Himalayan Journals, written in the year 1854, provides insight into how tropicality was observed and interpreted in South Asia, specifically India, through the lens of foreign travellers. The author of Himalayan Journals, Joseph Dalton Hooker, a naturalist and botanist, explores Darjeeling in India. Hooker describes Darjeeling as its own separate haven within India, an environmental refuge of sorts, from other areas in India that had an “unhealthy” climate (like that of the Indian plains). Hooker’s Himalayan Journals provides a closer look into colonial perspectives regarding nineteenth-century India. Hooker’s Himalayan Journals demonstrates that British colonisers dissected India, divvying up colonial Indian territories into certain sections, with each section categorised into different climatic spaces, with climatic spaces being attached to ideas about health, race, and social organisation. Hooker’s Himalayan Journals uses tropicality and environmental conditions in India to categorise which parts of India were dangerous tropical India, versus a temperate, healthy India suitable for European settlement.

As a British botanist, Hooker, in writing Himalayan Journals, shows a thorough knowledge of flora and fauna, weather and climate, and geography. Within Hooker’s account of climate, longstanding British understandings and prejudices about South Asia are also present, particularly through his descriptions of the climate and environment. Hooker first states that in order for Europeans to feel comfortable settling in the British Indian colony, they would need to be assured that the climate was temperate. Hooker writes, “the health of Europeans may be recruited by a more temperate climate.”¹ This idea is present throughout Hooker’s writing. While Hooker describes Darjeeling itself, he more frequently focuses on how Darjeeling affects the Europeans inhabiting it. Hooker asserts that statistical data showed “the value of the climate to Europeans suffering from acute diseases” and argues that European troops arriving in Bengal should not be sent to Calcutta, but instead should be sent to Darjeeling.² Hooker’s racial prejudices become most apparent when describing Europeans leaving the Indian plains as “sickly, pallid or yellow, soft and flabby.”³ This line of thought is consistent with Hippocrates’ argument that differences between populations could be explained through their environments. The understanding is that climate, seasonal variation, and geographical location are all influences capable of shaping human health.⁴ With this understanding also comes the understanding that certain bodies are better suited to certain environments and that movement between different climates can produce illness, further solidifying this significance as well as the distinction between tropical and temperate spaces.

While the idea that tropical versus temperate spaces could have different effects on one’s health held some merit in certain ways, Hooker’s efforts to repeatedly demonstrate distinctions between these spaces in Himalayan Journals also reflected biases. David Arnold asserts that nineteenth-century European travellers writing about India frequently constructed India as a more “tropical” other world. This act of exoticising and overemphasising the “tropicality” of the colonial territories was a commonality amongst many European literary works. The illustration of colonial territories, including those in India, as overly “tropical” and possessing wildly differing climates was often attached to or associated with negative connotations, like, for example, describing a colonial territory’s climate as being “unhealthy.” Contrastingly, the European authors referred to the climate of European countries as the more ideal temperate climate.⁵ Hooker’s account illustrates this through his description of the plains; instead of it being tropical, it is dangerously so, but the elevated spaces in India are described as being fitting for European settlement.

The division of climatic spaces reveals racial biases present at the time. In Hooker’s account, he writes, “Natives of the low country, and especially Bengalees, are far from enjoying the climate as Europeans do”; later, Hooker claims that their susceptibility to illness was due to their cultural practices, like those of clothing, diet, and sleep habits.³ Climatic differences then become intertwined with racial distinctions, distinctions that often carry certain negative connotations. Jiat-Hwee Chang’s analysis of tropical architecture examines this distinction as well. Chang argues that the “tropics” should not be understood as a neutral or objective climatic category. Chang writes that this is due to colonial understanding, or rather a lack of understanding, of tropical nature, where racial assumptions, medical knowledge, and practices of governance all interfere with creating an objective picture of tropicality in colonial territories⁶ Hooker’s description of Darjeeling is demonstrative of this, when certain climates only become a colonial concern or are deemed “unhealthy” or uninhabitable as soon as they affect the Europeans inhabiting them.

Hooker’s account in Himalayan Journals is a prime example of nineteenth-century thinking about the relationship between climate and social/racial groupings. Darjeeling as a space in Hooker’s account becomes this exception, an isolated space, as opposed to the other unfavourable climates in India (like that of the tropical plains). Descriptions of Darjeeling as elevated, not low, temperate, not tropical, give insight into what exactly foreigners viewed as a liveable environment. Hooker’s insight, combined with the context of thinkers like Hippocrates, further supports this spatial division, describing the importance of different peoples and their unique climatic needs. Again, this understanding is supposedly about climate, but more closely corresponds with race/social groups, as each race or group of people is blank. Writings such as Hooker’s demonstrate the creation of a colonial geography where certain spaces or environments were assigned a different racial or medical meaning to it.

1. Joseph Dalton Hooker Himalayan Journals, vol. 1 (London: John Murray, 1854), 115. [↩]
2. Hooker, Himalayan Journals, vol. I, 119. [↩]
3. Hooker, Himalayan Journals, 1:120. [↩] [↩]
4. Hippocrates, Airs, Waters, Places, XII-XVI, in Hippocrates vol. 1, trans. W. H. S. Jones (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1923), 106–17. [↩]
5. David Arnold, The Tropics and the Traveling Gaze: India, Landscape, and Science, 1800–1856 (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006), 42–54, 110–15. [↩]
6. Jiat-Hwee Chang, A Genealogy of Tropical Architecture: Colonial Networks, Nature and Technoscience (London: Routledge, 2016), 5–10. [↩]