Darjeeling district (Darjiling)
Kurseong, Siliguri and Mirik, three major towns in the district, are the subdivisional headquarters of the district. Kalimpong was one of the subdivisions but on 14 February 2017, it officially became a separate Kalimpong district.
Geographically, the district can be divided into two broad divisions: the hills and the plains. The entire hilly region of the district comes under the Gorkhaland Territorial Administration, a semi-autonomous administrative body under the state government of West Bengal. This body covers the three hill subdivisions of Darjeeling, Kurseong and Mirik and the district of Kalimpong. The foothills of Darjeeling Himalayas, which comes under the Siliguri subdivision, is known as the Terai. The district is bounded on the north by Sikkim, on the south by Kishanganj district of Bihar state, on the southeast by Panchagarh district of Bangladesh, on the east by Kalimpong and Jalpaiguri districts, and on the west by easternmost Province No. 1 of Nepal. Darjeeling district has a length from north to south of 18 mi and a breadth from east to west of 16 mi. As of 2011, it was the second least populous district of West Bengal (out of 19), after Dakshin Dinajpur.
The etymological term of Darjeeling is denoted "Tajenglung", a Yakthung Limbu terminology that means the stones that "talk to each other", according to the historian Sankarhang Subba of Darjeeling. The name Darjeeling acclaimed from the Tibetan words Dorje, which is the thunderbolt sceptre of the Hindu deity Indra, and ling, which means "a place" or "land".
Map - Darjeeling district (Darjiling)
Map
Country - India
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Modern humans arrived on the Indian subcontinent from Africa no later than 55,000 years ago. Their long occupation, initially in varying forms of isolation as hunter-gatherers, has made the region highly diverse, second only to Africa in human genetic diversity. Settled life emerged on the subcontinent in the western margins of the Indus river basin 9,000 years ago, evolving gradually into the Indus Valley Civilisation of the third millennium BCE. By, an archaic form of Sanskrit, an Indo-European language, had diffused into India from the northwest. (a) (b) (c), "In Punjab, a dry region with grasslands watered by five rivers (hence ‘panch’ and ‘ab’) draining the western Himalayas, one prehistoric culture left no material remains, but some of its ritual texts were preserved orally over the millennia. The culture is called Aryan, and evidence in its texts indicates that it spread slowly south-east, following the course of the Yamuna and Ganga Rivers. Its elite called itself Arya (pure) and distinguished themselves sharply from others. Aryans led kin groups organized as nomadic horse-herding tribes. Their ritual texts are called Vedas, composed in Sanskrit. Vedic Sanskrit is recorded only in hymns that were part of Vedic rituals to Aryan gods. To be Aryan apparently meant to belong to the elite among pastoral tribes. Texts that record Aryan culture are not precisely datable, but they seem to begin around 1200 BCE with four collections of Vedic hymns (Rg, Sama, Yajur, and Artharva)."
Currency / Language
| ISO | Currency | Symbol | Significant figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| INR | Indian rupee | ₹ | 2 |
| ISO | Language |
|---|---|
| AS | Assamese language |
| BN | Bengali language |
| BH | Bihari languages |
| EN | English language |
| GU | Gujarati language |
| HI | Hindi |
| KN | Kannada language |
| ML | Malayalam language |
| MR | Marathi language |
| OR | Oriya language |
| PA | Panjabi language |
| TA | Tamil language |
| TE | Telugu language |
| UR | Urdu |