Rethinking Hill-Valley Binary: Methodological Nationalism and the Trends of Writing Sociology in India

Introduction

This article seeks to critically engage with the trends of writing sociology in India by locating the argument within the discourse of contemporary debate on identity and belonging that deem necessary to connect theoretically with the discourse of colonial production of space. ¹ These theoretical linkages of space, identity and construction of sociology in India need to be looked at within the domain of historical writing that Indian sociology espoused since its inception. However, looking into such aspects of writing sociology in India demands critical assessment of the discipline itself, and hence, it is essential to question the very nature of calling the discipline of sociology as ‘Indian sociology’. This articulation of the discipline as a ‘national sociology’ has indeed created a perspective of doing sociology in India that is deeply embedded within the framework of national political boundaries, which therein exclude scores of marginalised communities who seems to be different or ‘other’. However, the notion of ‘otherness’ is a historical construction that has been inextricably embedded within the colonial construction of sociology in India. Thus, the colonial distinction of space between the excluded and non-excluded/partially excluded areas, schedule and non-schedule area continuously shaped the disciplinary boundaries in India, which perhaps has been less emphasised sociologically. Thence, one can argue that sociology in India is confined within not only the political boundaries of the nation-state but also the spatial imaginary of India and its ‘other’. These ‘other’ is not just a mere representation of national communities like caste, tribe and gender that drew considerable attention of research but also the geographical space between hills and valley, in other words, mountain and plains.

This article draws its argument by tracing the regional spatial relationship between the hills ² and plains thereby critiquing the colonial making of space in India and argues that it has created a sharp division between the hills and plains not only in terms of geographical features but also in terms of how sociology should be practised in these two different spaces. This hill-valley distinction provides an important theoretical lens to situate the construction of sociology in India in which space and categories coincide within pre-established knowledge and occupied an important domain of field setting and research enquiry of social sciences in India. Hills/mountain during the colonial intervention were constructed as ‘frontier commodification’/‘resource frontier’ (Bennike, 2017), or ‘summer capital’/‘hill station’ (Bhattacharya, 2013), thereby producing a knowledge of space that deem uncontested, and continued to feature as a natural theory of division between the plains and hills even in the post-colonial social sciences in India.

This colonial construction of dichotomy between the hills and plains in India needs to be gazed critically in order to understand the dynamic of space making and its legacy in orientation of discipline in India. In this context, this article attempts to trace out the making of regions since colonial time and its influence and legacy or otherwise in practising sociology in India. In this article, the case of Darjeeling will be discussed chiefly due to two reasons: first, its location in the strategic fringe of the nation-state allows us to see how colonialism, nationalism and trans-nationalism have impacted the development of sociology in India; second, it offers complex histories to connect global and national through the narrative of ‘connected histories’ (Harris, Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Sharma, & Viehbeck, 2016; Subrahmanyam, 1997) between different nations and to see how ‘connected histories’ can contribute in building global sociology today.

Sociology and Hill-Valley Binary in India

Indian sociology as a discipline has traversed a long journey but seldom has incorporated the discourse of Himalayan sociology. ³ This neglect has many reasons. One theory suggests that the over-obsession of the Indian sociologists in theorising the colonial categories like caste (Dirks, 1992) and tribe (Ghurye, 1959), informed by the nationalist project of methodological nationalism has constructed a tradition of ‘thinking’ that is deeply embedded in the notion of ‘binary’. Thus, Indian sociology over time evolved as a study of binaries between categories like castes and tribes, phenomena like tradition and modernity and ideas like nationalism and sub-nationalism, thereby further creating a regional binary between ‘mainland India’ and ‘other India’. These heterogeneous ‘others’ were later clubbed together into the homogenous entities of ‘Mongolians’ and produced a new history of the region that constituted a marginalised (backward) space (if not category) of the nation.

Another theory suggests that the colonial laws, such as excluded and partially excluded areas, schedule district and backward tract have a tremendous impact in keeping these two regions segregated from each other historically, and hence, produce two distinct domains of social enquiry. Thus, these two theories overlap and encompass each other, and re-configured the binaries in terms of space (hill-valley) and identity (caste and tribe), thereby defining the boundaries of sociology within which it has to limit itself. These binaries continued to shaped discipline’s architecture and organised theory and perspective accordingly.

Patel (2017, p. 125) identified two broad epistemes that govern the discipline of sociology in India—colonial modernity and methodological nationalism and argues that they organise (at times dictate) theories, perspectives, methodologies and methods, teaching and research practices of the discipline. From this perspective, this article propounds for rethinking and reframing the region within the nation and its dynamic in shaping the orientation of sociology in India and critical apprehension of binaries between hill-valley might offer a new insight to such endeavour.

