Every summer for nearly a century, the entire machinery of British India packed its bags and headed uphill. Files, clerks, the Viceroy, the army headquarters, even the printing press climbed thousands of feet into the mountains to escape the heat of the plains. These mountain towns, known as hill stations, were not accidental holiday spots. They were carefully built spaces that served the British need for comfort, health, and a sense of separateness from the people they ruled. Understanding how and why they came up tells us a great deal about how colonial power organised itself across the landscape.
Table of Contents
Why the British went to the hills
The first pull towards the mountains was medical and psychological. British settlers, unaccustomed to the heat of the plains, believed the tropics were breeding grounds for deadly diseases like malaria, cholera, and dysentery. After the cholera epidemic of 1817-21 swept through the subcontinent, the cool, elevated air of the hills seemed to offer both a cure for sickness and relief from homesickness. The mountains were imagined as healthier, more “English” environments where weary colonists could recover.
This health logic gave rise to the idea of the sanatorium town. Darjeeling is a clear example. The British leased the tract from Sikkim, and Dr. Archibald Campbell of the Indian Medical Service became the first superintendent of the sanitarium in 1839, laying the foundations of the hill station. A road connecting Darjeeling to the plains was built the same year. What started as a health retreat soon revealed a second purpose: the climate proved ideal for growing tea, and the experiment that Campbell began in 1841 with Chinese tea seeds turned Darjeeling into a commercial engine of the colonial economy.
From retreats to summer capitals
What truly transformed these towns was their elevation into summer capitals. As the heat became unbearable in the plains, entire governments simply relocated for half the year. Simla became the most famous of these. Sir John Lawrence officially declared Simla the summer capital of the British empire in 1864, after which the Viceroy and the full apparatus of colonial bureaucracy moved there between April and October each year. Departments, clerks, documents, and the armed forces headquarters all made the annual journey.
Simla was a summer capital in name, but in practice it functioned as the nerve centre of the Raj. Mahatma Gandhi observed that it was the true headquarters of the rulers of India, since it housed the Viceroy, the commander-in-chief of the army, and the lieutenant governor of Punjab. This was not unique to Simla. While Simla and Ootacamund served as summer capitals for the governments of India, Punjab, and Madras respectively, Darjeeling served as the administrative capital of Bengal, which shifted from Calcutta to the hills each summer. Ootacamund, or Ooty, in the Nilgiris of the south, played the same role for the Madras Presidency. Together these towns formed a network of elevated power centres scattered across the subcontinent.
Building little Englands in the hills
Once the British settled in, they set about recreating the homeland they had left behind. The architecture and social life of hill stations were designed to evoke an idealised England, right down to the building materials and the flower gardens. The result was a deliberate transplantation of British culture onto Indian mountainsides.
The visual language was unmistakably English. Towns featured Tudor-style cottages with lace curtains, manicured gardens, and gabled roofs, along with lakes, hotels, clubs, gymkhanas, golf courses, churches, and the famous mall roads. Houses were given fanciful British names. Anglican church spires and Victorian flower gardens lovingly recreated a distant homeland, giving each hill station a distinct British identity in the midst of a foreign environment. The buildings were typically raised in neo-Gothic and Tudor styles with sloping roofs and wooden walkways, often built to the detriment of the local populations who had lived there first.
Churches, clubs, and the social calendar
Religion and recreation were central to this imported way of life. Churches were among the first major structures to come up. Christ Church in Simla served as the geographic and social heart of the town, with the summer capital itself defined as a three-mile radius around it. In the Nilgiris, Gothic-style churches like St. Stephen’s anchored the European community of Ooty. These were not only places of worship but also social spaces where the ruling community gathered and reinforced its shared identity.
Beyond the church came an entire calendar of balls, theatre, horse racing, and club life. The presence of large numbers of British women, who arrived in greater numbers from the 1830s, gave the hill station its characteristic social texture. As historian Pamela Kanwar noted, the thickly wooded hills and swirling mist afforded colonists the chance to build around themselves a replica of English life. Simla in particular earned a reputation as a place of romance, gossip, and intrigue alongside its serious political business.
Schools for the ruling race
Education played a special part in keeping British culture alive in the hills. A network of boarding schools was set up to raise European and Eurasian children in a properly English environment, away from the perceived corruptions of the plains. The earliest and most influential was the Lawrence Military Asylum, which Henry Lawrence proposed in 1845 as a military-style boarding school in the Indian highlands for the sons and daughters of British soldiers. Nainital, Mussoorie, Ooty, and Darjeeling all became known for their European-style schools.
