AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST

Anxious Belongings: Anxiety and the Politics of Belonging

in Subnationalist Darjeeling
Townsend Middleton

ABSTRACT Across South Asia and beyond, the politics of belonging continue to breed alarming volatility and
violence. The embodied, affective dimensions of these politics remain an imminent concern. In this article, I question
how anxiety informs these reckonings of who belongs and who does not. Capable of galvanizing bodies and the
greater body politic, anxieties over national belonging remain a powerful, but less understood, political force. In
Darjeeling, India, anxieties over belonging—what I term “anxious belongings”—have fueled a particularly mercurial
subnationalist politics, involving recurrent agitations for a separate state of Gorkhaland. Situated amid these inter-
plays of anxiety, politics, and belonging, I identify anxious belonging as a collectively embodied phenomenon—at
once historical, social, and pregnant with political possibility. As I show, these anxieties are deeply rooted in body
and time. Today, they remain as unsettling as they are formative of a people and their politics. Thinking anthro-
pologically about the origins and sociopolitical life of anxiety in Darjeeling, with this article I signal new ways of
understanding—and perhaps anticipating—the volatilities that attend the politics of belonging worldwide. Anxious
belonging accordingly comes into view as a dimension of and potential for markedly agitated forms of life and politics.
[anxiety, politics, belonging, India, South Asia]

RESUMEN A través de Asia del Sur y mas allá, la polı́tica de pertenencia continúa generando, una inestabilidad y
violencia alarmantes. Las dimensiones representadas, afectivas de estas polı́ticas permanecen como una preocu-
pación inminente. En este artı́culo cuestiono cómo la ansiedad influye en las consideraciones de quien pertenece
y quien no. Capaz de incitar cuerpos y una entidad polı́tica más grande, las ansiedades sobre pertenencia na-
cional continúan siendo una poderosa fuerza polı́tica pero poco entendida. En Darjeeling, India, ansiedades sobre
pertenencia—lo que llamo “pertenencias ansiosas”—han avivado una polı́tica sub-nacional particularmente volátil
envolviendo recurrentes agitaciones por el estado separatista de Gorkhaland. Situada en el medio de estas inter-
acciones de ansiedad, polı́tica y pertenencia, identifico pertenencia ansiosa como un fenómeno colectivamente
corpóreo—a la vez histórico, social, y concebido con posibilidad polı́tica. Como demuestro, estas ansiedades están
profundamente arraigadas en cuerpo y tiempo. Hoy ellas continúan siendo inestables en la medida en que influyen
en la gente y su polı́tica. Pensando antropológicamente sobre los orı́genes y la vida socio-polı́tica de la ansiedad en
Darjeeling, con este artı́culo indico nuevas maneras de entender—y quizás anticipar—las inestabilidades que están
presentes en la polı́tica de pertenencia a través del mundo. Pertenencia ansiosa, por consiguiente aparece como una
dimensión de y potencial para formas de vida y polı́tica marcadamente agitadas. [ansiedad, polı́tica, pertenencia,
India, Asia del Sur]

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Vol. 115, No. 4, pp. 608–621, ISSN 0002-7294, online ISSN 1548-1433. 
C 2013 by the American Anthropological

Association. All rights reserved. DOI: 10.1111/aman.12051


R ecent years have seen anthropologists grow increas-
ingly interested in the embodied, affective dimensions
of political life. At home and abroad, collective states of
fear, anxiety, desire, and crisis are central to political life as
we know it. Nowhere have the bodily intensities of politics
been more striking than in the politics of national belong-
ing. Whether in the 20th-century genocides of Europe and
Africa, the perilous renderings of autochthony in Cameroon,
or the subnationalist agitations of Nepal, India, and Sri Lanka,
the politics of belonging continue to be marked by excep-
tional volatility—and, at times, seemingly incomprehensi-
ble violence (see, e.g., Appadurai 1998, 2006; Daniel 1996;
Das 2007; Geschiere 2009; Malkki 1995).
In this article, I ask how anxiety animates these reckon-
ings of who is “in” and who is “out,” who belongs and who
does not. Anxieties over national belonging remain a pow-
erful, but less understood, force of contemporary politics.
Capable of galvanizing individuals and publics alike, they
continue to imbue national and subnational politics with
alarming volatility and transformative possibility. Thinking
anthropologically about the social and political life of anxi-
ety, in this article I ask the following: How does collective
anxiety inform the politics of belonging? What are its social
manifestations and political possibilities? And to what extent
can anxieties over belonging shape a people and their politics
at the margins of the nation-state?
I take up these questions in the sub-Himalayan region of
Darjeeling, India. Since the 1980s, Darjeeling has played host
to two violent subnationalist agitations for a separate state
of Gorkhaland—a homeland for the Nepali-Indian (Gorkha)
peoples within India. Histories of precarity, discrimination,
and inequality dating back to their 19th-century immigration
from neighboring Nepal have beset the Gorkhas of Darjeeling
with deep-seated anxieties over belonging in India.1 These
anxieties over being-in and being-of the nation-state—what I
call “anxious belongings”—charge life and politics in Darjeel-
ing with potent intensities, at once unsettling and pregnant
with possibility.
Deeply rooted in body and time, anxious belonging
remains the driving force of a particularly searching subna-
tionalist politics in Darjeeling, including multiple agitations
for a separate state of Gorkhaland and a host other move-
ments for rights, recognition, and autonomy within the In-
dian union. Yet while a catalyst of identity and its politics
in the hills, anxious belonging frequents the contemporary
in episodic ways: surfacing one moment, receding the next,
only to surge again, electrifying Darjeeling’s public, spawn-
ing shocking political developments in the process. Situating
my work amid these volatile interplays of anxiety, politics,
and belonging, here I draw on both archival research and
recent fieldwork (2006–11) to explore the origins and man-
ifestations of anxious belonging today.2
To put it another way: if it may be said that politics in
this particular corner of India are especially “charged,” my
aim in this article is to understand the nature of that charge
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 609
itself. Examining national inclusion, exclusion, and citizen-
ship on an affective register, I build on the interdisciplinary
work of Elspeth Probyn (1996), Lauren Berlant (2005,
2007), Arjun Appadurai (1998), and others (Bell 1999;
Fortier 2000; Game 2001; Geschiere 2009; Stoler 2004)
to question how national belonging registers in and through
the body. But I add to these conversations a distinctively
anthropological reading of anxiety, one in which anxious
belonging figures as a collective embodiment—a shared
“structure of feeling,” as Raymond Williams would have
it (1961:64–65,1977:ch.9)—at once historical, social, and
political. Through time, these collective anxieties have af-
fected the Gorkhas in profound ways. Today, they remain
as unsettling as they are formative of the Gorkhas and their
politics.
What interests me, then, is not so much belonging but,
rather, the kinds of politics and social forms that spawn from
its lack.3 Precisely in its ability to affect individual bodies and
a greater body politic, anxious belonging has proven an ac-
tion potential for subnationalist agitation. But in galvanizing
identity politics, these anxieties have also made for a highly
unstable field of political operation, wherein regimes, dem-
agogues, and movements rise and fall with sometimes stun-
ning caprice. Recent events illustrate this volatility. Here
I focus on a charged sequence of events through which a
popular television show, “Indian Idol” (2007), triggered a
massive political upheaval in Darjeeling, leading, in turn,
to a second Gorkhaland agitation in as many generations.
