Abstract
Much as the scholarship on human rights has engaged with a diverse range of social, political and cultural themes, there is still a great deal to be said about how marginalized struggles develop everyday representations and ephemeral civic idioms contra dominant institutions. Extending this unexplored line of enquiry, I advance a minor communicative theory of human rights, arguing that its future lies in its broader representational function in civil society. By positing my ethnographic learnings from the Brokpa people of Ladakh within a working theory of recognition, I foreground how their political praxes mobilize a vernacular lexis of human rights to sabotage statist and institutional monopolies over legal enunciations. Such idiomatic claims help experiences of injustice transcend the procedural, formalistic obstacles of state and international law. When discursively asserted, they provoke the addressee to recognize the underlying contention as a social truth, not just a political or legal ploy. At the same time, in order to create a civic space independent of statist and other institutional hegemonies, these assertions need to maintain distance from state law and other international vestiges while retaining their inseparability from the larger human rights discourse as a latent thought. I term this cognition, with a nod to Adorno, non-identity thinking. In sum, recognition and non-identity thinking provide two theoretical motifs to investigate communicative praxes of human rights beyond the Brokpa people's struggles, without being mired in vernacularization, civic activism, rule of law, legal transplants, relativistic fetishism, universalist reification and other conceptual themes that prevail in our extant scholarly catalogue.
In March 2006, American Anthropologist published a special feature titled ‘Anthropology and Human Rights in a New Key’. The programmatic fodder for this engagement was taken from Melville Herskovits's ‘Statement on Human Rights’, drafted when international human rights law was being novelly minted after World War II (Executive Board of the AAA, 1947). Suspicious of the overarching promises in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, Herskovits encouraged anthropologists to exercise relativistic caution and normative neutrality in the spirit of scientific rigor. The discipline initially shared his isolationist doubts until mounting humanitarian abuses during the late Cold War in the 1980s and 1990s rendered political blindness untenable (Goodale, 2009: 18–39). Today, as the defeatist end-of-history illusion (see Moyn, 2012, 2016) seems to have faded into an all-too-real itinerary of unending violence (see Sircar, 2012), our reckoning with human rights cannot recede into purely legalistic, doctrinal or instrumental silos. Nor can it repent that the contemporary inflation of rights, some of which have been vehicles of social transformation, has unsettled the dogma of bounded meanings (Theilen, 2021). Though Mark Goodale (2006) outlines an ‘ecumenical’ agenda mostly for anthropologists, ethnographic accounts of human rights may morally inform its more pragmatic functions beyond the heightened role of mitigating violence. Of course, it is one thing to imagine such generality and completely another to make it happen without distancing the academy further from human rights workers who live much closer to the pain and suffering that frame our words. No doubt we must be wary of mindlessly globalizing the human rights regime and still try to understand the ethical significance of its emancipatory prowess; but how? Where are these people who hate and love it at the same time, much akin to the contemporary scholarly attitude of learning to accept human rights as a ‘violating enablement’ that we ‘cannot not want’ (see Spivak, 2008: 44)?
The 2006 issue is addressed to anthropologists, but its theoretical wisdom is interdisciplinary. What broadly emerges from the volume is that it is no longer analytically prudent to parse human rights into law, vernaculars, politics or even languages. That names like Jane Cowan (2006), Sally Merry (2006b), Annelise Riles (2006a) and Shannon Speed (2006) occupy the bylines is indicative of an ethnographic aptitude that is accessible to other theoretical vantages. While these diverse standpoints – which also mirror the much more unsolvable uncertainty concerning whether to approach human rights as a practice, discourse, philosophical topos or everyday phenomenon – expose its eclectic real-world applications, it is equally correct that governments and abusers have arrogated it for purposes we have a hard time endorsing (Wilson, 2006: 78). Ironically, the 2006 issue insinuates the limits of ecumenicalism: it says a great deal about a multitude of particularities, but at the expense of generalizability. Today, instead of regurgitating the universalism-versus-relativism debate (see Marks, 2013) or imposing a choice between condoning or condemning human rights (see generally Turner et al., 2008), we know that there are people in peripheral struggles elsewhere who already embody responses to these contorted dilemmas. They are in different places, bogged down by their own struggles, but perhaps the fact that their diverse idioms and practices somehow utilize the syntax of human rights, if only the threadbare phrase, signifies its enduring significance against the growing debris of its losses. Here, I unpack this possibility through a case study, suggesting that moral recognition might be the normative grammar behind multifaceted vernaculars of human rights around the world.
Our scholastic predispositions have visibly evolved from Herskovits's downright pessimism to the 2006 issue's calculated foresight. As Upendra Baxi (2008: 165) notes, we have, in large measure if not entirely, departed from the old ‘enunciatory justifications’ of human rights towards geo-philosophically, spatially and linguistically heterogeneous analyses. This insight is aimed at lawyers and practitioners, though it may just as well apply to ‘ecumenical’ compilations like the one above or the Stanford Studies in Human Rights. A running theme in this anthropological archive is the vernacularization thesis: if not the term itself, an unstated cachet of permeation appears to dictate how we ethnographically trace human rights across contexts, as though whole ideas and their socio-political indices are taken from the global, and through activism at the cusp of the local, such adaptations disseminate, spread like veins or disperse like air, to the grassroots. Much as Merry and Levitt (2019), along with other proponents of the thesis, have rejected its reduction to mere travel or diffusion, not enough has been done to theorize the everyday communicative praxes of human rights that circulate locally without interacting with higher political spheres like the state or international law. I will return to vernacularization only in the Coda, though the sections in between build towards it. But this cursory detour should locate the timeliness of my research. Disciplinarily, it counters the preoccupation with permeation. Conceptually, I posit normativity in quotidian expressions of human rights, not in ideational itineraries or cross-institutional activism.
To judge what works and what does not in a practice or discourse of human rights, we need an external standard to avoid repeating its own assumptions – one that is homologous with its telos of freedom and emancipation all the same. A particular hands-on use or a settled doctrinal dictum of international law is not sufficient to prove its moral credence. It cannot be any better to start from first principles either, since universal proclamations of dignity and other liberal maxims come laden with an indelible blot of imperialism (Kapur, 2006; Mutua, 2023), not to mention the mala fide orchestrators of mass violence who capitalize on their normative vagueness. At the same time, considering that our intellectual prevarications do not seem to prevent people on the margins from expressing certain claims in the lexis of human rights, perhaps there already are empirical resources to conceptualize its external moral purchase. This is one such attempt at listening to the peripheries for a model framework. A judicious legal ethnography of the mundane must be able to map any intuitive proclivity for human rights onto the social norms that ratify its ethical acceptability and the political logjams where it is born. Therefore, if we are to properly understand the sociality through which human rights proliferates, then the extant accent on Non-Governmental Organizations (NGOs), activism, translocality and vernacularization from international law may prove to be as unsatisfactory as formal and instrumentalist legal approaches. The popular morality of human rights might overshoot institutional and organizational reach. It could well be enmeshed in a banal communicative sphere – that is, in everyday socio-political relationships whose latent normativity also informs contexts where human rights idioms are deployed.
The coming ethnographic snapshots conceive of recognition – in a situated, contingent yet universalist parlance – as this operative norm. My notion of recognition, inspired by Axel Honneth (1996b), derives from formative human experiences of the intersubjective self, which then can be scaled up to unveil a moral integument where expressions of human rights pass from one agent to another. Contemplating human rights as a claim for recognition need not demote it to a monolithic origin, for its universalist normative appeal can well emerge from a multitude of grounds (Buchanan, 2013). The mishap lies in the dated preference for a priori meanings. On the other hand, I wish to revisit my fieldnotes to envision a shared moral – and still pluralistic – syntax of human rights that is psychologically driven towards the acknowledgement of one's creative agency in devising locally sensitive political techniques. I thus train my eyes on the Brokpa people, a micro minority in Ladakh inhabiting the four major villages of Darchiks, Garkone, Dah and Hanu between Leh and Kargil along the border with Pakistan. I write this piece after a year of living in Garkone for my doctoral fieldwork. Centered around a land dispute and an ensuant disagreement over the office of the village headman, the vocabulary of human rights has become a standard explanatory motif in the quotidian speech of some Brokpa agents, especially those boasting of an education and steady interactions with state officials. Neither does this elocutionary gambit rely on settled meanings, nor is it chiefly aimed at obtaining material entitlements from courts. At the cost of hazarding a spoiler, the esoteric script of human rights that I frequently encountered in the Brokpa villages has been contrived for mutual intelligibility with civil society. The absence of doctrine from their claims presages the gap between human rights and law, both international and municipal, as a fiat for utopic imagination that must actualize through political action. With a nod to Adorno, I call this non-identity thinking, 1 but to flag at the outset, abjuring doctrine is not heedless ignorance. As the cognition that induces variegated idioms of culture and representation, non-identity thinking, different though its substantive composition is for different Brokpa persons, is an interpretable phenomenon with temporal, sociological and strategic aspects. This volitional exercise in nescience is one way, inter alia, to undo the formalism of human rights law while retaining its political strength in civic representations of social exclusion.
