Dissimulations: representing Ladakhi identity more

DRAFT: Please cite the published version: van Beek, Martijn (2000). Dissimulations: Representing Ladakhi 'Identity'. Perplexities of Identification: Anthropological Studies in Cultural Differentiation and the Use of Resources. H. Driessen and T. Otto. Aarhus, Aarhus University Press: 164-188. Dissimulations: Representing Ladakhi Identity Martijn van Beek Now the strange thing about this silly if not desperate place between the real and the really made-up is that it appears to be where most of us spend most of our time as epistemically correct, socially created, and occasionally creative beings. We dissimulate. (Taussig 1993: xviii) The granting of autonomy to the Ladakh region of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K) in September 1995 was warmly welcomed by politicians from the main political parties in New Delhi. Prime Minister Narasimha Rao telegraphed his congratulations to Ladakh’s leaders, and the Indian national press reported the event in glowing terms. Already in the 1930s political leaders from Ladakh had been demanding special administrative arrangements, resources, and policies in recognition of the ‘distinct identity’ of the region (Bray 1991; van Beek 1998b; van Beek and Bertelsen 1997). At last everyone agreed, it seems, that the recognition of Ladakhis’ demands was timely, necessary, and just. At the swearing in of the newly elected members of the “Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh” (LAHDC)i, Governor Krishna Rao, local politicians, religious leaders, and representatives of ‘social’ organisations such as the Ladakh Buddhist Association and the Muslim Anjumansii, were gathered on Leh’s pologround to celebrate this moment of recognition of Ladakh’s ‘identity’. The Ladakh region comprises two districts, called Kargil and Leh after their respective capitals. The region covers the northern and eastern parts of J&K state, bordering on Baltistan (administered by Pakistan) and Tibet (under China’s rule). Kargil district has a predominantly Muslim population, while Leh is inhabited almost exclusively by Buddhists. The total population of the region, estimated at more than 200,000, is almost equally divided between between the two ‘communities’.iii A “cold desert”(Bhasin 1992) on the western edge of the Tibetan plateau between the Himalaya and Karakoram ranges, the economy of the region is based on subsistence agriculture and animal husbandry. State and army employment, provision of local produce and labour, and tourism constitute the main sources of monetary income. There is little agreement among the celebrants who gathered on Leh’s pologround to inaugurate the council, among academics or ‘ordinary’ Ladakhis, as to what, exactly, Ladakh’s identity is, or ought to be. Yet references to such an identity are made when Ladakh is represented in words or images, in political negotiations, or in marketing Ladakh as a tourist destination or worthy recipient of development aid (van Beek 1998a). The question arises how we should understand the fact that people can talk about and celebrate Ladakhi identity in this manner as if ‘it’ is in fact unproblematic and matter-of-fact like. Many of these actors gathered on the pologround know that they disagree about what Ladakhi identity is. Moreover, as we shall see, Ladakhi identity is officially impossible, and Ladakhi’s own social experience ‘falsifies’ the simple categorisations that are in official use. The fetishism of identities As I have argued elsewhere (1996;1997b; 1997c), in analyzing the discourse of identity in politics in the Ladakh region, acceptance of the terms of the contestation as representative of ‘real’ identities in Ladakh would mean abandoning analysis precisely at that point where it should begin. This produces a tautological reasoning where what we observe and are presented with is treated as in fact objective and representative. While most anthropologists are highly sceptical towards the straightforward primordialist reasoning still dominant in mainstream political science, there are fewer who will interrogate the notion of identity per se. Concrete, ‘empirical’ identities may be socially constructed, but the existence of a set of collectivities that are more meaningful and stable than other collectivities at a certain moment in world-historical time-space is assumed, and explained by reference to the ‘cultures’ and ‘systems of meanings’ that are tautologically imputed to these groups. The identity of the group explains the group’s identity.iv Identity is reified and made to stand for itself, as something that explains, the key to social order, rather than something which needs analysis, contextualisation and explanation. In this culturalist avatar of biological essentialism, ‘identity’ is fetishized, groups appear to exist ‘naturally’ and singularly.v This notion, in public use as well as in much academic discourse, serves to obscure the constitution of identities and the ongoing play of identifications and representations. On the other hand, a dismissal of the idiom of politics—identity, community, religion —as merely epiphenomenal means abandoning the analysis of the form in which demands are made, the often bloody reality and apparent efficacy of identity politics. While the form of Ladakh’s movement for regional autonomy between 1989 and 1993 was, indeed, what in South Asia is called ‘communal’, this characterization fails to capture not only the substance of the movement, but also the very causes that gave rise to it.vi The demand for autonomy, to put it briefly, is rooted in the perceived discrimination of the region in the allocation of resources by the state government of Jammu and Kashmir. Demands reflect this economic and political complex of causes fueled by fundamental changes in local livelihoods and expanding state intervention. The communal form or idiom of the movement—the “language of contention” (Roseberry 1996)—is above all a consequence of the reading by sections of Leh’s political elite of the Indian political system in practice. There is a strong local belief that communalism—a term that in South Asia refers to the politics and practices of sectarianism and religious community exclusivism—dominates the political process, in spite of the fact that such bias is officially denied and denounced. In the following, I will suggest that we need to distinguish between the everyday conception and use of concepts such as ‘identity’ as necessary fictions in the context of contestations over access to and allocation of (cultural, political, economic, symbolic) resources, and the ultimate impossibility, or lack of fit between such concepts and the multiplicity and fluidity of practices of social identification. Many recognize the ‘fact’ that any specific ‘identity’ is a fiction and cannot correspond with the totality of the social that supposedly represents.vii Yet this fictitiousness is forgotten, or ignored, like a public secret (Taussig 1993).viii We all live in a “realm of appearance and artifice” (Bewes 1997: 112), muddling through with necessarily limited understandings of our ‘real conditions’, understandings which are in turn structured through relations of power and by (culturally coded) notions about reality. Since the circumscription (e.g. by bureaucrats, scientists, or activists) of any single ‘identity’ must necessarily conflict with people’s lived experience of multiple and relatively fluid identifications, it is unlikely that any such singular ‘identity’ is simply, naturally, or consistently accepted by social actors.ix And because people generally are very well capable of distinguishing between the appropriate contexts for specific identifications, the acceptance in specific contexts of particular ‘necessary fictions’ such as a specific articulation of Ladakhi ‘identity’ does not necessarily cause anxiety or insecurity in individuals about their own ‘identity’. The question arises how we should understand what appears to be the disappearance of diversity, fluidity and multiplicity from conceptions of identity. Surely no system of classification, no matter how hegemonic or violently instituted can erase social experience altogether.x Just because singular or monochromatic social order is bureaucratically applied, politically claimed, and scientifically imagined and underwritten does not make it so in the entirety of social existence and experience. The will to order, in short, does not fully determine social reality. The question, then, is how social actors practically deal with this real ambiguity and instability that forever flies in the face of their orderings. As Timothy Bewes (1997: 59) puts it succinctly: “The business of humanity is precisely one of compromise, ‘inauthenticity’ and fabrication.” Ongoing processes of reconciliation of the impossible— dissimulations—are, then, the substance of culture. Official Identities, Social Identifications As Herzfeld (1992:108) notes, “cultural identity is the material of national rhetoric, social variation that of everyday experience”. Our everyday identifications, in other words, are creative and multiple, drawing on a range of repertoires depending on what we think the social situation might require. Different social situations, then, are elicit or require different forms of identification. What makes agreement and everyday use of ‘identity’ possible is precisely the lack of definition of what exactly is Ladakhi identity, and that it is in those instances when unambiguous, singular, and bounded identities are expected or demanded that the desire for semantic purity makes the irreducibility of practices of social identification appear as problematic and even pathological. This in turn may then be used as a justification for restoration of a purportedly ‘natural’or ‘traditional’ order.xi The impossibility of grounding national identity in essences of blood, language or territory was already recognized by Renan (1992/1887), as was the need to forget—and remembering to forget, as Anderson (1991: 200) reminds us. It was, according to him, the active willingness of individuals to identify with the impossible idea of the nation, that made the nation exist. To engage in deconstruction of certain identities, therefore, is a rather pointless exercise if the aim is to show their lack of authenticity or ‘fit’ with social practice. All social identities, all communities can be subjected to such an exercise. Rather, as Anderson exhorts us, we should investigate the ways in which communities are imagined, the conditions and processes that make their existence appear as if they were independent of ongoing production, dissimulation, and representation. Dissimulation, then, is not necessarily duplicitous or disingenuous, but the very substance of social identification. While the ‘violence’ of imposing singular identities on people is widely recognized today by social theorists, political and bureaucratic practice—rooted in and constitutive of a particular global ordering—requires a relatively stable singular order in order to fulfill promises of political representation and proper management. Liberal democracy, citizenship, and the discourse of rights practically require that demands or claims be justified through reference to some form of collective identity.xii Hence, we see a gradual convergence, through the mutually conditioning, reflexive processes of identification and classification of diverse social actors, of the imagined order with the order of practice. Social reality, at least in a rhetorical and performative sense, asymptotically tends towards compliance with the desired grammar of identities constructed by academics, bureaucrats, political leaders, and ‘ordinary’ people. The world, through the constitution of an ever finer matrix of sub-national, minority, or indigenous peoples, becomes gradually more compliant with the ‘universal code of particularity’, and the metaphorical quality of conceptions of ‘identity’ is gradually forgotten or ignored. Yet the appearance of stability of ‘identities’ is necessarily precarious and temporary. “The moment of the ‘final’ suture never arrives” (Laclau and Mouffe 1985: 86). Identifying Ladakhis The justifications of demands offered by Ladakhi political activists in terms of Ladakhi ‘identity’ are therefore to be understood first of all in the context of the normative frame of identification offered by the state.xiii The rise and prevalence of the politics of identity and identity discourse testifies above all to the hegemony of modern ideas and institutions such as nation and state (Handler 1996: 38).xiv Despite premature rumours of the death of the nationstate and the end of history, the contemporary world continues to be organized politically and adminstratively through the states system.xv This system is characterized by what Michael Billig calls a “universal code of particularity” that constitutes national identity as a “form of life”, a code that assumes an “identity of identities” (Billig 1995: 73). Yet, this code, enshrined for example in international law and the United Nations charter, presents itself as merely recognizing the reality of a world of peoples and nations and seeks to give each a proper home, i.e. a state. More appropriately, this code must be understood as constitutive of the ‘natural’ order it seeks to represent. The preamble to the Constitution of the State of Jammu and Kashmir states its project and basis of legitimacy unambiguously:xvi We the people of Jammu and Kashmir, having solemnly resolved [...] to secure to