Everyday Marginality of Nepalis in India
I found myself in a packed TATA Sumo1 at the New-Jalpaiguri Railway station on a muggy July day in 2006. Like many other middle-class Bengalis who had visited Darjeeling before, I knew that if I could bear the suffocating heat and humidity for about an hour or so I would enjoy the cool moist air of Darjeeling tea country upon reaching the outskirts of Kurseong town. There is a reason the British built sanatoriums there in the days of the Raj (Chatterjee 2001; Koehler 2015).
I was sharing my ride that day with a few Bengali and Marwari men, lower-level government bureaucrats and traders making regular trips to Kolkata from Darjeeling via Siliguri and back. They struck up a conversation with me on this long ride. Their assumptions about me and the very problematic conversation that ensued made the ride to Darjeeling more uncomfortable than usual. The exchange in the car is a peek into the gendered forms of discrimination faced by average Nepali women: the sort of class sexualities accorded by dint of their economic contributions.
Passenger 1: Madam first time in Darjeeling? Did you get a nice hotel? This is off-season, you may not get to see the Kanchenjungha … but you will get a nice empty town.
Me: Actually this is not my first time; I have been there before for work.
Passenger 2: You work in Darjeeling? Which office?
Me: I am a researcher … I am doing research for my PhD.
Passenger 1: OK, yes that is good, but what are you researching? Coming from North Bengal University?
Me: I am an anthropologist studying for my PhD in the USA and I am very interested in issues of economic development and especially women’s roles in Darjeeling’s economy.
Passenger 2: OK, so you are going to spend a lot of time on plantations, am I correct? Do you know the joke about the 3Ws of Darjeeling?
Me: Not really, I have never heard this joke.
Passenger 2: One should never trust its weather, its women and the wine. And by wine I mean raksi, not foreign liquor.
Collective laughter ensued among the men, strangely the Nepali driver of the car also joined in with a muted laugh, I could see him on the rearview mirror. I was very annoyed at this blatant display of sexism, classism, and regionalism shown in the casual denigration of Nepali women from Darjeeling. I held back my reactions. Sadly, the next ten years taught me that this sort of rebuke of Nepali women was an everyday occurrence that shadows the struggles and creativity of the women behind these colonial—now—post-colonial tropes.
The myth of the “nimble fingered” women also had related sister myths in Darjeeling which shaped the gendered political economy of tea production. The sister myths took on themes of sexual promiscuity, alcoholism, and unpredictability of women, justifying the need to govern, aiding the post-colonial extension of the white man’s burden which was now proudly carried over by his brown brothers as evident in this friendly chitchat on the way to Darjeeling. These sister myths had roots in the regions history, politics, culture, and activism, and shaped the terrain of gendered respectability (Sen 2012).
These sexualized, classist, gendered tropes operated at the “grassroots” of Darjeeling’s tea economy. This situation takes us to the heart of the gendered cultural political-economy of Darjeeling’s tea production, the contemporary identity struggles of its men and women, the crisis in marginality and respectability that Nepalis in India have to navigate in and outside Darjeeling. In this context, when I met Nepali strangers during fieldwork I was always a face of the mainstream that marginalized them. As I detailed in chapter 1, being Bengali was not an advantage during many research interactions, but opened doors during different ones.
A much stereotyped and ridiculed group, Nepalis in India and their struggles for acceptance as rightful cultural citizens of India (despite formal legal citizenship) have only increased over the past 100 years in response to the neglect and racism of mainstream India—both people and government (Middleton 2015; Sen 2012). Locally the manifestation of this national problem remains deeply gendered as women plantation workers are subject to the toughest stereotypes, augmented by the intense envy about their permanent jobs (in a region plagued with underdevelopment, substance abuse, and lack of employment options). But average Nepali women, along with Lepchanis (Lepcha women)2 and Bhotenis (Tibetan women), were designated as outsiders if they phenotypically resembled East Asians, just like my women friends from Manipur, Nagaland, Meghalaya in Delhi University. They could not pass as Indian and had the toughest go. Women outside the market areas and plantations also live under the shadow of the 3Ws; their everyday life is defined by a cultural political economy of distinction through serious mobility games (Ortner 2006) of respectability at the family, community, and personal level. The pride of being housewife entrepreneurs in the non-plantation basti (village) areas is a reflection of this politics of distinction. The advent of organic and Fair Trade production furthered this gendered politics of distinction within Nepali men and women, and between women and women, since the display, control, and use of women’s labor is at the heart of Fair Trade’s success and failures in Darjeeling.
