The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling

The Politics of Ethnic Renewal in Darjeeling
Author: Nilamber Chhetri
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 231
Release: 2023-02-24
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000840360

This book examines the nature of ethnopolitics evolving in the Darjeeling hills, located in the Eastern Himalayas. It highlights how in the wake of regional politics minorities pursue alternative avenues to attain rights and recognition. The book provides an astute analysis of competing claims of culture and identity engendered both by demands for regional autonomy and struggles for scheduled tribe status. It highlights the varied forms of ethnic demands often demonstrated through performative and discursive claims. The volume initiates a timely discussion on the discourse of recognition, politics of difference, and alterity which has wider implications and applications to understand South Asian realities. Drawing on rich empirical research, this work will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of politics, anthropology, sociology, tribal studies, ethnography, minority studies, and South Asian studies.

Great Transition In India: An Interdisciplinary Approach

Great Transition In India: An Interdisciplinary Approach
Author: Chanwahn Kim
Publisher: World Scientific
Total Pages: 206
Release: 2024-01-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 9811285519

India, with its vast population, has become a focal point of global attention due to its remarkable economic growth and potential. In addition, India's geo-political influence has assumed significance within the context of Indo-Pacific strategy. This has further intensified the need to understand and examine India's great transition from an inter-disciplinary perspective. The first two decades following independence were significant in highlighting the challenges faced by a newly independent nation and the strategies employed to address them. The pivotal turning point in 1991, when India initiated comprehensive economic reforms, also set the stage for a diverse political climate characterized by evolving ideologies.This book comprehends ongoing transition in India from interdisciplinary perspective. The chapters in the book highlight the key milestones and shifts in India's journey since its inception as an independent nation in 1947. Written in a simple and accessible manner, the book comprehensively addresses a diverse range of issues concerning India's significant transition, engaging prominent scholars from respective fields.

Women in 'New Nepal'

Women in 'New Nepal'
Author: Seika Sato
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 243
Release: 2023-03-23
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000859061

This book brings rarely voiced lives and experiences of women in Nepal to light and combines rich ethnography with discourse analysis. Multifaceted and critical, the volume situates its narrative in the profoundly transformative period after the turn of the century when ‘New Nepal’ was rising on the horizon and sheds light on Nepali women’s experiences in multiple sites, crossing class and ethnic lines. It is based on extensive fieldwork among women domestic workers, construction workers, street vendors, women from the indigenous community of Hyolmo, and others. Mainly through an ethnographic approach, the author explores Nepali women’s experiences on the ground, mostly situated in classed, ethnic, or other socio-cultural peripheries in Nepali social landscape. Through the unusually intimate narrative on these women from the global south, who are still prone to be cast into a deeply colonial, simplistic image of ‘victimized women’, readers will get a nuanced perspective of the multidimensional diversity among these women as well as a sense of kinship with oneself. The book will be invaluable for researchers and students of gender studies, global south studies, development studies, cultural anthropology/ethnography, Nepal studies, and feminist geography. It will be of interest to anthropologists, sociologists, geographers, policymakers, and those with an interest in global gender issues.

Darjeeling Reconsidered

Darjeeling Reconsidered
Author: Townsend Middleton
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 290
Release: 2018-04-26
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 0199093970

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.

Darjeeling

Darjeeling
Author: Dinesh Chandra Ray
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2022-12-22
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1000828808

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.

Indian Tribes in Transition

Indian Tribes in Transition
Author: Yogesh Atal
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2015-12-14
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317336313

India has witnessed a sea change in its social structure and political culture since Independence. Despite the developmental model that the country opted for, the hangover of the Raj continued to encourage fissiparous tendencies dividing the Indian populace on the basis of religion, ethnicity and caste hierarchy. This book argues for the need to develop a fresh approach to dismantling the stereotypes that have boxed the study of India’s tribal communities. It underlines the significance of region-specific strategies in place of an overarching umbrella scheme for all Indian tribes. The author studies tribes in the context of changing political and social identity, gender, extremism, caste dimensions, development issues, and offers a new perspective on tribes to accommodate the diversity and transformations within culture over time and through globalization. Lucid, accessible and rooted in contemporary realities, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of sociology and social anthropology, tribal studies, subaltern and third world studies, and politics.

