Summer is here and our hill stations are steadily getting overcrowded. Of late, each year as cars jam the highways, popular destinations like Mussoorie, Manali, Dalhousie, Dharamsala and Nainital are forced to put up road barriers: ‘Sorry, we are full!’ Social media then begins to heave and whine — Why? Why? Why? We bring loads of money to you, don’t we? When will you Pahadis learn to manage your tourism business like Goa and Rajasthan?

Kipling had once asked an interesting question: “What do they know of England, who only England know?” After reading a comprehensive narrative on the hows and whys of the creation of  hill stations like Nainital, Ranikhet, Shimla, Dalhousie, Ooty, Darjeeling and Mount Abu, our likely answer could be: “Maybe not nearly enough.” One little fact almost unknown now is that most of these towns were not created organically by the native Pahadis, but by the British during 1820-1920. They required these cool pads to help their own white officials with much-needed rest and recuperation after long stints in the heat and dust of India’s vast plains. These included Britons from various social backgrounds, but the higher officials were mostly from the upper classes: rebel third or fourth sons of affluent, titled families. They were all tired and exhausted after guarding the Raj and ruling the vast dusty plains of India, and could do with some leisure time activities in these resorts — fishing, hunting, sailing and even putting up plays occasionally.

The British discovered the Himalayan area as not just a mine of botanical information, species of wildlife and precious trails. It stood at a space where cultures and empires shared borders. In 1827, after Governor General Lord Amherst spent several salubrious months in Shimla with his family, the area became a fashionable summer ‘hill station’. Nainital, Mussoorie followed and Cantonments like Dehradun, Ranikhet and Lansdowne also cropped up. Shimla rose to be the summer capital of the Viceroy and his staff. A serious reconstruction of the Himalayan zone and a reinvention of its culture were undertaken by the colonial rulers in Kolkata and later, after the British shifted the capital westwards, from Delhi.

Few of us realise today as we grow dewy eyed over the perfect locations and design of these towns, that there lies a steady and well thought out erasure of local histories, and the brutal subjugation of the indigenous people. The matrix recreated by old local tales is fading with the local dialects and the mass migration of Pahadis to the plains in search of a living.

One must concede though that the British methods of spatial reorganisation of this ecologically delicate terrain followed a scientific study of the Himalayan region, that created for all builders a strict set of operating procedures. Designing of all civil and military works had to be overseen by seasoned geologists and engineers, whose word was law. The Great Landslip of 1880 that decimated the newly created summer resort town of Nainital further forced the British to review and create proper manuals and budgetary allocations for all building activity.

It is on record that the engineers refused to dilute the high standards of service on grounds of their working under difficult circumstances, or use inferior quality material.

In retrospect, the colonisers were not a monolithic category. Several of them cared deeply about the flora and fauna and the human beings who had lived in harmony with each other for centuries. It was soon realised that if the Sahibs, Mems and Baba Log were to be healthy, the vast domestic and bureaucratic support staff of khansamas, ayahs, clerks and nurses must also be provided good healthcare, regular vaccinations against contagious diseases like small pox and cholera, and hygienically safe homes. All that was of course done along clearly demarcated racial lines.

The British ejected the locals from ownership of land and forests to create urban structures that suited their mode of life. They also created permanent binaries between the rulers and the ruled, between leisure and work, development and ecological degradation and the first socio-cultural chasms between those who have the power to buy out the locals, demolish their lifestyles and use them as daily-wager labour.

These socio-cultural divides still bedevil old hill stations. The idle Indian rich are now buying prime properties, displacing the natives like the British. Most of the well-trained older professionals and managing staff with institutional memories had superannuated by the 1980s. They have mostly been replaced by people on grounds of not merit but their caste and political affiliations. Some two decades after Independence, things had started to flag, especially upholding of regular maintenance and repairs of roads and river waters. Two tiny hill states of Uttarakhand and Himachal Pradesh were carved out. Both had limited resources. Finally, it was decided that to beef up revenues, both be repackaged as perfect summer resorts where the rich and the religiously inclined (increasingly the same) would find ample leisure time.

With the young celebrating a good life as laid down by Hindi films, the elderly would find soul-cleansing pilgrimage trails to some of the holiest shrines in India. Thus the new map of vikas. No lessons, it seems, were learnt from the earlier ecological disasters and against advice, furious road expansion and tunneling was undertaken to facilitate revenue flow. Watching the rescue teams dredging the bodies of workers from power plants or collapsed tunnels and drowned pilgrims after sudden flooding, one wondered if the Central leadership, the corporates and state governments hotly apportioning blame for the tragedies on locals flouting norms, knew the real reason: their own greed.

Ironically, the biggest disasters in the last two decades have occurred in the valleys of our holiest rivers. And the iconic village of Raini, the birthplace of the Chipko movement, India’s first major public movement against environmental degradation, has now all but disappeared due to repeated floods and the resultant mass migration of its villagers to safer locations.

As a child of middle-class parents growing up in the hills in the ’50s and ’60s, one benefitted enormously from the civil hospitals and vernacular schools then run by ageing but efficient teachers, inspectors, doctors and their staff. Hospitals and schools were solid buildings, sparsely furnished but adequate with large playgrounds. Today, one would be lucky to survive them. Protocols are missing and teachers and doctors with young families rate their posting in hills as hardship posting. They try hard to escape to the plains as soon as they can. All that is changed regularly are the names of buildings because each new government wishes to confer immortality on their own deemed heroes.