The Magic Mountains: Hill Stations and the British Raj.

• Author: Rocher, Rosane

By DANE KENNEDY. Berkeley and Los Angeles: UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS. 1996. Pp. xiii + 264, 14 illustrations, 2 maps. $38, [pounds]30.

In this book Dane Kennedy, an associate professor of history at the University of Nebraska, has jumped continents - from the locale of his first work, Islands of White: Settler Society and Culture in Kenya and Southern Rhodesia, to the similarly insular world of the hill stations in India in which the British sought a retreat from heat, dust, and disease, and the overwhelming presence of Indians in the plains. The title echoes Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain, and the quotations from Mann's work which serve as epigraphs for each chapter gesture toward parallels between Mann's imagined Alpine world and that which the British imagined for themselves in the hills of India. They also point to the fact that, like the secluded sanitarium that serves as the site for Mann's examination of European society, the health resorts to which the British betook themselves in India constituted a locale in which they reviewed and reenacted their imperial power. For all the romanticism associated with the hills in British colonial literature and for all the vogue that vacations in the hills currently enjoy with affluent Indians, this meticulously researched volume neither wallows in imperial nostalgia nor partakes of escapist travel literature. To the contrary, it offers a trenchant analysis of colonial society.

After an initial chapter that traces the general development of hill stations, chapter 2 situates them in the context of views the British entertained of the somatic perils of the tropics. Hill stations, many of which owed their origin to medical establishments, were deemed safe havens, the cool and bracing air of which had curative powers for the morbidity and exhaustion that were associated with the plains. Not only were they health resorts, their climate and vegetation reminded the British of their homeland, and, as chapter 3 shows, their landscape and flora were altered to foster the illusion of a rural British setting. Concomitantly, descriptions of hill tribes, surveyed in chapter 4, depicted simple, rugged, noble savages, in stark opposition to the deviousness, effeminacy, and decadence attributed to the inhabitants of the plains.

If the initial four chapters present a well-documented, but not altogether unanticipated, portrayal of British views of their Indian environment, the three middle chapters offer a...