Dynamics of Public Administration

Places, constructed spatially, have multiple meanings for their inhabitants. It is normally said that one has to be fixed in space and in time if she desires to ‘belong’. Yet, space is not simply a geometric ‘thing out there’. The sites of memory are the points where space and time meet memory. Piere Nora has tried to define a difference between milieu de mémoire and lieu de mémoire. The sites of memory are the ‘milieux’, the real environments of memory; but today, with our lack of memory, we have to be content with lieux de mémoire, places which remind us of the past, of a (broken) memory. Space fuses place, property and heritage, and creates identity. Memory is spatial, and is created from places and images. A place (locus) is easily memorised –a construction, a characteristic location. Images are ‘forms, marks or simulacra of what we wish to remember’. The identity among people, heritage and territory is also brought about by the use of varied metaphors, the effective expressions of narratives of nations. Loss of territory erases history, jeopardises historical and cultural self-consciousness and renders identities invisible. This study, while interrogating the methods and motives of remembering the past and in revising how histories are recovered, explores as to how the Lepchas have endeavoured to reclaim memories, rewrite history, recreate, reframe and perform a collective identity for their nation, amidst threats of active construction of ignorance of their history and territory on the one hand, and of the threats of assimilation by dominant identity-based movements in the region, on the other.