Subnational Enterprise: Militarized Mothering,Women’s Entrepreneurial Labour and Generational Dynamics in the Gorkhaland Struggle

Introduction

This is a poignant moment to write about women’s collective imaginations and work around Gorkha identity and mobilization. As I began drafting this article, the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) won the Indian elections in 2019 returning with absolute majority in the parliament by delivering its strong message of securing the nation and its borders. BJP’s continued hostility towards religious minorities and Dalits needs no validation. Such BJP-led aggression and violence gained more prominence after the suicide of Rohit Vemula in Hyderabad in 2016. In this context, however, the BJP and its regional political allies made historic inroads among Indian Nepalis living in Darjeeling (my primary field site for ethnographic work since 2004). BJP’s MP Raju Bista won the Darjeeling seat with a notable majority. The message from Darjeeling was clear—Nepali migrants from Darjeeling who had come to work for the British Army and tea plantations close to 200 years ago found in the rhetoric of the BJP a chance to address their liminal position within the Indian nation. They wanted to be legible as citizen minorities who ‘secure the border of the Indian nation and keep terrorists from neighboring countries in check’. ¹ Local newspapers in Darjeeling upheld a new moment in the mobilizations of Indian Nepalis (Gorkhas) marked by extreme nationalism as opposed to regionalism (Dewan, 2019). It became interesting to note that a so-called progressive subnational movement was losing its place in the jostle with militarized right-wing discourses of securitization, protection and rampant Islamophobia, in a context where minority rights had entered a new and treacherous playing field. One must think through what historical and contemporary realities continue to fuel these kinds of populist responses among vulnerable populations in India’s strategic borders.

The 2019 election was preceded by the last phase of the Gorkhaland agitation that entailed a 104-day complete shutdown of the hills from the middle to June to late September 2017 (enabled by strong arm tactics of the Chief Minister of West Bengal, Mamata Banerjee). Every aspect of life was disrupted. There was violence leading to the death of 13 civilians from Darjeeling and one police officer from West Bengal Police. A complete ban was imposed on internet in Darjeeling and its subdivisions. Cell phone connections were stalled. Local TV stations, which broadcast news about Darjeeling district, in addition to national outlets were stalled from operating. One unique aspect of this movement was the imposition of the ‘people’s curfew/janta curfew’ during times when the West Bengal tried to bring normalcy to the hills by forcibly opening businesses in the town. Unheard of in the second phase of the Gorkhaland movement in 2013, plantations were closed for the entire duration of the strike and workers had to struggle for almost a year to get their wage disputes and bonus payments resolved for the period of closure. Under these extenuating circumstances, women’s self-help groups (SHGs), community-based informal organizations and collectives of various kinds, led food drives, collected medicine, mobilized their older children to tutor younger ones for free so that they would not fall behind on school lessons.

This new context of Gorkhaland in its hyper-nationalist garb, with women at the front lines and trenches of a community’s struggle, compelled me to think through the question of women’s collective enterprise more deeply. I wanted to reflect upon the continuities and discontinuities between women’s subjective reflections and roles within the multiple phases of the Gorkhaland movement by paying particular attention to women’s collectives but also individual women’s entrepreneurial acts (sometimes in leadership positions). Indian Nepalis are marked as racialized subjects (just like their counterparts in the North Eastern states) based on phenotypical and cultural differences (Bora, 2019). In this context, I found particular frameworks within feminist theorization and documentation of minority (African American) women’s struggles in pre-civil rights United States (Daniel Barnes, 2016; Higginbotham, 1993) to be instrumental. Reading Darjeeling through Black Feminism was essential since it enabled me to address the complexities in women’s collective engagements and formulate the central concept in this article: subnational enterprise. Subnational enterprise should be understood as a conceptual node to capture the diverse forms of labour and entrepreneurship that is enabled by and enable militarized social reproduction and cultural production in rural and urban Darjeeling. Women call this form of work sakaunu (in Darjeeling Nepali) and instances of such are provided in relevant parts of the article. Sometimes they may even refer to more economic aspects of such labour as business/bisniss.

Women’s collective work in various phases of Gorkhaland underscores that the process of Gorkha community’s search to be legible and acceptable by the Indian state also unleashed a cultural politics of militarized social reproduction. In drawing attention to militarized mothering, my article complicates existing ideas about women’s entrepreneurship in India (especially as practices in the context of subnational enterprise). To look at the undercurrents in this form of women’s enterprise (only part of which is entrepreneurship), one has to identify how women suture elements of their contemporary work lives with the existence of a legitimate Gorkhaland struggle. This article also tries to avoid easy and essential readings of Gorkha women’s entrepreneurship and labour practices and calls for a de-essentialized intersectional perspective in building this framework of subnational enterprise through relevant and careful reading of Black Feminist readings of motherhood, related carework and also entrepreneurialism which is outlined next. The overlapping presence of plantation dynamics, political struggle and situated cultivation of racialized identities stemming from ethnic stereotyping associated with colonial labour recruitment shape the contours of subnational enterprise. The latter attends to specific exigencies of political moments to buttress the struggle for a separate state. These creative manoeuvres share some similarity with Lili Irani’s idea of ‘entrepreneurial citizenship’ (2019, p. 2) where she states that citizens can ‘construct markets, produce value, and do nation building all at the same time’. While Irani’s application of her concept is in the domain of neoliberal industrial/financial ventures, it is also useful to think through my own idea of subnational enterprise where innovations in entrepreneurialism economically, emotionally and culturally sustain a subnation (Gorkhaland) un-birthed.

