ÿþ<html><head><link href="../../Styles/global.css" type="text/css" rel="stylesheet"> <link href="../../Images/favicon.ico" rel="shortcut icon" type="image/x-icon"><meta name="Keywords" content="Picture postcards from the British India depicting India's Hill stations.Priya Paul, hill station, Nainital, British, Himalayas" /><title>Picturing Mountains As Hills</title></head><body style="background-color:#666633" topMargin=0 ><div align="Center"> <table cellspacing="0" cellpadding="6" width="100%" style="background-color:#ffffcc"><tr><td style="background-color:#666633;font-size:12px;font-family:Verdana;" align="center"> <a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net" style="text-decoration:none;color:#ffffff;">Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture</a></td></tr><tr><td align="center" ><p><span style="font-size: 24px;"><span style="color: rgb(102, 102, 51);"><strong><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Picturing Mountains As Hills</span></strong></span></span></p></td></tr><tr><td align="center" > <p><span style="font-size: 14px;"><strong><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Hill Station Postcards and the Tales They Tell</span></strong></span></p></td></tr><tr><td> <table width="850" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0" border="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><strong><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The Landscape of the Hill Station &mdash; The Sublime and the Picturesque</span></strong></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> earliest encounters of Europeans with the Himalayas provoked in them a particular mixture of anxiety, awe and fear in the face of a wild and overpowering &ldquo;grandeur&rdquo; that they referred to as &ldquo;the sublime.&rdquo;</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><sup><span style="font-size: 10px;"> 5</span></sup></span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> This was a reaction familiar to Europeans from their encounter with the Alps, and for the British specifically, from their experiences of the &quot;grand tour.&quot;<sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">6</span></sup>&nbsp; And indeed some of the postcards memorialize this aesthetic, e.g., the view of the middle Himalayas in Mussoorie in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&amp;EId=102&amp;ImageId=4">Figure 04</a>, or the view of Chakrota in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&amp;EId=102&amp;ImageId=5">Figure 05</a>. In both these images, the viewer is suspended in space somewhere far away from the foreground, with no anchoring feature in the foreground to firmly situate the viewer's vantage point. It is a precarious position.&nbsp; Also, while we are looking at a point far away, the sheer size of the mountain makes it impossible for us to look down on it. The eternal snow on those peaks are untamable through mere sight. These visual details conjure up a sense of a terrain not easy to access or possess. </span></span></p> <table width="600" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="center"> <tbody> <tr> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=4><img width="229" height="144" border="0" alt="" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/shashwati/004.jpg" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=4> Fig.04</a></td></tr></table></td> <td><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=5><img width="229" height="144" border="0" alt="" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/shashwati/005.jpg" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=5> Fig.05</a></td></tr></table></td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">This sublime aesthetic response was inimical to the purpose of the hill stations which were set up to create a space for colonial society to enable it to rule more effectively.&nbsp; Especially after 1858, when India came to be ruled directly by the British government, the colonial reasons for being in India became explicitly articulated as a &quot;civilizing mission&quot; rather than a commercial one.&nbsp; The idea of civilization being disseminated was a bourgeois one, expressing the aspirations of the newly minted English aristocracy and mercantile class.</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">7</span></sup> </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> In England this idea found its aesthetic expression in the picturesque rather than in notions of the sublime. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The colonial project required taming the terrain for both commercial and ideological purposes, and the highest mountains in the world were not so easily tamed.&nbsp; They were a visible sign of the limits of colonial expansion.&nbsp; In the colony, therefore, the sublime aesthetic had to be progressively negated.&nbsp; In the hill stations, especially in the north, it was felt necessary to tame these mountains by excluding these views from everyday experience.&nbsp; This was accomplished by hill station society through actually seeking out sublime views, though, far away from their habitat.&nbsp; Colonial men and women organized picnics and excursions to locations away from town, even though such views were frequently available to them in their own backyards.