1Ethnic identity takes many forms in the Darjeeling hills. Beneath the Gorkhaland movement, which occupies most of the headlines, are stirrings of various other identity politics through which communities are preparing themselves for cultural survival and sociopolitical success in the 21st century. Whether enacted under the banner of Gorkha, tribal or other identities, these efforts are inexorably bound up in India’s forms of multicultural governance, even as they connect to broader regional and global configurations of indigeneity. Nilamber Chhetri’s recent book, The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling: Gorkhas and the struggle for tribal recognition, presents a timely and rigorous engagement with these shifting ethnic forms. Set in the Darjeeling-Kalimpong hills, where the author is originally from, this monograph leverages historical and ethnographic research to shed fresh light on the Gorkhas’ enduring quest for autonomy and recognition in India. Chhetri’s study notably illuminates the way these politics go hand in hand with ongoing processes of ethnic renewal. Many of the ethno-political demands that Chhetri investigates, including the Gorkhaland movement and communities’ bids for Scheduled Tribe (ST) status now date back decades, even generations. That these appeals remain pending after all these years says a lot about the machinations of the Indian state and the Gorkhas’ place within its ambit. Likewise, the fact that these communities still suffer this plight constitutes grounds for communities’ ever-evolving identity politics – and an opening for a significant new study of ethnicity in the region. Chhetri’s much anticipated The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling rises to the occasion with considerable acumen.
2‘Gorkha is a mosaic of identities woven into the fabric of the historically formed community’, one activist in Chhetri’s book notes (p163). The book (comprising six chapters and an introduction and a conclusion) brings together vivid ethnographic writing, archival work, autobiographical experiences and even quantitative analysis to provide a balanced, original look at this ‘mosaic’. The multifaceted methodology is centred around 18-months of fieldwork which the author conducted between 2013 and 2015. Yet the time frame under consideration here is much broader, with analysis delving into the region’s precolonial and colonial history and covering more recent events such as the 2017 Gorkhaland agitations, the formal establishment of Kalimpong district and the advent of Tribal Development Boards.
3Though not the first to cover the Gorkhaland movement and its relationship to local groups’ post-millennial quests for ST recognition (see, eg Shneiderman 2015, 2009; Middleton 2015, 2011; Shneiderman and Turin 2006), Chhetri’s book is fundamentally unique. Not only does the author extend the temporal scope to provide a more diachronic view of the politics of ethnic revitalisation, but he also significantly shifts the vantage point. Many (though not all) of the scholars who examined the complexities of Darjeeling’s political culture in the 2000s were from American and European universities – myself included (see also Besky 2014, Wenner 2020, Lacina 2018, Chettri 2018). Even as we built on the region’s extant scholarship (for instance, Subba 1989, 1992, Subba et al, 2003, Nepal et al 2009), we nevertheless carried out our work under the influence of intellectual currents germane to our home institutions. Chhetri’s engagement begins from a markedly different place. Having spent much of his life in the hills and having trained at India’s finest universities, Chhetri leverages his ‘multiplex’ positionality to provide simultaneously incisive and poignant analysis from within the communities he studies. The book teems with insightful juxtapositions of ‘hard’ scientific data (gleaned from extensive interviews and surveys) and ‘softer’ ethnographic and autoethnographic accounts of how ethnic renewal is altering the social and subjective fabric of everyday life. Chhetri is therefore right to carefully distinguish his work from earlier scholarship (p11–21). And indeed, a compelling commentary runs through the book that addresses what it means to study something as heavily charged as identity politics from within one’s own community – an anthropological positionality that Chhetri provocatively coins ‘living strangely with intimates’ (p17).
