Darjeeling (20 page)

Hill stations were a physical rendering of such aloofness.

The British “could start from scratch” on distant hilltops to be “celestially withdrawn from the Indian millions on the plains below,” live “a few months in the year entirely for themselves,”
²¹
and “pretend that India had receded from their lives.”
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The stations, built for Europeans, developed as oases of European civilization in the form of idyllic English or Scottish villages: churches with Gothic edifices, stained glass, and bell towers, bandstands for concerts with strident military tunes, the mall—limited to pedestrians and horses—for strolling, and, most notably in Shimla, a lively amateur theatrical season. Half-timbered, Tudor-style bungalows with low roofs and porches perched precariously on hillsides and offered stunning views. Owners christened them with names such as Willowdale, Springbrook, and Briar and surrounded them with roses and ornamental plants often raised from British seed. These flowering beds formed “a cordon sanitaire to keep India at bay.”
²³
For “Britishers,” hill stations were a fundamental part of life during the colonial era.

But hill stations were not intended to be tourist resorts as they are today. Rather, they were built as sanitariums for East India Company employees to rest and recuperate. With excruciating summer temperatures on India’s plains and tropical maladies cutting short the life span of British soldiers, whose numbers increased greatly after the uprising of 1857, Britain began building convalescent settlements in the mountains in the second half of the nineteenth century. Within a couple of decades, some eighty hill stations, from the grand (Shimla, Ooty, Darjeeling) to
the less noted (Yercaud in Tamil Nadu, Almora and Ranikhet in Uttar Pradesh), were spread across the subcontinent.
²⁴

Ranging from four thousand to eight thousand feet in elevation, their initial attraction was a less oppressive climate that offered a chance to regain health and recoup one’s old vigor. Heat was a frequent source of problems, although not infrequently exacerbated by inadequate clothing. Soldiers were still dressing in woolens and colorful Napoleonic-era uniforms with heavy ornamental insignia more suitable for a Central European battlefield than the scorching plains of the Indian subcontinent. The diet contained often excessively and unsuitably heavy food and too many bottles of fortified Madeira from Portugal. “We blame India for all our ailments, forgetting to accommodate our habits to its climate,”
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
, the domestic bible for the British in India that ran through at least ten editions between 1888 and 1921, sternly admonished,
²⁵
mindful that it took far too long for flannels to be replaced by cotton undergarments and girdles left in the closet.

At first modest, hill stations grew into a pure and distilled expression of the Britishness of the Empire
²⁶
and potent colonial emblems. From 1864 until 1947, the summer capital of British India was an improbably small and inaccessible mountain resort. “From Shimla were directed the affairs of 308 million people—two and a half times the population, by Gibbon’s estimate, of the Roman Empire at its climax,” Morris noted.
²⁷
Or, at the time, about one-fifth of mankind.

Shimla might have been comfortable, even somewhat familiar, but it took weeks to reach from the capital. Until 1911, when the newly crowned King-Emperor George V transferred it to Delhi, the capital of British India was Calcutta, some twelve hundred miles from Shimla. But when the heat arrived, as Kipling wrote:

… the Rulers in that City by the Sea

Turned to flee—

Fled, with each returning Spring-tide, from its ills

To the Hills.
²⁸

The level of British organization and the depth of desire, even desperation, to flee the heat culminated with the yearly move of the entire central government apparatus piece by piece from the capital into the hills when the hot weather arrived, and then back down again when it receded.
²⁹
The caravan of bullock carts, camels, and elephants, syces (grooms) and scribes, guards, memsahibs and children, cooks and ayahs making their way slowly to the hills was befitting of kings and conquerors on the move. “Hannibal’s army crossing the Alps,” Geoffrey Moorhouse noted, “had nothing on the British Raj ascending to its summer retreat.”
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Shimla had the viceroy and commander in chief in summer residence, as well as the Delhi and Punjab secretariats. But Darjeeling was the Queen of the Himalaya. Many tailgates on beefy Tata trucks and snub-nosed lorries plying the road from Siliguri today refer to it as “Queen of Hills.” Even the exacting authors of
The Complete Indian Housekeeper and Cook
called the scenery the “finest of all the hill stations.” Though not before noting that it was also the dampest one in India and “leeches and ticks are a perfect pest.”
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In 1911, the year the Indian capital shifted, Darjeeling town had possibly the highest concentration of Europeans in the country with a ratio of less than ten Indians to one European, where it was overall many thousands to one.
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During the summer months, the European population doubled.

