Suchergebnisse

Micro-entrepreneurship has historically played an important role in the country's economic growth, environmental sustainability and employment generation. More specifically, it is vital in regions where large-scale industries are not viable due to geographical barriers, as it plays a significant driving force in promoting regional balance, reducing disparities between plains and hills, and preserving the traditional material culture of the diverse ethnic groups and tribes of different regions. Based on fieldwork conducted in different areas of the Kalimpong hills, this work will attempt to underscore the micro-entrepreneurs life experiences and perceptions towards the challenges concerning entrepreneurial practice through a narrative inquiry. It is an attempt to reconceptualise the significance of 'micro entrepreneurs' in the sub-Himalayan hills. The findings point out include: (a) structural constraints, (b) behavioural constraints and (c) political activities that contributed to distorting the entrepreneurial environment at the micro level in hills.

Among the various crises that have fuelled multiple ethnic movements in India, the crisis of 'land' is one of the most fundamental yet understudied domains in the study of ethnicity and nationalism. This article examines the intricate relationship between land and ethnicity through the case study of Gorkha's demand for 'Gorkhaland' in Darjeeling Hills, India. The scholarship on the ethnic study has largely failed to understand the significance of land as identity and belongingness among many indigenous communities and this has created a distorted understanding of the place, community, and identity. In this article, I argue that land claims have been one of the fundamental elements of ethnic politics among Gorkhas in Darjeeling Hills and their movement for homeland articulates a distinct attachment of Gorkha struggle for land in Darjeeling Hills. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted in various parts of Darjeeling Hills, this article examines the complexity surrounding the notion of land and identity that has created fear and anxiety of not having land ownership. This article argues that the lack of landownership perpetuates ethnic politics in the Eastern Himalaya, but it has not yet gained attention in academia. Therefore, this article is an attempt to establish the centrality of land in a region like Darjeeling Hills where ethnicity has overshadowed other phenomena. It also shows how the state uses such material discourse of land ownership to manipulate not only ethnic politics for the homeland but also the implementation of various beneficiary schemes.

This thesis is concerned with the feminisation of local communities and its impact on food security in rural Nepal. The boosted labour market in Gulf countries has contributed to the absence of men, thereby shifting responsibilities to women within households, communities and state affairs in rural areas of Nepal. This phenomenon has an impact on all dimensions of rural life, including livelihoods but in particular on food security. The feminisation of local communities is a relatively new phenomenon and its relationship to food security is understudied as well as less attended. This thesis aims to address this gap by focusing on the relationship between the feminisation of local communities and food security. This thesis highlights a number of issues related to the feminisation of local communities, including the use of land, access to and control over resources, and women's participation in decision-making at the household, community and state levels. However, despite these changes, historically-rooted patriarchal practices and hierarchical relations among different social groups are reinforcing the status quo, thereby impacting on food security. This thesis employs a feminist political ecology perspective to critically analyse the relationship between the feminisation of local communities and food security. The study used a mixed methods approach and case study strategy to collect data from two case study sites: Nalma of Lamjung and Piprahar of Nawalparasi districts of Western Nepal. The thesis demonstrates the differentiated impacts of the feminisation of local communities on food security among different social and economic groups, highlighting the strategies employed to manage their livelihoods and everyday lives. Such differentiated impacts on food security are linked to the persistence of discriminatory practices based on gender, caste, ethnicity, and wealth. The thesis suggests that a broader political response on the issues of feminisation and food security is needed. This is possible when a ...

