Introduction
Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same.Footnote 1
Provincialism, or provinciality, is a space recognizable instantly.Footnote 2
‘A remote town’: this is how the Himalayan town of Gopeshwar, the district headquarters of Chamoli in the North Indian state of Uttarakhand is, almost universally, defined. Situated at a height of 1,308 metres above sea level, covering an area of 14.2 square kilometres, with a population of 19,833 according to the 2001 Census of India, Gopeshwar is to be found at a distance of 280 kilometres from Dehradun (the capital city of Uttarakhand) and 235 kilometres from the nearest railhead, Rishikesh.Footnote 3 Given the distance from large urban centres, its location on India's border with Tibet, the difficult terrain, and the poor transportation infrastructure, it is not altogether surprising that the English word ‘remote’ is often used to describe this town and, by extension, the district. An introductory pamphlet to Chamoli, for instance, describes it as being filled with sacred Hindu temples, ‘unique nature reserves’ and ‘scenic beauty’. ‘Educationally and economically, however, the region was poor since it had been a remote neglected part of the larger Garhwal district for the previous 100 years.’Footnote 4 This pamphlet, issued by the organization credited with spearheading the celebrated Chipko movement (andolan), only mentions the past 100 years.Footnote 5 Local accounts describe present-day Chamoli as a place that has, since time immemorial, been distant from the centre, a distance that remains to be overcome.
In 2000, under pressure from a mass agitation for a distinct Himalayan state, Uttarakhand was carved out from its parent state of Uttar Pradesh. Analysts of the Uttarakhand statehood movement are united in their opinion that the demand for secession from Uttar Pradesh was launched and fought on the basis of the spatial fact of the mountains (pahar). As Kumar notes, ‘The Uttarakhandi identity has in fact been developed and shaped because it has remained a geographically isolated region from the plains of Uttar Pradesh.’Footnote 6 The argument went that the developmental demands of the mountains are of a very particular nature, which cannot be fathomed by distant plainsmen (maidanis) who were ruling over the pahar.Footnote 7 The belief expressed by the movement was that ‘the developmental problems of the remote hill areas would be taken care of, only if a new (‘pahari’) state was created’.Footnote 8
I conducted 16 months of doctoral fieldwork, from 2006 to 2008, in this new Himalayan state of Uttarakhand. The first ten months of this period were spent living in Gopeshwar. Given that the state was formed in order to overcome a ‘geography of inequality’Footnote 9 within the national boundary of India, then a spatial analysis of the impact of the new state is in order. Here I propose such an analysis through a focus on words, narratives, affects, bodily dispensations, buildings, town plans, and a brief history of Gopeshwar and this Himalayan region. I am interested in exploring how the place of Gopeshwar is converted into a lived-in space with the overarching characteristic of being remote for certain segments of the town population. Definitionally, I follow de Certeau in thinking of place as an ordering of elements in a relationship of coexistence with each other and space as ‘a practiced place’.Footnote 10 I find it useful to draw upon the work of everyday theorists due to their emphasis on the meaningfulness (or the lack thereof) of space being created through practice.Footnote 11 The first contribution of this article, then, is to arrive at a historically situated, ethnographic exposition of present-day Gopeshwar, an unknown town located high up in the Himalaya, which would normally be dismissed as too unimportant to warrant a serious study.
Secondly, and relatedly, my effort to take space seriously leads me to identify and foreground the trope of ‘remoteness’, which is ubiquitous in all discussions of Gopeshwar. It is present in British colonial accounts, in local self-descriptions, in the statehood movement, as well as in everyday chatter among a cross-section of town residents. Instead of taking the word ‘remote’ to denote a harmless, geographical fact, I draw upon the now-exhaustive work on space, place, and territory that highlights the cultural and political work involved in rendering spaces with a seemingly natural and self-evident geography.Footnote 12 Specifically, I contribute to the discussion on the creation and perpetuation of ‘spatial inequity’ in India.Footnote 13 Ludden has made the point that spatial inequity in contemporary India is neither new nor haphazard, as is sometimes believed, and the task remains to ‘focus on inequality as an historical process, to isolate the specific newness of the present’.Footnote 14 I attempt in this article to do so through a focus on Gopeshwar and—by extension—Chamoli district in India's Uttarakhand. I begin this article by providing a brief history of Uttarakhand, Chamoli district, and the establishment of Gopeshwar as a district headquarters. An analysis of the manner in which the town plan of Gopeshwar has developed leads me to argue that it possesses morphological similarities to the British institution of the hill station, even as it emerges as a rather poor post-colonial cousin. I go on to describe everyday life in the town. In particular, I dwell on the narratives of agents of the state who express a longing to escape this ‘remote’ town. Through an interrogation of the trope of remoteness, I argue that the creation of the new state has served, ironically enough, to accentuate the traditional characterization of the Himalaya as a backward, inferior space within India.
Uttarakhand, the mountains (pahar), and Chamoli
At the time of India's independence from British rule in 1947, the regions that were then known as the princely states of Tehri-Garhwal, British Garhwal, and Kumaon division of the United Provinces of Agra and Oudh, were incorporated into the large North Indian state of Uttar Pradesh. In Uttar Pradesh, the same Himalayan region was divided into eight mountain districts, of which five were placed under the Garhwal Regional Commission and three under the authority of Kumaon Regional Commission.Footnote 15 From 1947 onwards, intermittent demands for a separate hill-state were made, but they were largely restricted to urban-based, elite groups and individuals.Footnote 16 In the mid-1990s, there was a sudden flare up in the demand, for the first time cutting across a much larger swathe of the state's population, including its rural residents. The rhetoric that informed this separatist movement was one that emphasized the geographical specificity of the mountains (pahar), which required a very different form of developmental effort from the type that is efficacious in the plains (maidan). This ‘self-evident fact’ was, it was claimed by the agitators campaigning for a new state, one that the development planners and implementers of Uttar Pradesh—primarily plainsmen (maidanis) sitting in distant Lucknow, the capital of Uttar Pradesh—were quite unable to comprehend.Footnote 17 On 9 November 2000, the government of India acceded to these demands, detaching the Himalayan portion of Uttar Pradesh to create the twenty-seventh state of the federal Indian Union, to be known as Uttarakhand. Present-day Uttarakhand consists of 13 districts divided between the administrative divisions of Garhwal and Kumaon.
