The Changing Tourist Gaze in India’s Hill Stations: Vignettes from the Early 19th Century to the Present - Tourism and Visual Culture: Theories and Concepts - page 12

Fig. 1.2. The Eastern Ghats, South India, an impediment to human habitation. Source: author (2006).

(a) (b)

Fig. 1.3. (a) Colonial cottage in Yercaud, recently renovated and extended; (b) virtually derelict cottage in
Yercaud. Source: author (2006).

These gardens were used for recreation by
European residents and by visitors because of
their quiet beauty and because they generated
a sense of the familiar through their staged
authenticity (MacCannell, 1999). It should be
noted that plants that thrived in the Himalayan
Botanical Gardens were quite different from

those of the south, but there was, nonetheless,
some degree of familiarity to be found in gar-
dens of both the north and the south, and the
produce of all the gardens contributed to the
ordering of the vegetation on the hill stations,
and to the taming of nature in these environ-
ments. In writings about hill stations, it seems to