HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies Volume 34 Number 1 Article 8 Spring 2014 Flighty Subjects: Sovereignty, Shifting Cultivators, and the State in Darjeeling, 1830-1856 Catherine Warner University of Washington, [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya Recommended Citation Warner, Catherine. 2014. Flighty Subjects: Sovereignty, Shifting Cultivators, and the State in Darjeeling, 1830-1856. HIMALAYA 34(1). Available at: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol34/iss1/8 This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 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]. Flighty Subjects: Sovereignty, Shifting Cultivators, and the State in Darjeeling, 1830-1856 Acknowledgements I would like to thank Anand Yang and Purnima Dhavan for their suggestions and comments on this paper and, more generally, for their intellectual guidance, and Andrew Davidson for support and encouragement with the writing process. I would also like to thank Sara Shneiderman for her insightful comments on an earlier version of this article, presented as a paper at the Modern South Asia Workshop at Yale. The anonymous reviewers' comments were also much appreciated. This research article is available in HIMALAYA, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies: https://digitalcommons.macalester.edu/himalaya/vol34/iss1/8 Flighty Subjects: Sovereignty, Shifting Cultivators, and the State in Darjeeling, 1830–1856 Catherine Warner This paper focuses on the historical experiences means of securing labor, the Company officials of shifting cultivators who lived in the eastern denied the role of the state in accumulating Himalaya in the areas around Darjeeling, Eastern labor power. In addition, colonial discourse fixed Nepal, and Southern Sikkim in the early 19th shifting cultivators as backwards and in need century. These groups played an important role of protection, undermining their important in state-formation in the precolonial period, as contributions to state formation under the regionally expansive states relied upon them previous dispensation. By distancing itself from for labor, military levies, and revenue. Shifting patron-client relationships as vital to state cultivators were organized under headmen formation and discrediting these networks who dispensed justice, collected taxes, and of labor organization in favor of market logic, negotiated with the state on behalf of their the Company in theory moved the terms of clients. The author argues that such groups sovereignty towards territory rather than formed the basis of sovereignty on the frontier, people. where control over subjects was more significant Keywords: Darjeeling, borderlands, colonialism, history, than control over clearly demarcated territory. shifting cultivation. Patrons of labor were well-versed in political negotiations and dexterously managed the shift to East India Company rule in Darjeeling in 1835; however, the Company administrators changed the terms of governance, even as they drew upon the headmen’s services in accessing laborers. By positing the labor market as the appropriate HIMALAYA Volume 34, Number 1 | 23 Introduction Following the Anglo-Nepal War of 1814-1816, the East India Company assumed the right to adjudicate the border be- In April of 1925, a Lepcha in Dikchu, Sikkim, told an tween Sikkim and Nepal, signaling its territorial ambitions anthropologist a story about the bat who evaded paying in the eastern Himalaya (Aitchison 1862). In practice, the taxes. According to the storyteller, Chyope, in the past Company’s assumption of the right to arbitrate a spatially the birds had demanded revenue from a bat.1 “When defined, exclusive border between the two states produced Nun-bong-pono-ong-fo (the king of birds) demanded his little change until disputes within Sikkim spilled over the tax, he [the bat] showed his teeth, and snarled, saying he border into Nepal in the 1820s. The Company’s attempts was not a bird, but that he belonged to the family of rats to insert boundaries between Sikkim, Nepal, and its own (ka-lok) and would not pay any tax [to which birds were territory after Darjeeling’s annexation in 1835, depended subject].” The rat king, hearing this, came to collect his upon its ability to understand—in order to shape—local due, but the bat flourished his wings and insisted that, as a hierarchies, systems encompassing not only patron-client bird, he was exempt from paying any tax on rats. The two relationships but also their attendant social and econom- kings held a council and decided to kill the bat for refus- ic obligations. In this light, territorial disputes proved ing to pay any taxes. The next day, the bat casually hung inseparable from disputes about sovereignty over people. from the eaves of a thatched roof and loudly proclaimed As a colonial power, the East India Company was unable to that although soon he would be killed, he had many bat create strong linkages with Indian society or create hege- relations working in the service of their own king who monic influence at the grassroots level (Yang 1989; Guha would seek revenge. Overhearing this and fearing the bat’s 1997). Thus, even as the Company engaged patron-client many supporters, the two kings fled. Chyope explained in networks to procure laborers for building the hill station, conclusion: “So that is why the bat is free from all taxation. these unequal relationships could no longer be considered Everybody in the world pays some sort of revenue, even the basis for legitimate rule. The notion that sovereignty we human beings, but the bat is free and doesn’t. That is adhered to territory rather than to people became an es- why he always hides in the day time, and flies at night” sential fiction for early 19th century colonial governance. (Stocks 1975: 47-48). My argument builds upon the work of scholars who have Although the anthropologist, De Beauvoir-Stocks, record- noted the colonial state’s territorialization of governance ed this story some decades after the events of the period and move towards unitary, non-overlapping forms of I shall address—the East India Company’s annexation of sovereignty in contrast to the “divisible and negotia- Darjeeling from Sikkim in 1835 and the initial development ble” forms of a pre-colonial dispensation (Jalal 1995: 14). of the colonial hill station through the 1850s—it evokes Many scholars have also offered insights into the ways in key historiographical questions regarding sovereignty and which colonial rule was territorialized by creating geo- identity in the borderland. In the story, the kings, who graphical inequalities and then employing discourses that collect taxes on the basis of shared identity, collaborate naturalized these inequalities. Such trends often meant with one another to support their own authority vis-à-vis that forested and mountainous spaces demarcated as their respective subjects. Sovereignty, then, is depicted ‘indigenous’ became ruled as exceptional spaces in need as exclusive and vested in the relationship between ruler of authoritarian forms of control, as colonial discourses and subject, one based on shared qualities—one is either defined indigenous people as less capable of participating a subject of bats or rats or birds. This view of kingship, in the new colonial dispensation than other colonized interestingly, does not match the multi-ethnic model of South Asians (Sivaramakrishnan 1999; Rai 2004; Shneider- the Namgyal rulers of Sikkim with which the Lepcha sto- man 2010; Sharma 2011; Ludden 2012). In accordance with ryteller would have been most closely acquainted; rather, this changing notion of sovereignty, Company administra- the story suggests that state authority (as encompassed in tors described their efforts to attract and maintain manual the right to collect taxes) rests with the heads of clans or laborers for carrying provisions, clearing and preparing ethnic groups. For the subjects, belonging to such a group building sites, and constructing roads, as the creation of a meant protection from multiple, competing authorities, labor market where none had existed. By positing the mar- all of whom might claim taxes or forced labor, in return ket as the ideal and just system for appropriating labor, for subordination to a single ruler. Such patron-client the EIC administrators discredited and contained existing relationships were crucial foundations for building state patron-client relationships even as they utilized them to sovereignty in the pre-colonial dispensation and became gain access to laborers. This move undermined the power key sites for colonial intervention in the initial period of of labor patrons with whom pre-colonial states had formed Darjeeling’s development as a hill station.2 alliances to achieve a territorial presence in the frontier. 24 | HIMALAYA Spring 2014 The colonial state would become the arbiter of territory religion’ (namely Hinduism and Buddhism) and the re-defi- and leave the control of labor to the ‘market,’ effectively nition of ethnic identities (English 1985; Ortner 1989). In reversing the terms, rather than practice,