Contagion and Enclaves

Front matter

POSTCOLONIALISM ACROSS THE DISCIPLINES

TROPICAL MEDICINE IN COLONIAL INDIA

NANDINI BHATTACHARYA

Contents

List of Illustrations List of Tables Acknowledgements List of Abbreviations

1 2 3

N Oo WwW A

Chapter 2

The Sanatorium of Darjeeling: European Health in a Tropical Enclave here were many ideological, political, military and medical reasons for hill-

stations in tropical colonies. The urgency of the question of the Europeans’ long-term survival in the tropics engaged medical discourses in Britain as well as in the tropical colonies in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.’ The eighteenth century represented a period of optimism about acclimatization and it had been generally a period when racial categorizations had not assumed absolute rigidity.” By the third decade of the nineteenth century acclimatization theories were eclipsed and there were serious doubts about the survival of the Englishman in India over a few generations. The contrast between the diseaseridden, crowded, unsanitary plains and the pure and healthy air of the ‘hills’ therefore came to be a familiar trope of official as well as medical discourses in colonial India. The hill-stations provided one means of establishing comfortable, familiar surroundings for the British in the tropics: their climate was supposedly not tropical.2 The logic of the development of hill-stations was their climatic opposition to the plains. The hill-station was a uniquely colonial phenomenon, and although best known in India, was institutionalized in many tropical

1 The point has been made by David Arnold, ‘Introduction’, in idem (ed.), Warm Climates and Western Medicine: The Emergence of Tropical Medicine, 1500-1900 (Amsterdam, Rodopi, 1996), pp. 1-19.

2 Mark Harrison, “The Tender Frame of Man”: Disease, Climate, and Racial Difference in India and the West Indies, 1760-1860’, Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 70 (1996), pp. 68-93.

3 Harrison has further argued that until the nineteenth century European medical perceptions regarded India’s difference with Europe, in climate as well as in civilizational terms, as one of degree rather than of kind. See Harrison, Climates and Constitutions, p. 119. Arnold has also argued that there was ambivalence regarding the recognition in European scientific and travel accounts of India’s topography as ‘tropical’ and that such a recognition was a historical process that continued to the mid-nineteenth century; Arnold (2006), pp. 110-42.

colonies. The British built hill-stations in Asia in the Ceylon and the Malay Straits — in fact the earliest ‘hill-station’ was at Penang in Malaya, which was occupied by the English East India Company (EEIC) in 1786 and by the early 1800s served as a site for recuperation for civil and military officials.* In late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Africa, social segregation followed closely on the heels of sanitation in the British colonies, and hill-stations facilitated the creation of exclusive, clean and secure social space for white Europeans.”

Empire in the Tropics, Recess in the ‘Hills’: The Hill—Plains Dichotomy in Colonial India

Historians of colonial India have seen the establishment, evolution and historical trajectory of hill-stations as determined by racial distinctions and a value system which favoured the hills over the plains. The explorations in the Himalayas, the slow but sure penetration of British influence in the areas bordering the mountains on the north, north-east and the north-west of India took place in the first two decades of the nineteenth century. As Kennedy has pointed out, the nomenclature was deceptive.’ Most of the ‘stations’ were located not on hills, but on high mountains, usually from 4000 to 6000 feet above sea level. Such were the hill-stations of Simla, Mussoorie, Landour and Darjeeling. Like many other colonial institutions the hill-station developed multiple nuances and spread geographically. For instance, the Bombay government, lacking access to high mountains, resorted to various hill tops in the Mahabaleshwar over the relatively modest Satpura and Aravalli ranges where several hill-stations sprang up to accommodate a seasonal population. Similarly Ootacamund in the Nilgiri range emerged as a notable hill-station in southern India. Initially established to ensure the recuperation of European troops in tropical colonies from eighteenth-century tropical diseases like cholera and dysentery, they evolved to become the seats of government and foci of elite social activity in colonial India.

