Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India 9780822385899

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BEYOND LINES OF CONTROL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

BEYOND LINES OF CONTROL . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

RAVINA AGGARWAL Duke University Press Durham and London 2004

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© 2004 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper  Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Minion by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. Library of Congress Catalogingin-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

CON T EN T S

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Acknowledgments vii Introduction: Borders Performed 1 1 Staging Independence Day 21 2 Observing Rituals in the Inner Line Zone 57 3 Screening a Contested Landscape 103 4 Songs of Honor, Lines of Descent 149 5 Border Games 179 Conclusion: Flowing across the Lines 223 Notes 237 References 267 Index 287

AC KN OW LED GM ENTS

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‘‘Tread slowly, tread slowly, or don’t tread at all, under your pen are a thousand lives,’’ a religious scholar in Ladakh said to me, quoting a modification of a verse in which a Persian poet had once referred to the thousand lives that lay under the feet of his beloved. Perhaps the number of lives affected by my pen will never figure in the thousands; nevertheless, these words resonated with me as I grappled with writing about the subject of conflict in a place that I have come to love over the past fourteen years. My steps toward this project faltered, retreated, and moved forward again, and the list of people who helped me through it grew longer and longer. Without the inspiration, hospitality, and wisdom of Sonam Phuntsog, I may never have returned to this book. I am also deeply indebted to the villagers of Achinathang, most of whom remain unnamed even though, after much deliberation, I have chosen to identify their village because my name is already associated with it in permit papers filed with state authorities. The creative energy of Ali Mohammad, Apo Roziali, Bashir Ahmed Wafa, Master Sadiq Ali, Mipham Otsal, Morup Namgyal, Nasser Hussain Munshi, Niyaz Munshi, Phuntsog Dinbir, Sukye Bulu, Tashi Tshomo, Tsheshu Lhamo, and Zainul Abideen was instrumental in my understanding of performances in Achinathang, Leh, and Kargil. Tshering Samphel, Rigzin Johra, Thupstan Tshewang, Councilor Spalzes Angmo, Akbar Ladakhi, Azgar Karbalai, Shafi Lasoo, Hassan Khan, Gulzar Munshi, Spalzes Angmo, Rigzin Spalbar, Maulvi Omar, Wangchug Tshao, Thinles Angmo, Tshangspai Chocho, and

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Ghulam Ali answered with grace difficult questions I posed about Ladakhi politics. Togldan Rinpoche generously made available monastic records of Achinathang. The Jammu and Kashmir Cultural Academy, the Tourist Department, the Information Department, the District Development Commissioner’s Office, the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives, and the District Evaluation and Statistical Agency in Leh provided me with access to government documents when I needed them. Abdul Ghani Sheikh worked collaboratively with me in ways that always broadened my scholarship. Tashi Morup provided enthusiastic research assistance in 2001–2003. The writings and comments of Ladakhologists Nicola Grist, Martijn van Beek, Kristoffer Bertelsen, John Bray, Patrick Kaplanian, and Kim Gutschow, were invaluable in framing my ethnographic understandings about Ladakh. With Monisha Ahmed I shared many experiences and ideas during the course of our research. Gelong Konchok Phandey, Kacho Sikander Khan, Abdul Qayum, Tshering Tashi, Phuntsog Tshering and Skarma Tshering Delegs, Akbar Rangar, No Tshering, Gelong Chottak Lagrug, and Tashi Rabgias enriched my knowledge of Ladakhi culture through lessons, interviews, and suggestions. For their hospitality in Ladakh, I am grateful to the members of the Achinapa house, the Oriental Guesthouse, Jigmet Guesthouse, Uletokpo Camp, Yasmin Guesthouse, Hotel D’Zojila, and the families of Jaffer Khan, Spalbar Goba, Anayat Ali, Wangchug Fargo, and the Munshi family. Phuntsog Wangchug Uletokpo, Nawang, Chondol, Dawa, Bashir, Matin Chungka, Tshering Wangchug Pinto, Angchug Karpotok, Karma Dolma, Raza Abbasi, Sonam Bahadur, and Celene Rego made me feel at home by helping me take care of the logistics of food, communication, and travel. The guidance of my professors, John Macia, Myrdene Anderson, Richard Bauman, Michael Jackson, Bonnie Kendall, Elliot Sperling, Joelle Bahloul, and Michael Herzfeld in particular, was formative in shaping my academic path. Research grants from Smith College made travel to Ladakh possible. Among my colleagues at Smith, I owe thanks to Elliot Fratkin, Reyes Lazaro, Susan van Dyne, Elizabeth Harries, and especially Frederique Apffel-Marglin, who stood by me in difficult times. I am enormously indebted to Suzanne Zhang-Gottschang for sustaining me with laughter and intellectual companionship, to Piya Chatterjee for her passionate commitment to her friends and to the ethics of research, to Kamala Visweswaran for her challenging mind and methodological rigor, to Geeta Patel, Debbora Battaglia, and Frank Korom for honoring my requests even at short notice, to Srirupa Roy for her resourcefulness and readiness to discuss

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issues of cultural nationalism, to Agha Shahid Ali for his faith in the resilience of poetic expression despite personal and political crisis, and to my friends in other places, Amili Setalvad, Leyla Ezdinli, Subur Munjee, N. Radhakrishnan, Avi Ghosh, Kai Friese, Giles Khan, Anjali Aarondekar, Sonia Jabbar, Lalit Vachani, Ashok Seth, Mamta Sekhri, Sujata Narula, Murzban Shroff, Nisha Bhandari, Malini Ghose, and Rashné Rustomjee for many stimulating conversations over the years. Thanks also to Inderpal Grewal, Kirin Narayan, and David Holmberg, who read an earlier draft of the manuscript. Ken Wissoker’s insights into interdisciplinary research and his generous and open editorial style; the efficiency and promptness of Christine Dahlin, Kate Lothman, and the staff at Duke University Press; and Kelly Gottschang’s help with map-making made the last stages quicker and enjoyable. My parents, Ravinder and Bina, were unceasing in their support, and other members of my family, Radhika, Archana, Ritika, the Dhingras, the Wheelers, and the Foxes, kept me going with their affection. Christopher Wheeler brought my ideas alive with his camera, offered editorial comments, helped me pack and unpack, and crossed numerous boundaries for me with patience and tenderness.

INTRODUCTION

Borders Performed . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Line of Control stretches for over 435 miles, separating the deserts, pastures, peaks and valleys that India holds from those controlled by Pakistan. Carved into the Himalayan and Karakoram ranges, it designates most of the western and northwestern boundaries of the State of Jammu and Kashmir, where Ladakh is politically located. Drawn and redrawn by battles and treaties, the line is identifiable by traces of blood, bullets, watchtowers, and ghost settlements left from recurring wars between India and Pakistan. On international maps, it appears as a sequence of ellipses, the breaks in form symbolic of the rupture between the two neighboring nations as well as their troubled but shared histories. For many of us who were educated in India, the Line of Control was not an obvious spatial marker. On the maps we drew in geography classes, the borders were undisputed and clear. From Kashmir to Kanyakumari, we were taught, did the territorial sovereignty of India extend. Kashmir was the popular abbreviation for the State of Jammu and Kashmir. The name of Ladakh, the State’s largest region, did not feature anywhere on our maps. By erasure or inclusion, the Line of Control (loc) has been materially and ideologically resurrected in systems of education, discourses of development and defense, and strategies for organizing government and managing citizens in the homeland. This book redirects standard plots about the loc that are transmitted through national imaginaries and state practices by placing cen-

Map of Jammu, Kashmir, and Ladakh.

Introduction 3

Road marker on the Leh-Srinagar highway. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

ter stage cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh. It shows that borders are far from peripheral to the nation-state, for it is at its borders that the nation is perhaps experienced most intimately; to border India, then, is to constitute the very heart of Indian identity. Ladakh is India’s northernmost area, bordering Pakistan on the west and Tibet on the east. As a borderland, it is subjected to the daily dramas of chauvinism that monitor cultural identity and citizenship between the two countries bisected by the loc and between the social groups within them. Yet it is also a dynamic, interdependent, and liminal locale that invites a grounded look at border cultures beyond the conventional template of security concerns. Moving away from conceptualizations of the loc as an inviolate or natural space, the chapters that follow show how cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games become sites for nation making and for the composition and enactment of border subjectivity in Ladakh.

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Introduction

‘‘BORDERING’’ INDIA

In 1989, the year that I first visited Ladakh, when the world celebrated the reunification of Germany following the fall of the Berlin Wall, the region of Kashmir was also witnessing a demand for dismantling an international border, that of the disputed loc. But whereas the demolition of the Berlin Wall was interpreted as a realization of the promise of democracy and a step that would pave the way for a ‘‘Europe without borders,’’ the demand for a borderless Kashmir escalated into violent outbreaks and hardened state control over the loc. Civil unrest gave way to full-scale clashes. Dissidents and minorities were killed or turned into refugees by armed separatists. Torture, rape, and other human rights abuses were inflicted by security forces on civilians suspected of militancy. The conflict become acute, with Pakistan accusing India of suppressing the spontaneous will of the Kashmiris for independence and India blaming Pakistan for sponsoring Kashmiris to fight its ‘‘proxy war’’ against India. A large military force was deployed in the area and a frenzied arms race ensued, giving the loc an international reputation as a dangerous nuclear flashpoint. That same year, on July 6, 1989, at the birth anniversary celebration of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, held at the Peace Garden (Zhi-be tshal) on the banks of the river Indus in Ladakh, peace was shattered when a taxi with Muslim spectators was prevented from entering the premises.1 This incident fueled simmering hostilities between Ladakh’s Buddhist and Muslim communities. The bazaar of Leh, where neo-Buddhists, trekkers, Zen motorcyclists, revelers, ravers, students, and researchers had once gathered in cafés called Dreamland and Friends’ Corner, suddenly turned into an arena of battle. Protestors clashed with police, monks took to oratory, and youths put on fierce and frightening masks. A momentous period referred to as the Agitation had started, which so affected Ladakhi society that when people measured time henceforth, they often spoke of life before or after this period. The Agitation instigated civil disobedience against the State of Jammu and Kashmir and advocated Union Territory status for Ladakh. Ambitious programs to reform rural areas were launched and social boycotts imposed to delimit interaction between Buddhists and Muslims. What do these events in Ladakh and the Kashmir valley have in common besides their concurrency? A major cause for the two conflicts can be traced to the cartographic imaginings and political strategies that brought about the formation of the modern Indian state and its borders. With the expansion

Introduction 5

of Britain’s imperial interests in the mid-nineteenth century, the Himalayas, which the British had hitherto perceived as dangerous and unknown frontiers, came to be viewed as natural borders for India (Bishop 1989). Linear boundaries replaced the frontiers of earlier political systems in British India (Embree 1977). According to Ainslee Embree, frontiers had been vast transitional zones, determined by geography and ethnic groups, passages where cultures blended into each other and where the land beyond was open to expansion.2 The concept of linear boundary, in contrast, separated and fixed the modern state concretely, through posts, fences, and pillars on the ground, and conceptually, through map representations and treaties with sovereign powers. Boundary commissions and institutes like the Trigonometrical Survey of India and the Royal Geographic Society were set up for the project of defining the territorial perimeters of the colonies through maps and scientific surveys (Bishop 1989). The map of India became lined with boundaries, such as the Durand Line separating it from Afghanistan and the McMahon and McCartney/MacDonald Lines separating it from Tibet, cartographic representations that were inevitably shaped by political interests and in turn, directed how India was conceived and administered.3 The military interests of the empire facilitated the incorporation of independent states such as Ladakh within the realm of the Dogra kingdom of Jammu, bringing together a diverse number of ethnic groups and religions under one ruler. Recent studies by Chitralekha Zutshi (2003) and Mridu Rai (2004) have brought to light how the colonial handshake between the British and the Dogras resulted in the centralization and bureaucratization of authority and the consolidation of a distinctly Hindu state practice by the Dogras, who used religious sanction to hold on to power against the seemingly secular directives of the British. This religious face of the Dogra state and the nationalist struggles for independence in other parts of India in turn spurred the expression of Kashmiri Muslim subjectivity along religious lines. With independence from British rule in 1947 and its simultaneous subdivision into the two nations of India and Pakistan, parts of British India were parceled out in accordance with a settlement known as the Radcliffe Agreement. The outcome of settling the destiny of such a culturally diverse landscape on the basis of cartography resulted in the death of half a million people and a staggering displacement of 10 to 12 million refugees as they crossed sides.4 The violence of this Partition, which is now being recounted in memoirs and analyzed academically after decades of silence, has often been cast as the pas-

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Introduction

sionate and communal response of Indian nationalism to a precise, comprehensive, and decisive system of allocation (Chatterji 1999). As Joya Chatterji and other historians have argued, however, boundary decisions through the Radcliffe Award were not made on the basis of geographic contiguity, religious majority, or economic rationality alone, but political bargaining and the desire for territory influenced Award decisions. Once it came into existence, the border created artificial barriers and radically altered the lives of citizens on both sides.5 During the Partition period, rulers of princely states under British India came under tremendous pressure to accede to one of the two dominions, Pakistan or India.6 Finding himself in the predicament of heading a Muslim majority state but not endorsing Pakistan or being favorably disposed to the Indian Congress, the Dogra maharaja of Kashmir would have preferred to remain independent. In the absence of a real independence option, he offered a Standstill Agreement. While the Agreement was in effect in Pakistan but still under consideration in India, Pathan tribals from Pakistan moved into Kashmir. The maharaja appealed to India for military aid, but armed intervention did not come unconditionally. When Indian troops arrived in Kashmir in October 1947, the maharaja signed the Instrument of Accession, yielding the state to India.7 Communal riots soon raked Jammu and Kashmir after the Accession, and rebellions against the maharaja’s rule led to the occupation and eventual breakup of the state between the two countries. In 1948, India brought the matter before the United Nations, and on January 1, 1949, a United Nations declaration fashioned the Ceasefire Line, which was to be a makeshift boundary along existing frontline positions. Pakistan and India signed an armistice, wherein India promised a plebiscite to honor the will of the people of Kashmir and Pakistan agreed to withdraw its forces from the areas under its control. Neither the plebiscite nor the evacuation occurred; instead, India and Pakistan went to war three more times after 1948, in 1965, 1971, and 1999. With the Simla Accord, signed in 1972, the Ceasefire Line came to be called the Line of Control or Line of Actual Control, dividing what would be classified as Azad Jammu and Kashmir and the Northern Areas of Baltistan and Gilgit in Pakistan from the Indian State of Jammu and Kashmir.8 The current Kashmir conflict, often attributed to the ‘‘unfinished business of Partition,’’ to religious fundamentalism, or to imperfect state practices of postcolonial nations, must be weighed against these histories of modernity. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the end of the cold war cannot be seen as an automatic and ultimate fulfillment of a peaceful and borderless global econ-

Introduction 7

omy.9 In India, as in other parts of the world, globalization, capital domination, and the uncertainties of identification wrought by flows of technologies and bodies were challenged by subnational and transnational uprisings, ethnic violence, and religious movements with differing ideologies fashioned in the wake of empire.10 Religious, regional, and extraregional causes for Kashmir’s insurgency overlapped with political mismanagement of electoral procedures, corruption, and lack of reliable leaders at the State and central levels (Bose 1997). Structural inequalities in economic institutions perpetuated unemployment and resentment among middle-class Muslim youth and poverty in the Muslim-dominated countryside of Kashmir (Ganguly 1997). Cold war politics and the U.S.-backed jihad in Afghanistan spurred the militarization of Islamic groups, and arms and trained guerrillas poured into Pakistan and eventually into the Kashmir valley (Behera 2000, Sikand 2001). Moreover, the rising tide of Hindu nationalism appropriated the ancient frontier myth of an Akhand Bharat expanding beyond the Himalayas and adapted the myth to the ambitions and pressures of standing out as a world player in the global marketplace.11 Globalization did not make national boundaries obsolete: the state, burdened by what Sankaran Krishna (1996) describes as ‘‘cartographic anxiety,’’ reinserted itself in even more menacing ways to crush opposition. It intensified surveillance over modern boundaries such as the loc, criminalizing civil transactions and social ties across them. It also dissolved the face of the external enemy into the internal one, culminating in a culture of fear against Muslims and other minorities within India. Positioned in the penumbra of the loc, Ladakh, too, is part of the discord in Kashmir and is affected by plans for its future. It has escaped the scale of uncertainty and violence that the Kashmir valley deals with daily, making it more accessible for travel and sustained research.12 Still, when the phrase ‘‘the voice of the Kashmiri people’’ is invoked for seeking resolutions for the Kashmir conflict beyond exclusive negotiations between Pakistani and Indian heads of state, political analysts generally ignore perspectives from Ladakh.13 When these perspectives are considered, it is to differentiate Buddhist Ladakh and Hindu Jammu from Muslim Kashmir, using religion as the criterion to ascribe a unified voice to the areas. But just as the Kashmir valley is home to diverse cultural groups, the high-altitude region of Ladakh, with its estimated population of 250,000 (about 3 percent of the population of the state), has a demographic composition that comprises Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, and Sikhs. Administratively, the governance of Ladakh is divided among various offi-

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Introduction

cial bodies at the local, State, and central levels. Ladakh has its own seat in the Lok Sabha (Lower House) of the Indian Parliament. Besides the presence of a central government bureaucracy, the region comes under the jurisdiction of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and is represented in the State legislature by four members elected to the State Legislative Assembly, two members nominated to the State Legislative Council, and a secretary chosen among them for managing Ladakh affairs. Ladakh itself is divided into two districts (Leh and Kargil), which are each in the charge of a district development commissioner, who is responsible for implementing schemes for public works and supervising everyday affairs. Leh and Kargil are further subdivided into five and seven blocks, respectively, each with its own block headquarters. At the local level, there is a network of panchayat committees for rural development that has come into effect only since 1999. Moreover, as a result of the Agitation that began in 1989, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Act was passed in 1995, with provisions for assuming decision-making and financial control in virtually every department previously managed by the State government, except law and order and the judiciary, which are still largely part of the State portfolio. The Agitation was a movement initiated by a segment of the Ladakhi leadership for the devolution of political and administrative power from the State government of Jammu and Kashmir, which it considered discriminatory to Ladakh and to Buddhists in particular. It was also set into motion by and bore witness to major shifts in the economy of Ladakh, as village-level agriculture, animal husbandry, and limited trade opportunities were reorganized by a growing tourist industry, which restructured employment, land, and market transactions considerably. Together with the private sector, the state featured as a key actor in economic development through its civil and military wings and accounted for the largest employment of educated labor. Revenues sanctioned by central and State five-year plans were used for building agricultural and service-oriented infrastructural facilities. Additionally, subsidies from border areas programs, funds from defense budgets, and special development packages poured in, giving Ladakh an advantage over rural districts in the plains of India. But the area’s vulnerability to war and the misplaced attempts at large-scale development undermined economic planning that was culturally and environmentally suitable and, in some cases, enhanced inequalities between social groups. Distinctive and intersecting struggles of religion, class, caste, gender, and ethnicity have taken place in Ladakh since the Agitation of 1989. The Kashmir conflict and corresponding national expectations have exerted a large

Introduction 9

influence on these struggles, more directly in some cases and tangentially in others. Here, I examine how cultural boundaries were constituted on the Ladakhi frontier; how they were constrained by the directives of the colonial and postcolonial state; how they were contoured into a social movement that was legitimized through discourses of purity, patriotism, and political and economic development; how they were executed, performed, resisted, and accommodated; and the implications they had for a place that modernity had scripted as India’s ultimate border. IMAGINED FRONTIERS

The image of the border manifests itself in popular representations of Ladakh that tend to portray it as a remote land located at the edge of modernity. Ladakh is described in binary terms, either as a self-sustaining and unique paradise open for adventure, sport, and tranquil spiritual self-discovery, a surviving remnant of the glory and mysticism of an unsalvageable Tibet, or else as a backward border on the fringes of India, a stark, hazard-filled wilderness where men of courage battle nature and enemies.14 Government directives, academic writings, and travel literature have all spawned images that add to the region’s marginalization. When official travel restrictions were relaxed during the 1970s and transport facilities subsequently developed, waves of European tourists initially interested in Tibetan culture, which had become less approachable after the Chinese occupation of Tibet in 1959, found their way into Ladakh. Ladakh gained renown in international circles with the publication of Helena Norberg-Hodge’s Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh in 1991, a book that hailed it as a haven of sustainable development and the last frontier in the war against modernity’s ‘‘development hoax,’’ with its malaise of environmental degradation, fragmented social relations, and loss of self-sufficiency.15 Such descriptions, together with Ladakh’s topography and cultural landscape, captured the imagination of travelers interested in alternative tourism. Inspired by the harmonious balance between environment and humanity prescribed in Buddhist teachings, students from the West poured in to earn school credit or work experience from volunteering in one of the several nongovernmental organizations that mushroomed there. Until the 1990s, anthropological studies mirrored popular perceptions of Ladakh as a proto–Tibetan Buddhist culture. Seldom did texts concern themselves with the other half of its population that practices Islam.16 Disturbed

10 Introduction

at the lopsided leanings of Himalayan studies toward some religions, writers such as Gerard Rovillé (1991, 113) urge scholars to refrain from partisan politics ‘‘bloqueés dans leurs horizons par la ligne de cessez-faire.’’ Ladakhologists such as Patrick Kaplanian (1985) and John Bray (1991) propose the expansion of Ladakh studies in the direction of exploring the area’s links with Central and South Asia. As an offshoot of the Silk Route, Ladakh’s association with the Central Asian trade was vital to its economy.17 British wars with Afghanistan and the significance that Central Asia assumed during the ‘‘Great Game’’ transformed the political status of Ladakh (Keay 1979; Huttenback 1995). In terms of religion, too, Bon and Buddhist customs that had prevailed in the Central Asian region influenced later forms of Tibetan Buddhism (Kvaerne 1985), and Iraq and Iran figured prominently both in the early spread of Islam in Ladakh and in the practice of Islam in the latter part of the twentieth century (Grist 1998; Pinnault 1999a). The attention paid to Ladakh’s relations with Tibet has certainly proven valuable for challenging ready identifications made in accordance with national borders. Ladakh’s affinity with Tibet is a historical phenomenon, traceable to a common monarchic lineage, a shared language family (Denwood 1995), commercial networks (Bray 1995), and systems of religious learning (Shakspo 1988). In recent times, notwithstanding the difficulty of actual contact, political decisions, militarization, migration of refugees, smuggling, and other economic transactions on the Ladakhi-Tibetan border affect the lifestyles of Ladakhis (Bray 1995), especially the nomads in its Changthang block.18 In fact, the Sino-Indian war of 1961–62 fought on this border was as important a stimulant as the loc in shaping national attitudes and defense policies.19 Despite its relevance to Ladakh studies, however, the Tibetan model alone is not adequate for addressing the social and political realities of modern Ladakh or comprehending the specificity of its political history, religion, culture, and language. Instead, situating Ladakh in a broader Himalayan context, which includes Tibet, provides a transnational perspective and erodes the boundaries of conventional area studies approaches that sharply cleave the study of East Asia from the study of South Asia. The Himalayas occupy a special place in Indian folklore and popular culture as sacred spaces replete with meditating hermits or as impenetrable barriers that have withstood invaders. But until recently, the name of Ladakh rarely evoked any sentiment of national pride despite its strategic importance and participation in all of India’s major wars post-Independence. As Agehananda Bharati (1978) alleges, for most Indians, the Himalayas tended to be

Introduction 11

‘‘ascriptive rather than actual mountains,’’ and its people were seen as strange mountain folk with peculiar social habits. Development-oriented measures implemented by the Indian government were also premised on this conception of Ladakh as backward and undeveloped. Correspondingly, when I mentioned my work in Ladakh, a question I was invariably asked was what tribe I was observing there. The characterization of anthropology as a discipline that studies tribes is rooted in colonial systems of knowledge. Classifying border residents as tribal marks them as primitive and mired in odd beliefs and rituals. Given that Ladakh did not fit into schemes of political or economic organization usually considered tribal, my first reaction to these queries was to respond that I was not studying tribal culture. Ladakhis had become ‘‘tribal,’’ however, not through some fixed and traditional identity, but after lengthy petitions and political negotiations, when eight groups in Ladakh took Scheduled Tribes status in 1989 to avail themselves of the economic and political provisions for affirmative action in the Indian Constitution that are permissible through the limited and established categories of caste and tribe. Besides this ‘‘tribal’’ label, and perhaps closely linked to it, is the category of ‘‘race,’’ by which Ladakhis are frequently differentiated, even though classifications of tribe and caste are officially used in India instead of race. As a result of my involvement with Ladakh, I learned to notice differential patterns of treatment in situations that I had taken for granted in the past. For example, I had my first experience of being turned away from a discotheque in India in a five-star hotel in Delhi when I was accompanied by Ladakhi friends. Smiling patiently at my consternation, my friends pointed out that ‘‘chinkies’’ were not exactly welcome in such establishments. The term ‘‘chinky’’ is a racial epithet with a diverse range of associations. I had mostly heard this word in urban contexts, often in school or university settings, to refer to those of Chinese nationality or to those ethnic groups who are supposed to look like East Asians. Ladakhi students studying in Delhi and Chandigarh used the term to include Nagas, Manipuris, Mizos, Sikkimese, and other communities from India’s northeastern areas, as well as Japanese, Chinese, and other East Asian nationals. This label enabled them to articulate their racial difference from other Indians and to describe the social and voluntary associations they had developed with other students from the northeast or for models of beauty that they admired, such as Japanese pinup girls and Chinese martial arts heroes, whose pictures were almost as popular as those of Bollywood film stars. At another time, as I was walking on a crowded Delhi street with Ladakhi friends, a man in a passing car yelled out ‘‘Hato, Gorkhe’’ (Move over,

12

Introduction

Gorkhas). ‘‘Gorkha’’ is a commonly used generic designation in India for all Nepalis. Gorkhas were seen as an aggressive but simple ‘‘martial’’ race by the British, and the high recruitment from this particular ethnic community in India’s colonial and postcolonial armies has resulted in the persistence of this kind of imagery in postcolonial times (see L. Kaplan 1997). The attribution of Gorkha identity extends to Ladakhi women, who are subjected to sexual harassment or to insinuations that they are sex workers, conceptions produced by the trafficking of women from the countryside of Nepal to red-light districts of metropolitan cities in India. As a consequence of these misconceptions, Ladakhi youth often confessed to me that they feel like outsiders in most Indian cities. In an interview about this subject, I was told, ‘‘Look, Ravina, I will tell you one thing. India is such a big country. We have different kinds of people. There are so many Indians, your people, who still don’t know that there are so many Mongolian people in this country. And earlier they used to look at us as a Gorkha, an inferior race. And that’s how in India we suffer, you know. I did suffer a complex of being a chinky earlier, you know, which I no more suffer because of friends like you. Still, when it comes to marriage, maybe you would have not married me.’’ Forms of racial distinction in postcolonial India have received very little attention in South Asian studies, where the discourse around race has been concentrated on colonial racism or racism faced by populations of the Indian diaspora in the West.20 In contrast, in conversations and meetings, Ladakhi historians and scholars speak of themselves as belonging to the ‘‘Mongolian race,’’ which they distinguish from the ‘‘Aryan’’ heritage of Indians like me. They see my objections to these problematic classifications as a failure to recognize the realities that border inhabitants live in. Such self-identifications and distinctions are internalizations of racial hierarchies that reflect the outcome of colonial history, but they are also expressions of an identity that has allowed Ladakhis to distinguish themselves positively and make visible submerged practices of institutional racism in contemporary India. Lately, a burgeoning cosmopolitanism in India has generated an attraction for trips to locales that are out of the ordinary and sparked an interest in cultural tourism in Ladakh. Its Hemis festival, for instance, is widely advertised and listed as one of the major tourist destinations in Government of India publications on tourism. Such portrayals have dispelled negative stereotypes of Ladakh to some extent. Yet, following the curfews and crackdowns that have accompanied the separatist struggle in Kashmir and the agitation for Union Territory status, Ladakh receives considerable publicity worldwide

Introduction 13

as a region of conflict. State departments of several countries routinely issue travel advisories cautioning their citizens about visiting the region. Friends and relatives worry for my safety each time they read reports about gruesome deaths in Kashmir, shelling episodes in Kargil, or pronouncements such as the one made in March 2000 by U.S. President Bill Clinton, that the loc is ‘‘the most dangerous place in the world today’’ (Press Trust of India 2000). An in-depth ethnographic engagement with the region’s cultural history reveals how Ladakh is constituted by its residents both as a border zone and as a social and political center. To combat images that single out their homeland as a zone of discord, Ladakhis compare its low rates of crime to routine innercity violence and security breaches elsewhere. They defend disparities in their society by pointing to gender, class, and caste hierarchies in other parts of India. They contrast their culture with that of the rGyagarpa (‘‘Indians’’), characterizing themselves as simple, spiritual, and egalitarian, and Indians from the plains as complicated, worldly, and class-ridden. At other times, they fiercely claim Indian identity, not only by resisting or accommodating centralized ideologies, but by seeing themselves as central to the national project. One politician told me, ‘‘It was we who fought in both the wars, lost our lives, cattle, and property. We are more Indian than the Indians.’’ Reinforced by consistent ‘‘low-level’’ shelling across the loc, instances of escalated war, and economic policies that are motivated by security affairs, Ladakh’s border location looms large in its self-imagination and in its strategies for political and cultural identification. To someone raised in the metropolitan city of Bombay, Ladakh defied my conventionalized ideas of Indianness but also embodied Indianness with an immediacy that was alien to me. I was confounded by the daily sight of army barracks and the degree of intimacy that people had with government bureaucracy. The following example illustrates this intimacy. When I was making arrangements to visit the village of Achinathang, I was informed that I would need an Inner Line permit, which could be obtained from the dc’s [district commissioner’s] office. If he wasn’t in, I was to submit my petition to the ac [assistant commissioner]. Once the permit was granted, the office may submit a copy to the goc [general officer in command] or the sp [superintendent of police]. I was never to take a Shaktiman or a onetonne [army truck] going that way. If I was fortunate, it might be time for a scheduled tour in a Gypsy by the cmo [chief medical officer] or beo [block education officer], or even ledeg [Ladakh Ecological Development Group], which was building a hydroelectric project there.21 If none of these options

14

Introduction

were available, as a last resort I could take the Service that ran on alternate days, which meant that I would have to identify myself at the three police checkpoints en route. After I had reached my destination, I might encounter bsf [Border Security Force] but not Scouts [Ladakh Scouts]. The itbf [IndoTibetan Border Force], itbp [Indo-Tibetan Border Police], or raw [Research and Analysis Wing] might conduct routine inquiries, but they were generally polite. It should be relatively uncomplicated, but if I had any complaints, I could address them to the zeo [zonal education office] in Khalatse. This counsel in Ladakhi and Urdu (the official language of the State of Jammu and Kashmir), with English thrown in for the acronyms, was given in a bureaucratese incomprehensible to me then but decodable by most nonliterate Ladakhis, indicative of their complex linguistic and political universe.22 Such multilayered and refracting experiences of identity demand that Ladakh be viewed, not merely as a frontier of either peace or hostility, but also as a cultural ‘‘crossroad’’; not an isolated periphery, but a place located in an orbit of national and transnational networks of travel, trade, migration, knowledge exchanges, political alliances, and conflicts.23 BORDER APPROACHES

As is evident from the discussion above, the image of conflict-ridden borderland is only one dimension through which Ladakh’s culture can be represented. Yet, from the time I first began my field research, the border emerged as a dominant frame of reference. Living in Ladakh at this time, I could not ignore the struggles over power and identity that were consuming its people. Scholarly theory, as Anna Tsing (1993, 13) has argued, ‘‘cannot be separated from local dilemmas and proportions.’’ Metaphoric, discursive, and sociopolitical boundaries in the borderlands of Ladakh, which lie in the vicinity of that geopolitical entity, the loc, became the main focus of my inquiry. My fieldwork extended to three main localities that are situated at varying distances from the loc. To understand how villagers coped with the Agitation, I stayed in Achinathang, a village along the Indus valley with a population of both Buddhists and Muslims. The village was part of a protected area near the loc and I needed a special permit to live there. In spatial classifications made by Buddhist Ladakhis, Achinathang is also known as phyi-nang-gi sa-mtshams (‘‘the border between insiders and outsiders’’) as it is located at the southwestern edge of Leh district and borders the Purig region in Kargil district. This border also loosely represents a religious divide; the district of

Introduction 15

Leh is almost 80 percent Buddhist and 16 percent Muslim, whereas an overwhelming majority of Kargilis are Muslim and approximately 18 percent are Buddhist.24 Different orders of Buddhism are prevalent in both regions, but the most prominent are the bka’rgyudpa and Gelugpa sects. Shi’as, Sunnis, and Nurbakshis are the main Muslim groups. In the capital towns of Leh and Kargil that also share the names of their respective districts, I acquired archival and statistical information, interviewed politicians, observed and participated in cultural performances, and interacted with other scholars. Kargil is situated so close to the loc that mountains on the Pakistani side are directly visible from the town. Leh, my point of entry and exit into Ladakh, is on the eastern end and not directly contiguous to the Chinese or Pakistani borders. It is a vibrant, rapidly urbanizing town of approximately 28,000 people, with a constant flow of migrants and travelers and a marketplace that is representative of its diverse population. Research in both rural settings and town areas assisted me in placing this ethnography within what George Marcus (1995) describes as a ‘‘world system’’ scenario, connecting dynamic and intersecting spheres of boundary formation within Ladakh to processes of nationalism and modernization that mold the loc. In the discipline of anthropology, following the work of Fredrik Barth (1969, 2000), there has been a long-established tradition of scholarship that investigates social boundaries between ethnic communities; what has been less privileged is research on international boundaries (Donnan and Wilson 1999; Donnan and Haller 2000). Noting the relative absence of border studies in anthropology, Renato Rosaldo (1988, 87) writes ruefully that ‘‘most metropolitan typifications suppress, exclude, even repress border zones.’’ Rosaldo proposes that a greater concentration on these porous domains can lead anthropology away from confining and homogenizing the concept of culture.25 Likewise, an anthropological emphasis on borders makes room for a perspective that not only offers us insights into neglected cultural zones but also makes for a critical inclusion of people’s agency in discussions of territory, sovereignty, and international policy. According to Wilson and Donnan (1998, 4), ‘‘The anthropology of borders is one perspective in political anthropology which reminds social scientists outside the discipline, and some within it, that nations and states, and their institutions, are composed of people who cannot or should not be reduced to the images which are constructed by the state, the media or of any other groups who wish to represent them.’’ 26 The anthropological angle with which I approached the sociopolitical composition of borders in Ladakh is that of ‘‘performance.’’ The concept of perfor-

16

Introduction

mance can encompass all forms of action in its broadest sense, but here I use the term narrowly to refer to self-consciously staged ‘‘cultural performances,’’ which, according to Milton Singer (1977), allow anthropologists to see what people consider to be exemplifications of their cultural practices.27 Cultural performances are frames in which the drama of life is mimicked and exhibited. Performance, however, is not just a passive mirror of society; in Victor Turner’s (1986, 22) words, it is ‘‘often a critique, direct or veiled, of the social life it grows out of, an evaluation (with lively possibilities of rejection) of the way society handles history.’’ Going steps further than Turner’s analysis, feminist theorists have forcefully demonstrated not only that society responds to history through performances, but that identities are constituted by virtue of being performed (Butler 1990). A focus on performance serves to widen conventional definitions of political power and identity, for it denaturalizes and exposes the social construction of state institutions. For instance, Clifford Geertz’s (1980) classic analysis of the theater-state, negara, shows how ritual, pomp, and ceremony were key to the expression of state power and the functioning of court politics in nineteenth-century Bali. The state, Geertz argues, ‘‘drew its force, which was real enough, from its imaginative energies, its semiotic capacity to make inequality enchant’’ (123). Anthropological critiques of Western models of state formation (Handler 1988; Herzfeld 1987, 1991; Kapferer 1988) have also disclosed that regardless of their claim to civil and rational standards, symbolic, theatrical, and poetic expressions of power were the driving engines of state politics in these societies, too. A useful structuring device for divulging how the state operates as a mechanism of social control, managing assertions of local heritage and converting rival interests into national icons and symbols, can be found in David Guss’s (2000) notion of ‘‘the festive state.’’ 28 Applying this concept to Ladakh, I explore the manner in which civil society interacts with and generates manifestations of the festive state—in official performances such as national day celebrations and military parades, in nonofficial state-sponsored functions such as the Sindhu Darshan and Ladakh Festivals, and in such public events as archery shows and movies that have become sites for negotiating and contesting status and power since the Agitation. Although the state is not always an obvious player in popular and cultural ceremonies, these ceremonies can be seen as sites that foster what Abner Cohen (1993, ix) refers to as ‘‘masquerade politics,’’ where politics is ‘‘articulated in non-political cultural forms such as religion, kinship, the arts.’’ Examining the construction of politics through categories of ethnicity, religion, class, caste, gender, race, or sexuality

Introduction 17

also enables us to understand the performance of border subjectivity among populations placed under these categories.29 The border becomes a space where the state expresses itself through a habitualized performativity and repeatedly asserts physical and symbolic authority over its citizens, particularly over hybrid zones and migrant bodies that contaminate dominant notions of purity and unsettle orderliness (Haller 2000). Under these conditions of state repression, borders can inhibit the articulation of agency and efface hybridity, warns Smadar Lavie (1996, 82) in her analysis of Israeli-Palestinian identity, until ‘‘only the border itself remains, with its barbed wire, lookout towers, and minefields.’’ As Alejandro Lugo (1997, 61) notes, borders do not necessarily result in the decentralization of power, for they are ‘‘simultaneously a bordure: a border surrounding a shield.’’ Investigations of societies on the U.S.-Mexican border have disclosed that because border crossings and lines of purity are carefully screened and tightly regimented, citizens of these interstitial domains can become even more disenfranchised from the mainstream or else totalitarian in their defense of it (Behar 1993; Limon 1994).30 For instance, the U.S.-Mexican border in Texas, the subject of a compelling ethnography by Jose Limon (1994), is bedeviled by hierarchies of power and dominance. Limon distinguishes between ‘‘wars of maneuver,’’ in which opponents face each other in actual physical combat, and ‘‘wars of position’’ that are fought on grounds of social relations and social stratification. Likewise, the Indo-Pakistani border is the locus for war as well as for national and ethnic acts of selective exclusion and inclusion. In the region of Wagah, soldiers on both sides convert the daily task of closing the border gates and lowering the flags in a riveting spectacle of uniform actions (Murphy 2001). According to Richard Murphy, ‘‘The Wagah border ritual is a dance of identical opposites, each poised in the mirror of the other’’ (186). Murphy argues that the border also manifests itself in social performances within Pakistan, such as the spring festival of Baisakhi in Lahore, where hints of the city’s multireligious heritage are either repressed by anti-Indian factions and orthodox religious groups or rendered to an ethnic past by the elite of Lahore. The loc too breeds the mistrust and adversity perpetuated in the policies and programs of India and Pakistan. In the borderlands that surround it, lines of control are produced in cultural performances, in zones of actual war, and in sites of social struggle. They are ratified in seats of ranking that distinguish castes and classes, played out in the game of archery and rites of passage ceremonies where religious and economic distinctions are imposed

18

Introduction

and exposed, screened in commercial films in which gender boundaries are reproduced, and staged on national holidays to grapple with state power. Conversely, Ladakh’s mixed heritage and its proximity to Pakistan may provide it with a sense of urgency and an awareness of the value of tolerant and amicable relations in contrast to those centered communities who are isolated from the other side by geography and culture. Unlike the Kashmir valley, where the massacre and exodus of Kashmiri Pandits and the continued violence against Muslim civilians burden the possibility of restoring peace, Ladakh is still a society where various religions are living and interacting daily, making the need for reconciliation even more pressing and possible. Just as the inhabitants of the U.S.-Mexican border creatively stage the character of the devil to both enact the history of their marginality and subvert it in Limon’s ethnography, Ladakhis also participate in cultural performances that delineate boundaries and simultaneously reveal ambiguities in centers that appear fixed. They resist lines of exclusion through gestures of intimacy and acts of longing. Often, expressions of plurality appear in fragments rather than coherent narratives, but, as the historian Gyan Pandey (1992, 28–29) suggests in his analysis of religious tensions between Hindus and Muslims in India, ‘‘With all their apparent solidity and comprehensiveness, what the official sources give us is also but a fragment of history. More, . . . what historians call a ‘fragment’—a weaver’s diary, a collection of poems by an unknown poet (and to these we might add all those literatures of India that Macaulay condemned, creation myths and women’s songs, family genealogies, and local traditions of history)—is of central importance in challenging the state’s construction of history, in thinking other histories and making those contested spaces through which particular unities are sought to be constituted and others broken up.’’ The quest for such fragments unravels the contradictions that prevail in official forms of history and tracks the submerged knowledges of marginalized groups. During a period when national identity and citizens’ rights are being argued on the basis of cultural heritage, when the state is making conscious efforts to erase interwoven histories and plural cultures by controlling information, redesigning history books, and designating some performances and citizens more authentic than others, a historical approach to the study of borderlands is all the more pressing. There are other texts that present a more straightforward and illuminating political history of the loc; this ethnography follows the trope of the border in a ‘‘multisited’’ (Marcus 1995), interdisciplinary manner into cultural and temporal spaces that may otherwise be seen

Introduction 19

as disparate. It juxtaposes the archives of official history and national narratives with travelogues, oral histories, literature, media images, and fragmented stories that articulate the major cultural debates in Ladakh from 1989 onward. It presents the symbolic and aesthetic elements of border performances in conjunction with social and material aspects of border life. Such an approach, according to George Marcus, enables ethnography to ‘‘discover new paths of connection and association by which traditional ethnographic concerns with agency, symbols, and everyday practices can continue to be expressed on a differently configured social canvas’’ (98). Writing about border identity raises several ethical conundrums, especially when the border in question has been depicted as a place of violence in some representations and hailed as an idyllic utopia in others. It calls for a close examination of the politics of the ethnographer’s location and a mapping of the research terrain that places the ethnographer ‘‘within the landscape’’ (Marcus 1995, 112). As Marcus suggests, multisited research ‘‘is designed around chains, paths, threads, conjunctions, or juxtapositions of locations in which the ethnographer establishes some form of literal, physical presence, with an explicit, posited logic of association or connection among sites that in fact defines the argument of the ethnography’’ (105). Ethnographers are not neutral observers of external realities, and my own association with the plains of India and its dominant Hindu religion oblige me not to take to the stands as a voyeur, consuming the exhibition of ethnic struggle between two minority communities in the mountains. Staying close to the thread of village life, the questions that I ask here investigate how the tremors of colonial, national, and regional practices affect the relationship between diverse communities in Ladakh and shape the way performances of nation and border are played out. When there are matters of self-determination and belonging at stake, doing research on border identity puts the ethnographer in situations that often require a justification of his or her stance on political outcomes. Often, I had to face questions from Ladakhis and other Indians about my position on the Kashmir issue: whether I was for or against Kashmir’s independence, whether I supported the trifurcation of the state and the demand for Union Territory status in Ladakh. I could not always provide direct answers to these questions. Even though I have been doing research in Ladakh every year since 1989, the ultimate decision is not mine to make. The Kashmir issue stirs so much pain, passion, and patriotism that those of us critical of state practices on the Indian front are invariably accused of sympathizing with violent Kashmiri militants or of being disloyal citizens who turn a blind eye to Pakistan’s

20

Introduction

military aggressions and its poor record in treating religious minorities. Already known, already imagined, the often-repeated assertions of Kashmir as paradise, Kashmir as ours, Kashmir as the symbol of India’s successful secularism, and, in the more recent and dangerous years of political conservatism, as the symbol of secularism’s failures have generated such a sense of familiarity with the region that very few Indians, or for that matter, Pakistanis, are taught anything about its culture or history. Because the Jammu and Kashmir border has become so vital for the self-perceptions of India and Pakistan and because the human cost of this lack of knowledge is so vast to both countries and to the region itself, it becomes imperative to move beyond ready explanations of the Kashmir conflict that make cultural differences appear innate and irreconcilable. On closer inspection, it becomes evident that the animosity between various religious and regional groups of Ladakh arises under specific circumstances and needs to be understood in the context of their histories. Through frequent demands for Union Territory status, Ladakhi leaders have strategically worked to publicize the area’s problems and to obtain financial commitments and political leverage for it that are quite unprecedented in other rural parts of India. But as these demands are crafted in response to neoliberal and nationalist ideologies of security, development, and politics, their effectiveness in securing intercommunal trust has been very limited (see van Beek 1999, 2000). To provide additional grounds for assessing such strategies and developing alternative strategies, I have chosen to analyze, rather than conceal, displays of discord that are connected to the political movement that arose in the area in 1989 and to seek artful models of plurality within Ladakh’s culture as Ladakhis decide the future of their homeland. Finally, this book must admit to being only a partial account of the realities of border life. The loc is, for now, what Oscar Martinez (1994) describes as an ‘‘alienated border,’’ where the possibility of cross-border interaction is proscribed by political tensions, militarization, and religious conflicts. Like most Ladakhis, my Indian nationality makes largely inaccessible border crossings into Pakistan’s northern area of Baltistan on the opposite side of the loc from Ladakh, and restricts my understanding of Baltistan’s place in the production of Pakistani national consciousness, of its processes of accommodation and resistance, of the power of its cultural performances, and of the parallels and discontinuities between Balti culture and neighboring areas.31 Still, the specter of those stories haunts the telling of this one, and the hope for an end to the prolonged strife animates the writings of some of us on both sides of the border.

CHAPTER ONE

Staging Independence Day . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Nothing is impossible when 100 crore Indians work together. That is the spirit of Kargil that we salute this Independence Day. My fellow Indians, militarily, the Kargil conflict has been a splendid victory. Diplomatically, it has been an unprecedented success. But we have also had another, even greater triumph—the manifestation of Indian unity. Faced with a crisis, our country has shown the world that despite the differences which we may appear to have on the surface, in our hearts we are Indians first. Indians who will give their all for their motherland. Unconditionally. The spirit in which India and Indians around the world have risen together has been overwhelming. A spirit that is more valuable than all the treasures in the world. Nurture this spirit. Keep it as strong even after this victory. Remember that we are Indians first. And we shall overcome everything that stands between today’s India and her rightful place among the great nations of the world. Together, let us make the 21st century India’s century. —PRIME MINISTER ATAL BIHARI VAJPAYEE

On August 15, 1999, on the occasion of the 53rd anniversary of India’s independence from British rule, Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee, leader of the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), greeted the nation with these words in the New Delhi edition of the Indian Express.1 An advertisement on the flip side of the page displayed camouflaged soldiers holding up the national flag,

22

Staging Independence Day

perched on the craggy terrain of Kargil, their fingers forming a gesture of victory. The caption above them read ‘‘Mission Accomplished!’’ The mission that the soldiers had accomplished was recapturing around seventy positions from approximately eight hundred mujahideen and Pakistani militia who had infiltrated the loc into sectors of Kargil district along the Sringar-Leh highway.2 The military face-off in Kargil formed the main thrust of the prime minister’s customary Independence Day address from the historic rampart of the Red Fort in the capital. With the parliamentary elections around the corner, he spoke of the upswings in the country’s economy despite the Kargil crisis and the international sanctions that followed the nuclear tests at Pokhran in May 1998. For the new millennium, he envisioned an India united in diversity, irrespective of region, religion, or caste, an India fortified by its endorsement of market values, its strong armed forces and expanded nuclear arsenal with which it would supposedly defeat the terrorism that enemy states exported. The prime minister’s speech on Independence Day was distinguished by the pervasive image of a victorious nation progressing to claim the twentyfirst century as its own. But this national holiday was more than a celebration of the nation’s onward march to future glory; even as it glossed over the past, it staked its claim over representing the past, namely, the accomplishment of Independence and the birth of a democratic country. The date of August 15, as Jim Masselos (1990) points out, signals a day on which Indian nationalists assumed power, a date marked by Nehru’s famous ‘‘Tryst with Destiny’’ speech and the official hoisting of the Indian national flag after the Union Jack had gone down the day before. The historical plot of the past, writes Masselos, has since guided subsequent Independence Day functions, but while leaders, dates, and events associated with the nationalist struggle and the end of British rule are still invoked to legitimize the present, it is mostly done through a routinized body of abstract symbols. For instance, commentaries do not necessarily lay out the significance of the Red Fort in an explicit manner, nor do performances focus predominantly on reenactments of the freedom struggle anymore. It is the state that has now become the focus of attention, so much so that celebrations of Republic Day (a day of self-glorification for the state) and Independence Day (a day of reckoning for the nation) are no longer very different from each other except in Delhi, the capital. Masselos argues that the form of Independence Day has remained consistent because various governments that came into power all drew on a conventional repertoire of symbols, but he recognizes that ‘‘the meanings which the form intended to bear varied according to political circumstance’’ (46).

Staging Independence Day

23

The meanings of Independence Day symbols have changed according to changing political contexts, yet, as the case of Ladakh shows, it is not just the meanings that vary; the form itself is contested and altered. In Ladakh, as in other border areas, the official form and agenda that have been set for Independence Day must often accommodate competing timelines, in which the moment of assuming power from British India refuses to recede into the background. This moment lingers on in the present to challenge and refute the mythical chronology of nationalism, belying the notion that territory and nation are coterminus or natural. It calls into question not just the maturation of the postcolonial state but also the very legitimacy of the nation’s birth. The problem of transferring power also remains at the heart of contemporary politics in Ladakh, where devolution of federal power and autonomy for or from the State of Jammu and Kashmir is deliberated repeatedly. In official performances of national days, as Srirupa Roy (1999b) demonstrates in her analysis of the Republic Day spectacle in New Delhi, the state constructs an Indianness by parading its modern/welfare economy through representative floats, its territorial integrity through marching citizen-soldiers, and its progressive nature through the diverse costumes and customs of its folk. This symbolic display of unity legitimizes and flaunts the centrality of Delhi as the capital and fixes subjects to their distinct geographies on the periphery. By contrast, an analysis of Independence Day performances in Ladakh reveals how the very principles of territoriality, unity in diversity, and developmental progress are reshaped by citizens on the border as they improvise and rewrite scripts of marginalization to claim a representational center. In this manner, Independence Day becomes the frame and the act, both a stage where histories and counterhistories of identity formation on the Indian border are displayed and also the performance through which national and bordered subjectivity is produced in the first place. In the valley of Kashmir, Independence Day celebrations have been systematically boycotted and the Indian flag burned, bearing witness to the fragmented and contested nature of nationalism. The flag, as Henk Driessen (1992) notes, ‘‘is perhaps the most powerful symbol of the nation state, assuming sacred qualities, and focal in what has been called civil religion.’’ 3 In 1999, most of the officeholders of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council (lahdc) also boycotted the state’s Independence Day function and unfurled the national flag in an alternative ceremony. But the struggles underlying their boycott are not identical to Kashmir’s troubled relationship with the center. The sections that follow take us on a journey through the

24

Staging Independence Day

form and the meaning, the history and performance of colonialism and independence in Ladakh, as they are shaped by the particularities of ‘‘political circumstance’’ there. INDEPENDENCE DAY IN LEH

On the summer morning of August 15, 1999, the Ra-dbang-tus-chen-zhag (Independence Day) function started at 9 a.m. in the town of Leh. People streamed into the main bazaar. Antique art and souvenir shops, vegetable stalls, and video libraries all had their shutters down. Street walls were plastered with political posters and graffiti. ‘‘Eat Congress, Sleep bjp, Vote nc [National Conference],’’ read one fading sign. ‘‘Vote for Youth,’’ urged another. The crowd proceeded through narrow, winding alleys toward the Polo Ground. The Polo Ground, or Shagaran as it is locally known, is a stark and stunning location, offering a spectacular vista of the Himalayan range. Religious processions, political rallies, tourist festivals, and much of the town’s modern history have been played out in this sandy stretch that was leveled flat in the 1960s by the Public Works Department for the sport of polo. Polo

Billboard in New Delhi after the Kargil war. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

Staging Independence Day

25

Prayer flags at the Namgyal Tsemo. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

made its way into Ladakh from Baltistan under the patronage of aristocrats.4 Now the game is mainly kept alive by the army and frequent matches are held between civilian and military teams. Visible from the southern end of the Polo Ground is the Leh Palace, built by the ‘‘lion-king,’’ Sengge Namgyal, in 1620. This royal edifice was home to the rulers of the Namgyal dynasty until the last sovereign monarch, Tshepal Namgyal, was deposed to the village of Stok by the Dogra conquerors from Jammu. The palace must have gleamed white and teemed with courtiers once. Ippolito Desideri, an Italian Jesuit missionary who visited Ladakh in 1715, described it as ‘‘a large, fine building.’’ 5 In recent years, only tourists scramble to visit its crumbling remains. Bought by the Archaeological Survey of India in 1992, it still awaits the promised restoration. Above the palace, rising from an adjacent mountainside, stands the fort and temple of the ‘‘Peak of Victory,’’ the Namgyal Tsemo, built in the sixteenth century by King Tashi Namgyal to commemorate his victory over invading armies from Turkestan. From this temple, the guardian deity, Chamba, Buddha of the future, protects and blesses the world below. Prayer flags flutter across the summit, wind-horses gathering and scattering the yearnings of wishful devotees. The northern edge of the Polo Ground is lined by state administrative

26

Staging Independence Day

offices: the office of the development commissioner, the tehsildar’s office, district archives, and a conference hall for deliberating social and governmental matters. Facing this cluster of buildings is a canopied pavilion, decorated with a ‘‘Welcome! District Administration, Leh’’ banner, that was set up for this Independence Day with special chairs to seat vips and early birds. Ordinary onlookers, a few hundred in number, found seats on the concrete stands along the edges of the Polo Ground. A giant advertisement for the Life Insurance Corporation dominated the backdrop, promising security and prosperity to investors. A policeman hovered around with a box of tear gas. The crowd jostled forward under the scorching sun to watch the ceremony. As the band began playing, Central Reserve Police with rifles in hand, National Corps Cadets attired in khaki uniforms, and schoolchildren wearing sashes of orange, white, and green, colors of the Indian flag, marched past in regimented military style. Morup Namgyal, one of the two hosts for the occasion, directed the crowd to applaud these children, ‘‘barely weaned from their mother’s breasts, who now promised to grow into radiant moons shining over their parents, protecting their village and motherland.’’ 6 The function was inaugurated by the chief guest, Ajat Shatru Singh, Minister of State for Information and Technology, who had been flown in from Srinagar to cut the ribbon and unfurl the tricolored national flag. Paying his respects to the abbots seated in the stands, Kushok Khanpo Rinpoche and Kushok Togldan Rinpoche, the chief guest congratulated the people of Ladakh for the resilience they had displayed during the Kargil war. His speech was followed by a cultural program, consisting largely of popular patriotic songs in Ladakhi, Urdu, and Hindi. As the program started, the Urdu commentator, Zainul Abideen, announced, ‘‘See the children standing in a line. See the smiles and hopes on their faces. A knowledgeable man has said that the destinies of nations are shaped in the classrooms of a school. May these very children become guides, administrators, and guardians of the future.’’ 7 Establishing a connection between modern education and the production of citizens has been vital to the successful performance of national days in Ladakh. Forty years ago, on August 24, 1959, Sridhar Kaul (who was posted in Ladakh as assistant inspector of schools by the Jammu and Kashmir government from 1939 to 1942 and is considered responsible for inculcating a political and nationalist sense among Ladakhi Buddhists) had written a letter to Stanzin Angbo, a teacher in Zangskar, instructing him about the value of teaching nationalist songs to schoolchildren: ‘‘You can perform a great service for Ladakh.—Sometimes such social gatherings should be held where

Staging Independence Day

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Lining up for the Independence Day march at the Polo Ground, 1999. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

songs and plays are shown. Where songs are sung and speeches are given. The desire to serve their nation should be instilled in them.—They should be made to memorize national songs thoroughly and the meaning of these songs explained to them.’’ 8 At the time Sridhar Kaul drafted this letter, the Independence Day celebrations were held at the Girls’ School in Leh. The ceremony was on a smaller scale then, with merely a flag hoisting and a few performances by students over tea and biscuits; the performances consisted mostly of short sketches on freedom fighters such as Gandhi and Nehru. Only in the 1970s did the venue shift to the Polo Ground. The organization of the Polo Ground event is the responsibility of the State Information Department, the Jammu and Kashmir Cultural Academy of Ladakh, a State body, and All-India Radio, Leh, a central government institution. Three members from these government bureaus form a judging committee to present awards for Best Performance and Best in March Past. In 1999, the first prize in the performance category was won by the students of the Central Institute of Buddhist Studies. The students dramatized the clash between the Kargil infiltrators and the Indian army by showing how mili-

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Schoolboys watching the Independence Day ceremony. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

tants, dressed in long black shirts and black masks, dug trenches and attacked camouflaged Indian soldiers, who fought back valiantly until all the militants fell to the ground or retreated. As some actors playing soldiers breathed their last, the actors playing survivors anchored a victorious Indian flag to a makebelieve summit and the skit was brought to a climax by a popular patriotic melody: Oh people of my motherland Let tears fill your eyes. Those who were martyred Remember their sacrifice. When the Himalayas were wounded Our freedom jeopardized. They fought with their last breath They laid down their lives.9 A child sitting behind me, no more than three or four years old, sang all the words to the song. Some spectators cheered and clapped, others wiped away tears. There was a solemnity and melancholy to the cultural show. The theme of dying for the defense of the Himalayas was too close to reality. Many

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civilians had been displaced in the Kargil war. Twenty-five men in the Ladakh Scouts had lost their lives. Their sacrifice had earned some recognition; one Ladakhi, Sonam Angchug, was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra medal and three others were given Vir Chakras. These honors for gallantry were conferred nationally on Independence Day and the news conveyed to soldiers in a military ceremony hosted at the Zorawar Fort in Leh. As the program continued, each commentator provided a brief outline of the Independence movement, pointing out that there had been unity and peace in India even during Aryan and Moghul rule until Westerners arrived in the guise of traders and tricked and betrayed the Indians. Morup Namgyal related his version of the horrors of colonialism through proverbs, describing it as a time when ‘‘the foreign mouse evicted the home mouse’’ and servants became owners, maids sang idle songs, monks drank alcohol, astrologers turned into businessmen, and thieves appointed themselves judges. Both the hosts thanked familiar heroes who had brought the country to independence and expanded on the contributions and wisdom of those who had been martyred in the freedom struggle. Given the contemporary postwar milieu, Mr. Abideen’s commentary focused heavily on the life of Shahid Bhagat Singh, the revolutionary freedom fighter who had been sentenced to death by the British in 1931 for bombing the Central Assembly Hall. The commentary praised the way Bhagat Singh had glowed with the sentiment of sacrifice even as he reached for the noose, and the way he had urged other youths to step out of their homes and face the gallows for the love of their nation. Mr. Abideen also cited a Vedic parable in which Sukra, leader of the gods, tells his disciples that they must rise without fear and adore the land where their ancestors rest, that they must be ready for war if their country sends them or go to prison if it demands imprisonment from them. They must live if it asks them to stay alive; they must embrace death if it asks them for that sacrifice, because it is improper to reject and disobey the will of their parents, and the nation is even dearer than their parents; to refuse it would be a grave mistake. Pakistan had come into this innocent land, Mr. Abideen remarked, dancing a dance of brutality and intending to oppress Ladakhis. Stirring venom in a cup of friendship, snakes had come to destroy them from across the border, but as true sons of the soil, they could courageously work together to crush the heads of these poisonous snakes. ‘‘Mother India,’’ he pledged, on behalf of the participants, ‘‘we are the guardians of your honor. Mother India, we are the surveyors of your border. Oh Himalayas, we are the protectors of your splendor.’’ In addition to championing war, the commentary also paid homage to

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world peace. Mr. Abideen quoted an anecdote from Einstein’s life in this regard: when Einstein was asked to predict the type of weapons that people would use in World War III, he answered that he couldn’t comment on World War III but he could say that during World War IV, people would fight with stones. Both commentators praised the diverse composition of the performers and the variety of cultures and peoples in Ladakh and India. They made brief references to future prospects in the army, to the importance of education, and to the potential for economic development in the region. They emphasized the necessity of uniting despite differences so that Ladakhis, who had braved their lives to defend the nation’s borders, would also be able to enjoy its fruits. In some ways, it was Independence Day as usual: formulaic speeches, children waving flags, nationalist propaganda, teeming crowds. The occasion seemed to be a microcosmic play of Independence rituals in the center. Directives and small subsidies received from the government prescribed the manner in which these rituals were to be implemented in Leh as well as in the capitals of each subdistrict in Ladakh. Just as the venue of the Red Fort evoked a historical continuity from imperial grandeur to nationalist struggle at the function in India’s capital, the ceremony in Leh was also distinctively set amid natural as well as architectural landmarks, the palace harking back to the royal period and the administrative offices against the Himalayas emphasizing the prevalence of government even in the remotest of border areas. Three motifs defining modern India dominated the prime minister’s speech: territorial integrity and military might, unity in diversity, and development through technology, education, and market growth. These elements were also reflected in the speeches and performances of the Leh celebrations. Impassioned anthemlike songs such as ‘‘Vande Mataram’’ (‘‘Hail Motherland!’’) and ‘‘Kar chale hum Fidaa’’ (‘‘We sacrifice our lives’’) celebrated territorial sovereignty but also reinforced the duty of citizens to preserve the soil of India and protect its borders. The dual commentary in Urdu and Ladakhi and the inclusion of Muslim and Buddhist students in uniforms patterned on local styles showed Ladakh’s distinctive ethos and at the same time affirmed that it was disciplined into a unified national whole. Finally, the chief guest’s brief announcement of employment schemes, scholarships, and relief for war victims offered Ladakhis a vision of a bright future in the armed forces or other middle-class professions that could be obtained by the necessary training and education. It was a reminder that the welfare state would insure those model citizens willing to sacrifice themselves for it against economic and territorial downfalls.

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But this performance of official nationalism, while authorizing and dispersing a centralized ideology about the rights and duties of citizenship in the modern nation, was both riddled with internal ambiguities and challenged by the actions of numerous citizen groups.10 The moment of Independence was a time for rejoicing but also a time of uncertainty in the wake of communal tensions and under the exigencies of constructing a modern nation, as Masselos (1990) observes. The haziness of August 15, 1947, manifested itself in future celebrations. Official speeches spelled out the achievements of the past year but also assessed the difficulties in the present and the obstacles that would have to be overcome in the future. Implicit in these performances was the understanding that Independence Day marked the genesis of the nation, but that the state as a legal guardian of rights and privileges was always in a stage of becoming. Correspondingly, in 1999, Morup Namgyal noted in his commentary at the Polo Ground, ‘‘Ral-gul la ma shes nang thag-pa-gul la shes’’ (Even if we couldn’t see the fine threads, we could at least feel the ropes). COLONIALISM AND THE ‘‘CASHMERE’’ CONNECTION

Amid this display of confession, solidarity, and optimism, what could account for the lahdc’s boycott of the state’s Independence Day function? A major reason for this controversy can be located in the nomination of Ajat Shatru Singh as chief guest for the ceremony. Singh had presided over the Independence Day rituals in 1997, too, when he was minister of tourism. Initially, on joining the cabinet of Farooq Abdullah’s National Conference Party, he had served as minister of information, sports, and youth affairs. But regardless of his specific portfolio, he was often sent to be the chief guest of Independence Day performances in the town of Leh. Ajat Shatru was the younger son of Dr. Karan Singh and grandson of Maharaja Hari Singh, the last ruler of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. His selection as chief guest was not just a matter of state protocol; it had roots in the very saga of colonization and independence in Ladakh that can be traced to 1834, when Wazir Zorawar Singh Kahluria invaded it on behalf of the Dogra lord, Gulab Singh, and the Sikh maharaja, Ranjit Singh. Before Zorawar Singh conquered Ladakh, it had been a kingdom of fluctuating fortune and size, ruled by monarchs who traced their descent from the tenth-century Tibetan king, Nyima Gon. It was during the reign of King Sengge Namgyal in the seventeenth century that Leh grew in importance as a major entrepôt in the Central Asian trade (Rizvi 1990/1996). As the criterion

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of trade gained priority over the criterion of militarily strategic location, the capital was moved from Shey to Leh. But trade and territory were deeply interlinked, as Ladakh’s connection with that luxury consumer good, pashmina, reveals. Pashmina is known in the West as cashmere, named after Kashmir, where Westerners first encountered it.11 The pashm fiber, used to weave shawls that were in high demand, is not in fact a Kashmiri product but a Ladakhi and Tibetan one, the wool of goats that graze in the high pastures of Changthang. Ladakh’s subjugation to Kashmir began when Singge Namgyal’s son, Deldan Namgyal, appealed to the governor of Kashmir for aid, fearing the possibility of losing his kingdom to Tibet in the seventeenth century. Aid did arrive in the form of troops from the court of Aurungzeb, the Moghal emperor in Delhi, but it was not unconditional. Although the Tibetan army was rebuffed, the Ladakhis had to comply with a three-way treaty with the Moghuls and Tibetans in 1684. By this treaty, known as the Treaty of Tingmosgang, the Tibetans guaranteed that they would channel all the pashmina from western Tibet (said to be of superior quality) through Ladakh.12 The Tibetans also worked out trade concessions, stipulated that official missions (lopchak) would be sent from Leh to religious establishments in Lhasa, and fixed the boundaries between Tibet and Ladakh. Similarly, Ladakh’s agreement with the Moghul court was that Kashmiri traders would have exclusive rights to purchase pashmina from Ladakh and that the king would convert to Islam and become a vassal of the emperor. The Ladakhi king complied temporarily, but as the Moghul court itself disintegrated, Ladakh retained its independence in a weakened form. The export of pashmina did continue according to treaty terms until 1834, when Zorawar Singh launched a series of aggressive campaigns against Ladakh, motivated by the desire to control the shawl wool trade, to command Kashmir by subduing and monitoring its northeastern passes, and annex a country reported to be easy prey.13 Zorawar Singh’s invasion is remembered in Ladakhi history as an act of plunder and pillage in which treasuries and monasteries were looted and the male population decimated from resisting his army or from being conscripted into it to fight difficult battles (see Tsering Samphel 1997). Rulers from Leh, Kargil, and Baltistan opposed the Dogras, but Zorawar Singh squelched their defiance. He marched into Ladakh four different times. The first time, in 1834, his force of five thousand men descended on the unsuspecting Ladakhis from Kishtiwar. The first battle between the Dogra and Ladakhi armies was fought in the Suru valley in the Kargil area on August 16, 1834. After this defeat, the young prince, Chogdul, escaped with his mother, Zohra Khatoun, to the

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British protectorate of Bashahr, where they appealed to the British to provide them with assistance. The prince’s father, Tshepal Namgyal, dispatched several envoys to British agents all over the country to plead his case. Three letters were sent to T. T. Metcalfe, the British agent of the Northwest Province.14 The first letter was accompanied by a gift of a bag of musk, a cow tail, and a dog. The second letter listed the havoc that the Dogra invasion had wrought, and the third letter expressed the king’s anxiety for his life. Appealing for aid in the form of three or four hundred sepoys and vowing to serve as a devoted hill chief under the British, he wrote, ‘‘The British Government is the cherisher of the whole world, and as the moon throws its radiance over the world at night, so does the British Government.’’ But these eloquent praises did not earn the king the support he sought, and the Calcutta court rejected his plea. Having fought expensive wars with the Gorkhas in Nepal, the British were not interested in administering remote areas. Furthermore, they were bound by a treaty they had signed with the Sikhs in 1809, whereby the Sikhs agreed that Punjab would be a buffer zone against the Afghans and the British promised not to interfere in the territories above the river Sutlej. Ladakh lost its independence when Tibet signed the Treaty of Leh in 1842, ratifying old trade concessions, reaffirming its borders with Ladakh, and acknowledging Dogra suzerainty over the region.15 The last nail in the coffin was struck by the Anglo-Sikh war. The British defeated the Sikhs and sold the territories under Kashmir to the newly crowned maharaja, Gulab Singh, who was able to convince them of his usefulness as a diplomatic liaison. According to the Treaty of Amritsar, signed in 1846, the British were to get a war indemnity of Rs. 7.5 million and an annual payment of ‘‘one horse, twelve perfect shawl goats of approved breed (six male and six female) and three pair of Cachmere shawls.’’ By this treaty, the Dogra king could rule over ‘‘all the hilly or mountainous country, situated to the eastward of the river Indus and westward of the river Ravee.’’ 16 Ironically, this border, east of the Indus and west of the Ravee, included neither Gilgit nor Kashmir nor even Ladakh, which lies to the north of the Indus. British boundary commissions later specified that these regions were to be part of the maharaja’s domain. The Treaty of Amritsar that transferred Ladakh to the Dogra maharaja clearly stated that the maharaja must acknowledge British supremacy. When the British government formally assumed the rule of India in 1858, all princely states were to agree to the paramountcy of the British Crown. Although they did not deem Ladakh economically viable for direct rule, the British pushed

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for control over regional trade with a commercial treaty that the Dogra maharaja was made to sign in 1870.17 This accord facilitated British access to lucrative raw pashmina and allowed them to establish the post of a British joint commissioner to be stationed in Leh for three months for the purpose of monitoring trade. In addition to the British joint commissioner, the administrative machinery in Ladakh was headed by a wazir-wazarat, or development commissioner. Frederic Drew and William Johnson, two wazirs in the pay of the maharaja, were British. Clauses in the Amritsar Treaty gave the British access to the documentation of trade routes in Ladakh through surveys and maps. Land surveys in Ladakh reorganized place into territory and streamlined dwellings with intersecting and multiple affiliations into discrete, measurable units of space. As Martijn van Beek (1996, 100) astutely remarks, ‘‘In the eyes of the British surveyor and politician, space was just that: empty and homogenous, and hence needed to be marked.’’ Several political and economic changes occurred in Ladakh under British/ Dogra colonization. In an overview of Ladakh’s contemporary problems, John Bray (1991, 118) suggests that before the Dogra invasion, there was no feeling of broad identification and national unity among the general populace and that Ladakhis identified with their village, monastery, or valley and not the region as a whole. But even though identification with a sovereign territorial Ladakh was not always stable or encompassing, it would be erroneous to deny the existence of all forms of regional cohesion and unity given the highly integrated systems of monarchic and monastic control in even the remotest vicinity of Ladakh, particularly during the time of kings such as Tshewang Namgyal 1 and Sengge Namgyal. Nevertheless, under Dogra rule, a centralized modern bureaucracy assumed control of political and economic transactions. The marketplace of Leh was vastly expanded and systematized. A court, treasury, police station, charas (cannabis) warehouses, and checkpoints for taxation were erected within its parameters. The British even renamed it Victoria Bazaar in 1901, and archival records mention a case where two shopkeepers were fined for not shutting their stores on the birthday of Her Majesty, Queen Victoria.18 Under Dogra/British colonial rule, a new mercantile capitalism built on earlier feudal systems of trade around the luxury commodity pashmina. Much emphasis was placed on regulating trans-Himalayan trade and finding new ways to generate profits from it. In the 1870s, the pashmina trade collapsed due to shrinking markets in Europe, and Ladakh’s thriving economy was severely affected (see Rizvi

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1999a). Ladakh continued to be a significant locus in British imperial designs, not as a place for potential profit anymore but as a buffer state and frontier zone against Russian advances in a Great Game played by two imperial powers jockeying for political dominance over Central Asia.19 For this reason, the British advised the maharaja to subdivide what was called the Frontier District comprising Ladakh, Baltistan, and Gilgit. Gilgit was made into a distinct agency in 1900, monitored by a British political agent, and the wazarat of Ladakh was created to include Leh, Baltistan, and Kargil. Zangskar, which was once part of Kishtiwar in Jammu district, was amalgamated with Kargil.20 Kargil’s appeal lay in its equidistant position from three of the region’s central towns: Skardo, Srinagar, and Leh. Some Kargilis are of the opinion that Kargil derives its name from this centrality, from the words gar and skyil, which mean ‘‘the center from any direction.’’ 21 Initially, the wazir of Ladakh spent four months each in Skardo, Leh, and Kargil. But shifting the entire staff proved too exhausting and expensive, so Leh and Skardo became the summer and winter capitals of Ladakh, respectively (Rizvi 1990/1996). The administration of such vast tracts of land was costly for the maharaja, and the people had to bear the brunt of this expenditure. For the purpose of increasing revenue, the Dogras overhauled agriculture in such a way that the ownership rights and hereditary privileges of aristocratic families (sku-drag) were consolidated as these families were put in charge of revenue collection.22 During the times of kings, taxes had been measured according to dwelling, as most Ladakhis earned revenue through custom duties and trade.23 Land surveys now altered the system of taxation so that taxes were calculated on the basis of land holdings (Grist 1991, van Beek 1996). Taxes were enormous, and a system of indentured labor (begar) exposed villagers to maltreatment at the hands of despotic officials and obligated them to provide human services as porters, herders, and workers on royal and monastic estates.24 Consequently, subsistence cultivation and ideals of self-sufficiency received a considerable setback. Dogra rulers and administrators did institute some reforms to provide tax relief, built schools and roads, and laid out irrigation canals, especially during the reign of Maharaja Ranbir Singh, but their attitude toward their Ladakhi subjects was extractive, autocratic, and aloof, by and large.25 Missionaries, too, pursued development activities in Ladakh and built schools, weaving centers, and dispensaries. But these measures were taken on behalf of Ladakhis.26 Characterized as simple, economically backward, and incapable of self-rule, Ladakhis were not invited to participate in governing or developing their

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homeland. Only in the 1930s, after riots broke out in Kashmir, did Maharaja Hari Singh set up the Glancy Commission in 1931 to assess regional imbalances and the conditions of minorities in the State.27 In 1934, he laid down a Constitution and sanctioned a thirty-three-member Praja Sabha (State Assembly).28 The Constitution was revised in 1939 to accommodate more representatives and the king of Ladakh became a member of the Praja Sabha (van Beek 1996). As the external threat of Russia and China receded, internal borders became the new zones of threat for the British. A preoccupation with religion and religious classification was reflected in census categories established by the colonial government (van Beek 1996). Ladakhi subjectivity was also articulated in increasingly religious terms in the 1930s. The consolidation of landed elites in central Ladakh, the reformulation of monastic leadership, and the development of a mercantile class in the colonial period are some of the factors that generated a potentially rival power structure that had repercussions in later years. From a sovereign land that had once possessed a coveted commodity mistakenly called ‘‘cashmere,’’ Ladakh had become a dependency on the fringes of Kashmir. From a mountainous barrier that designated the Indo-Tibetan frontier in the British imagination, it had come to inhabit the border of British India. Ladakhis were now being redefined as State subjects by new Dogra policies, but the policies facilitated their transformation into border subjects who would become tokens of difference and diversity in modern India. INDEPENDENCE IN THE WAKE OF THE PARTITION

‘‘On 15th August, 1947,’’ writes the Ladakhi historian Abdul Ghani Sheikh (1998–99, 184–185), ‘‘when Hindustan was created and a new nation, Pakistan, born, a strange kind of uncertainty spread in Ladakh. When the entire nation was celebrating Independence Day, there was no celebration in Ladakh. People were very concerned about which nation we would join— Hindustan or Pakistan.’’ By October of that year, the uncertainty was laid to a temporary rest when Maharaja Hari Singh signed the Instrument of Accession, whereby Ladakh and the rest of Jammu and Kashmir came under the jurisdiction of India. After the Accession, a branch of the maharaja’s army rebelled in Skardo and assassinated Lala Amarnath, the wazir of Ladakh. Groups of pro-Pakistani Gilgit Scouts marched into Ladakh from October 1947 onward and occupied Kargil, Nubra, Sham, and Zangskar.29 Testimonies of that invasion reveal that

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chaos and confusion were more the rule than a coherent and clear separation of enemies from friends. Writings about the role of Ladakhis during this period of invasion have been few and far between; only recently did a special collection of eyewitness accounts and essays appear in the Ladakhi journal, Sheeraza Ladakh (vol. 20, nos. 3–4, 1998–99).30 Among the narratives in this volume are those that praise the success of recognized soldiers such as Colonel Tshewang Rinchen for his heroism in the defense of Nubra (see Chibber 1998). Other essayists recount stories of unsung warriors who warded off the invaders by their ibex-like resilience, eating mountain grasses and climbing endless boulders, so hungry that they would have killed a human if they hadn’t found food in time (Tundup Tashi Shechan 1998–99). From reading these accounts, one gathers that Ladakhis contributed by donating food, repairing wireless sets, and smashing rocks to clear roads. Hundreds of Ladakhis joined the National Home Guards. There are stories of loyalty and betrayal, of Gilgit Scouts oppressing and firing at Ladakhis, and Home Guards cutting off the heads of the Scouts (Tundup Tashi Shechan 1998–99). Some villagers fled uphill with their valuable possessions; others buried them underground, crouching in their houses in fear. According to a memoir by Abdul Ghani Sheikh (1998–99), silent pacts were made between Buddhists and Muslims, pledging to shield each other if either Pakistan or India was victorious. The mayhem lasted for months and it looked as if Ladakh would buckle under pressure from the Scouts until fresh squads arrived with Colonel Prithi Chand, who was impelled by a dream to protect the monastery of Hemis. The defense of Ladakh was facilitated by the first aircraft that landed in Ladakh in May 1948 and subsequent flights that brought troops, supplies, and ammunition. By July 1948, most of the Gilgit Scouts had been defeated and the Indian forces conquered various peaks and passes. It was not until 1948 that Independence was publicly celebrated in Leh. Prithi Chand reports: ‘‘On 13 March at 11 a.m., there was a huge crowd in front of the Headquarters to witness the flag hoisting ceremony. One platoon of State Forces and men of X Column stood in front of the flag. The Lamas prayed and while they were playing puja cymbals and drums, the soldiers presented arms and the Union Jack was respectfully lowered. Following this the National Flag was hoisted with soldiers presenting arms again. I then addressed the crowd and said, ‘we have been sent here to help you to defend Ladakh’ ’’ (quoted in Chibber 1998, 153). Lieutenant Colonel H. S. Parab, commanding officer of 2/8 Gorkha Rifles, was appointed governor and head of military services in Ladakh. He set up a new cabinet in Leh in August 1948 that comprised a Buddhist as minister of

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defense, a local Muslim as home minister, a Christian as education minister, the English wife of an English missionary as health minister, and the missionary, Norman Driver, as chief minister (Rizvi 1990/1996; Chibber 1998). It was a cabinet with no special work, a strange, multireligious mixture of colonial and Ladakhi members. Back in 1947, on learning that the Partition of India was imminent, the Ladakh Buddhist Association had suggested three alternative solutions for the future of Ladakh in a memorandum it presented to Maharaja Hari Singh through the Praja Sabha: (1) that the maharaja govern it directly and not tag it to the Kashmir valley; (2) that Ladakh be amalgamated with the Hindu majority area of Jammu to form a special province; or (3) that Ladakh be permitted to join East Punjab (Madhok 1987, 36). But either because the maharaja had had no answer or because events had proceeded with such rapidity, the memorandum did not receive a reply. When the Cease-fire Line was drawn in 1949, the Leh and Kargil regions of Ladakh were left under Indian rule, but Baltistan, the third subdistrict of Ladakh, came to be controlled by Pakistan. A partitioned Ladakh found itself bound to its nemesis, Kashmir, a bond that would govern its political life in the decades that followed. DEVELOPING THE BORDER

In 1949, the year that the United Nations declaration was signed, the first prime minister of India, Jawaharlal Nehru, visited Ladakh, accompanied by his daughter, Indira, and Karan Singh, son of Maharaja Hari Singh. Landing in a Dakota plane at the newly constructed airfield in Leh, Karan Singh (1989, 139), the first member of the royal Dogra family to visit Ladakh, noted, ‘‘The mountains near the runway looked so close that Indira Gandhi wanted to walk up to them.’’ After his second tour, made shortly after the first, Karan Singh wrote a letter to Nehru urging him to accommodate the spirit of the people and shield them from exploitation or discontent in view of the region’s strategic importance to India. Nehru wrote back in response, ‘‘The real difficulty with Ladakh is its terrible economic backwardness’’ (quoted in K. Singh 1989, 141). Following Nehru’s visit, three major conceptual frameworks shaped the manner in which Ladakh was perceived nationally. The first was that Ladakh’s geography was strategically important for the maintenance of the nation’s territorial integrity; the second that it was an economically backward area; the

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third that its culture was diverse but essentially Indian in spirit. These perceptions played an important role in the framing of future central and State policies for Ladakh. The historian Partha Chatterjee (1993) claims that Indian nationalism was not a mere fascimile of Western models and that nationalists affirmed their agency in the struggle against colonial rule by fragmenting the material and scientific from the spiritual. During postcolonial times, agency has similarly been asserted by elite leaders of ethnic and regional groups in India who relate to the nation by granting it temporary financial custody of modernity, economic progress, and development, and reserving for themselves expertise in their distinct classical and cultural heritage. Ladakhi leaders adopted this rhetoric, too, arguing that it was morally incumbent on the state to remove their economic backwardness and guarantee them freedom to maintain their distinct heritage, for which they would offer it loyalty and patriotism in return.31 A memorandum presented to Nehru at his Teen Murti residence in Delhi on May 4, 1949, by the Ladakh Buddhist Association stated: Tibet is the cultural daughter of India and we seek the bosom of that gracious mother (India) to receive more nutriment for growth to our full stature in every way. She has given us what we prize above all other things—our religion and culture and it is the experience of having been the recipients of such precious gifts which encourages us to ask for more. The Ashoka Wheel on her flag, symbol of goodwill for all humanity and her concern for her cultural children, calls us irresistibly. Will the great mother refuse to take to her arms one of her weakest and most forlorn and depressed children—a child whom filial love impels to respond to the call? . . . It is true that the whole of this area is undeveloped and most of it is at present barren. But it must also be remembered that its economic potentialities are tremendous and in the hands of a great country like India it is bound to be transformed into a smiling garden and a source of immense wealth and power.32 But even with the implementation of relief measures like income tax exemption and abolition during Sheikh Mohammed Abdullah’s tenure as prime minister of Jammu and Kashmir, and despite the creation of the post of deputy minister of Ladakh affairs in 1953 that was filled by Kushok Bakula, abbot of Ladakh’s Spituk monastery, the ‘‘smiling garden’’ that Ladakhi leaders had hoped for did not materialize in the post-British years.33 Central and State in-

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vestment in the economic development of Ladakh mostly followed wars or threats of civil insurgency. The Sino-Indian war of 1961–62 resulted in the loss of more territory in the Aksai Chin area of Changthang that India had claimed as part of its territory.34 Grounds on which pastoral nomads had camped in search of green pastures and salt and paths through which monks had set forth to glean knowledge from the great monasteries in Tibet became bases of contention between India and China, littered with military camps and outposts. After this war, large numbers of troops were stationed in Ladakh and concerted improvements were made in transport and communication links. The presence of the army gave a boost to vegetable production and employment. Ladakhi soldiers had served in the Home Guards and Jammu and Kashmir Militia, and now they were incorporated into a paramilitary outfit called Ladakh Scouts. By this time, Ladakh was politically and administratively integrated into the State of Jammu and Kashmir, with its participation in State Assembly elections and with the preparation of a five-year plan for systematically implementing development schemes within the region (Bertelsen 1996). After the Indo-Pakistani war of 1965, a development committee was constituted to intensify work on electrical power, education, and irrigation and to rectify regional imbalances within the State (Kaul and Kaul 1992). The State government set up a commission of inquiry in 1967 known as the Gajendragadkar Commission, headed by Justice P. B. Gajendragadkar, to investigate allegations of regional disparities, ascertain reasons for discontent, and assess the efficacy of admission, recruitment, and development policies (Kaul and Kaul 1992). The commission found that funds allocated for development in Ladakh had been disproportionate, not due to deliberate machinations on the part of the government but because of the State government’s failure to comprehend the true nature of Ladakh’s ‘‘backwardness.’’ Consequently, Ladakhis were formally classified as ‘‘backward classes’’ and were accorded a fixed percentage (2 percent) in government posts (Bertelsen 1996). The commission recommended the inclusion of Ladakh in the name of the State, but this suggestion went unheeded. The commission also called for the establishment of a degree college in Ladakh and the provision of supplementary food grains, transport, and electricity facilities. In 1971, India and Pakistan went to war again, this time to decide the fate of eastern Pakistan, which would later become Bangladesh, but even though the bone of contention was at a sizable geographic distance, Ladakh was not spared from battle. With these wars, Ladakh’s significance as a border area

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increased and subsidized foods flooded in, making local agriculture less necessary and generating a culture of dependency. Extensive economic changes were also ushered in by tourism. Tourists were permitted to enter Ladakh in 1974, the year in which the Kashmir Accord marked the return to power of Sheikh Abdullah and his political party, the National Conference.35 The completion of the Leh-Srinagar highway in 1976 brought travelers looking for adventure and spiritual peace. Border skirmishes did not cease, however, and in 1984, in a planned mission called Operation Meghdoot, Indian troops set up posts at the Siachen glacier on the northwestern border of Ladakh, an area now described as the ‘‘highest battlefield in the world.’’ In the 1980s, the principal demand of Ladakhis from Leh was Scheduled Tribe status. After a series of negotiations, the president of India passed the Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir) Scheduled Tribes Order in October 1989, whereby eight tribes from Ladakh were declared Scheduled Tribes.36 The categorization of cultures as Scheduled Tribes had been envisioned in Nehru’s ‘‘Tribal Panchsheel’’ and sanctioned by the Constitution of India. By conferring tribal status, the Indian state simultaneously rendered border subjects ‘‘backward’’ and justified its territorial hold on them. The success of border regions like Ladakh in procuring Scheduled Tribe status came at a time when indigenous movements were most threatening to national security. For Ladakhis, tribalization was a radical step in constructing their political and economic identity. Scheduled Tribe status carried the potential of placing Ladakh under greater political control by the central government. At the same time, this designation allowed for the establishment of Tribal Advisory Councils to foster self-governance and allocated a substantial economic benefit package for the area through a special tribal plan (van Beek 1997). As developmental changes were restructuring Ladakh’s society and economy, Kashmir was retreating further away from the national mainstream. Caught in this crossfire, Leh Buddhists made several attempts to loosen their ties with the State of Jammu and Kashmir. A passage from the Ladakh Buddhist Association’s manifesto, A Brief Information Booklet (Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status 1989), underscores their disaffection: ‘‘In 1947, when the whole of India rejoiced over its independence, naïve Ladakhis believed that it was a new era for them too, a dream of being equal respectable partners in the shaping of its destiny and that of the State of Jammu and Kashmir.’’ Ladakhi leaders lamented that they had hoped to become children of a benign Mother India but had received only ‘‘step-motherly’’ treatment from an unfit custodian, the State of Jammu and Kashmir.

