Ajapa Sharma
Ajapa Sharma is a third year undergraduate student at Mount Holyoke College in South Hadley, Massachusetts, USA. Her month long internship at CRG and stay in Calcutta was funded by the McCollough Center for Global Initiatives at her college through the Global Summer Studies Fellowship. She is currently studying Sociology and South Asian History. Her interests pertain to borders and minority politics in South Asia and hence she chose to study the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling. 

I would like to thank everyone here at CRG for their warm hospitality here at Calcutta and for their immense support without which I could not have done this work. I would specifically like to thank Dr Ranabir Sammadar, Dr. Anasua Basu Ray Chaudhary, Prof. Subhas Ranjan Chakravorty and Prof. Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhary. I came to Calcutta through Mount Holyoke College’s Global Summer Studies Fellowship. What drew me to Calcutta is my interest in social movements and South Asian borders. I come from a background in Sociology and History, particularly South Asian history. The Gorkhaland movement interested me because   it concerns a population and a place that is not only marginal to the imagination of the Indian nation state but also literally on the geographical margins of the Indian map. My research pertains mainly to the Hills of Darjeeling. I visited Darjeeling from the 13^th to the 31^st of July and met with individuals from different professional backgrounds who could be described as members of the civil society. Darjeeling, a colonial frontier land is today in Independent India a peripheral region. In looking at Darjeeling as a peripheral region. I have understood the movement in Darjeeling whose longer historical demand has been the recognition of the cultural and linguistic difference of the Gorkhas not as an ethnic separatist movement but as a movement for cultural, political and economic integration of a borderland into the Indian state. In looking at the Gorkhaland movement I have focused on how the emergence of spearheads and political power centers that claim to represent the entirety of the demands of the population under question have coerced and co-opted other civic and political bodies and individuals into silence. Even though many may have divergent political viewpoints, the subtle and not so subtle coercive nature of political parties such as the GNLF in the 80s and GJM recently create situations differences are silenced or silently ignored. As national parties have little leverage over the specific ethnic demand within the state and the center and therefore lost following in the hills over the years and non political parties cannot claim political representation under what has become a development state, a regional party such as the GJM has become powerful in the hills. These parties therefore have worn a façade of bearing popular mandate. As state and central government locate these power structures for negotiation, there is a further silencing of alternate and dissenting political viewpoints. Whaile the emergence of a monoparty culture in Darjeeling has made it difficult for there to be a democratic dialogue and democratic process in Darjeeling, the state and central government’s negotiation specifically with these power centers creates a further silencing of alternative voices. The center as the Darjeeling case suggests sustains undemocratic forces in the periphery further alienating the people of Darjeeling from a democratic engagement in the Indian nation state. 

If one is to look beyond the past two and half decades, one is able to see that language and cultural recogniton of the Gorkhas was the main cause of the various political and civic bodies that sprung up in Darjeeling. Bodies such as the Pranta Parishad headed by literary figures like IB Rai were focused solely on the recognition of the Nepali language. The CPI (M) with its large following among the tea plantation workers was mainly concerned with the working class cause. What the GNLF did then was to claim that it represented all the aspirations of the Indian Nepalis in Darjeeling. Ghisngh brought up questions of citizenship and the security of Nepalis in India following the exhortion of a large number of Nepalis from the neighboring states of Assam, Bhutan, Meghalaya. Ghisngh played into the fear of political marginalization in the Indian Nepalis. The multitude of causes that it claimed torepresent allowed the GNLF to move into trade unions, started a women’s wing, a youth wing and moved into other bodies including organizations based on language. The separate state demand encompassed a myriad of other demands. If alternative voices sprung up, violence was used to silence them. After the formation of the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, as scholars like Subhash Ranjan Chakravorty have noted, there was the consequent weakening of the voices of the different alternative voices in Darjeeling. The opposition,  the CPRM, a regional offshoot of the CPI M lost following.

With this backdrop in mind I looked at the recent movement. The GJM like the GNLF was able to mobilize its following with the claim that the demand for a separate state encompassed every other demand of the people of Darjeeling. The inetersting question here is what made it possible for the GJM to mobilize people under the not so new demand of Gorkhaland 20 years after. While the silencing under Ghisingh created a desperate need for the vocalization of discontent among the people of Darjeeling, the issue of identity re emerged after the popular TV show, Indian Idol featured a Indian Nepali called Prashant tamang who won the show through popular voting mainly in the Darjeeling hill region. While the TV show itself might not have been the most important factor in the movement, it created discussions of citizenship and marginalization of Indian Nepali. *** So what we see here again is the rallying the same sort of emotive responses towards fear of marginalization as was the case of Ghisingh. The GJM’s ways of rallying people are not entirely different from the GNLF’s in the 80s. Like the GNLF, the GJM formed its women’s wing within a couple of months of its formation. The GJNM (nari morcha) played a crucial role in rallying the support not only of the more cosmopolitan women of Jwalapahad in insisting that at least a woman from a family must attend its meetings and rallies, but also by rallying the women tea plantation workers through its collaboration with trade unions. It was the women’s wing of the GJM the Gorkha Nari Morcha that obstructed Madan Tamang, the president of the ABGL or Akhil Bharatiya Gorkha League from making his public speech in June 2008.  Similarly the Gorkha Janamukti Yuba Morcha was formed to rally the youth of the region under GJM.

A particularly interesting slogan from the movement goes like this:

Agi Agi hida Yuba, Cheli Timro Saath Chinn
Agi Agi Hida Cheli, Mahakal timro saath chha.
Move ahead youth, the women are with you
Move ahead women, Mahakal is with you.