In thinking through the framework of subnational enterprise, few ethnographies of women’s enterprise and entrepreneurialism in South Asia (Moodie, 2008; Purkayastha & Subramaniam, 2004; Radhakrishnan 2018; Sharma, 2008) were particularly useful. In addition to the growing body of South Asian feminist work which illuminates the complicated roles and subjectivities women occupied within social movements (Arya & Rathore, 2019; Roy, 2012; Sangari, 1996; Sinha Roy, 2006), I found Carla Freeman’s concept of ‘entrepreneurial selves’ to add a new dimension by examining the shifting meanings of women’s labour between multiple phases of the Gorkhaland movement in Darjeeling district, India. I uphold women’s enterprise through vignettes of women actors and activists from different phases of the Gorkhaland movement and argue that these entrepreneurial practices build on earlier forms of reproductive labour exemplified in decades of militarized mothering ubiquitous in the social life of Darjeeling. Based on these and other information I have collected about women’s involvement in the movement from the 1980s to the present, I urge us to move beyond a purely economic understanding of entrepreneurialism. Anthropologist Carla Freeman writes in her most recent work that entrepreneurialism is

always in formation—akin to the processual work of class, gender, race and culture—and inextricably bound up with these dimensions of identity…entrepreneurial labors increasingly exceed the formal boundaries of productive enterprise to include everyday facets of social reproduction…to permeate every crevice of conscious and even unconscious life. (Freeman, 2014, pp. 2–3, emphasis in original)

I contend that looking at enterprise through a socio-psychological lens attends to conflicting gendered subjectivities in imagining a Nepali state within India. It also enables us to take a more intersectional approach to understanding how a Nepali state is imagined and produced and made to work in women’s everyday lives, a process I call subnational enterprise. It entails women’s participation as—mothers, mediators, brokers, vigilantes, financiers, fighters, in groups or individually. One spin off of this entrepreneurial work is the nurturance of a militarized subnational identity and emerging Islamophobia in both rural and urban areas of Darjeeling and among the diaspora.

Subnational enterprise as a framework makes a unique contribution to South Asian development studies because of its transregional reach in interrogating imperial legacies of militarization and its hegemonic formations that influence how contemporary racialized minority subjects connect to and converse with these transregional legacies as they navigate and negotiate these pasts across generations of kinship, household, local and cross-border relationships. Further, for development studies, this article’s call to complicate and de-essentialize women’s entrepreneurship and forms of enterprise, with a critical perspective on subnationalist movements and agitations, will positively shape discourse on household and community-level movements among minorities and the ways in which gender, class mobility, aspiration and ethnicity come together to produce a complex political reality.

Within this framework, my specific assertion is that gendered militarized labour, women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and political mobilizations around subnational autonomy are intricately linked. To understand the relationship between these entities one needs to zero in on the generational dynamics of women’s collective engagement in upholding the martial identity of Gorkhas and the consequences of such preoccupation on the legibility of Gorkha subjects vis-à-vis the Indian state. I draw from Black Feminist scholarship on the nuances of mothering and community work, strains of Feminist International Relations perspectives that attend to the invisibility of gendered labour in situations of conflict combining them with emerging feminist work on entrepreneurialism which emphasize its socio-psychological aspects.

Everyday militarisms survive through women’s generational practices of social reproduction expressed in gendered enterprise and entrepreneurialisms. ² Militarized mothering is perhaps a dire strategy of reconstructing a community’s history and its narrative in situated ways. The fact that most Nepali men face the real possibility of unemployment after completing their education compels men to migrate to work at low-paying jobs in metropolitan areas. Amidst these strategies of migration, what stands to be really lucrative is if someone succeeds to get into the Indian Army. The Gorkhas or Indian Nepalis have a long history of serving in the army and with great pride. This work in post-Independence India comes with a lifelong handsome pension and possibilities of continued employment and opportunities in India’s private security industry or such opportunities in the Middle Eastern Gulf region.

This type of work among men has impacted other areas of sociocultural life. As you enter Darjeeling, the soldiers’ monument in Batasia Loop greets everyone. The newly constructed Gorkha Ranga Mancha has a Gorkha soldier in life size greet you from a prominent and elevated position. From young boys sporting army garb in everyday work and play to these place-making practices, cultural production of military service spills over from public arenas to private life where family members pray and hope that one of the boys will become a paltane (a soldier). Darjeeling’s regional identity uses hyper-nationalist military tropes to weave together the moral code for why Nepalis in India need a separate state (Gorkhaland, separate from the state of West Bengal). In Darjeeling, these tropes may explain why a dominant section of the non-elite population is attracted to the exclusionary ideology of the BJP. Nepali scholars describe this unfortunate turn in Darjeeling’s youth politics by stating that ‘the glorification of martial identity has itself become part of their subjection and subjugation as the overall discourse defining the contours of such identity has been flawed since the colonial period’ (Chetri & Thapa, 2016).