To reorder human rights as a moral grammar for recognition is to focus on how the ubiquitous political ideas of universality, dignity, solidarity and so on can also burgeon from local conflicts. Although the conceptual and pragmatic make-up of these embodiments resembles their global, more widespread parallels, their expressions may befit different names – the way we will study their manifestations in Garkone as self-evidence, self-respect and self-esteem. More so, such cognitive and purposive reworkings on the ground level might be normative in the sense of being both politically desired by marginalized struggles and morally necessary for human rights to survive. The spread of international legal principles from their putative institutions has blurred the divide between law and non-law, carving an opening for culture to act as a mediator between the social and the juridical. On the flip side, this blindsiding of political and economic factors has endorsed a pernicious relativistic wisdom that allows almost any malefaction within its context (Merry, 2003, 2006a; also see Messer, 1993). A possible way forward, Richard Wilson (2007: 50) suggests, is to separate ‘human rights law’ from ‘human rights talk’. One implies legal codes, the other their cultural reception, and never shall we stop wondering which comes first – the chicken or the egg, the law or the talk. This is a moot concern for the Brokpa people. Their idioms of human rights do not require the state or international law for a provenance, for their talk relates to legality as a postponed value to be attained in the future. Bookended by the political struggle where this voice originates and the social disrespect it wishes to treat, law and culture serve as polymorphous representational genres of recognition. The underlying rationale is what I conceptualize as non-identity thinking in the penultimate section.
Even though I have previously grappled with the prominence of recognition in human rights praxes (Bhagabati, 2025), what I have learnt thus far from my Brokpa friends is not an importation of that theoretical acumen but a novel mediation between context and universality – or particular political struggles and human rights – that matures my interest in the cultural spine of respect and esteem. Therefore, my major argument, couched in a coda at the end, is that if human rights is to have a future despite its relentless inability to stop violence around the world, then we must develop a theoretical schema for its more minimalistic representational function in civil society. Perhaps this point can be arrived at from a different perspective. Rainer Forst (2010, 2024: 132–152) suggests that the moral validity of human rights lies in its emancipatory language that demands justifications from others – individuals, states and corporations alike – for social and political non-domination, while reflexively fixing a duty to equally respect the capacity of the rest to elicit obverse claims. Such a framework needs to be discursive and historically contingent – with this much I agree. Where I diverge from Forst is the deontic nature of his justificatory and reflexive second-order norm. My stress on recognition frames human rights more as a language or discourse than a matrix of rights and duties. Accordingly, I begin from the ground up, studying how such a reciprocal praxis is already available among the Brokpa people, and then finally comment on how this can outline the generalist normative function of human rights in civil society. But prior to that, a propaedeutic primer on recognition might be in order before beginning the ethnographic story in a section from there.
Methodological and theoretical groundwork
The growing anthropological gaze on recognition sees it at once as a political goal and a moral claim. People have wished to be noticed or recognized throughout history, but it is a modern sentiment, Charles Taylor (1994) writes, which recoups individual respect by dismantling traditional hierarchies and asserting corporate selfhood. This, conversely, can subsume individual identities within abstract group formations or obtuse ontologies that postulate what it means to be a human, such as the convention for an inherently dignified and undifferentiated humanity. Recognition, for Taylor (1998: 106), sits at the interstice between ‘philosophical anthropology and actual politics’ through the collective functionaries of customs and culture. An upshot of this has been the growth of multiculturalism in global movements (see, e.g. Mookherjee, 2014). But weaponizing recognition simmers ethnic volatilities and identitarian clashes. We read with Lorenza Fontana (2023) that recent conflicts between peasants and the indigenous in the Andes are irruptions of hitherto inert ethnic and class tensions that have been activated by an incipient recognition-based politics of rights and self-governance, often packaged under a veneer of equality and diversity. Since not all disenfranchised communities are spotlessly egalitarian, universal dignity may still be a vital pronouncement of self-determination against suffering, for multiculturalism cannot always erase social differences or prohibit one group from oppressing others. Honneth shows a more incisive alternative to the deadlock between the tyranny of groupism on one end and excessive individualism on the other by mooring the universal normativity of recognition in the psyche. The individual and the universal intersubjectively legitimize each other in this moral network. There is room here for collective rights as well as personal freedom. Denying the community its entitlements would destroy intersubjectivity, whereas inflicting violence in the name of the same community would count as a perversion of the dignity available to all.
In legal speak, recognition likewise operates as a moral comparator and a political conduit to forge sociality among actors who swear by the distinctiveness of law. The literature can be divided into two prongs: one that morally grounds law in recognition and another that prefigures it as a right. 2 Costas Douzinas (2002), with an impressive Hegelian flair, finds a latitude in human rights for both the concreteness of the modern person and its similarity with abstract humanity. He also hastens to mention that the ‘community’ is the ‘background and effect of recognition’ (Douzinas, 2002: 396). I am not quite sure of such communitarian tendencies. There is no one unified Brokpa idiolect of human rights, and the expressions of select power brokers need not bind everyone who relates to this identity. Although a claim for recognition does linguistically presuppose some semblance of a community for the utterance to be cogent, mistaking this semantic manoeuvre as a precondition unlocks a backdoor to ethnic violence of the sort that Fontana records in the Andes or Shannon Speed (2008) documents in the contests for a true Chol subject in Chiapas. The problem with the first series of legal works on recognition is the irredeemable search for a logos that can rationalize its usefulness and affinity to law. The way Douzinas roots recognition in an ersatz anthropology of the community, David Boucher (2011) discovers its relic in customary international law through natural law. That ‘customary behaviour creates rights, and the discursive activity of common law lawyers and international jurists constitutes recognition in the sense of knowing them, or formalizing them’ (Boucher, 2011: 755) is historically correct for how international law has developed over the last 600 years. The Brokpa people's expressions, however, are not encumbered by such an intellectual history, which in turn signposts the fact that the strategic mobilization of human rights in the struggles of the marginalized need not replicate any philosophical, theoretical or didactic concern about the nature and past of law. Recognition is a multifarious category (see Bartelson, 2013). Any logocentric attempt to diminish its practical valence to general epistemological enquiries about the origins and fundamentals of law denigrates its militant potential for undoing injustice and proffering a just selfhood without totally forsaking legal stratagems.
Just as the paragraph above demonstrates that recognition can neither be a legal right nor justify law without first securing legitimacy and morality externally, its relevance to human rights similarly craves prior moral–psychological grounding. Hence my reliance on Honneth (1996b: 71–91), who notes that to be recognized and mutually recognize another is a normative necessity since such intersubjective dynamics confirm the existence of the other and our dependence on it. The other's voice, as a soliloquy in our minds or an actual communication, proves our own presence. Without the other there is no self, and so it follows that we are morally bound to recognize them as a person on the same standing we wish for ourselves. This cannot be an amorphous interface devoid of institutional fixedness. Otherwise, there will be no common threshold for the kind of person we want to become ourselves by virtue of others striving for the same. Acting on this grounding, Honneth adumbrates three institutional modalities of recognition – love in the family, law in the state and solidarity in civil society. With time, the historicism of his early works has evaporated into a more contained argument, coming to fruition in Freedom's Right, for recognition being inseparable from autonomy (Honneth, 2014), which is a value ingrained in all technologies of modern democracy (see Deranty, 2011). For Brokpa power brokers, the state and the court are the very institutions that have exacerbated their political troubles with the headmanship and the disputed land. Yet they know that the solution lies with bureaucrats, so they are forced to parley with them. This condition of dependency is why my narrative of recognition also displays a minor institutional tilt – not to entrap normativity in the state but to acknowledge that since human rights today is bound up with statist geopolitical pressures, its idioms will also shuttle between officious agents and marginalized struggles as a matter of contingency. In short, my attention to delimited sites of politics is not the same as Honneth's shoehorning of recognition into three mutually exclusive spaces.
So we can now appreciate that the impulse for recognition is psychologically coterminous with the human need to be reassured of our sense of self by another – be it the mother in the family, the judge in the courtroom or someone else yet more. This bare minimum mental architecture is all that the subject of recognition requires. But the one of human rights, given the politically charged atmosphere in which it is anchored, must include more worldly conditions within its definitional remit. In fact, the subject of human rights amidst today's globalized diffusiveness, where the public sphere is in constant motion, culturally differentiating people at every node of time and space (see Appadurai, 1990), is relationally produced in the practices of aid workers, lawyers, activists, politicians, rebels against oppression and others who use its norms. 3 We are becoming more and more accustomed to beginning from difference nowadays than universalism – that is, to ‘flux, to movement, to becoming, to indeterminacy’ (Lash and Featherstone, 2001: 8), to recognition conforming neither to natural principles nor positive law, to it simultaneously subtending a community in words while circumventing pseudo-empirical generalizations altogether. We would do well to heed Joel Robbins’ (2009: 187) advice about taking Honneth's ‘relationalist position’ seriously as the flesh of sociality between ‘universalist ambitions’ and the ‘contemporary discourse on justice’. In this vein, the recognition-seeking subject of human rights also possesses the minimal psychological need for selfhood via the other. It is just that the location which hosts this generative process is in constant movement, flowing from one agent to another, engaging institution after institution, without donning new qualitative personae at fixed points. In Honneth's terminology, correcting misrecognition in the family fetches self-confidence; in law, self-respect; and in civil society, self-esteem. But in terms of human rights – since we are not splitting it into law, vernaculars, politics or languages – this institution-specific designation would be incompatible with its relational reality. For the Brokpa people, the communicative domain of their human rights praxes extends from casual conversations in the household to negotiations with bureaucrats. Confidence, respect and esteem are jointly and severally bargained for in this continuum, not chronologically, one after the other or in requital only from particular sources.
A relational outlook on universality assuages anthropology's obsession with relativity. When the discipline began wrestling with the philosophy of human rights, its immediate frame of reference was legal theory and jurisprudence. The debate effectively was set up between the universalism inherited from these disciplines and the cultural relativism that anthropology had long been mired in (see Wilson, 1997). Critiques of international law also continue to sink deeper into the quicksand of relativism with their dead-weighted dislike for universal charters. 4 Recognition sidesteps this impasse, for it tells us that universalities can germinate from situated, contingent chapters as well. For sure, the glossary of rights is rife with legal-liberalist phrases like autonomy, human dignity and personhood, so I retain these terms with an uneasy awareness of their Eurocentric specter. But an analogy with a certain political and intellectual trajectory in the West need not preclude a different conceptual development of similar values elsewhere. Rights-based struggles for recognition, for starters, have had a strong legacy in Africa (see Englund and Nyamnjoh, 2004), doubtless with tumultuous faith in modernity and democracy.
Since I commence with two current conflicts in which the Brokpa people are embroiled, my starting point is the inverse: the social pathology of misrecognition or exclusion (cf. Zurn, 2011). This does present a tangle. Honneth (1996a: 392, 393–394) believes that a social pathology is ‘determined as a deviation from an ideal’, which is discovered by a ‘weak formal anthropology’ of the ‘universal conditions’ of unenforced ‘human life ideals’. To recast Fabian Freyenhagen's (2015) criticism, he assumes universality to begin with instead of aggregating the empirical practices that display the structural recurrence of the universal ethic. On the contrary, if we kick off from extreme particularities, the entrance to a generalizable theory might be so far removed that we may never cross it. But we have to start somewhere, somehow overcoming the deep-seated anxiety of beginning that has long plagued Western philosophy (see Rose, 1992: 85–110). Human rights may hold an answer in the form of a framework where universality and particularity – as indeed the pathos and its antidote, the theoretical and the practical – dialectically legitimize each other's schematic performance in maintaining the singular discursive, analytic, legal and political characteristics of the field. Our analyses can begin from practice itself, without taking sides, without axiomatic declarations. Though not everyone conveys pain and suffering in the concordance of human rights, many have found in it a palliative capacity to lend labels to their travails and call for remedies as a matter of entitlement. Precisely because of its heterogeneity, human rights entails signifiers for both pathologies – violence, abuses – and their redressal (see Baxi, 2009).
After the revolutions in America and France, a nascent sensitivity towards human rights emerged in the 18th-century Western political milieu as a concrete type of empathy. Newfound notions of liberty delivered a naturally equal and franchised personality, which was understood to be self-evident, but without any explanation. Lynn Hunt (2007) posits that when Rousseau wrote about the ‘rights of man’ alongside those of ‘humanity’ and the ‘citizen’, he gave little definition to the terms. Only through epistolary novels about love and marriage did such embryonic conceptions of human rights gain popular currency, effecting widespread ‘brain changes’ that presupposed autonomy and empathy as spirited life forces. In Garkone, the story appears to be unfolding again. The plain signifier regulating the expressions of human rights there is no more verbose and no less mundane than the English phrase ‘human rights’. People suffuse it with their recollections of social disrespect, shunning reliance on prior semantic content while still presuming its authoritativeness to be self-evident. One of my interlocutors, whom I will introduce in the next section, quite tellingly verbalized this surmise of obviousness as the birth freedom ‘to be able to eat, not face torture, speak freely’. By invoking the mere term, Brokpa power brokers compile individual emotions into socially legible claims, which are then infused with the political charge associated with human rights to antagonize, alert and at times, soften bureaucrats for an end to the ongoing disputes in their favour. This happens outside statist enclosures, closer to civil society, where officials suspend some of their high-handedness. If 18th-century France gave rise to a proto-history of human rights, in Garkone a proto-sociology of recognition via human rights is under construction. The conceptual device through which this development keeps its configuration with law and the international open-textured, again, is non-identity thinking.
So what exactly is non-identity thinking – or, as the title of Adorno's monograph goes, negative dialectics? Simply put, it is the intuition that ‘objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder’ (Adorno, 1973: 5). Western philosophy has long prioritized identity thinking, resulting in either the one-to-one equation of universals with their supposed particulars or the misrepresentation of reality as a paradigm that contains specifics, diversely yet more or less wholly. Consider the dated motif of universal dignity. The first kind of identity thinking would see the Western Enlightenment man as the sole proper holder of dignity. The latter would concede some heterogeneity to humankind, but only to subsume all differences within the universal concept of dignity. We now understand well that neither vision accounts for the vibrancy of rights beyond liberal traditions. Non-identity thinking, however, leaves room for the experience of contradiction since it stems from the coercion that society exerts on persons or concepts – universals – on objects (Cook, n.d.: 4). Tactically, it assigns law merely the latent cognitive form of a political residue which might be the ideal corrective to present dissensions, but not just yet. When Brokpa power brokers seek to retain the assailed headmanship and land, their representations draw on imaginaries of ‘culture’, ‘tradition’ and ‘religion’, but the mention of law, so far as it is deliberated in conjunction with human rights, is consciously eluded. At the same time, law remains a helpful tool in their minds. Except, they prefer someone better versed in it to translate their claims into legal speak. They are happy not to cite law, knowing this might weaken their case, until the present culturalist contests are won, lest their mistaken legal assertions expunge their struggle altogether. Non-identity thinking is a shorthand for these cognitively connected sentiments: ignorance that awaits expertise and refusal that desires resolution.
