Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Darjeeling Darjeeling'

The structural and metamorphic evolution of the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya, a “classical” region of inverted metamorphism in the Himalaya, has been investigated by field studies combined with 2-D numerical modelling of the thermal evolution. In the Himalaya, an orogen-wide zone of inverted isograds is spatially associated with the Main Central Thrust (MCT). In the Sikkim-Darjeeling region, an inverted metamorphic field gradient is indicated by garnet-grade rocks in the upper Lesser Himalaya (LH), which increase in grade to sillimanite + K-feldspar assemblages in the middle to upper structural levels of the Higher Himalayan Crystallines (HHC). Metamorphic breaks in the “Barrovian sequence” have been established between the garnet- and sillimanite-bearing rocks in the Darjeeling region and between the kyanite-staurolite schists and biotite-sillimanite schists in Sikkim. Since the accurate location of the MCT is critical to constraining the metamorphic evolution of the Higher and Lesser Himalaya, a number of criteria are used in defining the MCT zone in this region. These include lithologic contrasts, increase in non-coaxial deformation features towards the MCT zone and geomorphology. The MCT forms a zone of distributed ductile deformation that has propagated southwards with time, resulting in a 3-10 km wide zone, containing rocks from both the Higher and Lesser Himalaya. Four episodes of deformation and two metamorphic events have been identified in the HHC. Textural evidence and garnet zoning profiles indicate a single episode of prograde metamorphism, but four deformation events in the MCT zone and the LH. Garnet zoning profiles from the HHC indicate retrograde equilibrium. M₁ resulted in a peak assemblage of prismatic sillimanite + K-feldspar as well as muscovite dehydration melting resulting in millimetre to centimetre scale leucosomes, while M₂ is associated with rapid exhumation of the HHC during simultaneous movement along the MCT and the South Tibetan Detachment System (STDS) forming decompression textures in metabasic boudins and pelites.

Why do middle class kids go to middle class schools? It all began with the story of a father’s dream. It was sometime in April in 2008 and I was in the midst of my undergraduate fieldwork. I had been exploring the resurgence in the ‘Gorkhaland’ movement across the hills of Darjeeling in North Eastern India. I had been interviewing various people who had been engaging in hunger strikes in pursuit of the cause. In the process of these interviews and in my general experiences during this time, I was struck by the constant rhetoric that they fought not for themselves or their own futures but for the futures of their children and generations to come. I was staying in the small town of Sukhia about 20 km outside of Darjeeling town. On that particular April day I had found myself temporarily housebound in the home of my host family, in the wake of a sudden tumultuous downpour. The weather it seemed was conspiring against my research, forcing me to postpone another interview. I sat in the kitchen waiting for the weather to pass, sharing an afternoon cup of tea with a side of sliced bread and jam, with Prabin, a member of my host family. Prabin worked in the office of the District Magistrate and thus was a man with a keen eye on local politics. As such, he had volunteered himself to be my unofficial research assistant. It had been a quiet Saturday about the house, as Prabin’s wife Binita and their 3-year-old son, Pranayan, were out shopping in the market. Prabin’s mother and father were visiting other family nearby, and Prabin’s younger brother, Pramod, had travelled into town to collect some supplies for his school. There was no sign of the rain letting up soon so Prabin and I continued to chat. Prabin’s son had recently started school and we were discussing his son’s apparent indifference towards schooling. ‘Everyday he cries! He doesn’t like school very much’. Prabin was convinced that his son would stop crying once he had learned the value of school. I had been working as an English teacher in a small private school and had seen first-hand how parents like Prabin acknowledged the importance of schooling choice, even as their children began their schooling journeys at around 2 years old. Prabin was keen to reinforce the idea that his son’s present school, a small building only 5 minutes’ walk up the road, was just the beginning. Prabin told me that he wanted his son to get a ‘good education’ in contrast to his own schooling experience, which he described as ‘simple’. Prabin told me that he dreamed of his son going to England and making enough money to support the whole family. Prabin knew that if his son was going to fulfil his dream then he would need to succeed at school, but not just any school. ‘I want my son to go to St. Joseph’s School; this is the best school in Darjeeling’. I was aware that there were many schools in Darjeeling, both in the town itself and in the surrounding areas, all of which professed to offer a high level of English medium education, so I was keen to know what made St Joseph’s such a certain choice. ‘Have you been there?’ he challenged me, as if to say that anyone who would lay eyes upon this place would know what he was talking about. ‘We will go there someday; it is a very nice place’. He was keen to emphasize how ‘nice’ this school was even if he had only seen the building from the road. ‘Others schools can teach English but [St. Joseph’s] is more than that. They play all the sport[s], they have good Rector, they have nice student[s], good discipline, this is the right place for my son’. Prabin emphasized that he dreamed of a good life for his son and in order to get there he first had to go to the right school. This was the first time I had even heard of St. Joseph’s School, but it provided a provocative insight into perceptions of the roles of schooling in India today. Prabin’s dream outlined a particular future for his son, which depended upon a foundation within a specific kind of schooling. I was immediately drawn to how he had mapped out a prospective educational trajectory, which leaned on certain intangible aspects of schooling that were perceived to subsequently guide his son towards a certain livelihood. St. Joseph’s had been singled out, as it offered something that others were perceived not to have. Perhaps most importantly of all, Prabin had never been to the school which he dreamed of. His ideas of St Joseph’s were ultimately imagined through an amalgam of stories that he had heard from work colleagues, interspersed with his own fleeting encounters in passing the school building. The imagined view of the school was integral in shaping Prabin’s actions. He was planning for his son’s future around a dream. Prabin’s perspective reflected a wider trend within literature pertaining to the Indian middle class, indicating a certain preference for a particular kind of schooling as being a necessary prerequisite for a specific, ultimately idealised, future livelihood. Donner (2006) identified a similar kind of career mapping amongst middle class Bengali families in Calcutta. The families, particularly the parents themselves, sought to admit their children to particular pre-schools, which were seen as the foundations of a scholastic career. Admission to future primary and secondary education hinged on the previous stage and as such, investment in each stage of the schooling process was vital in establishing the necessary trajectory for their child to progress on to specific occupations that would offer the necessary array of capital - financial, social and cultural – that would lead to a middle class life. What I became interested in was the concept that shapes this process. Why do middle class Indians choose certain schools and not others? What is the apparently intangible quality that leads parents like Prabin to desire St. Joseph’s over all the others? What is it about schools like St. Joseph’s that make them stand out from the range of available schools? It was with these questions that I headed off to St. Joseph’s for some answers.

