ESHS/HSS Annual Meeting

‘What Care These Men if India Is Starving?’: Hill stations, Climate and Famine Critique in Colonial India

• In Event: Contested Knowledges of Climate, Food and Famine

English Abstract

This paper examines how Indian newspapers transformed the colonial hill station into an
emotionally charged political symbol during the famines of the late nineteenth century. Hill
stations were high-altitude retreats originally conceived as convalescent sanctuaries for European
officials and later formalised as seasonal centres of imperial governance. Drawing on a wide
corpus of periodical writing, the chapter argues that these elevated enclaves became focal points
in a disaster tradition that framed famine as a product of misrule rather than nature.
Editors mobilised what I call 'emotional strategies': deliberate ways of crafting feeling in public
discourse to shape political interpretation, allocate responsibility, and influence how catastrophe
was understood. These strategies subverted prevailing climate determinism by using climate not
to naturalise scarcity but to assign moral and political culpability to the colonial state.
By tracing recurring tropes, such as the repeated juxtaposition of luxury with starvation, distance
with duty, and climatic comfort with administrative negligence, the chapter reveals how
emotions mediated public understandings of governance in catastrophe. In centring emotion, the
chapter reframes the famine politics of the colonial public sphere as a contest over climate,
food scarcity and responsibility.

Author

• Joseph Manock, University of Manchester