Picturing Gorkhaland: Via Darjeeling and the Bengali mind

(Spot the screamer: At Darjeeling taxi stand. June, 2008.
Click on the image for an enlarged view)

I had been waiting for the pictures to appear. Pictures that would prevent me from saying overtly political things in this precious little space I had saved for myself.

But my photographic senses let me down; the negatives carried only the dark shades surrounding the images I had hoped to register. And strange green spots. Only a few pictures materialized from the darkroom. Bless you.

Or else, you could be seeing pictures of the serene mountain mists sliding down windy wet terraces, once again, pictures of balaclava-clad Bengalis in dhotis enjoying a three-day spell of pleasant winter chill and attempting horse-riding while summer was blazing on the plains, Prasant Tamang singing in a cracked voice to a crowd of youngsters, and the silent blazing eyes of women marching for an autonomous Gorkhaland through the streets of Sukhia Pokhri.

For my return from the Darjeeling Hills coincided with escalating violence in the region; violence that simmers right now, but violence, like all violence, that feeds on itself and waits for an opportune moment to spring in.

The newspapers published from Kolkata that I still happen to read each morning had shamelessly fed on the violence throughout the last month. “Tourists hounded off the hills”— had been the frenetic refrain. Nothing of the sort, except a few awkward glances of people encountered, isolated acts by those idiots who always think in terms like “we” and “they” and squabble, squat, spit, bicker and bite, creating trouble for others, burning buses, deliberately hurting “them”, always believing that their political leaders will make the world a better place for "we" to live in and give "us" identities, at least recognition of some sort, and finally, the alacrity of people who always find themselves on the receiving end.

“Believe in me, I’ll give you Gorkhaland,” goes a small poster bearing the picture of Bimal Gurung, that I saw stuck on many walls in Darjeeling. I found it strange that people are believing in Gurung after they had experienced Ghising. Many hill-people I talked to during my trip, made exclamations of this sort: “We’ve little of a choice. At least we know now he’s one of us, and trying hard.”

Repetition of a horizontal level of comradeship that has been absent, but one that has always imagined in similar nationalistic imaginings of antethetical nature. Or how would you explain an eight-year-old Bengali boy working for fifteen hours at a stretch in a Mall-side Darjeeling hotel owned by a Bengali, if they share a common bonding of some sort, let's say, er, hmm, a colonial past? But you find that it’s stranger that the desperation, that drives hill-people to believe in the GJMM’s capacity for change, is often ignored.

This desperation is not fired by a political imagination, true, but is also nurtured by a series of serious iniquities. As Mahendra P. Lama, the man who prepared the first Development Plan of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council in 1989, puts it in an article:

Today, the people of the Darjeeling district are demanding answers to questions such as why the entire tea and cinchona industry is in the doldrums, what happened to the rich forest resources, why are there starvation deaths in the Dooars tea gardens, why are the three hill subdivisions still crying for drinking water and basic health facilities, and why Darjeeling has only two drinking water reservoirs in Sinchal, built in 1910 and 1931 by the British administration. There are various other signs of neglect by the state government. There are no panchayats in Darjeeling and hardly any Central government schemes are implemented here. Except in the state assembly, the people of Darjeeling figure nowhere in the decision-and policy-making process of West Bengal... (Storm brewing in the Mountains)

With or without considerations of Gorkhaland autonomy, or whether the GJMM is capable of redressal, these are the questions people living in West Bengal, and those on the seats of power, should also be asking.

The problem, I think, has another important dimension. Not to be found in Anjan Dutta's movies, though, even when it got something to do with the average Bengali's mindset.

There are some deep-seated sickening notions of a racial nature that are left untouched, especially by Bengalis, who form the dominating group in the region, and are simultaneously nostalgic, romanticizing and ignorant to the region from afar. Self-critical Bengalis have no problems with hill-people as long as they are loyal domestic helps and servants, lovingly called “Kancha” or “Bahadur”, irrespective of their proper names, and relegated to work relating to broadly-defined manual labour, or infantry-level military service. And note, how the pictures of retired Gorkha soldiers peacefully marching for autonomy and beaten up mercilessly by the West Bengal police, have conveniently receded from media memory. That communal Bengali organisations like Amra Bangali have found space in and around Siliguri, and support from the ruling parties, shows that the mindset of greater Bengali “racial superiority” has not changed much in years.

As long as this stupid segregration of peoples exist in the minds of the dominant group, the birds, flowers, clouds and hill-peoples, and also all the people living in the plains, I fear, have further trouble waiting for them. I can only share an apprehension. And meanwhile, no worthwhile images to be displayed that have survived my trip.

(Birds on the wire: from the balcony of Kanchenjonga Lodge, Manebhanjang.
Click on the image to enlarge)