Invoking Myths in Conflict Reporting: Evidences from Gorkhaland Agitation in India

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

Acknowledgements

The authors thank the anonymous reviewers of the paper for their comments. The authors also express their gratitude to Prof. Biswajit Das, Founding Director of the Centre for Culture, Media & Governance, Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi, for his valuable insights and feedback on the initial draft of the research paper. The authors would also like to thank Prof. Santanu Sarkar, a botanist from the region, for his valuable comments on the existence of poisonous plants in the Singalila National Park.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Note

All the names of the informants in this paper have been given aliases as per their request except for Gideon Lepcha, Santanu Sarkar, and Shambhu Nath Chowdhury.

Notes

1 In 2017 Darjeeling District was bifurcated into Darjeeling and Kalimpong districts.

Additional information

Funding

The authors received no financial support for this article's research, authorship, and publication.