‘Bāto deu, ‘Bāto deu...’ (Give the way, give the way...) : Darjeeling in search of new road

Tathagata Sengupta

The Hills. Darjeeling. Kalimpong. Ghoom. These names are synonymous with certain images for the middle-class bhodrolok bengali. These are images that can be found in one’s camera, or in the phone gallery of the newly-wed couple next door, or in the painted words on rusted tea-cans of the local tea shop, or in the calendar-catalogues of the local travel agent, or at times, in films like Satyajit Ray’s “Kanchenjungha”. That “Kanchenjungha” is Ray’s first film in colour, or that it is one of Chhabi Biswas’s last films soon after which he died in a car crash, or the fact that Ray said after his death that he wouldn’t ever again have an aged bhodrolok character in any of his films – all these stories can be heard in any typical bengali middle-class drawing room. Anyway, that’s an aside. We find in “Kanchenjungha” an elite bengali family and some others connected to them, trying to sort out various complications, dilemmas and misgivings shrouding their personal and family lives. According to the characters of the movie, a busy and complex city like Calcutta robs them of the space or courage for such sortings, but somehow the tall hills of Darjeeling, with their ancient proud forests, and the mysterious interplays of clouds, rains and sunshine, provide them with a new-found courage to wash off these dirts from their lives. Their day starts with concerns regarding whether they would be able to catch a glimpse of Kanchenjungha from the Darjeeling hills, whether the cloud cover would disperse or not. But as the day progresses, around twilight when the cloud cover actually subsides and the glorious Kanchenjungha reveals itself, the characters in the film by then are so engrossed in sorting out their lives’ conflicts and insecurities that they forget to even look at snow-capped beauty. They are preoccupied with settling all of these questions before they leave the hills the day after to get back to Calcutta, and start their lives afresh. The movie “Kanchenjungha” is important in the current context because it seems to showcase a blue-print for the bengali tourist who visits the hills in real. Kolkata’s tired middle-class bengalis generally flock to the hills to rediscover themselves, replenish their stock of courage and love, dump the piled up mental and emotional trash from the top of the hills onto the valleys down under, and to get a taste of the forbidden escape from the rules, laws, and survival rationality that dictate and govern their lives in their family and society, their jobs and businesses. Standing alone in one of those lonely curves of the hill roads, the bengali tourist wants to feel as if he is the owner of the hills, just like is suggested by the body language of Chhabi Biswas in “Kanchenjungha”. None of this is possible in the crowded, busy, disturbed, sweaty city of Kolkata. In the violent city, if one tramples by mistake on the person standing next to him in a crowded local train, he is greeted in public by chosen slangs and abuses. At that point of time it gets hard for him to think of himself as Tagore’s grandson or Ray’s nephew. Those ‘legacies’ are therefore reserved for the hills.

The bengali bhodrolok therefore loves Darjeeling, like he loves his lover, his wife. He can thus write poems and songs for the hills, he can make movies about them. If needed he can stamp Darjeeling’s name on the city’s trams, buses, on the fading walls of abandoned houses. Darjeeling in the summer break becomes the prized crown on the crownless head of the middle class bengali employee in the banks and corporations of the city as he types away balance-sheets day in day out, all year round, on his computer keyboard with fading alphabets placed precariously on the rickety small desk barricaded by old files and folders. After a whole day of insults from the younger but position-wise senior officer with expensive qualifications, after the same old grinding 8-hour workday of a toothless saw in the old saw-mill, like the nameless identity-less middle class employee returns home with the ambition of finally asserting himself as a ruler – the ruler of his household, in a similar way, at the end of the year he travels to the hills to feel like he owns them.