In an interesting spatial analysis of social movements in Latin America, Davis has highlighted what she terms ‘the power of distance’. Through a focus on location or territorial dynamics, she argues that ‘there is compelling evidence of a relationship between territorial isolation or physical distance from the institutions, practices, and projects of the national state, on the one hand, and social movement radicalism on the other.’Footnote 18 Indeed, it was precisely the articulation of a discourse of distance, or what I prefer to study as ‘remoteness’, that underpinned the demands for statehood. Residents of Chamoli district actively participated in this movement, with many proudly telling me of their travels down to the big cities in the plains to participate in agitations for the new state. A specifically pahari identity coalesced around the rhetoric of neglect of the pahar by the non-paharis. The vocabulary of the struggle was one that emphasized the ‘essentially secular shared attribute viz, the specificity of belonging to the mountains, and the distinctiveness of mountain society’.Footnote 19
Systematic neglect coupled with exploitation of the Himalaya for its rich natural resources such as timber and minerals is seen to have begun during British colonialism and continued unabated through what is often described as a ‘form of internal colonialism’ by the post-1947 Indian state.Footnote 20 The maltreatment of the pahar goes hand-in-hand with a stereotype of the pahari as lazy and profligate. As A Gazetteer of Garhwal Himalaya noted a long time back, ‘the indolence of the Garhwali and his proneness to falsehood have been insisted upon by all writers’.Footnote 21 The pahari identity is, of course, not uniform, as differences between Garhwal and Kumaon are often articulated.Footnote 22 Within Garhwal itself, there is a subtle differentiation. To quote the Gazetter again, ‘The Garhwali of the outer ranges is often a miserable creature: abject in poverty: truculent and offensive in prosperity or in the enjoyment of a little brief authority.’Footnote 23 A century on from the Gazetter’s observations, the description of remote Chamoli being inhabited by backward, lazy, alcoholic men and long-suffering, hard-working, industrious women was one that was commonplace among not just state officials but also middle-class residents of Gopeshwar.
Perhaps the one time the outer region of Uttarakhand shoots to prominence is when its role in forming the Himalayan bulwark of the land of India is considered. China's occupation of neighbouring Tibet and the felt need to better police the Himalayan border regions led to the creation of Chamoli as a separate district within Uttar Pradesh. On 24 February 1960 a newspaper advertisement made this news public and named Gopeshwar as the new district's administrative headquarters.Footnote 24 In 1960, however, there was no town of Gopeshwar, merely a tiny village bearing this name located 12 kilometres northeast of the small town of Chamoli across the river Alaknanda. The district headquarters could not be located in Chamoli itself due to its unfavourable location along the banks of the Alaknanda river, which subjects it to frequent flooding. Gopeshwar, the village, evidently derived its name from the Gopinath (Shiva) temple, which is estimated to have been built between the ninth and eleventh centuries AD. The town of Gopeshwar has grown up all around the temple complex but particularly to its north. This has led to the temple serving as the unofficial boundary between Gopeshwar gaon (village), as it continues to be called, and Gopeshwar shehar (town).
The district headquarters were eventually moved from Chamoli up to Gopeshwar only in the early 1970s, when the new town was deemed fit to serve as the location of the local state apparatus. In crucial ways, Gopeshwar is seen by residents of Chamoli district as an embodiment of the state (sarkar) in material terms, looming large over them from its mountain-top location, which in turn requires this town to function as an exemplar of what the modern nation-state of India should and does possess within itself.Footnote 25 The developmental intent on the part of the planners of the state comes across, for instance, in an official notification issued on 3 June 1967 by the ‘Housing Department’ of Uttar Pradesh, of which Chamoli was a part until November 2000. The notification reads:
Whereas the state Government is of the opinion that the following area in the village of Gopeshwar in district Chamoli requires to be regulated under the Uttar Pradesh (Regulation of Building operations) Act, 1958 (U.P. Act No. XXXIV of 1958), with a view to prevent bad laying out of land, haphazard erection of building or growth of Sub-standard colonies and also with a view to the development and expansion of the same according to proper Planning.Footnote 26
The ‘proper Planning’ envisioned by the state government led to the transformation of the village of Gopeshwar into the current district headquarters of Chamoli, which come equipped with a hospital, schools, a college, a library, a veterinary centre, sports facilities including a gym for policemen, a petrol pump, a bazaar, a post office, a computerized railway reservation centre, an official tourist rest house, a maidan (large, open piece of land for, among other purposes, holding public assemblies and conducting military exercises), and brand-new office buildings for every wing of the state that is functioning in the district. Somewhat ironically, the template for the formation of Gopeshwar—this local state's outpost in the nationalist, post-colonial state of India—appears to be none other than the colonial institution of the ‘hill station’.
The hill station versus the mountain town
Hill stations in India were a rather unique urban entity following neither the traditional Asian city pattern nor the colonial one, which consisted of the installation of a regimented grid of civil and military cantonments.Footnote 27 Rather, their architecture was distinctly Anglicized and comprised cottages, gardens and orchards, and the building of high quality infrastructure—roads, railways, bridges—from scratch. ‘European’ institutions such as hospitals, ‘convalescent homes,’ orphanages, schools, hotels, and missionary headquarters were set up. The British lived in the elevated areas along the ridge crests and flanks, while the native Indian towns were located at lower levels such as the bazaar area and further below.Footnote 28 The growing presence of the British led to a large influx of Indians into hill stations in order to service them. Physical distancing of one community (the British and the ‘natives’) from another was much more acute in the mountains than was possible in colonial towns in the plains due to the fact of the vertical layering of the hill station. This racialized segregation through the morphological nature of hill stations is nicely brought out in Kanwar's study of Simla, which functioned as the summer capital of the British Raj in India. Simla was divided into two sections: the station inhabited by the white colonial masters and the bazaar inhabited by the brown natives. In tracing the gradual development of Simla, Kanwar makes the important point that ‘the town was the spatial embodiment of a social system; the process of urbanization expressed the colonial dynamic at the level of space’.Footnote 29 Within the white station area too an elaborate layout of houses and offices was constructed which bore in mind the rank of the officials residing within them. Not just the size and architectural style of the buildings but also the locations were fought over.Footnote 30
Hill stations are pre-eminently believed to be nostalgic spaces where the British could briefly escape ‘the three constraining influences of “the station”, “the heat”, and “the natives”’.Footnote 31 This image helped gloss over their increasing importance as sites from which the imperial power, more and more often, went about governing its colony. Kennedy traces the ‘shift in the bureaucratic axis of the imperial state from the plains to the hills’ as, from the second half of the nineteenth century, hill stations became centres of power from which political and military orders were issued by the guardians of the Raj.Footnote 32 Under the British colonial state, then, hill stations became places that the ruling elite wished to escape to.Footnote 33 Gopeshwar, which is also a town in the hills, on the other hand, is a place only worth escaping from, claim senior agents of the state. Gopeshwar is not termed a ‘hill station’, even though it is a town in the hills and shares many of the characteristics of a hill station.Footnote 34 Rather, it is just another pahari shehar (mountain town). Yet, there are striking similarities in the physical layout of Gopeshwar and hill stations.
