zenith in the late nineteenth century. The political importance of the official stations was underscored by the inauguration of large and costly public-building projects."<ref name="kennedyDane" />Template:Rp

The term "hill station" has been used loosely in India (and more broadly South Asia) since the mid-20th century to describe any town or settlement in a mountainous area which attempts to expand its local economy toward tourism, or has been invested by recent mass tourism practices. Kullu and Manali in the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh are two examples of that shift in the meaning of "hill station". These two historical settlements existed prior to the British, and have not been extensively modified or shaped by them, or even particularly frequented by them. However, the rise of internal domestic tourism in India from the eighties and the subsequent growth in hill station practice by urban middle-class Indians contributed to the labelling of these two localities as hill stations. Munnar, a settlement in the state of Kerala whose economy is primarily based on tea cultivation and processing as well as plantation agriculture, is another example of a hill town transformed by modern tourism into a hill station.