Since the sociology in these two regions (hills and plain) experienced two different historical trajectories, it is worthwhile not to constitute its architecture from a single epistemic framework. The point of contention is to argue that Indian sociology in its tradition, reflects regional variation and over time evolved as sociology of Indian plains in contrast to sociology of hills. It is imperative on our part to question about how to develop the dialogical relationship between these two regions in terms of historical plurality, methodological imperatives and national political boundaries.

The article is divided into five different sections but interrelated themes. First, by drawing the argument from the methodological nationalism, this article shows how Indian sociologists have systemically ignored the hill-valley distinction. Second, it tries to historicise ‘the Himalayas’ as a distinct space that decentred nation’s histories from different perspectives and offers alternative scholarship to look differently into the ‘region’ within and outside nation-state framework. Third, it looks into the case of Darjeeling as a colonial hill station, its making and remaking process that have profound legacy in contemporary experience of nationalism (which constitute the fourth section) and fifth, it sheds light on the trans-national experience of Darjeeling hills, its mobility and circulation of people, objects and crafts that constitute ‘connected histories’ in order to understand the discourse between sociology and Himalayan studies.

Methodological Nationalism and the Reluctance of Indian Sociologists Towards Himalayan Region

The term ‘nation’ represents a natural and indispensable category in understanding the methodological nationalism. It implies that the discussion on the modern society entails an implicit understanding of the nation (Patel, 2017). The national boundary sets the agenda for sociological research, and hence, the nation becomes the natural boundaries within which societies of a different kind contained. In the words of Chernillo (2006, p. 2 as cited in Patel, (2017, p. 135), ‘the nation is treated as the natural and necessary representation of the modern society’. The methodological nationalism in its discourse reflects and reinforces the identification that many scholars maintain with their own nation-states (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002, p. 576) and hence limit the scope of theory and methods within the framework of state oriented research policy.

Wimmer and Glick Schiller (2003, p. 578) further identified three variants of methodological nationalism within social sciences in understanding the nature of Indian sociology in this context: (1) ignoring or disregarding the fundamental importance of nationalism for modern societies, this is often combined with (2) naturalisation, that is, taking for granted that the boundaries of the nation-state delimit and define the unit of analysis and (3) territorial limitation, which confines the study of social processes to the political and geographic boundaries of a particular nation-state.

Patel (2017, p. 136) further argued that ‘all social sciences in India including sociology were framed through the lens of methodological nationalism’. The nature of the Indian sociology was highly influenced by the nationalist project of defining Indian society through the prism of categories like caste and tribes and organised systematic knowledge about these categories in the curriculum and syllabus of sociology in India. This promotion of methodological nationalism further enthuses the earlier generation of the Indian sociologists to promote uniqueness of the Indian nation, its culture and civilisation which is, in fact, determined by the notion of Hindu civilisation. Ghurye (1959), in his study of Indian culture and its components of caste and tribe, developed a proposition of ‘backward Hindu’ to define those categories of ‘adivasi’ and build a holistic view of the Indian society guided by the notion of Hindu society and civilisation. The institutionalisation of the discipline further propagates the proposition of methodological nationalism to study Indian society and hence, was entrenched as the sociology of those regions mostly dominated by the Hindu culture and civilisation. Furthermore, Srinivas’s (2013 [1976]) adaptation of functionalist perspective to study the Indian society gave birth to a new generation of Indian sociologists whose focus is largely centred on the notion of caste and village study and thus enhances the growth of nationalist perspective in understanding communities and culture and dominated the trends of social science research in India.

This school of thought in India is engaged heavily in assessing the changes occurring in Indian society mainly through the prism of caste and Hindu ideology, thereby setting aside other categories like ‘adivasi’ as not being a part of the sociological debate. Thus, Indian sociology after independence evolved as a study of the caste system and village community and those that were not castes, such as tribes and the minorities were relegated to being backward and (or) underdeveloped (Patel, 2017, p. 138).

