Hill Stations and Colonial Urbanism: Understanding the Landscape of Darjeeling (1835–1947)

The present study has principally focused on the processes, factors, and forces behind the growth and development of Darjeeling as a colonial hill station. The study further looks into the consequences of urbanization on the society, economy, and polity, and ecology of colonial Darjeeling. For the making of Darjeeling as a colonial urban space, considerations like racial distinctions, climatic value, and strategic importance received priorities. The principal concern was to facilitate the recuperation of European bodies from the heat and diseases of the plains. However, European residential sanctity was intruded upon in the late colonial Darjeeling. It has been adequately approved by the study that the hill station of Darjeeling was a unique form of colonial urbanism. Colonial administrators planned the hill stations in the nineteenth century to create. Therefore, the Darjeeling hill station represented an idyllic social space away from the tropical climate and the cities in the plains. Its urbanization and inclusion into the greater colonial economy were affected ever since its establishment followed by subsequent material transformations. Therefore, a constant tension between its exotic and its functional elements persisted throughout the colonial period.