ourselves [...] Justice, social, economic and political; Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith and worship; Equality of status and of opportunity, and to promote among us all: fraternity, assuming the dignity of the individual and the unity of the Nation. (Jammu and Kashmir 1986: 314) This is a promise against which government’s performance and indeed legitimacy can be measured. In order to fulfil its obligations in this connection, the state arrogates itself the right to tax, allocate, and administer the resources at its disposal according to the plans its expert committees formulate. In this connection, the state relies on its officials and experts to collect the facts about the region that it requires in order to do its job properly and efficiently. Governmentality requires unambiguous, ‘classified’ information; the fluidity and ambiguity of identifications becomes not only “embarrassing”, as Herzfeld (1987: 27) suggests, but intolerable. The Indian nation may be fragmented and define itself through ‘unity in diversity’, but these fragments should be stable, and they should be Indian. Dedication to developmentalism, preferential treatment of minorities and other disadvantaged groups, and the primacy of bureaucratic procedure and “rule-by-record” (Smith 1985), but also the dark realities of communalism, are central elements of the culture of the Indian state, as expressed in the Constitution and official publications. For the state, clear, unambiguous classification of Ladakh’s population and the region as a whole are necessary in order to administer and develop the area. For Ladakh’s political leaders, a distinct, unambiguously defined, singular Ladakhi ‘identity’ would serve to strengthen and justify the demands for autonomy, reservations (positive discrimination), and other benefits. Various actors, from colonial and national Anthropological Survey of India social scientists engaged in the encyclopaedic task of identifying and describing “the people of India”, to Ladakhi politicians, from local adminstrators and IAS officers to tourism operators, share an interest in finding a ‘coherent’ scheme of classification and ignoring or at least not focusing on that which contradicts, defies, or escapes the taxonomic grid. Such official and scientific frames of classification are normative to the extent that benefits, rights, and resources are allocated to those who fit the frame and the grammar of identification that organizes it.xvii Representations of Ladakhi identity, whether official, bureaucratic, elite, or popular, rely on the expert visions, texts and images presented in the work of earlier administrators and scientists. Principal among these were the earliest encyclopaedic accounts of the region offered by British bureaucrats and scientists, whose formulations continue to be discernible in today’s scholarly and official accounts. Especially the descriptions of Ladakh’s population in Frederic Drew’s Jammu and Kashmir Territories (1976/1875) and Cunningham’s Ladak (1973) have had a major impact on the perceptions and representations of the people of the region.xviii Initially, there was little consistency in the use of terminology, race, tribe and community being used rather indiscriminately. A.S. Singh, the author of Ladakh’s “Code of Tribal Custom”, reports that the information is based on “a gathering fully representing the tribes concerned” (Singh 1912, emphasis added), but begins with a discussion of the races of Ladakh. His list includes Ladakhis, Changpas, Baltis, Dards, Mons and ‘Miscellaneous Tribes’, and is based mostly on Drew’s work. Attempts at unambiguous classification such as this were always plagued with difficulty, given the ambiguous social reality they were supposed to capture and represent. As census operations in the State became more ‘scientific’, the embarrassing multiplicity of ‘caste’ names became intolerable. The 1911 census, which allowed self-identification, produced almost 6000 ‘caste’ and more than 28,000 ‘sub-caste’ names (Census 1911). For the next census, in 1921, “The enumerators were strictly warned against recording nicknames, family titles and septs, whose number in this State is legion.” In order to better prepare the staff, “lists of the more important races, tribes and castes with their sub-castes had been prepared and circulated to the Census Officers well in advance of the primary enumeration, and this list proved to be of great value in the registration of caste...” (Census 1921:146). Subsequently the list of possible choices was progressively limited until the recording of race/caste/class/community was discontinued in the spirit of national equality in 1947.xix In official descriptions ambiguity continued to reign until the confusion was officially ended in 1989 through the recognition of the eight Scheduled Tribes of Ladakh (van Beek 1997b). The resolution of ambiguity was only apparent, as people in Ladakh tried to figure out to which ‘tribe’ they were supposed to belong. Some of the names referred to regional identifications (e.g. Balti, Changpa, Purigpa), others to occupational identifications (Mon, Beda). It is only the official Scheduled Tribe (ST) Certificate, which states the tribal identity of the holder, that fixes people’s identities unambiguously. A lively trade in ST certificates developed because of the considerable benefits attached to ST ‘identity’, such as cheap loans, easier access to higher education, and government employment quota. Complaints inevitably followed, and the administration and local courts continue to wrestle with the problem of corrupt practices in the issuing of certificates and the settlement of disputed cases. As these examples illustrate, the proclamation of tribes and other ‘racial’, ‘ethnic’ or ‘community’ classifications failed to find a shared identity that could capture the identifications of people in Ladakh. But why not simply ‘Ladakhis’? A look at the communities identified by Drew, in the Code of Tribal Custom (Singh 1912), Ramsay’s Practical Dictionary (1890), the Census, Gazetteer (1890/1974), and other official and scientific texts shows that religion is deployed as the effective organising principle. In these texts the designation Ladakhis is frequently reserved for Buddhists, while Balti and Beda are treated as exclusively Muslim. With slight modifications, this is the ethnographic and bureaucratic practice we find even today, as reflected in R.S. Mann’s The Ladakhi, partly based on a field study carried out in 1970-71 and published by the Anthropological Survey of India. Mann recognizes the existence of more ‘ethnic groups’, as he calls them, but maintains that Ladakhis are properly Buddhists (Mann 1986: 12). Also in the application of the ST classification since 1989, certain