When one looks at the housing landscape in Darjeeling and Kalimpong what immediately strikes us is the inverted nature of house construction along the hill slopes. Houses are built almost on top of each other, it appears, only one earthquake away from destruction. Yet, life continues in these areas producing a vibrant urban form and life and shows how people innovatively engage with their environment.
In this paper, based on doctoral fieldwork in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, I wish to see the ways in which colonial and post-colonial legacies of hill station construction and development shape the urban forms in the mountains. By taking seriously a multi-species analytic, I argue that mountains are not merely being acted upon, but are themselves very much alive and are productive of the way urban life is carried out. Further, the politics of the region is in a sense shaped by the mountains which act as a mark of distinction from the plains of Bengal. What are the ways in which the topographical and the political intersect and interact to 'world' these towns? How does everyday life continue to reproduce itself despite and in ways because of the discourse of resource scarcity and harshness of terrain that dominate life in the mountains? What are the limitations of plain-land oriented policy making with regards to urban planning in the mountains? Can we come up with a mountain-based epistemology to understand urbanisms in the highlands of the world? These are some of the questions that I will explore through this paper, in order to see how a mountain-based form of thinking can enrich both urban studies as well as anthropology.