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THE POLITICAL STRUGGLE FOR AUTONOMY

On August 15, 1989, a complete strike was observed in the valley of Kashmir. There were no celebrations, no speeches, and no mass rallies that day. The occasion would come to be labeled a ‘‘Black Day’’ by Kashmiri separatists, a public declaration of their demand to secede from the Indian nation (Daily Star 2000). Just twenty-four hours prior to this event, these separatists had enthusiastically celebrated the anniversary of Pakistani Independence, waving Pakistani flags and shouting ‘‘Pakistan Zindabad’’ (Long Live Pakistan!), highlighting their dissatisfaction with the state of affairs that prevailed in the region. Independence Day 1989 marked a movement that would leave indelible ‘‘scars on the face of Bharat Mata’’ (Mother India), as Muhammad Farooq Rehmani, chair of the Jammu and Kashmir People’s League, termed it.37 While Kashmir was staggering under the weight of this revolution, another drama was unfolding on the Ladakhi political stage. A series of protests was launched by the leaders of the Ladakh Buddhist Association that is locally called the Nang-pa’i-tshog-grus (literally, ‘‘the association of insiders’’). Their objective, however, was not to break away from the Indian Union; their demand was that the Indian government free them from the control of the State of Jammu and Kashmir and declare the district a Union Territory (see van Beek and Bertelsen 1997). They had raised similar demands in 1968 for regional autonomy and then in 1972 for central administration. The rationalization for these protests was that Ladakh’s incorporation into the State of Jammu and Kashmir had resulted in a ‘‘future dark,’’ with its ‘‘race and culture threatened in the hands of the Kashmir government’’ (Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status 1989). ‘‘Our grievances,’’ stated Rigzin Jora, general secretary of the lba and the District Committee of the Congress (I), ‘‘could be summed in one line: all this while, we have been denied our share in the government—be it political, be it administrative, be it educational, be it any thing you take.’’ 38 The lba alleged that state-sanctioned conversions to Islam, corruption, embezzlement, unfair allocation of funds to the region, and disproportionate employment patterns in government offices had threatened the survival of the Buddhist community and of Ladakh’s distinct cultural heritage. Demonstrations held in the bazaar and in the Polo Ground rocked the region with their ‘‘Quit Ladakh’’ and ‘‘Free Ladakh from Kashmir’’ clamor. Kashmiri-run businesses such as souvenir shops and travel agencies, and the Sabzi Mandi, where Kashmiri vegetables and meats are sold, were all targeted for boycott. ‘‘We have nothing in common with the Kashmiris. Their ways

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of living, of waking, sleeping, eating, praying, dressing, speaking, are totally different from ours,’’ insisted Mr. Jora. Although the lba first directed the Agitation against the Kashmiri government, it soon projected the hostility onto Sunni Muslim Argons within Ladakh, criticizing them for being opportunistic agents of the State and recipients of special economic favors because of their racial and religious affinity with Kashmiris. The lba levied a ‘‘Social Boycott’’ (me len chu len chad pyes) from 1989 to 1992, preventing Buddhists from interdining, intermarrying, and interacting with Muslims. It argued that Buddhism’s ‘‘leniency, liberalism, and patience’’ had prevented its youth from adopting Kashmir’s ‘‘Pro-Pak culture of the gun,’’ to which ‘‘the indoctrinated’’ Sunni youth were susceptible (Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status 1989). Citing a shared ethnic origin with Shi’a Muslims and emphasizing that it was the Sunni community that had to be brought down to size, it denied that the Boycott was ‘‘communal.’’ Yet the lba’s rhetoric of impending Islamic peril soon caused friction, and when the Shi’a leadership displayed its reluctance to join in the Union Territory demand, the Boycott eventually extended to them, too. Cases of arson and rioting were common during the Agitation. Sentiments of betrayal and fear rent the air. ‘‘Friends with whom I used to eat, go to movies, with whom I spent my life, they stoned me,’’ lamented Rigzin Spalbar, deputy secretary of the lba.39 Scuffles broke out, bombs were hurled at automobiles and cargo trucks on the Leh-Srinagar highway, and government-owned properties were damaged (see also van Beek 1996). The Kashmir Armed Police fired bullets to subdue unarmed demonstrators on August 7 and 27, but its action resulted in the death of four civilians, heightening the lba’s distrust of the State’s authority. Recalling the events of that dark August, the lba bitterly remarked in its manifesto, ‘‘At a time when anti-national activities were gaining momentum in the valley, resulting in total boycott of Independence Day celebrations, the Farooq Abdullah government, instead of nipping the secessionist movement in the bud, chose to let out his anger on the peaceful demonstration in Leh resulting in the loss of lives’’ (Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status 1989). Meanwhile, the central government declared an emergency in the State of Jammu and Kashmir in 1990, dissolved the elected government, and brought the region directly under the governor’s rule. With the breakdown of party politics and the suspension of elections, the influence of the lba deepened. While upholding the Social Boycott for three years (the impact of which is discussed in the next chapter), the lba did not relent on its agitation for Union

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Territory status. But the frequent disturbances and rallies affected tourism, Ladakh’s fastest growing industry, which was already hurt by the turbulence in Kashmir. Popular sentiment was one of frustration and even cynicism. Many believed that Union Territory status was a pipe dream, one that would never be actualized by the central government, which could not risk stirring additional trouble in the valley or sending a message that the Kashmir valley was free to secede with Ladakh separated from it and Jammu raising a similar demand. As an interim, not ultimate, solution, the lba compromised and accepted an autonomous Hill Council, modeled on the Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council.40 Such regional autonomous councils, sanctioned by the Indian Constitution for granting special status to ‘‘tribal areas,’’ had already been constituted in Assam, Mizoram, and Jharkand. Even as some members of the Sunni Argon community were dissatisfied with their exclusion from the list of Scheduled Tribes, Akbar Ladakhi, the new leader of the Ladakh Muslim Association, made it clear that he would support the Hill Council provided it was drafted in a secular manner and worked within the framework of the state’s constitution (Bertelsen 1996). In a meeting held in November 1992 in New Delhi, the lba laid out its plan for the Hill Council, but the central government would negotiate only on the condition that the Social Boycott was lifted. The lba called off the boycott and proceeded with further arbitration through a coordination committee. The Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils Act of 1995 was enacted by the president of India, Shanker Dayal Sharma, on May 9, 1995. According to the Act, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council in Leh would be composed of twenty-six elected and four nominated members, who were to hold office for five-year terms. A chairman selected from among the elected members was to serve as chief executive councilor (cec), and it would be the cec’s responsibility to nominate a four-member Executive Council. The District Development Committee was to answer to the Council rather than the State government. The legislative and executive powers and functions allocated to the lahdc were considerable. They included the formulation of the budget, tribal, five-year, and annual plans for the district, allotment of land, promotion of language and culture of the region, education, desert development, measures for employment generation and alleviation of poverty, and the power to levy specified taxes and fees. Elections for the first Council were virtually uncontested.41 Members who had been active in the Agitation resigned en masse from the lba and joined the Congress Party. Thupstan Tshewang, the dynamic and articulate architect

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of this new Ladakh, gave up his position as lba president to become cec. The Council was sworn in on September 6, 1995, by General K. V. Krishna Rao, governor of the State. The lahdc was instituted at a time when Ladakhis were disillusioned with the promise of development. The central government was spending the highest amount per capita on a Ladakhi schoolchild, but its effects were not productive. It was felt that the state unleashed violence on its citizens in its everyday rituals of reproduction, its assimilative surveillance, its failure to allow disparate borders to maintain themselves as culturally plural domains. At this time, too, discourses on sustainable and alternative environmental development were gaining a strong foothold in Ladakh, together with substantial funds from transnational sources. The lahdc was viewed as a pragmatic step toward bringing development to the grassroots level. The first advantage it offered was ensuring that job vacancies filled up instantly, as interviews could be conducted locally. Second, it allowed the carryover of funds from the District Plan, which had otherwise been underutilized because by the time the Plan reached Ladakh, the short working season was almost done. With the government in their own hands, councilors were determined to stop villagers from relying on subsidies and encouraged them to start getting involved in their own development. One of the most positive opportunities that the Council offered was accountability and transparency because it deflected work to the local level. Given their new privileges, Buddhist leaders felt that they were at last being rewarded for being ‘‘true patriots,’’ even if they had been made to compromise on their demand for Union Territory status.42 At last they were in charge of decisions about their development even though the actual work would begin now. At last they controlled their own destiny even if the road ahead was unpredictable. In such a triumphant yet cautious mood, the chairman of the Council, Thupstan Tshewang, unfurled the national flag on the Independence Day ceremony in 1996. A PARALLEL INDEPENDENCE DAY

What happened in this short span of time between August 1996 and August 1999 that resulted in the boycott of the Independence celebrations of 1999 by the lahdc? The initial setback to the lahdc came with the resumption of parliamentary and State Legislative Assembly elections in Jammu and Kashmir in 1996. The National Conference Party (nc), led by Dr. Farooq Abdullah,

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won a sweeping victory.43 But with the State government returning to power, the old antagonisms between the nc and the Congress-run Council surfaced. Supporters of Dr. Abdullah praised him for his secularism while opponents railed against his mercurial disposition and jingoistic speeches. The nc government faced increasing indictments of election malpractices and corruption. Ambiguous clauses in the Council Act of 1995 did not leave the lahdc free from State supervision. Budgets and expenditures sanctioned by the central government had to pass the approval of the State government. Councilors alleged that they found it impossible to work when the State government deliberately threw obstacles at every step. They argued that five years had elapsed since the formation of the Council but the State Assembly had not regulated financial rules or business conduct rules. In the absence of these rules, the lahdc expressed concern that its decisions could be legally challenged and its freedom to spend the money allocated to it stymied. The release of the controversial State Autonomy Report in April 1999, recommending a return to ‘‘pre-1953 status’’ and a greater devolution of all powers from the central Indian government to the State of Jammu and Kashmir except for finance, defense, and foreign affairs, caused further distress in the ranks of the lahdc and the lba.44 Councilors argued that granting ‘‘pre1953 status’’ and augmenting Srinagar’s control would jeopardize Ladakh’s development because even under the existing conditions the State government discriminated against Ladakh in several ways. In the first place, the political administrative structure gave predominance to the valley at the cost of Jammu and Ladakh. ‘‘If we are a democracy, why should this happen?’’ demanded Rigzin Jora, now an executive councilor.45 Summarizing the views of the lahdc and the lba, he contended that the government distributed funds disproportionately. The territorial extent of a State was a major criterion used by the Planning Commission for allocating funds; therefore, if the State of Jammu and Kashmir benefited from Ladakh’s size (which, between Leh’s 45,000 square kilometers and Kargil’s 13,000 square kilometers, accounted for 69.9 percent of the State’s total land area), then distributing funds only on the basis of population put Ladakh at a disadvantage because its population density was extremely low. He insisted that unlike in other districts, infrastructural costs were very high in Ladakh because raw materials had to be imported from outside, but these differences were not kept in mind when making allocations. Mr. Jora stated that Leh and Kargil could receive only funds reserved for district sectors and did not benefit from the State sector at

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all because the government had not invested in any major projects, such as the construction of roads and dams in the region. Furthermore, the population of Ladakh was dispersed over a vast area, a feature not considered by the state. ‘‘When you are talking about development, what is it?’’ he questioned. ‘‘Development means you are connecting villages, you are coming up with a dispensary here or a school there—this is development.’’ 46 The lba accused the State government of not reserving enough seats in government medical and engineering colleges for Buddhists. Under these conditions, the lba and lahdc did not envisage approving the State Autonomy Report or even the regional autonomy option that promised greater freedom to different regions within Jammu and Kashmir because regional autonomy was contingent on their acceptance of State autonomy. In 1997, the lahdc boycotted the Independence Day celebration sponsored by the state, arguing that the State government should have given the cec the honor of hoisting the tricolor instead of wasting fuel to fly in dignitaries from Srinagar. A truce was declared in 1998 after the conciliatory efforts of Abdul Rahim Rather, senior strategist for the National Conference. That year, the Republic Day and Independence Day functions were sponsored jointly by the Council and the State government. But matters deteriorated once again in 1999. Supported by the lahdc, the lba boycotted the January 26 Republic Day celebrations as a ‘‘mark of protest against the apathy of the State government towards the demands of Ladakhi people in general and Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council in particular.’’ 47 On this Republic Day, the task of saluting the parade and unfurling the flag had been given to Ajat Shatru Singh instead of the cec. To add insult to injury, Singh had arrived with an entourage that included nri (nonresident Indian) guests of Farooq Abdullah (see Hashmi 1999b). The staff of the district development commissioner’s (dc) office in Leh had been taken by surprise. Delays and the nonavailability of a dish called mog-mog, a Tibetan and Ladakhi dumpling marketed as authentic cuisine, had annoyed the chief guest. It was also significant that the objection raised was that the government had lost face in front of the nris, a group that India was increasingly targeting as a potential source for economic investment. Based on complaints resulting from this incident, Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah ordered the transfer of the dc, Basharat Dhar. One executive councilor told me that in his eyes the real reason for Mr. Dhar’s removal was that he had been functioning successfully and cooperatively, and if he had been allowed to do so for another year, the Council would have received a lot of credit, strengthening the election prospects of

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the Congress Party. Councilors were also disgruntled that the cec had not yet been appointed cabinet ministers and other councilors had not been designated ex-officio members in the State government, as had been specified in the Council Act of 1995. Protesting against the subjection of Ladakh to party politics rather than the real interests of the people, the cec threatened to renew the agitation for Union Territory status (Hashmi 1999a). He called for a strike on January 30 to demonstrate against the dc’s transfer and the victimization of local people. Criticizing the State government’s actions, a newspaper headline announced that Ladakh was ‘‘sitting on a time bomb’’ (Om 1999). An editorial in the Hindustan Times (1999) questioned the logic of the chief minister’s actions, writing that ‘‘an administration that was often called to deal with subversive elements showing scant respect for the national flag in some other parts of the State, should have welcomed the people’s initiative to participate on this occasion.’’ By August 15, 1999, the lahdc’s disillusionment was so strong that most of its members once again boycotted the state’s Independence Day ceremony and held a parallel one in the Council headquarters. But unlike the Republic Day boycott earlier that year, the Independence Day boycott met with a lukewarm response.48 The Republic Day protest had been ratified by members of various religious associations who put aside their differences and condemned the marginalization of Ladakh by the Srinagar government. They had pitched a tent on the road leading to the dc’s office and observed a strike for thirty-three days. Those who joined included members of the Ladakh Buddhist Association, Ladakh Muslim Association, and Ladakh Christian Association. Now, despite the lahdc’s claim that their flag hoisting was well attended compared to the state-sponsored Independence Day ceremony, there was a substantial attendance registered at the latter. A major reason for the indifference to this call to boycott was that parliamentary elections were around the corner, awakening old disagreements in Ladakhi politics, particularly with the functioning of the Congress and its representatives in the lahdc. Though there were several voters who were sympathetic to the lahdc’s call, opponents regarded the Independence Day no-show and the frequent rallies for Union Territory as a farce, a bargaining chip dangled by ambitious councilors anxious to gain visibility in the national elections. Opposition was also expressed by members of the Muslim community, who were sore about being underrepresented in the lahdc and did not care to support Thupstan Tshewang’s candidacy for member of Parliament given his active role in the Social Boycott. Female politicians, too, were critical

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of the heavy-handed tactics and lack of diplomacy displayed by the executive councilors.49 But the main challenge to the Congress-run lahdc came from religious leaders within the Buddhist community itself. Dr. Farooq Abdullah had nominated Kushok Togldan Rinpoche as Leh’s member of the State Legislative Council and suggested Kushok Khanpo Rinpoche of Thiksey for the Rajya Sabha seat at the Center. This enraged the councilors, who saw it as a ploy to place ‘‘uneducated’’ religious leaders as puppet figureheads. The Kushoks, in turn, threw in their lot with the nc because they felt slighted after the Boycott. Their support had been vigorously enlisted by the lba during the Boycott, but when the lahdc was granted, the leaders had ignored them on the grounds that religion and politics should be placed on separate platforms. Congress politicians suspected the two Kushoks of colluding with the Kashmiri government’s bid for regional autonomy vis-à-vis the Indian state and led rallies against them with slogans in Ladakhi that translate as ‘‘Autonomy supporters deserve to be slaughtered’’ and ‘‘Togldan Rinpoche, Enemy of the Faith.’’ 50 This campaign against spiritual leaders did not win support from rural areas, where the Kushoks had a substantial following and where people were already aggrieved that the seats from their subdistricts were given to Leh-based candidates, even though the Council had been commissioned to redress the ‘‘backward’’ and ‘‘remote’’ conditions of all of Ladakh. Moreover, the transition of power from the dc’s office to the Council meant that people were scrambling between two executive bodies to get signatures of approval even for small projects. Said one unsympathetic voter, ‘‘The Hill Council is like a dog. If you train it well, it will serve you. If you abuse it, how can you expect it to be loyal?’’ As Martijn van Beek (1999, 452) observes, in a critical assessment of the lahdc, the contingency of autonomous councils on territoriality and their subjection to wider political interests in the nationalist/development state prevent them from functioning as grassroots safeguards of good governance and diverse community interests. Members of the lahdc hoisted the flag of India in a parallel ceremony for Independence Day held at the Council’s headquarters in 1999. But most officials did not stay away from the Polo Ground this time, partly because government bureaucrats had been advised that their absence would result in punitive action against them. In addition, the lba’s instructions that shops in the bazaar were to be closed had shopkeepers grumbling about sacrificing a precious day of the short tourist season. Having nothing better to do, they wandered onto the Polo Ground to watch the state’s festivities.

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INDEPENDENCE DAY AND ‘‘THE SPIRIT OF UNITY’’

In his Independence Day address of 1999, the prime minister repeatedly saluted the spirit of unity that resulted from the Kargil war, but in Ladakh itself, there was much fragmentation and disunity at the time. Ladakh’s location within the State of Jammu and Kashmir and the debates around regional and State autonomy splintered the people of Leh and Kargil, the two precincts of Ladakh. Kargil had been created as a separate district from Leh in 1979 as part of a series of administrative measures taken by the State government a year after Sheikh Abdullah resumed leadership to zone the State into smaller districts (Lamb 1991). Ladakh had been bifurcated following colonial tehsil (subdistrict) lines, but in recent years, the lba and other critics of this subdivision cited it as an instance of communalism that claimed to fragment the area according to geographic practicalities but in fact separated the predominantly Buddhist Leh from the largely Muslim Kargil.51 Defenders of this division, however, emphasized that it was purely for administrative convenience and had been endorsed at the time even by highly respected Buddhists such as Sonam Norbu, minister of Ladakh affairs in the nc cabinet. By 1999, lines of friction had come to characterize the relationship between Leh and Kargil. The lba was bitter that Kargilis had not raised their voice to support the cry for Scheduled Tribe status for Ladakh. When Kargil district was granted Scheduled Tribe status by the central government together with Leh, one eminent spokesperson in Leh called the Kargilis undeserving beneficiaries of affirmative action because they had not done anything to earn it. Was their acceptance of this charity, he mocked, not akin to accepting food from Buddhist hands, alluding to the taboo practiced by Shi’a Muslims in Ladakh that forbids them from accepting foods and beverages prepared by non-Muslims. The implications and resentment around this food taboo recurred in conversations I had with lba leaders; they justified the 1989 Boycott against socializing with Muslims as a reciprocal ban on the policy of noninteraction that Shi’a Muslims had embraced for decades through their dietary restrictions. Another source of controversy between the lba and Muslim Kargilis was the issue of land ownership rights within the town of Kargil. The Ladakh Buddhist Association accused the latter of thwarting its rights to build a religious shrine in the marketplace for the convenience of Buddhist civilians stationed in Kargil for work. Even though a small plot had been allotted to the lba to build a religious monument in the Monza area of Kargil by a government order issued in 1961, the order had been revised in 1969 with the stipulation

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that the temple built the preceding year could serve only as an inn for officials and travelers. The objections that had been used by Kargili politicians were that historically, monasteries were located in mountainous areas and not in settled habitats and that a religious space so close to the mosque would only add to conflict. Soon after the inn had been constructed, it was demolished because Muslim leaders insisted that they had found evidence of an altar inside. In 1995, the Buddhists of Kargil district launched a protest against a situation that left them with no place to worship, celebrate festivals or sacred holidays, or cremate the bodies of those who died in the vicinity of Kargil town.52 They complained that favoritism and nepotism were rampant in Kargil and that Muslims had an unofficial agreement among themselves to not sell any residential or commercial land to Buddhists. In response to their protests, they had been promised land in the neighboring Khumbathang neighborhood, but nothing definite had come of it.53 The antagonism between Leh and Kargil was apparent in 1999, when a memorandum scribbled by the Youth Wing of the lba accused Kargili refugees pouring into Leh during the war of 1999 of being Pakistani agents. Although this can be read as a rash outburst on the part of youth who have been raised in an atmosphere of mutual distrust, and although it was promptly retracted at the behest of the senior members of the lba and many refugees did indeed find shelter in Leh, Kargili leaders cited it as an indication of the contempt that people from Leh perpetuated against them. They held Leh’s dominance in political and economic fields responsible for the neglect of Kargil, whereas popular opinion in Leh was that endemic corruption and conservative beliefs kept Kargil backward. Over the years, the lba had forwarded itself as a body of loyalists who had risen heroically to protect the nation’s frontiers. But Kargilis also defended their patriotism. Most Kargili Muslims that I met talked about the practical limitations of integration with Pakistan. Contended Kacho Habibullah, a prominent Muslim politician whom I interviewed in Kargil in 1991, ‘‘I say we are better off in India. Here we have freedom of speech at the least. But if I express my dissatisfaction with the state and ask for better amenities, does that mean I am unpatriotic—just because my name is Habibullah?’’ ‘‘Do you know,’’ a Kargili youth leader told me, speaking about the war of 1999, ‘‘that it was shepherds from Batalik that first detected the Pakistani infiltrators, but the army beat them up and accused them of lying. They suspected us even during the Kargil war.’’ Sheikh Azgar Karbalai, vice president of the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust, reported to me in 2000 that an army officer had

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confessed to him with tears in his eyes, ‘‘When we go to Manipur or Kashmir, they call us Indian and themselves Manipuri or Kashmiri. But in Kargil I feel how much they identify as Indians.’’ The Kargil war that had so mesmerized the nation slipped into oblivion with the withdrawal of Pakistani troops in July 1999. Little media attention was paid to the fact that in September of that year, whereas a majority of Kashmiris boycotted the parliamentary elections, Kargil recorded the highest percentage of voter attendance in the nation, 80 percent. The election was won by the nc representative from Kargil, Ghulam Hassan Khan, narrowly defeating his opponent, Thupstan Tshewang, chairman of the lahdc. Fueled with the fire of obtaining victory for their own representative after the trauma of the war, rival factions in Kargil put aside their differences and concentrated their energy on campaigning for Hassan Khan. Hassan Khan was considered progressive and secular and his supporters included Buddhists from Leh. In his victory speech he asserted, ‘‘We are as Indian as a Buddhist, a Hindu, a Sikh, not less. We are not traitors to our motherland but some factions have called us this so that we may be oppressed, so that we may become demoralized, so that we cannot hold our heads high.’’ 54 In another speech, he proclaimed, ‘‘There is no Indian like us. I am telling you the truth, no loyal citizen quite like us. In 1947, it was the people of Dras who rescued the Indian forces with their snow shoes.’’ 55 The episode that he referred to occurred during the Partition period, when Sonam Norbu, an engineer, and Colonel Prithi Chand were attempting to cross Zojila with reinforcements for the Indian defense. It was so icy and cold that they were stuck. The people of Dras, a Muslim area now in Kargil district, made mu-srog (snowshoes), with which the contingent of soldiers was able to cross the pass. Sonam Norbu reached Leh to design the first runway, which enabled military planes to land there. Eyewitness accounts mention this event as the turning point in the Indo-Pakistani battle for controlling Ladakhi territory (Sonam Phuntsog 1998–99). Expanding on this incident, Hassan Khan insisted that ten years of militancy in the valley had proven that Kargilis were peaceloving and that not a single person from Kargil could be considered a militant, for not even a small weapon had crossed its borders, and not even a bomb the size of a firecracker had been blasted by its residents against India. As a reward for their sufferings and sacrifice during the Kargil war, he was of the opinion that other than immediate relief aid, the state should invest in plans that had long-term potential for reviving and developing Kargil’s economy, such as horticultural production and marketing, recruiting Kargilis in the armed forces, and, above all,

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ensuring better educational facilities. Hassan Khan openly advocated a Hill Council for Kargil to prevent corruption and strengthen grassroots initiatives, but he was probably a lone spokesperson for this cause at the time.56 Kargil had refrained from creating a Hill Council, even though the Council Act of 1995 made a provision for two such councils. This added to the lba’s list of grievances against Kargil; it accused Kargili politicians of siding with Kashmir and acting in an obstructionist manner whenever there was a protest that involved speaking up against the Srinagar government. ‘‘When they go to Srinagar, they are not treated any better. They are also called Botas, just like us,’’ a leader of the lba told me.57 Said Rigzin Jora in one of our conversations, ‘‘We would get tremendous strength if the Kargilis joined us. We have everything in common—look at our history, ethnicity, language, and folklore.’’ But the Boycott chapter in the history of Muslim and Buddhist relations had left Kargilis feeling sandwiched between the devil and the deep blue sea. For them, their attachment to Kashmir through the Leh-Srinagar highway was as important as their links with Leh for communicating with the world outside. At a time when religious majoritarianism seemed to be winning the political game, a vocal faction within Kargil continued to support Kargil’s incorporation within Kashmir and disfavored steps toward Union Territory status, propelled more by the vision of reuniting Baltistan with Kargil to bring the region to a Shi’a majority than the attraction of aligning with the Kashmiri separatist movement per se. Kargilis were doubly criticized: by Buddhists for not supporting the movements for Scheduled Tribe status, a Hill Council, or Union Territory status, and by Kashmiris for refusing to join in the revolutionary movement or speak out against human rights violations by the army. One bureaucrat complained about the lack of bargaining power of Kargilis, saying, ‘‘We can never win. To the Kashmiris, we are Shi’a. To the Indians, we are Muslims.’’ Shi’a Muslims feared that without Kashmir to act as a buffer, they would have to succumb to the whims of Buddhists in Leh and a central government that was aggressively asserting its Hinduism, whereas Buddhists were apprehensive that their culture was slipping away because of their peripheral and minority status in the State of Jammu and Kashmir. In 1999, fearing a fresh bout of attacks, very few Kargilis showed up for the Independence Day celebration in Kargil town held a few weeks after firing ceased in July. It is evident that the successes of the Kargil war, exhibited so triumphantly on that Independence Day, were propagated at the cost of mystifying many ground realities. Balraj Puri (1999), a well-known journalist

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A medical center in Dras, Kargil, that was hit by shelling during the Kargil war. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

from Jammu, notes, ‘‘In short, all debate on Kargil that dominates the national agenda is based on the presumption that the entire conflict between India and Pakistan over Jammu and Kashmir is based on the title over real estate. In other words, it means a refusal to accept the fact that the people of the State also matter.’’ The pursuit of combative nuclear technology to defend the nation’s borders opened the gates for conventional war so that Kargilis were practically refugees since Kargil town was attacked by Pakistani artillery, killing eighteen people on September 30, 1997. According to Praful Bidwai and Achin Vanaik (2001), the war had put regional security in South Asia on a ‘‘short fuse’’ by undermining diplomatic gains made in Indo-Pakistani relations during the Lahore Declaration of February 1999. It had weakened the democratic process in Pakistan and fermented an outpouring of religious intolerance on both sides. While patriotic fervor may have inculcated an appearance of unity at the national level, it had not resolved the incongruities of state formation and ideology that marginalized and fragmented communities within Ladakh. .

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At the Independence Day ceremony of 1999 in Leh, its Urdu commentator, the poet Zainul Abideen (‘‘Aabid’’), read one of his compositions in praise of his homeland: Ladakh district, you are the Crown of India. These snow-covered peaks, protectors of India. In your lap are raised men with no fear. Seeking peace of mind, travelers come here. For the entire world, you are a peaceful region. Buddhist, Muslim, and Christian live as one. Aabid is proud to be a Ladakhi citizen. May Allah bestow kindness upon my India.58 He was also inspired by the occasion of Independence to pen another poem that wryly commented on the present: Fifty years since we achieved independence, But still the country’s ship has not sailed forward. Leaders like Nehru, Gandhi, and Azad were patriots, But leaders that followed could not take us forward. Tata, Birla, Modi, Bajaj, and Dalmia went ahead, But millions of citizens could not move forward. Corruption and dishonesty has spread in every school. That is why my companions could not move forward. Inefficient and influential people nabbed high posts. Honest and worthy people could not move forward. Communalism has spread in the entire nation. Consumed in its fire, no one can move forward. In these years, millions of poets have earned fame. But Aabid, your love stories could not move forward.59 Although this poem was not read at the ceremony, the staging of Independence Day became a forum through which Ladakhis interacted with official nationalism, assessing its offers of development and parading their contributions and hopes. It was also a site at which they displayed the contradictions, fissures, and difficulties of what it meant to be citizens on the border.

CHAPTER TWO

Observing Rituals in the Inner Line Zone . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

The Line of Control casts a long shadow over Ladakh. Those who dwell in this shadow are separated from the rest of the nation and from central regions of Ladakh by another boundary called the ‘‘Inner Line.’’ Running parallel to the loc, the Inner Line attempts to ensure that denizens of ‘‘protected areas’’ remain pure and secure. Police checkpoints, restricted travel permits, and other such rituals of surveillance monitor the movements of foreigners and Indians from outside Jammu and Kashmir who seek to venture into these areas.1 Back in 1873, the Bengal-Eastern Frontier Regulation that created the Inner Line system was introduced by the British government for the hill areas in the northeastern parts of India to prevent people from the plains from moving there.2 In the colonial Dogra territories of Kashmir, the Ladakh Frontier Crossing (Amendment) Regulation of August 26, 1937, amended from 1935, stated that no person, without permission from a ‘‘recognised British authority’’ or wazir-wazarat Ladakh (minister-in-charge of the political department), or tehsildar (minister-in-charge of the revenue department) of Skardo, could travel north to south of the Indus without a passport or a traveler’s or pilgrim’s pass.3 In postcolonial India, Indian citizens do not require such a passport for entering Ladakh, but regulations are applied to Inner Line areas close to the border. Foreign tourists require a restricted areas permit issued conditionally and defined by the central government. The parameters of the Inner Line for Ladakh are periodically modified. In 1978, rules laid out by the Foreigners (Protected Areas) Amendment Order (1974), issued by the Minis-

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try of Home Affairs, Government of India, came into effect, setting the Inner Line at ‘‘one mile north of road, Zojila, Drass, Kargil, Budhkharbu, Khaltsi, Nimu, Leh.’’ 4 As radical changes swept through the town and countryside of Ladakh during the Social Boycott phase in Ladakh’s history (1989–92), the maintenance of those inner lines that distinguish insiders from outsiders took on extraordinary dimensions. Selective ideas of indigenity and progress were absorbed into the reformist discourse of groups implementing the Boycott, often at the expense of histories of plurality. Cultural policies adopted during the Boycott years were governed by idioms of centralization and urban development, separating ‘‘modern’’ Ladakhi citizens from ‘‘traditional’’ peasants. Differential levels of access to tourism and education were already creating economic and ideological differences between the central and Inner Line zones of Ladakh. Now, with the new measures, farmers were represented as a group that had to be spoken for on account of their ignorance of true religion, economic efficiency, and the political causes of social injustice. Communities in the Inner Line regions were often subjected to sanctions, and a new kind of supervision attempted to direct their cultural activities. The complexities of border subjectivity in the Inner Line zone can be analyzed through different planes of experience. In each case, observation and travel become means for controlling or crossing borders. Through two cultural performances, a funeral ceremony in Achinathang and the acclaimed sngo-lha festival in the village of ‘‘Mingchanyul,’’ I explore the ritual and symbolic borders that represented ideal realms and sociocultural patterns of village life. I then trace the ways ritual margins intersected with the political and economic borders of these two Inner Line villages during the Boycott period. Next, I examine borders between observers and observed as they were constructed in the process of my fieldwork, drawing from concerns expressed in anthropology about the politics of the ethnographer’s position and the limits of representation. ATTEMPTED CROSSING

Shortly after my arrival in the village of Achinathang in 1991, an incident occurred that brought to light ways in which political boundaries transform and are transformed by borders constituted in ritual performances.5 It was the forty-eighth day after the sky-door (nam-sgo) had opened to release the forces of death, the forty-eighth day after he had collapsed at his daughter’s

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residence in a neighboring hamlet, when preparations began in earnest for the funeral feast (shi-zan) of Jamyang Chosphel of the devoutly Buddhist Tung-pa house.6 The rain fell gently, bringing a luster to fields that were gradually regaining their green. Spring is the mating season: flowers were in bloom, sheep were reproducing, the river swelled. On learning that female relatives of the deceased were kneading dough to make fried flatbreads (kab-tse) in the Tung-pa kitchen for the banquet the next day, I decided (at my host’s urging) to witness the event. I thought it would help me make sense of the funeral, to which the entire neighborhood had been invited. Cautious not to appear obtrusive, I paused at the main entrance door, the rgyal-sgo, while my companion, a young schoolgirl, ventured in at my request to solicit permission for me to enter. Nawang, the male head of the Tung-pa household, happened to be sitting in the courtyard between the main door and the kitchen. He was the one who responded to the petition she made on my behalf and his response startled both of us. He yelled at her, saying that there was nothing to ‘‘see’’ and that I would bring dishonor to the entire village through my writings. Then, apparently regretting his loud tone or alerted to my presence at the portal by the loud whispers of children, he conceded that we could come in if we wanted to. We did not go in. I was consumed with regret for my poor judgment and dismayed about the anthropological process itself through which I had attempted to make a spectacle out of death and personal grieving. Later, a discussion about Nawang’s conduct ensued in the kitchen of my hosts, Aba and Ama. Aba was not surprised by Nawang’s behavior. He insisted that I should not have asked for permission but should have entered quietly because, according to local convention, people may walk directly into the house, right to the inner door of the kitchen, unlike in Leh, where they must wait at the main door before they are summoned in. Aba argued that asking questions arouses suspicion and provides the host with unwarranted power to refuse. He said that I had created new thresholds for arbitration in my eagerness to avoid trespassing, which only succeeded in highlighting my status as an outsider who could not be trusted. His wife, Ama, on the other hand, thought that circumspection was appropriate because the time for dealing with the dead was potentially charged for both guests and members of the Tung-pa household. She warned that taking photographs of the dead body could cause my film to rot, just as recording laments of wailing women could lead to other mechanical debacles. A few months later, Nawang himself provided a reason for his hostile behavior, explaining that my presence had been suspect because I was positioned as

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an outsider at a time when villagers were at odds with external youth groups that were restricting the food to be served at mortuary feasts. These explanatory narratives provided by Aba, Ama, and Nawang framed my understanding of how thresholds (represented in this case by a literal doorway) become obstacles for departing souls and barricades for outsiders in Achinathang. Because death marks a symbolic and literal border, death rituals are particularly productive junctures for the study of border identity and multimarginality. A focus, therefore, on the ‘‘inhabited spaces’’ (Herzfeld 1991a, 13) of Achinathang is a useful beginning for understanding shifting and multiple social boundaries in Ladakh. LIVED LANDSCAPES OF ACHINATHANG

‘‘It happened like this, or so I heard,’’ Apo Roziali began, as we sat at the threshold of his store in Achinathang overlooking the main road. Apo Roziali, a retired farmer, was a respected elder of the village and an expert in local history. When I asked him if he knew of songs in which Achinathang featured, he went on to narrate a verse in which a fictive wedding party comes from upper Leh (Stod). When the wedding guests pass by Skyurbuchan, they remark, ‘‘Skyur-dri ‘khru-ba-’khrub’’ (A sour smell prevails), punning on the etymology of the village name, which can mean ‘‘sour place,’’ a sourness jokingly attributed to the smell of beer.7 Next, they reach the hamlet of Laido, where they comment, ‘‘Rgyu-ma yul gcig ‘dug’’ (Here lies a sausage-shaped place), alluding to the village’s long and narrow shape. When they arrive in Achinathang, they exclaim, ‘‘Gro-yos yas-pa’i na-chung’’ (Girls like perfectly roasted white wheat). Finally, when they pass Hanu mDo, the guests mutter, ‘‘ ‘Brog-dri ‘khru-ba-’khru b’’ (The smell of the ‘Brogpa abounds), referring to the reputation of the Hanu-pas of not washing for fear of losing their fortune. At the heart of the lyrical landscape that Apo Roziali conjured in his recitation is the village without the odd shape or smell, the village of Achinathang. If one follows the ceremonial route along the river Indus taken by the guests, one encounters Skyurbuchan to the east, Laido to the west, and Hanu to the south; Achinathang lies at the ‘‘crossroads’’ of these multiple heritage zones. Citizens from India’s metropolitan centers who view Ladakh as a peripheral zone may find Achinathang to be a quintessential marginal land, a place rarely mentioned in the great histories of empire, rarely debated in the speeches of parliamentary dignitaries, seldom visited by curious travelers eager to glimpse the

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splendors of the Himalayas. Its border location, however, does not lessen its importance. The increasing flows of people, capital, and communication networks in modern times should not erase the fact that people in the most ‘‘outof-the-way’’ places have been traveling and migrating for centuries, bringing with them cultural imports of various commodities and ideologies. As Anna Tsing (1993) has powerfully demonstrated, places that are designated as isolated, traditional, or fixed are nonetheless integral parts of national and transnational processes, and people who live in them actively reinterpret established categories of centers and margins, insiders and outsiders. In my experience and to my initial surprise, people in Achinathang rarely had specific names for mountains they lived amid, but mountain passes were generously named and known, bearing testimony to the importance of travel and the connection of landscape with social life. The verse recited by Apo Roziali anthropomorphizes the topos around him so that its characteristics become indistinguishable from the cultural traits of its inhabitants, their sausage-eating and barley-drinking habits, their strange odors and beautiful, wheat-like women. These traits point to some of the regional distinctions made by the residents of Achinathang, where knowledge of one’s place in society is intimately connected with knowing the physical and ideological boundaries of one’s world. But such demarcations are not innately inscribed in the structure of society or in its physical environment. To dwell in a place or to occupy a persona is to inhabit slippery realms of social practices. That boundaries are fluid is evident from strategies used to challenge seemingly fixed lines of kinship and descent, circular paths of religion and rebirth, or square plots of land used for cultivation. According to Apo Roziali, every place has a history that can be revealed through metaphor, story, and song. To understand people, one must know their place, he would say. To understand places, one must know the people they are composed of. In Apo’s view, all the residents of Achinathang were mi-srar, made from mixed strains of barley grains, some from here, some from there, a little bit of this and a little bit of that. Achinathang, located in the Khalatse block of Leh, is defined both by its social associations and its territorial contours. The Ladakhi word for village is yul. To those who reside in Achinathang, their village or yul is both an imagined community and a social reality, an abstract category and a contextual reference point for various locales.8 In its narrowest, territorial sense, yul indicates a place where one’s house is located. In a wider context, it can mean

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a whole region or nation (for example, rgya-gar-yul, the Ladakhi term for India). It can be the land of one’s birthplace (skyes-yul ), the land of one’s fathers ( pha-yul ), or simply a place where one dwells.9 Buddhist families in Achinathang often called their village thang (the plain), while identifying the larger village of Skyurbuchan, fourteen kilometers to the east, as yul. Most households in Achinathang traced their origins to Skyurbuchan. They had relatives from that region and owed allegiance to its monastery. They sent their children to the high school in Skyurbuchan, and marriages between the inhabitants of the two communities were frequent. Some families in Achinathang were still required to contribute to a joint village fund. A hamlet of approximately five hundred members in 1991, over 75 percent of whom were Buddhist, Achinathang officially fell under the leadership of the headman of Skyurbuchan, who had the authority to collect taxes (khral ) from its landowners (shar-ba). Oral histories from Skyurbuchan suggest that it had been settled as far back as the eleventh century, when floods swept in from Lamayuru during the visit of the Kashmiri Buddhist saint, Naropa (a.d. 956–1027). Buddhism was consolidated in the Sham region due mainly to the fact that King Jamyang Namgyal (r. 1560–90) donated this entire area to the ‘Bri-gung-pa order after he was healed from leprosy by a learned monk of this school.10 In the eighteenth century, when another king of Ladakh, Tshewang Namgyal, decided to reward his minister, the bka’-blon of Ayu, Tshewang Sonam Spalbar, for his bravery in battles with the kings of Khapulu and Shigar, he presented to him the uninhabited land of Achina mDo (mdo is a point where two valleys meet) and permitted him to build an irrigation canal to Dargo Lhamo in 1779.11 The higher sections of the valley (Achina Lungba) were already used as pasturelands by herders from Skyurbuchan and Hanu. Soon families began to settle in the new Achina mDo area. The bka’-blon’s son, Tshewang Dondub, announced his patronage to the ‘Bri-gung-pa order. In 1812, in memory of his deceased mother, he donated a silver statue of Chenrezig to the monastery of Phyang. For its propitiation, he presented the entire village of Achinathang as it existed then to the monastery after exempting its residents from the royal taxes of meat, barley flour, and beer. The seven original houses in Gongmathang paid taxes to the monastery of Phyang by making presentations of ten bre (four pints) of apricot seeds every alternate year. The villagers were given access to the Dargo Lhamo mountains, the Nyin Tsho for grazing, and the Nyin ‘Khor for wood. From Da-Hanu and Skyurbuchan, they could obtain wood of the pencil cedar. Some villagers link the nomenclature of Achi-

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nathang to the protective deity (srung-ma), A-phyi (pronounced Ap-ci), who is particularly revered as a foundational ancestress by the ‘Bri-gung-pa school. There are frescoes and statues of A-phyi in the temples of Achinathang and Skyurbuchan monastery. But according to Sonam Phuntsog, resident scholar and historian, the word a-ci-na means ‘‘foot of the mountain,’’ so that the name of the village, Achinathang, translates to ‘‘the plain at the foot of the mountain.’’ 12 As the village grew, Buddhism flourished there, primarily through the efforts of Meme Samphel, a learned hermit (tshangs-pa), who was born in a house belonging to the Phomsapa family in the mid-nineteenth century. Meme Samphel (also known as Konchok Wangpo) constructed several religious monuments, including the chapels of the Achinathang and Skyurbuchan monasteries.13 He brought a copy of the sacred Kangyur texts from the palace of Leh and introduced the practice of reading them in the region. His meditative travels took him to Tibet twice. Ruins of Meme Samphel’s meditation chamber are still located in the Lungba. A ninety-year-old resident even recalled seeing him as a child. On occasion, singers in Achinathang sing a song attributed to an anonymous blind boy, in which the boy praises his parents and his homeland, Skyurbuchan, where the land is sheltered by a golden shade because its ascetic benefactor, Konchok Wangpo, once lived on its mountain, the Zang Zang Ri thod. The inhabitants of Achinathang also acknowledged other zonal affiliations besides those with Skyurbuchan, each replete with its own history about how things came to be as they are. Across the Indus, toward the west, is Chigtan, an area that was converted to Shi’a Islam through a gradual process that commenced about four hundred years ago. Seven kilometers southwest of Achinathang is Hanu, the land of the ‘Brogpa (people of the high pastures).14 A series of battles fought in the past subjugated the residents of Hanu and brought them under the suzerainty of the Ladakhi king. Subsequently, they were forbidden the use of their language and religion. Most ‘Brogpa communities converted to Buddhism or Islam, but they retained a distinct cultural and ritual identity as well. In Hanu, festivals glorifying the resistance of local heroes to the Ladakhi king continued to be popular (Sonam Phuntsog 1999). Most Ladakhis stigmatize the ‘Brogpa as primitive and backward, although this bias is less prevalent in the Khalatse block than in other areas of Ladakh. In Achinathang, there were a few instances of intermarriage with ‘Brogpa families and an acceptance that they were a part of village history. The period from the sixteenth through the nineteenth century can be re-

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garded largely as a time when Buddhism was consolidated in Achinathang. But historians like Sikander Khan (1987) argue that Achinathang was actually founded in the ninth century by a ‘Brogpa king called Ti Sug and his queen, Ganga Sug, who ruled from their palace in Chigtan and took shelter in a castle on the other side of the Indus from Achinathang when they were attacked by invaders. They were believed to have been pre-Buddhist ‘‘Dardic’’ rulers who had originally migrated from Gilgit, now in Pakistan, a little before Lord Thathakhan (spelled khra khra mkhan) arrived in Ladakh.15 The theory that Ti Sug and Ganga Sug were the original founders of the village had its proponents and opponents in Achinathang. Although some villagers conceded that Ti Sug and Ganga Sug may have been the first inhabitants of the region, most of the residents of Achinathang had barely heard of them and considered their role in the foundation of the village to be improbable because the castle was situated at the opposite end of the river. In any case, the fortress in question lies in ruins and people say that its stone hearth, evidence of social life, can be found in a house in the nearby village of Garkon. One theory of primordial settlement that all factions seemed to agree on was that Achinathang was partially inhabited long before the sixteenth century and that its earlier name was ‘Brogpa’i-mos, ‘‘the grazing ground of the ‘Brogpa.’’ Situated at an altitude of approximately 12,000 feet, almost deserted now, this is the highest settlement in Achinathang. Place-names in this area, such as Brug-lo and Nach Mahal, reveal a connection with the Minarospeaking ‘Brogpa population of Da-Hanu. At some point, the ‘Brogpa may have coexisted with other villagers in Achinathang until they were pushed back into the region of Hanu. Some families attested that their land had been purchased from ‘Brogpas who had subsequently settled in Hanu. Today, the spatial configuration of Achinathang reflects its multiethnic and multireligious demographic structure and its historical changes. The village has expanded over the years and continues to do so in a descending movement along the mountains. A three-hour walk from the road leads to ‘Brogpa’i-mos, with smaller settlements scattered all along the valley in Achina Lungba. In 1991, there were twelve main houses there with seven branch houses and a total population of 101. A fifteen-minute walk away from the road (at an altitude of about 9,000 feet above sea level) takes one to Gongmathang, where all of the 260 occupants of the seventeen big houses and twenty-four small houses were Buddhist in 1991. These Buddhist segments of Achinathang have a protective deity (yul-lha), known as Brag-dmar-lha-chen (the Great God of the Red Rocks), who bestows prosperity on its occupants and whom the occupants, in

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turn, honor with monthly and annual rituals.16 Households patronize purity rituals (sangs) during the third day of the glo-sar (new year) and gsol-kha rites for the benefit of the yul-lha. Villagers form sodalities for herding cattle and goats and tend to gods through a similar system of household rotation (lhares). In addition, they sponsor prayer ceremonies by providing sustenance to monks and offerings for the two Buddhist temples in the village. The Gongmathang settlement is divided by a valley from a third neighbourhood called Yogmathang, situated close to the road. Yogmathang was settled during the second decade of the century. Of the twenty households (population 117 in 1991) that lived in Yogmathang in 1991, fifteen were Shi’a Muslim. Muslim households maintain strong alliances with Kargil. These households are responsible for donations to the mosque and imambara, a building where they assemble for Moharram. They collect funds for Arabic lessons and Koran teachings and organize religious and social events. Achinathang has a layout and history that fosters divergent and intersecting forms of identification that cannot be reduced to any single factor. During my fieldwork, I observed that members of diverse religious groups and residents of different localities in Achinathang interacted with each other in several ways. Participating in each other’s ritual celebrations was recognized as an important aspect of being a fellow villager, a yul-pa. Being a yul-pa also entailed undertaking the symbolic exchange of fire (mé), through hospitality around the hearth, and water (chu), through cooperation in agriculture, irrigation, and labor. People in this border community traced identity and defined ritual meaning through spatial classifications that defied strict categorization, at times undercutting ties of religion or residence and at others reinforcing them. THE THRESHOLDS OF DEATH

In the culturally diverse village of Achinathang, the funeral feast (shi-zan) for Jamyang Chosphel was staged on his family’s threshing ground (g.yul ‘thag), located behind the house where he had lived. The threshing ground was a circular space, bordered with stones, where cattle were driven in circles during the autumn months to trample freshly harvested and winnowed awns. The sound of rhythmic male voices humming and chanting the Om Mane Padme Hum litany in unison reverberated through the air that day. Guests arrived in the evening: Jamyang’s relatives and clients from neighboring villages and male representatives from Achina Lungba, all bearing chang (beer made with

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barley) and ta-kyi (wheat bread). The deceased man was precious and moral, they said. They had come for this last farewell, bringing gifts in memory of the expert weaver who had woven so many robes to clothe their bodies. There was so much chang that the keg was filled. A neighbor collected the offerings on the family’s behalf, announcing the house names of the donors. A remarkably detailed record of goods received (‘brel-tho) was kept, bearing testimony to the importance of reciprocal exchanges in fostering solidarity and cohesion between individual households.17 This list is consulted when it is the turn of the donor family to host a similar celebration, whereupon an equal amount or a bit in excess will be given as a gift by the receiving family. The joking and laughter of the men (who had taken up positions on the right side of the threshing ground) merged with the elegy of the widow and her children (seated on the left side) and the incantations of the astrologer seated in the center.18 More and more people came. The number of ta-kyi they bore ranged from four to sixteen, even numbers because this was a sorrowful occasion. Baskets filled with an assortment of dried black peas, roasted barley grain, apricot seeds, and sun-dried apricots had been laid out earlier. Generous quantities of apricot oil and rice broth, blended with stewed chilies and crushed walnuts, were handed out to guests. Family members then served us kab-tse (the deep-fried flatbread that had been cooked by the women the day before) and pa-ba (round balls of barley flour mixed with water). We were also given one or two big slices of wheat bread, one half-slice over which a small piece of pa-ba was applied, and one kab-tse. The pa-ba was taken from a concoction called pha gnyen ma gnyen, symbolizing the synchronization of the male and female principles, the mother’s and the father’s kin, agnates and affines, meshed and ground together, from which the child, now passed away in his old age, had first emerged. ‘‘Generally, this is served on the seventh day. It is the food of comfort after the suffering has abated a little. The people cry, ‘Give me some, give me a little,’ ’’ observed one guest. Guests folded the bread, broke off a piece, and dropped it on the floor for the dead person. The food was distributed, people ate, children passed their share on to their mother when they could eat no more, and mothers collected the remainder of the goodies in pockets or baskets, all the while drinking chang. As this was a public ritual, I was invited to attend by members of the Tungpa household, and I accepted, mostly to overcome my embarrassment from the tense encounter the day before. Nawang came up to me and explained, ‘‘Funerals are the most extravagant and expensive occasions, costing more

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Funeral foods laid out during a shi-zan in Achinathang.

than weddings. My brother is dead. That is his wife and those are his children. Today we will eat and feast a lot and give him some, too.’’ Unlike wedding feasts, which can be postponed for as long as a year, Buddhist funerals have a stipulated duration and obligatory expenses because they are associated with a period of ritual pollution that poses a potential threat to the community. The actions of living people have a lasting impact on the fate of the dead, which is decided within forty-nine days.19 The shi-zan marks the transmigration of the soul from death to rebirth, during which it frees itself from its erstwhile existence and assumes a new corporeal form. Anything that goes wrong in this transition can prove harmful to the successful rebirth of the departed and to the sanctity of the living if the soul should be reborn in an undesirable form. Buddhists regard reincarnation in the land of gods, demigods, or humans as auspicious (even though the goal of enlightenment is ultimately achieved only through deliverance from the worldly cycles of birth, death, and rebirth). They visualize reincarnation into the realms of animals, hungry ghosts, and hellish beings as lowly and tortuous states of ignorance. The interim stage between death and rebirth is called bar-do. It is described as a narrow passageway through which the soul or consciousness (rnam-shes) squeezes (Evans-Wentz 1957). Bar-do is a liminal, twilight zone, ‘‘between and

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betwixt’’ (V. Turner 1967) two worlds. During this period, the soul must be nourished and instructed for its journey to rebirth. The villagers must communicate with the departed, feeding them with food produced in the village, its own crop, so that they get a sense and taste of that food on their way to the other life. The turmoil of the bar-do stage is recounted through terrifying images in art, folktales, and litanies of a text entitled Bar-do thos grol (Liberation in the intermediate state).20 Bardo is a particularly difficult period because it calls on the living and the dead to accomplish the ideal of detachment from a habitus that is familiar. In everyday life, people liken travel away from the comforts of home to bar-do. Children in Achinathang often sang a song in which a young soldier proclaims the joys of patriotism but also despairs about the forbidding glaciers of Siachen, where he has been stationed, comparing the difficulty of living there to the state of bar-do. The experience of death, like that of birth, is considered to be a physical, emotional, and social separation in the Buddhist world. The journey of the dead from the hearth at home to the edge of the village and beyond illuminates the shifting margins of ritual space.21 The migration of the itinerant soul in the hybrid bar-do stage unsettles quotidian frontiers between persons and nonpersons. Relatives and neighbors must wean the dead person away from familiar territory. Until that time, the hearth, the home, and the village are tinged with impurity. Territorial boundaries, where the departure of the dead is moderated, become important sacred and social sites for the community of the living. A high-ranking monk channels the soul out of the deceased’s body through an opening that he makes in the skull.22 The soul must migrate or ‘‘change body’’ (‘pho-ba ‘deb pa), and the first ceremony performed by the monk is to guide and facilitate the transition from embodied existence into an asomatic state. Women begin wailing as the demise of a near relative is announced, broadcasting to the world the virtues of the deceased and the pain they are experiencing at their loss. Monks recite verses and perform liturgies to guide the soul through bar-do and propel it to the western paradise, the abode of Buddha Amitabha (Gergan 1940). The prayers last for several days. Astrologers (dbon-po) prepare horoscopes to interpret signs and obscurants that caused the death. They determine future dates and routes for the dead. The stamp of ritual impurity first affects close members of the deceased person’s extended household. For one month, they must not eat from everyday utensils or approach the hearth because the hearth is the center of social life in Achinathang, a zone where hospitality is most poignantly expressed.

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The relatives of the dead are also banned from crossing irrigation canals and entering fields (see Gergan 1940). They are more or less sequestered in the house and barred from public celebrations. For those with a suspicious nature, any sickness, crop failure, or climatic misfortune that prevails can be attributed to the surviving spouse of the dead. When the obligatory uncleanliness has ended, a person from the family’s pha-spun (a kin group connected by descent and residence) consoles and feeds the mourners, helps them wash their hair, and provides them with a sumptuous meal (sdug-zan), symbolizing the conclusion of the period of contamination.23 Relatives make bread from the flour presented by villagers and give some to the women present. All the villagers gather below the main gate of the house on an open space on the property of the dead person. Men form an inner ring and conceal the bier from women, who must circle this male configuration. In Achinathang, it is only men who carry the corpse to the funeral pyre, which they circumambulate three times, prostrating themselves on the floor in between rounds, shouldering the thrust of contagious contact. Only on land owned by their lineage members can they pause for rest. Cremation sites and open shelters behind rocks, where bodies are preserved until it is appropriate to immolate them, are located at the periphery of the village, where the fields end. The soul lingers in the home for seven days, gradually becoming aware of its condition after the fourth day, when it no longer perceives its footsteps or shadow. The bdun-tshigs feast (held ‘‘seven days’’ after the cremation) marks its departure from the home. Monks execute the g.yang-’gugs ceremony in the house with the main door firmly secured from inside to prevent the wealth of the household from escaping with the dead.24 Suspended between death and rebirth, the soul wanders for forty-one additional days in the vicinity of the village. It is at this time that the shi-zan or funeral feast is held. The shi-zan is dominated by women whose elegies situate the phenomenon of death within a complex nexus of social power. Laments (bshad-pa or ngus-mang) express bereavement through tears and talk, evoking paradoxical states of hierarchy and equality, order and disorder. Thus, a woman’s advice to an unfortunate dead soul to live and eat well in the afterlife may contain a veiled barb that he or she was not well fed or clothed when alive.25 At a parent’s death, a woman might go on to curse her helplessness as a poor daughter who was unavailable to provide filial care, indirectly pointing to neglect on the part of her brothers, who were at hand because they were the ones who inherited the natal home. Surviving spouses may hint that the cause of death lay in the misbehavior of relatives, and sisters of a dead man may charge a sister-in-law,

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married in polyandry, for favoring one brother over others. Occasionally, the stylized verses of the laments lead to open hostilities. But in most cases, moderation is displayed because people judge those verses with favor that hold subtle revelations of truth and have emotional and aesthetic appeal. At Jamyang’s funeral, too, the air simmered with such soulful sobs as the words of women threatened to expose some of the tensions that had existed between him and his family members. After the gathering cleared, the funeral party moved to the Tung-pa house to drink all night, cry a little, laugh a little, and bury their sorrows. The next day there would be no collective grieving or tears holding the soul of the dead back from its inevitable passage to rebirth. So that Jamyang would know how much was given for him when he was in shi-yul (the land of the dead), his relatives weighed portions of pa-ba with an imitation wooden scale and churning stick. Once they had recorded the weight, they marked the mock scale and discarded it along the path between the house and the threshing ground so that Jamyang would receive equal amounts in the land of the dead. One calendar year is the maximum duration sanctioned for private mourning. After that, sorrow has to be contained, dancing resumed, drab apparel put away, and celebrations of joy attended once again. THE SOCIAL BOYCOTT AND DISCOURSES OF MODERNITY

The funeral of Jamyang Chosphel transpired at a ritually fraught period of bard-do and during a phase of my fieldwork that Victor Turner (1974, 38) would deem a moment of escalated ‘‘crisis.’’ It reordered the world of the residents of Achinathang but not in a finite way; some social differences were resolved and others were exposed. Fusing hierarchy and interdependence, solidarity and segmentation, the shi-zan, or shi-ston (death show), as it is also known, was a symbolic display, upheld by the villagers as an exemplification of their ideals of charity, hospitality, citizenship, and power. Variations in the roles of men and women, monks and laity, adults and children, and poor and affluent individuals were reinforced in the seating arrangement, the placement of the funeral pyre, donations to monasteries, and sponsorship of prayers, all of which had to be handled with care lest they lead to quarrels about rank and place. Under these circumstances, efforts to maintain the sanctity of sacred space at Jamyang’s funeral only heightened the conflict between the eternal and the historically contiguous and between local praxis and religious allegiance. Doors and other ritual margins became politically disturbed arenas

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of liminality.26 Death, as Henk Driessen (1992) illustrates, may become an important issue in both interethnic and intraethnic strife. The danger of disorder lurking in death rituals was made all the more manifest by the cultural reforms of the Boycott, so that the conventional repertoire of rites and behaviors that mourners could draw on for averting danger was thrown into disarray.27 The status of insiders and outsiders was contested, the fidelity of villagers challenged, and the integrity of neighbors scrutinized during this period. The year of Jamyang’s death, 1991, was also the year of India’s adoption of the World Bank–driven economic liberalization reform package, generating hordes of young consumers and private entrepreneurs in the Indian plains. Students in New Delhi immolated themselves to protest the implementation of the Mandal Commission Report that recommended increases in reservation quotas in education and government services for ‘‘Oppressed and Backward Classes.’’ It was also the year in which youth power was harnessed to support a brand of cultural nationalism that would eventually result in the Ayodhya riots. An army of militant volunteers was trained in camps on the edges of Ayodhya, the mythical birthplace of Rama, hero-king of the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. These cadres of volunteers were to provide security for the Ram Rath Yatra from Somnath to Ayodhya led by L. K. Advani, a leader of the Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp). The yatra was to be ‘‘a journey in search of the heart of India, a journey that was to span the land lying between shining shores and rising to the heights of the majestic Himalayas’’ (Joshi 1997). It was to ratify territorial unity, rekindle patriotic fervor, combat prevailing forms of ‘‘pseudo-secularism,’’ and foster a sense of religious purity in Hindu society by rejuvenating the ideal standards of benign, popular government from the halcyon days of Rama’s reign.28 Objectives of cultural preservation and purity were also preoccupying a group of young political actors in the five blocks of Leh district. Friction against Ladakh’s marginalization in India was verbalized by the lba in religious terms, a move that complemented the growing communal sentiment of Indian nationalism. The Youth Wing of the lba that had been registered in 1989 contained impassioned members who had taken a vow in the Jokhang Vihara to vanquish enemies of their faith. A wide network of village- and block-level youth committees, collectively called Youth-pa by locals, sprung up and began functioning as executive and vigilante branches of the lba. According to the 1988–89 president of the Youth Wing, the youth worked under the strict guidance of the parent association but performed the ‘‘difficult tasks’’ for it, undertaking nocturnal sojourns during conditions of curfew and Sec-

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tion 144 (which prohibits the assembly of people in groups of four or more) to rally support and disseminate information on the objectives of the Agitation.29 Their mission was to strengthen the lba’s foothold as the voice of Buddhist Ladakh. Defining the role of the youth, Rigzin Spalbar, a prominent member of the lba, told me, ‘‘Youth is supposed to be more educated, more conscious of their rights than the older generation, which is illiterate. The youth give more power to our association.’’ 30 Youth associations were founded in several villages in the form of theater organizations with names like the Light of Theater Society (odzer ldozgar tshogs-pa) and Cultural Promotion and Preservation Society. These organizations set out to revive culture and promote a new Ladakhi morality by controlling cultural performances and enthusiastically taking over preparations for neighborhood archery fairs, rites of passage ceremonies, and religious rituals. They put up plays to warn against the consequences of hunting, alcohol consumption, polyandrous marriages, and other ‘‘social evils.’’ Old customs, depicted in the form of an old couple (apo-api ) acting as erring peasants, were targeted for reform.31 Cultural performances had been used for political action in a similar manner in 1969, when an association called the Lamdon Social Welfare Society was created.32 The Society used theater campaigns to preach against alcohol, polyandry, and animal sacrifice. Active in this Society were Thupstan Tshewang, Tsering Samphel, and Norbu Gyaltsen, college students educated in Srinagar, who would later rise to become prominent figures during the Agitation. These students criticized Ladakhi politicians for being under the control of ‘‘uneducated’’ religious leaders and embarked on a vigorous program of social reform, especially in the field of education (Bertelsen 1997). Morup Namgyal, one of Ladakh’s most well-respected performance artists and a founder of the Lamdon Society, recalls that villagers had not always been well disposed to the designs of the Society. Its skits against polyandry and primogeniture were welcomed by disadvantaged younger brothers in villages such as Achinathang and Dumkhar but resented by first-born males, who pelted the actors with stones at night.33 The villagers of Tingmosgang had gone so far as to sue the Society for its antipolyandry stance, but a settlement was eventually reached in favor of the Society. In the 1970s, drama troupes from the Lamdon Society traveled with their message from Leh to distant villages. But in 1991, plays on social issues were enacted by village theater committees themselves. The new morality fostered

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by these performances was representative of a new Ladakhi reality that appealed to the needs of a young generation. These needs stemmed from transformations brought about by education, urbanization, capital-dominated economics, and political authority. Literacy, one of the indices of progress in modern India, had become an important criterion for determining authority. Thupstan Tshewang’s return to Ladakh and his assumption of the presidency of the lba paved the way for a class of educated political leaders. The system of selection of village-level leaders changed from a structure of rotational obligation, endured by each tax-paying household, to an electoral format whereby ‘‘persons of authority, competence, and initiative’’ were to be chosen (Bertelsen 1997). Private schools that used English as the medium of instruction gained in popularity. By 1991, the number of primary schools in Ladakh had risen to 193 (compared to 45 in 1939) and there were 50 middle-level schools (compared to 8 in 1939). There were 27 high schools in the district of Leh in 1991, even though the first one had opened there only in 1951.34 Student enrollment escalated, with primary schools being constructed in almost every village. Education came to be prized and wealthy parents invested heavily in sending their children to private schools and universities in Delhi, Jammu, and Srinagar. Educated students expected to find lucrative employment in the civil and military sectors. As dependency on agriculture decreased, fields in Leh, once inalienable, were now sold to migrant consumers. Army consumption encouraged vegetable production and horticulture over the cultivation of barley, traditionally the staple food of Ladakh. Subsidized imports of food grains and essential commodities, including rice, wheat, flour, sugar, butter, milk powder, and salt, flooded the market. With 22,748 visitors in 1989, tourism emerged as a leading income-generating industry, partially spurred by the popularity of Buddhism in the West.35 Revenues from tourism multiplied in the Leh block, but because other blocks were sealed off for security considerations, income disparities and regional divides widened. Modernization did provide opportunities for education and employment in the armed, tourist, and civil services, but it did not alleviate the traumas of fitting into these new systems, nor did it raise people’s purchasing capacity for new consumer goods and opportunities. School failure rates rose to the highest in the country and competition for the few businesses was intense. A song in Urdu sung to me by a young boy from Achinathang wryly captures the plight of his generation:

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We’re studying in the ssb,36 that’s the happy part. The training is difficult, that’s the sad part. We go to a hotel for tea, that’s the happy part. No money in our pockets, that’s the sad part. Discontent with the unfulfilled promises of economic development, Ladakhi youth struggled with issues of assimilation and identity. Social rifts between the concerns of the educated, tourist-based, urban economy of the capital and a predominantly peasant economy in the Inner Line areas intensified. Informal youth groups with names like Tip Top and F-16 mushroomed in Leh to channel entertainment activities during the winter months. Coordinating cultural events gave them a new sense of direction, even if it meant reinventing the past and communalizing the future. It also brought them to the brink of confrontation with village elders. There were differences in expectations between older and younger generations during the Agitation, but this was not a new factor in Ladakhi society, where the transfer of power from fathers to sons was not an easy affair, even traditionally. In Buddhist households, for instance, when a male child is born to the son, the son stakes his claim as head of the main household (khangchen), requiring that his parents and siblings shift to an auxiliary dwelling (khang-bu). That tensions existed between the Muslim and Buddhist communities was also not new. Such clashes had occurred once before, in 1969, triggered by an incident involving an inheritance dispute in Sabu between a Muslim brother and a Buddhist sister and the subsequent desecration of Buddhist prayer flags, which generated anti-Muslim demonstrations and culminated in the torching of the district commissioner’s residence (Bertelsen 1996). Furthermore, the cultural reforms proposed during the Agitation also had a fairly lengthy and identifiable history. Neo-Buddhists of the Kashmir Mahabodhi Society had inspired the formation of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in 1938, predecessor to the lba. Its foremost agenda item had been to raise political consciousness and enlighten Ladakhi Buddhists, saving them from a supposed state of degeneracy or from conversion to Islam or Christianity by eliminating elements such as succession patterns based on primogeniture, habits of consuming alcohol, and polyandrous marriages (Bertelsen 1996). What was new about the Agitation was its systematic organization and extensive bureaucracy, which enabled the lba to reinscribe varied regional and communal problems into one unified manifest destiny of Ladakh. Dif-

