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‘She says herself, “I have no future”’:love, fate and territory in Leh District,IndiaSara Smith aa University of North Carolina – Geography, Campus Box 3220,Chapel Hill, 27599-3220, US

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To cite this article: Sara Smith (2011): ‘She says herself, “I have no future”’: love, fate andterritory in Leh District, India, Gender, Place & Culture: A Journal of Feminist Geography, 18:4,455-476

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‘She says herself, “I have no future”’: love, fate and territory in LehDistrict, India

Sara Smith*

University of North Carolina – Geography, Campus Box 3220, Chapel Hill 27599-3220, US

How and to what extent can love and desire be managed as factors in geopoliticalstrategy? This research expands the subject matter of geopolitical analysis and usesfeminist tactics to highlight the contingent and embodied practices through whichgeopolitical strategies materialize in seemingly unlikely venues. In the Leh District ofIndia’s Jammu and Kashmir State, political conflict between Buddhists and Muslimshas been articulated in part through women’s bodies. Buddhists and Muslims areproducing an embodied religious boundary through the prevention of inter-religiousmarriages. While in this case love has the potential to challenge political narratives, anytransgressive force is blunted by the separation of intermarrying couples or theirexpulsion from the territory of Leh District. Drawing on interviews, survey data andparticipatory oral histories in Leh District, this article seeks to destabilize andcomplicate the global geopolitical gaze by bringing the corporeal, desiring and desiredbody to the center of analysis with an examination of how women cope with, resist oractively participate in embodied geopolitical strategy.

Keywords: feminist geopolitics; political geography; territory; South Asia; marriage;bodies

‘I fell in love’, we say, the passive voice suggesting a compulsion unstructured by rational

concerns. Our desires may be intertwined with practices of power and hegemonic

discourses of sexuality, but the love stories we tell one another often describe surrender to

a giddy lapse in reason. In the Leh District of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State (J&K),

marriage between the Buddhist majority and Muslim minority is socially regulated due to

the politicization of religious identity. Those who fall in love across this religious

boundary (and those who gossip about such lovers) describe desire as a force that can only

be partially managed – sometimes with disastrous results. The need to manage disorderly

desire emerges from the geopolitical anxieties brought on by J&K’s tenuous territorial

status and the historical structuring of politics around religious identity: it is only one

symptom of the geopolitical territorialization of bodies. This research traces how love is

made geopolitical and to what extent geopolitical territories can be defined and defended

through the disciplining of desire.

Political and social anxiety about desire derives in part from a reprosexual reading of

the body that binds sexuality to reproduction and birth.1 In the logic of geopolitical

strategy, territories can be made or unmade through population. Who reproduces with

whom, and how much, is critical to the demographic composition of territories and the

constitution of armies. In a postcolonial context where borders were drawn on the basis of

ISSN 0966-369X print/ISSN 1360-0524 online

q 2011 Taylor & Francis

DOI: 10.1080/0966369X.2011.583344

http://www.informaworld.com

*Email: shsmith1@email.unc.edu

Gender, Place and Culture

Vol. 18, No. 4, August 2011, 455–476

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bodies marked according to religious identity, marriage and reproduction are rendered

immanently geopolitical. On the margins of the nation-state, J&K is perceived as

particularly vulnerable, to be gained or lost in part through population – with each voter

marked by their religious identity. This anxiety over the demographic makeup of the state

renders the body a key site of contest, and the gendered nature of this territorialization

highlights women’s bodies in particular as contested territory. During the partition of

South Asia, this geopolitical instrumentalization of the female body played out in the

political use of rape and other forms of violence.2 In Ladakh, this logic is replicated in

more mundane discussions about whom to marry and how many children to bear.

Leh District is part of the former independent kingdom of Ladakh. Together, the

population of Leh District and neighboring Kargil District is split between Buddhists and

(mainly Shia) Muslims; most Buddhists live in Leh and most Muslims live in Kargil (see

Figure 1 for context). Leh and Kargil residents refer to themselves as Ladakhis or

Ladagspa, and speak Ladakhi – a dialect of Tibetan. As ethnic, linguistic, and religious

minorities within J&K State and India, Ladakhis have repeatedly framed their political

demands in the language of difference. Since the 1930s, the primary difference used in

these framings has frequently, though not exclusively, come to be religious identity.

Alongside complex alliances and internal factions, religious identity is expected to inform

voting in Leh and in Kargil (Aggarwal 2004; Bertelsen 1996, 1997; Bhan 2006; Gutschow

2006; Tonyot 2009; Van Beek 2000, 2001). In J&K, contests for voters are always already

geopolitical: the status of the territory itself is the constant referent for local political

questions. In Leh District, the politicization of religious identity has been inseparable from

a concurrent politicization of marriage, fertility and the body.

Feminist geopolitics provides a revealing passage into these practices by enabling us to

understand love, intimacy and the erosion of inter-religious marriage as geopolitical: when

population becomes part of a territorial struggle, the body itself becomes a geopolitical

Figure 1. Context map showing Leh town and Leh District. Map produced by Kevin S. Fox.

456 S. Smith

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site. In this article, I integrate scholarship on love, desire and inter-religious/inter-caste

marriage into this feminist geopolitics framework in order to trace the paths through which

the transgressive potential of desire is caught and managed in geopolitical space so that

love becomes itself a disciplinary tool.

Feminist geopolitics, love and desire

Feminist geopolitics begins with the premise that territorial struggle and geopolitical

discourse cannot be divorced from the visceral and embodied forms of violence through

which they are manifest. Geopolitics, always about maps, is also about bodies: caught up in

war, constrained by boundaries, expelled from territories, counted or uncounted, desired or

shunned, merging or being made discrete. Hyndman (2001) and Dowler and Sharp (2001)

asked us to attend to the material manifestation of geopolitical practices. Contributing to

this project, Hyndman (2007), Secor (2001), F. Smith (2001) and others have worked

through global security in sites such as Iraq, Turkey, and Germany to demonstrate the

crucial ways that everyday practices make geopolitics and how geopolitics is manifest in the

meaning and counting of differently marked bodies (soldiers, civilians, Iraqis, Americans).

In feminist geopolitics, then, we find a rejection of the masculinist privileging of the

national and global scales as sites of conflict (Dowler and Sharp 2001; Hyndman 2001,

2004, 2007; Secor 2001; Sharp 2007; S. Smith 2009; Staeheli 2001). As demonstrated by

the ‘Feminist Engagements with the Geopolitical’ sessions at the 2009 Association of

American Geographers meeting, these responses take shape in nuanced case studies and

broader theoretical gestures that dovetail nicely with the turn towards more visceral and

everyday geographies of the state (Pain and Smith 2008; Gregory and Pred 2007).

The expansion of the subject matter and methodologies of geopolitical inquiry allows

us to read intimate negotiations about sex and birth as territorial struggles. Struggles for

territory are not contests over bounded state space alone, but are also struggles over the

bodies that populate that space. Through their embodied participation in projects that

reject or embrace state or national territorialization, the lives of citizens, refugees and

residents are imbued with geopolitical meaning. In Leh District, the women and men that I

interviewed spoke about marriage and children not only as individual and emotional

choices, but also as decisions inflected with geopolitical concerns. The possibility of desire

across religious boundaries was described as both an inevitable occurrence and as

geopolitically ‘impossible’. How then to understand the political work of love and desire?

