Building a Mountain Fortress for India: Sympathy, Imagination and the Reconfiguration of Ladakh into a Border Area
TL;DR: The authors examines the relationship between affect and the state in post-colonial India, foregrounding sympathy as a feeling that arises from the embodied encounters and interactions between the state and a local population through state-building in the Himalayas.
Abstract: This article examines the relationship between affect and the state in post-colonial India, foregrounding sympathy as a feeling that arises from the embodied encounters and interactions between the state and a local population through state-building in the Himalayas. It establishes the emergence of sympathy in the materiality of the Himalayas and in the historical conjuncture of the passage to Indian nationhood in Ladakh, which was marked by the mobilisation of the local population in the defence of the territory of India amid the first Indo-Pakistani war (1947–48). This article argues that sympathy, in leading the state to reimagine the population of Ladakh, is integral to the reconfiguration of the region into a border area and to the rethinking of the sovereignty of the Indian state at its Himalayan frontier.
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TL;DR: In this article, the authors track civil-military interactions in Kargil, located on the disputed India-Pakistan borderland, to analyze the normalization of structural violence and the production of affective regimes that defy dichotomies of resistance and submission.
Abstract: There is no doubt that military occupation of civilian spaces and lives constitutes a fundamental structural violence. This is more easily apprehended in cases where exceptional violence is wrought by security forces on civilian populations, as in the Kashmir Valley in India. How do we grasp the effects of securitization on the political subjectivity of citizen-subjects in the absence of visible violence and overt political critique? This article ethnographically tracks civil-military interactions in Kargil, located on the disputed India-Pakistan borderland, to analyze the normalization of structural violence and the production of affective regimes that defy dichotomies of resistance and submission. These affective regimes are characterized by paradoxical emotions, which are integral to securitized practices of colonization of subject populations. However, it is these very paradoxes that also lend insight into the incomplete hegemony of the military apparatus expressed in ambivalent political subjectivities.
4 citations
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors argue that large-scale transnational infrastructures, by controlling, facilitating and channelizing cross-border mobilities, have emerged as a major instrument of b/ordering space in border regions.
Abstract: Border regions worldwide have gained prominence for how nation-states order, divide and understand the world. This is increasingly made explicit in the selective management of global commercial and human flows, leading to a paradoxical development and a major dilemma for the contemporary bordering practices in border regions: that of concurrently facilitating differentiated mobility while ensuring territorial integrity, securing both territories and flows. This paper argues that large-scale transnational infrastructures, by controlling, facilitating and channelizing cross-border mobilities, have emerged as a major instrument of b/ordering space in borderlands. This is especially relevant in Asia, where transnational, cross-border connectivity infrastructure projects have mushroomed, supported by political rhetoric, big budgets and diplomatic vigour. Grounded in long-term ethnographic research, the paper scrutinizes variegated infrastructure spaces in the seemingly remote and conflict-riddled borderlands between China’s Yunnan province and northern Myanmar’s Kachin state, subject to intensive Chinese infrastructure developments since the mid-1990s, further accelerated by the launch of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) in 2015. The paper argues that infrastructures such as roads, plantations and special economic zones have started to regulate these volatile and contested borderlands more effectively than the official boundaries that delimit complex territorialities in the border region.
2 citations
01 Jan 2023
TL;DR: In this article , the authors examine India-China-Pakistan border conflicts in the Western Himalayan ice caps, and particularly focus on the ways in which these have been entwined with the region's more-than-human ecologies.
Abstract: To begin the case studies of this book, this chapter turns to the Western Himalayan ice caps. The region was once an un-bordered mosaic where people, goods, animals and water flowed through unencumbered. Its high altitude and difficult terrain made it impossible and undesirable for external powers to dominate and colonise. Nevertheless, a series of contenting empires claimed the region, and sought to draw borders across it, without actually settling in the region. This chapter examines India–China–Pakistan border conflicts in the region, and particularly focuses on the ways in which these have been entwined with the region’s more-than-human ecologies. I first look at how the environment has been alive in the process of state-making in the region. British colonial cartographers thought of mountain peaks as ideal, ‘natural’ places to draw borders. I then look at the ways in which the region was shaped by decolonization, eventually bordering and shutting off the intercommunal connections across the region. Following this, I discuss the ways in which the postcolonial states of the region have followed through on the colonial bordering logic, each seeking to take the high ground and delineate a linear border in an ecological region highly unsuited to this form of political organisation. I conclude by looking at how the environment is entangled with the conflict today. Throughout, I argue that the region’s politics have long had a deep connection to the region’s environment, and that this remains foundational to the border conflicts.
TL;DR: In this paper , the authors show that there is a growing need among Tibetan Buddhist people of the Indian Himalayan borderlands to forge a cultural unity that is Buddhist but removed from Tibet.
Abstract: ABSTRACT As the world speculates about a post-Dalai Lama scenario, what is the response among India’s borderland Buddhists? In this paper, I show that there is a growing need among Tibetan Buddhist people of the Indian Himalayan borderlands to forge a cultural unity that is Buddhist but removed from Tibet. With the decline of Tibet as a spiritual and cultural centre for Tibetan Buddhism, Himalayan Buddhist communities of India are strategically cohering around new identities and spaces that are firmly rooted in India. Given an impending future, when Buddhists around the world, and particularly in Asia, will no longer be able to depend on the figure of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama for guidance, there are concerted efforts underfoot to unite the Himalayan Buddhists of Ladakh, Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh and other border regions of India under a common platform. In this regard, research organizations, cultural associations, and educational institutions are assuming a key role. While many scholarly works have studied the role of associations and institutional spaces in the formation of a transnational identity for Indian Buddhists, this paper focuses on the transregional networks forged through cultural and educational institutions in the Himalayan border regions of India, focusing on the Delhi-based Himalayan Buddhist Cultural Association (HBCA) and other new organizations working for an Indian Himalayan Buddhist unity. I draw on my ethnographic work in Monyul, a Tibetan Buddhist cultural region in Arunachal Pradesh, Northeast India, to show how the Buddhist Monpas of Monyul are drawn into the pan-regional networks of Indian Himalayan Buddhism.
TL;DR: In this article , a multi-criterion-based analytical hierarchical processes (AHP) method was used to quantify the vulnerability of Trans-Himalayan Ladakh to natural and anthropogenic hazards such as earthquakes, landslides, snow avalanches, flash floods, cloud bursts, and border conflicts.
Abstract: The Union Territory of Ladakh, located in the northwestern Himalayan region, is highly vulnerable to natural and anthropogenic hazards like earthquakes, landslides, snow avalanches, flash floods, cloud bursts, and border conflicts. Occurrences of these disasters have significantly influenced the development and vulnerability scenario of Trans-Himalayan Ladakh. Findings reveal that despite suffering losses from natural and human-induced disasters, the region has benefited by grabbing the attention of policymakers at the national level. Consequently, long-term developments were positively impacted, reflecting infrastructural upgradation, improved transportation and communication, profoundly improving the socio-economic well-being of the people. Furthermore, post-disaster developments have managed to showcase the unique physiography and adventurous terrains of Ladakh, promoting tourism as the main economic driver in the region. The exponential growth of tourism and associated sectors have influenced the vulnerability scenario, which was quantified using the multi-criterion-based analytical hierarchical processes (AHP) method, indicating an increase in climate change-related vulnerability, followed by socio-cultural, environmental, and physical vulnerabilities. Specifically, the vulnerabilities with respect to flash floods, landslides, erratic rainfall, haphazard constructions, cultural dilution, water crisis, and changes in land use patterns have been exacerbated across the study area. The study highlights the need for effective management of these emerging vulnerabilities through proper planning to ensure long-term sustainable development goals in this environmentally fragile region.
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01 Jan 2010
97 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a materialist concept of "sympathy" was developed for the role of sympathy in the expansion of colonial rule in Papua New Guinea, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn.
Abstract: What is the role of sympathy in imperial state building? In this essay, inspired by the empiricist philosopher David Hume and the anthropologist Nancy Munn, I develop a materialist concept of sympathy in an effort to cast new light on the expansion of colonial rule. I deploy this concept in an analysis of reports written just before WWII by officials charged with extending the Netherlands Indies government's reach within western New Guinea. Along with gifts and outright acts of coercion, these officials made sympathy into a central component of their practices. Instead of avoiding the natives' gaze, they sought out more or less intimate moments of identification with their subjects; they tried to adopt the Papuans' perspective to reform Papuan ways. In teasing out the causal force of sympathy, as these officials viewed it, I make causal claims of my own about the impact of this experience of empire on the Netherlands' subsequent policy in New Guinea. In doing so, I advocate an approach to anthropological analysis that is empirical, if not empiricist, one that insists on the power of circumstances to shape the imagination, and the power of the imagination to shape the world.
92 citations
TL;DR: In this article, a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia were analyzed and used to explore the dynamics of empathy and intimacy that are necessary for the production and validation of fake documents and letters during conflict.
Abstract: This essay looks at the social, aesthetic, and violent life of fake documents. It suggests that fakes and forgeries, both as a general phenomenon and in the specific context of communal violence, offer a useful analytical site for an investigation into the relationship between empathy, power, and authenticity. Based on an analysis of a series of false letters that appeared in the lead-up to violent conflict in Indonesia, I approach the politics and poetics of forgery by setting the fake letters within a broader political discourse about falsity in Indonesia and beyond. Exploring the dynamics of empathy and intimacy that are necessary for the production and validation of fake documents and letters during conflict, I suggest that, contrary to received wisdom, empathy may be closely associated with violence. I also argue that empathy arises within particular political ontologies and specific forms of cultural intimacy that circulate in and beyond nation-states. An ethnographic enquiry into the social life of fake documents is therefore a useful starting point for an inquiry into the emotional aspects of instigation as well as for a political ethnography of empathy.
49 citations