MTB-MLE focuses on equitable quality education and lifelong learning for all and it is only possible when education responds to and reflects the multilingual nature of the society. MTB-MLE is seen as a good model for pre-primary level students. The main objectives of this study were: to examine to what extent MTB-MLE is effective to teach non-Nepali speaking students of Grade 3 and Grade 4 and whether the MTB-MLE approach or English medium instruction (EMI) results better in learners' achievement in reading Nepali and English subject. This study compared the learner's achievement in reading assessment between MTB-MLE school and English medium government school. This study comprised one hundred and sixty-three students including Grade 3 and Grade 4 in reading assessment in Nepali and English language. The questionnaires were used as research tools during the study. Results obtained from the data were analyzed quantitatively and qualitatively. The result showed that the performance of MTB-MLE school's students was better in comparison to the performance of English medium government school's students. Thus, MTB-MLE program showed that the MTB-MLE approach is effective in helping non-Nepali speaking students for sustainable learning, life-long learning and quality education.

Tea is considered as the most popular non-alcoholic beverage in the world. It is known that the tea, as a beverage was discovered long before the beginning of the Christian era. Terai-Dooars area of North Bengal has a long history of development of garden-based Tea industry. It is rightly said that the economy of Dooars is based on three "T"s – Tea, Tourism and Timber. The main industry of the Dooars region is the tea industry. : In the past Tea cultivation was introduced in the parts of western Dooars from the Darjeeling district, where, as a commercial enterprise, the industry was first established in 1856. At the beginning the planters were not very optimistic about the prospect of tea gardens in Dooars and Terai. However, it was soon explored that the climate and soil of the western of this part was suitable for the growth of tea; government offered land to the investor on the favourable terms and the industry flourished very rapidly. Many workers and institutions have discussed the initiation, growth and development of tea gardens and the industry. This paper is a review of the extent and characteristics of Tea industry in Terai-Dooars area and the works published by the previous workers.

The concept of security in international relations is highly contested with interventions by different schools of thought challenging the dominant statecentric theorization and practice of the same. This article analyzes the feminist perspective of international security. In doing so, it reiterates the need to redefine security by broadening the contours of the subject matter of international relations. While practices like global policy seem to have incorporated a gender perspective, these shifts have not altered the practice of marginalization of gender issues and feminist theories in international politics. The argument of this article, therefore, is that a feminist perspective of security is essential to bridge this gap between theory and practice.

Extending over an area of 3,149 square kilometers, Darjeeling district, located in sub-Himalayan northeast India, is the site of my research. Flanked by the international boundaries of Nepal, Bhutan, Bangladesh, and Tibet (China), this region is politically sensitive to India and culturally strategic to Gorkhas, the ethnic group of Darjeeling. Gorkhas are Nepali-speaking Indian citizens, who have been struggling for recognition since 1907. They call themselves "Gorkhas" to differentiate themselves from Nepalese, citizens of Nepal, with whom they share linguistic and cultural similarities. As part of their current movement for a home-state in India to secure their Indian identity, music performed in culture festivals such as Mahadasai Sanskritic Utsav during Dasai/Dusshera (October), a ten day annual festival celebrating the female power, Goddess Shakti, and Diwali (November) has emerged as a powerful medium for voicing the Gorkha cause in India. My research includes both archival and ethnographic work. Historically, I look into the musical and lyrical repertoires of Gorkha songs to determine how they establish and/or contradict definitions of Gorkha identity inscribed by colonial and nationalist discourses, and inform contemporary productions of Gorkha music at India's margins. The bulk of my archival research was conducted at the Central Library, North Bengal University, Paras Mani Pradhan library, Darjeeling, and All India Radio, Kurseong. Ethnographically, I first investigate the role of Gorkha music as it is performed in music festivals to represent Gorkha identity. Second, considering media - radio and television - as "leaky" medium seeping beyond and through ideological boundaries, I study the borderlands as a place of untethered possibilities engendering works of imagination that influence Gorkha movement at India's borders. Third, I study Gorkha musicians and their agency to note how they are able to subjectively represent and re-present Gorkha identity from their respective positions as Gorkha subjects located at and from India's borders. Lastly, approaching borderlands as an in-between space where culture is in a state of constant flux, I identify Gorkha borderland music as a dynamic voice that urges us to cross borders in order to allow new passages of awareness and self-representation.