What we see in women’s collective kin and community work in Darjeeling shares similarities with what Daniel Barnes (2016, pp. 53–54) describes as intergenerational ‘race work’ of African American/Black women in the pre- and post-civil rights era. What stands out, that is so important to apply to the case of Indian Nepali mothers, is women’s navigation of the politics of respectability by upholding nationalist (read white and this case Hindu nationalist) standards of acceptability and decorum while trying to balance that activism to reform the state to end racialized violence meted out at Black men. Drawing from the works of Black scholar-activists like Joy James and Angela Davis, Barnes develops her framework of ‘strategic mothering’ that ‘operates as a creation of Black space in that Black women work in particular professions with an eye towards racial uplift, not just for the Black community but to change the perspectives of Whites as well’ (2016, pp. 53–54). This kind of strategic mothering exists due to a minority community’s crisis of belonging under extreme political economic and cultural racism. The history of Black women’s activism also throws up the paradoxical effects of Black mothering where ‘community caretaking sometimes supportive of, sometimes antithetical to radical black intellectualism’ and often taking the nationalist route (James, 1997, pp. 120–121, cited in Daniel Barnes, 2016, p. 54). In the context of South Asia, Malathi De Alwis also cautions about simplistic readings of mother’s movements as they may entrench gender and class hierarchies in intended and unintended ways (De Alwis, 2008, p. 153). These contradictions are very much apparent in how Nepali mothers in Darjeeling socialize their male kin to serve the nation while simultaneously fighting the Indian state’s racialized neglect. My assertion of a de-essentialized intersectional perspective is to attend to this complexity of women’s reproductive labour within minority communities and its political consequences. With this framework, I now turn to what I designate as women’s brokering work in the community.

My assertions in this article draw on 16 years of longitudinal ethnographic work in urban and rural areas of Darjeeling between 2004 and 2018. In this piece, I draw on life history interviews as well as unstructured interviews with men and women in Darjeeling, with a particular focus on women interlocutors whose narratives are placed in two sections of this article right after this introduction. The findings in this article relate to the challenges minority movements face when scaling up and connecting with a national and global audience. I advocate for grounded explorations of the relationship between militarization, discourses of belonging, gender identity and social media to explain how right and left agendas jostle within the regional autonomy movement. Left politics is manifest when demands are made to raise plantation wage, improve infrastructure but the cultural politics of placing these demands and the moral justifications rely on militarized tropes. Left leaning agendas in local politics and developmental politics are issues I have amply documented in my book Everyday Sustainability: Gender Justice and Fair Trade Tea in Darjeeling. The data presented here are the first categorical examination of the place of militarization and gendered social reproduction in Darjeeling.

Militarization and Militarized Mothering in Darjeeling

Indian Gorkhas—a pan-community identity adoption by Indian Nepalis—have a crisis of legibility vis-à-vis the Indian state. Their ways of being legible over the years are marked by movements anchored in forms of militarized mothering. In this section, I draw on the life history of Debika Rai and her son Ruben to show how women’s collective work of navigating the Gorkha legibility crisis, emotional management of vulnerable male kin, attempts to move away from plantation life and be socio-economically mobile in the context of rural Darjeeling prop militarized mothering. Contextual practices of mothering are tied up with politics of respectability and belonging that has become both a survival strategy and trap for Nepali mothers. Militarized mothering as gendered entrepreneurialism enables the social reproduction of the subnation and its legible allegiance to the state takes collective form in familial relationships and community work.

This glorification of martial identity is woven into the fabric of militarized mothering and its result is community-level reification and value of a paltane. A paltane is a male soldier who shows the promise of class mobility since he will get a military pension at the end of his service in the Indian Army. This paltane’s ambition continues to be collectively nurtured by militarized mothering. In rural areas of Darjeeling, kith and kin networks are mobilized to ensure that at least one son in the family gets recruited in one of the Gorkha battalions of the Indian Army. Retired army officers also find other doors opening for them as they can now invest in land and their families can aspire to have greater financial security. In plantations, mothers who have a paltane at home are envied by others whose sons were not so lucky. Daughters who are married to paltanes know they can afford goods and services that are not available to other families.

I met Ruben many years ago in 2004 during my research in Darjeeling’s plantations. He was then a mere five-year-old boy, gentle and shy. He was too young for the local government school his two sisters were already attending. He was one of the older children in the plantation creche and I would often play with him. I would be at the plantation creche after four when these kids’ moms would come to get their children on their way home after the days thika (daily-wage work of picking tea). Here, I would arrange with the women on where and when to meet for further conversations. Or, at times, I would accompany them home where we would chat while they made dinner.

In 2007, Ruben’s mother, Debika, had recently been widowed. Ruben’s father had recently died of alcohol-related organ failure at 39. Like many men in Darjeeling’s plantations, he was never gainfully employed but he helped quite a bit by finding odd jobs in Darjeeling town. He learned carpentry and would fix people’s meagre homes in the plantation. If his luck fared, builders in town would recruit him for a few weeks on a larger construction project. A kind man, he tried to help out with household chores since Debika was at the plantation all day. But alcoholism had wrecked his health. Debika lamented in our conversation once:

I was a very happy young bride. My sister raised her children on her own since behna (her husband) was a paltane (army man/soldier). They had money but he hardly got to see their daughters grow up. But now they are all together enjoying the pension. Here I am broke, alone and left to fend for my children. I have told Ruben that he has to try very hard to clear that army test no matter how good he is in his studies. In fact, behna (sister’s husband) is has already told us he will talk to his army recruiter friends.