Paradoxically, these backward or marginal groups formed a domain of ‘other’ in the eyes of the Indian sociologists and left it to the discipline of social anthropology/anthropology whose job is to study the primitive communities in contrast to sociology as a study of modern society. With this binary of primitive and modern (Lévi-Strauss, 1966), in simple terms, tribes and castes of the Indian society as epitomised by the notion of Hindu civilisation, the sociology in India carried forward the same old episteme of colonial modernity in which the regional division of such categories was further institutionalised. Central and Northeast regions of India, where the tribal population was more in numbers, were declared as backward tracts and were considered a zone of anthropological research rather than a field of sociological inquiry. Thus, sociology in India produced a binary between the ‘mainstream/core’ and ‘periphery/margin’. Similarly, many poetic imaginations of the nation developed during the nationalist struggle further envisaged the image of nation as being one India or Bharat mata, thereby creating ‘a crisis of imaginations between macro-nationalism and micro-nationalism’ (Baruah, 1994).

How do we then understand the expression of sociology in these backward regions or periphery to understand the epistemic framework of sociology in India? How does colonial modernity (considered to be core episteme of sociology) not only create binary of opposition between the categories like castes and tribes but also reinforce spatial binaries between hills and valley and concretise its disciplinary framework under such binaries. What are the new ways to rethink and reframe sociology in India in relation to historical construction of space in India?

Our article argues that this region which appears ‘other’, ‘backward’ and ‘isolated’ in the eyes of Indian sociologists soon became a hotspot for anthropological research especially, for the anthropologists of the west. These researchers took a keen interest in researching these regions and communities which sociologists in India considered it as an insignificant domain of study. This reluctance on the part of Indian researcher (sociologists) as well as the mounting interest of Western anthropologists towards such isolated and backward tract, however, found a new expression outside the ambit of the nationalist project and produced a branch of knowledge called ‘Himalayan study’. Hence, it is crucial yet critical to historicise the Himalayan regions to understand the plurality of epistemic frameworks that constitutes our contemporary scholarship.

Historicising the Himalayas: Colonial Construction of Space and its Impact on Scholarship

Moran and Warner (2016) state that ‘one of the first questions to deal with is what do we mean by “the Himalayas” and what can be productively learnt from an engagement with the space of this broad region?’ The aim is to offer a ‘connect history’ of the Himalayan region by de-centring it from history of the nation-state and help us understand the history of the space and colonial modernity in producing the idea of nation that sets limit for sociological enquiry with and within the national political boundaries.

For centuries, though the Himalayas constitute an important geopolitical border, they were marginalised in terms of scholarship within the ambit of nation’s imagination/vision of social science research agenda. However, it is essential to historicise the ‘region’ within the dynamic of power, leisure and curiosity that the colonial rule exerts in the making of Indian hills. Indian hills which were originally established as a summer capital for the colonial government to serve their ever-fulfilled demand of leisure, luxury and resources, were continuously relegated into margin even in the post-colonial literatures. Thus, hills in India were never a part of the mainstream debate—gazed only as a picturesque mountain for summer retreat and relegate it as a mere colony of the nation-state, in which, the history of the region and its people does not fit well into the sociological imagination of the Indian sociologists.

However, this reluctant attitude was due to the nature of the colonial setting of the field from which the sociology in India draws its epistemic architecture. The British always looked Himalayas as a space for ‘adventure and science’. In 1886, the idea of Himalayan club was formally suggested to the Asiatic Society of Bengal by Mr F. Drew and Mr W.H. Johnson with the purpose of extending the knowledge of the Himalayas but was officially established on 6 October 1927. The objective of the club makes it abundantly clear that the idea of Himalayas before the British always featured as an empty space for recreation, and adventure by the white settlers,

… to encourage and assist Himalayan travel and exploration, and to extend knowledge of the Himalaya and adjoining mountain ranges through science, art, literature and sport.(Corbett, 1929, p. 2)

Thus, in opposition to the densely populated, long-settled plains, the hills or the Himalayas appeared to the British as terra incognita, trouble free, serene, sparsely populated, isolated and remote landscape waiting to be appropriated by the ‘settlers’, unimpeded and uncontested (Pradhan, 2007). With such dichotomy, the knowledge about the Indian hills was framed outside the lens of methodological nationalism but constitute an important landscape of the nation-state. This landscape of hills can be best analysed within the corpus of scholarship developed in interdisciplinary fashion, ungoverned by the nationalist agenda.

