Inheriting the Hill Station

5/19/2015 Inheriting the Hill Station - Edge Effects

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Inheriting the Hill StationBy: Sarah BeskyPosted on: May 19, 2015

What does it mean to make claims to belonging in a place that was built for someone

else?

Since 2006, I have been conducting research in Darjeeling, high in the Himalayan foothills

of Northeast India. Darjeeling was one of the first and most famous British “hill stations.”

The mountain peaks and ridgelines of former British colonies are dotted with hill

stations: settlements ranging from laboratory campuses in the East African highlands to

moderately sized Indian cities like Darjeeling, Shimla, and Mussoorie. Situated at

altitudes between 3500 and 7500 feet, hill stations were built on, or perhaps more

accurately carved out of, the vertical edges of empire.

The vast majority of Darjeeling’s residents are Indian Nepali, or “Gorkha,” laborers whose

ancestors were recruited from Nepal to clear-cut forests for the district’s railways, tea

plantations, and pedestrian promenades. Though British capital has dried up, Gorkhas

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environmental form. Most still depend for their livelihoods on the same industries that

once propelled the colonial-era hill station: tourism, timber, and tea. Mountain

bungalows, evergreens, and tea estates remain key features of Darjeeling’s landscape.

To the thousands of Indian and international tourists who visit Darjeeling each year—not

to mention the millions who consume Darjeeling tea every day—these plants, buildings,

and other features appear to “belong” in the remote Himalayan foothills.

But belonging in this erstwhile colonial refuge is complicated.

Since the mid-1980s, Nepali political parties in Darjeeling have been agitating for the

creation of an Indian state of Gorkhaland, which would comprise the region’s Gorkha

majority. The story of Gorkhaland is one of what Donna Haraway calls troubled

“inheritance.” Questions about the rights of Gorkhas to territory are bound up with

questions about the ecological effects of plantation monoculture and the

appropriateness of a sprawling city in the high Himalayan foothills.

Understanding Gorkhas’ claims to belonging requires a historical view of the hill station

as a built environment. Unlike the ports designed by previous generations of imperial

power, hill stations were spaces of secondary settlement. Hill stations were originally

conceived as refuges from the heat and congestion of the plains and ports where

colonial officials and their families spent most of their time. European travel writers and

doctors saw cool mountain weather as beneficial to the European constitution. The misty

foothills, evergreens, and fresh air of hill stations were thought to inhibit disease.

Built for the upper echelons of expatriate colonial society, hill stations quickly became

not only sites of recuperation but also the seasonal capitals of imperial administrative

centers (e.g. Darjeeling for Kolkata or Shimla for Delhi in India). Social reproduction

became a key function in many of them, and boarding schools and sporting clubs

popped up alongside seasonal bureaucratic offices. They were also sites of ecological

reproduction. Conifers and garden plants were imported and replanted in hopes of

bringing hill station landscapes in line with British ideals of a restorative “nature” and a

leisurely countryside.

Darjeeling, 1874. Postcard courtesy of James Sinclair.

These alpine villages, complete with iron fencing, rose gardens, and gingerbread

ornamentation, overlooked other landscapes of ecological reproduction. Hill stations

became centers of growth for imperial agricultural commodities, mostly tea, rubber, and

cinchona (quinine, a malaria preventative, is made from the cinchona tree). As



productive (or potentially productive) sites, hill stations were thus birthplaces for applied

agricultural science. Darjeeling became the first British plantation zone to successfully

cultivate the highly desirable Chinese variety of tea, Camellia sinensis.

In Darjeeling, the new sciences of botanical taxonomy and landscape engineering

meshed with that of anthropology. Nepalis, who made up the region’s indentured labor

force, were deemed ideal tea plantation laborers. Colonial tea planters imported

laborers to pluck, process, and pack tea that would move down the mountain in crates.

During the colonial era, capital flowed back up the mountain from ports and offices in

Kolkata, if only to maintain bungalows and their rose gardens, and to keep the modest

worker housing minimally livable.

In contemporary Darjeeling, however, these flows are out of balance. Gorkha activists’

political arguments for statehood have often taken spatial form. Tea and timber “flow

down the mountain,” but revenue never comes back up. Tourists and leisure-seekers still

come “up the mountain” to enjoy the cool air and to catch a glimpse of the region’s

natural wonders: red pandas, snow leopards, and cascading rivers. But their actions are

ultimately extractive as well. Gorkhas rarely benefit from tourist encounters, even

though they, too, are among the features of the landscape being consumed.

A billboard in Darjeeling, 2008. (Photo by author.)

As Darjeeling residents explained to me, a plantation economy still based “down the

mountain” in Kolkata is insufficient to support Gorkha livelihoods or maintain a decaying

city. Each afternoon on Darjeeling tea plantations, women workers carried tea to huts on

access roads, where managers weighed and bundled it into sacks before a tractor or

porter carted it down to factories for processing. After that, tea flowed down, yet again,

to market centers in the plains. The trucks that plied these roads always came up empty,

but they left full. Medicines, water, and construction materials, mandated by Indian

labor law, rarely came up.

