A SEARCHING POLITICS

Anxiety, Belonging, Recognition

HOURS AFTER DARK, I find the village council president squatting over a small fire, seething with anger at the anthropologist in his midst. He casts me a sideways glance, then turns away with sudden revulsion. In his hands is a dead chicken. Feathers stick to his calloused fingers; others float seemingly suspended on the tense air between us. I squat down beside him as the flames ribbon over the lines in his face before they leap into the night. He appears to be trembling.

"Sir," I say, "I heard you came to my house this afternoon looking for me."

He shoots a look of disgust into the fire, responding gruffly, "No."

He works the bird with redoubled vehemence. I try again. "But, sir, my landlord told me you came."

"No, I didn't come!" he snaps back, now visibly shaking.

I don't know what I have done to upset him, so I wait. As he plumes the last feathers, I engage him again. "I heard there was some problem with my survey."

"What is this survey? You come here and ask these questions: 'When did your family migrate from Nepal? Why did they come? How long have they lived in this village?'" Suddenly, his upwelling anger cuts off his speech.

"No, no ... let's talk about this. I didn't mean to upset anybody. Why are you so upset?"

"I am the president of the village council. If you want to ask questions about the village this is fine, but these questions of 'When did you come? Why did you come?' I am the president! You can't ask these questions!"

Suddenly it starts to make sense. Earlier that day, I met with a new assistant to help me conduct a simple survey of the village. Having lived there for seven months, I assumed it would be a straightforward project. I left the survey forms with my assistant and told him to await further instruction. Apparently, he had not. And now something had gone terribly awry.

"Please forgive me," I tell the president. "Now I understand that I should have cleared this survey with you."

"Oh, yes, you should have ... but this business of 'When did you come to Darjeeling? From where in Nepal?' You can't ask these questions." His temper resurging, his tone again becomes aggressive.

"Wait!" I say assertively. "What's the problem? Listen, you and I both know, we all know: the people here, their ancestors came from Nepal."

His antagonism checked, he is taken aback. He begins shaking his head back and forth, before begrudgingly admitting: "Okay, Okay. We know, we know that! But you can't ask these questions ... That would be proof. If we put our signature here [inscribing his signature on his hand like it was paper] ... That would be proof!"

This admission of the obvious now out in the open, the tension dissipates and I breathe a tempered sigh of relief. Clearly, this is not the time to hash out these matters, so we agree to a meeting (for me, more like a tribunal) with the village leadership the following morning. As I get up to leave, I place my hand on the president's shoulder in hopes of conveying my sincerest apology. He shakes his head, staring only into the fire.

* * *

The village night can be especially dark when one is in trouble. On the clock and with the imperatives of apology pressing upon me, I thus began a frenetic search for understanding. As I moved through the village long after gates had been shut and front doors locked, it was easy for me to reconstruct the immediate backstory of an overzealous research assistant, a wary village leader, and a gag order that spread like wildfire. The deeper history of anxiety was more opaque, yet frighteningly present.

Since arriving in Darjeeling, the Nepali-speaking Gorkhas have been beset with uncertainties over their place in India. Generations of discrimination, precarity, and exclusion have imparted to these groups deep-seated anxieties over being-in and being-of India. These anxieties about belonging — what I call anxious belonging — are deeply rooted in body and time. Through the years, they have fueled an array of identity-based movements. These movements have, in turn, constituted a categorically searching politics, in which the terms of mobilization may suddenly shift — say, from Gorkha to tribal — but the affective undercurrents remain alarmingly the same. Surging one moment, receding the next, taking this form, then that, anxious belonging has consequently made for a particularly volatile — or charged — ethnopolitics in Darjeeling. My goal here is to understand the nature of that charge.

I begin with my harrowing encounter with the village president not to relive the regrettable disturbance I caused my neighbors, but rather to foreground the histories, anxieties, and desires that animate the ethno-contemporary in Darjeeling. Doing so, I offer an alternative reading of these struggles for rights, recognition, and autonomy. I frame these movements as, beyond all else, a politics to belong in India. This requires tracing a history of anxiety from the precarious conditions of colonial life in Darjeeling, through the violent Gorkhaland Agitation of the 1980s, and into the designs of the twenty-first-century tribe. Involving, as it did, a shift from a violent ethno-nationalist movement to a more indigenous-based politics, the tribal turn provides a compelling case study of the ethno-contemporary — one that signals the broader contours of this global conjuncture while underscoring the specific histories (and energies) that shape the ethno-contemporary in particular places at particular times. Examining this shift from Gorkha to tribal politics, this chapter aims to raise a deeper set of questions about the conditions that drive communities into intermittently violent and ethnological relations with the state and themselves. Toward that end, let me return to the crisis with which we began.

* * *

Minutes before my meeting the next morning, I am pacing nervously near the village temple when I run into my friend and neighbor Deepak. "Deepak, what happened?" I ask.

"It's fine, there is just that one question that is a problem," he tells me.

"Which one?" I ask, pulling the form from my bag.

Scrolling down the questions with his finger, "This one," he says. "'How many generations ago did your family migrate from Nepal?' The people around here are scared of what will happen to this information. If we put our signature on this, then people are scared it will be proof, and if the government gets it, they will send us...