My emphasis on non-identity is not philosophical obfuscation or legal romanticism. When Brokpa power brokers grapple with law, they do not view it as a sublime good. They accept its shortcomings and regret that state functionaries have damaged their legal recourse. But apart from civil society, they would also like their claims over the headmanship and for the impugned land to succeed in the legal arena. In fact, anthropology is no stranger to ignorance. There is work on the mutuality between nescience and fragmented knowledge (see Kirsch and Dilley, 2015; Mair et al., 2012), and how this cultivates protocols of learning in milieus where knowing determines what one can do (Dilley, 2010). People ‘claim ignorance for themselves in order to temper potentially hazardous allegiances’ and navigate social organizations (Gershon and Raj, 2000: 3). Although I build on this agenda, my text requires a theoretical bridge between the Brokpa people's practices and the contemporary relevance of human rights. To be sure, the link is not superimposed. It is already readable from the thinking and actions of my interlocutors, and non-identity is the caption it achieves in my text.
In sum, I zoom in on Tashi and Stanzin, a father–son duo. While it is true that they are two of the most renowned actors in the land and headmanship disputes, this is not the complete reason why I foreground them and not others who are equally involved. They live under the same roof, dine together every night and have shared innumerable chit-chats about the conflicts over cups of butter tea. It is tough to craft a nuanced biographical case study in a piece of limited length. 5 But shining the spotlight on two people who come from the same domicile implies that the geographical, cultural and everyday details procured from one also fashion the life of the other without attenuating the scope for social and acquired differences. Tashi's and Stanzin's concept of human rights enshrines a normative scaffolding for its political muscle. The minutiae might differ from conflict to conflict, but the moral complexion remains the same. Likewise, the social processes concocting the subjects of these praxes may change from one location to another, but the psychological anatomy of recognition is more or less similar for everyone living in our contemporary situation of flux and flows.
‘To be able to eat, not face torture, speak freely’: Representing human rights ordinarily
Gargardoo is about 15 km away from Garkone. Traditionally governed by the Brokpa nambardar (headman) of Garkone, the village today is split between Buddhist Brokpa and Purgi-speaking Muslim inhabitants, with the latter enjoying a sound majority. The story goes – according to a letter to the Governor of the erstwhile Jammu and Kashmir state from the nambardar in the 1980s – that the people of Garkone occupied the land in Gargardoo after a dispute with the ruler of Kharmang, in present-day Pakistan, in the early 20th century (Nambardar of Village Gurkon, n.d., para 3). In 1979, when Ladakh was divided into two districts, Garkone, along with Gargardoo, was placed within the Muslim-majority Kargil (ibid, para 5). The villagers alleged that the local administration, out of sympathy for landless Muslim ‘outsiders’, began falsifying revenue records and settling ‘refugees from Pakistan’ (ibid, paras 6–7). Though the trope of outsiders has persisted over the years, it has shifted from the sensationalism of Pakistani intruders to a sense of felt ‘harassment’ at the hands of migrants from nearby Muslim villages who have abandoned their deprived homes for a ‘so-called prosperous place’. 6 Worried by this demographic onslaught, the nambardar, representing ‘the real Aryan race’ of the Brokpa, took exception to the allotment of eight kanals 7 of land each to 12 refugee families despite the agreement having been only for two (Nambardar of Village Gurkon, n.d.: 2 & 6–9). Even though 100 kanals were to be kept aside for communal use, most of it was also said to have been fraudulently given to outsiders. The Brokpa, fearing expulsion from their ‘motherland’, implored the Governor to mend this administrative ‘high-handedness’ (Nambardar of Village Gurkon, n.d, para 12).
From the 1970s to about 2010, the Brokpa residents of Gargardoo witnessed their home becoming increasingly segregated: a graveyard was earmarked between 1976 and 1978; the space around it, the upper ranges of the village, was concentrated among Muslims; soon a mosque was built as well. In 1979, the government formally allotted land to 101 Brokpa and 60 Muslim families. 8 These parcels were given on lease, as per Section 4 of the Jammu and Kashmir Land Grants Act 1960, and could not be transferred. Yet the Muslim inhabitants are said to have divided their plots with newcomers, colluded with revenue officials to enlarge their holdings and occupied the common appurtenances to their leaseholds. As their population grew, the Brokpa people felt compelled to leave. Though most could not sell their land legally, they begrudgingly digested the compensation on offer and vacated their properties. Today, against around 70 Muslim households, no more than 15 Brokpa ones remain, out of which seven maintain permanent residence. 9 For close to five decades, the loss of Gargardoo seemed irreparable. But in 2019, the Indian Parliament abrogated Jammu and Kashmir's constitutional autonomy and made Ladakh a separate union territory. Purportedly, in the former Muslim-majority state, the administration often sided with the encroachers. However, after 2019, Ladakh has been governed from the Centre. Around this time, Tashi and a few other power brokers saw a chance to turn the tables. They knew that the privately held parts of the village were lost. But the commons were still available. In order to restore some Brokpa ownership over Gargardoo, they attempted to occupy the communal land and build a Buddhist educational institute that would be open to all faiths. In 2022, nine Muslim complainants from Gargardoo informed the Deputy Commissioner (DC) of Kargil that some Brokpa trespassers were damaging their grazing and foraging land (Ahmad et al., 2022). The conflict reached the Jammu and Kashmir High Court, a one-judge bench of which dismissed the petition of the Muslim claimants in May 2023 while remanding the matter back to the DC, before whom it was pending anyway. 10 The DC is yet to pass a determinative order, although he has instructed his subordinate Tehsildar to maintain the status quo and check any further encroachment (Tehsildar, Kargil, 2022).
What interests me here is the displacement of an ongoing cultural, 11 even communal, 12 contest to a carefully sanitized legal register. The initial grievance, on official papers, was never between Muslims and Buddhists but between ‘outsiders’ and inhabitants who were already there, occasionally coloured with the communitarian pride of Brokpa-ness. In the High Court case, the petitioners never claimed to be Muslim representatives. As per its title, it was filed as a disagreement between the whole of Gargardoo, with the first party being the ‘Inhabitants of Panchayat Halqa Gargardoo’, and some unscrupulous elements from Garkone without any Brokpa or Buddhist qualifiers. Perhaps this substitution of the communal with the legal through the intermediary of rights indicates how, more than recovering lost land, at stake is the recognition of the Brokpa people as the ones who have been wronged in spite of having proper pre-existing dominion over the village. When technical and bureaucratic hyperboles censor the social undertones of legal claims, human rights can commission a return to the impaired social as a political undertaking. I have learnt this much from Tashi.
Tashi, a schoolteacher, is an influential power broker in Garkone. He holds no official position but is a close confidante of the nambardar and has been instrumental in the election of past sarpanches, including his brother's. He has been known to finance the construction of houses for those without sufficient means and has availed a personal loan for the renovation of the village gompa. From negotiating with the Muslim petitioners to searching for lawyers to take up the case, he has been at the forefront of the legal dispute. When the matter was listed before the High Court, Tashi was delighted to see a Ladakhi judge on the bench. Now that the judgment has provided no remedy and merely sent the dispute back to the DC, he finds himself at a deadlock. The DC can do little to hatch a resolution, although the legal onus is on him. His position is rather indecisive in the precarious political setup of Ladakh that seems to invert the Comaroff'’s (2006) insistence on the propagation of disorder through law. In Ladakh, confusion following the abrogation of Jammu and Kashmir's statehood and autonomy in 2019 has encouraged too many haphazard legislative and executive moves in compensation, ensuing in further confusion. Last year, five new districts were formed (Singh, 2024), but to date there is no clarity on their geographical demarcation and the subsequent rearrangement of the administrative cadre. No one knows where the new headquarters will be or which of the new districts will fall under the Autonomous Council in Kargil and which in Leh. Amidst this uncertainty, miffed doubly by the extant power tussle between the Council and the Government of the Union Territory, the DC is the personification of a ‘paper tiger’: a helpless yet governmentally potent bureaucratic edifice where state policies are distorted to the point of absurdity and ineffectiveness (Mathur, 2015).
