Find this original research paper in Vol. 37, No. 4 issue of Critical Arts published by Taylor & Francis, New York. Critical Arts is a SCOPUS indexed research Journal. It is edited by Prof. Tomaselli, Keyan G. – University of Johannesburg, South Africa and Prof. Dyll, Lauren – University of Kwazulu-Natal, South Africa.
Cite this Research Paper
Das, M. K., & Roy, B. (2023). Invoking Myths in Conflict Reporting: Evidences from Gorkhaland Agitation in India. Critical Arts, 37(4), 94–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/02560046.2023.2230252
Abstract
The Gorkhaland agitation has been a popular uprising in India’s Darjeeling Hills from 1986 to 2017. The sub-nationalist movement that witnessed the bloodiest phase between 1986 and 1988 was associated with threats and everyday risks faced by journalists. Undertaking three case studies of widely reported news events that were largely typical of the reportage during the period and triangulating them through in-depth interviews of the journalists who reported those stories and nine others who reported similar news events then, this paper examines how journalists strategically invoked myths to weave their stories at a time when reporting objectively became risky. Such rituals were invoked by news writers, often deliberately and sometimes unconsciously, as they struggled to narrate gory and unexplainable incidents. The paper argues that there is a clear pattern to such a mythic construction of news. Framing such social crafting of news in the region’s historical and cultural context, the paper further posits that such employment of myths in the making of news drew inspiration from local folklore based on the popular regional archetype of the Yeti believed to protect the sacred land space of Ma’yel Lyang and Shangri-La – a myth traceable to the nature-religion connection intrinsic to the region.
KEYWORDS: News, Gorkhaland agitation, conflict reporting, myths, sacred landscape, Yeti
Gorkhaland agitation, journalists and myths: context and connections
The demand for a separate state – popularly imagined by the name of Gorkhaland – in the Eastern Himalayan region of India out of the Indian state of West Bengal is inextricably associated with the struggle for and assertion of Indian identity of the Gorkhas in India. The bloodiest phase of the movement began in 1986 and ended in 1988 with the signing of the Gorkhaland Accord, which sought to give more political autonomy to the local population in the concerned hill subdivisions of Darjeeling district1. More than 1200 lives were lost in the carnage during this violent phase. While a combination of historical factors, in general, could be attributed to what Middleton (2013, 606) aptly calls “anxiety over belonging” among the Nepali-speaking majority population in the district, the mass uprising in present times was fomented by what was claimed as the ethnic-racial discrimination of the Gorkha community, their political marginalisation and a pronounced neo-colonisation of Darjeeling Hills by West Bengal and its majority Bengali speaking population (Middleton, 2018). The people thus belonging to the dominant and relatively affluent Bengali community were deemed as colonialists who replaced the gora sahib(s), i.e. the white officers (a popular reference for Englishmen in India) after the independence of the nation (Subba, 2009). The emergence of the Gorkha National Liberation Front (GNLF) and the violent movement for a separate state within the constitutional framework in 1986 led by its leader Subash Ghisingh was, in fact, constructed around this precarious anxiety.
- In 2017 Darjeeling District was bifurcated into Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts.
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