categories (e.g. Balti, Bot/Boto) were effectively ‘filled’ on the basis of religion.xx The preoccupation with religion as constituting a general and irreducible principle of classification derives from British (and Indian) preoccupations, rather than from social practice in Ladakh—at least in the sense of it being the fundamental principle of identification. This colonial influence is also illustrated by the gradual move from ‘race’ to (religious) ‘community’ in the census classifications applied in Ladakh, which in accordance with waxing British involvement reflected British imaginings of the imputed essence of Indian society: caste and religious community. Religion, in British imagination and political practice was the irreducible essence of communal identity, as expressed in the South Asian usage of the term communalism.xxi It was inconceivable that people adhering to two different religions could form a single community. Ladakhis, therefore, had to be Buddhists, and Muslims had to be something else. To ignore, downplay, or dismiss the Islamic element as ‘foreign’ was also in line with scholarly preoccupations with Ladakh as a surrogate for Tibet. Often referred to as “Western” or “Little” Tibet, Ladakh was regarded as a sufficient substitute for traditional Tibetan culture and religion as long as Tibet remained off-limits for Europeans. Scholarly publications, also recent ones, frequently reflect this ‘tibetocentricity’ and rarely adequate attention is given to Islam or ‘muslim’ contributions to what people in Ladakh themselves regard as a hybrid culture.xxii While some local origin stories are variations of a familiar Tibetan myth, there are also examples of presumably indigenous, local stories in which first settlers are said to have come from different places. Aggarwal (1994), for example, recounts how people in the village of Achinathang refer to themselves as being from ‘mixed strains of barley grain’.xxiii People in Ladakh, like people everywhere, identify with different social groups and shift ‘identities’ frequently and often unreflectedly depending on their own and others’ readings and expectations of their situation. They are, unsurprisingly, embedded in a series of often overlapping and/or cross-cutting webs of belonging, which may be based on age or gender, kinship or occupation, or other dimensions of social life. Buddhism, for example, can serve as a shared reference for nearly half the population, but more important for daily religious practice are the sub-sect and monastic affiliation of the household, or the personal links with specific teachers and deities who may belong to different traditions.xxiv Households, arguably the most important social units in Ladakh (Aggarwal 1994; Dollfus 1989; Phylactou 1989), are commonly connected by different labour sharing arrangements (such as ra.res/ba.res)xxv, residential organisations (bcu.tsho), ‘clan’ affiliations (pha.spun)xxvi, and religious associations (for example chos.spun), but these networks are not commonly congruent. In the course of their daily lives, then, people in Ladakh ‘manage’ a range of social ‘identities’, some of which may be contradictory or overlapping. Regional antagonismsxxvii, traditional hierarchy, new money and political affiliations all conspire against singular identifications across Ladakh, although especially when traveling outside the region or interacting with outsiders people do identify and are indeed identified as Ladakhi.xxviii As socially skilled actors, people generally have a good sense for which social ‘identity’ is salient and appropriate in a certain situation. It is when situations are not clear, or when different orders clash in a certain setting, that problems of identification arise. State and bureaucratic insistence on semantically pure categories constitute an important and growing source of situations where reconciliation, hiding, or forgetting of ‘identities’ is required, but this kind of problem is not unknown in the ‘traditional’ sphere. Proper seating order (gral) , for example, is a crucial element at any gathering.xxix The seating of guests requires an assessment on the part of the hosts of the relative status of each visitor or guest. However, there are different systems of ranking, and the accommodation of these different systems in a given social situation can cause headaches, since mistakes can have serious consequences.xxx In principle, monks and other religious leaders are seated highest, and according to their rank. Nobility is similarly seated according to rank, with the royal lineage at the head. Age, gender, economic standing, social respectability, and ‘caste’ (in the case of stigmatized groups such as Mon and Beda) may all go into the deliberation. But how should one weigh the relative importance of these rankings when they need to be accommodated at the same event? Where does one seat the headmaster with respect to the local nobility? What about army officers, local politicians, formally higher status nobles, and technically always superior incarnate lamas (sprul.sku)? Since a final, formal calculation of rank and place is not possible, the social viability of any such arrangement depends on the willingness of guests and hosts to accept the assessment—usually arrived at after considerable discussions among the hosts and their friends and helpers. They must agree to suspend the argument at some point, as final, objective criteria—even those supplied by ‘tradition’—and social practice cannot be made to agree without such dissimulation. [Picture from inauguration plus few lines discussion?] The management of these incommensurable orders at the local level relies, then, on a degree of dissimulation and active willingness of those involved to accept a measure of inconsistency. When we shift analysis to the level of collective ‘identity’ at the regional and national level—where stakes are higher in important respects—the impossibility of matching singular semantic orders and multiple social practices becomes more pronounced and still more open to contestation. The Clash of Communities? Like elsewhere in the subcontinent, religious community became the basis of political representation in Kashmir’s Praja Sabha, the popularly elected Assembly established in 1934.xxxi Ladakhi political activists, educated and assisted by neo-Buddhist Kashmiris and other outsiders, learned to formulate their demands in terms of religious community.xxxii Consequently, regardless of whether unambiguous communities on the basis of religion existed on the ground, religious identity became a central theme in political strategies of Ladakhis, most clearly and violently during the agitation of 1989-1992. This campaign to “Free Ladakh from Kashmir” was led by the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) and