The British Era

Under the Company and the Crown, the hills got their modern face: Nainital, Mussoorie and Ranikhet were founded, the Forest Department fenced the woods, and Kumaon and Garhwal gave India both loyal regiments and fierce freedom fighters.

The British ran Kumaon and eastern Garhwal as a non-regulation province from Nainital and Almora, while Tehri remained princely. The new rulers surveyed, taxed and above all reserved the forests, striking at the heart of hill subsistence; resentment over forest law simmered for a century and broke out in movements like the 1921 coolie-utar (forced labour) agitations and the burning protests of Rawain.

This is also the era of the hill station. Mussoorie (1820s) and Nainital (1841) grew into Raj summer capitals, Ranikhet and Lansdowne into cantonments of the Kumaon and Garhwal regiments, and Dehradun into a town of institutions with the Survey of India and the Forest Research Institute. Jim Corbett tracked his man-eaters in these decades, and the railways reached the foothills at Kathgodam, Dehradun, Rishikesh, Kotdwar and Tanakpur.

The hills answered the national movement in their own key. Badridutt Pandey led the Kumaon agitation that broke forced labour in 1921; Peshawar in 1932 made a national hero of Veer Chandra Singh Garhwali, the soldier who refused to fire on unarmed protesters; and Sridev Suman died in a Tehri jail in 1944 after an 84-day hunger strike against princely rule.