CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2020
| Author | Tewari, Tilak |
|---|---|
| Title | British Social Life in the Himalayan Hill Stations of India (nineteenth and twentieth centuries) |
| Summary | One important aspect of British colonialism in India that has largely been ignored by historiography is the establishment and development of several ‘hill stations’, i.e., settlements in high-altitude, hilly areas, throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. These hill stations were initially established in the early nineteenth century as leisurely retreats from the scorching heat of the plains but subsequently served as loci of political power in the British Empire in the latter half of the nineteenth century. In this thesis, I study the distinctive sociocultural space of the hill stations which developed through the complex interaction between the colonizers, the natives, and their immediate natural environment, as well as the way in which the acquisition and assimilation of these territories into the British Empire became an avenue for imperial self-fashioning. The aim of this thesis is to use contemporary narratives from a variety of sources – guidebooks, surveys, and travelogues – to trace the transformation of the Himalayan foothills from scantily populated, non-urban sacred spaces to highly urbanized, predominantly British settlements incorporated into the Empire. I document the evolution of these stations and their changing function over time in the context of larger developments in the Empire. On the one hand, I use previously underutilized primary sources to refine and, in some cases, critique the existing arguments that hill stations served as an instrument for political and ideological domination by segregating the rulers from the ruled, and that they sustained a specific form of social life reminiscent of bourgeois English society in the metropolis. On the other hand, I argue that this process created many internal contradictions. The hill stations, rather than becoming mere simulations of European country life, developed as complex colonial spaces where the entangled interaction between a stratified British society, its colonial subjects, and the high-altitude hilly environment created a far more curious, intricate and composite colonial experience that has not been grasped in existing literature on the subject. |
| Supervisor | Iordachi, Constantin; Trencsényi Balázs |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2020/tewari_tilak.pdf |
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