ABSTRACT
Hill stations were built in colonial India to provide respite from the tropical heat for British civil and military personnel. The Revolt of 1857 hardened racial hierarchies and legitimised hill stations that were spatially and culturally distant from the Indian plains. Here British troops, government officials, and their wives and children retreated to escape Indian realities – political, racial, and medical. Simla, Darjeeling, Ootacamund, and other hill stations came to represent Englishness, where tropical diseases such as cholera and malaria were absent. Later the Indian elite had to be accommodated there; moreover, the hill towns became integrated within the regional political economy.
