From Residency To Raj Bhavan: A History of the Shillong Government House

At five thousand feet in the heart of the Khasi hills the British created a hill station, the product of their imperial imagination, that was to become, as one civil servant phrased it, “as near a chip of England that could be conceived outside the British Isles.” In this British enclave, in the midst of tribal territory ruled by elected chiefs, was their seat of authority, the Government House, designed, built and nurtured to complete that illusion. The present Government House, or Raj Bhavan, was constructed and occupied in 1903-04 after the destruction of the Chief Commissioner’s Residency in the great Shillong earthquake of 1897. The story begins with the East India Company’s search for hill resorts for Europeans that started with the Cherrapunjee experiment after the outbreak of the first Anglo-Burmese war during 1824-26 and ended with the discovery and development of Shillong in the mid eighteen sixties. One of the first private houses to be built in the new station was the Deputy Commissioner Colonel Henry Stuart Bivar’s. When Shillong became, in addition to being the administrative center of the Khasi and Jaintia Hills district, the headquarters of the newly create province of Assam in 1874, Bivar’s house was transformed into the Chief Commissioner’s Residency. From then on its history has been inextricably interwoven with that of the hill city. This volume tells the history of the Raj Bhavan, its long line of distinguished tenants and the role they played in the making and unmaking of modern Assam, the after independence, its gradual transformation from a symbol of the Raj to that of a vibrant democracy in the successor state of Meghalaya.