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fering factions were asked to suspend their disagreements for the cause. High monks like Togdan Rinpoche, abbot of Phyang, and Khanpo Rinpoche, abbot of Thiksey monastery, once bitter political rivals of Bakula Rinpoche and Sonam Wangyal in the State Legislative Assembly elections, were enlisted to help implement the Agitation in their precincts. Opponents of the Social Boycott were branded as traitors, and Sonam Wangyal (1997), the righthand man of Bakula Rinpoche, was himself boycotted for voicing his disapproval. He was subjected to a severe form of ostracization: his household’s access to social exchange was cut off and monks were prohibited from performing the last rites on his wife’s death until his children announced that they would have nothing to do with their father. A set of guidelines was issued to Touring Committees, founded to mobilize peasants and to recruit representatives from the rural areas, instructing them to implement the Boycott and penalize defaulters.37 The lba maintained a front of consensus through motivational and intimidation tactics. As existing systems of arbitration were undermined, villagers frequently referred disputes about the interpretation of codes and resolutions to Sunday session courts held by the lba at its office in the Jokhang Vihara. lba officeholders proclaimed that once its value was understood, the Agitation was ‘‘caught up as a hysteria.’’ 38 Those involved in the Boycott increasingly used the derogatory term phyipa (outsiders) for Muslims to differentiate Islamic culture from ‘‘indigenous’’ Buddhist culture. The image of endangered cultural purity was liberally used, even as most of the measures taken by the lba against the Sunni Muslim community in fact revolved around their prominence in Ladakh’s modern economy (see Bertelsen 1996; van Beek 1996). Sunni Muslims, or Argons as they are locally called, are descendants of migrants from Yarkand and merchants from Kashmir who had long settled in central Ladakh and married locally. As their access to land was limited, the livelihood of the Sunnis did not depend on agriculture, the mainstay of Buddhist and Shi’a populations. Relying on the travel business, some of them grew to be affluent traders and shopkeepers and others worked as guides, porters, and petty vendors. Among them were also educated specialists of the Persian language, who served as scribes and government officials, especially as Persian was the lingua franca of the Dogra Court. After the 1970s, rapid modernization tipped the balance of power away from agricultural households toward professionals with tourism and service sector jobs, in which the Sunnis already had a strong foothold. By contrast, due to the relative value they placed on agriculture, systemic administrative neglect, poverty, and forms of religious practice that discour-

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aged modern education, the presence of Shi’as in middle-class professions was small. Thus, during the Boycott, Shi’as were not initially perceived as a threat. It was Sunni travel agents, accused of selling distorted stories of Buddhism to tourists, who were subsequently denied permission to enter monasteries for commercial purposes and Sunni contractors in the Public Works Department who were charged with indulging in unchecked corruption (van Beek 1996). Sunni leaders defended themselves against allegations that the influx of their extraneous Islamic culture threatened indigenous Buddhist culture by arguing that they had assimilated into Ladakh and could not be considered outsiders. Shi’as from the Purig region in Kargil, who were later targeted by the Boycott, also claimed indigenous legitimacy on the basis of the ethnicity they shared with Buddhist Ladakhis, stressing that Islam had come to Ladakh without forcible conversion. During this time, the lba actively sought the collusion of the peasantry, claiming that its agitation was a pan-Buddhist rally against discrimination by the government of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. But valorizing modernity, youth, and education, it continued to depict farmers as immobile, unworldly, and antiprogressive ideologues who thrived on ritual and rumor. Similar articulations of Buddhist nationalism can be found in Sri Lanka, where Richard Gombrich and Gananath Obeyesekere (1988) trace changing social trends in nineteenth-century Sinhalese Buddhism to the rise of an anticlerical village intelligentsia, who attempted to fashion a Buddhist social and economic ethic grounded in material rationality and personalized worship. In Ladakh, too, a shift in the political economy from subsistence agriculture to cash labor resulted in the fragmentation and reformulation of traditional political and economic authority. Yet, as Kristoffer Bertelsen (1997) has argued, this reformulation took place not through the privatization of worship but through the abstraction and universalization of Buddhism in a manner that attacked local customs and religious pluralism. Corresponding attacks against pluralism resulted from religious and cultural reforms that had been initiated among Shi’a Muslims by members of the Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust (ikmt) and the Islamiya School in Kargil. The Islamiya School, established in 1951, had organized study trips to Najaf with sponsorship from Iraqi sources. In 1974, foreign clerics were expelled from Iraq and clerics in training there returned to Ladakh. They preached a textual Islam and imposed a stricter standard against dance, music, and alcohol consumption (Grist 1998). The ikmt came into existence shortly after the death of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1989 by building links with the Iranian Cul-

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tural House. Although it advertised itself as the more liberal organization of the two, arguing that it supported women’s education and was more adaptive to changing times, the ikmt tended to favor Iranian behavioral norms over local customs. The rigid dictates of religious groups and their claim to universality were not passively accepted by farmers in the Inner Line areas, however. Through ‘‘everyday acts of resistance’’ (Scott 1985), strategic manipulations, and ‘‘counter-archaeologies’’ (Herzfeld 1991a), farmers claimed alternative centers and undermined the Boycott.39 Villagers from Achinathang positioned themselves in multiple ways in arguments about food, alcohol, and ancestors, and the margins between those who dwelled on the inside and those who were on the outside fluctuated in the face of different sociopolitical circumstances. By reproducing some of these arguments here, my intention is not to romanticize the resistance of farming communities or dismiss the grievances of youth groups; rather, by revealing these contested acts of knowledge production, I suggest that boundaries based on communalism were not necessarily natural or acceptable to all Ladakhis, and that cultural plurality was also a part of their indigenous heritage. BUDDHISM IN CONTESTED FIELDS

The impact of Boycott policies was felt strongly in Achinathang. Jamyang Chosphel’s brother, Nawang, a practicing farmer (shar-ba) in his fifties who had served in the army in his youth, was an elected representative of the village council of the Gongmathang community. He was often asked to act as an intermediary between the villagers and visiting dignitaries. Since 1989, there had been an unusual number of visitors from Leh to Achinathang: politicians, abbots, government administrators, and the diasporic community of wage earners who returned to justify the Boycott, seek collaboration against the Jammu and Kashmir State government, and initiate reforms. As in other villages, cultural preservation committees and youth vigilante groups had sprung up in Achinathang and Skyurbuchan. They were supported by the Youth Wing of the lba under the leadership of town-based wage earners with roots and land in Achinathang who deployed the younger generation of adult men (roughly between the ages of eighteen and thirty-five) to carry forth their mission. In a speech made during his tour to the village, Thupstan Tshewang declared, ‘‘You boys and girls of Achinathang, each of you is a member of the Association.’’ 40

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The youths with whom I spoke initially saw themselves as part of a progressive rebellion that would simultaneously free them from the hegemony of tradition, ally them with a larger cultural movement, and save their religion from persecution. But any euphoria that older farmers may have felt for the emancipatory potential of the Social Boycott began waning by 1991, and some of the youth in the village were disillusioned, too. As one young farmer told me, ‘‘The benefit is for those in Leh.’’ Nawang’s position as a councilor became stressful because he frequently had to appease older and younger landholders. Clandestine rebellions against the Boycott were frequent; these had to be hidden from the gaze of outsiders for fear of exposure and repercussion. Since 1989, grave altercations had ensued between the Youth-pa and older farmers about the quantity and nature of food offerings to be distributed during feasts.41 Already, the reformists had called for a reduction in the size of the ‘brang-rgyas, the meal-mountain, carved from barley dough dipped in water that stood at the center of the ritual ground during marriage and birth banquets and on the fourth day of the New Year.42 In the past, barley was the staple crop of the Ladakhi countryside. Achinathang’s lower altitude permitted the cultivation of two seasonal crops, barley and buckwheat. Households in Achinathang had a mixed economy of agriculture, animal husbandry, and horticulture. Village communities were sustained largely by raw materials available in the local environment and by an intricate nexus of reciprocal exchanges of labor and goods. A complex trade network of salt and wool had enabled farmers to diversify their lifestyles. In recent times, subsidized rations of rice and wheat, new commercial markets for apricots, and increasing employment in the armed and civil services had begun to compete with older habits of food consumption, causing the importance of barley to decline in urban areas and among the youth. The Youth-pa enjoined farmers to retain the symbolic value of the meal-mountain without subjecting themselves to unnecessary economic burdens. A similar move toward controlling the presentation of food had been imposed on Shi’a Muslims by the ikmt from Kargil, limiting the number of days for wedding feasts and the number of dishes that could be served in order to reduce the monetary strain on the bride’s family, which bears the brunt of the culinary costs incurred.43 For mortuary feasts, the lba denounced the convention of distributing barley flour balls, deeming them inedible and prescribing their substitution with a dish called tshogs (made of a better quality of barley flour and sweetened with jaggery) to prevent undue waste. But defending the custom, one grandmother from Achinathang argued, ‘‘The zan is a type of las-bes [labor

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exchange]. We make the food so that the dead will receive it in their world, adding on to our list of merit.’’ Another villager declared that offerings were made in order to feed a soul in transition, because to be reborn as hungry ghosts (yi-dwags), who capriciously devour souls but are never content or satiated, is the worst destiny imaginable. In village lore, ghosts (shi ‘dre) were ravenous creatures that lured hapless persons with invitations to tea or to meals. Villagers considered envy and greed to be at the root of sorcery. Victims of this sorcery would hear voices soliciting them but would find themselves afflicted by sudden illness if they allowed themselves to succumb to the temptation of these venomous solicitations. Older men used the notion of charity as a powerful critique against attempts by the cultural revivalists who restricted sacrificial offerings, categorizing them as anti-Buddhist squanderings of precious resources that prevented people from capitalizing on surplus. ‘‘I don’t believe in the hunger of the dead,’’ contended one guest, ‘‘but the next day I find that the food I laid out has disappeared. An impoverished fellow villager, a starving child, or a bird or animal must have eaten it. That is the essence of true Buddhism—charity toward all sentient beings.’’ Another guest added, ‘‘And so what if the pa-ba is unpalatable. We feed it to our cattle. We are farmers and herders, after all.’’ The opinions expressed by these farmers remind us that feasts are not undertaken solely for the benefit of the dead. They are closely linked with the vicissitudes of daily life in which kinship, economic bonds, and residential alliances are affirmed in the habitats of the living. As Sherry Ortner (1978) has demonstrated in her study of Sherpa society, feasts are also about the resolution of social inequity, challenging karmic laws of reward and punishment. Another major source of controversy in the practice of funerary rites involved the centrality accorded by Buddhist farmers to the keg of chang. Chang was brewed in every Buddhist household and served at funerals and festive occasions. Drinking chang was tied to the pattern of agricultural life and to a sense of collective and personal identity (see also Dollfus 1985). It was an important aspect of cultural life, in which the keg of barley beer occupied a central place in the ritual arena of wedding and funeral feasts. Exchanging chang was a primary index of social relations, especially manifested in settlements called ‘khor-’khor-po, circular clusters where houses in close proximity in Gongmathang entertained and supported their neighbors. ‘Khor comes from the verb ‘khor-ba (to roam, encircle) and is indicative of the rotating rounds of feasts between neighbors.44 Villagers used chang to harness resources and exchange labor for cooperative tasks such as plowing and weed-

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ing the fields and for large-scale works such as constructing the enclosure for an electricity generator or laying bricks for the expansion of the monastery. Laborers were entitled to payments of beer and food as compensation. Mothers praised chang for its nutritional value; mixed with flour, it was fed to infants, and children too were permitted to imbibe moderate quantities of beer at public festivities.45 But with more and more children attending school, I often heard older schoolmates or local teachers, who refrained from drinking chang by and large, hurl words of admonition at students who seemed to be enjoying its taste. Drinking was considered inappropriate for the educated who would assume careers away from a life of farming. Alcohol parties often set the stage for making political decisions about the future course of village affairs. Traditionally, it was middle-aged farmers who made these decisions, but their authority and leadership were being challenged by the youth. For the latter, barley and chang were linked to a nonproductive, peasant economy. For the elders, policies to prohibit chang were unilateral decisions taken by external youth wings who were not qualified to evaluate the state of commerce for all of Ladakh. The lba used a critical discourse against chang to argue that it was drinking that kept the farmers steeped in indolence and ignorance, hindering the modernization and development of Ladakh.46 It launched anti-alcohol campaigns through modern morality plays, extended village tours, and education programs, operations that received some support from student groups in Achinathang and Skyurbuchan, more so in those houses where alcoholism had resulted in abuse and illness. But farmers provided counterexplanations for their drinking, emphasizing tradition and recognizing drinking as a vital ingredient of social practice and Ladakhi identity. Elders whom I interviewed noted that chang had once been consumed largely at public congregations, but now that personal profit had taken ascendancy over social largesse and land was not the chief source of sustenance for many, drinking had become more private. People blamed the chang that was consumed by those huddled in the privacy of their houses for the present discord. Chang was brewed not only for secular ceremonies but also for those occasions associated with sacred dates. The lba sought to cleanse what it believed was decadent and defiling to Buddhism by mandating that monks, who must maintain ritual purity, and readers and astrologers, who come in contact with venerated texts during prayer feasts, be subjected to strong anti-alcohol prohibitions. Through the persuasions of the youths, the villagers agreed to shift their chang parties to alternate dates or to abstain from drinking on holy

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days. But there was considerable resistance to adopting these measures. One elder pointed out that it was inconceivable to him that anyone might consider drinking chang antireligious. Chang, he argued, was a libation for the deities and ancestors, who would be offended if the appropriate offerings were not made. He was referring to the custom of sprinkling the first drops of each pitcher of chang with the fourth finger as an offering (lha gsol-pyes) for the deities of the three worlds (the lha, the klu, and the btsan) and also for the dead (shi-mi ). Another villager, arguing against sanctions on drinking alcohol on the tenth night of each Buddhist month celebrated to honor Guru Rinpoche, saint of the Bka’rgyud-pa order, to which Buddhists in Achinathang belong, claimed that Guru Rinpoche himself was the patron of liquor and, being his devotees, villagers were obliged to emulate his deeds.47 Besides chang, the lba also prohibited rum at public celebrations and threatened offending members with high monetary fines. It crusaded against the custom in which the bride’s paternal aunt pours a-rag (barley brandy) at the wedding and the ritual in which hosts hand out btsag-mo or rtsabs (a mixture of chang and barley flour) to guests. Cheap rum, however, was readily available in army canteens. Sometimes, soldiers from neighboring checkpoints bartered rum for poultry, meat, and apricot oil.48 Once in a while, relatives who worked for the army also brought gifts of rum. Rum, or nagpo as it was called in Achinathang, ‘‘the black drink,’’ was greatly prized and reserved for special occasions, such as when entertaining important bureaucrats or serving a weaver as part of the remuneration for his services. Villagers spoke of rum as being more palatable than chang but quite unaffordable for everyday life. Only those with surplus cash or special connections in the army or the city could procure rum, and only those who were extremely generous or wealthy would treat friends and visitors to it. Serving rum over beer was a sign of class distinctions, its distribution and consumption symbolic of those who had ‘‘taste.’’ 49 The lba claimed that it had stopped the distribution of rum and a-rag at local functions to ease the coercion that the underprivileged classes felt to emulate standards established by the rich. In Leh, however, rum was freely served at elite weddings and there were bars where it was consumed by top officials of the very same committees who considered locally produced chang deleterious and tasteless. Ironically, too, hotels and travel agencies promising exotic and authentic experiences of Ladakh often listed chang on their cultural menus. Yet, if drinking too much chang was considered pathological by the lba, violating ideals of Buddhist culture, drinking no chang was considered equally

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sacrilegious by many farmers. The few young people who responded to the social measures and gave up drinking chang altogether were put under immense pressure to drink at parties. When they declined, they were mockingly called ‘‘Purig-pa’’ (a term used for the Muslims who were believed to have originally come from the Purig region), challenging their claim to being pious Buddhists. According to the Muslim inhabitants of Achinathang with whom I spoke, chang was perhaps the most salient feature distinguishing them from Buddhists. Young Muslim children learned to wrinkle their nose at even a whiff of alcoholic breath. Achinathang Muslims often criticized Buddhists for failing to live up to prohibitions on alcohol dictated in their religious texts. Among the Islamic community of the village, the intake of intoxicating agents like chang was forbidden, and people justified abstinence by insisting that they would be rewarded by flowing rivers of wine in the afterlife. A middleaged pilgrim, newly returned from hadjj, explained that alcohol clouded one’s ability to reason and prevented one from functioning effectively. Even so, some elderly Muslims whose ancestors had emigrated from the Purig region recalled stories of parties that had been celebrated with much song and dance at a time when religious practice had been more syncretic and even Islamic festivals (Id ) were marked by the consumption of a special beer called idchang.50 In contrast to their opinion about Muslims, Buddhist farmers considered migrant workers from Nepal (called ‘‘Gorkhas,’’ regardless of their ethnicity) who worked as rock cutters or masons in Achinathang to be hearty drinkers. These workers had an ambivalent standing in the community; they were praised for their hospitality and generosity and disparaged for their propensity to spend their wages on meat and alcohol. Buddhist villagers emphasized their own distinctiveness as landholders who were obliged to reinvest in their land, as opposed to the landless Nepalis, who wandered from place to place in search of jobs and a roof over their heads, building houses and clearing fields that they would never inhabit. Drinking alcohol was a means of creating boundaries between insiders and outsiders. On one side, to abstain from drink was to surrender desire for sociality and become a devoutly religious person (chos-pa), bordering on celibacy and monkhood. On the other side, abstaining from alcohol was to give up religion altogether and become like a Muslim (but to drink too much was to violate norms of propriety). From the point of view of older farmers, an upstanding Buddhist was not a teetotaler but one who could maintain an appropriate balance, one who was prosperous but not too haughty or self-sufficient

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A row of mchod-rten. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

to share a cup of chang with fellow villagers, and one who could indulge in alcohol but not lose control in case alliances between families and the household’s material welfare were harmed. Another issue of dissension between the town-based Youth-pa and farmers was whether or not dead souls (shi-mi) were authorized to participate in the world of the living as ancestors. Each patrilineage (pha-spun) in the village has its own cremation-hearth (spur-khang); pyres of monks are built separately at an exalted height on the grounds of their families. Villagers take pains to avoid cremation areas, and schoolchildren admitted to me that they were afraid to walk near them lest they run into wayward, malignant ghosts. The ashes of cremated bodies are buried on the top of a mountain (for the gods), or deposited in the river Indus (for the subterranean deities) (Asboe 1932). On the fourth day after death, the surviving bone fragments of the corpse are pulverized and mixed with clay and the dust of five elements to construct clay tablets called tsha-tsha (Brauen 1982; S. Khan 1987). The clay tablets are entombed in a mchod-rten (reliquary) or in the niche of a sacred ma-ni wall, or preserved in the chapel of the house, depending on the economic standing of the family. Rich families tend to build separate shrines to commemorate their dead (see S. Khan 1987). By and large, mchod-rten are built in honor of high monks or individuals of renown or affluence. In contrast, ancestor wor-

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ship in fields and houses is a means for farmers to demarcate the landscape with their personal and collective histories. With the metamorphosis of land from areas of cultivation into gardens or guesthouses for tourists, field ancestors have become almost redundant in towns, contributing to judgments by reformists that they were outmoded in all areas of Ladakh. The lba legitimated social segregation in the name of religious preservation, surrendering the dialectic tension between ‘‘circular time’’ (which marks the genesis, destruction, and reincarnation of the dead) and ‘‘linear time’’ (in which the dead have forsaken the world of the living to enter into a removed and remote domain) in favor of a doctrinal interpretation of Buddhism by labeling local customs heterodox. But mortuary rituals, as David Holmberg (1989) has illustrated, do not necessarily contradict the textual constructions of Buddhism; rather, they can be ‘‘paratexts’’ through which Buddhist ideology takes accessible form.51 Fields in Leh were often circumscribed by brick enclosures (gyang), but fields in Achinathang seldom had fences, in spite of occasional scuffles over ownership of property, stray animals, and government subsidies for fence construction. Aba told me that to build a bounded wall around one’s fields was considered antisocial and egotistical, erecting barriers that distanced individual space from community interests.52 Houses and fields belonged to individual families, but they were not discrete or insular. Although there were different levels of entry and exit into a house, both symbolic and material, the house was a passage through which the traffic of sheep, goats, and humans constantly traveled. For Buddhist farmers in Achinathang, burial grounds and crematoria lay outside the trails on which the living tread, but the exclusion of the dead was not final. If displeased, they might return as malignant spooks, hungry ghosts, or souls that had lost direction. If appeased with appropriate rituals of hospitality, they could become protectors of the living. On the eve of the Buddhist New Year, women marked their kitchen doors with fresh spots of flour to ensure that ghosts, if they should wander back into their house, would flounder in confusion on seeing these unfamiliar marks and, becoming convinced that they had entered the wrong house, leave once again. Ancestors, however, were verbally invoked at the hearth on occasions when important meals were served and fields were ploughed for the first crop. They were propitiated with food and offerings on the hearth, on rocks outside the homestead, and on the edges of the mother-field. Bits of wheat bread, barley cakes, liquid butter, and chang were placed on rocks at the margins of fields in gratitude for the

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founders who had first cleared the land. The first households to commence plowing were those that belonged to the families of the initial settlers. To honor ancestral beings, both Buddhist and Muslim families in Achinathang celebrated the festival of mamani in the cold of winter, although dates of observance differed. Victuals for mamani included cooked legs and heads of goats and sheep that had been stored through the year and buckwheat bread (tan-tan, fruit of the second harvest).53 On January 21, Muslim villagers visited graves of their forbearers and read the Koran. They exchanged food with each other in an appointed field. Mamani is said to be of ‘Brogpa origin, having found its way into Purig and Ladakh by way of Gilgit and Baltistan.54 In Khalatse, the mamani feast used to be held beside a row of shrines called mamani mchod-rten, a name that denotes a mixture of Buddhist and ‘Brogpa views of the world. Yet, in the ideology of purity that prevailed during the Boycott, the past was polarized into discrete segments at the expense of syncretic rituals. The devotional or placatory aspect of ancestor rituals met with stern reproach from some Islamic clerics in Kargil, who denounced the veneration of ancestors as being hazardous to the fundamental belief in one god. Celebrations of mamani and ancestor propitiation, with their animal sacrifices and legacy of burial, were also condemned by the lba as Islamic in nature or as remnants of an unenlightened and misguided pre-Buddhist past. But if, as Sikander Khan (1987) reports, citing an inscription deciphered by Francke in 1904, mamani is held to pay homage to the founders of the Ba-ni-yar tribe of Gilgit and to the first ‘Brogpa leader, Melo, then its significance is particularly subversive, testing the lba’s claim to authentic and timeless Buddhist control in the territory of Ladakh. Moreover, ancestors were present even in more orthodox Buddhist practices, spatially concretized through mchod-rten, edifices that contain relics of saints, venerable monks, and dead relatives. These reliquaries sometimes occur in formations of three (rig gsum mgon po), painted white, red, and blue. In scriptural treatises, this color system is attributed to the trinity of the Great Protector Buddhas: Avalokitesvara (Boddhisatva of compassion), Vajrapani (Boddhisatva of power), and Manjusri (Boddhisatva of knowledge). However, laypeople often gave alternative explanations that divided the cosmos according to local beliefs, relating white to lha-yul (realm of the gods), red to btsan-yul (realm of the terrestrial deities or demons), and blue to kluyul (realm of the subterranean guardians and water serpents). This does not imply that farmers in Achinathang were ignorant of the formal significance of

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The dben-sdum mchod-rten in Achinathang.

sacred shrines. On the contrary, the new dben-sdum mchod-rten in the midst of the residential area in Gongmathang, constructed in 1986, was selected from among the eight different architectural styles of mchod-rten that are representative of the eight essential acts of the Buddha’s life.55 After a particularly distressing and conflict-ridden period in Achinathang, villagers hoped that with the construction of this shrine peace would prevail, as it had when a council of monks constructed an epitaph of peace when polemic discord threatened to disrupt the unity of the Sangha (the monastic order) during the life of the Buddha. In the course of their routine activities, people circumambulated the mchod-rten in a clockwise direction, creating a repertoire of merit and symbolic capital with the circular motion of their bodies, agents setting in action the wheel of time. But in 1991, peace was hard to procure. As a result of the Boycott, Muslim neighbors from Achinathang, who would otherwise have attended Jamyang’s funeral, were not invited. Although clandestine rebellions continued through covert purchases from Muslim shops and informal social visits, the policing

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that went with the Boycott generated an environment of intense censorship and suspicion in the village. Ritual habits of consuming chang and foods like tshogs and kap-tse and feeding the ancestors, all aspects of Jamyang’s funeral feast, were now inseparable from the reigning conflict. Viewed through this broad political and social framework, hybrid performances became all the more conspicuous and attempts to suppress them all the more dictatorial. MEDIATING PURITY, PERFORMING SNGO-LHA

Barely two months had elapsed since the episode at the Tung-pa household when I found myself playing participant and observer in a controversial cultural performance in another Inner Line village. After the funeral episode, I decided to focus my research on those occasions to which I was specially summoned and where my presence was not an element of surprise or doubt. That summer, Lobzang, the president of the Association for the Cultural Preservation and Promotion of Mingchanyul, invited me to write about Mingchanyul’s three-day-long sngo-lha festival. This festival celebrates the availability of pasture as the tops of mountains green and blossom with flowers. It is linked with fertility and economic abundance. The word sngo-lha is rooted in the color sngon-po, which refers to the blue of the skies and rivers and the green of the fields and grass. Villages in Sham, including Achinathang, mark the day of sngo-lha with a keg of chang. Householders bring curds and milk to a common field on the designated night to be eaten with ta-kyi. They appoint herders to lead the livestock out of the village to graze in the high pastures. Lobzang guaranteed that the sngo-lha of Mingchanyul would be worth the strenuous journey. With a population of around 550, almost half of whom identify as Buddhist and half as Muslim, the village was accessible with considerable difficulty from both Leh and Kargil. Mingchanyul means ‘‘famous place.’’ I call it that because it had once acquired fame, almost legendary, among lovers of folklore for its unique, hybrid culture. I first heard of Mingchanyul through a politician who had a poet’s soul, Akbar Ladakhi, president of the Ladakh Muslim Association in Leh, who described it as the epitome of harmonious living and religious tolerance. After that, I came across articles by Ladakhi writers who had visited it at different times.56 I read that children born in its vicinity were given two names, one Buddhist and one Muslim; when they grew older, they would select a religion and a name that corresponded with it. Members of both faiths cooked their meat in the same pot; the halal portion was tied by a string to distinguish it from the muldar one.57

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The first man to go on hadjj in the entire Purig region, from Photula in the west to Zojila in the east, belonged to Mingchanyul; despite the prestige he had earned in the Islamic world, he had sent his son to Lamayuru monastery to become a monk. I requested Aba to accompany me to Mingchanyul as he felt passionately for its mixed heritage and had led many enthusiasts and writers to this area. We asked Apo Roziali to sing a sngo-lha song for us, but it was a Friday afternoon, reserved for prayers and mosque affairs, and he was mindful of being watched by neighbors. He recited these lines instead: Hundred boys born in the Tiger Year gather fragrant chondol flowers. Hundred girls born in the Sheep Year gather rose buds. In the valley below, sngo-lha is coming. In the fields above, srub-lha is coming. In Brusha, harvest time is coming. But what rises in the sky? Let long-tailed comets rise. What takes birth in the earth? Let leaves of poison take birth. Aba and I made our way to Mingchanyul on the sixth day of the fifth lunar month of that Iron Sheep year. Crossing the Indus on a precarious wooden trolley, we reached the other side of the river, and then, after four long hours through winding mountain paths and green fields of barley, we saw the tall, white dar-chen flag that marks the entrance point to a settlement. Silhouettes of ruined castles loomed over whitewashed houses in the twilight, Phatamkhar, Thato-mkhar, and Mentog-mkhar, castles built by armies of the brave warrior king from Brusha (now Gilgit), Thathakhan, who is credited with founding Mingchanyul in the ninth century. Aba pointed out the site of the birch tree that villagers believe blossomed from Thathakhan’s walking stick. The stars shone so brightly that clear Himalayan night that I felt I could almost touch them. We followed the trail made by drums and flutes till we reached the dancing ground, where the villagers and their guests were gathered. On seeing us, Lobzang and his team of young volunteers led us to the gathering. Aba was given a place in the men’s gral, high up in the seating hierarchy with other male guests but just below the monks and the headman. I too was welcomed warmly. The dancing ground was covered with a parachute canopy for the occasion. The villagers had spared no expense: they had hired a diesel generator and a loudspeaker; they had filled huge, pencil cedar kegs

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with chang and placed them in the center. Women clad in velvet sulma and serpentine, turquoise-studded headgear danced with slow, languorous steps that made them look as if they were gliding. The men took the floor after them. Then young boys, young girls, and guests danced, until it was midnight and time to shift the party to private houses. Sleeping arrangements for the guests had been made at the village oracle’s house, but I, being an outsider, was not permitted to enter this sacred space. Instead, I was taken to Lobzang’s house. We sat around the hearth and planned the agenda for the following day. I complimented them on their superb organization. Lobzang informed me that every year, wage earners and professionals like him returned to the village for sngo-lha. He said that they would come back even if they were posted on the Siachen glacier. Wangchuk, the secretary of the Association, spoke with pride of the importance of tradition and authentic culture. They had mandated that all villagers dress in Ladakhi attire; violators of the dress code were subject to fines. The music, too, was genuine, he noted, not the adulterated disco beats played in other festivals. A youth named Stanzin, who had been quiet until that moment, interceded, remarking that if things had changed, it was because the Muslims had attempted to postpone the sngo-lha festivities until after Moharram, the period when Shi’as mourn the martyrdom of Imam Hussain. But Buddhists had opposed this move on the ground that the date for sngo-lha had been fixed for hundreds of years, long before Islam entered Ladakh. Subsequently, an argument involving rights to the use of the dancing ground had ensued between the two groups. Wangchuk revealed that police had been summoned from the station in Chigtan to halt the sngo-lha festivities. The solution the authorities proposed was that, as the dancing ground belonged to the village as a whole, it should be partitioned into two so that both the ceremonies could be held simultaneously. This decision had been unacceptable to the Muslim mourners, who decided to retreat to the imambara. Lobzang and his friends reported that the resolution had caused so much ill will among members of the Muslim community that they refused to watch the dances as they had in the past; only children sneaked in and out when their parents weren’t on the lookout. Stanzin was more critical of the situation than the other youth. He kept referring to the Muslims as phyi-pa (outsiders) and to their customs as go-log (inverted). His friends teased him about his fervor, but Stanzin was not in a humorous mood. He looked at me earnestly and confessed that he had been a practicing Muslim before converting. Recounting his reasons for choosing

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Buddhism, he said that his entire family was Muslim except for one brother, and like other boys his age, a bride had been brought for him when he was fourteen. He had lived happily with his bride for seven years until she eloped with the akhon’s son. Stanzin had learned to read the Holy Book from the akhon. He confessed that he had lost faith in the akhon’s words and in the religion system the akhon advocated after his failure to speak up against his son’s actions. ‘‘A man rejects his religion when his heart is broken,’’ Stanzin said solemnly. Soon after this disclosure, Lobzang turned to me and confessed that he had invited me in the hope that I would set the record straight. According to him, a couple of writers from the big town had visited and written ‘‘incorrect stories’’ about villagers eating together and intermarrying. Mingchanyul’s inhabitants had been left alone for years. Then, fearing that the village was caught in the grips of a state of heathenry, the ikmt from Kargil began sending mullahs to teach Islam and the lba from Leh sent monks to institute reforms. Discord set in as people tried to become ‘‘true Muslims’’ and ‘‘true Buddhists.’’ The Boycott may have succeeded in Leh, but it could not work in Mingchanyul. Here, the phyi-pa were inside their homes: cousins, brothers, mothers. Where could they go if they boycotted them? I was instructed to take down the ‘‘true history’’ of Mingchanyul, one in which there had been no interdining between different faiths and no intermarriage without conversion. I had not bargained for being selected as the chronicler who would disavow a history of religious plurality. I went to bed with a sinking heart. At the crack of dawn, Lobzang awakened me so that I might accompany the men setting out for the high pastures. I turned down the offer, preferring to walk with the women to fields where young girls were stringing dried magenta roses into garlands. The women cautioned me against touching the flowers until both the lha-rdags and village headman had checked with Aba that I was unmarried. The lha-rdags is the guardian of the village deity. He led us to see the purification ceremony (sangs) a few yards away from the women’s gathering, explaining that it had been introduced only two years earlier, even though Skyabgon Rinpoche, chief abbot of the ‘Bri-gung-pa order, had prescribed it as a substitute for ‘‘anti-Buddhist’’ animal sacrifices when he toured the region in 1975.58 The local youth too had been trying to convince the farmers that sangs was the civilized way to propitiate the gods, but the villagers were uneasy and some of them suspected that deities too remained less than satisfied. As the lha-rdags talked, twigs and leaves of different trees smoldered

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on embers of coal. The clang of cymbals filled the air. With fragrant sticks of incense and prayers of atonement, the presiding monks purged Mingchanyul of evil. We returned to the fields. Men streamed down from the mountains, bringing indigo chondol flowers they had gathered. They chopped poplar trees to make long poles. Lobzang informed me that it was considered inauspicious to jump over these poles. Garlands from domestic flowers made by the girls and wild mountain flowers collected by the boys were hung onto the poles. The new initiates cleansed themselves by taking a dip into the murky pond in the midst of the fields. Once, perhaps, in the distant past, men would have ridden on horses and stomped through barley fields belonging to the king. Barren women would have prostrated themselves before the poles. On another day, elders would have designated skilled herders to take the lactating cows, goats, and other livestock to the hills. Nominated herders would have been honored with prayer scarves and a round of the best and most potent chang. But there was no respite for Mingchanyul that day. Frictions between the wage laborers (mulazim), who lived away from the village, and the farmers (shar-ba) came to the fore. The headman of the village was furious because someone had walked off with his garlands and some of his poplars were missing. His accusations of theft aroused the ire of the volatile youth, who began plotting to depose him. Meanwhile, the procession of men and nubile girls moved toward the shrine singing the famous mentog ltadmo (flower show) song that calls for benevolent rulers, abundant harvests, plentiful wool, salt, and water, and joy in the assembly of friends.59 After two stanzas, the men in the crowd let out the victory cry ‘‘Yasha, yasha, yasha!’’ during which the poles all bowed in a circle. But interruptions became more frequent as quarrels erupted between the inebriated supporters of the headman and his opponents, threatening to disrupt the entire festival. We reached the shrine somehow. The girls offered their garlands to the protective deity of the village, stag-pa lha-chen, the Great God of the Birch Tree. Lobzang and the others took me to the shrine of the village deity, where horns of ibex and goats were piled up to form a pyramid with sacred juniper branches in their midst. Knowing that this was a rare occasion when women were permitted to approach the shrine, I felt very lucky. I saw Aba in the distance and moved in his direction, anxious to share my excitement. But a man stood in front of him, yelling. ‘‘You are responsible for what afflicts us. I’ve seen you bring strangers here and I’ve heard your programs on radio. Now

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our village will be contaminated. How can we know if she is really unmarried. Leave at once! We’ll show the Indian woman around ourselves.’’ He lunged toward Aba. Others restrained him. The girls I had walked with tried to console me, asking me to excuse his drunkenness. Aba drew me aside and whispered that it was important for us to leave before the sun set. He feared that things would get worse as people got more intoxicated. He had been kept up all night by the interrogation of a group of young men who had demanded that he never assist anyone to write about their village except in ways they considered appropriate. I did not want to leave without thanking Lobzang. I didn’t know if I would have a chance to reconcile things, to set the record straight. But not wanting to jeopardize Aba’s safety or place Lobzang in a compromising position that might widen the gap between the youth and the elders, I followed Aba in miserable silence. Apo Roziali’s rendition of the sngo-lha song kept echoing in my head. It was only later that I learned that Apo had accidentally omitted a verse and a few words so that instead of a prayer for protection (‘‘Let long-tailed comets not arise’’ and ‘‘Let leaves of poison not take birth’’), the song had turned into a sinister prophecy.60 I wondered if my experience was symptomatic of a general malaise associated with sngo-lha or if the sngo-lha I had witnessed had been uniquely horrible. Friends in Achinathang had spoken about the fair as a time for picnicking, dancing, and finding potential wedding partners. Some of them, including Aba, had affinal kin in Mingchanyul. Most certainly, symbols of cleansing and purging recurred in the rituals, gendered in ways that positioned me, both a woman and an outsider, as a polluting agent. I reprimanded myself severely for not refusing the invitation of the youth to join the procession to the shrine. As Mingchanyul receded behind us, Aba and I could hear the faint wails of women and the thump of hands beating chests as Muslim devotees mourned the martyrdom of Imam Hussein. The desert stretched on endlessly before us as we walked back to Achinathang.61 ETHNOGRAPHY WITHIN THE INNER LINE

In the years that have passed, I have tried to understand the events that transpired in Achinathang and Mingchanyul in 1991. Although I do not have all the answers, I know now that at a point in time when severe constraints were placed on the residents of Achinathang and Mingchanyul to comply with regional struggles, my efforts to examine the preparation of funeral foods at the Tung-pa house and the rituals of sngo-lha were reminders to some that

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I was an urban outsider who might judge their culture unfavorably. It is not that funeral feasts and seasonal festivities are private or secret occasions.62 In fact, they are both performances that invite and even require participation. Funeral feasts are called shi-ston, where the word for feast, ston, can also mean ‘‘to show’’ in its verb form. But rivalries between the youth and the farmers, magnified by the Social Boycott and pressure from Islamic and Buddhist clerics, had been put on display in cultural shows. In my attempt to converse across cultural borders and get an authentic understanding of Ladakhi performances, I had crossed thresholds that led to protected zones. Where the ‘‘front stage’’ of the performances was open to me, I had attempted to go ‘‘backstage.’’ 63 I was not a supporter of the cultural reforms or a stereotypical tourist content with the front stage, but as an anthropologist concerned with observing and recording, my presence too was inscribed in discourses and histories of travel, cultural control, and surveillance.64 The effects of the Boycott were far-reaching, transforming all major facets of life in Ladakh. For those of us writing about culture at the time, our anthropology was inevitably shaped by its constraints. Thus, while doing her research in the western valley of Nubra, Smriti Srinivas (1998, 46) found that, ‘‘as the boycott was in force, my moving between the Muslims and Buddhists in the village created difficulties for me as an uneasy participant-observer in a time of strained relations.’’ Commenting on her stay with the pastoralists of Changthang to study their system of weaving, Monisha Ahmed (1996, 54) acknowledged that she concealed her religious identity because ‘‘I was emphatically told that if I was a Muslim I could not stay in Rupshu, because the boycott prevented them from allowing Muslims in Buddhist areas.’’ Although there were other researchers questioning issues of identity and politics in Ladakh, what Smriti, Monisha, and I shared in common was that we are Indian ethnographers who had access to Inner Line zones because of our nationality.65 Committed to a humanist and pluralist ideology, we looked to border locales for our fieldwork projects. Yet we were educated youth from India’s major cities who had no experience making a livelihood through farming or pastoralism. As we crossed into the Inner Line, we too were positioned as contested agents, implicated in the performances of power through which cultural knowledge was transmitted. One month before Jamyang’s funeral, clutching my Inner Line permit, I had boarded the bus for Achinathang on a gloomy, cold day with snow falling in thick, white drops and rumors of disasters and slippery roads ahead. The crowded bus made it way through hazardous slopes. Whitewashed mchod-

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rten and mani walls garnished the landscape, interspersed with brightly painted yellow shrines delivering cautionary messages in English to motorists: ‘‘My curves are gorgeous, handle them smoothly’’ and ‘‘Accidents are prohibited here.’’ The wretched trip was transformed into a carnivalesque ride when, eight hours later, in Skyurbuchan, a raucous wedding party boarded the bus, golden-hatted gnya’-bo-pa and arrow-brandishing bkra-shis-pa escorting a bride to her affinal home in Achinathang. The gnya’-bo-pa (witnesses) are the groom’s peers, led by a bkra-shis-pa (an auspicious person, chosen from among those whose parents are both alive). Wedding performances were an important aspect of my research; all of a sudden, the claustrophobic enclosure of the bus faded and I faced the expanding vista before me with a renewed sense of orientation. This interruption, which I interpreted as an auspicious omen of welcome, proved to be the opposite when we finally reached our destination. Villagers informed me that the wedding was the last of the year because it was the first day of spring in Sham, the beginning of the sowing season. Nuptial feasts are celebrated only in the cold of the winter, when fields are bare and there is labor to spare. I had observed several weddings in Leh town during the summer but had not anticipated any seasonal restrictions elsewhere. In Achinathang, when people were just getting used to having a stranger in their midst, a neighbor came into Aba’s house to look for me. Aba had just finished applying the last layer of mortar to the brick wall that he had been constructing to extend my room into the courtyard so that I could have a private place to bathe. The outer walls of rooms in Aba’s house have words etched in them to designate the function of the room (kitchen, chapel, bathroom) and dates for the year that the room was built or the year that the information was written by a youthful Aba anxious to practice his calligraphic skills. The neighbor who entered said that his wife had a severe backache. I heard him request Aba to ask the Kha-cul-ma for some medicine. With my limited comprehension of colloquial Ladakhi at the time, I didn’t catch very much of that conversation, but the word Kha-cul-ma, which means ‘‘woman from Kashmir,’’ stuck out. The neighbor had probably assumed that I was a government official or schoolteacher from the Kashmir valley because women from regions outside the State seldom came to Achinathang. Government employees occasionally visited the village to file progress reports and survey the status of education, health, and economic growth. Staff members of State administrative bureaus and departments were generally appointed from areas outside Achinathang.

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Often, policies for yar-rgyas (development) were executed without adequately assessing their relevance to the village community.66 In Achinathang’s Lungba settlement, for instance, a primary school building was constructed by government contractors, but it was placed right next to the cremation ground and remained abandoned for a long period because most of the pupils and teachers were afraid to approach it. When I questioned the government contractors about their action, I learned that the only piece of land the villagers were willing to surrender for erecting the school was that which they deemed worthless for cultivation. This failed project was an indication of the alienation that farmers felt from the modern education system. Besides being associated with development personnel, I was also classified by religion and profession. When I stayed in Yogmathang, people frequently remarked at how Islamic my name sounded. Behind my back, the most common name given to me was Bombay-mo (woman from Bombay). This was revealed to me one day when I was passing by a house and the children began screaming that I should come in, calling my attention by shouting ‘‘Achele, Bombay-mo! Ache-le Bombay-mo!’’ They were chastised by an elder who smiled politely and uttered a cursory ‘‘Skyod-lé’’ (Come in), which is a common greeting not to be taken literally unless repeated several times. Although I had established that I was living in the United States, it was my Bombay home that registered most with villagers. One evening, when Ama brought home some helpers (bes-pa) who had assisted her in plowing, a young dancer donned a mask and sheepskin and was persuaded by the others to perform a ‘‘disco dance’’ in my honor. He began with a popular Bollywood tune mixed with some new lyrics: A, b, c, d, e, f, g. . . . From g came Gandhiji. Gandhiji went to Pakistan. Pakistan exploded a bomb, From the bomb came Bombay. From Bombay comes my friend. Greetings to my friend! Eat and drink at night, Sleep during the day. The place from where I had come continued to arouse much curiosity. My very presence in the area of Achinathang into which only Indian nationals may be officially permitted convinced the villagers that I was an Indian (a per-

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son from ‘‘down’’), but, as a young woman traveling alone, I did not conform to their images of the Indian plainswomen who they had typically encountered as army wives, schoolteachers, or actors in Bollywood films. My double agency confounded local categories of phyi-rgyal-pa (foreigner) and rgya-garpa (Indian national). Initially, I was subjected to permit checks and quizzes about my hometown. I was told the tale of a haggard, beggarly woman who had once passed through this village. So pitiful had her plight been that some women had been moved to give her barley and water. But they soon found out that their hospitality had fed a spy, a young, able-bodied woman disguised as an old hag. For several weeks after that, when people stared at me, I felt that they were waiting for me to take off my mask. I was mistaken for a spy on another occasion when I stopped by the house of the village council member in Yogmathang to ask him to inform me of upcoming weddings. The word that I used for weddings was bag-ston, but instead of pronouncing the initial consonant as a ‘‘b,’’ I had enunciated it as a ‘‘p’’ so that the word sounded more like pak-ston, a way of speaking that I had learned in Leh which the villagers designated as stod-skad (high speech) because Achinathang is considered part of Sham or lower Ladakh versus the Leh area, referred to as Stod. The member had mistaken my request as a request for information on Pakistan, a misunderstanding that enhanced my association with the exotic world of international espionage. That incident, coupled with my own expectation that ritual time in Achinathang would be no different from that in Leh, were among the factors that identified me as someone who was obviously not a farmer but a person akin to a towndweller from Stod. Stories of espionage are frequent in an area where military inspections regulate entry and exit. Ladakh’s history is replete with narratives of travelers who have resorted to subterfuge to enter Tibet via Ladakh during the Dogra/British colonial period, including George Littledale, Captain Hamilton Bower, and Surgeon-Captain W. G. Thorold (Hopkirk 1983). In the 1860s, under the recommendation of a Royal Engineer officer named Captain Thomas George Montgomerie, Indian scholars (pandits) were also trained and recruited by the Raj’s intelligence service to travel undercover in Tibet when Tibet was closed to the West. As Peter Hopkirk has demonstrated, Sarat Chandra Das, the author of Indian Pandits in the Land of Snow (1893) and A Tibetan English Dictionary with Sanskrit Synonyms (1902), was a Bengali writer and spy whose journeys to Tibet between 1879 and 1882 revealed considerable information about the Lhasa Court but also brought disgrace and punishment to the people who unwittingly collaborated with him.

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At the turn of the nineteenth century, the development of transport facilities and the availability of guidebooks and photographs propelled more visitors to Ladakh. Most of Ladakh’s Western visitors had previously been officerhunters on holiday from their posting in the northwest frontier; they were now joined by landscape artists, mountaineers, and sightseers. Visitors that came to Ladakh during the colonial period were attracted more by exotic difference than spiritual empathy. Only sporadically was Ladakh presented as a place of enhanced spirituality; artists such as Nicholas Roerich painted brilliantly hued Himalayan landscapes that were haunted by an unshakable mysticism. In addition to officers and explorers who crossed into what are now Inner Line areas, colonialism also sanctioned the presence of missionaries who set out to rescue Ladakhi souls from the dark constraints of Buddhist ignorance. A church was established by Moravian missionaries in the block capital of Khalatse. Missionary scholars such as Heinrich August Jaeshke (who compiled a well-known Tibetan-English Dictionary first published in 1881), Friedrich Redslop (who founded the Mission School in Leh in 1886), and August Hermann Francke (one of the most prolific scholars of Ladakhi culture) set out to convert the inhabitants of the region to Christianity in order to liberate them from devil worship and heathen beliefs. But according to John Bray (1985), some of these missionaries later came to acquire an admiration for Ladakhi customs. A contemporary of Francke, the Moravian missionary Samuel Ribbach (1940/1986), authored a fictional biography, Drogpa Namgyal, about one man’s struggle to come to terms with religion in Khalatse. Although this book offered a more sympathetic outlook on local customs, it ends in a climactic finale, when, on hearing about the death of its protagonist, a learned Buddhist hermit from Khalatse proclaims, ‘‘I myself have recognized that the way and teaching of Yeshu [Jesus] is good. It is wrong to believe in the thousands of Buddhas and gods and to make offerings to them. There is only one God and one Saviour. To believe in him and to concentrate one’s thoughts on him in meditation—that is true religion’’ (200). By the mid-twentieth century, the pursuit of Eastern philosophies imprinted itself more firmly in postwar Europe and the United States, but by then, Tibet (which had already been hostile to foreign visitors) was invaded by China and Ladakh was closed off as a ‘‘protected area’’ in postcolonial India. The restrictions on foreign travel to Ladakh were relaxed in 1974, and with the completion of the Leh-Srinagar highway in 1976 and the operation of Indian Airlines flights for civilian purposes in 1979, national and international visitors began to make their way in.67 Within a short while, tourism took over as

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Ladakh’s largest income-generating industry after the military and governmental administrative sectors. After 1976, tourist interests and tourist currency also influenced the performance of Buddhism in Leh, shaping the partial selection of some rites over others. Practices considered eye-catching and exotic found a special place in the lore of travelers. For example, several travelogues reported the spectacle of disposing of the dead in Tibet, where the flesh of a corpse is fed to birds (e.g., Seth 1983; Iyer 1988). Death in Buddhism assumed extensive popularity in the West with the widely read text Bar-do thos grol (translated as Tibetan Book of the Dead ), a translation of a spiritual text of the Nyingmapa sect of Buddhism. This text, note Peter Bishop (1997) and Donald Lopez (1998), has come to stand for most of Buddhist eschatology in the West and has been reincarnated in various versions, each version influenced by the position and history of its translators. Even as the ritual aspects of religious life in Ladakh were becoming objects of curiosity, the packaging and marketing of Buddhism was based on the historical proclivity in the West for granting credibility to its meditative, monastic, and textual forms. As Peter Bishop (1989, 95) states, ‘‘It was easier for the West to produce a rational and coherent ‘Buddhism’ from textual sources than from the seemingly chaotic and culture-bound practices of Tibetan religion.’’ Such views of purity were also part of some of the scholarship on the Agitation. Thus, John Crook (1990), conflating Kashmiri Muslims with Ladakhi Muslims, blames Muslim capitalists and leaders for creating cultural strife by gaining undue trade advantages over their innocent and naïve Buddhist compatriots. Simultaneously, he denies Buddhists agency by denouncing the Agitation as a phenomenon merely rooted in modernization and in the bourgeois sentiments of competition and individualism, perpetuated by Ladakhis ignorant of the true principles of Buddhism. Attributing the present crisis to a fall from spiritual purity, Crook writes, ‘‘Of Buddhism itself they have little learning, and their interest in meditation is limited to stress reducing, mind calming practices of a non-hierarchical non-monastic form suitable for improving the performances of bank managers or engineers’’ (385). Reformist discourse from Leh and Kargil was influenced by these perspectives, often at the expense of histories that signaled the region’s multiple practices. After 1995, foreign tourists in groups of four were allowed to visit Achinathang, but they mostly used it as a rest stop on their way to the Da-Hanu area, where they hoped to experience what was advertised as its authentic and quaint ‘Brogpa Indo-Aryan culture. Although tourists tended to pass by

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rather than engage in the life of Achinathang, their existence was not peripheral; residents cited tourism as a measure of the affluence or corruption that separated other villages from their own. In turn, they were indirectly subject to constructions of authenticity that tourist preferences shaped. At the door of the Tung-pa house in 1991, amid the crisis of regeneration caused by death, my presence as a traveling fieldworker had called for new thresholds of arbitration between insiders and outsiders. Like roving ghosts who may or may not become beneficial ancestors, my behavior too was itinerant and unpredictable.68 When asked what my profession was, I could not find a word corresponding to ‘‘anthropologist,’’ so I identified myself as a generic writer (‘bris-mkhan). I was always attending performances and asking questions about history and culture, but the purpose of my endeavor was not entirely clear to many villagers. They were accustomed to folklore enthusiasts being singers and storytellers themselves, not youth from different cultures. Most people continued to think I was writing a guidebook for tourists. It was members of Aba’s family and his network of friends who were much more accepting of me, although eventually I developed long-term social bonds with several other villagers. Youth closer in age to me, curious and anxious to make connections beyond the frontiers of their village, extended offers of friendship, as did villagers too old to farm who were happy to have an eager listener. For the rest of the community, my habit of asking questions and taking notes accentuated my difference from farmers. This distrust was even more pronounced under the ritual danger of bar-do because, in their eyes, social reintegration and successful rebirth come with detachment and acceptance of mutability. Never would people perform funeral laments for me outside a funeral setting, and I was instructed never to reproduce them in Ladakhi. Like a soul in bar-do, my lack of awareness and inability to comprehend impermanence could have proven haunting and menacing in multiple ways. It was only as I gained confidence in my ability to speak the local dialects, as my reliance on foods and goods that could only be purchased from the markets of Leh decreased, as I learned to be comfortable with my surroundings, allowing my body to follow the paths up and down the mountain without reflecting on the possibility of falling, and as I began to spend most of my time in the family kitchen, the center of social life, that my image began to change.69 The kitchen was the place where the family cooked, ate, slept, and entertained guests. During winter, human activity revolved around the winter kitchen in the lower story, and during the summer months, social life moved to the upper kitchen. The kitchen also had special symbolic signifi-

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cance in the religious beliefs of Buddhist Ladakhis. It contained the central pillar of the house, which is interpreted by Paul Murdoch (1981) as representing Mount Meru, the axis mundi of the Buddhist cosmological universe; Murdoch considers the skylight of the kitchen through which smoke passes from the hearth and exits upward to be a symbol of the connecting passage between the earth and sky worlds. Kitchens were multipurpose units, structured around hearths that varied in shape and size. Older kitchens, mostly in the Lungba, had hearths made from three pieces of stone (zgid-bu). Almost every house in Achinathang possessed an iron hearth (lcags-rgyad), chiseled by a smith, with multiple stoves to enable several pots of food and water to cook together. A few wealthy households had large and intricately carved metal furnaces for cooking. Nowadays, most houses have a gas cylinder that is used in conjunction with the iron stove. It was around the hearth that hospitality was most poignantly expressed. A hissing, crackling fire signaled the arrival of guests; an overflowing pot of chang became portentous of a party. When Ama cooked, she occasionally left one piece of wheat bread on the frying pan during daylight so that the deities who visited the house would not return hungry. Night, she said, was a time for the demons and so her pan was left empty to deter the unwelcome visitors. The kitchen was also a central arena for the expression of identity. In Achinathang, most households did not have separate rooms for looking after guests, although the wealthier houses and newly constructed residential extensions were all equipped with at least one area that served as a bedroom and entertainment room. Within the kitchen, the inner wall, behind the hearth or directly adjacent to it, gleamed with the shine of metal—copper, brass and steel pots, pans, plates and spoons, all decorated on shelves along the wall. For the first few months of my fieldwork, only those who were comfortable exhibiting their surroundings would invite me into their kitchen and agree to divulge their lineage histories. Others were more reticent, preferring to entertain me in a guestroom or even on the terrace, constantly apologizing for the unclean floor and unruly environs. Within a few months, I became so attached to the kitchen in the houses I lived in that I found it virtually impossible to tear myself away from the warm fire fueled by cow dung and wood. And the onset of winter meant that few people expected me to sit elsewhere. Eventually, as the seasons went by and I continued teaching in the middle school, I came to be addressed by my first name or by kin terms, such as a-che-le (elder one) or no-mo-le (younger one). Eventually, too, the Boycott was revoked in 1992. It had been a landmark

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period in Ladakh’s history, with ramifications that were to span several years. ‘‘When the elections start again,’’ Sonam Wangyal had predicted, ‘‘the boycott will be lifted but the lines of hatred in people’s hearts will take long to heal.’’ Soon after, new lines began appearing on the map of Ladakh, demarcating zones within them as protected and restricted national parks for the preservation of the flora and fauna residing there.70 But as disparities in economic power and regional ways of knowing were not adequately addressed, the everyday rituals of violence and differentiation that the Boycott ushered in continued to divide communities along religious and ethnic lines.

CHAPTER THREE

Screening a Contested Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Since long Ladakh has been attracting film-makers. It provides barren landscapes inhabited with joyous and hard-working people. Away from the noisy cities, one can find a perfect place for filming here. —ADVERTISEMENT FOR SNOW LEOPARD TRAILS, INDIA

I personally feel that anyone who comes to Ladakh, who wants to make a film here, they use our location as it appears to them. But actually Ladakh is something more than it appears. The reality is something else. We are not just barren land and a moon and an Indus river flowing. We are something more than that. We are a civilization; we have a way of life. —PHUNTSOG LADAKHI, FILM DIRECTOR

One November night, when a postnuptial sulum party for Sakina Bi and her in-laws was in full swing, a crew from the Special Services Bureau brought to Achinathang a documentary about the valor and patriotism of the Indian army. The film, which had several shots of soldiers guarding the Himalayan border, was projected on the façade of a mountain to a rapt audience that had collected in a field by the stream that divides Gongmathang from Yogmathang. The soundtrack was amplified by the narrow, enclosed gorge so that those of us watching from a high ledge in Yogmathang could also catch most of the words. Viewing a film featuring border mountains on a natural screen made by them was a surreal and mesmerizing experience. Not many such spectacles were available in the village; the sulum faced stiff competition.

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At opportune moments, guests and family members discretely slipped away from the wedding house and gathered in this moonlit theaterland. Among the onlookers, I saw Sakina’s mother, her relatives, and friends. The last time I had seen them all was when Sakina had performed the skyin-’jug laments at her departure ceremony two days earlier. With her face covered in her hands, sobbing and lamenting, she had taken leave of all the villagers present. Had it been a week before, these onlookers may have appeared to me as people in their own right, with formal birth names and well-earned nicknames— Zulfiqar Ali, Grandmother Fatima, Master Hussain, Seven-toed Moosa, Truant Tundup, Cunning Mariam. But now that Sakina had spun them into the webs of her history, demonstrating her claim on them through skillful verses, they became mere ciphers that had drifted in and out of her world at one time or another. The land around us was equally transformed: the mulberry tree became her childhood playmate, the zigzag pattern in the sand a path on which she had scampered to and fro, the field below a product of her watering and weeding, the adobe house a home she both cherished and deserted to elope with her lover, and the school building in the distance the bane of her existence. I, too, had become a footnote in her story, the female peer/guest writer that she would leave behind. Sakina stayed indoors, but even as we sat watching the documentary without her, our interactions, our seating choices, the familiar tone of our words to each other, momentarily reflected our participation in her wedding ceremony. Somewhere between Sakina’s imprint on her village and her physical absence from the film lies an entire history of representing ‘‘home’’ and ‘‘belonging’’ in Ladakh. In this chapter, I illustrate how popular films set in Ladakh play on colonial and postcolonial conceptions of gender, geography, and race to present borders as feminized landscapes. These films perpetuate a notion of homeland that reinforces national integration and male control. Gender, as feminist theories of performance have argued, is a process of becoming that is created and reproduced in performance.1 Viewing gender as performance allows us to move away from naturalizing identity and directs us toward the practices, histories, and political economies through which bodies become gendered. Studies of frontera spaces such as the U.S.-Mexican border have reframed perspectives of gendered performativity further by highlighting the boundaries created by race, class, ethnicity, and sexuality (Anzaldúa 1987, Limon 1994). They alert us to ways in which rites of performance can fall short of bringing about transcendence and effective resistance of subject positions

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when they are appropriated by dominant agendas or themselves mask power and masquerade as margins.2 From the several documentaries and features filmed in Ladakh, I have selected four films—The Razor’s Edge, Haqeeqat, Dile Se, and Sonam Dolma— that are self-consciously framed as performative and aesthetic enactments of Ladakh’s cultural realities.3 The characters in these films are alternative in the sense that they look beyond the comforts of home in their search for individual or collective fulfillment. But despite their attempts at identifying with the margins, they reinforce structures in which the center is masculinized and the border becomes female and raced. Difference, established through landscape, costume, and plot, becomes a key mechanism for composing Ladakhi character in Hollywood and Bollywood films. In these films, the roles available for playing Ladakhi women draw on models of women’s freedom and resistance only to reproduce centralized and conventional gender, race, and center/border dichotomies. Within Ladakh, too, women-centered performances focus on ‘‘reproduction or retreat,’’ as Ria Reis (1983) phrases it, in which women are expected to be caretakers of ‘‘home,’’ of religion, nation, and family. Classic and popular narrative plots involving women are structured around their relevance to principles of agnatic kinship and male transcendence but rarely acknowledge the role of female descent groups, women’s fluctuating experiences of home, or their struggles for land. Skyin-’jugs laments, which are almost exclusively performed by women, however, clearly demonstrate that the perception of homeland is not uniform. Such multiple and contested conceptions of home have also been noted by several authors who have documented performances, poems, and lyrics by South Asian women (e.g., Desjarlais 1992; Grima 1992; Narayan 1986, 1997; Raheja and Gold 1994). From their research, we can deduce that women’s words contain elements that collaborate with the maintenance of the status quo as well as components that refuse to comply with existing forms of domination.4 In the same vein, the skyin-’jug genre both permits the confirmation of patterns of male descent and offers a conduit for women to express sentiments of alienation, speak against deterritorialization, and redress their historical absence from discourses of citizenship. Including these performances in contemporary films set in Ladakh can work as weapons for disenfranchised groups in frontiers that are embattled.

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A LOCATION FOR WAR AND DISCOVERY

There was a time before the 1990s, before it became marked as a violent battlefield, that the Kashmir valley was pictured as an idyllic honeymoon destination and a fashionable outdoor location. Scenes from popular movies showed film stars rolling in the snow, rowing around the Dal lake in a shikhara (gondola), strolling along misty pine forests, or dancing in flowery gardens against the backdrop of the Himalayas. The valley also featured as the setting for narratives in which a hero from the plains would lose his heart to a budding Kashmiri beauty. Films on Ladakh, by contrast, have largely dwelled on romance thwarted by war or corruption. Instead of lush, green vales, shots of the landscape are composed almost as if romantic love could not be consummated on its rocky terrain. Wartime strategies and territorial conflicts have influenced the types of films made and shown in Ladakh. The 1960s, following the Sino-Indian war, were significant in the history of media and entertainment. A Field Publicity Department was established in Leh in 1962. This department was assigned the function of arranging programs on health, education, national integration, and development through cultural programs, exhibitions, seminars, and screenings of Hindi films and documentaries prepared by the Films Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting.5 During this decade, a theater for the entertainment of military troops, the Trishul Hall, was also built in Leh. In 1967, a movie theater was built by license holders Abdul Qadir and Abdul Qayum Benaras for providing ‘‘entertainment to the people of Leh.’’ 6 During the 1980s, the availability of video players and satellite dishes made films accessible in private homes. A television tower with a range of forty-five kilometers was erected in Stok, near Leh, in 1995, and from 2002, Prasar Bharati Broadcasting Corporation of India started televised transmissions from its Doordarshan center in Leh. Serials, shorts, and music videos on Ladakh were commissioned by Kashmir Doordarshan. Ladakh-related projects were sponsored by Kashir, a new channel inaugurated in 1998 by Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah as counterpropaganda against Pakistani information networks. Political considerations and sensitivity to Ladakh’s border location were also behind the Indian government’s refusal to authorize Ladakh as the venue for Martin Scorcese’s Kundun and its retraction of permission previously given for filming Annaud’s Seven Years in Tibet.7 The government was mind-

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ful of arousing Chinese displeasure at projects sympathetic to the Dalai Lama. The one Hollywood motion picture that had been filmed in Ladakh, The Razor’s Edge (1984), had much to do with war, too, but a war in which Ladakh served as a buffer, and not the arena itself. This version, a remake of the 1946 film starring Tyrone Powers, is based on Somerset Maugham’s (1944) novel with the same title. It heralds the birth of a new American hero, Larry Durell, who rejects the conventions of the post–World War I boom in the United States to discover himself through work and travel rather than money and marriage. Durell, played by Bill Murray, eventually finds himself not in the rowdy cafés of Paris or in genteel company in Chicago but in the mysticism of India. Traveling not as a luxury tourist but as a middle-class spiritual explorer, he learns that the solution to economic depression at home is a pragmatic return to the ‘‘work as worship’’ ethic. The location where he acquires this wisdom is India, which in the novel and first version of the film is portrayed as a Hindu ashram in the mountains. By 1984, Western impressions of India as a third world country teeming with people didn’t deem it quite as suitable for solitary self-actualization. In Murray’s film, the Hindu ashram is replaced with Thiksey Gompa, a Buddhist monastery in Ladakh. His character ascends up the mountains from the first level in Srinagar, where he is chased by a screaming horde of urchins, to the streets of Leh, with its mellow and cheerful women, to the monastic world of abbots and initiates which is purely male, and then finally, individually, to the summit, where he acquires enlightenment after walking a path that is described to him as being ‘‘difficult as the sharp edge of a razor.’’ Before embarking on the last two stages, Durell trades in his Western garb for an outfit that is supposed to appear more local. The moment of anxiety that this switch causes is dealt with by Murray clowning around in front of a row of women selling vegetables in the marketplace of Leh. ‘‘What do you think, honey? Too much? Not enough?’’ he asks of the women, not expecting them to either understand English or respond. Then, picking up an elongated, cylindrical turnip from the vegetables spread in front of them, he asks, ‘‘Shouldn’t this one be walking by now? Do you ever think of giving it a cold shower or aspirin?’’ The camera pauses, registers the women’s nonunderstanding, and then shifts to one woman laughing unabashedly as the actor loses his footing and lurches forward amid this tomfoolery. He addresses his Kashmiri escort with this conclusion: ‘‘You know, I could do well up here, I think.’’ Durell’s sexual innuendoes, his lack of a sense of propriety or selfconsciousness at parading publicly before these women, and the cameo role

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Bill Murray in monks’ robes in The Razor’s Edge (1984), directed by John Byrum.

assigned to the laughing Ladakhi woman capture some of the ways tourists interacted with locals in the 1980s.8 But this scene has historical precedents, too, that are rooted in cartographies of conquest and what Ann McClintock (1995) terms ‘‘articulated categories’’ of gendered, class, and racial differentiation through which the West understood Ladakh and its women. NOT LIKE HER VEILED SISTER

The route from Srinagar to Ladakh taken by Murray’s Durell was also a route taken by numerous explorers and officers from the West during the colonial period. The accounts produced by some of these travelers describe the valley of Kashmir as the essence of feminine beauty, shrouded in mystery and soaked with the fragrance of roses. It was a hilly beauty, away from the heat and dust of the plains, comparable in climate to England, one that caused several writers to express their disapproval that Kashmir had not been made a British colony. Their disapproval versus the justification for England’s official position on the status of Kashmir is illustrated by a conversation that Lieutenant-Colonel Torrens (who made a hunting trip to Ladakh via Srinagar in the 1860s) has with his friend, Lord William Hay, deputy commissioner of Simla and superintendent of Hill States, in which the latter spells out the British government’s logic for supporting the Dogra maharaja. Lord Hay ar-

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gues that direct British rule over Kashmir was not viable economically because a huge military expenditure would have to be incurred and because Kashmiri soil was unsuitable for lucrative plantations of coffee and tea. Moreover, English settlers, tempted by the climatic similarities to make Kashmir home, would be forced to marry local women, a proposition so unpalatable to Lord Hay that he remarks, ‘‘What greater curse can befall a country than to be overrun by a race of half-breeds—endowed with all the bad, deficient in all the good qualities of the parent stock?’’ (Torrens 1862, 59). Official considerations aside, leisure time fantasies of imperial subjects created a grid of desirability codified in terms of geography and race, at the apex of which were virginal, fair-skinned, and rosy-cheeked Kashmiri women in their picturesque surroundings. ‘‘I cannot help thinking that the pureness of the water is in great measure the cause of the Cashmeree being physically so much finer than natives of the plains of India,’’ wrote a sportsman, Cowley Lambert (1877, 76). Commenting on the attractiveness of Kashmiri women, Godfrey Vigne, one of the early travelers in Ladakh, wrote that they were ‘‘gifted with a style of figure which would entitle them to the appellation of fine or handsome women in European societies. They have the complexion of brunettes’’ (1842/1981, 143). As British intervention in Kashmir became more entitled and authoritarian, images of its beautiful landscape recurred, but Kashmiri people were erased or denigrated in colonial representations (Rai 2004). Great Game geopolitics also affected the British position on Kashmir in the mid–nineteenth century, and as the acquisition of Kashmiri-held provinces such as Gilgit became imperative for patrolling the frontier, Kashmiri men became the target of criticism. It was the ethnic groups at the frontier, the Afghans, Sikhs, and Gorkhas, groups that the British classified as ‘‘martial races,’’ that were grudgingly admired or feared for their masculinity.9 Colonized by Moghuls, Afghans, Sikhs, and then Dogras, Kashmiris were regarded as weak, insincere, and cowardly. Given their quarrelsome disposition, commented Major Gompertz (1928, 27), ‘‘not unnaturally, the Kashmiri doesn’t govern himself.’’ Instead, in his view, ‘‘real men’’ such as the Moghuls had been more equipped to rule, and the British were, ‘‘like them, aliens also to India, and like them, therefore, naturally fitted to govern’’ (25). Similarly, Alexander Cunningham (1854/1998, 278) reasoned that Kashmiris had never invaded Ladakh because their ‘‘effeminate’’ nature had been deterred by its extreme poverty and hostile climate. Yet, if Kashmir was conceptualized as a veritable paradise in travel lore,

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Ladakh was described as stark and bare, devoid of sweet and soft nature. It was rugged and hard, a place where the veils and curtains had been drawn aside to expose a topsy-turvy land, ‘‘where magic is properly at home,’’ according to Major Gompertz’s Magic Ladakh, a book that was written in 1928 but is still cited today. At the time that Gompertz was writing, the economic offerings of Ladakh had already been exploited to the advantage of the British by the establishment of the position of joint commissioner in 1867. So, despite occasional comments about the atrocities of Dogra rule and how much better the simple souls of Ladakh would have fared under the British, travelers rarely cast a covetous gaze upon its landscape or women. Remarking on taxes paid by Ladakhi landholders to the Dogra maharaja, the British captain William Henry Knight (1863/1992, 230–231) notes, ‘‘It seems a hard case that such hardly-subsisting people should have to pay anything whatever in such a sterile dreary territory as they possess.’’ The British fancied themselves the protectors of indigenous mountain folk against patriarchy and tyrannical Dogra rule. But, as Chitralekha Zutshi (2003, 69) argues, the discrediting of Dogras and Kashmiri Pandits in ‘‘antimiddlemen colonial rhetoric’’ has to be viewed in the context of increasing imperial desire for economic and administrative control over Kashmir. Much as they railed against the injustices that the maharaja heaped upon Ladakhi folk, British travelers were not reticent about using their passports to extort labor, pack animals, and supplies from villagers (e.g., Adair 1899). Authors such as Gompertz (1928) portrayed Ladakhi men as courageous, ‘‘sturdy animals’’ rather than resistant warriors, attributing their lack of fighting spirit to Buddhist beliefs in nonviolence. Ladakhi women, Gompertz wrote, moved about freely, unlike their ‘‘veil-cursed’’ Eastern sisters (62). Gompertz’s view is corroborated by Captain Edward Frederick Knight (1893), who traveled in Ladakh in 1891. Knight had this to say of Ladakhi women: ‘‘These uncomely creatures wander about openly and unveiled, look the Englishmen fearlessly in the face, and greet him with a cheerful smile’’ (46). Similarly, on their expedition ‘‘from the vale of Kashmir to the barrens of Ladakh,’’ Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt (1926), sons of Teddy Roosevelt, declared, ‘‘This is the land of woman’s emancipation. No longer was the adult feminine population kept in the background. Women working in the fields straightened up and greeted us as we passed, and once I saw a man and woman laughing and jostling each other as if they were good friends and comrades—something unimaginable in India and Kashmir’’ (22, 37). The Roosevelts’ information on Indian women may have been influenced by their meeting with Katherine Mayo (1927), the

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American author of Mother India, a widely circulated book that condemned the plight of Indian women and recommended British intervention as the only recourse to their misery.10 In the same vein, Frederic Drew (1875, 250), who served as governor of Ladakh for the maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir, wrote that the liberty of Ladakhi women ‘‘is as great as that of workmen’s wives of England; not only do Ladakhi women go about unveiled, but also they mix where men frequent and enter with them into their pursuits of business or pleasure, and partake too of their toil.’’ The mobility of Ladakhi women, for necessity and not pleasure, was singled out as a point of similarity with working classes in England. But for Drew (1875, 252), among others, their independence was marred by the custom of polyandry, which ‘‘has a bad effect on their natures; that, beyond the openness which one admires, it makes them over-bold, shameless, and causes them to be in a general way coarser than their other circumstances need make them. I attribute the greater facileness, as compared with neighbouring countries, with which those connections with foreigners are formed that have resulted in so many varieties of half-castes at Leh.’’ Polyandry was an issue that virtually every writer mentioned to delineate difference, whether out of curiosity or repugnance or for the sake of appealing for a relativistic understanding of this practice. Casting colonized peoples and landscapes as virginal or sexually aberrant was a means to justify colonial penetration and occupation, contend Mary Louise Pratt (1992) and Ann McClintock (1995) in their critical writings on the history of Western travel. Locating the ideological and material underpinnings of the British empire in its complex aesthetics of body and landscape, Inderpal Grewal (1996, 57) writes that ‘‘colonized women, and here my focus is on Indian women, were never seen as beautiful the way Englishwomen were believed to be.’’ Grewal shows that beauty and virtuosity were linked with the qualities of whiteness, transparency, domesticity, leisure, and nonsexual fertility of British women at ‘‘home’’ and contrasted with the picturesque plainness of peasant women in the ‘‘fields’’ or with the danger, mystery, and fear of Indian women believed to possess sensuality solely for the sake of pleasure. In Ladakh, masculine desire intersected with what Saloni Mathur (1999, 96) terms ‘‘a complicated sexual and political economy,’’ where native identity was staged by accentuating divisions that both fascinated and repelled Western travelers. Even when Ladakhi women were likened to English peasants, topographic and racial typology was used to distinguish them, and most writers in the colonial period wrote disparagingly of their physical appearance.11 For

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instance, Drew (1875, 239) notes, ‘‘There is no doubt that they are an ugly race; their best friends cannot deny it. As to the women, the best that can be said of their looks is that some of the younger ones are ‘not so bad looking.’ ’’ A philosophy of Social Darwinism underlay much of the description of racial types made by Alexander Cunningham (1854/1998, 294–295), one of the members of the Boundary Commission of 1847, who speculated that negative physical traits of the Ladakhis were linked to their culture: ‘‘I am unable to say positively what may be the cause of the great number of very short women; but I am inclined to attribute it partly to the system of polyandry which prevails among them.’’ In a crude travelogue written in the style of a safari guide, the British hunter Augustus Henry Irby (1863, 142) opines, ‘‘Both are wonderful countries: Cashmere, for its beauty and fertility; Thibet, for its savage desolation and sterility. The natives of each land, too, partake strongly of the relative characteristics of their land: the Cashmiries, famous for personal beauty, the Thibetans, as notorious for ugliness.’’ Over the years, as alternative and Eastern philosophies became acceptable to a postwar Europe grappling with the meaning of life and death, as travel to Ladakh was restricted by the postcolonial government of India until the 1970s, as access to Tibet, ‘‘the sacred utopia’’ of the West, was closed after the Chinese takeover in 1959, and as mass tourism, environmental crises, and population pressures reduced the enchantment of traveling on well-trodden tracks, Ladakh took on a hue of revered spirituality to be gazed at with greater romantic and less critical differentiation.12 But the extraction and export of religious knowledge from Ladakh to the West did not dispel disparities in travel or in the distribution of capital. Given this history, Bill Murray’s cross-dressing in The Razor’s Edge in what is supposed to be native wear becomes a game that reiterates gender and race boundaries, a passing that is what Ann McClintock (1995, 70) calls ‘‘the privilege of whiteness.’’ 13 His flirtatious encounter with Ladakhi women allows him to adopt a desexualizing posture, inserting them in a racial world outside the realm of Western desire, but simultaneously, by exaggerating a mutual camaraderie born of sexual freedom, depriving them of membership in a respectable female world. The Ladakhi woman’s response of resistant and ridiculing laughter becomes nonthreatening because it has already been appropriated and categorized. And so, seated in the streets of Ladakh, without a speaking part, Ladakhi women inhabit their peripheral place in the saga of a Western male journey to the peaks of enlightenment right through the land they dwell in.

