Apparently India is the only country in the world with hill stations. This is not, of course, because other countries don’t have little towns perched on their mountains, but because "hill station" is by definition an Indian refuge from the heat of its plains, with a colonial history behind it. You can’t escape to a hill station in Austria or Scotland, for example, because they only have ski resorts and tourist Shangri-la’s.
Moreover, in such countries there isn’t the huge topographical and climatic contrast between mountains and plains that you need for the very concept of a hill station to exist: even if you manage to spot a plain in Scotland larger than a football field, it won’t be an unbearable, low, lying stretch from which you need to run, specially in summer. Theoretically, the U.S. could have hill stations, but it has a good substitute: air conditioners.
British hill stations were, and largely remain, India’s geographical equivalents of the social elites they attracted. They also continue to serve a much larger psychological function which links British desires and times with our own. If you managed to find refuge in hill stations, they seemed like quiet havens of sanity, which, despite their ever-burgeoning populations, removed you from the clamorous urban hell of mainstream India. This was so in 1903, this is so in 2003. There is no clear distinction between the summertime desires of colonial upper classes and those of postcolonial brown-skinned elites.
Now it’s summer, when affluent India’s neo-colonial yearnings for escape make this clearer than over the rest of the year. If Ayodhya were situated 6500 feet above sea level, even I would be tempted to become a card-carrying member of the VHP. But everyone who has any money has put it into a hotel instead of a temple and is running in the opposite direction from Lord Rama’s birthplace, mostly uphill to a hill station, recognising no doubt that that’s the right way to heaven.
One historian, Nora Mitchell, has listed as many as 96 of these hill stations; another historian, Dane Kennedy, thinks there were 65. But if, like me, you want an infinite period of temporary relief from middle India and its revolting political culture — and therefore want yourself and your dog to exclusively own the whole country’s pine-scented air for all time — you tend to get the feeling that your particular hilltop must be the only one there is in the country since the whole of effing India seems to be on your tail.
Many of these hill stations began life as long ago as the 1820s, when early British settlers first sought nests in attractive locations. One of the events that gave impetus to hill settlements was a huge outbreak of cholera in the plains between 1818 and 1821. Another was the belief in the hills as a restorative against tuberculosis, a third the inability of mosquitoes to breed beyond a certain altitude.
It’s a sobering thought that a combination of bloodsuckers — bacteria and the Brits — gave us our hill stations. Ironically, the blood is now being sucked out the other way: India’s hill stations will soon be sucked dry by a new variety of bloodsuckers. Us.