Guest post by SUMANA ROY

A few years ago, I took my students to the cemetery in Darjeeling. I lived in an apartment just above the Happy Valley Tea Estate, from where I saw the prettiest of sunsets, had a colleague point out the ranges of Sandakphu to me quite often, and from whose long narrow balcony I imagined shadows of, as the lingo among Bengalis in Darjeeling went, “Sahib Ghosts”. Apart from the weather, perfect and monstrous in turns, what kept Darjeeling alive to “professors from the plains”, as we were called, was the mythology of “biliti” (“foreign”) ghosts waiting for the appropriate moment to reclaim what they had created – tea-gardens, the schools and colleges, the architecture, the cookies and cakes, the “style”, a word in which we tried to condense the British legacy. We spoke about planchettes, about ghosts we wanted to invite for tea, while history professors debated with political science researchers whether that meeting would be a post-postcolonial one or an anti-postcolonial moment. Continue reading Birds, tea, ghosts and the Indian National Congress: Sumana Roy →