A Contested Landscape 113 LANDSCAPE AND SEXUALITY IN NATIONAL REPRESENTATIONS

Colonial rhetoric feminized India’s landscape while constructing Indian women as passive prisoners of barbaric, oversexed, and oppressive traditions. Anticolonial campaigns also mapped the female body onto their imaginings of an India free from British rule. In these nationalist struggles, the figure of Bharat Mata or Mother India, signifying the abstract nation, assumed different forms, ranging from avenging goddess demanding blood sacrifices of her patriotic sons to sorrowful victim of colonial rape and pillage; from selfeffacing and supportive mother to Gandhi’s storehouse of moral uprightness and nonviolence (see Kumar 1993). As Sumathi Ramaswamy (2003) shows, colonial cartography erased precolonial depictions of the earth as feminine; nationalists now inscribed these colonial maps with bodyscapes of Bharat Mata to produce an anthropomorphized India that could be simultaneously nativistic and territorially expansive, scientifically modern and religiously ordained. Even as her parameters remained distinctly modern, this cartographic goddess was made to share the aspirations of a colonial and Vedic geographical imaginary, extending ‘‘a setu himachalam,’’ from the Himalayas in the north to the oceans in the south (Deshpande 2000, 178; Ramaswamy 2003). But what of lands such as Ladakh that stretched even beyond the Himalayas? How to account for their incorporation into Indian space? Nationalists approached this issue in contradictory and complicated ways. Coping with the multiple realities of Indian society and the trauma of Partition, the framers of the Constitution of India were aware that postcolonial India had to accommodate diversity. One of their chief strategies was to design a country that recognized linguistic, ethnic, and religious differences, but that nevertheless could be integrated into a comprehensive union that surpassed these differences. With secularism upheld as a principal ideal, it was not religion but an indigenous way of life fostered by the soil that was to be the basis for state formation. In his congratulatory speech to Rajendra Prasad on being elected chairman of the Constituent Assembly on December 11, 1946, Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, one of the framers of the Constitution and the first vice president of India, proclaimed, ‘‘A nation does not depend on identity of race, or sentiment, or on ancestral memories, but it depends on a persistent and continuous way of life that has come down to us. Such a way of life belongs to the very soil of this land. It is there indigenous to this country as much as the waters of the Ganges or the snows of the Himalayas, from the very roots of our

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civilization down in the Indus Valley to the present day, the same great culture is represented among Hindus and Muslims. We have stood for the ideal of comprehension and charity all these centuries.’’ 14 Ladakh’s membership into the Indian union was justified on two counts. Even though the princely state of Kashmir had acceded to India, some of the policymakers felt that it was outside their jurisdiction to make the Constitution take effect there. But as far as Ladakh was concerned, Ladakhi leaders themselves had asked to be hugged to ‘‘the bosom of that gracious mother (India)’’ (Sridhar Kaul and Kaul 1992). Although it was decided, after some debate, that the Kashmir question could not be settled solely by legislation prescribed by the Constitution of India, requests by leaders in Jammu and Ladakh served to sow the seeds for retaining federal control over the area.15 In addition, Ladakh also qualified for inclusion on account of its Buddhism, a religion that originated on the ‘‘spiritual soil’’ of India, and because the river Indus, from which the name Hindustan was derived, flowed through Ladakh from the ‘‘cradle of civilization,’’ Lake Manosarovar in Tibet, where the Vedas are believed to have been first recorded. The geographical and historical realities of Ladakh, however, did not match the center’s grandiose vision of its golden heritage or development potential. In virtually every travelogue and official document, the word ‘‘barren’’ was used to describe the region. Travelers remarked on Ladakh’s aridity versus the perceived fecundity of the Indian soil. Thus, Major Ahluwalia (1980, 3), who fondly referred to Ladakh as the ‘‘Central Asian Diamond,’’ opened his book, Hermit Kingdom Ladakh, with these lines: ‘‘ ‘If there is a paradise on earth, it is here, it is here, it is here,’ exclaimed the Moghal king, Jahangir, moved to such ecstasy by the beauty of Kashmir. He was doubtlessly enthralled by the valley’s lush greenery, its abundance of flowers and fruits, its shimmering springs and translucent lakes. He could not have possibly been thinking of that arid region in eastern Kashmir which is known as Ladakh.’’ Differences were expressed not just through gendered topographic contrasts but through cultural and racial ones as well. For example, Kashmiri Pandits, who formed the Kashmir Raj Bodhi Maha Sabha in pre-Independence days, feared that Ladakh’s isolation and deviation from Indian Buddhism into Tibetan Tantric practices had given rise to strange customs and religious rites (Bertelsen 1996). These neo-Buddhists in Kashmir strove to reform social practices such as polyandry that they associated with erosion of character, sexual license, and reproductive stasis. In the discussions held at meetings of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association, polyandry was described as a

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‘‘shameful custom’’ that had allowed Islam to expand by slowing down Buddhist population growth and generating a surplus of women, who were forced into interfaith marriages and conversion (Bertelsen 1996, 146–148). In addition, they feared that the custom of primogeniture that sustained polyandry created friction between brothers and adversely affected solidarity within the Buddhist community. Under the recommendation of the Pandits, King Jigmed Namgyal submitted a memorandum according to which the Praja Sabha passed the Buddhists’ Polyandrous Marriages Prohibition Act in 1941. A couple of years later, in 1943, the Ladakh Buddists’ Sucession to Property Act was levied, permitting all the brothers in a family to inherit family property. In a country where population pressure was the subject of much concern and policymaking, and where the rising tide of displaced persons after Partition made land distribution an urgent task, Ladakh’s low population density may have seemed a function of underutilized or sterile land relations. But this misconception also came from understanding economic productivity only as commercial agriculture and industrialization.16 Descriptions of Ladakh’s culture and geography through metaphors of sexuality and reproduction persist even after Independence, and even more thorough political analysts such as Chaman Lal Datta (1972, 24) describe ‘‘Lamaism’’ as a perverted form of Buddhism, clothed in Tantric mysticism and ‘‘impregnated’’ by ‘‘the ancient gods and spirits of former inhabitants, thus making it a medley of superstition, wild beliefs, and contradictions.’’ Datta attributes Ladakh’s colonization by the Dogras to conditions within Ladakh where the kings had allowed themselves to be dominated by queens. Similarly, the Gazetteer of India’s (n.d., 86) publication on the Ladakh region states, ‘‘In its pure form Buddhism vanished more or less entirely and what is prevalent in Ladakh today is Lamaism.’’ Male writers frequently remark about the ability of Ladakhi women to travel and associate with men. Thus, Sridhar and H. N. Kaul (1992, 158) note that young Ladakhi girls traveled on pilgrimages with men who were not related to them and danced in mixed gatherings with the ‘‘least sex consciousness,’’ although they do warn the reader that this should not be construed as sexual license. Correspondingly, Kak (1978, 2) maintains that ‘‘the women of the Buddhist tablelands enjoy complete social liberty; they go about unveiled and know no social taboo. One cannot come across any kind of inhibition or even subdued expression of discontent when the women mix where the men frequent and enter with them into their pursuits of business or pleasure.’’ Sheo Raj Singh (1969, 115), leader of a twenty-seven-member Border Security

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Forces expedition, points out that the local women his team encountered in Zangskar ‘‘were not at all self-conscious and gathered around our camp and wanted to join the boys in playing cards. But again this too free mixing had to be discouraged!’’ He goes on to conclude that five of the expedition members ‘‘reached the summit of a 19,500-foot virgin peak on which they were able to hoist the national and bsf flags’’ (117). Linking the Ladakhi landscape with sterility, virginity, or freely moving women, without immediate productive or reproductive capability, gives it the appearance of a wilderness that is sexually out of control or else waiting to be brought under control. It is argued that the presence of the Indian army has brought about economic progress, instilling morality and monogamy in Ladakh (e.g., Kaul and Kaul 1992). In the imaginings of the center, Ladakh could be claimed as an extension of postcolonial India by virtue of a common heritage and a common future based on modernization and economic development. When analyzed through ‘‘actual rather than ascriptive’’ lenses, to borrow Agehananda Bharati’s (1978) phrase, however, it has a historical, racial, and cultural identity that does not conform to the ‘‘persistent and continuous way of life’’ that Radhakrishnan had conceived to be crucial for Indian nationhood. Thus, central and State policies either domesticate Ladakh’s historical and racial differences by the processes of tribalization, or else acknowledge and exaggerate them in distinctly gendered forms so that backwardness, barrenness, and dysfunctional sexuality became characteristics of both its women and its soil. The legacy of these portrayals still haunts the representation of Ladakh in popular media. MOTHER INDIA’S IMPOSSIBLE DAUGHTER

The very first time that a Ladakhi woman was portrayed in a mainstream Indian film was in Haqeeqat (The truth), directed and produced by Chetan Anand in 1964 under his Himalaya Films banner. Set against the backdrop of the Sino-Indian war and hailed as a masterpiece of realism, Haqeeqat aimed to present an authentic and humanistic account of the war through its blackand-white cinematography, lengthy battle scenes, and actual footage from newsreels of the time. Made just seventeen years after India’s independence, it was dedicated to the first prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, and his ‘‘Unity in Diversity’’ motto, which rested on the faith that the nation was the guardian of justice, and citizens of diverse regions and cultures all shared the unified objective of protecting it from external invaders.

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VHS cover of Haqeeqat

One of the primary female characters in Haqeeqat, the half-Kashmiri and half-Ladakhi Angmo, is characterized as one such loyal patriot. Angmo is drawn into the national struggle when she meets Captain Bahadur, son of the brigadier in charge, through her younger brother, Sonam, who hero-worships Bahadur and hopes to grow up to be a brave officer like him. Their first encounter is in the form of a rescue mission, with Angmo crying for help and Bahadur saving a bleating goat kid entangled in a tree on a rocky precipice, a task she is surprisingly unable to perform given that she plays a village girl. They fall in love instantly, and Bahadur admits to seeing the entire beauty of the landscape reflected in her eyes. Bahadur’s infatuation for Angmo entices him to follow her to Leh and into the throes of war on the border, where several soldiers are congregating to man the military posts. The odyssey of these soldier-heroes from different parts of the country to the far frontiers of Ladakh is narrated through flashbacks, songs, and letters. Stationed in the Changthang region, the territory they are defending is so unfamiliar that the young soldiers and junior command officers are filled with doubt about committing to war emotionally and physically. The boundaries of the fledgling nation are not clear in their minds and they are unsure about whom the land belongs to or if they should even risk their lives saving it. At this point, a major intervenes and clarifies the difference between peaceful and nonaligned Indian nationalism versus the expansionist, imperial, deceitful, and ungrateful nature of Chinese communism. Would India guard such barren territory

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if it were not rightfully hers, he demands to know. The men are convinced and pick up their guns. The encouragement of women and family members back home sustains the morale of the troops. In a letter that a young soldier receives, his bride writes that she has heard that ‘‘not a blade of grass grows there’’ (echoing what Nehru said of the Aksai Chin territory that was lost to the Chinese during the war), so she is sending some seeds and soil from the flowerpots he had planted with his hands.17 She urges him to think of her when the flowers blossom. Her letter goes on to promise that when he returns he will find her dressed as a bride, just as he remembers her. The camera follows the contours of the bride’s lushness lying in wait on the marital bed, bejeweled and adorned in bridal finery, and then returns to parched images of the Ladakhi landscape, highlighting the soldier’s dual responsibility of safeguarding the national frontier and the domestic one. But inasmuch as the border is deemed worthy of protection, it can grow and remain fertile only with the transplantation of a seed from the center, nourished and watered by the soldier-husband.18 Eventually, as the Chinese army advances, his attempt to salvage this plant will lead to his death. The callings of conjugal bliss, in the form of the ‘‘desexualized mother and the wife/lover whose sexuality was contained,’’ can ‘‘be capable of heroic nationalism,’’ as Purnima Mankekar (1999) observes in her provocative reading of Paramvir Chakra, a television serial of the 1980s by the same director, Chetan Anand.19 Beauty and erotic love must function as strategies for national reproduction; they have no place on their own.20 When conjugal duty is uncontained and gets in the way of national and filial duty, the outcome is lethal. Once the men are killed, brides don the garb of widows, stripping off their gold bangles for war donations. In the end, the soil of the nation takes over the role of the bride, as the following lines from Haqeeqat’s famous patriotic song, ‘‘Kar Chale Hum Fidaa,’’ suggest: Let them surrender Beauty and Love Those youth who have not bathed in blood. Today the earth has become a bride, friends. We leave this nation in your custody, friends Dedicate to you our body and life, friends.21 It is not only daughters and mothers from the plains but border subjects, too, who support the war effort. Although helpless and coy, Angmo trains for war when needed, overcoming her femininity to fight by Bahadur’s side

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against the enemy. If she survives, he will take her to his home in glittering Delhi and buy her beautiful clothes and jewels and introduce her to his mother. Instead, she is captured by the Chinese army, whose tactics of torture and rape are likened to Ravan’s dishonoring of Sita in the Hindu epic, the Ramayana. As the lovers are killed defending the last post, their hands strain toward each other but never meet. The survivors who take the last salute are the unmarried major and Angmo’s young brother. The song of martyrs, ‘‘Kar chale,’’ that marks the film’s finale equates Angmo with Sita and the Indian soldiers with Sita’s husband, Ram, and brother-in-law, Lakshman, who waged an epic war to protect her honor. Angmo’s identification with Sita reveals the hope of assimilation in Nehru’s version of nationalism. Overt differences in race and religion are downplayed, and if they are brought to the screen, it is through folk costumes and occasional hints of linguistic plurality. The appeal of Haqeeqat lies in its emotive depiction of the innocent nation under attack from external invaders. Songs from the film continue to be performed in virtually every Independence Day program across the country. But now ethnic unrest and separatist movements are rampant in the states of Assam, Manipur, Nagaland, Jammu and Kashmir, and Punjab. Dil Se (From the heart), the second Bollywood film to allegorize the nation/border nexus in an interracial love story partially set in Ladakh, is left to address the question of violence within the state.22 Released in September 1998, it is part of a wave of Bollywood films dealing with the subject of nationalism and insurgency.23 Petitioning the Indian Censor Board to grant it tax-exempt status, the film’s director, Mani Ratnam, claimed, ‘‘We are trying to bring the social concerns plaguing our country to mainstream cinema.’’ He went on to add, ‘‘In our limited way, we have tried to reach out to the people of the peripheral/bordering states—their problems, their lives and their loves. The problem with mainstream cinema is that it never locates the films in a geographically identifiable territory. The place of the event/narrative is always kept vague. I am changing that.’’ 24 In Dil Se, too, the border is embodied in a female character, Meghna, played by the film star Manisha Koirala. Meghna hails from a community that has been tortured and betrayed by the very nation that promised it liberation. Heir to a legacy of army violence and sexual brutality, she resorts to militancy. Together with a few accomplices, she sets out to fulfill the mission assigned to her to assassinate the president of India on Republic Day. It is on a stormy night on a railway platform that she first runs into Amar, the protagonist of the film. In stark contrast to Meghna’s genealogy, Amar’s line of

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A still from the song ‘‘Satrangi’’ in Dil Se (1998), directed by Mani Ratnam.

descent is a model of postcolonial citizenship: a father martyred in the army, a grandfather who was a freedom fighter in the Indian National Army. As a program executive for All India Radio, Delhi, Amar is on his way to the border to record the reactions of citizens to the fiftieth year of Indian independence. Icon of urban, middle-class manhood, Amar embarks on his Discovery of India aboard the railways.25 As Amar interviews citizens of the Northeast about progress made in the past fifty years, he is confronted with their disillusionment and anger. The only words of faith he can recover are from the mouths of little children, who recite in the tones of rote learning, ‘‘India is the best, saare jahaan se achcha.’’ Amar pursues Meghna to get to her heart and to connect with the pulse of the nation in a journey that takes him from the jungles of the Northeast to the desertscape of Ladakh. Watching Dil Se, I was reminded of a Ladakhi saying: ‘‘The seasons of Ladakh are like the fashions of Bombay.’’ Ladakh’s unpredictable weather has even been noted in glossy tourist brochures, where I’ve seen it written that here one can die from frostbite and sunstroke all on the same day. In ‘‘Satrangi,’’ a song sequence of this film, Bombay’s fashions dance in harmony with the changing seasons of the Ladakhi terrain. Meghna slips in and out of clothes that are now as frosty as the blue Pangong lake of Changthang, flowing chiffon as its windswept sandy plateaus, achingly white as its icy winters.26 The chorus rasps a verse by the nineteenth-century Urdu poet Mirza Ghalib, comparing love to the divine flame of attraction that no power can resist or extinguish.27 ‘‘Tu hi tu, tu hi tu satrangi re’’ (Only you, only you, are sevenshaded), the besotted Amar tells his beloved, only she is the rainbow-colored, complete love experience. Amid exotic locations, lyrics of yearning, and photography reminiscent of glamorous commercials, woman and landscape be-

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come one—unpredictable, mysterious, untranslatable. In the remaining segments of the film that are shot in Ladakh, Meghna, wearing a dark, pleated robe tied with a sash at the waist (gos), both mimics a Ladakhi woman to escape security forces but also becomes an allegorical representation of India’s border regions. Personified by Meghna, border areas in the film signal their resistance through their refusal to be integrated into or identified by the mainstream (she admits that her name, too, is false). Throughout the movie, the director decentralizes linguistic uniformity, interspersing Hindi with Urdu, Malayalam, Assamese, and Ladakhi, in a manner that bears his signature in past movies.28 Similarly, the film depicts national diversity through religious pluralism. Thus, Meghna is a Christian in the Northeast, placing flowers on graves in the title song ‘‘Dil Se’’; a whirling dervish in the ‘‘Satrangi’’ number, evoking the Nurbakshi, Sufi, and Shi’a history of the region; and a Buddhist in Ladakh, kowtowing in appropriate ritual fashion before a statue of Chamba, Buddha of the future. In the second half of the film, shot in New Delhi, Meghna and her revolutionary cohort appropriate state-sponsored institutions as sites of resistance. Using her connections with Amar, she secures a job at All-India Radio, her colleagues infiltrate the army, and the Rajpath parade on Republic Day is first brought to the screen not through the usual congratulatory news clips, but through the imaginations of those who are planning to sabotage it. In an interview with the Indian Express, Mani Ratnam, Dil Se’s director, is quoted as saying, ‘‘All the border states are suffering from similar problems of insurgency. Repression has not been able to stem the trouble. Their demands and sentiments have to be taken care of instead. Maybe we should try to understand them and extend a warm hand. And that is what Dil Se tries to do.’’ 29 But if the border qualifies for national understanding in Haqeeqat and Dil Se, it is in its essentialized feminine form. The classification of the center as Hindu and male remains constant. In Haqeeqat, there are almost no adult Ladakhi men throughout the film, despite the fact that several Ladakhis were recruited in the Jammu and Kashmir Militia, which fought in the Sino-Indian war. The surviving Ladakhi male is a pubescent boy who does not pose the risk of crossing the border into Delhi but has the potential to enable national survival by taking his appropriate place in the armed forces when he grows older. In Dil Se, the border man, now come of age, is not content to surrender his rugged brawn to become a porter or paramilitary trooper. He demands more of the central government and of the modern nation and is thus, inevitably, cast as a secessionist. Most border men in the film (besides a revolu-

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tionary northeastern leader interviewed by Amar who is accorded a benign normalcy) are portrayed as sinister, violent, useless, and one-dimensionally unemotional. Enabling Amar to cross borders are women from the peripheries: a camouflaged rebel who escorts him into the militant camp and a sympathetic, maternal, radio station director who challenges his assumptions of male leadership but, because she is a mother, refrains from venturing into dangerous zones of conflict. Meghna, the object of Amar’s obsession, also serves as a bridge between center and border. In his initial encounter with all three, Amar expects to find a male but learns that in these border locations, gender roles are markedly different. Meghna becomes a figment of his fantasy. As a victim of the state, without sexual agency, she is deserving of compassion. As a woman traveling alone, however, her sexuality is suspect. She is contrasted with Amar’s virginal fiancée, daughter of a family friend from the southern State of Kerala, whom he agrees to marry to please his family when Meghna vanishes, leaving him high and dry in Ladakh. Meghna’s indifference and independence suggest to Amar that she is capable of tribal practices such as polyandry. ‘‘You people have four or five husbands,’’ Amar accuses when her companions challenge him for conduct that veers close to sexual harassment. In various scenes of the movie, Amar’s Orientalizing gaze sees Meghna as small-eyed, flat-nosed, high-cheek-boned, a visual contradiction for the viewer looking at Manisha Koirala. The scene that takes place just after Amar has finished proposing to Meghna and she has turned him down reveals his racial apprehensions. Assume we are married, Amar asks Meghna, do you think we will be happy? Teasingly, he begins charting out the course of their married life; when it comes to the subject of children, he remarks that one thing is for sure: their children should look like him, with a face like his and similar eyes. She replies that if he wants them to look like him, he can keep them. Amar feigns consternation and demands to know if she would want them to resemble her, with her small eyes and flat nose. And when Meghna questions his characterization of her nose as small, he adds, ‘‘Kya tumhe kisi ne bataaya nahin ki bas tumhaari hasi hi thhik-thhaak hai?’’ (Did no one tell you that it is only your smile that is all right?). Although this dialogue is scripted as lighthearted banter, Amar’s invocation of the smile of the border woman as her one asset both recreates colonial descriptions and subverts them, for Meghna rarely smiles in the film. Besides relationships of romantic love, maternal symbols are also central to the plots of both Haqeeqat and Dil Se. In Haqeeqat, the portrait of Baha-

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dur’s mother constantly watches over his brigadier father as he charts the defense of India’s territory on a map. The father urges his soldiers to replace the customary worship of Lakshmi, the goddess of wealth, on the occasion of Diwali, the Festival of Lights, with prayers to the ‘‘dark mother,’’ Kali, who can be appeased only with blood sacrifice. Kali, the avenging mother, was a favorite goddess in the anticolonial struggle, too. When the prospects of good harvests and economic progress have been hindered by the invasion of the nation’s territory, then the brigadier in the film suggests that it is not Lakshmi but Kali who should be invoked in prayer. The portrait of Bahadur’s mother seems to take on these different manifestations. More directly, she sanctions his relationship with Angmo, writing that she can gauge from his letters how a desolate place like Ladakh has flourished through the presence of this beautiful girl. In Dil Se, Amar’s mother in Delhi is less willing to accommodate Meghna, but she eventually welcomes her into her home as Amar’s friend and coworker. Giving this raced border woman shelter, as Amar does, causes Meghna to reflect on her dangerous actions and to falter momentarily from the goal of revenge against the nation with which she has been indoctrinated since childhood. But Amar’s act of providing Meghna refuge is portrayed as fundamentally insidious, putting both the Hindu family and the nation at risk. Angmo’s travels to the front line and Meghna’s journeys to the borderlands separate them from other Indian women who stay at home or travel in acceptably escorted fashion. Angmo becomes a manifestation of the boundarycrossing Sita in her abducted, violated form, not her maternal one. Meghna is the daughter who craves the touch of her own mother’s hands, but in the absence of this possibility, she rejects Mother India. She awakens on Republic Day to a red dawn, the red light cloaking her like the veil of a bride. She straps on a bomb and strokes her abdomen as a pregnant mother would. But, persuaded by Amar, she finally opts to surrender to death in his arms rather than go through with her suicide-bomber plan to kill the president. Although Ratnam doesn’t opt for the popular resolution where Amar is able to dissuade Meghna, he also cannot allow her to succeed in her mission. The explosive embrace of the two lovers, which is actualized, as opposed to the one between the lovers of Haqeeqat, where the hands of the dying lovers never touch, is only tenable because it allows the nation to be rescued. Dangerous marginality can lead to the peril of impurity, so in both cases, love is unconsummated and the nation saved from the travails of miscegenation once more. Like Haqeeqat, Dil Se is also caught in the dilemma of Indian nationalism’s failure to accommodate feminine sexuality or find a secular vocabulary for

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addressing racial difference.30 In his critique of another Mani Ratnam film, Roja, Rustom Barucha (1998, 134) has argued, ‘‘The right to know the history of Kashmir beyond crude associations with terrorism needs to be demanded and actively pursued by all citizen groups and public forums in India concerned with the protection of democracy.’’ The same can be said for Ladakh, a possibility that Dil Se opens up but does not fulfill. Even though the film is unparalleled in contemporary commercial cinema for its complex and subtle representations of nationalism and subnationalism, given that the political economy and ideology of Bollywood film production is geared overwhelmingly toward a Hindi and Hindu heartland, Dil Se too historicizes the secular male hero from Delhi, the heart of the nation, and subjects border women to undifferentiated and opaque allegory.31 Because they are racial and religious minorities, different from middleclass Hindu women, to allow Angmo and Meghna to live, marry, and reproduce would mean reconceptualizing a national project founded on the glorification of Hindu, Aryan motherhood.32 Not mainstream enough to assume the maternal role, the Ladakhi border woman is scripted as Mother India’s childless and doomed daughter, or alternatively, as her potentially disruptive daughter-in-law. BRAVE MOTHERS, CHASTE NUNS

Colonial and national representations have marginalized Ladakhi women by dwelling on their sexuality, sterility, and mobility. Conversely, performances within Ladakh praise the chastity, domesticity, and reproductive strength of its women, and folksongs celebrate Ladakh’s bountiful environment with its flowing rivers and fertile soil. Descriptions of infertile, bleak wildernesses are reserved for distant and foreign regions. When the word ‘‘barren’’ is used as a form of self-reference by Ladakhis, it is generally in languages introduced by colonization, English or Urdu. Thus, in the famous memorandum requesting that Ladakh be incorporated into the Indian Union, presented by Kalon (bka’-blon) Tshewang Rigzin to Jawaharlal Nehru in 1949, it was written, ‘‘It is true that the whole of this area is undeveloped and most of it is at present barren.’’ 33 Here, ‘‘barren’’ is strategically deployed to indicate the economic potential Ladakh can offer, suggesting that if the state invests in it politically and commercially, it can be transformed into a ‘‘smiling garden.’’ The analogy between a prosperous land and a happy garden can also be

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found in songs devoted to favorite kings. In a song praising the king of Ladakh, Chosrgyal Thsepal, recorded by Francke (1902a), the king’s garden, the Karzoo garden in Leh, is envisioned as a place where male and female birds chirp melodious songs and youth gather to sing eulogies under the shelter of the walnut tree, a symbol of the king’s steadfast reign. Green leaves sprouting from barks of trees, meadows blooming with flowers, trees of life that spread their branches from underground serpent worlds to the world of gods above, are all common motifs in Ladakhi folksongs. Contours of the landscape recur in these melodies so that summits become metaphors for celestial abodes and mountain ranges beads of rosaries. Songs in praise of a village frequently liken its girls to ‘‘saplings of a field’’ or to ‘‘wheat grain’’ and ‘‘barley flour.’’ When its citizens represent their birthplace in the Ladakhi language, Ladakh becomes a productive and reproductive success story. Reproduction is one of the primary means of achieving social recognition for women in Ladakh. Motherhood is idealized in both Muslim and Buddhist communities. One of the most prominent maternal models is A-phyi, the primary protector or srung-ma in the pantheon of guardian deities of the ‘Bri-gung-pa order of Buddhism, prevalent in most villages of lower Sham. A-phyi is often represented with a wish-fulfilling jewel in her left hand and a human skull and damaru (hour-glass drum) in the right and seated on a white horse. According to her biography, A-phyi’s birth name was Choskyid Dolma and she was born to the Skyura clan in Tibet. As a child, she displayed a strong proclivity toward religion. When she grew older, she traveled to the district of Khams to marry the great Nyingmapa sage Ames Tshultim Gyatsho. Initially, he rejected her proposal, pleading that he was of poor means and did not have any worldly desire to marry. To this, A-phyi replied that she, too, was not interested in worldly passions, but she believed that their union would set in motion interdependent elements that would be conducive to spreading the Buddha’s doctrine. Ames relented, but when A-phyi gave birth to four sons, people began doubting her commitment to spirituality. To overcome their fears, A-phyi performed several miracles and magical feats and wrote religious texts, including A-phyi-sgrub-thabs (A-phyi’s method for conjuring) to lay down the basic tenets for religious practice.34 She revealed that the true reason for her existence in the world was to become a guardian of the Dharma. When her time to relinquish the world arrived, she disappeared without leaving any corporeal remains. Her second son, Pekar Wangyal, had four sons, the youngest of whom was the father of Jigten Gonpo, the founder of

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the ‘Bri-gung division of the Bka’-rgyud-pa order (see Sperling 1987). A-phyi, or ‘‘grandmother,’’ is a teknonymic reference to Choskyid Dolma’s relation with this founder. Good mothers such as A-phyi can spread the religious doctrine with their own power and learning, but it is in their capacity as begetters of important men that they are remembered. A married woman’s dedication to religion is often suspect, and her sexuality is validated only as long as it serves the needs of social and religious patrilineality. Social dramas play out society’s distrust of women to distinguish good behavior from immorality. For example, a folksong sung from the perspective of Nyilza Angmo, wife of King Deskyong Namgyal (r. 1720–40), reveals her sorrow when she is divorced on the basis of a false impression.35 The king had suspected her of adultery, disbelieving her story that a crow had stolen her lha-rgyu (chief turquoise), which she had placed on a rock while washing her hair in Karzoo garden. Loose hair is a symbol of sexuality in a woman that must be held in check by head adornments covered with lines of turquoise, a rule that was observed more strictly in the past.36 As Nyilza Angmo heads back to her birthplace, Mustang, she appeals to the village deity of Masro, saying she had come with two hundred horses but was being sent back on only one. She pleads with Guru Rinpoche, her spiritual deity (yi-dam), the two oracles of Masro, the monks of Hemis, and ministers and courtiers to pray for her so that she can avoid being divorced. The story of her tragic departure becomes almost epic because Nyilza Angmo was the mother of Saskyong Namgyal, who was to become third Stag-tshang or reincarnated abbot of Hemis monastery, the largest and most powerful monastic institution in Ladakh. It was Saskyong who was responsible for starting the tradition of the Hemis festival, for commissioning the huge thangka painting of Guru Rinpoche that is displayed in the monastery’s courtyard every twelve years, and for generally augmenting its fortunes. In Mustang, too, Nyilza Angmo’s honor was vindicated when her son, Yeshes Paldan, was recognized as the sixth Panchen Lama. In some narratives, women’s labor is acknowledged only as a means of producing religious pioneers, and they are expected to cope with whatever obstacles come their way. Stories from the life of the Buddha and other canonical collections show how the death of the mother in childbirth (particularly on the fifteenth day of the lunar month, when the moon is full) is considered a noble sign, heralding the birth of an incarnate monk. In everyday life, too, women must work in the fields as long as they can during the duration of their pregnancy and present a visage of temperance when they are in labor, lest they

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be called weak, lazy, or unfortunate. A mother’s stoic capacity to bear pain is then transmitted to her sons, who can develop into honorable citizens not afraid to die for the defense of their homeland. The lyrics of the following song of Ama Danmo (Ibex Mother) from the Gesar epic sung by Apo Roziali recount the brave front that a wounded ibex mother puts on so that her son might not witness her suffering: Son: Mother, you look like you’ve been weeping. Mother: Beloved son, it is nothing more than the water I drank. Son: Mother, I see that your waist is blood red. Mother: Beloved son, it is nothing more than the red mud I rolled in. Son: Mother, I see a man on the pass. Mother: Beloved son, there is only a shepherd on the pass. Son: Mother, I can see a gun on his shoulders. Mother: Beloved son, that is nothing more than the shepherd’s stick. Mother: Beloved son, let a hundred big ibex walk in front. And let a hundred big ibex walk behind you. Strong and mighty boy, never walk ahead. Beloved son of mine, never lag behind.37 Motherhood has also been used as a symbol of political resistance in Ladakhi history. For example, in 1989, when the Agitation against the Kashmiri government was at its peak, three civilians were killed in ‘‘accidental’’ fire by the Jammu and Kashmir police. Among the deceased was a child who was hit by a bullet. The crowd scattered in terror, but a young girl named Kunzes had the presence of mind to pause. She braved the shots and carried the corpse in her arms to shelter it. The town of Leh buzzed with the story of Kunzes’s feat. She was named ‘‘Jhansi ki Rani,’’ after the queen of Jhansi who resisted the British armies, riding on horseback with her adopted son in what is now known as the first war of Indian Independence, or what British history describes as the Indian Mutiny of 1857.38 When motherhood is so celebrated, married women without children are pitied and subjected to allegations of witchcraft, promiscuity, and evil. Witches are visualized as denizens of the dark, crafty, cannibalistic creatures who fly in the dark, mounted on the central beam of the house (ma-gdung), for which they substitute their hair so that they can secretly congregate at crossroads with other witches and devise schemes to steal and devour souls, particularly those of children. To be without progeny is to sink in the desolate possibility of being without name, status, or family, passing away without

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leaving any memory. Bearing children is therefore one of the primary ways through which women can stake a claim in any familial, religious, and national heritage.39 In contrast to the maternal figure, a regular hero in radio and stage plays is the woman who renounces the social world to serve the religious one. Two of the most popular performances of this genre are the musicals Nangsa ‘Od ‘bum and Zilzom. Nangsa ‘Od ‘bum is a famous hagiography from the Jataka texts that reveals the difficulty of pursuing a spiritual path.40 Born as a beautiful girl, Nangsa has no desire for worldly pleasures, but her parents force her to marry the arrogant prince of Rinang, who takes a fancy to her. In the palace at Rinang, Nangsa gives birth to a boy who is as cherished as his mother is by the courtiers, arousing the envy of her sister-in-law, depicted as a frustrated spinster reluctant to turn over the keys of the treasury to the new lady of the house. This sister-in-law, Ani Snetmo, paragon neither of spiritual virtue nor reproductive value, hatches conspiracies to humiliate Nangsa, eventually leading to Nangsa’s death. Nangsa returns from the dead and wanders in the mountains of her parents’ village until she finds her Tantric teacher. Displaying power through miraculous feats rather than celibate purity, she subdues the armies of Rinang who attempt to capture her forcibly. Nangsa compares herself to a snow lion, a wild yak, and other creatures of the forest that cannot be held captive by domestic chains. Thereafter, her parents, her in-laws, and her subjects are all brought into the fold of the Dharma. Nangsa ‘Od ‘bum means ‘‘a hundred thousand brilliant lights.’’ I saw a version of this play enacted by the Ladakh Theatre Organization at the Ladakh Festival in 1999. The group’s repertoire of plays includes several classics with female protagonists. Nga’i Mi-tshe (My life), of which I have seen rehearsals, and Idthok Lhamo, named for its protagonist, are among these. The former depicts the impermanence of romantic love. The central character is torn from her lover in each lifetime until a young suitor puts an end to her anguish by wooing her through his religious and compassionate nature. Idthok Lhamo is also a love story, in which the actualization of erotic desires between the beautiful Idthok Lhamo and Prince Norzang gives divine sanction to the rule of Prince Norzang, the king, who goes on to reign according to dharmic principles. So, although the erotic is not taboo in Ladakhi performances, it mostly functions, as Sumathi Ramaswamy (1997, 35) phrases it, to serve the nation by ‘‘the peaceful and productive transformation of men and women into patriots who are passionately attached to it and to one another in ties of longing and belonging.’’

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There are other stories that commemorate women who resist the pressures of domesticity by seeking refuge in monastic religion. For example, Zilzom, a musical radio drama composed by the well-known singer Morup Namgyal, relays the contributions to Buddhism made by the noble woman Zilzom. The play’s narrative shows how the eighteenth-century king of Ladakh, Delden Namgyal, loses his heart to Zilzom, the beautiful wife of Chosnyid, minister of Saboo. The king orchestrates the murder of his minister and then sends his men to summon the grieving Zilzom, but she insists that they first perform elaborate mortuary rites for her husband; the king empties out his stores to host a lavish funeral. Anticipating the king’s proposal, Zilzom flees to the village of Igu. The king sends his men to bring her to him and she agrees, on the condition that he erect a mani-ringmo, a long, sacred wall in the shape of a pad-rag (the turquoise-studded headgear worn primarily by Buddhist women). Several months later, when the wall is erected, the king’s men return. Zilzom feeds and feasts them and asks them to wait while she bids farewell to the household deities in the chapel. When she emerges at last, they gasp in horror. For instead of adorning herself with the marital pad rag, Zilzom has changed her clothes and cut off her hair, signifying her adoption of a state of celibacy and nunhood. Even today, as one enters Leh, a mani-ringmo built of brick and stones inscribed with sacred mantras, appears at the southern end of the marketplace, for which some residents give credit to Zilzom. These historical and classical feminine idols model and guide the lives of contemporary women and are, in turn, fashioned anew through varied interpretations and retellings. As Kim Gutschow (1998) has shown, nuns in the Karsha monastery in Zangskar adapt the script of Nangsa ‘Od ‘bum so that Nangsa becomes a nun in the end rather than a powerful yogin. Enacting this biography provides the nuns a space to articulate the ordeals of family expectations and obligations they had to overcome in their religious journeys. The act of cutting one’s hair, as Zilzom did, is also an oft-recounted choice in the lives of women, functioning as a socially ordained means of resistance. WOMEN AS TRADITION

Mythic images and qualities typical of exemplary women in Ladakhi history and literature are enfolded into Dolma, the central female character of Sonam Dolma, the first feature-length film to be made by a Ladakhi director, Phuntsog Ladakhi. The film was released in 1998 on Kashmir Doordarshan. I clearly remember the time when Dolma was just being conceived. In fact,

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my first memorable introduction to Ladakh was through Phuntsog, who was working on a film project directed by my friend’s uncle in Bombay. He was a graduate from the Film Institute in Pune, hoping to get a break in Bollywood films. It is strange for me to imagine such a time now, but when I met him, I wasn’t quite sure where Ladakh was. When I ran into Phuntsog again in Leh in 1989, he took me to the screening of the music videos that he had directed for Kashmir Doordarshan. He pointed out how hard it had been to find a female costar and how he had finally convinced a young performer, Rigzin Angmo, to loosen her inhibitions for the camera. The role of Dolma, which he was creating at the time, was performed by a non-Ladakhi woman in the end.41 In the film, Dolma is offset against her childhood sweetheart, Sonam. The narrative chronicles Sonam’s moral corruption and loss of identity that result from the irrational and punitive system of modern education and the money economy of tourism. Sonam’s education entails a smattering of Ladakhi, Urdu, and English and competence in none. Unable to cope with school, he is reduced to a tout as an adult, chasing tourists and selling his culture in an antique and souvenir shop. In Sonam Dolma, the state betrays its citizen by indoctrinating young boys in its secular institutions, not by looting and pillage. Here, it is the trauma of losing Buddhism that becomes the angst of the Ladakhi male hero. Sonam’s sexual and business involvement with a foreign tourist amounts to a betrayal of Dolma and his own culture. In this case, the interracial affair is with a Western woman, depicted as sexually available and morally lax. Nationally emasculated male identity can achieve its virility only by taking the extended foreign hand, a partnership that induces Sonam to steal an antique Buddha from the monastery, climaxing in doom and divine retribution. All along, Dolma, closer to her cultural heritage and better adjusted because she has been educated in Ladakhi, serves as his moral guide and compassionate counterpart. She reconciles with Sonam’s waywardness by rejecting romantic love. Dolma chooses the razor’s edge, undergoing tonsure rituals to become a nun. In Sonam Dolma, landscape is photographed in a manner different from that of Hollywood or Bollywood films: the locations are crowded markets, residential quarters, schoolyards, green fields, and tourist hangouts such as the German bakery, not stretches of barren desert. Produced as an independent venture, the film was broadcast in the State but has not yet been picked up by national networks. Phuntsog Ladakhi has now completed Daastan-eLadakh, a television serial in Kashmiri for the Kashir channel that tells the

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neglected history of the Ladakh Scouts and their bravery in battle in the fifty years since Independence. He has considerable experience with military themes; he starred in an episode of Chetan Anand’s Paramvir Chakra as Brigadier Sher Jung Thapa and wrote a song that became the virtual anthem of the Ladakh Scouts.42 Well-known in Ladakh as a musician, Phuntsog has addressed issues of modernization and tradition in his songs; ‘‘Namo Namo,’’ a Hindi number dedicated to the Dalai Lama, was a hit in Himachal Pradesh, too. Besides striving for Buddhist merit, Phuntsog sees himself as an Indian patriot and a loyal son of Mother India. Speaking of the difficulties he faced outside Ladakh in the Bollywood film industry, Phuntsog told me in a pragmatic voice, ‘‘For the entire Mongolian race, this gate was opened by Danny Denzongpa. He became a star and he washed away this complex of a Chinkie not becoming an actor, you know. So when I went there, Danny was already a star. I didn’t have to suffer the complex that I used to earlier suffer. But Danny must have suffered to break the gate. No one doubted me, because Danny was already a star and I am from the Film Institute. I did not have this kind of hardship. But I didn’t get proper roles either.’’ 43 Aware of the racial and regional stereotypes prevalent in popular cinema, Phuntsog chose a subject matter that could portray the problems of Ladakhi society but also lend itself to translation in national and international contexts. To reach a mainstream audience and find a place on television, he made Sonam Dolma in Hindi. Phuntsog looks forward to the opportunity to make a film in Ladakhi that, as he phrases it, ‘‘springs from the soil’’ and tells a detailed story of the pains and pleasures of its residents. For now, however, the legitimate channels available for Phuntsog to construct a Ladakhi counternarrative remain expressions of patriotism and remorse for the loss of cultural purity that Westernization has brought about. Targeting audiences who are embedded in structures of national, racial, and linguistic dominance, however, results in limited models within which women’s relationship to their land can be portrayed. In Sonam Dolma, it is left to Dolma, the female Ladakhi character, to ultimately uphold ‘‘tradition.’’ In 2002, an independent film called San-tsams (The border) was finally produced in Ladakhi by Lobzang Toro and No Tsering as a tribute to the role of the Ladakh Scouts during the Kargil war.44 Inspired by Haqeeqat, it is an action film that reinserts Buddhist Ladakhis in the drama of the battle for the loc. Although it hints at more complex facets of masculinity and citizenship through two humorous characters playing lazy porters, female characters in

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Advertisement for San-tsams, Leh town (2002), directed by No Tsering and D. Wangchuk (Mogol).

this film make minimal appearances, serving as icons of a ‘‘home’’ in which modern romance thrives in green gardens and is contrasted with the harshness of the ‘‘border.’’ IN THE ROLE OF A BRIDE

The films on Ladakh discussed above have all been directed by men and have primarily centered on the crisis of male citizenship, with women cast as supportive or antagonistic foils.45 Although it cannot necessarily be assumed that women making films would automatically challenge available representations or broaden the spectrum of roles for women, nonetheless, it is useful to consider performances that Ladakhi women have composed to understand how they relate their own engagement with the landscape. In films, we have not yet seen Ladakhi women characters make it as brides. Acting as brides, however, is a dominant motif in women’s own oral performances. Even as narratives of extraordinary mothers and nuns inspire women, they voice their his-

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tories through alternative routes, aside from reproduction or retreat, which frequently end in collaboration with patrilineal structures but occasionally open the possibility for reorganizing spatial boundaries to decentralize conventional claims on home and land. To illustrate this, I must return to the occasion of Sakina’s wedding, where this chapter began. At the mgron feast thrown for Sakina before her wedding, we gathered at night at Mariam’s place, a few adults and many young girls, to eat and sing wedding songs that both mocked and welcomed marriage. Our favorite was a song in which the bride tries to convince the matchmaker to buy locally available items for her trousseau and not to go all the way to Kabul to shop, lest her wedding be delayed. That night, pesky village boys tried to crash the party, but the women permitted them to participate for only a short while. The highlight of the evening was a parody of the skyin-’jug performed by two newlyweds. Skyin-’jug (from the words skyin, meaning ‘‘exchange,’’ and ‘jugpa, ‘‘to enter’’) is one form among the various genres of poetry performed in Lower Sham that belongs almost exclusively to women, whether Buddhist or Muslim, whether rich or poor. It is a bride’s lament, her last embrace before the exodus from home and loved ones. The couplets of the skyin-’jug embody a history of coping with separation, passed down from female to female like the suhag songs in the Kangra valley of the Himalayan foothills recorded by Kirin Narayan (1986). Even though the format is quite formulaic, the verses are articulated in a highly personalized manner, created from contexts particular to the individual and influenced largely by her experiences with those present. Parodies of the skyin-’jug are among the most common forms of play in predominantly female company, especially during informal potluck parties (isun). Skyin-’jug spoofs generally begin with much laughter and ribaldry. A couple of women dress up as brides or even as bride and groom to act out the leave-taking rituals in front of a chuckling audience. But before too long, their laughter is replaced with soft sniffles and teary eyes. Such a tearful mood also took over the mgron and its guests, Sakina’s female peers (ya-do-pa), her confidantes and companions. Initially, when I was less adept at deciphering Ladakhi, I was mortified at finding a perfectly fun-filled party transformed into a funeral-like atmosphere when a simulated skyin-’jug began. My doubting attitude changed once my grasp of the language improved and my own parting from Achinathang became imminent.46 Words of departure, if well performed, rarely failed to strike an emotional cord, reminding women that their time in their natal home was almost always transitory.

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Although weddings are delineated as celebrations of joy (skyid ), they make way for the enunciation of the inevitable sorrow that accompanies the loss of a home, a daughter, sister, or friend. The verses of the skyin-’jug signify an emotional commitment which is tied to the weariness of the body and its inability to break free of a homesick ache (sun-pa), expressed in a nostalgic sigh and a loss of bearing.47 Homesickness or sun-pa comes from the withering melancholy of uprootedness, the yearning of memory for familiar territories, the forlorn brooding of a body lost and wandering among strangers. Apo Roziali once crooned an ancient song for me about a bride who was to be taken to Hor-yul (the province of Sinkiang in China) to be married. It was customary then, he said, for middle daughters to be sent away to distant lands. The bride had wept bitterly and prayed, ‘‘May the strength of my knees stay with my father. May the power of my waist stay with my mother. For my sisters, I leave behind my beauty; for my brothers, my ability to work. All my wealth and fortune, I bestow on my fellow villagers. May I, just like a corpse, ride on this horse to my husband’s village.’’ Apo believed that the pathos in the lyrics had moved the king so much that he had forbidden this practice from then on. In another composition, much like a Keatsian requiem of pining and heartache, a bride confesses to a sparrow a pain so deep that she curses the destiny that abandoned her to a life in which she could no longer participate in the harvest celebrations of srub-lha in the valley of her birth.48 Correspondingly, birds are invoked in songs as messengers and in possession rituals as transporting carriers on whom deities ride into the bodies of oracles in the human world. Women are visualized as birds of passage that fly across different skies. A woman’s beauty is often compared to that of a golden oriole or a turquoise dove. But women are regarded as birds with clipped wings. Their appeal against loneliness is a cry in vain, a breakdown of communication, an ironic inevitability of their splintered existence. Teenage girls in Achinathang often sang a song expressing this sentiment: ‘‘Blue ink on white paper, I send a letter with a bird / But alas! The words of birds, Humans do not understand.’’ 49 Verses of the skyin-’jug reflect the postmarital residential pattern in Ladakh, which is generally patrilocal, where a woman must leave her birthplace and adjust to life in the dwelling of her husband’s family. Therefore, locality is an important determinant for matrimonial alliances. The selection of spouses varies from matches within the village to marriages in ‘‘other villages’’ (gzhanmi yul ) considered culturally similar, particularly in terms of religion and dialect, so that the bride can adjust easily to the customs practiced there. Mothers have a vested interest in brides that their sons bring home because a

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forceful and quarrelsome daughter-in-law from a strange and unknown village could evict them from the main house once she gives birth, whereas an amiable daughter-in-law could prove to be a powerful ally. Parents prefer that their daughters marry in a village that is nearby and with which their village has a history of marital exchanges. Without the support and alliance of other women and kin from her parental family in the strange, new environment, life can be a series of ordeals for a bride. In the early 1990s, villagers informed me that those who married into distant locations such as Leh or Kargil town or the Indian plains did so out of poverty or disease or else out of romantic love.50 Affinal alliances with villages further away were the outcome of one person marrying in or out of these places and then acting as matchmaker for friends or relatives from her natal village. Prestige issues and caste status meant that it was women from royal and noble families or those from oppressed castes who often traveled long distances for marriage. Journeys of princesses and noble women to distant residences are often recounted in popular songs. One of the most sorrowful numbers is attributed to Nyilza Angmo, a twentieth-century princess of the Masro royal family who committed suicide in her husband’s home in Spiti. In this song, the princess describes the village of Masro, where the village deity, Rong-btsan-rgyal-po, protects the youth and where villagers propitiate gods and goddesses in the central chapel with offerings and butter lamps. Removed from the shadow of this religious and blessed land, Nyilza Angmo laments that she is deprived of its shelter. Her destiny is so inauspicious that she is damned to dwelling among mortals even after being born in paradise. The life of a girl, the lyrics inform us, is pitiable and vulnerable. The world, represented by Nyilza Angmo’s parents, understands only relations of class and wealth; it is cruelly indifferent to a daughter’s loneliness and love for her homeland: Chang makes my father happy. For a pot of chang, he sent me away. Tea makes my mother happy. For some Chinese tea, she sent me away. Entering the other village, I was covered In jewels of turquoise and coral. When I entered the other village, Turquoise and corals, gold and pearls, Of what use were they?

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Don’t leave, others say. Masro is too far away. But in my thoughts I only see The center of Masro village.51 Although it is harder for brides from distant places to feel at home, the sense of separation that women in Ladakh feel in their husband’s house does not necessarily correspond to distance in geographical terms, but rather to a social and physical displacement from a house that they once called their own. Sometimes, a bride is fortunate enough to have a husband who lives just a few doors away, like a schoolteacher named Angmo whom I knew in Achinathang. When Angmo was married to Tashi, a police officer, she was six months pregnant. But although all her relatives heaved a sigh of relief when the wedding date was finally set and congratulated her mother, saying, ‘‘Yulgi nas la yul-gi phabs’’ (For the grain of the village, its yeast), and though they were a perfectly matched couple, he of the Horse Year born and she of the Sheep Year, of one trough nourished, Angmo howled as if she would never stop on that journey of a few hundred yards from her house to the affinal compound. Some women later criticized the performance, saying that she and her mother had cried excessively and used inappropriate words, as though they were wailing at a funeral (bshad-pa) rather than a wedding. But Angmo herself confessed to the unbearable alienation she felt when it was time to say goodbye to the house that she had helped build with her savings and labor when her father had disowned his wife and children, evicting them from the main house. A month after the wedding, when Tashi returned to his posting in Leh, Angmo went back to her mother’s house to help with the harvest. Despite the gossip, she continued to live there, returning to her in-laws’ place only when Tashi came home on weekends. In Ladakh, virilocality is the preferred practice, but uxorilocality is permitted, especially when there are no male heirs to carry on the family name. Most women welcome uxorilocality, at least verbally, for they feel they have a better and more secure status in their parents’ home, as Reis (1983) attests in her survey of residential patterns in the households of Thiksey village in upper Ladakh. Yet, contrary to the findings of Lynn Bennett (1983), who asserts that in Nepal, it is women in their role as wives and not as sisters who are dangerous and polluting, sisters who challenge the inheritance of their brothers are deemed equally dangerous in Ladakh. For instance, a woman I will call Yangzom remained single well into her thirties, notoriously turning

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down suitors and refusing to leave her house to marry, and made it known that she was not averse to the idea of bringing in a husband (mag-pa). Yangzom had a brother who was in the army, a brother who was in possession of the main house, from which her mother had split with the other children, and a third brother who had died less than a year earlier. It was the latter’s widow and male child who were authorized to inherit the new house and it was with her brother’s young widow that Yangzom had the biggest dispute. She managed to get rid of her sister-in-law temporarily when the daily quarrels grew too much and she requested a job transfer to a neighboring village. Yangzom maneuvered circumstances to her advantage, using her status as a nonliterate farm woman to capitalize on her indispensability to a family largely composed of educated wage laborers and in need of farmers. In this way, Yangzom managed to manipulate the categories of womanhood. Instead of reproduction, she banked on production as a means to wrest ownership of the house from its designated heirs. For this, she was labeled selfish and hungry for power and property. When women resist male domination by negotiating structural categories that classify them as docile and passive, they risk the slander and shame of being considered pho-so-can (egotistic). Yangzom did eventually succeed in acquiring a mag-pa, but in most cases, as William Sax (1990) demonstrates about the Himalayan region of Garhwal, not only is a woman subordinate in her husband’s house, but in her natal house she is ritually repressed as well to prevent her from challenging the realms of male authority. The association of women with the domestic realm does not guarantee them control over this space, either. For women, home often remains quintessentially deterritorialized. In some areas, women may not give birth in houses other than those belonging to their husband’s phaspun. When I collected genealogies in Achinathang, people often omitted the names of married daughters, for to be married is to relinquish the right ‘‘to feed one’s stomach’’ from one’s father’s land and to forfeit the right to cremate one’s body on the pyre of his pha-spun. When a bride leaves her home, the g.yang-’gugs ritual is performed to prevent the affluence of the household from leaving with her. In her in-laws’ house, she is often seen as an outsider whose intrusion can be dangerous for the unity and harmony of the family. Hence, the sangs rite is executed at the threshold to cleanse her of any impurities before she can enter the new house. The journey from her own house to the other has transformed her from a source of fortune to a symbol of pollution. The following laments that I recorded from the Leh region, where skyin-’jug

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is referred to as bag-ngus (tears of the bride), illustrate the hardships that are believed to await a bride, disenfranchised as she is from her own home: Brother, foundation pillar of the house, greetings! In this house where hundreds and thousands live There is no place for your sister. To eat the food [of the other village], I’ll need cheeks of iron. To do the work, I’ll need sleeves of thick silk. When your little sister reaches the other door Each strand of hair will have a nit.52 In her new house, a bride must learn to master its rituals and routines. She must first of all learn to live with a new identity. No longer will a girl be merely Sakina or Amina or Dolma or Yangskyid or the bo-mo (daughter) of her natal house, but also the mna’ ma (daughter-in-law) of the house of her husband. And she will continue to retain her married title until her mother-in-law is old enough to be called ‘‘grandmother,’’ whereupon it will be her turn to assume the responsibility of mother, mistress, and caretaker of the house. In her natal home, she may no longer pray to the house god or sit by the hearth. By marriage, she has relinquished her place in her family’s funeral kiln; now her husband’s family must fulfill that ritual. In her new home, she will be seated below her mother-in-law, but in the absence of the latter she can gain access to the bang position by the hearth. The rise and fall of house fortunes is often linked to the in-coming bride. On the day following the wedding, the bride cooks special breads and an invitation is issued to all villagers. Aba told me that in the past, one of the ways of gauging the endurance of prospective spouses was through their skill in making tea that was measured in thickness against a jau coin, the old form of currency in Ladakh. Nowadays, too, domestic prowess is an important test, and people praise those who are khrampa, agile, conscientious workers in the field and at home. As a housekeeper, a woman is expected to excel at domestic chores, including cooking, cleaning, and managing children. In addition to displaying her working talent, a bride must learn how to entertain guests and assume the duties of a gracious hostess, strengthening the alliances of her husband’s family with neighbors and kin. Mothers are responsible for inculcating good qualities and appropriate behavior in their daughters. They are the ones who respond to the skyin’jug with their own farewell (a-ma’i bshad-pa), which is similar in content and cadence to ngus-mang (many tears), the tormented dirge of death. The

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a-ma’i bshad-pa (a mother tells) begins by apologizing for the hardships that a daughter was subjected to in her natal home and salutes her for her dependability. It goes on to instruct the bride to comport herself with dignity and fortify herself against the difficult physical labor that she will face in her affinal household by going to bed last and rising right at the break of dawn. The following verses of the bshad-pa that I have translated were recited for me by Ama and her friends in Achinathang: The longest rope of all, we let you carry, mother’s little darling. The largest basket of all, we let you carry, mother’s little darling. You were your mother’s right hand, little one You were your mother’s helping hand, little one. Garments to clothe and shelter your mother, you laid out. Always at the head of the working team, you set out. Let your braided hair cover your back like a rug (to bear loads). If your little feet hurt, cover them in the folds of your skirt. If your hands burn, cover them in the folds of your sleeve. Your father and brother have Brought you all these things. They are not more than others. They are not less than others. Don’t consider yourself unfortunate. Don’t envy others their wealth. Spread your left hand below And with the right hand above Greet your father and brothers. Spread your left hand below And with the right hand above Greet the others. Consider the other mother as your mother. Consider the other father as your father. Call us ‘‘them,’’ little one. Call them ‘‘us,’’ little one. The exchange of material goods is an important element of the wedding, as the a’ma’i bshad-pa reminds us. Guests before whom the bride weeps press some money or a white silk scarf into her hands. The money that the bride

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accumulates serves as a reserve fund for the future. As she completes the rituals of skyin-’jug, the bride’s trousseau is laid out and counted in front of the witnessing guests. In Buddhist families, a rope is strung from the central pillar in the kitchen, blocking off the hearth and the inner portion of the kitchen, and gifts provided by the bride’s neighbors and relatives are counted one by one. They are then entered into an elaborate and detailed record (zong-yig). Muslim families are obliged to throw a feast for each offspring married for the first time. In accordance with the Islamic doctrine (shari’at), there is an equal division of property among brothers. Women are entitled to a small share of paternal land, although they seldom feel free to claim it. Despite legal changes in inheritance rights, because primogeniture continues to be paramount in rural Buddhist families, it is the eldest daughter or son for whom a nuptial feast or bag-ston is given. Here, the eldest son customarily inherits the house and the fields. Other children are wedded with minimum ceremony, generally through a sanctioned nocturnal elopement (brkus-te song), recognized the following day with beer and the skyin-’jug performance. One may actually reside with the groom’s family for as long as a year and bear children before formally announcing a wedding with the transport of the dowry (skar-’dzin). The eldest daughter receives the bulk of the pots, pans, and vessels, as well as her mother’s pad-rag. Instead of fixed property, women have control over money, livestock, and other goods presented to them even if the marriage fails. In the opening lines of the bshad-pa, marriage is pictured as a rope (thagpa) between families that holds together the social fabric.53 Ropes tie a woman to her ancestral abode, like the thick, long ropes with which they lift numerous loads on their backs—fertilizer, food, cow dung, babies—in baskets of matted willow, transporting grass and wood for fuel. Carrying willow baskets is a female chore; a man who is seen carrying one is ridiculed. Divorce is visualized as a cut in conjugal ties, a rent, a tear, and a parting of ways. Pain is linked to the bonds of attachment that cling to the heart; hearts that are broken are called yid-‘chad. Similarly, houses without progeny are classified as rabs-‘chad (‘‘generations cut’’). When a man divorces his wife, he is said to have ‘‘cut’’ her from his life. A Buddhist widow divorces her deceased spouse by cutting a string (skud-pa ‘chad-pyes) bound to his body before cremation.54 If she chooses not to undergo this rite, she is compelled to reside at her marital home and cannot return to her natal family or remarry. When there are no strings attached, so to speak, she may wed again, but she surrenders her claim to her children, who belong to the patriline. A mother is only legally entitled

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to her infants until they reach the age of four, after which she may be allowed only visitation rights. If a Buddhist widower without offspring cuts his dead wife’s string, then her relatives must come from her village, dress her, cremate her on their own grounds, host the funeral feast, bear the funeral costs and burden of labor, and also take back her pad-rag and other items of dowry. Whereas the ropes of marriage link women to different homes, cutting the rope severs their participation in one realm or the other. Tensions between filial loyalty and the loyalty between husband and wife can lead to the dissolution and fragmentation of the main house. Mothersin-law and daughters-in-law struggle for power and command over the close quarters that they occupy. Failure to maintain an effective balance between different homes can lead to a cleft beyond repair, ending in partition and poverty for the household. Brides, it is said, often neglect affinal loyalties by according a higher status and greater hospitality to their agnatic kin. They can be potential harbingers of discord and conflict, threatening the stability of the marriage by desiring frequent and extended visits to their natal home. Ironically, women have a long history of migration through marriage, but it is male travel that is acknowledged and celebrated. Proverbs such as ‘‘Po shig ‘grul-na rgyal, mo shig ‘dug-na rgyal’’ (Better for a man to go abroad and a woman to stay at home) pay homage to male wandering.55 It is recognized that women must step outside the domestic area for work or for social purposes within the village, but unsupervised travel is discouraged and censored. Should a Muslim woman decide to visit her parental home or attend a wedding or funeral, she is likely to be accompanied by her husband or a male relative. Buddhist women have greater freedom in this respect and often make group visits without men for pilgrimages, festivals, or fulfilling social obligations. Education and service-oriented careers outside the countryside have made travel a necessity in recent times, disrupting previous constraints on mobility. Still, women who wander alone at night are considered promiscuous and evil, occasionally accused of being witches (gong-mo). Shame or khrel-ba can be brought on a woman and her entire household if she violates the tacit boundaries of village space.56 The misdeeds of both men and women can be dishonorable and shameful, but it is women who are most susceptible to the allegation of being khrel-med (immodest, without shame). Women’s bodies are subject to spatial controls; for example, women are barred from approaching the kitchen hearth when menstruating, and Buddhist women cannot come near the chapel or near spaces allotted for the clan deity. A frequent justification that women provided for these taboos was

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that it was because their bodies were btsog-po (dirty) during the menstrual period. In the past, married Buddhist women were strongly urged to put on their pad-rag before crossing streams or even stepping outdoors. One explanation for this was that after marriage, the female body was identified with the klu, deities of the underworld, and the pad-rag was meant to give a woman’s head the shape of a serpent (see also Kaplanian 1981; Tashi Tshomo 1992). The pleated skirt of a woman’s garment and her long, creased pajamas represented the scaly garb of the klu. Married women are still prohibited from entering the spaces in a house where horns of ibex and goats are kept to propitiate the gods of the upper world and the goddess of the hearth, the bang lha-mo. Accidentally placing these horns at the sacred spot of the klu can have serious ramifications; special prayers are performed to avert the disorder. When a female child is born, instead of ibex icons, guests bring fried flatbread, serrated at the edges, called kab-tse (literally: ‘‘crocodile’’ in the colloquial language). While men are encouraged to be climbers, grounded in the defense of their brethren and motherland, women are like crocodiles that swim between water and earth, inhabiting a dual universe. In their expressive genres, women construct ideologies that partially internalize male objectifications of their bodies as weak, dangerous, and marginal and their words as unreliable and insignificant. Women’s social conversations are often characterized as gossip, expressed in the notion of mi-kha (the mouths of people), that threatens the moral order of society.57 They stand to be scolded for talking too frequently or loudly in public. Outspoken women, even in modern politics, are always in danger of having their speeches interpreted as disruptive or irreverent. Undermining the verity of their words, women in Achinathang would often respond to my queries about the effects of the political conflict in Ladakh by disclaimers such as ‘‘We are like donkeys. How should we know? Ask the men who know how to write.’’ Instead of providing me with direct and abstract answers, they denigrated the value of their oral accounts in favor of male textual expertise. On the other hand, through performances such as the skyin-’jug that are ‘‘self-reflexive metacommentaries,’’ to use Nadia Seremetakis’s (1991, 2) expression, they voiced biographical information about their lives in public by naming their close kin and by narrating the experiences shared by them. Through this medium, they validated a system of knowledge that recognizes a different kind of centrality, a centrality that is based on the acceptance of movement and journeying, of dwelling in a world composed of myriad social relations, what Jitka Kotalova (1993) calls ‘‘belonging to others,’’ and of the pain of emotional involvement

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in those human relations. Even though it is they who have to cope with displacement, women I interviewed did not conceive of attachment as wholly debilitating but more or less as a vital means of existence. For brides, maintaining their relationships with their natal family and male siblings can provide prestige, insurance, and a better bargaining position in society.58 The intermediacy of women becomes necessary for social propagation and the sustenance of the state. Mothers, the only ones expected to respond publicly to the skyin-’jug, are enlisted to facilitate their daughter’s adjustment to her new identity even as they mourn her departure. They instruct the bride to take her leave by raising her hand to her forehead in special gestures of farewell (bag-ma’i ju), with one wrist raised over the other, clinking together wedding bracelets made of silver or conch shells (dung-lag) before touching her forehead. In the final verse of their bshad-pa, mothers entreat the bride to make the transition from insider to outsider and to understand that attachment to another home is easier once one no longer lays claim to one’s own. Emotional attachment to the landscape is required of brides, particularly when it reminds them of how fortunate they are to belong to a homeland. Homeland is most commonly referred to as pha-yul (fatherland) in Ladakhi, although it is also described as skye-yul (birthplace) and lte-khrag thigs-sa’i ma-khang (‘‘the home where blood from my navel has fallen’’), where home (khang) is linked to the root ma, signifying uterine ties, like the ma of magdung (foundational beam) and ma-zhing (foundational field). Despite these maternal allusions, however, land is customarily passed from father to son, and patrilocality and patrilineality are the prescribed forms of residence and inheritance in both Buddhist and Muslim communities. Under these conditions, erotic love is acceptable, as the many love songs in Ladakh demonstrate, as long as it preserves the faith and ensures the propagation of land, not when it threatens to trespass into forbidden zones. Women have been subjected to physical violence when such love leads them to breach the ultimate taboo: intermarriage with members of different religions or castes. Intermediacy and attachment are regarded with suspicion when they serve women’s individual pursuits of sexual or romantic bliss rather than national or community interests. Since the Social Boycott, political groups have condemned locations such as movie theaters for being breeding grounds for illicit love. Women who enter these theaters are exposed to sexual assaults or slander. Thus, women in Ladakhi border communities have become the subject of a unidirectional cinematic gaze controlled by men and dominant ethnic groups. Upper-class urban women do watch films on tele-

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vision in the privacy of their homes. But if Ladakhi women feature in any program, it is in the form of an occasional clip, such as the nationally broadcast video of the patriotic song, ‘‘Vande Mataram’’ (Hail Motherland!) that advertises dancing, pad-rag-clad women as tokens of the nation’s ‘‘quaint’’ and ‘‘diverse’’ heritage. Rarely are women’s political and social battles for justice and land displayed in any television program. Even though documentaries, such as the widely circulated Ancient Futures made by Helena Norberg-Hodge, address changes in women’s lives, they maintain the myth of an unspoiled Ladakh and visualize masculine modernity as impinging on smiling, simple, and maternal tradition. Yet Ladakhi women have protested against their own marginalized status in various expressive genres. The writer and philosopher Tashi Tshomo (1992), for instance, urges women to spin new threads, this time of education and not just marriage: Wake up women! Arise! When women sleep spindles sleep. When spindles sleep, we will not be clothed. We will die of cold.59 Ladakhi women have also attempted to represent their communities by contesting local and national elections. But, given the hold of men on political space, their endeavors have met with only limited success. Still, they use their oratorical skills and are a presence in virtually every election. As hordes of men are joining the army, women are left to tend to fields they are not entitled to inherit. Although the lahdc has allotted new lands in Leh in the name of husband and wife, these changes have not made a big impact in the countryside.60 Once, women like Rigzin Dolma, queen of Masro, resorted to courtroom drama to defend their land rights. When her wealth and property were seized by the royal family of Stok after her husband deserted her and left Ladakh, she rode to Srinagar on horseback and argued before a judge until she won ‘‘Court of Ward’’ status in 1943 and eventual ownership for her children in 1957.61 Women without such high-ranking connections have also vocalized their connection to the land through compositions such as the skyin-’jug performances. A bride’s displays of nostalgia may further patriarchal agendas that contain women’s sexuality and ratify ideologies in which women are considered weak and vulnerable. But by exhibiting the indeterminacy and intermediacy of women’s worlds, these lyrical compositions also complicate categories of home and belonging in ways that direct us

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to reconsider understandings of citizenship as homogeneous and fixed. Film performances that use the Ladakhi landscape as location and feature actors passing for Ladakhi women could usefully engage with such complexities of women’s lives and struggles to tell a more decentralized border story. WEDDING HOMES

Back in Achinathang, on the eve of her wedding, Sakina’s peers, her ya-do-pa, kept ‘‘the wick moist’’ in the women’s room (bomo-khang), singing wedding tunes, staining Sakina’s hands with henna, washing her hair, dressing her, and whispering reassurances. They presented her with bangles, rings, and other personal mementoes so that she would not forget them. The importance of the ya-do-pa was reflected in the many instances in which they had been able to demand money in the past few days: for aiding Sakina with her cleansing ablutions, for making the woolen turban that was placed over her wedding cloth, and for allowing the groom’s party to enter the main door (after beating them severely with willow sticks and subjecting them to a duel of riddling songs). They would no doubt meet with more financial success for releasing the bride. The night was interrupted briefly when a group of boys recruited to serve food to the women’s room took objection to the presence of the male schoolteacher and neighbor, who had slipped in to watch the girls perform. Ridiculed by Sakina’s girlfriends, the boys complained to male relatives, who dragged the intruders from the room. The relative next ordered a girl, chosen by the bride’s peers as their representative, to leave too because she had been married before. A Buddhist neighbor intervened to support the schoolteacher and the girlfriends, but a quarrel with religious undertones developed between the two sides. The girlfriends refused to cooperate with their male kin and rejected food for some time. Then tempers died down, hunger overtook everybody, and they resumed singing in mellow tones, darting an occasional glare at the tattletale boys. The culmination of the night’s rejoicing was Sakina’s skyin-’jug to these ya-do-pa. After this, the groom’s party led her away, placing the white wedding shroud or mgo-ras on her head, brandishing their ritual arrow toward the sky, and shouting ‘‘Yasha, yasha, yasha,’’ even as she wailed a shrill cry of distress and began the final round of skyin-’jug by paying respect to the land of her ancestors and her home where she had lived for many years. Sakina bade farewell to her relatives and companions. She begged forgiveness from

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A bride performing the skyin-’jugs in Achinathang.

her siblings and friends for lifelong omissions. By the time she had finished, there was hardly a dry eye in the room. ‘‘Don’t get carried away,’’ a guest called Ali warned me afterward. ‘‘Sakina could have been giggling behind the wedding cloth for all you know. This is just a show put on by girls for collecting money, not genuine sorrow. She’ll have a feast with all that cash.’’ Sakina, he added, had been living in her husband’s home for over a year after eloping with him and could hardly be as distraught as she pretended to be. Ali’s cynicism reminded me of a Ladakhi proverb: ‘‘Thug-khyags khol-ba-khol rdzun yin, bag-ma ngu-a-ngu rdzun yin’’ (Cold soup pretends to boil and a bride simulates weeping). Of course, not all men echo Ali’s skepticism. Men, especially fathers, are also driven to tears by the despair expressed in the words of the skyin-’jug, but by and large, those men I interviewed expected marriage to be an institution so transforming, as Ali did, that women, once wedded, would immerse themselves in their conjugal households. Women, on the other hand, told me that their affinity with their natal village could never be terminated. They perceived themselves as intermediaries between homes, both the victims and protectors of the welfare of the two domains.

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Ali had dismissed Sakina’s tears as mere performance, not an articulation of true grief, assuming that she had chosen romantic love over her homeland. Sakina uttered nothing too controversial at her wedding. Like other brides, she may have nervously forgotten her verses, or shyness and fear may have prevented her from articulating what she thought, or else the beauty of the moment and the depth of her emotions may have erased grudges she previously held, allowing her to make the journey smoothly, shedding the appropriate tears and reconciling with estranged ones without upsetting laws that favor male inheritance. It was in the numerous performances and plays before this moment, when her married girlfriends put on the costume of a Ladakhi bride, that the full extent of the skyin-’jugs verses was expressed in all their aesthetic and political force. It was in these prewedding parties that her unmarried peers sang songs that both anticipated and mourned the prospect of traveling to another village after marriage, capturing the apprehension and excitement, the heartache and erotic contentment that such migration promises. Although not free from male control, their laughter and lyrics were reminders of the importance of shared landscapes and community relationships. Sakina’s stylized tears at her wedding hinted at these subversive performances, in which she imagined her place in her homeland, not as a peripheral character in a national or religious plot, but as its center.