4 S. Robert Aiken, ‘Early Penang Hill-station’, Geographical Review, 77 (1987), pp. 421-39.

5 For an overview of white segregation within African cities, see Maynard Swanson, ‘The Sanitation Syndrome: Bubonic Plague and Urban Native Policy in the Cape Colony, 1900-1909’, Journal of African History, 38 (1977), pp. 387-410. For a comparison of segregated colonial town-planning in Africa between the French and the British empires, see Odile Goerg, ‘From Hill-station (Freetown) to Downtown Conakry (First Ward): Comparing French and British Approaches to Segregation in Colonial Cities at the Beginning of the Twentieth Century’, Canadian Journal of African Studies/Revue canadienne des études africaines, 32 (1998), pp. 1-31. See also P.D. Curtin, ‘Medical Knowledge and Urban Planning in Tropical Africa’, The American Historical Review, 90 (1985), pp. 594-613.

6 Kennedy, The Magic Mountains, pp. 1-14; King, Colonial Urban Development, pp. 165-76. See also Judith T. Kenny, ‘Climate, Race, and Imperial Authority: The Symbolic Landscape of the British Hill-station in India’, Annals of the Association of American Geographers, 85 (1995), pp. 694-714, and Queeny Pradhan, ‘Empire in the Hills: The Making of Hill-stations in Colonial India’, Studies in History, 23 (2007), pp. 33-91.

The numbers of European troops in India increased under the drastically changed concerns after the revolt of 1857 and this lent greater urgency to the problem of high mortality among European troops in the tropics. Although their flora and fauna were often unique both in the Himalayas and in the Nilgiri, Satpura and Aravalli ranges, some hill-stations provided sites conducive to the introduction of flora from colder climates. And most importantly, they promised the space for an alternative world where the European (as a racial category) could feel comfortable and the Englishman recreate in some measure the cosy, even intimate, atmosphere of ‘home’ within the tropical colonies. Apart from their natural and scenic advantages, hill-stations also afforded to the British in India opportunities for architectural distinctiveness, the advantages of sewerage, clean water and social spaces such as the Mall, a promenade that excluded Indians except in manual capacities. British rule established municipal governance in all parts of urban India, but the governance of hill-stations remained in the control of colonial officials and therefore beyond the interventions of Indian nationalists whose priorities in local government rarely extended to conservancy and sanitation.

As historians and indeed contemporary residents in late colonial Indian hill-stations have argued, the hill-stations did not remain exclusive European enclaves, overrun as they were by multitudes of lower-class Indians in menial and subordinate positions within households as well as in civilian administration. Since they are supposed to have collapsed under their own weight, can we then see a hill-station as a colonial enclave at all? | would argue here that the enclaves maintained a balance between permeability and exclusivity; that the raison d’étre of the hill-station was the integration of their respective areas within the colonial political economy. Therefore it was immaterial whether or not the hill station was truly a healthy climatic resort. Diseases could and often did make their presence felt in chronic and epidemic forms in the hill resorts. Colonial governance was administered through the control of epidemics and the sustenance of an exclusive social and political space through modes that included the invention of a distinct disease environment for the ‘hills’ from that of the Indian plains. Similarly, the hill-stations actively encouraged migrant populations, and at the same time administrators attempted to limit their social and cultural influence within the limits of the town. In this chapter I have analysed the sustenance of Darjeeling as a site of medicalized leisure for Europeans. While hill-stations were sites of rejuvenation of white, European bodies in tropical climates, the very concept of rejuvenation of white bodies in the tropics was problematic. The British had seen tropical climate as the cause of their ill health and in that it was not just the hill-stations, but the hills themselves that were British colonial constructions. The hills—plains duality was constructed in terms of medical discourse and climatic theories of disease. This chapter shows that the hills—plains dichotomy was a false one, and was sustained through medical discourse and practice through the institutionalization of the hill-stations themselves. The hill-station of Darjeeling itself was sustained through its absorption into the larger colonial economy through the development of the tea plantations in the surrounding regions. Once established, the Indian elite formulated their own medicalized rationale for staking their claims on the hill-station.

