Ooty Preserved: A Victorian Hill Station in India

by Mollie Panter-Downes

Preserved...and rather charmingly commemorated in this quintessentially Victorian village in the Blue Hills of South India--the Queen of the Hill Stations (superseding Kipling's Simla)--a little "patch of England" where the sun has never set. Mrs. Panter-Downes makes a tour of Ootacumund, Ooty, lovely Ooty from its 19th-century existence as a small spiritual spa with tonic air for English exiles to today, with its dwindling number of Europeans (chiefly widows and daughters) and the faint encroachment of modern times--a film factory. Around she goes, from its Government House to its Library to its Club to its Old cemetery which Sir Richard Burton said was already "so extensive, so well stocked" over a hundred years ago. Along with its photographs (some of old aquatints) this is a somewhat pleasing but limited literary daguerrotype with amusing period appointments. Partial New Yorker appearance.--Kirkus

Genres: Travel, History

134 pages, Hardcover

First published June 1, 1954

About the author

Mary Patricia "Mollie" Panter-Downes was a novelist and newspaper columnist for The New Yorker. Aged sixteen, she wrote The Shoreless Sea which became a bestseller; eight editions were published in 1923 and 1924, and the book was serialised in The Daily Mirror. Her second novel The Chase was published in 1925.

After her marriage to Aubrey Robinson in 1927, the couple moved to Surrey, and in 1938 Panter-Downes began writing for the New Yorker, first a series of short stories, and from September 1939, a column entitled Letter from London, which she wrote until 1984. The collected columns were later published as Letters from England (1940) and London War Notes (1972).

After visiting Ootacamund, in India, she wrote about the town, known to all as Ooty, in her New Yorker columns. This material was later published as Ooty preserved.

Mollie Panter-Downes died in Compton, Surrey, aged 90.

Selected works:

- The Shoreless Sea (1923)
- The Chase (1925)
- My Husband Simon (1931)
- One Fine Day (1947)
- Minnie's Room (Short stories collected between 1947–1965) Republished by Persephone Books in 2002.
- Good Evening, Mrs Craven (short stories collected between 1938–1944) Republished by Persephone Books in 1999.
- Ooty preserved: a Victorian hill station (1967).

Reviews

[Jbondandrews · Rating 3 out of 5]

I did hope that this book would have had a bit more of the history of Ooty rather than just how the English were surviving in India in the late 1960s.

[Felicity · Rating 3 out of 5]

If the author's reports from wartime London were largely anecdotal and unattributed, this account of a Victorian hill station seems to derive from the reading room of a gentlemen's club in Mayfair. It may be unfair to criticise the author for producing an anglocentric record of hill-station life, when she neither claimed nor intended to do otherwise, but any account of India without the Indians is bound to be partial. She reports the enthusiasm of the ex-pats for hunting beasts and bargains, shooting, dining, cricket, golf, and generally playing the game, and then expresses astonishment at the well-stocked and little-used Nilgiri library, which allegedly had a membership of only 50 members, Indian and European. Given how unwelcome the Indians appeared to be on English territory, and how little time the sporting English had left for literature, her surprise surprises me. Her literary allusions to 'The Cherry Orchard' elude the non-natives' dream of returning home to the country of their imagination, while continuing to live a charmed life in the country of their colonisation. Even the hill station itself was built as a refuge from the intemperate climate of India, a Utopian 'England in the tropics' (134). She repeats 'unenvious stories' of those who have returned to the homeland and found themselves unable to settle in the sunless, servant-less and now 'socialist' country (of the 1960s) for which they have yearned. If only they could enjoy the benefits of their native country without having to pay the shocking price of inflation. However sad the spectacle of genteel poverty, it's hard to disagree with Macaulay's verdict on an earlier generation: 'They encounter an uncongenial climate for the sake of what they can get' (63), and this post-independence generation discovered to their cost that could not 'get' in England the life-style they had enjoyed in India for the price of a little inconvenience and a lot less money. Panter-Downes avowedly finds it easy to understand the English who have stayed on, 'for Ooty is home', a verdict with which I do not disagree, albeit for rather different reasons.