CHAPTER FOUR

Songs of Honor, Lines of Descent . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Among the many genres of folksongs in Ladakh, there is the family of songs called ‘gying-glu that is inspired by the exploits of the epic king, Gesar of gLing, and sung in praise of heroes and warriors.1 Evaluating the importance of such folksongs, the Ladakhi cultural historian Nawang Tsering Shakspo (1993, 72) writes, ‘‘As a frontier state, defense was foremost in the popular consciousness and consequently the traditional folk songs tended to be more about bravery and chivalry.’’ Modern-day variants of ‘gying-glu liken courageous leaders and gallant soldiers to mighty Gesar and urge them to defend the boundaries of the nation. But there is another boundary that songs demarcate, a line drawn in blood and history that shapes the face of every cultural show performed in Ladakh. This line, known as the gral, organizes participants and spectators into ranks of old and young, male and female, wealthy and poor, high and low. Where people sit in this gral illustrates their place and identity in Ladakhi society. And like the disputed loc that has echoed with the sounds of numerous wars, this line, too, is rent with notes of discord. A controversy involving the gral first came to my attention one autumn, when I was staying in Achinathang’s Gongmathang neighborhood. It was a season for stories and cold nights. Attention had shifted from the fields as houses, deserted for most of the day, buzzed with activity after the sun went down at 5 p.m. Men scrambled home and basked in the few remaining hours of sunlight. Women broke open apricot pits on their terraces. Sweet varieties of seeds were reserved for sale, bitter ones were sun-dried on threshing circles

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until they could be ground into paste for extracting oil. Householders washed barley grains and roasted them on sand or dried grass. They engaged cattle for lugging flour from the grinding mill. Weavers were in business, clothing cold bodies for the winter, while masons made bricks, built walls, and coated them with mortar. Velvets were discarded in favor of woolen snambu robes, and goat hides were pulled out from storage to cover women’s backs. Sheep and goats that were back from the mountains were kept in the warmest rooms in the lower stories of houses. Most families had fattened calves for sale; the purchasers would sell them for a small profit to other villages. In Yogmathang, the shearing of sheep had begun. Farmers in the Lungba piled cow dung and wood for winter fuel and made fertilizers for the fields. Days of drinking were back, although they hadn’t really gone anywhere. Meals were lavish, with tomatoes, cauliflower, onions, potatoes, walnuts, and apricots. Orders were placed for jewelry and eatables stored as wedding preparations started in full swing. The water of the Indus turned turquoise once more. Flame-colored trees would soon be leafless. The air smelled crisp, children crammed for exams, teachers and other employees waited for the holidays. It was also the time to propitiate deities. Monks from Skyurbuchan had graced the village. We could see them walking from door to door, together with the smith, blowing their horns and collecting donations of carefully weighed amounts of grain (bsod-snyoms). The monastery and domestic chapels echoed with chants thanking celestial deities, appeasing the village god, subduing enemies, purifying houses, and preserving family fortunes. Charity ran high, as the harvest had been good and food was plentiful. But amid this festive atmosphere, there was one group that was conspicuously missing. Among the social groups that usually claim remuneration from householders (trong-pa) are monks, smiths, and Mon musicians. Mon musicians qualify for compensation from the householders because no festival or cultural performance organized by Buddhists can start without playing the lha-rnga, the tune that pays homage to the deities, at which the Mons are such experts. So when they did not attend the harvest celebrations, it was noticeable, and as I learned on further questioning, it was the outcome of an incident that had taken place in the previous year. A Mon family in Skyurbuchan had been celebrating the marriage of a daughter by throwing a party to which all the villagers had been invited. During the course of welcoming and seating guests, a quarrel had arisen about the gral. The Mon hosts had relegated guests of their own caste from outside villages and from the groom’s party onto a higher rung of the gral, an action

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A householder (center) serves chang to villagers sitting in gral formations at a festival in Skyurbuchan.

that had outraged many of the local guests of higher caste. Declaring that it was a breach of protocol, these affronted guests had left the party in protest. They then called for a boycott of Mon families, or me-len chu-len ‘chad pyes (‘‘to cut off the exchange of fire and water’’), symbolically severing social relations with this community by denying them hospitality at home and cooperative agriculture in the fields. As the Mons from Skyurbuchan also served the residents of Achinathang, the boycott was adopted here, too. Substitute musicians from trong-pa households within the village had to be found to beat the drums and summon dancers for cultural feasts. Similar boycotts of the gral swept over Ladakh as culture became the tool through which modern Ladakhi political identity was articulated at the local and national levels. Most of Ladakh’s population was officially classified as ‘‘tribal’’ after 1989, and cultural performances showcased troupes enacting ‘‘authentic’’ tribal identity. The establishment of events such as the Ladakh Festival enabled government resources to be mobilized for inspiring appreciation for the folk traditions of border peoples and creating avenues for the display of their performing arts and cultural heritage. But, as Margaret Sarkissian demonstrates in her analysis of government attitudes toward Malaysia’s Portuguese settlement, diverse ethnic practices can be accommodated in

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safe and sanctioned spaces to portray a front of ‘‘multiethnic tolerance and national harmony’’ (2000, 12). Efforts made by the state for preserving Ladakh’s culture were tied to the region’s strategic border location and to perceived ideas of its ethnic difference from mainstream Indian society. Demands made by local leaders during the Agitation for Scheduled Tribe and Union Territory status also used similar cultural representations to construct the vision of a homogeneous cultural and religious Ladakh under threat from forces of modernization and external faiths. Such discourses of cultural preservation sidelined divisions based on caste practiced internally within Buddhist and Muslim groups. With modernization, opportunities for economic advancement began opening up for different castes and classes, and the gral, a space through which participants and spectators customarily displayed their social standing, also underwent a transformation. Transformation did not occur without contest, however. Boycott cases involving the gral reflected the clash of old structures of power and status with expressed modern ideals of unity and egalitarianism. They also indicated that diverse performances were being incorporated into new power structures in a manner that was not entirely conducive to overcoming caste boundaries and that could in fact lead to the eventual exclusion of caste musicians from the performing arts. LINES OF HOSPITALITY AND HIERARCHY

The gral features prominently in the verses from the Gesar epic that are sung when men and women congregate for a wedding feast or birth ceremony. Considered one of the longest poems in world literature, versions of the Gesar epic are found in Mongolia, Tibet, and Nepal as well.2 A script of the Ladakhi version was first documented by A. H. Francke, who mentions that one of his major sources was a member of the Beda caste.3 In this saga, bards rhapsodize about the miracles executed by Gesar, about how he assumed phantom forms and created havoc among his foes, rescuing his wife, ‘Bruguma, from captivity by vanquishing the demon king of Hor, and expanding the empire of gLing with his army of eighteen fearless warriors, his talking horse, and his sure-shot arrow. The landscape of Ladakh is filled with mementos from Gesar’s life. Around Achinathang, people say that one can find sites such as his threshing circle, his bathroom, and even petrified remnants of his pot and grain. Traditionally, recitals of the Gesar story could be performed only in the winter season in Ladakh, when fields were no longer green. The following

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verses attributed to the Gesar epic are translated from a song sung for me by the talented musician Sukye Bulu, a farmer from Achinathang: On an auspicious day, I had an auspicious dream Under an auspicious star, I had an auspicious dream. Saw sBalu Tung-Tung making preparations for the gral with rugs and carved tables. Saw old men sitting on the right side like vultures descending. Saw young men sitting on the left side like the stag-tsho of a weaving frame. Saw the eighteen pha-spun sitting in the middle row. Saw forty-five ma-spun sitting in the middle row. Saw wheat-like young girls sitting in the back row. Saw the dwarf ’s servant, Tamchan Dorje, sitting at the end of the line. Saw the singing, drumming, Mons sitting behind him. Saw the dwarf, Tung-Tung himself, sitting on his conch throne. Saw the dwarf ’s wife, Tholmo, prepare and pour the beer.4 In these lyrics, as the singer dreams of the witty and worldly dwarf, sBalu Tung-Tung, making arrangements for the wedding feast of Gesar, he visualizes the social order of Ladakh. The dream reveals a vital and paradoxical aspect of society: the longing for community through hospitality versus patterns of hierarchy that are upheld when different strata of people sit together in the gral during social gatherings and cultural performances. The gral (pronounced dal in Sham and tal in central Ladakh) is an arrangement that structures people into ranked seats. To sit in a place is to embody and inhabit a material territory, a cosmological sphere, a social identity, and a niche in the universe.5 As Alessandro Duranti (1992, 662) writes, ‘‘The appropriate existential epithet in these cases is not cogito, ergo sum, nor even loquor, ergo sum . . . but rather something much more mundane and physical, namely, I sit here, ergo sum.’’ 6 Bonds between sitting and dwelling are reinforced in the Ladakhi language where the existential verb ‘dug-ba and its honorific form zhugs-ba have a range of meanings: ‘‘to be,’’ ‘‘to sit,’’ ‘‘to reside, occupy.’’ When a person is possessed by the covetous consciousness of another, the phrase used is ‘‘Gon-bo zhugs-pyes’’ (The body is possessed or occupied by a witch); similarly, when spirits are channeled through oracle mediums, they say, ‘‘Lha zhugs-pyes’’ (The gods have taken possession). In Buddhist rituals, seats are constructed for gods and goddesses, and the lha-tho, present in every Buddhist village, is the seat, throne, or dwelling of the village deity.

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When planning the construction of a house, Buddhist families in Achinathang pay careful attention to the direction of seats. They prefer the right side of the hearth, called the bang, for housework. It is to this side that the doors of storage rooms are oriented. These doors are locked at most times and only members of the family’s pha-spun have access to them during major ritual events. The side opposite the bang is the gral, which is reserved for guests. Low, wooden tables are placed here, ranging from those decorated with bright colors and ornate dragon motifs to relatively simple, unembellished pieces of furniture. Woolen rugs or straw mats are heaped to the side and quickly brought out at the arrival of guests. Guests held in high esteem are entitled to the grandest carpets that a family possesses, while those deemed inconsequential are seated on the bare floor. The seat closest to the fireplace on the gral side is called gral-mgo (the head seat). In a mixed gathering of graded ranking, monks prevail at the gral-mgo, followed by guests of differing status and age, with individuals of lower rank seated halfway between the kitchen door and the hearth (gral mjug). Sometimes, villagers grant higher spots to guests from outside if they belong to a high caste. Often, there is a separate middle row for out-of-town visitors (zhung-gral ) to resolve any conflicts that may arise. Caste is a major feature that determines seating arrangements. The higher one is in comparison with others, the higher one is seated in the gral. This pattern is reflected in the ordering of lived space, too, so that monasteries, representing the realm of the sacred, are often situated high above habitations, at a considerable distance from profane village life. The oldest monastery of Achinathang also stands at the apex of the Lungba settlement, flanked by a long flag and a pencil cedar tree. On a clear day, the silhouette of the Nyindum mountains in the Suru valley is visible on its southern side. It is from this monastery that Chenrezig (Tibetan: Spyan-ra-zig, Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara), the incarnation and very essence of compassion, casts his gaze down upon the village.7 This idol of Chenrezig is the eastern-facing one of four identical images built in the four cardinal directions.8 The monastery is dependent on the villagers’ hospitality for sustenance; landowners are essential for sponsoring rituals on the religious calendar. Although monks do not form a separate caste, they are chosen from the houses of the upper or common castes. The highest segment among hereditary castes is that of royalty (rgyal-rigs), a caste not found in Achinathang. In other parts of Ladakh, remains of palace fortresses (mkhar) once occupied by royal dynasties are situated high on the mountains, lower only in relation to temples and monastic edifices that house

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the clergy. The second caste from the top is that of the nobility (sku-drag), who are seated ahead of the laity. Families of ministers, chiefs, and regents who were revered functionaries of former kings are included in this caste. In the past, members of the aristocracy built their homes near castles. Their houses were distinguished by their balconies (rab-sal ). Balcony seats were even reserved for them at monastic festivals, and they were requested to lead the dances performed at cultural shows. The status of the sku-drag was also marked by honorific language with which laypeople addressed them. Their houses were called gzims-khang as opposed to khang-pa, the word used for houses in general, or trong-pa, used for the households of commoners. Special terms of address are still used for the aristocracy, such as shema for women and kaga for men. In Achinathang, there is one shema who hails from the Dragshos family of Skyurbuchan, the official court dancers during monarchic rule. She is seated at the head of the female gral. In the village of Achinathang, where almost all the residents were once monastic serfs, most villagers belong to the caste of commoners (mang-rigs). Here, circular grals have come to replace linear ones for public occasions. Villagers I interviewed insisted that this geometry dissolved hierarchies and fostered unity. But there are also ways in which the circular gral sustains the system of hierarchy, although to a lesser extent. Seniority, in terms of age, remains a stratifying feature of the seating order. Seats toward the right of the center, called gyas-gral, are considered auspicious and were traditionally reserved for the elders; seats to the left (gyon-gral ), where the younger men sat, were not as highly favored. Now, with the importance placed on youth, it is educated civilians who are frequently accorded the highest seats when distinguished guests such as abbots or leaders of one of the regional political parties visit. The status accorded to a person also depends on the wealth and position of that individual at a given moment. Officeholders, such as the ‘‘member’’ (the elected representative of the village in government affairs) and the kotwal (the representative responsible for hosting dignitaries who visit the village), are entitled to loftier posts. Those who are specialists in medicine (amchi ) and astrology (dbon-po) also receive higher seats. Women generally sit below the men in separate circles or in lines to their left. At the bottom end of the gral sit the group of people labeled rigs dma’-mo (lower castes) or rigs-ngan. Three hereditary castes are subsumed under this category: Garba, Mon, and Beda. Here, rigs refers to a ‘‘race or caste or rank,’’ and ngan embraces myriad words of negative meaning. It can refer to a person who is lowly, impoverished, despicable, or evil. The word ngan-pa also

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designates configurations that are evenly numbered. It is opposed to zang-pa, a term signifying prosperity, goodness, and, alternatively, odd numbers. Odd numbers are considered felicitous in Buddhist culture; gifts that guests bring to parties usually reflect this division. In Buddhist houses, the wooden beams that adorn and support the ceiling are arranged so that they add up to an odd number. I have heard some Buddhists refer to this as a mark of distinction between their way of life and that of the Muslims from Kargil district, who do not pay attention to this feature when they construct houses. Today, there is just one house in Achinathang that was granted by the villagers to a Garba (smith) family from Skyurbuchan more than a century ago. The current resident, Tharchen, is responsible for manufacturing and repairing household utensils, cookware, and metal instruments used in agriculture for the trong-pa of Achinathang. His house is a rudimentary shelter consisting of a single room. When I visited his home with Aba, he offered us tea hesitantly, not sure if we would accept. Upon our acceptance, he served the tea in a brass ladle (thung-bu) and steel bowl (sgor-mo), considered the ‘‘cleanest’’ utensils of his kitchen. Tharchen told us that he was still required to carry his own cup with him when he attended parties or visited the homes of other castes (although some houses were more relaxed about this). If he forgot his cup, he had to wait for the host to offer him beer or tea in a steel cup that the host would later cleanse thoroughly with ashes from the hearth. If people lent him their clothes, they would fumigate them with pencil cedar afterwards. During weddings and other occasions of happiness sponsored by his caste members, all the villagers would attend, but the higher castes would prepare their food themselves and brew beer to serve their own members at the feast. They did so to maintain the prohibition against accepting cooked foodstuffs from lower castes. Tharchen alleged that the higher castes did not assist those of his caste during funerals and other events of sorrow. His own relatives had to come from afar to bear the bier and aid the family with funeral preparations.9 Tharchen’s principal place of residence is Skyurbuchan, where he lives with other smiths in houses that are situated in a common neighborhood with other trong-pa. In contrast to the dwellings of the smiths, however, houses belonging to Mon families are segregated from the rest of the village. Whereas men from the smith caste stand behind other men in dance lines, members of the Mon caste are prevented altogether from participating in village dancing, although dances can seldom commence without the musical accompaniment of the daman (kettledrum) and surna (oboe) that are played by their musi-

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Musician with daman. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

cians.10 It is Mons, too, who present the trong-pa the ritual arrows (mda’) to place at religious shrines (Kaplanian 1981). Mons play religious tunes in honor of the gods, while smiths chisel the metal roofs for temples and gild the statues of religious figures within them; still, children from these castes are prevented from joining the order of monks, and women who choose a religious path are denied ordination as nuns. To explain the reasons for the discrimination faced by the Mon and Garba castes, scholars have turned to histories of conquest, immigration, and racial difference. Some histories speculate that the Mons were indigenous inhabitants of Ladakh, others that they were immigrants; some emphasize that they were of the Aryan race, others that they were Austro-Asiatic, and still others hypothesize that they were practitioners of the pre-Buddhist religion identified as Bon.11 A commonly held local view about the history of the Mons in Ladakh is that they were hunting tribes who came from the Himalayan outreaches in Eastern India (Sonam Phuntsog 2000). Here, they encountered groups of pastoralist ‘Brogpas, whereupon a boundary was established to the effect that Mons would not venture below Khalatse and the ‘Brogpa would not trespass in the territories above it. Later, the Mons came into contact with migrants from Tibet who looked down on them for their practices of hunting and butchery. Subsequently, most of them converted to Buddhism and took

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to professions of carpentry and weaving. Those who resisted were pushed out to Zangskar and even Baltistan or to Spiti, a region formerly part of Ladakh but now in the State of Himachal Pradesh. According to research done among Mon elders by Sonam Phuntsog (personal communication), segments of Mon society took to working with iron and formed the Garba caste. Because smiths sometimes extended their skills to silver for religious purposes, they gradually began to assume a higher status. A different view of the origins of Mons is held by A. H. Francke (1907/1998), according to whom Mons did not convert to Buddhism but were Buddhists who were responsible for ushering the first wave of Buddhism into Ladakh. Francke asserts that Ladakh was once ruled by Mons by drawing evidence from architecture and language: names of old castles in Zangskar, rock sculptures such as the statue of Chenrezig in Mulbeg, palace ruins in Sakti and Chemrey. Francke argues that the low position of the Mons probably resulted from their conquest by the Tibetans, who belonged to a different nation. In his opinion, Ladakhi culture is a mixture of Mon, ‘Brogpa, and Tibetan customs. Yet even Francke admits that ‘‘to find out who the Mons really were is impossible in most parts of Ladakh’’ (19).12 Mons have been the record keepers of Ladakh’s history, composing ballads of courtly intrigues and virtuous battles, common love tunes, and hymns for the gods, but their own stories are mostly found in fragments of oral narratives. Not a single caste musician that I interviewed could remember a song dedicated to their collective past.13 To explain how the Mons came to be occupational musicians, Mohammad Abbas Qazmi (1985), a historian from across the border, leads us into the court of Ali Sher Khan Anchan, sultan of Baltistan, whose reign in the sixteenth century heralded a system of classification that divided the region into five castes. The first caste comprised the royalty and sayyeds, regarded as direct descendants of the Prophet. The next tier comprised the aristocrats, the ribo drag-shos (upright government servants), who served as administrators, military officers, and governors. The third caste included the shali drag-shos (bent government servants): small administrators, clerks, and teachers; soldiers and farmers were part of the fourth, phalonopa caste, and musicians fell into the fifth category. Ali Sher Khan sent representatives from the fifth caste to the Moghul emperor Shah Jahan’s court in Delhi to learn to play the daman and dab (tambourine). They returned to Skardo after mastering sixty types of tunes (dbyangs; 16). When the Balti princess, Gyal Khatoun, married Jamyang Namgyal, the king of Ladakh, she

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brought with her a troupe of Mon musicians as court entertainers. They were called mkhar-mon (palace Mons) and were settled in the village of Phyang. In the seventeenth century, wealthy families of Ladakh such as the Lonpo of Alchi, the king of Gya, and the Drag-shos of Khalatse retained families of Mons in their dominions and granted them land. After the Dogra invasion, when the rule of the kings ended, Mons were adopted by different villages and given land in exchange for performing music. It was these musicians who brought to folk culture the courtly tenor of high art with their repertoire of complex instrumental styles that celebrated the virtues of kings and religious leaders. Despite their contribution to the arts in Ladakh, Mons regularly bear the humiliation of being seated at the end of the gral. But there is one caste, that of the Beda, which is denied access to the gral altogether. The Beda are a caste of songwriters and musicians, both Buddhist and Muslim, who made their living by traveling from place to place, sometimes as far as Lahore in pre-Partition days, accompanied by tambourines and trinkets that they traded on the side. A sizable number of songs that are known in Ladakh have been authored by this caste. They also acted as emissaries and as sources of information, composing and broadcasting songs to eulogize the accomplishments or express the feelings of patrons in the places they visited. According to one theory, the root of their wandering can be traced to the exiled prince of Guge and Purang in western Tibet, who was disinherited and banished because of his obsession with music (Sonam Phuntsog 2000). Oral histories collected from elders of this group suggest that ancestors of contemporary Beda migrated from Spiti from the mid-nineteenth century to the first two decades of the twentieth century, when the previous incarnation of the latest Kushok Bakula was abbot of Spituk monastery. Descendents of men called Samjor and Gondar first arrived in Zangskar and then moved toward central Ladakh. Smith and musician castes occupied subservient positions in the villages of Ladakh. Itinerant Beda castes who dwelled outside and crossed village boundaries for economic sustenance had even less recourse to power. They were barred from entering monasteries and made to stand outside the main doors of houses when they petitioned for alms. Older residents of Achinathang clearly remember how indigent bards from the Beda caste would come begging at their doorstep and how they were strictly forbidden from socializing or marrying into this caste.

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CASTE CONFLICTS AT THE GRAL

Several explanations have been proposed for the persistence of caste taboos in Ladakh. According to the French anthropologist Patrick Kaplanian (1981), these taboos are based on cultural conceptions of purity and pollution. Kaplanian uses the structural model of caste relations to justify the moral polarities that are made between outsiders and insiders and high and low castes in Ladakhi society.14 In his model, caste hierarchy is the function of a cognitive map in which the sky-bound pure castes are placed in opposition to those castes that come into contact with polluting agents that penetrate the earth. This duality, he writes, is manifested in the different occupations that go along with caste status. The settled castes recognize their mutual obligations and interdependence with each other, whereas the landless Beda are excluded from the system of social reciprocity because they are relegated to the world of uncivilized nature and to the rank of outsiders. Therefore, alms that the Beda receive as charity differ from bsod-snyoms that are presented as payment by householders to the Mon and Garba communities. Reasons of purity and pollution are articulated by Ladakhis as well to legitimize caste hierarchy. Even today, it is widely believed by householders that accepting cooked food and water from and having sexual contact with lowranked castes is ritually contaminating (see also Gutschow 1998). People cautioned me about openly mixing with such castes in the event that I, too, become unclean because pollution can be transferred from one body to another. Structuralist justifications for caste, however, tend to portray this system as an internally coherent structure, moored in time and space, ignoring transformations resulting from histories of ethnic domination and economic disparity. The caste system is not static, nor is it uncritically accepted, as can be seen from research in other parts of India.15 Moreover, as Ferry Erdmann (1989) notes, the distinction between aristocrats and commoners in Ladakh was never clear and delimiting. Disagreements over seating took place often enough, confirming that caste ranks were not permanent. Powerful and affluent families vied for status and were sometimes appointed to positions of high rank by rulers, particularly in those villages where there were few or no noble households.16 Intermarriage between castes was also a common means of fostering strategic alliances. Once in a while, caste differentials would be superseded by romantic love, generally in the case of women from the oppressed castes marrying into upper-caste families. One of the most infamous cases of intercaste marriage recorded in Ladakh’s history is that of Tshewang Namgyal

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(r. 1760–82), the king who gifted the village of Achinathang to his minister in Ayu, whose scandalous marriage to a woman from the Beda caste almost cost him his throne and had tragic consequences for her.17 In the twentieth century, with the breakdown of traditional political systems and the end of colonial rule, social ranks were subjected to considerable fluctuation. For instance, in 1947, the year of India’s independence from British colonial rule, a different battle for place was being waged in Ladakh, perhaps more visible to its inhabitants than the freedom movement sweeping over the rest of the country. This battle ensued in the village of Nyemo between two families, that of the Zimskhang, who derived his power from his hereditary role as minister to the king (bka’-blon), and that of the Nangso (zaildar), a powerful administrator of the Dogra regime in charge of tax collection and the governance of a cluster of hamlets. It began when the zaildar, Nangsopa Rinchin Namgyal, arranged a match for his adopted daughter with a prince of Zangskar.18 The zaildar already had an elevated status in the gral, but the villagers refused to raise his position further after his affiliation with royalty. They did, however, agree to accord the highest seat to his royal son-in-law. Meanwhile, the Zimskhang house of the bka’-blon witnessed the entrance of a royal daughter-in-law from the Masro palace. The contest for the highest seat was fierce. Records of the fights date to 1947 and oral histories attest that they continued until the 1960s. Police were summoned for major festivals in Nyemo because of the friction. The case was brought before the Young Men’s Buddhist Association in Leh, which passed a resolution to the effect that the right (yas-pa) side was to be conceded to the bka’-blon and the left (yon-pa) to the zaildar. Notes from the minutes of this meeting show that the arbitrators criticized the zaildar for insulting the bka’-blon instead of living up to his duty to protect him.19 They accused him of defiling Buddhist tradition by his actions, presumably for refusing to sit below the abbot and for continuously harassing the bka’-blon even after the verdict. The Young Men’s Buddhist Association sent a delegation to the village to inspect matters. They created a gral for monks in the center and granted the right one to the bka’-blon. But even though the bka’-blon had managed to obtain the coveted right side, it was a hollow victory, for it was mostly the kitchen staff and musicians who were placed below him. As the high official of the neighborhood, the zaildar wielded considerable influence and was able to oblige high-ranking villagers and win them over to his side on the left. Eventually, both families came to be related through marriage and the enmity abated. Similar conflicts around the position of aristocrats transpired in other vil-

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lages. In Dumkhar, the gral was a major bone of contention between the blonpo (minister; a hereditary title bestowed during monarchic rule) who had married a nonaristocratic woman, and the trong-pa villagers, who refused to confer on him the honor of high seating, arguing that times had changed and, as the minister had diluted his noble heritage by marrying outside his caste, he was no longer fit for his seat. Quarrels about seating also arose in Skyurbuchan, but they were resolved by creating a zhung gral, a middle line, where respected members of the community, including the amchi, were seated. In Khalatse, a sgor-mo (bowl-shaped) gral replaced the old linear one as a result of a dispute between the villagers and the Drag-shos family. Even among ordinary citizens, places are not fixed, and although there is tremendous pressure to conform to caste status, there occurs, every now and then, what Sherry Ortner (1978, 75) calls ‘‘a microshift in the status hierarchy.’’ For the process of sitting is ambiguous and fluctuating, riddled with protesting and persuading, coaxing and contesting, submitting and subverting. My own seat was the subject of constant negotiation in Achinathang, where women have separate lines at large gatherings or sit behind men during private functions. Initially, I was seated with men in people’s homes. In public places, I was occasionally placed high in the gral with older and high-ranking women, despite considerable protests on my part. After a while, I grew accustomed to the placement, and deciding that it was futile to argue otherwise, quietly accepted the seat I was offered. This generated some resentment among older women who were forced to sit behind me, an unmarried woman at the time. One day, a feast was held to celebrate the completion of an irrigation canal. As I made my way to the feast, I was beckoned by Ama to the head of the female gral. ‘‘Come here, Ache Ravina. Do come. Have a seat. Please. Right here,’’ she said with inflated, honorific deference. Before I could sit down, she ordered me to wait as she swept the floor clean with slow, exaggerated gestures. I had barely settled in my seat and was just about to take a sip of chang from my cup when others joined in the act, snatched my cup, and insisted that I could not drink without a table in front for it to rest on. Someone found a rock to serve as a surrogate table. I tried to resume drinking, but before the cup could touch my lips, I was asked to wait once again. ‘‘This piece of black rock will simply not do. We need a white table for our Ache,’’ said my tormentor as she signaled to the children to fetch me a white stone. Everyone was giggling by now and I joined in the laughter self-consciously, tossing away the rock. Gestures such as these show that subversion and reorganization are recur-

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rent features of the gral and adjustments must often be made to accommodate kinship and residence, hospitality and hierarchy, the high status of distant guests versus the high demands of one’s neighbors. Parties are sites of struggle, fraught with political activity. Stepping outside the boundaries of one’s position in the gral or failing to respect the etiquette of seating can lead to friction and even to ostracism. On the one hand, sitting together reaffirms social ties; hospitality evokes the ideals of largesse, generosity, reciprocity, and egalitarian exchange. ‘‘If one feeds one’s neighbors, it is an investment,’’ Apo Roziali explained to me. ‘‘For one will then be fed in the afterlife. Even a dog remembers the favors it has enjoyed.’’ Social exchange is an insurance against hunger and isolation, as is exemplified by the trade of bits of buttered bread between people sitting next to each other on the tshesh bcu, the tenth day of every month, observed in honor of Guru Rinpoche. This exchange is undertaken with the hope that separated friends may meet once again in the next life. Thus portrayed, sitting together epitomizes communion and solidarity. On the other hand, one sits next to one’s peers, to those who are equal in rank and caste authority. To desire a common ground in the future is also to eternalize the hegemony of the present. Systems of ascribed ranking frequently come into conflict with ideals of hospitality and kinship, calling for new grounds of arbitration. Within the social arena, the position of hosts is central, their seat akin to a throne, as recounted in the song about the gral from the Gesar epic. Their position also varies according to the context of the ritual being performed. During public ceremonies, hosts are generally required to assist in the process of serving and catering. If the occasion is a Buddhist one and chang is to be served, hosts usually occupy the central place by the keg, making rounds to ensure that guests are well looked after. In addition to the host’s family, members of his or her pha-spun are also deployed to serve at birth, wedding, and funeral feasts. A pha-spun, which literally means ‘‘father’s brothers,’’ is a kin group in which the members are connected by principles of descent that are flexible and are based on residence and cordial relations between families rather than agnatic ‘‘bone’’ (rus) lines. All those acts that are closed to outsiders, such as access to the bang position and the stores, entering the house during the month-long taboo after birth and death, or entering the reserved area where the house deity (bang-lha-mo) is seated, are open to the pha-spun. The closeness of relatives and the ties of kinship are as pressing, if not more so, than caste demarcation.

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Typically, one’s kin are drawn from a physical domain that is comparatively intimate and close. It is generally those who reside in the vicinity of one’s neighborhood who share in the exchange of labor and sociality. But the historical resettlement of the smith and musician castes has involved much dispersal over space, so that their numbers rarely go beyond five to ten houses in large villages. Because of this and the strict observance of caste endogamy, they are obliged to seek marital alliances from distant places. For these castes, whose ancestors are not enshrined in village space, whose lineage deities do not occupy a distinct ‘‘seat’’ or ‘‘home,’’ whose celebrations of joy and sorrow are not aided by their neighbors, the nexus of distant relatives assumes added significance. During weddings, the propagation of the house, with its social members and material products, becomes as important as propagating the social order. On this day, it is the bride who is situated at the highest end, just below the monks, with the groom’s entourage below her. A yung-grung symbol, drawn with grains of barley on the floor by the gral-mgo of the groom’s house, becomes the seat of the newlyweds. The placement of the meal-mountain (brang-gyas), the heaps of stones (tho) piled on the way for the groom’s party, and the arrow dug into the tin of grain (mda’-dar) during the wedding all reinforce the cosmic design of the world as a mandala, with the wedding ground as its central axis (Brauen 1983). These centers of ritual space compete with the centrality of caste dominance. The Mon family that was boycotted in Skyurbuchan and Achinathang had also placed its relatives at a higher level, privileging the immediacy of kinship in wedding rituals over the universalizing schema of caste. Systems of hierarchy and norms governing exchange made the family’s bid for centrality a precarious one. The village guests succeeded in walking out and imposed a boycott on them. When it was lifted after a year, ostensibly with apologies on the part of the musicians, both sides were relieved. Feasts of the wealthy gain their prestige from the quality and quantity of food served and from the entertainment they provide. Without skilled musicians, it had been a year of diminished festivity and sporadic dancing. Yet, shortly after the suspension of that boycott, another one was imposed on all seven Mon families in Skyurbuchan and Achinathang because one of them had been invited on behalf of the government to tour India and was unavailable to play the surna for a wedding in the noble Drag-shos house. When I visited Achinathang in 2000, this latest boycott had entered its eighth year.

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THE NIGHTINGALE OF LADAKH

In almost every village in which caste stratification exists there have been conflicts between caste groups, indicative of the changes in social organization and power in modern Ladakh. As the old seating order is debated, new kinds of seats are now the source of contention. Caste is still a factor in post-1989 political elections and representatives from sku-drag families wield considerable influence in the new system, too.20 One of the thirty seats allocated for councilors in the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council is reserved for oppressed castes. Tsheshu Lhamo, described as ‘‘the Nightingale of Ladakh’’ on the cover of a cassette that features her songs, and one of the most renowned performing artists in Ladakh, was the first to hold this post.21 Her nomination to the lahdc allowed her community to voice its grievances against violations of land rights and submit applications for new meeting spaces for cultural performances and collective gatherings. The story of Tsheshu Lhamo’s life illuminates the ways contemporary policies and attitudes have impacted the world of performance artists. Based on several interviews with her over the years, I am able to present some aspects from her life that are relevant to the understanding of caste, music, and social boundaries. Tsheshu Lhamo’s formal name is Sonam Palskyid, given to her by Kushok Bakula. Her father was from the Beda lineage of Samdor from Spiti. Her mother, Tshering Putith, from the Khunpa family in Kinnaur, was famous for her song routines and for the finale, where she would pick up money from a plate with her mouth, her hands behind her back. According to Tsheshu Lhamo, her mother had a great desire to go to the Hemis festival that is held on the tshesh bcu (the tenth day of the month), but she gave birth in the village of Chemrey on that very day and was unable to travel. She was consoled by her neighbors, who told her that although she hadn’t been able to visit the monastery, she could at least bring the tshesh bcu back home: they advised the new mother to informally address her baby girl as Tsheshu. ‘‘So that was how I got this name,’’ Tsheshu Lhamo said to me as we sipped butter tea when she visited me at the guest house I was staying in. ‘‘This is my mother’s pet name that I go by: Tsheshu Lhamo, Ama’i jo [mother’s dear one].’’ Tsheshu Lhamo further related that as she grew older, her mother took her on trips and taught her songs. During these years, she sometimes worked as a coolie in the high ranges of Khalatse. The family used to sell rings, plastic bangles, and semiprecious stones, often in exchange for just one plate of flour, and they would spend all their wages on food. On one occasion, they

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even roasted grass for food because they could afford nothing else. Travel was vital to Tsheshu Lhamo’s life, but the journey was far from smooth. After getting married, she gave birth to three children, but none survived. She bore many hardships, carrying her children in her arms as she begged in village after village. Tsheshu Lhamo remembered the birth celebration of bka’-blon Tshewang Rigzin’s oldest son as a turning point in her life. She had been singing a song at the door of the aristocratic bka’-blon family in the hope of getting some food when the bka’-blon summoned her inside because his guests were curious about the woman with the beautiful voice. When he asked her to step into the room, Tsheshu Lhamo hesitated in embarrassment. Then he asked her to sing and she began with the lha-rnga, followed by a congregational folk song (gzhung-glu) to comply with the high caste status of her hosts. The guests all praised her voice and asked for her name, which they noted down on a scrap of paper. Tsheshu Lhamo admitted that she was surprised when they actually sent for her on the occasion of the wedding of the bka’-blon’s daughter, where she sang and performed and was rewarded with gifts that included an entire sack of grain and an old robe. Reminiscing fondly about the generosity of the bka’-blon’s family, Tsheshu Lhamo noted that the bka’-blon was among three men who had invited her to the dak bungalow when she was once camping in Leh. At the dak bungalow, she was introduced to a person she describes as ‘‘a big man from the Jammu and Kashmir Cultural Academy.’’ Seeing these people, she recalls that her body shivered and trembled but the bka’-blon reassured her and encouraged her to sing, promising that they would record her songs and take them to Kashmir, from where they would send her money. Lacking a fixed place of residence, she gave the men the bka’-blon’s address. After that, she left for lower Ladakh to take advantage of the apricot-picking season, and then returned to Leh by harvest time. But when many months passed and she did not hear from the Academy, she was convinced they had taken her songs and given her just one cup of tea as compensation. Finally, she received a tin of biscuits and a check for a sum that was respectable in those days. That marked the beginning of Tsheshu Lhamo’s association with radio; from then on, she was invited to record songs at the Radio Kashmir station in Srinagar, where she delighted listeners by singing a Balti ghazal. Her beautiful voice won her acclaim, and in 1986, when Zail Singh was president of India, she went to Bombay to receive the Sangeet Natak Academy Award. Tsheshu Lhamo started out as a landless migrant and ended up traveling far and wide in different condi-

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tions altogether. In her estimate, her life had improved vastly in the prior fifteen years; she now had a house, some land, and small fields with a few poplars and willows to her name. ‘‘Not the apricots, walnuts, and apples that flourish in Achinathang,’’ she pointed out. ‘‘Just a small piece of land, Ama’i jo! ’’ In the years when Tsheshu Lhamo was becoming popular, families of Beda who once camped in tents outside villages were becoming sedentary, residing in specially designated segments of bigger towns. In 1983, they received grants of land in the Manisermo or Lotsawa Ling settlement of Leh and in Kuzey and Palam near the village of Chushod in central Ladakh as a concession made by the State government to accommodate those who did not have houses and fields. But land grants given to the Beda castes did not exempt them from hostility. Fights would break out between those settled in Beda colonies in Kuzey and Palam, where Tsheshu Lhamo lives, and their neighbors from Chushod. One confrontation, centered on the use of village resources, started when trong-pa women of Chushod refused to allow the residents of the colonies to collect rocks from the village and escalated into a situation in which Chushod villagers threatened to raze the colony houses to the ground. As the councilor of the oppressed castes, Tsheshu Lhamo presented a plea to the Ladakh Buddhist Association and the village committee, arguing for the rights of her community members as Buddhists, as legitimate landowners, and as villagers who should be given their share of the area’s resources. Her appeal worked and the tension dissipated. But the fear of future threats and memories of the past remained wedged in Tsheshu Lhamo’s heart. Remembering the cruelty of villagers when they yelled out caste names as insults, she said: They would call us Beda, Garba, and Mon, not by our individual names. It’s true that we belong to these groups, but they considered us rigs-ngan, low and vile. They made us sit on the ground, never offering a table or cup, keeping our cups below the table or to the side. They would throw food at us as though we were dogs. It was humiliating. We may be Beda, Garba, or Mon, but our srog [breath] is one, isn’t it? Why call us rigs-ngan? Gewa Rinpoche [the Dalai Lama] also said that we should not be called names like this. People welcome me now. Invite me in. Say, ‘‘Tsheshu Lhamo, come sit.’’ Even offer me a rug and table at times. Other Beda who beg are still mishandled. This is not right. We should all be treated respectfully. We should be allowed in the gral even if we are seated at the bottom. If it is your cup, you drink it, I say. Don’t

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give it to me. Your clothes, you wear, and I’ll wear mine, but why call me dirty? I am not asking for your things. There is one khuda who has created us, isn’t there? Tsheshu Lhamo served as a councilor from 1995 to 2001. When I last stopped by her house in 2002, I found that she was partly paralyzed as a result of a stroke she had suffered earlier in the year. Coincidentally, around the time of her stroke, a major section of the All-India Radio archives in Leh was destroyed in an accidental fire; many recordings by Tsheshu Lhamo and other artists were lost. Tsheshu Lhamo mourned the loss of her singing voice, through which she had made a living. Even though she had been nominated to Ladakh’s first autonomous government, she now faces a future without pension and the possibility of her songs not surviving in public memory. FROM CASTE TO TRIBE

In her narrative about her life, Tsheshu Lhamo drew from sermons delivered by the Dalai Lama to protest against divisions of caste among people of a common religion. In 1985, the Dalai Lama made history by visiting the house of a smith, where he was felicitated by members of all three oppressed castes. The story of his visit has reached legendary proportions, and photographs of him holding up drumsticks and beating a daman are hung in several homes. Acting on his advice, the three castes have adopted the term lag-shes-pa (craftspeople) to classify themselves and to emphasize their occupational specialization as artisans, sculptors, woodworkers, and musicians. For the past few years, at his birthday celebration on July 6 at the Peace Garden near Choglamsar, the Dalai Lama has openly expressed his disapproval of caste, denying that it has any basis in Buddhist doctrine.22 ‘‘The Dalai Lama has said that since we play the lha-rnga, the melody for the gods, we should be fed first, not last. But nobody will listen,’’ lamented one surna player. Lag-shes-pa leaders maintain that religious heads did not initiate substantial measures to alleviate caste discrimination because they were reluctant to endanger their standing with the trong-pa castes, who constitute a larger political voting block. Perhaps caste differences within Buddhist communities have been ignored because Buddhism itself has been the religion prescribed by leaders of oppressed castes outside Ladakh as a recourse to Hindu casteism. For instance, Babasaheb Ambedkar, the prominent Scheduled Caste citizen responsible for

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drafting the Constitution of India, embraced Buddhism in 1956. But there was little contact between Buddhists in Ladakh and Buddhists from oppressed communities in other parts of India. The only evidence of communication between Ladakhis and Ambedkar that I was able to find was in an article published by Tashi Rabgias (1990, 31), describing an encounter he had with the leader when he was visiting Burma as an interpreter for Kushok Bakula. Tashi Rabgias reports that Ambedkar gave him this advice for Ladakhis: to teach English to the youth. A possible reason for the lack of communication between Ladakhis and Scheduled Caste Buddhists is that Vajrayana Buddhism practiced in Ladakh is different from forms practiced by the latter. A more significant reason is that organizations in Ladakh that had the means to foster such links were run by upper castes.23 In Ladakh, political struggles for improving the region’s status tended to overlook caste differences and focus on religious and developmental neglect by the Jammu and Kashmir State administration. It was Ladakh’s border location, mountainous geography, economic deprivation, and distinctive culture that officially led to the recognition of eight groups, amounting to 95 percent of its population, as tribes in 1989; these groups were then given Scheduled Tribe status in 1991. But criteria for identifying the eight tribes, traceable to colonial typologies, were highly inconsistent, varying among factors such as region, religion, race, language, and caste (see Srinivas 1993). Research done by Martijn van Beek (1996) on census documents dating back to colonial times reveals that caste was a principal category of organization in Ladakh until the 1911 census, but by the 1931 census, religious affiliation had become the determining factor for identifying communities within Ladakh. The first Indian census after Independence displayed many similarities with its Dogra/British predecessors. ‘‘Race, caste, and tribe’’ ceased to be recorded; the emphasis moved overwhelmingly toward religion, region, and nationality as modern concepts of citizenship were instituted (van Beek 1996). Caste emerged as a condition of backwardness, the specialized characteristic of those ‘‘scheduled’’ for affirmative action by the modern state. Yet constitutional safeguards through affirmative action were reserved only for oppressed castes that professed the Hindu faith. It was not until the Scheduled Castes Disability Act of 1990 that those castes that had converted to Buddhism could qualify for state assistance. Even so, Christian and Muslim groups are still excluded from Scheduled Caste status on the grounds that they already enjoy privileges awarded to minorities. Driven by anxieties around conversion from Hinduism to Buddhism, there appears to be little understanding of caste on

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the part of the government of areas such as Ladakh, where Hinduism is not directly implicated. In 1991, the Mon, Beda, and Garba communities chose to list themselves as tribes rather than as castes with the hope that the stigma separating them from other Ladakhis would be erased if they claimed a similar group identity as the trong-pa. HERITAGE POLITICS AND MUSICAL FUTURES

The designation of Ladakh as a tribal area has widened avenues for cultural performances. Sizable amounts of government funds are allocated for the promotion and exhibition of its culture.24 The Ladakh Festival, officially instituted in 1993 by the Jammu and Kashmir Tourism Department, is one of the major cultural events to receive government sponsorship.25 This festival is celebrated annually from September 1–15. Cultural troupes present musical concerts, folk dances, archery contests, polo matches, cultural dramas, and even a Great Himalayan Motor Race featuring daredevil riders who race from Leh to Khardongla on a road that is marketed as the highest motorable road in the world. The primary objective of this festival is to extend the tourist season in Ladakh beyond the month of August by generating ‘‘awareness about the richness and pageantry of centuries-old customs of its people, their traditions and folk heritage’’ (Daily Excelsior 1999). Since the formation of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council in 1995, the festival organizers not only invite artists from different villages and blocks to perform in Leh, but they have also decentralized the festival by scheduling a few days in rural venues so that regions other than the Leh block can take advantage of the opportunity to showcase their culture and profit from tourist visits. In 1998, the Ladakh Festival was used by the members of the Beda caste as a site to voice their protest against persisting injustice. Inaugurated by the Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, one of the main draws of the 1998 Ladakh Festival was the reenactment of trade scenes from the Silk Route, replete with Bactrian camels and caravans laden with pashmina, tea, and rugs. The cultural program included mask dances by monks from Thagthog monastery at the Jokhang courtyard, songs by villagers of Turtuk, a simulated marriage ceremony, and a polo tournament in which the army’s Trishul team defeated the Indus Civilians’ team to win the Polo Cup. River rafting along the Indus and an exhibition of thangka paintings at Thiksey monastery were advertised as added attractions. The festivities spread to Nubra and Changthang as well.

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A dance at the Ladakh Festival. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

A news report in the Jammu-based newspaper, Daily Excelsior (1998), stated, ‘‘Besides the heroic dance of the legendary King Kesar, the variety of folk and modern dances with songs were the main attraction of the last evening programme of the Information Deptt.’’ On the opening day of the festival, a carnival of performers marched from the hillock on which Lamdon High School is located through the main bazaar to the Polo Ground. That evening, the Archery Stadium was packed with a large number of local spectators and foreign tourists. The master of ceremonies explained the significance of various dances and songs in the cultural show. Commenting on the music, he explained that it was traditional to start every ceremony or festival with the beat of the lha-rnga, that this was music offered to gods and goddesses, high lamas and kings, or to noble families to request them to dignify the occasion, and that this tune contained 360 notes.26 But the notes of the lha-rnga that would normally have welcomed the distinguished guests were extremely faint that year. Musicians from the Beda group had decided to collectively boycott the festival to bring their situation to public notice when a young girl of thirteen from their community was found dead by her mother and sister, her head smashed by a rock and her body discarded high in the graveyard area. Even though the police suspected it was an inside job, neighbors and family mem-

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bers of the deceased decided to stand up to the officials because lag-shes-pa youth were arbitrarily rounded up for questioning and subjected to police brutality. The neighborhood united to boycott the Ladakh Festival. Ali Mohammed, the reputed surna player for All India Radio, Leh, told me that when there was no music for entertaining guests, he received threats that he would be transferred to the Kargil radio station. But the protestors stood firm and Tsheshu Lhamo came forward as their collective representative. Finally, the assistant commissioner and the director of the radio station, who had been a source of support all along, gave them prayer scarves and requested them to return to the festival. The community asked the police to stop the physically and emotionally tortuous interrogation. In Ali’s opinion, police beatings have lessened since that time. In some respects, the plight of Ladakh’s caste musicians has improved visibly in the years following this incident. Education and careers in the army, police, and service industry have opened doors for a change of caste status. Beda groups that traded petty commodities in the past now use their marketing skills in the modern economy, selling turquoise, pearls, and housewares out of vending stalls or even successfully running antique and jewelry shops for the tourist sector. But overall, education, urbanization, and modernity have not been entirely successful in eradicating caste distinctions, especially in the rural areas. Even under the new economy, unemployment is high among the lag-shes-pa; often, the only jobs available to them are those despised by other castes, such as cleaning toilets, a task that formerly had to be performed by the villagers of Igu because of a royal decree. An army employee told me a story of one lag-shes-pa soldier who could not rise in rank because soldiers from other castes refused to serve under his command; similarly, educated smiths generally find it impossible to find brides from higher castes. In another case, villagers refused to accept a lag-shes-pa teacher; when she was eventually transferred to another village, she had to live in the school building because no one would rent her a room. I also learned that at a festival in the Sham region, the dancing of a lag-shes-pa teacher with the village women aroused the displeasure of the headman; under the pretext that there were too many dancers crowding the floor, he divided the line with a stick, instructing young girls from trong-pa families dancing behind the teacher to sit down. This division ensured that the teacher danced right at the end of the line. Affluence, too, was no guarantee of equal treatment, as is confirmed by the experience of one lag-shes-pa businessman who had acquired considerable wealth in Jammu and married an outsider. At a party that this businessman

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was invited to, he took a seat in the middle of the gral in order to assess the outcome, but no one, not even young boys, would sit below him. They pushed and squeezed into the line above so that the rest of the space below him remained empty. The pain in his heart was so deep that he swore he would not attend such functions again. Furthermore, career opportunities provided by higher education and the modern marketplace have led to quarrels with villagers who threaten to dispossess the musician and smith castes of the land commissioned to their families if they do not perform their traditional services. Acts of ostracism against the lag-shes-pa are on the increase throughout Ladakh. The longest caste rift in the entire Khalatse block is the twenty-year boycott in Dumkhar Gongma that was levied against the resident Mon families because they would salute only the blon-po (minister) with welcome music ( pheps-rnga) and not his attendants. In Tagmachig, lag-shes-pa families are still debarred from taking a short cut to Urbis village lest they pollute the shrine of the village deity that lies en route. In Khalatse town, a Mon family was boycotted by the rest of the villagers until Togldan Rinpoche, head of the Phyang monastery, requested the villagers to grant them land on the grounds that a woman from that family had married a fairly wealthy Muslim ‘Brogpa from Dras who had then converted to Buddhism. Movements such as the 1989 Agitation emphasized justice, religious unity, and cultural preservation in Ladakh, but the marginalization of the lag-shespa continued. In protest, lag-shes-pa leaders led processions in the marketplace of Leh, warning upper castes that if their demands were ignored, if the discrimination against them persisted, and if no other castes would marry them, they would have no recourse but to convert to Islam.27 Many members of the smith community insisted that caste stigmatization was absent among Muslims and ‘Brogpas. Most Muslims too stressed the fundamentally egalitarian nature of Islam, where there are no restrictions on interdining with those of the same religion. Caste hierarchy, however, is not limited to Buddhist society. Lines of ascription and hierarchy were prevalent among the Muslim population in the Chigtan block, where a few houses claimed descent from former lords. Besides, members of Agha families, considered to be direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed, were granted gral priority. Smith families who had converted to Islam were distinguished by the Urdu term ustad (master). Some Muslims I questioned admitted this was a form of distinction and that they would never marry a lower-caste person. Conversion to Islam has improved the lifestyle of many, granting them

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greater inclusion and respect in public meetings, but intermarriage with an upper-caste person still results in frequent persecution for the couple. Furthermore, as Islamic society provides very little opportunity for musical performances, practicing Muslim smiths have benefited more than musicians, who rely on Buddhist ceremonies and government performances to make a living. In the village of Chigtan, where people converted to Islam more recently, the families who were still popularly designated as Mon found it harder to gain acceptance because of the strong taboo on musical performances. Ironically, folk music condemned by Muslim clerics and claimed as authentic and traditional by Buddhists contains syncretic melodies and rhythms played on instruments like the daman, which is of Persian origin, and the surna, which was brought from Baltistan into Ladakh.28 The daman of Achinathang, too, had once been purchased from the Lord of Sod, Baltistan, about seventy years ago, when public dancing came to be prohibited there. Reforms by politicoreligious organizations such as the Ladakh Buddhist Association have focused on erasing caste pollution by substituting it with religious purity. Conversion has been a major factor governing the politics of caste since the Agitation. The anxiety of conversion has finally motivated the lba to mobilize a campaign against caste, but its execution has been very slow. A poster printed by the lba in 1998, distributed to every Buddhist household in Ladakh, lists among its slob-ston don-tshan bco-nga or ‘‘15 lessons’’ this lesson: ‘‘For those who are the beneficiaries of the religion of the Buddha, there should be no discrimination on the bases of caste and ‘bone.’ Generally, distinctions between low and high caste or bone should not count within the association.’’ 29 Progressive upper-caste Buddhists who view caste discrimination as the cause of social backwardness have organized a forum known as the Society for Promotion of Social Equality of Ladakh, which was registered in 1999. Its president, Tshering Tashi, is from Zangskar, and among its founding members is Gelong Konchok Phandey, a learned monk from Achinathang and Aba’s younger brother. The organization holds seminars and workshops to combat ignorance and to appeal to Buddhist values of universal compassion. In an interview, Tshering Tashi spoke of the difficulty he faced with his cause, even occasional resistance from his family. But he was determined to reform what he perceived as injustice within his own religious community. ‘‘An incarnate monk is like a Mon,’’ he told me, equating the two as being specialists devoted to the task of spreading Buddhism, and ‘‘the engineer is like a Garba,’’ comparing the two professionals who both work with metal and earth. The

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Society run by Tshering Tashi aims to function as a philanthropic nonprofit association to ensure better educational and economic opportunities for the downtrodden and boost their morale and sense of belonging to a religion and nation. Encouragement from rural and urban members of the upper castes, education, and economic and political representation have all brought about significant modifications in caste relations, but they have also heightened religious borders within the lag-shes-pa. Those lag-shes-pa who are Shi’a must also abide by the restraints on social interaction and interdining with nonMuslims, making it difficult for lag-shes-pa groups to form a united front. Ali, the surna player, acknowledged that being Muslim had helped him avert numerous hardships he would otherwise have borne as a lag-shes-pa, but it had also distanced him from other Beda groups. For example, he had served as the president of the Gar rtsed glu dbyangs tshogs-pa (the Dance, Song, and Melody Society) but was asked to resign on grounds that he believed were related to his faith. The Gar rtsed glu dbyangs tshogs-pa was a guild formed to represent the needs of caste musicians, settle internal problems, and provide assistance to members during occasions of happiness and sorrow.30 As a noted radio station employee, Ali had been consulted to make lists of participant families eligible to receive funds for participating in the Ladakh Festival, but, according to him, even though he had compiled a list that was very inclusive, there was resentment against his choices. The distrust, he commented, had really grown with the Agitation and with activities and campaigns of the lba. Ali complained that his father had been the resident surna player for the monasteries of Spituk and Phyang but the lba had tried to expel him and ordered the lag-shes-pa not to retain Ali as president of their cooperative. His father was reinstated only when Bakula Rinpoche directly intervened on his behalf. Intercaste rivalries have also affected a united struggle against exploitation. When Mon families are boycotted in villages, those of the Beda are summoned to take their place and play music for festive occasions. Different Beda troupes place a bid before a committee and successful bidders are dispatched to the hosting villages, where they receive grain and cash as payment for music performed during weddings and other celebrations. Ali Mohammed openly voiced his opposition to this practice and implored his people to stand united and support other dispossessed castes, but many Beda felt that their poverty left them with few options. In Ali’s estimation, it was this dissolution of unity (cig-gril ) that weakened their struggle against domination.

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Differences between the three lag-shes-pa castes existed even in the past. For example, the Mons of Skyurbuchan had to serve smiths in a separate ladle and cup to prevent them from being contaminated; they were assigned seats lower than women and children of the latter caste. But occasionally, diverse groups came together and expressed a common history of suppression by the upper castes. Presently, most Mon and Garba households have become educated and some of them are quite affluent, widening the disparity between them and the Beda, who remain poor. Now, each neighborhood has its own president, with a representative who is elected annually. Constant subjugation has created a situation wherein caste musicians are faced with the option of living in urban areas, educating their children, and sacrificing their hereditary professions, or else dealing with overt discrimination in rural habitats. Even though Ali Mohammed’s musical skills have brought him his coveted position at the radio station, making him a household name and getting him special treatment, such as urban Ladakhis offering him a table at restaurants and treating him like a trong-pa, he is aware that the persecution of other Beda musicians has not abated. Ali regretfully remarked that he could not visualize an end to this discrimination for at least another hundred years, an end that would be possible only if their children were educated and surrendered their ancestral profession. Like Ali, Tharchen, the smith from Achinathang, had reservations about recruitment in noncaste professions and thought it was important to propagate the traditional crafts, as they are free from the heavy burdens that farmers have to bear. But his is not a conviction popular among the youth, who, even if they are talented, prefer the anonymity of new professions. Within the lag-shes-pa community, newly formed youth wings express dissatisfaction at the slow pace of progress even after the efforts of the Dalai Lama and the formation of a Social Welfare Committee. In a memorandum (grosgzhi) produced in 1998, they voiced their complaints on behalf of the lag-shespa. The benefits given by the government were futile, the memo argued, for even those who went to school were subject to segregation, and at the moment of death, no one but their own pha-spun members would touch the corpse because they were still considered impure. In some villages, they were not allowed to participate in prayer services, enter monasteries, or approach the roofs of houses where deities are propitiated. The memorandum denied that oppressed castes were lowly and blamed segregating customs for spreading evil. It demanded to know why they were still considered distinct ( ya-phyes) when strangers from other religions—Indians, Kashmiris, Baltis, Nepalese,

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foreigners—roamed around freely with respect and honor. The memorandum went on to estimate that in the twenty years between 1950 and 1970, twenty-nine girls had married non-Buddhists and that number had almost doubled in the prior two decades. It warned that there was an imminent possibility of even more marriages with outsiders. Frustrated by the persisting prejudices and acts of exclusion, more vocal and radical reformists within the lag-shes-pa community have urged their people to refrain from lowering their dignity by begging or greeting upper castes with the conventional welcoming salute. Some feel that mass intermarriage with non-Buddhists is the only solution for putting an end to histories of discrimination and that other than the allotment of a few acres of land and the reservation of the lahdc seat, there has been almost no state intervention in caste matters by either the central or the local government. Most of the younger generation has resorted to removing caste labels from Scheduled Tribe identity cards, choosing religious or regional tribal affiliation instead. For instance, Muslim musicians were traditionally designated as Beda, but in the Scheduled Tribe census, most members of this group do not identify themselves in this manner. There are 2,100 members listed in these three tribes for all of Ladakh, but unofficial estimates list the number as closer to 5,000. Ali Mohammed is one of the few musicians adamant about not surrendering his caste identity. ‘‘That is who I am,’’ he told me. ‘‘You can know me as a Beda. I’ll say it myself. It doesn’t make me any less of a person.’’ Ali is convinced that any hope for the eradication of caste discrimination lies in the solidarity expressed by castes that are oppressed. He would like to reinforce ideals of oneness, collective advancement, and, above all, a delight in music among his people. Today, music in the public sphere is no longer the prerogative of caste musicians. Radio and television have created competitive spaces and widespread markets for songs and plays. The story of King Gesar is aired on radio in the winter season. A burgeoning cassette industry is bolstering the talents of folk and ghazal singers such as Morup Namgyal, Phuntsog Dinbir, and Khadija, and fusion bands like awa. Besides Central Asian and Tibetan rhythms, strains of Western and Indian popular melodies can also be detected in contemporary Ladakhi music. Troupes like cats (Cultural and Traditional Society) and lhasol (Ladakh Artists Society of Leh) entertain cultural tourists and sightseers, both at old dancing grounds and in hotel lobbies. At performances held at concert halls and auditoriums, seating arrangements are reorganized in ways that make it difficult for spectators to discern the caste

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identity of those seated near them. Even seats at major monastic festivals are now sold to high bidders. Government-sponsored celebrations such as the Ladakh Festival are making effective strides in preserving Ladakh’s musical heritage, while new styles of entertainment mark the advent of a modernizing Ladakh. Considerable energy is being invested in ending the district’s marginalization and using its border identity advantageously, but the direction the identity movement has taken in its attempts to maintain cultural purity and prevent transgression across religious boundaries has failed to adequately redress the plight of those castes whose music constitutes a vital cultural and historical record. Lines of blood and caste still hinder the realization of the qualities of pluralism and togetherness that are also legacies of Ladakh’s musical arts and social ideals.

CHAPTER FIVE

Border Games . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Almost a year after the Kargil war had subsided, I made plans to visit Achinathang for its two-day archery fair. Friends from Achinathang whom I encountered in Leh were full of stories about the war. They told me of the sounds of explosions that wracked the village even as All India Radio routinely broadcast reports about the bravery of Indian soldiers and the victories they had attained, the peaks they had recaptured, and the Pakistani infiltrators they had taken captive. A shell struck the village of Sanjag across the river from Achinathang and a woman was killed watering her fields in Da. Vehicles carrying corpses of hundreds of soldiers were a daily sight. Carcasses of wild animals, especially ibex, spread across the pasturelands in the high reaches of the valleys. As Gelong Konchok Phandey and I made our way from Leh to Achinathang in his Armada, we saw newly erected army barracks and war memorials on either side of the road. Road signs put up by the Himank division of the Indian army blazed slogans such as ‘‘Himank the Himalaya Tamer’’ and ‘‘Think of us when you go home. For your tomorrow we gave our today.’’ Set in the aftermath of the war, the archery show that we were to witness also reflected the major shifts in local and national politics that had taken place in the prior months. I was not used to arriving in Achinathang in the comfort of a private vehicle. In the years when I traveled primarily by bus, the bus too had been a strange spectacle for villagers. Around midafternoon, every two days, cheers

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Road marker on the way to Achinathang. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

of children would be heard in the village and, shortly after that, as thunder follows lightning, the honking, spluttering government bus would come to a halt and deposit its passengers and their goods at the doorstep of the mountain. Watching people come and go had been a favorite way to pass time. These days, Ladakh’s Scheduled Tribe status had made more people eligible for federal subsidies and loans to purchase vehicles. As the dollar went up and the rupee was devalued, as Honda and Suzuki entered the Indian market with their local collaborators, new models of automobiles were no longer oddities. Now, a dirt road reached all the way to the Gongmathang commons and we drove right up to them. It was a sultry summer day and the village was festive and green, filled with the scent of flowers. Mosquitoes, flies, bed bugs, and even an odd snake or two were out to savor the sun. The schoolyard where the archery dance (mda’rtses) was being held was covered with parachute fabric and decorated with colored paper flags. Rugs and tables were laid out for special guests. I noticed that many women were adorned with new pad-rags, men wore goncha robes held together by bright sashes, and young girls were dressed in polyester tunics. Apo Stanzin, the oldest man in the village, led the dance line. Next, children danced to the tune of a song praising the happy village of Achinathang. Girls

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Sign for Vijay Thang military zone.

standing in a row chimed ‘‘Tashi delegs, esteemed guests! Welcome to our village.’’ A breakdance by a young male dancer brought him much applause. Folk dances were interspersed with several such ‘‘disco’’ numbers, a very different scenario from the early 1990s, when village elders had classified those dances that called for swaying and swinging to the beat of popular Hindi music as vulgar and coarse rkyag-rtses (shit dances). Most of the villagers I had known for the past decade were assembled together. Daughters married into other villages had come with their husbands and babies in tow. Sons who had migrated for work purposes had returned home. Families from the Lungba had joined the fair, and even women from Yogmathang sat quietly among the spectators. The only other time I had seen such a large-scale gathering in Achinathang was in 1991, during the visit of Skyabgon Rinpoche, head of the ‘Bri-gung-pa order. To my surprise, I was not the only outsider. Teachers from Jammu and Kashmir are often posted in Achinathang, but they do not always attend local functions. This time, the guest list included army officials who were entreated by villagers to join the dance. I was told that the newcomers were now insiders who lived in the new extension of Achinathang, Vijay Thang (Victory Plain), named after Operation Vijay in the Kargil war.

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The archery competition itself was a brief affair, with men of Team A making a clean sweep and defeating their rivals in Team B. A tug-of-war contest started on the second day, but it had to be abandoned midway when the rope snapped. ‘‘Like our village with no unity,’’ joked one farmer. Solar panels and a diesel generator provided lighting for the evening’s last cultural program. When the fair concluded, the archers shot two arrows at the boundary line of the village, shouting ‘‘Kya ho, kya ho’’ to frighten enemies and exorcise demonic forces from their homeland. That year, the archery game in Achinathang called for an enthused gaze from its spectators, providing an opportunity for renewing alliances between estranged segments of the village. The Social Boycott between Buddhists and Muslims had officially ended in 1992 and the Agitation for autonomy had subsequently resulted in the formation of the lahdc. The Buddhist community had invited its Muslim neighbors to participate in the game as observers and the Muslim community had accepted the invitation, opening up a transformative and liminal space that held the potential for dismantling structures of separation in the village. Conversely, the presence of the army at the archery show demonstrated that performance and community identity were always at the risk of co-optation in a discourse of national integration and patriotism that maintained itself through the existence of enemies and demons across the loc. In this chapter, I use the trope of ‘‘game’’ in two ways: to explore the structuring of archery matches and performances, and to examine the formation of social identities in Ladakh, particularly of religion, gender, and nation. For, despite the sociality and entertainment that it signifies, archery is a ‘‘serious game,’’ to use Sherry Ortner’s (1999) term, where the rules, the moves, and the outcomes are played out on political fields shaped by colonial and national gazes of fear and desire.1 Matters of social status, political power, and interreligious relations are negotiated in these fields, and lines between players and spectators, insiders and outsiders, allies and enemies drawn. By delving into the histories of the game, we learn that differences between opposing teams, Buddhists and Muslims, Indians and Pakistanis, men and women, are not natural preconditions of geography or identity; rather, they emerge from a complex interplay of political and cultural strategies. Although recurring wars and conflicts make differences seem unending, lived histories reveal that borderlines do not stay still; they dance with the arrows and flow with the game.

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THE ARGON DARTSES

Archery (mda’-phangs) is one of the oldest and most widespread cultural performances in all of Ladakh. It originated in ancient times, writes the historian Sikander Khan (1987), when Tibetan, Mon, and ‘Brogpa tribes used bows and arrows to hunt deer, wild yak, and ibex. Even today, the Mon community is given the task of presenting the first arrows for archery contests. Bashir Ahmed Wafa, an expert on folklore in Kargil, informed me that archery contests can also be traced to the period when Ladakh was under monarchic rule. In those times, when there were no bombs and no rockets, the mda’-phangs served as a training camp in which men showed off their strength and skills. The king selected the very best archers for his army and ordered annual competitions in Leh, where children were taught lessons in defense. Even when the martial significance of archery competitions diminished, they functioned as councils by which village leaders were selected, shepherds appointed to lead livestock to the pastures, decisions made for sharing water resources, conflicts resolved, and punishment meted out to offenders. These competitions varied regionally in terms of the materials used for the equipment, in the months selected for play and the duration of the games, in the composition of teams, placement of targets, and prizes and fines. In some areas, the games were held in the midst of spring; in others, archery was a winter sport that preceded plowing. Some villages placed two targets at opposite ends of a field; others had only one target. In some contests, there existed a system called rgyal-pham, where beer was prepared from the two tins of barley donated by winners and four tins that losers were expected to pay up. Sometimes it was the victors who had to sponsor a feast; often, it was the burden of the losers. But hitting the bull’s eye made of white clay was a common goal across villages. Of all the archery contests, the most famous in twentieth-century Ladakh was the Argon Dartses (Ar-gon-ni mda’rtses), which drew its reputation not merely from the sport of archery but from the carnival of music and drama that accompanied it. An extravaganza that combined traditional folk dances with the glamour of international performances, it was held annually in the month of May in the town of Leh and attended by villagers from all over Ladakh. Reminiscing about the significance of this event, an Argon elder described it as ‘‘the original Ladakh Festival.’’ Said Abdul Ghani Sheikh, a wellregarded Argon historian, ‘‘Watching the Argon Dartses, I would think to myself that this was the happiest time of my life.’’

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A common explanation given for the Argon Dartses is that it was a festival celebrated by the Sunni Muslim Argon community of Leh. The English doctor A. Reeve Heber and his wife, Kathleen Heber, writing in 1926 (157), comment that Buddhists and Muslims had separate archery meetings. Abdul Qayoom, noted for his knowledge of Ladakhi history, dated the origin of the Argon Dartses to the first two decades of the twentieth century. Scholars like Abdul Ghani Sheikh (1997b) have pointed out that archery contests had long been popular in the Argon community, but the cultural program for which the Argon Dartses acquired its renown was fashioned largely by those Argons who had traveled far and wide with trading, hunting, and adventure expeditions. These travelers formed a troupe called Jung Bumti that included celebrated adventurers such as Rassul Galwan, Kalam Rasool, and Khushal Ramzan. They also performed at the annual function hosted by the wazir of Ladakh to welcome the British joint commissioner in the Residency Garden in Leh (see Heber and Heber 1926). A different interpretation for the Argon Dartses was given to me by Mohammad Akbar Rangar from the Shi’a community of Leh. A passionate advocate of the festival, he insisted that the Argon Dartses was not just a festival for the Sunni Muslim Argons, but that its participants were in fact from diverse religious backgrounds. He interpreted the term argon to refer to something or someone that is ‘‘mixed,’’ a meaning that is commonly associated with the word. Another Ladakhi scholar, Eliezer Joldan (1985), also maintains that from a very early time, the festival’s illustrious cast of actors did include non-Argons. Joldan writes that his own father and a Mr. Stobdan of the aristocratic Srangara family, both non-Argons, had performed in the Argon Dartses; nevertheless, he still refers to this archery contest as a function hosted by the Argons. These theories need not be seen as contradictory; it is possible that as the festival increased in popularity, the organizers and contestants ceased to be chiefly Argons and came to include members of different religions after the 1950s. In Akbar Rangar’s experience, it was only elite and affluent men of Leh between the ages of forty and sixty who were involved in the actual game, irrespective of religion, because they were the ones who could afford the entrance fees required to pay for the meals and equipment. Young and ordinary people seldom had a chance to play. In my interviews with several Ladakhis who had participated in this festival, I learned that before the actual Dartses commenced, a meeting was called to appoint an honest man as manager (nyerpa). The chosen candidate was honored with prayer scarves and put in charge of money and arrangements.

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Archers walking in the Leh bazaar for the Ladakh Festival. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

As the day approached, tents and carpets were laid out and the grals set up. Two teams were formed and distinguished players were chosen as leaders (margo). The leaders, generally from upper castes and classes, selected their teams carefully. The game was organized in rounds, each round consisting of a pair of players from opposing teams, each player receiving two bamboo arrows. There were many guidelines for appropriate attire and etiquette. In the early years, only those wearing white robes, special leather boots, and a rum’i tibi (a Turkish fez with a pompom on top) were permitted to play. The players were required to bring silver cups with saucers and lids. The winning side would distribute money to the musicians; those who succeeded in piercing the leather tsaga (bull’s eye) would lead the next dance, and the losing team had to sponsor at least one meal. Interspersed with archery was the colorful pageant for which as many as thirty daman and surna players were invited to entertain guests. Akbar Rangar recalls that the queen of Stok viewed the festivities of the Argon Dartses from a reserved glass room in one of the adjoining houses. It was a time of revelry and enjoyment. Even though no alcohol was ever served, cannabis was used as a stimulant during colonial times. When someone dropped a little

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cannabis into another’s cup, the owner of the cup would have to oblige with a dance. The dances comprised old folk styles as well as styles from Yarkand, Kashmir, Gilgit, Tibet, and Himachal Pradesh. There was a peacock dance, a lion dance, and a very popular evening show, the dragon dance, which featured a dragon chasing a man running in a zigzag manner in the dark, holding a glowing object symbolizing a norbu (precious jewel); nine men with candles tracked the dragon’s moves. It was at the Argon Dartses that the Petromax lamp was first brought into Ladakh as a special effect in the 1920s. Comedy acts were also part of the general routine and no one was spared, not monks, Balti Muslims, Yarkandis, or Kashmiris. The performances and customs that I have mentioned so far are highlights of the festival that were related to me by people I interviewed.2 There was, however, considerable variety in the show as trends changed. At one time, scenes would depict the marketplace of Leh with Yarkandi traders getting high on cannabis and losing their money to robbers, or else a Kashmiri Pandit settlement officer making rounds to survey land and determine taxes, aided by corrupt underlings. In later years, scenes from the Indo-Chinese war were enacted. In the memory of my interlocuters, one of the most popular items listed on the program for the Argon Dartses was the daytime drama Skyan (Snow leopard), a parody of the feats and foibles of an English hunter, his memsahib wife, and his Kashmiri orderly.3 Although it was open to much improvisation, the skit usually began with the Kashmiri orderly, played by a Ladakhi actor dressed in a Kashmiri outfit, calling out loudly to the headman and kotwal (a representative in charge of community policing) and then the residents of a Ladakhi village, turn by turn. When they had assembled before him, the Kashmiri character would mistreat the villagers and demand that they bring eggs, meat, and other such food for the hunting party. In the next scene, the English hunter would march in, hand in hand with his wife, who wore dark glasses and a colored scarf over her head. The spectators would chuckle in glee at this mimicry of the sahibs. Then, to the music of drums and oboes, a leaping, dancing man dressed only in leopard skin would slink in. The Kashmiri would draw the sahib’s attention to it, but the elusive snow leopard would wag its tail and move away, leaping from balconies and jumping through the crowd. The audience would laugh and children would applaud. Thinking he had cornered the leopard, the hunter would fire; a firecracker simulated the sound of a gunshot. But the shot would not hit the target, and the leopard would surface again and the game of hide and seek would continue. The En-

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glish hunter would strut around, portraying himself as heroic and his orderly as a coward. As the hunter was busy tracking the snow leopard, the orderly would try to lure his wife away. A second shot would be fired. This time, the leopard would reel and then stand upright again, only to come crashing down on all fours. After the English hunter had taken elaborate measurements of the width, breadth, head size, and tail of the dead leopard, the guide would drag over the headman and the villagers to serve as porters. They would tie up the carcass and lift it up. The sahib and madam would dance together in celebration. And the orderly would dance, too. COLONIAL GAMES

The Skyan spoof offered a humorous but critical commentary on the inequalities in power that existed between the British and those who were subject to their authority. English officers and surveyors caught in another game, the Great Game of guarding boundaries and exorcising enemy demons from the frontier, often came to Ladakh to spend their leisure days hunting and exploring. In fact, the first English officer to be stationed in Kashmir was an officer on special duty, sent there in the 1850s to provide consular services for these travelers (see Huttenback 1995). Here, in a land they called ‘‘Sportsmen’s Paradise,’’ the hunters tested their mastery over nature. But the trails they followed in pursuit of wild animals, sources of rivers, or hitherto undiscovered territories across the Himalayas and Karakorams were perilous and unyielding. They faced the threat of accidents, avalanches, starvation, wind and ice storms, robbery, and even murder.4 The journeys these British contestants undertook could not have materialized without a substantial force of local expertise and laborers who served as cooks, horsemen, porters, guides, and hunters. Yet, in the travelogues they published, they concealed their anxiety behind narratives of thrills and heroism.5 With a few exceptions, travel accounts by sahibs and, occasionally, memsahibs disparaged their Kashmiri and Argon crew for lacking qualities of manhood, honesty, or courage.6 When Kashmiri shikaris (hunters) proved themselves to be skillful, they were characterized as indiscriminate killers who, unlike their civilized employers, had no sense for environmental balance. Driven by the ideals of an emerging modern masculinity that placed so much of a premium on science, precise measurement and classification became important objectives for the Western sahibs.7 Such modern ideals of manhood are exemplified in the writings of Sir Fred-

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erick Edward Adair (1989), decorated captain of the 3rd Battalion of the Rifle Brigade, and one of the only travel writers to mention the village of Achinathang.8 Sir Frederick had reached Ladakh in 1894 to capture some big-game trophies after winning many accolades for his service in the Northwest Frontier Provinces. Achinathang is briefly described in his memoir as a plateau land, situated amid mountains of wild beauty, where he had his first glimpse of Ladakhi women and where he camped overnight before moving on to ‘‘picturesque’’ Skyurbuchan and onward onto the upper regions of Ladakh to complete his ‘‘very pleasant ramble through High Asia.’’ Adair’s adventures led him and his entourage of Kashmiri shikhari, cook, and several coolies through the torrents of the Dras river to the meadows of Baltistan, drenched with the fragrance of flowers and the whistles of snow-cocks, and down the rocky ravines of the Indus valley into a world inhabited by marmots and partridge, oorin and ibex. Adair stalked elusive beasts at times and spared lives at others. In keeping with the honor code of hunters, he tried to avoid the female of the species and targeted long-antlered bucks with his rifle. The largest animal that his gun brought down had a rack measuring forty-two and a half inches. Of the Ladakhi men that he initially encountered on descending from Baltistan to the settlement of Hanu, Adair said that they had ‘‘queer goodnatured faces and little pigtails’’ and were generally disinclined to offer him assistance until he had waved in their faces the documents and letters of introduction prepared by the office of his friend, the British joint commissioner of Ladakh, Captain Godfrey (97). After he completed this trip, he preserved and recorded it in a travelogue, The Big Game of Baltistan and Ladakh: A Summer in High Asia. Besides British servicemen like Adair, other players in the game of adventure included Ladakhi villagers who were called on to provide porterage services and supplies for official expeditions and travelers. Supplying corvée labor, according to anthropologist Nicky Grist (1994), was a way peasant households were made to pay taxes even during the times of the kings. But they also gained prestige and merit through this system. With the Dogra regime, however, the system of obligatory porterage (begar) became excessively exploitative and incited resistance. For instance, I heard storytellers in Leh delight in the exploits of a semifictional character called Apo Zed-Zed who is believed to have bamboozled powerful men like the wazir of Ladakh by taking the lice from his own body and transferring it to the wazir’s mattress that he was required to carry, giving the wazir a sleepless night. Resistance notwithstanding, in most cases, villagers reluctantly complied with travelers’

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demands when they were shown passports and other such official letters, lest they face the wrath of powerful administrators. Among the various groups of people enlisted for transport and guidance were the Argons, who specialized in the business of travel. While some Argon families were wealthy merchants (for example, Abdul Wahid Radhu, who traveled to Lhasa on Lopchak missions), most Argons were motivated to work in the travel industry for a number of reasons: lack of cultivable land back home, poverty, financial and status aspirations, or the romance of exploration (Sheikh 1997b).9 One highly esteemed Argon adventurer was Rassul Galwan, who went on to become chief trade officer of the district. Rassul Galwan dictated the events of his trips in a memoir entitled Servant of Sahibs published in 1923. It was at Rassul Galwan’s wedding that his coadventurers Kalam Rasool and Razak Akhon first performed the boat and dragon dances. Traveling with caravans brought fame and wealth to a few fortunate Argons like Rassul Galwan, but there were many others whose expectations were not fulfilled; they were often victims of physical exhaustion and psychological abuse; some were lost without a trace, and others died gruesome, lonely deaths. Tales related to Eliezer Joldan (1985) by Kalam Rasul, who rose to the rank of caravan leader in several expeditions and is noted for returning to Ladakh from China after three years of being presumed dead, uncover the indignity and trauma borne by some Argons who fell into disfavor or were found by their masters to be ailing during a mission. Reflecting on his experience of journeying, Kalam Rasul composed a woeful song: There are, in Ladakh, there are, Arrows three thousand five hundred. The star that strayed far away, that was only I. The arrow that strayed far away, I am that Kalam Rasool.10 The last survivor of this generation of Argon porters was Khushal Ramzan, who conveyed the wonders of his journeys through magic tricks performed in a medley of tongues. It is rumored that he spoke Turkish and smatterings of languages from Russia, Burma, and China. When he returned to Leh, he became unstable and roamed around like a hobo in the bazaar. Today, he is best remembered for his carefree ditty, ‘‘Yod na yod-de tsherka, med na medde tsherka, yod-med gnyis–kyi bar-na, meme ramzan sod-de-chan,’’ which translates as ‘‘Those who have, suffer because they have, those who have not, suffer because they have not. Haves and have-nots are the same. Meme Ramzan is the fortunate one.’’