Now that we have been led into the ‘household’, let us spend a few more words on it. Every night, in the nooks and corners of his bedroom, our middle class bengali is just like the Chhabi Biswas of “Kanchenjungha”, the powerful patriarch. He loves his wife, but he only makes the rules and regulations governing that love, and he only reserves the right to break them. In his bedroom, he is the MP, the MLA, he only is Pranab Mukherjee, Mamata Banerjee, he only is Prime Minister Narendra Modi. He, all by himself, is the police administration, the chief justice, the media and the censor board. He only decides what is allowed and what is not, which piece of news can make it out of the bedroom, and which ones ought to be censored. IPC, CRPC, the Constitution – everything stands null and void in the premises of his household. It’s always Section 144 there, it’s always the Emergency of 1975 in place, year after year. Whether his household is to be home to the dreams, aspirations and freedom of his family members, or whether it is to be the Central Jail, he only decides that. He only decides ‘how much’ independence and freedom is to be allowed, and where the lines are to be drawn, in a way not very different from deciding how much salt to add to the food. Which books are to be read, which songs can be sung, which dresses are allowed, what kind of language is to be spoken, how should the relations between people be, how should relations with the outsiders be, all of it is determined by the crownless emperor of the household. All of this is enforced using the rhetoric of discipline and peace. But the key rule among all these rules, almost a meta-rule, is that none of these rules or their legitimacy can be questioned. Raising questions regarding any of these will attract brands such as ‘anti-national’ in this ‘nation’ called the family. Raising questions will attract missiles like the UAPA and Sedition Act. Another thing is, the laws of the household are not the same for all its members. The gender, sexuality and economic independence of the particular member determine what kind of law applies to him or her. The job description specified for the wife in the family comprises mostly of cooking, cleaning, and raising kids to grow up as law-abiding citizens. She doesn’t however get paid any salary for this work. She has to depend completely on her husband for her economic needs. She does get some monthly allowances, and it seems she only decides how to spend that money, to some extent. But there also there are various rules and boundaries and specifications that she has to abide by, that are dictated by her male owner. She has been taught to abide by these instructions right from her childhood days, by her parents’ family. However, if one does sit down and does the math, it might well turn out that the total amount of sweat and blood that this woman sheds throughout her life in feeding the family members, cleaning up after them, nursing them when they are sick, breeding children, then raising them, is no less than that of the man, and in many cases would probably be only more. But every Sunday evening when the male patriarch of the house looks for free T-shirts in the Big Bazaars and other such shopping malls, he conveniently forgets that the biggest supplier of free goods and services in his life has been his subject called the wife.

Anyway, the point is, till the time the woman in the household gladly accepts all these terms and conditions like a law-abiding citizen, till the time she buries the stench of the day’s sweat and toil with nightly bodysprays and smells like the beautiful Darjeeling, till the time the “hills are smiling”, digesting all the insults and abuses hurled at them, there is no lover like her! Till the time she replenishes her husband’s ego and self-respect night after night, by quietly cleaning up his body, his soul and his clothes, at the cost of her own small ever-shrinking fixed deposit of self-respect, so that he can get by the next day on the city’s streets, trams, buses and offices, till then she is as ‘unparallel’ as Ray’s “Kanchenjungha”. Till the time Darjeeling works free of cost as a washing machine of the urban tourist, till when the hills are working to recharge the fragile ego of the middle-class Calcutta bhodrolok tourist and nature-lover, till then they are the best. Till the time Darjeeling is happy to be just a prop, a stage, for parachuting directors like Ray from Calcutta-Bombay-Delhi, till the time the role fixed for her in Bengali-Hindi movies is for her rocks-trees-clouds-fog-snow-toytrain, till the time the only role for people living on these hills in such movies and poems and songs is that of background local folk tune, and of random people passing by, or tea-garden coolies, or the shabbily dressed sad-faced hungry Lepcha kid begging on the streets, who invokes trigger-happy pity and charity, with who one can click selfies and post on facebook, but who can’t be allowed to play the protagonist in movies like “Kanchenjungha”, till then there is no such lover as these hills! Till the time the woman in the household keeps providing food for the family from the dungeons of the kitchen, till the time the contract teagarden worker swallows all the verbal, mental and physical abuses hurled at her by the bhodrolok plantation manager and keeps supplying ‘world-class’ tea leaves with back-breaking labour, till the time the Gorkha sanitation worker of the tourist lodge washes off all the dirt thrown at her by the bengali tourist, without complaining, till then she is the sweetheart. Till when she stays happy spending her monthly allowance within the boundaries chalked out by her husband, till when the hills remain happy with the money thrown at it by the Bengal government through GTA and the hundred other boards, till then they are reliable. Till when she silently listens to the song her husband composed for her, and regurgitates them happily, till then she is ‘ideal’.

