Darjeeling Reconsidered
Darjeeling Reconsidered

Author: Townsend Middleton

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2018-04-26

Total Pages: 290

ISBN-13: 0199093970

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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.

Headstrap
Headstrap

Author: Nandini Purandare

Publisher: Mountaineers Books

Published: 2024-04-01

Total Pages: 276

ISBN-13: 1680516418

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This captivating chronicle delves into the untold story of a tribe of people who have played a significant role in mountain exploration and climbing in the Himalayas. Situated in northern India, Darjeeling was developed as a colonial retreat by the British in the early 1830s and soon became famous for its tea gardens, attracting locals from around the region, Nepal, and Tibet in search of work. When Darjeeling became the jumping-off point for early Himalayan expeditions, workers from the Sherpa and Bhutia communities soon established themselves as the preferred high-altitude porters, bringing fame, entwined with tales of valor, courage, and sacrifice, to the city. These are some of their stories. Over the course of a decade, authors Nandini Purandare and Deepa Balsavar conducted a series of interviews with Sherpas from Darjeeling, as well as their family members, descendants, friends, and contemporary climbers. Headstrap weaves a vivid tapestry of this particular Sherpa community, giving them the recognition in mountaineering literature that they deserve.

Darjeeling
Darjeeling

Author: Dinesh Chandra Ray

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 2022-12-22

Total Pages: 300

ISBN-13: 1000828808

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History has always dealt with people, yet often gazing at the people from the perspectives of the non-people – colonizers, intruders, outsiders and the privileged elite insiders – who seem to have internalized the ‘mainstream’ perspective framed by the outsiders. In this context a group of scholars working on Darjeeling felt that there was a need for an inclusive people’s history of the Darjeeling hills. The present volume tries to fill this gap of the missing voices of the people of the Darjeeling hills and their cultures through re-writing inclusive history of society and culture from ‘below’, not only by de­coding the elements that are treated as tradition, but also the trans­formations in the realms of arts and ecology. For, the tribal-scape of the Darjeeling hills is not a static/frozen zone and the people (hence, the geo-space) are in continuous transition from traditional beings towards becoming neo-traditional. Accepting history as constantly ‘extra mural’ the objectives of the book are to focus on un­documented histories related to harmony, intimacy, belongingness and environ­mental care and thereby, interact the living with what is often projected as ‘dead’, by rejecting to abide by any given set of references as the final/‘scientific’/authentic and, thereby, opening up with other kinds of historical dialogue with the understated historical items that are accessible in Darjeeling. Taylor & Francis does not sell or distribute the print version of this book in India, Pakistan, Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka.

Himalayan Studies in India
Himalayan Studies in India

Author: Maitreyee Choudhury

Publisher: Mittal Publications

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 150

ISBN-13: 9788183241960

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Proceedings of a national seminar held at Raja Rammohunpur in December 2003.