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Introduction : reinventing the plantation for the 21st century -- Darjeeling -- Plantation -- Property -- Fairness -- Sovereignty -- Conclusion : is something better than nothing?
Nestled in the Himalayan foothills of Northeast India, Darjeeling is synonymous with some of the finest and most expensive tea in the world. It is also home to a violent movement for regional autonomy that, like the tea industry, dates back to the days of colonial rule. In this nuanced ethnography, Sarah Besky narrates the lives of tea workers in Darjeeling. She explores how notions of fairness, value, and justice shifted with the rise of fair-trade practices and postcolonial separatist politics in the region. This is the first book to explore how fair-trade operates in the context of large-scale plantations. Readers in a variety of disciplines—anthropology, sociology, geography, environmental studies, and food studies—will gain a critical perspective on how plantation life is changing as Darjeeling struggles to reinvent its signature commodity for twenty-first-century consumers. The Darjeeling Distinction challenges fair-trade policy and practice, exposing how trade initiatives often fail to consider the larger environmental, historical, and sociopolitical forces that shape the lives of the people they intended to support.
FEED YOUR SOUL WITH ASMA KHAN’S COLLECTION OF AUTHENTIC INDIAN RECIPES ASMA KHAN STARS IN NETFLIX’S AWARD-WINNING SERIES CHEF’S TABLE Award-winning restaurant Darjeeling Express began life as a dinner party with friends; Indian food lovingly cooked from family recipes that go back generations. In this book, Asma reveals the secret to her success, telling her immigrant’s story and how food brought her home. The recipes pay homage to her royal Mughlai ancestry and follow the route of the Darjeeling Express train from the busy streets of Bengal, through Calcutta, where she grew up, and along the foothills of the Himalayas to Hyderabad. Platters of dishes boasting texture and intense fla...
_______________ 'Koehler ... has the polymath's curiosity for everything, as well as the writer's ability to listen to and retell a good story ... A richly digressive book' - Nicholas Lezard, Guardian 'This exhaustively researched and eminently readable book will delight foodies, history buffs and armchair travelers alike' - Seattle Times 'Koehler has the knack of a good storyteller who has found a great story to tell' - South China Morning Post _______________ WINNER OF THE IACP AWARD FOR LITERARY FOOD WRITING Set against the backdrop of the looming Himalayas and drenching monsoons, this is the story of how Darjeeling developed its tea industry under Imperial British rule and eventually cam...
This book, the second of two volumes, continues the authors’ ground-breaking re-examination of India’s history and political economy. This volume describes the economic fortunes of India in the second half of the 20th century. Beginning with the reconstruction of the Planning Commission and India's hybrid model of economic planning, the authors describe the multiple shocks weathered by the system before being replaced with a fully free market model after the collapse of the Soviet Union. Chapters consider the stresses placed on India’s organisation by the shocks of the twentieth century, from its experiments with a socialist economy to its embrace of the Washington consensus in the 1980s. The impact of the invasion of China in 1962 and India’s struggle to find its feet post-partition are also given detailed analysis. The book’s unique perspective helps to shed light, for the first time, on how India’s organisational structure negotiated the country’s immense historical and cultural inheritance with the stresses of a twentieth century nation state.
Darjeeling occupies a special place in the South Asian imaginary with its Himalayan vistas, lush tea gardens, and brisk mountain air. Thousands of tourists, domestic and international, annually flock to the hills to taste their world-renowned tea and soak up the colonial nostalgia. Darjeeling Reconsidered rethinks Darjeeling’s status in the postcolonial imagination. Mobilizing diverse disciplinary approaches from the social sciences and humanities, this definitive collection of essays sheds fresh light on the region’s past and offers critical insight into the issues facing its people today. While the historical analyses provide alternative readings of the systems of governance, labour, and migration that shaped Darjeeling, the ethnographic chapters present accounts of dynamics that define life in twenty-first century Darjeeling, including the Gorkhaland Movement, Fair Trade tea, indigenous and subnationalist struggle, gendered inequality, ecological transformation, and resource scarcity. The volume figures Darjeeling as a vital site for South Asian and postcolonial studies and calls for a timely reexamination of the legend and hard realities of this oft-romanticized region.
For a few years in the early 1990s - when the embers of a violent agitation for Gorkhaland were slowly dying down - Parimal Bhattacharya taught at the Government College in Darjeeling. No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memoir of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years. As Parimal tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling slowly grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway - once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train; and the vas...
Proceedings of a national seminar held at Raja Rammohunpur in December 2003.
India is everywhere: on magazine covers and cinema marquees, at the gym and in the kitchen, in corporate boardrooms and on Capitol Hill. Through incisive reportage and illuminating analysis, Mira Kamdar explores India's astonishing transformation from a developing country into a global powerhouse. She takes us inside India, reporting on the people, companies, and policies defining the new India and revealing how it will profoundly affect our future -- financially, culturally, politically. The world's fastest-growing democracy, India has the youngest population on the planet, and a middle class as big as the population of the entire United States. Its market has the potential to become the wo...