Since colonial times, the hills-valley divide has been a major theme in understanding the ethnic relations in the eastern parts of South Asia and in Southeast Asia (Kipgen & Roy Chowdhury, 2016; Suan, 2009). ⁴ The seminal work on the production of space (Zomia) and the division of hills and valley can be traced in the works of van Schendel (2002) and Scott (2009). Scott used the concept of Zomia further to describe the process of state formation in upland Southeast Asia and critically showed how the upland areas have been kept outside the state. In his analysis, the ‘ungoverned’ people of highland Asia ‘makes no further sense’ and hence constitute ‘stateless’ people of the state. This work opened a new conception for the scholars engaged in the Himalayan region to rethink the region and the history of the nation-state in which borders and borderland render different meanings. However, the alarming rise of climate threat has indeed encouraged the scholars and policymakers to pay attention towards the mountain or Himalayan region that has changed the nature of scholarship focussing the Himalayas. The Indian Himalayas Climate Adaptation Programme of Swiss Agency for Development and Corporation and Department of Science and Technology, Government of India are good examples of emerging scholarship that focus in the highland research to develop sustainable lowland.

Shneiderman (2010) in her study on the eastern Himalayas emphasises on the need to consider the historically contingent and politically activist ways people living in the Himalayas, who often engage in cross-border movements that bring them into contact with multiple states, have themselves employed different concepts of the region and notions of belonging to particular spaces. Similarly, scholars like Holmes-Tagchungdarpa, Sharma and Viehbeck (2016, pp. 43–44) put forward an historical endeavour to develop ‘connected histories’ to understand the Himalayan histories.

This connected history of the Himalayan region across the borders of the nation-state challenges the idiom of methodological nationalism in which the architecture of Indian social theory is constructed and continued to flourish. To enrich the methodological and theoretical terrain of Indian social sciences, one need to relook into the history of space production in India in order to tease out the possible future for comprehensive and comparative social theory. Hence, the section below would attempt to historicise the Himalayan region by taking the case of Darjeeling hills and show how the hills were kept isolated since the colonial time and produced dichotomy between the hills and plains in India that exhibit crises not only in terms of geographical division but also in the articulation of belongingness and nationality.

Darjeeling as a Colonial Hill Station: History, Space and Anxiety for Resources

The British interest towards Darjeeling hills arose in search of a hill station in India mostly for the lower income groups of the East India Company in urgent need of a change of climate. Their wealthier colleagues usually withdrew to South Africa for the restoration of their health or even returned to England (Pinn, 1986, p. 1) and for those in North, South and Western part of India had Simla, Mussoorie, Poona, Nilgiri Hills and so on. Since Calcutta in Eastern India represented a major city of the British India, the British government considered it necessary to establish a summer capital or hill station. An experiment to have similar hill station was done at Cherrapunji in Assam, but it proved to be a washout, literally, as it turned out to be one of the wettest places in the world (ibid., p. 1). Darjeeling hills appeared to be an ideal and alternative place for the British hill station.

On 1 February 1835 through the dubious ‘deed of grant’ between the Raja of Sikkim and the East India Company in which the Raja was to receive ₹3000 per annum, which later increased to ₹6000 per annum from the company, the British finally possessed the tract of Darjeeling to use for the sanatorium purpose.

The British official Dr Campbell’s survey report recorded 100 souls comprising mostly of Lepchas tribes (Samanta, 2000, p. 12). However, validity of such report appeared contentious for the later historians of the region who claim that the British colonial officers like Lyold and Campbell survey were based on the parochial imagination of Darjeeling town and its people. Their statistical figure represents only the population of the present day observatory hills in Darjeeling, thereby ignoring the larger portion of the town. Nomadic tribes like the Lepchas and Mangars of Darjeeling hills and Sikkim, who were in constant movement along the present political borders of Sikkim, Darjeeling and Nepal for their cultivation sustenance, were difficult to be enumerated in the census. These misrepresentations of the facts in the early British survey reflect the imperial curiosity towards the Darjeeling hills and its future apprehension for resources.

Such imperial curiosity can be marked at two levels of ecological proximity: first, Darjeeling, due to its strategic location along the international political borders of Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal, provides the colonial government a fertile ground for international trading relation mainly with Tibet and Central Asia, and to counter the Prithiva Narayan Shah’s blockade of trade route to Lasha; and second, Darjeeling with its cool climatic condition provides a favourable destination for the summer capital to avoid the searing heat of the plain below and more importantly, British colonial officers quickly realised the potential of the virgin land in Darjeeling for commercial crops like tea, timber and cinchona, which Sikkim considered as a worthless mountain. It is essential to locate the colonial curiosity within two important discourses of ‘climate’ and ‘location’ and examine how it has shaped the mapping of Darjeeling hills as an imperial hill town in contrast to plain.

