Darjeeling

Until the 19th century the ridge on which Darjeeling stands was a thinly settled part of Sikkim, fought over by Sikkim, Nepal and Bhutan and known by a name usually explained as the place of the thunderbolt. In 1835 Sikkim granted the tract to the East India Company, which wanted a sanatorium where British officials and soldiers could escape the heat of Bengal. A road was cut, a settlement laid out along the ridge, and by the 1850s the town had hotels, churches, boarding schools and a growing population drawn from Nepal and the surrounding hills.

Tea transformed it. The first commercial gardens were planted in the 1840s and 1850s using Chinese seed, which suited the altitude and thin mountain air, and within a generation the district was exporting a tea that fetched premium prices in London. Labour came overwhelmingly from Nepal, and the Nepali-speaking population that arrived to work the gardens became the majority community of the hills. The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, completed to the town in 1881, carried the tea down and the visitors up, and made the journey itself famous.

After independence the town remained a summer resort, a schooling centre and the capital of the tea trade, and from the 1950s a base for Himalayan mountaineering; Tenzing Norgay lived here and led the institute founded after his ascent of Everest. Demands for a separate Gorkhaland state for the Nepali-speaking hills produced a violent agitation in the 1980s and further shutdowns in later decades, which damaged both tourism and the gardens. Autonomous hill councils have administered the district since, and tourism has largely recovered.

Darjeeling belongs to the Himalayas rather than to Bengal. Nepali is the everyday language, and the population includes Gorkha, Lepcha, Bhutia, Tibetan, Bengali, Marwari and Anglo-Indian families, with Hindu temples, Buddhist gompas, mosques and a set of 19th-century churches all within a short walk of one another. Tibetan refugees settled here after 1959 and run the Self Help Centre, whose carpet weaving and handicrafts are part of the town's trade.

The festival calendar reflects that mixture: Dashain and Tihar in the autumn, Losar in late winter, Buddha Purnima in spring, Christmas in the churches and schools, and Durga Puja among Bengali residents. Masked cham dances are performed at the monasteries on their festival days, and Nepali folk music and the madal drum are heard at weddings and public programmes.

Education has shaped the town since the 19th century: boarding schools founded for the children of the Raj still take pupils from across India and from neighbouring countries, and their old buildings and playing fields occupy much of the upper ridge. Mountaineering is a second point of pride, with a long list of local climbers and Sherpa families. Manners are quieter and less demonstrative than on the plains, bargaining is gentler, and residents are used to visitors but weary of being treated as scenery.

About 120,000 people live in the town itself, with many more in the tea estates and villages spread down the ridges around it. Tourism and tea are the two industries, supported by government and army employment, the schools, and small trade; the season runs in two peaks, spring and autumn, and much of the town lives on what those months bring. Many families also have members working in Siliguri, in the Gulf or in the Indian army's Gorkha regiments.

Water is the constant preoccupation. The Victorian supply system from the Senchal lakes has never kept pace with the town's growth, and much of Darjeeling relies on tankers, springs and stored rain, particularly in the dry months before the monsoon. Steep, unstable slopes, heavy construction and landslides add to the strain, and traffic on the single main road through town is slow at almost any hour.

Days are shaped by the weather and the light. Work begins early, the market is busiest in the morning, cloud often rolls up the valley by midday, and evenings are quiet and cold, with shops shutting sooner than in the plains. The tea gardens below follow their own calendar of plucking rounds from spring to autumn, and the estates' labour conditions and wages are a recurring political issue in the hills.

The food is Himalayan and eaten hot. Momos, steamed or fried dumplings filled with pork, chicken or vegetables, come with a fiery tomato and chilli sauce and are sold everywhere from market stalls to restaurants; thukpa, a noodle soup with meat and greens, is the other staple. Shyaphaley, a fried Tibetan meat pastry, and thenthuk, a soup of hand-pulled dough pieces, belong to the same tradition, and plates of chow mein have been absorbed into it.

Nepali home cooking supplies the rest. Dal bhat — rice, lentils and vegetable curries — is the everyday meal; gundruk and sinki are fermented leaf and radish preparations turned into sour soups; aloo dum, potatoes in a spiced gravy, is a common snack; and sel roti, a sweet ring of fried rice batter, is made at festivals. Chhurpi, hard cheese from cow or yak milk, is chewed for hours or cooked into soups. Millet beer is drunk in the hills as tongba, poured hot into a wooden pot and sipped through a bamboo straw.

Then there is the tea. Darjeeling's estates produce a light, aromatic leaf graded by flush — the delicate first flush of spring, the fuller second flush with its muscatel character, and the autumn plucking — and it is drunk here without milk or sugar so that the flavour survives. The town also keeps a colonial appetite for bakeries, with bread, cakes and breakfasts that belong to the era of the sanatorium and the boarding schools.