The Pennsylvania State University The Graduate School College of Earth and Mineral Sciences FROM COLONIALISM TO NEOCOLONIALISM? GEOGRAPHIES OF TOURISM IN THE INDIAN HIMALAYA A Thesis in Geography By Matthew A. Hartzell © 2008 Matthew A. Hartzell Submitted in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Master of Science August 2008 The thesis of Matthew A. Hartzell was reviewed and approved by the following: Deryck W. Holdsworth Professor of Geography Thesis Adviser B. Ikubolajeh Logan Professor of Geography and African and African-American Studies Karl S. Zimmerer Professor of Geography Head of the Department of Geography *Signatures are on file in the Graduate School ii ABSTRACT In colonial India, hill stations in the Himalaya were simultaneously enclaves for European leisure-seekers and outposts of power, hegemony, and territorial ambition. Today the Himalaya continue to attract independent foreign tourists in the form of backpackers, ecotourists, and trekkers. Critics in the tourism literature allege that these tourists, fixated on discovering new ‘off the beaten path’ places, replicate colonial patterns and processes and thus contribute to a kind of modern-day ‘neocolonialism.’ This thesis assesses the validity of this allegation by tracing changes over time in the geography of tourism in the Indian Himalaya, thus framing the alleged ‘neocolonial’ tourism of today in juxtaposition with the ‘actual colonial’ tourism of the past. The ‘geographies’ at the core of this work are broad, encompassing not just physical locations, patterns, and connectivities that can be drawn on a map, but human spatialities and discourses that are colored by human agency, power relations, and the geographical imagination. Evidence is drawn from historical and contemporary texts such as travel guidebooks, travel literature, books, websites, journal articles, and maps. Field methods include in-depth, semi- structured interviews and participant observation that were undertaken in 2007 in Shimla, Manali, Dharamsala, Ladakh, and Spiti in the Indian states of Himachal Pradesh and Jammu and Kashmir. This varied and layered evidence is combined to illustrate the complexities, cultural conflicts, politics, and economics that underlie patterns of tourism, and backpacker tourism specifically, in the Indian Himalaya. While this research does find that there is evidence of neocolonialism to be found, it acknowledges that any conclusions are highly context-specific and vary from person to person and place to place. It also argues that the concept of neocolonialism is most pertinent to contemporary tourism when it is understood in a broader frame of reference than colonialism proper and the historical focus on state actors. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Tables .................................................................................................vi List of Figures ............................................................................................... vii Chapter 1. INTRODUCTION .............................................................................. 1 Introduction .............................................................................................. 1 The problem: Tourism as neocolonialism ............................................................ 3 Objectives and research questions ..................................................................... 5 Why India? Introduction to the case studies ......................................................... 7 Methodology ............................................................................................ 11 Positionality ............................................................................................. 13 Chapter 2. LITERATURE REVIEW ..................................................................... 16 Tourism geographies and tourism development models .........................................................16 Postcolonial theory in tourism: Orientalism and neocolonialism ................................ 23 Backpackers in India and their antecedents ......................................................... 33 Place preference differentiation and cultural capital ............................................... 43 Chapter 3. SHIMLA ........................................................................................ 49 From colonial to postcolonial leisurescape .......................................................... 49 Decolonization of the colonial leisurescape ......................................................... 51 Regulation, preservation, and segregation .......................................................... 57 Foreign tourists in Shimla ............................................................................. 61 Chapter 4. MANALI ....................................................................................... 65 Travel and tourism in the Kullu Valley before hippies and backpackers ....................... 65 Hippies and backpackers in the Kullu and Parvati Valleys ....................................... 69 Development, segregation, and contestation in Manali ............................................ 74 Environmental impacts of tourism ................................................................... 78 Social impacts and the issue of drug use ............................................................ 80 The discourse on Israeli backpackers ................................................................ 86 Chapter 5. DHARAMSALA .............................................................................. 92 Historical background and demographics of tourism in Dharamsala ............................ 92 Consumption, commercialism, and commodification ............................................. 94 The village of Bhagsu ................................................................................ 101 Chapter 6. LADAKH AND SPITI ...................................................................... 107 Historical background and the opening up of Ladakh ........................................... 107 Tourism development in Ladakh and its impacts ................................................ 111 The trekking industry: Pursuing the “frontier” ................................................... 117 Further frontiers: The case of Spiti ................................................................. 120 Resilience and mitigation of tourism’s impacts .................................................. 126 iv Chapter 7. INTERVIEWS ............................................................................... 132 Introduction to the interviews ................................................................................................132 Spatialites and spatial discourses in backpacker tourism ........................................ 133 Development and change: Contrasts between preconceptions and actual experiences ...... 139 Backpacker framings of identity and positionality ............................................... 144 Chapter 8. CONCLUSION .............................................................................. 152 Now that we have been there and back, what can we say? ..................................... 152 And what lies ahead?................................................................................. 161 Bibliography ............................................................................................... 165 Appendix ................................................................................................... 173 v LIST OF TABLES Table 3.1 Indian and foreign tourists in Shimla District ................................................................50 Table 4.1 Indian and foreign tourists in Kullu District ..................................................................71 Table 4.2 Number of guesthouses and hotels in Manali ................................................................75 Table 5.1 Indian and foreign tourists in Kangra District ...............................................................93 Table 5.2 Results of commercial transects in Dharamsala ............................................................98 Table 6.1 Indian and foreign tourists in Lahaul and Spiti ............................................................121 Table 6.2 Percentage of Himachal Pradesh tourists who visit Lahaul and Spiti .........................122 Table 8.1 Comparison of place and page counts in Lonely Planet ..............................................154 Appendix Table 1 Summary statistics and demographics of interview informants ...............................173 Table 2 Tourism-to-population ratios ....................................................................................176 Table 3 Change in Lonely Planet page counts over time .......................................................177 Table 4 Foreign tourist arrivals in India, 1951-2003 .............................................................178 vi LIST OF FIGURES Figure 1.1 Locator map ..................................................................................... 9 Figure 1.2 Location of field sites .......................................................................... 9 Figure 2.1 Schematic model of “tourism space” ........................................................ 19 Figure 2.2 Hypothetical localization curves comparing different subgroups of tourists ........... 21 Figure 2.3 Cover of Lonely Planet’s first edition India guidebook ..................................