On Mullingar Hill: Memory, Movement and Belonging in a Himalayan Hill Station by Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger

On Mullingar Hill: Memory, Movement and Belonging in a Himalayan Hill Station
AUTHOR- Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
| HB ₹2450 |
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INFORMATION
- AUTHOR : Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger
- HB ISBN : 978-93-7452-828-0
- Year : 2025
- Extent : 352
- Discount available on checkout
- Usually dispatched within 3 to 5 working days.
On Mullinger Hill recounts oral histories and personal narratives of shopkeepers in Landour Bazaar, Mussoorie, whose families have helped create the culture and heritage of the Himalayan hill station. The book expands who ‘counts’, beyond colonial actors, in the making of histories of India’s hill stations. While many shopkeepers or their ancestors—some of whose fathers the author knew growing up in Landour—have migrated from across northern South Asia, others continue to move to the bazaar from Garhwali mountain villages for economic opportunities. At the same time, many shopkeepers’ descendants are now moving off the mountain for similar reasons; as a popular proverb observes, ‘Pahar ka pani pahar ki javani—the waters of the mountain, the youth of the mountains’, both go downhill. The continual movement in and out of the bazaar has created a unique local cosmopolitanism. Each shopkeeper’s narrative offers perspectives on agency, identity, home, and belonging—issues relevant beyond the hill station. On Mullingar Hill suggests that ‘belonging’ is continually re-created through rituals and everyday interactions; ‘home’ is multiple, gendered, and context-specific; and movement itself is part of Mussoorie’s heritage.
The Author
Joyce Burkhalter Flueckiger is Professor Emerita at Emory University. She received her PhD in South Asian Language and Literature from the University of Wisconsin and has carried out extensive ethnographic fieldwork in India, including in Chhattisgarh, Hyderabad, Tirupati, and Mussoorie. She is the recipient of fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the American Institute of Indian Studies, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Fulbright-Hayes. Her publications include Material Acts in Everyday Hindu Worlds; Everyday Hinduism; When the World Becomes Female: Possibilities of a South Indian Goddess; In Amma’s Healing Room: Gender & Vernacular Islam in South India; and Gender and Genre in the Folklore of Middle India.