The DC is fine with delaying the court's directives and waiting till his tenure is over. An anecdote frequently repeated by those spearheading the dispute is that an internal memo from the Secretary to the Lieutenant Governor of Ladakh has ordered him to stall any action till the new districts start functioning. Tashi too is happy to wait. He believes that once all the Brokpa villages – Darchiks, Dah, Hanu and Garkone – are granted a single district, the Muslim intruders will leave on their own. For him, this interim period is not one of lethargy but the very necessity for human rights to work. In his mind, since the legal rights associated with the property dispute languish in a stalemate, the issue has acquired a cultural dimension. There is barely any Buddhist-owned business in Kargil, he maintains, and almost all non-Muslims working in the town live on rent. In the 45 odd years of living in Kargil, the Brokpa people have been persistently denied government jobs, property outside their villages, electoral representation and developmental funds. The events in Gargardoo are symptomatic of this enduring discrimination. So he wishes to truncate the communal status of the land there lest the Muslim inhabitants claim adverse possession in the future. He unapologetically considers this a human rights concern because losing Gargardoo would be a signifier of death.
‘If we give up the land’, he told me, ‘they will feel that our culture and religion are up for grabs, the way people from our community have been converted in Pakistan’.
Unleashing human rights as a remnant of domestic law, a corrective to its stagnancy and retreat in the face of state interests, is a strategy for power Brokers in Garkone to solicit support from civil society and bureaucrats. In the aftermath of their legal and administrative setbacks, they have realized that they need some leverage over the state to jolt its functionaries into action. Communicating their claims as human rights transposes them to a new political register, where proxies like culture and religion are neither artefacts of norms, nor merely reifying exercises of power, but resources to reinstate the land dispute into a social sphere over which bureaucrats do not have full control. We will soon examine how Tashi and his son's embodiments of self-evidence, or birthright, facilitate this. When Norbu, the current nambardar, visited the Chief Secretary of Ladakh to seek a solution, he was initially met with a lukewarm response. But then he intensified his mentions of human rights and culture. He suggested that if the administration were to continue with its neglect, his people would become louder about their human rights. The Chief Secretary could not afford provincial backlash in addition to the debilitating agitation for regional autonomy in Ladakh. To placate Norbu, he assured him a unified district for all the Brokpa villages by 2028, after which they would secure the demographic strength to oust their Muslim rivals. Norbu's threat of antagonizing the state through human rights, which he learnt from his fellow soldiers in the Army and their deep-seated hatred of it (cf. Wahl, 2017), is a communicative tactic on par with Tashi's and Stanzin's. My point is that the human rights idioms of these power brokers are oriented towards highlighting their sentiments of exclusion and injustice, thereby demanding attention and resolution from bureaucrats as an entitlement. More viscerally, after having been disrespected by the Muslim residents of Gargardoo, the officials who colluded with them, and then law, their claims contain a latent wish for self-respect and self-esteem through the recognition of their tribulations.
Consider Stanzin's thoughts on birthright as an example. He is 28-years-old and Tashi's middle child. A graduate of India's top engineering college, he now shuttles between Garkone and Leh, trading apricots and apples to wholesalers from the mainland while helping Tashi with his public works. He gets regular updates on the Gargardoo dispute from his father and has thoroughly read their lawyer's response to the hostile petition. His phone gallery has scans of all the accompanying annexures. Although the named litigants are a select few from the village, the conflict recurs as a matter of curiosity and importance in everyone else's minds. People ask each other for the latest developments on their wayside chats, discuss the best course of action by the fire at the changra, 13 and are generally aware of where the case stands. Stanzin's closeness to his father, a key organizer, has given him a ringside view of the legal battle. His education, coupled with a relatively cosmopolitan mentality acquired in Chandigarh, Pondicherry and Bombay during his years outside the village, shields his interest in the issue from the otherwise prevalent ethnic, communal hues. Besides being a mundane legal quibble, he thinks their ownership of the contested land is a ‘birthright’ that cannot be destroyed by the court's verdict.
‘See’, he let out a sigh after a long interview, ‘people have sold and bought land, and the revenue records are not the same. We should not oust those who have built houses and have been living there for many years. But this does not change the fact that originally all this land was ours and only we can demand it as a human right’.
I asked Stanzin what he meant by ‘human right’, and he took it as a query about its generic substance. ‘To be able to eat, not face torture, speak freely’ are all human rights for him.
‘Human rights make us human’, he said.
So how does a provincial land dispute rise to the stature of such fundamental entitlements? I pressed on. Stanzin did not know.
‘I do not have enough knowledge about this, about which law or treaty might be appropriate here. But that should not matter. I don’t know what Papa thinks about human rights. But when we use the phrase, we all understand each other. We get the broad meanings. And we know how much the land means to us.’
In pretending not to know about human rights, Stanzin ended up divulging a lot about its representational function. Whether his fellow power brokers also believe in being ‘able to eat, not face torture, speak freely’ is immaterial. It is the sentiment of self-evidence undergirding this statement that creates a shared idiom of human rights, the political modality of which, however, is not the same for everyone. Stanzin dislikes his father's occasional communal slurs, and Tashi does not practice Norbu's antagonistic irony. But each of them knows that the other feels equally disrespected by the loss of land in Gargardoo and the subsequent troubles. From this topology of shame and disappointment, mirroring the pathology of ostracism and discrimination in Kargil, the possibility of a solution is wagered with the restitution of self-esteem and self-respect. This much, if not any substantive meaning, is self-evident to everybody. And they understand that human rights is the language in which officials listen to them in civil society.
Although Tashi reciprocates his son's notions of ‘birthright’ in the land, he has little trust in state officials. In the spring, the District Judge at Kargil visited Garkone. A compassionate, intellectually inclined officer of the court, he sympathized with the Brokpa people's case. He even endorsed their human rights strategy. But he was baffled that the matter was directly placed before the High Court, while such a run-of-the-mill property dispute should have commenced at the District Court. Since a superior judge had sent the file to the DC, he could do little. Tashi quite liked the District Judge's deferential, soft-spoken and empathetic demeanour. But such personal comportment, as Pierre Bourdieu (1994) cautions us, does not necessarily liberate officious mentality from the state's fold, where its patrimony doles out capital from time to time to restrict the citizenry from looking beyond it. Tashi has accordingly realized that the buck stops with the Brokpa people. The District Judge's sympathy, the Chief Secretary's assurances make them feel seen and heard – as though after years of discrimination and neglect, the state has unclogged its ears – but limits to their mandates preclude material indemnification. So Tashi thinks that building an educational institute will forbid further occupation.
What will become of their ‘culture’, ‘the human right to ancestral land’ which Tashi exhorts, now that the institute cannot be built unless the DC allows it? To quote him, ‘nothing much’. Tashi reposes more trust in extra-judicial means than in courts and the DC. Clubbing the Brokpa villages together in a new district, voicing their claims through local religious leaders, or stopping the water supply to the fields of the Muslim inhabitants are some ploys he thinks will be more expedient than waiting for a judge to rule.
‘The land is our human right, and so it will remain’, Tashi exclaimed after the District Judge had left. ‘If not a school, we will do something else. We will stop their water. They will leave the village automatically once we get a new district. These idiots from our village have created the issue by selling their land, and now we cannot get it back. So as long as we do something, and keep doing something, others will know that we have not forgotten our human rights, and they should not either’.
What Tashi calls ‘others’ has a dual connotation. First, it enshrines a whiff of universality: the sense that the Brokpa people's title over the land in Gargardoo is obvious enough for everyone to notice without further riders. Second, more concretely, it denotes the context where their claims carry practical, not merely symbolic, weight – in other words, civil society, an ill-defined, shapeshifting intermediary between the state and personal dispositions where agents overstep their immediate zones of being and action to interact and fabricate reciprocity. Indeed, Indian civil societies, of which Ladakh's is a species, do not invariably entail the democratic neatness that crafts associations and movements in the West, beyond the state, market and family (see, e.g. Dirks, 1989; Pulla et al., 2019; Varshney, 2001). But we know from Sudipta Kaviraj (2003) that they exist; and with Brokpa power brokers, we can envisage them as ephemeral communicational settings where bureaucrats and people from the margins converse outside their primary social positions. Thus, apart from the institutional postures of tolerance, autonomy and the rule of law, civil society – as it features in the Brokpa people's claims – is also a desire for decency, a ‘culturally, historically or even individually defined’ tool to construct the ‘meanings’ ascribed to mutual respect (see Markus, 2001: 1023–1024). This processual respect – not reacquiring the lost land or any teleological end – is precisely the core motive behind the human rights discourse in Garkone. So long as bureaucrats align with the Brokpa people, promising secondary benefits such as a new road or a new district, they are content, albeit provisionally, with the reciprocity. Norbu, after all, has embraced the Chief Secretary's deal to avoid a political storm until 2028 due to his nambardari's official ethos, as an obligation he owes to Ladakh's top bureaucrat for being a lowly rung in the statist hierarchy. Tashi's micro acts, from occupying the commons for the institute to speculating about terminating his rivals’ water supply, keep him invested in the dispute as a routine chore, notwithstanding his disenchantment with the administration. These tentative measures shine on the Brokpa people's public visibility – and, as a corollary to the disrespect and discrimination from which they begin their campaigns, also on the centrality of recognition to their human rights assertions.
