The Peruvian native tree was smuggled across malaria-plagued British colonies in search of  suitable location for the production of quinine. In the Eastern Himalayan foothills of Mungpoo, it took its deepest  root.

In 1862, under the direction of Dr. Thomas Anderson, a Scottish botanist and Superintendent of the Royal Botanic Garden Calcutta, cinchona flourished. The subtropical climate and sub-alpine hilly altitude (1200-6170 ft asl) of Mungpoo provided ideal conditions for the quinine-yielding Cinchona trees that were native to the Andes, South America. The success encompassed the hills of Munsong-1901, Rongo-1938 and Latpanchar-1943. The plantation provided British colonies with an economically vital steady supply of the anti-malarial drug. 

The land that hosted the plantation was a land plowed by geopolitical drills. It shaped the demography and ecological footprints of the landscape even before the colonial expansion could sow the seeds.

The land that hosted the plantation was a land plowed by geopolitical drills. It shaped the demography and ecological footprints of the landscape even before the colonial expansion could sow the seeds. The land that would later become plantations was once within the jurisdiction of the Chogyal who ruled the Kingdom of Sikkim. In 1718, the east of Teesta River including Munsong and Rongo was annexed by the Kingdom of Bhutan. Decades later, Mungpoo and Latpanchar too changed hands in 1780, the western stretches of Teesta River fell into the expanding Gorkha Kingdom of  Nepal.  

It was only after the Anglo-Gorkha War (1814-1816) and the subsequent Treaty of Sugauli (March 4, 1816),  the Darjeeling hills were ceded to British India, paving the way for the establishment of plantation. Furthermore, its expansion was further encouraged by the Treaty of  Sinchula (November 11, 1865) following the Anglo-Bhutan War (1864-1865). 

The colonial enterprise needed hundreds of hands to extract the bitter quinine. Soon, labourers were brought from the Kingdom of Nepal and the Kingdom of Sikkim under the Sardari system.

The colonial enterprise needed hundreds of hands to extract the bitter quinine. Soon, labourers were brought from the Kingdom of Nepal and the Kingdom of Sikkim under the Sardari system. The trusted workers, given the title of Sardars, were sent back home to fetch family and convince community members to work in the plantations. As the result of this, the communities are still predominantly engaged in the plantation. The Sardars earned a monthly commission of one anna for every hand that laboured the land.  

Like the cinchonas, the people who worked the land too were uprooted and planted.

The nature of their work was cyclic, the rhythm of “Badla”. An acre of land in exchange for a lineage of continuous toil. With time both the cinchona and the people adapted, leading to a seamless naturalization in the region. This influx of migratory kin not only carved the plantation with their toil but also created a tight-knit community still seen in Mungpoo today. 

They perished as nameless, numbered labourers but imprints of their footprints remained on the roads, factories, and settlements of Mungpoo. Their individual histories often remain quieter than the ruins they left behind. 

Mungpoo today lies in West Bengal, India. It is administered by The Directorate of Cinchona and other Medicinal Plants under the Department of Food Processing Industries and Horticulture, Gorkhaland Territorial Administration. But it was not always so. Mungpoo was originally under the Department of Commerce and Industries until 2006. 

1934 onwards, German synthetic alternatives like chloroquine and hydroxychoroquine entered the market. Hence the demand plummeted for the labour-derived, labour-intensive organic quinine. The World Wars also aided in the demise of the colossal colonial endeavour. Factories slowed and many structures were left to decay beneath the moss and monsoon rain.

This departmental shift marked the end of the era. The era of the grand colonial pharmaceutical history. A prudent pivot, a stark pivot, towards survival. Survival through diversification. 

Rubber. Cardamom. Kiwi. 

Lemongrass. Strawberry.  

This departmental shift also washed away the bleak traces of those nameless, numbered pioneers who woke up at 4 am, reached Ganti Ghar at 6 am and toiled on the land till 4 pm. Reminders of community, livelihood, and belonging erased - year by year. 

Today, these crumbling monuments of industrial decay serve as landmarks. Like landmarks that anchor memory and magnetic fields for the migratory birds returning innately. 

Season after season.  

The hills too have migrations. 

A syndicate seat. A train ticket. 

A flight overseas. 

Migrating- in search of Mughlan 

An oasis.

Fleeing economically parched hills. 

Stunted academic seeds. 

Healthcare, crumbling 

But like birds they return innately. 

Season after season- 

For festivals.  

For funerals.  

For home. 

For returning residents, Chamra Godam A lady-

Elegant. Poised. 

Wrapped rust-red. 

Where cinchona bark was laid to weather for quinine. Stood as a landmark in our emotional map.  

A glimpse from the car meant: “I am home.”

The Godam was like the Cinchona plantation-

weathering, but still standing.  

Like a mother awaiting her returning kin. 

The Godam was unlike the Indian monuments of tourism.  

But she was ours. 

 Our history.  

 Our heritage.  

 Our sense of belonging.

Today, on the 11th of May 2026, the Chamra Godam is being dismantled piece by piece. 

Today, do these crumbling monuments of industrial decay matter? It matters profoundly-to the local  plantation workers and their descendants. To them, these ruins represent not just a lost era of global significance, but also their generational heritage and cultural identity. A tangible proof against the recurring identity scrutiny.  

This history forms the foundation of their ongoing quest for World Heritage recognition, supported  by Kalimpong Krishak Kalyan Sangstha, which notes that the plantation actually precedes the iconic Darjeeling Toy Train (1881). Our antique factory machineries could be turned into a  museum.  

Alas!

From earth she came. To earth she departed. 

Among her ruins, I sat-

in silence-

Stillness.

Structures without spectacles are rarely deemed worth preserving. 

What remains now is the plein air painting from the sunny morning of 16th September, 2024.

REFERENCES: 

1. Antique machines of Mungpoo Cinchona Plantation. (2018, April 2). Get Bengal. 2. Chowdhury, K. D. (2022). Cinchona in Darjeeling: A Colonial Overview. Innovation The Research  Concept, 7(1).  

3. Middleton, T. (2021). Becoming-After: The lives and politics of quinine’s remains. Cultural  Anthropology, 36(2), 282-311. https://doi.org/10.14506.2.05 

4. Middleton, T. (2024). Quinine’s remains: Empire’s Medicine and the life thereafter. University of  California Press. https://doi.org/10.155/liminos.187 

5. Pradhan, U.M. (2020, October 8). Hydroxychloroquine and our cinchona. The Darjeeling  Chronicle.  

6. Rai, G. (2024). The changing narratives of Indian Gorkhas. Education India Journal: A Quarterly  Refereed Journal of Dialogues on Education, 10(2), 574-586. 

7. Safarkhani, M. (2025). Space to place, housing to home: A systematic review of sense of place in  housing studies. Sustainability, 17(15), Article 6842. https://doi.org/10.3390/su17156842 8. Sarkar, D. (2013, November 7). Cinchona plantation in Darjeeling is in shambles. The Economic  Times (7 November). 

Abstract

This is the first of a two-part article revisiting the Lhotshampa crisis: the expulsion of an estimated 100,000 ethnic Nepali citizens of Bhutan between the late 1980s and early 1990s. Much of the existing literature, journalistic and scholarly alike, narrates this crisis as a closed historical episode. Part I argues instead that the crisis originates in a specific and traceable administrative sequence rather than a spontaneous ethnic conflict. Drawing on historical and legal scholarship together with testimonial and comparative evidence, this part traces the crisis across three registers: the history of invited migration and formal integration that preceded it; the 1985 Citizenship Act and the 1988–89 census through which a settled population was retroactively reclassified as stateless; and the contested archive of personal testimony, corroborated by international monitors, through which the crisis has most often reached outside audiences. A concluding section situates Bhutan's citizenship politics within a wider South Asian pattern of 'suspect citizenship' directed at transborder and linguistically distinct minorities, from Nepal's own Madhesi population to India's Gorkha diaspora. Part II, published separately, examines the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the crisis's unresolved and actively reopening present, including the 2025-2026 U.S. deportations of resettled refugees and the continued detention of Bhutanese political prisoners.

Introduction: Beyond the Brand

For much of the past three decades, the Kingdom of Bhutan has occupied an unusually favourable place in the global imagination. Its policy of Gross National Happiness (GNH), formally adopted as a development framework and elevated, particularly after 2008, into the organizing rhetoric of the state (Munro 2016), has made Bhutan a recurring reference point in conversations about alternative models of progress, environmental stewardship, and cultural preservation. This reputation is not undeserved: Bhutan's record on forest cover, its constitutional commitment to carbon neutrality, and its careful management of tourism are real and frequently studied achievements. The difficulty is not that this image is false, but that it is partial, and the part it omits-a forty-year history of contested citizenship, expulsion, and unresolved statelessness affecting the kingdom's ethnic Nepali minority, known as the Lhotshampa, or "southerners"- rarely enters the same conversation.

This article is the product of a collaboration between two writers with different relationships to that omission: one of us works within an academic institution and approaches the subject through the comparative literature on citizenship, statelessness, and South Asian state-making; the other writes from within the cultural and geographic borderlands of the Eastern Himalaya, where the Lhotshampa diaspora is not an abstraction but a set of neighbours, sources, and family histories. What is in question is whether the specific legal and administrative mechanisms used to unmake that population's citizenship between 1985 and the early 1990s, and the way their consequences have been managed, or left unmanaged, in the decades since, can be examined without either flattening Bhutan into a caricature of repression or allowing the GNH brand to function, in Michael Hutt's (2003) phrase, as a shield against scrutiny.

Much existing writing on the Lhotshampa crisis falls into one of two modes. The first is descriptive history, anchored in Hutt's (2003) indispensable Unbecoming Citizens and a handful of subsequent monographs, which narrates the expulsion and its causes but largely concludes its account around the turn of the millennium, when the refugee camps in eastern Nepal were at their largest. The second is advocacy journalism, which periodically rediscovers the crisis, often through human-interest profiles of individual refugees, without situating it within the legal architecture of statelessness or following its more recent developments. Neither mode has fully absorbed what we consider the most analytically interesting fact about this case: that the crisis did not end with the resettlement of more than 100,000 refugees to third countries between 2007 and 2016. It was, instead, displaced again: first into a residual population of several thousand elderly and infirm refugees left behind in two consolidated camps in Nepal, and then, in 2025, into a wholly new register, when the United States began deporting Bhutanese-born refugees whom Bhutan itself refused to receive, producing a small but legally significant cohort of people rendered stateless for a second time, nearly two decades after the international community had declared their situation durably solved.

This first part of the article establishes the historical and legal foundations of that claim. We begin with the historical formation of the Lhotshampa community and its administrative unmaking through citizenship law and census; we then turn to the contested archive of personal testimony through which the crisis has most often reached outside audiences, and to the regional pattern of "suspect citizenship" of which it forms a part. Part II takes up the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the crisis's least-examined recent chapter: the 2025-2026 reopening of statelessness through deportation, alongside the continued detention, and in one case death, of Bhutan's remaining political prisoners.

