The Country and the City in the Himalayas

“Farming isn’t what it used to be.” That’s what people across Kalimpong told me when I was there in summer 2022 after a COVID-induced fieldwork hiatus. Something had shifted. In the before-times, people were quick to valorize farming as the thing that distinguished Kalimpong, a district of West Bengal in the Himalayan foothills. Farming, and tenurial rights to land, gave the Nepalis and Indigenous Lepchas and Bhutias who call Kalimpong home a different political consciousness.