I kept in touch with Debika over the years and saw Ruben’s path charted. I learned over the years that Ruben and his friends would frequently measure their chest width and try to practice sprinting to see how close they were to Indian Army’s recruitment standards. All this was in preparation for getting through the army. Ruben would frequently dress in an army-themed print shirt—a hand-me-down from his uncle. He would eventually get through the army recruitment test to Debika’s relief and satisfaction, after one failed attempt.

Ruben’s story is not the common one; not everyone gets through Indian Army’s gruelling physical test. Arbitrariness of tests in this intense environment of ethnicized recruitment creates anxiety for young male youth. More often, the dream of becoming a paltane was crushed on recruiting day when young teenage boys did not meet the physical and fitness requirements even if they had succeeded the written portion of the test. To keep Nepali boys motivated to go back to retake the recruitment test continues to be a product of women’s collective work of militarized mothering. Ubiquitous in rural areas, it offers what Cynthia Enloe (2000, p. 237) had labelled the ‘Gurkha formula’, which according to her could very well be the Scottish or African American formula alluding to the material and cultural reality for colonized minorities for ‘first class citizenship’ by working in the army.

In a region marked by massive male employment and substance abuse, vigilant mothering takes unique forms. Military metaphors imbue daily conversation. Homes proudly display pictures of sons in military uniform placed at times alongside photographs of male relatives who served the Indian Army. Sometimes there would be pictures from peacekeeping force jaunts in distant lands. As Bidhan Golay observes: ‘The British Indian Army and the tea gardens while competing with each other completed the process of colonization of the body of the “Gurkha”’ (Golay, 2006, p. 39). Debika and Ruben’s trajectory stands testament to this observation where the dream of a better future than a wage-suppressed un-dignified plantation life was military service.

Debika’s neighbour’s son had migrated to Chandigarh to work in a restaurant. He eventually died under mysterious circumstance, and the family was told that a truck had hit him. When the body was sent to the family, they found that there were surgical incisions to take out his kidneys. Debika’s neighbour’s son was a victim of organ trade. When narrating this incident, Debika remarked with tears in her eyes: ‘It is better to be a martyr as an army man rather than being killed as a chowkidar’, implying the everyday dangers that each Nepali youth have to navigate on their journey to find employment. Women in minority communities, like the Indian Nepalis, do the collective work to make Nepali men legible as respectable state subjects. Contemporary cultural productions of Nepali masculinity are deeply interwoven with these deliberate tactics of ‘strategic mothering’ through celebrating the Gorkha martial identity.

So far engagements with the imperial origins of Gorkha identity have been a topic of concern among Nepali scholars trying to theorize the origin and impact of the pan-Gorkha identity among Indian Nepalis. Indian Nepali scholar Tanka Bahadur Subba (1992, pp. 67–74) writes at length explaining why Nepali-speaking Indians—Nepalis—are different from Nepalese (citizens of Nepal). He and other scholars trace the orientalized recruitment strategies of the British imperialists who concluded that Gorkhas were a ‘martial race’. Such orientalized tropes, however, provide a powerful cultural anchor to the present attempts of Indian Nepalis to claim their rightful place within the Indian state by seeking a political solution anticipated to pave the way for a more respectable inclusion within the Indian nation state. The Indian Nepali community has experimented (and with modicum material and political gain) pursuing a tribal path (Chhetri, 2018a, 2018b) to garner the Indian state’s affirmative action resources. What has remained unexamined in this context is how this Gorkha martial identity remains a discursive force within families, especially those seeking a way out of plantation servitude. Amidst the plethora of regimental histories and origin stories of Gorkhas’ gallantry, as exemplified in books by some Nepali scholars like Bandana Rai, Chhetri (2006, p. 3) underscores the absence of research on the contemporary engagements with these categories of the past.

In her engagement with US everyday militarisms, Patricia McFadden expresses concerns over essentialized feminist theorizing(s) of motherhood, especially in the US context where militarization has reached epic proportions. For her, there are many ‘dangers and seductiveness of motherhood as a construct and as an identity of refuge’ (2008, p. 65) in times of war and crisis since motherhood is ‘a slippery slope to conservatism whether women activists admit it or not’ (2008, p. 65). She reasons that the fear of populist anti-feminist backlash has affected the ‘taboo status of critical analysis and debate around motherhood and militarism…leaving the discursive space largely undertheorized (and basically conservative) within feminist scholarship’ (2008, pp. 65–66). Mothering is such a naturalized force in the social fabric that it manifests itself in collective form and must be addressed in situations since ‘pain or loss, especially of a child who is loved and wanted, can so easily become a dangerous rallying point for incipiently conservative emotions and practices’ (2008, p. 66). This aspect of motherhood manifests itself in Darjeeling, where the celebration of martyrs is evident in public places of villages and towns. In well-to-do middle-class communities, the old men who served in the British Gurkha regiments are esteemed and marked (even posthumously). As described to me by a recent army recruit of just 19 years old, ‘Kaila baje served in the golden years of paltane life’—implying that the British Regiment pensions were handsome and the job more prestigious. Men sport hand me down military gear even if they are not army recruits. The most prominent leaders of the many phases of the Gorkhaland agitation have been men with a military connection. A Nepali journalist claims that Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) leader Subhash Ghishing’s latching on to and popularizing the Gorkha/Gorkhali label was due to his army background (Tamang, 2020). It is under his leadership that the Government of India formalized Indian citizenship of Gorkhas through gazette notification number 2601/6/88-ICI.

In the early 2000s when I began working in Darjeeling’s rural areas, Ghishing’s popularity was at its peak, even though there were murmurs in Darjeeling town about his problematic policies. Even now he enjoys support among older women who remember the Gorkhaland agitation of the 1990s. Comparing him to Darjeeling’s new political leaders, he is still revered as the most effective leader. Dhanmaya Tamang, a retired plantation worker I have known for many years, stated: ‘he is the true son of Darjeeling, born in the plantation, matured in the Indian Army. We raise our sons to be as fearless as him so that they can learn to command the central government’s respect.’

The ubiquity of militarized mothering in Darjeeling is also evident in women’s political performances. In political rallies, we see an elderly lady dressed in traditional Nepali choli wielding a khukri, caught in a striking pose and cheered on by a large group of women of various ages in a Gorkhaland protest during the 2017 phase. This image was circulated widely on social media by a pro-Gorkhaland local news outlet, Darjeeling Chronicle. It struck me because it captured the essence of vigilant militarized mothering which has remained a stable economic and cultural force in Darjeeling’s social life and a conduit through which right-wing politics gets buttressed in the area. It complements statements I heard in modest lower middle-class homes. Dhanmaya Tamang in our conversation also mentioned that ‘our sons are not terrorists; they fight terrorists in Kashmir’. Dhanmaya’s unabashed pride for the martial past and present of Indian Nepalis and its impact on the public life of Gorkhas and the political possibilities it has engendered. The latter includes fear of the Bangladeshi Muslim migrants who are ‘favoured by Mamata Banerjee’.

These situated narratives and related livelihood practices relate to another observation of Patricia McFadden, who cautions against ‘uncritical embrace of the notion of motherhood’ which can ‘easily distract from the less intimate issues of militarism and state impunity, particularly when such practices are deployed against those who are not our kin or social counterpart’ (2008, p. 66). What McFadden describes is amply evident in the collective care work that mothers and sisters do at the family and community level. Feminist scholars increasingly attend to these forms of social reproduction inter-generationally in communities affected by protracted conflict. Darjeeling’s mothers have waged a silent war both for and against the Indian state’s efforts to discipline Indian Nepalis. According to one of the Indian Nepali scholars, ‘The British Indian Army and the tea gardens while competing with each other completed the process of colonization of the body of the “Gurkha”’ (Bidhan Golay, 2006, p. 39). There is much truth in this observation since the collective work women do to make Nepali men legible in certain ways and contemporary cultural productions of martial identity is very much an imperial by-product. Indian Nepalis thus engage in a politics of ethnicized exceptionalism to navigate the psychological and material impediments of the racialized violence of the Indian state. Martial identity is one such strategy which is actively cultivated by women.

The mighty khukri/knife-yielding Gurkhas were celebrated as the loyal hard-working servants of the British empire, as opposed to Darjeeling’s indigenous inhabitants like Lepchas (Pradhan, 2017, p. 73). Historian Queeny Pradhan also details the colonial practice of ethnic classification of Nepalis distinguishing them from Lepchas, plains people, and adivasis:

Their dexterity and resourcefulness was expressed in the various ways in which they used their khukri: slim, genteel, smiling, nimble Nepaulese … armed with their universal kukri, or short knife, stuck in their girdles, with which they do most of their wonderful things, and which is at one and the same time, a pen knife, a carver, an axe, a tooth-pick, a hatchet, a spoon, a knife and fork, all in one as well as a weapon of defense should occasion require. (Avery, 1878, p. 16, cited in Pradhan, 2017)

Pradhan further writes that this kind of trait-based evaluation of labouring capacity, dexterity and skill led to a hierarchical classifying system noticeable in the colonial discourse on Darjeeling:

The Nepalese emerged as the largest and the most important component of the indigenous community in Darjeeling due to the policy of deliberate encouragement by the colonial state … the Nepalese were placed on the highest rung on the labour pool, the Lepchas were placed at the bottom of the scale. The rest of the rest of the ‘polyglot’ population of Darjeeling was placed in between. (Pradhan, 2017, p. 77)

The ambiguity of classification politics is also evident in women’s collective arrangements of bribes to local brokers and contacts who have come to know army recruiters. Women facilitate such processes to a large extent. Debika admitted to me that through her paltane behna (brother in law in the army), she and other women in the plantation and adjoining areas who had young sons learned where and when bribes would be necessary either before or after Indian Army’s physical test.

