Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India

During their long occupation of India, the British built four metropolises. Within easy reach of these, nestled in the cool mountains, they built resorts to which they could escape for rest and recreation. Soon these became the summer capitals of the governors. This led to the vast network of roads, rail links and communications that allowed the British to rule from these comfortable surrounds. This became a major legacy of the British rule in the country, yet little has been published about them.

Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India, by Vikram Bhatt, Mapin, 192 pages, $85 The hill stations were crucial to British rule in India, argues McGill architecture professor Vikram Bhatt in this detailed evocation of the Raj. With their temperate climates, which offered Europeans respite from summer in Bombay and Calcutta, the stations provided sanitoriums for the soldiers, boarding schools for the children and lengthy holidays for the wives. Indulging neither imperialist nostalgia nor postcolonial recreations, Bhatt provides a straightforward social and architectural history of these towns where the British recreated home in a way not possible down on the sweltering plain. -- Kate Taylor- THE GLOBE AND MAIL

Vikram Bhatt, associate professor of architecture at McGill, offers an elegant, socio-architectural foray into the pampered world of British colonists and the magnificent mountain resorts they built for summer refuge from the heat, dust and their subjects in India. Bhatt's labourious research takes us to neo-Gothic churches, mansions, bungalows and viceregal lodges in nearly 100 hill stations scattered across India. Some are in Himalayan valleys ringed by snow capped peaks in the north; others are atop the lush mountains of the subtropical south. Be it Simla or Darjeeling, Ootacamund or Mahabaleshwar, Bhatt's engaging narrative, his 115 lavish colour photographs and historical lithographs take readers on a fascinating journey through colonial life in the Victorian era. Historical anecdotes, quotes from letters and Bhatt's personal observations spice up a subject that hasn't received all that much attention in the past. -- - Ashok Chandwani

'It was now May; the heat was terrible ... at Jamalpur the thermometer stood at 117 degrees at 11 o'clock at night, one Victorian bride wrote on first experiencing an Indian summer. Unable to tolerate such heat, the British retreated to hill stations in cooler mountain areas, staying in cottages such as the one above, in Ootacamund. In Resorts of the Raj (Antique Collectors' Club, BP45); Vikram Bhatt explores the mountainside legacy left by the British occupation of India. -- Country Life, 16 Apr 98

An invaluable source-book on the inspiration and style of the hill stations, Vikram Bhatt's Resorts of the Raj has achieved exactly what it set out to do - provide a balanced overview of the subject that fills in a nap for this fascinating architectural offspring of the colonial era. ...Bhatt's information is far-ranging and takes in the sociological factors as well as the artistic and climatic. He tells us corrugated tin sheets were invented in Scotland at the very time early hill residents were looking for something less porous than thatch - or lighter than hill slate to put on their roofs. His statistics are useful without being intrusive and good background Information is tucked away in his end notes...

It is Bhatt's sense of sound architecture that makes this book so satisfying to lovers of the lower ranges. His grasp of the curious array of factors that combined to give us the hill station - theological, sociological and meteorological - is both lucid and convincing. He has given the subject a coherent vision. Credit must also go to Mapin for a production that does India proud. -- Bill Aitken, The India Magazine of her People and Culture, April/May 1998.

MCGILL NEWS, Alumni Quarterly, Vikrarn Bhatt's Resorts of the Raj: Hill Stations of India is a sumptuous treat for the eyes. The heart of the book is the McGill professor of architecture's exquisite photographs of the hill stations to which the British rulers of India resorted for much of the year. The accompanying text implicitly makes a case for the architecture of the stations as part of the heritage of India, deserving of preservation. This is despite the ironic fact that they were originally seen as salubrious enclaves of Britishness, "homes away from home" for health seekers and the homesick wishing to escape the heat and bustle of the Indian plain. Bhatt even seems to suggest that the architecture of the stations was better integrated to its environment than some of the more haphazard development which succeeded it. Bhatt's text is charming, written with a light touch...

Agreeably urbane and a fount of information, Bhatt is an enjoyable guide to the architectural legacy of the Raj. -- Elizabeth Elbourne, McGill Professor of History