Acclimatization had been an enduring concern o f white settlement in the colonised world. It exercised the concerns o f a host of scientists, medical men, geographers, administrators, military personnel and civilians in all parts of the world. The emphases on aspects o f acclimatization changed over the centuries that spanned the debates themselves. The settlement of white men in the tropics raised issues in every Western empire. The answers varied from the West Indies to the Americas, and from Australia to India. D N Livingstone has made the point that in the debates on acclimatization, particularly after the germ theory and with the optimism o f men like Sambon and Manson, the focus shifted in the twentieth century from the environment to the conquest o f parasites and microbes.170 Warwick Anderson has further argued that the advent o f laboratory medicine in the twentieth century eclipsed the concept o f acclimatization, instead the question o f the survival of the white man in the tropics came to depend on the conquest of microbes
-170 D avid N Livingstone, ‘Tropical clim ate and moral hygiene: the anatomy o f a Victorian debate’
British Jou rnal o f H istory o f Science, V ol.32 1999, pp. 93-110.
pathologising the native population and thereby rendering the white men in the
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tropics, separated and sanitised, further distant from the natives.
However, a perusal of the historians’ treatment o f acclimatization makes it imperative to assume that the question remained the same: ‘Whether, and in what manner was the white man to survive over two or three generations in the hot/tropical climates?’ But in assuming this question, historians have neglected one aspect o f the history o f acclimatization. Through a historical analysis of Darjeeling this chapter has explored, not what the white man perceived as the threat to the survival o f the race in the tropics, but what was the actual practice of settlement.
A shift to such a perspective is necessary to resolve the contradiction noted by Harrison : that it was precisely at the time of the pessimism about acclimatization and the hardening o f racial categories (after the mid -nineteenth century) that the
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colonization o f India was at its zenith. The fact is that various kinds o f settlement o f white peoples of European origin occurred in various parts o f the globe from the sixteenth century onwards: and the modes of settlement were of course different in every country.
In Queensland, Australia though workers’ discourses incorporated the notion of
‘white Australia’ there were debates about using ‘coloured labour under white leadership’ to ‘develop the Australian tropics’ in the twentieth century.173 These views were eclipsed in the rhetoric for a ‘white Australia’. In Malaya or India there was no sustained settlement of the land as in the settler colonies: civilians and military personnel, planters and doctors left gradually after decolonisation. In India,
171 Warwick Anderson, ‘“Where Every Prospect Pleases and Only Man Is V ile” : Laboratory M edicine as C olonial D iscourse’, C ritica l Inquiry, V ol. 18, N o3, 1992, pp. 506-529.
172 Harrison, C lim ates a n d C onstitutions, pp. 133-47.
173 W arwick Anderson, The C ultivation o f Whiteness: Science, H ealth a n d R acial D estin y in Australia, M elbourne, 2002, p. 164.
Ceylon and Malaya, there was enough labour made available (mostly through the indentured system initiated by the colonial states) in the plantations. Though the debates on acclimatization encompassed the nineteenth and the twentieth century, with differing discourses: race, environment, anthropological debates on racial characteristics and ‘seasoning’, natural selection, the germ theory, immunisation of races, degeneration, and the pathologisation o f certain races all playing its part in the debates, the key difference finally rested between the ‘settler colonies’ of North America and Australia, and the ‘enclaves’ of managerial control in the Indonesian islands, Ceylon, Malaysia, and the plantation areas in India.174 The colonization of the Darjeeling hills and the Duars and the Terai through the last decades o f the nineteenth century and the early twentieth century was effected in the context o f the availability of labour on a large scale. Thus three factors were relevant to the colonization o f Darjeeling- large parts of the Darjeeling area was settled by native immigrants from Nepal, the cheapness o f the indigenous labour and the fact that though Darjeeling itself was relatively sparsely populated, in the larger context of India and Nepal there was no dearth of population. The native populations in south and south -east Asia were not overwhelmed or overlooked in the same way as the numerical smaller natives o f North America and Australia.175 Therefore the question o f white settlement in the area was limited only to managerial positions. It is possible to argue, thus, that the discourses on acclimatization need to accommodate political and economic contingencies on the question of white settlement in the tropics.
174 Livingstone, ‘Tropical clim ate and moral h ygien e’. A lso see Warwick Anderson, ‘Immunities o f Empire: Race, D isease and the N ew Tropical M edicine, 1900-1920’, Bulletin o f the H istory o f M edicine, V ol. 70, N o. 1, 1996, pp. 94-118.
175 Anderson has made the point that ultimately in the Philippines the goal that the Americans set for them selves was to keep them selves apart from the pathologised indigenous peoples. Settlement was given up as a long term option in the twentieth century. See Anderson, Im m unities o f Empire.
The attempt to create European enclaves in the colonial tropics was a multifaceted endeavour. Once the idea of long term acclimatization was seriously challenged in the post -1858 era, in colonial India in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries there were attempts to create enclaves in various locations not only in the hill stations and they were articulated in medical, social, and sanitary and strategic terms. The layout of the hill- stations were different from the cantonments and ‘civil stations’ of colonial India. As Kennedy has pointed out, in the hill-stations British Indian
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architecture had freer expressions, with many houses with gables and turrets. The cantonments and civil stations on the other hand, had wide straight roads and ordered residential bungalows and barracks. But despite dissimilarities in architecture and the lay-out between the civil stations and the hill stations, in crucial aspects the hill-stations after all duplicated the civil stations - their marked architectural difference and physical distance from native towns and settlements, plenty o f free, airy spaces, and the availability of sewerage- all o f which contributed to their perceived relative salubrity. So can the hill station be seen as a part o f the continuum of the civil station, the civil lines, and trips to the sea and going home to England? It seems likely. The climate of the hill stations provided respite from the heat o f the Indian plains to European bodies, but their settlement and colonization had greater economic implications. It was not a coincidence that planters in Darjeeling had a strident advocate o f hill sanataria at various forums in the mid
nineteenth century in London, one Hyde Clarke, who termed himself ‘Agent for British settlers in Darjeeling’.177
176 Kennedy, The M agic M ountains, p. 3.
177 Hyde Clarke, ‘C olonisation o f British India’ Jou rnal o f the S o ciety o f A rts, v o l.7, 1859, p. 645.
See also by sam e author, ‘On Hill Settlem ents and Sanitaria’, Jou rnal o f the S ociety o f A rts, vol. 17, 1869;‘The English Stations in the Hill Regions o f India: Their Value and Importance, with Som e
2.11. Conclusion
How should we view the settlement and colonization o f the Darjeeling hills in the late nineteenth century? One illustration will exemplify the processes that contributed to the colonisation of Darjeeling. In 1875, one Reverend Ayerst corresponded with the Government of Bengal on the subject o f an European settlement near Sitong at Kurseong. His concern, he explained to the governor of Bengal, was ‘the destitute condition of a large number of unemployed Europeans and East Indians scattered over the plains of India’.178 He explained that ‘the only way to raise them from pauperism and the influence o f heathenism would be to gather them into the community o f a Christian village with a quasi-English climate’.179 He was given permission by the Bengal government to prospect for
suitable land for a European farming settlement in the lower slopes o f Darjeeling. 180
Ayerst contemplated that the proposed land, if granted by the government, would be divided into a ‘Home Farm’ specialising in dairy farming, as well as allotments of twenty acres o f good farming land to all volunteer settlers. Though Ayerst had obtained an audience from the Governor and proceeded to prospect for a suitable stretch of hilly farming land, the Deputy Commissioner o f Darjeeling confided his misgivings about the project to the Commissioner at Rajshahi, ‘ I have very grave doubts as to whether the project could be successful under any circumstances in any part of these hills....it is very unlikely that Europeans o f any class could work....on
Statistics o f their Products and Trade, Jou rnal o f the S ta tistica l S o ciety o f London, V ol.44, N o. 3, ( Sep. 1881), pp. 528-573.
178 Letter from Deputy Com m issioner, Darjeeling to Com m issioner o f Rajshahye and C ooch Behar D ivision, 15 April 1876,Government o f Bengal A Proceedings, General Department, June 1876, (W B SA ), p. 107.
179 Ibid.
180 Ibid, p. 108.
the hill side during the rains without serious danger to their health’.181 The prospect of Europeans, even the indigent and the supposedly consequently immoral ones, undertaking hard manual labour in any part of the tropics was impossible. But significantly, when Ayerst was refused the grant o f land from the government of Bengal a few months later, he was informed that
...the Lieutenant Governor is unable to perceive any sufficient ground for anticipating that the project could be undertaken; or that...it could succeed...
