Crooked tales from the hills
the hills and proving disastrous for the tea gardens and tourism. According to a report by this newspaper, these industries have taken a hit of about ~400 crore this year.
Most Bengalis living in the plains have reacted to these disturbances with a mix of disgust and alarm, but academic and columnist Parimal Bhattacharya, once a resident of the hill station, looks at it with a more empathetic lens in his book. “No party with a support base in the plains of West Bengal can dare engage with a statehood demand of the hill people — that will amount to political hara-kiri,” he writes, at the end of his book, explaining that for Bengalis it is nearly impossible to think of Darjeeling without blinkers of nostalgia. At the same time, he is sympathetic to the demands of Darjeelingeys: “I don’t know if that state will ever be born, and what price in blood will be paid for it, or what its shape will be. But I do hope that the wounds in the minds of the hill people will heal one day.”
Such a response is the result of living in the hill town, where Mr Bhattacharya had gone in the early nineties as a young college professor. As he knows, Darjeeling is not merely a town. “Perhaps Darjeeling is not a town, perhaps it is a narration that is being put together for more than a century now,” he writes in the middle of the book. A few pages later, he changes his definition: “Darjeeling exists in a way of seeing, something that is wrapped around this hill town like a mantle of mists.” Mr Bhattacharya has not only mastered this way of seeing, but has also injected himself into this narrative, implicating himself in its fate. Consequently, it is difficult to pigeonhole his book into a neat genre: It is not only a memoir, or a history, or natural history, or anecdote — it is everything at once, and more.
The book is informed by other texts: Satyajit Ray’s Kanchenjungha (1962), Nepali short stories of Indra Bahadur Rai and Indra Sundas, the poetry of Jibanananda Das, Rabindranath Tagore as well as Andrew Marvell, and even esoteric texts such as Fred Pinn’s books on Louise Mandelli, a planter and ornithologist, whose great collection of local birds and their eggs now adorn the shelves of the British Museum and the Natural History Museum in Darjeeling. It is also filled with interesting dramatis personae: the narrator’s grandfather, his friends and colleagues, his students and strangers, as well as his friend Julia, an English researcher who comes to Darjeeling to study some Lepcha settlements.
Mr Bhattacharya’s Dadu – grandfather – was the only person in his family to support his decision to go to Darjeeling, only a few years after the first phase of the violent Gorkhaland movement that had claimed many lives. “Dadu was a pucca sahib trapped in the body of a Bengali babu... his favourite flower was the daffodil, though he had never set his eyes on one. But daffodils bloomed in Wordsworth’s poetry and that was enough for him.” While the description is humourous, Mr Bhattacharya is aware of how his grandfather – and he – were products of the British colonial project in India and the Victorian education philosophy of Thomas Macaulay. “It was thanks to him [Macaulay] that I went to Darjeeling to teach English literature to the young people of the hills.”
This self-consciousness colours his interaction with Julia as well as his student and Gorkhaland activist, Newton Subba. This is important as some might say the Bengali refusal to acknowledge Gorkhaland is akin to a colonial sentiment. The student explains to his teacher why Bengalis could never understand the Nepali demand for statehood: “In Kolkata people mistake us for the Chinese, and when we got to Delhi we are treated as Tibetan refugees.” “But isn’t this true about all the people of the Northeast,” asks the naive teacher. The prompt reply: “But then they have their own states. We don’t.”
With Julia, there is a dramatic reversal of positions. “Julia always called our country’s Independence the transfer of power... She viewed the town built by her own countrymen from a perspective I did not have... Before I met her, I used to grope my way through the mist of trite nostalgia; Julia offered me bifocals.”
It is difficult to pigeon-hole his book into a neat genre: It is not only a memoir, or a history, or natural history, or anecdote — it is everything at once, and more
Memoirs of a Hill Town Parimal Bhattacharya Speaking Tiger 194 pages; ~300