involved a three-year social boycott of Muslims, banning all types of interaction between the ‘communities’.xxxiii As Buddhist political leaders later indicated, their choice for a communal strategy was a conscious one, since—as one of them put it— “we are living in system that is communal.” The “playing of the communal card”, LBA leaders reasoned, would ensure them the attention of the central government, especially given the simultaneously escalating ‘Muslim’ insurgency in the Kashmir Valley. The campaign involved a strong emphasis on Buddhism as the authentic, shared identity and culture of Ladakh, and a social boycott was imposed on Muslims. Young men adopted the earrings once worn by Buddhist nobles, the Tibetan script suddenly appeared on the signs of shops not owned by Muslims to make it easier to know where one could do business, and on religious holidays loudspeakers on the main temple in Leh rang with the taperecorded recitations of monks.xxxiv Many observers, including academics, were quick to accept the agitators’ claim that the agitation was a spontaneous uprising of the Buddhist Ladakhis against the discriminatory policies of the Muslim dominated State government. Close analysis of the history and actual practices of the agitation, however, shows that such easy domestication is problematic.xxxv The demand for autonomy had been raised repeatedly since at least the 1930s and generally not in religious partisan ways, but through all-Ladakh idioms. For example, memoranda submitted to State and Central governments since the 1960s generally demanded “declaration of the entire population of Ladakh as Scheduled Tribe”, while the All-Ladakh Action Committee that spearheaded this movement for more than a decade comprised both Muslims and Buddhists from Kargil and Leh. It was also in this all-Ladakh context that the more recent articulations of the demand for regional autonomy were voiced in the early 1980s. A “Memorandum submitted to the Hon’ble Minister of State for Home Affairs, Govt. of India on his visit to Leh on Feb 7, 1982, on behalf of the people of Ladakh through Ladakh Action Committee, Leh” begins: “We regret to submit that with the continueous subjugative and maligned attitude of Jammu and Kashmir Govt. Ladakhies have so far been neglected in every sphere of developmental fields. Ladakhies remained economically, educationally and politically backward as were many many years back. [...] Their [a State cabinet delegation, MvB] visit was followed by a maligned conspiracy to wage a communal riot which fortunately was a unknown thing to Ladakhis and failed in totality and Ladakhies maintained their age old freternity and communal harmony as usual.” (text as in original) Similarly, ‘broadlines’ for regional autonomy drafted by the Ladakh Action Committee in 1982 demand autonomy for the entire Ladakh region, and an accompanying “background note” deplores that “by bifurcation of Ladakh into two districts of Leh and Kargil, the name of Ladakh has been wiped off from history and even geography. As a compensation for this emotional loss, the people of Ladakh demanded divisional status for Ladakh with headquarters at Leh.”xxxvi The Buddhist “community” is deeply divided along class, regional, political ideological, and sectarian lines. Similarly, it is impossible to identify a homogeneous Muslim community in the complex social and political realities on the ground. Not only is there a significant division between Shias and Sunnis, but also political and class affiliations fragment the ‘community’. In the initial stages of the agitation, the LBA sought to exploit these divisions by inviting Shias to join the “Ladakh People’s Movement for Union Territory Status” and targeting the Sunnis as foreign (Kashmiri) elements.xxxvii The mobilisation of Buddhists and Muslims in the course of the agitation was a difficult and long process, and could never be maintained except for short periods and through the use of incentives including threats and actual physical punishment.xxxviii Experiences during my repeated and prolonged stays in Ladakh during the early agitation period in June-October 1989 and subsequent years, suggest that there was no enduring mobilisation of ‘the Buddhist community’ in any meaningful sense of the term. People did show up to demonstrate, sometimes in large numbers, but they did so for a variety of reasons, such as to avoid sactions such as fines or beatings, to have a day on the town and visit relatives, or also because they strongly supported the LBA cause. The unity of Ladakh’s Buddhists and of the Muslims, then, existed mostly as claims and representations, and the identity this unity supposedly reflected and constituted was of that elusive character in between the real and the really made-up. The fragmentation and recombination of different sections of the population in the wake of the creation of the Hill Council illustrates these unstabilities.xxxix Representing Ladakhi ‘Identity’ “Just as subordinates are not much deceived by their own performance there is, of course, no more reason for social scientists and historians to take that performance as, necessarily, one given in good faith.”(Scott 1990: 90) The communal division of society in the context of the Ladakh Buddhist Association campaign, although created with sticks as well as carrots, and heavily policed and sanctioned, then, constitutes an important set of identifications in official and public discourse in Ladakh. Yet this simple communal, binary reading of Ladakh as populated by two communities, cannot be recognized officially. As noted earlier, communalism is publicly deplored, regarded as the source of all evil and a most serious threat to the survival of the nation. Ladakh’s Buddhist ‘identity’, therefore, could not be officially recognized, and certainly could not be made the basis for political representation and empowerment. So, towards the end of his address to the first meeting of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council, Leh, the Governor of Jammu and Kashmir finally acknowledged the existence of Islam, and explicitly stated that “Our country is a tapestry of different cultures, customs and traditions. ... This land [Ladakh] has been blessed by the confluence of two of the greatest religions of the world. May this glorious intermingling of cultures be strengthened.”xl In the contestation over the allocation of political, economic, and other resources, state actors, academics, and local activists in Ladakh represent their demands and justifications in terms of the hegemonic discourse of the Indian state. Since difference— cultural, economic, climatic—warrants special attention, measures, and privileges, the art of representation consists in finding a way of balancing the irreducible