This paper argues that the politics of tribal and indigenous recognition in the Sikkim-Darjeeling-Kalimpong Himalaya cannot be understood within the nation-state frame that is conventionally, and anachronistically, projected onto its history. Before it was divided between the modern territorial states of India, Nepal, Bhutan, and China, this Eastern Himalayan corridor was a comparatively continuous zone of chiefdoms, Buddhist networks, and trans-montane trade routes that recognised no such boundaries. Colonial treaty-making between 1814 and 1865 began the work of carving this corridor into discrete national territories, a process only completed in the twentieth century. Layered onto this new territorial grid was a second, equally consequential imposition: a colonial ethnographic classification of "tribe," developed by administrators such as H. Risley (1891) and E. T. Dalton (1872) on evolutionary and racial-typological premises poorly suited to a subcontinent whose social boundaries have always been fluid, interactive, and historically shifting. This paper traces how that classification, despite its shaky empirical foundations, was inherited almost intact by the postcolonial Indian state through the Lokur Committee and the constitutional Scheduled Tribe framework, and became progressively more, rather than less, consequential over time, as a fixed political category collided with an expanding and contested field of claimants. The divergent recognition regimes that subsequently emerged in Sikkim and the neighbouring hill districts of Darjeeling and Kalimpong are read here as one especially clear product of this deeper history: two adjoining fragments of a single pre-national region, channelled into different constitutional fates by the differential timing of their absorption into the Indian nation-state.

Mr. Aniket Sarkar, "The Colonial Ethnography of the Eastern Himalayas: A Political Ecology of Contested Histories, Identities, and Regional Formation in Sikkim and Darjeeling-Kalimpong Region" International Journal of Humanities and Social Sciences Research Studies, V1(3): Page(90-102) July - August 2026. ISSN: 3139-0854. www.ijhssrs.com. Published by Scientific and Academic Research Publishing.