The labour of mothering is multifaceted as evident from the work of women described in this section. Documenting these everyday forms of labour and collective work is important since women’s contributions are often undocumented and conceal social reproduction and emerging cultural productions. Thus, Fatimah Kant argues for writing more pointedly about women’s hidden roles in resistance (in her case of Kashmir conflict, 2018, p. 47). In the next section, I detail another aspect of the labour of subnational enterprise—brokering. This can be seen as everyday suturing where women connect the disparate aspects of Gorkha life and memory to emergent politics. This may entail peculiar cultural productions as well as financial entrepreneurship.

Brokering as Collective Work

The Gorkhaland movement’s leadership has remained male dominated. Women’s narratives about the movement are often laced with highlighting women’s work in preventing violence, in brokering deals with the police, keeping household calm and attending to calls to participate in big public events when the leaders requested. Women’s brokering work was particularly important during the first phase of the Gorkhaland agitation as evident from my conversations with the women leaders of the GNLF (the party which led the first agitation in the 1980s). In 2011, when I interviewed her, Indrakala Pradhan was in her late 60s and worked for a local NGO. She belonged to what many refer to as the Nepali upper class which gained wealth and power after the first Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council was formed in the later 1980s. Pradhan claims to have been a founder of the Gorkha National Women’s Organization but laments that no one remembers their work. She emphasized the strategy of this women’s group within Subhash Ghising’s GNLF was to emphasize the political solution to the Darjeeling issue and to ensure that she personally along with her female compatriots would convert people in communist strongholds of Tukvar and Bijanbari but daring to speak in public against the ruling communists. Pradhan, in recounting her work, stated:

We wanted to cleanse the fear and build our base—our group did not wait for security updates. We fought the battles on the street. Do you remember the infamous and very violent 34th Battalion of the Central Reserved Police Force sent to quell our agitation? No one dared to veer near them—those traitors were killing our sons, but we stood up to them.

Apart from brokering loyalty and building the GNLF’s base on the hills, Ms Pradhan also claimed to have served as the mediator between the Indian Congress leaders (like Inderjeet Khuller) and GNLF leaders during the 1980s Gorkhaland agitation.

Women recount everyday incidents of peace-making. Bindu Rai, who was close to 65 years in 2012, mentioned how Nepali male activists and the state government imposed Central Reserve Police Force (CRPF) men would frequently lock horns. Often CRPF men would be from Darjeeling and they felt torn between their jobs to put down agitators while also knowing the importance of Gorkhaland. ‘It was tough seeing bhai bhai ko larai (brothers fighting). Often, we would call these men to our homes for meals when feasible so that they understood that we cared for their job duties’, said Bindu Rai. While these activities remain in the regions’ oral history, they fail to rise up to a level where they get documented within sensationalist narratives of the Gorkhaland movement. Women practised everyday peace-making by brokering deals by doing the kind of kin and community work which is also apparent in contemporary bouts of the movement.

Populist politics in Darjeeling relies on episodic rekindling of the demand for a separate Nepali homeland (state)—Gorkhaland. In moments when social mobilization around this demand is not overt, the performance of Nepali loyalty to the Indian nation is expressed through various discourses and material practices. At the opportune moment, an attack on these subliminal desires and practices leads to rejuvenation of the cause. The subliminal desires depend on women’s collective work of keeping alive this populist Gorkha dream in everyday life.

To substantiate an instance of such an event and the build up to it, it is necessary to turn to events in the year 2007. That summer of 2007 was an exciting one in every Nepali household in Darjeeling and in India. In Darjeeling the monsoons were weeks away. Women in the household had finished plucking tealeaves and completed other household chores for the day in preparation for watching a popular TV show—The Indian Idol. This season of The Indian Idol was very special for the villagers because Prashant, a Nepali soldier (paltane-turned policeman) and native boy from Darjeeling, was among the top claimants of the title, competing with talented singers from other regions of India—a rare occasion. Prashant’s significance in the moral world of Nepali women was revealed to me in a comment made by my host, ama (mother of the house), while she checked on people who had come to watch TV in her house to see if they needed prepaid cell-phone vouchers. She had purchased these vouchers in bulk to vote for Prashant when the TV anchors announced the voting time. As we gathered in front of the TV, ama told me with great excitement, ‘We have to make Prashant win, we know he might not be the best singer out there but he is our boy, he made us proud. We pāhādis are loyal to our boys despite the many challenges we face every day at work and home, we have protected them always, and this time he is going to win.’ ³

These events formed the backdrop of the second phase of the Gorkhaland movement’s that began in the autumn of 2007 and started largely as a way to overthrow the GNLF from local governing bodies. The GNLF was accused of not putting enough support behind Prasant. Prasanti, the daughter of the house, became quite active in the second phase and when I enquired about the nature of her participation, she remarked that there was a lot of sakaune kaam (procurement work) involved in the movement and women were absolutely necessary for its day-to-day operation. Compared to the first phase of the Gorkhaland movement of the 1980s, women were more visible this time around within and outside the Nari Morcha of the GJM (Gorkha Janamukti Morcha). She further remarked stating: ‘Netaharu Gorkhaland ko mang lai business banai sakecha, tara Gorkhaland hamro pani to business jastoi ho’ [The political leaders have made a business out of the demand for Gorkhaland, but Gorkhaland is women’s business too]. Interestingly, similar comments were being made more forcefully after the failure of this third phase to make any notable progress in the search for a separate Nepali state.

