The Demands of Recognition

State Anthropology and Ethnopolitics in Darjeeling

Townsend Middleton

• Publisher: Stanford University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780804796309
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Kultur- & Sozialanthropologie

Since the British colonial period anthropology has been central to policy in India. But today, while the Indian state continues to use ethnography to govern, those who were the "objects" of study are harnessing disciplinary knowledge to redefine their communities, achieve greater prosperity, and secure political rights.

In this groundbreaking study, Townsend Middleton tracks these newfound "lives" of anthropology. Offering simultaneous ethnographies of the people of Darjeeling's quest for "tribal" status and the government anthropologists handling their claims, Middleton exposes how minorities are—and are not—recognized for affirmative action and autonomy. We encounter communities putting on elaborate spectacles of sacrifice, exorcism, bows and arrows, and blood drinking to prove their "primitiveness" and "backwardness." Conversely, we see government anthropologists struggle for the ethnographic truth as communities increasingly turn academic paradigms back upon the state.

The Demands of Recognition offers a compelling look at the escalating politics of tribal recognition in India. At once ethnographic and historical, it chronicles how multicultural governance has motivated the people of Darjeeling to ethnologically redefine themselves—from Gorkha to tribal and back. But as these communities now know, not all forms of difference are legible in the eyes of the state. The Gorkhas' search for recognition has only amplified these communities' anxieties about who they are—and who they must be—if they are to attain the rights, autonomy, and belonging they desire.

CHAPTER 1

A SEARCHING POLITICS

Anxiety, Belonging, Recognition

HOURS AFTER DARK, I find the village council president squatting over a small fire, seething with anger at the anthropologist in his midst. He casts me a sideways glance, then turns away with sudden revulsion. In his hands is a dead chicken. Feathers stick to his calloused fingers; others float seemingly suspended on the tense air between us. I squat down beside him as the flames ribbon over the lines in his face before they leap into the night. He appears to be trembling.

“Sir,” I say, “I heard you came to my house this afternoon looking for me.”

He shoots a look of disgust into the fire, responding gruffly, “No.”

He works the bird with redoubled vehemence. I try again. “But, sir, my landlord told me you came.”

“No, I didn’t come!” he snaps back, now visibly shaking.

I don’t know what I have done to upset him, so I wait. As he plumes the last feathers, I engage him again. “I heard there was some problem with my survey.”

“What is this survey? You come here and ask these questions: ‘When did your family migrate from Nepal? Why did they come? How long have they lived in this village?’” Suddenly, his upwelling anger cuts off his speech.

“No, no . . . let’s talk about this. I didn’t mean to upset anybody. Why are you so upset?”

“I am the president of the village council. If you want to ask questions about the village this is fine, but these questions of ‘When did you come? Why did you come?’ I am the president! You can’t ask these questions!”

Suddenly it starts to make sense. Earlier that day, I met with a new assistant to help me conduct a simple survey of the village.¹ Having lived there for seven months, I assumed it would be a straightforward project. I left the survey forms with my assistant and told him to await further instruction. Apparently, he had not. And now something had gone terribly awry.

“Please forgive me,” I tell the president. “Now I understand that I should have cleared this survey with you.”

“Oh, yes, you should have . . . but this business of ‘When did you come to Darjeeling? From where in Nepal?’ You can’t ask these questions.” His temper resurging, his tone again becomes aggressive.

“Wait!” I say assertively. “What’s the problem? Listen, you and I both know, we all know: the people here, their ancestors came from Nepal.”

His antagonism checked, he is taken aback. He begins shaking his head back and forth, before begrudgingly admitting: “Okay, Okay. We know, we know that! But you can’t ask these questions . . . That would be proof. If we put our signature here [inscribing his signature on his hand like it was paper] . . . That would be proof!”

This admission of the obvious now out in the open, the tension dissipates and I breathe a tempered sigh of relief. Clearly, this is not the time to hash out these matters, so we agree to a meeting (for me, more like a tribunal) with the village leadership the following morning. As I get up to leave, I place my hand on the president’s shoulder in hopes of conveying my sincerest apology. He shakes his head, staring only into the fire.

. . .