Historical Foundations: Migration, Invitation, and Integration

The Lhotshampa are frequently described, in both Bhutanese government statements and unsympathetic commentary, as a population whose presence in southern Bhutan was unauthorized or marginal until relatively recently. The historical record complicates this framing considerably, though it does not resolve into a simple counter-narrative either. Contact between the Himalayan courts of Nepal and Bhutan predates the period of mass migration by more than two centuries: Hutt (2003) documents cordial relations between King Ram Shah of Gorkha and the Shabdrung Ngawang Namgyal, the seventeenth-century unifier of Bhutan, including reciprocal religious privileges and the summoning of Bhutanese lamas to Nepali courts. These early ties are not, by themselves, evidence of large-scale settlement, but they establish that the two polities were never strangers to one another, a fact that complicates later characterizations of the Lhotshampa as a wholly foreign population with no prior relationship to the Bhutanese state.

Sustained migration into Bhutan's southern lowlands, by contrast, is a phenomenon of the mid-to-late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and it was substantially encouraged rather than merely tolerated by Bhutanese authorities. Following the 1865 Treaty of Sinchula, which concluded the Anglo-Bhutanese Duar War and ceded the Bengal Duars to British India, Bhutan's remaining low-lying southern territory-malarial, densely forested, and largely unsuited to the agricultural practices of the Drukpa-majority north-remained sparsely populated and underdeveloped (Hutt 2003). Bhutanese regional authorities, including the Dorji family of Ha Valley acting under royal decree (kasho), employed local labour contractors (thikadars) to recruit Nepali-speaking settlers to clear and cultivate these lowlands around the turn of the twentieth century (Hutt 2003; Dhakal & Strawn 1994). The settlers introduced sedentary, terraced wet-rice cultivation in place of the shifting cultivation practised in the north, and by the mid-twentieth century the south's agricultural output had become a substantial part of the kingdom's economy.

The historiographical dispute is less about whether migration occurred-it plainly did, in both invited and informal forms- than about how much of it, and which generations of settlers, the state was later willing to recognize as having occurred with its consent.

This is also the point at which a more even-handed reading becomes necessary. Bhutan's own later accounts of this period, and some Western reporting sympathetic to the Bhutanese government's position, describe the same migration not as state-sponsored settlement but as a steady, largely unregulated influx of Nepali labourers drawn by Bhutan's comparatively low population density, free land, and eventually free education and healthcare, which by the late twentieth century the state itself characterized as having outpaced its capacity to track or absorb (O'Brien 2010). Both readings can be true at once: that the initial waves of settlement were actively invited and administratively organized, and that subsequent decades saw migration the Bhutanese state came to regard, rightly or wrongly, as exceeding what it had sanctioned. The historiographical dispute is less about whether migration occurred-it plainly did, in both invited and informal forms-than about how much of it, and which generations of settlers, the state was later willing to recognize as having occurred with its consent.

What is not seriously disputed is that a substantial Lhotshampa population was formally and unambiguously naturalized. The Lhotshampa, far from a monolithic ethnic bloc, comprised Rai, Limbu, Tamang, Gurung, Magar, and various Indo-Aryan caste groups, predominantly Hindu but including Tibeto-Burman-speaking Buddhists and a smaller Christian minority (Hutt 2003). Their economic integration was followed by formal political recognition: the 1958 Nationality Law, promulgated under the modernizing third king, Jigme Dorje Wangchuck, granted citizenship to Lhotshampa residents and explicitly recognized them as Bhutanese "southerners" (Hutt 2003). For three decades thereafter, Lhotshampa citizens served in the civil service, the Royal Bhutan Army, and early development administration; localized political organizing, such as the short-lived Bhutan State Congress founded in 1950, concerned itself principally with taxation and local civil grievances rather than separatism, and in fact helped prompt the very legal inclusions that followed. By any reasonable historical accounting, the Lhotshampa of the mid-twentieth century were not a marginal or unauthorized population on the periphery of the Bhutanese state; they were one of its constituent communities, formally naturalized and materially central to its southern economy. What changed, beginning in the 1980s, was not the historical record of their arrival but the political utility of contesting it.

The Reversal: Citizenship Law, Census, and the Manufacture of Statelessness

The reversal of this settled status did not occur through a single decree but through the sequential operation of legislation and administrative procedure, precisely the combination that the international legal scholar Neha Jain (2022), in an influential recent analysis, terms the "manufacturing" of statelessness: the use of facially neutral bureaucratic criteria of time, documentation, and geography to produce, rather than merely record, a population without citizenship.

This is a common nationalist ideological state concern posed as demographic anxiety; small states bordered by much larger neighbours routinely cite demographic anxiety as a basis for restrictive citizenship and immigration policy, and Bhutan is not historically unique in this regard.

By the late 1970s, the Drukpa-led political establishment had come to view the Lhotshampa's demographic growth and distinct cultural practices as a potential threat to a cohesive Bhutanese national identity, a concern Bhutanese officials and sympathetic commentators have since framed in terms of demographic inundation- a small, sparsely populated kingdom of fewer than a million people situated between two demographic giants, anxious that an unintegrated and rapidly growing minority along its southern frontier could, over time, alter the kingdom's political character entirely (O'Brien 2010). This is a common nationalist ideological state concern posed as demographic anxiety; small states bordered by much larger neighbours routinely cite demographic anxiety as a basis for restrictive citizenship and immigration policy, and Bhutan is not historically unique in this regard. The question is not whether such a concern existed, but whether the legal instruments used to address it were proportionate, prospectively applied, and consistent with basic guarantees against arbitrary deprivation of nationality under Article 15 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (United Nations 1948).

The 1985 Citizenship Act tightened naturalization requirements considerably and, crucially, was applied with retroactive effect: it established 31 December 1958 as a cutoff date by which residence had to be documented, typically through land tax receipts, in order to establish citizenship (Hutt 2003; Jain 2022). The demand for this specific category of documentary proof was, as the U.S. State Department itself noted at the time, difficult to reconcile with the widespread illiteracy and limited administrative capacity that characterized rural Bhutan in 1958, meaning that many families who had lived in the kingdom for generations, and who held later citizenship identity cards issued under earlier procedures, could not produce the singular document the new law required (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The 1988-89 census that implemented the Act compounded this difficulty by being conducted exclusively in the Nepali-speaking southern districts, sorting residents into a series of numbered categories from genuine citizens down through categories denoting non-national women married to Bhutanese men, returned migrants, and, at the bottom, those to be treated as illegal immigrants regardless of any documentation they held (Human Rights Watch 2007; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The selective geography of the census, applied only where the Nepali-speaking population resided, is among the strongest pieces of evidence cited by international observers for the proposition that this was not a neutral citizenship review applied uniformly across the kingdom, but a targeted mechanism of exclusion (Jain 2022).

The legal reclassification was accompanied by a cultural one. The state's "One Nation, One People" policy elevated the customs of the Ngalop Drukpa elite-dress, language, and religious practice-into compulsory national standards (Saul 2000; Neikirk & Nickson 2024). The 1989 royal decree requiring all citizens to wear the national dress (gho for men, kira for women) in public, and the restriction of Nepali-language instruction in southern schools under the Driglam Namzha code of conduct, transformed routine cultural practice into a site of state enforcement, policed through on-the-spot fines (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Bhutanese officials defended these measures, then and since, as necessary cultural preservation in a small kingdom that, in a phrase attributed to the king at the time, could not afford the luxury of cultural pluralism (Hutt 2003, cited in Neikirk & Nickson 2024)-a justification that finds an uncomfortable echo across the region's other minority-citizenship disputes, discussed below, but one that Bhutanese authorities have continued to advance in good faith as a matter of small-state survival rather than ethnic animus.

Beginning in 1988, the government formally encouraged emigration, and from 1990 onward combined this with arrest and the destruction of homes; a U.S. State Department refugee official, Terry Rusch, described the process at the time as people being expelled in what she called a little-noticed but very real ethnic cleansing exercise (O'Brien 2010, quoted in Neikirk & Nickson 2024).

Whatever its intent, the policy's effect was to convert Lhotshampa political organizing, much of it initially focused on civil rights and representation rather than secession, into evidence of disloyalty that further justified denaturalization (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Beginning in 1988, the government formally encouraged emigration, and from 1990 onward combined this with arrest and the destruction of homes; a U.S. State Department refugee official, Terry Rusch, described the process at the time as people being expelled in what she called a little-noticed but very real ethnic cleansing exercise (O'Brien 2010, quoted in Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Within roughly three years, more than 100,000 people-at the time, close to one-sixth of Bhutan's resident population-had left or been expelled (Human Rights Watch 2007). The Bhutanese government's position, then and largely since, has been that this figure substantially overstates the number of genuine Bhutanese citizens involved, and that many who joined the exodus were recent or undocumented migrants exploiting the camps' humanitarian assistance to claim a citizenship they had never legitimately held (Human Rights Watch 2007). This dispute over numbers-not merely a rhetorical disagreement but the central unresolved question of the bilateral verification process discussed in Part II-has never been authoritatively settled, and any honest account of the crisis has to hold both the scale of documented exclusion and the genuine uncertainty over its precise demographic boundaries in view at once.

Lived Histories: Testimony and the Limits of the Archive

Statistics and statutes describe a policy; they do not, on their own, convey what it meant to live through one. For this reason, much of the most cited writing on the Lhotshampa crisis, including Hutt's (2003) own account, turns to individual testimony, and it is worth pausing on both the value and the limits of this method.

Hutt's portrait of a woman he calls Dil Maya remains one of the most frequently invoked personal narratives in the literature. An agrarian woman who, in her own description, had never owned a pair of shoes before her displacement, Dil Maya experienced the policies discussed above not as abstract legislation but as a sequence of intimate disruptions: restrictions on her language, the closure of familiar local institutions, and ultimately the forced separation of her family, as she spent decades in a refugee camp in Nepal while a son remained in Bhutan, legally and physically cut off from her (Hutt 2003). What makes her account analytically significant, beyond its emotional weight, is her own framing of it: Hutt records her describing her process of recollection as chat-két garnu, "sorting things out"- a deliberate, reflective reconstruction of events that resists the passive, generic category of "refugee" through which her experience might otherwise be flattened. This is close to what C. Wright Mills (1959), writing in a wholly different context, called the sociological imagination: the capacity to locate one's own biography within a structural and historical process, rather than experiencing it merely as private misfortune.

A different kind of testimony comes from Tek Nath Rizal, a former Royal Advisory Councillor who became one of the most prominent Lhotshampa political dissidents after petitioning the king to review the 1985 Act and the 1988 census. Rizal's memoir, written after his own extended imprisonment, documents in detail the conditions he says were faced by Lhotshampa detainees during the late 1980s and 1990s, including prolonged isolation, physical restraint, and what he and other former detainees describe as deliberate psychological pressure (Rizal 2009). Independent corroboration of mistreatment during this period comes from contemporaneous reporting by Amnesty International and the U.S. State Department, both of which documented arbitrary arrest, torture, and the use of bonded labour against detained Lhotshampa during the same years (Neikirk & Nickson 2024). Two brief excerpts from Rizal's memoir illustrate the register in which this testimony is written:

"Once again for a month, I was served food mixed with pieces of broken glasses... I was allowed to eat my food only after smoking forty cigarettes." (Rizal 2009: 39)

"The mechanism was torturing my inner soul, leaving me with unbearable pain... I had been transformed into a dead body with only the consciousness alive." (Rizal 2009: 32)

Evans's (2010) subsequent fieldwork among Lhotshampa communities adds a further, less dramatic but no less significant layer: accounts of relatives who remained in Bhutan after family members fled being denied the "no objection certificates" required for travel, higher education, and formal employment-an administrative, rather than physically violent, form of exclusion that nonetheless entrenched a durable second-class status for those who stayed.