&nbsp; This uneasiness is expressed pictorially as well:&nbsp; first, by depicting these views in isolation without the intrusion of anything that is at a human scale which would otherwise give us a sense of the immense size of these mountains by comparison; and second, by simply keeping them out of the imagery of hill stations. In the entire Priya Paul collection of over two hundred picture cards, only three use the sublime aesthetic.&nbsp; The others follow a picturesque aesthetic or some variation of it. The picturesque aesthetic became increasingly more amenable to colonial discourse.</span></span></p> <table width="231" height="147" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="right"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=6><img width="229" height="145" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/shashwati/006.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=6> Fig.06</a></td></tr></table></span></span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The card shown in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&amp;EId=102&amp;ImageId=6">Figure 06</a> is a typical example of the picturesque aesthetic.&nbsp; Solan, a satellite station of Simla, was the site of a military hospital and a brewery. In the picture, the object of interest is the native bazar on Solan Hill seen from a higher elevation with a tree in the foreground framing the picture.&nbsp; Conforming to a conventional picturesque view, it has variety and contrast in the roughness and the smoothness of the terrain and in areas of darkness and light. As stipulated in the earliest manual of the picturesque aesthetic by William Gilpin in 1782,&nbsp; there are three planes within the composition with the object of interest&nbsp; occupying the middle ground, and the&nbsp; trees in the foreground providing a darker frame to direct the eye to the object of interest, in this case the native bazaar.<sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">8</span></sup>&nbsp; <br /> </span></span></p> <table width="231" height="147" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="1" border="0" align="left"> <tbody> <tr> <td> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><table valign="middle"><tr><td> <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=7><img width="229" height="145" border="0" src="/cmsdesk/userfiles/image/shashwati/007.jpg" alt="" style="border-top-style: none; border-right-style: none; border-left-style: none; border-bottom-style: none"/></a></td></tr><tr><td align="Center" > <a class="navigation-a" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=7> Fig.07</a></td></tr></table></span></span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The ideological uses of the picturesque are a little more explicit in the&nbsp; postcard shown in <a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&amp;EId=102&amp;ImageId=7">Figure 07</a> which bears the caption, &quot;The Railway Loop above Tindharia, Darjeeling Hills, India.&quot;&nbsp; This image could be from Europe, as opposed to the Bengal Presidency. This is not an accident when one thinks of how hill stations were constructed to be a &quot;home away from home.&quot;&nbsp; However, it could also very well be titled &quot;The little steam engine that could,&quot; the very picture of industrious activity and indomitable spirit that colonial men especially prided themselves on. </span></span></p> <p><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">The presence of the train in the image accomplishes several of the things that the picturesque aesthetic was tasked with, foremost of which was that it implied ownership and property&mdash;whether it was the image of a beautiful woman, or of a landscape.</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">9</span></sup></span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">&nbsp; The pictured object&rsquo;s ability to produce pleasure, status or economic gain conferred a certain value to the owner (viewer) of the image. So imposing a picturesque&nbsp; aesthetic on an alien landscape was one way of appropriating and taming it.&nbsp; This appropriation was tied to notions of property and class, to who could afford to possess unproductive land and had the education to appreciate the landscape. The economic potential of the land was a subterranean factor in this enjoyment, and it could be argued a necessary component of it.<sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">10</span></sup> This potential for future wealth embedded in the picturesque aesthetic was highly resonant in the colonies.&nbsp; Hence the train in the hills. It not only makes the picture more pleasing, it also makes it very clear to whom the hills belong&mdash; namely, the people who put the train there.&nbsp; </span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">Thus even as the train enhances the picture by following a graceful loop around the hill, its path also functions as a marker<br /> of an enclosed piece of land</span></span><span style="font-size: 16px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">. Finally it is hard to dismiss the importance of the train itself which was the means to extend both leisure and commerce through the second half of the 19th century and well into the 20th; it was both the means to transport viewers to pleasing views, and also the engine of commercial activity.