The village night can be especially dark when one is in trouble.² On the clock and with the imperatives of apology pressing upon me, I thus began a frenetic search for understanding. As I moved through the village long after gates had been shut and front doors locked, it was easy for me to reconstruct the immediate backstory of an overzealous research assistant, a wary village leader, and a gag order that spread like wildfire. The deeper history of anxiety was more opaque, yet frighteningly present.

Since arriving in Darjeeling, the Nepali-speaking Gorkhas have been beset with uncertainties over their place in India. Generations of discrimination, precarity, and exclusion have imparted to these groups deep-seated anxieties over being-in and being-of India. These anxieties about belonging—what I call anxious belonging—are deeply rooted in body and time.³ Through the years, they have fueled an array of identity-based movements. These movements have, in turn, constituted a categorically searching politics, in which the terms of mobilization may suddenly shift—say, from Gorkha to tribal—but the affective undercurrents remain alarmingly the same. Surging one moment, receding the next, taking this form, then that, anxious belonging has consequently made for a particularly volatile—or charged—ethnopolitics in Darjeeling. My goal here is to understand the nature of that charge.

I begin with my harrowing encounter with the village president not to relive the regrettable disturbance I caused my neighbors, but rather to foreground the histories, anxieties, and desires that animate the ethno-contemporary in Darjeeling. Doing so, I offer an alternative reading of these struggles for rights, recognition, and autonomy. I frame these movements as, beyond all else, a politics to belong in India. This requires tracing a history of anxiety from the precarious conditions of colonial life in Darjeeling, through the violent Gorkhaland Agitation of the 1980s, and into the designs of the twenty-first-century tribe. Involving, as it did, a shift from a violent ethno-nationalist movement to a more indigenous-based politics,⁴ the tribal turn provides a compelling case study of the ethno-contemporary—one that signals the broader contours of this global conjuncture while underscoring the specific histories (and energies) that shape the ethno-contemporary in particular places at particular times. Examining this shift from Gorkha to tribal politics, this chapter aims to raise a deeper set of questions about the conditions that drive communities into intermittently violent and ethnological relations with the state and themselves. Toward that end, let me return to the crisis with which we began.

. . .

Minutes before my meeting the next morning, I am pacing nervously near the village temple when I run into my friend and neighbor Deepak. “Deepak, what happened?” I ask.

“It’s fine, there is just that one question that is a problem,” he tells me.

“Which one?” I ask, pulling the form from my bag.

Scrolling down the questions with his finger, “This one,” he says. “‘How many generations ago did your family migrate from Nepal?’ The people around here are scared of what will happen to this information. If we put our signature on this, then people are scared it will be proof, and if the government gets it, they will send us back to Nepal.”

“No! That’s impossible!”

“You see, this is a political thing. We had the Gorkhaland Agitation where we tried for our own state. The people of India think we are foreigners. We have tried for the Sixth Schedule [tribal autonomy]. There is discrimination from the people of the plains. So there is history there.”

“But, Deepak, everyone’s ancestors came from Nepal, right?”

“Yes, but we can’t say that. People think we are foreigners. Like, you know, the situation with the Bhutanese refugees that got sent back to Nepal. If the Ministry of External Affairs somehow gets hold of this form and it has all of our information: where we came from, when we came . . . people think they could send us back.”

He breaks off to check his watch. We’re late.

ANXIETY, BELONGING, RECOGNITION

Deepak’s explanation came not a moment too soon for an ethnographer in trouble. As we made our way to the meeting, I was glad to have him at my side and glad to have a bit more understanding of the crisis I had caused. Thankfully, this meeting commenced with less intensity than that of the night before. Clearly, I was guilty on two counts: first, for failing to clear the survey with the village leaders; and second, for violating a people’s sensitivities. The latter was the more serious offense. I therefore began the meeting with an earnest apology. Having heard my side of the story, the council members reciprocated with apologies for their overreaction to my honest, but insensitive, mistake. With an awkward shame lingering among us, conversation shifted to friendlier matters, suggesting that the case was closed. But there was clearly more to this encounter.

As Deepak pointed out, his people’s place in India remains a “political thing” with a real and problematic history. Since the nineteenth century, he and his people have been severely marginalized. Despite being the region’s majority and bona fide citizens of India, they have been shunned as “outsiders” and “foreigners,” and geo-racially typed as “hill peoples” and “chinkies.” Economically, the Gorkhas remained pegged to the lowest rungs of a plantation economy dominated by tea. Morally, they have been constantly questioned about their national and nationalist loyalties. Politically, they remain under the thumb of West Bengal and thus lack the representation, autonomy, and homeland they desire. The Gorkhas consequently find themselves relegated to a literal and figurative corner of the nation.