The first and most obvious similarity between hill stations and Gopeshwar is the physical distancing of those who wield state power from the ‘natives’ or the local residents. The agents of the state live and work in the upper crests of the hill on which Gopeshwar is spread out, monopolizing the land, ostensibly, for affairs-of-state. The locals live below, in and around the crowded bazaar area. Two-thirds of the way into the town, one comes across a petrol pump constructed at a turning with a small landing around it. The sole petrol pump in town, it is a critical orienting landmark in the town. Directions in Gopeshwar are almost always delivered in relation to it. Hence, such and such office/shop/person is below the petrol pump (petrol pump ke neeche) or above it (upar). The petrol pump functions as a de facto cut-off mark between ‘state land’ (sarkari zameen) and ‘non-state land’ (gersarkari zameen). Only government offices and residences are to be found on the ascent up from the petrol pump. The first major office directly after the petrol pump is the Development Office (Vikas Bhawan) followed by the Public Works Department, the District Court, the Forest Department, and, finally, the district magistrate's office or the Collectorate. On the summit are located the official residences for all the state personnel who manage these offices. The district magistrate (DM), the most powerful government official in the district, resides in a colonial-style bungalow commanding the best view of the Nanda Devi (7,817 m), the second highest mountain in India and the patron-goddess of Uttarakhand.
The second similarity between the colonial hill station and the post-colonial district headquarters shifts beyond a reading of the spatial tactics described above to a consideration of the tangible structures comprising the state-space of the town. These include an array of offices, residential areas for the officials, a club for socializing, parks in which they can play badminton and cricket, a library, and a residential colony for officials. Following the model of hill stations, these amenities have been built into Gopeshwar too. That is where the similarities end. The club, the parks, the library, the hospital, with their newly constructed look, all stand out in the town. Despite their newness, they remain almost entirely unused, lending them a faintly haunted air. In all the time that I spent in Gopeshwar, the club was utilized on just one occasion—New Year's Eve—to host a party for the district officials. In a town where almost nobody speaks the English language, the library possesses, uncannily, English classics such as the complete works of Oscar Wilde. Unsurprisingly then, it too wears a desolate look. Although possessing the requisite physical buildings, the space above the petrol pump (upar) remains empty (khali).
Living in the lake: residing ‘above’
The emptiness of the space above is starkly evident on the very summit of the hill in the residential area called Kund colony, which is an exclusive preserve of government functionaries. According to local folklore, there used to be a lake (kund) up there that, mysteriously, dried up one fine day. The colony was constructed around and within the dry bed of this mythical lake. Just as Gopeshwar the town is divided into two—the state and the nonstate—by the petrol pump, so is residence in the town partitioned. One either lives ‘in Kund’ or ‘neeche’ (below or down there). To say that ‘I live in Kund’ (mein Kund mein rehata hoon) in Hindi literally translates into English as ‘I live in a lake/pond.’ In Gopeshwar, however, Kund does not denote ‘lake’, it implies an association with sarkar (the state), that small but powerful and prestigious state apparatus in Chamoli and, hence, operates as a mode of distinguishing oneself from the rest of the inhabitants of Gopeshwar. Residence in Kund is offered primarily to those who are transferred into Chamoli from without and are situated higher up in the state's bureaucratic hierarchy. The colony itself is segregated and ordered on the basis of the same hierarchical system. The top-ranked employees—Class I, as they are officially termed by the government of India—reside in the centre of the colony in the basin in three-bedroom apartments. The sizes of the residences decrease as one moves outwards from the basin of Kund to the periphery, where the lowest level employees—the Class IVs—live in single-room, multi-storied accommodation. Just as the split into ‘above’ and ‘below’ allowed for a segregation between senior agents of the state and commonplace town residents, the status hierarchy of the state machinery itself is quite literally mapped onto the buildings located ‘above’, be it the offices or the residences of the officials. Reminiscent of the spatial formations of hill stations, Gopeshwar attests to Ludden's recent claim that the end of imperialism and the onset of national sovereignty has not eliminated ‘imperial forms of territoriality’, which continue de facto.Footnote 35
There is just one exception to the centre−periphery assemblage in Kund. This is the seemingly strategic location, on the highest point of Kund's boundary, of a large colonial-style bungalow designated for the superintendent of police (SP), the top police official in the district. The backyard of this residence is carved onto a protruding edge overlooking the town below. From here you can look down onto the town, level by level, almost until the maidan. It would be difficult to identify individuals at that level, but it is easy enough to observe the goings-on of Kund colony and the movements of people until the petrol pump. In the evenings, the SP would often seat himself just behind the edge of the wall in his backyard so that nobody from below could see him nursing his ‘English whisky’, while watching the goings-on of the town. The SP was my landlord and I often would be invited over to his bungalow for a chat as he indulged in this ‘hobby’, as he described it to me.Footnote 36 ‘My job never ends,’ he would sigh dolefully, ‘for I have to constantly keep an eye on these useless (nalayak) Gopeshwar-wallahs.’ An argument can be made for the SP's backyard being the real-world realization of Foucault's principle of Panopticism. The arrangement of the backyard did impose a visibility on the residents of the state-space of Gopeshwar, while holding onto the invisibility of the SP. He kept a close eye on the goings-on of some particularly ‘dangerous people’ (khatarnak log): the Nepalis who lived in shacks just under his bungalow, the young men who would play cricket and then smoke or drink, some old men who were forever gambling, unmarried young women or the particularly ‘dolled up’ (bani-thani) married ones, and, of course, his own policemen and other government officials. However, it was common knowledge among those living in Kund that the SP might be observing them. Power was, certainly, visible in the shape of the protruding backyard, with its low wall from behind which one could be spied upon, but unverifiable in that the SP might be at home watching them—but then again, he just as well might not be. Yet, it did not seem ‘to induce in the inmate a state of conscious and permanent visibility that assures the automatic functioning of power’, which is what Foucault considers to be the major effect of the Panopticon.Footnote 37
In fact, I would argue that in Gopeshwar, there was a very different form of surveillance in operation. Here no one individual was the sole observer—rather everyone, with no exceptions (including the SP with his panoptical backyard), was watched by everyone else. The gaze of all upon all was constant and all-encompassing, in that everyone seemed to be acquainted with all the townspeople, and were bizarrely well informed of each other's daily movements through the town. Novels and travelogues set within small towns in India describe such a form of surveillance in humorous detail.Footnote 38 The fact of the vertical layering of a mountain town such as Gopeshwar aids the observation of individuals moving about, especially on levels below one's own location. In addition, there are few destinations, as such, in this tiny town. One is either at work/school or at home or in the bazaar or taking an evening walk in the Deen Dayal Upadhyaya public park at the edge of town or paying obeisance to the lord at Gopinath mandir. In a sense, then, there is a surveillance of all by all.
