Transformed Human- Nature Relations: A Saga of Darjeeling under Early Colonial Dispensation

Abstract

This Article focuses on the transformations of human-nature relations as a result of colonial occupation of Darjeeling in the mid nineteenth century. The study explores the applicability of the contending theses of “modes of production”, central to materialist historiography, and “modes of resource use”, central to post- colonial nationalist historiography in understanding environment, ecology and culture of colonial Darjeeling as a form of human interaction with nature. Arguments of post-colonial critical scholarship on environmental history central to continuity and change have also been tested to understand the processes of transformations of human-nature relationship in colonial Darjeeling. While making a conscious attempt to stay away from ecological determinism, this Article, nevertheless, is tied together through the rubric of ecological premises that defined and structured the socio-political history of Darjeeling. The study has attempted to discern how the pre- colonial instinctive and natural ecological concerns for Darjeeling tract were overrun and ecological premises were modified by the colonizers. This Article firmly affirms that amidst human- nature relations, Darjeeling has been a unique experience of environmental and material transformation. The study, at the end, intends to strike at the cog of the colonially evolved political economy of human-nature relationships.