National dynamics have compounded their anxieties over belonging. Throughout India, Nepali-speaking groups have suffered prejudice and periodic bouts of ethnic cleansing—particularly in India’s Northeast, where targeted expulsions in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s established alarming precedents.⁵ The Bhutanese refugee crisis of the 1990s only exacerbated the unease, as roughly 100,000 Nepali-speaking refugees, unwelcome in India, passed through Darjeeling, en route to the interminable refugee camps of eastern Nepal.⁶ These events hit close to home in Darjeeling. As Deepak’s testimony shows, they powerfully inform the Gorkhas’ collective sense of vulnerability.

The anxieties came to a head in the 1980s when the Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF) launched its violent agitation for a separate state of Gorkhaland. When asked why the name Gorkhaland, the GNLF’s charismatic founder, Subash Ghisingh, explained, “[Because] only the ethnic name of any place or land . . . can germinate the real sense of belonging in the conscience of the concerned people.”⁷ Three years (1986–88) of violence failed to deliver to the Gorkhas the homeland they desired, leaving the people unrequited and in search of political alternatives.

The quests for tribal recognition and autonomy followed soon thereafter. These movements reset the terms of ethnopolitical mobilization—effectively replacing the failed banner of the Gorkha with the more ethnologically savory figure of the tribe. This reset was not coincidental either at the local level or at the national level. Becoming tribal presented a way out of the violent failures of the 1980s and into a mainstream quickening with India’s 1990s embrace of economic liberalization. At this conjunction of local and national history, the tribal turn was equally logical and timely. For a people consistently denied recognition and autonomy, it marked an innovative engagement with the ethno-logics of late liberal governance. Following Partha Chatterjee, we might productively see the tribal turn as a “politics of the governed”—in this case, a strategic renegotiation of governmental categories in the name of social justice and economic gain.⁸

But there was more to these tribal politics than the pursuit of rights and entitlements. Their political instrumentality notwithstanding,⁹ these newfound tribal movements also operated on a more affective register. They were geared as much toward the attainment of affirmative action and autonomy as they were toward that sacred stuff of recognition to affirm these communities’ being-in and being-of the nation—and themselves. They were, in other words, always also a politics to belong. It was Hegel, of course, who first emphasized the self’s need for recognition.¹⁰ Recognition, he argued, was vital to self-fulfillment. I mean to suggest something similar—namely, that the promise of these movements lay not only in the tangible advantages of affirmative action and autonomy but also in the more existential realms of affect, belonging, and self-realization.

These dialectics of recognition and belonging became especially clear in the tribal rhetoric of the times. As but one example: on the occasion of Bhadra Purnimā in 2006, Subash Ghisingh’s Department of Information and Cultural Affairs (DICA) commandeered the town plaza (Chow Rasta) to put on a massive celebration of tribal identity. DICA officials decorated the plaza in classic “animistic” fashion and set up a PA system with enough power to rattle windows across town. Thousands observed the spectacle, as shamans recited their chants, pounded their drums, and shook violently with the gods that possessed them. As tourists, journalists, and the greater public took in the sights and sounds, DICA officials watched over the event with a careful eye. Proper orchestration was imperative. To conclude the festivities, a high-ranking GNLF official took the stage to offer a few closing remarks. As he explained,

the rituals and practices that you have witnessed here today give us our identity as tribals. We have drifted away from our identity. We have to know ourselves . . . We have not been able to recognize ourselves. We have not been able to recognize ourselves as tribals . . . That is why the Sixth Schedule is a great opportunity for us to understand our identity and our customs and traditions . . . There are great mysteries hidden within, and these mysteries are to be revealed.

Note how the speaker hails the Sixth Schedule as an “opportunity” for rediscovering the tribal self. “We have not been able to recognize ourselves,” he exclaimed. “We have not been able to recognize ourselves as tribals.” With these last words, the speaker struck upon the crux of the tribal turn: how were the people of Darjeeling to find themselves in this category of the state? How were they to recognize themselves as tribal?

Enter ethnology. Throughout his remarks, the speaker ...