Inheriting the Hill Station

8 Responses

  1. Phillip says:

    Fantastic essay. I have just reviewed Val Plumwood for the electronic journal ‘Plumwood Mountain’, named to honour Val’s memory. It was very interesting to see her work being quoted in this article. The postcolonial enterprise is so important!

    • Sarah Besky says:

      Thank you for reading! I am very much enjoying diving into Val Plumwood’s work for this new project. Her thoughts on belonging, home, and “shadow places” are very thought-provoking and have caused me to think about life in Darjeeling in different ways. I look forward to reading more of the “Plumwood Mountain” online journal. Thank you for the reference. SB

  2. Abriti Moktan says:

    Ma’am very well written essay, informative and philosophical simultaneously.
    But I have one point which I came across in your write up that disturbed me.
    The fact that you have written that Gorkhas are not indigenous people. Well its the truth that most of the communities were migrants but there are few of them who are the natives of the place for instance the Lepchas, etc. I am confident enough to state this because I have recently worked in the History of Gorkhas for my project in the university.

    • Sarah Besky says:

      Thank you for your comment. You are right that the Lepchas are an example of people who have occupied the region since well before the colonial period. I apologize for not elaborating on this point in this short post.

      My research has been predominantly with tea workers in Darjeeling. My conversations with them highlighted what I see as a tension between primordial (or indigenous) senses of belonging and historical senses of belonging.

      When I talked to tea workers, they did not speak about primordial belonging. Rather, their oral traditions emphasized that their ancestors had migrated to Darjeeling from what is now Eastern Nepal. I think this is why I framed my statement in the way that you found disturbing. Tea workers firmly believed that their claims to Darjeeling were rooted in histories of labor. My worry about appealing to indigeneity is that it occludes this history, and that it does not accurately reflect what my respondents on tea plantations told me.

      Thank you again for reading and for allowing me to clarify this point.

  3. sahitya says:

    That was really an amazing post on Darjeeling. Your post just allured me to visit Darjeeling.

Leave a Reply