The ‘queen of hills’ Udhagamandalam basks in the bicentenary glory

The ‘queen of hills’ Udhagamandalam basks in the bicentenary glory of the first colonial expedition up the hills led by John Sullivan

On January 8, 1819, sitting in Dimbatty valley, the Collector of Coimbatore, John Sullivan, wrote to Sir Thomas Munro, who was Governor of Madras: “My dear Colonel, I have been in the Highlands for the last week. This is the finest country… it resembles I suppose Switzerland more than any other part of Europe… it freezes here every night, this morning we found ice in our water chatties (clay pots).”

It has been two centuries since this expedition of colonial explorers, led by John Sullivan, made its journey up the Nilgiri hills. As the Nilgiris celebrates the bicentenary of this exploration, heritage enthusiasts, ecologists and locals are uniting to celebrate the legacy of the ‘blue mountains’.

“Ootacamund, the first hill station of the British Raj, officially came into being on June 1, 1823 when Stonehouse, the first modern building on the hills was opened,” says Venugopal Dharmalingam, honorary director of the Nilgiri Documentation Center (NDC) who came up with the idea of the bicentenary celebrations.

Set up in 2006 as a Public Trust, the NDC, has painstakingly gathered and published, a voluminous documentation of the hills. John Sullivan, the Collector of Coimbatore, of which Nilgiris was then a part, first sighted Ootacamund in 1821, bought about 100 acres from the native Todas of Hottegamund and began construction of Stonehouse in 1822.

Also read: Scrutinising Sullivan 200 years after his arrival in the Nilgiris

Stonehouse, which now serves as the Government Arts College, has played a key role in the development of the hill station over the two centuries.

Sullivan saw the mountains as a health resort. To promote his plan for a sanatorium for sick European troops in India, he lost no time in making the hills habitable by laying roads, building houses, planting English vegetables, trees, and flowers. He dammed the waters into a series of reservoirs all the way to the East coast more than 200 kilometres away for irrigation and navigation. The plan could not go beyond the first reservoir for want of funds and the town was blessed with a fine ornamental lake which later became a prime tourist attraction. “The work on the lake started in January 1823 and completed by June-July 1825, personally supervised by Sullivan and carried out by tank diggers from Vellore,” explains Venugopal.