Read with an awareness of the affective histories explored
in the first half of the article, this saga appears but the latest
chapter in the Gorkhas’ deeper history of marginalization,
precarity, and discrimination. Importantly, this politically
significant instance of pop culture reactivated more than the
Gorkhas’ anxieties over belonging. It also reactivated, to an
actionable level, their desire for subnational autonomy. Sup-
port for the second Gorkhaland Movement swept through
the hills accordingly.
Equally reactive and transformative, these articulations
show crisis and uncertainty to be the operative conditions
of politics in Darjeeling. These conditions, I argue, are best
understood as the collective embodiments—the affects, that
is—of a people seeking, yet perennially denied, their place in
the nation-state. Whether latent or manifest, these anxieties
of belonging “live,” as it were, in the body and in the body
politic. There, they continue to breed markedly “agitated”
forms of life and politics.
I should emphasize that the circumstances of this study
are specific. Nevertheless, I believe we may recognize in
subnationalist Darjeeling a pattern of volatility, reactivity,
and crisis endemic to the politics of belonging writ large.
In this regard, anxious belongings’ specific manifestations in
Darjeeling stand to teach us a great deal about how anxi-
ety informs—and charges—the politics of belonging world-
wide. With this in mind, I begin this study with a fittingly
anxious day in the field.
610 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013
AN ETHNOGRAPHIC CRISIS (2007)
Hours after dark, I find the village council president squatting
over a small fire, seething with anger at the anthropologist in his
midst. His shifty eyes cast me a sideways glance, then turn away
with revulsion. In his hands is a dead chicken. Feathers stick to his
calloused fingers; others float seemingly suspended on the tense air
between us. I squat down beside him as the flames ribbon over the
lines in his face before leaping into the night. He appears to be
trembling.
“Sir,” I say humbly, “I heard you came to my house this
afternoon looking for me.”
He shoots a look of disgust into the fire, responding gruffly,
“No.”
He works the bird with redoubled vehemence. I try again. “But
sir, my landlord told me you came.”
“No, I didn’t come!” he snaps back, now visibly shaking.
I don’t know what I have done to upset him, so I wait. As he
plumes the last feathers, I engage him again, “I heard there was
some problem with my survey?”
“What is this survey? You come here and ask these questions:
‘When did your family migrate from Nepal? Why did they come?
How long have they lived in this village?’” Suddenly, his upwelling
anger cuts off his speech.
“No, no . . . let’s talk about this. I didn’t mean to upset
anybody. Why are you so upset?”
“I am the president of the village council. If you want to ask
questions about the village this is fine, but these questions of ‘When
did you come? Why did you come?’ I am the president! You can’t
ask these questions!”
Suddenly, it starts to make sense. Earlier that day, I met with
a research assistant to plan a simple survey of the village. Having
lived there for seven months, I assumed it would be a straightforward
project. I left the survey forms with my assistant and told him to wait
further instruction. Apparently, he had not. And now something had
gone terribly awry. “Please forgive me,” I tell the president, “Now I
understand that I should have cleared this survey with you.”
“Oh, yes, you should have . . . but this business of ‘When did
you come to Darjeeling? From where in Nepal?’ You can’t ask these
questions.” His temper resurging, his tenor again becomes aggressive.
“Wait!” I say assertively, “What’s the problem? Listen, you
and I both know, we all know: the people here, their ancestors came
from Nepal.”
His roughshod antagonism checked, he is taken aback. He
begins shaking his head back and forth, before begrudgingly admit-
ting: “Ok, Ok. We know, we know that! But you can’t ask these
questions . . . That would be proof. If we put our signature here
[inscribing his signature on his hand like it was paper] . . . That
would be proof!”
This admission of the obvious now out in the open, the tension
dissipates and I breathe a tempered sigh of relief. Clearly though,
this is not the time to hash out these matters, so we agree to
a meeting—for me, a tribunal—with the village leadership the
following morning. As I get up to leave, I place my hand on the
president’s shoulder in hopes of conveying my sincerest apology. He
shakes his head, staring only into the fire.
*****
The village night can be especially dark when one is in trou-
ble. On the clock and with the imperatives of apology press-
ing upon me, I thus began a frenetic search for understanding.
Moving through the village long after gates had been shut
and front doors latched, the immediate backstory—one of
an overzealous research assistant, a wary village leader, and a
gag order that spread like wildfire—was easy to reconstruct.
The deeper histories of anxiety were to prove steadfastly
more opaque yet frighteningly present.
UNSETTLING HISTORIES
Minutes before my tribunal, I am pacing nervously near the village
temple when I run into my neighbor: “Deepak, what happened?” I
ask.
“It’s fine, there is just that one question that is a problem,” he
tells me.
“Which one?” I ask, pulling the form from my bag.
Scrolling down the questions with his finger, “This one: How
many generations ago did your family migrate from Nepal? The
people around here are scared of what will happen to this informa-
tion. If we put our signature on this, then people are scared it will
be proof, and if the government gets it, they will send us back to
Nepal.”
“No! That’s impossible!”
“You see. This is a political thing. We had the Gorkhaland
Agitation where we tried for our own state. The people of India think
we are foreigners. We have tried for the Sixth Schedule [another
form of ethnic-based autonomy]. There is discrimination from the
people of the plains. So there is history there.”
“But Deepak, everyone’s ancestors came from Nepal, right?”
“Yes, but we can’t say that. People think we are foreigners.
Like you know, the situation with the Bhutanese refugees that got
sent back to Nepal. If the Ministry of External Affairs somehow gets
hold of this form and it has all of our information: where we came
from, when we came . . . People think they could send us back.”
He breaks off to check his watch. We’re late.
*****
As Deepak pointed out, his people’s place in India remains
a “political thing” with a real and problematic history. Since
migrating from Nepal for work in 19th-century British
India, the Nepali-speaking (Gorkha) peoples of Darjeeling
have endured marginalization on multiple registers—
political, economic, moral, ethnoracial, and geographic (see
Figure 1). Today, Darjeeling remains under the jurisdiction
of West Bengal—the people and state of which have come
to be seen as an oppressive force controlling the political
and economic prospects of the Gorkhas. National dynamics
have compounded the Gorkhas’ concerns about their place
in India. Nepali-Indian populations across India continue to
endure various forms of structural exclusion and periodic
bouts of ethnic cleansing and violence—particularly in
India’s northeast (see Hutt 2003:193). Targeted expulsion
and violence in Mizoram, Assam, Manipur, and Meghalaya

FIGURE 1. Darjeeling in the context of South Asia (http://commons.
wikimedia.org/wiki/File).
have established alarming precedents for the people of
Darjeeling, as has the Bhutanese refugee crisis, wherein
Nepalis fleeing Bhutan were denied asylum in India and sub-
sequently transported through Darjeeling to refugee camps
in Nepal. As can be gleaned from Deepak’s testimony, these
events powerfully inform the Gorkhas’ sense of vulnerability
in India.
Local cries of an “identity crisis” increased throughout
the 20th century in Darjeeling (Lama 1996; Samanta 2000;
Subba 1992). The angst came to a head in the 1980s when the
Gorkhaland National Liberation Front (GNLF)—led by the
charismatic Subash Ghisingh—launched a violent agitation
for a separate state of Gorkhaland within India (1986–88). As
for “why the name Gorkhaland?” Ghisingh explained, “[Be-
cause] only the ethnic name of any place or any land . . . can
germinate the real sense of belonging in the conscience of
the concerned people.”4
Despite three years of violence, the agitation failed—
leaving the people’s longings unrequited. Two decades later
(2006–07), the quest for autonomy took another turn as
Ghisingh sought to make Darjeeling a “tribal area” as per the
Sixth Schedule of the Indian Constitution. Despite massive
mobilizations of “tribal identity,” this movement also failed.
