‘White Todas’: the politics of race and class amongst European settlers on the Nilgiri Hills, c.1860–1900
The Nilgiri Hills lie in the north-western corner of what is now Tamil Nadu, and was formerly part of the Madras presidency. Before 1799 the Hills had formed a rather detached part of Tippoo Sultan’s Mysore. Although they do appear to have paid revenue, their various tribes lived in comparative isolation, broken only in 1819 when the first European bungalow was constructed on the lower slopes near Kotagiri by the collector of the Coimbatore District. From the 1820s onwards the Hills, and particularly Ootacamund (Ooty), the chief sanatorium, became a popular resort for invalid Europeans, revelling in the ‘half-English’ weather of the plateau, 6,000 feet above sea level. From the 1850s they became fashionable, as well as a health resort, and by 1870 Ooty was acting as the summer capital of the Madras presidency, the seat of government for four to six months of the year. Nevertheless, with an average population density of no more than 127 per square mile in 1901, less than any other district in Madras, and a main town, Ootacamund, of only 18,500 inhabitants, the Nilgiris were of minor economic and demographic significance, and have accordingly attracted little attention from historians since the publication of Sir Frederick Price’s voluminous history in 1908. With or without the familiar diminutive, Ooty is always belittled by the associations of the term ‘hill station’. In imperial and nationalist mythology this implies a place apart, Kipling’s ‘abode of the little tin gods’, divorced from the everyday concerns of the ‘real’ India on the Plains. Dane Kennedy’s The Magic Mountains and Pamela Kanwar’s Imperial Simla are the principal detailed studies of this peculiar urban form, and show clearly that hill stations were no different from other Indian towns in depending on Indian capital and enterprise for their maintenance and development. Despite this, Kipling’s grass-widows and dashing young subalterns still hold centre stage in the popular perception of the hill station, obscuring not only the Indians who made this brittle existence possible, but the substantial numbers of Europeans who came to the hills not to play, but to work. Together with the presidency towns, but for somewhat
Goa, and the Blue Mountains; Or, Six Months of Sick Leave
A light read, this book was written by the author, as the name suggests, when he was on vacation recovering from an illness. Being the wanderer that he was, Richard Burton wield his pen and opinion that arouse different feelings in the people who read his works Blunt to the point of being bigoted, he was not one who'd mince his works. The book starts with a description of his voyage to Goa; he then describes the Goan country and people and further touches upon its history from there he continues his travel to visit Calicut, Malabar (in the modern Indian state of Kerala; and Ooty. These areas include the Nilgiri Mountains also called the Blue Mountains. Burtons prolific pen never misses to get down anecdote. The lives of the locals, their customs, their language, the history and other sights and experiences that he under went while on the road.
The Crisis of Bengal Agriculture, 1870-1927— the Dynamics of Immobility
During the era of ’high imperialism’ in Bengal from 1870 to 1914, European capital and European enterprise built up a modern industrial complex around the metropolis of Calcutta, which drew its sustenance from the cash crop agriculture of the hinterland. Yet this impressive growth in the manufacture of raw materials, which in turn stimulated the export of primary products and agriculture, seemed to exercise little multiplier effect on the agricultural economy of Bengal. The long-term trends in the agriculture of the province, as reflected in official statistics relating to movements in population and acreage, were slightly downward from the beginning of the twentieth century. The virtual absence of any linkage effects between the growth of modern industry and the state of the rural economy calls for an explanation. The economic basis of the existence of the metropolis of Calcutta-its government, its business, its multifarious activities and professions-was the extraction and transfer of a large surplus from its agricultural hinterland without any equivalent return to