For Freud (1962), desire is integral to the formation of self and society; in our forced

separation from our mother and sublimated desire for her, our striated self is born, part

against part. Our violently repressed desires give birth to an unconscious that determines

our desires, but which we can never fully know; the foundation of society is the law built to

restrain this force. Forced to un-know our desires, we are caught in a dialectic of desire:

lack and the paternal law (Butler 1987). Foucault (1978) eviscerates Freud’s unconscious

id with the declaration that there is no prediscursive desire. While both Butler and

Foucault find subversive potential in erotic play, for Foucault there is no authentic desire

that can be recovered and freed. Our understandings of our own subjectivity, wants and

needs are thoroughly imbricated within the deployment of power, so much so that the

question of a true self or true desire becomes irrelevant. Desire, then, is not liberation and

does not speak back to mechanisms of power. In Butler’s (1987) reading, Foucault’s

refusal to be caught between these two forces – desire and the law – represents his attempt

to escape the dialectical power play of desire and repression. While I am reluctant to

completely abandon the notion of desire as a potentially transgressive force, Foucault’s

Gender, Place and Culture 457

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assertion that part of the management of desire is its incitement and the elicitation of

confession is critical to understanding the geopolitical work that the idea of love and desire

performs in Ladakh.

Love and desire play important roles as products and mechanisms of empire (Stoler

1995, 2002; Young 1995; Deleuze and Guattari 1983), as projections of racist fantasy

(McClintock 1995; Nast 2000), and as emotions that reorient the self in relation to the

nation (Ahmed 2004). These deployments of love and desire derive from Freudian or

Foucauldian framings of repression or incitement. Nast upends Freud’s mapping of the

psyche by suggesting that his psychoanalytic approach replicates its own uncomfortable

unconscious desires through the formation of a normalized, oedipal family: portrayed as

sexual threats, black men are punished for the white fantasy of the mother as an object of

desire. This oedipal fantasy maps out spatially in the psyche and in segregated spaces

intended to protect the white paternal family. Deleuze and Guattari (1983) frame Freud’s

unconscious as the production of lack and its complement, thousands of desiring-

machines, and Nast reinvigorates this use of Freud with the modification to ‘racist

oedipalization’ (Nast 2000, 222).

Young (1995) likewise finds in Deleuze and Guattari a cogent means to rethink the

colonial project as ‘an agonistic narrative of desire’ tied to state paternalism and its

rendering of the body as a product tied to heterosexual marriage. Ahmed (2004, 124) picks

up this point in her work on love. Love relationships are about reproducing femininity and

the national ideal. ‘“Reproducing” the race’ and heterosexual love become central to what

one owes the nation: ‘Making the nation is tied to making love in the choice of an ideal

other . . . who can allow the reproduction of the nation as ideal in the form of the future

generation’ (Ahmed 2004, 124). Feminist scholars working in South Asia have been at the

forefront in addressing symbolic and governmental conflations of nation and body and the

gendered processes through which this correlation is made material.

Biopolitics, national bodies and modern love in India

Above all, what was broken up which was of the highest importance was something very vitaland that was the body of India. That produced tremendous consequences, not only those thatyou saw, but those that you cannot imagine, in the minds and souls of millions of humanbeings. (Jawaharlal Nehru on the partition of India and Pakistan, quoted in Krishna 1994, 83)

In their reading of ‘sectarian demography’ in Northern Ireland, Anderson and

Shuttleworth (1998) observe that the racialization of religion and concomitant reading

of local territory as a microcosm of the nation leads to a politics of population, loss and

retreat. In this context, commentators on an Ulster Television show evoke a Catholic

demographic threat: ‘are [Protestant] numbers down and consequently is their number

up? . . . Catholics who aspire to a United Ireland may soon outbreed them.’ In 1920,

Northern Ireland was formed from six of Ulster’s nine counties, ‘to give it a “safe” two to

one majority of Protestants, assumed to be British unionists, over Catholics, assumed to be

Irish nationalists’ (Anderson and Shuttleworth 1998, 188). As they observe, this

headcounting, so familiar in South Asia, is not only dangerous, but flawed on two

additional counts: it belies a long history of intermarriage and conversion, and it assumes

that religion, national identity and political views are co-determined.

Anderson and Shuttleworth (1998) point to scalar registers of territoriality: a particular

building or site for a parade becomes symbolic of the nation. Likewise, Krishna observes

that the postcolonial cartographic anxiety expressed in Indian nationalism is manifest at a

range of sites, and, as both Krishna (1994) and V. Das (1995) have evocatively observed,

458 S. Smith

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this anxiety finally comes to rest on bodies. Describing a soldier’s death on Siachen

Glacier, Krishna (1994, 68) notes, ‘the Indo-Pakistan border, here as elsewhere, is literally

being drawn in blood’. Drawing on De Certeau (2002), Krishna (1994, 89) claims a special

kind of embodied violence plays out on the borders of the nation, in which the residents of

border areas are read as ‘unconsciously recalcitrant’ by the Indian state, and that ‘rendered

as synecdochical organs on a larger body politic (“the eyes and ears”) people in the border

area are thus literally reduced to abstractions less than human’.

The 1947 division of the subcontinent into India, Pakistan and Bangladesh (at that time

East Pakistan) meant that these three states were premised from birth on an intimately

political link between each body (marked and counted according to religious identity) and

the territory that they inhabit. These borders are drawn based on biopolitical calculations:

‘So after a first seizure of power over the body in an individualizing mode, we have a

second seizure of power that is not individualizing but, if you like, massifying, that is

directed not at man-as-body but man-as-species’ (Foucault 2003, 243). In classic

governmental fashion, the management of population has been both extensive (inventoried

in censuses, subject to national planning) and intimate (family planning as an intervention

at the site of the body, the enlistment of the family in the project of modernity). This

policing was prefigured in the tragedy of partition, in which bodies, and women’s bodies in

particular, as several scholars have elegantly and movingly argued, became symbols of the

nations-in-formation (Butalia 2000; V. Das 1995; Menon and Bhasin 1998). When women

became signs for the nation ‘through which men communicate with each other’ (V. Das

1995, 56), their rights, needs and lives became secondary to their symbolic value to the

nation. Describing the more recent sectarian violence in Gujarat, Oza (2007) notes the

particular use of rape as symbolic dishonor, ‘since women embody the site of regeneration

and culture’.

Bacchetta (2000) understands the demolition of the Babri Masjid in 1992 as the

culmination of Hindu nationalists’ reconfiguration of the mosque as a symbol of Muslim

male sexual aggression targeting the (Hindu, feminine) nation. The sexual violence that

followed that event was an extension of the nationalist logic of purification and domination

that the mosque’s destruction signified. These events are themselves rooted in British

colonial constructions of gender and sexuality, which relied on hypermasculinized and

hyperfeminine apparitions of Muslim and Hindu identity to justify British rule. The

destruction of the mosque reveals a spatial strategy to conflate, ‘the gendered and sexed

body, territory, the temple and the mosque, the nation, and relations of domination and

subordination’ (Bacchetta 2000, 279).

Exploring more mundane manifestations of these subtexts, Puri (1999) writes that

middle- and upper-class women are expected to embody and defend national cultural

identity through their sexuality. In her Delhi interviews, stereotypes of sexual repression

fall apart, but links between ‘heteronormativity, nationalisms, and transnational

hegemonic codes’ place women’s desire at the service of the nation by framing it against

western sexuality (Puri 1999, 2). Discourses about family and kinship dovetail with state

and nation making to legitimize sexual governance (Mody 2008). Chowdhry (2007, 1),

studying inter-caste and inter-religious marriages in rural Haryana, suggest that a

postcolonial social tension is ‘best reflected in issues connected with marriages that have

gone against the customary practices and cultural norms of rural society’. When men and

women marry across caste lines it is viewed as a challenge to power structures in the

village and usually results in violence or death intended to deter future instances.

