A Foot-hill Town

Darjeeling - a portrait of the Raj hill station made for schools

Darjeeling was one of the Himalayan foothill towns favoured by fragile members of the Raj in their bid to escape the blistering summer heat in Calcutta (now Kolkata). This film was re-edited from material shot for a Secrets of India portrait of Darjeeling and features footage of tea picking, Government House, the bazaar and the ‘toy train’ railway (declared a World Heritage Site in 1999). Among the highlights are a pair of Westerners who have taken to local dress, and in the film’s most telling sequence, the sight of four men pushing and heaving two Brits up a precipitous slope in a rickshaw.