The Expansion of Darjeeling

The area of Darjeeling and indeed the tracts where most of the Himalayan hill-stations were located had been part of the growing Gorkha Kingdom of Nepal in the late eighteenth century. From the late eighteenth century the Gorkha Kingdom, formerly a small principality in Nepal, had militarized itself and taken over the more prosperous kingdoms in the Kathmandu valley.® It next eyed the Himalayan principalities of Kumaon, Garhwal and Sikkim. The rapid conquest of the hill principalities in Garhwal and Kumaon, as well as British ambitions in the trans-Tibetan trade which would have to pass through Nepal, put Nepal into direct conflict with the EEI Company.? The consequence was a bloody war in which it took two years for the Company’s army to decisively defeat Nepal. Under the treaty of Sagauli (1816) between India and Nepal, a large section of the western Himalayan Terai was taken from Nepal and annexed by the East India Company.'° This was the tract where Mussoorie and Simla were later built. The area of Darjeeling, further, under a separate agreement (Treaty of Titalya, 1817) was given over to the King of Sikkim as part of the ring-fence policy, to create a buffer state between Nepal and India."!

Captain G.A. Lloyd and J.W. Grant, the Commercial Resident at Maldah in northern Bengal, visited the area to settle border disputes between Nepal and Sikkim. Later they arrived at Chongtung near Darjeeling and first thought of a sanatorium at the site in 1828.'? In 1829 the Government of India sent Captain J.D. Herbert, Deputy Surveyor General, to the site to explore possibilities for the establishment of a sanatorium for the use of European troops in India. His report was wholly favourable and his first assumption was to link health with climate: ‘The first point to be considered in the establishment of a station of

8 Kumar Pradhan, The Gorkha Conquests: The Process and Consequences of the Unification of Nepal, with Particular Reference to Eastern Nepal (Calcutta and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 89-105.

9 D.R. Regmi, Modern Nepal: Rise and Growth in the Eighteenth Century (Calcutta, Firma KLM, 1975), pp. 332-417.

10 John Pemble, The Invasion of Nepal: John Company at War (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1971), pp. 344-48.

11 For British policy in the princely states of colonial India, see Michael Fisher, Indirect Rule in India: Residents and the Residency System, 1764-1857 (Delhi, Oxford University Press, 1998). For a brief overview of British recruitment of various Nepali communities in Darjeeling, see Atis Dasgupta, ‘Ethnic Problems and Movements for Autonomy in Darjeeling’, Social Scientist, 27 (1999), pp. 47-68.

12 E.C. Dozey, A Concise History of the Darjeeling District with a Complete Itinerary of Tours in Sikkim and the District (2nd edn, Calcutta Art Press, 1922), pp. 2-3.

health is obviously climate.’'? Besides, he considered the logistics: new roads and maintenance of a supply line. To that end it was also essential to have permanent and settled British-ruled administrative centres relatively close, and Herbert found Darjeeling more convenient than other hill-stations for British troops in north India from Allahabad:

To give a better idea of the nature of the approach to Dargeeling, | would say that it is very nearly as promising as that to Semla, it is much more so than that to Dehra, and between it and the Almorah one, there can be no comparison whatsoever ...'*

In 1835, Captain Lloyd negotiated with the King of Sikkim for the cession of the land on which the sanatorium of Darjeeling was to be situated. Faced with the intent of the British government in India, the king, initially reluctant, finally leased the area in 1835 for an annual payment of Rs 3000.’° In the true tradition of the man in the field, Lloyd did not wait for instructions from the Governor General before pushing for and obtaining the lease.'® There were supposedly around a hundred inhabitants at the site, who were mainly the indigenous Lepchas.'’ After he successfully secured the lease and organized the labour for building the road to Darjeeling, the government replaced Lloyd with another official, Archibald Campbell.’® In 1839, Surgeon Major Campbell who had formerly served at the Residence in Nepal, was posted to Darjeeling. He was vested with wide-ranging fiscal, civil and judicial powers. For the next 22 years Campbell served as the Superintendent of Darjeeling and oversaw its settlement and steady expansion."

