From the Editorial Desk........

 Special Issue  

 (Un)Common Landscapes and Ruptured Memories: Autoethnographies of North Bengal

Editors: Aparajita De and Rajib Nandi

In our collective imagination North Bengal is often synonymous with Kanchenjunga, Darjeeling tea and of idyllic vacations spent in the colonial hill station of Darjeeling, or the forest reserves of Jaldapara or Buxa, or perhaps the simple elegance of Gayatri Devi, Maharani of Jaipur and the Princess of the native state of Cooch Behar.

Though within Bengal yet North Bengal has always had a unique identity outside the realm of Bengal in terms of its history, culture, politics and geography. North Bengal could easily be referred to as a cultural and political frontier where many cultural regions overlap. Over the centuries, it has grown as a place of many cultures and even today, is strategically located within these multiple social and political boundaries. Historically the region is a melting pot of Brahmnical, mongoloid, Austro-Asiatic and Dravidian cultures having always welcomed people from different places to come and live here. Consequently, many ideas, cultures and races are socially assimilated with the place being founded and re-constituted several times, in addition its history being written, re-written and re-interpreted repeatedly.

North Bengal is also a site of resistances. Since the ancient period, the people here tried to maintain their own identity through both cultural exchanges on one hand and resistances against cultural and political aggression on the other. This place gave birth to several movements either in protest of colonial categorization or in protest of economic and social deprivation by the landlords. In the present era, the region has made its mark due to a series of social movements based on ethnic and lingual identity of its people.

Interestingly, a very large number of colonial documents exist on North Bengal, mostly ethnographic/linguistic/botanical surveys or land settlement reports. Post-independent North Bengal too witnessed a large number of writings on social and political issues by the local authors and scholars. Surprisingly a majority of these authors contributed outside the university system – through a large number of scholarly magazines, little magazines and newspapers. The uniqueness of North Bengal lies in this large volume of local literature that is being produced by authors outside the university system. There is no doubt that they contribute hugely in re-writing and re-documenting the regional and local histories.

The present series of the autoethnographies will explore self-reflective writings/photo essays that bring out uncommon views of common, everyday landscape through the authors’ personal experiences and memories that connect their autobiographical stories to the wider cultural, political, and social meanings and understandings of North Bengal.

Authors' Bio- Note:

The author is an Assistant Professor in Department of Geography, Delhi School of Economics, University of Delhi.She is also the Convenor of the Department's Media Lab and Digital Library. She is currently working on Mediaspace, Bollywood and popular culture.

Rajib Nandi is a Research Fellow at Institute of Social Studies Trust, New Delhi and holds Ph.D. in Social Anthropology from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi.  His areas of research interests include Social movements and Environment.