Adi Prakash

In the Himalaya of northeastern India, the Lepcha indigenous community have been successfully resisting the Teesta Stage IV damming project in the state of Sikkim since 2005, facing pressure from the Indian state. Simultaneously, efforts have burgeoned in both states of Sikkim and West Bengal to save the Lepcha language, an endangered language with about 30,000 active speakers. I study the impact of the impending Teesta Stage IV dam and multi-ethnic politics on the Lepcha homeland— Mayel Lyang— in Sikkim and West Bengal states of India. In doing so, I aim to understand development and state building narratives in India from the perspective of indigenous ontology and explore how cultural revitalisation occurs across different sociopolitical and historical contexts. I employ an understanding of semiotic ideology based on Peircean semiotics and look at Mayel Lyang as a site of ideological work and the Lepcha language as being framed in multiple ideological assemblages. Bringing together literatures from geography, cultural anthropology and linguistic anthropology, I attempt to unpack the lived and imagined experience of Mayel Lyang for the Lepcha