This aspect of being ceaselessly inspected by the residents of the small town ‘suffocated’ the senior functionaries of the state. They felt that they were constantly in the public gaze, which stifled them by disallowing that much-required relaxation into the private self. As the young chief development officer (CDO), a member of the highly revered Indian Administrative Service, grumblingly told me (the only person in the entire district who dared to address him by his first name), he was ‘tired of being CDO-sahib twenty-four-seven’. I suggest that this feeling of exhaustion, caused by being constantly scrutinized by residents of this small town in India, did not lead so much to a Foucauldian disciplining of the self, as it did to a self-imposed seclusion, a shuttering away of the self, a conscious distancing of oneself from the wider social world of the town which all the senior officials in the town practised religiously. It was considered too risky to remove the official face of the state, which the bureaucrats wore in their daily professional lives, and allow the very people they were supposed to rule over—their subjects so to speak—to peep into the private self that lay behind the mask. In Shooting an Elephant, Orwell has compellingly describes the white man's pain as he finds that he constantly has to present himself as a sahib during the British Raj: ‘He becomes a sort of hollow, posing dummy, the conventionalized figure of a sahib . . . he wears a mask, and his face grows to fit it.’Footnote 39
Posing as a sahib aside, even with their co-workers, it was difficult for the more senior bureaucrats who work within this highly hierarchical and formalized local state set-up to relinquish the structure of their official life and forge ties of genuine friendship with their colleagues and neighbours in Kund. A distinction between the public and the private was coherently articulated to me by many of them on numerous occasions. They believed that it was acceptable to have their work—technical and managerial—put under public scrutiny, but they longed to be able to lead their private lives with some measure of seclusion. They did not think was possible in a small, provincial town such as Gopeshwar in contradistinction to the modern, urban experience of life in Dehradun or Delhi. Simmel refers to the crowdedness of cities as ‘. . . a technique for making and keeping private matters secret, such as earlier could be attained only by means of spatial isolation’.Footnote 40 It was precisely through the means of spatial isolation that the bureaucrats posted from larger cities attempted to hold onto their private selves. The layout of the town aided this process. Officials living in Kund did not have far to go in terms of their work place, which was usually just a level or two below their own homes. Further, most of them were provided with official vehicles that would transport them up and down. As they had government-appointed domestic help to look after the household requirements, they rarely, if ever, went into the crowded bazaar area. Life for them remained largely upar (above the petrol pump). This isolation, lack of privacy, and confinement to a small portion of the hill on which Gopeshwar is set, led to a sense of being incarcerated, stifled, and entrapped. In their own words, life (zindagi) as it should ideally be lived is not to be found here, it is elsewhere.
‘Life is elsewhere’
In official circles there is a well-known fact about Chamoli, which is that only one of the three Ps can bring you here. The three Ps are: promotion, probation or punishment. Most commonly Chamoli is a ‘punishment’ posting, sometimes a promotion (as was the case with the DM who was posted to Chamoli just before I left but who told me that he wished he had not been promoted if living in Gopeshwar was what it entailed) or occasionally a probation posting that will measure your resilience and your willingness to work. The three Ps are directly related to the level of remoteness of the region. The most junior officials or those who are being punished are posted to far-flung border districts such as Chamoli. Those next on the seniority/punishment scale are posted to the belt adjoining the outlying district, and so on in an increasing order of seniority and decreasing level of punishment, as one comes closer to the capital. Only the chosen few—the most senior, the most deserving, and those with the best connections—get to remain in Dehradun. A posting to Chamoli is thus held in very low esteem by state functionaries.
The CDO of Chamoli was one such official who considered Chamoli the ultimate punishment posting. More specifically, he described his posting as a ‘curse’ and as divine retribution for uncharitable thoughts he had once harboured. He loved recounting this story to me: during his training at the Indian Administrative Service Academy, he had come to Chamoli for a trek with his colleagues. On the way up the trail, they had met an old man who, on learning that this Indian Administrative Service officer was of Uttarakhand cadre, had kindly said that it would be nice if he was to be one day posted in Chamoli. He would only half-laughingly tell me:
At that moment I had cursed the old man and mentally thought that I would die if I was posted here in the back of beyond. Lo and behold, I finish my training and guess what my first posting was going to be? My parents scolded me saying that god was punishing me for having cursed that old man and for having had thoughts of killing myself. I think they are right.
‘What is wrong with Chamoli?’, I would ask. The CDO never failed to be amused by what he perceived to be the naivety of this question, coming as it did from someone who had lived her life in metropolises:
This place is so remote. There is nothing here (yahan kuch nahin hai). Everything is lying empty (har cheez khali pada hua hai). Nowhere to go, nothing to do. Dehradun is 10 hours away and my work does not allow me to leave my station as often as I would like to. My friends and families are so far away. It is such a dead place . . . all my colleagues are living it up in their areas. Have you seen the condition of my official residence or the club or the marketplace?