The town spread almost vertically along a semicircular ridge, with buildings plastered to the shelves of the hillside. At the top sat the European quarter (residential bungalows and cottages, the lending library, pharmacy, Club, and church, with the steeple of St. Andrew’s as the apex), then came the cheap hotels, bazaars, huts, and native tenements below in descending consequence but increasing density down to where the rickshaws waited and carriages loaded.

Along with being Bengal’s chief sanatorium for the convalescing, Darjeeling acted as the provincial summer capital for the regional government whose seat was a distant Calcutta, some four hundred miles south. Men working in the civil or military administration and businessmen sent their wives and children into the hills to spend the hot months in the mountain air and, if lucky, joined them for a fortnight. Early Darjeeling also attracted some wealthy Indians and a few local princes. The maharaja of Cooch Behar built a sumptuous summer home there as did the maharaja of Burdwan.

The visit in the spring of 1880 by Lord and Lady Lytton, the viceroy of India and his wife, marked the hill station’s arrival. The heavily bearded statesman and poet and his wife, who had been a lady-in-waiting to Queen Victoria, arrived with a thirty-one-gun salute and departed five
days later under another regal salvo into the March sky. Darjeeling had “come of age.”
³³

Not every early visitor was impressed, though. “Darjeeling itself is not so striking in its beauty as Lucerne or Chamounix or St Moritz,” wrote John Oliver Hobbes in 1903. “It may be questioned whether it is beautiful at all. The town has no plan, and it straggles apparently over several hillsides.”
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What caught the attention, pen, and hyperbole of Hobbes was the bazaar, with its picturesque elements that Darjeeling’s Swiss and French rivals could never match:

One could buy skins of beasts, turquoise earrings, silver girdles, prints of the gods, bangles, dreadful drugs from the native apothecary, prayer wheels, rice, maize, yellow ochre and powdered carmine for one’s face, bangles and dress materials. The girls often have their cheeks stained horribly with the blood of goats or chickens, and they wear their wealth in necklaces made of rupees for which they are sometimes murdered.
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The city remains, as when Hobbes experienced it, essentially a set of tiered landings and switchbacks with steps and steep ramps running between, jammed with buildings, shops, and cafés, and all roads leading up to the long, broad plaza at the saddle below Observatory Hill. The Chowrasta is the city’s flattest point and meeting spot, where four important pedestrian streets come together, and everyone in town seems to pass through at least once during the day.

“In any town in India the European Club is the spiritual citadel, the real seat of the British power,” Orwell wrote in
Burmese Days
,
³⁶
his scathing portrait of British attitudes during their rule of British India (including Burma) and Ceylon (Sri Lanka). The Club—like the Company—was given a capital
C
, and often a capital
T
, too: The Club.

Their beginnings go back to the early coffeehouses in London, men-only places where every class and trade had a favorite in which to gather. Eventually they set up their own private establishments. Such exclusivity transplanted effortlessly around the Empire. In India, Calcutta’s Bengal Club, established in 1827, was the first, followed by the Byculla Club in Bombay and the Madras Club five years later. After the uprising in 1857, they appeared in nearly every station across India.

The Club was “a symbol and center of British imperialism,” wrote Leonard Woolf—writer, editor, and husband of Virginia—recalling his seven years as a colonial administrator in Ceylon. “It had normally a curious air of slight depression, but at the same time exclusiveness, superiority, isolation. Only the ‘best people’ and of course only white men were members.”
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Club membership was based, foremost, on race. A system that would essentially allow any class of white but no class of Indian, no matter aristocracy or Oxbridge education, was ironic and particularly galling. Yet, in a country where Hindu castes were rigid and many Brahmans would not eat food touched by lower castes, such segregation was not unique.
³⁸
(The decision, at the end of Britain’s rule, to begin allowing in
some
Indians divided members—and Empire.)

