From Highlands to Hill Stations: Scots in the Mountains of India
University of St. Andrews
Biography
Tilak is a doctoral candidate in History at Te Herenga Waka – Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand. His research spans across environmental history, history of medicine, and history of science. He examines the different ways mountains, the custodians of earth’s deep history, have shaped the human spirit through the centuries, and draws attention to the fragility of these regions in the age of climate-crisis and environmental decay.
Introduction
Other than existing on their own, “spaces” undergo cycles of production and reproduction. From ritual sites to political frontiers, geological record to ecological sanctuaries, leisure enclaves to arenas of self-fashioning, mountains take on many meanings. Tilak critically examines the Scot colonists’ framing of the ghatis, nadis and parvats of the Indian subcontinent into longing reflections of their childhood in the glens, straths, and braes back home. The production of the Himalaya and Western Ghats in the colonies as surrogate homes for the colonist was a touchstone in maintaining a sense of self and cultural continuity—as the emotional and psychological anchors of the displaced. But the occupation of these sites had long term consequences for the sensitive ecologies of these mountains. Tilak draws attention to the rampant extraction of lumber to fuel industrial progress in Europe, thoughtless introduction of invasive species in sensitive ecologies, and the exploitation of labour in hillside plantations that permanently haunt the histories and futures of these regions.
Research
Tasteful Matters
On 22 February 1728 Alexander Gerard was born in the Chapel of Garioch in Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He would go on to study at the University of Aberdeen and then at the University of Edinburgh, returning to Aberdeen as professor of natural philosophy and divinity. In 1783, towards the end of his life, he co-founded the Royal Society of Edinburgh, Scotland’s prestigious academy of science and the humanities. A product of the Scottish Enlightenment, Gerard wrote on a range of intangible feelings such as those of novelty, beauty, harmony, ridicule, and virtue. In fact, in 1756, the Philosophical Society of Edinburgh awarded the best essay prize to his Essay on Taste.
“As reason investigates the laws of nature, taste alone discovers its beauties. It fills us with admiration of the stupendous magnitude of the mundane system. It is charmed with the regularity, order, and proportion, which every part of it displays, even to the most illiterate; with the beauty and variety of colours, which tinge the face of nature; with the fitness and utility of all its production; with the inexhaustible diversity, and endless succession of new objects which it presents to view. Flowers disclose a thousand delicate or vivid views. Animals appear in comely symmetry. Here the ocean spreads forth its smooth and boundless surface; there the earth forms a verdant carpet. Mountains rife with rugged majesty; the valleys wear a pleasant bloom; and even the dreary wilderness is not destitute of august simplicity” (Gerard 1759, 187).
Gerard was writing at a time when mountains elicited a range of moods, and his essay reflects a broader trend underway in Britain. Contrary to the quite pathetic descriptors applied to mountains as “warts, blisters, imposthumes” or “rubbish of the earth” (Nicolson 1959, 62) on the earth’s otherwise smooth and pleasing surface, a newfound appreciation of mountains was finding expression in literary culture. Here in this passage the ‘stupendous magnitude’ and ‘rugged majesty’ of mountains emerge as praiseworthy aspect of that divine nature bestowed upon humans. In Europe, going into such whims and fancies about the natural world was, for some, an exclamation of love and devotion to God. Such ecstatic appreciation “lay in the enlargement of the soul to experience more completely the powers, desires, and aspirations given by its great Original, the true Infinite, God” (Nicolson 1959, 135). But unlike the rest of nature which was quite picturesque, the mountain sublime had a great deal more texture.
Hopeless Sterility to Ecstasy
Like the EARTH Scholars in 2024, the prolific Samuel Johnson was travelling the highlands of Scotland in 1773. Underwhelmed, he wrote, “an eye accustomed to flowery pastures and waving harvest is astonished and repelled by this wide extent of hopeless sterility” (Shepard 1967, 131). Perhaps he was not yet in tune with the revival of Longinus and the sublimity that was intrinsic to the misty, magical, and mournful “Ruines of the old World” (Nicolson 1965, 278).
