Anxious Belongings: Anxiety and the Politics of Belonging in Subnationalist Darjeeling

Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this article, I question how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In Darjeeling, India, anxieties over belonging—what I term “anxious belongings”—have fueled a particularly mercurial subnationalist politics, involving recurrent agitations for a separate state of Gorkhaland. Situated amid these interplays of anxiety, politics, and belonging, I identify anxious belonging as a collectively embodied phenomenon—at once historical, social, and pregnant with political possibility. As I show, these anxieties are deeply rooted in body and time. Today, they remain as unsettling as they are formative of a people and their politics. Thinking anthropologically about the origins and sociopolitical life of anxiety in Darjeeling, with this article I signal new ways of understanding—and perhaps anticipating—the volatilities that attend the politics of belonging worldwide. Anxious belonging accordingly comes into view as a dimension of and potential for markedly agitated forms of life and politics.