These accounts deserve to be taken seriously as evidence, not merely as colour. At the same time, an honest reckoning with this archive requires acknowledging its asymmetry. Virtually all of the widely circulated personal testimony on this crisis comes from refugees, exiled dissidents, or researchers working with refugee populations; there is, by the nature of the situation, very little comparable testimonial record from Lhotshampa who remained in Bhutan, since the same legal and political conditions that produced the exodus also constrain independent reporting from within the kingdom. Neikirk and Nickson (2024) note that Nepali-speaking Bhutanese who remain in the country are not permitted to form rights-related associations and are themselves viewed with official suspicion. This is not a reason to discount the testimony that does exist-corroboration from independent international monitors over more than three decades is, by ordinary evidentiary standards, substantial-but it is a reason to be precise about what kind of claim the testimonial record supports. It supports, with considerable confidence, the claim that a documented and substantial number of Lhotshampa experienced arbitrary citizenship deprivation, family separation, and, in many recorded cases, custodial mistreatment. It does not, on its own, resolve the separate and more contested question of exactly how many people were affected, nor does it capture whatever account the Bhutanese state and the Lhotshampa who remained within it might offer of the same years-an account that, for reasons rooted in the politics of the kingdom itself, remains comparatively undocumented in any independent or verifiable form.

Regional Resonances: Suspect Citizenship in South Asia

Read in isolation, the Lhotshampa crisis can appear to be either a uniquely Bhutanese aberration, incompatible with the kingdom's pacific international image, or, in more polemical accounts, a singular indictment of Buddhist statecraft. Neither framing withstands comparison with the broader region. Mary Des Chene's (2007) influential argument that postcolonial South Asian studies has systematically under-attended to Nepal and the Himalayan states-treating them as anthropological curiosities rather than as nation-states with ordinary, comparable politics of exclusion-applies with equal force to Bhutan. Once the kingdom's "Shangri-La" branding is set aside (Ferraro 2012; Walcott 2011), its citizenship politics align closely with patterns documented across its neighbours.

Mary Des Chene's (2007) influential argument that postcolonial South Asian studies has systematically under-attended to Nepal and the Himalayan states-treating them as anthropological curiosities rather than as nation-states with ordinary, comparable politics of exclusion-applies with equal force to Bhutan.

The clearest parallel is the Madhesi population of Nepal's own Tarai plains, whose Indian-influenced dialects, dress, and cross-border kinship ties have for decades made their loyalty to the Nepali state a recurring subject of suspicion, and whose access to citizenship documentation has been correspondingly difficult, particularly for women seeking to transmit citizenship to their children (Saul 2000). The structural irony-a state that itself displaced its Nepali-speaking minority on grounds of insufficiently demonstrated loyalty sits adjacent to a state that subjects its own Nepali-affiliated minority to a strikingly similar test-has been noted by several scholars working across both cases, though the legal mechanisms, party politics, and historical grievances involved in each are distinct enough that the comparison should illuminate rather than collapse the two situations into one.

A second resonance lies further east, in India's north-eastern states, where ethnic Nepali communities collectively known as the Gorkha diaspora have long navigated the same basic distinction between an indigenous "son of the soil" and an outsider variously labelled bahiragat or videshi. The implementation of the National Register of Citizens in Assam, intended to distinguish lawful long-term residents from undocumented migrants, produced-much as Bhutan's 1988 census did-a sorting exercise in which the burden of historical documentary proof fell disproportionately on linguistic and religious minorities, generating a population rendered stateless or quasi-stateless by an ostensibly neutral administrative procedure rather than by an explicit ethnic decree. Miyamoto et al. (2021) and Munro (2016), writing on Bhutan specifically but drawing on this wider literature, both note that the conflation of majority religious or ethnic culture with official national identity, whether through Bhutan's Driglam Namzha or through comparable projects elsewhere in the region, is less an exception within South Asian state-making than one of its more common instruments.

The relevant point is narrower and, we think, more useful: the specific combination of retroactive legal cut-offs, geographically selective implementation, and the political reclassification of civic organizing as disloyalty is a recognizable and recurring South Asian pattern of producing "suspect citizens" out of transborder or linguistically distinct populations.

None of this is offered to relativize Bhutan's record by diffusing responsibility across a regional pattern, nor to suggest that documentation-based citizenship review is inherently illegitimate; nearly every modern state, including long-established liberal democracies, relies on some combination of jus soli and jus sanguinis rules that inevitably exclude some long-resident populations. The relevant point is narrower and, we think, more useful: the specific combination of retroactive legal cut-offs, geographically selective implementation, and the political reclassification of civic organizing as disloyalty is a recognizable and recurring South Asian pattern of producing "suspect citizens" out of transborder or linguistically distinct populations. Recognizing Bhutan's policies as an instance of this pattern, rather than as either a uniquely Bhutanese failing or an isolated historical accident, is itself part of what a more rigorous, less sensationalized account of the crisis requires.

Part II of this article turns from this historical and evidentiary foundation to the crisis's unresolved policy afterlife: the failed bilateral verification process between Bhutan and Nepal, the resettlement programme that followed it, and the events of 2025-2026 that reopened the question of Lhotshampa statelessness in a register neither Bhutan nor Nepal anticipated.

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For many of us in the Sikkim-Darjeeling hills, the word ‘refugee’ exists as an abstraction – a word, a chapter in a book, a documentary; something else, someone else, somewhere else. Growing up in Sikkim it was not something that ever came up in conversation, even though many of my Tibetan friends had a refugee background. Maybe it was owing to adolescence, youth, interest, information (or the lack of it) that the word ‘refugee’ barely entered our lexicon. Or maybe it was the privilege of having been born and brought up in Sikkim, where we were far removed from the plight that had befallen the ethnic Nepalis in Bhutan. It would be decades later that I would learn about their displacement, and their presence and proximity in Sikkim and Darjeeling, where many Bhutanese refugees worked as seasonal migrant labour or married into families in the region. 

‘Refugee’ is a loaded word – it carries history, trauma, memory, stereotypes, colours perception and action. When I began to prepare for my research on the Lhotsampas in Launceston, Tasmania, I thought I understood what that word meant in practice. I had read books and articles on Bhutanese refugees and refugees in general, after all. However, in hindsight, I was underprepared when I arrived in Launceston. Not underprepared in terms of theory and concepts, but more in terms of my own spatial and cultural dissonance, my surprise at how trauma, memory, past and the present were interspersed in everyday life, their real estate successes, and for their ‘moving on’ with their lives in Australia, while still sharing a collective nostalgia for Bhutan and their camps in Nepal. 

What began as a research project in 2021 has evolved into a very close relationship with many Bhutanese families and individuals in Launceston. One of the very first things I learnt was that no one self-identified as Lhotsampa – the people of the south/southerners. Everyone spoke of themselves and of others in their community as Bhutanese. Following common practice, I too use the term Bhutanese when I speak or write about them. 

Resettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. 

The more time I spent with the Bhutanese, the more loaded and intense the word ‘refugee’ felt. While I felt uncomfortable using the word, scared of triggering memories and trauma, the Bhutanese seemed to own their ‘refugee-ness’. They lived with it and built their futures despite it. And owing this reResettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. fuge-ness also meant a constant adjustment and recalibration of identities as refugee, citizen, Bhutanese and Australian. Resettlement did not end when they arrived in Australia, it is still a constant and everyday negotiation. 

Making Home

The Bhutanese community in Launceston, Tasmania live predominantly in three neighbouring suburbs of Invermay, Mowbray and Newnham. While many rent, many more own their own homes; a seamless convergence of the booming migration-led real estate market in supposedly unsavoury Australian suburbs and the Bhutanese aspiration to own their own homes. While home ownership provided many a sense of comfort and stability, many have found financial upward mobility through multiple home ownership. A feat significant for anyone but even more impressive for those who only started arriving in Australia in the late 2000s. 

While home ownership is a universal aspiration, this was a particularly important for the Bhutanese. As one of my friends explained, many Bhutanese families had never lived in rented accommodation. While in Bhutan they had lived in their own homes, no matter how small, and then for the next two decades, had lived in the camp in rows of bamboo and ikra huts. Renting, therefore, added a sense of ukkus-mukkus (उक्कुस मुक्कुस), that feeling of uneasiness in an already alien land. 

Beyond comfort and stability, Bhutanese investments in real estate and businesses are also shaped by the heartbreaking acceptance of the fact that they will never be able to go back to Bhutan, not even as visitors. That door is conclusively shut. Australia is now their home, at least in a legal, technical and administrative sense. However, does this extend to the feeling of home? This is not something easy to decipher. This is an even more painful question for the older generation who live with the memories of their life in Bhutan – their rice fields and plum trees, the obstinate mules and domesticated pigeons that they still remember fondly, and for many, the families and friends they will never see again. 

How do you make home somewhere else when your identity and entire being are entangled in the memories of the hills and valleys, the gurgling rivers, in the sweetness of the freshly plucked orange from your garden, in the noises and rhythms of village life, where you yourself were a different person? As a refugee, it is not just about making home; it is making yourself all over again. 

For many Bhutanese, across all age groups, social interactions beyond the Nepali-speaking world are hampered by their limited grasp of the English language. Their engagement and understanding of Australia and Australians are mediated by those who can speak and understand English. Making home and perhaps, even their own selves, comes through the re-creation of place and through activities and rhythms that were part of daily life, especially for many older Bhutanese. 

When engagement with the outside world is a series of translations, the home and the kitchen garden become a refuge. Many Bhutanese spend significant time and energy on their kitchen gardens, a space and activity that feels familiar and maybe, even intuitive. The humble kitchen garden, thriving with raaya ko saag (mustard leaves), iskus (chakos), dalle khorsani and chillies of different varieties, makaai (maize), farsi (pumpkin), rukh tamatar (tamarillo) etc., is not just any ordinary garden. It is a space that is intentionally cultivated, honed, and cared for. Not only does the garden keep the memory of home and food cultures alive, the familiar action of hoeing, weeding, planting, watering, harvesting, fermenting also lends a sense of confidence and purpose. For those whose knowledge and experience do not find meaning in their new settlement, the kitchen garden becomes a space where they are still purposeful, productive, and valuable. 

When engagement with the outside world is a series of translations, the home and the kitchen garden become a refuge.

Making home is also difficult when there are multiple versions of home. For most Bhutanese in Launceston there are at least two versions of ‘before’ and ‘after’ – before and after Bhutan, before and after the camp in Nepal. While Bhutan is home, the camps were also home for more than two decades before third-country resettlement began in 2008. 

Making home is also difficult when there are multiple versions of home.

Life in the camp was difficult. Families lived on meagre rations provided by the World Food Program, and the goodwill of their neighbours when they ran out of basic necessities. Memories of harassment and discrimination by their Nepalese neighbours who lived in the camp vicinity still throbs and smarts; they remember the hardship of earning just a fistful of money, enough only just to get by. However, despite the everyday struggles, the camp provided community, friendship and solidarity. Most Bhutanese, young and old, still reminisce about this sense of community and closeness that they shared in the camp; the physical proximity of houses and peoples perhaps heightened these relationships. Once re-settled in Australia, lives have become busier, houses farther apart and the need to borrow sugar or oil does not arise anymore. 

