HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 35 Number 2 Article 12 January 2016 Producing Himalayan Darjeeling: Mobile People and Mountain Encounters Jayeeta Sharma University of Toronto,
[email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Sharma, Jayeeta. 2016. Producing Himalayan Darjeeling: Mobile People and Mountain Encounters. HIMALAYA 35(2). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol35/iss2/12 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License. This Research Article is brought to you for free and open access by the DigitalCommons@Macalester College at DigitalCommons@Macalester College. It has been accepted for inclusion in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies by an authorized administrator of DigitalCommons@Macalester College. For more information, please contact
[email protected]. Producing Himalayan Darjeeling: Mobile People and Mountain Encounters Jayeeta Sharma Introduction This article explores the social production of Darjeeling through the social and cultural This article explores the social production of Himalayan Darjeeling through the social and cultural encounters that encounters that helped transform a mountain helped transform a health resort—originally intended for health resort for colonial functionaries British colonial functionaries—into a vibrant mountain into a vibrant Himalayan hub for vernacular hub for vernacular modernity and local cosmopolitan- ism. Darjeeling’s evolution as a transcultural locale owed modernity and local cosmopolitanism. While much to the improvisational strategies and asymmetrical Darjeeling’s high-altitude setting inextricably relationships of and between the mobile historical subjects linked it to the intense exploitation of subaltern who constituted this mutable mountain space as much as it bodies, it evolved as a dynamic urban locality constituted them.