But the moment she raises questions about any of this, she turns from the sweetheart, to the betrayer, overnight. The day she learns to compose and sing her own song, in her own language, not as a ‘background tune’, but as the main voice, she becomes ‘extremist’, ‘terrorist’ and ‘antinational’. Her ‘lover’ partner then wraps his fists around her throat in order to suffocate her to death. He starts spreading rumours about her character. Bullets and tear gas shells are then fired in Darjeeling-Kalimpong-Sonada. One after the other, common people lose their lives. The hills are set on fire, as if its the pyre of her agnipareeksha. When the starving workers of the tea plantations and cinchona plantations, living precariously under minimum wages, pushed to the edges of the tall cliffs of Darjeeling, go on indefinite strike to protect their almost emptied fixeddeposit-accounts of self-respect, to take back their stolen pride, the police administration of their Bengali ‘lover’ blocks all possible ways to take rice up into the hills from the plains in order to suffocate and starve them to death. Through checkposts and search patrols dotted all along the main roads, the police dries out the supply of the minimum resources required for the hills to survive, under the barrel of the gun. On the other hand, the Bengali newspapers and TV media, for who Darjeeling so far was synonymous with bright beautiful pictures of the hills on the Saturday supplement alongwith bright beautiful faces from Tollywood (the Kolkata movie industry), or with advertisements of travel agents talking garbage about where to find good Bengali food even in a remote village on the hills over never-ending hour-long slots, suddenly embark upon proving that the hills are ‘traitors’, ‘characterless’. In complete unison they claim that Darjeeling has sold her beauty for long, now “she’ll have to beg in the alleys of Kolkata to survive”. Sounds familiar? This is exactly what is said about women in the family who talk about women’s freedom. None of the umpteen Bengali newspapers or news channels, busy with the character assassination of the hills, carried one objective factual article or news program about the history of Gorkhaland’s struggle for self-respect. Nowhere has it been stated that the State government-run schools in the hills use english as the medium for curriculum, with only one paper on Nepali language. In these many years, none of the state governments paid any attention to building up a curriculum and pedagogy in Nepali. The children in today’s schools in the hills are fast losing the habit of reading or writing in Nepali. In such a situation, and in the overall context of the hubris of Bengali language and nationalism in the hill administration and infrastructure, the move on the part of the State government to impose Bengali as a compulsory third (or fourth, or fifth, doesn’t matter) language in the schools, can only bring wreckage and erasure in the lives, history and culture of the society there. This, even if the Bengali bhodrolok of West Bengal doesn’t realise, must not be too hard to understand for those in East Bengal (today’s Bangladesh) who still have the embers of the memory of the Language struggle they waged there, defending Bengali language against the forced imposition of Urdu by then rulers of Pakistan. Anyway, the rumours and misinformation and lies about the hills keep getting peddled, day in day out. This includes spreading lies about discovery of ‘arms’ there, censoring the news of violence by police forces on the women, and perhaps the biggest of lies, that the agitation for Gorkhaland is only a political instigation by the local leaders and political parties of the hills, and that the people at large have nothing to do with it. Just like it is invariably touted about women in the family fighting for their rights and self-respect that it is just because of propaganda by some “extreme feminists”, and that the women at large generally have nothing to do with it. In order to create space for this campaign of lies, the first step that was taken was to gag the hills by cutting off internet, phone services and the local cable tv networks. Not very different from the way censorship works in the bedrooms of middle class households. In any situation of conflict, the Bengali police officers are keeping themselves in the background, pushing the Gorkha police personnel to the front lines. Just like in the household, the male patriarch conducts the aggression from behind the scenes while pitching women that are in his control against the belligerent ones. Like any other ‘benevolent dictator’, the patriarch expresses concerns related to security and safety for the women members in case they are allowed ‘too much freedom’. He also expresses concerns regarding the conflicts that would arise between the women themselves in such turbulent winds of freedom. The Bengali intellectuals, who till two days back were not concerned in the least about hunger deaths happening almost on a daily basis in the ‘peaceful’ tea gardens, or about the questions of rights of the Lepchas or any other community of the hills, those same people are suddenly shedding tears about the inconvenience and hunger faced by people on the hills due to the strike, so much so that they would put the crocodiles of the Sunderbans at shame. It reminds us of the scene from another of Ray’s movies, “Nayak” (the Hero), where Sumita Sanyal, at a sudden audition in the middle of the night switches from tears to laughter within seconds, and mocks at a perplexed Uttam Kumar, while wiping her tears off, “I dont need glycerine”.

