Chora Bato: None of the Pathways in Darjeeling is Straight
Parimal Bhattacharya _____________________ In Tenesse Williams’ play A Streetcar Named Desire, the heroine takes rides on a streetcar line named Desire to come to the city center. In New Orleans, there really was a line by that name. If a tramway in a US city could be named Desire, then the taxi route to the hill town of Darjeeling could very well be named Longing. To understand this, one must go to Chowkbazaar on a dim, foggy afternoon. There one would see the battered Mahindra and Land Rover service jeeps waiting in front of the police outpost, below Golghar restaurant, and would hear the impatient cries of drivers and their assistants – Silgarhi-Silgarhi-Silgarhi Kharsang-Kharsang-Kharsang Last Turn! Last Turn! Last turn. After this, darkness would fall, no vehicle would ply on hill roads. Darjeeling would be completely cut off at night from the rest of the world. During my years of exile there, every time I heard the anxious calls of these men, I felt a sudden tug at my heart. Their litanies were blended with the muezzin’s call for evening prayer that rose from Butcherbustee below and filled me with a deep longing. One of my colleagues had an 8-year old son who suffered from asthmatic fits. These came unannounced, and he had to be immediately shifted to lower altitude as there was no other remedy. The jeep drivers’ calls would cast a shadow on the nervous father’s face. Another colleague, who had an odd sense of humour, would respond by singing aloud a Tagore song – Orey ay, amay niye jabi ke re bela sesher sesh kheyay Orey ay, diner seshe… ‘Oh come! Who’ll carry me in the last ferry at the day’s end…’ – the lyric says something like this, and then: ‘For whom the daylight has died but the lamp of the night has not been lit, it is he who is sitting at the pier.’ The light of the day would really die for us with the ardent cries of last-turn drivers, the lamp of the night would not be lit, we would plod on to go and sit at the pier…I mean, at one of the many pubs in town. I have heard anxious footsteps of village folk who had come to town on various work, and were hurrying to catch the last-turn service jeeps. With nightfall, not only would Darjeeling be cut off from the plains, but the settlements scattered all over the hills, too, would shrink into tiny islands in a dark ocean, the mountains would return to the priemeval times. The darkness would slowly curdle over the jeep stand, the calls would become mystical and indistinct: Kalempoong-Kalempoong-Kalempoong! Lebong-Lebong-Lebong! Kharsang-Kharsang-Kharsang! Last turn! Last turn! A keen ear could pick out in these slurred utterances roots of original Lepcha place names that the jeep drivers unknowingly evoked. Thus, Kurseong became Kharsang, Lebong Alebong, and Darjeeling became Dorhzeling. In Lepcha language, each of these words has a meaning: Kharsang means the land of white orchids (alternately, the star at dawn), Ale-bong is a tongue-shaped spur, and Kalempoong is ‘the ridge where we play’. In fact, many peaks, rivers, gorges and plateaus in these hills still bear Lepcha names whose sounds have been twisted in other tongues. Thus, Peshok comes from pazok, which means forest; Mirik from mir-yok, ‘a place burnt by fire’; Phalut from Fak-lut, or ‘the denuded peak’; and Senchal comes from shin-shel-lo, which means cloud-capped hill. These bear testimony to the fact that the Lepchas were the original inhabitants of Darjeeling hills. This is also acknowledged in British official documents. When the king of Sikkim gifted the East India Company the 24 miles long and 6 miles wide Darjeeling hill tract, so that they could build a sanatorium there, it was inhabited by the Lepcha tribe. But that shouldn’t stop us from taking a critical look at the image of pristine wooded mountains sparsely dotted with a few Lepcha dwellings before the British set foot here. The object of seeing, and showing, Darjeeling hills as an almost uninhabited place was two-fold: one economic, the other cultural. For the tenancy of this hill tract, the Company had agreed to pay the king an annual grant of three thousand rupees (the amount was later doubled). Lack of human habitation and, consequently, limited scope for revenue collection would have meant that the gift was rather profitable for the Sikkimese monarch. And then there was the colonial mindset at work behind the notion that Darjeeling was ‘discovered’ by the British. This led to the fabrication of a nostalgic home town on foreign soil, upon exotic Himalayan terrain. # The fabrication progressed through the 19th century on war footing; a military officer was appointed for this. In 1835, after the East India Company obtained Darjeeling hills as a gift, it sent Colonel Lloyd and Dr Chapman, the surgeon of the Governor General, to sojourn there and find out whether its environment and climate were suitable for a sanatorium. They stayed there for eight months, from November 1836 to January the next year, in a wattled hut that they built for themselves. Based on their report, Darjeeling Association was formed in Calcutta with a brief to set up a town in the mountains. The years 1838-39 were a period of intense activity in Darjeeling. Jungles were cleared and plots of flattened land were distributed among members of the association. Also, and what was of crucial importance, the construction of a bridle path to Darjeeling via Punkhabari began. The Darjeeling Family Hotel was set up; a colony came up with about a dozen cottages. St. Andrew’s Church was built in 1843; the Loreto Convent was established four years later. In the lower part of the settlement, not yet a town, dwellings of coolies and menials, most of them from the plains, were coming up now as a large native labour force was sine qua non for the comforts of sahibs and memsahibs. This led to the growth of