Virtuous Movements and Dirty Politics

This chapter is concerned with the relationships between virtue, immorality, and politics as they are contested and negotiated within the space of a statehood movement. It explores how political leaders in Darjeeling present themselves as virtuous despite being involved in ‘politics’, which is associated with morally despicable behaviour such as selfishness and corruption. At the heart of such camouflage stands the blurring of the boundaries between what counts as moral and immoral. Yet, leaders’ attempts to respond to idealist imaginations of the movement as untouched from ‘dirty’ politics prove difficult, not only because the constituents perceive their leaders to exploit the movement for private gain, but also because the need to distribute patronage forces them to make compromises with the very state government from which they demand autonomy. Whether the border between virtue and immorality has been transcended is subject to a continuous struggle over political authority and legitimacy.

Electoral Competition and the Gorkhaland Movement

This chapter examines movements for greater local autonomy in Darjeeling since India’s independence. Political leaders generally mobilize to demand autonomy during periods of heightened electoral competition. These movements tend to fade when electoral competition is low. When mass movements have won autonomous institutions for Darjeeling, movement leaders have used these institutions to repress local electoral competition. Without electoral pressure, incumbent leaders in Darjeeling are feckless in pressing autonomy demands. Both the national government in New Delhi and the West Bengal state government in Kolkata have encouraged the anti-democratic features of Darjeeling’s autonomous institutions as a means of maintaining stability. I make this case by showing the parallels in the careers of Deoprakash Rai, Subash Ghisingh, and Bimal Gurung. Each leader de-escalated demands for Darjeeling’s autonomy as his personal power consolidated.

Introduction

This introduction establishes key frameworks for reconsidering Darjeeling’s past, present, and future. The book’s editors provide a succinct history of the region and an overview of its current circumstances—thereby establishing shared ground for the chapters that follow. Discussing Darjeeling’s status as a crossroads of Asia writ large, the introduction frames the region as a key site for the study of both South Asia and the postcolonial world, broadly conceived. These opening arguments challenge the prevalent yet problematic understandings of Darjeeling as the ‘queen of the hills’—a place somehow apart or above it all—instead calling for a timely rethinking of this often-romanticized region and its people through attention to the historical and contemporary complexities that constitute Darjeeling’s histories, politics, and environments. Highlighting each chapter’s contribution, the introduction launches the book’s project of reconsidering Darjeeling through critical approaches from across the humanities and social sciences.

Afterword

In this provocative afterword, senior scholar and Vice Chancellor of Sikkim University Tanka Subba comments on Darjeeling Reconsidered’s implications for Darjeeling Studies. Subba draws on his own life and work in the Darjeeling hills to productively extend and critique the conversations initiated by the book’s authors. Touching on a range of issues, including Darjeeling’s questionable postcoloniality, its importance in the shifting geopolitics of South Asia, and the long-term prospects of Gorkahaland, Subba leverages his considerable expertise to offer new insight into Darjeeling’s past, present, and future.

Women, Fair Trade Tea, and Everyday Entrepreneurialism in Rural Darjeeling

Based on more than a decade of ethnographic research in Darjeeling’s non-plantation tea producing areas, this chapter highlights the gendered effects of Fair Trade certification of organic non-plantation tea on rural tea cooperatives. Through a focus on rural women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and their run-ins with the transnational Fair Trade bureaucracy, the chapter underscores how Fair Trade interventions can inadvertently strengthen patriarchal/gendered power relations in Fair Trade certified tea cooperatives in Darjeeling. It highlights how women tea farmers also creatively use specific Fair Trade interventions to defend their own entrepreneurial priorities and rupture Fair Trade’s imbrications with local patriarchies. Women tea farmers creatively juxtapose Fair Trade and swaccha vyāpār, a local translation of Fair Trade, to defend their own entrepreneurial ambitions and enact new modalities of women’s collective self-governance. This chapter brings much needed attention to women’s contemporary economic lives and their role in tea production in non-plantation rural locations of Darjeeling.