The lack of entertainment options such as cinemas and shopping malls, and the poor quality of the infrastructure, including their own residential quarters in Gopeshwar, were always compared unfavourably with what could be found in the large towns in the plains. Thus, in Dehradun one would live in better residential areas, have access to educational and health facilities, be able to eat out in restaurants, shop in malls, and go to the cinema. The ‘emptiness’ (khalipan) that bureaucrats repeatedly spoke of in reference to Gopeshwar was, first, a very literal and material one. This tangible lack of quality infrastructure contributed to and exacerbated the second sort of emptiness: that of the near total absence of families.
In my very first conversation with the incredulous DM of Chamoli, I was warned off living in Gopeshwar as it was too ‘remote’ a place for a young woman of my class background to live in. By way of example, he told me that his own wife and children lived in Dehradun, as did the families of all other officials who had been posted into the district. All the senior officials in Gopeshwar were men. The only wives to be seen were those who were recently married and did not yet have any children. Hence, during the time I lived in Kund, out of the 30-plus inhabitants, only one officer's wife lived with him for the majority of the time period. She too told me, though, that she would ‘run home as often as possible for it is so deadly boring here’. Given the fact that everyone's families were not here, half the officials' attention and time was turned towards Dehradun or the other cities in the plains where their families lived. These bureaucrats repeatedly told me how difficult they found it to ‘manage both fronts’.
Their apparent incarceration in the mountains seemed to be putting a strain on the families, especially the marriages, of all the officials. A senior forest official told me that he was in a real bind because his wife hated it in Gopeshwar and his ageing parents would not even survive the strenuous drive up here to ‘this nothingness’. With real earnestness he told me that his wife was threatening to divorce him if he did not get posted out soon. Another forest official told me how Gopeshwar is not a place where one can ‘keep a family’ (family ko rakh sakte hai). Yet another forest official told me that his wife never visited him in Gopeshwar for ‘when we got married she knew that we would spend most of our lives in jungles. But a jungle in the pahar in this remote region is more than she had bargained for.’ A sub-divisional magistrate (SDM) of the district told me how his wife could not endure living in Gopeshwar for more than two days as she had grown up in Delhi and was unused to the ‘backwardness of a remote region such as Chamoli’. Another official told me how his parents-in-law were aghast when they discovered he was going to be posted ‘in the pahar’ (pahar mein) and said that, had they known of this in advance, they would never have allowed their daughter to marry him. Two unmarried officers told me that they were being compelled to go down the path of arranged marriages as they did not want to remain bachelors forever and, naturally, there was no chance of ever meeting ‘anyone interesting up here’.
The intersection of gender and class was particularly striking in such discussions of Gopeshwar, especially when compared to colonial hill stations where, Kennedy has argued, ‘form followed function: the lives led in the hills replicated the social experiences of the upper middle classes at home’.Footnote 41 These were intensely social spaces filled with events such as teas, picnics, balls, fetes, strolls, social calls, and the intrigues, gossip, and romances these social activities led to—a life that novels set in the British Raj vividly depicts.Footnote 42 The creation of a home-like space had allowed for a large population of British women to be in residence in hill stations. In Gopeshwar, by sharp contrast, there were almost no women in the state-space. Quite unlike the official order issued by the government of Uttar Pradesh, which declared the new district capital ready for residence in the 1970s, the families of bureaucrats never deemed Gopeshwar fit to be inhabited: the hospital in town had no regular medical staff and offered minimal facilities, the various schools were not of the standard that would appeal to the relatively well-off bureaucrats, the bazaar was judged inferior and provincial, there were no cinemas and restaurants. The absence of wives and children greatly contributed to the sense of emptiness that officials referred to as looming over the town.
Women officials, in general, are spared being posted to Chamoli due to the hardships it entails. The gendering of the state-space of Gopeshwar then—the offices and Kund—was distinctly and overwhelmingly male. If women were posted up to Chamoli, they tended to go on long or medical leave. The only woman official I encountered in the district was Ruchi, a new young recruit of the provincial civil services, who was posted as the SDM of Joshimath, a tehsil of Chamoli that lies along the Tibetan border. She told me that she had been posted there since ‘those old men in Dehradun’ (referring to the senior officials who had ordered her posting) did not think that she—a young, single woman hailing from the plains—could manage it and she was intent on proving them wrong. Ruchi belongs to the category of the ‘other backward classes’ but she was certain that it was not her supposedly lower caste affiliation that had led to this terrible posting which had led to her being packed off to the most remote sub-division of remote Chamoli. Rather, she believed it was because she was a young woman from a large town in the plains—a maidani—and this had made her, as she repeatedly described it to me, ‘a victim’. She described her posting to Chamoli as one filled with such hardships that it had ended up eliminating all fear from her:
I can battle wild bears and leopards, walk up vertical inclines in the snow to identify dead bodies, travel as the only woman with contingents of louts, deal with all sorts of pressure especially that of the local goondas (thugs) . . . you name it and I can deal with it for I have no fear of anyone or anything left in me. Living here all alone in the middle of nowhere, having to deal with the issues and people that I have to, I am now scared of nothing. I am not happy about this, for to remain human, one must fear something . . . at the very least fear god. But I fear nothing. Perhaps these massive mountains have made me inhuman?
Ruchi ascribed her distaste for her posting to the harshness of life in the high Himalaya, peopled as it is with the stereotypical pahari male. In other words, she highlighted her maidani origins and identity. At least half of the 30 or so bureaucrats who lived in Kund hailed from the pahar. Strikingly, there was little difference between their impressions of Chamoli/Gopeshwar and those of the maidani bureaucrats. The top bureaucrats of the district—the DM, SP, CDO, SDM, DFO (divisional forest officer)—were, in fact, paharis. Nevertheless, they voiced almost identical narrations on the remoteness and backwardness of Chamoli. Pigg has described the process of overcoming distinctions such as regional origins among civil servants charged with administering bikas (development) in Nepal and their amalgamation into a distinct class with shared desires and outlooks on life.Footnote 43 The section of state agents living in Kund, which I similarly study as a class-unto-itself, evaluated Gopeshwar, and the pahar per se, as a backward step in their lives. For them this was not a place where the lifestyle, the public amenities that shape the consumption patterns of the middle class in contemporary urban India, and codes of behaviour and interactions with others matched those they aspired to.
Everyday work in Chamoli, too, possessed many a trying feature. The yatra (pilgrimage) season to the prominent Hindu temple of Badrinath is an example of this. The Badrinath temple remains open from May to November. The throwing open of the portals of the temple in early May is followed by a veritable deluge of pilgrims aboard buses, trucks, cars, motorbikes, with the most pious making the pilgrimage on foot. Near Badrinath stands Hemkund Sahib, a Sikh gurdwara (temple) that adds heavily to the volume of pilgrims. The fact of the yatra is a source of pride for local residents for this is a time when the magnificence and sacredness of this part of the Himalaya is openly acknowledged by all of India. For the bureaucrats, however, the grumbling about Gopeshwar/Chamoli continues throughout this period. As it was hard to call Gopeshwar ‘remote’ and ‘dead’ when half of India is itching to get here, the complaints during this period were directed at the sort of work they had to undertake. The bureaucrats were constantly on ‘VIP duty’, which involved making painstaking logistical arrangements and escorting senior state agents—bureaucrats, politicians, judges—around Badrinath and Hemkund Sahib. Further, this was a time when their administrative unit came under the critical scrutiny of the aforementioned VIPs. While local residents took great pride in what they possessively considered to be ‘their’ temple, senior bureaucrats were left exhausted by the stresses associated with its location within their area of command.
At the end of the yatra season came an even more demanding period in their lives in Chamoli: the onset of the monsoons. In early July when the yatra was ongoing, though not at the frenetic pace of May and June, the heavens, literally, opened up. The result was mayhem. Landslides, destruction of houses and fields, trees and boulders falling down, waterfalls springing up in the unlikeliest of places, rivers swelling up to alarming proportions, failure of telecommunications and power for days on end, road accidents, blockages of milk, vegetable, cooking gas and newspaper supplies coming up from the plains became the norm. Chamoli went, overnight it seems, from being the cosmic centre of the Hindu universe to being, once again, a ‘remote’ land that struggled to provide basic amenities of ‘modern’ life in India. Newspaper articles screamed headlines such as ‘Chamoli returns to the age of primitive man’, ‘Even in the 21st century no road, no electricity, no water, no food in the Abode of Gods’,Footnote 44 accompanied by constant talk of the lack of development (vikasheen), deprivation (vanchit), and backwardness (pichadapan) of this region. Officials were left to run from one accident site to another. Chaos reigned supreme, a chaos that was hard for the senior officials to control, given the limited physical and human resources at their command and the unpredictability of the rains in this ecologically fragile region. During both the yatra season and the monsoons, senior officials were held up as being directly responsible for the events that were unfolding before their eyes. When things went wrong, as they did all the time, the officials were held accountable for it, and were targeted by name and designation by the vernacular press and the general public alike. Expectations of senior officials in Gopeshwar were, indeed, great.
Escaping Gopeshwar
A posting to Gopeshwar was often described as being sent to kala pani (literally ‘black water’). After the 1857 uprising, the British established the Andaman Islands as a penal colony. In order to get to the cellular jail located there, convicts had to cross the ‘black waters’ or travel across the Bay of Bengal. British officials assumed that the journey across the sea led to ‘caste pollution’ and hence functioned in and of itself as a form of punishment. Kala pani is now used in everyday speech to signify a punishing exile from home or a form of isolation.Footnote 45 A posting away from Gopeshwar is, similarly, described metaphorically by officials as a release from prison. When I went around the various offices in the town to make my farewells at the time of my own departure from the town, nearly all the officials congratulated me on having ‘served my time in jail’. At farewell parties for officials, the speeches were always loudly congratulatory on the richly deserved release, the escape from the constraints of this ‘remote’, ‘underdeveloped’ place. The relief was visible on the faces of those who were ‘escaping’. In Dehradun I often met up with officials formerly posted in Gopeshwar. Shuddering visibly, they would describe their time in Gopeshwar as a dark, depressing, lonely period. Many would thank Lord Badri (Vishnu) for blessing them by not only allowing them to escape from this particular station but also for letting them come away in one piece.
The narratives and remembrances of Chamoli that I recount above can be seen as voiced ‘spatial stories’ in that they ‘carry out a labour that constantly transform[s] places into spaces or spaces into places’.Footnote 46 The narratives related above were transforming a place—the town of Gopeshwar designed by urban planners—into a space—an empty space that must be escaped from. The uniformity of the buildings of Kund colony (constructed in the modernist architectural style characterizing all Public Works Department buildings in contemporary India), their shuttered windows and derelict gardens, the silence that pervaded, were at odds with the hustle-and-bustle of life below in the bazaar and the residential colonies there. As a space, in de Certeau's sense of the term, Kund was dead. These narratives about life in Chamoli district were always accompanied with matching bodily and affective gestures such as grimaces, droll rolling of the eyes, exhausted rubbing of the eyes or foreheads, the drooping of the shoulders, sarcastic turning of the lips, mournful sighing, despairing looks cast heavenwards as if to ask why the gods had chosen to punish them so. These non-linguistic expressions lent colour to the stories woven around Gopeshwar and the district, convincing me of their veracity. Well beyond discussions in which I would expressly ask officials questions about the district or the everydayness of life, their resentment at being sent there was all too evident. The very word ‘Gopeshwar’, for instance, would often bring a light frown to their faces; their brows would furrow at being reminded of the constant pain of living there. While reading the local newspapers detailing the travails that beset the district, they would shake their heads and often dramatically read aloud a few lines. When setting off on holiday or going to Dehradun on yet another uncalled-for ‘business trip’ there would be a spring in the step, merry giggling, naughty condolences shouted at those who were left behind.