In any case, questions like “What will happen to the Lepchas, the ‘original’ sons of the soil, once Gorkhaland comes into being”, seem to have suddenly caused the headache of the Bengali intelligentsia. When the struggle for women’s liberation takes place, how the women in the family will resolve their own conflicts, is their concern. This should not be a worry of the male patriarch of the family. Similarly, the internal contradictions and conflicts within a struggle for self-determination are primarily concerns internal to the struggle. It is ultimately the people that are part of the struggle who will have to resolve these contradictions. It is primarily the responsibility of the democratic forces of the area. From outside of the struggle, one can and should extend the hand of support and solidarity towards any effort to resolve such contradictions, but the sly attempt at derailing an entire struggle for self-determination by citing such internal contradictions, although may be temporarily covered using the perfume of ‘democracy’, but its stench will spread with time. After the partition of Bengal, when the ‘sons of the soil’ of West Bengal were trying to resolve the socio-economic-political crisis related to the influx of migrant Bengalis from the Eastern part, through correct or incorrect means, we didn’t find people of Gorkhaland taking up any kind of paternalistic role in presiding over the process! In the case of Gorkhaland, why just the question of the Lepchas, or Bhutias, or other communities, there are many other questions related to the democratic aspirations of the people there. For example, the question of minimum wages for the tea garden workers, cinchona plantation workers, the question of health and education infrastructure, the question of women’s emancipation, the question of the rights of other genders and sexual minorities, the question of religious minorities, of caste practices, of economic inequalities, and so on – these are all questions that any society is faced with, to some extent or the other, in some form or the other. But the task of setting the direction for the struggle related to all these questions, the task of leading that struggle, the task of building a ‘democratic Gorkhaland’ is primarily that of the democratic forces of the region. And the point is, these struggles are already going on. Kolkatabased Bengali ‘intellectuals’ do not know of these struggles, neither have they tried to know about them, which is not surprising because for them the icon of democratic struggle on the banks of Teesta is, after all, the Bengali revolutionary protagonist Animesh of Samaresh Majumdar’s “Kaalbela”. The fact that Gorkhas, Bhutias, or Lepchas could be the leaders of a democratic struggles, is as vulgar and as alien to the Hilsa eating taste-buds and Samaresh Majumdar reading psyche of the bengali bhodrolok as salt-tea and Gundruk. What is Gundruk? Please look it up on your smartphone, ‘digital India’ still has internet connectivity I am told! Its worth mentioning here that there is no problem with reading Samaresh Majumdar or eating Hilsa, but it is deeply problematic to impose these tastes on others.