In her seminal Mountain Gloom and Mountain Glory, Marjorie Nicolson argued that mountain perceptions underwent a radical shift in a period of just 50 years in Britain. After the publication of Thomas Burnet’s Sacred Theory of the Earth in 1691, they became a subject of widespread interest and embodied the capacity to elicit a complex set of emotions— “delightful Horrour, a terribly Joy” (Hooker 1943, 380); “pleasing kind of Stupor and Admiration” (Burnet 1719, 192); or “romantic confusion” (Nicolson 1959, 327).
In a fitting reversal of Johnson’s response to the mountains, Thomas Gray wrote with excitement to his friend: “I am returned from Scotland, charmed with my expedition; it is of the Highlands, I speak … the mountains are ecstatic … [n]one but those monstrous creatures of God know how to join so much beauty with so much horror” (Tovey 1912, 93).
One look at my journal that I took with me on our bus rides across Scotland, especially the entries following Glencoe, will reveal less elegant sentences that eerily resemble the feelings present in Gray’s letter to his friend. A band of scholars rooted in different sensibilities had the opportunity to engage with that landscape simultaneously through its past, of peat-coring and cultural histories heard in vernacular; its present, of the immediate business and commodification of the landscape; and its future, of devious deer, rewilding, and landlords leaving locals lacking. Those stories will appear elsewhere.
The Himalayan Sublime
Gerard Sr’s three grandchildren, the brothers Alexander, James, and Patrick Gerard set foot on the Himalaya in the early years of the nineteenth century. They were pioneer explorers of the rugged mountain terrain and scaled incredible heights at a time when such feats were unheard of.
While near Yulang in the high Himalaya, Alexander Gerard Jr described the scene that confronted him:
“One may conceive the beauty of a sequestered glen presenting a carpet of the sweetest smelling flowers intermixed with many varieties of thyme and other aromatic shrubs, shut in by huge cliffs on either side, some of them of bare granite frowning in awful magnificence over the peaceful herds, and threatening them with destruction, others crowned with everlasting snow rising in the wildest forms which the most fantastic imagination could conceive” (Lloyd 1840, 2: 278).
The Welsh military man William Lloyd had joined the brothers in 1822 on an expedition up to the Buran Pass and was struck by the scenes he was lucky to witness, exclaiming:
“[T]he sublimest objects of this sublimest scene of savage grandeur, are on our right. These are the mighty peaks that bound the Umrain [sic] Pass, springing in naked majesty from the Changsheel [sic] or Kusshain [sic] ridge, which is a torn wilderness of sterility. The heavens are of the deepest dye, the air as pure as at the Creation, and as still; and so vividly does every thing appear, that it seems of a frailty which the merest motion of the hand would shatter to pieces” (Lloyd 1840, 1: 240).
Figure 1: Samuel Bourne (British, 1834–1912). The Manirung Pass. 1866. Albumen silver print from glass negative, image: 23.5 x 29.7 cm (9 1/4 x 11 11/16 in.). Classification: Photographs. Purchase, Cynthia Hazen Polsky Gift, 1993. Accession Number: 1993.331.
The 1866 photograph by Samuel Bourne is one of the earliest of the high Himalaya. During this expedition, Bourne travelled with botanist and geologist Gorge Ranken Playfair (of the St Andrews Playfair family), along with 80 porters, flocks of sheep and goats, and delicate camera equipment, to trace the source of the Ganges River. The image encapsulates elements of sublime horror and the insignificance of humanity against the vastness of the eternal mountains.
A Highland Heath in the Himalaya
Scots imagined Scotland in many rolling hills around the world. The military surgeon John Rollo earned his MD at the University of St Andrews and was stationed in Barbados in the 1780s. He wrote of the island:
“At Barbadoes [sic], the inhabitants of Bridgetown, on recovery from disease, find it their interest to go into the country; particularly that part of it called Scotland, which is a hilly ground, has its air chiefly from the sea, and is fanned by a constant wind” (Rollo 1783, 110).