With people’s hopes and anxieties roused once again, a new
militant group, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha—the Gorkha
People’s Liberation Front—stormed to power in 2007–
08. Riding the waves of Indian pop culture (more on this
later), and promising nothing short of a separate state within
the Indian union, the new party quickly launched a second
Gorkhaland Movement (2007–12). And so, amid constant
protests, sporadic violence, and ambient anxiety, agitation
once again gripped the body politic.
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 611
TOWARD AN ANTHROPOLOGY OF ANXIETY
Delivered moments before my tribunal, Deepak’s testimony
came not a moment too soon for an ethnographer in trouble.
By linking the trembling body of the village president to the
unsettling histories and current politics I have just described,
his explanation put anxiety at the fore of my anthropological
concern.
With the psychoanalytic tradition, I identify anxiety as
an affective state—a phenomenon that is “felt” and thus
located along the “borderland” of psychology and physiol-
ogy (Freud 1959:19, 1966; Green 1999; Protevi 2009).
Born not of belonging but rather its lack, anxious belonging
proves an anxiety in the classically psychoanalytic sense (see,
e.g., Lacan in Harari 2001). But where Sigmund Freud and
Jacques Lacan saw anxiety as an individuated, affective phe-
nomenon, I offer a more social—more anthropological—
reading. Through my analysis, anxiety comes into view as
a historically produced, socially experienced phenomenon.
Anxious belonging is a collectively embodied “structure of
feeling” (Williams 1961, 1977). As such, its origins lie not
in the sexual development of the individual but, rather, in
the Gorkhas’ compromised place in the moral and political
economies of colonial and postcolonial India. To understand
its bodily affects, we must therefore understand its historical
and social origins—a point Teresa Brennan (2004:3; see also
Masco 2008) has made about affective phenomenon more
generally.
If psychoanalytic models don’t tell us much about the
Gorkhas’ troubled pasts, Freud and Lacan do shed light on
the nature of anxiety itself. Both identified uncertainty as
anxiety’s operative condition. Lacan left us the perplex-
ing aphorism, “Anxiety is not without an object,” implying
the uncertain presence of anxiety’s object (the threat is
both “real” and imagined, projected, imminent, etc.; Lacan
in Harari 2001:33). Freud likewise commented, “Anxiety
(Angst) has an unmistakable relation to expectation: it is
anxiety about something. It has a quality of indefiniteness”
(1959:90). Anxious belonging in Darjeeling is unequivo-
cally about being-in and being-of India. The frameworks of
the nation-state therefore are integral to its constitution.
In his seminal essay, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in
the Era of Globalization,” Arjun Appadurai (1998) explains
the graphic nature of ethnic violence as the expression of
rampant uncertainties over identity engendered by global-
ization. Amid these anomic conditions, the body, Appadurai
suggests, serves as a theater for the “dead certain” reckoning
of “us” and “them.” Appadurai’s concerns with collective
anxiety, political conflict, and ethnic violence resonate with
my own, but our analyses differ in important ways. First, in
linking ethnic violence to globalization, Appadurai largely
passes over the all-important frameworks of the nation-state.
This overlooks the troubled histories of those who dwell at
the nation-state’s geographic and symbolic margins. Second,
Appadurai pins ethnic violence to anxieties over identifica-
tion. I concentrate on anxieties over belonging. The optic
of belonging allows us to see that the Gorkhas’ anxieties are
612 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013
fundamentally about being-in and being-of the nation-state.
But, true to Freud’s earlier point, it is the uncertainty of
their belonging in India that has made for such an “agitated”
political contemporary. How is this the case?
The Gorkhas’ hair-trigger sensitivity to the question
of their place in India offers a start. Sustained precar-
ity, marginalization, and discrimination have rendered the
Gorkhas vulnerable to a range of both real and imagined
threats. As Freud noted, anxiety constantly expects its next
trigger, constantly searches for the next object upon which
to fix its attention. Anthropologist Kathleen Stewart notes
something similar when she writes, “Anxiety ranges without
object. But so too does the sense of potential” (2007:94).
This looming sense of potential—that is, that sense of some-
thing imminent and threatening—helps explain the reactive
nature of the Gorkhas and their politics. Importantly, these
anxieties are not without precedent. Local history and the
crises suffered by Nepali-Indians elsewhere in India remain
sources of grave concern. From these bases, the Gorkhas’
anxieties of belonging may be set off by a myriad of triggers.
Insensitive remarks, questions, slights, and other articula-
tions of exclusion can elicit violent responses, initiating,
in turn, potentially transformative political mobilizations
and conflict. The field of potential stimuli is categorically
open—as is the ability to play upon and play to these shared
anxieties. The latter has proven integral to a viral politics of
anxiety that has developed within the Gorkha community (a
point to which I return later), as well as to this community’s
persistent conflict with the peoples and state of West Ben-
gal. For now, the anthropological question remains: How
does anxious belonging become a social phenomenon and,
in turn, a political force? This requires a shift in attention
from anxiety’s hold on the individual body to its hold on the
collective body politic.
Since Émile Durkheim’s (1995) considerations of col-
lective effervescence, and running up through the more
contemporary work of Victor Turner (1969) and Edith
Turner (2011) on “communitas” and Stanley Tambiah’s work
on rioting crowds (1996), social scientists have been fasci-
nated by the intersubjective possibilities of embodied expe-
rience. These classic studies have shown us that the feelings
of shared experience do not just move through individ-
uals and communities; they constitute them. Indeed, the
shared history of anxious belonging—replete with enduring
forms of structural exclusion and punctuated by compound-
ing crises—have galvanized Gorkha identity and the politics
thereof. With these memories of exclusion and crisis, anxiety
has come to “live” in the body and in the body politic. There,
it continues to “lay a powerful claim upon the present” (Nel-
son 2008:3) as it informs recurring panics and particularly
impassioned forms of cultural and party politics.
Anxiety here proves a protean, episodic phenomenon.
Manifesting in fits, flashes, outbreaks, and crises, anxious be-
longing remains an elusive “object” of anthropological study.
What is more, the affective intensities it elicits frequently
shapeshift into other political and emotional forms—most
notably, subnationalist desire. Along with these desires, fear,
rage, and even joy all frequent the episodes that I examine
here. To the untrained eye, the volatilities of life and politics
in Darjeeling might seem incomprehensible, unpredictable,
even unjustified. Anthropology, I believe, can offer a dif-
ferent reading. Importantly, if we are to understand the
mercurial emergences of anxious belonging today, we must
first ground this collective anxiety in the hard realities of
Darjeeling’s past. Toward that end, I turn now to the
Gorkhas’ earliest days in Darjeeling.
COLONIAL UNEASE
Since first arriving to colonial Darjeeling, the Gorkhas have
been beset with insecurities over their place in India. In the
1850s and 1860s, outbreaks of anxiety began to flash across
the hills. Captured by the archive in the affective language of
alarm, flight, and unease, the panics excerpted below foretell
a broader pattern to come. Indeed, they bear directly on the
crisis I caused in 2007.