Anyway, coming back to the question of democratic aspirations, we don’t even know that the sound of the Bengal-Delhi Governments’ bullets in the hills is getting drowned by the roaring slogans, poems, songs and plays woven by democratic poets, writers, singers and activists, echoing against the walls of the mountains, dancing along the rhythms of the young Chel river, bouncing off the banks of the wise Teesta. Kolkata’s Bengali bhodrolok ‘Marxists’ haven’t read or heard poet Pradeep Lohagun’s poem traveling along the rallies in the hills, “the empty stomach can’t read the letters on the Constitution, the naked body cannot lift the weight of democracy, the bare feet of the homeless cannot travel to the Parliament, the only religion of hunger is to fill the stomach even if by snatching food. Hunger does not know any other religion.” (It’s another thing that my translation has destroyed his original poem in Nepali, perhaps reconfirming the centrality and essence of language in all of this). Its not just about not having read Pradeep Lohagun and others, many haven’t. This author also hadn’t read him till may be a few days’ back. The issue is, the Bengali ‘leftist’ and ‘democratic’ intellectual (let’s not even talk about the right-wing), historically, hasn’t even felt the need to read them. Just like they haven’t heard the courage and confidence in Chewang Yonzon’s poems, “There is no such history of muffling the voice by cutting the throat, of killing the dreams by plucking out the eye, of stopping the alphabets from writing revolution by chopping off the fingers”. (Again, I hope my translation is pardoned). We haven’t heard the bullet-like words of young tea-garden workercultural activist-poet-composer-singer Prasidh Rai’s song “Muktamann” (The Free Mind). Moreover, Pradeep, Chewang, Prasidhs are not a sudden phenomenon, they are the torch-bearers of a glorious history and tradition of revolutionary cultural struggle, whose architects include poets and writers like Agam Singh Giri, Parijat (Bishnukumari Waiba), Bikash Gotame and so many others. In the words of Prasid himself, “the more of us you kill, more will be born! For every single person you kill, a thousand will take birth! You think you can kill people to kill the urge to live?!” But for the Bengali intellectual who is enraged by the cultural hubris of Bombay-Delhi-US, the words ‘cultural activist’ or ‘revolutionary band’ mainly bring home names such as Bob Dylan, Jon Lennon, Pete Seeger, Indian Ocean, Delhi Sultanate, and may be that of Kabir Suman, Mousumi Bhowmick, Mohiner Ghoraguli, but thats about it. The names of Paarijaat or Prasid will never figure in this ‘favourites list’ of the ‘culture’ and ‘politics’ loving bhodrolok. It doesn’t carry the name of Machaan, a band formed by tea garden worker-poet-composer-singers. It never will. At least the history of Darjeeling tells us so. After all, the woman lover cannot be a comrade, or a compatriot. Her task is to smile like a flower, and apply balm on the wounds of her male partner who has returned from the battlefield. Any how, the point is, the nefarious plan of the Government to silence the hills by shutting down the internet, has been cast away into the Jaldhaka river from top of the Rongo hills by the words and songs of people’s sorrows, pain, love and struggle – the words and the songs that are now laughing out loud at Kolkata-Delhi. These are not the laughs of a lover, these are the laughters of being able to throw away the male patriarch who wanted to ‘own’ love. These are laughters of having gained freedom from his lordship. These laughs no longer make happy headlines of “hills are smiling”. Instead, these laughs run chills down the spine of the patriarchstate, for the first time in his life he gets scared. The hollowness of his ‘love’, the fact that his love was nothing but a skeleton hidden carefully inside a thin skin, gets exposed. In this case, the thin skin of bhodrolok Bengali’s “love for Bengal” has been torn apart into pieces by the laughter of the hills. Ever since the struggle broke out in the hills, the bhodrolok has been citing “love for the motherland” to defend the firings, and to claim that “Bengal won’t be divided”. We all know what the actual division of Bengal has meant historically for the socio-cultural relations of the people of West Bengal with those on the other side. When we brag with a deep voice and high eyebrows about “Bengali culture”, “Bengali literature”, etc., how many writers, poets and composers from Bangladesh do we think of? The ruling party whose Chief Minister and Education Minister ended up imposing Bengali on the hills in their attempt to ruffle their feathers against Delhi’s imperialist imposition of Hindi across the country, for how many members of that party is Dhaka-Chattagram-Barishal closer than Delhi-Bombay-Gurgaon? How many of these ‘defenders’ of Bengali language know anything about the history of the Mother-tounge movement in then East Pakistan? If they did, they would perhaps understand Gorkhaland a little better. They would also perhaps understand that one can not fight against Hindi imperialism by naming Kolkata metro-rail stations after randomly chosen Bengali icons, or by posting photos of rajnigandha sticks on the birth anniversaries of Jeebonananda-Nazrul Islam. Otherwise they wouldn’t have to spend so much of public money to construct Hanuman temples all across Kolkata in an attempt to hold off Ram. When was the last time that people of Kolkata took Hanuman this seriously? Actually why just the ruling party, how many of the Kolkata’s intellectuals have read or heard the names of any two or more of the Bangladeshi writers, other than Tasleema Nasrin? Thus, given such a history, the only response that comes to mind when one hears “Bengal won’t be divided” in response to the demand for Gorkhaland, is, borrowing the words from the people of Bhangor, “Hush up sir, else the donkeys would laugh!”. Bengal is getting divided everyday, and it’s being done by the Bengalis, not by the Britishers or Delhi, definitely not by the Gorkhas!

