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

Abstract

Reviewed by: Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India Dia Mohan Ravina Aggarwal . Beyond Lines of Control: Performance and Politics on the Disputed Borders of Ladakh, India. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004. Pp. ix + 305, illustrated. $76.45 (Hb); $23.95 (Pb) Beyond Lines of Control is based on fourteen years of Ravina Aggarwal's research among people who live in Ladakh district along the line of control (LOC) between India and Pakistan – one of the most contested borders in the contemporary world. In this book, Aggarwal explores cultural performances, asking how they negotiate borders that demarcate states of being and becoming. At the same time, she argues that borders are sites where people enact their versions of "territory, sovereignty, and international policy" (15). [End Page 245] Aggarwal's book is significant for a number of reasons. First, the author draws on ethnographic material and historical sources to show why the LOC, should be recognized as a place historically formed out of plural identities, multiple conquests, and cooperation rather than from the India–Pakistan or Hindu–Muslim conflict that has become the stereotypical image of the region. In particular, she focuses on the complex emerging relations between Buddhists and Muslims in the Ladakh region to show how community is formed as a simultaneously inclusive and exclusive construction. Second, drawing on ethnographic material, the author shows that borders between places, identities, and states of being (such as between death and rebirth, purity and pollution, observer and observed) are not natural or inviolate in social practice. For the author, borders are sites of performances of power through "daily dramas of chauvinism," on the one hand, and dynamic acts of liminality and contestation, on the other (3). As such, borders produce intimate experiences of nation and what she calls "border subjectivity" (3). Third, readers, regardless of their political proclivities, will recognize here the violence, inhumanity, and ultimate futility of expecting people to live within the fixed boundaries of nations or of gender, religious, and caste identities. To study power relations along the border, Aggarwal chooses not conventional concepts of security and governance but people's production and reception of staged cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, wedding and funerary rites and feasts, films, songs, and archery competitions. She explores these as "national and ethnic acts of selective exclusion and inclusion" which produce further lines of control bred in "the borderlands that surround" the LOC (17). The first chapter analyses the meaning of interruptions in Independence Day ceremonies, officially aimed at memorializing the birth of a unified nation. In the aftermath of the Kargil War of 1999, the LOC was n ot an abstract symbol of enduring conflict. Staged in the proximate shadow of the LOC, Independence Day celebrations in Ladakh could not neatly affirm the official narrative of unity. The spectre of unsettled claims to unity was overwhelming. Further, in the context of Ladakhi claims for regional autonomy from the governance structure of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, the author traces another unsettled boundary of more immediate relevance to Ladakhis. With the foundation of the Ladakhi Autonomous Hill Development Council in 1995, she argues, Ladakhis gained autonomy in form but not substance. As Ministers of Kashmir continue to be chief guests for flag-hoisting ceremonies in Ladakh instead of Hill Council leaders, public performances underscore ongoing negotiations with unsettled lines of control. Starting at the LOC, Aggarwal uncovers multiple constructions of centre– margin relations demarcating "true Muslims" and "true Buddhists," insiders and outsiders (90). For example, she shows how Ladakhi Buddhists articulated claims of being "true patriots" in relation to secessionist Kashmiri Muslims (45). Muslims returning from new religious learning in Iran and Iraq to [End Page 246] Ladakhi contexts of Muslim and Buddhist cohabitation, demarcated difference with a new focus on Buddhist polyandry, alcohol consumption, singing, and dancing. In turn, community borders were redrawn in Buddhist collective drinking rituals (82). With Muslim condemnation of singing, a Mon (lowest Buddhist caste of traditional musicians) wedding ceremony took on a larger meaning because the hosts chose to seat their own caste members higher than members of higher castes, explicitly breaking prescribed rules of hierarchy...