Living with Risk: High-rise Construction,Precarity and Urban Futures in Darjeeling and Kalimpong

Abstract

There has recently been a large number of disasters that have occurred in the Indian Himalayas, both western and eastern. These disasters have drawn our attention to the limits and problems of current models of development and urban expansion in mountainous regions. Darjeeling and Kalimpong are two eastern Himalayan towns located in northern West Bengal. While these towns are regularly affected by landslides, there has not yet been a disaster that has made national news. However, based on intensive fieldwork of two years, I argue in this article that current practices of urban expansion, particularly the construction of high-rise buildings, are a disaster in the making in the region. A focus on high-rise constructions and their impact on the mountains and the people living in them allows me to show anxieties about ecological and political futures that are co-constitutive in this area, which has been facing decades of marginalisation by the government of West Bengal. Further, this allows us to bring out the complexities of urban life in these towns, disrupting the possibility of there being any homogeneous mountain subject, as has often been seen in work on Himalayan societies. This article argues for the need to take seriously the political economy of disasters in the Himalayas in order to begin to conceptualise solutions to what are very complex problems.