Archibald Campbell, a postgraduate surgeon from Edinburgh, had joined the EEIC in 1827. He was posted to Kathmandu.” Campbell served for eight years in Nepal. He, along with Brian Hodgson, the Resident at Nepal, was a keen Orientalist as well as naturalist. Like most old India-hands, his local knowledge included knowledge of local flora and fauna as well as the inhabitants of the region. The British residency at Kathmandu had an uneasy relationship with the Court, but Campbell used his local knowledge to good effect and wrote several papers on the economic, social and cultural aspects of the country and of the inhabitants of Nepal during his tenure. This knowledge served him later

13 Report on Dargeeling: A Place in the Sikkim Mountains, Proposed as a Sanitarium, or Station of Health (Calcutta, Baptist Mission Press, 1830), p. 3.

14 Report on Dargeeling, p. 6.

15 Joseph Dalton Hooker, Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist in Bengal Sikkim and Nepal Himalayas etc. (New Delhi, 1999, first pub. 1854), vol. 1, p. 110.

16 Fred Pinn, The Road of Destiny: Darjeeling Letters, 1839 (Calcutta and Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986), pp. 119-29.

17 O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteer, p. 22.

18 Pinn, The Road of Destiny, pp. 174-75.

19 R.D. O’Brien, Darjeeling: The Sanitarium of Bengal and Its Surroundings (Calcutta, W. Newman & Co.,1883), pp. 14-15.

20 Memorandum of the Services of Dr A. Campbell, Bengal Medical Services... (Hastings, Osborne, 1856), p. 1.

Figure 2.1 View of Jalapahar, Darjeeling when he developed the town of Darjeeling by encouraging Nepali immigration. Campbell’s first task on becoming Superintendent was to attend to the construction of the basic administrative infrastructure. In the next ten years he made allotments of land to private individuals. The Army established a ‘convalescent depot’ for British troops at Jalapahar near Darjeeling. Around the nucleus of a church, bazaar, the administrative cutchery and a few houses the hill-station gradually came to be well known and often frequented by seasonal visitors.” Initially, Darjeeling was a frontier zone that offered various opportunities to enterprising Europeans. A group of such were the Wernicke-Stolke family, who had initially arrived in 1841 as Moravian missionaries.” They established their mission at Tukvar, a few miles below the town.” After his mission shut down, Johann Andreas Wernicke engaged in contract work for the government in Darjeeling, which involved supplying timber and brick for the construction of public buildings and roads. Two of the three Moravian families found reasons to stay on, and Wernicke went on to build several shops in the town, having received contracts from the government and acquired land within the town as well. ‘At this time ... the East India Company were ready to make grants of land to persons who were willing and capable of helping in the development of Darjeeling as a station.” Three of his sons went into the flourishing tea industry in the 1870s. The family owned several tea gardens in the Darjeeling area, as well as several buildings, in fact a part of an entire street. His grandson

21 The Dorjeeling Guide: Including a Description of the Country, and of Its Climate, Soil and Productions, with Travelling Directions etc. (Calcutta, Samuel Smith, 1845), p. 43.

22 Typescript titled ‘The Wernicke-Stolke Story’, Mss Photo Eur 421, APAC, p. 4.

23 ‘The Wernicke-Stolke Story’, p. 4.

24 ‘The Wernicke-Stolke Story’, p. 4.

Frank was sent ‘home’ to England where he and his siblings received an expensive public school education.” Later he joined the IMS and changed his name to the anglicized Warwick.”

Within a decade of the lease, Darjeeling was a fast-growing town with opportunities for enterprise and commerce, ready to receive European convalescents. When the botanist Joseph Dalton Hooker visited in 1848 he found it a pleasant hill-station with a small resident European population that attracted several seasonal visitors. He could at the end of an eventful two-year visit compare the growth of Darjeeling to an Australian colony, ‘not only in amount of building, but in the accession of native families from the surrounding countries’.?” While it was evidently proving popular with Europeans who needed to convalesce, the efforts of Campbell further established its position as a trading centre for the people of the surrounding areas:

At the former period there was no trade whatsoever; there is now a very considerable one, in musk, salt, gold dust, borax, soda, woollen cloths, and especially in ponies ... The trade has been greatly increased by the annual fair which Dr Campbell has established at the foot of the hills, to which many thousands of natives flock from all quarters, and which exercises a most beneficial influence throughout the neighbouring territories. At this, prizes are given for agricultural implements and produce, stock, etc, by the originator and a few friends, a measure attended with eminent success.”°

