Invoking Myths in Conflict Reporting: Evidences from Gorkhaland Agitation in India.

The Gorkhaland agitation has been a popular uprising in India's Darjeeling Hills from 1986 to 2017. The sub-nationalist movement that witnessed the bloodiest phase between 1986 and 1988 was associated with threats and everyday risks faced by journalists. Undertaking three case studies of widely reported news events that were largely typical of the reportage during the period and triangulating them through in-depth interviews of the journalists who reported those stories and nine others who reported similar news events then, this paper examines how journalists strategically invoked myths to weave their stories at a time when reporting objectively became risky. Such rituals were invoked by news writers, often deliberately and sometimes unconsciously, as they struggled to narrate gory and unexplainable incidents. The paper argues that there is a clear pattern to such a mythic construction of news. Framing such social crafting of news in the region's historical and cultural context, the paper further posits that such employment of myths in the making of news drew inspiration from local folklore based on the popular regional archetype of the Yeti believed to protect the sacred land space of Ma'yel Lyang and Shangri-La – a myth traceable to the nature-religion connection intrinsic to the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]