To understand what possibilities women want to further through their gendered projects of value and how their aspirational entrepreneurial ventures are located in a particular context one needs to appreciate the nuances of gendered class formation in Darjeeling’s rural areas within and outside plantations. To grasp these changing relations, knowledge about certain aspects of colonial tea production in Darjeeling as well as its postcolonial specifics is important.3 Also important is an understanding of more recent protracted political mobilizations manifested in the two major subnational political outbursts (Gorkhaland Movement I and II). The latter shaped these gendered rural-class distinctions. One also needs to understand the different kinds of development initiatives that have affected plantation and non-plantation rural areas post-1947, the year India became independent from British rule. I attempt to detail all of the above in the rest of the chapter.
Politics of Recognition
Amidst the colorful happy faces of Nepali tea pluckers on Indian television and the occasional newspaper article about the abuse and trafficking of Nepali women in Delhi, there is a striking paucity of information and research about the political involvements of average Nepali women (especially rural plantation workers or smallholder women farmers) in their community’s quest for political autonomy within India. It does not take that much effort to understand that women from rural areas in Darjeeling would play an important role in their communities’ struggle for respect and recognition; their confident presence in the market (as traders) and in villages and plantations has given them access to resources which are reflected in stereotypes about the “Darjeeling Girl” (Leichty 2003). Women’s engagement with Nepali subnationalism within India shapes how women imagine the political and how they insert themselves or not within political practices (Kandiyoti 1994) affecting their individual and collective practices of social and economic entrepreneurship within and outside plantations. As I will demonstrate in chapters 7 and 8, women’s imagination of political possibilities also impacts the tenor or their household relations and community activism.
Feminist philosopher Nancy Fraser’s conceptual distinction between “politics of recognition”4 and “politics of equality” (Fraser 1997, 2000) is useful in framing the specificity of political transformations in Darjeeling. Also important is the need to complicate the dichotomy that Fraser presents in order to understand what she perceives as the downside of contemporary struggles over identity. A move beyond the recognition-redistribution dilemma to locate Nepali women’s complex positionalities within Nepali struggles for political and cultural autonomy requires an intersectional feminist approach (Cho, Crenshaw, and McCall 2013) aiding a well-rounded understanding of women’s strategic positionalities within Nepali subnationalism.5 This approach helps us understand the gendered ramifications of subnationalism in India’s northeast as well as locate the specificity of Nepali women’s subjectivities within discussions of contemporary South Asian feminism.
It is too easy to characterize women plantation workers’ participation in subnational politics as a struggle for subnational and ethnic recognition where Nepali males set the political agenda sidelining women laborers’ issues of wage bargaining, or as simply a struggle for more labor rights where women encounter male domination in all spheres of their lives, such as household, community, and workplace. The multiple marginalities of Nepali women plantation workers (i.e., their marginalization in their workplaces, in the households, and as Nepalis, since they are a part of minority community in India) make them complex subaltern agents for whom cultural “politics of recognition” has material and affective consequences in their communities and workplaces. The latter articulates a politics of equality, which has symbolic and gendered implications.
For women outside plantations in the basti areas where the smallholder women farmers reside, support for subnationalism entailed filling trucks to go to rallies, money collection, food preparation. The changed circumstances in many rural areas after the GNLF came to power in the late eighties was access to patta (formal land deeds), the inroad of NGOs and their projects like micro-credit, the ānganwādi ICDS programs for women, roads, and eventually electricity, along with government jobs for some influential men loyal to the GNLF. In fact, the plantations were the last bastions of non-GNLF politics until the very end when the Communist Party was overthrown by the GNLF (also in the late eighties) to form the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGCH).