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Fortune did indeed favor a few daring travelers who rose to become big men and amass much wealth, see many extraordinary sights, and carry these cosmopolitan images back to Ladakh to present at the Argon Dartses festival. ROMANCE, FERTILITY, AND OTHER MASCULINE ACTS

The Argon Dartses was a spectacle of modern masculinity produced from the capital economy of colonial romance and sustained and sponsored by feudal landowners and affluent merchants, a drama in which men played roles of lovers and laborers, subalterns and hunters. In sword dances and wrestling matches, participants flaunted their skill and muscle with posturing and flamboyance. Almost the entire cast of performers at the Dartses was male; women from musician castes made only occasional appearances. But performing femininity was very much a part of the theatrical agenda, and female impersonators played women’s roles. For example, one act consisted of an acrobatic and pregnant lion giving birth to a cub, culminating in a dance by both. Heber and Heber (1926), who saw this dance performed at the wazir’s reception for the British joint commissioner, report that it was imported from Chinese Turkistan. These writers cite Waddell as their source for understanding the origin of the lion dance, which Waddell attributes to the ‘‘mythical lion of the Himalayan snows, which is believed to confer fortune on the country where it resides’’ (213). They suggest, however, that the birth scene was entirely a Ladakhi improvisation. An absolute crowd pleaser was the festival’s standard mock marriage scene, recreating the journey of the groom’s men (gnya’-bo-pa) to the bride’s house and their triumphant return with the bride on horseback. At the door of the bride’s house, traditional sgo-glu or ‘‘door songs’’ were posed as a series of questions by actors playing the bride’s peers to those playing the groom’s peers, to which the latter had to respond correctly in order to cross the threshold. The questions tested the gnya’-bo-pa’s knowledge of the surrounding landscape, of the names and positions of places and religious deities in the four cardinal directions, of the location of material goods, and of the meaning of everyday customs. The songs also pertained to practical and domestic domains and demonstrated the crucial importance of social exchange. An essential object carried by the gnya’-bo-pa was the mda’-dar or ritual arrow dug into a can of barley grain. This arrow is a propitious emblem associated with fertility. Motifs of fertility and virility are vital to the game of archery. Bashir Ahmed

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Wafa informed me of a belief that had prevailed in Kargil that if an archer were to shatter the bull’s eye, he would be blessed with a son. That archery and fertility are fundamentally connected is substantiated by the old tradition of playing in fields with targets placed on top of fertilizer heaps to ensure a bountiful harvest. In Kargil, reports Sikander Khan (1987), a mirror of metal placed on the target signified female chastity and delicacy. Women hid their mirrors to obstruct the men, but the referee usually managed to get it from a newlywed bride. If the shooters were successful in shattering the mirror, the men won; if not, the women claimed victory. The archer who shattered the mirror had to present a goat or sheep to everyone involved. Morup Namgyal, an authority on the Gesar saga, alerted me to songs that reaffirm the identification of the archer as the ideal man, fearless in war and fecund and social in the domestic sphere. Ballads called garu, sung in some villages of central Ladakh while plowing fields, include verses that are attributed to the Gesar epic, in which Gesar advises the enemy spies of Hor to heed his warning, boasting that he has three thousand arrows that are waiting to be released to Horyul, of which three wish to stay behind with him.11 If circumstances were such that he needed to shoot the three arrows that were reluctant to leave, the first one would show him the white path on which he could safely reach enemy lands, the second one would draw out the enemy’s red blood, and the third would end the enemy’s black life. The invincible Gesar tells his opponents, ‘‘If I shoot these arrows, they will surely hit the target. If they hit the target, no one will be spared.’’ In another version of this song, recorded by Eliezer Joldan (1985) from Sabu, Gesar instructs his indestructable golden arrow, Serda Yuron, to invade the capital city of Horyul. Once it reaches Horyul, the arrow lands on the central pillar of the house and no amount of hammering can unfasten it until Gesar’s estranged wife, ’Bruguma, ceremoniously proceeds to the pillar, carrying a white silken scarf and a can of grain, her two companions holding an incense burner and a pot of chang, all symbolic of fertility and sociality. In Ladakh, arrows were once made from bamboo or the bark of the sed tree, whereas prized bows were made with pressed ibex horn until hunting ibex was banned in 1978. Found on craggy rocks and pastures hidden from the gaze of human settlers, ibex are also symbols of masculinity. They are valued for their antlers, fleece, and meat, and their horns are offered at the abode of deities at the village shrine and on terraces or rooms where the hearth goddess of a household resides. When a male child is born, visitors make dough effigies of ibex and pin bow-shaped talismans to the boy’s cap.12 ‘‘So that the

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boy grows up like the ibex, nimble, fastidious, and brave,’’ explained one giftbearer from a house in Yogmathang that had been graced by the birth of a baby boy. Typically, an ibex horn is burned at the front door of a house to proclaim the birth of a male child.13 The ibex is the mascot chosen by the Ladakh Scouts division of the army, for, like the ibex, who scale the highest peaks and whose horns are so pleasing to the gods, men are encouraged to be strong and virile, and, again like the ibex, who travel in herds, sharp and alert to the perils ahead, men are encouraged to be watchful and protective. Height signifies elevated status: an eminent and morally strong man, for example, is called mi-mthon-mo (high man); mothers shower their son with blessings such as ‘‘Mul-beg-gi Chamba tsogs cha-cog, Dar-mgo-i star-ga tsogs cha-cog, Shi-gar-ri shing-rgyal tsogs cha-cog’’ (Like the Chamba of Mulbeg, may you grow, Like the Walnut Tree of Dargo, may you grow, Like the Great Tree of Shigar, may you rise).14 These ideals of loftiness are illustrated in the following stanzas, translated from a Zangskari song that Ama sang for me: Now walk, mother’s prince, Move to the highest peak. We will eat the healthiest grass. We will drink the cleanest water. We are not humans that nourish like worms. We are not birds that nest under rocks. The big ibex are runners. Up high, our horns won’t cross. Down below, our knees will hurt. Male control over the game of archery has resulted in women being excluded from playing the game or touching arrows or bows for fear of draining their potency. Although women do climb mountains to look for meadows for grazing livestock and wood and grass for fuel, hunting and providing meat are usually regarded as male tasks. If a woman kills an animal by accident, the meat is classified as ma’i sha (women’s meat) and its consumption is restricted to the slayer.15 The presence of women in hunting grounds in the high mountain pastures is associated with the mythical sman-mo, guardians of the ibex, who are conceived as golden-haired, terrifying sirens who lure men away and ravish them sexually. It is said that men can escape captivity and enhance their chances of material welfare by tricking the sman-mo and obtaining their hair. These norms of sexuality and domesticity that governed gender relations

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Ibex mascot on marker outside the Ladakh Scouts Headquarters. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

in Ladakh were articulated in the archery games of the Argon Dartses. In addition, the Argon Dartses was a site in which modern dilemmas of romantic love were played out. Requirements of porterage in the colonial period sustained the adventures of a bourgeois consumer economy, generating a masculinity among Argon men that was shaped by their labor of travel. The pain of separation that results from travel was a recurrent theme in the cultural performances of the Argon Dartses. In this male-dominated festival was an acknowledgment of the disruption, loss, and fear of being forgotten when one leaves home for extended periods of time. As Marta Savigliano (1995) has demonstrated in her analysis of the Argentine tango, the machismo associated with that dance is not an essential characteristic of Latin male behavior, and if we listen to the lyrics of tango songs, we can see that the workingclass compadrito or ruffian character displays his anxiety and suffering by frequently whining about materialistic women seduced by a capitalist world in which he is peripheral. Similarly, the song most commonly associated with the Argon Dartses today is a soulful ghazal that may have been composed by a lover who had to embark on a long journey and leave his sweetheart behind. He implores her not to forget his words while he is away, promising that he

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will not let go of memories of their magical love at the Argon Dartses. He justifies his absence by promising her that enlightening commodity, kerosene, but she refuses to accept it as a substitute for his presence: Man: On the day of the Argon Dartses In the Galden Kadpa, I have not forgotten my love. I keep your words in my heart. Nomo Bibi, think for yourself. Oh, Bird of my life! Woman: You run away with the excuse That you will bring us kerosene Leaving me to face the dark. Man: Oh Bird of the garden of paradise! Oh pearl, like a Khoja among commoners! I have not forgotten my love, I keep your words in my heart. My heart lies in your custody, Don’t break it. There is none other than you, Oh, Songbird of my life! 16 The reunion of lovers separated by wide distances was also the theme of an evening performance at the Argon Dartses, the amban dance or boat dance that the adventurers Dokhta Akhon and Kalam Rasool had first seen in Kashgar in the Chinese province of Xinjiang (Heber and Heber 1926). According to Abdul Ghani Sheikh (1976), whose brother, Deen Mohammad, played the role of the princess, this dance marked the finale to the second day. About the amban dance, Joldan (1985, 55) writes, ‘‘My father and Baba Gulam had the boat frame and paper cabin etc. made and stored in Charas godown and would lend us when we held our Archery.’’ The dance depicted an amban (Chinese officer) wearing a flattish hat, receiving a message that his wife was coming to join him in the distant area where he was posted on official duty. A paper boat, lit by a lamp, would make its way toward him with a princess and oarsmen inside. The boat would rock and sway, moved by an imaginary rising tide. The audience would watch with their hearts in their mouths. The lamp would be extinguished as the boat approached the shore. The amban would yell at the oarsman for his poor navigation. He would step inside the

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boat and it would disappear, creating a whimsical, mysterious mood for the spectators. The last day of the Argon Dartses was reserved for nere or encore performances that were brought back by public demand. When the festival ended, the players unleashed a volley of arrows at the edge of the playing field to ward off demons, a rite of purification borrowed from the mda’-srad ritual practiced in Buddhist ceremonies; the shooters were careful to avoid shooting the arrows in the direction of holy sites, whether Mecca or a Buddhist ma-ni wall. Then tents were dismantled and people dispersed, only to await a new selection of teams and a fresh round of arrows and dances in the next year. THE END OF THE ARGON DARTSES

The Argon Dartses is not performed anymore. It so happened that when the Karpotogs, a well-known Buddhist family, sold the Galden Kadpa site in which it was celebrated, the Kadpa was eventually acquired by the Ali Ju family, who built Ladakh’s first cinema on the very same spot in 1967. After that, though they had lost momentum, some enthusiastic players appealed to the district office for space, and the government sanctioned a lot just behind the Kadpa for the Dartses. The Dartses continued for a few more years, occasionally regaining glimpses of its former glory. In the early 1980s, old programs were revived when an open-air archery stadium was built in Leh. Joldan (1985, 55) reports that in 1983, ‘‘half the population of Leh and the neighboring villages watched for hours the week-long Ladakh Festival, arranged by the Tourist Department when some of these dances were performed.’’ But in 1986, during the Dartses, players were pelted with stones by youth who were under the assumption that it was just a Muslim function. After that incident, the Argon Dartses was no longer held. Only in 1996 did a flash of the old festivities emerge, when an exhibit of the Dartses setup was presented at the Ladakh Festival.17 It won first prize in the category of decor. Why did an event as popular as the Argon Dartses die out? Many different reasons were given to me, but most of the people I interviewed surmised that the Dartses was no longer performed because of the strained relations between the Buddhist and Muslim communities following the Social Boycott. A sword of hate has come between us, commented Haji Azgar, an old shopkeeper. Mohammad Akbar Rangar observed that everything had changed in Ladakh and the old sentiments of brotherhood had ended. Among other justifications was that it could not compete with new forms of entertainment

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from the outside world that were brought in by radio, film, and television. Another explanation, offered by former players, was that people had become devoted to tourism and the pursuit of money, which didn’t leave them time enough to rehearse or design elaborate costumes. Respondents to my query also brought up the general prohibitions on public folk performances that were levied on Argon Muslims in Ladakh when the head priest of the Jama Masjid, Maulvi Mohammad Omar Nadvi, returned from his Deobandi School–styled training. The Deobandi School of Islam adopts a puritanical stance on dance and music, so that any music that does not directly invoke the divine is considered hypocritical and frivolous, causing the devoted to deviate from their religious paths.18 Yet Islamic theologians continue to debate whether music is permissible or forbidden in the Koran. In Ladakh, Muslims who were well-versed in Islamic teachings questioned the maulvi’s hardline position by citing an incident from the Prophet’s life when he had asked his wife, Ayesha, not to leave for a wedding without the accompaniment of a singer. The maulvi, who is otherwise respected for his discourses against communalism, replied that even though such precedents could be found, even a little exposure to music and dance was corrupting and therefore had to be stopped completely. He threatened not to perform wedding rituals (nikah) at those ceremonies in which women danced publicly. A couple of Muslim families from Leh challenged his diktat and hired musicians and dancers for their children’s weddings. Muslim women’s public dancing gradually stopped, but a troupe of Argon men, dressed in white robes and their characteristic rum’i hat, continued to represent their community in festivals and cultural shows. Still, a general mood of conservatism began to prevail in matters of veiling, prayer, and entertainment. Community support structures for the Argon Dartses were eroded. BLESSED ARROWS, FORBIDDEN DANCES IN KARGIL

Despite the prevalence of a moral consciousness that denounces music and dance, research into the history of Islam in Ladakh reveals that music was not always alien to its practice. According to some histories, the earliest form of Islam that was absorbed into the region was that of the Nurbakshi order in the fifteenth century, founded by the Sufi radical from Persia, Syed Mohammad Nur Baksh (1393–1465). In the late fifteenth century, Mir Shamsuddin Iraqi disseminated Sufism in Baltistan (T. Khan 1998).19 Sufism places empha-

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sis on coexistence with other faiths and inner union with the divine through devotional love, meditation, and ecstatic music and dance. In Ladakh, the influence of Islam was consolidated when Gyal Khatoun from Baltistan married King Jamyang Namgyal (r. 1560–1590) and brought with her an entourage of preachers, soldiers, and musicians. Their son, Sengge Namgyal, is considered to be the greatest king of Ladakh. Islam proliferated as rulers in Ladakh struck strategic alliances with the lords of Skardo and pacified the Moghuls by marrying Muslim princesses or converting to Islam (Dollfus 1995; Grist 1998).20 Learned families of sayyids from Iran, believed to be direct descendents of the Prophet Mohammed, were invited to Purig from Baltistan and Kashmir. Their children, known as aghas, are recognized as spiritual leaders in Kargil and are distinguished by their black turbans. But in the seventeenth century, Sufi beliefs and the Nurbakshi order faced competition and control from Shi’a clerics who had moved to Baltistan to avoid being harassed in the Sunni Moghul courts (T. Khan 1998). As Kargilis also traveled to Baltistan for spiritual learning, the Shi’a denomination that was dominant there overtook the Nurbakshi elements in the Kargil region.21 After the Partition of Ladakh from Baltistan, travel between the two areas decreased drastically. New economic opportunities presented themselves, and makhtabs or religious colleges in Qom in Iran and Najaf in Iraq became the preferred centers of learning for Kargilis (Grist 1998; Rizvi 1996). Some of the students who studied abroad were conferred the title of sheikh and returned to Kargil as scholars and preachers, often donning white turbans. In 1974, Iraq expelled Shi’a clerics and the Iranian revolution followed in the 1980s; Kargili clerics residing abroad returned to focus their attention homeward. In their attempt to instill a purer religion, they denounced music and dance as anti-Islamic. Prior to these restrictions, Kargil had housed a number of theater clubs, such as the Shaheen Dramatics Club, the Naubahar Dramatics Club, and the Friends Dramatics Club, that had existed there from the 1950s. Artists belonging to these clubs performed plays on social issues in makeshift theaters constructed on fields and old dancing grounds.22 Among their plays was a sketch of the freedom fighter Bhagat Singh, with all the parts played by male actors. Another club performance remembered by some Kargilis was the occasion in which a couple of boys twisted to a song from the popular Hindi film An Evening in Paris. One of the participants recalled that Munshi Habibullah, who was then a member of the Ladakh Development Board, awarded them some

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money on seeing the dance and remarked that although Kargil had a long way to go to actually become like Paris, they had transformed it into a virtual Paris in one evening. The government of Jammu and Kashmir attempted to further promote local cultural performances in Kargil by sponsoring a 350-seat auditorium. This auditorium was completed in 1979 but it barely made it past the inaugural function. Mayhem erupted when an actor, playing the part of a charlatan Muslim clergyman in a skit about the trappings of urbanization, took it upon himself to improvise on his character’s image by portraying him mouthing holy words even as he secretly held on to a bottle of liquor. That marked the end of theater shows at the auditorium. The Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust took control of this space and used it as an office until the tenure of Mr. Shaleen Kabra, the respected and feared district commissioner of Kargil in 1999–2000, during which it was turned over to the Information Department. In 2001, this auditorium came under the control of the Notified Areas Committee and is now used as a venue for seminars, conferences, and social awareness programs.23 In the mid-1970s, the government’s Field Publicity Department also began showing films in Kargil, but the response from the clergy was so negative that the officer in charge had to leave. Today, even though local stores rent out video players and movie cassettes for private viewing, there is still no civilian cinema in Kargil.24 For centuries, Kargil had shared a similar cultural heritage with Leh, and regions like Chigtan had practices that blended Islam with local beliefs. But as religious pressure intensified in Kargil, folk performances came under attack, too. The Chigtan block of Kargil district was particularly famous for its recitation of the Gesar saga, but Muslim clerics who interpreted this epic as a tribute to the prowess and victorious expansion of Buddhism opposed its performance. The days when villagers from Chigtan would sit by a hearth for hours, cheering, interjecting, and liberally commenting on the characters in the plot and on the real-life characters around them, are almost gone. Now only a handful of storytellers remain who can recite verses of this epic (sgrungs) from memory for days on end. Gone, too, are the polo-playing lords who had patronized the arts. Like the decaying palace fortress at Chigtan, only dim vestiges of this oral tradition have survived. The pressure to suppress storytelling was intense in Kargil. Yet, I found that enthusiasm and knowledge about the Gesar epic thrived in Kargili households. Radio provided a fresh impetus for folksongs and folklore. Here, one

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A view of the river Suru and the town of Kargil. Courtesy of Christopher S. Wheeler.

could clearly hear such stations as Radio Moscow, the bbc, Voice of America, and, of course, Radio Pakistan. When I stayed in Kargil in 1991, the Gesar epic was serialized every Wednesday from across the border on Radio Pakistan, Skardo.25 My Kargili friends would seldom miss an episode of the Balti transmission because they were used to hearing compositions in the Balti dialect and found this version of the Gesar less theatrical than the one broadcast from Leh. In the past few years, the biography of another hero, Ali Sher Khan Anchan, has also generated a body of faithful listeners. Balti music wields a strong influence on both sacred and secular cultural performances in Kargil. In fact, Buddhists in Leh mistakenly refer to all Kargilis or Shi’as as Balti. Critiquing the use of this label in Leh, Grist (1998, 46) writes, ‘‘This term both has derogatory connotations and also implies they are outsiders, as the name refers to neighbouring Baltistan.’’ In Kargil itself, the ethnic group of Baltis is specifically taken to include those sections of its population that once migrated from Baltistan or residents from villages such as Kharul and Karkidchu that were culturally Balti but were ceded to Kargil when the Ceasefire Line was drawn. According to Master Sadiq Ali, one of the foremost composers and historians of Kargil, most of the Baltis that settled in Kargil town were from the Kharmang valley in Baltistan. Kharmang had been included in the Kargil tehsil for administrative purposes during the Land

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Settlement of 1908–1911. Even though it was handed to the Pakistani side after the Partition, inhabitants from this area working in Kargil town as traders, government employees, laborers, and students stayed behind on the Indian side. It was these migrants who occupied the portion of the marketplace in Kargil known as Balti Bazaar, where they had built a mosque and imambara. Master Sadiq Ali proudly informed me of the contributions that Baltis had made to Islam and to indigenous culture. The establishment of mosques in Kargil and the deepening of people’s allegiance to them had generated new festivals, such as id and navroze, in place of glo-sar and srub-lha, and these new rites needed Islamic eulogies and elegies, kasidas and marcias. Baltis, who had a history of translating and interpreting Islam according to their own traditions and language, supplied the appropriate music for religious services in Kargil. According to Master Sadiq, they were able to do so because they had not let their authentic tongue be corrupted, whereas the Ladakhi and Purigi dialects had deviated from the original pronunciation of words. Even though some Arabic and Persian words had been mixed into the Balti language, he argued that it still retained the classical style of Tibetan that Lonpo Ano and his son, Thunmi Sambota, had scripted during the reign of the Tibetan emperor, Srong bTsan Gampo, in the seventh century.26 Said Bashir Ahmed Wafa, the noted Balti musician, ‘‘We kept Islam but we kept our culture side by side. We took the ghazal form and gave it a Balti touch. Initially, these ghazals were even called khuda’i-glu [songs of god].’’ Master Sadiq Ali observed that because Balti singers had excelled in the art of writing lyrics in their own language and had not tried to just imitate Kashmiris or Iranis like the Purigpa Kargilis had, they were even ahead in composing modern melodies. These days, a modern recording industry has generated a sizable market for Balti ghazals.27 Ghazals relate stories of women as beautiful as red roses, of wine that soothes the mad grief of a rejected lover, of precious moments forgotten with distance and time. ‘‘If arrows from my beloved’s eyelashes strike against my heart, [Oh World], do not pity me,’’ croons a lovesick man in a popular number.28 Music, dances, and costumes from Baltistan fascinate contemporary musicians in Kargil even as some of them criticize other Pakistani singers for not being able to hold a note like their Indian counterparts. Most of the young Baltis of Kargil have never visited Baltistan, but they have relatives in that region—siblings, aunts, uncles, cousins. Songs from Baltistan reach out to them, old folk songs not sung publicly in Kargil anymore and lilting ghazal tunes of romantic love, with Urdu phrases intertwined with Ladakhi, symbolic of their own mixed heritage. Their passion for Balti music is the

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outcome of a shared habitus, a common amalgam of history, language, and culture, and not just an articulation of their Islamic identity. There are several members even among the Purigis, the largest Muslim ethnic group in Kargil, who object to the censorship of music. Kargilis have been heatedly discussing the role of music and modernity in their culture, and some of these debates have resulted in bitter rivalries. For example, ideological fractures between the Islamiya School and Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust factions in Kargil resulted in clashes over sacred and ritual performances. In 1997, during the Ashura procession, which pays homage to the martyrdom of Imam Hussain, the ikmt tried to reduce zanjiri matam or the custom of self-flagellation with chains and blades. The ikmt was acting according to the position adopted by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1994. According to David Pinnault (1999a), who has documented some of these developments in detail, Khamenei’s position corresponded with a growing self-consciousness in Iran about the public face of Shi’a Islam to the outside world and to the desire for taqrib or rapprochement between Shi’a and Sunni sects to create a unified Islamic front. The ikmt’s efforts were not appreciated by supporters of the Islamiya School, who viewed bloodletting rituals and lamentations as expressions of their love for the Prophet’s family and their willingness to empathize with its suffering, and not as a gory spectacle. Supporters of the Islamiya School also complained about being coerced by the ikmt to yell slogans such as ‘‘Zidde wilayat-e-faqih murdabad’’ (Death to those who oppose the heirs and trustees of the Prophet’s rule) against the United States, Israel, and Salman Rushdie. By identifying the three enemies of Khomeini as enemies of the wilayat-e-faqih, the ikmt had followed the Iranian Constitution’s understanding that Khomeini was not just the most learned of all mujtahid (‘‘learned spiritual leader’’), with powers to rule on matters of Islamic jurisprudence, but that he was the Supreme Leader (wali-e-faqih) of all mujtahids and a representative of the twelfth Imam (al-Mahdi), with the power to rule on spiritual and political matters and bring transformations to the Ulama (see Grist 1999).29 Those who were loyal to the Islamiya School in Kargil refused to accept Khomeini in this role and questioned the ikmt’s logic of interpreting Islam according to the fluctuations of Iranian politics. One disgruntled youth told me, ‘‘When they have 40 percent seats reserved for women, when women are forming jazz bands, when they can walk without veils, when they have ski teams, casinos, and clubs in Iran, when they are reviving relations with the United States, then why must we be suppressed? We can see this on the Discovery Channel. For years, we had to model ourselves

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according to the swing in Iranian politics, but Iranis always retained their Persian culture. It was we who were left nowhere. Not successful in adopting an Irani or worldly culture and without knowledge of our own.’’ Public intellectuals in Kargil also warn against abandoning local cultural practices. For instance, Kacho Sikander Khan (1997, 250) alleges that crusades against local practices were carried out ‘‘under the wrong notion that religion and folklore are conflicting forces which they are not. Folklore is the fabric of a nation’s or community’s culture and culture is its Past, its identity.’’ Determined efforts to revive cultural traditions are now being made by educated youths from the elite and bourgeois classes, who are aware of the implications of cultural preservation for promoting the tourist trade, attracting Western investments, and capitalizing on the 1999 war that has placed Kargil so prominently on the national map. Some of these youth formed the Kargil Social and Cultural Organization (kasgo) in 1997 and started collecting old folksongs and encouraging new musical works. Recognizing the problems associated with transcribing the Kargili language into the Urdu/Arabic script, kasgo aims to reclaim the Ladakhi script under the label Ngati skad (Our language), rather than Bodhi, as it is now known, so that this script is not identified with Buddhism alone. Similar affirmations of multiple cultural identity and ancestry are also being articulated in Baltistan, where a number of intellectuals and educated youth are rebelling against religious controls by learning the Tibetan script and recovering local traditions and customs (T. Khan 1998). Today, Nasser Hussain Munshi, Bashir Ahmed Wafa, and other members of kasgo have developed a serial called Rgas-skad (Ancient lore) for All India Radio, Kargil, which has been broadcasting programs since 1997. In the year 2000, forty-six artists from Kargil represented the Jammu and Kashmir float in Delhi on the occasion of Republic Day. At the Kargil Festival held that June, local bands put on a pop music concert. Groups of girls risked censorship by the aghas and sang and danced for the festival’s cultural program. Even back in 1991, when I first visited Kargil, I heard the refrain of female voices singing popular Hindi film songs and Urdu ghazal melodies in wedding houses days before the actual nikah ceremony, accompanied by loud claps and shouts of encouragement for the dancer who happened to be performing at the time.30 But now, women are much more visible in the marketplace. Old-timers from erstwhile drama associations still assemble at a nukkad, a corner in Kargil town, where they debate and discuss daily events. The pop band United Sagar Associates (usa), an offshoot of kasgo, practices with drums and guitars in a local hotel room, stopping briefly for the morning and evening calls to pray

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(subh and zawal azans). A fatwa (edict) issued by the aghas against the sport of polo has been lifted, as Janet Rizvi (1996, 210–211) points out, after the tourism authorities persuaded the aghas that such cultural displays were being promoted for the economic revitalization of Kargil.31 Restrictions that the Shi’a clergy imposed on dance and music never extended to the game of archery. Rather, the clergy encouraged archery as an activity of self-defense that was sanctioned by Islam to prepare for the time when infidels would wage war against the faithful and to commemorate the massacre at Karbala, in which the commander of Caliph Yazid’s armies had shot an arrow to initiate the battle against the disciples of Imam Hussain, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammad.32 Aghas, like monks, participated in archery themselves. Instead of the beats of the daman and surna, however, successful shooters in the Shi’a community were felicitated by psalms in praise of the Prophet and saints (naath and kasida). Such psalms have also become official substitutes for wedding songs in Kargil. Yet, despite all the efforts toward cultural reawakening, archery is still not that prominent in Kargil town. According to Bashir Ahmed Wafa, the reason for this lukewarm attention to the game is not religious restraint but ‘‘international rules.’’ Now flat fields are designated as venues instead of the customary sloping grounds, which had enabled archers to gaze down at their targets and the audience sitting behind them to have a clearer view. Others cite lack of time and rival entertainment as factors that killed the enthusiasm for archery in Kargil town. In the countryside of Kargil district, however, particularly in the Chigtan block, competition for winning archery championships is fierce. People feast on the flesh of a goat afterward, even though, unlike the old days, there are no daman and surna to serenade the accomplishments of players.33 ARCHERY AND BUDDHIST-MUSLIM RELATIONS IN ACHINATHANG

In the Buddhist villages of Ladakh, archery has made a huge comeback since the late 1980s. Village archery has become a steady feature of every Ladakh and Kargil Festival. This revived form of archery is different from the earlier form of mda’-phangs that was once played in the fields before plowing began. Now called mda’-rtses (literally, ‘‘arrow dance’’), it is not merely the changcentered bash that Rizvi (1996, 148) describes as ‘‘little more than excuses for a summer party.’’ In the wake of a post-Agitation consciousness about exhibiting cultural identity, the mda’-rtses that I attended in Gongmathang in June 2000 reflected not just emerging aesthetic trends but also developments

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An archery enthusiast in Achinathang.

in selecting leaders, managing a changing economy, and mediating relationships with Muslim neighbors. In the archery festivals prior to the Agitation, barley was gathered from households to brew beer, and those in charge of brewing were appointed on a rotational basis. After the Agitation, the quantity of chang consumed in public notably diminished, and every Buddhist household in the village donated a fixed cash amount for meals and arrangements. Youth theater committees and the wage-earning mulazim assumed control of the preparations. In 2000, Muslim visitors from Yogmathang were invited to attend the ‘mdartses; they responded positively, a very different state of affairs from the Boycott period, when wedding feasts and birth celebrations passed without any interaction between the two groups. But even though the relations between the two communities had altered since the Boycott, they still did not play the game together. People in Yogmathang held a separate archery match in March, where they invited residents from nearby villages in the Chigtan block to play. In contexts other than archery also, relations between the Buddhist and

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Muslim communities of Achinathang cannot be understood as either completely integrated or divided. Instead, they displayed fluctuating negotiations of difference, what the South Asian historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002, 140) calls ‘‘identity’’ and ‘‘proximity,’’ where ‘‘identity’’ refers to the circumstances in which difference is ‘‘frozen, fixed, or . . . erased by some claim of being identical or the same’’ versus ‘‘proximity,’’ where ‘‘(historical and contingent) difference is neither reified nor erased but negotiated.’’ Muslims had become residents of Achinathang following an extreme shortage of water in the region of Kharbu in the Chigtan block. An order issued by Hashmatullah Khan, the district administrator, allowed the drought-stricken families of Kharbu to build fields in a sandy stretch at the foot of Achinathang. But the irrigation canal they built in 1911 was situated in the territory belonging to the people of Achinathang, who refused to let the newcomers in. The latter then moved to the neighboring village of Hanu, where they were met with opposition once again. Meanwhile, Hassan Khan, lord of Kharbu, borrowed money from some Buddhist families in Chigtan and Laido and began the construction of a canal in the untapped site of the Yogmathang area.34 By the time it was completed, the water scarcity in Kharbu had eased a little, and the new fields were subsequently sold to both Muslim and Buddhist buyers from neighboring villages. The original demographics of Achinathang were altered once again when, in 1947, troops from the Gilgit Scouts overtook the village. Most Buddhists who remembered that infiltration told me that they fled to the Lungba and that the occupiers looted valuables from pantries, gobbled sweet and sour apricot seeds, and stole turquoise jewelry and cattle, but they had not killed anyone. Speaking of that time, one old woman from the Lungba said, ‘‘My mother died the year before and we considered it a blessing that she didn’t live to see the day of phyi-pa domination.’’ Other Buddhist inhabitants recalled protecting their Muslim neighbors when the Indian forces eventually prevailed. Some Muslims from Yogmathang fled to the Pakistani side or to the homes of their relatives in Purig, a few out of loyalty to the new nation, others in fear of Hindu and Sikh retribution. For example, one family’s relative from Haknis was put to death for having mistreated Buddhists and looted temple treasures. But though the rest of his family had nothing to do with his actions and were critical of him, they were afraid that they would be punished, too. The Yogmathang habitation was practically deserted for a decade. Only a handful of families chose to stay behind. Buddhist neighbors cultivated the fields of those missing and sent half the proceeds to their kin. Relatives of

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those who had fled gradually trickled in and occupied the abandoned houses. Baker Khan, once an inspector in Kargil who had demonstrated wit and loyalty by instructing the residents of Dras to make snowshoes when the Indian reinforcement crew was stuck at Zoji La during the Pakistani invasion in 1947, also spent his last days in Achinathang. Today, Yogmathang has its own member to represent it in the village council. There are three Muslim pha-spun groups that are formed by drawing lots to provide aid for social and religious rituals. Young Muslim men belong to a committee called the Intizamiya Committee that looks after arrangements for religious and cultural ceremonies. Labor is organized on the basis of proximity and households have cooperative units for agricultural purposes. For religious guidance, they look to the Islamiya School in Kargil, and prosperous individuals go on the hadjj pilgrimage to gain merit and expiate sins. There are noticeable differences in the orientation and decor between Muslim and Buddhist houses in the village. Muslim houses are seldom whitewashed, their windows seldom ensconced in carved wooden frames. No prayer flags adorn their terraces. Rows of barley fields are fewer in Yogmathang because the cultivation of edible grass to feed livestock is a greater necessity there, as the inhabitants are denied herding rights in the Lungba. The apparel and language of the two communities also register some differences. Muslim women wear veils; if Buddhist women cover their heads at all, it is with a pad-rag or scarf. Muslim men are circumcised; older Buddhist men can be identified by the incision in their left ear and their beardless faces. Muslim children write in the Arabic/Urdu script; the script used by Buddhists is Tibetan. In Leh, the word for ‘‘tomorrow’’ is tho-re and the word denoting ‘‘next year’’ is nang-mo; in Gongmathang, where the villagers speak the Sham dialect, the word for ‘‘tomorrow’’ is nang-mo and the word for ‘‘next year’’ is as-ke. In the Purig dialect of the Yogmathang Muslims, ‘‘tomorrow’’ and ‘‘next year’’ are both as-ke. In these short distances over space, tomorrow can be transformed into next year if one is not mindful of the context. There are also variations in the social organization and marriage norms of Buddhist and Muslim segments of the village. It is taboo for Buddhists to marry relatives who can be traced as far back as seven generations, but in practice this is not strictly observed. Among Muslims, there is a system of preferential parallel cousin marriage and polygyny is permitted. But while the Muslim Civil Code in India legitimizes multiple wives and the practice is not infrequent in Kargil, most Muslims in Yogmathang strongly discourage

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it.35 A ghazal sung for me by a young woman recounts the shame faced by the daughter of a man who had three spouses. If there is but one Allah and but one person who is her father, the daughter in the ghazal asks, then what justification does he have for his three wives? The only case of polygyny in Yogmathang that I know of was that of a Buddhist man with two wives. While the custom of polyandry slows down the fragmentation of cultivable land belonging to Buddhists, Muslims, too, do not necessarily subdivide households but often form joint and extended families, in which the elder brother farms the land and the younger male siblings undertake wage labor, contributing to a common exchequer (Grist 1991, 137). Apo Roziah’s family exemplified such an organization. His oldest son was a police officer and lived with his wife in Kargil town when he was not on duty; the second son was a farmer, and the third lived with his family in Achinathang but spent quite some time away from the home base as he took construction jobs on contract; a fourth son had returned as a sheikh after studying in Iran, and the youngest son was unmarried and lived on his own due to differences with his brothers. He was given a small room, extended from the main house, much like a khang-bu (‘‘small house’’) in Buddhist Gongmathang. There are no instances of intermarriage between Buddhists and Muslims in Achinathang, although a few cases of interreligious marriages have occurred with other villagers in the past. For example, a woman from Achinathang married a Muslim in Kuksho and her husband’s sister was married into a Buddhist household in Achinathang. A long time ago, during the establishment of Yogmathang, one Muslim construction worker had converted to Buddhism and settled in the village by marrying a local woman. There is also one scandal about a Buddhist man who had fallen in love with a Muslim woman long before the Boycott, but this story has a tragic ending: the woman was forced to marry someone else and died soon after. Interreligious marriage and conversion became even more controversial during the Agitation, when the lba entered into a verbal agreement with Muslim associations in Leh to ban these practices and punish those who defied their agreement by forcing them to leave Ladakh and threatening their families with excommunication. But occasionally, marginalized individuals use conversion as a token of protest and as a weapon for negotiating their status within their community.36 One man in Yogmathang threatened to become Buddhist if he was continually persecuted and prevented from getting his rightful share of familial land. Another man, not getting along with his

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neighbors, threatened to sell his house to a Buddhist, thereby cutting into Yogmathang’s Muslim majority, until he was dissuaded by political pressure from Kargil. Although identifying with their religious heritage is important for both communities, even the most devout Muslim houses were willing to provide me with genealogies of their families, which often indicated a relatively recent history of conversion from Buddhism, dating back to no more than three generations. Some of them were forthcoming about their respect for preserving the Buddhist shrines and texts that were part of their heritage. Yogmathang Muslims regretted that the Boycott had resulted in their exclusion from Buddhist celebrations of joy and sorrow (skyid-sdug)—birth ceremonies, weddings, funerals, all events in which they had participated with equal gaiety or solemnity before. Buddhist elders also expressed sadness that poverty had once compelled those from Yogmathang to welcome food and hospitality from them but that prosperity had diminished that need and had brought about a rift as exchange had gradually become more problematic. They criticized Muslims for eating fish, hunting, and maintaining such strict pollution taboos that they would not eat from the same plate or accept cooked food from the hands of non-Muslims. Similarly, Muslims were critical of alcoholism, polyandry, and the caste system in Buddhist society. The reasons that my hosts in Yogmathang gave me for most of their differences with Buddhists, however, were yul-pa’i khrims (the customs of place), not the canonical dictates of religion. They used the veil to illustrate what they meant. The veil is worn by Muslim women in such a way that it covers their head but not their face and cascades down their back, except in the case of brides, for whom modesty codes demand that they partially cover their face as well. Clerics in Kargil insisted that women who were partially covered were ignorant of deeper Islamic symbolism and morality, but women in Yogmathang declared that although they did believe that baring their hair was as disgraceful as exposing their pubic hair, it was only elite women who did no farm labor who could afford the luxury of concealing their face. The religion of every village, they said, must be mindful of its local practices. Another example of a regional interpretation of a religious norm was what farmers from Yogmathang told me about the origin of Ramzan (Arabic: Ramadan). During the month of Ramzan, the ninth month of the Islamic calendar, every Muslim person of age is expected to maintain thirty roza or days of fasting because it was during this month that the verses of the Koran were delivered to the Prophet Mohammed by the angel Gabriel. Muslims observ-

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ing this fast are to abstain from food from sunrise until sunset, and speech and sex are also strictly controlled. According to Islamic belief, those who keep roza will be absolved of their sins, and to those who do not fast, the doors of paradise will be closed. A somewhat different rationale for Ramzan that I heard in Yogmathang was that in bygone days, entire villages were punished for the misdeeds of one person, and all Muslims were required to fast in the present to atone for the sins of their ancestors, a brother and sister who had once stolen a goat (ra-ma) and some grain (zan) from the Prophet. In this explanation, the Koranic meanings for Ramzan were substituted with pastoral and agricultural contexts that were specific to the Ladakhi environment. Despite the Islamic significance of Ramzan, the local explanation for it also incorporated the bsnyen-gnas (to stay with mantra), a Buddhist fast for gaining merit and avoiding rebirth as a hungry ghost, generally observed during the first Buddhist month, which often corresponds with Ramzan.37 It was believed that Buddhists had to observe bsnyen-gnas because their ancestors too had consumed the intestine (snye-ma) of the Prophet’s goat. Stories such as these demonstrate that the lives of the two communities were interconnected despite their dissimilarities. For example, one Muslim family that ran a chicken farm in Achinathang lost much of its poultry to frost one winter. The deceased chickens were given to Buddhist neighbors because Muslims are obligated to consume only meat that is halal, ordained by Islamic rites. Correspondingly, it was Muslim households that generally slaughtered meat in Leh because Buddhist ideals of nonviolence mean that the profession of butchery is disparaged, even though meat was a common item in the diet of most Ladakhis. In the Da-Hanu area, where the consumption of beef was absolutely prohibited for the Buddhist ‘Brogpa people, Muslim families were an important outlet for the disposal of old cows no longer useful for farming. I was often a participant in the exchange between the two communities. Friends in Gongmathang beseeched me to ask my hosts in Yogmathang for tomato seeds and onion shoots (gardening is more widespread in Yogmathang) and to inform them when the mulberries were ripe and the flowers had bloomed so that the children could be sent to pick some (the relatively lower altitude of Yogmathang results in earlier harvests of fruits and flowers). From Yogmathang, I received many requests to take messages to Gongmathang: from an octogenarian ex-headman rendered immobile with age to his dear old friend in Gongmathang, asking him to eat healthy foods and to stay alive; from patients to the nurse orderly (the medical office is located on land

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sanctioned by a family in Gongmathang), notifying her that medical supplies for headaches and diarrhea were needed urgently; from villagers who wanted to inform the operator from Gongmathang that the generator for the microhydroelectric project was down again and a collective decision needed to be taken about the next course of action. Although the Social Boycott was then being monitored strictly in many parts of Ladakh, it proved difficult to maintain in a village like Achinathang. Eagerly adopted at first, it soon outlived its purpose. After all, there was just one middle school and no real marketplace, just some scattered shops with everyday necessities where children looking for candy were the most frequent clients. A big wedding banquet or an accidental death in Buddhist areas brought about sudden shortages of barley grain which could be remedied by purchasing surplus grain from Muslim households that did not use the extra grain to brew beer. There were clandestine rebellions against the Boycott, even during its heyday. A surreptitious purchase of onions, a procurement of poplars for the monastery, a loan of cattle for plowing, a quiet summons for agricultural assistance, a gift of scarves and money from Buddhist neighbors for Sakina’s wedding—these little acts of revolt may not have resulted in a revolution, but they did frustrate the functioning of the Boycott and accelerate its resolution. The years that have elapsed since the Boycott have brought about changes, some controversial, others conciliatory. Whereas the people of Yogmathang had once rejected the proposition of having a sheikh in their village for liturgical services, they now have a sheikh from their own community who has been trained in Iran. Although still distant from the factional politics of Kargil, the hold of the ikmt has strengthened. The mosque has been refurbished and a loudspeaker brought in for broadcasting the call for prayers. This instigated an adverse reaction from a Buddhist neighbor, who chose to blast religious music at the same time, creating a scenario of loudspeaker politics similar to that in Leh, where the lba had taken to playing taped hymns from the Jokhang Temple to coincide with and drown out the azan. Not able to garner much support from other Buddhists, the neighbor stopped this practice after a short while. Relations between Achinathang’s Buddhists and Muslims were also seriously threatened during the Kargil war of 1999, when a bus full of Border Security men drove up to Yogmathang one night. They arrested one man from that neighborhood and then another from Gongmathang; one was Muslim, the other Buddhist. Their houses were searched and some dynamite and two

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unauthorized rifles were recovered. State and military authorities frequently blast dynamite to build roads, but private use is forbidden; still, it is not out of the ordinary for villagers from all over Ladakh to use small quantities of dynamite for leveling the rocky terrain to make houses or fields. The two men were hauled away. For a few days, an air of gloom pervaded the village. The story made the news in a major Indian newspaper: Tuesday, June 29, 1999 Kargil Special: Huge arsenal of weapons recovered in Ladakh Jammu: Police have arrested 25 subversives and recovered a huge arsenal of weapons in Turtuk and Achina Thung areas of Leh district of frontier region of Ladakh during the last fortnight, police said. Police conducted raids in Turtuk and Achina Thung and arrested the 25 militants who had been sent along with weapons from across the border, a senior police officer told pti [Press Trust of India] here on the phone from Leh today. These subversives, basically belonging to Ladakh region, had crossed over to other side during the 1971 war. On interrogation they revealed that they had been sent into Ladakh by Pakistan’s Inter Services Intelligence (isi) to set off bombs and kill political leaders and vips, besides innocent people, the police officer said. Weapons recovered from them included 11 ak-type rifles, one Pika machine gun, one universal machine gun, one rocket launcher with three rockets, one sniper rifle, one 303 rifle, four pistols, 3000 rounds of ammunition, 15 grenades, seven kgs. of explosives and 107 gelatin sticks. (Indian Express Newspapers 1999) On reading this news item online from my office in Northampton, Massachusetts, I was frightened for the villagers and then perplexed about the identity of the subversives it referred to. When I reached Ladakh that autumn, Aba told me that he felt the Muslims of Yogmathang had done nothing that was treacherous during the days of Partition and similarly, he was sure that the two men arrested had nothing to do with treason or militant activities. ‘‘We all knew there was no truth to this,’’ he said. ‘‘Their rifles were ancient. They were only used for hunting.’’ The prisoners were finally released and, a year later, the charges against them dropped. Besides the political ramifications of the Kargil war, economically too, the village has witnessed many changes. The dak bungalow by the main road, emblem of state bureaucracy, torched during the Agitation of 1989, its roof ripped off and a stream of colored prayer flags defiantly laying claim to the burned ruins, is now converted into a small commercial area for a shop and restau-

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rant that serve locals, tour groups, and army personnel living in barracks in Vijay Thang down the road. The establishment of the army settlement in Vijay Thang was a major harbinger of change. After the experience of the Kargil war and after investigations that blamed the army for security lapses, the army, under Lieutenant-General Arjun Ray, commander of its newly created 14th Corps Division, embarked on a vigorous mission to win the cooperation of border citizens and improve its image with alienated civilians. Through a border management program called Operation Sadbhavna (Operation Goodwill), it began utilizing funds from the central reserves for building what one reporter described as ‘‘a human defence line.’’ 38 Under this plan, schools, hospitals, orphanages, and vocational training centers were constructed in 190 villages along the loc. When I visited Yogmathang in 1999, villagers complained that their fields were destroyed by army camps. But by 2000, residents of Achinathang also praised Vijay Thang, which had become a distribution center for the army’s food and supply division.39 Helicopters laden with goods brought from Leh whizzed overhead daily and made for remote outposts. A medical department was set up, which provided employment for locals and offered them free treatment. People from all over the Khalatse block came especially to receive treatment from the ‘‘lady doctor.’’ The presence of the army also meant an instant outlet for poultry, fruits, and vegetables, and in turn, villagers could purchase canteen goods such as rum, cooking oil, and condensed milk at low rates. A new affluence was evident in Achinathang: some families had their own vehicles; new shops and restaurants lined the road, the door to one of them prominently displaying an ‘‘I love my India’’ sticker. Conscious of building alliances with their neighbors from the army, the organizers of the mda’ rtses of 2000 held in Gongmathang invited the corps commander of Vijay Thang to be the chief guest. Although he did not attend, he sent ranked officials as representatives. The organizing committee welcomed them warmly. The day after the mda’ rtses concluded, the villagers called a meeting at the same venue in the tent-covered schoolyard. This meeting was summoned to discuss village affairs and elect a member to represent the Gongmathang and Lungba segments. Though invitations were issued to the village in general, the active participants were mostly men. Female teachers and employees who were well respected were also invited, but they did not voice their opinion. This was a very different setting from elections I had witnessed in previous years, which had been negotiated in a field around a keg of chang prepared for some village ceremony. Now the proceedings were

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dominated by men of a younger generation, not the generation of azhang-pa (uncles).40 An army veteran, an old hand at leading the village, was chosen to be member, but some of the youth were dissatisfied by this outcome and mumbled their disapproval. One rather drunken youth was loud in his condemnation of ‘‘old and ineffective’’ leaders. He was quickly silenced, but the atmosphere turned heavy. The youth’s ranting made it obvious that the question of political authority was a matter of conflict in the village. In fact, the very issue of village representation had come under reconsideration when villagers were offered the opportunity of having their own goba (headman) to replace the member as their representative in a future Panchayati Council. So far, Achinathang had been under the jurisdiction of the goba of Skyurbuchan. The inhabitants of Gongmathang and the Lungba turned down this option, preferring to stay with Skyurbuchan despite the autonomy and economic benefits of having their own goba. I was told that the main reason for this was because they were afraid of sharing the pastures of the Lungba with the residents of Yogmathang. For several years, they had been engaged in a legal battle with the people of Yogmathang for rights to the pastures and trees of the upper valleys. Legally, the population of Yogmathang was barred from the Lungba because they had not been included as residents in the village during the land survey of 1908. Buddhist villagers were adamant about not sharing their territorial rights with later ‘‘immigrants.’’ Whereas some Muslim householders were resigned to the Buddhists’ denial of access to pastures in the Lungba, others bemoaned the injustice of the situation and the inconvenience it caused them, having to retain their livestock within the village during the summer at the risk of damaging their fields. Even though Muslim households with small plots of land or connections in Chigtan and Kharbu appointed a relative there to look after the herds in the summer, sheep and donkeys often strayed. But political dissension was not just a function of religion. The people of Achinathang had differences with the way affairs were handled in Skyurbuchan, too. Dissatisfied with the dominance of Skyurbuchan, the villagers from Achinathang cast their votes against Skyurbuchan’s candidate in the second lahdc elections later that year. One councilor was shared among the villagers of Laido, Skyurbuchan, Achinathang, Da, and Hanu. Residents from Achinathang felt that Council funds would be more equitably distributed if the position was occupied by a person from a village other than the large and powerful village of Skyurbuchan. So, for the first time, a ‘Brogpa candidate, the only contestant to fight the election independently, was elected by a nar-

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row margin. Voting patterns for the State Legislative Assembly and Lok Sabha races also reveal that villagers made electoral decisions strategically and situationally and that religious allegiances were not uniform. For instance, in the 1999 parliamentary elections, they were torn between voting for the scythe and the hand, for the National Conference Party that is supported by Togdan Rinpoche, a religious head of the ‘Bri-gung-pa order, and the Congress Party, which claimed to truly represent Ladakhi Buddhists. On the last evening of the mda’ rtses, a busload of young viewers from Skyurbuchan showed up to watch the cultural program of dances and skits. Their hooting and booing disrupted the cultural show and a physical fight broke out between the hosts and the uninvited guests. Villagers were united in their condemnation of the hooligan behavior displayed by the Skyurbuchanpa. The outsiders departed and normalcy resumed the next day. The party continued as Buddhist villagers who hadn’t seen each other for a long time organized a feast with leftovers. There are two story lines, then, that frame the game of archery in this village of Achinathang. In the first, groups of Buddhists and Muslims were brought into an uncomfortable coresidence by the act of a colonial administrator, resulting in a struggle and court case over land use which has not yet been resolved. It remains a village where taboos against the ‘‘contagion’’ of intermarriage are manifested in punitive measures, with severe restrictions against women who violate the code, a village that cannot put aside its differences to take advantage of the benefits of a common leader, a performing ground where the claim to heritage in games like archery reinforces the idea of exclusion at its worst and makes only spectators of neighbors at its best. The second scenario, however, shatters these clean lines. It exposes economic and ideological fractures, not merely between those of different faiths but within those groups who identify with a common religion. It points to a mutual involvement and interdependence between Buddhists and Muslims that prevents them from surrendering to the atmosphere of suspicion even in times of war. By no means a multireligious miracle, Achinathang is an arena where common play and dance have not been realized but linger on as possibilities. In his perceptive analysis of the Moharram rituals in Leh after the Boycott, David Pinnault (1999b, 311) writes, ‘‘They keep communal relations going, despite underlying ambivalence, imperfections and all.’’ So also the archery game in Achinathang offers a set of moves that contain the potential for hardening enmities or forging alliances; the way that the game will

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play out is contingent on how its residents subvert the dominant discourses of differentiation. MODERN ARCHERY

Throughout Ladakh’s history, archery shows have identified outsiders, defined by religion, by region, by caste, class, and gender. Sometimes they have separated Buddhists from Muslims, Kargil from Leh, Ladakh from Baltistan. Just as fervently, they have celebrated a common heritage and a community of insiders that comes together to feast, welcome spring, pray for good harvests, and rejoice in the warmth of belonging. There are songs that pay homage to the ideals of equality that playing together can perpetuate. Morup Namgyal, Ladakh’s most famous male singer, narrated for me the lyrics to a Ladakhi song from his native village, Wanla: The village youth of this small village are skilled at mda’ rtses. Those arrows without difference, we will use those for mda’ rtses. The young girls of this small village, all the shells they wear are equal. The children of this village, all the stones in their slingshots are equal. Today, fresh rules are fostering new alliances and shifting old boundaries. Women banned from touching arrows are participating in the game as archery takes on modern forms. A female archer from the Changthang area, Sonam Yangchen, has made it to the national women’s team. Whereas age and status once jealously controlled participation in the game, elders and youths have joined forces to revive the game in Leh. Mohammad Akbar Rangar passed on his passion to his son, Abbas. Abbas was selected for training in ‘‘modern’’ archery under the Special Area Games for people of tribal and remote areas, a program of the Sports Authority of India.41 Skarma Tshering Delegs, the son of the traditional archer Phuntsog Stobdan, won the Junior National Champion in 1986–87 and secured a bronze medal in the Senior Championship. Ladakhi archers excelled in the categories they were placed in nationally and set new national records in modern archery. But the Special Areas program was shortlived, and lacking funds for the expensive equipment, modern archers found themselves without a channel for their sport. Modern archery is not free from controversy. Older players contend that it is not rooted in local culture, and while it gets more than its fair share of national and international attention, it does nothing to enhance local archery

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Skarma Tshering Delegs, modern archer, Junior National Champion 1986–87.

and even works against it. But irrespective of these differences, a group of archers has formed the Ladakh Archery Association to rejuvenate interest in both traditional and modern archery. The Association sponsored the First Traditional Archery Championship in Leh in 2000, inaugurated by Chamanlal Gupta, minister for civil aviation. Formed in 1999, the Association has as many as two hundred members, both Buddhists and Muslims. Modern archers from Kargil have expressed interest in joining them. The Association applied for funds to the local and State administrations, but the response was lukewarm. Some members allege that political organizations do not encourage their Association as they do village-level archery because they have no stake in protecting communal harmony. They express regret that the fragmentation that has plagued Ladakh since the Agitation put a stop to the Argon Dartses. Coincidentally, the cinema hall that replaced the Argon Dartses on the Galden Kadpa has not been spared from sectarian demons either. Owned by a Sunni Muslim, it was boycotted during the Agitation and accused of being a site where Muslim men preyed on Buddhist girls. Even though movies are screened there nowadays, it stands in a state of serious disrepair. And the open-air archery stadium is now converted into an indoor one, too narrow for the range required by shooters. PATRIOT GAMES

The rules of play in the game of archery have frequently been drawn and transformed against the backdrop of state politics. The Great Game played during

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the colonial regime led to the construction of new geopolitical borders and boundaries across the Himalayas. Writes one player from that time, the British sportsman-officer Captain Frederick Adair (1989, 1), ‘‘Where is the traveller who, having gazed on a mighty range of hills on an unknown land, has not experienced a kind of fascination and indefinite longing to surmount the barrier and see, with his own eyes, what lies beyond? It was with such a feeling that I had gazed on the Himalaya from the Indian side.’’ The ‘‘indefinite longing’’ that Captain Adair describes feeling as he gazed at the other side of the Himalayas exposes a history of romance and conquest that was founded on the subjugation of mountainous nature and its conversion into ‘‘natural’’ frontiers. The game that he participated in was upheld through a culture of patriotism, masculinity, and imperial vision; it relied heavily on the labor and travel of men in border areas. In postcolonial times, the frontier between India and Pakistan is also fortified by ideologies of patriotism and difference and the labor of border men serving as sentinels for their countries. During the Kargil war, villagers on the border were taken to the front line as porters, carrying a load of thirty-five kilos of ammunition each on their backs in exchange for a remuneration of Rs. 300 ($65). Hostilities between India and Pakistan have enhanced paranoia and forced people to prove they belong to either one side of the border or the other, as though there were natural and eternal geographies of separation between the two. The case of Turtuk village, the other place indicted together with Achinathang for harboring militants during the Kargil war, demonstrates how fluctuating the zones of belonging really are. After the Indo-Pakistani war of 1971, four villages of the Turtuk sector were brought over to the Indian side. A high percentage of educated men who worked in Balti areas outside Turtuk were left behind on the other side of the loc; it was mostly women, children, and farmers who were transferred to India. Youths from Turtuk confessed to me that older people were still confused about their national allegiance. Partition had made them repudiate their Indian connections to become citizens of Pakistan and the 1971 war had demanded just the opposite. Security teams from the army constantly required them to cooperate in espionage and surveillance activities. When weapons were seized from Turtuk during the Kargil war, the village was black-marked as a breeding ground for insurgents. Rumors spread in Leh that militancy from the Kashmir valley had reached Ladakh’s backyard and every Muslim house probably concealed illegal weapons. Members of a youth group from Turtuk whom I interviewed countered this view, insisting that most of the

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people in police detention were not militants at all but villagers who had been caught in a game of double agency and unwittingly accepted weapons they did not know how to use, lured by the prospect of a better hunt.42 Buying into the discourse of patriotism, the lba too used the possession of unlicensed rifles as a way of portraying Muslims as insubordinate Indians, in contrast to patriotic Buddhists. Like nomadic hunters from a preagricultural past and women who are attached to two homelands, Muslims too were suspected of dubious nationalism for their desire to freely traverse national borders instead of dwelling sedentarily in one land and expressing their undivided allegiance to it. This was obvious from the first reaction of the Indian army when Muslim shepherds from Batalik reported to them that they had seen infiltrators on the mountains around Kargil in 1999. These shepherds were physically manhandled and subjected to intensive interrogation. Muslim leaders criticized policies of recruitment to the army and the Ladakh Scouts, which employ an overwhelming majority of Buddhists, for being discriminatory. As evidence of Muslim loyalty to India, friends in Kargil gave me examples of patriotic songs that were composed during the war, even by lyricists of Balti heritage such as Master Sadiq Ali. Said Mr. Ghulam Hassan Khan, the member of Parliament from Kargil, ‘‘About our patriotism, I have this to say. The other day, I met a general and this is what he told me. You know the religious songs that we sing during our weddings—they are called kasida. The general said that last year in the villages, the womenfolk and children were running helter-skelter after the Pakistani shelling and the males were taken to the border—even then, they were sitting in the army Shaktiman trucks singing those songs faithfully. This proves that we are trustworthy.’’ 43 Following the Kargil war, diplomatic ties between India and Pakistan deteriorated to a great extent and expenditure on defense increased. The WagahAttari passenger train, the Samjhauta Express, and the Delhi-Lahore overland bus service were discontinued, and envoys expelled after the December 13 attacks on the Parliament of India. Lessons the army learned from the war propelled it to seek personnel who could cope with mountainous areas. Where there had once been very few Muslims in the border reserves of the Indian army, Kargilis are now being recruited in large numbers. Although some leaders of the ikmt initially opposed the induction of Kargilis in the army on the grounds that they must not participate in war against their Muslim brothers in Skardo, Baltistan, there were large numbers of applicants who saw army jobs as an answer to the district’s poverty and who were no longer convinced that their brethren across the border would not harm them first.

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Additionally, regiment status was given to Ladakh Scouts, resulting in better benefits and salaries for recruits. Army enrollment has been so high in the past three years that there are now villages in Ladakh where there are almost no young men visible in the fields. New weapons, replacing bows and arrows, are taking over the land these days. Agni and Prithvi, Ghauri and Shaheen.44 Bofors aimed at Skardo and Kalashnikovs ready for Kargil. Endlessly staging the violence wrought by the Partition. Radio, television, and print media in both India and Pakistan add information to the arsenal. A romanticized masculinity associated with war and defense is being reaffirmed at the cost of other expressions and ideals of manhood. In the midst of the Kargil war, for instance, a cover of India Today (August 16, 1999), one of the country’s most widely circulating magazines, showed a determined soldier in the prime of his life, armed with modern artillery and attired in an outfit that looked almost like a spacesuit, poised to climb mountains to defend his country. Most of the images of soldiers on the front line portray them ascending the mountains; descent is rarely featured, perhaps because too many soldiers did not make it down. After the war, a poem by the British mountaineer and poet Geoffrey Winthrop-Young was posted on the official Operation Vijay Web site of the Indian army, where despite being disabled during World War II, the poet recounts his dreams of victory, freedom, and mastery of the hills, proclaiming, ‘‘I hold the heights, I hold the heights I won.’’ 45 Sites of the Kargil war, Thololing and Tiger Hill, are being promoted as tourist monuments and adventure destinations. A pilgrimage to these sites is as much a part of the Kargil Festival’s agenda as village archery shows. Through national days such as Kargil Diwas, observed in Delhi to commemorate the war, and national festivals such as the Sindhu Darshan in Ladakh, lines that divide patriotic insiders from enemy outsiders are hardened and reproduced. The performance of Pakistani and Indian nationalism in this manner has cemented a borderline in which the other side is sealed off as a place of absolute difference that cannot be understood, or else as a space of such familiarity that evokes nostalgia for the past and invites no gaze of curiosity for the present. Performative interactions between civilians of the two countries are reduced to sporting events such as cricket matches, with separate national teams and clear demarcations between winners and losers. It is in the ‘‘deep play’’ of these cricket matches when the stakes of national pride are the highest, as Clifford Geertz (1973) has shown in the case of the Balinese cockfight, that questions of loyalty and citizenship are most pronounced, leading

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to eruptions of communal violence against minority citizens.46 Where measures to promote trust and diplomacy are routinely ignored, and where audiences lack alternative playing fields and lived spaces to work out their differences, competitive games degenerate into symbols of machismo and national chauvinism, failing to create a place for collective celebration.47 LINES OF COMMUNICATION

Borders and boundaries created after the Partition have reduced the lived experiences and play activities of Pakistan and India into mere spectacle. According to Dipesh Chakrabarty (2002), the Partition lives on in national memory, identified as a rupture stemming from irreconcilable ethnic and religious differences, or as a device for reconstructing the pre-Partition past into a time marked by the absence of differences. Like so many families at the time, my family was also affected by the shadow of this Partition. My parents were born in western Punjab, my father in Sialkot and my mother in Lahore, during the years of the struggle against colonial rule. My parents rarely speak of their childhood memories. My mother barely remembers; stories of the Partition that were passed on to her were mostly about fears that pervaded the life of her family and the heroism displayed by them in outmaneuvering attackers. My paternal grandparents, in contrast, living in their congested flat in a multistoried building in Bombay, reminisced with undue romanticism about the house they had left behind in Sialkot, with its open spaces and its community of friends, relatives, and loyal Muslim workers, workers who protected the house long after the family left, in case they should return. Although they spent four decades in Bombay, my grandparents did not relate well to its metropolitan values. My grandfather spent most of his time in his bedroom, controlling his children and grandchildren through feudal rules whispered by invisible voices from across the border, living in what Purnima Mankekar (1999, 289–290) calls ‘‘a refugee camp of the mind.’’ Not permitted to enter that world, we despaired of his incomprehensible pronouncements and took comfort in our island-city and the breeze of the Arabian Sea, wondering only occasionally about other cities in that other nation of Pakistan that were also touched by its waters. Yet, when I look at the map of South Asia now and think of how I have spent most of the past fourteen years of my time in India in the State of Jammu and Kashmir, I notice that Sialkot is almost on the other side of the loc from Jammu. Partitioned families from Ladakh cannot find solace in spatial distance;

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they are caught in the paradox of painful closeness. As the historian Abdul Ghani Sheikh (2001, 68) writes: The Partition has affected more than just the destiny of a nation. It has split apart towns, villages and homes that were once one. At the Line of Control there are, they say, such villages where a brother can see his brother ploughing the fields, watering them, harvesting and threshing the crops on the other side. But if a brother wants to meet his brother on the other side, he has to trek several kilometers from his village and cross the forbidding pass, 18,000 feet high, to reach Leh. From there he can then fly to New Delhi and after several months of struggle and waiting in the capital, if he should acquire a visa, he can travel to meet his brother in Islamabad or Lahore but not in his brother’s own village in the Himalayan territories. Being so close to his brother’s home, he is so far away. Like a star in the sky that he can see but not touch. With the partitioning of India, families in Ladakh and Baltistan were torn apart. Abdul Ghani Sheikh too was separated from his brother, Deen Mohammad, who, with several other government employees, had accompanied the wazir of Ladakh, Lala Amarnath, to the winter capital of Skardo and been left behind on the other side when the wazir was killed. Deen Mohammad was endeared for his cross-dressing roles in the Argon Dartses. Many of the short stories and essays that Ghani Sheikh composes deal with the complexities and continuities of a bygone Ladakh when the Argon Dartses was at the height of its splendor. He admits that it was not the actual sport of archery that he loved but the dances that accompanied it. Perhaps as a tribute to those dances and to the memory of his brother, he writes and speaks to me so longingly of the archery dance, commenting on its highlights from the first day until the end. Beyond the realm of nostalgia, however, his stories deal with forces that are tearing people apart in today’s world and the struggles of ordinary citizens to keep the channels of communication open. Letters, described by Urvashi Butalia (2001) as ‘‘an archive with a difference,’’ feature prominently in Ghani Sheikh’s writings. In a fictional story, ‘‘The Locked Trunk’’ (Sheikh 2001), the initial exchange of letters between Tashi, a Buddhist Ladakhi, and Anwar, his childhood friend who moved to Baltistan with the Partition, contain inquiries about each other’s welfare and practical questions about how to deal with possessions left behind in Ladakh. Lack of communication possibilities due to the hostile atmosphere between India and Pakistan and Tashi’s conscription into the military soon create an

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aura of suspicion, so that feelings of friendship are buried; when letters are written in subsequent years, they are too late to mend fences. Similarly, in another story, called ‘‘First Letter,’’ letters are sent by two Balti brothers, Hassan and Hussain, who reside in Baltistan and Kargil, respectively, to inform each other of the loss of their sons in the Kargil war.48 The story begins: ‘‘When the Kargil war ended, the first letter I received from across the border pierced my heart like a poisoned arrow. No doubt, the letter that I had posted from Kargil to my brother’s address two days ago had also caused such pain.’’ Letters are also a source of information in ‘‘Two Nations, One Story,’’ an autobiographical essay written by Ghani Sheikh (2001) about his brother, Deen Mohammad. In this essay, we learn that Deen Mohammad visited Ladakh when border crossings were more relaxed and sent letters when the Tashkent Accord or other such political pacts made communication possible.49 Ghani Sheikh also relates an account of his own travel to Islamabad for a conference, where, despite official restrictions that prevented him from visiting his brother’s house in the Himalayas, he was felicitated at a dinner party in Pakistan’s capital by Balti scholars. To these scholars he presented a copy of his latest book and obtained copies of their writings on culture, folklore, and history in return. The aspirations of border citizens like Ghani Sheikh to overcome everyday performances of exclusion open a space for contemplating a ‘‘practice of proximity’’ (Chakrabarty 2002) as an alternative to nationalist ideologies of difference and indifference. Such a practice does not attempt to sweep away differences but allows for an awareness of the political and positional limits of border crossings, opening a path for rewriting the bloody lines of postcolonial nationalism, where the armed services now provide the principal career opportunities for Ladakhis. ‘‘Two Nations, One Story’’ ends with a hope for healing: ‘‘The official story of our countries, India and Pakistan, written during the last fifty years, is filled with tension, hatred, malice, and misunderstandings. I believe that one day the story will also be told in which separated hearts are united again’’ (Sheikh 2001, 80).

CONCLUSION

Flowing across the Lines . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Among the resources shared by Pakistan and India is the river Indus, or Sengge’i kha-babs, as it is called in Ladakhi, ‘‘Flowing from the lion’s mouth.’’ The river originates from Lake Manosarovar at the foot of Mount Kailash in Tibet, makes its way from Ladakh into Pakistan, and eventually drains into the Arabian Sea. During winter months, it meanders through the mountains like a garland of turquoise, moistening and fertilizing the Himalayan soil. In the summer, it mixes with glacial silt to assume an opal-colored sheen. The Indus is what Sherry Ortner (1973) describes as a ‘‘key’’ symbol that provides, in this concluding chapter, the opportunity of using the lens of performance once more to evaluate the political, historical, and cultural practices of border subjectivity that have guided this book. To honor the Indus and to recreate the practice of river worship that apparently prevailed in the province of Sindh before it was incorporated into Pakistan, a festival called the Sindhu Darshan Abhiyan was initiated in 1997 by L. K. Advani (later the current deputy prime minister of India) and Tarun Vijay, editor of the right-wing journal, Panchajanya. Vijay (1997) writes of his encounter with the Indus in an essay entitled ‘‘Mother Sindhu, We Have Not Forgotten You!’’: It seemed to set an ambience of Blessing. It seemed as though Sindhu Mata was smiling and asking us the question—Why have you thought of me after fifty years! Where were you till now!!?—

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It seemed a strange irony that even though a devout Hindu remembers the Sindhu every morning prior to a bath, even though our ancestors have paid tributes to the Sindhu, even though our Vedas are full of the mention of Sindhu, even though the Sindhu has nurtured the soul of our nation, it did not occur to us in the last fifty years after our fractured Independence, that just like we worship the Ganga, Yamuna, Krishna, Kaveri, Narmada, Satluj and Brahmaputra, we should worship the Sindhu, bathe in the Sindhu and take home its holy water just as we take home the water of the Holy Ganga! Celebrated annually in June since its inauguration, the main ceremonies of the Sindhu Darshan Festival are held at the Sindhu Ghat, a specially constructed site on the banks of the Indus near Shey, the precolonial capital of Ladakh. The festival takes the form of a yatra, a type of pilgrimage that has been one of the hallmarks of the bjp’s modus of political outreach. In 2003, the festival was inaugurated from Mr. Advani’s residence in New Delhi. Advertised widely in the media, the snowbound pass of Zojila was cleared for overland traffic, several additional flights added, and travel and accommodation arrangements subsidized by the central government for a large number of yatris (pilgrims) as well as performing artists, poets, youth volunteers, political dignitaries, and journalists from various parts of India. The program was scheduled for a three-day period but festival-related events lasted for several days. The festival’s stated objectives were to revive pride in India’s heritage, to celebrate patriotism and inculcate a sense of national integration among citizens.1 At the inauguration of the Sindhu Darshan Festival of 2003 on June 1, the deputy prime minister hoisted the Indian flag to the tune of the national anthem. Yatris chanted a hymn to the national goddess, Bharat Mata (Mother India). A prayer service to the Hindu water deity was conducted on a stage that jutted out into the shallows. It was followed by the immersion of water transported from sacred rivers of the country into the Indus, including those of the Brahmaputra, which flows through States in the northeast that border China and Bangladesh. The intent of this immersion of waters was to create a ‘‘networking of rivers,’’ both as a symbol of national integration and as a combined solution for addressing recurring draughts and floods (Tribune News Service 2003). After the water rites were concluded, there was an extravagant cultural program by visiting artists and local dance troupes. The stage on which these

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Deputy Prime Minister L. K. Advani at the immersion ceremony of the Indus at the Sindhu Darshan Festival, 2003.

cultural activities were performed was surrounded by hordes of journalists, almost blocking the view of the sizable audience that was seated on the sidelines. The number of attendees was considerably higher than in previous years, when the festival ended up being more of a circus for politicians and media personnel than a populous local event. Security checks were extensive and only those with passes previously obtained from the district commissioner’s office were allowed into the small central pavilion. I was fortunate to find seating in the space reserved for commentators and technicians of All India Radio, Leh, who were providing live coverage and interviewing people for their impressions of the festival. The range of performers and the multiple religions and regions they represented seemed to be the signs of a liberal state that sponsored festive spaces where freedom of art and expression flourished. The Sindhu Ghat was lined with garish landscapes painted by visiting artists. An installation sanctioned by the lahdc and designed by Mustafa, a Ladakhi Muslim artist, was built on a podium that resembled the base of a mchod-rten, linking Mount Kailash to Buddhist beliefs. Resting on this base was a glass showcase containing an artistic replica of the mountain, with heads of a peacock, elephant, horse, and lion sculpted on its four sides to represent the four rivers that emerge from

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Installation representing the Indus emerging from the lion’s head on Mount Kailash.

it, the Ghagra, Sutlej, Bhramaputra, and Indus, respectively. Modern and folk dances matched the homage dance to Lord Shiva (who the Hindus believe meditates on Mount Kailash) performed by dancers renowned in the classical traditions of Orissi, Kathak, and Bharat Natyam. The evening program was held at Leh’s Polo Ground, where, with the palace silhouetted in the backdrop, a pop band called Silk Route strummed a romantic Hindi number about drowning in love and the message of national unity and patriotic love boomed loud in the qawali recital in Urdu by the famous Sabri brothers. Besides literary seminars, artist camps, and photography exhibits, the organizers of the Sindhu Darshan hosted an interreligious conference at the Assembly Hall in Leh and advertised the participation of various religious heads, deeming the festival a true mark of communal harmony. Political dignitaries, including the deputy prime minister, the chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed, and the chief executive councilor of the lahdc, Mr. Thupstan Tshewang, made speeches about the festival. In his speech, Mr. Advani expressed his delight with the momentum it had gathered since its inception and emphasized the festival’s significance for domestic tourism and the eventual resurrection of peace in Kashmir. He announced that he would advise the prime minister of India to broach China about opening the shorter and more convenient route along the Indus val-

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Nehru with Ladakhi leaders during his 1949 visit. Courtesy of Nehru Memorial Library Collection.

ley to Mount Kailash during his forthcoming tour to Beijing. Mr. Advani said that the Sindhu Darshan, already a symbol of national unity, would become a symbol of international unity in the near future and that just as representatives from diverse religions were present at the festival, the day would come when representatives from Pakistan and China would also attend it. .

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The Indus festival reinforces the centrality of the border in the national imagination. It offers a space for assessing the state’s past relationship with borderlands and charting a plan for future relations. Continuities and ruptures in the way that official nationalism has imagined and interacted with Ladakh in the postcolonial years are nicely illustrated by comparing visits to the river Indus made by Jawaharlal Nehru, the first prime minister of India, and Atal Bihari Vajpayee, the prime minister in 2003. Nehru’s visit to Ladakh in 1949 was part of a wider travel itinerary to the frontier districts of the country. Photographs from these border tours show him mingling with the folk, often dressed in their native outfits, saluting military officers, and shaking hands with local leaders.2 In Ladakh, he donned an elegant kangtop hat and a brocade garment designed for aristocrats. He rode on horseback to spend three days at the monasteries of Thiksey, Hemis, and Spituk, where he unveiled a photograph

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Nehru on the Indus. Courtesy of Nehru Memorial Library Collection.

of Gandhi and discussed the future of Ladakh with Kushok Bakula, Stagsang Rinpoche, and other regional leaders. Soon after that trip, Nehru recalled his visit to Ladakh with much nostalgia in one of his fortnightly letters to the chief ministers of newly formed Indian states. Describing it as a land ‘‘where nature is dominant and triumphant,’’ he contrasted Ladakh with the densely populated West Bengal frontier that had been reeling under the trauma of the Partition. The wide variation in these two cultures drove him to contemplate the diversity that was India. ‘‘India,’’ he wrote, ‘‘therefore, displays both the bare foot or the chappal [sandal] encasing it and these fur-lined boots of the north’’ (Parthasarathi 1988, 406). Three impressions of Ladakh stood out in his mind. The first was the sight of the ice-covered peaks of the Himalayas visible from the air. The second was the monotony of ‘‘bare and bleak’’ sandy wastes broken by a glimpse of an occasional monastery on a hilltop. The third memory that Nehru treasured was of a ‘‘moonlit night on the banks of the Indus.’’ Praising the beauty and sound of the Indus’s flowing water, Nehru remarked, ‘‘The Indus, which gives India her name, and which, in later stages, becomes a mighty river, sweeping down to the sea, was here a mountain stream with something of the frolic and

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playfulness of youth’’ (407). A black-and-white picture taken from the shore portrays Nehru himself frolicking in this stream on a wooden raft. Attired in shorts and a fedora on his head, he could be mistaken for a big game hunter or an explorer out to map the source of eastern waterways. Fifty-one years after Nehru’s visit, Atal Bihari Vajpayee made a pilgrimage for the Sindhu Darshan to the banks of the Indus. Dressed in a Ladakhi kos, Vajpayee was escorted to the spot where the festival is celebrated, only a few kilometers away from the location where Nehru had discovered the river. Contrasting the nationalist orientations of these two prime ministers, Satish Deshpande (2000, 183) ascribes a ‘‘cultural geography’’ brand of nationalism to the Vajpayee government, versus the ‘‘economic geography’’ ideology of the Nehruvian state. Nehru, who seems to have understood Ladakh primarily in terms of its memorable but ‘‘underdeveloped’’ landscape, had imparted these words of advice to Ladakhis: ‘‘You are backward and unless you learn and train yourselves you cannot run the affairs of your country.’’ 3 Deshpande alleges that this approach forwarded a centralizing philosophy of development and modernity and repressed rather than erased religious and regional sectarianism. He writes, ‘‘If Nehru claimed that dams and steel plants were the temples of modern India,’’ the contemporary government attempts to ‘‘resacralize the nation-space’’ by building temples (188). The dams that Nehru is believed to have idolized were not rejected by the Vajpayee government either. At his visit to the Sindhu Darshan festival of 2000, Vajpayee promised to inaugurate new hydroelectric projects in the State, and his organizers claimed that the festival site would be electrified twenty-four hours a day.4 Both prime ministers espoused guarantees of economic progress and ‘‘unity in diversity’’ in their speeches to the Ladakhi public, but there were fundamental differences in their approaches. Whereas Nehru had traveled through the desert on horseback to participate in the Hemis festival, dismissive as he was of religious ritual, Vajpayee had authorized the invention of a tradition that would enfold minorities and borders in a cosmic Hindu geography. A type of cultural nationalism with its fetishism of flags and temples had come to stand in for the ceremonial displays of economic development and progress that were widespread in the Nehruvian era. The Sindhu Darshan Festival marked the attitude of an India that was ruled by the Hindu right and a government that legitimized pilgrimages to map the national terrain and unveil a Hindutva presence in border areas. Hindutva factions have been appropriating the ancient history of India by predating signs and symbols from Aryan life so that they can be collapsed into

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First day cover and stamp commemorating the Sindhu Darshan Festival.

the earlier period of the Indus Valley Civilization, considered native to India. A brochure designed by the Government of India’s Department of Tourism (2000, 2) for the Sindhu Darshan outlines the immense significance of the Indus by quoting references from the Rig Veda, such as ‘‘Sindhu in might surpasses all streams that flow’’ and ‘‘Rich in good steeds is the Sindhu,’’ horses being the insignia of divine kingship. Describing the banks of the Indus as being abundant in horses (which are identified with the coming of the Aryans) corresponds to revisions made by the right to prove that unlike Muslim rulers, Hindu Aryans were not migrant invaders of India. Similarly, a stamp issued to mark the Sindhu Darshan Festival depicts the mountainous landscape of Ladakh with the Indus running through it and a Harappan bull figurine on the left corner, evoking the connection with the famed archaeological site of Indus Valley culture. The stamp ratifies the state’s perception of the Ladakhi border as primarily empty landscape. Although the first day cover includes sketches of the people of Ladakh, it pointedly selects those ethnic groups that are identifiable as Buddhist or ‘‘Aryan.’’ In a scathing critique of the spirit of the stamp, Ramachandra Guha (2000) calls it ‘‘the stamp of ugliness.’’ A marble plaque has been built at the Sindhu Ghat to commemorate the Sindhu Darshan Festival, on which the name of the benefactor and date of its consecration are engraved in three scripts: Hindi, Urdu, and English. Ladakhi, not recognized as a national language, is missing from the picture. This ab-

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sence is testament to the way local history continues to be obscured in the festival. An essay from bjp Today also summarizes the state’s attitude of appropriating Ladakh for building a national history while simultaneously denying its heritage. Writing about the Sindhu Darshan Festival of 2003, the author suggests that ‘‘it has exposed the indolent township of Leh, and through Leh via television to the large mass of Middle India, to national symbols and how they form an integral part of nationhood and that a people without pride in their past, cannot be especially hopeful about their future’’ (Siddharth 2003). .