.... Among many other objections there is this, that almost all the available lands in the Darjeeling district have been taken up for tea plantations or cinchona plantations or Government forest reserves...
.... If persons with some little means were to obtain small grants of land, whereon to settle, experience in Darjeeling shows that such grants gradually become absorbed into larger properties belonging to capitalists
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or to companies.
Thus while the fact that acclimatization theories were not in favour in the late nineteenth century was a reason for refusing permission for a European farm in the Daijeeling hills, the government also emphasised the fact that the entire area was already appropriated within the larger colonial economy. Within a few decades of their annexation into British India, the Darjeeling foothills were taken over by tea plantations interspersed with stretches o f ‘reserved’ forest’. A larger European or Anglo-Indian settlement, the dream of an eccentric clergyman, could not be granted official sanction or assistance. Ironically, at the time o f its settlement, Hodgson had contemplated that a settlement o f Europeans of a poorer class in Darjeeling hill areas would offer the opportunity for a fresh start to impoverished Europeans; it should, he had pointed out, be ‘a perfect godsend to the peasantry of Ireland and Scotland’.183
181 Ibid, p. 109.
182 Ibid. Letter from O fficiating Secretary to Government o f Bengal, to the Rev. W. Ayerst, 15 June 1876, p . l l l .
183 Hodgson, ‘On the Colonization, Commerce, Physical Geography etc. o f the Himalaya, p.20.
There was a paradox therefore, in the construction of a European enclave in Darjeeling. Kennedy has addressed this duality by arguing that the nature o f the colonial bureaucracy, and the domestic life o f the ruling class in colonial India demanded the labour and skills of Indians who by their very presence disrupted the idyll of a sanitary, European enclave in the hill-stations. My contention is that the European enclave, so far as the hill-station of Darjeeling was concerned, contended with tensions o f a different order. The larger colonization and settlement o f the Darjeeling hills was reflected in the urban settlement o f Darjeeling. The tea plantations, with their British planters and Paharia labourers, contributed to the growth o f population within the entire area, and thereby to the congestion of the idyllic spaces around and within the hill-station of Darjeeling. As is demonstrated above, the settlement of Darjeeling from its very inception was based on logistics that included the presence o f large numbers of natives. They served eventually, not only as domestic labour for the Europeans, and as clerks for the civil administration, but as plantation labourers in the tea estates. The growth of Darjeeling and the discrepancies in medical discourses about its efficacy as a health resort; the establishment of the Eden sanatorium, its emergence as a social space rather than a strictly curative one; all o f these trends need to be understood in the context of one salient fact. That is, the enclave of the Darjeeling hill station was articulated and even desired but at its heart lay another pattern, also o f colonial origin: the establishment o f a plantation economy. That is the paradox of the enclave of Darjeeling: its greater logic could not accommodate with any integrity its original raison d’etre. In that sense, the idea of a European hill- station was an anomaly.
The hill-station of Darjeeling was an ostentatiously European social space. Its spacious bungalows, hotels, Mall and clubs; its picturesque views, special municipal
provisions, such as piped water from reservoirs and exclusive medical institutions such as the Eden Sanatarium, marked it out as an area o f special privilege in sharp contrast to the lack of sewage, drinking water, and medical institutions that was prevalent in most of moffusil or urban sites in colonial India. Throughout the colonial period, Darjeeling would retain this air o f exclusivity, of clean streets and a functional municipality, and access to well-maintained medical institutions, though its specific European composition would be challenged by the Indian elite.
The hill station o f Darjeeling was one aspect o f the construction o f a European sanitary enclave in colonial north Bengal. The other aspects were reserved forests and the tea plantations that appropriated the entire Darjeeling hills area, rendering the Reverend Ayerst’s project of settling Europeans there impossible. The plantations, mostly managed by British planters and supervised by British doctors, but employing large numbers of tribal and low-caste labourers, were enclaves o f large-scale colonial capital in northern Bengal. The tea plantations, for different reasons, emerged as exclusive sites where medical research could be pursued with relative ease, as the labourers lived in a confined area. They dynamics of following preventive health measures were also different in the sites, where planters’ authority was supreme and the government’s bureaucratic machinery played a secondary role.
In that sense they too were ‘privileged sites’ o f medical practice.