Archival Excerpts:
I. October 1854: The Deputy Commissioner of Darjeel-
ing, A. Campbell, alerts government of “universal”
rumors of an invasion by Nepal, inducing “much alarm
among the population.”5
II. November 1854: Campbell continues, “The alarm
amongst the Nipalese subjects employed here . . . rose
to such a pitch . . . that about 500 men employed on
the government works were not to be found.”6
III. September 1858: Campbell describes rampant rumors
of a proclamation by Nepal’s prime minister that “all
the Nipalese who do not return to their country before
the end of the Durga poojhā shall be shut out from ever
going back to Nepal and shall be considered in the light
of British subjects, or as enemies in the approaching
invasion of Darjeeling from Nipal.” This time 1,000
laborers fled in two days.7
IV. October 1858: Under what he terms the “pressure of
failing labor,” Campbell reports hearing further that
the prime minister “had issued a proclamation to all
Nipalese wherever located that now or never was the
time to return to their allegiance. . . . The whole na-
tive population became uneasy at these rumors, the
sappers got alarmed, and the European community
did so also.” Between October 9 and 19, 700 more
men on government hire: gone.8
V. October 1864: The superintendent reports the local
population to be “selling their property at a loss and leaving
in large numbers” due to spreading fears of invasion and
extradition by Nepali forces.9
What was the nature of this unease? Why were the
Nepali settlers so anxious about being in India? Ever since
the 1830s when the British began developing Darjeeling as

a sanatorium and later as a tea-growing district, colonial
administrators tacitly encouraged the immigration of labor
from Nepal and surrounding areas.10 Nepal at the time was
undergoing tumultuous land reform and excessive taxation
policies, which put considerable strain on its ethnic hill
populations (Whelpton 2005:50–55). Forced labor regimes,
bonded labor, and slavery were commonplace in this feudal
order (Holmberg et al. 1999).11 British India, meanwhile,
offered wage labor and an escape from Nepal’s oppressive
hierarchies and economic circumstances. With these push–
pull factors, thousands of “sturdy hillmen” were soon pouring
across the border (Chatterjee 2001:65–80; Hutt 1997:109–
113; Subba 1992:39–44; Subba and Sinha 2003:14–17).
Given the proximity and types that flowed in, Nepal was,
for the British, an ideal and decidedly ethno-logical labor
pool. But there was one problem: the Nepali government
did not approve.12
Thus, while the colonial planters relegated the dirty
work of moving bodies across borders to informal labor
recruiters known as sardārs, the entire system operated in
a realm of quasi-legality, which obviated the possibility of
formal papers, acknowledgment, or bona fides of any sort.
From the outset, this was a history of migration that could
not officially exist (cf. Stoler 2009)—which helps to ex-
plain the archive’s relative silence on the laboring peoples of
Darjeeling. Any traces of this history, any residues of quasi-
legality, by juridical rule would have to be rendered on a
different register.
Extradition was a real, albeit rare, possibility. Along
with formal extradition cases, the archive tells harrowing sto-
ries of Nepali raiders crossing into Darjeeling in the dark of
night to recapture escaped slaves.13 In the official and demi-
official reports of these cases, British ambivalence toward the
Gorkhas is clear. The colonials wished to claim these people
as British subjects yet recognized they had little recourse
to do so. The resulting ambivalence largely mirrored the
empire’s ambivalence toward Nepal. At times, the British
treated the Himalayan kingdom as merely a princely state;
at others, a sovereign nation (Singh 1996:34–35, 68–77).
Though they relied on—and encouraged—Nepali immigra-
tion, the British nevertheless refused to claim the Gorkhas
of Darjeeling as British-Indian subjects. Such were the co-
nundrums of quasi-legality.
These juridical ambiguities were to play a critical role
in shaping the Gorkhas’ questionable status in the future
nation-state. To this day, many Gorkhas, including those in
the village where I lived, still lack proper papers. This is why
my neighbors reacted so strongly to my survey questions
about household ownership, immigration, and so on. In
this sense, the aftereffects of this colonial history remain
hauntingly present. The fear of being sent back to Nepal,
the lack of papers, the hair-triggered sense of panic—the
resonances with the crisis I caused in 2007 are uncanny.
Ensuing generations would see their uncertain belong-
ings in India translated onto other registers. Particularly in
the lead-up to Indian independence in 1947, the Gorkhas’
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 613
national(ist) loyalties were called into question. The issue
concerned not so much their ties to Nepal but, rather, to the
British. Since the mutinous Revolt of 1857 when they stood
by the British in their desperate defense of Delhi, the famed
“Gurkha” regiments of the British Indian army had been a
trusted ally in combating sedition.14 But as the tables of em-
pire began to turn, so too did the legacy of this ostensibly
“brave,” “chivalrous,” “martial race.”
Anticolonial propaganda clearly illustrates this point. In
1931, multiple parcels of nationalist propaganda were in-
tercepted in the Darjeeling post office. The materials were
confiscated as part of a nationwide investigation into an anti-
colonial initiative to lure the Gorkhas into the independence
movement.15 The parcels teemed with pamphlets implor-
ing the Gorkhas to join the struggle against the British. The
arguments were agonizing. Taking the Gorkhas to task for
their service to empire, one pamphlet asked, “What have you
gained by giving your lives for the English? In the Mutiny of
1857, the Gurkhas and the Sikhs [another ‘martial race’] de-
prived the Indians of the Swaraj [independence; ‘self-rule’]
they had won and gave it to the English. Now the Sikhs have
made amends for their error and they are fighting for the
achievement of Swaraj. The Gurkhas too should rectify their
mistake and help India.”16
Crucially, the propaganda laid the burden of history not
only on military Gurkhas. All Gorkhas were responsible for
the wrongs of the past: “Civilian Brethren!” it hailed. “It is
your religious duty to make amends for the work supplied
by military brethren. It is your religious duty to bandage
the injuries inflicted on account of their mistakes.” As this
nationalist rhetoric makes painfully clear, the once-heralded
identification of the “martial Gorkha” had now become es-
pecially problematic for a minority seeking moral belonging
in the nation to come. If, as Berlant (2007) and other theo-
rists of “affective citizenship” have argued (Fortier 2009:19;
Mookherjee 2005), national inclusion involves not just the
formalities of papers, rights, and recognition but also shared
structures of feeling, the Gorkhas’ quasi-legal history of mi-
gration, the precarities of their colonial labor, and their
service to empire rendered them lacking in both the formal
and informal credentials of national belonging.
Prior to independence in 1947, anticolonial Congress
party leaders promised equitable minority status for the
Gorkhas in an independent India.17 Correspondence be-
tween Gorkha nationalists (outside of Darjeeling) and the
likes of Motilal Nehru, Jawaharlal Nehru, and Vallabhb-
hai Patel stressed the urgency of an “authoritative decla-
ration on behalf of the Congress that the Gurkhas were
their own brethren forming an integral part of the In-
dian community.”18 Yet whatever stroke-of-midnight hopes
the Gorkhas of Darjeeling might have harbored were soon
dashed by the realities of the postcolonial political economy.
In this more recent past, ethnoracial discrimination, polit-
ical marginalization, and a pronounced neocolonization of
Darjeeling by West Bengal and the “people of the plains”
only redoubled earlier exclusions.
614 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013
National dynamics continued to affirm the Gorkhas’ lo-
cal experiences of nonbelonging. Take, for instance, the
Nepali Language Movement. In 1972, the All India Nepali
Language Committee began a protracted struggle to make
Nepali a national language of India.19 The movement had
strong activist roots in Darjeeling (Booth 2010), but it strug-
gled to gain ground at the national level for the millions of
Nepali speakers of India. Then, in 1979, the initiative suf-
fered a most telling rebuke when Indian prime minister
Morarji Desai rejected the bid by publically declaring Nepali
to be a “foreign language” spoken by foreigners in India
(Dhakal 2009:157; Samanta 2000:101).