The Making of Darjeeling a ‘Queen of the Hills’

The white settlers found virtually uninhabited Darjeeling hills as appropriate for their military strategists also. This desire for a cool climate and a healthy life encouraged the white settler to explore the Indian hills which erased the earlier historical and political identity of the place. The earlier story of human settlement was erased, thereby producing a new narrative of colonial history in which the legitimacy of the white settlement seems to be never questioned (Mills, 1993, p. 189). Thus, the history of Darjeeling before 1835 was erased from the colonial narratives and was considered as invalid in its relation with the modern historiography. O’Malley (1985 [1907], pp. 53–54), in his district gazetteer, contrasted the climate of tarai and the hills of Darjeeling district in the following words:

The district (Darjeeling) is composed of two portions, the tarai, a low malarious belt skirting the base of the Himalayas, which is notoriously unhealthy, and the hills, where the climate is wonderfully bracing…The people who live in this tract have their energies sapped by fever and are far from virile…When Darjeeling is reached, the Europeans find a climate in many respects like that of Europe…

The dichotomy of the healthy hills and unhealthy plains manifest the colonial construction of medical and climatic discourse underlying the essence of colonial modernity. Lord Elphinstone cited the medical concerns as the reason for the move to and long stay in the hills. Similarly, Nandini Bhattacharya argued that ‘the hill stations were built to facilitate the recuperation of European bodies from the heat and diseases of the plains’ (2013, p. 1). Hence, there began the construction of sanatorium in the Darjeeling hills to serve the health and diseases of the white settler. In 1883, the Eden Hospital was established to accommodate only the Europeans and Lewis Jubilee Sanatorium was opened in 1887 for the natives. Towards the end of the 19th century and early 20th century, the Victoria Memorial Dispensary was established for both the Europeans and the locals. This intersection of health, medicine and climate in the making of the hill station gave a new picture of Darjeeling hills largely build around the notion of comfort, beauty and hygiene mostly for the white settlers, and the life of locals were homogenised under the category of ‘coolie’.

This development of sanatorium and other infrastructure slowly transformed the scattered village into an imperial town, and by 1840, Darjeeling had two public buildings: a hotel and the wattle and daub courthouse and some thirty European residences (Pradhan, 2007, p. 44). When Dr Campbell was appointed as the superintendent of Darjeeling, he encouraged allotments of land to the Europeans for the building of dwelling houses, barracks and other accommodations were built for the invalid soldier (Hooker, 1855). All these were done on the cost of heavy clearance of forestland. Heavily covered timbered lands were transformed into bazaars and woods from timber were used for the building activities. In fact, the hill stations were developed by drawing upon the forest resources from the vicinity. Thus, a town was set up in the Darjeeling hills with a new form of urban centre in the colonial India (Bhattacharya, 2013) and were kept isolated from the mainland British India.

Notably, these sanatoria occupied a vital significance for the British government in India to maintain their military position not only against the outside force but also to govern natives in India. David Arnold stated that ‘between 1818 and 1854 more than 8,500 British soldiers died of cholera, and between 1859 and 1867 a third of all deaths among British troops in India were due to the disease’ (2004 [1986], p. 127). This subsequent increase in the mortality rate due to disease more than war further enthused the British to move towards the hills. In 1848, the Jalaphar depot was established on a narrow ridge above the town in Darjeeling for the British troops (Dozey, 1992), which later included barracks, a hospital and officers’ quarters. In 1844, another cantonment was built at Senchal but was abandoned in 1867 and transferred to Jalapahar due to the rumours of several suicide by the soldiers’ owing to excessive isolation and bitter cold (ibid.). In 1882, Lebong cantonment was established as a part of Jalapahar cantonment and later in 1895, it became a separate cantonment. This development of cantonment in the hill station was mainly to safeguard the European interest in the Indian colony from various internal and external forces and also to keep the Gorkha Kingdom under the check. Highlighting the significance of such station from the military strategic point of view, Newall (1882) writes:

…I think that the garrison of Jullapahar (the burnt mountain), on which the barracks are situated, should be strengthened by a few pieces of heavy ordinance etc., so as to enable a portion of the garrison to take the field if necessary, and operate on the ‘line of least resistance’ leading into our territory.

When climate and location juxtapose in the colonial anxiety for power, resource and politics, Darjeeling hills appeared as a strategic imperial town in the eastern Himalayas not only for the purpose of well-being of the company servant but also to maintain trading route with Nepal, Sikkim, Tibet and Bhutan that constitute a major share of economy for the British in the Himalayan region. Items like salt, gold, silver, precious stones and coarse woollen stuffs were regularly imported from Tibet to British India and articles like tobacco, indigo and kutch (catechu) were exported to Tibet. European and Indian goods used to be transported to Nepal and Bhutan, thereby making Darjeeling an important Himalayan space where global and local intersect through the circulation of goods, people, culture and ideas.