Membership was, secondly, based on occupation.
Boxwallahs
, a rather contemptuous name for all those engaged in trade, fell well down the rank across India except perhaps in port cities such as Calcutta and Bombay, where commerce dominated affairs.
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Those in the army were above nonofficials, but residing at the top were ICS men—generally recruited just out of Oxford or Cambridge. Know as “Heaven-born,” these were “the colonial equivalent of the Hindu Brahmin caste.”
⁴⁰

“Ironically,” lamented Eugenia Herbert, “in the new order of things, the once-glorious merchants (
boxwallahs
) and planters ranked virtually on par with untouchables.”
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Not so in Darjeeling. While ICS, British army officers, and railway officers drank at the Planters’ Club, the planters themselves and
burra sahibs
—head managers at the tea gardens—were its aristocrats. It was the hub of social life for British working on Darjeeling tea estates.

Established in 1868, the Darjeeling Planters’ Club was built on a parcel of land donated by the maharaja of Cooch Behar, who was the only one allowed to park his rickshaw on the main porch of the Club. It was a place to meet, swap stories, commiserate, and talk shop.

“The life of a planter was very lonely,” observed the Club’s current assistant secretary, Shabnam Bhutia, on its open verandah with brilliant white walls and tea-leaf-green doors during a spring day. Dozens of potted purple and white flowers had symmetrically been arranged on a stepped, three-tiered platform beneath sets of mounted horns. Wide wicker chairs were turned toward the midday sun like sunflowers. The planters had
little chance for social activity. Gardens were remote, and even ones side by side took time to reach.
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With a staff of servants, cooks, houseboys, bearers, and gardeners, life on a tea estate could be comfortable for the planter, but lonesome. Society and even other Westerners were generally too distant for regular contact. Applicants in Europe wanting to work on a tea estate were required to be bachelors, wait some years before marrying, and then secure permission to do so from the
burra sahib
⁴²
—which is to say, approval not just of the marriage but also of the woman, often found among the small Anglo community in Darjeeling.

Being a planter or a European working on any of the tea gardens obliged becoming a Club member, and being a member was a key part of the social life. Liquor played an important role at the Club, but was governed by an unwritten rule: beer from eleven a.m., gin in the afternoon, and whisky not before sunset.
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Billiards and bridge were offered, and, in the evenings, dancing to songs already out of fashion in Britain, but that hardly mattered. On Club night it was packed: Attendance was obligatory. The Club had a couple dozen rooms available for the planters to stay over, or for their guests. After Mark Twain gave a lecture in Darjeeling, he retired to one of its rooms.

Most didn’t sleep over, though. The junior members of a tea estate—the assistants and engineers—needed to make the garden’s dawn roll call no matter how late they stayed at the Club. So the men made their way home, somehow, late at night. They would ride back along the network of precarious paths, crossing on horseback streams and rivers whose swollen torrents were dangerous in the rainy season.
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Until just a few decades ago, horses remained a principal means of transport on a tea garden, and planters received a horse allowance. “Every manager rode his estate, and horses were considered more expensive than wives,” according to Gillian Wright. “Even in 1971, a planter was allowed Rs 300 a month for his horse and Rs 150 a month dearness allowance upon marriage.”
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While managers now make that late-night drive in a jeep, the roads are frequently washed out by monsoon rains, overrun by streams, and, in most cases, remain just as wild. “Driving home at around midnight from the Club,” Vijay Dhancholia, a member since 1992, recalled, “I saw a
leopard on the road with a deer, and it crouched there until we went right next it.”

Such an evening out today is an anomaly. While most garden managers are members, like Dhancholia, they now rarely go. Planters’ families live with them on the estates, and with Internet, mobile phones, and satellite TV, most planters don’t need the Club for entertainment or even to socialize.