History has always dealt with people yet often gazing at the people from the perspectives of the non-people – colonizers intruders outsiders and the privileged elite insiders – who seem to have internalized the ‘mainstream’ perspective framed by the outsiders. In this context a group of scholars working on Darjeeling felt that there was a need for an inclusive people’s history of the Darjeeling hills. The present volume tries to fill this gap of the missing voices of the people of the Darjeeling hills and their cultures through re-writing inclusive history of society and culture from ‘below’ not only by decoding the elements that are treated as tradition but also the transformations in the realms of arts and ecology. For the tribal-scape of the Darjeeling hills is not a static/frozen zone and the people (hence the geo-space) are in continuous transition from traditional beings towards becoming neo-traditional. Accepting history as constantly ‘extra mural’ the objectives of the book are to focus on undocumented histories related to harmony intimacy belongingness and environmental care and thereby interact the living with what is often projected as ‘dead’ by rejecting to abide by any given set of references as the final/‘scientific’/authentic and thereby opening up with other kinds of historical dialogue with the understated historical items that are accessible in Darjeeling. About the Author Dinesh Chandra Ray Ph.D. is presently Assistant Professor in History Southfield College Darjeeling. As Joint Editor he edited Discourses on Darjeeling Hills (2013). Srikanta Roy Chowdhury Ph.D. is presently Assistant Professor in History Southfield College Darjeeling. He has published From Ba?galar Itihasa to Ba?galir Itihasa: History in Making (2007) and edited 1857: Text & Beyond (2013) and Darjeeling Hills University & the Prospects of Higher Education in the Hills (2020).