The gendered marginalization of women in Darjeeling remains embedded in a political field (Ray 1999) with mutually overlapping social, political, and ethnic terrains that deny women plantation workers both dignity and higher wages at the same time as it paves the way for some of Darjeeling’s rural residents to gain landed resources through a reorganization of “fallow” or unregulated land. Hence, it is crucial to apply a feminist intersectional lens and account for ethnicity and gender within a single framework to understand women’s cultural struggles in Darjeeling, and its nuances, since there is no single reality called “women of Darjeeling.” For that we need to extend and reformulate Fraser’s “recognition-redistribution” dichotomy and emphasize their intertwining to take note of women’s complex gendered positionalities within Nepali subnationalism. I demonstrate in this book that women’s agency within Nepali subnationalism has to be understood in terms of place-based meaning-making that attends to their everyday entrepreneurialism and work within and outside household practices to negotiate patriarchy and its newly emerging benevolent forms.
Meaning-making is as much economic as it is a cultural redefining of oneself in the midst of multiple marginalities and regional political economies. One needs to understand “women of Darjeeling” not only through their roles in economic production and social reproduction, but also through their cultural productions, as I have asserted in the introduction to this book. I contend that meaning-making occurs by an appropriation of the language of subnationalism, i.e., politics of recognition to reinterpret workplace and household situations in bolstering claims for higher wages and other kinds of redistribution of power and resources within the plantation and cooperative6 hierarchy. The concept of meaning-making helps us discern how women plantation workers code their equality-claims in language of ethnic exceptionalism and recognition (as pāhāDi/hill women). It may seem that Nepali women plantation workers and smallholder women farmers are giving in to dominant male hegemonic plans about Darjeeling’s future. However, I see such place-based meaning-making practices as interruptions to the suppression and silencing of women’s voices within subnationalist politics as revealed to interlocutors like me during critical ethnographic encounters.
Women’s narratives point to the evolution of a particular form of gendered historical consciousness through which women plantation workers and smallholder farmers find a way to express how political shifts in Nepali labor and ethnic politics have engendered “interstitial politics”—not apparent to the casual observer (Fraser 1997; Sexsmith 2012; Sen 2012). The post-communist era cultural politics of subnationalism helped women address issues of structural violence by having the freedom to express themselves as proud pāhāDi7 workers or farmers, but such modalities did not question other forms of structural limitations facing the Nepali workforce, such as the absence of regular wage and bonus increases. Nepali women plantation workers, irrespective of their present political affiliations, feel that the Gorkhaland Movement has empowered them in some aspects of their lives as much as it has disempowered them in other arenas. To elucidate my point further, I offer an ethnographic vignette.
One crisp winter morning Lachmi, a tea-plucker, and I set out to meet the other twelve women plantation workers in the tea-plucking group who Lachmi oversaw. Lachmi was in a particularly bad mood that day, lamenting her inability to negotiate a job for her youngest son in the plantation bungalow as a guard. As we walked away from her home into the plantation she pointed me to a Nepali male Chaprāsi (field supervisor) and told me “do you see him sister; they are the bane of our existence, those chamchās.8 Here I am, always encouraging the girls in my group to work hard so that our company makes more money and here they are roaming around whole day and misreporting to the manager and owner to prove their efficiency.” Upon this comment, I asked Lachmi why there were no women field supervisors—Chaprāsis. She replied:
There is no reason why we women cannot become Chaprāsis, but who will fight that battle? Are the unions of any use? They are only interested in Gorkhaland and partybazi.9 Our sāhib10 always listens to the wrong kind of people, the insincere Nepali men, who tell him that women are untrustworthy and drink too much—worthless. We might not know how to run the country like Indira Gandhi, but we know how this plantation works and we are pāhāDis;11 we work harder than people in the plains.