Meanwhile, Nepali-Indian communities across the
country continued to be subjugated to various forms of
prejudice and disadvantage. In India’s northeast, these com-
munities increasingly found themselves the targets of ethnic
cleansing efforts and periodic violence: in Mizoram in 1967,
in Assam in 1979, and in Manipur in 1980 (Hutt 2003:193–
194). The plight of Nepalis in neighboring Bhutan also struck
close to home, as roughly 100,000 Nepali-speaking refugees,
unwelcomed in India, passed through Darjeeling, en route
to the interminable camps of eastern Nepal (Hutt 2003). For
the Gorkhas of Darjeeling, these instances corroborated and
compounded their own longstanding insecurities over their
place in India. Relegated to the geographic margins of the
nation, lacking political voice, economic opportunity, and a
secure sense of being in and of India, the Gorkhas’ anxieties
over belonging soon would engender new forms of politics
in Darjeeling—these of a more radical kind.
AGITATION
The anxieties came to a head in the 1980s when the Gorkha-
land National Liberation Front launched a violent agitation
for a separate state within India. As GNLF founder Subash
Ghisingh explained: “The growing fears of the Gorkhas had
spread like a cancer. No ordinary medicine would cure this
malady—it was a very, very old disease. There was just
one capsule which could clean the system of this affliction—
Gorkhaland.”20
Ghisingh, like the people he represented, had been
called many things: “antinationalist,” “foreigner,” “traitor,”
and so forth, but the classic anthropological character of the
shaman is more apt. Given his propensities for the mysti-
cal (he frequently claimed magical abilities), it is unlikely
Ghisingh himself would have shed that label like he did
xenophobic pejoratives: “Me! An antinational!” he once ex-
claimed, aping an epithet he described as “far removed from
reason. For, weren’t we just longing to be called Indians?”21
Ghisingh’s words call to mind Probyn’s writings on the
longings that inhere belonging. Recognizing belonging to
be a “profoundly affective manner of being,” Probyn sees
these longings as a source of “immense political possibility”
(1996:13, 8). Ghisingh would concur. Gorkhaland was and
remains a “longing to be”—an embodiment that cannot be
understood sans the framings of the nation and of the man
Ghisingh. For there, in the ambiguous netherworlds of na-
tional belonging, we find the sorcerer and his magic. Like
the healer of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s fascination (1963:191),
Ghisingh was a master of abreaction, a conjurer of malady
who could affect the traces of a “very, very old disease” so as
to prescribe its notional cure—Gorkhaland.22
During the 1970s and early 1980s, political outfits like
the Pranta Parishad and the All India Gorkha League made
similar demands for autonomy and a separate state within
India. Ghisingh’s innovation was to inject a viral politics of
anxiety into this milieu. The seeds were already sown. Un-
der the spell of Ghisingh, they metastasized into what the
man himself called a full-blown “cancer.” With a curious
blend of poetics, paternalism, and paranoia, Ghisingh fo-
mented uncertainty. Doing so, he transformed anxiety into
the stuff of political conflict. He fixated on the Indo-Nepali
Treaty of 1950, which had granted “reciprocal” rights (of
property ownership, business, movement, etc.) to Nepalis
domiciled in India and vice versa. The treaty said nothing of
dual or “reciprocal” citizenship. Moreover, the Indian Con-
stitution states unequivocally that all those residing in India
at the time of independence were legal citizens.23 This in-
cluded the majority of Darjeeling’s population. Yet Ghisingh
preached otherwise. Addressing the masses on June 2, 1985,
he explained:
This word “reciprocal” has become a blemish for we [sic] (Nepalese
in India). This word indicates that we have come to India after
the 1950 Treaty as immigrants. Accordingly, we are not bona fide
citizens of India. Life and future is not secure for us in India.24
Note how quickly the rhetoric of doubt slips from a ju-
ridical to an affective register—from a legal “word” to a “life
and future . . . not secure.” Only through political conflict
and the achievement of a separate state of Gorkhaland, then,
would the Gorkhas find the security for which they longed.
The vaults of history opened, Ghisingh frequently raked over
more recent wounds. “Consider our situation,” he told India
Today in 1986, “[In 1976, Prime Minister] Morarji Desai de-
scribed us as foreigners and said we were welcome to go back
to Nepal . . . But if there is Gorkhaland then our identity as
Indian, belonging to an Indian state, will be clear.”25
This was classic Ghisingh. Reintroducing the threat of
extradition (first evidenced in the 1850s), he and the GNLF
reminded the people of their sensitivities precisely by ag-
gravating the anxieties in question. With each iteration,
those nerves became simultaneously more raw, more real—
fueling, in turn, an escalating guerilla insurgency. Ghisingh
and the GNLF were not just summoning a history of anxious
belonging, they were also producing it. Like the internal–
external dialectics of The Nervous System exposed by Michael
Taussig (1992), agitation became thus an embodied state and
a political project.
The three-year agitation (1986–88) left an estimated
297 dead and some 1,164 private homes destroyed
(Samanta 2000:54). Today, vivid memories remain: of de-
capitated heads appearing in the bazaar; of atrocities com-
mitted by military and paramilitary forces of the Central

Government and Government of West Bengal; of razed
villages, disappeared loved ones, and countless other trau-
mas. Crucially, the movement failed. On July 25, 1988,
Ghisingh signed a Memorandum of Settlement, ending the
agitation. As part of the deal, an official (gazette) notification
was issued by the Indian government to clarify the question
of Gorkha citizenship.26 Further, the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill
Council (DGHC) was established—a makeshift government
with limited autonomy that the GNLF and Ghisingh would
control for the next 20 years (1988–2008). These concilia-
tory measures did little to assuage the people. Nevertheless,
with Ghisingh at the helm (and answering directly to West
Bengal), the energies of agitation were kept at bay—largely
by their one-time instigator.
Such was the state of play when I began fieldwork in
2006. Little did I know that the dynamics I had come to study
would precipitate Ghisingh’s shocking end. For now, suffice
to say, the Gorkhaland agitation did not “cure” the people’s
anxieties over belonging. It exacerbated them, rendering
them ripe for future mobilization.
AN ETHNOLOGICAL TURN
In 2005, Ghisingh declared his intention of making Darjeel-
ing a “tribal area” as per the Sixth Schedule of the Indian
Constitution.27 By law, this form of autonomy incorporates
existing “tribal” political institutions into district councils
with powers to regulate forest and property rights, social
customs, and local administrative structures (i.e., the ap-
pointment of headmen and chiefs). The Sixth Schedule was
no Gorkhaland, but it promised greater autonomy nonethe-
less. Bringing it to Darjeeling would prove difficult, how-
ever. For one, there were no existing “tribal” political in-
stitutions; current sociocultural practices mapped poorly to
the government’s definition of tribes; and only 32 percent of
Darjeeling was recognized as Scheduled Tribes of India—far
short of the majority thought necessary (Middleton 2011).
Making this ethnological turn even more peculiar was the fact
that Ghisingh earlier (1986) had rejected the Sixth Schedule,
scoffing, “We are not tribals . . . . We are civilized. Look at
me, I wear a three-piece suit and shoes!”28 Two decades
later, a less-militant Ghisingh was reconsidering.
Throughout 2006, as the proposal was being worked
out in closed-door meetings in Kolkata and New Delhi,
Ghisingh worked to prove the “tribal” identity of Darjeeling.