Yet, there is familiarity and closeness still; community members celebrate festivals and various cultural events together, and support each other through difficult times. They remain connected with other Bhutanese around the world through social media, which offers moments of comparison and reflection on how their lives have changed so far. TikTok has had a transformative effect on middle-aged women especially who enjoy watching and making videos together, much to the chagrin of their children, who had never witnessed this singing and dancing versions of their mothers before. 

Resettlement has been transformative on many other levels too. It has encouraged, compelled or forced Bhutanese men and women to go above and beyond their comfort zones, to adapt once again to a new place and situation, none of which they asked for in the first place. For a community that had lived within the confines of a camp for more than two decades, the possibility of freedom- to choose where to live, work, travel- was perhaps a daunting proposition. While there were many fears and challenges, necessity often forced change; overcoming them also meant mobility and financial independence, which was truly transformative, especially for women. However, while most embraced Bhutanese new opportunities to study, work, earn, some were unable to face these challenges.

While memories of Bhutan, the displacement and settlement in the camps are firmly etched in the minds of the older generation, they hold a different place in the lives of the younger Bhutanese, born in the camps in Nepal, who came to Australia at a young age. This generation of youth have a shared sense of distinction as Bhutanese, despite having never been to Bhutan. Maybe this distinction from other Himalayan nationalities comes from their shared experiences of socio-economic hardships, their political limitations as refugees and restricted mobility beyond camp boundaries. This distinction is also shaped by their experiences as young refugees in Australia, often living in outer suburbs, and attending underfunded public schools. In the early re-settlement years, many young Bhutanese experienced racism and ostracization from their peers which pushed them towards each other and other young people from the Global South. While Bhutanese youth work across different sectors and have friends and colleagues from different communities, they often tend to socialise mostly within the Bhutanese community – maybe it’s the comfort and familiarity of language, food, music, social norms and their shared refugee background; which in turn strengthens their bonds and identity as Bhutanese, even across state borders.

However, this generation could be the last generation of Bhutanese youth to speak Nepali fluently and share this sense of Bhutanese-ness whilst also embracing Australian norms and practices. For the generation that was born in Australia, being Bhutanese is a part of their history and heritage, but perhaps not central to their identity.

Conclusion

When Bhutanese families left their camps in Nepal, they were not entirely sure of where Australia or Tasmania was, what the people were like, or what they would do when they arrived. When they left the camps, every individual was allowed a single bag weighing 20 kgs each; many families did not even collectively own belongings that weighed the total weight allocated to their family. Those who arrived first reassured and guided others who followed. Accepting the re-settlement offer was, on many levels, a leap of faith in the system and themselves. While re-settlement has offered stability, the opportunity to belong to a country, and to participate in the world with equal rights, it is also a liminal experience wherein the Bhutanese are constantly negotiating different social worlds. 

And while their story of adversity, resilience, failures and success is not unique to other refugee experiences, it is one that definitely warrants listening and understanding that refugee lives are not always resolved once they are re-settled. 

Hydropower projects on the Teesta have been accompanied by intense debate and conflict. While policymakers frame dams as symbols of clean energy and development, local communities have raised concerns about environmental degradation, cultural survival, and increased disaster risks (Rai & Khawas,2021).

Hydropower projects on the Teesta have been accompanied by intense debate and conflict. While policymakers frame dams as symbols of clean energy and development, local communities have raised concerns about environmental degradation, cultural survival, and increased disaster risks (Rai & Khawas,2021). Resistance movements have taken many forms. Youth-led organizations such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) have organized hunger strikes, petitions, and media campaigns, while traditional village councils in Lachung and Lachen ( Dzumas) have used customary authority to oppose projects ( Navin & Vimal, 2021). Scholars such as Sherpa (2022), Rai & Khawas (2021), and Chettri (2018) have highlighted how these movements are linked to questions of indigenous identity, environmental justice, and the right to define development. 

The glacial lake outburst flood (GLOF) and the failure of the Teesta Stage III hydropower project reshaped the stakes of this debate. Scientific and journalistic accounts describe how the GLOF travelled far downstream, causing severe destruction and loss of life, and reigniting long-standing warnings about the risks of placing major infrastructure in an evolving cryosphere. While hydropower politics in Sikkim has been studied in depth, much scholarship implicitly treats 'the community' as a single unit, either resisting or accommodating development. My research begins from a different question: how do internal differences, especially across two generations, the older and the youth,  shape the way hydropower is understood, contested, or reluctantly accepted? 

While hydropower politics in Sikkim has been studied in depth, much scholarship implicitly treats 'the community' as a single unit, either resisting or accommodating development. My research begins from a different question: how do internal differences, especially across two generations, the older and the youth, shape the way hydropower is understood, contested, or reluctantly accepted?

The interesting part that became clear over time was that there wasn’t just one way to understand the river or the changes around it. Conversations with elders often moved through memory, rituals and a sense of responsibility towards the land, while younger people spoke in terms of environmental change, livelihood and the future. This article grows out of these conversations. It examines how hydropower is understood differently across generations in North Sikkim's Dzongu and Chungthang, and how these differences shape how people relate to the river.

Intergenerational Perspectives: Dzongu and Chungthang

For many elders, the river forms part of a larger cosmological system in which mountains, forests, and rivers are interconnected through spiritual relationships. Disturbing the natural flow of the river through hydropower development is therefore perceived not only as an environmental change but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual balance.

Across both areas and generations, the river was consistently described as more than a physical resource. Participants frequently referred to the Teesta and Rongyong rivers as sacred landscapes embedded in cultural traditions and everyday life. The stories of Rongnyu (now known as Teesta) and Rangeet, also known as the story of Parilbu and Tutfo , a famous Lepcha folk story, were stories I heard from many older people I conversed with. Namgyal Lepcha, a 63-year-old resident of  Dzongu says, “When we were children, these stories were part of our textbooks. Now I often wonder whether today’s children still know these stories or feel connected to them”. Ritual practices related to healing, death ceremonies, and oath-taking often take place in relation to the river, reinforcing its role as a moral and spiritual anchor within the community.  For many elders, the river forms part of a larger cosmological system in which mountains, forests, and rivers are interconnected through spiritual relationships. Disturbing the natural flow of the river through hydropower development is therefore perceived not only as an environmental change but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual balance. Chewang Lepcha, an older respondent, explained, "We Lepcha people worship the environment, our land, and the river. We pray for our rivers, mountains… when they dig big tunnels for the dam, there is a negative impact on that because we don’t know whether they are only impacting the environment but also harming our sacred deities that are present in our land and river". Therefore, they view large dam projects as harmful not only to nature but also to the sacred relationships embedded within the landscape. 

Younger respondents often framed their concerns through discussions of ecological sustainability, tourism-based livelihoods, and environmental protection...However, these generational differences do not indicate a weakening of cultural attachment. Instead, it suggests that cultural identity is being reinterpreted by younger generations through contemporary concerns about environmental change and future livelihoods.

While elders articulated their connection to the river primarily through ritual practices and oral histories, the youth participants expressed their attachment in different ways. Younger respondents often framed their concerns through discussions of ecological sustainability, tourism-based livelihoods, and environmental protection. A  young mind from Upper Passingdang Dzongu recalled her childhood memory, “The river holds many picnic stories for us. We often went to the riverbeds to collect wood, and that is also where we found an insect called Nokbu”. However, these generational differences do not indicate a weakening of cultural attachment. Instead, it suggests that cultural identity is being reinterpreted by younger generations through contemporary concerns about environmental change and future livelihoods. Youth participants frequently emphasized that protecting the river is essential not only for cultural identity but also for sustaining economic activities such as tourism and community-based enterprises. This indicates that rather than experiencing cultural erosion, the relationship with the river is being expressed through new forms of environmental awareness and practical engagement. 

Development as a Contested Promise 

Another major theme that emerged from the interviews was skepticism toward development narratives associated with hydropower projects. Both elders and youth expressed concerns regarding the benefits promised by hydropower companies and government institutions. Participants frequently mentioned employment opportunities as one of the main justifications used to promote dam construction. A youth from Chungthang shared, "The dam promised development, but the work in tunnels was dangerous and temporary".

This perception reflects broader concerns about uneven development, where the economic benefits of electricity generation are distributed beyond the region while environmental and social risks remain concentrated locally.

However, other  respondents also described these jobs as temporary and often dangerous, particularly tunnel work carried out during construction phases. Several participants explained that once the construction phase ended, long-term employment opportunities were limited. This perception reflects broader concerns about uneven development, where the economic benefits of electricity generation are distributed beyond the region while environmental and social risks remain concentrated locally. 

Disaster as Lived Evidence of Risks 

The October 2023 glacial lake outburst flood played an important role in shaping perceptions of hydropower projects. For many participants, the disaster transformed environmental risk from an abstract possibility into a lived reality.

The October 2023 glacial lake outburst flood played an important role in shaping perceptions of hydropower projects. For many participants, the disaster transformed environmental risk from an abstract possibility into a lived reality. Elders frequently interpreted the flood through spiritual narratives, describing it as a reminder of the consequences of disturbing natural balance. In contrast, younger participants often framed the disaster in terms of environmental miscalculation and infrastructural vulnerability. Despite these differences in interpretation, the disaster created a shared sense of concern regarding the long-term sustainability of large-scale hydropower infrastructure in the region. 

Generational Knowledge and Ecological Memory 

A key difference between elders and youth lies in the type of knowledge they value. Elders often draw on oral histories and spiritual beliefs when discussing the river. Many described how the landscape used to look before hydropower development and how certain areas were considered sacred. This form of ecological memory provides a historical perspective on environmental change. Elders frequently compared present conditions with past experiences, describing shifts in water flow, changes in agricultural patterns, and the disappearance of certain fish species. 

A key difference between elders and youth lies in the type of knowledge they value. Elders often draw on oral histories and spiritual beliefs when discussing the river...Youth participants, by contrast, often framed environmental concerns through discussions of climate change, sustainability, and tourism.

Youth participants, by contrast, often framed environmental concerns through discussions of climate change, sustainability, and tourism. Their language reflected exposure to environmental education and media narratives. However, this did not mean that the youth lacked emotional attachment to the river. Rather, their relationship with the landscape was expressed through different cultural forms. 

Cultural Revival and Resistance 

An unexpected finding was the role of cultural revival among youth participants...This presented a unique way of showing how resistance movements are evolving across generations. While earlier protests relied heavily on hunger strikes and public demonstrations, younger activists are experimenting with new forms of communication that combine culture, art, and environmental activism.

An unexpected finding was the role of cultural revival among youth participants. Several young people described efforts to promote Lepcha culture through modern artistic forms such as music, film, and fashion. Traditional clothing and musical instruments were being incorporated into contemporary performances. These cultural expressions often carried environmental messages. Songs and stories about the Teesta River were used to raise awareness about hydropower issues and to communicate the importance of protecting the landscape. 

This presented a unique way of showing how resistance movements are evolving across generations. While earlier protests relied heavily on hunger strikes and public demonstrations, younger activists are experimenting with new forms of communication that combine culture, art, and environmental activism. 

Differences between the Two Sites- Dzongu and Chungthang

The two field sites, Dzongu and Chungthang present distinct contexts that shape how hydropower development is perceived and experienced. While both locations are situated within the Teesta river basin, their relationship with hydropower projects differs significantly, influencing the nature of community responses. 