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In addition to the official platform, regional administrators and Ladakhi spectators have their own agendas and perceptions of the festival. Economic advantages that the festival might signify are a high priority for State leaders; at the 2003 Sindhu Darshan Festival, Mufti Mohammad Sayeed made an appeal for investing in the State and Thupstan Tshewang emphasized the festival’s importance in promoting domestic tourism. Yet unaccountable amounts of government funds had already been spent and lavish pledges of development funds made at earlier festivals were still to be realized. Given that a majority of the visitors were accommodated in camps, a few large hotels where delegates and media groups were hosted were the chief beneficiaries of the projected boost in domestic tourism. Moreover, promoting domestic tourism without expanding existing infrastructural facilities had the potential for irreversible environmental damage and increased dependency on an industry that had already proven unpredictable due to high security risks arising from border conflicts. Goals of integrating youths from different parts of India could have been a welcome remedy for misunderstandings about a society considered to be outside the mainstream. But while visitors commented about the sheer beauty of the landscape and the hidden treasure they had discovered in Ladakh, the tour schedule itself left little room for more than a cursory glimpse of Ladakh’s culture or for meetings with Ladakhis not involved in festival preparations. In Ladakhi performances, the Indus, the lion river, has become a commonly used literary idiom, mainly as a nurturing energy source for Ladakhi warriors, who are likened to sons of lions grown brave from drinking its nectar waters. Praise for warriors also featured significantly in the commentary by Phuntsog Ladakhi, the director of Sonam Dolma, during the evening program of the Sindhu Darshan Festival at the Polo Ground. Switching effortlessly between Ladakhi, Urdu, and English, the filmmaker led the packed

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crowds through a history of Ladakhi intervention and bravery in the wars against Pakistan and China, pointing out Ladakh’s unceasing loyalty to the Indian union. Drawing inspiration from the festival, he had composed a song to the Indus: Oh, Indus, Your clear water is the source of our life. No land is home to you, you know no boundary lines. Some call you Sindhu and others Indus Your mission is to serve the whole universe.5 Yet, despite its pronounced performance of international unity and communal harmony, the Sindhu Darshan Festival occasioned rifts in Ladakhi society. In the year 2000, when it was widely publicized that diverse political parties and religious associations within Ladakh had actively organized and participated in the festival, officials of the Ladakh Buddhist Association furtively passed a memorandum to the prime minister, listing their grievances against the Jammu and Kashmir State government and railing against its policies of favoritism toward Muslims. That year, the president of the lba downplayed concerns that the festival was targeting Ladakh for ‘‘saffronisation,’’ pointing out how the bjp government had generously offered to build a cultural center in Ladakh that could prove advantageous to Buddhists.6 But since then, the Godhra massacre in Gujerat in 2002 and the communal nature of the bjp campaigns during the State elections in Himachal Pradesh raised doubts about its sincerity in acting as a bridge for different religious streams.7 Conspicuous by their absence in 2003 were Buddhist monks, whose chants on the river stage had been a regular feature of the festival. At this time, too, Leh was entering a new phase in its relationship with Srinagar after a dramatic change of government resulting from the victory of the Congress-People’s Democratic Party (pdp) coalition over the National Conference Party that had affiliated itself with the bjp in the State Assembly elections in 2002. When Mufti Mohammad Sayeed of the pdp was sworn in as chief minister, one of his first acts was to empower the lahdc by removing obstacles that prevented it from exercising financial control over its affairs. The portfolio of State minister for science and technology was given to Mr. Rigzin Jora, who had been elected unopposed to the State Legislative Assembly. After hoisting the national flag on the Republic Day ceremony of 2003, Thupstan Tshewang publicly thanked the chief minister for the confidence his steps had generated.8 Kargil, too, was motivated to claim the provision made in the lahdc Act of 1995, entitling it to a Hill Council of its own. The chief

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minister’s ‘‘healing touch’’ policy of dealing with disgruntled regions, civilians, and militants within Kashmir had its fair share of critics but nevertheless had sparked some optimism that peace may return to the valley. As the ‘‘stepmotherly’’ Kashmir set out to win back Ladakh, voices clamoring for Union Territory status became fainter. Seeing frenzied devotees pour in all at once for the festival, Ladakhis expressed wariness about mass migrations from the plains if they were no longer protected by Article 370 of the Constitution of India, which grants special privileges to the State of Jammu and Kashmir, such as reserving ownership of land for State subjects. At the time that the Sindhu Darshan was held, diplomatic talks had resumed between India and Pakistan and the Wagah border had reopened, renewing optimism for positive dialogues on the Kashmir issue. Since 1947, the possibility of peaceful relations between India and Pakistan had been foreshadowed by confrontations. Suspicious and jingoistic ideologies within the two countries lent themselves to blaming external factors for violent and secessionist acts that occurred internally, rather than assessing causes of dissension and disaffection fairly. Yet, as Rita Manchanda (2002) observes, even amid war and hostile situations, what remained persistent was the effort to bring about amicable coexistence and cooperation. Manchanda argues that there has been a long history of pursuing noncombative tactics between India and Pakistan through no-war agreements, visits and dialogues between heads of states, confidence-building measures, water-sharing treaties, trade contracts, and accepting third-party arbitration, such as the international border tribunal’s resolution on the disputed Rann of Katch border in 1969. The Indus Water Treaty, for example, belies convenient images of India and Pakistan as star-crossed enemies. Signed in 1960 after World Bank arbitration, it gives Pakistan exclusive storage rights to the canals and waters from the western rivers of Indus, Jhelum, and Chenab to compensate for India’s rights over the eastern rivers of Ravi, Beas, and Sutlej. The treaty was not revoked despite the escalation of tensions after the 2001 attacks on the Indian Parliament, and the Permanent Indus Commission continues to facilitate cooperation and information exchange on future floods and hydroelectric projects.9 Furthermore, track-two diplomacy through conferences between intellectuals of both nations, attempts by nongovernment organizations to celebrate a common Independence Day, and the creation of people-to-people initiatives such as those undertaken by the Pakistan-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy are also indicative of efforts at cooperation (Manchanda 2002). As far as Kashmir is concerned, several possibilities for resolving the con-

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flict have been put on the table, the most obvious being the proposition of conducting a plebiscite that would give it the option of joining India or Pakistan or becoming independent.10 A modification to this option is the proposal to grant Union Territory status to the regions of Jammu and Ladakh and then put the future of the Kashmir Valley to a vote. But critics are wary of the balkanization of the State into units partitioned along religious lines in a manner that neither guarantees peace nor represents the diverse perspectives from within the regions. A plan that has found more support in India is converting the current Line of Control into a de jure border. This plan for partition has been rejected by groups desiring a separate state for Kashmir and has also met with the disapproval of Shi’a activists in Baltistan and Kargil. Another proposition, deliberated by a think tank called the Kashmir Study Group, advocates declaring the region a sovereign entity entitled to its own citizenship, flag, and constitution, with India and Pakistan demilitarizing the loc, controlling foreign affairs and defense in areas on their side of the loc, and allowing for the free transit of people, goods, and services between both parts.11 Whatever the ultimate resolution to the conflict in Kashmir, peace cannot return to the area only by India and Pakistan settling the future of the Line of Control; grandiose visions of future outcomes must look beyond international territorial settlements and take into account those monsters, those frictions, and those movements that are already separating citizens within the nation on the basis of ethnicity, religion, region, gender, caste, and class. For the process of healing to commence, concerted efforts must be made at various government and community levels to perform in ways that regain the trust of the people, safeguard interests of marginalized groups, decentralize power, and restructure ineffective political, economic, and social systems. In addition to reports by state inquiry commissions and official delegations, more empirical research is required to address the complex historical and cultural realities of different communities in the region, an endeavor to which this project has aimed to contribute. Festivals like the Sindhu Darshan are examples of the sensational exercise of institutional power undertaken by the state, masking dominance by systematically invoking nature and tradition and abstracting divergent perspectives into modern structures of conformity. But as Ronald Schwartz (1994) has demonstrated in the case of Tibet, religion and culture, revived by the Chinese as relatively safe conduits of public expression, took on a momentum of their own and became the basis of resistance there. According to Henk Driessen (1992, 193), ritual performance ‘‘generates power that can be tapped

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for different purposes.’’ The performative mode can produce, articulate, justify, and accommodate structures of power. But it can also expose the conceits and ambiguities of political formations and become a form through which power is challenged and reclaimed. The potential of border performances to genuinely recuperate alternative meanings and represent plural interests has to be evaluated in material and social terms together with symbolic ones. .

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The Indus is a serpentine river of hope and torment, echoing with sounds of war and worship and making deserts bloom. Winding through the Himalayan mountains, the trajectory of its waters shapes the contours of diverse lands and cultures. But it is these lands and cultures, in turn, that make the river what it is. In the central Ladakh area, Indus waters are controversially used for the Stakna, Martselang, Igu, and Phe dams. Besides irrigation and electrification, bridges have been built over the Indus and used for trade purposes. ‘‘In Ladakh,’’ observes Abdul Ghani Sheikh (2002, 6), ‘‘gompas, imambaras, forts and mosques stand on the banks of the Singe Khababs.’’ Even though the Indus is not the primary source of water in other parts of Ladakh, it is fed by springs and streams that are channeled by the labor of villagers who construct networks of canals and form cooperative sodalities to settle water disputes.12 A resourceful program by Tshewang Norphel, nominated for the Asian Innovation Award in 1998–99, to build artificial glaciers makes it possible for water to be stored in the winter season. Water has ideological significance, too; cultural beliefs that sources of streams are the domains of klu deities that cause diseases when injured or polluted affect the manner in which water is consumed and preserved. The Indus flows and ebbs, its body filled by the hundreds of glacial streams from villages like Achinathang, each transformed by the histories and performances of their inhabitants. Through circumstances adverse and seasons favorable, the streams collect into tributaries—Shyok, Suru, Zangskar, Nubra, and Drass—which merge with the Indus and give it substance. And as the summer begins, the river pushes its boundaries and rushes full stream onto the other side, taking the imprints of these performed lives, if not the performers yet, beyond the Line of Control.

N OT ES

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INTRODUCTION

1 All Ladakhi terms have been transcribed according to the system prescribed by Wylie (1959), and the orthography is largely based on the work of Jäshcke (1987). Some terms given here are not accounted for in dictionaries, and I have spelled them in the manner in which people in Ladakh wrote them for me. Place-names have sometimes been spelled in a manner closest to their pronunciation in English. 2 See also Bannerjee (2002) for a description of precolonial borders. 3 Maps were not just representations of state territory; rather, it was cartographic knowledge that was instrumental for the materialization of the modern concept of the state, argues Michael Biggs (1999). Barrow (1994) makes a similar argument for the role of maps in conceptualizing territory in British India. 4 For testimonies and analytical essays about the Partition, see Menon and Bhasin (1998), Butalia (1998), Jalal (1998), Rahman and van Schendel (2003), Chatterji (1999), and Chakrabarty (2002). 5 See also van Schendel (2002), Rahman and van Schendel (2003) for ways in which the Partition and state borders formed thereafter affect the identities and economic conditions of citizens who live in Indian and Bangladeshi enclaves. Urvashi Butalia (1998) also discusses the effects of the Partition in Punjab beyond religious divides. 6 There are numerous sources outlining the history of the Kashmir discord, including Akbar (1991), Behera (2000), Bose (1997), Jha (1996), Lamb (1991), Mushtaqur Rahman (1996), K. Singh (1989), Varshney (1991), and Wirsing (1994). 7 The terms and date of this Accession have generated much controversy. Lamb (1991) implies that the accession was never signed, that if it was signed, it was after the deployment of Indian troops, and that British maneuvering had already made the accession of Kashmir to India a fait accompli when they revised the Radcliffe line to

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Notes to Introduction give Gurdaspur to India, thereby giving India highway access to Jammu. Jha (1996) challenges Lamb’s theory in his version of the events of 1947. The text of the Accession can be found in Behera (2000: 305–308). Rival positions are summarized in Wirsing (1994). For a full text of the Simla Agreement, see Madhok (1987: 81–83). The Line of Control left undefined territory in the region of the Siachen glacier, which has been a zone of recurrent combat since the 1980s. The boundary that divides the Indian-controlled side of the glacier from the Pakistani is called the Actual Ground Position Line. For ethnographic studies on the complexities of reunification in Germany after the Berlin Wall, see Borneman (1998) and Berdahl (1999). See Appadurai (1998) for an analysis of how the abstraction of embodied knowledge under transnationalism and globalization results in ethnic violence. The disenfranchisement that leads border subjects to violent subnationalist rebellion in other parts of India has been powerfully illustrated by Cynthia Mahmood’s (1996) and Brian Axel’s (2001) writings on Sikhs in Punjab and Sanjib Baruah’s (1999) analysis of the insurgency in Assam. According to a news story by A. J. Philip (2000), the Rashtriya Swayamevak Sangh (rss), the militant right-wing organization, uses a map of India that includes the countries of Burma, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and Afghanistan. For details about the rise of Hindu nationalism, see Hansen (1999). A good summary of the major categories of writings on Kashmir can be found in Behera (2000). Compared to writings by journalists, political scientists, and historians or memoirs and treatises laying out justifications for war and militancy, there is very little empirical research on the effects of the conflict and the cultural politics of the Kashmir valley. A notable and welcome exception is a collection of essays called Speaking Peace, edited by Butalia (2002). The neglect of Ladakh in dialogues about Kashmir has also been brought up by Behera (2000). For a discussion of popular and academic representations of Ladakh, see Aggarwal (1997, 2000). A critical analysis of Norberg-Hodge’s approach can be found in Bertelsen (1996), van Beek (2000), and Aggarwal (2002). For more inclusive accounts, see recent works by Dollfus (1995), Bertlesen (1996), van Beek (1996), Srinivas (1998), and Rizvi (1999b). For research by anthropologists on Ladakhi Muslim culture, see Grist (1998, 1999) and Pinnault (1999a, 1999b). The history and culture of the Muslim community has also featured in the writings of Ladakhi scholars such as Abdul Ghani Sheikh (1976, 1995, 1997b). For a description of Ladakh’s Central Asian trade, see Warikoo (1995), Radhu (1997), and Rizvi (1999a, 1999b). For a general account of Ladakh’s relations with Central Asia, see Sheikh (1997a). For an ethnographic analysis of the lifestyles of nomads in Changthang, see Ahmed (1999). The Sino-Indian war of 1961–62 has been discussed in Fisher and Rose (1963), Lamb (1975) and Mehra (1992).

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20 Piya Chatterjee’s (2001) ethnography on the organization of labor in a tea plantation in the West Bengal Himalayas provides a useful discussion of racial differences made between the Indian ethnographer and her interlocutors. 21 Gypsy is a vehicle model made by the manufacturer, Maruti Udyog Ltd. 22 The different positions in Ladakh on the status of language are laid out in Aggarwal (2001b). 23 Janet Rizvi (1990/1996) also uses the term ‘‘crossroad’’ to describe Ladakh’s cultural landscape. The contrast between conceptualizing identity through the spatial metaphor of ‘‘crossroad’’ versus ‘‘borderzone’’ is nicely articulated in Geeta Patel’s (2002) analysis of the Kashmiri poet Miraji. 24 The last official census in Jammu and Kashmir was taken in 1981. After a hiatus of two decades, a census was once again sanctioned for 2001. I have not yet been able to obtain figures from the 2001 survey. 25 See also Appadurai (1986b, 1988) and Gupta and Ferguson (1992, 1997) for the limits of conventional anthropological approaches to the study of place. 26 A good example of border agency can be found in the works of Peter Sahlins (1989), who argues that local border identity is affected by national boundaries but that border cultures do not surrender their distinct modes of differentiation and may even prompt the delimitation of national boundaries, as was the case with Cerdanya’s historical role in delimiting the French and Spanish border. 27 My understanding of performance is also shaped by Bauman (1975), who writes that performance can be defined by contrasting it with competence, the formal and tacit knowledge of grammatical appropriateness that was highly elaborated and privileged by the structural studies of language and culture. Performance is the artful and practiced counterpart of competence, stressing context over text, creativity over authority, actual behavior over idealized generalizations. 28 See also Kelly Askew’s (2002) ethnography on the role of music, economic changes, and national politics in Tanzania. 29 In this context, Driessen’s (1992) ethnography of the Spanish-Moroccan frontier is an inspiring study of ethnic, regional, and ethnic identity articulated through rituals. 30 For a summary of the contribution of U.S.-Mexican border studies to the anthropology of borders, see Alvarez (1995). 31 For an overview of the separatist Ba¯la¯warista¯n movement in the Northern Areas, see Sökefeld (1999). For an essay on recent identity movements in Baltistan, see T. Khan (1998) and Sengge Tshering (2000). I also learned more about this area from personal conversations with Mohammad Hasnain Sengge Tshering. For accounts of the relations between Baltistan and Ladakh, see Sheikh (1998) and Shakspo (1998). 1 STAGING INDEPENDENCE DAY

1 Prime Minister Vajpayee’s Independence Day Address to the Nation, August 15, 1999, http://www.indianembassy.org/special/cabinet/Primeminister/1999ID PM Speech.html.

240 Notes to Chapter 1 2 There is a vast amount of literature describing the Kargil war. For a quick, although fairly pro-Indian, summary, see Ganguly (2002). See also Jerath (1999) and Khare (1999). 3 Dreissen (1992) usefully explores the symbolic importance of the flag for challenging the legitimacy of the state and of dominant ethnic groups in his ethnographic study of the Spanish-Moroccan frontier enclave of Melilla. 4 Polo is the word for ball in Ladakh. There are different versions of the introduction of polo in Ladakh. Some sources attribute its origin to the Baltis who accompanied the bridal party of Queen Gyal Khatoun; others argue that it originated in Gilgit. The most popular version finds a royal connection and confers this game to the king, Sengge Namgyal, who is said to have imported it from Baltistan. For a discussion on this topic, see Sheikh (1998). 5 Desideri (1937/1995, 79). Although almost all travelogues on Leh mention the palace, detailed descriptions of it are scant. By the time we see references to it, it is the colonial period, and the palace appears to be in partial use only. Francke (1926/1972) writes that a room in the ‘‘great palace’’ (lha chen dpal mkhar) filled with old manuscripts was perhaps a remnant of the royal library. Scriptures were written on indigo paper in gold, silver, and copper. Jane Duncan (1906) mentions a castle in a state of disrepair where the king lived once a week. During Major Gompertz’s (1928, 166) time, a chapel and a couple of rooms in the palace appeared to have been occupied by the royal family for one or two winter months a year. 6 My notes for the Independence Day ceremony were checked against Morup Namgyal’s notes on his commentary, which he generously shared with me. 7 I am grateful to Zainul Abideen for sharing notes on his speech with me. 8 I am indebted to Sonam Phuntsog for showing the original text of this letter to me. I have translated it from Urdu. Bertelsen (1996) provides a detailed description of the key role played by Sridhar Kaul in the Kashmir Raj Maha Bodhi Sabha founded in 1931. This Sabha deeply influenced the Young Men’s Buddhist Association established in Ladakh in 1938. 9 I translated these lines from the Hindi song, Ai mere watan ke logo. 10 Masselos (1996) also underscores how Republic Day becomes a forum for protest by labor groups and political dissenters. 11 For the history and symbolism of pashmina, see Ahmed (1996, 2002) and Rizvi (1999a). 12 Details of the Treaty of Tingmosgang can be found in several sources, including Petech (1977), Ahmed (1996), and Rizvi (1996). 13 Datta (1972, 1984) and Petech (1977) provide detailed accounts of Zorawar Singh’s invasion. 14 The letters are reproduced in full in Datta (1984, 96–100). 15 The Treaty of Leh is discussed in Kaul and Kaul (1992) and Rizvi (1996). The texts of all the treaties can be found in Mehra (1992, 167–170). Tsering Samphel (1997) highlights its influences on Ladakhi culture. 16 The Treaty of Amritsar is reproduced in Drew (1875, 546–547) and Mehra (1992, 172–174).

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17 The Commercial Treaty of 1870, reproduced in Drew (547–550) placed an even greater emphasis on surveying. The impact of this treaty is discussed in van Beek (1996) and Rizvi (1999b). 18 I obtained this information from the Political Department files of the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives, record number 72-B-59. 19 In his book The Gilgit Game, John Keay (1979) presents a good historical narrative about the Great Game. See also Huttenback (1995). 20 For the creation of the Gilgit Agency, see Lamb (1991). 21 I am indebted to Nasser Hussain Munshi for alerting me to this etymology. According to Abdul Ghani Sheikh, the name of Kargil may be derived from Kargi, the ‘Brogpa founder of this town. 22 See Mehra (1992) for an in-depth account of how the surveys were carried out. Van Beek (1996) provides a scathing critique of the impact of land surveys in Ladakh. 23 See Cunningham (1854/1998) for a description of the pre-Dogra system of taxation. 24 Porterage and labor under the Dogras are discussed in Grist (1994) and Sheikh (1999). 25 See Kaul and Kaul (1992) for details on the social reforms instituted during the Dogra period. 26 The activities of Moravian missionaries in Ladakh are laid out in Bray (1985). 27 Findings of the Glancy Commission are reported in Kaul and Kaul (1992), Bertelsen (1996), and van Beek (1996). 28 Details of the Constitution are given in Lamb (1991). 29 For a critical discussion of Gilgit’s revolt against the maharaja, see Sökefeld (1999). 30 See also Kaul and Kaul (1992) for accounts of the invasion and Gutschow (1998) for a nicely related narrative of the conflict in Zangskar. 31 Minutes from the Young Men’s Buddhist Association reveal that Ladakhis had already begun representing themselves as disadvantaged and marginalized toward the end of the Dogra rule, according to Bertelsen (1996) and van Beek (1996). 32 For the full text of the memorandum, see Madhok (1987, 37–39). 33 During his stay in Ladakh, Nehru approved of Kushok Bakula, abbot of Spituk monastery, as district president of the National Conference in Leh. On this trip, Nehru was also escorted by Sheikh Abdullah, prime minister of the State of Jammu and Kashmir. Sheikh Abdullah had opposed the State’s unification with Pakistan and played a major part in convincing Kashmiris to throw in their lot with India. The State government passed the Big Estates Abolition Act in 1950 to restrict the size of landholdings so that ownership by actual tillers could be assured (see Bertelsen 1996; Sridhar Kaul and Kaul 1992). But this act generated much controversy in Ladakh. Even though land was redistributed in ways that benefited common households, land requirements for agricultural cultivation in the high-altitude and desertlike climes of Ladakh were different from the rest of the state. Besides, monasteries owned large tracts of land, and it was argued by the All-Ladakh Gompa Association that a drastic reduction in their landholdings would interfere with Buddhist practice. Kushok Bakula directly confronted Sheikh Abdullah about the lack of funds for the rehabilitation of Zangskari refugees, the cancellation of concessions such as

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Notes to Chapter 1 educational scholarships and stipends that had been granted by the Dogra administration, and the exclusion of Ladakh from five-year plan budgets. In 1952, the Delhi Agreement was signed between Nehru and Sheikh Abdullah, in which the latter accepted that Kashmir was a part of India. India agreed to confer special status to Kashmir, by which it would be able to have its own flag and an elected head of state. The jurisdiction of India would extend only to matters of defense, foreign affairs, and finance, as stipulated by Article 370 of the Indian Constitution. Shortly after, Sheikh Abdullah announced the demise of the Dogra dynasty, established a Constituent Assembly in the state under an elected head of state or sadr-e-riyasat, and signed the Delhi Agreement with the center. The sheikh’s campaigns for greater independence for Kashmir under Article 370 caused much concern to Nehru and led to his eventual dismissal in 1953 (Lamb 1991). Meanwhile, according to Bertelsen (1996), Kushok Bakula’s political supremacy in Ladakh was consolidated when he was appointed deputy minister of Ladakh affairs, even though major decisions regarding the functioning of the ministry could be taken only in consultation with the development commissioner. A number of schools were established in Ladakh and attempts were made to market local products through the Ladakh Wool and Pashmina Syndicate Ltd. (Bertelsen 1996). Kushok Bakula’s powers increased and he was inducted into the Council of Ministers as minister of Ladakh affairs when G. M. Sadiq succeeded Ghulam Mohammad Bakshi as chief minister of Jammu and Kashmir. For an analysis of the political dispute between India and China over the border of Ladakh, see Fisher and Rose (1963) and Lamb (1975). Major General Jagjit Singh’s (1983) work is a military memoir of the battles from the Ladakhi front line. The Kashmir Accord was signed by Indira Gandhi and Sheikh Abdullah on November 13, 1974. Kashmir agreed to remain part of India in return for maintaining the clauses of Article 370. The full text of this accord can be downloaded from http://www.kashmir-information.com/LegalDocs/KashmirAccord.html. I derive these insights on the history and impact of Scheduled Tribe status from Martijn van Beek’s (1996, 1997) excellent analysis on the politics of tribalization in Ladakh. Kashmir: Odyssey of Freedom, http://www.ummah.org.uk/kashmir/docs/ody11.htm. Rigzin Jora, interview with author, October 1990. Rigzin Spalbar, interview with author, March 10, 1991. See also van Beek (1996, 1999) for details about the formation of the lahdc. There was a considerable amount of arm-twisting involved in negotiating this lack of contest. In one case, the rivalry between candidates for a seat in central Ladakh resulted in physical combat. The term ‘‘true patriots’’ is used in the report of the Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status (1989). Martijn van Beek (1998) also makes the argument that autonomy for Ladakh was demanded on the grounds that Ladakhi Buddhists had been true Indian patriots. While the sole parliamentary seat of Ladakh went to Congress candidate Mr. P.

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Namgyal, the two assembly seats were shared between the Congress and the National Conference Parties. I thank Mr. Tsering Samphel for giving me access to the Report of the State Autonomy Committee (Jammu, April 1999) and Regional Autonomy Committee Report (Jammu, April 13, 1999). Rigzin Jora, interview with author, July 22, 2000. Ibid. These grievances are also listed in a letter to Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee that the lba handed to him on June 7, 2000. Thupstan Tshewang quoted in the Kashmir Times, January 25, 1999. Bukhari (1999), however, quotes the state minister for irrigation, Mr. Sagar, who claims that the Republic Day function of 1999 was attended by two thousand people. This seems an unlikely number even under the best of circumstances. Both sides often claim that their functions are truly representative of the people’s will, inflating numbers at their own celebrations and downplaying attendance at the other’s. They expressed these views in my interviews with Councilor Spalzes Angmo and Spalzes Angmo of the bjp Party in September 1999. The first slogan was translated with the help of Kai Friese. Bray (1991), for example, supports the opinion that the division was on a religious basis. I am grateful to Sonam Patwari and Tshering Tundup of Wakha for showing me documents that laid out the history of their protest around this issue. Despite this, members of the Ladakh Buddhist Association in Kargil didn’t see Leh’s intervention in their cause as a sincere move but as a bargaining chip that was raised only to bolster their own needs by bringing up discrimination by Muslims to the central government. Hassan Khan’s victory speech aired on All India Radio, Kargil, on October 6, 1999; my translation. Ibid. He disclosed his opinion in an interview with me on June 24, 2000, and also at a public education seminar in Kargil town. Ladakhis complain that they are sometimes called this term as a mark of disrespect in Kashmir. Bota, presumably meaning Buddhist, is used in the sense of ‘‘hillbilly.’’ My translation, from Urdu. My translation, from Urdu. I thank Mr. Abideen for enthusiastically reciting this poem for me.

2 OBSERVING RITUALS

1 A good analysis of the ritualistic process of border crossings can be found in Haller (2000). In his description of the ‘‘border theater’’ enacted by state guards and civilians for crossing the Nador-Melilla border, David McMurray (2001) also innovatively uses the lens of performance to analyze border practices. 2 Information about this act was downloaded from http://www.aitpn.org/Reports/

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Notes to Chapter 2 EC&Ips.pdf. The area in which this act was levied includes the contemporary Indian states of Mizoram, Nagaland, and Arunachal Pradesh. There is considerable debate on the benefits of this act, in which some argue that it serves as a safeguard against encroachment on the economy of indigenous people, and others make a case for its abolition on the grounds that it was created to protect British economic interests in mining and tea plantations and resulted in isolating and neglecting the inhabitants of these regions. This information was obtained from the Government of Jammu and Kashmir, Publicity Department, file 496/r-15 1937, State Archives Repository, Jammu. In 1927, Maharaja Hari Singh began the policy of conferring ‘‘state subject’’ status to identify citizens of Jammu and Kashmir, details of which can be found at http://www .kashmir-information.com/LegalDocs/44.html. This quote is taken from Hassnain, Oki, and Sumi (1977, 109–111). Their book also has the text of a similar notification issued by the Home Department of the Government of Jammu and Kashmir. Segments of this chapter that deal with the politics of death rituals in Achinathang appeared in an earlier essay (Aggarwal 2001a). According to Buddhist cosmology, the earth and the sky are shut off from the world of humans by apertures called nam-sgo/sa-sgo (sky door/earth door). On the east and west sides of house walls, a complex threaded contraption is hung to ensure that the doors do not open (Powell 1977). Tung-pa Jamyang and Nawang are names I have given to protect the identity of those individuals. The people of Skyurbuchan have a reputation for being heavy drinkers. Others trace the ‘‘sourness’’ to a rare olive tree (skyuru) that was found in the midst of the village. A more accepted explanation of the etymology of Skyurbuchan shows it to be a corruption of ‘‘Skyid-bu-can’’ or ‘‘the place of bountiful children’’ named by Meme Samphel in the mid-nineteenth century to rejoice in the flourishing of the Buddhist doctrine. I was also told by the astrologer in Achinathang that he had heard elders say that the name was originally ‘‘Skyin-brus-can’’ (‘‘a place dug out by ibex’’), referring to the reservoir-like cavity that still exists in the center of the village below the monastery, where water collects on its own. For a discussion of yul, see Srinivas (1994). In his study of Tamilian personhood, E. Valentine Daniel (1984) contrasts the abstract, bounded, and constant units of territorial demarcation (tecam and kiranam) with the person-centered and shifting notions of country, nation, state, or village (ur and natu). The definition of yul is similar to the latter. I obtained most of my information on Jamyang Namgyal’s patronage of the ‘Brigung-pa order from a history of the ‘Bri-gung-pa lineage translated for me by Gelong Konchok Phandey. Dollfus (1989) and Shakspo (1988) also provide useful information about these events. Accordingly, after being afflicted with leprosy, Jamyang Namgyal consulted diviners and oracles, but to no avail. At that time, the ‘Bri-gung monks in Tibet were famous for their treatise on the appeasement of the klu. The king invited a ‘Bri-gung monk, Chos-rje-ldan-ma-kun-dga’-grags-pa, to heal him. Chosje Kunga, who was meditating on Mount Kailash at that time, went to the banks

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of Lake Manosarovar and dipped his hand in to determine if his visit would be beneficial to the king. First, he received a stone inscription with the Om mane Padme hum mantra carved on it. This is the mantra of Chenrezig (Sanskrit: Avalokitesvara), the favorite deity of the klu. Encouraged, he dipped his hand in once more to determine if his journey would be useful in spreading the doctrine of the ‘Bri-gung school in Ladakh. This time, he received a stone with the image of the poet-sage Milarepa on it. Convinced that these were positive omens, he decided to accept the invitation to visit Ladakh. Once cured, the king gratefully gifted the whole region of Sham to the ‘Bri-gung sect, specialists par excellence in rituals of purification for the lethal disease. That is how the ‘Bri-gung faith prospered in Ladakh. And that is how Achinathang, which is located in Sham, eventually fell under the jurisdiction of its monasteries. I am extremely grateful to Togdan Rinpoche for giving me permission to copy this edict, preserved in the treasury of Phyang monastery. Sonam Phuntsog (personal communication) bases his interpretation on the physical features of another area in the Kargil district that is also called Achinathang. I have not been able to find any direct linguistic evidence for his theory. Among the edifices founded by Meme Samphel are the monasteries of Da, Garkon, Dartsigs, and Hanu, the mchod-brten at Dargo, and the kagan gates of Kuksho and Laido. For giving me information on this religious figure, I am indebted to Sonam Phuntsog. It is difficult to know what terminology to use for this group, so I have retained ‘Brogpa instead of Dard. While ‘Brogpa is considered disparaging if used as a contemporary appellation or form of address for the residents of Da and Hanu, it is also the label under which they have claimed Scheduled Tribe status. Dard is used by Francke (1906) and Vohra (1989), but Graham Clarke (1977, 370) has challenged the legitimacy of this category, arguing that while the people whom this label embraces never classified themselves as such, it is a possibility that they were called Dard by others to designate them as ‘‘fierce, uncivilized, outsiders.’’ To add to the complexity, ‘Brogpa also refers to a patrifraternal (pha-spun) group. The ‘Brogpa pha-spun is recognized as having originated from Gilgit as well, but its assimilation into mainstream Ladakhi society has precluded it, to some extent, from the social stigma attached with the ethnic ‘Brogpa. The existence of Ti-Sug and Ganga-Sug is also confirmed by Hashmatullah Khan (1939) and Sikander Khan (1987), but they are described as Mons (tribes from the lower western Himalayan areas of Spiti and Lahul) by these authors, whereas Francke (1926/1972, 174–178) depicts them as spiritual deities from Gilgit who were welcomed by the ‘‘fairy’’ of Dargo, who made the river freeze in the summer. Francke, too, considers them to be contemporaries of Thathakhan, but he conflates Thathakhan with the sixteenth-century king, Tsangkhan Malig (r. 1550–75). This theory would make Ti-Sug and Ganga-Sug denizens of the sixteenth century, too. This deity was installed by a monk just sixty-five years ago. It was brought from the Skindiang valley of Khalatse. See Brauen (1982) for a good discussion of ‘brel-tho. According to him (323), ‘brel-

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Notes to Chapter 2 tho (‘‘connection-list’’) comes from the word ‘brel (‘‘to adhere, to be connected, connection, union’’). In his classic essay, ‘‘The Pre-eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Ritual Polarity,’’ Robert Hertz (1960) proposes that sanctions that privilege the use of the right hand over the left are based on ideological social institutions. The right side is identified with male vitality and sacred spheres, whereas the left side is linked with women, death, and profanity. Applying this analysis to Hindu rituals in India, Veena Das (1977) disputes this dichotomy between impure and pure and traces the relation between lineage gods, ancestors, and the left hand to death rather than impurity. Similarly, Beck (1972) ties the principles underlying caste organization in Konku society in south India to the right/left divergence, whereby left-hand caste deities are generally female and connected to death, serpents, and darkness. See Evans-Wentz (1957, 6–7) for the symbolic significance of the number 49. This is more of a normative schedule than an actual one, as rebirth can take place at any time after the consciousness becomes aware of its state and looks for a new body. The Bar-do thos grol is a ‘‘treasure text’’ about the art of dying which was composed and hidden in the eighth century by Padmasambhava and discovered in the fourteenth (Lopez 1998). There are three main bar-do states described in this book, each of them containing the potential for enlightenment (Evans-Wentz 1957). The first state is called ‘chi kha’i bar-do (‘‘transitional state of the moment of death’’), where the consciousness is not yet conscious of death, but if it comprehends reality in the clear light that dawns during this period, it can be liberated from rebirth. The second state, chos-nyid bar-do (‘‘experiencing of the glimpsing of reality’’), marks the breakdown of the personality when the realization dawns that it no longer possesses a body. If reality is still not comprehended, the third state, srid pa’i bar-do (‘‘transitional state of rebirth’’), sets in, which is defined by the quest for a new body. A description of the symbolism of the bar-do stages is provided in Corlin (1988). The ya-tra ritual is another example in which travel is associated with death. A banquet is given to the villagers before setting out for pilgrimages or long journeys in case one does not return. Even though it is mostly Muslim families in Achinathang that practiced this custom, it is not considered to be of Islamic origin. It was said to prevail among the ‘Brogpa villages nearby, after which the host retired from social life and lived like one who was dead. To my knowledge, this is still executed in Da and Hanu, although the host is not necessarily isolated after the ceremony. This Buddhist extraction ceremony has been discussed in considerable detail by Waddell (1895/1978), Gergan (1940), Paul (1982), and Kvaerne (1985). I have not seen it performed, only described by lay villagers and one monk from Achinathang. Brauen (1980) provides detailed information on behavioral norms for the pha-spun in central Ladakh. The g.yang-’gugs ritual is also performed when a bride leaves her natal home to reside with her husband’s family and at the end of the second harvest each year. The politics of women’s wailing has also been recorded by Briggs (1992) in his writings on Warao death rituals. He illustrates how the deployment of verbal strategies

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such as parody, irony, and recontextualization enables women to reinterpret the authority of the ‘‘truths’’ produced by men in other public settings. Here, I draw from Mary Douglas’s (1966) assertion that notions about purity and pollution work to control boundaries between internal and external states. But I depart from the implications in her thesis that these states are fixed, abstract, and cognitive, always indicative of a reality out there. Charles Frake (1975) usefully extends the analysis of thresholds to the organization of social space, showing how doors introduce procedures for discerning and regulating classes of people. My analysis of funerary rites is informed by Clifford Geertz’s (1973) well-known essay ‘‘Ritual and Social Change,’’ in which he writes about the controversy surrounding a funeral performance in central Java when worldviews and lifestyles, religion and politics clash in a community that was traditionally a synthesis of local customs, Hinduism, and Islam. In this case study, Geertz pays special attention to the micropolitics of death rituals as they are affected by historical socioeconomic changes, infusing a dynamic perspective to symbolic theories of ritual. The yatra was the prelude to the 1992 demolition of the Babri mosque in Ayodhya, which resulted in the destruction of property and the death of several citizens. Much has been written about this event. In addition to media reports, writings by Gopal (1991), Narain (1993), and Akhtar (1997) are informative. Anand Patwardhan’s documentary, In the Name of God (1992), provides a searing exposé of the politics of the demolition. Wangchug Tshao, interview with author, May 1991. Rigzin Spalbar, interview with author, March 10, 1991. Although villagers looked on these performances as humorous and entertaining for the most part, they caused some discomfort and resentment among those who felt their lives were being laughed at. I remember a comment made by a spectator sitting near me in Achinathang. She pointed to a young dancer and said, ‘‘Last year he was a snotty-nosed brat [snab-dur], this year he’s become a hero.’’ Bertelsen (1996) has provided a lengthy description of the Lamdon Social Welfare Society. I am grateful to Morup Namgyal for sharing this information with me. See also Bertelsen (1996). Figures obtained from the Gazetteer of India, Jammu and Kashmir State 1991. Government of Jammu and Kashmir 1991a, 1991b. Special Service Bureau is a subsidiary of the Research and Analysis Wing (raw), India’s most powerful and secret intelligence agency; ssb units in Ladakh provide commando and intelligence training. This was one of the eight directives in the lba’s ‘‘Brief Guidelines for Touring Committees’’ publication, reproduced in Bertelsen (1996, 216). Rigzin Jora, interview with author, October 1990. In the Cretan town of Rethemnos studied by Herzfeld (1991a), bureaucratic claims to authenticity and antiquity were actively debated. ‘‘The battle,’’ he writes, ‘‘is over the future of the past.’’ He contrasts ‘‘social time’’ (that which is constituted in the every-

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Notes to Chapter 2 day interactions of people and in their formal relationships) with ‘‘monumental time’’ (that which is appropriated by a modernist bureaucracy to naturalize space). The citizens of Rethemnos defended their place in history by forwarding ‘‘counterarchaeologies’’ as they strove to claim for themselves a ‘‘place in history.’’ The manner in which peasant insurgencies transformed bourgeois politics and hegemonic government policies in colonial India has been well documented by the subaltern studies school (Ranajit Guha 1983). The transition to nationalism in India may not have proceeded directly from peasant revolts, but it would be erroneous, maintains Partha Chatterjee (1993), to reject them as ‘‘localized’’ events without significance. The lba touring team came to Achinathang on April 28, 1991, the same day as Skyabgon Rinpoche, head of the ‘Bri-gung-pa order of Buddhism. Arjun Appadurai’s (1981) label ‘‘gastro-political’’ is a useful concept for understanding the conflicts surrounding food exchanges in Achinathang. Ortner’s (1975, 1978) research among the Sherpas also underscores the political power of ritual offerings. Abby Ripley (1995) also writes about the social significance of food in Ladakh. Martin Brauen (1983) asserts that the meal-mountain is a symbolic representation of Mount Meru (Ri-rab), which, in Buddhist theology, stands at the heart of the universe. Takashi Maeda (1976, 156) describes propaganda by youth groups to curtail wedding expenses in Japan, where, he alleges, the crusaders are seldom bound to thrift in their own practices. There are three such divisions—the ‘gram-’khor (literally, ‘‘the one nearby,’’ referring to the cluster near the mountains in this case); the g.zhung-’khor, which is the middle region; and the zur-’khor at the edge of the mountain—a tripartite division generally upheld in the practice of beer drinking for informal occasions and small feasts. Khor-khor-po sections are akin to the bcu-tsho clusters in the village of Hemis Shukpachan (Dollfus 1989). Similarly, among the Kofyar of Nigeria, who regard beer as an important ecological element, providing protein value and a balanced diet, beer may be fed to children before they are weaned (Netting 1964). For studies about the social significance of alcohol, see also Karp (1980), March (1987), and Shukla (1978). Details of a 1930s antialcohol directive is presented in Bertelsen (1996). These proposed measures went hand in hand with the ‘‘criminalization’’ of home-brewed alcohol by the revenue collection system of the colonial British regime analyzed by David Hardiman (1986), transferring the brunt of taxation on alcohol to the subaltern peasantry, while simultaneously forwarding the moral imperative to curtail a ‘‘pernicious habit.’’ In India, control over the production and distribution of liquor was wrested from the peasants, and alcohol became a nonlocal, illicit commodity. Although the discourse of modernity validated itself as a rational outgrowth of commodity exchange and surplus production, it nevertheless deployed the hallmarks of ‘‘tradition’’ in this enterprise. Correspondingly, Mandelbaum’s (1965) historical overview of drinking patterns in India reveals that in Vedic literature, liquor was considered ambrosia for the gods and was drunk by all castes. With the rigidification of caste hierarchies, drinking assumed a diacritical function, delineating castes

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by permitting or tabooing the use of alcohol. Those castes associated with ritual purity were subject to the strongest prohibitions. The advent of nationalism in the mid-twentieth century witnessed the adoption of a social code in which liquor was prohibited for all castes in the state. Differences in practice and belief were encompassed under a national rubric which was founded on the prescriptive ideology of the dominant castes. In Ladakh, however, excise duties on chang produced at home were exempted by Maharaja Ranbir Singh and upheld in later years by the Dogra and British administrators despite calls from administrators in Srinagar to levy them (Political Department files of the Jammu and Kashmir State Archives, 6/H-34, 1901). Included in the marvels attributed to Guru Rinpoche in Ladakh and Tibet is the discovery of apricots, new methods of irrigation and agricultural fertility, and the invention of chang, originally as an offering to appease flesh-eating and alcoholdrinking deities (Paul 1982, 152). The exchange rate was generally two rum bottles for the purchase of one bottle of apricot oil. The monetary value of a bottle of chang in Leh varied from Rs. 2–5 ($0.04–0.11), while that of an average bottle of low-priced rum ranged from Rs. 30–80 ($0.65–1.70), depending on the source from which it was procured. Bourdieu (1984) links the construction of aesthetic taste to class distinctions, where the power of dominant classes is legitimized by cultivating manners and styles that serve to enhance their exclusivity. Id is the Arabic word for festival. In this context, it can mean either Qurban-’Id (‘Idu’l-Azha) or ‘Idu’ul-Fitr, festivals connected with the religious Islamic calendar. In his study of Tamang rituals, Holmberg (1989) illustrates that drawing an absolute dichotomy between canonical Buddhism and its ‘‘sacrificial’’ factions is a misconception. He writes that mortuary rituals do not necessarily contradict the textual constructions of Buddhism; rather, they can be ‘‘paratextual equivalents’’ or primary vehicles through which Buddhist ideology takes accessible form. Holmberg explores the polyphony or multivocality of religious practice in the ritual and mythical fields of Tamang society, using an interpretive model in which culture is viewed as a text. In the tradition of Brohm (1963) and Tambiah (1970), he focuses on the dialectical tension and the complementary synthesis of lamaic and sacrificial formulations in the ‘‘single total field’’ of religion in Nepal. Here, Buddhism is tribalized and clanbased, not universalizing and totalitarian. Holmberg attributes this to the history of state formation in Nepal, where the regimes in power have favored Hinduism and where the ‘‘metalogous’’ divergences among Tamang ritual practitioners (lama, limbu, and bombo) are not exclusive but permeable. By the same token, there were no dogs in the entire village then. The domestication of canines is also discouraged in Islam; it is said that for seven generations no angel will grace the gates of a house that rears a dog. Keeping dogs to guard the house against strangers and intruders was construed as a sign of stinginess, a public boast by which people indicated their economic wealth and their circumspect and miserly characters as those who stashed and protected their riches. When I visited Achinathang in June 2000, I noticed many fields with fences. One family had even purchased dogs.

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53 According to Sikander Khan (1987), a live sheep or goat was slaughtered and eaten raw in ‘Brog-yul in the past to appease bloodthirsty ancestral spirits. 54 This is a theory held by Francke (1904). Excavated graves and bones are evidence that the old nomadic tribes of Gilgit buried their dead before they were converted to the belief in cremation. 55 For a description of the eight different styles of mchod-brten, see Tucci (1988). 56 My decision to conceal the name of the village makes it difficult for me to cite specific sources. However, see Shakspo (1993) for a description of a similar village. 57 Halal means ‘‘prescribed.’’ Here, it refers to meat that has been cut according to appropriate Islamic rites, by slitting the throat of the animal. Muldar is meat obtained after the animal has died from natural causes. This is the type of meat that Buddhists in Ladakh usually eat. Those whom I interviewed in Mingchanyul vigorously denied that this custom of mixing food ever existed. 58 According to Sonam Phuntsog (1997), high monks from Tibet or those trained in Tibet occasionally advocated the substitution of sacrificial offerings with ceremonies of atonement. In 1896, during the reign of the Ladakhi king Sonam Namgyal, the ‘Brug-pa Rinpoche and ‘Bri-gung Chung Tshang Choskyi Lodos visited Skyurbuchan and other villages in the Sham area and proselytized against animal sacrifice. This mission was then taken up by Bakula Thubstan Chodnor, the chief abbot of Spituk, when he returned from Tibet in 1944–45, and intensified in the Sham area with the 1960 calls of the abbot of Phyang monastery, Togldan Stanpa Gyaltsen, and the 1975 and 1991 visits of Skyabgon Tshetshang Kunzang Thinle Lhundup, head rinpoche of the ‘Bri-gung-pa. 59 A version of this song was recorded by Francke (1902a, 101–103) during the srub-lha festival in Skyurbuchan. 60 I am grateful to Morup Namgyal for alerting me to the standard verses to this song. 61 I have not returned to Mingchanyul, but my repeated inquiries about it have yielded varied opinions. Members of an education team from Kargil that surveyed Mingchanyul in the spring of 2000 described it as the most unusual and integrated village they had seen, where both communities cooperated on matters of teaching their children. They were surprised that the villagers confided that relations had been much better in the past. A member of a nongovernmental organization in frequent contact with Mingchanyul reported that its residents had decided that different hours for using the changra would be allocated if Moharram should coincide with sngo-lha again. A Buddhist political party worker speaking about the discrimination suffered by minorities in Kargil, particularly on the issue of conversion, mentioned that his spouse was a Muslim from Mingchanyul, but the days when its inhabitants could opt to practice both faiths or a religion of their choice were almost gone. 62 This is different from funerals and funerary rites observed by Driessen (1992) in the enclave of Melilla, where, he notes, outsiders are barred because of their association with grief and contentious ethnic positions. 63 I take these categories from MacCannell (1976), who argues that tourists attempt to penetrate the backstage in their quest for authentic experiences but that these ex-

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periences are often closed to them due to structures of modernity that make such intimacy virtually impossible. Anthropology is fraught with the potential for failed communication as its practitioners attempt to cross cultural borders. Yet, these failures, according to Kamala Visweswaran (1994, 99), ‘‘are as much a part of the process of knowledge constitution as are our oft heralded successes.’’ Other researchers working on issues of political identity during that time include Bertelsen (1996), Grist (1998), and van Beek (1996). As Stacey Pigg (1992) has demonstrated, the targeting of village societies in frameworks of development plans often essentializes villagers as ignorant and backward. For the organization of infrastructural facilities for tourism in Ladakh, see Jina (1994). Robert Desjarlais (1992) also connects anthropological epistemology with the aesthetics of soul loss in another Himalayan community, the Yolmo of Nepal. My approach differs from his in that it seeks to integrate the political and poetic dimensions of ethnographic practice without assuming unproblematic commonalities of experience. An emphasis on experiential and collective modes of seeing and sensing rituals has also been provided by Jackson (1989), Stoller (1989), and E. Turner et al. (1992). Any justifications I have provided cannot claim to be absolute, for, as Rosaldo (1989) has shown, rituals are emotional events that cannot be comprehended by analytical devices alone. I am reminded of an anecdote in which Paul Stoller (1989, 83), while researching sorcery among the Songhay of Niger, is told by one of his teachers, ‘‘If you listen to us, you will learn much about our ways. But to have vision, you must grow old with us.’’ One of the new government initiatives for wildlife protection is to declare large tracts of land in Ladakh as national parks. Hemis National Park is one such example.

3 A CONTESTED LANDSCAPE

1 Judith Butler (1990) argues that gender is not biologically inherited as fixed identity but is fashioned in performance and enactment. Such an understanding of gender allows marginalized subjects the possibility for subverting and reinventing the self in empowering ways. A comprehensive analysis of debates around gender and performance studies in the discipline of anthropology can be found in Morris (1995). 2 As McClintock (1995) has also cautioned, not all reinventions and border crossings bring about racial or gender empowerment. 3 By the summer of 2002, the Hollywood film (The Razor’s Edge), Bollywood films (Haqeeqat, Paley Khan, Kala Dhandha Gorey Log, Joshilaay, Dil Se, and Escape from Taliban), films made by independent directors or small-budget international collaboration (Das Alte Ladakh, Namgyal, Samsara, and Road to Ladakh), and a film by a Ladakhi director (Sonam Dolma) had all used Ladakh as a major location. Of the Bollywood films mentioned above, it is only in Haqeeqat and Dil Se that the story is actually set in Ladakh; others use Ladakh as a location to represent either Af-

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Notes to Chapter 3 ghanistan or some fictional place. For example, Joshilaay (The fiery ones, 1989) uses Ladakh as an outdoor set for a Western-style saga of blood and vengeance. This film was initially directed by Shekhar Kapur but then completed by Sibte Hasan Rizvi. In the village of Akalgad, almost a palindrome of Ladakh, all traces of Ladakhi identity are replaced by people who wear clothes from the plains, whose racial appearance is non-Ladakhi, whose language is non-Ladakhi. The raja of this tinsel town is the only one portrayed in an improvised costume with Ladakhi touches. The film uses the palace of Stok that belongs to the king of Ladakh as the palace of this dacoit turned despotic raja. After 2002, several more Bollywood films were being filmed in Ladakh, including J. P. Datta’s loc, Kargil. Caren Kaplan (1992) categorizes components of accommodation and conformity in women’s testimonies as ‘‘in-law’’ elements and those of resistance as ‘‘out-law’’ elements. One of the commercial films that the Field Publicity Department brought to Achinathang during my stay there was Aradhana, a 1960s classic about the devotion of a socially spurned mother to her son and to the nation. A license for setting up a Ladakh Talkies for screening 16mm films was first issued by the Information Department under Section 4 of the Cinematograph Act of 1957 to M/s Dr. Mohammad Hussain Khan and Chhetan Namgyal in 1952 (Information Department file 2288/ID 45/57). Later, it was taken over by a man named Noor-uddin Zargar. But the spaces where screenings were held were one-room halls, first in a family compound and then in the main bazaar, not full-fledged theaters. See Orville Schell (2000) for an analysis of the making of Seven Years in Tibet. The Ladakhi woman featured in the film happens to be a close friend. She was one of the women rounded up to act as vegetable sellers. In her memory of this incident, she characterizes her laughter as one of embarrassment brought on when the crew offered her some biscuits and then snatched them away playfully when she reached out to take one. The crowd watching burst into laughter and she laughed back selfconsciously. Afterward, the money promised for the day’s labor on the film never reached her. See L. Kaplan (1997) for a reading on British racial images of Gorkhas as ‘‘martial.’’ For a good summary of the controversy generated by this book, see Sinha (1998). This has also been demonstrated by Martijn van Beek’s (1996) meaningful analysis of colonial systems of classifying and representing Ladakhis. An exception to this type of depiction is the account by Heber and Heber (1926, 275), who spent twelve years in Ladakh. They write that ‘‘no visitor to Ladakh will deny the attractiveness of this sturdy hill race.’’ For a perceptive analysis of the way political and environmental ideologies of the 1980s shaped the perception of Tibet as ‘‘green,’’ see Tony Huber (1997, 103–119). Neo-Buddhist and environmental ideologies shaped the Western perception of Ladakh, too. This phrase is from McClintock’ s (1995) reading of Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, where she alleges that Kim’s cross-dressing and passing for Indian cannot be considered

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subversive; rather, it reinforces the modes of surveillance by which imperial power was wielded. Government of India, Constituent Assembly Debates, http://alfa.nic.in/debates/ vol1p3.htm. Government of India, Constituent Assembly Debates, May 27, 1949, http://alfa.nic .in/debates/vol8p10a.htm. A critique of the economic orientations of the postcolonial state during the Nehruvian years can be found in Deshpande (2000) and Roy (2001). See Friese (2000) for a reference to Nehru’s quote. Significantly, another watering project, the Stakna dam, hallmark of Nehruvian economics, was to become one of the largest civil expenditures incurred by the government in Ladakh. See also Ramaswamy’s (1997) provocative reading of the way the erotic in Tamil poetry furthers the cause of Tamil nationalism. Film stars have often been taken to front lines to entertain troops and boost their morale. The Bollywood star Raveena Tandon’s visits to hospitals for injured soldiers was well publicized in the Indian media. In an interview in the Indian Express, an eyewitness reported that he had seen soldiers in the Kargil war who hung the actress Sonali Bendre’s photograph on their rifles (Indian Express Newspapers, 1999, http://www.indian-express.com/ie/daily/19990911/ile11129.html). My translation. The original Urdu lyrics penned by Kaifi Azmi are ‘‘Husn aur ishq dono ko rusva kare, woh jawaani lahu mein jo nahati nahin. Aaj dharti bani hai dhulan, saathiyon. Kar chale hum fidaa jaano tan, saathiyon, ab tumhaare hawaale watan, saathiyon.’’ I am grateful to my friends Agha Shahid Ali, Agha Iqbal Ali, Srirupa Roy, Anjali Aarondekar, and Sanjeev Gupta for their passionate conversations and shared interest in this film. Among the Bollywood films in this genre are Maachis (1996), Border (1998), Sarfarosh (1999), Fizaa (2000), Mission Kashmir (2001), and the jingoistic Gadar (2001). Dil Se is the third in a trilogy of films by Mani Ratnam that deal with the subject of ‘‘love in the time of terrorism.’’ The two films before Dil Se are Roja (1992), which deals with terrorism in Kashmir, and Bombay (1995), which deals with HinduMuslim riots in the wake of the bomb explosions that rocked the city on March 12, 1993. Whereas these two films were originally made in Tamil, Dil Se is Mani Ratnam’s first film in Hindi. It was produced by a company called India Talkies, which Ratnam started along with Shekhar Kapur and Ram Gopal Verma. Quoted in Bhattacharya (1998). I owe this insight to a lecture at Amherst College in September 2000 by the film critic Gayatri Chatterjee, in which she showed how the railways become allegories of modernity in Indian films. The Pangong lake is a border in itself: part of the lake is on the Indian side and part in China. The plateau of Changthang is the location where the Sino-Indian war was fought in Ladakh.

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27 Mirza Ghalib was a nineteenth-century poet who is remembered for his romantic Urdu poetry that was often put to music by courtesans. 28 Ironically, in their reverence for the perfumed tongue of Urdu, the lyrics of Dil Se foreground a language that is marginalized nationally but is regarded by educational reformers as a colonial language imposed by the State of Jammu and Kashmir. 29 Quoted in Bhattacharya (1998). 30 As Tejaswini Niranjana (2000, 164) astutely notes, Mani Ratnam’s films work to ‘‘create convergences between the human, the secular and the nationalist and dramatize the condensation of these characteristics in the Hindu male who has discarded caste and community.’’ 31 See Ganti (2000) for a broader picture of the construction of Indianness in Bollywood. 32 Dominant images of pan-Indianism have been challenged in other regions. In Tamil Nadu, as Ramaswamy (1992) illustrates, there is a long history of opposition during the nationalist struggle and in the postcolonial period against conflating Bharat Mata with a Hindu, Aryan, and Sanskritized heritage and future. More specifically, according to Kashyap (1998), Dil Se was not well received in the state of Assam, a region that it attempted to represent sympathetically because it did not offer an intimate portrayal of Assam’s realities or an alternative perspective. 33 Quoted in Madhok (1987, 39). 34 I am grateful to Gelong Konchok Phandey for helping me translate this text. 35 I thank Morup Namgyal for bringing this song to my attention. 36 A discussion on the economic and symbolic significance of turquoise hair adornments can be found in Aggarwal (2002). 37 A Balti version of this song can be found in Hazrat (1990) and a Kargili version in S. Khan (1987, 208–210). 38 To my surprise, when I inquired about Kunzes the following year, I was told that she was no hero, that her character was dubious, her morals lax. Questions that I posed to members of the lba only yielded these answers: that she was ‘‘out of control’’ and had been indulging in inappropriate behavior in Delhi. They had had no option but to confront her publicly and bring her back to Ladakh. Years later, when I tried to approach Kunzes for an interview, I learned that she had disappeared. Some people said she had been murdered; others said she was in Dubai. There were hints of marital discord, and suspicion that ‘‘people at the top’’ were involved. But there were no clear answers. Little is now known of the girl who was once an icon of courage, a maternal symbol of Ladakhi resistance, no less than the queen of Jhansi. 39 For a discussion of the importance of motherhood in Ladakhi society, see Reis (1983), Ahmed (1996), and Aggarwal (2002). 40 See Allione (1986) for a translation of this story. 41 The role of Dolma was played by an artist named Manisha from Delhi, selected for her ‘‘Nepali’’ looks. Interestingly, the other Manisha, Manisha Koirala, the female lead actor Dil Se, is from Nepal. People who watched the filming said they expected her to be friendlier (probably out of a sense of Himalayan identity). Manisha

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Koirala’s commercial appeal, of course, rests on her not being too physically identifiable as Nepali, except for her fair skin, which is regarded as an asset. Sher Jung Thapa was awarded the Maha Vir Chakra for his display of bravery at Skardo during the 1948 Indo-Pakistani war. Details of his feats can be found in Chibber (1998). Phuntsog Ladakhi, interview with author, July 22, 2000. Danny Denzongpa is an actor from Sikkim who also trained in the Film Institute of India and landed roles in several Bollywood films, mostly as a gangster or villain. Although Samsara was also made in Ladakhi, San-tsams is the first Ladakhi production of its kind. I am indebted to No Tsering for arranging a private viewing of this film. The exception to this is Samsara (2001), an Indo-European production directed by Pan Nalin, a filmmaker of Indian origin. Sexuality is a dominant theme in the film; its story revolves around the struggles of the male protagonist, Tashi, who gives up his celibate, monastic life to pursue his sexual desires and eventually marries a Ladakhi girl, Pema, played by the Hong Kong actor Christy Chung. The ideals of Buddhist life, as they are applicable to Ladakhi society, are better researched in Samsara than in other commercial films made by non-Ladakhis because glimpses of monastic life, marriage, agriculture, household rituals, filial relations are portrayed in various scenes. The film neither extols the virtues of the world of the monk or that of the householder, but rather carries a message about understanding desire and claiming responsibility for whatever path one has chosen in life. When Tashi prepares to return to the monastery in the film’s concluding segment, Pema confronts him about his decision to abandon his wife and child, likening his silent departure to that of the actions taken by Gautama Buddha. But the journey the film takes on is largely a male journey; the female characters act as supporting backdrops that are not fully developed, so that sexual scenes seem almost pornographic and Pema’s confrontation with Tashi in the climax appears to be an empty gesture rather than a sustained feminist critique of models of male spirituality. Furthermore, by taking liberties with actual possibilities open to monks once they have left the order and by imposing a strange mixture of dialogues that are largely Tibetan rather than Ladakhi, the film reaches out to a Western market interested in Tibet but undermines its own potential for telling a Ladakhi story with any depth. Kotalova (1993) writes that it was only after she had lived in her field site in Bangladesh for some time that women began to proffer alternative interpretations of bodily injunctions. For example, she learned that their initial insistence on veiling was presented as an official definition of what it meant to be a Muslim. Once she had been repositioned as a ‘‘long-term guest’’ in their society, they explained veiling as a protection from evil spirits, countering a textual explanation of Islam by a system of beliefs considered to be quite heterodox. Her acceptance into the village community was achieved through her socialization into the categories of acceptable womanhood. Like a new bride, the shift in her identity from a position of ‘‘relative strangeness to relative familiarity’’ was accomplished by various techniques of bodily management: veiling, letting her hair grow out, wearing a sari.

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Notes to Chapter 3 Some of my earliest friends in Achinathang were also newly wedded women who felt for my condition an empathy born of estrangement. An uncanny silence on my part, a faraway look, my habit of sitting with my hands cupped beneath my chin, my reference to my hosts as Ama and Aba would be interpreted as signs of sunpa, inducing pitying glances and words of solace. The ambiguity in my role as a woman and an ethnographer was often moderated by attempts to change my appearance so that the trauma in adjusting to the customs of gzhan-mi yul (‘‘strange places’’) would lessen. I was urged by women to wear Ladakhi clothes rather than trousers because they felt the latter were bu-tsha tsogs (‘‘boy-like’’), to braid my hair so that I would not be thought of as loose or crazy or urban, to adopt a posture of squatting with my legs close together as farming women in Achinathang are so adept at doing, to lift a basket on my back without flinching, to travel in a group rather than display a preference for solitude. Although my ability to read and write the Ladakhi script was admired, it removed me from the world of farmers. After witnessing that I was visibly moved by the skyin-’jug verses and not just observing or recording their emotions, more women felt comfortable discussing their feelings of pain, separation, and resistance. In a similar manner, the Yolmo of Nepal, studied by Robert Desjarlais (1992, 103), use the word tsher-ka to convey a sense of ‘‘isolation, a depressive melancholy, an unwelcome pensiveness, and an inability to relate the trials of the heart to others.’’ Desjarlais (1992, 103) poetically reports that the Yolmo liken tsher-ka to the pain that arises in the ‘‘absence of the beloved, and typically strikes the ‘heartmind’ when a daughter leaves her parents’ hearth in marriage, a son ventures alone to India or Kathmandu for employment, or children mourn the death of parents.’’ The connection between birds and emotion is beautifully expressed by Steven Feld (1982, 42), who proposes that birds in Kaluli ‘‘are metaphoric of human society and their sounds come to stand for particular forms of sentiment.’’ The Ladakhi lyrics are ‘‘Shog-dkar-pa’i nang la nag tsa sngon-po, yi-ge, yi-ge bya btang kal le na, re hai le bya skad mi la mi shes.’’ In the past decade, the preference for marriage partners has shifted considerably and partners in villages around Leh are considered quite desirable, as other channels for employment besides agriculture are opening up and with increased migration and availability of land in Leh. Tsheshu Lhamo graciously sang these stanzas for me in September 2000. These verses were performed for me by Kunzes, Tsheshu Lhamo’s adopted daughter. Stitching, spinning, and weaving are symbolically significant in Ladakhi society. For example, Kaplanian (1983) illustrates how the difference in spindles used by men (sku-ru) and women ( phang) reflects the symbolic opposition between gender roles in Ladakhi cosmogony. Moreover, needles (khab) were once crucial gifts, presented to the bride by her girlfriends. In the area of Da-Hanu, a needle was a prerequisite for engagement; the groom’s family presented his future bride with a needle to initiate the negotiations. The end of the marriage was signified by returning the needle. For further information on the symbolic and gendered aspects of weaving in the Himalayas, see March (1983) and Ahmed (1996, 2002).

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54 Among Muslims, when a man divorces (talaq) a woman, he is obliged to pay the amount (mahr) that was arranged before the wedding. 55 This proverb can also be found in Gergan (1942, 211). 56 Categories of ‘‘honor’’ and ‘‘shame’’ have been usefully expanded by scholars of Middle Eastern (Abu-Lughod 1990) and Mediterranean (Herzfeld 1991b) societies, where official discourse links men with honor and women with shame. That these categories can be used as a form of insubordination has also been excellently demonstrated in Erica Friedl’s (1989) work on the women of a rural mountain village in Iran. 57 For good discussions of mi kha, see Kaplanian (1983) and Srinivas (1998). 58 Good examples of the ways the interstitial place of woman empowers them can be found in Strathern (1972) and Seremetakis (1991). 59 My translation. 60 Reforms in Buddhist civil law come under the Hindu Civil Code in India. Changes in the legal status of Indian women’s property rights have been documented by Agarwal (1994) and Basu (1999). The new lahdc system of land allotments in Leh in the name of husband and wife is also mentioned in van Beek (2000). I am grateful to Rigzin Jora, who was an executive ccouncilor of the lahdc at the time, for pointing this out to me. 61 I am grateful to members of the Masro royal family for sharing their genealogy with me. 4 SONGS OF HONOR

1 Tashi Rabgias (1970) and Nawang Tsering Shakspo (1993) have identified several genres of folksongs in Ladakh, including chos-glu (religious songs), gzhung glu (congregational songs), ‘gying glu (heroic songs), togs glu (love songs), rten-’grel glu (good omen songs), tshig-glu (songs of sarcasm), bag ston gi glu (wedding songs), chang glu (drinking songs), zhabs gro (dance songs from Changthang), shon-glu (dance songs), and bal-glu (songs of the Balti people). 2 Summaries and comparisons of the different regional versions of the Gesar epic are provided by George Roerich (1942). 3 Francke (1901, 1902a, 1902b) rigorously compiled original songs from this epic and annotated and translated them. 4 A more standard and popular version of this song, called gral tsir, sung in the dialect of Purig, can be found in S. Khan (1997, 58–60). In this version, sbalu Tung Tung is actually setting the place for the wedding on behalf of ‘Bruguma’s parents. 5 Similarly, Jackson (1992, 28) notes that the word nyanami among the Walpiri of central Australia encompasses the dual verbs ‘‘to sit’’ and ‘‘to be.’’ 6 Duranti (1992) explores the interconnection between language and social space in his analysis of Samoan ceremonial greetings. Forms of greetings, he posits, are interactive, socially constituted, and arbitrated. Greetings depend not only on the status of Samoan individuals but also on the physical and cultural loci of temporal and spatial arrangements through which individuals are identified within the social order.

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Notes to Chapter 4 It is the position and movement of bodies in social space that gives meaning to their interactions. The image is a manifestation of Chenrezig in his Bcu-gcig-zhal form, a form that he acquired during his endeavor to uplift all sentient beings in hell into the Buddha’s realm. When Chenrezig led these souls to the Potalam Mountain, he saw them wither away and fly back into the depths of Hell like autumn leaves falling from a tree. He was overcome with despair and discouragement. For this slip of faith, Chenrezig was punished and his head smashed into a thousand pieces. His teacher, Buddha Amitabha, gave him words of condolence, assuring him that the misfortune that had befallen the sentient beings in Hell was a result of their own actions and destiny. And even though Chenrezig had failed to alleviate their abysmal existence and consequently suffered from a loss of belief, his compassionate thoughts had been worthy. As a result, Amitabha restored the thousand pieces into eleven heads for four types of actions (three white heads for peaceful works, three green heads for detailed works, three red heads for subduing evil forces, one dark blue head in the wrathful form, and one golden head symbolizing Buddha Amitabha), with a thousand arms and a thousand eyes in the center of each hand representing the thousand monarchs associated with the thousand Buddhas, working for the benefit of all humanity. In this cluster, the south-facing image is in the castle at Skyurbuchan, the west-facing one in the dgon-pa of Skyurbuchan, and the north-facing one is in Wanla. Findings by Mann (1972) corroborate Tharchen’s observations. It is male musicians who are customarily in charge of these instruments. Investigations into the origin of caste hierarchy have been at the heart of South Asian anthropology; by contrast, there has been no in-depth study of caste in Tibet or in Ladakh. Rather (1997) does provide an excellent summary about the disparate views about Mon origins. Kaplanian (1985) and Erdmann (1983) have also written about caste origins in some detail. Traces of caste organization can be found in the regional ethnographies of Hemis Shugpachen (Dollfus 1987) and Zangskar (Gutschow 1998) as well as in travelogues from the colonial period (Heber and Heber 1926). Ladakhi scholars have shed light on the subject of caste as well (Gergan 1976; S. Khan 1987; Sonam Phuntsog 2000). In the case of Tibet, Landon (1905) and French (1995) write of the outcaste ragyab-pa caste of beggars in Lhasa, and blacksmiths are discussed in Nebesky-Wojkowitz (1975) and French (1995). Yet, most descriptions of hereditary discrimination in Tibet have focused on the system of serfdom rather than caste (Goldstein 1989). That there are several complexities involved in tracing the origin of Mons is also noted by the Tibetologist R. L. Stein (1962/1972), who offers various interpretations of this term. He writes that during the sixth or seventh century, the southern region of Tibet, inhabited by aboriginal tribals of the Himalayan forests, had not been organized into states and ‘‘was lumped together under the rubric ‘Mon,’ which was possibly related to the word ‘Man’ used in literary Chinese for all southern ‘barbarians.’ But even in the earliest texts mention is also made of Mon peoples in the

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east, along the Sino-Tibetan border. In the west, the name is given to other low caste communities in Ladakh; and lastly it is applied to Sikkim and Bhutan’’ (34–35). Only in one song recorded by S. Khan (1997, 156–157) have I been able to find a song that reflects on the condition of the Mon castes. In this song, a woman defends her beloved, Kazim, by saying that people may call him the child of a Mon but for her he is as noble as a Moghul Hor or the prince of Baltistan. The structural analysis of the caste system in India outlined by Louis Dumont (1970) has generated an enormous body of literature and has had a strong impact on the study of caste in the Himalayas. Dumont maintains that the political and economic domains of social life are ‘‘encompassed’’ (Dirks 1989) by religion in the Indian ideological system, where the spiritual authority of the Brahmans is paramount and pervades the temporal, political authority of kings. The concept of a fundamentally homogeneous India, where the ideology of hierarchy remains unchallenged, is forwarded by scholars such as Michael Moffat (1979), for whom communities of ‘‘untouchables’’ such as the Periyar live by consensus and replication of wider caste relations. Alternatively, there are many scholars of caste who have gone beyond structuralist explanations, including Berreman (1971), Mencher (1974), Appadurai (1986a), Raheja (1989), Dirks (1989), Mani (1989), and Alter (2000). A provocative critique offered by Arjun Appadurai (1986a, 751) challenges structuralist assumptions that those of lower status accept the legitimacy of caste. ‘‘I am certain,’’ he writes, ‘‘that rural untouchables, at least in this century, must have more in their heads than replicating their superiors, surviving from day to day, and playing out their karmic destinies.’’ For example, when the villagers of Tagmachig appealed to the king of Ladakh to send them a sku drag family, he gave them members of the Nangso family of Nyemo who were, in return, able to use the dominion that came with this position to augment their power. The Chronicles of Ladakh, translated by the Moravian missionary August Herman Francke (1926/1972, 122), make it appear that the king was temporarily afflicted by mental instability and that ‘‘the devil entered the king’s mind, and giving way to the influence of bad servants, he married a [woman] called Bhe-mo-rgyal.’’ Bhe-morgyal or Bibi was a Muslim woman from the Beda caste. The bride who had originally been selected for the king, Princess Kunzang Angmo from the Zangla castle in Zangskar, left him and returned to marry the king of Zangskar. According to the Chronicles, the madness that ailed the king led him to perform deeds that were ‘‘unusual and strange.’’ He developed a fixation for horses and drained the treasury by employing one groom each for his five hundred horses. He levied taxes three times in one year. But more scandalous, and here the text gets uncertain, is that he indulged in bizarre practices like paying great attention to ‘‘horses’ feet and genitals,’’ perhaps for ‘‘finding felicitous days.’’ Unable to bear this behavior any longer, his courtiers ‘‘collected many soldiers, pressed into the palace, turned the Bhe-mo out and imprisoned her.’’ Other histories portray a gorier fate for Bibi than the one described in the Chronicles. They conclude that she was nailed to the gate of the

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Notes to Chapter 4 bazaar and flogged to death (Gergan 1976; Petech 1977). The Chronicles footnote the discovery of a document showing that the king abdicated his throne, at least for a short while, following the Bibi period. The historian Luciano Petech (1977) provides a very bleak picture of Tshewang Namgyal as a corrupt monarch who did not honor Buddhist traditions, but in other records, the king lives on as a benevolent ruler under whom peace prevailed in Ladakh. According to Francke (1926/1972), evidence of Tshewang Namgyal’s munificence can be found on rock inscriptions in places like Skyurbuchan. Tashi Rabgias’s (1984) dynastic history portrays the king as a just administrator who did not discriminate on the basis of religion and mediated in conflict-ridden situations with impartiality and success. From this account, we learn that the king was victorious in his wars with Sod and Kartagshar, that he was responsible for restoring the monasteries of Likir and Mangyu, that religious scholars visited Ladakh, that the monasteries of Hemis and Chemrey flourished, and that monks became ethical during his reign. After his disastrous marriage to Bibi, the Chronicles make note of the king’s marriage to Princess Bikim Wangmo of Sod, whose name appears to be a combination of Buddhist and Muslim names. Forging alliances by marrying princesses of different religions was not unusual for royalty. What was unprecedented was the king’s ultimate act of defiance: marriage to a Beda woman. Zangskar had its own king even after the mediations at the Council of Wanla, in which the Nyingmapa monk Rigzin Tshewang Norbu, dispatched from Tibet by the Dalai Lama to settle succession disputes among Ladakh’s royalty to prevent Kashmiri invasion, prescribed that only one king be allowed to inherit the throne of Ladakh. The heir to the throne was to be the eldest brother; all younger brothers had to join the monasteries of Hemis or Thiksey. The kingdoms of Zangskar and Henaskud were permitted to retain their own royal line, but the kingdom of Purig was merged with Ladakh after the death of its ruler, Tashi Namgyal (Francke 1907/1998; Shakspo 1988). I am grateful to Martijn van Beek for sharing the minutes of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association with me. Although the Mons were chastised and boycotted for allowing kinship to interfere with their professional duties, kinship networks and caste membership feature significantly in modern affairs as well. Caste elites wield a lot of power in politics, government service, and private business. In the tourist business, for example, most of the major hotels in the town of Leh are owned by aristocratic families, who have become the main agents in the social marketing of hospitality. Tsheshu Lhamo served one term and then Rigzin Spaldon from Stakna was nominated to the second lahdc as councilor for the oppressed castes. Official Chinese reports have criticized the Dalai Lama’s government for claiming that Tibet was a utopia before Chinese intervention, arguing that 95 percent of the population were serfs or slaves, that temples did not permit smiths and slaughterer castes to enter, and that even the Dalai Lama had decreed that no child of such castes could work for the government (Xinhua News Agency Domestic Service, Beijing, in Chinese, 1997, swb fe/d2820/cns 180197). I am very grateful to Robbie Barnett

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for sending these reports to me. Regardless of the verity of these allegations, what is notable is that for several years, the Dalai Lama has been a passionate and committed spokesperson against caste and religious distinctions in Ladakh. In the late 1990s, the Ladakh Buddhist Association did begin to celebrate Ambedkar Jayanti and named a library site after him, moves hailed by some as due recognition to a prominent Buddhist citizen and cynically regarded by others as a ploy to occupy government land in the name of a library. I am indebted to the Jammu and Kashmir/lahdc Department of Tourism and Tashi Morup for their assistance with research on the Ladakh Festival. According to information I received from the department, funds allocated for 1999 were Rs. 18 lakhs (approximately $30,000). A Ladakh Festival was also held in the mid-1980s from 1983 onward, but it was smaller in scale and restricted to performance groups from Leh. Rather than being an exact amount, the number 360 is more of a sacred symbol for Buddhist Ladakhis that is also used when gods and goddesses are being enumerated. Conversion, as Gauri Vishwanathan (1998) argues, is not just a sign of alienation or breakdown of identity but can be used as a source of empowerment and protest for individuals and communities marginalized by both their own religion and by modern secular society. Larson (1985), Trewin (1990), and Shakspo (1993) have all written about the hybrid nature of Ladakhi music, whereby its songs can be placed in the genre of melodies from Tibet and other places in the East and its folk instrumental music is derived from Kashmir and Central Asia. Trewin, however, argues that these two divergent strands have harmonized in response to each other in the past four hundred years and can no longer be considered discordant. This poster was created after a series of workshops spearheaded by the president of the Ladakh Buddhist Association, Tsering Samphel. The poster has a border with illustrations from the Jataka parables and the symbol of the eternal knot in the four corners. Among the other points listed on it are recommendations on education, consumption of alcohol, religious practices, language, and prevention of conversions. The caste issue, rigs-rus, is brought up in the thirteenth point. This is the Ladakhi text: ‘‘Sangs-rgyas thugs-rje-can gyis rigs-rus grtso-bo ma yin gsung-nang bzhin. Spyi-tshogs nang-du rigs-rus mthon-po dang dma’-mo’i dwye-ba rtsi dgos.’’ From 1991 to 1992, this society changed its name to Rol-dbyangs tshogs-pa (the Musical Society), but soon after, it returned to its former name.