Since the hill tracks were difficult to traverse even with collies carrying their baggage, the development of transport and communication was considered as an outmost significance, and hence, cart roads and railway lines were made to ensure the free flow of goods and services (O’Malley, 1985 [1907], p. 35). On 2 July 1838, Lieutenant John Gilmore was appointed as an Executive Engineer to construct a road that would link Terai plains and Darjeeling but due to unrecovered illness that he encountered during the monsoon, another Engineer Lieutenant, Robert Napier replaced him on 13 May 1939. Thus, by 1842, an ‘old military road’ was constructed from Pankhabari to Darjeeling connecting the teria in Siliguri below to that of the hills mostly Kurseong, Sonada (Sena Dah meaning bears den), Jorebungalow (Jor meaning a pair and hence, pair of British bungalow), Aloobarie and Darjeeling town. Forests were cleared on a large scale to build roads and a total of eight staging bungalows were constructed along the line of the old military road (Lama, 2009 [2008], p. 47).

From 1861 to 1869, Darjeeling cart road was constructed at a cost of ₹6,000 per mile (Pradhan, 2007, p. 69) initially to connect Kurseong and Darjeeling and more suitably for carrying bulk goods on horse and bullock cart and later from Kurseong to Siliguri was constructed. However, the construction of such roads on steep slopes of the mountain terrain costed not only huge money and time but also many lives of the coolies. Concerning the condition of people employed by the British, Sam Smith in his letter to David Wilson writes:

…But, wonderful to say, money is no temptation to natives in this part of the world, at least not to go up the hill. Nor will it be until great changes take place here, and a better road be made in lieu of present apology for one, which had broken away in several places.

…Another and greater evil is the want of shelter at the three different stages above Punkhabaree. Coolies take four days in going up from Punkhabaree, and two in returning. Exposure to night air created fever…The natural consequence of this is that the greater parts of them are knocked up in one trip. If these difficulties are not speedily removed, the name of Darjeeling will strike such a terror to the natives that not a man for any sum will go near the place, and then what will be done? (Pinn, 1986, pp. 165–166; The Hurkaru, 1839, June 7)

Nevertheless, the completion of roads invites various tenders to establish buildings and hotels to be erected in the Darjeeling hills that would quickly transform the virtually uninhabited tract into an imperial town crystallised around the notion of bazar in which the dealers of the plains are to be settled permanently with their goods and shelter for their coolies are to be provided—where English style cottage were to be built for the English settler and missionary school for children of those officials. Amidst of all these transformations was the introduction of the Himalayan railway that greatly reshaped the transport and communication of Darjeeling hills towards the end of the 19th century. Known as the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the rail connectivity added a new momentum to the growth of the hill station in Darjeeling. Trading activities became much easier after the construction of the railway line, and rapid migration of traders took place from various locations. Thus, Darjeeling expanded in concert with extension of imperial control over the eastern Himalayan economy and trade (Bhattacharya, 2013, p. 8).

By the end of the 19th century, Darjeeling hills featured to the world as a destiny not only for health and tourism but also for trade, resource and power in which colonial curiosity and capitalist anxiety intersect and transformed Darjeeling hills into a mere ‘commodified space’ for resource extraction through commercial business of tea and tourism. This, in fact, restructured the social and human history of Darjeeling, thereby exhibiting potential for political significance of the space and its future apprehension.

The story of tea transformed the narratives of Darjeeling and its people therein bringing the predicament of migration mostly from neighbouring region (Nepal). Large number of Nepali labourers were brought in the Darjeeling hills to work in the colonial industries like tea and cinchona in which the idea of space and identity coincide with the colonial modernity that shaped the sense of belongingness in the Himalayan state. Nationalist imagination slowly reaps into the modern Nepali literature, thereby paving a path for political consolidation of the hill people that under nascent transformation of ‘being in and being off’ within the Indian nationalist struggle for freedom (a section on nationalist question will be discussed below).

