Open AccessDoonstruck Diaries of Victorian Memsahibs: Between the Journal and Jhampaun in Mussoorie and Landour
Author(s) -
Arup K. Chatterjee
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
lectora
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2013-9470
pISSN - 1136-5781
DOI - 10.1344/lectora2021.27.9
Subject(s) - carving , alien , cabinet (room) , subjectivity , psyche , archetype , history , art , art history , sociology , archaeology , literature , philosophy , psychology , psychoanalysis , demography , population , epistemology , census
Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, in the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged in Victorian literary imagination with the journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that the Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects of grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on the Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, and depopulating aspects of the hazardous, the alien, and the local. A thread of archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) and Himalayan vistas— link the aesthetic arcs in the journals of Eden, Parks, and the Wallace-Dunlops. Although the architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued the Doon's representational spaces with a reproducible English character, rendering its terra incognita into terra familiaris in imperial psyche, while carving a distinct imperial subjectivity for Memsahibs.