5 BORDER GAMES

1 Ortner (1999, 23) describes the sport of mountaineering on Mount Everest as a ‘‘serious game’’ in which ‘‘serious’’ refers to ‘‘the constant play of power in the games of life.’’ 2 I am indebted to Abdul Qayum, Baba Hamid, Sonam Phuntsog, Abdul Ghani Sheikh, Haji Azgar, and Mohammad Akbar Rangar for sharing their memories of the Argon Dartses with me.

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3 For an account of the Skyan performance, see also Sheikh (1977, 76–79). Conversations with Mohammad Akbar Rangar and Abdul Qayum also shed light on some of the details. 4 Among those who were murdered were the English merchant William Moorcroft, who disappeared in Baltistan; the English explorer and member of the Royal Geographic Society George Hayward (see Keay 1979); and the Scottish explorer Andrew Dagleish, who was murdered by the Afghans. 5 For discussions on the politics of porterage, see Ortner (1999) and Aggarwal (2000). 6 For testimonies of the positive characteristics of Argons by Lord Dunmore, Francis Younghusband, and Sven Hedin, see Sheikh (1997b). For critical accounts of Kashmiri and Argon servants, see Irby (1863), Lambert (1877), and Gompertz (1928). Isabella Bishop Bird (1894) and Fanny Workman (Workman and Workman 1900) were among the women explorers who discussed the misdeeds of their porters at length. 7 The journey of Theodore and Kermit Roosevelt (1926) to Ladakh and Central Asia sheds light on the manner in which scientific objectives were transforming ideals of masculinity in turn-of-the-century America. 8 See Adair (1989, 101–102) for descriptions of his visit to Achinathang. I am grateful to the librarian at the India Office Records collection of the British Library for his assistance in helping me find information on Captain Adair. 9 The account of Abdul Wahid Radhu’s (1997) travels in Tibetan caravans to Lhasa can be found in his memoir, Tibetan Caravans. 10 A full translation and the entire transliterated text of this Ladakhi song can be found in S. Khan (1997, 177–178). 11 Archery is also associated with Azhang Daro or Nono Gongma, one of the heroes of the Gyalam Gesar, who could shoot down flying birds in the sky with arrows that would obey his will (S. Khan 1987; Morup Namgyal, personal communication). 12 Pascale Dollfus (1989) observes that in the village of Hemis Shugpachan, it is the smiths who give miniature bows and arrows to male infants. They are pinned to their caps to ward off evil. 13 See also Dollfus (1987) for the significance of the ibex in Ladakhi culture. 14 High images of the Buddha are often thought to be manifestations of Chamba, but, contrary to popular belief, the rock carving of Chamba at Mulbeg is actually not a Chamba but an Avalokitesvara. The tree in this proverb refers to the original tree on which apricots and other fruits blossomed that Guru Rimpoche is believed to have planted in the Shigar village of Baltistan. 15 For accounts from other cultures that illustrate how idioms of meat stand for masculinity, see Michael Herzfeld (1985) and Jose Limon (1994). 16 I am grateful to Morup Namgyal for giving me the lyrics to this song, and to Sonam Phuntsog for helping me translate it. 17 According to Mohammad Akbar Rangar, this exhibit was designed by the residents of the Skyangos and Gogsum neighborhoods of Leh. 18 For a historical analysis of the Deobandi School, see Metcalf (1982).

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19 Mir Shamsuddin Iraqi was a disciple of the mystic Amir Kabir Syed Ali Hamdani, who is believed to have initiated Sufism in Kashmir. 20 Meanwhile, in the Suru valley of the region now known as Kargil district, the Balti queen, Khri-lha Khatoun, wife of the seventeenth-century king, Khri Namgyal, was responsible for propagating Islam with the help of a scholar named Akhon Mohammad Sharif. She sold her jewelry to build a mosque in the castle at Kartse and invited a teacher named Mir Hashm from Baltistan to teach the scriptures to her son, Prince Khri Sultan (H. Khan 1939; Grist 1998). It was this Khri Sultan who ruled over Purig as well, and gradually, the name Purig came to designate the entire Kargil region. According to Francke (1926/1972), Khri Sultan was defeated by the king of Ladakh, and by 1758, Purig was incorporated into Ladakh permanently. 21 There is still a substantial Nurbakshi population in the Nubra block of Leh district that is affiliated with the imam of Skardo (Srinivas 1998). 22 I am grateful to Nasser Hussain Munshi, Bashir Ahmed Wafa, and Master Sadiq Ali for sharing their stories and experiences of theater in Kargil with me. 23 Areas designated as ‘‘notified’’ were established in India by the British government to prevent land alienation and maintain aboriginal identity. 24 There is, however, an army theater called Chinarkali in Kargil town that was frequented by civilians until the Iranian Revolution. 25 That Ladakhis and Baltis share a common passion for the Gesar epic is corroborated by Shakspo (1998). 26 King Srong bTsan Gampo is the seventh-century ruler of Tibet who is credited with consolidating Buddhism. He sent his minister, Thunmi Sambota, to India to learn the Devnagri script that was then modified and used as a standard script for Tibetan. 27 The ghazal is a genre of poetry and music. Although its roots can be traced to Arabic literature and Persian poetry, in India it has assumed a distinctive touch, reflecting the sociohistorical experiences of Indo-Muslim life in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, while retaining some of the original Persian imagery and content (Manuel 1991). The Indian ghazal was sung in Urdu. In the past few decades, with the booming of the film and cassette industries, it has achieved enormous commercial popularity and has assumed more of a hybrid form, incorporating elements of Hindustani music, with singers and audiences who are not necessarily Muslim (Manuel 1991). The synthetic fusion of the ghazal has resulted in the production of new social identities over the ages, as Peter Manuel has demonstrated. 28 I heard of this song from Raza Abbasi, Gulzar Hussain Munshi, Inayat Ali, and Afzal Sherwani in Kargil. 29 I am grateful to Gulzar Hussain Munshi and Sheikh Ahmad Mohammadi of the Islamiya School for clarifying ideological differences between the Islamiya School and the ikmt. 30 Traditional ritual songs have been modified to a great extent and are often replaced by more popular themes and tunes, even during Buddhist weddings. 31 One reason given to me for Muslim clerics legitimizing the game of polo was that Yazid had played polo with Imam Hussain’s head at Karbala after decapitating him,

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Notes to Chapter 5 and so the faithful were permitted to learn polo to arm themselves for a future Holy War. This interpretation was first brought to my attention by Zainul Abideen in Leh. According to S. Khan (1987), a goat was slaughtered on the last day of the mda’phangs in Kargil and its organs, head, and neck were placed as targets. The person who managed to hit one of these parts could claim it. Goats were also sacrificed in celebration by the archer who hit the bull’s eye. I learned of these dates through oral accounts collected from Yogmathang elders and from Sonam Phuntsog, who recorded them from a stone inscription he found on the site that was later demolished during some construction activities. In India, there is a separate Civil Code that regulates decisions of marriage and inheritance among Muslims. See Viswanathan (1998) for a provocative discussion on conversion as a strategy of resistance. During the period of bsnyen-gnas, liturgies for Chenrezig are uttered and devotees meditate on him. They are to abstain from killing, stealing, sexual contact, lying, occupying high thrones or carpets, eating meat and onions, drinking alcohol, purchasing new ornaments, and using fragrant emolients. The bsnyen-gnas alternates with smyung-gnas in twenty-four-hour cycles for sixteen days. The smyung-gnas liturgies are to be accompanied by absolute silence and the absence of solid or liquid foods. Kim Gutschow (1999) has provided an account of this practice in the Zangskar region. ‘‘Operation Hope,’’ Indiareacts.com, 2001, http://www.indiareacts.com/Story31.htm. There are four main subdivisions of the army in Achinathang: the Food and Supply Division and the Medical Department in the Vijay Thang area and the Workshop and Engineering Divisions in the Byang Thang area. There are more army personnel than local residents in the vicinity of the village now. The Panchayat Committee that was established after the implementation of the Jammu and Kashmir Panchayat Act comprised one Sarpanch leader from Skyurbuchan and eight committee members, two of whom were elected from Achinathang during the 2001 elections. These elections marked the realization of the political aspirations of Buddhist youth, as both of the successful candidates were young Buddhists. The Indian army has also encouraged archery in Ladakh and formed two teams, the Ladakh Archery Club and the National Archery Club. These teams include some of those archers who played in the Argon Dartses. The Indo-Tibetan Border Police (itbp), too, plans to open an archery academy. Tashi Namgyal, a Ladakhi who is an assistant commander in the itbp, was awarded a gold medal for archery in Bangkok. The practice of hunting defines the margins between civilized and uncivilized behavior in Ladakh. At one time, it was the means of existence for the nomadic tribes (Mons and ‘Brogpa) that are believed to have inhabited all of Ladakh. There are stone inscriptions in lower Ladakh that show hunters pursuing ibex with bows and arrows (Francke 1907/1998). When settled agriculture succeeded pastoralism as the chief source of sustenance, game animals such as the ibex were driven to higher

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grounds. Ibex are symbolic of a prehistoric and halcyon age of nomadism, when the boundaries between gods and humans were not clearly differentiated (Kaplanian 1983). On the other hand, they are also remnants of a dark past when hunting was the way of life, a lifestyle that came to be condemned by Buddhism and contained by Section 8 of the 1978 Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife Protection Act. Hunting ibex is outlawed because the ibex are counted among endangered species. Sermons by religious leaders and dramas staged by Buddhist youth groups during archery fairs and other such festivals regularly appeal to villagers to refrain from hunting. Characterizing hunters as devoid of compassion and humanity, these consciousness-raising plays condemn the use of modern rifles for hunting because they amplify violence and threaten to make living creatures extinct. Hassan Khan, interview with author, June 23, 2000. These are names of the missiles tested by India and Pakistan. Downloaded from http://www.vijayinkargil.org/warmemorial/kargil1a.html on August 13, 2001. For an excellent discussion of the history and politics of Indian cricket, see Ramachandra Guha’s A Corner of a Foreign Field (2002). When Indo-Pakistani tensions are played down, cricket can also function as a uniting force. Rita Manchanda (2002, 131) reports that ‘‘President Zia gave a political impetus to the de-escalation of tension through ‘cricket diplomacy,’ when he visited India to watch a cricket match in Jaipur and used it as an occasion for an informal bilateral summit.’’ This is an unpublished story called ‘‘Pahla Khat,’’ written in Urdu by Abdul Ghani Sheikh. The Tashkent Accord was signed on January 10, 1966, between Prime Minister of India Lal Bahadur Shastri and President Ayub Khan of Pakistan after the 1965 war between their countries. The Accord restored the Ceasefire Line and opened communication lines.

CONCLUSION

I am grateful to the Nehru Memorial Library for making photographic prints of figures 27 and 28 for me. Despite repeated attempts, I have not been able to ascertain the institution with whom the ownership rights lie. 1 See the official Sindhu Darshan Web site, www.sindhudarshanindia.com. 2 These photographs were shown to me by Srirupa Roy from her collection. Roy’s assistance and her extensive knowledge of the workings of the Nehruvian state helped me think through this section. 3 This quote, from Nehru’s speech printed in the Amrita Bazar Patrika on August 7, 1949, is taken from van Beek (1999, 447). There are contradictory accounts of Nehru’s treatment of Buddhism. According to Radhu (1997, 284), Nehru was overheard remarking at the Hemis Festival, ‘‘What a waste of time. I’d like to be able to draft all these monks into the army and make them work. What they’re doing is no good to anyone and doesn’t improve anyone’s life.’’ In contrast, the Buddhist histo-

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Notes to Conclusion rian Nawang Tsering Shakspo (1988) stresses that Nehru presented photographs and statues of Buddha to the Stagtshang Rinpoche of Hemis and to Kushok Bakula and remarked, ‘‘Buddhism is the prevailing religion here in Ladakh so Buddhist religion and learning must be encouraged and helped’’ (35). A good description of the cultural events and rituals of the 2000 Sindhu Darshan can be found in a report published in the Kashmir Times, June 8, 2000. This verse is translated from Phuntsog Ladakhi’s Hindi song, Sindhu. Saffron is a sacred color in Hindu rituals; ‘‘saffronisation’’ has become a commonly used term to describe the imposition of Hindutva principles. For a good critique of the Sindhu Darshan of 2000, see Tripathi (2000). For links to reports that directly implicate the state as a sponsoring or complicit participant in Gujarat, see the Web site of Sabrang Communications, www.sabrang .com. I am grateful to Tashi Morup for giving me a report on the Republic Day ceremony of 2003. According to Mushtaqur Rahman (1996, 176), the Indus Water Treaty demonstrated a step toward a peaceful resolution of a crisis issue; it demonstrated a spirit of goodwill and cooperation for better relations between the two countries, whose boundaries were often contested and whose rivers were overlapping.’’ But the treaty has been criticized for partitioning rights to rivers rather than fostering genuine water sharing (see Manchanda 2002 for a reference to this criticism). At the Sindhu Darshan of 2000, Farooq Abdullah, the Jammu and Kashmir chief minister, called for the abrogation of the treaty, attributing the problems of power shortage and irrigation in the state to the unfair advantage the treaty accorded to Pakistan. There has also been dissatisfaction from Pakistan, which is on the lower riparian side, about the problems of salinity and flooding caused by methods of water control and release upstream (Manchanda 2002). For a good summary of the possibilities and shortcomings of proposals for the resolution of the Kashmir conflict, see Wirsing (1994). This proposal can be found on the group’s Web site, www.kashmirstudygroup.com. See Gutschow’s (1997) analysis of the politics of water control in Zangskar.

R EFER EN C ES

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I N D EX

. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .

Aba, 88, 91–92, 94, 99, 138 Abbas (Rangar), 215 Abdullah, Farooq, 31, 45–46, 47, 49, 106, 170, 266 n.9 Abdullah, Mohammed, Sheikh, 39, 41, 50, 241–42 n.33, 242 n.35 Abdul Qadir, 106 Abdul Qayoom, 184 Abideen, Zainul (‘‘Aabid’’), 26, 29–30, 55 Achina Lungba, 62, 64, 213 Achina mDo, 62 Achinathang (Leh district, Ladakh), 14– 15; affluence in, 212; archery in, 204–5, 214–15; Buddhists vs. Muslims in, 204–5, 210–11, 214; caste in, 155, 156; dben-sdum mchod-rten in, 86; dogs in, 249 n.52; economy of, 78; fields in, 84, 249 n.52; food exchanges in, 78–79, 248 nn.41–42; funeral ceremony in, 58– 60, 65–70, 86–87, 99, 246 n.19; Gilgit Scouts’ occupation of, 205–6; hearths in, 100; history/geography of, 60–65, 245 n.12; lba in, 77, 248 n.40; monastery of, 154, 258 n.8; vs. Skyurbuchan, 213–14; sngo-lha festival in, 87; Social

Boycott resisted in, 77–78; tourists in, 98–99; travel writing about, 188; visitors to/outsiders in, 94–96. See also archery competitions Actual Ground Position Line, 238 n.8 Adair, Sir Fredrick Edward, 187–88, 217 Advani, L. K., 71, 223, 224, 226–27 adventurers, 187–90, 261–62 n.4 Afghans/Afghanistan, 7, 109, 261–62 n.4 aghas, 197, 202, 203 Agitation (1989): and archery competitions, 203–4; bureaucracy/organization of, 74–75; civil disobedience instigated by, 4; conversion during, 207–8; intermarriage during, 207; justice/religious unity/cultural preservation emphasized by, 173; and the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Act, 8; and purity, 98; and Section 144, 71– 72; Union Territory status advocated by, 4, 42–44 Ahluwalia, Major, 114 Ahmed, Monisha, 93 Akhand Bharat, 7 Akhon, Dokhta, 194

288 Index Akhon, Razak, 189 alcohol/drinking, 80–83, 248–49 n.46. See also chang Ali Ju, 195 Ali Mohammed, 146–47, 172, 175, 176, 177 Ali Sher Khan Anchan, 158, 199 All India Radio, 27, 168, 179, 202, 225 All-Ladakh Gompa Association, 241–42 n.33 Das Alte Ladakh, 251 n.3 Ama, 100 Ama Danmo (Ibex Mother) song, 127 Amarnath, Lala, 36, 221 Ambedkar, Babasaheb, 168–69 Ames Tshultim Gyatsho, 125 Amitabha, Buddha, 68, 258 n.7 Amritsar Treaty (1846), 33, 34 Anand, Chetan: Haqeeqat, 105, 116– 19, 121, 122–24, 131, 251 n.3; Paramvir Chakra, 131 ancestor worship, 83–85, 250 n.53 Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh (Norberg-Hodge), 9, 144 Anglo-Sikh war (1845–46), 33 Angmo (an Achinathang schoolteacher), 136 animal sacrifice, 90, 203, 250 n.58, 263–64 n.33. See also food exchanges/offerings Annaud, Jean-Jacques, 106–7 Ano, Lonpo, 200 anthropology: border studies in, 15; and estrangement, 255–56 n.46; failed communication in, 251 n.64; within the Inner Line, 92–101; methodology/objectivity in, 19–20; multisited, 19; political/poetic dimensions of, 251 n.68; tribal focus of, 11 A-phyi, 62–63, 125–26 Aradhana, 252 n.5 Archaeological Survey of India, 25 archery competitions: in Achinathang, 204–5, 214–15; and the Agitation, 203–

4; alliances renewed via, 182, 214–15; archery as a serious game, 182, 261 n.1; Argon Dartses, 183–87, 190–96, 216, 221, 262 n.17; army’s presence at, 182, 264 n.41; attire/etiquette for, 185; dancing at, 180–81, 185–86, 190, 194– 95, 221; Daro associated with, 262 n.11; diversity in, 183, 186; fertility/virility motifs at, 190–91; Gesar associated with, 191; goats slaughtered at, 203, 263–64 n.33; Gongma associated with, 262 n.11; history of, 183–87; insiders vs. outsiders at, 215; Islamic sanction of archery, 203; marriage spoof at, 190; masculinity in, 190, 193; mirrors at, 191; modern vs. traditional archery, 215–16; music at, 193–94; newcomers/visitors to, 181; pageant at, 185–86; police/army teams at, 264 n.41; political shifts reflected in, 179; politics of, 216–20; and power/status, 16, 17–18, 182; purification rite at closing of, 195; rgyal-pham system in, 183; sexuality/domesticity articulated in, 192–93; Skyan performed at, 186–87; village archery, 203–4; women at, 192, 215 Argon Dartses, 183–87, 190–96, 216, 221, 262 n.17 Argons. See Argon Dartses; Sunni Muslims army, 182, 212, 218–19, 264 n.39, 264 n.41 arrows, 191, 262 n.12 Aryans, 230 Ashura procession, 201 Assam, 119, 254 n.32 assimilation, 119 astrologers, 68 Aurungzeb, Emperor, 32 automobiles, 180 autumn activities, 149–50 Avalokitesvara (Chenrezig, Boddhisatva of compassion), 85, 154, 245 n.10, 258 n.7, 262 n.14, 264 n.37

Index awa, 177 Ayodhya mosque demolition/riots (1992), 71, 247 n.28 Azgar, Haji, 195 Baisakhi festival (Lahore, Pakistan), 17 Baksh, Syed Mohammed Nur, 196 Bakula, Kushok (Thupstan Chodnor; Bakula Rinpoche), 39, 75, 159, 175, 227–28, 241–42 n.33, 250 n.58, 265 n.3 Bali, 220 Balti Bazaar, 200 Balti people/language, 199–201 Baltistan, 24–25, 35, 38, 158, 240 n.4 Bangladesh, 40 Ba-ni-yar tribe (Gilgit), 85 bar-do (stage between death and rebirth), 67–68, 99, 246 n.20 Bar-do thos grol (Liberation in the intermediate state), 68, 98, 246 n.20 barley, 73, 78, 80, 203–4. See also chang barley flour balls, 66, 78 Barth, Fredrik, 15 Barucha, Rustom, 124 baskets, carrying of, 140 bbc (radio), 198–99 bdun-tshigs feast, 69 Beas river, 233 Beda caste, 155, 159, 160, 167, 170, 171–72, 175–76 beef, 209 Benaras, Abdul Qayum, 106 Bengal–Eastern Frontier Regulation (1873), 57, 244 n.2 Berlin Wall, 4, 6–7 Bertelsen, Kristoffer, 76, 241 n.31, 242 n.33 Bharati, Agehananda, 10–11, 116 Bharatiya Janata Party (bjp), 21, 71, 232 Bharat Mata (Mother India), 113, 124, 224, 254 n.32 Bharat Natyam, 226 Bhe-mo-rgyal (‘‘Bibi’’), 259–60 n.17 Bidwai, Praful, 54

289

Big Estates Abolition Act (1950), 241 n.33 birds, symbolism of, 134, 256 n.48 Bishop, Peter, 98 bjp (Bharatiya Janata Party), 21, 71, 232 bjp Today, 231 bka’-blon (Ayu), 62 bka’-blon family (Leh), 124, 165–66 bka’-blon family (Nyemo), 161, 259 n.16 Bka’-rgyud-pa order, 15, 81 blue, symbolism of, 85 boat (amban) dance, 189, 194–95 Bodhi, 202 Bollywood. See movies Bombay, 220 Bon, 157 borders: agency/identity at, 15, 17, 19, 104, 239 n.26; and decentralization of power, 17; studies of, 15, 104. See also boundaries; Inner Line; loc Border Security Forces, 115–16 Bota (a term of disrespect), 53, 243 n.57 boundaries: created by race/class/ ethnicity/sexuality, 104–5, 251 n.2; fluidity of, 61; purity/pollution as, 70– 71, 247 n.26. See also borders; Inner Line; loc Boundary Commission, 112 Bower, Hamilton, 96 Brag-dmar-lha-chen (village deity), 64, 245 n.16 Brahmaputra river, 224, 225–26 ‘brang-rgyas (meal-mountain), 78, 164, 248 n.42 Bray, John, 10, 34, 97, 243 n.51 ‘brel-tho (record of goods received), 66, 245–46 n.17 ‘Bri-gung-pa order, 62–63, 125–26, 244– 45 n.10 British imperialism, 4–5 British sportsmen, 187–90 ‘Brogpa, 63–64, 85, 157, 173, 183, 245 n.14, 246 n.21 ‘Brogpa’i-mos (Achinathang), 64

290

Index

bshad-pa (counsel), 138–39, 143 bsnyen-gnas rituals, 209, 264 n.37 Buddha, 86, 126, 262 n.14 Buddhists/Buddhism: in Achinathang, 60–65; Bka’-rgyud-pa, 15, 81; ‘Brigung-pa, 62–63, 125–26, 244–45 n.10; on charity, 79; consolidation of Buddhism, 263 n.26; cosmology of, 58–59, 100, 244 n.6; on death, 68, 98; Dgelugs-pa, 15; even vs. odd numbers, significance of, 155–56; father-to-son power transfers, 74; on hunting, 264– 65 n.42; Kangyur texts, 63; in Kargil district, 14–15, 50; on kitchens, 100; in Leh district, 14–15, 50; mortuary rituals vs. textual constructions of, 84, 249 n.51; on Mount Meru, 248 n.42; vs. Muslims, 4, 43, 50–51, 53, 74, 204–11, 214, 243 n.53; nationalism of, 76; Nehru on, 265 n.3; in Nepal, 249 n.51; Nyingmapa, 98; on polyandry, 114–15; popularity in the West, 73, 98; on primogeniture, 115; purity of, 98; on reincarnation, 67–68, 246 n.20; Scheduled Caste, 168–70; sects of, 15; at the Sindhu Darshan Festival, 232; Sinhalese, 76; tourism’s influence on, 98; Vajrayana, 169. See also funeral ceremonies; Young Men’s Buddhist Association Buddhists’ Polyandrous Marriages Prohibition Act (1941), 115 Butalia, Urvashi, 221 butchery, 209 cannabis, 185–86 caravans, 189 cashmere (pashmina), 32, 34–35, 36 cassette industry, 177, 263 n.27 caste system: Beda caste, 155, 159, 160, 167, 170, 171–72, 175–76; Buddhist vs. Hindu, 168–69; challenges to, 160, 259 n.15; conflicts between castes, 165; conversion to Islam by caste members,

173–75, 261 n.29; vs. cultural preservation, 152; Dalai Lama on, 168, 176, 260 n.22; discrimination/ostracism against lower castes, 156–57, 159, 171– 78; and drinking, 248–49 n.46; Garba (smith) caste, 155, 156, 157–58, 160, 170, 173–74, 176; gral seating by caste, 154–56, 159–62, 164–65, 172–73, 259 n.16; intermarriage between castes, 159, 160–61, 173–74, 259–60 n.17; and kinship, 164; oppressed castes, 165, 260 n.21; origins of, 157–59, 258 n.11; political/economic influence of, 259 n.14; power of caste elites, 165, 260 n.20; purity/pollution as determining hierarchy in, 160; ranking of castes, 154–56; right/left divergence in, 246 n.18; rivalries between castes, 175–76; structural analysis of, 259 nn.14–15; taboos in, 159, 160; in Tibet, 258 n.11; tribal affiliation vs. caste, 177. See also Mon caste cats (Cultural and Traditional Society), 177 Ceasefire Line, 6, 38. See also loc census, 169, 239 n.24 Central Institute of Buddhist Studies, 27–28 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 205, 220 Chamba, 25, 262 n.14 Chand, Prithi, 37, 52 chang (barley beer), 65–66, 79–82, 87, 203–4, 248 n.44, 249 nn.46–48 chang glu (drinking songs), 257 n.1 Changthang, 10, 32, 40 charity, 79 Chatterjee, Partha, 39, 248 n.39 Chatterji, Joya, 6 Chenab river, 233 Chigtan, 63, 173, 174, 198, 203, 204 ‘chi kha’i bar-do stage, 246 n.20 children, Buddhist vs. Muslim, 206 chinky (a racial epithet), 11 Chogdul, Prince, 32–33

Index chos-glu (religious songs), 257 n.1 Choskyid Dolma (A-phyi), 126 chos-nyid bar-do (experiencing of the glimpsing of reality), 246 n.20 Chosrgyal Tshepal, King, 125 circumcision, 206 class and taste, 81, 249 n.49 clothing, Buddhist vs. Muslim, 206 cockfights, 220 Cohen, Abner, 16 cold war, 6–7 commoners (mang-rigs), 155 communication lines, 221–22, 265 n.49. See also radio; television Congress Party, 44, 47–48, 214, 243 n.43 Congress-People’s Democratic Party (pdp) alliance, 233 Constituent Assembly, 242 n.33 Constitution (India, 1950), 113, 114, 168– 69, 233 Constitution (Iran), 201 Constitution (Jammu and Kashmir, 1934, 1939), 36 conversion, religious, 173–74, 197, 207–8, 261 n.27, 261 n.29 counter-archaeologies, 77, 247–48 n.39 cows, 209 cremation, 83, 250 n.54 cricket matches, 219–20, 265 n.47 Crook, John, 98 Cultural and Traditional Society (cats), 177 cultural performances, 15–16, 72, 170, 198. See also archery competitions; Ladakh Festival; mda’-rtses; music cultural preservation, 202–3 cultural vs. economic geography, 229 Cunningham, Alexander, 109, 112 curfews, 71–72 Daastan-e-Ladakh (P. Ladakhi), 130–31 Da-Hanu area, 98, 209 Daily Excelsior, 170, 171 Dalai Lama: birth anniversary celebra-

291

tions of, 4, 168; on the caste system, 168, 176, 260 n.22; movies sympathetic to, 106–7 daman (kettledrum), 156–57, 174, 258 n.10 dams, 229, 235 Dance, Song, and Melody Society (Gar rtsed glu dbyangs tshogs-pa), 175, 261 n.30 dancing: at archery competitions, 180–81, 185–86, 190, 194–95, 221; boat (amban) dance, 189, 194–95; dragon dance, 186, 189; folk vs. popular, 181; lion dance, 186, 190; mda’-rtses (arrow dances), 203–4, 212, 214; peacock dance, 186; prohibitions against, 174, 196, 197, 203; at the Sindhu Darshan Festival, 226 Darjeeling Gorkha Hill Council, 44 Das, Sarat Chandra, 96 Datta, Chaman Lal, 115 dead souls (shi-mi), 83 death: as a border, 60; and circular vs. linear time, 84; mourning period, 70; and travel, 68, 246 n.21; and women’s wailing, 69–70, 246–47 n.25. See also funeral ceremonies Deen Mohammad, 221, 222 Delegs, Skarma Tshering, 215 Delhi-Lahore bus service, 218 Denzongpa, Danny, 131, 255 n.43 Deobandi School, 196 descent, lines of. See gral Deshpande, Satish, 229 Desideri, Ippolito, 25 Dge-lugs-pa order, 15 Dhar, Basharat, 47–48 Dil Se (Ratnam), 105, 119–24, 251 n.3, 253 n.23, 254 n.28, 254 n.32 Dinbir, Phuntsog. See Ladakhi, Phuntsog District Development Council, 44 District Plan, 45 divorce, 140, 256 n.54 Dogras: demise of, 242 n.33; Hindu state practice by, 5; Ladakh invaded/controlled by, 31–36, 110, 115

292

Index

Donnan, Hastings, 15 doors, 70–71, 154, 247 n.26 Drag-shos family, 155, 162, 164 Dras, 52, 206 Drew, Frederic, 34, 111–12 Driessen, Henk, 23, 71, 234, 250 n.62 drinking/alcohol, 80–83, 248–49 n.46. See also chang Driver, Norman, 37–38 Drogpa Namgyal (Ribbach), 97 Dumkhar, 162, 173 Durand Line, 5 Duranti, Allessandro, 153, 257 n.6 economic reform, 71 economic vs. cultural geography, 229 education, 26–27, 71, 73, 95 Einstein, Albert, 30 elections, 212–14, 264 n.40 elopement, 140 embodied knowledge, 6–7, 238 n.9 Embree, Ainslee, 5 Erdmann, Ferry, 160 erotic love, 143 Escape from Taliban, 251 n.3 ethnography. See anthropology fasting, 208–9 Feld, Steven, 256 n.48 festive state, concept of, 16 Field Publicity Department, 106, 198, 252 n.5 fields, fenced vs. unfenced, 84, 249 n.52 films. See movies Films Division, 106 fire (mé), 65 ‘‘First Letter’’ (Sheikh), 222, 265 n.48 First Traditional Archery Championship (2000), 216 flooding, 233, 266 n.9 folk music, 149, 174, 177–78, 202, 257 n.1, 261 n.28. See also Mon caste food exchanges/offerings, 78–79, 84–85, 248 nn.41–42

Foreigners Amendment Order (1974), 57–58 Francke, August Herman: The Chronicles of Ladakh translated by, 259 n.17; on the Dard (‘Brogpa), 245 n.14; on the Gesar epic, 152; on the Leh Palace, 240 n.5; mamani inscription deciphered by, 85; missionary work of, 97; on the Mons, 158, 245 n.15; music recorded by, 250 n.59; on Tshewang Namgyal, 260 n.17 Friends Dramatics Club, 197 funeral ceremonies: cremation, 83, 250 n.54; and ethnic strife, 71, 247 n.27; mchod-rten, 83, 85–86; outsiders at, 92–93, 99, 250 n.62; shi-ston, 93; tsha-tsha, 83. See also chang Gajendragadkar, P. B., 40 Gajendragadkar Commission, 40 Gandhi, Indira, 38, 242 n.35 Gandhi, 113 Garba caste, 155, 156, 157–58, 160, 170, 173–74, 176 garden, as analogous to prosperous land, 124–25 Garkon, 64 Gar rtsed glu dbyangs tshogs-pa (Dance, Song, and Melody Society), 175, 261 n.30 garu, 191 Gazetteer of India, 115 Geertz, Clifford, 16, 220, 247 n.27 gender: dichotomy of in movies, 17–18, 105, 112; as performance, 104, 251 n.1. See also men; women Gesar epic, 149, 152–53, 177, 191, 198–99, 257 n.4, 263 n.25. See also gral Ghagra river, 225–26 Ghalib, Mirza, 120, 254 n.27 ghazals, 177, 193–94, 200, 202, 263 n.27 ghosts (shi ‘dre), 79, 83, 84 Gilgit, 35, 250 n.54 Gilgit Scouts, 36–37, 205–6

Index glaciers, artificial, 235 Glancy Commission, 36 globalization, 6–7, 238 n.9 glo-sar (new year), 64–65 goat slaughtering, 203, 263–64 n.33 Godfrey, Captain, 188 Godhra massacre (2002), 232 Gombrich, Richard, 76 Gompertz, Major, 109; Magic Ladakh, 110 ‘‘Gon-bo-zhugs-pyes’’ (The body is possessed or occupied by a witch), 153 Gondar, 159 Gongmathang (Achinathang), 64, 65, 79, 86, 203–4, 206, 209–13 Gorkha, 11–12, 82, 109 Gorkha Rifles, 37 government bureaucracy, 13–14 gral, 149–78; age-related seating, 155; boycotts of the Mons, 150–51, 152, 164, 260 n.20; caste-related seating, 154– 56, 159–62, 164–65, 172–73, 259 n.16; circular vs. linear grals, 155; conflicts over seating, 160–64; and folksongs, 149; and hospitality, 163; kinshiprelated seating, 163–64; seats/tables for, 154; sitting/dwelling in, 153; social exchange at, 163; wedding seating, 164 gral-mgo (head seat), 154 gral tsir (Gesar-epic song), 257 n.4 Great Game, 10, 35, 109, 187, 216–17 Great Himalayan Motor Race, 170 Grewal, Inderpal, 111 Grist, Nicky, 188, 199 gsol-kha rites, 64–65 Guha, Ramachandra, 230 Guss, David, 16 Gutschow, Kim, 129 Gyal Khatoun, Queen, 158–59, 197, 240 n.4 g.yang-’gugs ceremonies, 69, 137, 246 n.24 ‘gying-glu (heroic songs), 149, 257 n.1

293

gzhung glu (congregational songs), 257 n.1 gzims-khang (houses of nobility), 155 Habibullah, Kacho, 51 Habibullah, Munshi, 197–98 hadjj, 206 halal vs. muldar meat, 87–88, 209 Hanu, 63, 64 Hanu-mdo, 60 Haqeeqat (Anand), 105, 116–19, 121, 122–24, 131, 251 n.3 Hay, William, Lord, 108–9 hearths, 100, 154 Heber, A. Reeve, 184, 190, 252 n.11 Heber, Kathleen, 184, 190, 252 n.11 height, symbolism of, 192, 262 n.14 Hemis Festival, 12, 126, 265 n.3 Hemis National Park, 251 n.70 Himalaya Films, 116 Himalayas, 4–5, 10–11 Hindu Civil Code, 257 n.61 Hindu nationalism, 7, 238 n.11 Hindustan Times, 48 Hindutva factions, 229–30, 266 n.6 history, official vs. fragmented/oral, 18–19 holidays, national. See Independence Day; Republic Day Holmberg, David, 84, 249 n.51 home/homeland, conceptions of, 105, 143, 147 homesickness/melancholy from uprootedness, 134, 256 n.47 Hopkirk, Peter, 96 household rotation (res), 65 houses, Buddhist vs. Muslim, 206 hunting, 187–88, 261–62 n.4, 264–65 n.42 Hussain, Imam, 89, 92, 201, 203, 263 n.31 hydroelectricity, 229, 233, 235 ibex, 191–92, 264–65 n.42 Id, 82, 200, 249 n.50 id-chang, 82

294

Index

identity vs. proximity, 205 Idthok Lhamo, 128 Igu dam, 235 ikmt (Imam Khomeini Memorial Trust), 76–78, 198, 201, 210, 218 immolation by students (New Delhi, 1991), 71 impurity, ritual, 68–69 Independence Day: and British/Dogra colonization of Ladakh, 31–36; and education, 26–27; flag burning on, 23; historical date of independence, 22; and independence following the Partition, 36–38; Indo-Pakistani celebration of, 233; in Kargil town, 53; Kashmir celebrations of, 23; Ladakh celebrations of, 23, 26–31, 37, 55; lahdc boycott of, 23, 31, 45–49; in Leh town, 26–31, 37, 55; symbols of, 22–23; and unity, 50–55; Vajpayee’s address, 21–22, 30, 50 India: borders/frontiers established under British rule, 4–9, 237–38 n.7, 237 n.3; British rule in, 33–34; Pakistan’s conflicts with, 40–41, 233–34, 266 n.9; Partition period/independence of, 5–6 Indian Airlines, 97 Indian Censor Board, 119 Indian Express, 21–22 Indian Independence, first war of (1857), 127 Indian Parliament, 233 Indo-Pakistani wars. See Kargil war; Partition Indo-Tibetan Border Police (itbp), 264 n.41 Indus river, 223–26, 229–30, 231, 235. See also Sindhu Darshan Festival Indus Valley Civilization, 229–30 Indus Water Treaty (1960), 233, 266 n.9 inheritance, 140, 143, 264 n.35. See also primogeniture Inner Line: ethnography within, 92–101; Foreigners Amendment Order, 57–58;

Ladakh Frontier Crossing Regulation, 57; Mingchanyul sngo-lha festival in, 58, 87–92, 250 n.57; parameters of, 57–58; permits required for travel, 57; Social Boycott in, 58, 74–78, 85–87, 93, 101; surveillance rituals at, 57. See also Achinathang Instrument of Accession (1947), 6, 36, 237–38 n.7 intelligence service, 96 Intizamiya Committee, 206 Iran, 197, 201–2 Iranian Cultural House, 76–77 Iraq, 197 Iraqi, Mir Shamsuddin, 196, 263 n.19 Irby, Augustus Henry, 112 Islam. See Muslims/Islam Islamiya School, 76, 201, 206 Israel, slogans against, 201 Jaeshke, Heinrich August, 97 Jammu and Kashmir: census in, 239 n.24; development of, 40; establishment of, 6; governance in, 8; land area of, 46; unrest/separatists in, 119. See also Kashmir Jammu and Kashmir Cultural Academy of Ladakh, 27 Jammu and Kashmir Wildlife and Protection Act (1978), 264–65 n.42 Jhelum river, 233 Jigten Gonpo, 125–26 Johnson, William, 34 Joldan, Eliezer, 184, 189, 191, 194, 195 Jora, Rigzin, 42, 46–47, 53, 232 Jung Bumti, 184 Kabra, Shaleen, 198 kab-tse (flatbread), 66 Kadpa, 195, 216 kaga (term of address for male aristocracy), 155 Kak, B. L., 115 Kalam Rasool, 184, 189, 194

Index Kali, 123 Kaplan, Caren, 105 Kaplanian, Patrick, 10, 160, 256 n.53 Karbalai, Azgar, Sheikh, 51–52 Karbala massacre, 203, 263 n.31 ‘‘Kar Chale Hum Fidaa,’’ 118, 119, 253 n.21 Kargil district, 8, 13; archery in, 203; Buddhists/Muslims in, 14–15, 50; creation of, 50, 243 n.51; vs. Leh district, 50–54; mosques in, 200; religious pressure in, 198; war in, 22, 27–29 Kargil Festival, 202, 203, 219 Kargili language, 202 Kargil Social and Cultural Organization (kasgo), 202 Kargil town: archery in, 203; Buddhist monument in, 50–51; centrality/location of, 15, 35; Chinarkali theater in, 263 n.24; Gilgit Scouts’ invasion of, 36–37; Independence Day in, 53; land ownership in, 50–51; origin of name, 35, 241 n.21 Kargil war (1999), 21–22, 27–29, 50–54, 179, 211–12, 217–19 Karpotog family, 195 Karsha monastery, 129 Karzoo garden, 125 kasgo (Kargil Social and Cultural Organization), 202 Kashir (tv channel), 106 Kashmir: British intervention in, 108–9; colonization of, 109; discord in, causes of, 6–7; future of, proposals for, 234; idyllic image of, 106, 108–10, 114; Independence Day in, 23; independence of, 4, 42; Indian-Pakistani disputes over, 4, 6, 237–38 n.7; Ladakh’s subjugation to, 32–33, 36, 38, 41–45; men of, criticism of, 109; militancy in, 217–18; riots in (1930s), 36; status under India, 241– 42 n.33; strike in (1989), 42; violence in, 13, 18; women of, praise of, 109; writings on, 238 n.12 Kashmir Accord (1974), 41, 242 n.35

295

Kashmir Armed Police, 43 Kashmir Doordarshan, 106, 129 Kashmir Mahabodhi Society, 74 Kashmir Raj Bodhi Maha Sabha, 114 Kashmir Study Group, 234 kasidas (eulogies), 200 kathak, 226 Kaul, H. N., 115 Kaul, Sridhar, 26–27, 115 Khadija, 177 Khalatse, 85, 97, 162 Khamenei, Ayatollah, 201 Khan, Baker, 206 Khan, Ghulam Hassan, 52–53, 218 Khan, Hashmatullah, 205, 245 n.15 Khan, Hassan, 205 Khan, Sikander, 63–64, 85, 183, 191, 202, 245 n.15, 250 n.53, 263–64 n.33 khang-bu (small house), 207 khang-pa (houses), 155 Khanpo Rinpoche, 49, 75 Kharbu, 205 Kharmang, 199–200 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 76–77, 201 ‘khor-’khor-po (circular settlements), 79, 248 n.44 Khushal Ramzan, 184, 189 kitchens, 99–100 klu deities, 235 Knight, Edward Frederick, 110 Knight, William Henry, 110 Koirala, Manisha, 119, 122, 254 n.41 Konchok Phandey, Gelong, 174 Koran, 196, 208–9 Kotalova, Jitka, 142–43, 255 n.46 Krishna, Sankaran, 7 Kundun (Scorcese), 106–7 Kunzang Angmo, Princess, 259 n.17 Kunzes, 127, 254 n.38 Ladakh: as backward/undeveloped, 10–11, 38–40, 41, 124, 229, 241 n.31; as barren/stark, 109–10, 114, 124; British/Dogra colonization of, 31–

296

Index

Ladakh (continued ) 36, 110, 115; British sportsmen in, 187–90, 261–62 n.4; colonial classification/representation of Ladakhis, 111–12, 252 n.11; conflict-ridden image of, 12–14, 20; as a cultural crossroad, 14, 239 n.23; cultural diversity in, 38– 39, 152; demographic composition of, 7; economic shifts in, 8; geography of, 3; governance of, 7–8; government bureaucracy in, 13–14; imagined as frontier, 9–14; incorporation into Jammu, 5; Independence Day in, 23, 26–31, 37, 55; men of, British characterization of, 110; neo-Buddhist/environmentalist perceptions of, 112, 252 n.12; population of, 7, 46–47; race in, 11–12; schools in, 242 n.33; spirituality of, 97, 112, 114; strategic importance of, 10, 38–39, 40– 41; studies of, 10; subjugation to Kashmir, 32–33, 36, 38, 41–45; and Tibet, 9–10, 32; tolerance/reconciliation in, 18; tourism in, 12, 41, 44, 97–99, 170; travel restrictions to, 97; Union Territory status demanded by, 20, 42–45, 48; weather in, 120; women’s mobility/sexuality/openness in, 110–12, 115–16, 124 Ladakh Artists Society of Leh (lhasol), 177 Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council. See lahdc Ladakh Buddhist Association. See lba Ladakh Buddhists’ Succession to Property Act (1943), 115 Ladakh Christian Association, 48 Ladakh Ecological Development Group (ledeg), 13 Ladakh Festival, 16, 151, 170–72, 178, 195, 203, 261 n.25 Ladakh Frontier Crossing Regulation (1937), 57 Ladakhi, Akbar, 44, 87 Ladakhi, Phuntsog, 103, 177, 231–32;

Daastan-e-Ladakh, 130–31; Sonam Dolma, 105, 129–32, 251 n.3, 254 n.41 Ladakhi language, 230–31; script, 202 Ladakh Muslim Association, 44, 48 Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status, 42, 43, 242 n.42 Ladakh Scouts, 40, 130–31, 218, 219 Ladakh Theatre Organization, 128 lag-shes-pa, 168, 171–77 lahdc (Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council): composition/functions of, 44–45, 242 n.41; establishment of, 8, 44–45, 170, 182; financial control by, 232; Independence Day boycott by, 23, 31, 45–49; and the Ladakh Festival, 170; land allotments by, 144, 257 n.61; oppressed castes represented on, 165, 260 n.21 Lahore Declaration (1999), 54 Laido, 60 Lake Manosarovar, 114 Lakshmi, 123 Lamaism, 115 Lambert, Cowley, 109 Lamdon Social Welfare Society, 72–73 land: alienation of, 263 n.23; garden as analogous to prosperous land, 124–25; inheritance of, 143; pasture access, 213; redistribution of, 241–42 n.33 landscape, in national representations, 113–16 Land Settlement (1908–1911), 199–200 Lavie, Smadar, 17 lba (Ladakh Buddhist Association): in Achinathang, 77, 248 n.40; Ambedkar Jayanti celebrated by, 261 n.23; on the caste system, 174, 261 n.29; on circular vs. linear time, 84; on drinking, 80– 82, 248–49 n.46; ‘‘15 lessons’’ poster, 174, 261 n.29; on Kargil, 52–53; on Ladakhi development, 39; on Ladakhi independence, 38, 41; on mamani and ancestor worship, 85; manifesto of, 41; on mortuary feasts, 78–79; as patriots,

Index 45, 242 n.42; on religious purity, 174; on the Sindhu Darshan Festival, 232; Social Boycott by, 42–50, 74–78, 243 n.53; Youth Wing, 51, 71–72, 77, 247 n.31 ledeg (Ladakh Ecological Development Group), 13 Leh district, 4, 8; Buddhists/Muslims in, 14–15, 50; creation of, 50, 243 n.51; vs. Kargil district, 50–54; tourism in, 73 Leh Palace, 25, 240 n.5 Leh-Srinagar highway, 41, 53, 97 Leh town: fields in, 84; Independence Day in, 26–31, 37, 55; layout of, 24– 26; Mission School, 97; population of, 15; and Srinagar, 232–33; as summer capital, 35; trade in, 31–32 Leh Treaty (1842), 33 leprosy, 62, 244–45 n.10 lha-rdags (guardian of the village deity), 90 lha-rnga (music used to start ceremonies or festivals), 171 lhasol (Ladakh Artists Society of Leh), 177 lha-tho (seat of village deity), 153 Limon, Jose, 17, 18 Line of Control. See loc lion dance, 186, 190 literacy, 73 Littledale, George, 96 Lobzang, 87, 88–91 Lobzang Toro, 131 loc (Line of Control; formerly Ceasefire Line): as an alienated border, 20; creation of, 6; as a dangerous place, perception of, 13; demilitarizing of, 234; development of, 38–41; drawing of, 38; future of, proposals for, 234; geography of, 1, 3; mistrust/adversity bred by, 17–18; as a natural space, 3; as a nuclear flashpoint, 4; and the Siachen glacier, 238 n.8; surveillance/anxiety over, 7. See also Inner Line

297

‘‘The Locked Trunk’’ (Sheikh), 221–22 Lok Sabha (Lower House; Indian Parliament), 7–8 Lopez, Donald, 98 lte-khrag thigs-sa’i ma-khang (home where blood from my navel has fallen), 143 Lugo, Alejandro, 17 Lungba, 213 Magic Ladakh (Gompertz), 110 makhtabs (religious colleges), 197 Malaysia, 151–52 Manchanda, Rita, 233, 265 n.47 Mandal Commission Report, 71 Manipur, 119 Manjusri (Boddhisatva of knowledge), 85 Mankekar, Purnima, 118, 220 maps, 5, 7, 237 n.3 marcias (elegies), 200 Marcus, George, 15, 19 marriage: Buddhist vs. Muslim, 206– 7; intermarriage between castes, 159, 160–61, 173–74, 259–60 n.17; intermarriage between religions, 143, 207, 214; locality for, 134–35, 256 n.50; loyalties in, 141; migration through, 141; and the Muslim Civil Code, 206–7, 264 n.35; rope’s symbolism in, 140–41. See also polyandry; weddings; women, as brides Martinez, Oscar, 20 Martselang dam, 235 masculinity: modern, 187–88, 190, 193, 262 n.7; romanticized, 219 Masro royal family, 126, 135 Masselos, Jim, 22, 31 matam (mourning), 201 Mathur, Saloni, 111 Maugham, Somerset, 107 Mayo, Katherine: Mother India, 110–11 McCartney/MacDonald Line, 5 McClintock, Ann, 108, 111, 112, 251 n.2, 252 n.13

298

Index

mchod-rten (reliquaries), 83, 85–86 McMahon Line, 5 mda’-rtses (arrow dances), 203–4, 212, 214 meal-mountain (‘brang-rgyas), 78, 164, 248 n.42 meat, halal vs. muldar, 87–88, 209 media, 219. See also radio; television me len chu len chad pyes, 43, 151. See also Social Boycott Melo, 85 men, 141, 206, 257 n.56. See also masculinity menstruation, 141–42 mentog ltadmo (flower show) song, 91, 250 n.59 Metcalfe, T. T., 33 mgron feast, 133 Mingchanyul, 58, 87–92, 250 n.57, 250 n.61 Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, 106 missionaries, 35, 97 modernization, 73–74 Moffat, Michael, 259 n.15 Moghuls, 109, 197 mog-mog (dumplings), 47 Mohammed, Prophet, 173, 197, 201, 208 monasteries: donations to, 150; landholdings by, 241–42 n.33; location of, 154; Meme Samphel’s founding of, 63, 245 n.13 Mon caste: archery of, 183; vs. Beda caste, 175–76; boycotts of, 150–51, 152, 164, 173, 175, 260 n.20; bsod-snyoms presented to, 160; conversion to Islam by members, 174; discrimination against, 156–57, 159; Francke on, 158, 245 n.15; vs. Garba (smith) caste, 176; history of, 157–59, 258–59 nn.12–13; as a lower caste, 155; as musicians, 156–57, 158–59, 258 n.10; tribal status of, 170 Montgomerie, Thomas George, 96

mortuary feasts, 78–79. See also funeral ceremonies Morup Namgyal, 26, 29, 31, 72, 129, 177, 191, 215 motherhood, 125–27 Mother India (Bharat Mata), 113, 124, 224, 254 n.32 Mother India (Mayo), 110–11 Mount Kailash, 225–27 Mount Meru, 100, 248 n.42 movies: about nation/nationalism, 119, 253 n.23; about women, 144; center/border dichotomy reproduced in, 105; Dil Se, 105, 119–24, 251 n.3, 253 n.23, 254 n.28, 254 n.32; gender dichotomy reproduced in, 17–18, 105, 112; and ghazals, 263 n.27; Haqeeqat, 105, 116–19, 121, 122–24, 131, 251 n.3; home accessibility of, 106; in Kargil, 198, 263 n.24; Kashmir as idyllic in, 106; Ladakh as a location for/subject of, generally, 105–6, 251–52 n.3; race dichotomy reproduced in, 105, 112; railways in, 119–20, 153 n.24; The Razor’s Edge, 105, 107–8, 112, 251 n.3, 252 n.8; Samsara, 251 n.3, 255 nn.44– 45; San-tsams, 131–32, 255 n.44; Sonam Dolma, 105, 129–32, 251 n.3, 254 n.41; theaters and screening spaces, 106, 252 n.6; war/territorial conflict in, 106 mujtahid (learned spiritual leader), 201 Munshi, Nasser Hussain, 202 Murdoch, Paul, 100 Murphy, Richard, 17 music: at archery competitions, 193–94; Balti, 199, 200–201; clashes over, 201; folk, 149, 174, 177–78, 202, 257 n.1, 261 n.28; ghazals, 177, 193–94, 200, 202, 263 n.27; Hindustani, 263 n.27; Islamic prohibitions against, 196, 197, 201, 202, 203; of Phuntsog Ladakhi, 131; lharnga, 171; ritual vs. popular, 202–3, 263 n.30. See also Mon caste; songs

Index Muslim Civil Code, 206–7, 264 n.35 Muslims/Islam: on archery, 203; vs. Buddhists, 4, 43, 50–51, 53, 74, 204–11, 214, 243 n.53; conversion to Islam, 173– 74, 197, 208; dance/music restrictions for, 174, 196, 197, 201, 202; Deobandi School, 196; dietary restrictions of, 50; on drinking, 82; egalitarianism of, 173; extended families, 207; festivals of, 82, 249 n.50; in Kargil district, 14–15, 50; in the lahdc, 48; in Leh district, 14–15, 50; loyalty to India, 218; marriage practices of, 140; militarization of Islamic groups, 7; Nurbakshi, 15, 196, 197, 263 n.21; on polyandry, 206– 7; sects of, 15; spread of Islam, 262–63 n.20; Sufi, 196–97, 263 n.19. See also Shi’a Muslims; Sunni Muslims Nadvi, Mohammad Omar, 196 Nagaland, 119, 244 n.2 Namgyal, Deldan, King, 32, 129 Namgyal, Deskyong, King, 126 Namgyal, Jamyang, King, 62, 158–59, 197, 244–45 n.10 Namgyal, Jigmed, King, 115 Namgyal, Saskyong, 126 Namgyal, Sengge, King, 25, 34, 197, 240 n.4 Namgyal, Tashi, King, 25, 260 n.18 Namgyal, Tshepal, King, 25, 33 Namgyal, Tshewang I, King, 34, 62, 160–61, 259–60 n.17 Namgyal Tsemo (‘‘Peak of Victory’’), 25 ‘‘Namo Namo,’’ 131 nam-sgo/sa-sgo (sky door/earth door), 58–59, 244 n.6 Nang-pa’i-tshog-grus. See lba Nangsa ‘Od ‘bum (a hundred thousand brilliant lights), 128, 129 Nangso family, 161, 259 n.16 Nangsopa, Rinchin Namgyal, 161 Narayan, Kirin, 133

299

Naropa, 62 nation/nationalism: and assimilation, 119; and Bharat Mata (Mother India), 113, 124, 224, 254 n.32; and colonial rhetoric, 111, 113; and diversity, 113; landscape/sexuality in representations of, 111, 113–16; and modernity/development vs. classical/cultural heritage, 39; movies about, 119, 253 n.23; nation vs. territory, 23; panIndianism, 254 n.32 National Archery Club, 264 n.41 National Conference Party (nc), 31, 41, 45–46, 214, 233, 243 n.43 National Home Guards, 37 Naubahar Dramatics Club, 197 navroze, 200 Nawang (Tung-pa household), 59–60, 77–78 nc. See National Conference Party Nehru, Jawaharlal: on the Aksai Chin territory, 118; on Buddhism, 265 n.3; Delhi Agreement signed by, 242 n.33; on the Indus, 227, 228–29; in/on Ladakh, 38, 227–29, 241 n.33; Ladakhi appeal to, 39; with Ladakhi leaders; ‘‘Tribal Panchsheel’’ of, 41; ‘‘Tryst with Destiny’’ speech by, 22; ‘‘Unity in Diversity’’ motto of, 116, 229 Nepal, 136, 249 n.51 New Year, 84 Nga’i Mi-tshe (My life), 128 ngan-pa, 155–56 Ngati skad (Our language), 202 ngus-mang, 138 nikah ceremony, 202 nobility (sku-drag), 155 Norberg-Hodge, Helena: Ancient Futures: Learning from Ladakh, 9, 144 Norbu Gyaltsen, 72 Notified Areas Committee, 198, 263 n.23 No Tsering, 131 Nubra, 36–37

300 Index nuclear testing (Pokhran, 1998), 22 Nurbakshi Muslims, 15, 196, 197, 263 n.21 Nyemo, 161 Nyilza Angmo, Princess, 126, 135–36 Nyima Gon, King, 31 Nyingmapa order, 98 Obeyesekere, Gananath, 76 Om mane padme hum mantra, 245 n.10 Operation Meghdoot, 41 Operation Sadbhavna (Operation Goodwill), 212 Orissi, 226 Ortner, Sherry, 79, 162, 182, 223, 261 n.1 Padmasambhava (Guru Rinpoche), 81, 126, 163, 246 n.20, 249 n.47, 262 n.14 Pakistan: India’s conflicts with, 40–41, 233–34, 266 n.9; Partition period/ independence of, 5–6, 42 Pakistan-India Peoples Forum for Peace and Democracy, 233 Panchajanya, 223 Panchayati Council, 213 Panchen Lama, 126 Pandey, Gyan, 18 Pangong lake, 120, 253 n.26 Parab, H. S., 37–38 Paramvir Chakra (Anand), 131 parks, national, 101, 251 n.70 Partition, 5–6, 36–38, 197, 219–21 pashmina (cashmere), 32, 34–35, 36 patrilocality/patrilineality, 134, 143 patriotism, 45, 51–52, 54, 217–18, 224, 242 n.42 Patwardhan, Anand: In the Name of God, 247 n.28 pdp (People’s Democratic Party), 233 peasant resistance/revolts, 77, 247–48 n.39 Pekar Wangyal, 125–26 performance: border-crossing surveillance rituals as, 57, 243 n.1; cultural, 15–16, 72, 170, 198; definitions of, 15– 16, 239 n.27; front stage vs. backstage

access by tourists, 93, 250 n.63; gender as, 104, 251 n.1; and identity formation, 16; ritual, power generated by, 234–35; women-centered, 105 Periyar caste, 259 n.15 Permanent Indus Commission, 233 Petromax lamp, 186 pha gnyen ma gnyen (a food used in rituals), 66 phalonopa caste, 158 pha-spun (a kin group), 163, 206 pha-yul (fatherland), 143 Phe dam, 235 Phuntsog Stobdan, 184, 215 Phyang, 62 phyi-pa (outsiders), 75 Pinnault, David, 201, 214 pluralism, 76, 90 pollution, 70–71, 160, 247 n.26 polo, 24–25, 198, 203, 240 n.4, 263 n.31 polyandry, 72, 74, 111, 112, 114–15, 206–7 polygyny, 206–7 porterage, 188–89, 193, 217 Powers, Tyrone, 107 Praja Sabha (State Assembly), 36 Prasad, Rajendra, 113 Prasar Bharati Broadcasting Corporation of India, 106 Pratt, Mary Louise, 111 primogeniture, 72, 74, 115, 140 proximity, 205, 222 Punjab, 119 Puri, Balraj, 53–54 Purig dialect, 206 Purigi people, 201 purity, 64–65, 70–71, 98, 160, 247 n.26 Qazmi, Mohammad Abbas, 158 Qom (Iran), 197 rabs-‘chad (childless homes), 140 race/racism, 11–12, 105, 111–12 Ra-dbang-tus-chen-zhag. See Independence Day

Index Radcliffe Award (1947), 5–6, 237–38 n.7 Radhakrishnan, Sarvepalli, 113–14, 116 Radhu, Abdul Wahid, 189, 265 n.3 radio, 177, 195–96, 198–99, 219. See also All India Radio Radio Pakistan, 198–99 Rai, Mridu, 5 Rama, 71 Ramaswamy, Sumathi, 113, 128, 254 n.32 Ramayana, 71 Ram Rath Yatra, 71, 247 n.28 Ramzan (Ramadan), 208–9 Rangar, Mohammad Akbar, 184, 185, 195, 215 Rann of Katch border resolution (1969), 233 Rao, K. V. Krishna, 45 Rassul Galwan, 184, 189 Rather, Abdul Rahim, 47 Ratnam, Mani, 254 n.30; Dil Se, 105, 119–24, 251 n.3, 253 n.23, 254 n.28, 254 n.32 Ravi river, 233 The Razor’s Edge (film; 1946), 107 The Razor’s Edge (film; 1984), 105, 107–8, 112, 251 n.3, 252 n.8 The Razor’s Edge (novel; Maugham), 107 reciprocal exchanges, 66 Redslop, Friedrich, 97 Rehmani, Muhammad Farooq, 42 reincarnation, 67–68, 246 n.20 Reis, Ria, 105, 136 Republic Day, 22, 23, 47, 48, 202, 243 n.48 Rgas-skad (Ancient lore), 202 rGyagarpa, 13 Ribbach, Samuel: Drogpa Namgyal, 97 ribo drag-sho caste, 158 rifles, 218, 265 n.42 rigs dma’-mo/rigs-ngan (lower castes), 155–56 Rig Veda, 230 Rigzin Angmo, 130 Rigzin Dolma, Queen, 144 Rigzin Spalbar, 43, 72

301

Rinpoche, Guru. See Padmasambhava rites of passage ceremonies, 17–18 ritual arrows (mda’), 157, 190 rituals, 99, 201, 251 n.69. See also specific rituals rivers, 233, 235, 266 n.9. See also Indus river Rizvi, Janet, 203, 239 n.23 Road to Ladakh, 251 n.3 Roerich, Nicholas, 97 Roja (Ratnam), 124, 253 n.23 ropes, symbolism of, 140–41 Rosaldo, Renato, 15, 251 n.69 Rovillé, Gerard, 10 Roy, Srirupa, 23 Royal Geographic Society, 5 royalty (rgyal-rigs), 154–55, 158 roza (days of fasting), 208–9 Roziali, Apo, 60, 61, 88, 92, 134, 207 Rushdie, Salman, 201 Sabri brothers, 226 sacrificial offerings, 90, 203, 250 n.58, 263–64 n.33. See also food exchanges/offerings Sadiq Ali, Master, 199–200, 218 Sakina Bi, 103–4, 133, 145–47 Samjhauta Express, 218 Samjor, 159 Samphel, Meme (Konchok Wangpo), 63, 244 n.7, 245 n.13 Samsara (Pan Nalin), 251 n.3, 255 nn.44– 45 San-tsams, 131–32, 255 n.44 Sarkissian, Margaret, 151–52 Savigliano, Marta, 193 Sax, William, 137 Sayeed, Mufti Mohammad, 226, 231, 232–33 sayyed caste, 158 Scheduled Castes Disability Act (1990), 169 Scheduled Tribe status, 11, 41, 44, 151–52, 168–70, 177, 180

302 Index Schwartz, Ronald, 234 science and masculinity, 187–88, 262 n.7 Scorcese, Martin, 106–7 seats, importance/direction of, 153–54 Section 144 prohibitions, 71–72 Seremetakis, Nadia, 142 Seven Years in Tibet (Annaud), 106–7 sexuality: in archery competitions, 192– 93; in national representations, 111, 113–16 Shaheen Dramatics Club, 197 Shakspo, Nawang Tsering, 149, 257 n.1, 261 n.28, 265 n.3 shali drag-sho caste, 158 Sham, 36–37, 62, 244–45 n.10 Sham dialect, 206 Sharma, Shanker Dayal, 44 Sheeraza Ladakh, 37 Sheikh, Abdul Ghani, 36, 37, 183–84, 194, 235, 241 n.21; ‘‘First Letter,’’ 222, 265 n.48; ‘‘The Locked Trunk,’’ 221–22; ‘‘Two Nations, One Story,’’ 222 shema (term of address for female aristocracy), 155 Sherpas, 79 Shi’a Muslims, 15, 43, 50, 53, 63, 65, 75–76, 197 shi-ston (funeral feasts), 93 shi-zan feast, 67, 69. See also funeral ceremonies Siachen glacier, 41, 238 n.8 Sialkot, 220–21 Siddharth, Gautam, 231 Sikhs, 33, 109 Silk Route (pop band), 226 Silk Route (trade route), 10, 170 Simla Accord (1972), 6 Sindhu Darshan Festival, 16, 219, 223–27, 229–35, 266 n.9 Sindhu Ghat, 224, 225–26, 230–31 Singer, Milton, 15–16 Singh, Ajat Shatru, 26, 31, 47 Singh, Gulab, 31, 33 Singh, Hari, Maharaja, 31, 36, 38

Singh, Karan, 31, 38 Singh, Ranbir, Maharaja, 35, 249 n.46 Singh, Shahid Bhagat, 29, 197 Singh, Sheo Raj, 115–16 Singh, Zorawar, 31–32 Sino-Indian war (1961–62), 10, 40 Sita, 123 Skardo, 35, 36 Skyabgon, Tshetshang Kunzang Thinle Lhundup (Skyabgon Rinpoche), 90, 248 n.40, 250 n.58 Skyan (Snow leopard), 186–87 skye-yul (birthplace), 143 skyin-’jug poetry, 105, 133–34, 137–38, 140, 142, 145–47 Skyurbuchan, 60, 62–63, 77, 150, 162, 213–14, 244 n.7 sman-mo (guardians of the ibex), 192 sngo-lha festival, 58, 87–92, 250 n.57 Snow Leopard Trails, 103 Social Boycott (1989–92), 182, 195, 243 n.53; Achinathang resistance to, 77–78; within the Inner Line, 58, 74–78, 85–87, 93, 101; by the lba, 42–50; rebellions against, 210 Social Welfare Committee, 176–77 Society for Promotion of Social Equality of Ladakh, 174–75 Sonam Angchug, 29 Sonam Dolma (P. Ladakhi), 105, 129–32, 251 n.3, 254 n.41 Sonam Norbu, 50, 52 Sonam Phuntsog, 63, 158, 245 n.12, 250 n.58, 264 n.34 Sonam Wangyal, 75, 101 Sonam Yangchen, 215 Songhay people (Niger), 251 n.69 songs, 91, 127, 133, 149, 250 n.59, 257 n.1, 257 n.4. See also music Special Areas program, 215 Special Service Bureau (ssb), 74, 247 n.36 Spiti, 158 Sports Authority of India, 215 Srangara family, 184

Index Sri Lanka, 76 Srinagar, 35, 232–33 Srinivas, Smriti, 93 Srong btsan Gampo, King, 200, 263 n.26 ssb (Special Service Bureau), 74, 247 n.36 stag-pa lha-chen (village deity), 91 Stagsang Rinpoche, 227–28 Stakna dam, 235, 253 n.18 Standstill Agreement (1947), 6 Stanzin, 89–90 Stanzin, Apo, 180 State Autonomy Report, 46–47 state formation, ritual/ceremony in, 16 State Information Department, 27 State of Jammu and Kashmir. See Jammu and Kashmir; Kashmir stitching, symbolism of, 256 n.53 stod-skad (high speech), 96 storytelling, 198–99. See also Gesar epic Sufism, 196–97, 263 n.19 Sug, Ganga, Queen, 63–64, 245 n.15 Sug, Ti, King, 63–64, 245 n.15 suhag songs, 133 Sukra, 29 Sukye Bulu, 153 Sunni Muslims (Argons), 15, 43, 44, 75–76, 189, 196. See also Argon Dartses surna (oboe), 156–57, 258 n.10 Sutlej river, 225–26, 233 Tagmachig, 173, 259 n.16 Tandon, Raveena, 253 n.20 Tantric practices, 114, 115 Tashi, 136 Tashi, Tshering, 174–75 Tashi Rabgias, 169, 257 n.1, 260 n.17 Tashi Tshomo, 144 Tashkent Accord (1966), 265 n.49 taste and class, 81, 249 n.49 taxes, 35, 39, 110 television, 106, 177, 195–96, 219 territorial demarcation vs. country/nation/state/village, 244 n.9 Thapa, Sher Jung, 131, 255 n.42

303

Tharchen, 155, 176 Thathakhan, Lord, 64, 88, 245 n.15 theater organizations, 72–73, 197–98, 247 n.31 Thiksey, 136 Thololing, 219 Thorold, W. G., 96 Thunmi Sambota, 200, 263 n.26 Thupstan Tshewang, 44–45, 48, 52, 72–73, 77, 226, 231, 232 Tibet: castes in, 258 n.11; Chinese occupation of, 9, 97, 112; as ‘‘green,’’ 252 n.12; and Ladakh, 9–10, 32; travel restrictions/spies in, 96, 112 Tibetan Book of the Dead (Bar-do thos grol), 98 Tibetan script, 202, 206 Tiger Hill, 219 time, circular vs. linear, 84 Tingmosgang, 72 Tingmosgang Treaty (1684), 32 Togldan Rinpoche (Togdan Stanpa Gyaltsen), 49, 75, 173, 214, 250 n.58 togs glu (love songs), 257 n.1 Torrens, Lieutenant-Colonel, 108–9 Touring Committees, 75 tourism, 12, 41, 44, 97–99, 170, 231 tradition, women as, 129–32 travel, 68, 187–88, 246 n.21 Tribal Advisory Councils, 41 tribal status. See Scheduled Tribe status Trigonometrical Survey of India, 5 Trishul Hall (Leh, Ladakh), 106 trong-pa (households of commoners), 155 ‘‘Tryst with Destiny’’ speech (Nehru), 22 tsha-tsha (clay tablets used in funeral ceremonies), 83 Tshering Putith, 165–66 Tshering Samphel, 72, 261 n.29 tshesh bcu (tenth day of every month), 163 Tsheshu Lhamo (‘‘the Nightingale of Ladakh’’), 165–68, 172, 260 n.21

304 Index Tshewang Dondub (bka’-blon), 62 Tshewang Norphel, 235 Tshewang Rigzin, Kalon, 124, 166 Tshewang Rinchen, Colonel, 37 Tshewang Sonam Spalbar, 62 Tsing, Anna, 14, 61 Turner, Victor, 16, 70 Turtuk village, 217–18 ‘‘Two Nations, One Story’’ (Sheikh), 222 United Sagar Associates (usa), 202 United States, 17, 18, 201 unity, spirit of, 50–55 ‘‘Unity in Diversity’’ motto, 116, 229 Urdu/Arabic script, 202, 206 Urdu language, 14, 254 n.28 usa (United Sagar Associates), 202 uxorilocality, 136 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 21–22, 30, 50, 229 Vajrapani (Boddhisatva of power), 85 Vajrayana Buddhism, 169 Vanaik, Achin, 54 van Beek, Martijn, 34, 49, 169, 241 n.31, 242 n.42, 252 n.11 ‘‘Vande Mataram’’ (Hail Motherland!), 144 veiling, 208, 255 n.46 Vigne, Godfrey, 109 Vijay, Tarun, 223–24 Vijay Thang (Achinathang), 181, 211–12 village leaders, 73 villagers, ignorance/backwardness of, perception of, 251 n.66 virilocality, 136 Voice of America, 198–99 Waddell, L. Austine, 190 Wafa, Bashir Ahmed, 183, 190–91, 200, 202, 203 Wagah-Attari passenger train, 218 Wagah, 17 Wangchuk, 89 warriors, 231–32

water (chu), 65, 205 233, 235, 266 n.9 weapons, 211, 217–18, 219 weddings: as celebrations of joy, 134; cost of, 66–67, 78, 248 n.43; and elopement, 140; farewell gestures in, 143; feasts at, 78, 140; gifts for the bride, 139– 40, 256 n.53; prewedding activities, 145–47; propagation of the house during, 164; rum served at, 81; wedding parties/witnesses, 94. See also women, as brides whiteness, privilege of, 112, 252 n.13 widows/widowers, 140–41 wildlife preservation, 101, 251 n.70, 264– 65 n.42 Wilson, Thomas, 15 witches, 127, 141 women: at archery competitions, 192, 215; attachment to others, 142–43; as brides, 132–41, 143, 145–47; British vs. Indian, 111; Buddhist vs. Muslim, 206; childless, 127–28; claims to their children, 140–41; clothing of, 142, 206; and dangerous/polluting, 136–37; distrust of, 126; domestic skills of, 138; hairstyles of, 126, 129; illicit love by, 143; labor of, 126–27; liberty of, 110–11; menstruating, 141– 42; mother-daughter relationships, 138–39; motherhood, 125–27; noble, journeys of, 135–36; nuns, 129; political activities of, 144; property rights of, 140, 144, 257 n.61; protests by, 144; sensuality of, 111; sexual harassment of, 12; shame/immodesty attributed to, 141, 257 n.56; spatial restraints on, 141–42; speech/gossip of, 142; spiritual/patriotic, 128; submissive insubordination by, 257 n.56; subordination of, 136–37, 142; in television programming/movies, 143–44; testimonies by, 105; in theaters, 143; as tradition, 129–32; travel/wandering by, 141; visibility of, 202

Index ya-do-pa (companions), 145 Yangzom, 136–37 yatra (pilgrimage), 224 Yazid, Caliph, 203, 263 n.31 Yeshes Paldan, 126 yid-‘chad (broken heart), 140 Yogmathang (Achinathang), 65, 204–13, 264 n.34 Yolmo people (Nepal), 251 n.68, 256 n.47 Young, Geoffrey Winthrop, 219 Young Men’s Buddhist Association, 74, 114–15, 161, 241 n.31 youth groups, 74

305

yul (village), 61–62, 244 n.9 yul-pa (villager), 65 yul-pa’i khrims (customs of place), 208 zang-pa, 155–56 Zangskar, 35, 36–37, 158, 161, 260 n.18 Zed-Zed, Apo, 188 zhabs gro (dance songs), 257 n.1 Zilzom, 128, 129 Zimskhang family, 161 Zohra Khatoun, Queen, 32–33 Zutshi, Chitralekha, 5, 110

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Ravina Aggarwal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. She is the editor of Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh and Into the High Ranges: The Penguin Book of Mountain Writings. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Aggarwal, Ravina. Beyond lines of control : performance and politics on the disputed borders of Ladakh, India / Ravina Aggarwal. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. isbn 0-8223-3428-3 (cloth : alk. paper) isbn 0-8223-3414-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Ladakh (India)—Politics and government. 2. Ladakh (India)—Boundaries. 3. Ladakh (India)—Social life and customs. I. Title. ds485.l2a33 2004 320.954'6—dc22

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