His Department of Information and Cultural Affairs (DICA)
engineered massive spectacles of “tribal identity”—many
of them seemingly invented out of thin air. GNLF cadres
took to the streets, mandating attendance at public rituals,
implementing “tribal” dress codes, and leveling pressures
spoken and unspoken to fall into ethnological line. The public
turned out en masse. Jeeps with loudspeakers blaring and
GNLF banners flying overhead led the way, as shamans,
cultural troops, ethnic delegations, and thousands of citizens
bedecked in “authentic tribal” attire moved to the syncopated
rhythms of the shaman’s drum—an ancient beat carrying
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 615
FIGURE 2. The “tribal” subjects of Darjeeling (2006).
fresh promises of autonomy and belonging in the nation-
state (see Figure 2).
On October 11, 2006, Ghisingh’s identical bulletproof
limousines rolled into the town of Lebong, where he was
to inaugurate a new community hall. This being a rare ap-
pearance for the reclusive Ghisingh, I gladly took my seat
among the thousand or so GNLF cadres in attendance. After
the requisite performances of “tribal” culture, the Old Man,
as Ghisingh had come to be known, took the podium to be-
gin a rambling diatribe on culture and politics. “We are hill
tribes!” he proclaimed. “Our civilization, our culture, our
tradition, all that we have here in Darjeeling are of ancient
times . . . . The Indian Government may have knowingly or
unknowingly tried to break us. But this could not be broken.”
Ghisingh went on to accuse not only the “Britishers”
but also “international spy agencies” such as Pakistan’s ISI,
Russia’s KGB, and the United States’ CIA of trying to destroy
their “tribal” culture. For years, Ghisingh had warned that
foreign spies were operating in the hills—never giving any
reason as to why such operatives would care to meddle
in either the politics or “ancient culture” of this particular
corner of India. That wasn’t the point. Ghisingh stared down
these imagined foes with great bravado. He explained the
passions of his “tribal” politics as follows:
Though my blood is still hot, I have kept it under control. Locking
horns with the Government of Bengal and Delhi is not going to
work. The way forward is the kind of politics I am doing these
days. In today’s context of the Sixth Schedule, it is the policy of
protecting the tribals. Not a separate state of Gorkhaland, but
security for the tribals!
Ghisingh’s appeal to the “security of the tribals” reprised a
politics of anxiety pioneered during the Gorkhaland Move-
ment. But whereas in the 1980s, he harped on the vulner-
ability of the Gorkhas, now it was the “tribes” who needed
security. The “hot-blooded” passions coursing through these
identifications, Ghisingh professed, were the same.
Support for the Sixth Schedule surged throughout 2006,
but the potential at hand proved fleeting. Come 2007, Ghis-
ingh had yet to finalize the deal. The opposition, meanwhile,
616 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013

began accusing Ghisingh of forsaking the people’s dream of

Gorkhaland. Public intellectuals convened forums to raise
awareness of the Sixth Schedule’s shortcomings, as op-eds
filled the papers, debating this form of autonomy’s ability to
satisfy the people’s desires of national inclusion in either a
juridical or affective sense (Berlant 2007; Fortier 2009).
Ghisingh responded by redoubling his efforts to get
the bill to Parliament before the critiques gained traction.
National politics repeatedly deferred that prospect. The
coalition government in Delhi had more pressing—more
central—issues to manage: among them a suddenly fragile
India–U.S. nuclear deal and politically volatile land expro-
priations in West Bengal and elsewhere. Despite promises
otherwise, the Monsoon Session of Parliament came and
went without any results, making it clear that Ghisingh was
finding little purchase at the Centre.
In Darjeeling, the public grew restive. Attendance at
“tribal” rituals suddenly dropped. No longer willing to de-
fend Ghisingh’s “tribal” musings, many people questioned
whether the Old Man had lost a step in his old age—perhaps
even his mind. As dissent crept through the ranks, one had
to wonder: Had Ghisingh abreacted anxiety one too many
FIGURE 3. Celebrating Prashant.
times? Was the sorcerer, now with his “tribal” trick hanging
in the balance, finally losing his magic? Time would soon tell.
Unbeknownst to any of us, Indian pop culture was about to
present the people of Darjeeling with an altogether new saga For the people of Darjeeling—indeed, for Nepali speakers
of being-in and being-of the nation. the world over—his victory was seen as a coming-out party
on India’s national stage. As such, the moment engendered
INDIAN IDOL immense pride among the Gorkhas. Ultimately, though, it
September 23, 2007: the party began just after 6:00 p.m. was about more than just cultural politics. Prashant’s ascent
People poured into the streets. Jeeps and motorbikes over- to Indian Idol stardom evoked a deeper history of anx-
flowing with youth paraded through town honking, chanting, ious belonging—somehow (if only momentarily) redressed
and singing in anticipation. Across the nation, the votes had through the magic of pop culture. For one shining moment,
been cast. In just a few short hours, a Gorkha of Darjeeling a marginalized minority historically discriminated against as
stood to become an Indian Idol. “outsiders” and “foreigners” assumed its place at center of the
Minutes before the winner of “Indian Idol” (2007) was to national imagination. A Gorkha was Indian Idol. The fairy
be announced, Darjeeling’s Prashant Tamang was handed the tale was real.
microphone and the opportunity to sing one last impromptu Yet, by September 25, the euphoria of two days prior
number. A boyish 24, Prashant launched into “Bir Gorkhali,” had morphed into outrage. The day after Prashant’s victory,
an a cappella ode to Gurkha warriors. On air before millions, Ulta Pulta Nitin, a disc jockey of Delhi radio station Red
Prashant’s off-the-cuff rendition was a bit awkward and not FM, went on air and sarcastically warned Delhi that if all
nearly as polished as his competitor’s song. But it appeared Nepali chowkidars (guardsmen) became Indian Idols, who
as heartfelt as it could be. One of Darjeeling’s own, for a would guard the private property of India?29 Riffing on com-
celebrated moment, could bask in the national limelight. mon Gorkha stereotypes, Nitin joked, “Prashant Tamang has
Then, just before 10:00 p.m., Bollywood star John become Indian Idol. Tonight we need to guard our houses,
Abraham reached into his magic box and confirmed what malls, and restaurants by ourselves as there will be no Nepali
many already knew in their hearts: Prashant Tamang was people to guard these places.” He further remarked, “All
this year’s Indian Idol (see Figure 3). Firecrackers exploded momo (dumpling) shops will remain closed as the Nepali
across the hills of Darjeeling. The promenade became a guy has become Indian Idol.”30 The comments rekindled
thicket of joy. People danced in the streets as live images precisely the kinds of discrimination that Prashant Tamang’s
of Prashant warped across public jumbotrons. The Prashant victory had seemed to overcome. And so, the tables of this
Fan Club launched all-night parties. Local schools, colleges, affectively charged moment suddenly turned (see Figure 4).
tea gardens, and most businesses were granted a holiday so By September 25, the Prashant Fan Club, led by then-GNLF
that the carnival could continue into the next day. muscle man Bimal Gurung, had declared a bandh (general
Hailed as an ambassador of the Gorkha people, Prashant strike), shutting down all commerce and travel in the hills.
Tamang had become much more than an instant pop icon. Effigies of DJ Nitin were ablaze in the streets.

FIGURE 4. Deriding DJ-Nitin/Defending Gorkhas.
On the morning of September 28, 5,000 Prashant sup-
porters gathered in Siliguri (a city three hours to the south)
to file an official complaint against DJ Nitin. For those of us in
Darjeeling, the details of what happened next remain hazy.