Dzongu 

Dzongu, a protected Lepcha reserve, is characterized by a strong and long-standing opposition to hydropower projects. Resistance in this region is deeply rooted in the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape.... The presence of movements such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) has played a crucial role in shaping collective resistance. Over time, this resistance has become part of the region’s social and political identity.

Dzongu, a protected Lepcha reserve, is characterized by a strong and long-standing opposition to hydropower projects. Resistance in this region is deeply rooted in the cultural and spiritual significance of the landscape. For many residents, the river is not only an ecological resource but also a sacred entity connected to ancestral identity and ritual life. As a result, opposition to hydropower in Dzongu is often framed as a form of cultural and environmental protection. 

The presence of movements such as the Affected Citizens of Teesta (ACT) has played a crucial role in shaping collective resistance. Over time, this resistance has become part of the region’s social and political identity. The opposition in Dzongu can be understood as preventive, as it aims to resist hydropower development before significant environmental or cultural disruption occurs. The relative absence of large-scale hydropower infrastructure in the region allows residents to imagine and advocate for alternative futures centred on ecological preservation and cultural continuity. 

Chungthang 

In contrast, Chungthang represents a site where hydropower development is already embedded within the landscape. The presence of dam infrastructure and the impact of the 2023 GLOF have shaped local experiences in more immediate ways. Unlike Dzongu, where resistance is collective and clearly articulated, perspectives in Chungthang are more fragmented and complex. 

In contrast, Chungthang represents a site where hydropower development is already embedded within the landscape. The presence of dam infrastructure and the impact of the 2023 GLOF have shaped local experiences in more immediate ways. Unlike Dzongu, where resistance is collective and clearly articulated, perspectives in Chungthang are more fragmented and complex.

Many residents in Chungthang have direct experience with both the benefits and risks associated with hydropower. While some acknowledge the economic opportunities and infrastructure development linked to these projects, others express concerns about environmental degradation, safety, and further intensified these concerns, making environmental risks more visible and tangible. At the same time, economic dependency on hydropower related activities and the presence of infrastructure complicate unified resistance. This results in a more ambivalent stance, where individuals may simultaneously recognize the risks of hydropower while also navigating its economic realities. 

Comparative Insight 

The contrast between Dzongu and Chungthang shows how local context shapes perception. While Dzongu reflects a strong, culturally rooted resistance, Chungthang illustrates a more complex engagement shaped by lived experience and infrastructural presence. These differences reinforce the importance of not treating communities as homogeneous entities, as perspectives vary not only across generations but also across locations.

The contrast between Dzongu and Chungthang shows how local context shapes perception. While Dzongu reflects a strong, culturally rooted resistance, Chungthang illustrates a more complex engagement shaped by lived experience and infrastructural presence. These differences reinforce the importance of not treating communities as homogeneous entities, as perspectives vary not only across generations but also across locations. 

 Hydropower expansion in the Eastern Himalaya intensifies landslides, seismic instability, and flooding.  Many interviewees described how blasting for tunnels and dam construction had altered landscapes, increased landslide risks, and disturbed natural water flows, reinforcing concerns highlighted in the literature regarding the incompatibility of large-scale infrastructure with fragile mountain ecosystems. They described hydropower projects as decisions imposed from outside the community rather than initiatives emerging from local needs. Several interviewees noted that development decisions were made by government institutions and private companies with limited consultation with the communities living closest to the river.

Hydropower expansion in the Eastern Himalaya intensifies landslides, seismic instability, and flooding.  Many interviewees described how blasting for tunnels and dam construction had altered landscapes, increased landslide risks, and disturbed natural water flows, reinforcing concerns highlighted in the literature regarding the incompatibility of large-scale infrastructure with fragile mountain ecosystems...Several interviewees noted that development decisions were made by government institutions and private companies with limited consultation with the communities living closest to the river...

Participants also frequently expressed frustration about the lack of local benefits from hydropower projects. In particular, several respondents pointed out the paradox that electricity is generated in their region while nearby villages still face irregular power supply. Others emphasized that employment opportunities created by dam construction were temporary and often dangerous, particularly tunnel work. These narratives reinforce Gergan (2020) observation that local communities often bear environmental costs without receiving corresponding long-term economic benefits. 

These narratives reinforce Gergan (2020) observation that local communities often bear environmental costs without receiving corresponding long-term economic benefits. 

The legacy of ACT remains highly visible within community narratives. Many participants referred to the movement as a collective struggle that had shaped local attitudes toward hydropower over several decades. Interestingly, while earlier protests were largely organized by elders, younger generations now appear to be carrying forward the movement in new ways. Youth participants described engaging with the issue through cultural expression, such as music, storytelling, and art related to the Teesta River. It also shows that while the forms of resistance may be changing across generations, the underlying commitment to protecting the river remains strong. Many elders described the river as a living presence involved in important life-cycle rituals. Participants explained that the Teesta and Mount Kanchenjunga are invoked as witnesses during marriages and other social ceremonies, reflecting a belief that natural landscapes hold moral authority. 

Some elders also described funeral rituals in which ashes and bones are returned to the river, reinforcing the idea that the river forms part of the spiritual journey of the soul. These narratives demonstrate how hydropower development is experienced not only as environmental transformation but also as a disruption of cultural and spiritual order. Elders frequently framed their opposition to hydropower in terms of sacred geography and ancestral responsibility, emphasizing the spiritual consequences of disturbing the river. Youth participants, on the other hand, often discussed hydropower in relation to environmental sustainability and future livelihoods. Several young respondents emphasized the importance of protecting the river and not disturbing its natural flow, and also on initiating tourism-based livelihoods such as rafting, trekking, and homestays. These perspectives suggest that generational differences do not necessarily represent disagreement but rather reflect different ways of articulating environmental concerns. 

The legacy of ACT remains highly visible within community narratives. Many participants referred to the movement as a collective struggle that had shaped local attitudes toward hydropower over several decades.

While elders and youth share many concerns about hydropower, they frame these concerns differently. Elders emphasize the sacredness of the landscape and the importance of preserving cultural traditions. Their narratives often reflect a sense of responsibility toward ancestral land and spiritual balance. Youth perspectives, while still rooted in cultural identity, focus more strongly on future livelihoods and environmental sustainability. For example, several participants expressed interest in developing tourism activities that rely on a healthy river ecosystem. These differences should not be interpreted as a generational divide, instead, they represent complementary perspectives that together strengthen community resistance. Elders provide historical and spiritual legitimacy to environmental concerns, while youth contribute new forms of activism and communication. This intergenerational dynamic may also explain the resilience of anti-dam movements in regions such as Dzongu. Rather than fading over time, resistance continues to adapt as younger generations reinterpret cultural values in contemporary contexts. 

Elders provide historical and spiritual legitimacy to environmental concerns, while youth contribute new forms of activism and communication. This intergenerational dynamic may also explain the resilience of anti-dam movements in regions such as Dzongu. Rather than fading over time, resistance continues to adapt as younger generations reinterpret cultural values in contemporary contexts.

Conclusion

Hydropower conflicts in North Sikkim cannot be understood solely through economic or technical frameworks. They are deeply embedded in cultural identity, environmental memory, and evolving forms of activism. By examining intergenerational perspectives, the study reveals that community opposition to hydropower is both shared and diverse.

Hydropower conflicts in North Sikkim cannot be understood solely through economic or technical frameworks. They are deeply embedded in cultural identity, environmental memory, and evolving forms of activism. By examining intergenerational perspectives, the study reveals that community opposition to hydropower is both shared and diverse. Elders and youth articulate their concerns through different narratives, yet both groups remain deeply connected to the river and the landscape. The findings also highlight the importance of incorporating local knowledge and cultural values into development planning. Policies that treat rivers purely as economic resources risk overlooking the complex social relationships that communities maintain with their environment. As climate change and infrastructure expansion continue to reshape Himalayan landscapes, understanding these relationships will become increasingly important. Development strategies that fail to engage with local perspectives may deepen existing conflicts and undermine long-term sustainability. Recognizing the diversity of voices within communities is therefore essential for creating more inclusive and just approaches to development in mountain regions.

The findings also highlight the importance of incorporating local knowledge and cultural values into development planning...Recognizing the diversity of voices within communities is therefore essential for creating more inclusive and just approaches to development in mountain regions.

Author’s Note: This article is based on my Master’s field research (Azim Premji University) conducted in Dzongu and Chungthang, North Sikkim, focusing on intergenerational perspectives on hydropower projects and the Teesta River. 

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In the Himalayan regions of Sikkim and Darjeeling, honey has never been a mere sweetener. It has long carried the weight of tradition, healing, and heritage.

A spoonful of honey remains a mother’s remedy for childhood coughs, a beekeeper's gift to neighbours, and a symbol of community life. But as markets modernized, this once intimate relationship between people, bees, and their produce has gradually weakened. Today, much of the honey found in local bazaars is sold in reused rum bottles, lacking clear identification or traceability, raising concerns about its purity and authenticity. In fact, finding a truly pure bottle of honey has become a challenge. Pricing also presents a paradox, often inconsistent or expensive, which makes quality honey inaccessible to many. As a result, honey is reduced to a medicinal product only used occasionally for coughs and colds rather than being integrated into daily diets and lifestyles. 

What happened to our honey heritage? The answer lies not in the failure of farmers or bees, but in the absence of structured market access, branding, and recognition. While rural communities continue to produce honey with traditional knowledge and ecological awareness, their efforts remain invisible in wider markets.

This decline raises a pressing question: What happened to our honey heritage? The answer lies not in the failure of farmers or bees, but in the absence of structured market access, branding, and recognition. While rural communities continue to produce honey with traditional knowledge and ecological awareness, their efforts remain invisible in wider markets.

Indigenous Beekeeping Traditions 

Experienced beekeepers like Mayalmit Lepcha and Lhaku Doma Bhutia carry forward a tradition of indigenous beekeeping. One shaped not by formal training, but by years of observation, patience, and inherited wisdom.

At dawn or dusk, when the forest is calm, and the bees are less agitated, they move silently through wooded areas, reading subtle signs of the environment. The hum of a swarm, the movement of branches, the scent in the air, until they locate a resting colony. With practiced ease and remarkable courage, they identify the 'queen bee' with bare hands, understanding that she is the heart of the colony. Once gently secured in a soft, breathable cloth, she is carried to a prepared log hive, and as if guided by an invisible thread, the worker bees follow her, re-establishing their home.

These 'log hives' are a testament to 'indigenous engineering' crafted from naturally fallen tree trunks, hollowed and sealed with a mixture of clay and cow dung that provides insulation, protection from rain, and a familiar scent that attracts bees. Whether placed in backyards, mounted on raised stone platforms, or hung under rooftops, each hive reflects a deep understanding of local climate, materials, and bee behaviour. This knowledge is not written in manuals but passed down orally, from elders to younger generations, through demonstration and daily practice.

These 'log hives' are a testament to 'indigenous engineering' crafted from naturally fallen tree trunks, hollowed and sealed with a mixture of clay and cow dung that provides insulation, protection from rain, and a familiar scent that attracts bees. Whether placed in backyards, mounted on raised stone platforms, or hung under rooftops, each hive reflects a deep understanding of local climate, materials, and bee behaviour. This knowledge is not written in manuals but passed down orally, from elders to younger generations, through demonstration and daily practice.