This thesis explores Tibetan ideas regarding the life-span and the various life-forces that influence longevity. It presents a substantial body of ethnographic data from seventeen months of fieldwork among Tibetans in the Darjeeiing Hills, West Bengal, India (between June, 2004 and May, 2006), an area where I lived for long periods of time since 1992. The thesis supplements this ethnographic material with translations from two Tibetan medical texts (twelfth and seventeenth century CE) and a selection of astrological tables and divinatory texts that are used by Tibetans in this region today.

The Darjeeling Himalayan Railway (DHR) had been introduced in 1881 in the hills of Darjeeling as a vehicle for economic and social development in Colonial India. The importance of Darjeeling as the economic and strategic centre accelerated the implementation of the DHR as the main mode of transport in the Himalayan foothills of Northern Bengal. At the time of its inception Darjeeling Himalayan Railway was a commercial railway carrying freight and running regular mail trains serving the new needs of the region as it developed as a military base and tea production centre. Since then the DHR has evolved through different periods of time incorporating different phases of its own existence both as a mode of transport and as a heritage form. In 1999 the DHR was declared as a World Heritage Site due to its significance as a hill passenger railway and an example of the engineering excellence of 19th Century and the socio-economic development that it brought into the Darjeeling region. However, even after ten years of its inscription as a World Heritage, very little research has been done on the DHR. This thesis, thus, focuses on the DHR. In my research, I have firstly attempted a cultural analysis of the 'journey' of the DHR. How it is instrumental in making 'travel experiences' and how it is itself constituted through different embodied travel practices and performances. In this context it is shown how the 'hybrid geographies' of humans and machines that contingently make both people and materials move and hold their shape. In this way, it explores the complex relationality between the traveller and the mode of travel and how it incorporates different aspects of mobilities and materialities. I also focus on the DHR's relationship with the community alongside the railway track: how the people and this 19th century mode of travel, continue to be attached with complex and enduring connections. Secondly, I have focused on the representational aspects of the DHR. It is evident that tourists reorder the world through the manipulation of texts, images and practices 8 similar to what colonialism did to codify colonial people to better impose its institutions and policies. In the present context I therefore explore, in light of post-colonial theory, how the DHR has been proliferated in various discourses. Hence, I examine the significance of the intangible aspects inherent in the DHR and attempt to trace out these 'contact zones' by drawing upon aspects of post-colonial theory. Indeed, the research gains theoretical currency from two different theoretical perspectives, namely, 'Post-Colonial Theory' and the new 'Mobilities' paradigm. Methodologically, the research was broadly ethnographic and based on mainly on interviews taken in the field, as well as observations on board the train. Significantly, I also walked extensively along the track (nearly 35 km) from Kurseong to Darjeeling at different times as a comprehensive way to understand the whole process of the DHR. This can be conceptualized as the 'co-present immersion' of a researcher in the field for observing and recording. The thesis concludes with indications to possibilities of future research on the DHR such as the relations between cars and the DHR which could bring new understanding to the mobilities paradigm.