We do need to fight against the ruling classes of Delhi, and their political weapon Hindi as the ruler’s language, and that need is as much Bengal’s as is it Gorkhaland’s. But in the name of such a resistance, the kind of terror and shameless bullying that the Bengali ruling class, its police admninistration and its intellectual class are conducting in the hills and Duars, and the forest-fire of extreme Bengali chauvinism that they are fanning there, is precisely playing into the hands of Delhi itself, and BJP, if not anything else. One shouldn’t forget the fact that Gorkhaland has its own local ruling classes and their political formations, and they have proved repeatedly over time that they are as opportunists as anyone else. Too many times in history have they mortgaged the hopes, aspirations and self-respect of the people of Gorkhaland at the vaults of the bigger rulers, be it BJP, or TMC, or CPI(M), or Congress, in a bid for increased pocket money, greater allowances. And there is money in the hills, a lot of it. The ambitious extravagant projects of the rulers for selling off the mountains, the forests, its rivers, its people, the tea gardens, the cinchona plantations, cannot possibly be thwarted by the moist meaningless nostalgia of Ray’s “Kanchenjungha”. Anyway the empty “love” that Bengal has for the hills has been ready for auction for quite sometime now. Thus if the current state of affairs continues, it is hard to see how the State Government, even for its own political ends, would be able to prevent an alliance emerging between certain sections of the Gorkha ruling class with the rulers at Delhi. Just like how constructing Hanuman temples, eulogising Shyamaprasad Mukherji on facebook, or engineering a politics of counter-riots is not going to prevent RSS from spreading like a cancer across Bengal. But in the hills, all of this means the continuing cornering of various democratic forces and working class people who are fighting for their self-respect and identity. The two-fold fight that these democratic forces are having to wage, both inwards and outwards, is becoming harder and harder by the day. In such a situation, it is the moral political responsibility of every Bengali democrat to stand in support and solidarity of the democratic and working class people of the hills, and sing in chorus with them. It is time to begin to understand the hills, understand its language, understand its history of agony. This is required not just for Gorkhaland, but in fact more so for Bengal itself. There are many intellectuals in Kolkata who spend sleepless nights worrying about Palestine. Only a handful of them take to the streets when it comes to Kashmir. Of course that’s the right thing to do, they should do it again and again. But whenever the question of Gorkhaland emerges, these same people pull down Marx-Lenin-Tagore from their crowded bookshelves, dust them up, and log on to social media. After that starts the flurry of meaningless comments and arguments on facebook, in harmony with the flurry of bullets screaming through the mountains. The stock values of the corporation called Facebook keep going up, the values of the lives and respect of people keep plunging down, strangled Marx, Lenin and Tagore keep praying for death again, and who knows, the only person who probably laughs at all of this from behind, like the true Almighty, is Mark Zuckerberg! Far away meanwhile, in the mountains, the terror of Bengal-Delhi Governments keeps raining down upon the ‘traitor lover’, with the silent and loud support of the Bengali middle-upper classes, and their ‘intelligentsia’. The roaring monsoon waterfalls in the mountains turn red with blood, common working class people’s dreams and aspirations come rumbling down in the form of landslides here and there.

