The Changing Profile of the Summer Capital of British India: Simla 1864–1947

Abstract

INDIAN hill stations have often been portrayed as islands of European settlement, providing colonists with a retreat, both from the heat and the native culture of the plains.British planners meant them to be English enclaves, but the image owes not a little to the innumerable references available in accounts written by the British in India. Hill stations, with their thickly wooded hills and swirling mist, afforded colonists an opportunity to build around themselves a replica of English life. The presence of European women in large numbers at hill stations enhanced the image. They, more than their men, tended to withdraw within the closed circle of European society. It was an endless succession of balls, archery, fetes, picnics and amateur theatre. Their diaries, letters and novels covering almost a century, hardly ever went beyond an account of the rounds of social engagements. The view has been perpetuated by fiction. Simla had its Rudyard Kipling, and that hill station was peopled by larger-than-life images created by the writer in the 1880s. But so vivid was the evocation that British visitors seemed to search for them in Simla even a quarter of a century later.