complexity and multiplicity, the tensions and contradictions of local identifications and practices of belonging, with the expectations and demands for unambiguous singular collective identity of the state and the academics and other experts it relies on. The stability or persistence of certain ‘identities’—for example of ‘religious identity’ through the erasure of Muslims from many academic, official, and popular understandings of Ladakhi identity—is inherently unstable in that it is premised on an acceptance of a representation of Ladakhiness that is convincing not by virtue of its ‘reality’ or ‘deep rootedness’ in Ladakhi culture, but by its correspondence with the expected (cultural) forms of singular identities that are characteristic of the hegemonic discourse of identity and difference in its Indian form. As argued earlier, several different logics of identification operate in social and political practice in Ladakh. The irreducible multiplicity of everyday social identifications has been domesticated officially through the recognition of eight ‘tribes’. In addition, there is the communalist idiom and political practice that permeates the Indian polity and some levels of Ladakhi social and political practice. The composition and structure of the Hill Council reflect the simultaneous and contradictory operation of several of these principles. First, people are elected to represent different constituencies, which are geographically defined. In drawing the boundaries of constituencies, religious, political ideological, and economic considerations have all played a role in order to prevent domination by the urban centres and to ensure representation of at least some Muslims. In addition, the Governor appoints four members to represent ‘principal minorities’, i.e. Muslims, women, and a representative for ‘backward classes’. Hence, officially Ladakh’s unique conditions and characteristics, particularly climate and geography, are referred to in the “Reasons for Enactment” accompanying the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Act. The process towards achievement of this recognition of Ladakh’s autonomy and unique identity, however, was driven by a communalist strategy arguing on the basis of religious ‘identity’, and communal identifications are recognized and to some extent enshrined in the implementation of the Act. The political process since the (official) abandonment of the communal strategy by the LBA leadership in 1992, as well as a close analysis of the historical antecedents of the movement, show that class, regional, and sectarian ‘identities’ have had and continue to have a significant influence. In daily social interactions, people continue to shift, claim, contest, and deny specific ‘identities’, whose ‘origins’, salience, ‘reality’ and so forth cannot be easily settled, fixed, or deconstructed. Meanwhile, almost all Ladakhis carry a card that identifies them unambiguously as ‘a Balti’, ‘a Bot/Boto’, ‘a Changpa’, . . . Conclusion The ‘unique identity’ that was celebrated on the Pologround and which is referred to time and again in the rhetoric of representation in academic, bureaucratic, and political texts is not an ‘identity’ in any formal sense at all. It does not constitute a homogeneous, singular, unambiguously defined and bounded ‘entity’. In fact, outside these representations, in other spheres of social and cultural practice, there is no unity at all, as illustrated also by the rapid fragmentation of the precarious unity displayed at the first meeting of the Hill Council. Ladakhi ‘identity’ was not, is not just or really Buddhist, nor is it just or really a series of tribal communities. Its ambiguity, multiplicity, and fluidity is irreducible. Yet, these communal and tribal identities are necessary ‘fictions’. It is only through the imagining of such order, its ‘proper’ identification and representation, that the state can recognize its existence and empower it, and manage it. Therefore, in spite of the contradictions between such singular notions and their own everyday experiences of difference, people in Ladakh, not only the political elite, can ‘live’ with such a fiction, as long as it is allowed a measure of incompleteness and openness, and as long as ‘membership’ is not circumscribed in too exclusive a fashion or associated with too far-reaching implications in terms of livelihoods and social practice. In other words, as long as such official identities can be treated much like other social ‘identities’, there is no question of anxiety or confusion: even the tribal identities can therefore be accepted and put into use. They have their proper place and context. As long as official discourse of ‘identity’ in practice and implications resembles in its tolerance of ambiguity, difference and even paradox, the everyday creative identifications that characterize the social reality it purports to merely represent, such ‘category mistakes’ do not interfere with the inhabitability of the social orders people construct. It is precisely the ambiguity of local practices of identification that makes it possible for people to imagine their shared identity (‘Ladakhi’) in an unproblematic, even unreflected fashion. It is the lack of narrowly defined characteristics and criteria of proper Ladakhiness that makes Ladakhiness possible in social practice: ‘it’ can exist, because it remains relatively undefined, undemarcated in any rigid sense, allowed to exist somewhere between the real and the really made-up. It is this ‘everyday’ reality of the irreducibility of difference—an appreciation that does not mistake the metaphors of ‘identity’ for the ‘reality’ it symbolizes—that is sought to be banished from the rationalised, objectified systematicity demanded by science, bureaucracy, law, and the principles of liberal representative democracy. The positing of categorical purity makes everyday practices of social identification intolerable and causes Ladakhi ‘identity’ to appear like a cynical, inauthentic construct. It is only through the acceptance of the imperfection of the match between (singular, stable, homogenous) imputed ‘identity’ and (multiple, fluid, heterogeneous) social practices of identification, that social life —indeed social ‘groups’—are made possible. For a brief moment, then, the Governor, the President, Parliament, and people in Ladakh together created and enabled the temporary semblance of stability that is required for an ‘identity’ to be identified and celebrated. It could only be imagined in such a way, differently for different people. Identity of imagining is not necessary, just a willingness to imagine identity. The domesticated, non-communal but partly religiously defined, unified but fragmented, notion of Ladakhi ‘identity’ is, in other words, real yet unreal, a fiction with a material presence. The currency of this notion, and the fact that it serves as the basis of so much concrete action, legitimizes and justifies allocations, claims and demands, relies on its ambiguity, which however needs to be forgotten—at least officially, now and then. We identify, therefore we dissimulate. Acknowledgement: This contribution is based on research made possible in part through a Jennings Randolph Peace Scholar Award from the United States Institute of Peace. Supplementary support for fieldwork in Ladakh in 1993-1995 was granted by the Peace Studies Program, International Political Economy Program, and South Asia Program, all at Cornell University. The ideas and material upon which this argument is based have been developed in the course of research and professional activities in Ladakh since 1985. I gratefully acknowledge the collaboration, support and encouragement I have received from numerous people in Ladakh. 