This article argues that an adequately historicized and politicized understanding of the women's movement in Nepal (or elsewhere) requires a detailed examination of the construction of the gendered subject herself in the complex geo-political space of the emergent (Nepali) nation state. In turn, this unravelling of the gendered subject in Nepal serves to reinforce the premise that the representation of 'the Nepali Woman' as a single over-arching category is a contemporary construction, which has been achieved at the expense of consistently effacing the historically prior multiple and contested ethnic/caste identities taken by thrust upon women in what is now the new Nepal. The 'natural' goal of the women's movement since post-1990 Nepal to achieve a (single) feminist agenda has become part of the problem, as it can only be achieved at the expense of respecting the radical diversity and difference that is covered over by the 'theoretical fiction' of the unified nation of Nepal. The main important players, whether it be the women from mainstream political parties, or the women of the NGO world or the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoists), have all contributed to excluding and silencing radical diversity in the name of expediency and elite power brokering. Moreover, it is argued that the contours of this composite discourse continue to be shaped by the international aid industry in Nepal, where 'development' is not merely the epistemic link between Nepal and the 'West', it is also the locus classicus of generic apolitical consciousness-less Nepali woman whose cause is taken up by scholar and activist alike.

"The Routledge Handbook of Highland Asia is the first comprehensive and critical overview of the ethnographic and anthropological work in Highland Asia over the past half a century. Opening up a grand new space for critical engagement, the handbook presents Highland Asia as a world-region that cuts across the traditional divides inherited from colonial and Cold War area divisions - the Indian Subcontinent/South Asia, Southeast Asia, China/East Asia, and Central Asia.

Thirty-two chapters assess the history of research, identify ethnographic trends, and evaluate a range of analytical themes that developed in particular settings of Highland Asia. They cover varied landscapes and communities, from Kyrgyzstan to India, from Bhutan to Vietnam and bring local voices and narratives relating trade and tribute, ritual and resistance, pilgrimage and prophecy, modernity and marginalization, capital and cosmos to the fore. The handbook shows that for millennia, Highland Asians have connected far-flung regions through movements of peoples, goods and ideas, and at all times have been the enactors, repositories, and mediators of world-historical processes. Taken together, the contributors and chapters subvert dominant lowland narratives by privileging primarily highland vantages that reveal Highland Asia as an ecumune and prism that refracts and generates global history, social theory, and human imagination. In the currently unfolding Asian Century, this compels us to reorient and re-envision Highland Asia, in ethnography, in theory, and in the connections between this world-region, made of hills, highlands and mountains, and a planetary context.


The handbook reveals both regional commonalities and diversities, generalities and specificities, and a broad orientation to key themes in the region. An indispensable reference work, this handbook fills a significant gap in the literature and will be of interest to academics, researchers and students interested in Highland Asia, Zomia Studies, Anthropology, Comparative Politics, Conceptual History and Sociology, Southeast Asian Studies, Central Asian Studies and South Asian Studies as well as Asian Studies in general."

Darjeeling has been largely represented as a place where fine tea grows and where the mighty Kanchenjunga graces its presence as an attraction for tourists. Much has been written about its colonial formation and its tea, but discursive formation of the area has been rather unfair for the inhabitants who are lost in this narrative of 'leisure'. This injustice is all the more magnified when one perceives the identity crisis and the politics of belonging that the people of Darjeeling have been subjected to since the days of empire, continuing up to present times under the nation state. Against this misrepresentation Darjeeling, as lived by its inhabitants, needs to be reimagined. The politics of belonging is a recurrent theme across South Asia and the anxieties over belonging that the people face in Darjeeling has to do a lot with the kind of knowledge that has so far been produced about the region. This article will attempt to decolonize that knowledge and reimagine Darjeeling from an insider's perspective. This will be done through the iconic literary figure of Indra Bahadur Rai and his writing. In the present study I will be primarily looking at his only novel Aaja Ramita Cha (There is A Spectacle Today) (1964), and his essay Pahad ra Khola (Mountains and Rivers).