Constructing Colonial Urban Space in the Darjeeling Himalayas: a Re-reading in History

Abstract

This article argues that, 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. By then, the hill station of Darjeeling posited a unique form of colonial urbanism. The study reveals that Darjeeling formed an integral part of the colonial political economy. Once this was accomplished, the integration of its resources into the larger colonial economy sustained the expansion and consolidation of the town. Importantly, plant capitalism, that is the infusion of colonial capital in commercial tea plantation, that had incorporated Darjeeling into the late 19th century capitalist world system, heralded large socio-economic and demographic transformations, resulting in ecological and landscape changes.