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Darjeeling Reconsidered: Histories, Politics, Environments

Amazon.com Price:  $35.05 (as of 04/03/2019 00:31 PST- Details)

Description

Darjeeling occupies a special place in the South Asian imaginary. With its Himalayan vistas, lush tea gardens, and brisk mountain air, Darjeeling used to be the consummate colonial hill-station. The romance with the “queen of the hills” lives on, as thousands of tourists (domestic and international) yearly flock to the hills to taste its world-renowned tea, soak up the colonial nostalgia, and glimpse mighty Mount Kanchenjunga. Darjeeling’s fame has now gone global and its legacy continues to fuel Hollywood and Bollywood fantasies. But this is only a part of Darjeeling’s story.

Darjeeling Reconsidered provocatively rethinks Darjeeling’s legendary status in the postcolonial imagination. Mobilizing diverse disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this definitive number of essays sheds fresh light at the region’s past and offers critical insight into the issues facing its people as of late. The historical analyses break with hackneyed colonial accounts to provide alternative readings of systems of governance, labour, and migration that shaped Darjeeling. The ethnographic chapters present state of the art accounts of dynamics that define life in 21st century Darjeeling: among them the realpolitik of subnationalism; Fair Trade tea; indigenous struggle; gendered inequality; ecological transformation; and resource scarcity. Through these eye-opening perspectives, Darjeeling Reconsidered figures Darjeeling as a very important web page for South Asian and Postcolonial Studies-and calls for a timely re-examination of the legend and hard-realities of this oft-romanticized region and its people. The book seeks a place at the shelves of postcolonial theorists, at the syllabi of undergraduate and graduate courses on South Asia, and in the rucksacks of intellectually curious visitors from everywhere the world to Darjeeling.

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