Reports suggested a minor skirmish broke out at the front
of the procession in a crowded commercial strip. The row
quickly spread along communal lines. Bengali shop own-
ers emerged from their stalls with sticks and attacked the
Gorkha protestors. About 800 Gorkhas, including 50 chil-
dren, fled into the courthouse grounds, seeking shelter from
the barrage of bricks and rocks hailing down upon them. The
Bengali mob now owned the streets. Tear gas was ineffec-
tive. The police then vanished, leaving the Gorkhas on their
FIGURE 5. Outside the courthouse. (Photo courtesy of Kundan Yolmo)
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 617
own to weather the storm. For eight hours they remained
trapped inside the courthouse (see Figure 5).31 Finally, at
7:45 p.m., the army and Border Security Forces were called
in to free the trapped Gorkhas.
The news broke piecemeal in Darjeeling. On the
national channels, looped videos of burning vehicles,
projectile-wielding mobs, and police idling at a safe distance
played incessantly, as reporters tried to make sense of what
was happening. Simultaneously, Darjeeling’s local channel
aired live footage of the All Gorkha Student Union (AGSU)
protests going on in Darjeeling town. There, hundreds of
enraged youths chanted, “The police procession should give
us justice! All those who slander the Gorkhas, watch out!
Death to the Bengali Government!” The streets of Darjeeling
went dead as people awaited more news. No one was sure
whether another bandh had been called. It didn’t matter.
The fantasy had turned into a nightmare.
*****
Bandhs in South Asia bring an eerie peace. Without the drone and
wobbling headlights of the Jeeps that typically ply Hill-Cart Road,
the crossroads are pleasantly quiet and strangely dark. Needing a
break from the slow drip of information coming over the television,
my friend Prakash and I happen upon an old friend, Puran, who
emerges from his freshly painted store sporting a three-piece beige
suit. A budding entrepreneur who dabbles on the side in jazz guitar,
Puran, with his long ponytail and laid-back style, cuts quite the
figure as he ambles over, hand outstretched to greet us. As we talk,
Puran tells us that earlier in the day he and friends almost beat up a
carload of Bengali men who made a comment at a local girl as they
passed the very stretch of road on which we are standing. Narrating
618 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013
the event, Puran suddenly puffs up his chest and flinch-strikes at
the air, as though the Bengalis were right there, close enough to feel
his rage. I am taken aback; this is not the easygoing Puran I have
come to know.
“What did they say to her?” I ask.
He doesn’t remember. “Normally I wouldn’t do such a thing,
but at this moment, in the wave of the moment. . . . ” He can
explain no more.
We discuss Prashant’s win, Nitin’s comments, the riot. I share
with Puran my sympathy but gently suggest to him how things
could have been different had the people of Darjeeling not reacted
so strongly to the comments made over the airwaves of Delhi. If they
had only let it roll off their backs . . .
Puran listens intently, then rejects the grounds of my perspec-
tive. “But you see, this Prashant Tamang thing is really about more
than Prashant Tamang.”
This much is painfully clear.
SHAPESHIFT
To understand how anxious belonging fuels subnationalism
in Darjeeling, consider the immediate aftermath of “Indian
Idol” (2007). Just five days after the riots, the All Gorkha
Student Union (AGSU) announced: “The recent Siliguri riots
have prompted us to speak out. The incident made us feel
that the Gorkhas are not safe. We always have to prove our
identity in this country. This is happening because we do
not have our own land. . . . The Gorkhas require their own
land!”32
That same week (October 7, 2007), former GNLF
member and leader of the Prashant Fan Club, Bimal Gurung,
quit the GNLF to start his own political party. Twenty-
thousand people thronged to see the former GNLF hench-
man launch the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha—the Gorkha Peo-
ple’s Liberation Front (hereafter, the “Morcha”). With the
crowd extending as far back into the bazaar as one could see,
I found a perch on the beams of an unfinished construction
project to witness Darjeeling’s largest public gathering since
the 1980s Gorkhaland agitation. In the crowded streets be-
low, the masses chanted, danced, and swayed, as specially
written songs flooded the scene with pinings for Gorkhaland.
There and then, the hot-blooded youth of AGSU, many of
them drunken and shirtless, pledged their allegiance to Gu-
rung’s new “Liberation Front”—infusing an old cause with
a new generation of vitriol. The quest for Gorkhaland was
once again a movement.
“Indian Idol” (2007) became a watershed moment for
Darjeeling. The saga proved Ghisingh to be woefully out of
touch with his people and the times. Importantly, Ghisingh
never supported Prashant’s Indian Idol bid, seeing the hoopla
as mere child’s play. His lack of support for one of Darjeel-
ing’s own hurt the Gorkha people deeply—so much so that
just days before the show’s finale, and with Ghisingh in In-
donesia, posters went up in town warning that if Prashant
didn’t win, Ghisingh would not be allowed to return to
Darjeeling. Betrayed by their paternal leader and strung out
from the emotional rollercoaster that followed Prashant’s
victory, the public was on edge. Meanwhile, having led the
spirited campaign to Indian Idol victory, Bimal Gurung’s po-
litical capital was surging. And so, with the masses once again
reverberating with anxiety, the Morcha’s muscular politics
proved right for the time. Anxious belonging thus came to
serve a virulent party politics.
The newly founded Morcha stormed to power in 2008.
Using the promise of Gorkhaland as its carrot and political
intimidation as its stick, the Morcha induced sweeping polit-
ical conversions, taking over the municipality and triggering
a budding agitation against Ghisingh and for Gorkhaland.
Interparty violence and protests turned the tide irrevocably
against Ghisingh. With his GNLF members either convert-
ing to the Morcha or fleeing the hills, Ghisingh could hold
on no longer. On February 29, 2008, the longtime savior
of the Gorkhas was forced to resign—ending two decades
of GNLF rule (van Beel and Bertelsen 2008). Taking his
place was Bimal Gurung, the newly arisen demagogue to
answer the people’s longings. Gurung’s face suddenly be-
came ubiquitous, appearing on placards, murals, and banners
throughout town. As was the case with Ghisingh during the
1980s, now it was Gurung bedecked in the green, yellow,
and white colors and flags of Gorkhaland. Taking a page from
his former boss, Gurung rekindled a politics of anxiety to
fuel this new movement for a separate state. Harnessing the
energies at hand, Gurung and the Morcha engineered a sub-
nationalist agitation of devastating effects. From 2008–12,
acerbic protests, assassinations, indefinite strikes that crip-
pled the local economy, interparty violence, and sporadic
attacks on government offices became the hallmarks of their
ad hoc insurgency. Amid this day-to-day uncertainty, life
necessarily proceeded in fits and starts. And so, with a pub-
lic on edge once again, agitation made its uncanny return to
the bodies and politics of the Gorkhas.
No one foresaw Ghisingh’s sudden fall from power,
nor the ensuing inception of a second Gorkhaland Move-
ment. Yet, when understood through the analytic of anxious
belonging, this sequence through which a television show
became the catalyst of political upheaval and subnationalist
agitation proves more believable. How quickly the eupho-
ria and cultural pride of Prashant’s victory morphed into
horror and anger. How quickly that horror and anger mor-
phed into revived determination for Gorkhaland. Through-
out these linked episodes, the embodied intensities of anxiety
shapeshifted into a range of political emotions—each pulsing
with visceral energy and possibility. One moment, it was joy;
another, hot-blooded rage; the next, unbridled subnation-
alist desire. Indeed, shapeshift remains anxious belonging’s
signature mode of actualization—and therein, its greatest
potential to radically affect life and politics in Darjeeling.
