“In the past, we ate from one plate”: Memory and the border in Leh, Ladakh

Abstract

In India's Jammu and Kashmir State (J&K), the politicization of religious identity over the course of the twentieth century has become part of life in complex and contradictory ways tied to geopolitical uncertainty and contested borders. In this case study set in J&K's Leh District, I argue that border life and attendant vulnerability have charged both bodies and buildings with territorial potential. Fraught relations between Leh District's Buddhist majority and Muslim minority reproduce a border sensibility in the center of Leh town: restrictions on inter-religious marriage and fears of demographic change play out against a backdrop of religious structures being remodeled in ways that stake out territory at the heart of town and reference globally-identifiable religious architectural styles. How are inter-religious boundaries between people re-imagined to fit a shifting geopolitical context? What remains of an embodied past of inter-religious family ties? Through this case, I argue for attention to when and how political borders are recalled and embodied in relationships between people, in the spaces that we inhabit, and in the interpretation of those spaces. This article draws on seventeen months of research conducted during 2004, 2007–2008, and 2010, including a survey of 192 women's family decision-making, interviews, and youth photography and oral history projects to trace the interplay of memory, monumentalized religion in the built environment, and intimate life.