UCLA

The Central Himalayas are among the most ecologically abundant and historicallyvenerated landscapes of South Asia. This dissertation studies the cultural politics of place-making in the Central Himalayan regions of Kumaun and Garhwal from the late eighteenth to the middle of the twentieth century. After the region was annexed by the East India Company in 1815, the mountain landscape was recursively mapped, surveilled, demarcated, and appropriated for colonial revenue and resource extraction. Unequal relations between the mountains and the subcontinental plains intensified as a consequence, at the expense of historic trade relations across the Central and trans-Himalayas. From the nineteenth century onwards, an ever-widening number of travelers, officials, timber merchants, sportsmen, pilgrims, Ayurvedic medical practitioners, and settlers from both the colony and the metropole were also drawn to the Central Himalayas. I examine the complementary and conflicting ways in which mountain landscapes were framed, refashioned, represented, and brought into cultural circulation by English travelers and officials, as well as by Indian elites who attempted to subvert colonial hegemony.

Drawing upon Sanskrit, Hindi, and English sources from archives in Delhi, Uttarakhand,and London, I chart the ways in which the Himalayas loomed over the geographical imagination of India under colonial rule. I argue that modern imaginaries of the Central Himalayas as an ideal site for improvement, pilgrimage, and healing reinforced ‘upper’ caste hegemony, racial regimes of property, and the bureaucratic elision of caste and gender specific labor from the mountain ‘commons.’ In the nineteenth century, just as racial logics of the sublime legitimated colonial authority over the people and places of the Himalayas, secular conceptions of agency as the absence of pain undergirded infrastructural ‘improvements’ that routinized class and caste-based hierarchies in Himalayan pilgrimages. While the Central Himalayan landscape had been shaped by agrarian slavery and unequal access to land prior to colonial rule, the late colonial enclosure of the mountain commons exacerbated systems of social exclusion. I follow the unexpected trajectories of colonial spatial enclosures as they were reworked by anti-caste activists and actively adopted by Indian elites who commodified associations between the Himalayas and healing in the early twentieth century.