So, what about it? It is fair to ask how Tashi's, Norbu's or Stanzin's words, actions and beliefs are of any worth outside Ladakh, to a general opinion on human rights. Their lived realities may not be didactic to others who have their own, especially in more vulnerable proximity to violence. But from their praxes we can excavate a norm of recognition, and with this we may begin sketching a communicative anthropology of human rights. To rehearse my argument, Brokpa power brokers teach us that the lexicon of human rights can be used to transcend the procedural and formalistic obstacles of state law, thereby provoking addressees to recognize an expressed contention as a social truth. Operative in their speech, to borrow from Veena Das (2020: 3–4), is not ‘simply the meaning of a word’, of human rights, but ‘what gives words life’ – that is, an everyday where their political idioms exceed institutional confines, usher bureaucrats into their civil society and dismantle the lines between discourse, law, vernaculars and languages. This elocution of human rights is tantamount to life as a whole, to the habitus of their felt discrimination, where certain signs that encapsulate a desire for recuperative respect may not be transparent outright. Das here is admirably Wittgensteinian, although this speedreading can also be attributed to Honneth's communicative normativity. Moral regard for social interactions is not aroused by restrictions on linguistic capabilities but by the ‘violation of identity claims acquired in socialization’ (Honneth, 2007: 70). Hence we encounter Tashi and his son often attaching exclusionary categories to the land conflict, even though they try to veer away from the identity politics of communalism. The spoken and unspoken dichotomies of Muslim-versus-Buddhist, Brokpa-versus-outsiders, original inhabitants-versus-refugees, as indeed right-versus-wrong, are all interpellations of a self that feels disrespected by the erring other.
At the heart is an affective loss, experienced individually but fomented by the social pathology of exclusion, of which the Gargardoo conflict is a miniature. Everyday articulations of human rights wrench this dejection from its individualized, amorphous and disparate crevice in the mind and cast it in a normative light. Self-respect and self-esteem, as moral deserts, are demanded in requital. Honneth (1996b: 93–131) writes that when loss is experienced as a deprivation of the equal legal status given to all, we litigate before law. Appearing in a forum where our assailants are placed on the same footing as our harmed selves soothes our self-respect. But social discords can also injure our special location in society, like the Brokpa people's originary title over Gargardoo as its first settlers. Then, legal equality will not be sufficient: for these unique wounds, unique recognition is the ointment (see Anderson, 1996: xvi–xvii; Honneth, 1996b: 93–131). The Chief Secretary's and the District Judge's kindness exemplifies the restoration of self-esteem through exceptional fidelities beyond institutional normalcy. Often, the norms of self-esteem and self-respect are threatened together, for certain disputes can have simultaneous legal and political trajectories. Gargardoo is a case in point. Human rights composes a communicative link to commensurate the disparate manifestations of such conflicts without letting their politico-legal differentiation inhibit moral claims. Just because the High Court, DC and rival petitioners have fragmented the land dispute into multiple registers, it does not mean that the Brokpa people cannot advance a wholesale normative avowal of their own. Recognition is the generic intuition which stimulates them to do so in the idiom of human rights. How, then, do their localized praxes relate to law? Are their strategies strictly relative, or do they have a way to engage broader, more commonplace vestiges, like the international genesis of human rights? We shall now turn to these questions in the coming section.
Wilful ignorance, non-identity thinking and scaling up
Land is not the only contested element in Gargardoo; the village's headmanship, or nambardari, also is. The nambardar, known as goba in other parts of Ladakh, is a colonial creation. As the British imperium expanded across the Gangetic plains of Northern India in the 19th century, new areas were cleared for cultivation and taxes were imposed on the people settled there. Villages emerged as the primary unit of living and governing in the rural hinterlands, and with them, so did the office of the nambardar – the intermediary managing imperial revenue stipulations while carrying the emblem of the state to villagers. By design, the nambardar was supposed to represent the collective will of a settlement, which rhetorically encompassed the extractive yet outwardly benevolent will of the colonial state (Bhattacharya, 2019: 124–125). Land settlement – or revenue assessment – in the region around Skardu, which included Garkone and Gargardoo before independence, was first undertaken in 1901 under RT Clarke (see Schmidt, 2008: 253–254). In 1911, one Thakar Singh 14 supervised another settlement, with surveys in the Kargil tehsil beginning as early as 1910 (see Hill, 2014: 6). In the resultant report, Garkone, spelt ‘Garkhono’, is praised as a village of plenitude, with rich soil, clean water and bountiful harvests (Singh, 1912). Both the text and the enclosed map mention Gargardoo – written ‘Gurgra’ – as part of Garkone. All in all, by the time of the 1911 settlements, Gargardoo had already obtained a distinct geographical shape – not individually, but as a cartographic and administrative enclave of Garkone, with a common nambardar.
Earlier in Brokpa villages, the nambardar was usually selected through a system of rotational obligation for a set period, averting the concentration of power in a single household (Aggarwal, 2004: 73; Bhan, 2014b: 80). But after independence, the office gradually lost its sheen, so much so that the unavailability of suitable candidates has turned out to be a chronic problem. After all, INR 1500 is grossly inadequate compensation for an added burden with no real privileges. A good many tasks and benefits associated with the nambardari have devolved onto other state functionaries. The nambardar does not collect taxes anymore. As village-level self-governance became a constitutional ideal in the 1960s and 1970s, the mark of headmanship that was earlier coterminous with the nambardari has been arrogated by the sarpanch – the elected head of the panchayat, a local cluster of wards found throughout rural India. Although nambardari was formalized in Jammu and Kashmir by legislation in 1972, 15 it received no acknowledgement in the 1980 act 16 that introduced the panchayati structure to the region (Bajpai and Kothari, 2022: 11). In some stretches of Ladakh, the nambardar and the sarpanch share convergent responsibilities (Kothari et al., n.d.: 13). But in and around Garkone, it is the sarpanch who has a more material role. He signs off on developmental projects, manages funds from the government and liaises with other departments. The nambardar does have a say in all this, but not the privilege of signature. He will be consulted before asphalt is laid on the gravelled link road to the centre of the village, although the final decision rests with the sarpanch.
It is this ambivalence of the nambardari system – confounded, under changing sovereignties, by its uncertainty between traditions and the state, customs and law – which enabled the Muslim inhabitants of Gargardoo to approach the DC for a new headman of their own. When Norbu was appointed in 2017, people in Garkone had arranged it among themselves. Today, the Muslim inhabitants of Gargardoo see little sense in retaining the two villages as one revenue unit. When Norbu's 5-year tenure elapsed, the DC constituted a committee to investigate the possibility of severance. The Tehsildar directed him to deposit his official stamp as well. In seeking a separate nambardar for Garkone, Tashi and Norbu's Muslim rivals strove to dislodge the Brokpa people's locus in the village and its affairs, including the ongoing legal matter. If the selection were to be conducted within 70 Muslim and 15 Buddhist households to the exclusion of those in Garkone, the odds of a Muslim nambardar would be next to a foregone conclusion. Norbu, running out of options, went to meet his time-tested ally, the Chief Secretary. The same old script of human rights, antagonism and the importance of political equanimity was repeated. Culture, again, was invoked as a mere signifier to underscore the Brokpa people's self-evident monopoly over the nambardari. The touchy topic of the new districts was broached. Once more, the Chief Secretary came to Norbu's rescue. He issued instructions to the DC to let Norbu continue till 2028 and abandon all action on the Muslim applicants’ demand for the time being.