In these cases, the media, the state and cultural representations such as film all play a

contingent role. The modern state, presumed to be the protector of individual rights, emerges

Gender, Place and Culture 459

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in these stories as a complex site at which colonial and patriarchal power structures are both

reinforced and potentially resisted. Chowdhry argues that on the whole, the justice system in

India today perpetuates colonial and patriarchal power structures and ‘criminalizes female

sexuality’ as an inherently transgressive force. In its denial of autonomy, the state, ‘imposes

an identity on her that is not her own. This collusion of the family, community, and state ends

in tragedy’ (Chowdhry 2007, 14). Echoing V. Das (1995) on women’s symbolic value to the

nation being prioritized over their desires, Chowdhry finds that in the case of inter-caste and

inter-religious marriages, courts selectively accept evidence from women and send them

back to their natal homes even when this places them in danger.

Mody’s (2008) ethnographic work with love-marriage couples affirms that the idea

that an ‘authentic “Indian marriage” is an arranged marriage’ is a serious political project

that produces and enables specific forms of violence (Mody 2008, 22). Rather than being

peripheral, this kind of political work is ‘central to the reproduction of ideas about the

modern, virile and globally successful Indian nation and serve to justify an even greater

vigilance by the state, communities and families towards “sexual governance”’ (23).

C. Gupta (2009) finds a similar theme linking campaigns launched by the Arya Samj in the

1920s and more recent assertions unfolding today that accuse Muslims of a ‘Love Jihad’.

For Gupta, instances of ‘transgressive love’ complicate homogenizing narratives of

communal identity by introducing women’s sexuality, needs and desires. Further afield,

Nagar’s (1998, 2000) ethnographic work in Dar es Salaam finds that the intersections of

race, caste and religion play out on the regulation of women’s bodies and reinforce

demands for sexual purity.

In this valuable work on the meanings of sexuality, love and love-marriage, the body

emerges as a key site for national identity. In the case study below, I will build on this

problematization of love by engaging with the ways that the idea of love and desire collide

with political and territorial practices.

How love became dangerous: modernity and irrepressible, impossible love3

Question: So, your children have already married, but if one of them had wanted to marry aMuslim, would that be ok?

Nilza:4 I would beat them and bring them back.

With this offhand remark, Nilza describes common practice in inter-religious elopements.

Nilza is a Buddhist woman in her fifties, but both Shia and Sunni Ladakhis expressed

similar sentiments. Even if families were privately willing to accept such a marriage, the

extent of societal disapproval makes such a position almost unimaginable. Some form of

physical violence or separation5 is the expected (and perhaps the only acceptable)

response to such a situation. While marriage between those of different religions is

protected by the Indian constitution, in the Leh courthouse the Ladakhis who represent the

state would not sign the marriage certificate of an intermarrying couple: to do so would

invite intervention from the families, as well as Muslim and Buddhist leaders. As the legal

sanction of a Muslim–Buddhist marriage is effectively impossible within the territory

policed by Ladakhi religious and political organizations, couples are most often stopped as

they flee the district to Delhi or Srinagar to marry. As one Buddhist man in love with a

Muslim woman informed me plaintively, the Indian constitution matters little:

individuals’ contact with the state is only through capillary sites (A. Gupta 1995).

Out of 73 women (24 Buddhists, 24 Sunni Muslims and 25 Shia Muslims) asked what

should happen in the case of intermarriage, 54 women believed it should be prevented, 11

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believed it should be allowed, and eight did not feel able to answer the question.6 What

makes the answers startling is that among these women, more than 80% have close

relatives of the ‘other’ religion – within one or two generations.7 Until the 1980s,

occasional marriages between Buddhists and Muslims occurred without much incident.

The majority of those with whom I spoke had a mother, father, aunt, uncle, grandfather or

grandmother who had been born as a member of the other religion. These relatives usually

maintain close ties with their families of origin – and though they usually converted to the

religion of their marital family, this was not always the case. One woman, for example,

described her mother as being Buddhist at home, and Muslim when she went to visit her

natal family. This kind of blurring is no longer possible for those making marital choices

today. There has been a rapid disentangling of family trees.

Motherland and fatherland, aside from their other historical connotations, suggest that eachnation is a grand genealogical tree, rooted in the soil that nourishes it. By implication, it isimpossible to be a part of more than one tree. Such a tree evokes both temporal continuity ofessence and territorial rootedness. (Malkki 1992, 28)

What do these marriages, and the fuss that is made over them, have to do with

geopolitics? For many of those I spoke with, particularly those who came of age before the

Buddhist–Muslim split of the 1980s, marriage was seen as integral to the practices of

geopolitics. Several residents of Leh pointed to the close relationship as one reason Leh

was spared the carnage other parts of India experienced on partition. ‘Muslims and

Buddhists have blood relations. We cannot be separated from each other on the basis of

faith’, I was told, and a Sunni Muslim man in his seventies who recalled partition told me,

‘Because of the relationships, nobody so much as pinched us. Part of the reason is that the

roots of many of the Muslims are Buddhist.’

The disentangling of family trees is indicative of a process in which bodies themselves

have become territory. In the arborescent nature of nationalism described by Malkki

(1992), family trees and the rootedness of the nation in a particular territory are linked.

Seen both as symbols of identity and as instruments through which control of electoral

territory can be managed (because Muslim bodies are expected to mean Muslim votes and

Buddhist bodies are expected to equal Buddhist votes), counting becomes crucial. Each

body must thus be distinguishable: any hint of the rhizome (Deleuze and Guattari 1987)

challenges this equation, and families themselves must be reorganized to fit the

arborescent model. This requires shifts in the management of love and desire. In Ladakh,

desire emerges as both a repressed and an irrepressible force; in the case study that follows

I attempt to hold in tension Foucault’s desire as a product of power with the desire as force

that is espoused in different ways by Freud (1962) and Deleuze and Guattari (1983). In

formulating this approach I have drawn on helpful readings by Butler (1987), Stoler (1995,

2002) and Young (1995).

Historical context

Even before the partition of India at independence in 1947, religion was beginning to take

on political salience in the princely state of J&K. The 1930s witnessed the creation of

social welfare organizations in Ladakh by each of the major religious groups. The

precursors to today’s influential Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA), including the

Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA), were formed at that time.8 Sunni Muslims

formed the Anjuman Moin-ul Islam and Shia Muslims created the Anjuman-e Imamia.

These steps prefigured not only the political use of religion, but also the impending

territorial struggle for women’s bodies. To make Ladakhi Buddhism conform to global,

Gender, Place and Culture 461

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rather than localized, practices, polyandry was banned in 1941 and primogeniture in 1943.

There is some evidence that the removal of these checks by the YMBA and later the LBA

was part of a program to enable the Buddhist population to compete with the Muslim

population (Van Beek 2000, 2004; Gutschow 2006).9

According to elderly informants, until the early twentieth century it was common for

Buddhist families to bring in one bride to marry two or more brothers. Under this system,

the household remained contained – with all the brothers pooling land and resources.

Bringing new land under cultivation was nearly impossible given the arid climate that

renders agriculture completely dependent on a finite resource – the glacier-fed streams.