The women formed a key part of the movement but I’ve found that even as a part and wing of the GJM, they do not have a distinct voice. On asking a member of the Nari Morcha why there were few to none women in the tripartite talks, the respondent replied that she could not answer that question and one would have to  ask the central committee regarding this.

The systematic creation of political wings with the membership of specific interest groups allowed the GJM to co-opt alternative interest groups into the movement. The membership of the GJM after 2008 was diverse, ranging from members of Ghisingh’s party, lawyers, academic intellectuals willing to chart out a plan for Gorkhaland, businessmen and others. In 2008, a civil society forum was started in Darjeeling. But as the chairman notes it has been difficult for the forum to maintain a membership that does not overlap with that GJM (the power center). The close kinship and patron client relations in Darjeeling’s closely bound community, as many of my interviewees noted makes it even more difficult for alternative and dissenting voices to resist.  The idea that one has to participate in the movement even just to “show his face” to his neighbor runs strong. Before the signing of the Pintail agreement, The GJM sent out notices to organizations like the Hotel Owner’s association to be present at the signing and also stipulated the dress code for the event. One of the members of the hotel owners association noted, “Bimal Gurung would have probably not even noticed that we weren’t there but because the owner of the next door hotel would be there, I had to go.”

Rajni Soren

Rajni Soren  was an intern at CRG in  the month of  May  2006 . She is a law student  at NALSAR, University  of law, Hyderabad. She  works on issues of displacement and  refugee flows. At CRG she worked under the supervision of Dr. Sabyasachi Basu Ray Chaudhury. She also assisted various other work in CRG. During her internship she completed a fact sheet on "Displacement in Jharkhand". The report is available on Refugee Watch Online.

Christopher Bass 

Christopher Bass was a trainee researcher at CRG in the month of June 2006. He is an English and French major at Millikin University, Illinois, USA.  In addition to interning with the Calcutta Research Group, he has studied in Paris and Montpellier, France.  In spring 2006, Chris was awarded his honors in English for his thesis, [In]Sanity and Discontent: A Postcolonial Inquiry into Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea. In this project he inquired into both the postcolonial and feminist critical interpretations of Rhys' West-Indian text.  Chris Bass also received the Conant Award, for the strongest interpretive and critical paper in the Millikin English department, for his thesis. His presentation of a cameo of this paper at the 2006 Illinois Philological Association Conference, held at DePaul University, was well received by the academic community.  Chris is also the recipient of the 2006 Summer Undergraduate Research Fund (SURF), which was made available by Millikin University. This funding secured the financial support for his internship at the CRG. Currently, Chris is involved in a collaborative research and the writing of a related article comparing the representation of immigrants in American and Indian newsprint.    

His Internship Report 

I would like to thank the Calcutta Research Group (CRG) for allowing me to work as an intern with the organization.  I enjoyed working and discussing with such knowledgeable and passionate "academic activists." As an intern I was fortunate to work under the guidance and support of Dr. Paula Banerjee.  It was an honor to work with such an impassioned and dedicated academic.  Dr. Banerjee's knowledge and interest in the issue of migration also helped guide my own research. 
 
The opportunity to be an intern with the renowned researchers of the CRG greatly influenced my receiving the competitive Summer Undergraduate Research Funds (SURF) from Millikin University of Illinois, USA, my home institution.  Receiving the research funds allowed me to collaborate with my advisor on a comparative analysis on immigration and its representation in American and Indian newsprint. The CRG internship became an essential venue for this continuing research.

My internship with CRG significantly contributed to my research on immigration and media. The CRG library is comprehensive. My access to the organization's collection of periodicals enhanced my understanding of the current situation with immigration in India.  Of particular benefit to me were the articles from the Assam Tribune, The Shillong Times, and other local papers from the northeastern regions of India. Also included in their periodical archive were the major dailies, such as, The Times of India and The Telegraph.  The assortment of both local and national newspapers in the CRG collection makes a vast range of opinions on immigration, which vary from region to region, easily accessible for researchers like me.  In addition to the research on periodicals, I was also able to use a selection of theoretical and political texts, such as Marshal Mcluhan's Understanding Media, B. Manna's Mass Media and Related Laws in India, Rita Manchanda's Media Crossing Borders, and The Global Media by Edward Herman and Robert McChesney.  I used these texts as a means to build a contextual base on which to theorize my own thesis.  The extensive textual collection yet again made me realize that the CRG is engaged with the most current political discourse.  I was able to use their wide selection of texts in researching the issue of how the media intersects with and interprets issues of immigration. 

Besides research, my internship involved assisting in various office assignments and participating in the preparatory meeting for CRG's annual winter migration course. The meeting was designed as a venue for the reflection on the course from the previous year and also as space for the discussions about the necessary improvements for the upcoming 2006 winter program. I was impressed to see how well the CRG embodies the John Dewey model of "action-reflection-action" in everything that they do. My responsibilities for the meeting were to welcome and register the notable guests as well as take the minutes of the suggestions and comments offered during the meeting. Working with these various assignments allowed me to interact with academics from all over the globe.  I was honored to meet the representatives from the embassy of Finland, academics from the northeastern regions of India, and professors and publishers from New Delhi. Although I was impressed with the overall academic discourse of the meeting one particular suggestion, which generated much discussion, stands out in my memory. It is a suggestion that is a strong evidence of CRG's commitment to students from every continent of the globe. It was argued that additional efforts would be made to provide students from economically depressed nations with the opportunity to attend the course-particularly students from Africa.  For me, this discussion highlighted CRG's passion for teaching beyond the limits of one nation or continent, thus proving that their course is not restricted by borders and boundaries. 

On my return to the United States, my research continues, and its success is indebted to my exceptional experience with the CRG.  I hope to remain in contact with the members of CRG.  The organization was a gracious host for me in India, and I am hopeful for a future association and/or collaboration with the group.