Hill station

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File:Shimla Southern Side of Ridge.JPG
Shimla, a city founded as a hill station. The city's urban planning and architecture, as seen here on the south side of the Ridge, were designed to foster a European experience for homesick colonial officials and executives.

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".[1][2] 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 Script error: No such module "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.[3][4]Script error: No such module "Unsubst". Tipu Sultan (1751–1799) notably used it as a summer retreat.[5]

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.[6] 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."[7] 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."[8][9]

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."[10][11][12][13][14] William Dalrymple wrote that "[t]he viceroy was the spider at the heart of Simla's web: From his chambers in the Viceregal Lodge, he pulled the strings of an empire that stretched from Rangoon in the east to Aden in the west."[15] 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."[16] 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."[17] 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.[18][19] 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".[1]

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."[8]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.

List of hill stations

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Africa

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Antsirabe, Madagascar
File:Ifrane.jpg
Ifrane, Morocco

Americas

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Asia

Bangladesh

File:SajekSight 08.jpg
Sajek Valley, Rangamati Hill District, Bangladesh, the most popular hill station and summer destination in Bangladesh

Cambodia

File:Mairie du Bokor.jpg
Former residence of King Sisowath Monivong at Phnom Bokor

China

Cyprus

File:Platres.jpg
Platres, Cyprus

Hong Kong

India

Script error: No such module "For". Hundreds of hill stations are located in India. The most popular hill stations in India include:

File:Nainital on a warm summer evening.jpg
A summer evening view on the Nainital Lake and town, in the state of Uttarakhand, India. Hill stations are often created or shaped according to European aesthetics. Here, the natural lakes of the Kumaon hills echo the lakes of the Swiss Alps, celebrated at the same time in Western Europe. In Ooty and Kodaikanal, the lack of water bodies has been compensated by the creation of artificial lakes.
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Tea plantations in Darjeeling, West Bengal, India
File:Stone House , Government Museum, Ooty Tamil Nadu India.jpg
The Stone House at Ooty, the first colonial mansion built in the Nilgiris

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Indonesia

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Puncak, West Java, Indonesia

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Iraq

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Amadiya in northern Iraq

Israel

Japan

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Karuizawa in Nagano, Japan

Jordan

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Jabal al-Ashrafiyeh in Amman, Jordan

Malaysia

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Cameron Highlands, Malaysia

Myanmar

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Nepal

File:Namche Bazaar from above, Nepal.jpg
Village of Namche Bazaar in Nepal

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Pakistan

File:Sunset in hills - Holy Trinity Church, Murree.jpg
Murree, a popular hill station in Pakistan

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Khyber Pakhtunkhwa
Punjab
Sindh
Balochistan
Gilgit Baltistan

Philippines

File:Baguio panorama.jpg
Baguio, Philippines

Sri Lanka

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File:Sri Lanka Teeplantage.jpg
Nuwara Eliya, Sri Lanka

Syria

File:Bloudan Jerjanieh.jpg
Bloudan, Syria

Uzbekistan

Vietnam

File:Xuan Huong Lake 11.jpg
Da Lat, Vietnam

Oceania

Australia

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Mount Macedon, Victoria
File:Bardon sunrise.jpg
Bardon, Queensland
Victoria
South Australia
Queensland
Western Australia
New South Wales

See also

References

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  1. ↑ a b 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/
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  15. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  16. ↑ 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
  17. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  18. ↑ Contagion and Enclaves: Tropical Medicine in Colonial India | Nandini Bhattacharya | https://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/UPO9781846317835/upso-9781846318290-chapter-2
  19. ↑ Bhattacharya N. (2013). Leisure, economy and colonial urbanism: Darjeeling, 1835–1930. Urban history, 40(3), 442–461. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0963926813000394
  20. ↑ a b c d Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".
  21. ↑ Script error: No such module "citation/CS1".

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Bibliography

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External links

Template:List of hill stations Template:Authority control

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