Varied Aspirations and ‘Development’: Three Spaces of Kurseong

This paper investigates three different spaces, that is, the bazaar (town), comman (plantations) and busty (rural areas) within Kurseong, a small town in the Darjeeling hills, India. Based on informal conversations and interviews, the paper shows how ‘aspirations’ of the dwellers of these spaces are shaped and produced in fundamentally different ways. By tracing these differences, the paper argues that aspirations have a direct connection with the organization of space on the ground. The primary objective of this exercise is not merely to point out that there are such internal differences in this town but to locate ‘aspirations’ within a set of larger processes. For instance, we show how varying aspirations of the people in these three spaces are connected by their political demand for carving out this region from West Bengal to form a separate state of ‘Gorkhaland’ within the Indian union, and consequently to projects of ‘development’ and a boom in tourism. Such larger processes significantly intersect with life aspirations of the people and take on very different forms in these three spaces.