When the time for harvesting arrives, typically during the peak months of June and November, the process is carried out with care and respect. Under the cover of night, when bees are calmer, the beekeepers use smoke from burning jute to gently pacify the colony. With soft green grass, they brush aside the bees without harming them, and with simple household tools, they cut the honey-filled combs one by one. The honey is then squeezed, filtered through cloth, and allowed to settle naturally, preserving its purity and richness. Every step reflects a balance between utilization and conservation.

When the time for harvesting arrives, typically during the peak months of July and December, the process is carried out with care and respect...Every step reflects a balance between utilization and conservation.

The harvest season is a time of quiet celebration. Families carefully collect honey from hives, ensuring enough is preserved for medicinal use while setting aside portions to gift or trade. This act of sharing is not transactional; it is communal. Honey has been a gesture of goodwill, a way to strengthen bonds among farmers, families, and villages.

The harvest season is a time of quiet celebration. Families carefully collect honey from hives, ensuring enough is preserved for medicinal use while setting aside portions to gift or trade. This act of sharing is not transactional; it is communal.

Folklore and oral traditions have further elevated honey’s place in society. Stories of bees and blossoms are told to children, embedding respect for nature and its rhythms. Honey is featured across rituals, festivals, and even in spiritual practices, where it symbolises purity and abundance.

A Land of Untapped Sweetness

Sikkim, proudly known as India’s only fully organic state, is rich in biodiversity. A landscape where nature expresses itself in countless forms, offering immense potential to produce some of the world's most distinctive and flavorful honey. Across its varied terrain, from dense forests to cultivated fields, different floral sources shape unique honey profiles. The 'cardamom fields' lend a deep, earthy richness, 'orange orchards' bring a light citrus sweetness, and the seasonal bloom of 'rhododendrons' adds rare and aromatic notes. In this way, Sikkim's honey is not just a product; it is a reflection of the region’s altitude, flora, and changing seasons, capturing the essence of its vibrant ecological diversity in every drop.

Sikkim's honey is not just a product; it is a reflection of the region’s altitude, flora, and changing seasons, capturing the essence of its vibrant ecological diversity in every drop.

'Buckwheat honey' from Sikkim is one of the most distinctive and premium varieties of honey found in the Himalayan region. Produced from the nectar of buckwheat flowers grown in Sikkim’s high-altitude, chemical-free environment, it stands out not just for its taste but for its identity, purity, and health value.

With exports reaching nearly USD 177 million, India stands among the leading honey exporters in the world. Yet, despite this, Sikkim contributes only a tiny fraction, around 35–40 metric tonnes annually, revealing a vast gap between potential and production.

At the national level, initiatives like the 'National Beekeeping and Honey Mission', often referred to as the "Sweet Revolution", are pushing India towards becoming a global honey powerhouse. With exports reaching nearly USD 177 million, India stands among the leading honey exporters in the world. Yet, despite this, Sikkim contributes only a tiny fraction, around 35–40 metric tonnes annually, revealing a vast gap between potential and production. Sikkim is a land overflowing with nectar, still waiting to be fully discovered.

The Silent Architects of Life

Each hive is a powerhouse of ecological service, pollinating thousands of flowers and quietly sustaining biodiversity. Their work strengthens crop yields, improves seed quality, and builds resilience against climate variability. Without them, farming systems would weaken, biodiversity would shrink, and food security itself would be at risk. Bees, in essence, are not just honey producers; they are guardians of ecosystems, weaving together the delicate balance between agriculture and nature.

Behind this potential lies a workforce that asks for nothing yet gives everything: the bees. They are the silent architects of agriculture, ensuring that crops do not merely grow, but flourish. In the Himalayan terrain, where crops like cardamom, fruits, and vegetables form the backbone of rural livelihoods, bees play an irreplaceable role.

As part of our survey in Hathidhunga in West Sikkim, Tulsi Chettri described how beekeeping gradually reshaped his fields. What began as a modest experiment soon revealed its deeper impact: bees not only produced honey but also carried pollen across his crops, strengthening yields year after year. He observed fruits ripening more evenly, plants growing more resilient, and productivity steadily improving. For him, beekeeping became more than an additional source of income; it evolved into a quiet partnership with nature, sustaining both his livelihood and the land he cultivates.

As part of our survey in Hathidhunga in West Sikkim, Tulsi Chettri described how beekeeping gradually reshaped his fields. What began as a modest experiment soon revealed its deeper impact: bees not only produced honey but also carried pollen across his crops, strengthening yields year after year...For him, beekeeping became more than an additional source of income; it evolved into a quiet partnership with nature, sustaining both his livelihood and the land he cultivates.

Each hive is a powerhouse of ecological service, pollinating thousands of flowers and quietly sustaining biodiversity. Their work strengthens crop yields, improves seed quality, and builds resilience against climate variability. Without them, farming systems would weaken, biodiversity would shrink, and food security itself would be at risk. Bees, in essence, are not just honey producers; they are guardians of ecosystems, weaving together the delicate balance between agriculture and nature.

The Missing Link: From Hives to Markets

The rich indigenous knowledge is slowly fading. With increasing deforestation, climate variability etc., bee populations are declining, and traditional practices are being disrupted...At the same time, modern beekeeping techniques, while efficient, sometimes overlook the ecological balance and cultural depth embedded in indigenous systems. The loss of this knowledge is not just about losing a method of honey production; it is the erosion of a way of life, a sustainable relationship with nature, and a cultural identity.

The rich indigenous knowledge is slowly fading. With increasing deforestation, climate variability, etc., bee populations are declining, and traditional practices are being disrupted. Younger generations are often drawn toward modern livelihoods, leaving behind these labour-intensive and skill-dependent traditions. At the same time, modern beekeeping techniques, while efficient, sometimes overlook the ecological balance and cultural depth embedded in indigenous systems. The loss of this knowledge is not just about losing a method of honey production; it is the erosion of a way of life, a sustainable relationship with nature, and a cultural identity.

One account from our field surveys captures this challenge vividly: Sukhang Limboo of Ralak in North Sikkim, once a respected beekeeper, eventually abandoned the practice. His decision was not out of lost passion or skill, but of a missing market. Without buyers, jars of honey lost their worth, and alongside them, a tradition that had been both pride and livelihood. His story reflects the broader reality of many beekeepers in the region, where heritage and hard work falter against weak market support.

One account from our field surveys captures this challenge vividly: Sukhang Limboo of Ralak in North Sikkim, once a respected beekeeper, eventually abandoned the practice. His decision was not out of lost passion or skill, but of a missing market...His story reflects the broader reality of many beekeepers in the region, where heritage and hard work falter against weak market support.

Preserving and documenting indigenous beekeeping practices is therefore crucial, not only to honour the wisdom of communities like those of Mayalmit Lepcha and Lhaku Doma Bhutia but also to integrate these time-tested methods into future sustainable agricultural practices. Farmers in Sikkim and surrounding regions possess deep ecological knowledge and the ability to produce high-quality honey. But their journey often ends at local bazaars, where honey is sold in unlabelled or reused bottles, stripped of identity and trust. Without branding, certification, or structured market access, even the purest honey struggles to find its true value.

This is where emerging efforts like APSRI Foods step in, attempting to bridge this critical gap...In doing so, such initiatives are slowly transforming honey from an anonymous product into a meaningful experience, one that people can trust, value, and incorporate into their daily lives.

Production remains low, not due to a lack of capability, but due to a lack of connection. Farmers are willing to produce more, but without assured markets, incentives fade. The result is a cycle where potential remains untapped and traditions begin to decline. This is where emerging efforts like APSRI Foods step in, attempting to bridge this critical gap. By focusing on authentic sourcing, storytelling, and accessible packaging, APSRI Foods is working to reconnect farmers with markets and consumers with trust. It is not merely about selling honey; it is about restoring its identity. Each bottle becomes a narrative, carrying the story of the hills, the labour of farmers, and the unseen work of bees. In doing so, such initiatives are slowly transforming honey from an anonymous product into a meaningful experience, one that people can trust, value, and incorporate into their daily lives.

A Sweet Future Waiting to Be Realized

Across the world, the journey of honey has evolved from a humble tradition to a well-structured industry, offering valuable lessons for the Himalayas. In Europe, small beekeepers came together through cooperatives, turning honey into a story of origin and purity that consumers trust and are willing to pay for. In parts of Africa like Ethiopia and Tanzania, beekeeping has become both a livelihood and a conservation effort, blending traditional wisdom with modern techniques to reach global markets. Even within India, states like Kerala and Himachal Pradesh have shown how collective action and government support can transform honey into a recognized and valued product, reminding us that with the right structure, even the smallest hive can find its place in the largest markets.

Sikkim and Darjeeling stand at a unique crossroads, where tradition meets opportunity. The biodiversity is rich, the knowledge is deep, and the global demand is rising. What remains is to bridge the gap between production and perception, between heritage and market. Because in every drop of Himalayan honey lies more than sweetness; it encompasses the promise of livelihoods, sustainability, and a story waiting to be told.

Sikkim and Darjeeling stand at a unique crossroads, where tradition meets opportunity. The biodiversity is rich, the knowledge is deep, and the global demand is rising. What remains is to bridge the gap between production and perception, between heritage and market. Because in every drop of Himalayan honey lies more than sweetness; it encompasses the promise of livelihoods, sustainability, and a story waiting to be told.

Life is defined by the moments an individual experiences during her journey, leading from birth to death. The kind of person one becomes during this journey is a reflection of the values guiding them. My grandmother, hailing from Hee Gaon, West Sikkim, was cheerful and inquisitive about life, always looking forward to the next day. She lived each day with utmost grace and dignity.  

My beloved grandmother (Boju/Yuma) recently passed away after battling health issues with the same zeal and humility with which she had lived her best days. She left for her heavenly abode on the 12th of February, the same date that her beloved husband (my dearest grandfather) had left us 11 years ago. I vividly remember my mom (Ama) recollecting the date while gently caressing grandma’s hand on her deathbed and saying, “Babu gako pani aaju ko taarik ho 12” (Today is the same date, when Dad had passed away, the 12th). To be so in love with one another that even when death arrives at the doorstep, it lingers to keep the soulmates together. The love that my grandparents shared has remained alive through us, the family. 

Boju's demise was followed by multiple weeks of mourning and gatherings of people who visited us with the love that Boju had shared with them. During those days, there were many conversations about our grandmother's memories and anecdotes. She was the epitome of love and generosity, treating all living beings with kindness. She was truly sunshine personified. Losing our grandmother was a loss, but in knowing her, we gained far more than we could ever imagine. Her lessons on love, kindness, generosity, and to always keep one’s inner child alive are our biggest assets. Amongst all those memories, one that remains alive through her valuables is the hand-woven traditional Nepali corn husk mat, a circular hand-woven mat made of dried outer corn husks. These circular mats have always been an essential component across traditional households of different communities in Sikkim. The Limboos (Subba) are one such tribal community that obtains many materials from nature, making them objects of daily use. Some of the common items include the traditional tongba ( a container made of bamboo for drinking fermented millet), doko ( a woven bamboo basket used for carrying goods and products ranging from musical instruments to religious items), etc. Nature is a fundamental and inherent part of the Limboo community.    

Losing our grandmother was a loss, but in knowing her, we gained far more than we could ever imagine. Her lessons on love, kindness, generosity, and to always keep one’s inner child alive are our biggest assets. Amongst all those memories, one that remains alive through her valuables is the traditional Nepali mat, a circular hand-woven mat made of dried outer corn husks.