Buddhist families also frequently sent a son to become a monk at one of the local

monasteries. Ladakhis commonly assume that these practices provided natural limits to

population growth as well as an oversupply of marriageable Buddhist women. Combined

with an assumption that Sunni Muslims, as traders and businessmen, were better-off

financially than Buddhist farmers, these practices are discussed as one reason for frequent

marriages between Buddhist women and Sunni Muslim men. Some women became nuns,

even though this did not have the same status or necessarily entail monastic life, as many

nuns remained at home contributing labor to the family economy.10 After the

reformulation of Buddhist marriage and inheritance norms in the 1930s and 1940s, the

next serious steps toward the political regulation of love and babies were not to come for

another 40 years.

The 1980s were a time of political upheaval. Since before independence, Ladakhis had

made several attempts to gain autonomy from the princely state of J&K, using the

language of cultural difference.11 As van Beek observes (2001), Kashmiri resentment of

India is mirrored by some Ladakhis’ sense of Kashmir as a colonizing power. Accusing the

state government of unfair distribution of resources, neglect of the region and

discriminatory hiring, Ladakhis argued that their geographic, linguistic and religious

differences give them the right to their own administration. Although there were hints of

communalism in 1969, it was not until 1989 that the use of religion as a mobilizing factor

became hegemonic in this struggle. Emergent unrest in the Kashmir valley provided a

backdrop for Ladakhi Buddhists to get the attention of the central government, and the

LBA once again demanded autonomy from the state of J&K.12

The LBA employed a radical new tactic – conflating religious and political identity, a

social boycott was imposed on Ladakhi Sunni Muslims, accusing them of benefiting from

preferential treatment handed out by the Muslim-dominated state government.13 The use

of the social boycott is defended by those who saw it as a necessary evil and derided by

those who interpret it as the most cynical of political strategies. These opinions are not

necessarily drawn on religious lines; some Muslims sympathize with the Buddhist strategy

and some Buddhists express regrets over the series of events. This social boycott, which

Ladakhi Shia Muslims soon accepted in solidarity with the Sunnis, prohibited contact

between Buddhists and Muslims. Shopping at Muslim stores, inviting Muslim friends and

relatives to dinners, weddings or funerals were forbidden under threat of monetary fines or

violence. The boycott was accompanied by mass demonstrations and scattered incidents of

violence – Muslim houses were burned in three villages near Leh, and the Kashmiri police

shot and killed four Ladakhis – three Buddhist demonstrators in the temple in Leh bazaar

and a Sunni Muslim woman mistaken for an arsonist on the night that houses were burned

in Thikse.

The boycott lasted from 1989 to 1992, when a truce was negotiated between Ladakhi

Buddhists and Muslims, and the representatives of Leh District were promised a local

governing body to handle the administration of everything but security. The Ladakh

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Autonomous Hill Development Council was installed in 1995. In the wake of the

agreement, an informal and unwritten deal was made to prevent intermarriage between

Buddhists and Muslims. Everyone I interviewed for this project knew of this arrangement:

in such a case, each side is responsible for separating the couple and retrieving their own

wayward son or daughter. Political and religious leaders tell me the deal is crucial both in

order to prevent arguments or demonstrations due to inter-religious marriage, and in order

to keep in equilibrium the population of unmarried youth, which is described as a balance

sheet. If, for example, Buddhist women were to marry Muslim men, there would be

‘leftover women’ on the Muslim side (it is inevitably the women who are described as

being leftover). The concern about balance is tied to conversion, babies and the

assumption that a woman and her future children will take on the religious identity of the

husband. Part of the reason that marriage outside the religious community is considered

problematic is that it will result in an increase in population on what is perceived to be

‘the other side’. This logic is one justification for the territorialization of bodies and

desire.14

It is important to note the assumptions that underlie this territorialization of religious

identity, women’s bodies and electoral politics are shot through with contradictions.

Hence, the policing of the Buddhist–Muslim boundary and the politicization of religious

identity form a background for complex and ever-shifting loyalties and coalition politics

(Aggarwal 2004; Van Beek 2001; Bhan 2006). The creation and subsequent dissolution of

the Ladakh Union Territory Front, the 2007 split in the LBA leadership, tensions between

rural and urban leaders in Leh District, and increasing infighting between Shia factions in

Kargil politics (Bhan 2006, 2009; R. Gupta 2009) all indicate that religious identity is only

one marker of political significance in Ladakh. It is the geopolitical importance of

religious identity as a historical determinant of borders in this particular postcolonial state

that renders it a key point of contention in the policing of bodies in the region.

The impossibility of intermarriage

In the winter of 2008, my research assistant, Hasina, and I were walking back to the bus

stop in a village near Leh when she encouraged me to stop at one last house. The mother of

the Sunni household had a headache, but her 19-year-old daughter volunteered to talk to

me. She was less reticent than many of the young women we spoke with that day – and

also wore her headscarf in a modern and careful style that few adopt. Aisha told me she has

a friendly relationship with her many Buddhist relatives and that her own mother was born

Buddhist. At this point, her mother smiled wanly from the corner, but Aisha’s younger

brother did not turn away from the drama he was watching on TV. Aisha owes her

existence to a marriage that blurred religious boundaries, but she was unequivocal in

stating that such marriages were better prevented today. In the past, she told me, because

individuals had less knowledge of their own religions, they were less able, and less

compelled, to protect them. Today was another matter.

Aisha’s case, and the manner in which she connected knowledge, literacy and

segregated marriage are not unusual. This rigid categorization was repeatedly mentioned

in interviews, as links were made between literacy, wealth, competition, education,

geography and embodied boundary making, as in this interview with a Sunni Muslim

woman.

Faeda: Whatever Muslim house you go in, you won’t find one in which there isn’t a Buddhistgrandma. It was later, that happened, that Muslims weren’t able to bring Buddhist girls andBuddhists weren’t able to bring Muslim girls. In the past, we didn’t have that.

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Faeda thinks that today marriages between Buddhists and Muslims should be ‘blocked’.

Asked if intermarriage brought people together, Faeda replied:

Faeda: Yes, but in the past, people were honest and good. The divisive talking, ‘him, that, me,this’, they didn’t have that... Nowadays, where will you find people like that? Nowadays,everyone is looking after his or her own wellbeing.

Question: Why is there this difference?

Faeda: In the past, people stayed in their own country [yul ],15 and they only knew about theirown country, they didn’t arrive in far away places. Now they have studied, and they have seenthe outside countries. Understanding that, seeing others not eating on one plate, seeing themfighting, seeing those faraway countries . . . All the youth have been to all kinds of places, andthat is why conflict has come in this country. Otherwise, if we say Kache [Muslim],16 withinit, there are 72 types. Nurbaksh, Shia, Sunni, Balti. In the beginning . . . we didn’t even sayKache and Balti. Seeing the outside world, they have understood, this is our religion. In thepast, we didn’t know which one was true.

Like Buddhist Nilza and the young Aisha, 60-year-old Faeda posits that there is a link

between religious knowledge and exclusionary practices. She also maps geography onto

the formation of distinct communities, suggesting that categories of rigid difference were

imported when travel to places outside Ladakh became more common. Rashid, a hard-

working father of three in his fifties, similarly suggests that literacy and knowledge mean

that, today, marriage between Buddhists and Muslims could destroy Ladakh.

Rashid: Today, that kind [of marriage] is very, very difficult. So difficult. Today, each personhas come to understand his or her own religion. Before, because they didn’t understand, theygot along nicely. Nowadays since people understand, it has become difficult. If that happens,there will be a demonstration or a riot, so it is not possible today. There will be a disturbanceand it will destroy our country.

Question: Didn’t that happen in the past?