The establishment of Darjeeling, the colonization and the settlement of the neighbouring areas, and the expansion of its trade was achieved through a steady poaching of territories from Sikkim and Bhutan. This formed part of the strategy of securing the border of British India with its supposedly recalcitrant neighbours. The first annexation was from Sikkim. During his visit, J.D. Hooker went on several botanizing trips in the eastern Himalayas, to the borders of Sikkim and Tibet.” Consent for his expeditions was reluctantly forthcoming, and in one of the expeditions in Sikkim he and Campbell were held hostage by a faction of the Sikkim court. Their six-week captivity ended when the British government sent extra troops to Darjeeling and threatened an invasion. The entire episode resulted in cessation of the annual payment of Rs 6000 (it was doubled from Rs 3000 in 1846) and the annexation of the Sikkim Terai and of 640 square miles to British territory at the frontier.” In 1860-61 following further

25 ‘The Wernicke-Stolke Story’, p. 4.

26 D.G. Crawford, Roll of the Indian Medical Service 1615-1930 (London, London Stamp Exchange, 1986), p. 538.

27 Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. 1, pp. 108-9.

28 Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. 1, p. 109.

29 Hooker represented India, particularly the eastern Himalayas, as a decisively tropical region, despite the variations in temperature and the existence of fauna typically found in temperate regions in the area. See Arnold (2006), pp. 199-201.

30 O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers, pp. 29-31. See also Dozey, A Concise History, p. 4, and Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. 1, pp. 302-3, and A. Campbell, ‘On the Lepchas’, The Journal of the Ethnological Society of London, 1 (1869), pp. 143-57.

battles with Sikkim a new treaty ‘guaranteed the opening out of the country to trade, and the removal of all restrictions on travellers and merchants ... fixed the minimum rates of transit duties to be levied on goods between British India and Tibet’.2' Thereafter, the efforts of Campbell resulted in making the area (through Kalimpong) the centre of the trans-Tibet trade and also encouraged immigration from Nepal.** In 1866 the British territories in the Darjeeling hills area were further expanded by the annexation of Kalimpong from the King of Bhutan. The Anglo—Bhutan war, too, was occasioned by ‘lawlessness’ in Bhutan and periodic raids from the Bhutan frontiers.

Darjeeling and Colonial Economy

British policy enabled immigration from eastern Nepal who settled in the area and provided the crucial labour needed to establish the sanatorium town with its cantonment and fledgling commerce and industry. It also encouraged trade between the borders and even fuelled dreams of a trans-Tibetan trade, the subject of many treaties with Nepal as well as Tibet. That, and strategic considerations regarding both Nepal and Tibet, make it difficult to assume that the Edenic hill sanatoriums were ‘uncontaminated’ spaces in the perspective of the British administrators. At first many Nepalis crossed the border to work for a season and went back to their villages.” Gradually many settled in Darjeeling. Nepali immigration proved particularly useful when the tea plantations, an enormously labour-intensive industry, took off commercially. My contention is that the Edenic sanctuary was always a part of the colonial economy, not just a refuge from the ills of the tropics. The Darjeeling plantations, unlike the first tea plantations in neighbouring Assam, did not have to resort to indentured labour because Campbell actively encouraged the migration of labourers from eastern Nepal. The example of Darjeeling reveals many more motives in the establishment of enclaves for European health, their settlement and occupation. The indigenous Lepchas were pushed out of the area by the more enterprising Paharia (Nepali) immigrants ‘partly due to their inability to stand Paharia competition for land and partly due to the daily increase in population of the place. The Lepchas, like the Meches of the Terai, practised jhum (shifting) cultivation, a practice always looked upon with suspicion and disdain by the

32 For immigration to the Darjeeling district, see Tanka Bahadur Subba, The Quiet Hills: A Study of the Agrarian Relations in Hill Darjeeling (Bangalore, ISPCK, 1985), pp. 10-17. See also by same author, Dynamics of a Hill Society: The Nepalis in Darjeeling and Sikkim Himalayas (Delhi, Mittal Publications, 1989), pp. 120-21.