This dissertation explores the various contexts of curative and preventive health in a particular economic zone, the tea estates of northern Bengal (Darjeeling, Duars, and the Terai) in the colonial period. The sanatorium of Darjeeling was established in the mid-nineteenth century as a European retreat from the dusty and clamorous plains of Bengal. The white/European settlement in Darjeeling encouraged tea plantations in the surrounding lands, by clearing the forests and transplanting them with tea plants and encouraging immigrant labour, demarcating enclosures, thereby rapidly creating a distinct site of economic activity in the region. When the tea plantations extended to the virgin forests in the foothills of the Himalayas, the region known as the Terai and then to the in the newly annexed (from Bhutan) plains beyond in the western Duars, the plantation economy predominated the landscape where large tea estates were interspersed with pockets of newly ploughed jute and paddy fields cultivated by tenant-sharecroppers. The processes outlined above led to a complex set of colonial enclaves. Darjeeling was conceived as a European retreat, a site of recovery for the white race in the tropics- an enclave of one kind. The tea plantations were constructed as enclaves of a different kind flanked by villages these were 'estates' where the labourers, overseers and the management resided in the estates in accommodations that varied according to a strict hierarchical order. Through an analysis of various archival sources including municipal and medical papers, private papers of officials and planters, publications of the tea industry, as well as contemporary medical journals this dissertation attempts to examine diseases, medical practices, and the role of the state within the dual enclaves of the hill-station and the tea plantations.

This thesis examines Tibetan perspectives on the causation, management and treatment of mental illness (Tib.: sems nad) within a Tibetan exile community in Darjeeling, northeast India. Based on two six-month periods of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2011 and 2012, it examines common cultural understandings of mental illness and healing, and how these are reflected in health-seeking behaviour. To date, research on lay Tibetan perspectives of mental illness and their impact on health-seeking behaviour has been limited, especially in relation to the concept of smyo nad (‘madness’). Following on from work by Jacobson (2000, 2002, 2007) and Millard (2007), the thesis investigates lay Tibetan perceptions of the causation and treatment of various kinds of mental disorders through the use of indepth semi-structured interviews and participant observation, comparing and contrasting Tibetan approaches to those of biomedical psychology and psychiatry and their accompanying classification systems, the American Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) and European International Classification of Disease (ICD). Four case studies of individuals labelled with different Tibetan and biomedical diagnoses related to mental health conditions are described in order to illustrate a number of key concepts in Tibetan approaches to mental illness and its healing. The research found that that a number of informants successfully combined different – sometimes opposing – explanatory frameworks and treatment approaches in response to an episode of mental illness. However, the thesis concludes that the Tibetan and biomedical categories remain difficult to correlate, due in part to their culturally-specific nature, based on significantly different underlying assumptions regarding individuals and their relationship to the environment.

 

Abstract

The focus of this essay is the american director Wes Anderson and the use of colour in his films. I also put some focus on colour as a neglected element in film studies, and what has caused this neglect. In my own research, I have analysed three of Anderson's films: Bottle Rocket (1996), The Royal Tenenbaums (2001) and The Darjeeling Limited (2007). To get a broad sense of a films use of colour, I have investigated the colour scheme, the colours of the costumes, as well as colour patterns. I have also interpreted the symbolism related to certain colours and then used the results of the analyses to answer the question; "how does Wes Anderson use colour, and in which film is this most apparent?" A very generalizing answer to this question, is that Anderson use colour as a means of signifying the characters' feelings and ambitions, and also their relations to the themes of the films. He does this by connecting symbolic values to certain colours and makes these colours stand out in certain scenes and in the characters' clothes. The film that best shows this use of colour is The Royal Tenenbaums. In short, this essay will hopefully bring some understanding of how colours are used in the films of Wes Anderson, but also open up the eyes of the readers to the importance of the neglected element itself; colour.

 

Makaibari Tea Estate is one of the plantations in Darjeeling, West Bengal, which has converted to organic practices. Organic agriculture is an acknowledged farming practice, with both environmental and health-related benefits. However, workers’ direct experience of working at an organic tea estate differs. This study was investigating the organic awareness, level of work satisfaction and health among the workers of Makaibari Tea Estate. The aim was to examine what advantages the workers perceive, as well as what limitations there still are to achieve a good work environment. The method used was qualitative and data was collected by interviewing 31 people from six villages belonging to the tea estate. Thematic analysis was used when coding the data. The results show that there is a lack of knowledge and awareness about the meaning of organic, both in a broader perspective, as well as within the tea estate. Even if there is a knowledge deficiency about the organic practices of Makaibari Tea Estate, the workers were very positive about Makaibari being organic. Moreover, the workers of the tea estate had very few health issues with even less of them related to their work situation. The work satisfaction was high but the majority of workers worked unwillingly. To increase the knowledge and awareness of organic, accessible information from the company should be provided on regular basis. Secondly, the wage and the education level should be raised, in order to empower the people on the tea plantation.

The majority of households in the hill regions of Nepal are net consumers of their agricultural produce. The harsh geographical topography, low landholdings and uncertain weather make households in the hills more susceptible to food insecurity. This research examines the role of small millets in achieving food and livelihood security for the people of Dhikur Pokhari VDC in Nepal. As a project based on qualitative research, data was collected through semi-structured interviews, observations and focus group discussions. In addition, market and value chain analysis for small millets was conducted. The findings show that small millets have a significant role in ensuring food security, particularly for the marginalized households. The findings also show that, through their exchange properties, small millets contributed towards generating household livelihoods. Further, findings revealed the existing formal and informal markets for small millets and showed a direct correlation between small millets-based market, and food and livelihood security for the people of Dhikur Pokhari VDC.