Encapsulated in Lachmi’s words are deep frustrations with the plantation manager and his male henchmen’s close surveillance of women workers. Also notable is anger over the local labor union preoccupied in partybazi without engaging any questions of women worker’s empowerment. Her sarcastic comment about India’s first female prime minister has to be contextualized as disgust for the negative sexualized representations that are part of everyday work and community life, as evident from my opening vignette in this chapter, and have made Nepali women become the “other” of mainstream Indian femininity. Her negotiation of these existing frustrations is articulated through pride for a pāhāDi identity, which many plantation workers used as a motivational reference for their toil. In doing so they defended the essentialized image of a hill worker that the male leaders of Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) and now the Gorkha Janamukti Morcha (GJM) carefully use as a key cultural trope through which the broader Nepali community maintained their distinction in the local economy of difference; distinguishing them as people of substance different from the adivasis (indigenous people/sons of the soil) in the plains and madeshis (other plains people). Ethnic pride and loathing for sexist labor practices perpetuated within Nepali politics marks the complexity of women’s political engagements in Darjeeling. Outside plantations in the basti areas the celebration of pāhāDi identity is reflected in the pride of owning ones land (mato), the privilege of which is not available to the plantation workers.
Thus, an intersectional feminist understanding of women’s agency in Darjeeling’s tea plantations must acknowledge that women are marginalized in complex ways resulting from “multiple patriarchies” (Chatterjee 2001) and their ethnic, economic, and political manifestations. In response to such multiple marginalizations, women use cultural tropes of an essentialized pāhāDi identity. These symbolic tropes hinder the possibility of raising important work-based issues in the plantation, such as the need for new shoes in the monsoon or a small loan for their child’s education. Yet a job for the male members of the household, the claims of which are couched in languages of ethnicity and subnationalism, also have material consequences for these women. Thus, production and reproduction of minority identity, whether ethnicized or subnationalist, in response to larger political economic forces, is a deeply gendered and classed process (Alexander Floyd 2001; Kandiyoti 1994).
These gendered everyday material and discursive manifestations of “politics of recognition” are totally absent from the existing literature on subnationalism in India (Kohli 1997; Das Gupta 1997; Middleton 2015). The paucity of information about the creativity of poor women in Darjeeling is perpetuated by the increased media focus and scholarly interest in the struggles of the broader Nepali community within India. The latter focuses on diagnostic moments of ethnic anxiety, decentralized territorial arrangements and forms of violence, and how Nepali people are struggling to find a “tribal slot” (Samanta 1996; Lama 1996; Middleton 2015; Li 2000), in which men are disproportionately represented barring a few instances where women become martyrs. But detailed ethnography of everyday realities helps us move beyond seeing Nepali women either as victims, silent bystanders, or heroes. Instead, it upholds women’s complex subjectivities and how, through their labor and affect, women uphold the symbolic economies of struggle, the critical cultural work they do to make the movement meaningful for average people—despite dictatorial and corrupt leaders, and setbacks in the movement (see also chapter 5). The social reproduction of local politics and regional distinctions is intricately tied to the labor of women at work and home.
Struggles of Darjeeling Nepalis
The majority of Darjeeling’s population is Nepali, but Nepali people are a minority group in India. The Nepali community in Darjeeling has been engaged in gaining more resources and recognition within the Indian nation-state. After India’s independence from British rule in 1947, India maintained an open boundary with Nepal. Citizens of each country could move freely across borders, work, and live in India and Nepal, but they did not have voting rights.12 Since colonial times, people from Nepal migrated to work in Darjeeling’s tea plantations. Nepali men were recruited to fight in the British army and to work as guards and cooks in colonial households. In the early years of plantations men, children and women were employed in tea plantations, but a much more gendered division of labor emerged after WWII when a huge number of Nepali men were recruited in the India army’s Gurkha Regiment (Dash 1947). When World War II ended a lot of these soldiers returned to Darjeeling, where they faced joblessness. The economic crisis due to the war, which resulted in a food crisis, meant plantations were not expanding to hire more laborers. It was also during this time that the first cries of Gorkhastan (a separate state for Indian Nepalis) were raised by the CPI. Unemployed returning soldiers found new engagements in CPI-dominated plantation unions. Some also joined the Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League (ABGL) which had less power and was more mainstream nationalist in their affiliation with the Congress Party. The Gorkhastan movement fizzled in the face of militant CPI-led labor organizing but was in the agendas of ABGL and CPI politics.
Darjeeling Nepalis like Maila Baje, a veteran political figure who rose to prominence during the 1940s, provided leadership of the first CPI-affiliated labor union that was established in the region and called the Darjeeling Tea Garden Workers’ Union in 1945 (Rai 2000, 28). The demands made by this union under Maila Baje’s leadership also laid the groundwork for the Plantation Labor Act (1951). The demands included wage and bonus regulation and adjustment, pension payment, provisions for maternity costs, hospital construction, educational opportunities within plantations, and abolition of child labor.