Let us return to the nuances of these conversations before we get into more detail about the dynamics of subnationalism and the multiple layers of sakaunu. The comments from Prasanti and ama point to two important aspects of the Nepali struggle for subnational autonomy—first, the constant entrepreneurial work of planning and procuring for the ethnic cause at the household level, which entailed the affective management of male anxiety within families, in the context of Darjeeling’s chronic economic stagnation and accompanying male unemployment and out migration. Second, the metaphor of ‘business’, which was uttered in English, alluded to the creative work that women do to make Gorkhaland and the quest for autonomy a reality in everyday life. The equation of sakaunu as business is derived from household-level fundraising women assist with during times of agitation. My recent interviews reveal that a lot of women assisted with local rallies, not just through filling the venues and being on the frontline but contributing their SHG savings or collecting money through informal revolving credit groups in plantations (called Ghumauri; see Sen, 2017). The procurement of vouchers for supporting the Nepali Indian Idol contestant is another creative venture. More recently, women in non-plantation basti areas have used their SHG savings to make necessary deposits at local panchayats to secure NREGA work for men in their villages. Sakaunu therefore entails much more than financial support of the agitation, but it is a way for women to creatively leverage material resources for affective management of male anxiety at the community and household level.

But sakaunu had many other layers. In the context of household work, it could mean petty trade which Nepali women in rural areas are very adept at. This form of everyday hustling included selling items for trade. These networks also brought in news and views about local politics and what their communities’ men were engaged in. Sakaunu could involve work for the local Samaj (village-level social institutions) or providing reciprocal labour at the neighbour’s house. A metaphor for helping out, assisting, managing or paying bribes for son’s careers in the army.

Read through the lens of more than 16 years of learning from Nepali women from all walks of life, sakaunu also meant care work critical for dealing with the successive setbacks Indian Nepalis to mitigate their precarious and ‘deterritorialized’ (Golay, 2006) existence. After the initial years of celebrating the Gorkha Hill Council (formed at the end of the first phase of the agitation in the early 1990s), frustration set in among men and women since the Hill Council could not provide a panacea for the lack of economic options for men from Darjeeling. Ama’s comments upheld a crucial aspect of the Nepali tea plantation workers’ subjective feelings about their role in Nepali struggle for rights and respect within India but also nurturing Nepali boys often displaying forms of militarized motherhood, despite the intense male surveillance of Darjeeling’s women’s lives. Ama’s statement, ‘this time he is going to win’, helps contextualize the feelings of disappointment that permeates the subjectivities of Nepali people who failed to get a separate state, Gorkhaland, during their movement for it in the 1980s, hence the tone of determination. Further, her comment, ‘We pāhādis are loyal to our boys despite the many challenges we face every day at work and home’, is a reflection of the steadfastness of Nepali women workers (in plantations and outside) to support their paltane boys and community members in a scenario where male unemployment and substance abuse had reached its height. But this form of critical movement-related care work also heighted women’s desire for respectable inclusion in their home-grown subnational movement for Gorkhaland and therefore, ama’s comment, ‘We have stood by our boys…..we have protected them.’

This kind of strategic community work is this seen throughout different phases of the movement and among differently placed Nepali women from Darjeeling from different generations. 9 October 2017 was the first strike-free day after a 104-day shutdown of the hill district in this third major outburst of the more than 100-year-old Gorkhaland struggle. I called Shanta to enquire how things were upon receiving a WhatsApp message from her after the 104-day internet ban being over in Darjeeling district. I immediately called, relieved and excited about the return of normalcy; however, she was not able to talk beyond a minute or so; she was rushing over to catch the last morning junga (car) to Lebong where she urgently needed to deposit money from her SHG. She requested: ‘Aile hatar cha la—feri phone garnuhos—business me dherai loss bhayo’ [I am rushing now, can you please call again, we have made many losses in our SHG business]. During the strike, Shanta and I had spoken few times since phone connections were also hampered, and, in the few times that we spoke two points of anxiety emerged—hundred days ko kam (National Rural Employment Guarantee Act/NREGA work for 100 days) and the losses their SHGs various money-earning ventures had already suffered. In this context, the bank deposit was very important since SHG group members in Shanta’s village often brokered contracts in the local panchayats for village based projects where their husbands and brothers could work (these days the second most viable income-generation avenue in case the boys were not found to be good enough to join the Indian Army). The 100 days of contract work in a year would bring in a good chunk of money to expand the household income but it would be a psychological boost for male kin since well-paying jobs for rural Nepali men were few and far between unless they migrated to an urban location in India. I see in Shanta and her SHG’s work a form on brokering that is quite common in Darjeeling’s rural areas.

