The Land in Gorkhaland: Rethinking Belonging in Darjeeling, India

The Land in Gorkhaland: Rethinking Belonging in Darjeeling, India

Sarah Besky, University of Michigan

Since the mid-1980s, regional separatist parties in the Darjeeling district of West Bengal have been agitating for the creation of an Indian state of Gorkhaland, which would comprise the region’s majority of Indian Nepalis, or “Gorkhas.” In the autumn of 2007 a newly formed political party, the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha, or GJMM, reignited the Gorkhaland agitation. Since then, GJMM leaders’ arguments for statehood have often taken spatial form. Tea and timber, Darjeeling’s two most abundant natural resources, “flow down the mountain,” but revenue from these industries rarely comes back up. Since Darjeeling’s founding as a British hill station in the 1830s, tourists have come “up the mountain” to enjoy the cool air and Himalayan vistas, and to catch a glimpse of the region’s natural wonders: red pandas, snow leopards, and cascading rivers. With a separate state of Gorkhaland, the economic boons of the region’s industries—in particular the “three T’s” (tea, timber, and tourism)—would circulate back from the plains to the mountains.

This spatial vision of injustice is encapsulated in the Nepali linguistic dynamic between oraalo (downhill) and ukaalo (uphill). Himalayan scholars have long analyzed the gravitational and capital forces on resources and people that force them to “go down” (Hitchcock 1961; Seddon et al 2002). Stopping downhill-uphill circulation through general strikes, or bandhs (literally “closed”) was a key tactic in the direct actions of the GJMM. Bandhs included not only closures of all businesses, but also the roads and railways that connected Darjeeling to the rest of India. During bandhs, rallies, and frequent month-long “cultural programs,” GJMM politicians insisted that Darjeeling residents, both women and men, wear “traditional” dress. Party leaders promoted performances of Gorkha dance, song, and theater as a way of showing to a wider public the existence of a distinct identity. Their speeches were peppered with metaphorical references to the deep relationships between Gorkhas and the soil, flowers, and other features of the Himalayan landscape—the same images that lured tourists to the hills.  

During fieldwork from 2008 to 2011, I attended rallies and lived through bandhs with Gorkhas who supported the movement but who were not part of the GJMM vanguard: women tea workers, laborers in markets and restaurants, students, and recent graduates. Bandhs and cultural performances are common expressions of belonging in Indian subnationalist movements. These activities attest to an overlap between place and identity. They reinforce the notion that subnational movements are struggles for land by a particular group of people. Existing scholarship on subnationalism in India has done much to illustrate the multiple meanings of ethnic, “tribal”, and indigenous belonging, but land itself has figured less prominently in these analyses (Bagchi 2012; Baruah 1999; Middleton 2011; Nag 2002; Singh 2010; Shneiderman 2014). In this paper, I argue that for many Indian Nepalis (for Gorkhas; I use these terms interchangeably as do my interlocutors), the salient political struggle was as much with land as it was for land. For those outside the political vanguard, dress codes, performances, and speeches were all “good fun,” but they were just political (Besky 2014). Most Gorkhas with whom I worked knew that they were not indigenous inhabitants of Darjeeling. Many were the descendants of laborers recruited from Nepal during the colonial era to work on British tea, timber, and cinchona plantations. These plantation crops were likewise imported to the region during the colonial period. Gorkhas also helped construct Darjeeling town, a British hill station and mountain refuge.

The experience of land for Gorkhas is, to paraphrase Donna Haraway, one of troubled “inheritance” (Haraway 2008, 2010). The story of Gorkhaland is one of both asserting ethnic belonging and struggling to maintain plants, animals, and an urban infrastructure whose place in the region, while firmly rooted, is far from “natural.” Questions about the rights of Gorkhas to place are bound up with questions about the ecological effects of tea plantation monoculture, the sustainability of forests, and the appropriateness of a sprawling city in the high Himalayan foothills.

To understand how land figures into questions of belonging requires a move away from attention to strategic representations of people and place and toward analysis of everyday experience. After offering some historical background and framing, I track three struggles with land. First, I examine the problem of landslides on tea plantations, showing how Gorkhas were implicated not only in the maintenance of a monoculture but also in working the edges of tea and forest. As a result of pressure on plantation land, as I show next, Gorkhas have begun moving to Darjeeling town. Environmental activists and longtime town residents have begun to blame this new population for speeding the decay of colonial infrastructure, particularly through a lack of attention to waste management. Debates about working-class Gorkhas’ role in urban waste and infrastructure deterioration came to a head in Cyclone Aila in September 2009 and raised further questions about who and what belonged in the region. Despite moves by some Gorkha activists to use Aila as a pretext for more local control of environmental management, the state and the GJMM have continued to emphasize stewardship of indigenous wildlife, particularly endangered red pandas, in their discourses about land. The outsized place of pandas, as I argue in the final section, elides the everyday encounters between townspeople and urban “pest” animals. These encounters, which result in part from the squeeze on land, reveal a further problematic overlap between discourses of ethnic and ecological belonging.

In discussing how questions of belonging manifested in landslides, urban decay, and confrontations with waste and animals, I bring attention to what Rob Nixon, following Anna Tsing (2004), calls the “ecological ordinary”—the “quotidian,” historically and geographically particular interactions between people, land, and nonhuman creatures that tend to defy easy political representation (Nixon 2011: 184). Ethnographically, I focus on a series of “edge effects.” In ecology, an edge effect describes the results of contact between two types of ecosystems. Nixon uses the term metaphorically, to describe a crossover between humanistic, social scientific, and ecological knowledge about the environment (Nixon 2011: 30, see also Cronon 2014). I use the term in this way, but I also call attention to the ways in which struggles with land in Darjeeling occurred in the region’s material “edges”: where tea plantations filled with the imported Chinese jāt (variety) of tea bush meet “native” forest, where a Raj-era town meets Himalayan countryside, and where humans meet nonhumans. Here, I define “land” as an ongoing series of human-nonhuman interactions, and I draw on Emily O’Gorman’s idea that belonging is never simply a question of biology or culture in isolation, but a terrain of contested biocultural meanings (2014: 285). In Darjeeling, land was less a passive territory or raw material than a confluence of economic, aesthetic, climatic, and biological activity. A view of Gorkhaland as a struggle for land might focus on questions of geopolitical or ethnic boundary making (Barth 1998). A focus on edges, on the other hand, is less about boundaries than about overlaps—everyday instabilities and vulnerabilities that make and unmake land and people’s place within it. As long-term components of Darjeeling, tea, timber, inorganic waste, colonial infrastructure, and pests straddle the edge between “invasive” and local.