The years between independence and the first Gorkhaland agitation saw an increase in union activity and a slowdown of plantation growth. But this period also brought about a gradual realization that state-mandated wages and other facilities could not end the everyday marginalization of Nepalis within India who could not claim a secure spot in the country. Because of an open border policy, Nepali migrants, even if they have legal citizenship rights in India, are frequently called outsiders. They experience cultural marginality. During my fieldwork, the main accusations that Nepali youth had toward the rest of India was that Indian citizens of non-Nepali descent treated them as foreigners even though most Nepali families have been in Darjeeling for generations. While Nepali migrants have settled in other parts of India, such as Delhi or Dehra Dun (in North Western India), or Assam, in Darjeeling district, they are the majority. Because of their different language, culture, customs, and their movement back and forth between Nepal and India and their distinct phenotype, there developed a feeling among non-Nepali Indian citizens that Nepalis belong to Nepal. Because of cultural discrimination, Nepali people also felt like outsiders in spite of their legal entitlements.
Contrary to mainstream notions, especially reflected in mainstream private media, that Nepalis are possibly more loyal to their “homeland”—Nepal—than to India, my ethnographic experiences reveal that the relationship between Nepali people in Darjeeling with their original homeland was contested, just like other diasporas. Many even now have a picture of the Royal Family of Nepal in their homes, but through my interviews I learned that they consider themselves part of India because this is where they work and have settled, in spite of visits to Nepal. Visits to Nepal for economic well-being are increasingly rare. Women tea farmers and plantation workers also perceived Nepal to be an underdeveloped country that has lesser prospects than India. Some of my informants would have male family members or neighbors get brides from Nepal. Women tea farmers explained to me that many agricultural households preferred women from Nepal as brides because they were supposedly more simple (sidhā), and they were also good at agricultural work. My informants also mentioned that cross-border marriages were now few. Narratives of Nepali men revealed that they wanted to migrate to Mumbai, Goa, Delhi, and Bangalore for work. Nepal was not a viable option for them. In recent years, migration from Nepal to other parts of India, especially Delhi, has increased since the state of West Bengal (where Darjeeling is located) and Eastern India in general are seen as lacking in employment prospects. The complexity of the ties between Nepalis in India to their original country is lost in popular representations of Nepali people.
In post-independence India, a Nepali watchman in a middle-class Indian home was a quintessential representation of the community and its place in the nation. Soon after my return from Darjeeling in September 2007, there was widespread violence in Darjeeling because a radio jockey in Delhi had made sarcastic remarks about a Nepali boy becoming the “Indian Idol.”13 The radio jockey continued his sarcastic remarks, saying that everyone in Delhi would have to guard their own homes and businesses now that there would be no Nepali people to guard homes and communities as Nepali boys were entering talent contests. There would be no roadside momo14 shops in Delhi. Young Nepali men in Darjeeling reacted violently to these insults to their community and Nepali men. GNLF15 members called for a strike, and the radio station had to go off air for a while. Knowing how much my informants wanted Prashant (the Nepali contestant in Indian Idol) to win in “Indian Idol,” I was not surprised by the violence that followed these remarks.
Common literacy around the Nepali community in India is formed through the image of “bāhādur,” “kānchā,” or “kānchi” (stereotypical names of Nepali people) that appear in numerous Hindi films. Nepalis were accepted as trusted servants, and through their occupation provided security to Indian homes and the nation. In many ways, Nepali people still are taken for granted in these occupations. It is common in India to hear derogatory stereotypes about Nepali men, especially about the work they can perform, their stupidity, and their faithfulness. The owner of Sonākheti frequently used these stereotypes with me in our conversations. Nepali women are seen as hard working, but whimsical and sexually promiscuous.
