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This dissertation examines how ethnological knowledge conditions the possibilities of rights, recognition, and belonging in the nation-state for the peoples of Darjeeling. Fueled by longstanding anxieties over their place in India, ethnic groups have increasingly turned to ethnology to reconstitute themselves as acknowledgeable communities. These techniques have proven instrumental to these groups ’ quests for recognition as Scheduled Tribes of India, and to broader efforts to bring ethnic-based sovereignty to Darjeeling as either a separate state or a ‘tribal area ’ as per the Indian constitution. The effects of these ethnological initiatives, however, extend well beyond recognition. In time, they have fundamentally reshaped the political, social, and subjective contours of ‘identity ’ itself. This dissertation accordingly focuses on the dynamics by which the people of Darjeeling have taken up—and taken on—normative ethnological forms to achieve their twinned objectives of ethnic revitalization and formal recognition from the Government of India. The research is based primarily on ethnographic and historiographic work conducted in India in 2006-7. Historically, it interrogates: (i) the (post)colonial past