Agriculture was introduced much later in the region after the British annexed the portion of the present-day Kalimpong and Dooars region from the Kingdom of Bhutan in 1865 and mainly after the settlement of the upper caste Nepali population in the region. The fertile land in the hilly slope of Kalimpong was then quickly brought under cultivation, thereby adding more impetus to the revenue generated colonial administration. To vanguard the capitalist commodification of resources and human labour, the British kept Darjeeling excluded from the standard governmental politics by considering the region as scheduled district in 1874. This Schedule District Act of 1874 came under review in 1917 as a part of Montague–Chelmsford Report (Middleton, 2013), and in 1919 the region of Darjeeling was accommodated under the schedule of the backward tract. All these developments, though for imperial capitalist venture, makes one point clear that Darjeeling was kept isolated from the mainland India and the only commonality between the two was the sharing of the same English Governor General. Thus, it was only after the Government of India Act 1935 that Darjeeling was partially incorporated as a part of Bengal but under the partially excluded category.

It is this colonial curiosity towards the ecological potentiality of the region for maintaining imperial anxiety over profits and resources that had historically kept the Darjeeling hills as a mere isolated and backward tract and the same legacy continued even today while understanding the dynamic of space and identity in the Darjeeling hills. Till today, Indian social science continued to look Darjeeling hills as a ‘colonial town or hill station’ that featured more in travel guide books than in social science literature.

Suffice to say here that the colonial construction of Darjeeling as a hill station in India finds no or any concrete representation in the epistemic structures and programmes of contemporary social sciences. Hence, the emergent needs to critically re-examine how historical insensibility of Indian social scientists has created a dearth of inclusive and comprehensive theory and methodology of social sciences in India. It is through the domain of the nationalism that Darjeeling hills gained certain significance in contemporary Indian academic but was continued to be relegated as a colonial town in terms of knowledge production process.

Nationalist Question in Darjeeling: Being Nepali(?) in India

The theory of nationalism was never a part of sociological domain in India and even in Europe and was made the domains of anthropology and later of political science (Wimmer & Glick Schiller, 2002). Though Indian sociology grew within the trends of methodological nationalism, it was preoccupied with the categories of caste and tribes as being ‘modern’ and ‘primitive’ and hence, inhibits the paradox of categorising national communities in modern India. This systematic blindness of the Indian sociology towards the theory of nationalism has produced a methodological impediment to study the modern society in India characterised by multiple nationalism.

Interestingly, the nationalist question in the Darjeeling hills was (is) always contested as the region is dominantly inhabited by the ethnic communities of the Nepali origin. Due to their close cultural and linguistic proximity with Nepal, the identity of community in Darjeeling hills seems questionable not only to the politicians but also to the academicians in many cases. The Nepali language, being the lingua franca of the region inherits many political tensions since historical mooring. However, two sets of arguments, both connected to the above-discussed historical facts can be drawn here to understand the question of nationalism in the trans-national character of the Nepalis in Darjeeling.

In one way, most of the academic writings put forward their claims by locating the colonial theory of space with the notion of belongingness as being distinct from West Bengal but being an Indian. Scholarly argument ⁵ suggests that Darjeeling hills were never a part of standard governmental politics, and it was an irony that the Darjeeling hills were incorporated as a part of West Bengal and therein lies the crisis of identity and belongingness in India. This form of argument based its claim from the treaty of Sauguli and the treaty of Titalya signed in 1816 and 1817 between the East India Company and the Gorkha Kingdom in which the tract of Darjeeling hills officially encountered colonial footprint. Such form of belongingness of Nepalis with Darjeeling has been well expressed:

We, the Nepalis of Darjeeling, are trusted by both India and Nepal, and so both India and Nepal try to win our affection; but Darjeeling is ours and we are Darjeelings.

The names of those who donated money may be written on Darjeeling’s grand town halls, banks, clubs and houses, but countless Nepalis carried loads on their foreheads, broke their backs, feel ill and died during the construction of those building. It is they who made Darjeeling… (Rai, 1964, translated by Thapa 2017, pp. 170–171)

Another set of arguments materialised such established historical facts in order to legitimise the political demand. This is visible from political acts unfolding in Darjeeling hills after independence over the ethnic identity of Nepali as ‘Gorkha’ and their demand of Gorkhaland as a separate state for the Nepali speaking population in India. It explicitly distinguished the Gorkhas from the Nepalis in order to draw a sharp line between the Nepalis of Nepal and Nepalis of Indian origin. Thus, by demarcating a boundary between the two identities, the Nepalis in India were seeking for national inclusion as being ‘Gorkha’ within Indian definition of citizenship, politically different from the citizen (Nepalese) of Nepal.