But these days, time, light, wind, love – these are flowing somewhat in the opposite direction. These days Darjeeling-Kalimpong are too busy to keep looking up towards Kanchenjungha in awe. Their streets are now filled with common people. Everyday thousands of people are rallying in their winding roads, one after the other. Hundreds of people are conducting public meetings in the villages-towns and cities strewn across their forests. Tea leaves haven’t been plucked in a while now, the tea workers are demanding minimum wage apart from a separate state. The tea plants seem to be growing taller everyday in keeping with the rising decibels of the slogans. The hills are resonating with songs, poems, street theaters, band music, stretching across its length and breadth. The cascades and the waterfalls, the small mountain rivers, seem to be dancing and tumbling with added fervour to keep up with the music. Pamphlets and posters are raining on people, alongwith the rain drops. Signatures are being collected on mass petitions. Thousands of women are taking to the streets everyday, shouting feminist slogans, together with the ones demanding Gorkhaland. Small magazines like “Laali Guraas” (Red Rhododendron) are being distributed. Numerous poems and songs are being written, street plays are being composed. Its the common people who are writing all this, with the ink flowing from their lives’ pain, romance and anger. These colours churned out from the bodies and souls of the people are being used to paint slogans and graffittis on the walls, on the streets. Cultural activists are taking out rallies, covering hundreds of miles by foot, stretching from Kalimpong to Darjeeling, then again from Jorbangla to Sukna, and then again from Kalimpong to Labha to Gorubathan. From there to Rongo. The route for the next phase is from Bijanbari to Sukhiapokhri to Mirik. Unfed, half-fed people are waiting on the street corners, in front of their homes, to donate whatever they have to those walking in the rallies, to ensure they have enough strength to keep going. Those who have only water in their house, are waiting with water. The aunt sitting with a few vegetables on the roadside, the didi who sells plastic sheets to run her house, are giving off their only sources of income. Those who don’t even have that, are offering eyes brimming with dreams, and throats filled will slogans gushing out of their bodies with whatever energy they are left with. One would get to hear not just Nepali or Hindi or English songs in these rallies, but the occasional Bengali ones too. The conversations and chatters one gets to overhear from people passing by are not just about wanting the destruction of Mamata Banerjee or Narendra Modi, but also, in fact much more frequently, about the fears and distrust about their own local leadership: “What if again this time they betray us?”. One gets to hear, “This time there is no letting go. We’ll not leave them (Mamata, Modi, etc.), and if our guys strike deals with Delhi or Kolkata, we won’t leave these fellows as well”. In the middle of all this, one gets to hear mouth-organs from afar, playing revolutionary tunes, together with melodicas, guitars, djembes. Lines like “bāto deo, bāto deo, naulo yuglai bāto deo, sunaulo yuglai bāto deo, hāmi āndhi ka santān” (“Give the way, give the way, give the way to new times, give the way to golden times, we are the children of storms”) can be heard floating from one end of the hills to the other. When, in protest of police firings, thousands of youngsters and school children are taking to the streets, armed with slogans on their shoulders and roti-sabzi in their small tiffin boxes, one can see clear approval in the eyes of their parents, and a strange cocktail of steep pride mixed with deep worry and anxiety. Different rallies are meeting each other on the streets, on route to their respective destinations. Songs and slogans are getting almost magically intertwined, interwoven. Thousands of fists are punching into the sky, as if in desperate attempts to pluck the stars. Basic meals are getting cooked for hundreds of people in the community halls, to feed them after the meetings. In between, the few hours in the dead of the night are quiet. The mountains are silent then. The mountains are standing guard then for their tired, turbulent, sleeping children. Next day, with sunrise, restarts the daily schedules of rallies, songs, guitars, slogans, or at times, bullets again, again fires, deaths, blood, one more martyr.

Whether Gorkhaland achieves statehood or not, the hills have already won. They have rescued their love from the cages of its Bengali masters, from their bedrooms, and let its wings loose in the open blue sky. The hills are now writing their own poems of romance, their own songs and ballads of love, with their own blood. They don’t need Ray’s “Kanchenjungha” anymore. In fact these days it’s Kanchenjungha who tries in desperation to pull away the curtains of clouds and fog, to be able to catch a glimpse of Darjeeling-Kharsang-Kalebung, to be able to tell them, “Salute comrade!”.