Annoyed with the legal capture of the land dispute, most people in Garkone are worried that simmering tensions over the nambardari may cause similar stagnancy. Apart from Gargardoo, Hordass and Yaldor are also a part of Garkone, under a single nambardar. Typically, people from the major villages have family and kin in these hamlets, so a unified headmanship streamlines decisions about festivities and rituals. While this is often cited as a pragmatic rationale, sentimental attachment to the nambardari is tethered to the collective feelings of discrimination and exclusion that also shape the land conflict.
‘I have a religious duty. I have a cultural duty too. Will Muslims do all this?’ Norbu tried explaining.
‘What do you mean?’
‘See, every Losar, the village lama consults his books and calendar and issues the exact dates. The nambardar takes the dates from him and informs the rest of the village. I have to organize everything. I tell people when to show up for rituals. I ensure balance: the right amount of worship, the right amount of dance and songs and drinking. The Muslims have nothing to do with our festivals. Singing and dancing are haram for them. They look down on our religion. They won’t even eat from our hands. You have seen this yourself, haven’t you?’
Relaying the Losar dates and Muslims practicing segregation – one practical, the other experiential – may seem different deeds, but they sprout from the same seed of dissatisfaction. The issue, as Stanzin puts it, is ‘cultural, not legal or political’.
‘The nambardari has been ours forever – like, maybe not forever, but for a long, long time. What is human rights? To be able to eat, not face torture and speak freely. These things are basic and need no questioning. People here think of the nambardari similarly. It is what it is. With the land case, people know that it is their fault that they sold their properties, so they do not mind the court case. But with the nambardari, it is not individual. It has always been ours, so no one thinks any deeper about it.’
We are back with the affect of self-evidence – being able to eat, not face torture and speak freely – but to what extent? We may mistake such abstract statements as a flight to ungrounded universalism, a pour-over to the broader internationally motivated human rights discourse. Yet, as we realized with the land dispute, Brokpa power brokers disseminate their claims primarily within their tentative civic space, detached from any global, legal or statist circumscriptions. How, then, are we to decipher the fact that in consciously, even anxiously, expelling law and the international – among other extra-contextual tokens – from their human rights impressions, representing agents like Tashi, Norbu and others end up viscerally reinscribing legality and globality as latent traces? The strategic motive, of course, is to recognize the Brokpa people's vulnerability, thereby recuperating their hurt moral resources of self-respect and self-esteem against statist stuckness. That still leaves a lot to be said about the cognition framing this intuition, where law and the international appear as negatives. The following paragraphs christen this pattern of thought non-identity thinking.
A byproduct of the self-evidence that people ascribe to the nambardari is the desire to retain regulative control over the institution, safe from the juridical interventions of the state. However, instead of outright naysaying the state, a praxis of ignorance and deferral to expert knowledge is employed. And somehow, while articulating dispositions of not knowing, all outside intrusion is stalled as cumbersome and irrelevant. This nescience is aimed at two objects: state law and the global as the source of human rights. The summer had just arrived in Garkone, and with the wintery torpor behind us, Tashi was readying himself for a new season of public campaigns. He could not help but lament over how cluttered the land dispute had become. He sighed that at least their claim over the nambardari was straightforward. Whenever officials would question their avowals of culture, representatives such as Norbu would shift their stress onto the phrase human rights and end the discussion right there. No one would nudge them towards courts or stretch the issue further. Although it is beyond my present scope to contemplate why state functionaries might yield to such a foreclosing parlance of human rights, some reasons can be gleaned from the surface. Besides washing its hands of petty remote politics, the administration imputes much lower stakes to the nambardari dispute, compared to the land matter. The Brokpa people have held it since its commencement, and irregular counterclaims by the Muslim residents are easy to thwart since they have not yet succeeded in galvanizing the contest via courts or regional leaders. Brokpa power brokers were happy to let things be and not invoke human rights. But they had no choice. Once their Muslim rivals wrote to the DC and began clamoring for the office as a legal claim, they felt that they too needed an equally authoritative register. Since they were the ones with a pre-existing title over the institution, they found in human rights a readymade syntax to label this in politically galvanic terms.
Tashi said, ‘Let them [the Gargardoo Muslims] cry about law.’
We had been talking about the land and the nambardari disputes for a couple of hours now, and he was keen on proving that the squabble over the headman was a non-issue – or, a pointless spat his rivals had fomented, whose conclusion was already written in stone in their favour.
‘Let them speak about law. Speaking is one thing; the actual truth is another. Our human rights will work over whatever court they want to go to or whichever official they bribe.’
‘To be able to eat, not face torture and speak freely’. Tashi's tirade was redolent of his son's definition of human rights. What exactly did he mean by all this?
‘You know, human rights, what more do I say? You are a lawyer, you know more about it. What can I tell you about human rights? The thing is, we know culture, religion, the sixth schedule are our human rights, and so is the nambardari. But we do not want any court case. We can sort out the nambardari issue ourselves. We don’t want to be stuck in court-kacheri anymore’.
Over time, I became used to utterances like the one above. They shared some common motifs: a distaste for any juridical or statist prying, a refusal to say more about human rights than its self-evidence, and a postponement of legal knowledge and action. Remember, Tashi knows the court case in and out. He is the one hiring lawyers and approving their submissions. Yet when it came to the nambardari, he would often display reluctance, almost insinuating that I should figure out the meaning and purpose of his human rights assertions myself without encumbering him. This nescience also has an operative dimension. When Norbu approached the Chief Secretary, he was told that the Muslim parties had a solid contention. That about 70 households felt excluded from the process of selecting their headman was bad press for the administration. Frankly, this went against the principles of equitable governance. Norbu did not engage. He merely appealed to the Chief Secretary's magnanimity. After all, how could a provincial nambardar handle these lofty ideals? He knew that the nambardari had always been theirs, and it was up to the Chief Secretary's patrimony to protect the Brokpa people's bequest. Irrespective of the exact words, Norbu painted himself as a helpless, unaware villager and the Chief Secretary as the pinnacle of epistocracy. The result was as expected. No sooner had the Chief Secretary's concern for equity and fairness receded behind his buttered ego than he issued orders to the DC to sustain Norbu's office till 2028.
How are we to ponder this volitional propensity for ignorance, especially by the very power brokers who had been strong-minded and categorical about the land dispute? For they know what they are doing. Tashi's abstention from legal knowledge and Norbu's flattering the Chief Secretary are gambits that, simultaneously, proclaim sovereignty over the nambardari and let their avowal of human rights chart its own course, without antagonizing the state. What is happening is not ad hoc or impromptu. In contrast, it is a necessity born of the mismatch between the Brokpa people's felt self-evident ownership over the nambardari and the ongoing contestations that dilute this totality.
Towards the end of my fieldwork, Tashi asked if I could finally wrap my head around his people's plight. I replied that something about the nambardari conflict still seemed half-baked.
‘Yes, right, even we do not understand much.’ He retorted with his characteristic nonchalance. ‘It is all half and half. That is alright.’
Time and again, a sense of incompleteness, the disappointment that the right of nambardari was not yet entirely theirs, would appear to fuel Tashi's withdrawal from legal dealings. I once enquired why he had not linked the nambardari dispute to his representations for the land in Gargardoo.
‘What was the point?’ Tashi replied. ‘We are already losing in court with the land case. Nobody, anyway, listens to the nambardar. What's the point in messing with these judges and officers and outsiders once again? We know the nambardari is our human right. Even the Muslims know that this is our custom. So be it. Things will work out on their own. Once we get a district, the Muslims will give up their case themselves. If nobody listens to them, they will forget to shout after some time. There is no point in playing into their hands by involving the court and officials. We know little about them, they know nothing about what we want and they work for their own interests anyway.’
This, concisely, is non-identity thinking: neither a wholehearted claim, nor an attempt at explaining the Brokpa people's marginalized entitlements to outsiders, but believing that the nambardari is their human right and then being hush-hush about it since their neighbours and the state do not yet acknowledge its self-evidence. ‘Things will work out on their own’ is a gesture towards the future, an iteration of the hope that retreating from the operation of law today will entrench the Broka people's right fully tomorrow. Insofar as their particular claims have not yet attained the universality encompassing abstract human rights – that is, not everyone embraces their hegemony over the nambardari – the concept itself is thought of as a residue, a negative which will someday align with the perfect outcome of Tashi and his compatriots getting what they want (see Rose, 2014: 56–57). Thus, at present, they think of human rights as an aberration in public. They are convinced that the nambardari is theirs, almost as a natural, self-evident fact, but others are not. So they keep their assertions to themselves in order to refrain from touching a nerve in statist circles and civil society.