33 Subhajyoti Ray has argued that Bhutanese raids were not attacks on the property of peasants, but a means of ‘enforcing collection of tribute’. See Ray, Transformations on the Bengal Frontier, p. 28.

34 See O'Malley, Bengal District Gazetteers, p. 317.

35 Memorandum of Manager, Government Estate, to Deputy Commissioner, Darjeeling, 20 June 1898, General Department, collection G, file no. 32 (Record Room, Darjeeling).

colonial officials, whose attempt was to generally settle the land with permanent rent-paying cultivators. But even those Lepchas who tried to cultivate permanent fields were driven out by the Paharia moneylenders who usurped their land by the turn of the century.

Campbell introduced tea to Darjeeling, the product that would contribute most to the transformation of the economic base and geographical space of the entire Darjeeling hills. He reported his first experiments in tea cultivation to the Agri-Horticultural Society in 1847. He first attempted to grow tea from seeds from the Kumaon, which he procured from Nathaniel Wallich, Director of the Botanical Garden at Calcutta, in November 1841. In 1846 he obtained seeds from Assam, in order to ‘give an extended trial to the plant’.*° The next year he reported the failure of his seedlings, which did not survive the winter snow. The Journal advised that, similar results having been obtained in Mussoorie, the tea plant would thrive up to the altitude of 6500 feet.’ In the ensuing years he distributed seedlings to various settlers in the Darjeeling hill region, and several of them succeeded in growing tea.’

Campbell moreover attempted to establish local industry by introducing the manufacture of coarse paper by importing artisans from Nepal and local materials.’ He also (unsuccessfully) tried to grow cotton in the region.“ There were also plans to establish cinchona plantations through private enterprise in the Darjeeling hill area after the success of the tea plantations.*' Besides the commercial plantations, large sections of the land in Darjeeling were taken over by government as ‘reserve forests’, where forest management and the supply of timber and other commodities from the forest provided the government with revenues. It moreover restricted access to forests resources for the local population. The sanatorium town as well as the entire Darjeeling district became a part of the colonial economy.

Therefore Campbell’s initiatives, exercised through the powerful office of the Superintendent of Darjeeling, contributed greatly to the colonization and settlement of the Darjeeling hill area in the first decades of the foundation of

36 A. Campbell, ‘Note on the Culture of the Tea Plant at Darjeeling’, Journal of the Agri- Horticultural Society of India, 6 (1848), pp. 123-24.

37 Journal of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India, 7 (1850), p. 31.

38 J.A. Crommelin, ‘A Brief Account of the Experiments That Have Been Made with a View to the Introduction of the Tea Plant at Darjeeling’, Journal of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India, 8 (1852), pp. 91-95.

39 Journal of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India, 1 (1842), pp. 210-21.

40 A. Campbell, ‘On the Cultivation of Cotton in the Darjeeling Morung; and the Capabilities of That Tract for the Extensive Growth of Superior Cottons’, Journal of the Agri-Horticultural Society of India, 7 (1850), p. 287. The cultivation of the superior variety of cottons in India was a very crucial component of scientific agronomy in colonial India. Reports of attempts to cultivate cotton (and tea) in India were published regularly in the volumes of the India Review and Journal of Foreign Science Arts from 1838 to 1848 as well as in the publications of the Journal of Agri-Horticultural Society of India between 1842 and 1852.

41 J.A.H. Louis, Gates of Thibet: A Bird’s Eye View of Independent Sikkhim, British Bhootan and the Dooars as a Doorga Poojah Trip (Delhi, Vivek Publishing House, 1972, first pub. 1894), p. 8.

the hill resort. A few years after he retired, at a meeting of the Ethnological Society of London, Campbell reminded his audience, ‘People flocked from all sides, and we rapidly acquired a thriving population. When I took charge there were not more than fifty families in the whole tract ... In 1861, when I left Darjeeling, the total population was estimated at 60,000.’