While the Gorkhaland movement’s key agenda seemed to oscillate between economic underdevelopment and identity issues as a key organizing strategy of the ideological platform, collectively women from both rural and urban areas enabled the centring of a militarized subnational identity. Gorkha sacrifice to the Indian nation and rekindling the martial past and present of Gorkhas was key here. This is most evident in the work of activist lawyer Bandana Rai based in Delhi. Rai, in her many media releases on her YouTube channel and interviews, has called for a re-signification of the ‘bahadur’ stereotype. This stereotype is a derogatory trope that is often used in media to refer to Nepali men who work as loyal guards, cooks and is seen to be associated with Nepali men even in Bollywood films. Bandana Rai in 2017 also became one of the leaders of the newly formed national body to work for Gorkhaland. In in an interview, she passionately called for a re-signification of the term bahadur. She urged people to remember that its actual meaning is associated with bravery and that collectively Indian Gorkhas needed to establish that. This project of ‘re-signification’ of the bahadur label is also at the heart of the fierce nationalism of Indian Nepalis and was used strategically in the second Gorkhaland movement to also debunk questions of Nepalis’ loyalty to the Indian nation vis-à-vis Nepal (in the context of India’s open border with Nepal over years). Interestingly, GSSS activist Bandana Rai’s book Gorkhas: A Warrior Race was published in 2009 when the second Gorkhaland agitation was brewing and she has been the most popular face of the agitation in Delhi in its third phase.

While left out of any formal negotiations/talk between political parties in Darjeeling and the BJP government in Delhi during the time of the most recent agitation—Rai along with a few other organizers in Delhi had a tremendous presence in social media. She mobilized Nepali youth in Delhi to get behind this project of re-signifying the cultural face of Gorkhas within India. Despite BJP’s unpopularity in the hills, Rai is known to have connected with the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh in Delhi. Here is what she had to say in a recent interview where the ambiguity of the cultural identity of an Indian Nepali is apparent: ‘We need new ways to make us noticed’, Rai explained: ‘In order to get people on our side, it is important that the rest of India knows us well. Our image, sadly, is still limited to that of warriors ready to shed blood. But we are much more. They must get to know us’. ⁴

While social media use has been a marked feature of this third phase of the agitation the project of emotional management of Nepali identity and particularly the insecurities of male Nepali youth is something that has been a constant feature of Indian Nepali communities and is very much at the core of Gorkhaland in its new avatar. It became most apparent to me in the summer of 2007 when Prashant Tamang was a contestant for the Indian idol which I have discussed before. Prashant Tamang Fan Clubs became major platforms for recruiting women in the GJM and their leadership was noted through entrepreneurial potential of mobilizing support for the sub-nation/Gorkhaland through people’s support (see also Rai, 2015, p. 49).

Women’s collective work upheld in this section demonstrates how women have nurtured subnational desire, managed masculine affect, held peace and strategized to uphold a certain kind of politics over the years. Their brokering work forms a cornerstone of subnational enterprise. Sometimes in traditional left political analysis of autonomous movements, complex desires of ordinary movement participants are looked over. This omission affects a more holistic appraisal of the contradictory tendencies within liberatory movements. While looking for autonomy within the Indian nation, Gorkha subnationalism takes a circuitous route to buttressing a crude form of nationalism where gendered labour and affect are key.

Conclusion

The 2020 Shaheen Bagh protests in Delhi are now being framed as part of a global fourth wave of feminist uprising (Kurian, 2020). ⁵ It was encouraging to see religious minorities, especially minority women fighting for their constitutional right to belong, by occupying public space in a nation’s capital protesting against the Citizenship Amendment Bill and associated National People’s Registry. But poor and minority women’s politics in collective form also have other ramifications as argued and demonstrated by South Asian feminists (Sen, 2009) studying the Hindu right’s women’s mobilizations from a granular level—living in communities where the pull of right-wing politics is palpable and empowering. The scenario I uphold here has ramifications for deeper understanding of why right-wing politics may enter locales through women’s collective work of reconstructing community history and collective and individual selves building on imperial/colonial categories. Unfortunately, only certain kinds of academic engagements with minority women’s politics have defined feminist work in India. It is time to engage with the complexities of women’s collective agency at the margins of the state, in out-of-the-way places to unpack the complexity of the present moment by contextualizing structural violence through a de-essentialized intersectional perspective.

Gendered subnational enterprise in Darjeeling is perhaps best understood as ‘not just a particular path of income generation and consumption but also a new way of living and feeling that is shaped by and simultaneously giving new expression to gendered, classed and racialized subjectivities’ (Freeman, 2014, p. 9). The few vignettes that I present here are an effort to also see if unmooring the discussion of entrepreneurialism from discussions of neoliberal self and subject formation at this present historical juncture in Darjeeling is productive to understand the predicaments of Nepali subnationalism spanning hundred years. While the strategic use of women as the movement’s public face, whether from above or below, may oscillate, their everyday work of producing and reproducing ‘individual selves and collective identities’ (Jeffrey & Basu, 1997) continues. Let us not essentialize the agentive work of Nepali women but make visible the political economies of everyday sustainability (see Sen, 2017) that harbour this unique cultural and economic form of subnational enterprise. One of Darjeeling women’s main contributions/way outs/agency is to entrench a militarized cultural citizenship in the context of subnationalism. Their consent for this movement has to be seen through the lens of nurturing a tricky politics of difference. Since being middle class in rural Darjeeling has such strong associations with military labour and recruitment, the cultural work of subnational enterprise has a deep political economic context. It is important to think through what liberatory politics really means in the context of more than a hundred years of Gorkhaland struggle for subnational autonomy within India.