If Susan Buck-Morss (1979: 49–52) were to say it, non-identity mediates between lived experiences associated with the concept of human rights and a sentiment of essentialized, evident truths: ‘to be able to eat, not face torture and speak freely’. This is a structure of thought, a cognition, though its upshots are quite pragmatic. Stanzin thinks that reducing the fight for the nambardari to minimalistic human rights decouples it from the complex land dispute. When the Muslim residents initially wrote to the DC, they wanted to color their complaint as an administrative matter. Brokpa power brokers retaliated with their bold declarations of culture, wresting the dispute from both the DC and the Muslim petitioners. Now the conflict is supposed to be either an administrative impasse or a seemingly natural, transhistorical right of the Brokpa people, crowding out the prospects of a court case.
Law is latent in this cognition of non-identity. It is not contemplated only as a disciplinary tool, a command issued by a ruler, or a statist framework for social behaviour. Neither is its abstract, affective, artefactual trace in the minds of Brokpa power brokers any less material than its empirically material quotient. We can rejig Timothy Mitchell's (1999) opinion on the state to this end. Just as the distinction made between conceptual and empirical manifestations of the state proves to be artificial in the final analysis, the machinery of intentions that undergirds law – the rule-making, norm-making, habit-making and decision-making capacities – often overwrites the divide between the juridical and the social, the thinkable and the observable, the experienced and the experienceable. In Tashi's, Norbu's and others’ dealings with the nambardari, the legal is to be prevented. It is a behemoth to be averted; an unnecessary complication; a spectral presence around their human rights claims, but independent of the quasi-historical, cultural fact from which the legitimacy of their nambardari emerges. Such a willing distance from the dictum of the state might not be peculiar in Ladakh. In Fernanda Pirie's (2013: 6) study of a Ladakhi village, she found that people felt ‘no need to refer to any rules to address disputes’. The ‘micro-political organization of the village’ and the fear of conflict had constructed a civic morality detached from law. Annelise Rile'’s (2006b: 62) theoretical outline of this phenomenon is perhaps closest to mine. ‘Anthropological concepts and methods of knowledge production’, in relation to human rights, ‘are best understood as a kind of rebellion against the instrumentalism of legal knowledge’. Culture, then, becomes ‘a performative position, an alternative to both legal instrumentalism and the critique of instrumentalism’. Similarly, when Tashi and others claim the nambardari under the guise of culture, they enact an aversion to legal instrumentalism, given their misfortunes with the land case. For this to happen, their communications and expressions need to be crafted as the negativization of what otherwise would be repositories of human rights – that is, law and the international.
Tashi has converted the top three floors of his house into a guesthouse, and Stanzin manages it. We were talking about business one evening when he off-handedly remarked that some international scrutiny over the nambardari might help their case. I was confused by his out-of-place comment, so I asked him to go on.
‘You know, we have so many foreign guests, but we have never tried to make use of them. Courts, DC, media, leaders and so on are fine, but these foreigners like that we are different. They experience Ladakh here [in Garkone] like it was before the tourism boom. Quaint, pristine and people who are not business-minded. So let them speak about our cultural issues and problems. They write blog posts about how we look and what we eat, about our songs and dances. But they know nothing about how our culture is under threat. They do not know because no one tells them. Maybe we should.’
The international as a communicative, publicity-oriented reserve was beginning to feature in his expression. So why had they not harnessed their foreign tourists?
‘Papa, uncle and others do not think the time is right. Already so much is happening. 6th Schedule, the court case, new districts. Involving foreigners would actually annoy everyone. Maybe once we get a district, we can lobby together outside of Ladakh as well.’
‘What about your human rights then?’
‘What about it? Our human rights will be ours. Human rights is universal, no? The nambardari has always been ours; this is historically established. Nothing can change that.’
‘Like to be able to eat, not face torture and speak freely?’
‘Yep! That. I mean, I don’t know if these are human rights, but you get the point.’
‘So why international then?’
‘Because that is the whole point of us claiming things as human rights. Everyone should acknowledge it, because it is a fact. So it can’t be just a hundred, two hundred people in Ladakh. It should be everyone who comes here. Plus, human rights comes from international law, right?’
Stanzin's sentiment is also echoed by Tashi, Norbu and Sarpanch, albeit with a less prominent stress on international law. But the baseline is the same: that their human rights over the nambardari should gain eminence internationally, but not just yet, for the right time will arrive once the concurrent administrative and legal jumble is streamlined. The global is not irrelevant to them. Rather, at present, it is too far-fetched, almost inappropriate, yet its significance is retained cerebrally and quietly, as an abnormality to be corrected and redeemed later. Analogously, Trevor Marchand (2015) observes how woodworkers at the Building Crafts College in East London forsake business education for more bench time. They choose to remain in the dark about commerce so as to hone their craft, abjuring one form of knowledge for expertise in another. This is all it boils down to in Garkone as well, for the opportunity costs are patent to Brokpa power brokers. They relinquish law and the international, offering ignorance as a rationale, to protect their cherished nambardari from external infringement.
Before we conclude this foray into non-identity thinking, a final consideration remains: the problem of scaling. How can we traverse from the individual to the political via the social – and, in the process, derive generalizable theoretical insights? For instance, in Lynette Chua's (2018) work on how the language of human rights empowered queer activists in post-2011 Myanmar to reclaim love and intimacy, Buddhist Karmic beliefs enabled political aggregation. More cerebrally, even the passing feeling of belonging to an imagined professional community may inspire collective action – very much like David Kennedy's (2005: 38–48) sudden realization, while hearing about humanitarian abuses from a captive in a Uruguayan prison, that he was a trained lawyer ethically bound to offer aid. Despite the identitarian commonalities among Brokpa power brokers, their claims do not necessarily share a unified cosmology, nor are they held together by professional loyalty. Their willing ignorance of law and the international draws on a temptation to sustain the quotidian, to safeguard their everyday reality from the risk of incurring statist, decontextualized changes beyond their know-how and control (Snow et al., 1998: 2–3). Maybe the answer to the scaling challenge lies between Adorno and Honneth. For Adorno, ‘the actual process of socialization is based on the fact that as economic subjects [individuals] do not relate to each other at all immediately but act according to the dictates of exchange value’ (Adorno, 1972: 51; cited in Rose, 2014: 93). Mistaking exchange value for use value, as a rampant sociological trend, is the germ behind negative dialectics. Thus, he might well be proposing that people construe their social relations among each other through non-identity. If this seems overly simplistic, it is because he merges ‘ideology, domination and reification’, and the ‘individual is not satisfactorily reinserted into the socio-political context’ (Rose, 2014: 95). Honneth underscores this as a main infirmity in Adorno's later work. His inability to account for collective struggles stems from the predication of ‘oppression’ on an ‘individual basis’ (Honneth, 1979: 47). It is through a commitment to Habermas's sphere of normative interaction, and not just Adorno's domain of production, that Honneth envisions culture as a ‘practical–critical activity’ (Foster, 1999: 7) – a vocabulary for recognition, normatively infused by human rights in regard to the nambardari dispute.
Still, what about scaling? It happens through the communication of non-identity. That the nambardari has historically belonged to the Brokpa people is ubiquitous knowledge in Garkone, and so is the fact that the Muslim residents of Gargardoo are trying to usurp it. The mismatch between the former feeling of self-evidence and the latter pathos is what triggers non-identity thinking. Common villagers, unable to do much, defer to power brokers for a solution, knowing that their culture is endangered. Power brokers harp on human rights, also knowing that their culture is endangered. And their claims of human rights turn on themselves and exhibit reclusion from state law and civic internationalism, exactly because the Brokpa people's culture is endangered. One level of ignorance and inability flows into another since individuals feel that the non-identity between their obvious cultural deserving and the contested reality has to be corrected, yet they can only do so much.
Coda: Legitimizing human rights as a mode of representation
In a sense, what we have learnt thus far goes against the grain of our contemporary scepticism with the global human rights movement. