Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic

In order to administer their great Empire of enlightened paternalism the British had to meet the formidable challenges of the Indian environment. It is said that the average lifespan of an English gentleman living in Calcutta and working for the East India Company, or later the Raj, was merely two or three monsoons. Evidence of this is plain enough in the Park Street South Cemetery. Grave after grave speaks of men – and many women too – who came to work in India and who died at an early age, usually from malaria or dysentery. The English found the heat and grime and dirt and disease of India almost unbearable.

Accordingly, they had to adopt strategies to ameliorate their situation and to overcome the challenges they faced. One such strategy was the institution of the hill station. In order to escape the conditions of the Indian plains they found cool places in the hills to which they could retreat. These were places, moreover, where they could re-create vestiges of English life as a means of preserving their own institutions, codes of civility and sense of identity amidst the exotic chaos that was India. The British hill stations were tiny enclaves of England transplanted to the cool hills of the Indian sub-continent.

On the plains, the British developed a distinctive architecture. They fused classical (Graeco-Roman) styles with many features adopted from Mahometan buildings. The Moghuls before them had developed imperial public buildings that would remain relatively cool in the scorching summers. The English took some of these features and blended them with their own architecture creating a unique Anglo-Saracen style that can be seen in such buildings as the India Museum – formerly the Royal Asiatic Society building – in Calcutta, and many other examples. Although undoubtedly British and European these buildings have broad porticos and walkways that create shade and cool spaces after the manner of Islamic buildings.

In the hill stations, however, there was no need to appropriate Saracenic styles. The cool environment meant that the British could confine themselves to European architectural modes without exotic oriental elements. In keeping with the function of the hill stations, moreover, these were private rather than public buildings and so there was more scope for individuality and personal expressions of taste and wealth. The challenges were different. There were two main ones. Firstly, the hills tended to be very steep, quite unlike the English landscape. And second, the whole environment was prone to earthquakes from time to time, a danger with which the English were not accustomed. Hill station architecture had to be adapted to these factors.

In the first place, the Victorian gothic cottage or manor house was blended with styles and modes more adapted to steep hills, specifically to Scottish baronial architecture. But this proved to be prone to earthquake. The Scottish baronial building is made of heavy stone and is several floors high. Through tribulation the British learnt that this was not well suited to an earthquake zone. Instead, they also turned to the Swiss chalet and blended elements of Swiss wooden architecture with English gothic styles. Thus they created a distinctive hill station architecture, the so-called Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic.

This is the type of architecture that one finds still in the Indian hill stations - Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic - although much of it is in advanced disrepair today. There are some well-preserved examples, but the modern Indians often show a blithe disregard for the heritage of the Raj era (and indeed for heritage in general). Worse, as well as suffering appalling neglect, Raj architecture has been crowded out by the tasteless inhuman concrete monstrosities (and earthquake death-traps) that are typical of post-colonial Indian building.

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Below readers can find a pictorial essay of such Himalayan Swiss Chalet Gothic buildings as the present writer was able to observe in Darjeeling, the great hill station once attached to Calcutta. The town was first settled as a sanitarium for British soldiers recovering from malaria, but later became the celebrated site of the British tea industry. It is now populated by Nepalis and Tibetans and Gorkas and, while still charming and a place of great beauty, much of its architecture, alas, has suffered the fate mentioned above.

Yours,

Harper McAlpine Black