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

Aggarwal, Ravina

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0822334143 ISBN 13: 9780822334149

Verlag: Duke University Press, 2004

Inhaltsangabe

The Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost thousands of lives. In this innovative ethnography, Ravina Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the conflict-which tend to emphasize geopolitical security concerns and religious essentialisms-to consider how it is experienced by those living in the border zones along the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India from Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region in northern India's State of Jammu and Kashmir. Located high in the Himalayan and Korakoram ranges, Ladakh borders Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh, Beyond Lines of Control is an impassioned call for the inclusion of the region's cultural history and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir. Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier, how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state, and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional control that are legitimized through discourses of religious purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted in particular cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games. By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.

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Ravina Aggarwal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. She is the editor of Into the High Ranges: The Penguin Anthology of Mountain Writings and the editor and translator of Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh, by Abdul Ghani Sheikh. She was a founding editor of the journal Meridians.

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""Beyond Lines of Control" is a theoretically sophisticated, gracefully written ethnography about the politics of performance--and the performance of politics--in one of the most contested geopolitical landscapes in the world."--Piya Chatterjee, author of "A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation"

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BEYOND LINES OF CONTROL

Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, IndiaBy RAVINA AGGARWAL

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2004 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-3414-9

Contents

Acknowledgments................................................viiIntroduction: Borders Performed................................11 Staging Independence Day.....................................212 Observing Rituals in the Inner Line Zone.....................573 Screening a Contested Landscape..............................1034 Songs of Honor, Lines of Descent.............................1495 Border Games.................................................179Conclusion: Flowing across the Lines...........................223Notes..........................................................237References.....................................................267Index..........................................................287

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. An advertisement on the flip side of the page displayed camouflaged soldiers holding up the national flag, 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. 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 twenty-first 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).

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,...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Duke University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2004
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0822334143
• ISBN 13: 9780822334149
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Auflage: 1
• Anzahl der Seiten: 316
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar