Protectors of the land and water: citizenship, territory and vulnerability among the Lepcha in Sikkim and West Bengal

Abstract

ABSTRACT In Sikkim, India, indigenous activists protesting against dams in their reserve, Dzongu, have turned ancestral territorial boundedness into a political resource and asserted that all Lepcha have stakes in Dzongu’s future, reconceptualising citizenship as not defined by the Indian government or the subnational states of Sikkim and West Bengal, but as deriving from the relations of the Lepcha to their ancestral territory that spans present-day borders. I analyse this reconceptualization and the strong local resistance against it along three modalities: the temporality of historical boundedness, the spatiality of the traditional territory, and the polysemy of territorial relations. I conclude that the indigenous cross-border claims failed to be sustained as political action due to the legacy of state institutions as welfare providers, the vulnerability of Sikkimese belonging, and the non-inclusion of local understandings of the sacred Dzongu landscape. This article contributes to the debate on polysemic territoriality, citizenship, resistance and vulnerability.