I have thus far concentrated on the experiences of residents of Kund. Given the elite positioning of this mobile sarkari community in local terms, it might not be altogether surprising that they dismiss Gopeshwar as a mofussil town.Footnote 47 Their descriptions of Gopeshwar as a remote, backward place were shared, however, by many other middle-class residents of the town as well, especially by the younger generation. The poor quality of its educational institutions and lack of employment opportunities in Chamoli were the most pressing reasons for this. Those who could afford it would send their children to school in towns in the plains such as Dehradun and Hardwar. Failing that, they were sent to Srinagar, Nainital or Almora. When the time came for college education, however, the urgency with which outlets were sought, increased vastly. Funds were gathered, relatives and contacts ferreted out, colleges and polytechnics identified, and children were shipped off to make a life for themselves elsewhere. The pressure on young men to find educational and/or job opportunities was particularly intense. As someone who had experience and knowledge of the world beyond the pahar, my informants in Gopeshwar would frequently consult me on the best way for their children to find a way out. Many a chai (tea) time conversation in the government offices was spent discussing exit strategies for the next generation. When I was not in the government offices, I would spend time with three small NGOs. The NGOs were staffed by residents of Chamoli, all of whom were resident in Gopeshwar. All three employed women and men in their twenties who held, at the least, a Bachelor of Arts degree. In NGO offices, workshops, and trips to villages for events such as awareness creation or village meetings, the conversation would more often than not turn to possible options for leaving Chamoli, either via employment or by enrolling for further studies. In the case of the unmarried women, there was the further option of their parents finding them a groom who lived in the plains. NGO jobs were often seen as a stepping stone to finding a better paid and more stable job in Dehradun or, even, one of the metropolises. While I was living in Gopeshwar, I thought these conversations were always held with me as I was able to act as a good ‘bhagne-ke-chaare-ka consultant’ (running-away-options consultant), as it was once memorably put. I did notice, though, that even when I was sitting on the sidelines or during those long, shared Sumo or bus rides to Dehradun, the NGO-workers would be constantly discussing exit options among themselves. Before my departure from Dehradun in January 2008 I noted that four of the NGO-workers had successfully exited Gopeshwar. On my return to Dehradun in the summer of 2009, I met up with them and they reeled out a long list of those who had succeeded and who had failed in their attempts to escape. Again, I noted just how quick the turnover had been and how these educated, aspirational young men and women had devised channels through which they could, as they would often put it, bhago (run away). The ones who remained ‘stuck’ (phase hue) in Gopeshwar were regarded pityingly. The educated younger people who worked with the NGOs, then, agreed with the sarkari elite that a life should be sought out away from Gopeshwar. Their motivations for wishing to leave, however, differed somewhat. Apart from the more prosaic reasons such as access to better educational and employment opportunities, these young people had a curiosity to savour the life of the ‘happening’ bit of India in Dehradun and other maidani towns. Yet again, as with officials hailing from the mountains, I did not discern among this set of paharis a pahari identity that manifests itself in a sense of attachment to the mountains.Footnote 48
The younger generation, middle classes and officials located in the higher levels of the administrative hierarchy were then, I have argued, seeking to escape, to overcome the distance they constantly posited by using the word ‘remote’. However, the melancholia of Kund's temporary inhabitants, with their dreams of escaping Gopeshwar, was at odds with many who lived neeche (down below). These long-term residents of Gopeshwar and/or this region of Uttarakhand experienced a ‘special, sensual and intimate attachment’ to the mountains, which allowed them to feel as if they were in ‘their proper place’ (saheen jagah mein hai), a feeling that Gray expresses with the phrase ‘being-at-home in the hills’.Footnote 49 To show this more explicitly, I offer a short life history of someone who lived neeche: Mr N.
Mr N and I shared a desk in the Gopeshwar office where I conducted my fieldwork. At the time that I met him, he had been doing his job for the past 28 years in this office in Gopeshwar. Mr N hailed from a small village in Chamoli district. A Pahari Pundit (mountain Brahmin) by caste, his father owned a sizeable piece of cultivable land in their village, which fell in the valley. The relative wealth of his family allowed him to attend Garhwal University in the town of Srinagar, where he was awarded a Bachelors of Arts degree. Armed with this, Mr N set off to make his life and fortune in India's capital city, New Delhi, in the mid-1970s. In Delhi, his uncle helped him get a job fairly quickly with a private legal practice in Hauz Khaz, an upmarket South Delhi enclave. Back home, his family was ecstatic at their son's evident success and promptly arranged his wedding to a suitable young woman of the same caste from a neighbouring village. The young Mr N came back home briefly to get married before returning alone to Delhi and his accounting job at the law firm.
Six months later, Mr N ran away from Delhi. Every time he would tell me about his running away, he would laugh aloud. ‘I ran away from that madhouse’ (mein woh pagalkhane se bhag gaya) he would tell me again and again, between loud chuckles, as if he could not believe his good fortune at having done so. Needless to say, Mr N's parents were less than impressed by the rashness of their son's decision to quit his comfortable sinecure in the heart of the country. What made him do so? It seems that he could not bear the loneliness of life in the metropolis, located as it is, at such a distance from his family in the village. The crowds and the traffic perplexed him, the rudeness of his colleagues and the abruptness of his superiors upset him, his material living conditions were poor for he shared a small room with two other young men, both recent migrants to the city and both equally bewildered by it. Mr N is convinced that, had he remained in ‘the madhouse’ (pagalkhana), as he termed Delhi, he too would have ‘gone mad’ (pagal ho jata). Hence, he decided to leave and return home in the pahar to his outraged family. He knew he ran the risk of being unemployed forever as secure jobs are very hard to come by in the mountains, but he preferred that fate to the one he was certain awaited him in Delhi. On his return he struggled to find a job for nearly three years. In the end, however, ‘Lord Badri (Vishnu) came to his rescue’ and Mr N won the most prized of jobs in the mountains—a sarkari naukari or a salaried government job—in his very own district.
Mr N looks on his job in the District Rural Development Agency as his reward from god for having the courage of his convictions. It has allowed him to build a life and a home in Gopeshwar close to his natal village and his parents. Mr N is not alone in his devotion to Chamoli. Many other permanent local staff who lived neeche in the district office had shunned the option of leaving the mountains and going to cities such as Dehradun or Delhi. Many had, like Mr N, returned home after brief, unsuccessful stints in such places. For the returnees from the big cities in the plains, Gopeshwar was the place where life could be lived. In that sense, they were diametrically opposed to the more senior state agents or aspirational young NGO workers for whom life was, most emphatically, elsewhere, anywhere but there. The case of Mr N and several of his colleagues in the district office, who could not imagine leaving Gopeshwar, indicates how experiences of place are differentiated across diverse subject positions.