Gorkha claims for a separate, independent state stem from a desire to stop

disproportional downhill flows, not only of tea, but also of educated and underemployed

youth, and potable water. This spatial vision of justice is encapsulated in the Nepali

linguistic dynamic between oraalo (downhill) and ukaalo (uphill). Himalayan scholars

have long analyzed the gravitational and capital forces that compel resources and people

to “go down”: to work in urban centers in India and beyond in service industries and the

military. “Going down” is both a geological, gravitational process and a historical one,



framed by a particular postcolonial experience of maintaining a colonial resort built for

the extraction of both experiences and materials. “Going downhill,” then, is a process of

ruination that stems from the colonial project of hill station development and

postcolonial process of neglect. What remains in the wake of downhill erosion and uphill

neglect is the debris of plantations, of botanical gardens, of basic infrastructure.

In order to make claims on Darjeeling’s land, Gorkhas must paradoxically make claims to

these remains of European leisure. They must make claims to having built them and to

being qualified agents of their repair. Hill stations like Darjeeling, then, are examples of

what environmental philosopher Val Plumwood calls “shadow places”: places materially

and immaterially oriented to the enjoyment and sustenance of others. Shadow places

are hard to claim as homelands, as Plumwood explains. In such sites, “[t]he very concept

of a singular homeplace or ‘our place’ is problematised by the dissociation and

dematerialisation that permeate the global economy and culture.”1

As I observed during my fieldwork, stopping economic and social erosion through

general strikes, or bandhs (literally “closures”), was a key tactic in the direct actions of

Darjeeling’s main Gorkha separatist party, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha, or 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 promoted performances of Gorkha dance,

song, and theater as a way of showing to a wider public the existence of a distinct

identity.

Bandhs and cultural performances are common expressions of belonging in Indian

subnationalist movements. These activities attest to an overlap between place and

identity and 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 and indigenous belonging, but land

itself has figured less prominently in these analyses. For most Gorkhas I know, however,

the salient political struggle was as much with land as it was for land.

For tea workers, Gorkhaland named not only a struggle for autonomy over resources like

tea and a means of controlling their flow through territory, but also a struggle with the

land underneath tea. Workers were well aware of the problems of plantation

monoculture on steep Himalayan foothills.

A Darjeeling tea plantation. (Photo by author.)



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Plantation owners in the early 2000s began intensifying production to meet increasing

international demand for Darjeeling tea. Amid this intensification, the oraalo/ukaalo

discourse signaled another kind of precarious belonging, one of actual soil, plants, and

water. Certainly, Gorkhas knew that they were not indigenous inhabitants of Darjeeling.

They also knew that as a settlement built atop a mountain ridge surrounded by miles

upon miles of mono-cropped tea fields in a place with a long, heavy monsoon, that land

itself was also “going down.” The question was not if land would slide, but when.

Landslides, long a concern of Himalayan political ecology, remain problematic because

they are both “natural” features of high-gradient landscapes and traceable threats to

already-marginalized people, even as those most vulnerable are often blamed for them.

As both ecologically spectacular and ecologically ordinary events, landslides are a form

of what Rob Nixon calls “slow violence.” In Darjeeling, they are the result of simultaneous

productive and destructive work: daily tea plucking and long-term deforestation. On

plantations, landslides—either realized or imagined in the bending rows of tea—

highlight a sense of what Nixon calls “displacement in place”: the condition of “being

simultaneously immobilized and moved out of one’s living knowledge as one’s place

loses its life-sustaining features.”2 But the landscape’s life-sustaining features, and

Darjeeling’s very existence, have long been predicated on the provision of goods and

services for places elsewhere—from the colonial metropole to the global market.

Landslides in Darjeeling speak less to the existence—or literal erosion—of a coherent,

unified “homeland” than to the perils of inheriting and trying to make claims to a

“shadow place,” a place dislocated by the flows of things and ideas about those things

and the people and places that produce them. The presence of Gorkhas in this shadow

place is marked by ecological instabilities that exist in tandem with precarious senses of

Indian citizenship. While “land” is often simply a suffix for national and subnational

struggles in the Global South, attention to how land itself plays into such struggles on the

vertical edges of empire opens up new environmental contours in ongoing discussions

of the politics of belonging.

Sarah Besky is currently Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Natural Resources and

Environment and a Fellow in the Michigan Society of Fellows at the University of Michigan.

Beginning in July 2015, she will be Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology and

Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs at Brown University. She received her

Ph.D. from the Department of Anthropology at the University of Wisconsin in 2012. Sarah is

the author of The Darjeeling Distinction: Labor and Justice on Fair-Trade Tea Plantations

in Darjeeling India (University of California Press, 2014) and is currently working on a new

book project on transparency, financialization, and tea auction reform in Northeast India as

well as the research described above on long-term landscape change and subnationalism in

the Indian Himalayas. Website. Contact.

1. Val Plumwood, “Shadow Places and the Politics of Dwelling,” Australian Humanities

Review 44 (2008): 139.

2. Rob Nixon, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor (Cambridge: Harvard

University Press, 2011), 19.

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By: Sarah Besky

Categories: Essays

Tags: Plantations, Postcolonial Studies

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