Northeast India

In Sikkim, India’s model development state, the government
implements wide-ranging control over its territory through laws,
regulations, and coercion. As a border town neighboring West
Bengal, Jorethang is a zone of transgression that blurs urban and
rural space, migrant and citizen subjects, and licit and illicit
activities. In this paper, we use a walking ethnography of
Jorethang town and border crossings to make three arguments.
First, as Jorethang has grown the Government of Sikkim has
effectively abdicated enforcing the spatial order it enforces
elsewhere in Sikkim, enabling Jorethang to be ruled—in effect—
by commercial interests. Second, Jorethang’s growth has been
fueled by migrants drawn to work on infrastructure projects, in
private construction, and in illicit cross-border trade. This is an
alternative story of urban growth in a rapidly urbanizing border
state and is in contrast to the highly planned urban development
evident in other parts of Sikkim. Third, Jorethang offers a glimpse
of the bifurcated urban future of the eastern Himalayas. While
model modernity is manifest in showpiece urban areas such as
Namchi and Gangtok, border towns like Jorethang have become
zones to supply, service, and profit from model modernity without
being bound by its rules. Through these arguments we identify
the internal border between Sikkim and West Bengal as a crucial
division between different spatial orders, between the model
development state of Sikkim and the imploding tracts of adjacent
West Bengal. In Jorethang these orders merge bridging the
orderly and disorderly and providing opportunities for
development through delinquency.