The circular hand-woven traditional corn husk mat (pira) is a common item in Limboo households. What made my Grandma’s work of art even more special was her dedication to using plastic waste wrappers to weave the mats. Instead of using traditional materials like dried husks of corn, she used the waste wrappers collected from our household's garbage and processed them, making them suitable for weaving. Every step was done meticulously by hand and with a lot of patience. 

The circular hand-woven traditional corn husk mat (pira) is a common item in Limboo households. What made my Grandma’s work of art even more special was her dedication to using plastic waste wrappers to weave the mats. Instead of using traditional materials like dried husks of corn, she used the waste wrappers collected from our household's garbage and processed them, making them suitable for weaving. Every step was done meticulously by hand and with a lot of patience. 

Recollecting a conversation that I had with her, which has been archived in a video, she carefully selects each piece of plastic and cuts with a kitchen knife to prepare the raw material for the mat. When I asked her how long it takes to finish weaving one standard-sized mat, she answered with her gleeful smile, "It takes me a week or around 15 days to make one from scratch, but if the plastics are already prepared, I can finish one mat in a week. Sometimes, I weave inconsistently, but mostly whenever I get a break from my usual routine". 

Her commitment to weaving these beautiful mats, which also served a significant functional purpose in homes, was due to her dedication towards the craft and the family. She didn’t just make them to store at her house or to sell for profit; her only intention was to gift them to her family members as a token of love. For my grandma, one of the things that she treasured the most was her family. She wove these mats and made sure that every household of her children would possess them. In an old conversation with her, my grandma told me that she had already gifted the mats to my uncle (mama) a few days back. These mats are her memento. In our house, my mom has kept them carefully, as a decorative piece or using them on the traditional stools; every corner of the house has a piece of my grandma’s love. Even during the days of her final rites, I noticed how things such as the deceased's favourite clothing and hobbies left in the form of artefacts, like the mats made by grandma, held so much sentimental value. My mom and aunt converse deeply about grandmom’s favourite sarees while recollecting their favourite memories of their mother. That is when my aunt looked at the mat placed near grandma’s bed and reminisced about how her mother made sure to weave many mats to gift them to as many people as she could.  

My grandmother (Boju) never knew about the term ‘sustainability’, having received no education on the concept of recycling and having no training on environmental protection, yet she played her part responsibly in fulfilling the values it encompassed. This is the difference between their generation and the current generation that we belong to. We have ample information about sustainability to write multiple essays or share on social media posts, but we lack the basic skills to take action.  

My grandmother (Boju) never knew about the term ‘sustainability’, having received no education on the concept of recycling and having no training on environmental protection, yet she played her part responsibly in fulfilling the values it encompassed.

Losing my grandma and her art of weaving these mats not only indicates a declining traditional skill, but also the lost virtue of patience. Traditional art forms of tribal communities such as the Limboos are more than just an archival piece, it is a blend of culture, history and a testament to their identity. With the gradual passing away of the older generation and the shift in socio-economic priorities, the traditional handicrafts, such as these woven mats, have become a vanishing craft in Sikkim. 

Starting a project of your own also means having the patience to build things from the ground up. I don’t think my grandma ever thought about making profit from her creations or about the term ‘sustainability’. All she knew was that using the waste plastic wrappers as an alternative to the dried husks of corn was the right thing to do, and gifting them to her loved ones came naturally to her.  

This made me realise that the concept of environmental sustainability is as simple as it can get. We do have the knowledge about sustainable waste management, and we spend hours studying about it, but what is more important at this hour is to be careful in our daily actions. To be sustainable requires neither education nor digital literacy; one can attain sustainability by actually taking small actions. To belong to a tribal community also means to be aware that sustainability is intrinsically linked with our culture and identity, deeply ingrained in our past and future.    

This made me realise that the concept of environmental sustainability is as simple as it can get. We do have the knowledge about sustainable waste management, and we spend hours studying about it, but what is more important at this hour is to be careful in our daily actions. To be sustainable requires neither education nor digital literacy; one can attain sustainability by actually taking small actions. To belong to a tribal community also means to be aware that sustainability is intrinsically linked with our culture and identity, deeply ingrained in our past and future.

At the centre of the film is a young woman who returns to her native village in Sikkim after a period of living in Delhi. Her ‘homecoming’ could have been handled as a familiar urban-rural contrast or a triumphalist rediscovery of roots. Instead, Shape of Momo treats the return as a series of calibrations - between body and landscape, kinship and obligation, desire and community expectation. The film uses the protagonist’s re-entry into village life to examine how social norms are reproduced day after day, in gestures and silences more than in overt confrontation. This is not melodrama; it is cumulative social pressure rendered in small, precise scenes.

Shape of Momo treats the return as a series of calibrations - between body and landscape, kinship and obligation, desire and community expectation. The film uses the protagonist’s re-entry into village life to examine how social norms are reproduced day after day, in gestures and silences more than in overt confrontation.

The film’s understanding of ‘return’ is especially compelling because ‘return’ itself is never innocent.  Migration alters perception. Distance changes thresholds of tolerance. Urban life does not necessarily liberate the protagonist, but it equips her with comparison. What she encounters upon returning is not an unfamiliar world but a familiar world newly visible. The camera repeatedly emphasises routines she once accepted without question. The result is subtle but effective: critique emerges not through confrontation but through altered attention.

Astonishingly spare moments make the film’s emotional work. When the grandmother casually mentions having heard of surgery to alter sex from female to male, the line lands like a centuries-old ache momentarily voiced; the remark condenses generations of female angst into a single, destabilising phrase. That compact sequence reveals how cultural fantasies about gender can be both surreal and deeply felt.

The film’s strength is its refusal to moralise. Rather than presenting patriarchy as an abstract enemy to be defeated...Shape of Momo shows how gendered rules are woven into survival strategies, economic scarcity, and intergenerational habit.

A recurring motif in the film is ‘work performed and work withheld’, alongside the gendered assumptions tied to both. The narrative shows how a female-only household can be subtly held ransom by its own tenants and male domestic helpers who defy the household in small ways with impunity, their leverage resting on the threat of withdrawing labour that only a man is socially permitted or physically expected to provide. The family’s reluctance to enforce order is not merely deference; it is a pragmatic calculation about labour that men must provide. This attention to labour broadens the film’s critique. ‘Patriarchy’ appears not only as ideology but as infrastructure. Bodies, tasks, and obligations are distributed unevenly. Dependence reproduces hierarchy. The film’s strength is its refusal to moralise. Rather than presenting patriarchy as an abstract enemy to be defeated, Shape of Momo shows how gendered rules are woven into survival strategies, economic scarcity, and intergenerational habit.

‘Women’s agency’ is depicted as nuanced and imperfect. The protagonist is neither an emblem of feminist purity nor a victim in a tearjerker. She is resourceful, often constrained, sometimes complicit in the very practices that limit her. Even education and relative economic power do not guarantee emancipation: the tenant’s son, who benefits from the household’s generosity, nonetheless refuses the protagonist social recognition and respect, a small but telling instance of how gender status hierarchies and entitlement persist irrespective of material dependence.

Yet the film also insists that change is possible in modest, cumulative ways. ‘Small acts’ become metaphors for shifting norms: the protagonist’s morning jog becomes a quiet study of progress. On her first run, she notices a woman doing her morning walk on her building terrace; the second time, the woman has moved to jogging on the terrace, and the third time, she is jogging on the road. This progression - deliberate, gradual, but salient - signals how public space can be reclaimed one step at a time. These gestures illustrate the film’s thesis that resistance is often incremental rather than transformative overnight.

The film makes a careful case that ‘patriarchy’ is not only about individual men’s choices but about systems that make certain choices costly to resist. The protagonist is often labelled “wrong” simply for questioning what her community has normalised; the film powerfully conveys that in patriarchal contexts, the “wrong” frequently operates as the preserved “right,” and realignment efforts face unnameable yet insurmountable odds.

The film makes a careful case that ‘patriarchy’ is not only about individual men’s choices but about systems that make certain choices costly to resist. The protagonist is often labelled “wrong” simply for questioning what her community has normalised; the film powerfully conveys that in patriarchal contexts, the “wrong” frequently operates as the preserved “right,” and realignment efforts face unnameable yet insurmountable odds.

If the film has a limitation, it is the occasional opacity of its storytelling cadence. Viewers seeking a tightly plotted arc may find the film slow; Rai’s patience is deliberate, but it demands active spectatorship. Yet that slowness ultimately becomes one of the reasons the film travels well across contexts.  ‘Slow cinema’ asks viewers to inhabit rather than consume. In an era increasingly governed by acceleration and summary, Shape of Momo insists that understanding social life requires duration.

Shape of Momo does not offer easy answers; it leaves its audience with a sharper sense of how patriarchy endures, and how resistance might begin, not with grand gestures but with small, sustained acts of reimagining everyday life.

For readers of social commentary, that deliberateness is a virtue: the film is a document for study, a prompt for discussion rather than a consumption object that yields instant moral clarity. Tribeny Rai’s film will be discussed for some time as both an aesthetic achievement and a cultural milestone. Quiet and resolute, it trusts detail over declaration and seeks to convert empathy into critique by way of lived observation. Shape of Momo does not offer easy answers; it leaves its audience with a sharper sense of how patriarchy endures, and how resistance might begin, not with grand gestures but with small, sustained acts of reimagining everyday life.

For decades, Nepali-language films from northeastern India - from Sikkim to Darjeeling and beyond - have existed largely at the margins of the national film conversation. Filmmakers worked with limited budgets, localised distribution networks, and small audiences; their work rarely entered the national or international limelight dominated by mainstream Indian cinema. Shape of Momo’s  festival circuit visibility, therefore, matters as more than an individual success. It arrives at a moment when festivals and digital platforms are changing the dynamic: films with strong regional specificity and universal thematic depth are increasingly likely to travel, attracting attention from producers, mentors, and distributors who can amplify local stories. In that context, Shape of Momo exemplifies how a film from Sikkim, when backed by craft and the right network, can move beyond parochial viewing to create institutional pathways for others.

Shape of Momo exemplifies how a film from Sikkim, when backed by craft and the right network, can move beyond parochial viewing to create institutional pathways for others.

At the same time, the celebration of festival visibility should not obscure a more difficult question:  ‘Who eventually gets to watch the film?’ International recognition creates legitimacy, but legitimacy and accessibility are not identical things. A film can circulate through prestigious institutions and remain unseen by the very communities from which it emerges. This contradiction is especially visible in the case of regional cinema from mountain societies, where exhibition infrastructure has not kept pace with cultural production.

Although the movie has the backing of renowned people who possess deep networks in the world of film production, programming, and circulation, its long-term fate may depend more on platforms than on red carpets. Festival exposure generates conversation, but conversation alone does not guarantee sustained viewership. In all probability, the film may discover its widest and most enduring audience once it debuts on digital streaming platforms. The reach of digital distribution far exceeds that of brick-and-mortar theatres, especially for films that emerge from small linguistic markets and geographically dispersed communities.