Nepali people share their marginality with other people from India’s northeast.16 Nepali people believe that Bengalis or Marwaris (other madeshi regional groups originating outside Darjeeling) who occupy important offices and dominate business ventures discriminate against them despite benefiting from Nepali labor. They were also of the view that Nepali people suffer disadvantages in social and occupational settings because of these enduring stereotypes about their capabilities. In the places where I did my fieldwork, the standard advice given to a migrating man was, “Please do not end up becoming bāhādur or kānchā (servant), try to do something better.” Such feelings of inferiority have deep historical roots of servitude in colonial labor recruitment and at present are amplified by the poor economic condition of Darjeeling. Nepali women were very anxious about the future of their sons and even if they were in jobs outside Darjeeling women feared the kinds of jobs their male family members were doing. In Darjeeling there were very few employment opportunities for men besides being drivers and some opportunities on the plantation. Women dominated the latter. When men found jobs, they were menial. Nepali people have always had to work under a Bihari, Marwai, Kashmiri, or Bengali business owner in Darjeeling. Even today, in the remotest villages, the main grocery/supply store is owned by a Bihari/Marwari (popularly called a “kaiya”). To start small ventures it is common for men and women to approach these traders.
Among Nepalis in India the invocation of pāhāDi-ness is pronounced because Nepalis find in this usage an effective way of maintaining their distinctiveness from plains people, whom they perceive as oppressors, as cunning, smart, and privileged. PāhāDi-ness simultaneously expresses marginality and pride/difference. Nepali plantation workers and tea farmers took pride in their pāhāDi identity. Many Nepali people would say, “hami pāhāDi majale kām garchu”/“we pāhāDis work with great zest” or “India lai bachaunu ko lagi pāhāDi lāi chahincha”/ “to save India you need a pāhāDi” (alluding to the presence of Nepalis in the Indian army). Political parties in the hills also used pāhāDi-ness strategically to build local party loyalties.
Leaders of the Gorkhaland Movement in the 1980s sought to change this situation of marginality and underdevelopment among Nepali people through the formation of a separate Nepali state. This Nepali state was supposed to represent the interests of the Nepali people. This particular form of recognition politics shaped the regions political developments. The movement for a separate state was violent; 1,200 people were killed, mostly men. In 1988, the dream of a Nepali/Gorkha State was temporarily compromised when the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council (DGHC) was formed to oversee the development of Darjeeling, and provide respectable work for more Nepalis in DGHC offices. This was GNLF’s promise and a way for them to gain legitimacy in the eyes of Nepali people. Unemployed male Nepali youth were particularly attracted to this new party and the movement because they faced chronic unemployment in Darjeeling. Nepali women were also supportive of the new party because it promised a possible brighter future for their sons, brothers, and husbands. Unions with GNLF affiliation became a male-dominated space.
The negative images of Nepali people were also gendered representations of a minority community. Women were seen as hard working (bolstered by their predominance in the plantations and markets), and men were seen as belligerent, lazy, and prone to alcoholism. The images, along with growing discrimination in the rest of India and the lack of opportunities for Nepali youth (except for the army and police services), have led to a crisis in Nepali masculinity. The demoralization among young Nepali men and the problem of substance abuse was a cause for much alarm in Darjeeling. The culmination of pent-up anxiety was seen during the Gorkhaland agitation of 1986, when Nepali GNLF members killed other Nepalis suspected of having other party loyalties.
The mid-1980s were important times in Darjeeling and had significance for the future of the region’s labor unions. Events during this time changed the course of the plantation labor union and party politics. The district prepared for a subnational uprising for separate statehood, which culminated in the late 1980s. Many of my informants reported unrest on the plantations, and even inter-union fighting. Until the mid-1980s, most labor unions were dominated by various communist parties, most notably the Communist Party of India Marxist (CPIM). Nepalis, who wanted a separate state from just being a district in the state of West Bengal in eastern India, also wanted their “local” party and this gave birth to GNLF. Communist loyalists joined the GNLF, at times forcibly, because being a Nepali meant supporting the “local” party, the Gorkha/Nepali party. Some people joined the GNLF and became natural loyalists and others recount stories of being violently forced into joining the GNLF. The thrust of the movement was to have a separate state that would uphold the identity of Nepalis as citizens of India, contesting their popular representation in the mainstream as foreigners. Women also participated in the movement, in covert ways, as will become evident in later chapters.17
The negative representations of Nepali males in Indian society have created a crisis in masculinity, exacerbated in household and community politics, because of the continued prevalence of women in the labor force. While women have become important in the household economy, men have been faced with high unemployment in Darjeeling, resulting in a massive migration of Nepali men to other places in India. Working for or networking with the local party (GNLF) thus became a way for Nepali male youth to spend their time. This was not just the case in Darjeeling, but in many other parts of India where unemployment is rampant and male youth ended up working for local political parties. But it was not just about spending time in the party; the formation of the Hill Council meant that party involvement would lead to a possible employment in the Hill Council (DGHC) or the party. These major political developments shifted the tenor of union politics within plantations. GNLF supporters urged their party members to be good pāhāDi, work hard, and not engage in unnecessary trouble, like the communist unions in the plains.