These institutions were not neutral. As historian Heeral Chhabra has shown, the hill schools catered specifically to Europeans and Eurasians, and it was precisely this feature of serving the ruling ‘race’ that gave them their high social status and exclusivity. Education in the hills reinforced the social boundaries that the British wanted to maintain everywhere in India.
Exclusion built into the landscape
The most revealing feature of hill stations was who they kept out. These towns were designed as European preserves, and the exclusion of Indians was not incidental but central to their purpose. The mountains offered the British a way to physically separate themselves from the people they governed.
Historian Dane Kennedy captured this clearly when he described the hill station as a space where it was possible to render the Indian into an outsider. The Sarmaya foundation’s account puts it even more sharply, noting that the hill station served the symbolic purpose of inscribing social distance between the British and their Indian subjects onto the landscape itself. The original inhabitants of these valleys, the Paharis of Simla, the Lepchas of Darjeeling, and the Todas of Ooty, were pushed to the margins of the new towns and recast in colonial writing as primitive figures of the wilderness.
Two doors, two sanatoriums
Even the institutions built for healing were divided along racial lines. Darjeeling offers a striking case. The Eden Sanitarium, built in 1882 and named after the governor of Bengal, was meant to cater exclusively to Europeans. A separate facility, the Lowis Jubilee Sanitarium for Indians, had to be set up five years later in 1887, funded through donations from Indian landed aristocrats like the rajahs of Cooch Behar and Burdwan. The message was plain: even the wealthiest Indians could not simply share the same spaces as the British.
This racial etiquette excluded even the highest-placed Indians, and it extended to people of mixed descent. Wealthy Bengalis who built summer palaces in Darjeeling, and Indian princes who came up for the season, still found themselves shut out of the clubs and key social spheres that defined British life in the hills. This everyday exclusion of the Indian elite fed directly into their support for the nationalist movement in the decades that followed.
Cracks in the exclusive ideal
Yet the dream of a perfectly sealed European world was never fully realised. Hill stations depended entirely on Indian labour. Servants, porters, shopkeepers, and construction workers were essential to the running of these towns, even as they were given threadbare clothing and expected to fend for themselves in matters of housing and sanitation. The “little England” could not function without the very people it tried to keep at arm’s length.
Over time, a westernised Indian elite also began to claim space in the hills. Families like the Nehrus spent holidays in Mussoorie, where political functions were less dominant and access was easier. As Kennedy observed, hill stations were meant to be places where the British defined themselves through an exclusive set of values, but they ended up attracting a westernised Indian elite whose adoption of the same practices subverted British claims of exclusivity. The boundaries the British drew so carefully began to blur even before independence.
The lasting legacy
When the British left, the hill stations stayed. Simla, now Shimla, became the capital of Himachal Pradesh. Darjeeling remained the “Queen of the Hills” and a centre of the global tea trade. Ooty, Nainital, Mussoorie, and dozens of others were absorbed into a thriving domestic tourism economy. The mall roads, churches, and Tudor cottages that once marked these as exclusive European enclaves are now heritage attractions visited by millions of Indian travellers each year.
This is the irony at the heart of the hill station story. Spaces built to exclude Indians and to symbolise imperial power are today among the most popular holiday destinations for Indians themselves. The colonial architecture survives, but the social order it was meant to protect has been completely overturned. The hill station endures as both a pleasant retreat and a physical reminder of how empires organise space, climate, and race to serve their own ends.
What do you think? If the hill station was designed to keep Indians out, what does it mean that they are now cherished Indian holiday spots? And should we view this colonial inheritance mainly as heritage to preserve, or as a history of exclusion to remember?
References
- https://sarmaya.in/spotlight/summer-holidays-the-origin-of-indias-hill-stations/
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_Darjeeling
- https://indianculture.gov.in/stories/simla-summer-capital
- https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3837203/
- https://www.scmp.com/week-asia/people/article/3158402/paradise-lost-rise-and-fall-indias-british-colonial-era-hill
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lawrence_Military_Asylums
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-asian-studies/article/changing-profile-of-the-summer-capital-of-british-india-simla-18641947/241C23F6C91694E982F76E15F2D9E0FB
- https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/1478210315569040
- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hill_station
- https://liverpool.universitypressscholarship.com/view/10.5949/UPO9781846317835/upso-9781846318290-chapter-2
- https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/urban-history/article/leisure-economy-and-colonial-urbanism-darjeeling-18351930/622E8268DA163A6523CF60E2B75B4AE9
- https://d1i1jdw69xsqx0.cloudfront.net/digitalhimalaya/collections/journals/ebhr/pdf/EBHR_31_03.pdf
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