Darjeeling Reconsidered

Description

Darjeeling occupies a special place in the South Asian imaginary with its Himalayan vistas, lush tea gardens, and brisk mountain air. Thousands of tourists, domestic and international, annually flock to the hills to taste their world-renowned tea and soak up the colonial nostalgia.
Darjeeling Reconsidered rethinks Darjeeling’s status in the postcolonial imagination. Mobilizing diverse disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this definitive collection of essays sheds fresh light on the region’s past and offers critical insight into the issues facing its people today. While the historical analyses provide alternative readings of the systems of governance, labour, and migration that shaped Darjeeling, the ethnographic chapters present accounts of dynamics that define life in twenty-first century Darjeeling, including the Gorkhaland Movement, Fair Trade tea, indigenous and subnationalist struggle, gendered inequality, ecological transformation, and resource scarcity. The volume figures Darjeeling as a vital site for South Asian and postcolonial studies and calls for a timely reexamination of the legend and hard realities of this oft-romanticized region.

About the Editors
Townsend Middleton teaches in the Department of Anthropology, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA.
Sara Shneiderman teaches in the Department of Anthropology and School of Public Policy & Global Affairs/Institute of Asian Research, University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada.

Table of contents

List of Tables and Figures
Acknowledgements
List of Acronyms and Abbreviations
Note on Language
Introduction: Reconsidering Darjeeling
Sara Shneiderman and Townsend Middleton

Section I Histories of Exception
1. Unwritten Histories: Difference, Capital, and the Darjeeling Exception
Townsend Middleton
2. ‘A Summer Place’: Darjeeling in the Tourist Gaze
Rune Bennike

3. Himalayan Darjeeling and Mountain Histories of Labour and Mobility
Jayeeta Sharma

Section II Politics and Social Movements
4. Electoral Competition and the Gorkhaland Movement
Bethany Lacina

5. Virtuous Movements and Dirty Politics: The Art of Camouflage in Darjeeling
Miriam Wenner

6. The Rowdies of Darjeeling: Politics and Underdevelopment in the Hills
Mona Chettri

7. The Quest to Belong and Become: Ethnic Associations and Changing Trajectories of Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling
Nilamber Chhetri

8. The Promise of Class Analysis in Understanding Nepali National Identity in Darjeeling: An Engagement with Kumar Pradhan’s Work and Thought
Swatahsiddha Sarkar and Babika Khawas

Section III Environments and Labour
9. Subnational Occupations: A Year in the Life of the Darjeeling Tea Management Training Centre
Sarah Besky

10. Connection amidst Disconnection: Water Struggles, Social Structures, and Geographies of Exclusion in Darjeeling
Georgina Drew and Roshan P. Rai

11. Women, Fair Trade Tea, and Everyday Entrepreneurialism in Rural Darjeeling
Debarati Sen

Afterword
Tanka Subba

Glossary
Bibliography
Index
About the Editors and Contributors