Nepali Diaspora in a Globalised Era

Nepali Diaspora in a Globalised Era
Author: Tanka B. Subba
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2015-10-05
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1317411048

This is one of the first books to explore Nepali diaspora in a global context, across India and other parts of South Asia, Southeast Asia, Europe, and Australia. It discusses the social, political and economic status and aspirations of the Nepali community worldwide. The essays in the volume cover a range of themes including belonging and identity politics among Nepalese migrants, representation of Indian Nepalis in literature, diasporic consciousness, forceful eviction and displacement, social movements, and ritual practices among migrant communities. Drawing attention to the lives of Nepali emigrants, the volume presents a sensitive and balanced understanding of their options and constraints, and their ambivalences about who they are. This work will be invaluable to scholars and students of Nepal studies, area studies, diaspora and migration studies, social anthropology, cultural studies and literature.

The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal

The Rise of Ethnic Politics in Nepal
Author: Susan I. Hangen
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2009-12-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1135181594

The relationship between ethnic politics and democracy presents a paradox for scholars and policy makers: ethnic politics frequently emerge in new democracies, and yet are often presumed to threaten these new democracies. As ethnic politics is becoming increasingly central to Nepali politics, this book argues it has the potential to strengthen rather than destabilize democracy. Drawing on years of ethnographic fieldwork, Susan Hangen focuses on the ethnic political party Mongol National Organization (MNO), which consists of multiple ethnic groups and has been mobilizing support in rural east Nepal. By investigating the party’s discourse and its struggles to gain support and operate within a village government, the book provides a window onto the processes of democratization in rural Nepal in the 1990s. This work presents a more nuanced understanding of how ethnic parties operate on the ground, arguing that ethnic parties overlap considerably with social movements, and that the boundary between parties and movements should be reconceptualised. The analysis demonstrates that ethnic parties are not antithetical to democracy and that democratization can proceed in diverse and unexpected ways. Providing an in-depth discussion of the indigenous nationalities movement, one of Nepal’s most significant social movements, this work will be of great interest to scholars and students of Asian Politics, South Asian Studies, and Political Anthropology.

Rituals of Ethnicity

Rituals of Ethnicity
Author: Sara Shneiderman
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 328
Release: 2015-03-25
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 0812246837

The first comprehensive ethnography of the Thangmi, a marginalized community who migrate between Himalayan border zones, Rituals of Ethnicity explores Thangmi cultural worlds and regional political histories to offer a new explanation for the persistence of enduring ethnic identities despite the realities of mobile, hybrid lives.

Ethnic Inequality in the Northeastern Indian Borderlands

Ethnic Inequality in the Northeastern Indian Borderlands
Author: Anita Lama
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-12-23
Genre: History
ISBN: 1000331024

Ethnic Inequality in the Northeastern Indian Borderlands analyses the relationship between symbolic violence, inequality and ethnicity, and addresses the question of unequal integration of small ethnic groups into state structures by using the Limbus of the Northeastern Indian borderlands as a case study. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence, the author argues that the ethnicization of the Limbus has been associated with the devaluation of their cultural identity, which was itself first constructed and naturalized by the same process of ethnicization. The book is a pioneering work in terms of the application of Bourdieu’s sociology to Northeast India and the theoretical interpretation of ethnic inequality in Northeast India. In addition, the book contributes to the overall understanding of the constant structural identity of symbolic violence and its varying manifestations. Exploring the symbolic dimensions of power relations within state structures, this book will be of interest to a wide readership from various disciplines including area studies, global studies, comparative studies, borderland studies, inequality studies, sociology, anthropology and political science.