However, both these set of arguments revolve around the issue of nationality of the Indian Nepalis in the post-colonial nation-state, thereby claiming the legitimacy of the space (Darjeeling hills) as their belongingness. Legitimising the colonial laws like excluded area and isolated area to substantiate their argument on belongingness with Darjeeling, Nepalis in India draw a considerable fact that Darjeeling hills cannot fit well into the modern administrative boundaries of West Bengal and hence, exhibit tension and crisis concerning the issue of Nepali identity in India.

Thus, connecting space and identity under the rubric of the Nepali nationalism, the tenant of nationalism creates a homogenous picture of ‘We Nepali’. Since, Nepali identity in India was looked upon with a suspect and threat, Darjeeling too was looked as a space for picturesque mountain, and hence, Nepalis in Darjeeling and Darjeeling for Nepalis seems paradoxical question before the nation-state. Therefore, state oriented research shows less interest towards such regions and community therein creating a dearth of perspective and methodology to study the Indian society in a comprehensive manner.

Consequently, ethnicity as an approach of political discourse found new expression among the researchers working in regions like Darjeeling and Northeast India and constitute its own epistemic architecture different from the mainstream domain of nationalism in India. Thus, to accommodate such voices of nationalism (that come from the fringe of the nation) within the grammar of the Indian nationalism, theorists like Baruah (1999) and others propagated the term ‘sub-nationalism’. Similarly, Nepali nationalism put an effort to accommodate itself within the discourse of sub-nationalism and expressed their claim in language that Indian nationalism acknowledges. However, acknowledgement is acceptance, that is, acceptance of ‘being Indian’. Thence, several efforts were made by the Nepalis in India to prove their ‘Indianness’ from the language movement to the Gorkhaland movement. The failure of such movements to deliver guarantee to the Nepalis in India to call themselves as ‘Indian’ lead to the construction of a new political era that critically demand the transition in history and identity of people, space and idea of being a Nepali. Consequently, the colonial construction of the Darjeeling hills as a distinct geographical space and the gaze of state oriented social science theory has opened up a new avenue for the development of multiple ethnic identities characterised by a new ethnic political upheaval especially after the 1990s (Tamang & Sitlhou, 2018) that perhaps demand trans-national exploration of theories and methodologies.

Conclusion: Sociology in the Hills

Himalayas has been an under-studied area historically and is mostly known in a popular discourse as ‘sacred mountains’, but the closer examination of historical facts reveals a picture characterised by the global outlook where different variants of modernity, capitalism and nationalism juxtaposed and produced different meanings of space and identity. It provides an important terrain where diverse species (both human and non-human), objects (tangible and non-tangible), spaces (national and trans-national) and belongingness intersect with each other within the logic of shared history and hence, constitute an important artery to connect global with local and national with international (or trans-national). As discussed above, the colonial construction of the Darjeeling hills provides a critical reflection of space and identity where trans-national historiography opened a new debate of national representation, and hence, it is crucial for sociologists to change analytical tools and look beyond the nationalist agenda.

This trans-national project of cultural representation to get recognition by the Indian state in which various objects, crafts and ideas transcend national boundaries invites us to rethink history in terms of its connectivity. Cultural boundaries traversed national boundaries and re-draw community’s imagination of political boundaries, and hence, ‘connect histories’ of the region might offer a new insight to rethink the boundaries of discipline beyond the national political boundaries. Considerably, the trans-national history of Darjeeling and its underrepresentation in contemporary Indian social science vis-à-vis hitherto global outlook present a discursive field to develop a connected and collaborate approach for the social science to bypass its methodological impediment caused by nationalist agendas. Although connecting diverse ground of enquiry is a challenging task, but making an effort would help sociology in India to move beyond the state centric theories and methodologies and hence, would contribute in building interdisciplinary approach of doing sociology within and outside the national boundaries. As suggested above, an endeavour to develop ‘connected histories’ of the Himalayas helps to de-centred national history; historical sociology need to re-construct its epistemic structure outside the binaries of space that had hitherto created a hierarchy between the ‘hills’ and ‘valley’.

Sociology in India needs to deconstruct its ‘self’ and reconstitute its disciplinary framework outside its national imagination that can even focus on trans-national elements of theoretical orientation and reconstitute its methodological tools. Moving beyond the established methodological nationalism would not be an easy task as it entails heavy criticism mostly in the domain of political construction of national identity, however, the change of our analytical tools, objects and methods might contribute in developing inclusive social theory not coloured by self-evident sociological theory of the nation-state. Thus, the above-discussed arguments based on the case of Darjeeling hills might throw some light on rethinking the tradition of writing sociology in India and the scholastic engagement within the discipline of sociology.