Environmentalism in the Darjeeling hills: an inquiry

This article focuses on the discourse on environmentalism in the Darjeeling hills, which has been hidden and/or overshadowed by factors such as ethnicity, nationalism and state-making. Centring on what I call the ‘environmentalism of the hills’, this article examines the history of environmentalism in the Indian Himalayas that was shaped by how British colonialism controlled territories, resources and subjects. I show how colonialism resulted in a distinct separation between humans and nature as suggested by Deborah Bird Rose (2013). Identifying the Darjeeling hills as one of the important locations for Himalayan scholarship, I conceptualise the ‘environmentalism of the hills’ as one of the possible ways of rethinking the debate on environmentalism in the Himalayas. In this article, I develop a framework that encourages an exchange of views on different varieties of environmentalism in academic scholarship, taking into account specific local histories and cultural contexts, and how these are embedded in and shaped by more encompassing larger ideational frameworks.