CONCLUSION
“Indian Idol” (2007) and its subnationalist aftermath offer
powerful reminders of pop culture’s ability to charge and
recharge publics and politics. These events likewise signal
the volatility of politics at the margins of India and beyond. It

would be all too easy to write off these mercurial dynamics
as overly reactive, irrational, or incomprehensible. But this
would be to cast aside the embodied histories and anxieties
of a people still searching for their rightful place in the
nation-state.
In Darjeeling, anxieties over belonging remain an un-
settling, but also transformative, sociopolitical force. Not
without history, and not without reason, they continue to
shape a people and their politics in formidable ways. In this
regard, the conditions of anxious belonging in Darjeeling are
specific but hardly unique. Anxieties over belonging remain
an indelible feature of political life at the margins of In-
dia. Subnationalist agitations continue to reverberate across
South Asia. And, more broadly, the politics of belonging con-
tinue to exhibit sudden and striking volatility. Forming part
of this pattern, the agitations of Darjeeling—subnationalist
and otherwise—affirm the affective volatilities and transfor-
mative potentials at hand.
The episodes presented here are moments when anxious
belonging made itself known and felt in the most visceral
of terms. As nodes—or spikes—in a longer history of anxi-
ety, these episodic articulations merit careful consideration
in and of themselves. But from an anthropological point of
view, it is equally important to read between these succes-
sive moments of crisis, panic, mobilization, and so forth.
Anxious belonging, after all, is not only the charge that fre-
quents these moments of anxiety, it is also that underlying
structure of feeling that subtends and spans these episodic
emergences. Whether latent or manifest, imminent or re-
alized, these anxieties are always in a sense “there” for the
people of Darjeeling, awaiting their next threat, their next
trigger, their next actualization. So lives anxious belonging
in the body and in the body politics of a people long rel-
egated to the literal and figurative margins of the nation.
There it remains an integral dimension of and potential for
imminently agitated forms of life and politics.
Townsend Middleton Department of Anthropology, Univer-
sity of North Carolina–Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599-3115;
ctm22@email.unc.edu
NOTES
Acknowledgments. I would like to acknowledge a number of
readers and respondents who have helped steward this article to its
current form. I received valuable comments from William Mazzarella,
Jaideep Chatterjee, Saiba Varma, Mara Kaufman, Anne Alison, Tomas
Matza, Christian Lentz, Ajantha Subramanian, Sumathi Ramaswami,
Saurabh Dube, David Holmberg, Dominic Boyer, Viranjini Munas-
inghe, and especially Jason Cons, who has seen this piece through
too many incarnations. A special thanks, as well, to my colleagues at
the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill for their sustained
support. The thoughtful comments I received from my anonymous
reviewers at AA were outstanding. Equally, I owe a great deal to the
Middleton • Anxious Belongings 619
keen eye (and patience) of AA’s editor, Michael Chibnik, as well as
AA’s Mayumi Shimose who gracefully guided this article to publica-
tion. Finally, my utmost thanks to the people of Darjeeling, only some
of whom appear here. Facets of this research were supported by the
Mario Einaudi Center of International Studies at Cornell University
and the American Council of Learned Societies.
1. Recent papers by Thapa (2009) and Dhakal (2009) have also
noted the people of Darjeeling’s longstanding desires for be-
longing in India. Their analyses, however, do not engage the
question of anxiety.
2. The material for this article was gathered through 15 months of
fieldwork in 2006–07, as well as additional fieldwork in 2004,
2005, 2010, and 2011. Archival research was conduced in the
West Bengal State Archives (Kolkata), the National Archives of
India (New Delhi), and the India Office Records at the British
Library (London).
3. Readers of Freud and Lacan will notice a resonance here with
these authors’ conceptualization of anxiety as “lack.” I engage
these psychoanalytic models later in this article.
4. The Voice of Gorkhaland, November 25, 1987.
5. Letter 554, October 29, 1854, India, Foreign, December 29,
1854, 22–34SC. I cite archival materials in the following man-
ner: document name and date (if applicable) + the archival
call number, which generally follows the format: Government,
Department, Branch (if applicable), File Date, Proceeding Num-
ber. Where the archive strays from this format, I have used the
call number in its original form.
6. Letter 568, November 9, 1854, India, Foreign, 29 December
1854, 22–34SC.
7. India, Foreign, 21 December 1858, 2522–6FC.
8. India, Foreign, 30 December 1859, 1431–1446, FC/SUP.
9. Bengal, Political, Political, November, 1864, 27–28.
10. The archive mentions Nepal, Bhutan, and Sikkim as the sources
of the Nepali immigrants. The historical demographics of the
region remain unclear for this period. And while not all of
the “Nepali immigrants” came directly from Nepal (some came
from Sikkim and Bhutan; others seem to have been already in
Darjeeling [Subba 1992:39–50]), Nepal nevertheless emerged
as the principal labor pool for the British. India, Foreign, August
1837, 139–140; India, Foreign, 28 June 1841, 135–6FC; India,
Foreign, 27 April 1855, 63FC.
11. The British readily acknowledged these conditions. See India,
Foreign, 28 June 1841, 135–6 FC.
12. India, Foreign, 31 December 1858, 2522–6FC. The Nepali
government allowed Gurkha military recruitment elsewhere in
Nepal, but it refused to sanction civilian emigration to Dar-
jeeling. Quite to the contrary, the Nepali state demanded the
immediate return of emigrants, promising amnesty to refugee
slaves or else the denial of future entry and citizenship in
Nepal. These demands, along with intermittent trade embar-
gos, signaled the Nepali government’s concern with controlling
the flow of both goods and people across its eastern border
into British Darjeeling. India, Foreign, 31 December 1858,
2522–6FC.
620 American Anthropologist • Vol. 115, No. 4 • December 2013
13. India, Foreign, August 1868, 219–220, Political A; India, For-
eign, August 1868, 404–5, Political A; India, Foreign, February
1869, 9, Political A; India, Foreign, March 1878, 1–8, Political
A. India, Foreign, January 1864, 222–223, Political A; India,
Foreign, July 1866, 63, Political A; Bengal, Judicial, August
1868, 206–209.
14. Gurkha refers to the military ranks of these Nepali-speaking
peoples. Gorkha refers to civilian populations. On Gurkhas and
the 1857 Revolt, see Des Chene 1991:123.
15. India, Home, Political F, 14 September, 1931.
16. Intelligence Bureau Translation. India, Home, Political F, 14
September, 1931.
17. India, Home, Political F, 14 September, 1931.
18. India, Home, Political F, 14 September, 1931.
19. The movement eventually succeeded in 1992.
20. The Illustrated Weekly of India, October 2, 1988.
21. Lama 1996:261.
22. Borrowing from psychoanalysis, Lévi-Strauss worked with the
notion of abreaction to explain how sorcerers conjured and re-
enacted the ailments of their patients so as to cure them of their
infliction. See Lévi-Strauss 1963.
23. Constitution, Section 2, Article 5.
24. Lama 1996:22–27.
25. India Today, October 31, 1986.
26. Lama 1996:241–245.
27. Articles 244(2), 275(1).
28. Frontline, August 9–22, 1986.
29. See Chhetri 2008.
30. Darjeeling Times, September 26, 2007.
31. The Telegraph, “Moments That Made 2007,” December 31, 2007.
32. The Telegraph, October 4, 2007.
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