On Political Anxiety: Dispatches From Gorkhaland

ABSTRACT What might anthropology tell us about the politics of anxiety now loosed upon the world? Offering some provisional answers to this question, this article tracks the political anxieties that move through Gorkhaland. The Gorkhaland movement is a periodically violent struggle for a separate state in India for the Gorkhas of the Darjeeling‐Kalimpong Hills. Yet after three devastating subnationalist agitations, Gorkhaland does not exist. Not yet. This homeland nevertheless occupies a central place in Gorkhas’ hearts, minds, and bodies. What would it mean to study anxiety through this “place” and its manifest agitations? Comprised of short ethnographic dispatches, this article provides glimpses of anxiety on the move—a condition that connects and jumps between the Gorkhaland movement and other agitations for rights and justice. The dispatches draw from two decades of research, including recent fieldwork on Darjeeling's crumbling cinchona plantations—themselves acute arenas of agitation—to mirror the episodic, mercurial nature of political anxiety itself. In keeping with the concerns of this collection of essays, I sign off each dispatch with a message from Gorkhaland to the anthropology of anxiety: the goal being to foster approaches for better understanding the anxieties that animate this and other real and imagined places.