This possibility should not be understood as an admission of theatrical weakness. Rather, it reflects  a structural transformation in contemporary viewing culture. Streaming has increasingly become the second life of independent cinema. Theatres create prestige and event value; digital circulation creates memory, repetition, and discovery. A viewer who misses a theatrical screening may still encounter a film months later through recommendation algorithms, social discussion, or word of mouth. Such delayed encounters often produce longer cultural afterlives than initial theatrical windows.

This possibility also illuminates a difficult reality about cinema economies in the eastern Himalayan  region. Almost the whole of Sikkim’s population may feel invested in watching the film for obvious  reasons: regional pride, linguistic familiarity, curiosity, identification, and recognition of place. Yet  interest does not automatically translate into ticket sales.

This possibility also illuminates a difficult reality about cinema economies in the eastern Himalayan  region. Almost the whole of Sikkim’s population may feel invested in watching the film for obvious  reasons: regional pride, linguistic familiarity, curiosity, identification, and recognition of place. Yet  interest does not automatically translate into ticket sales. One could plausibly imagine that only a  relatively small proportion of interested viewers would actually end up entering a theatre. The reasons are less cultural than infrastructural. Modern theatre infrastructure remains sparse outside the capital region and a few urban centres.  Distance, transport costs, scheduling constraints, and the absence of convenient exhibition spaces  quietly shape viewing behaviour. Similar limitations extend into neighbouring hill regions such as  Darjeeling and Kalimpong, where audiences often remain culturally connected but physically  distant from formal screening networks. These realities can be deeply frustrating for filmmakers  because they expose a paradox: there may be enthusiasm for regional cinema without adequate  means to consume it.

The reasons are less cultural than infrastructural. Modern theatre infrastructure remains sparse outside the capital region and a few urban centres.  Distance, transport costs, scheduling constraints, and the absence of convenient exhibition spaces  quietly shape viewing behaviour. Similar limitations extend into neighbouring hill regions such as  Darjeeling and Kalimpong...These realities can be deeply frustrating for filmmakers  because they expose a paradox: there may be enthusiasm for regional cinema without adequate  means to consume it.

That frustration became unexpectedly tangible at the screening itself. When the end credits  appeared, Tribeny Rai and a few members of the cast unexpectedly entered the theatre to thank  those of us who had come to watch the film. The gesture was warm and gracious, but it left me  conflicted. I was happy to see the filmmaker and her team receive direct acknowledgement from the  audience; at the same time, there was something faintly melancholic about seeing an artist  compelled to assume the role of marketer to sustain the life of the work.

Such limitations also reveal something larger about contemporary capitalistic market structures.  Exhibition follows expected returns. Investors build screens where populations are dense and purchasing patterns are predictable. Smaller linguistic regions become economically difficult to serve even when cultural demand exists. Under these conditions, the smallness of market size can hold the success of the artistic expressions ransom. The issue is not necessarily a lack of audience  but a lack of infrastructure capable of converting dispersed interest into measurable revenue.

And perhaps that same logic applies to the future of the film itself: not through one triumphant  opening weekend, but through accumulated encounters across festivals, theatres, classrooms,  streaming catalogues, and conversations - small, sustained acts through which a regional story  gradually becomes part of a larger cultural imagination.

And perhaps that same logic applies to the future of the film itself: not through one triumphant  opening weekend, but through accumulated encounters across festivals, theatres, classrooms,  streaming catalogues, and conversations - small, sustained acts through which a regional story  gradually becomes part of a larger cultural imagination.

Unlike cities in the plains, mountain cities operate under severe constraints-limited land, fragile ecology, and difficult mobility. Most urban planning frameworks are designed for flat and gentler terrain. As a result, places like Gangtok  grow without a model. Congestion, poor last-mile connectivity, pressure on water and services, lack of public space, and increasing vulnerability to disasters are the consequences of unplanned urbanization.

Unlike cities in the plains, mountain cities operate under severe constraints-limited land, fragile ecology, and difficult mobility. Most urban planning frameworks are designed for flat and gentler terrain. As a result, places like Gangtok  grow without a model. Congestion, poor last-mile connectivity, pressure on water and services, lack of public space, and increasing vulnerability to disasters are the consequences of unplanned urbanization.

Gangtok’s growth has been largely organic, not by design but by default. This is not due to a lack of imagination, but the lack of a shared vision-and the confidence to pursue it. If we continue this way, we risk locking ourselves into a future of compounding problems.

Mobility as the Foundation of Urban Form

Urbanisation begins with access in the mountains, where terrain makes movement difficult, mobility does not just support the city-it shapes it. The way we move determines how we build, where we live, and how communities connect.

Today, road-based mobility dominates, but roads are land-intensive and inefficient on steep terrain. As population and vehicle numbers grow, congestion inevitably worsen, leading to gridlock. If mobility is the foundation of urban form, then rethinking mobility is the key to rethinking the city itself.

Contour Urbanism: Building Along the Terrain

In the mountains, flat land is rare-but where it exists, life thrives. Instead of large plazas, what the terrain offers are linear stretches along contours. These can become car-free pedestrian pathways-“strips of life”-that form the backbone of urban habitation. [Fig.1]

Clusters of these horizontal walkways, connected vertically by lifts, escalators, and ramps, can create accessible, inclusive neighbourhoods. Such a system supports walking, encourages community interaction, and provides a structured framework for services like water, sewage, and electricity. [Fig. 2]

At a larger scale, neighbourhoods can be connected through a network of these pathways, forming a city-wide mobility layer that is human-centric rather than vehicle-dependent. [Fig. 3]

Ropeways: A Mountain Solution

For longer distances and steep gradients, ropeways offer a compelling alternative. Unlike roads, they require minimal land, traverse slopes efficiently, and operate without adding to ground congestion. They are environmentally cleaner, quieter, and less disruptive to fragile mountain ecosystems. Modern systems can carry not just passengers, but goods and emergency services as well. Of course, ropeways come with concerns-privacy, visual impact, and questions of ownership. But these are design and governance challenges, not reasons for dismissal.

Ropeways, unlike roads, demand a design approach that leverages their ability to traverse steep slopes and sharply reduce travel distances. In a ridge-based city like Gangtok, lines should run perpendicular to the ridge to enable efficient uphill and downhill movement.

Ropeways, unlike roads, demand a design approach that leverages their ability to traverse steep slopes and sharply reduce travel distances. In a ridge-based city like Gangtok, lines should run perpendicular to the ridge to enable efficient uphill and downhill movement. A linear spine from Ranipul to Bojoghari can connect these lines and facilitate longer-distance travel. [Fig. 4]

If integrated thoughtfully with pedestrian networks, ropeways can fundamentally transform how Gangtok moves-and, by extension, how it grows.

Planning Through Mobility

Mobility is not just a transport issue; it is a planning tool. Choosing the right mobility system can help address multiple urban challenges simultaneously-housing, congestion, service delivery, public space, and even disaster management.

Mobility is not just a transport issue; it is a planning tool. Choosing the right mobility system can help address multiple urban challenges simultaneously-housing, congestion, service delivery, public space, and even disaster management.

Imagine a parallel, car-free layer across the city: a network of walkways, vertical connectors, and ropeways that allows people to move without relying on vehicles. Such a system could revitalise neglected neighbourhoods, stimulate local economies, and improve quality of life where it is needed most. Even existing neighbourhoods can be retrofitted. By connecting and reorganising current paths into coherent horizontal networks, accessibility can be significantly improved. With genuine public participation, such transformations are not only possible but likely to gain support. 

Beyond Infrastructure: The Question of Ownership

How we build is as important as what we build. The prevailing development model-often driven by large, externally executed projects-prioritises infrastructure over people. It limits local participation, erodes ownership, and misses precious opportunities to build local capacity. Conventional public-private partnership (PPP) frameworks, while widely used, may not be optimal in contexts where institutional capacity is limited and socio-economic equity is a priority.

How we build is as important as what we build...Gangtok needs an approach that involves community-oriented ownership structures, where local stakeholders-including residents, landowners, professionals, and government-participate directly in the planning, financing, and operation of infrastructure systems.

Gangtok needs an approach that involves community-oriented ownership structures, where local stakeholders-including residents, landowners, professionals, and government-participate directly in the planning, financing, and operation of infrastructure systems.

Such models offer several advantages:

•  Enhanced local ownership and accountability

•  Retention of economic benefits within the region

•  Opportunities for skill development and capacity building [especially for a transformative technology for mobility in the mountains like ropeways]

•  Greater alignment with community needs and priorities

External technical expertise can be incorporated in a consultative role, ensuring quality while preserving local agency. While ownership should remain local, the benefits of a ropeway system must be widely shared to avoid monopolies. An alternative to a conventional PPP model is a community-led consortium that conceives, builds, and operates the system, supported by international technical experts as advisors.

Equity can be distributed among key local stakeholders based on agreed contributions, creating an ownership structure aligned with community interests [Fig. 5]

• Promoters (Sweat Equity): Entrepreneurs, designers, planners, contractors, and professionals who initiate and steward the project.
• Landowners: Given land scarcity in Gangtok, owners-especially at station sites-can contribute land as equity; government land can be similarly valued.
• Contractors: Construction partners can take equity in lieu of cash payments, reducing capital expenditure and debt reliance.
• Government: A key stakeholder through land and power contributions, requiring a more enabling and flexible institutional approach.
• Local Neighbourhoods: Representation in governance ensures accountability and alignment with community needs.
• Ropeway Company (Strategic Partner): A reputable international firm could come on board under aligned CSR objectives, providing expertise and potentially reducing dependence on external financing.

This model distributes ownership, lowers upfront costs, and embeds the project within the local socio-economic fabric.

External technical expertise can be incorporated in a consultative role, ensuring quality while preserving local agency.This is not just about equity; it is about long-term resilience. A city that understands and manages its own systems is better equipped to adapt and thrive.

External technical expertise can be incorporated in a consultative role, ensuring quality while preserving local agency.This is not just about equity; it is about long-term resilience. A city that understands and manages its own systems is better equipped to adapt and thrive.

The Governance Gap

None of this is possible without clarity in governance. Today, there is ambiguity over who is responsible for planning and managing the city. This  situation undermines long-term thinking and allows short-term, ad hoc decisions to prevail. Without a coherent vision and accountable leadership, even the best ideas cannot be implemented effectively.

Planning is, fundamentally, an act of governance. It requires intent, coordination, and the ability to think beyond immediate pressures. A community-based ownership model will have the inherent checks and balances to help it succeed and can possibly grow to fill the vacuum of stewarding the city.

Planning is, fundamentally, an act of governance. It requires intent, coordination, and the ability to think beyond immediate pressures. A community-based ownership model will have the inherent checks and balances to help it succeed and can possibly grow to fill the vacuum of stewarding the city.

A Choice About the Future

Gangtok stands at crossroads. It can continue on its current path-reactive, fragmented, and increasingly strained. Or it can choose to evolve deliberately, using its constraints as a framework for innovation. This is not just about infrastructure or mobility. It is about the kind of city we want to become—and the kind of society we want to be.

Development, if understood as evolution, demands direction. It requires us to define what matters, to take responsibility for our future, and to ensure that growth strengthens rather than erodes our social fabric. In the end, cities reflect their people. Their values, their governance, and their sense of collective purpose are embedded in the spaces they create. If Gangtok is to thrive, it must not only build differently-it must think differently.

In the end, cities reflect their people. Their values, their governance, and their sense of collective purpose are embedded in the spaces they create. If Gangtok is to thrive, it must not only build differently-it must think differently.