Educating the New Himalayan Woman: Global Networks of Gendered Education, Religion, and Commerce in Darjeeling and Kalimpong

Darjeeling and Kalimpong functioned as key urban centers in the dissemination of imperial ideology between the British Empire in India and its Himalayan neighbors in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The impact of the interactions that took place in these spaces, however, was complex and led to unexpected outcomes in negotiations between colonial administrative practices and local motives. This article explores the education of three Himalayan women from Tibet, Bhutan, and Sikkim in Darjeeling and Kalimpong with the intention of developing a gendered history of global interaction in these spaces. The education that these New Himalayan Women received via missionary schooling did not necessarily have the desired outcome of transforming them into ideal native collaborators for imperial powers. These women instead asserted their own agency, using the global awareness gained through these interactions to act as cultural brokers and to facilitate the connection of their Himalayan states to the world on their own terms.