Doonstruck Diaries of Victorian Memsahibs: Between the Journal and Jhampaun in Mussoorie and Landour

Established as colonial hill stations in Indian's Doon Valley, the 1820s, Mussoorie and Landour emerged Victorian literary imagination with journals of Emily Eden, Fanny Parks, Wallace-Dunlop sisters. This paper argues that Doon's female imperial architextures invented new prospects grafting Anglo-Saxon aesthetics on Himalayan terra nullius, diminishing, miniaturizing, depopulating aspects hazardous, alien, local. A thread archetypes —jhampauns (Himalayan loco-armchairs) vistas— link aesthetic arcs Wallace-Dunlops. Although architexture was ostensibly apolitical, it imbued representational spaces a reproducible English character, rendering its incognita into familiaris psyche, while carving distinct subjectivity for Memsahibs.