After the agitation, plantation unions focused on getting people into DGHC jobs since plantations had very few work opportunities for men and plantation employment was stagnating. Many small farmers (including members of the tea cooperative) in the post-Gorkhaland period got their formal land titles. They were ardent supporters of the GNLF. This ownership of land influenced their identity and, at present, they see themselves as “farmers” and not plantation workers. This ownership of land resulted in the formation of a future cooperative (now sanstha) and strengthened the small farmers’ movement to get government recognition for their tea. Plantation workers, also loyal to GNLF, could not show many tangible benefits of the agitation, as the GNLF could not solve the unemployment problem by increasing plantation recruitment. In fact, the GNLF was so averse to traditional labor activism that plantation workers lost faith in it.
These historical developments shaped the contours of social justice as expressed in Darjeeling. In the early 1980s the GNLF was born out of the collective desire of Nepali people in India to have their own state within India, which would be called “Gorkhaland.” Whenever I refer to agitation, it means the Gorkhaland Agitation of 1986−88. Darjeeling also witnessed a 2nd Gorkhaland Agitation because the first Gorkhaland Agitation ended without the formation of the Nepali state/homeland within India. The leadership of DGHC between 1988 and 2007 had also become dictatorial. In 1988, the DGHC was formed, which just led to more decentralized administrative power for the local state in Darjeeling. Subhash Ghising was its chairman. Ghising was seen as a dictator by many locals and, twenty-two years after his rule began, his closest allies ousted him from power by forming a new party Gorkha Jana Mukti Morcha (GJM). This new party had similar viewpoints as the GNLF led by Ghising, but the new movement promised to be less violent and more Gandhian (peaceful) in its approach and tactics, but still rallied for a separate Gorkha state. From my content analysis of newspaper articles and personal interviews with people, I gather that this new party GJM and its tactics are being questioned by minority political groups in Darjeeling as being non-democratic and coercive, just like the first Gorkhaland Agitation.
While Nepali minorities in India are victims of stereotyping and economic disparities, there are many significant differences among them. These differences are both socioeconomic and cultural, and are deeply gendered. Non-plantation tea producers, like the women tea farmers in my study who engaged in household tea production, were seen as dutiful tradition-bound wives. Ironically, women tea farmers and plantation workers were at most times engaged in the same task of growing and harvesting tea, but the ideologies associated with their work varied significantly. The tea farming households also distinguished themselves from plantation households. Both women plantation workers and market women were seen as “chuchchi” (with sharp tongue) and “bāthi” (street smart). Tea farmers saw their female relatives as being “sidhā” (simple/straight). The ownership of land was a major factor in the tea farmers’ self-perception. Male tea farmers took pride in the fact that their women did not have to go to work. Access to family land, no matter how small, motivated women to engage in forms of activism at the family and community level; this stood in sharp contrast to strategies of everyday sustainability in the plantation.
These gendered social distinctions shaped women’s practices and subjectivities, as I will describe in the rest of the chapters. Women plantation workers, in the absence of strong unions, would be afraid to get into arguments with their male bosses; they would fear being called “chuchchi” (street smart or immodest women) tarnishing their already negative representations. Women tea farmers on the other hand engaged in defying their image as docile housewives, using Fair Trade and seeking recognition for their misrecognized labor.
The continuing marginality and socioeconomic vulnerability of Nepalis also affected my approach to fieldwork as I maneuvered different expectations of people I met in Darjeeling as is evident from the previous chapter and throughout this book.