ABSTRACT
In the nineteenth century, several European naturalists, travellers, civilian and medical practitioners had travelled to India and gazed at the magnificent oriental mountains, which they vividly described in their literatures. Though their descriptions were very fictitious, it also contributed to a debate whether the Himalayas were situated in the tropics, or far beyond the tropics. Until nineteenth century, Indian landscape commonly appeared to the Europeans as a land of encircling death. The first-hand impressions through travel and medical literatures strongly reinforced this spatial sense of mortality. The growing conceptual division between tropical and temperate South Asia was accentuated by the fact that early nineteenth-century botanists were interested in the exuberance and diversity of tropical plant life or in the temperate species of the Himalayas and Nilgiris, but found little of interest in the cultivated plains in between. The scientific representation of India in terms of a torrid core and temperate rim received authoritative endorsement from Hooker in the 1840s.