The Quest to Belong and Become

Exploring the intricate processes of ethnic mobilization in Darjeeling since the turn of twentieth century, this chapter provides a diachronic understanding of ethnic associations and highlights their changing forms and functions. The analysis focuses on the hybrid nature of ethnic demands oscillating between classically civil and political concerns. In this regard, the chapter discusses how ethnic associations in recent decades have interacted with state institutions and framed their identities as ‘tribes’, worthy of official Scheduled Tribe recognition. It further analyses the various manifestations of these demands and documents the associated contestations brewing within ethnic associations over questions of ethnic or ‘tribal’ culture. The chapter argues that these demands reflect a blend of political and civil societal concerns, which reflect a perpetual quest to become and belong in contemporary India.

The Rowdies of Darjeeling

‘Rowdies or rowdy’ refers to a person who fits somewhere between a gangster and a goon, not a criminal per se but prone to crime and violence, usually at the behest of political leaders. ‘Rowdies’ are the face of political movements, an integral and ubiquitous feature of Darjeeling politics. Their centrality to popular movements indicates a form of hill politics that challenges accepted notions of political participation, democracy, and mobilization. The essay engages in an assessment of the political culture of Darjeeling through the perspective of the ‘rowdies’ who are a product of the social, political, and material circumstances of postcolonial Darjeeling. It examines the vital role that ‘rowdies’ play in shaping the political terrain of the region and how their lives provide a context through which to understand contemporary state and society in Darjeeling.

‘A Summer Place’

From the tales of nineteenth century British explorers to contemporary tourism advertising, representations of Darjeeling circulate far and wide. Across more than a century and a half, Darjeeling is repeatedly pictured as ‘a summer place’: a picturesque landscape of misty tea gardens, quaint cottages, and elusive mountain views. This chapter explores the colonial origins and historical persistence of this ‘tourist gaze’ in producing Darjeeling. Approaching this representational history from a vantage point grounded in the questions of belonging forcefully raised by the Gorkhaland movement, the chapter illustrates how commodified Darjeeling is defined more by its scenery than by its inhabitants, pictured as a place you visit rather than a place of belonging, and sold as a consumable good. It argues that, as this tourist gaze leaves notions of inhabitation and belonging obscured, its global reach and historical persistence complicates ongoing quests for local autonomy in Darjeeling.

The Promise of Class Analysis in Understanding Nepali National Identity in Darjeeling

The class question of Nepali identity in Darjeeling lacks adequate attention, except in the writings of historian Kumar Pradhan. Pradhan has emphasized class as the primary factor that reinforced national unity among the Indian Nepalis (i.e. ‘Gorkhas’) settled in Darjeeling. This chapter explores the interstices between class and culture in order to illustrate how community solidarity rather than class polarization galvanized the pan-ethnic Gorkhas of Darjeeling. The chapter draws on Marxian class analysis with a Weberian tint to conceptually situate the perennial problem of Gorkha identity. Putting Darjeeling, Pradhan’s work, and social theory into dialogue, the chapter shows how the identity question in Darjeeling calls for a new program of research. Situating Pradhan in his life and time, the chapter concludes by asking what lessons one can draw from his proposals in understanding related questions of nationalism, federalism, and pan-ethnic unity across the Indo-Nepal border in the twenty-first century.

Himalayan Darjeeling and Mountain Histories of Labour and Mobility

This chapter interrogates the historical trajectories of the Himalayan subjects named as Lepchas, Bhutias, Gurkhas, and Sherpas, who played a crucial role in producing Darjeeling as a vibrant mountain space for circulation, enterprise, and culture. The establishment of an imperial hill station resort led to numerous and novel—often unanticipated—labouring and service openings that the indigenous peoples of the Eastern Himalayan borderlands parleyed into new possibilities for livelihood and mobility, albeit with varying degrees of success. The chapter examines how the complicated negotiations of indigenous groups with the racially determined practices of tea plantations, botanical and mountaineering expeditions, mission stations, and military recruitment shaped new modernistic identities and were constitutive of Darjeeling as a trans-Himalayan space defined by mobile lives and cross-cultural encounters which in turn it helped constitute.