The incessant production of remoteness
The point of this article is not only—or even primarily—to show how Gopeshwar comes to be understood and defined by a certain, elite section of its populace as a ‘remote’ place. It would be limiting to look at Gopeshwar/Chamoli/the mountains of Uttarakhand merely as a place that fails to meet the requirements of the agents of the state. Rather, a fairer way to look at this region would be as a place that has been failed by the state, that has been cast aside as ‘remote’ and therefore inconsequential, that has been denied access to those processes that are allowing the plains belt in Uttarakhand to ‘develop’ or modernize rapidly. As Gupta and Ferguson rightly observe, ‘spaces have always been hierarchically interconnected instead of naturally disconnected’.Footnote 50 Gopeshwar/Chamoli has always been connected to the plains of Uttar Pradesh/Uttarakhand but in an entanglement of power relations that casts the former, dominantly, in a particular light. This relationship of power, many paharis assert, continues to deny the pahar access to the very same opportunities that are currently being offered to the maidan of Uttarakhand. Figures attest to the skewed growth of Uttarakhand. The gross state domestic product of Uttarakhand grew by 11.6 per cent between 2000−05 due to the surge in the manufacturing and service sectors. This growth has been restricted to the three plains districts of the state, with the remaining ten hill districts, which constitute 53 per cent of the state's population, remaining more or less untouched by these two industries.Footnote 51
Statistics on out-migration or figures on regional economic growth in Uttarakhand do not, I believe, tell the whole story. And neither, for that matter, does the historical literature on the region that has, somewhat romantically, highlighted the paharis’ capacity to protest.Footnote 52 Rather, one must turn to the everyday practices that, as Lefebvre would have it, produce space.Footnote 53 I argue that it is in and through everyday narratives of remoteness and the omnipresent desire among prominent inhabitants to seek a life elsewhere that Gopeshwar is produced as an empty, ‘backward’ space. Remoteness manifests itself and is experienced daily through various means: through the sheer emptiness of the state space, the shuttered windows and lonely evenings inside crumbling houses, spatial stories, grimaces, and muttered expletives. The melancholia of Kund's temporary inhabitants and the dreams of escape harboured by the younger generation of paharis need to be taken seriously as central to the production and reproduction of Gopeshwar as a certain type of a space. Further, the unquestioning acceptance and description of Gopeshwar as ‘remote’ needs to be critically interrogated. In this respect the comparison with hill stations is salutary. The then-remote Himalaya were seen by the colonial rulers as a place of escape, as a place to be actively developed, made habitable, and lived within. The Himalaya were valued for their beauty and climate, and their distance from the steaming, thronging plains of India.Footnote 54 This image of the mountains allowed certain hill stations to flourish. Gopeshwar, in contrast, is dismissed as remote and almost undevelopable; for the post-colonial inheritors of the state apparatus, it is quite simply a place to be escaped from.
In line with the argument of this article, villagers and lower-level development workers in Chamoli often equated their marginalized and underdeveloped conditions with its low status as a place, deriving from its ‘remoteness’. One of the primary reasons for the failure of development attempts, according to local accounts, is the disengagement of state officials and NGO workers alike, who are interested only in finding ways out of this remote land. Their open disgust at their location exemplifies the point that residents of Chamoli know only too well: there is a pervasive hegemonic discourse of the remote, ‘backward’ pahar in which the skilled, the rich, and the powerful—maidani and pahari alike—would never live there for longer than they can help it. There is, as I mention above, a long history to this discourse. The movement for statehood was publically fought on the grounds that it would overturn precisely this damaging conception of the pahar. The cruel irony is that the creation of Uttarakhand has done nothing to attenuate this discourse in Chamoli. In fact, by making the contrast between the maidan and the pahar even starker within the smaller circumference of the new state, it has, I argue, in fact accentuated it.
It was estimated that many people would move to Gopeshwar from the surrounding villages to take advantage of the superior facilities it was to offer—a 1995 assessment by the government estimated the population of Gopeshwar would increase to 27,897 by 2006.Footnote 55 The Census puts its actual population at a figure that is almost one-third less—19,883.Footnote 56 This, too, is a misleading number as it refers to individuals who registered as hailing from Gopeshwar but who do not actually reside there throughout the year. Due to high migration to the plains, especially seasonal migration by men in search of employment, local estimates put a much lower number to the long-term residents of the town. In startling contrast, the population of the towns in the plains of Uttarakhand has increased exponentially ever since the creation of the new state in 2000. While reliable statistics on migration from the hills to the plains after the creation of Uttarakhand are hard to come by, the common perception in Chamoli is that the only real ‘effect’ of the creation of the supposedly Himalayan state in northern India has been that the Himalaya it was meant to nurture are being depopulated. An oft-heard aphorism, delivered with sadness by the older generation of paharis—‘The mountains are ending/finishing (pahar khatam ho rahen hai)’—neatly catches this sense.
The point of this article is to bring to light such everyday chatter, affective responses, and commonplace grumbling about this region of India. There is an enormous power and far-reaching consequences of self-perpetuation condensed into a single adjective—remote—that is perennially attached to this place. By unfailingly and uncritically describing Gopeshwar as ‘remote’, one is not, I believe, merely stating a ‘fact’ in terms of a literal distance from widely accepted central points. Rather, one is condemning Gopeshwar, and by extension the district of Chamoli, to remain so in perpetuity.
I opened this article with an inner thought of Coetzee's chief protagonist in Waiting for the Barbarians—a magistrate administering a frontier settlement for an unidentified empire. One evening he sets off to find ‘. . . in the vacuousness of the desert a special historical poignancy’. Even as he does so, the magistrate is aware that ‘The space above us here is merely space, no meaner or grander than the space above the shacks and tenements and temples and offices of the capital. Space is space, life is life, everywhere the same.’Footnote 57 Contra Coetzee's protagonist, for many residents of Gopeshwar—and especially for agents of the state posted in from without—the space of their frontier district is starkly different from other, more desirable spaces, particularly that of the capital city where every structure held greater poignancy. Life in Gopeshwar is not really life, it is located elsewhere.