In Pulau Pinang, Malaysia, one of the bungalows in the road leading up to the hill station was evocatively called the Highlands of Scotland (Aiken 1987, 429).
In the Indian subcontinent, Shillong, a quiet hill station in present day Meghalaya, was popularly known as the ‘Scotland of the East’ (Hasan 2011, 84).
In the erstwhile princely state of Bushahr in the high Himalaya, Alexander Gerard Jr was struck by the “beds of several sorts of prickly shrubs, like furze, vegetate here and there, which give some parts of the country the appearance of a Highland heath, and strongly remind a Scotchman of his native land” (Lloyd 1840, 2: 92). When maharaja Ranjit Singh offered a particularly piquant alcoholic concoction to Gerard Jr and his companion, Alexander Burnes, the Scotsmen, “hardened on home-made whisky, were the only visitors who were able to stomach it.” (Keay 1977, 72).
A passage from artist, writer, and intrepid explorer of the Himalaya James Baillie Fraser is worth quoting in full:
“…covered with short grass and small mountain flowers, and stunted birches; and which bore altogether a strong similarity to some of the Scottish Highland hills, and here, indeed, I first discovered their own characteristic plant, the true heath, or heather. And no one who acknowledges that lively feeling of attachment to his country, so peculiarly called into life by the association of ideas, by the sight of a flower, of a scene, however rude, that he has seen in the days of his youth, but will sympathize in the joy with which I hailed this much-loved and long looked for remembrancer of the “land of brown heath and shaggy wood.” I plucked it and placed it in my hat, with a delight that I believe much amused my attendants … Here, too, those beautiful birds, the peacock pheasants, were seen and heard in greater numbers the higher we rose, and might have been taken for grouse in our own heather. (Fraser 1820, 437).
Figure 2: William Brockedon. James Fraser. 1833. Black and red chalk, 13 3/4 in. x 10 in. (348 mm x 255 mm). Transferred from National Gallery, 1994. Primary Collection, National Portrait Gallery, 2515 (48), London.
Tentacles of Progress
The subtitle is borrowed from historian Daniel Headrick’s book where he draws attention to the technologies which constituted the infrastructure of colonialism’s extractive economies.
Figure 3: M. Jackson, Sir W. Denison and Others Planting the First Quinine Tree in the Neilgherry Hills, India, wood engraving, 1862. Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0).
Colonialism decimated local ecologies. When Britain was done denuding Ireland and itself of forest, it turned to its colonies. Extraction of timber and firewood in the Himalayan region grew unchecked between 1887-1913 (Dangwal, 2005). The indigenous shola grasslands of Nilgiris in the Western Ghats, where the Scot planter William McIvor (pictured above with the spade and hat) established cinchona and eucalyptus plantations, were wiped out and replaced by these alien commercial products (Joshi et al, 2018). Labour mobilised to work in tea plantations was paid diminutive wages and subject to subhuman treatment such as flogging if goals were not met (Bhowmik, 2011).
Today, the tourist industry of the Indian subcontinent lures the upwardly mobile, middle-class Indian to hill stations to experience the “colonial vibe” and “Victorian atmosphere” in old cottages and bungalows now turned into hotels, a tasteless and vulgar prospect. Unchecked tourist traffic that exceeds the carrying capacity of these sites continues to put pressure on an already ecologically fragile landscape. Ironically, what drives tourists to these sites is the anticipation of ‘wilderness, remoteness, and pristine nature’ which, while assuredly found, also highlights the lack of socio-economic development opportunities for local communities who reside in these areas. Poor policy implementation and lack of environmental consciousness only accentuates this Stockholm syndrome in the mountains of India.
The sublime mountains emerged as “Ruines of the old World,” once revered as sentinels of earth’s deep history. But these “raw and ghastly” wounds of nature are now face to face with their next tormentor: the claws of capitalism that carve them deeper and wider.
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