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Kargil’s population feels vulnerable because of the district’s greater dependence and proximity to the Kashmir valley, and it was feared that accepting regional autonomy might have been read as lack of support for the militants there (van Beek 1996). Since 1997, Pakistani troops have regularly shelled Kargil town, and in the spring of 1999 a major incursion across the Line of Control (LoC) forced tens of thousands of people to flee to safer places. These events, too, were interpreted by some as “punishment” for lack of support for militant separatists. See Himal (May 1998) for a series of articles on the problems of the populations on both sides of the LoC. iiThere are two main Muslim organisations in Leh. The Anjuman-e Mu’in-e Islam is the main Sunni social organisation. The Anjuman-e Imamia is its Shia counterpart. There is also, in political contexts, a Ladakh Muslim Association (See e.g. Pinault, in press). However, this is merely an ad hoc body without formal membership, leadership, or constitution, and presently defunct. The main Buddhist organisation is the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA). Other prominent Buddhist social organisations are the All-Ladakh Gonpa Association and the Lamdon Social Welfare Organisation. In addition, many monasteries have established welfare associations. iiiPopulation figures are estimated on the basis of extrapolation from decennial growth rates at the time of the last regular census held in 1981 and population figures form a “mini census” conducted in 1987 in connection with the granting of Scheduled Tribe status to the majority of Ladakh’s population (discussed below). The report from this special census remains classified. ivJames Tully (1995: 199), quoting Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations, writes: “His interlocutor insists, surely, ‘a thing is identical with itself.’ Wittgenstein replies, there ‘is no finer example of a useless proposition, which yet is connected with a certain play of the imagination. It is as if in imagination we put a thing into its own shape and saw that it fitted.” vThe concept of ‘community’, perhaps even more so than identity, remains undertheorized. See e.g. Connolly (1991) and Holmes (1993: 176 ff). vi‘Communalism’ in the South Asian context refers to religious ‘community’ partisanship. For a thorough conceptual and historical discussion of communalism, see Pandey (1990, especially chapter one). viiIt is worth remembering the distinction between vertreten and darstellen that is embedded in the concept. See e.g. Spivak (1988). viiiThe importance of memory and forgetting as active processes is discussed elegantly in Anderson (1991; 1993) and in the recent collection edited by Gillis (1996). ixAt the same time, stereotypes, e.g. about ‘ethnic’ groups often persist in the face of experiences and ‘facts’ that would appear to debunk them. For Žižek (1992:49) this is ‘proof’ that an ideology is really succeeding. Although approaching ideology from a different angle, Etienne Balibar similarly sees the impossibility of dispelling racist ideas through information as a consequence of the fact that racism is “effective thinking upon an illusory object” (Balibar and Wallerstein 1991: 221 emphasis in the original). It is this misrecognition of the constructs of the mind—and its real effect that “whoever classifies . . . causes to exist in practice that illusion that is collectivity based on the similitude of its members” (ibid. 221)—that makes identity fetishism so pernicious. xTotalitarian ideology may seek such a total ‘hold’ over people, where subjects “no longer feel any contradiction between it and reality” (Žižek 1992:49). It is this desire to erase the “traces of its own impossibility” that is typical of ideology. xiSee e.g. the discussions by Billig (1995) and Herzfeld (1992; 1996) xiiThis point, of course, is central to the argument for what Spivak calls “strategic essentialism”, and a common consideration in political movements of ‘indigenous peoples’ (see e.g. Assies 1994; Dyck 1985; Stavenhagen 1994). xiiiThis is not to suggest that scientists and bureaucrats unilaterally construct representations of Ladakhi identity/-ies out of thin air. They also draw on local practices, and local actors are implicated in the same process of production of representations of singular identities. xiv‘Realist’ international relations theorists on the other hand see the rise of identity politics as an expression of the vitality of ethnic identities at a world-historical time of the birth of a new order. See e.g. Horowitz (1985); Jalali (1992-93); Moynihan (1993). While such positions may be regarded as hopelessly inadequate and outdated by anthropologists, it is worth recognizing that this classical perspective continues to predominate among policy-makers and politicians, if not among the general public. xvA useful overview of the debate is offered by Mann (1996). xviThe State of Jammu and Kashmir has a special status within the Indian Union, specified in Article 370 of the Constitution. It is the only state with a separate constitution. All laws passed by the Central Government and affecting the State need to be ratified separately by the J&K State Assembly, as happened in October 1997 with the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Council Act. xvii This “imperialism of categories” (Nandy 1990: 69) constitutes the essence of colonisation, as Comaroff and Comaroff suggest (1991: 19). However, drawing on Foucault, I would argue that it is an expression of “governmentality”, rather than of colonialism per se (Foucault 1991). I disagree with the Comaroffs, when they argue that this kind of process turns the colonized others into “pliant objects and silenced subjects of our scripts and scenarios”. Rather, the