Subnational Enterprise: Militarized Mothering, Women’s Entrepreneurial Labour and Generational Dynamics in the Gorkhaland Struggle

This article posits that gendered militarized labour, women’s everyday entrepreneurialism and political mobilizations around subnational autonomy are intricately linked. To understand the relationship between these entities, one needs to zero in on the generational dynamics of women’s collective engagement in upholding the martial identity of Gorkhas, and the consequences of such preoccupation on the legibility of Gorkha subjects vis-à-vis the Indian state. To locate the specificity of women’s collective engagements with Gorkhaland, I propose a de-essentialized intersectional perspective in drawing up my framework of ‘subnational enterprise’. I draw from Black Feminist scholarship on the nuances of mothering and community work, strains of Feminist International Relations perspectives that attend to the invisibility of gendered labour in situations of conflict, and the emerging feminist work on entrepreneurialism which emphasize its socio-psychological aspects. My framework of subnational enterprise draws on 16 years of longitudinal ethnographic work in urban and rural areas of Darjeeling, and in this piece, I draw on life history interviews as well as unstructured interviews with men and women in Darjeeling. I advocate for grounded explorations of the relationship between militarization, discourses of belonging and gender identity to explain how right and left agendas jostle within a regional autonomy movement.