4The book’s ‘Introduction’ establishes the contexts and the key analytic frames for the study that follows. In chapter 1, ‘Discreet groups and collective identity’, Chhetri examines Darjeeling’s precolonial and colonial history to chronicle the consolidation of the Nepali/Gorkha community. The historical review of land settlement practices, demographics and colonial law and legality does important work to establish the grounds of Gorkha ethnogenesis in the 20th century. Already in this history, we can begin to see a pattern of negotiation between the collective ‘Gorkha’ identity and the cultural identities of groups such as the Tamangs, Gurungs, Rais and others who comprise the Gorkha conglomerate. Chapter 2, ‘The formation of ethnic associations and changing ethnopolitics in Darjeeling’, adds heft to these concerns by charting the rise of ethnic associations in the region. Chhetri contributes to an increasingly robust picture of the mid-20th-century political organisations that were to become precursors of the ethnic associations driving today’s bids for ST status and ethnic revitalisation.
5Chapter 3, ‘Moving forward to become backward’, focuses closely on these contemporary efforts to achieve tribal recognition and ethnic renewal. The analysis covers ground similar to the scope of my earlier book The Demands of Recognition, as it tracks the category ‘tribal’ through the governing systems of the colonial state and into India’s postcolonial forms of multicultural governance. Yet it adds to this genealogy insightful, locally grounded and often autoethnographic illustrations of how demands for ST status dovetail with communities’ efforts to renew lost traditions. Chhetri uses excellent ethnographic vignettes to lay bare the relationship between politics and everyday practice. This analytic concern runs through the remaining chapters of the book. In Chapter 4, ‘Remember the past, restructuring the future’, the author shows how performances of tribal culture (for government officials and other audiences) are not simply instrumental; they are also generative of new subjectivities and community practices. Written a good decade since the heydays of Darjeeling’s tribal turn in the mid-2000s, the observation of these generative effects is a point hard-won through diachronic analysis. Compared to earlier work, Chhetri’s book bears ethnographic witness to the longer-term effects of political performance on everyday life.
6Chapter 5, ‘Ritualizing ethnicity, ethnicizing rituals’, takes a closer look at these dialectics of politics and practice. Chhetri sketches the important role of ethnic entrepreneurs and ‘identity framers’, who function as knowledge producers and intermediaries between communities and the state. Chhetri offers a granular analysis of aspiring tribes’ autoethnological accounts. But these ethnologies of the self are not carried out, Chhetri argues, merely for political gain. To illustrate their substantive impact, Chhetri shares a memorable fieldwork encounter with two Bhujel ritual specialists – one the mentor Phoro, the other the apprentice – carefully consulting a pamphlet entitled ‘Death Rituals of Bhujel Community’ as they perform the last rites for a neighbour in Kalimpong. This real-time consultation of the ethnological word is but one example of the ways in which ‘collected’ culture is shaping ‘collective’ practice (p150).
7The book’s sixth and final chapter, ‘From construction to constitution’ covers more recent events such as the establishment of Tribal Development Boards, the creation of Kalimpong district in 2017 and the return of the Gorkhaland agitations during the long summer of 2017. For this chapter, Chhetri reserves something of a methodological surprise – namely, the inclusion of significant quantitative data that compliments the largely qualitative analysis that precedes it. Gleaned from extensive surveys, the quantitative data is remarkably revealing of how people reconcile (or not) the sometimes competing, sometimes overlapping claims of Gorkha and tribal identities. For example, 72% of Chhetri’s respondents were of the opinion that everyone in the hills should be granted ST status. Remarkably, 50% believed that the discourse of tribalism would engender the demise of the Gorkhaland movement (pp176–177). As these numbers illustrate, Darjeeling’s overlapping politics of ethnic identity are not without their inhabited tensions.
8Nor are these politics static. Forms of ethnicity in the hills continue to morph. As Chhetri explains in his conclusion, ethnic identity is in a constant state of becoming. It is mutable, multiple and ever-changing. The ‘mosaic’ that Chhetri’s informant mentions earlier begins to look more like a kaleidoscope – a constellation of political and subjective forms that assume new shapes and affective dimensions depending on the moment and the vantage point through which they are observed. Chhetri’s signature achievement is to trace these shifting forms and to cast them in freshly ethnographic, local light. The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling, in this regard, represents a significant advancement in the study of the Darjeeling-Kalimpong hills. With the publication of this book, Chhetri has made an important contribution to the anthropology of the eastern Himalayas and, more generally, of South Asia.