Power and Domination
Ranjeeta Dutta
OTHER LANDSCAPES: COLONIALISM AND THE PREDICAMENT OF AUTHORITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY SOUTH INDIA by Deborah Sutton Orient Blackswan, 2012, 239 pp., 695
July 2012, volume 36, No 7

Nestled within an idyllic ecological environment, the hill stations have always been an ideal summer retreat. However, the quietude of these settlements and the tranquility of their landscapes belie a history of conflicts and negotiations mostly dated to the nineteenth century, between the hill communities and the British. The sanguineness and salubrity that have often been taken for granted as natural and preexisting were in fact the result of a conscious colonizing process of the hills. The book under review recounts such a narrative of power and domination that created specific ethnographic, agricultural and arboreal typologies in the Nilgiri hills located in the erstwhile Madras Presidency. The title of the book encapsulates three important concepts of ‘predicament’, ‘landscapes’, and ‘other landscapes’, that form the template on which the complex history of colonization of the Nilgiris and its subsequent evolution as an idyllic hill station are elaborated upon.

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