&nbsp; The valorization of mobility in the train postcard is also significant in the light of how ideas and institutions were moved and transplanted between the colony and the metropole.</span></span></p> <hr /> <p><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"><sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">5</span></sup> In 1756 Edmund Burke popularized the notion that feelings of horror and terror were integral to the aesthetic experience of the sublime, which was an appropriate response in the face of grandeur (Bermingham A. &quot;System, Order and Abstraction: The Politics of English Landscape Drawing around 1795.&rdquo;&nbsp; In Mitchell W.J.T, <em>Landscape and Power</em>. 2 ed. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press; :77-102.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">6 </span></sup>Around the middle of the 17th century, it became fashionable for young men of means in Britain to travel for extended periods of time in continental Europe as part of their education.&nbsp; This practice continued well into the 19th century.&nbsp; Their travels in Europe introduced such men to the Alps, so very different from the hills familiar to them from Wales and Scotland.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">7</span></sup> In the 19th century it was widely feared that&nbsp; Europeans would genetically degenerate in the tropics within a generation or two.&nbsp; They had to be saved from the inhospitable Indian climate, and by implication from the insalubrious company of natives.&nbsp; It was also believed that government officials could be thrice as efficient in a cooler climate, away from the hot plains and its inhabitants (Kennedy, Dane Keith. <em>The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj</em>.&nbsp; Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). </span></span><br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;">8</span></span></sup><span style="font-size: 12px;"><span style="font-family: Verdana;"> A picturesque aesthetic was articulated as such by William Gilpin in 1782, in his book <em>Observations on the River Wye and several parts of South Wales, etc. relative chiefly to Picturesque Beauty; made in the summer of the year 1770</em>. From ÿþRyan S. <em>The Cartographic Eye: How Explorers Saw Australia</em>. Cambridge, New York and Melbourne: Cambridge University Press; 1996: 247.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">9 </span></sup>Anzai S. &ldquo;Transplantation of the Picturesque.&rdquo; In: Dowler L, Carubia J, Szczygiel B <em>Gender and Landscape</em>. 1st. London and New York: Routledge; 2005:55-74.<br /> <sup><span style="font-size: 10px;">10 </span></sup>Simon Ryan<em> ibid</em>.</span></span></p> </td> </tr> </tbody> </table> </td></tr></table><table style="width:850px"><tr><td></td><td align="right"><span style="font-family:Verdana;font-size:12px;color:#ffffff;">Select Page</span><select id="cmbPages" class="text-box" onchange="javascript:openPage();"> <option value="1">1</option><option value="2">2</option><option value="3">3</option><option value="4">4</option><option value="5">5</option><option value="6">6</option></select> <script type="text/javascript" language="javascript">function openPage(){ var i = document.getElementById('cmbPages').value; var path =window.location.pathname.substring(0,window.location.pathname.lastIndexOf('/')); if(i== 1) window.location.href = path + "/index.html"; else window.location.href = path + "/index_" + (i-1) +".html"; } var path =window.location.pathname.substring(window.location.pathname.lastIndexOf('/')+1); if (path.indexOf('_') == -1) document.getElementById('cmbPages').value=1; else {path = path.substring(path.lastIndexOf('_')+1); document.getElementById('cmbPages').value=parseInt(path)+1;} </script><a class="navigation-a" href="index.html" style="color:#ffffff;">Previous</a> <a class="navigation-a" href="index_2.html" style="color:#ffffff;">Next</a></td></tr></table><table style="width:100%;"><tr><td></td></tr><tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><a class="gallery-a" style="color:#ffffff;" href=http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/viewgallery.aspx?id=84&EId=102&ImageId=1>Visit The Gallery</a> </td></tr><tr><td align="center" colspan="2"><a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Tasveer Ghar Home </a>-<a href="http://www.tasveergharindia.net/frmessaylisting.aspx" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Gallery </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/pages/copyright.html" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Disclaimer on images </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/cmsdesk/pages/Contact_Us.html" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> Contact us </a>-<a href="http://tasveergharindia.net/Unsubscriber.aspx" class="footer-a" style="color:#ffffff;"> UnSubscriber </a></td></tr></table></div><script type="text/javascript">try {var pageTracker = _gat._getTracker("UA-8020078-1");pageTracker._trackPageview();} catch(err) {}</script> </body></html>