ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the socio-cultural world of the British hill station as it is portrayed through the lens of Kipling’s early work in a selection of short stories from Plain Tales. With a focus on the stories’ hill station settings and Kipling’s liminal perspective on British India as a recently-returned Anglo-Indian writer, the chapter explores that Plain Tales offers a decidedly ambivalent view of British colonial authority in the heart of the summer capital of the Raj, Simla, and its surrounding environs. The importance of hill stations as sites that shored up British colonial identity was not lost on Kipling, and many of the Plain Tales stories revolve around the politics of marriage and matchmaking, especially as it relates to the upward mobility of Anglo-Indian characters. The concentration of families in hill stations like Simla also made them critical sites for exerting social control over women’s sexuality and reproduction to ensure the reproduction of colonial authority.