David Rennie, an IMS surgeon, found Darjeeling a bustling town, accommodating two companies of the British army at its cantonment at Jalapahar in 1865.* Besides the tea plantations, in the late nineteenth century the Government of India established a cinchona plantation in Mungpoo in the Darjeeling hill area near Kalimpong.“ By 1871, when the production of tea in Darjeeling exceeded three million pounds, and tea plantations extended to the foot of the Terai, the Journal of Society of Arts in London (which promoted commercial agriculture in the colonies) noted that ‘The great drawback now is a line of railway, to connect Darjeeling with the East Indian Railway at Sahibgunge or Rajmahal.’*° The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, which ran from the foothills of the Terai up to the hill town, was completed in 1881.“ This facilitated the bulk transportation of tea. It also reduced the travelling time for seasonal visitors. In 1882, the first sanatorium in the town, the Eden Sanitarium, exclusively for Europeans, was established. The large increase in the population of the town was partly due to the regular summer shift of the entire administration of the government of Bengal from Calcutta to Darjeeling. The overall dramatic rise in the population of the Darjeeling hill area is evident from the census over the years: it rose from 94,996 in 1872 to 249,117 in 1901.4”

We have noted above the military, strategic and commercial background of the gradual British annexations into the area that finally formed the district of Darjeeling. This was not only the site of the idyllic retreat of an Edenic sanctuary from the over-populated, clamorous plains. Kennedy has empha-

42 A. Campbell, ‘On the Tribes around Darjeeling’, Transactions of the Ethnological Society of London, 7 (1869), pp. 144-59.

43 David Field Rennie, Bhotan and the Story of the Dooar War: Including a Three Months Residence in the Himalayas etc. (London, John Murray, 1866), pp. 272-74.

44 Abhijit Mukherjee, ‘The Peruvian Bark Revisited: A Critique of British Cinchona Policy in Colonial India’, Bengal Past and Present, 117 (1998), pp. 81-102. Cinchona plantations were also established in the Nilgiris in south India. Kavita Philip has made a distinction between the government-owned cinchona plantations in the Nilgiris and the privately owned and managed tea, coffee and rubber plantations, because the cinchona plantations were supposed to have ‘occupied a romanticised ecological space in the colonial imagination, unlike the economic and managerial conceptions of the plains landscapes’. See Kavita Philip, Civilising Natures: Race, Resources And Modernity in Colonial South India (Hyderabad, India, Orient Longman, 2003), p. 255. In Darjeeling, where the landscapes were romanticized in the tea plantation areas as much as anywhere else, Philip’s argument is not acceptable.

45 ‘Darjeeling Tea Crop’, Journal of the Society of Arts, 20 (1871), p. 94.

46 Darjeeling and Its Mountain Railway: A Guide and Souvenir (Calcutta, Caledonian Printing Co., 1921), pp. 13-14.

47 Imperial Gazetteer of India, Provincial Series, Bengal, vol. 2 (Calcutta, Superintendent of Government Printing, 1909), p. 197.

Each of these squares measures 300 Scace yards across from side to side

Figure 2.2 Street Map of Darjeeling town, nineteenth century sized the Edenic sanctuary aspect of the hill-station, arguing that the British understood the Lepchas, the indigenous people, as the ‘guardians’ of the Edenic sanctuary because they did not militarily confront annexation to British India.“ But the demography of the entire Darjeeling hill area changed drastically after its annexation to British India. The Nepali immigration into Darjeeling was the result of a conscious policy initiated by Campbell in order to populate and settle the entire region, as well as to provide much of the labour necessary to sustain the European habitation of the town itself. The hill-station of Darjeeling was indeed a colonial enclave, but its sustenance was the consequence of military, strategic and economic considerations as well as debates over climate and health in tropical colonies.

Sanatorium Darjeeling

The unhealthiness of the hot and humid Indian plains, and especially the plains of Bengal, was an all too familiar convention of medical discourse in nineteenth-century colonial India. The mountains were posited in opposition. Harrison has pointed out that until the 1830s, the acclimatization theories were both optimistic and heterogeneous; this, together with the fact that the implications, mostly derogatory, of the word ‘tropics’ were not explicit until