Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India (review)

Before the brief but fierce fighting in 1999 along the Line of Control separating Indian and Pakistani controlled areas of Jammu and Kashmir, the Ladakh region was not particularly well-known to the general public in India. This conflict—India's first televised war—projected Ladakh and particularly the Kargil district, onto a national stage. Yet it did so while largely relegating Ladakh's population to a minor supporting role for the Indian troops who were sent up the slopes to recapture the peaks occupied by Pakistani intruders. Ladakh was represented mostly as a barren and empty wasteland, a backdrop for patriotism and heroic acts of bravery performed by Indian troops. In fact, the battle had little to do with Ladakh or its people per se, but much with Kashmir proper, the hotly contested "unfinished business" of the Partition of the subcontinent in 1947. Even the wars fought in Ladakh, it seems, are not particularly concerned with the land or its people, except as symbols of larger national agendas, although the impact of global, regional, and national political agendas is felt only too clearly in the villages and towns dotting this sparsely populated region.

Ever since the region was incorporated into the state of Jammu and Kashmir in the 1840s, Ladakhi political leaders have argued that the region was being neglected. Although not ruled directly by the British, Kashmir's political system was built on representation of communities defined by religion, and from the 1930s there has been growing political tension between the majority Buddhist and minority Muslim communities in Ladakh. After repeated and at times violent agitations for separation from (Muslim majority) Kashmir, Ladakh was granted so-called Autonomous Hill Development Councils in 1995, whose power was significantly increased in 2002, giving the region a considerable degree of internal autonomy. Today, tensions between the religious communities remain high, though mostly invisible to casual observers and to the many domestic and foreign tourists.

Ladakh, then, is a region where borders—natural, political and cultural—play a significant role in shaping local lives and perspectives. Ladakh also challenges the received frameworks of scholarly divisions of labour: it has been studied predominantly from the perspective of Tibetan studies, although it has been part of South Asian and specifically Kashmiri and Indian political contexts. Until the 1990s, very little scholarly attention had been given to Muslims living in Ladakh, although they constitute around half the population, just as hardly any research has been carried out in Kargil District, except for the overwhelmingly Buddhist Zangskar region. Ravina Aggarwal's important book is part of an important shift in scholarship on Ladakh that places the region and its people firmly in a South Asian, Indian context, a development she herself has helped to promote through her earlier writings.

Based on extensive and repeated fieldwork in different parts of the region over more than a decade, Aggarwal sets out to describe and analyze how identity and belonging are constituted and contested historically along and across the borders and boundaries demarcating social, political and economic landscapes and communities of Ladakh. She does so in part to create an analytical and ethnographic space for local perceptions and local agency, reclaiming a centrality for the lives and perceptions of people otherwise routinely treated and depicted as marginal. In this sense, Aggarwal's book is firmly rooted in the anthropological tradition of writing from the margins, for those whose voices find little space in the corridors of power. Himalayan societies with close cultural and religious ties with Tibet have often been described in romanticized terms, projecting onto these communities western—as well as southern—dreams and desires of peaceful communities living in balance with nature. Aggarwal's often passionate account of Ladakhi society and politics offers a much more realistic vision of how people in Ladakh live together and strive to meet the challenges of rapidly changing socio-economic circumstances and a...