Rashid: In the past, people were kind and pure. Because of that, whether a Buddhist went witha Mussalman or a Mussalman went with a Buddhist, nothing happened. In the past, people hadreally clean hearts and that is why nothing happened. Now we have a few too many literatepeople, and there are more people with bad intentions.

This narrative travels along problematic tropes in Ladakh and elsewhere: that the past

was a simpler time when people got along. The right set of questions reveal a series of

fissures in stories about past contentment – in the memories of Leh residents in their eighties

and nineties today, class and caste lines were quite rigid, and debt, malnutrition and illness

were constant threats. Thus, while love between Buddhists and Muslims might not have been

strictly policed, marriages were structured by patterns of wealth and by caste. There is a

Ladakhi saying that you should look for a bride or groom, ‘with a house underneath the

palace and fields beneath the reservoir’. The phrase, used by several informants when I asked

what was considered important in choosing a spouse during their parents or grandparents’

generations, signifies political influence and high status (geographically marked as the house

under the palace)17 and wealth (fields easy to irrigate). In the case of intermarriage, claims of

a more fluid boundary between Buddhists and Muslims in the past are borne out by the

degree to which residents of Leh are related by blood across religious lines and continue to

maintain those relationships through wedding invitations and holiday visits. In suggesting a

hardening of barriers to inter-religious marriage, I indicate a fragmenting and realignment of

acceptability. I am not arguing that before 1989 marriage was unregulated, but rather that

the criteria used to determine what is and is not acceptable has changed.

The configuration of borders based on religious identity and the acute awareness of the

implications of population in J&K in particular mean that religious identity is read through

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the lens of territory, while other forms of difference such as caste or class are enunciated

differently. The ways that caste and class backgrounds matter are shifting slightly to match

emergent economic forms. While others would contest this assessment, Dolkar, for

instance, told me that educational attainment today can overcome low economic status or

even caste background, while in her mother’s generation the most important thing was to

be the first daughter of a family (hence, the one to inherit her mother’s perak18). Today,

according to Dolkar, wealthy families would accept as a bride either one from ‘a rich

family, a high-caste family, with a big house’, or a ‘poor girl who is a doctor or an

engineer’. As will be discussed below, caste and class matter with regard to the policing of

inter-religious marriage.

The transition to strict maintenance of religious boundaries and the attendant ban on

intermarriage is described not as a set of conscious decisions, but as passive acquiescence

to modernity. In a discussion with Salima, an educated, middle-class, recently married

woman in her twenties, her mother frequently interjected:

Question: Are there marriages between Muslims and Buddhists?

Salima: Today, nobody does it.

Salima’s mother: Today there’s a change. A change has come in all the people.

Question: Today, is it prevented?

Salima’s mother: In the past, people’s minds were good.

Salima: How can today’s people be like that? Today we are ‘modern’. Our minds havematured. Our own religion is our own, that’s how people think today.

It is not only Muslims who speak of the past in these terms. Asked if she has Muslim

friends, Yangchan, a Buddhist in her sixties, gave a response nearly identical to the

Muslim women above:

Yangchan: I have relatives. My mother’s blood, my father’s side, and in the past, that sayingKache [Sunni Muslim] or Boto [Buddhist], in the past we didn’t do it. We had a goodrelationship. If a Kache became Boto or a Boto became Kache, no one would make a noise.Since that time, with the increase in wealth and education, now people make a distinctionbetween the religious sects, and say that people shouldn’t convert.

Question: So, when you were young, was there that kind of thing?

Yangchan: No. When I was young, we didn’t have it. My friend, my same age, she wouldn’tsay, ‘you’re Boto’ and not drink out of my cup. We would drink out of one cup.

One argument against intermarriage is that the practice is a potential cause of conflict.

Political leaders and elite Leh residents present a subtle analysis of the strategy behind the

politicization of religious identity and the ensuing conflict, for instance arguing that the

pursuit of political goals through the means of religious identity is simply the most

effective technique within the Indian state. Those outside the political circles, however,

sometimes suggest that such marriages are the main cause for conflict. When I asked

Salima what causes conflict between Buddhists and Muslims, she answered in this way:

That is when brides run away with someone, isn’t it? . . . Today’s young people don’t havegood hearts, and if something small happens they use it as an excuse to start trouble.Otherwise, what’s the problem? We’re all from one yul. If a bride marries someone from herown yul, what’s the problem? What can you say about that? It’s when someone from a well-known family gets married outside their religion, that’s when the fighting breaks out.

Salima’s observation that love affairs involving well-known families are strictly

policed echoes the sentiments of many of my interviewees. The hardening of religious

categories is tied to status and class in that the intermarriage of a woman from a wealthy or

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well-known family is expected to result in a stronger disciplinary response than an

intermarriage involving a woman from a lower caste or class status. This also means that

women who elope across the religious border are often derided in gossip as coming from

lower economic classes or having a low caste background. While caste and class do not

raise the same geopolitical problems as religious identity (because of religion’s historic

role in determining national borders), the intersection of each of these forms of difference

does shape how the policing of marriage plays out.19

Layla: If [runaway brides] are, what should I say . . . low caste? Then no one says anything. Ifsomeone is wealthy or from a good family, then they will make a big demonstration.Otherwise, for the low caste, they do nothing, no matter how many go. They don’t even go tothe trouble of finding out.

The inevitability of love

Stories told about love marriage are complex and contradictory. There is a general

insistence that in the past there was the occasional love marriage between a Buddhist and a

Muslim, and that it was not problematic – at the same time, there is also an assumption

that today’s women are more likely to choose their own spouse, and that love marriage did

not exist in the past. Zainab, though only in her fifties, insisted that love marriages were

not around in her youth, using the English word (adding the rhyming syllable ‘bove’ to

indicate ‘etcetera’): ‘At that time, we didn’t do “love-bove”. There was nothing like that

. . . Today, love is more common. They don’t know what they’re doing and after a short

time, they end up in divorce.’

Around the edges of the hegemonic anti-intermarriage stance there are murmurs of

frustration. These voices describe love as an unstoppable force, suggest fate brings

individuals together or emphasize an understanding that develops when you choose your

own spouse. Sakina went against her Buddhist parents’ wishes in order to marry a Sunni

Muslim and convert during the height of the Buddhist–Muslim conflict in the 1980s; she

simply and eloquently insisted that love marriage was happier and that marriages between

religions should not be prevented.

Sakina: Love marriage is happier. Even if you’re poor, you’ll support each other. Withsomeone your parents picked for you, then if you have problems, you will suffer. But if youchoose for yourself, then even if you have hard times, you still make an effort and stay. It’sbetter and happier since you chose yourself. Since you chose for yourself, even in sufferingthere is happiness. Isn’t that how it is?

It is challenging to talk about love and desire, perhaps especially in a language in

which it is more common to resort to the English word than to use a Ladakhi equivalent.20

When I asked how and why women chose their husbands, if they had chosen for

themselves, they professed to be shy and often resorted to talking around the question. A

Sunni Muslim grandmother, over 100 years old, blushed, giggled and, suddenly animated,

declared, ‘I’m so glad there aren’t any men here to hear this question!’ Without giving

explicit reasons, women said they were happy or pleased, or thought he was nice, and used

phrases such as, ‘ngarang thadte songpin’, ‘having decided for myself, I went’, ‘I just

liked him’, ‘I thought I would be happy’, or ‘because of the letters he sent me’.

Alternatively, several women turned the tables on me, saying, ‘like you, I had a love

marriage, how did you decide?’ or ‘you understand these things’.21 Details were usually

vague – and often included intermediaries and love letters. Women emphasized their

agency in selecting their partner and valorized companionship and affection. Those who

had arranged marriages could sometimes specify the quantifiable criteria by which they

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had judged their prospective spouse, and sometimes described becoming ‘close’ over time.

Those not in love marriages sometimes suggested that impulsive romance (‘those who run

away suddenly’), and love marriages were more likely to end in divorce.22

More common than Sakina’s defense of love marriage was the suggestion that there

were those who were fated to be together, and the argument that it was impossible or

dangerous to separate a young couple. Amina was uncomfortable, just like Nilza, with the

thought of her child marrying outside her religion, but she does not believe she has the

power to control her only child.

Question: For instance, if your girl said she was going to marry a Buddhist, how would thatfeel?

Amina: That wouldn’t feel right. As much as possible, I would tell her not to go. Then, if sheinsisted on going, there would be nothing I could do.

Question: There are those who are brought back and run away again?

Amina: That’s right, it’s in the child’s hands. Isn’t it so often the case that a Buddhist goeswith a Muslim and her family takes her back, then later she just goes away again? There’snothing you can do.

Amina places agency in her daughter’s hands, but there are frequent allusions to fate as

an unstoppable force, as in the words of a Sunni grandfather in Chushot, who told me:

If I’m thinking that I am going to prevent this child from being a Buddhist, and I think I can tiehim up and keep him, with his fate, he will escape from the window. That’s how it is. It’s ourfate, it is what is written on our foreheads.

In another interview, Hamida said: ‘if they fall in love, what can we do?’ At that point, her

sister interrupted her to point out that people would cause a disturbance in such a case and

Hamida said: ‘Even if they do, the couple will run away anyway, since they are in love.’ I

asked what would happen if her young daughter, playing nearby, fell in love with a

Buddhist – but this question only produced laughter and a muted ‘who knows?’

Saeda, a 24-year-old Shia woman studying for her MA in Jammu, was one of the few

people who said intermarriage should be allowed, ‘Because I have friends that I know of,

who are having an affair . . . the girl is Buddhist. The boy is Muslim.’ I asked what Saeda

thought would happen to her friends in the future, and Saeda replied, ‘She says herself, “I

have no future.”’ In these views of intermarriage – as a phenomenon to be repressed and

as something that is irrepressible due to the forces of love or fate – we find both agency (‘I

chose for myself’) and a deceptively passive language of powerlessness – ‘people’s hearts

have changed’. Salima and her mother describe a progression towards a modernity that

disallows marriage between those of different religions, while Hamida and Amidah

describe love and fate as uncontainable forces. Held in tension, these relinquishments of

agency – to a modern geopolitics of the body or to love and fate – provide an opening for

a barrage of micro-regulatory techniques that intersect with gender, class, caste and other

practices of difference.

Despite a common belief in fate or uncontrollable love, the majority of the young

women I spoke with said that they would prefer an arranged marriage in which their

parents make sure the husband turns out to be reliable (but in which they have veto power

should they disagree). Some equate love with youth and irresponsibility, not as a path to

long-term happiness. Jigmet, newly married and pregnant with her first child, told me her

peers were only interested in

guys with a good job and a good education . . . During their college days, girls fall in love onlyin that sense, in a childish way. But when they go for a longer term . . . to get married, theythrow out their boyfriend to marry the guy who has a good profession.

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Love and desire are most often either addressed through (or against) Freudian,

Foucauldian or Deleuzian theoretical frames, that is, as unrecoverable, unknowable and

sublimated, as a residue of power relations or as diffuse and fragmentary impulses.

Following Foucault, I do not suggest here that we can recover desire and longing outside

of discourse or a love that preempts the categorization of religious identity. Part of the

appeal of love marriages that fray religious lines may even be produced by the disciplinary

actions and cautions of parents and religious figures. Endless gossip creates a recurrent

storyline and dangerous specter of ‘the end of Buddhist girls’, with just a handful of tragic

pairings, and spirals into discussion about love, fate, and regulation of dress and

comportment. In this case, the question of an authentic but repressed desire seems beside

the point, as well as impossible to discern. What does appear relevant to a geopolitics of

love is the way that desire is deployed as a narrative device in the stories that are told about

young couples: that is, as an irrepressible force, fraught with danger. This framing is

undercut by the domesticated figures of grandparents who have intermarried, but it serves

a useful purpose in rallying co-religionists around a perceived threat, as well as providing

an arena in which to form a code of conduct for how young women should behave, as well

as intersecting with caste and class practices.

‘They’re our blood, aren’t they?’ Territorial and temporal limits to love

This research has made me privy to endless gossip – most of which is of the tragic variety.

Many of those who fell in love after the intermarriage ban are casualties of this territorial

struggle and confirm the importance of a feminist approach to geopolitics.23 Without

attending to star-crossed lovers and those who gossip about them, we would miss a

significant mechanism through which territorial struggles play out on the bodies of men and

women. It is Leh’s geopolitical context and its political process, born in the partition logic of

counting bodies, that renders love crossing religious boundaries impossible. Couples who

have remained together are exiled in distant towns. They are excised so thoroughly from

their families’ lives that when I first asked one woman how many children she had, she

omitted her third daughter (who had married a Muslim), no longer considering her flesh and

blood and only telling me her story once we were further into the interview. In another case,

the couple has been separated and remarried to those within their own religion – but at least

one of them unhappily so. In two other cases, the women involved never remarried and live

at home with their parents. What can these women tell us about geopolitical practice? To

return to the question this article began with: have love and desire been made subject to

geopolitical strategies to defend an electoral and geopolitical territory comprised of bodies?

Or do they comprise an irrepressible force that escapes from attempts to territorialize it?

When those I spoke with discuss Buddhist–Muslim lovers, they at once proclaim

desire as an irrepressible force – and as a force that must be repressed. When geopolitics

play on the body, love and desire become impossible traps. In the ways that longing for an

Other are talked about in these cases, both Foucauldian and Deleuzian approaches to

desire are invoked and speak to the geopolitical management of romance. I cannot entirely

abandon the idea that, for those couples who forge a lasting bond across the religious

border, love had some transgressive force; however, that force is blunted by their

expulsion from the policed territory or the breakup of their love affair. As in the case of the

inter-caste marriages that Chowdhry (2007) explores, the bad endings meted out to those

whose desires are unruly turn that desire into a justification for disciplinary action and, as

Mody (2008) suggests, the state, in these cases, does not or is not able to create a space for

these desires to survive.

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The incitement to discourse about inter-religious romance and its popularity as a topic

of gossip (such that even being seen with someone of the opposite sex and other religion is

grounds for suspicion) are indications of the productive and generative techniques of

power. This flurry of gossip, condemnation and fear enables a retrenching of conservative

regulation – with each side seeking to inculcate its values in the bodies of its youth.

Foucault’s sense of desire as that which is formed in the elicitation and his attention to the

microphysics of power are both appropriate. Attention to the ‘problem’ of intermarriage

renders it a juicy and pleasurable topic of conversation and justifies the language of

management and control of sexuality. Sakina, the woman who defended love marriage,

also presented a cogent critique of the gendered nature of this management:

Sakina: Since it’s their fate, why bring them back? It just makes things worse for the girl . . .people will gossip about her and no one will marry her and it will be terrible for her . . . Fromthe time she goes [with her chosen lover], from that time, it is wrong to bring her back . . . Forthe boy, it’s no problem. They’ll just bring another woman to be his wife . . . If you do bringthe girl back then you better build her a nice house and get her a nice husband.24 Or send her asa bride but really do it nicely!

This use of the threat of intermarriage as a reason for managing bodies and sexuality is

also clear in this Muslim leader’s insistence that the LBA should teach Buddhist girls how

to behave:

The LBA has always been involved in [the regulation of marriage between Buddhists andMuslims]. I think this is their main agenda to control these things. But they should control it ina more systematic way . . . they are not doing any homework. They don’t have a code ofconduct; they don’t look at what the Buddhist girls are wearing, what society they are keeping,and in what activities they are involved. This is the main thing, to control the girls right fromthe house to the school and the college. And if they can deny a girl to marry a Muslim, and ifthey can threaten or have agitation on this point, why can’t they make a code of conduct? Adress code? Right? There are so many things. They can organize awareness camps, educatethe people, educate their womenfolk, educate their girls. I don’t think they are doing anythingon that line. Just they are coming when they hear that a Muslim boy took a Buddhist girl, andtheir boys come and they start beating the Muslims or intimidating the family.

This leader’s embrace of a disciplinary sensibility reveals the work that geopolitical love

stories do in this context. A young Buddhist woman wearing jeans – for current

assumptions are that only Buddhist girls would wear jeans – is read as territorial

capitulation to Muslim advances. As in Nast’s case, the geopolitical possibilities of love

require a spatial fix – in this case, a cultivated territorial resistance to legitimating inter-

religious desire within the bounded space of Leh district.

For Foucault, our very desires are part of our subjectification; desire itself is

incorporated into the circulation of power as one of many technologies that make our

selves as they make the state, the family, the school, the clinic. In the ways that young

people in Leh imagine their futures and their love lives, we can see disciplinary action and

self-regulation both setting and removing limits on love: while love marriage may be part

of common parlance, marriages crossing religious boundaries are unacceptable. While

love may play a role in marriage, that role extends only insofar as it does not present a

challenge to the homogenization of religious blocs. Practical concerns shape the

transformation from childish love – unbounded – to love that knows its boundaries and

ensures a stable future in a marriage insured by parental support. Thus, while young and

old continue to talk about fate – about a compulsion so strong that if one were tied up, one

would escape through the window – in practice this fate does not seem so powerful after

all. Of course, this emphasis on the rational precludes a marriage that would not only

alienate family and friends but could even lead to riots.

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We can read Deleuze and Guattari’s diagnosis of oedipal desire as a manufactured lack

and their turn to desiring machines as a productive force as a complement to Foucault’s

view of desire as a product of the law. The escape of young lovers over the mountains may

signify a line of flight to some extent – but on the other side of those mountains, what they

are seeking is the validation of the law in the form of legal marriage. This is where any raw

force of transgressive desire is blunted: a couple who flout the anti-intermarriage

agreement comprise no challenge to the partitioning of bodies into carefully delineated

territories. The geopolitical power of marriage as a binding force that the previous

generations of Ladakhis speak of required that such marriages be legitimated and absorbed

into the fabric of day-to-day life. That process reoriented what Ahmed (2004) calls ‘the

direction of bodies’, sending them on unexpected routes and ensuring that those bodies

would arrive as celebrants at weddings or as mourners at funerals where those being

married, buried or cremated held beliefs different from their own.

The geopolitical pressures today are such that couples who do follow their hearts, or

the emotions generated by a folded note delivered by a classmate, end up ensconced at

home, unmarriageable and derided or else united in isolation, in a distant town or city.

Rather than creating a bond of blood, this kind of desire ripples out from the couple as

whispers and fears. This only justifies and replicates the disciplinary moments in which a

mother tells her daughter not to stay out late or a politician issues a news release accusing

young men of intentionally enticing young women with deceptive promises of love only to

convert them. While economic class, caste status, employment and level of education are

described as important factors in choice of spouse, it is religion that has special salience

and requires special regulation, for religion is the characteristic understood to be part of a

struggle for territory.

Lila, a Shia woman in her fifties told me that intermarriage could prevent riots: ‘If a

girl comes to our side or goes to that side and then has children, people will think, “they’re

our blood, aren’t they?” Then, won’t that make a difference in whether or not there are

riots?’ Continuing with the scenario, she said that this was why there was not violence in

the past. ‘They would say, “we’re relatives”. And then they didn’t do anything. They

would say, “even if they’re Muslim, they are our relatives”, or, “we’re relatives with the

Buddhists, we brought our grandma from a Buddhist house.”’ The last generation of

children of mixed marriages are now in their twenties – they are Aisha – who is against

intermarriage – and Saeda – who supports intermarriage, but believes her friends who fell

in love across the religious border have no future. Even if Aisha and Saeda were to fall in

love and choose to be with someone of a different religion, they would not find a home in

Leh, and their relationship would not perform the work of cohesion that Lila attributes to

such marriages. Set in contrast with the sentiment that ‘They’re our blood, aren’t they?’,

the views of Aisha and Saeda indicate the territorialization and taming of desire.

This taming is perhaps not absolute – as we see in those few couples that do resist

regulation – but its potential as a counter-geopolitical force has been curbed through

regulatory practices that expel or destroy such challenges from the territory being

defended. In individual cases it is possible that the couple might remain together, but only

in instances in which this does not pose a challenge to bodily geopolitical struggles. When

such couples are expelled from the territory, this means that their bodily presence and the

birth of their children do not pose a challenge to the mapping of politicized religion onto

bodies. Instead, through dramatic exile or through the dissolution of such unions, unruly

love becomes part of a set of narratives that tighten the policing of bodies and perversely

make such relationships more impossible. Within this bounded space, such couples do not

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exist to do the geopolitical work of forging bonds. Instead, their tragic stories only serve to

underwrite bodily regulation and boundary making.

Acknowledgements

Stanzin Tonyot, Jocelyn Chua, Gabriela Valdivia, Alvaro Reyes, Nina Martin, Banu Gokariksel andAnindita Datta were kind enough to read drafts and make tremendously helpful comments andsuggestions. Thanks to Deborah Dixon and the two anonymous reviewers for their close readingsand extremely constructive criticisms. Discussions with Sallie Marston, Paul Robbins, John PaulJones III, Richard Eaton and Mark Nichter helped me arrive at ideas embedded in the article. Thanksto Kevin S. Fox for producing the map. None of this research would have been possible without thegenerous participation of Ladakhi interviewees, who kindly gave their time to answer my oftenintrusive questions or without the assistance and inspiration provided by Dolma Tsering and HasinaBano during fieldwork. This research was supported by the Fulbright-Hays Doctoral DissertationResearch Abroad Program, the Society of Women Geographers, the International DissertationResearch Fellowship Program of the Social Science Research Council with funds provided by theAndrew W. Mellon Foundation, the University of Arizona Social and Behavioral Sciences ResearchInstitute, the Association of American Geographers Political Geography Specialty Group and theAssociation of American Geographers Qualitative Research Specialty Group.

Notes

1. I borrow this term from Friedman (2000) and Warner (1991).2. There is powerful and meticulous research on this topic from a number of feminist scholars,

especially V. Das (1995), Butalia (2000) and Menon and Bhasin (1998). In geography,Bacchetta (2000), R. Das (2006) and Oza (2007) have written on the ways that the use of sexualviolence to define national identity emerged again after the Babri Masjid destruction and inthe more recent 2002 violence in Gujarat. In other contexts, this sexual violence is framedas embodied nationalism (see, among others, Allen 1996; Korac 1999, 2004; Mayer 2004;Morokvasic-Muller 2004; Yuval-Davis 1989).

3. The Leh District case study comprises approximately 13 months of fieldwork in 2004, 2007–8and 2009. I draw here on my survey of 192 women, as well as longer interviews with 65 of the2008 survey participants, interviews with local political and religious leaders and others, and aparticipatory oral history project with Ladakhi youth. The participants reside in or wereinterviewed in Leh town, as well as the surrounding villages of Chushot, Thikse, Phyang,Choglamsar and Shey. Approximately half the women lived in Leh town itself, the other half inthe surrounding villages (but with easy access to Leh, and were hence influenced by the moreurban setting).

4. This name is a pseudonym, as are all the names that follow.5. Although these cases were not as extreme as those described by Chowdhry (2007).6. These numbers vary from the preliminary results in S. Smith (2009) as the sample is larger.

Interestingly, many of those with more permissive views were the Shia Muslim women whom Iinterviewed later in the course of the project.

7. From a sample of 105. Sunni Muslims were the most likely to have relatives, while ShiaMuslims were the least (out of 32 Buddhist women, 25 had Muslim relatives, while out of 35Sunni women, 33 had Buddhist relatives, and for the Shia women, 27 out of 38 had Buddhistrelatives).

8. For more detail on this period, see Van Beek (2001) as well as those cited in note 11.9. Note though that scholars of polyandry in Tibetan contexts argue that while it could check

population growth, populations which practice polyandry could still experience populationincrease (Childs 2003; Goldstein 1981). Note also that other factors did serve at that time to limitpopulation growth in Ladakh – especially poor nutrition, high infant mortality and lack ofmedical facilities to treat epidemics such as the measles epidemic. For a detailed account ofthese challenges see Wiley (2004).

10. For an excellent account of the lives of these nuns and the political and moral economy, seeGutschow (2004).

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11. It is not possible to provide extensive background here, but see Aggarwal (2004), van Beek(1996, 2001, 2004), Bertelsen (1996, 1997), Bhan (2006), Gutschow (2004; 2006) and Srinivas(1998) for excellent analysis of the political events of the 1980s and subsequent developments.

12. It is important to note that Ladakhi demands for autonomy have always been for greaterautonomy from the state of J&K, never from India.

13. Sunni Muslims are the prosperous descendants of Sunni traders from Kashmir, Yarkand andelsewhere, who settled and married Ladakhi women over the past few hundred years. For moredetail on this history, see the excellent accounts by Rizvi (1998, 2004) and Fewkes (2009).

14. It is this equation that ties the concern over marriage to recent developments in family planning.In the last decade, however, there has been a backlash against family planning led by the LBA;teachings by Muslims leaders have also condemned the use of birth control, especiallysterilization (Aengst 2008; S. Smith 2008, 2009). The resistance to family planning is framedboth in strictly religious terms (i.e., contraception is a sin) and in explicitly territorial termsthrough the argument that Buddhists’ use of family planning means they will lose electoralcontrol of the territory. Buddhist activists suggest this has geopolitical implications for the futureof J&K (S. Smith 2009).

15. Yul is a word with multiple meanings. While it could mean country or village, here Faeda isreferring to Ladakh. Ladakh is thought of as an insular, contained space – one that you leave andenter, going ‘philoga’ (outside) or ‘aa-ong-a’ (over there) when you travel to India (Gyagar – inLadakhi).

16. Kache is often used to denote Sunni Muslims descended from Kashmiri and Central Asiantraders who settled in Ladakh, however, in this context and others it is used as a more generalterm for Muslim.

17. Ministers and other high-ranking families own the land and houses on the slope beneath Lehpalace – although today many of those homes have been abandoned in favor of more spacioushomes down in the valley.

18. The perak is a cobra-shaped turquoise headdress passed down from mother to eldest daughter.19. Unfortunately, I cannot speak here in great depth about the intersections between religion and

other forms of difference – this is an important question requiring further research.20. This use of an English word to describe the phenomenon suggests the idea of love is of recent

provenance and at conferences it has been suggested to me that I have not addressed thehistoricity of romantic love. It is not possible for me to fully address that issue here, though Iwould like to do so in future work. While I do acknowledge that this is a danger, I would alsoargue that the language of traditional flirtatious songs and the way that those in their eighties andnineties describe marriages in which the young couple chose their own spouse indicate that‘love’ in Ladakh is not new, only being reframed to fit modern conceptions.

21. Due to my position as a chigyalpa, or ‘outsider’, married to a Ladakhi since 2002, my own lifestory was often made a part of the conversation by participants, who teased me by asking if mymarriage was arranged and compared or contrasted their experiences with marriage to mine. AsLeh is a small town with rather tight networks of gossip, participants often already knew thisinformation or surmised it when I began speaking Ladakhi.

22. The Oxford English Dictionary defines desire as longing and love as affection. Desire isdescribed as ‘a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen,strong sexual feeling or appetite, something desired’, and love as ‘an intense feeling of deepaffection, a deep romantic or sexual attachment to someone’. In the parlance of Ladakhi women,the language of love and desire is oblique, but references to both of these sentiments(an unexplainable longing, a bond based in understanding and forged over time) are made. Todefine love or arrive at a truth about why someone chooses the person they do is beyond thescope of this article, I only hope to understand some of the geopolitical work the idea of lovedoes.

23. I have not discussed these stories here, as it would be impossible to conceal the identities of thecouples.

24. Here she uses the word magpa for husband and implies that the parents should bring a husbandinto their household for the daughter, rather than sending her as bride. Magpa can be used in thegeneral sense of husband or to indicate a husband who is brought into the household of the brideand whose children will bear the family name of the bride. By using the word ‘bring’ in this case,she indicates the second meaning.

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Notes on contributor

Sara H. Smith is Assistant Professor in the Department of Geography at the University of NorthCarolina at Chapel Hill. Sara received her PhD in Geography at the University of Arizona in Tucsonin 2009. Her work is concerned with the relationship between territory, bodies and the everyday.Sara’s current projects focus on how political and geopolitical conflict is constituted or disruptedthrough intimate acts of love, friendship and birth, and on how young people form their politicalsubjectivities in relation to geopolitical conflict and local political struggles.

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ABSTRACT TRANSLATIONS

‘Ella misma dice, “no tengo futuro”’: amor, destino y territorio en el distrito de Leh,

India

¿Como y hasta que punto el amor y el deseo pueden ser gestionados como factores en una

estrategia geopolıtica? Esta investigacion expande el tema del analisis geopolıtico y utiliza

las tacticas feministas para destacar las practicas contingentes y corporizadas a traves de

las cuales las estrategias geopolıticas se materializan en lugares aparentemente

improbables. En el distrito de Leh, en el estado de Kashmir y Jammu en India, el

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conflicto polıtico entre budistas y musulmanes ha estado articulado en parte a traves de los

cuerpos de las mujeres. Budistas y musulmanes producen un lımite religioso corporizado a

traves de la prevencion de los casamientos interreligiosos. Mientras que en este caso el

amor tiene el potencial de desafiar las narrativas polıticas, cualquier fuerza transgresora es

atemperada por la separacion de las parejas interreligiosas que se casan o su expulsion del

territorio del distrito de Leh. Basandome en datos de entrevistas y cuestionarios y en

historias orales participativas en el distrito de Leh, busco desestabilizar y complejizar la

mirada geopolıtica global, trayendo el cuerpo fısico, deseante y deseado al centro del

analisis con un estudio de como las mujeres afrontan, resisten o participan activamente en

la estrategia geopolıtica corporizada.

Palabras claves: geopolıtica feminista; geografıa polıtica; territorio; Asia del Sur;

casamiento; cuerpos

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