colonized others are themselves actively involved in the process of “conceptualizing, inscribing and interacting”. xviiiThey have also been appropriated as ‘evidence’ by Ladakhi political activists and their sympathizers to bolster their claims. See e.g. KRBMS (1935), and Buddhist memoranda of 1932 (Buddhists 1932) and 1949 (Ladakh Buddhist Association 1990/1949). xixSee van Beek (1997a) for a more detailed historical analysis of census classifications of Ladakh’s population. Important discussions of the politics of enumeration in India include Appadurai (1993), Cohn (1991), Jones (1981), and Pedersen (1986). xxIn local parlance in Leh, the term Balti is used to refer to Shia muslims, also those from the region known as Purig. The existence of the formal ‘tribal’ identity of Purigpa is practically ignored in daily use in Leh, although that is the official designation for the vast majority of Shias from Kargil district. xxiOn the British perception of religious community in India, see e.g. Pandey (1990) and Inden (Inden 1990). xxiiSee Aggarwal (1994; 1997) for a discussion of this issue. More recently, anthropologists and sociologists working in Ladakh have begun to pay more attention to Islam. Examples include the work of Dollfus (1995), Grist (1993; 1995; 1998), and Srinivas (1995; 1997). xxiiiAggarwal (1994), Dollfus (1989), and Kaplanian (1991) offer discussions of local oral traditions regarding the settlement of the region. Little is known about the early history or population of the region prior to the tenth century. xxivMuslims similarly identify with different religious traditions, such as Sunni, Shia, and Nurbakshia. On Shias and Sunnis, see e.g. Pinault (In press). Shias in the Suru valley of Kargil District follow different spiritual leaders known as Agas and there has been considerable conflict between different factions. See Grist (1998, especially chapter three) for a discussion of this issue. There is no Muslim community in any simple sense, any more than there is a Buddhist ‘community’ in Ladakh. Yet, the principle of such a community is recognized e.g. through the Buddhist term nang.pa [insiders]. I have heard Muslim leaders use the term qom in this ‘community’ sense, explaining that on a certain political question they needed to consult their qom. xxvSee Dollfus 1989 (especially chapter 7) for a detailed discussion of las.bes and other relations of reciprocity and mutual aid in the village of Hemis Shugpacan in lower Ladakh (gsham). xxviA pha spun is a group of households that help one another with arrangements surrounding birth, marriage, and death. They are commonly identified through the worship of a specific deity or pha lha. In principle the name suggests a patrilineal ‘clan’, but this is certainly not always the case in practice. Rather, membership is relatively open to newcomers. The practices and principles of pha spun vary considerably across Ladakh (and across time, no doubt). For discussions, see e.g. Brauen (1980); Dollfus (1989); Gutschow (1995); and Phylactou (1989). xxviiSignificant antagonisms exist for example between Leh and the regions of Sham and Changthang. In Leh extensive repertoires of ‘ethnic’ jokes exist that poke fun at the greed of Sham’s traders, or the backwardness of Changpa nomads. These days, the rivalry and suspicions are expressed particularly clearly during election campaigns. xxviii The recognition and significance of regional provenance is illustrated by the fact that e.g. the large monastery of Tashilhunpo in Shigatse in Tibet had a separate ‘hostel’ (khang.tshang) for monks from Ladakh. xxixAggarwal (1994) reports a case where an entire group of households was put under a ‘social boycott’ (me.len chu.len chad.pa) because at a wedding hosted by this (low status) group, bride and groom and their relatives were deemed by the invited (higher status) villagers, to have been seated too high. The conflict endured for months. xxxThe minutes of meetings of the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (which cover the 1938-1952 period, albeit with significant gaps) show how a considerable part of the organization’s energy was devoted to arbitrate in cases of disputes over alleged insults by inappropriate seatings at social events. xxxiKooiman (1995) is overstating the case when he suggests that separate electorates were not a feature of the political system in the ‘Princely States’. xxxiiFor a detailed discussion of the role of neo-Buddhists, see Bertelsen (1997). xxxiiiSee van Beek (1996) for a more comprehensive discussion of this process. xxxivIn 1995 this practice escalated into a competition between the muezzin of the Leh Sunni mosque and the taped monks of the Chokhang, just across the street from one another. Whenever the Muslims were called to prayer, the sound of the monks rang out as well. As a Buddhist activist joked, “Now Buddhists are also called to prayer five times a day.” xxxvAs I have argued elsewhere, the representation of Ladakhi demands for autonomy in the course of the agitation involved a domestication of Ladakhi identity in two senses. First, the multiplicity of identifications in Ladakhi social practice was ‘tamed’ through its representation as a singular, coherent, and unambiguously bounded Buddhist identity. Secondly, representations of Ladakhi identity were ‘Indianized’ by the adoption of the communalist idiom that is so central to Indian politics. See van Beek (In press-a) for more detail. xxxviThese quotes are taken from an undated document entitled “Regional Autonomy for Ladakh within the Framework of the Constitution of Jammu and Kashmir State. Broadlines for Regional Autonomy”and an undated “Background note regarding events leading to the recent agitation in Ladakh” by Congress MP P. Namgyal. Both are most likely from January or February 1982. xxxviiAs mentioned in note 1, the predicament of the Shia population of Kargil District illustrates the consequences of these identifications. Caught between Buddhist radicals and the insurgents in the Kashmir Valley, their identity is reduced to Muslim. When refugees from Kargil and Dras sought refuge in Leh in the wake of the outbreak of large-scale fighting in the spring of 1999, the Youth Wing of the LBA issued a statement casting doubt on the loyalty of the Muslim refugees and demanding their ouster from Leh. Later, the LBA, Muslim associations, and other political and social organisations met and promised to maintain harmony and to defend Ladakh against all intruders. xxxviiiA more elaborate discussion can be found in van Beek and Bertelsen (1997) and Bray (1991). xxxixFor a discussion of post-Hill Council developments, see van Beek (1999). xlEarlier in his speech, he refers only to Buddhism as Ladakh’s “unique cultural heritage” and even quotes the Buddha.