'Land Question and Ethnicity in Darjeeling Hills Essay\r'

'ABSTRACT\r\nAlthough economical factors ar often considered as essential for augmenting hea hence safaris, the analytic traffichip amongst economic issues and affectionateity is far from being clear cut. In an prove to address the fuss of ethnicity in a non- redness theoretical bland, most of the studies on ethnic problems inadvertently indulge such(prenominal) logical inconsistencies. Such a critical reading led us to carry ethnicity as a lived-in category †much standardised the notions of clique or caste †where both the genuine and cultural domain of terrene life congregates. With the avail of a case study of the Gorkhaland trend in the Darjeeling Hills (India) and the in spew of a powericular field of secular predis point †namely, the issues related with land and agrarian affable physical composition, this paper attempts to argue that ethnic gestures are a dynamic podium wherein the encoded supposeings of textile and/or economic issues/g rievances are decoded in cultural idioms.\r\n blush if the discussions on ethnicity prolong an inbuilt tendency to develop a theoretical glance over that criticizes Marxian class analysis and demands an self-reliant modelual frame duly encouraged by post-Marxist and postgeomorphologicist/postmodernist theoretical renditions, literatures on ethnicity for the most part have stressed economic factors, in some(prenominal) way or the other. Hence, finding available studies, which have made considerable advances in understanding the problem of Gorkha ethnicity, that have concentrated their focus on economic factors as the root run of ethnic enmity and conflict in the Darjeeling Hills (West Bengal, India) is common.\r\n‘Economic stagnation’ (Dasgupta 1988), ‘ fractious implementation of discipline policies’ (Chakrabarty 1988), ‘economic deprivation and omission’ (Bura Magar 1994; Lama 1988; McHenry Jr. 2007; Nanda 1987), ‘petty-bourgeoi sie aggrandisements against the dominance of monopoly capitalists of the Centre and the verbalise’ (Sarkar 1988), ‘economic negligence, exploitation, and unavailability of white-collar jobs’ (Chadha 2005), ‘growing unemployment and none motherly attitude of the state regarding the over exclusively development of the pitchers mound areas’ (Timsina 1992), ‘uneven development’ (Dasgupta 1999; Datta 1991), ‘endemic poverty, underdevelopment, and the perceptual experience of being â€Å"malgoverned”’ (Ganguly 2005), are some such factors galore(postnominal) scholars put as the root cause of the Gorkhaland work in the Darjeeling Hills. However, none of these studies have made it profusely clear how economic conditions †the domain of the material †are linked to the desires of ethnic separatism, which conceptually remained under the championship of culture †the non-material. Again, if the economic facto rs remarkably remained so signifi preemptt, as the studies stage, then why ultimately the cultural warpath (i.e., 81 ethnic conflict) and not an economic one (i.e., class conflict) appeared as a suitable remedial awayline?\r\nOne obvious question arises thus: how the ‘material’ is transposed into ‘cultural’? The present paper is an attempt to answer such questions by analyzing the case of the Gorkha ethnicity and causative agency as it emerged out of the people’s grievances experient through their quotidian life processes cloaked in their relative positions inside the structural inequality. In fact, ethnic identity much give care the issues of class or caste is a lived-in category that emerges out of the perceptual experience of reality and receives constant reformulation, since the reality is itself dynamic.\r\nIn our intercession ethnic identification †much like all other identifications †is overall rooted in the large canvas of mixer experience, which determines the processes of framing contending alliances between and among groups ground on their varying capacity of possessing the valued and uncommon imaginations available in the society. Instead of pinpointing the causes of the movement, our analysis attempts to see that the assertion of Gorkha ethnic identity has had payoffs with respect to preference access and utilization and that the draw out struggle of the Gorkhas for kick downstairs statehood is that trajectory wherein both the cultural and material aspects of routine life coalesce. Somemagazines this happens even without an immediate ethnic ‘other’. This is finickyly the case, as the study shows, with the cumulation agrarian sector.\r\nIt thus becomes imperative that the problem should be studied in a historical plane putting utmost emphasis on the well-disposed formation of the Darjeeling Hills, which would help us focus the plan of resource distribution on an ethnic pl ane vis-à-vis the question of structural inequality. The importance of treating the issue of Gorkhaland movement as a historical phenomenon can merely be ignored, especially when one finds that the Darjeeling Hills has experienced a century long historicity of protest †sometimes accommodative, sometimes violent †to achieve a separate politico-administrative exhibition for self rule.\r\nMoreover, the historical perspective is needed to show the fundamental changes that have taken place at heart the brotherly formation of the region since the colonial eld and had corresponding effects for furthering the cause of the movement in the post-colonial period. Therefore, a proper historical analysis of ethnicity can help us understand how the grievances of the masses were articulated and were translated into the courses of violent action, how new equations came up because of state interference and how the overall dynamics of the movement kept on rolling, putting ethnicity at the center stage.\r\nSOCIAL validation AND SOCIAL MOVEMENTS\r\nIndeed, there can never be a single cause of an ethnic movement that stretched over a century.1 However, our concern regarding the causes of Gorkhaland movement is not about degree but of kind, by which we mean that Gorkha ethnicity, or for that matter the Gorkhaland movement, is embedded in the fond formation of the Darjeeling Hills. It is neither entirely the point of intersection of old sentiments nor even the result of elite manipulation, but had been the resolution of a dynamic neighborly formation that reproduced its tillable forces, relations of production, as well as the relations of subjugation and exploitation meted out by its incumbents. The loading of kind formation in augmenting the cause of accessible movement has been stressed by most of the major theoretical paradigms in some form or the other.\r\nFor example, functionalism, though lately emerging from its erst date position of bracketing c omplaisant movements as pathological social behavior, became increasingly concerned with the analysis of social movement as a variety of (normal) embodied action and showed the destiny of framing a general hypothesis on the social system while analyzing social movements as a collective phenomenon of some sort. Likewise, symbolic interactionism and resource mobilization theory, in their attempts to analyze social movement, put stress on the relational structures and on the colonial processes of interaction mediated by certain networks of belonging, respectively. The Marxist tradition, perhaps, has given utmost emphasis on the essential to view social movements in relation to structural arrangements available in the social formation.\r\nEach social formation is rooted in a particular structure of relationship and movement is not the cause but the outcome of the differentially arranged social ensnare in which privileges and rewards are more in possession of some minority groups comp ared with the majority others. Even the post-Marxist or for that matter the New tender trend (NSM) perspective in their zeal to study the identity-based movements as manifestations of post-material claims hardly denied the importance of social formation while understanding the questionable post-material claims of the NSMs. In outlining the principles for the analysis of collective action, Melucci (1996:24) †a prominent figure of NSM school †points out that the analytical field of the NSMs depends on the systems of relationships within which such action takes place and toward which it is directed.\r\nThe recorded history of the Gorkhaland movement suggests that the first spurt of the movement can be marked out in the year 1907 when the hill people submitted a memorandum †for the first time †to the colonial government urging separation from the then Bengal and the need to formulate a separate administrative arrangement for the Darjeeling Hills. ALTHUSSER, SOCIAL FORMATION, AND THE DYNAMICS OF RURAL DARJEELING winning a cue from the centrality of social formation in the study of social movement as analyse above, an attempt has been made to focus on the social formation of the Darjeeling Hills2 and its contribution to the development of a protracted ethnic movement in the region. Our treatment of the concept of social formation is Althusserian in inspiration and is viewed as a complex complete composed of concrete economic, political and ideological relations that provide the air upon which the consolidation of selfhood of the individual or the group within a given social space becomes feasible.\r\nIt is expense mentioning here instead of using such damage like ‘social system’, ‘social order’ or for that matter ‘society,’ Althusser (1997) preferred the use of ‘social formation’. Since he believed while terms like ‘social system’ and ‘social order’ presupposes a structure that reduces the form of all its emanations, ‘society’ as a concept is loaded with pre-Marxist humanist founding that treats social life as ultimately the product of individual human beings. Althusser has used the concept of social formation with some broader theoretical appeal. He problematized the so-called base-superstructure module by bringing together the notions of social system, order, and society closer to his postMarxist formulation of social formation.\r\nSocial formation, for Althusser, is constituted of a complex of concrete economic, political, and ideological relations, bound together and given their particular guinea pig as capitalist, feudal or whatever by the fact that economic relations, is the ‘determinant in the goal instance.’ Conceived in this manner the concept of social formation presupposes that under this model social reality is neither determined, nor to be explained by a single causal variable but always by the wh ole structure (a notion that he labels as ‘overdetermination’), which corpse amenable to the economic determinant only in the last instance. The uniqueness in Althusser’s concept of social formation lies in the fact that it problematizes the ‘base-superstructure’ relationship (that remains central, almost invariably, to the whole realm of post-Marxist scholarship) to that uttermost(a) of Darjeeling has been one of the prominent hill stations essential by the British in colonial India.\r\n'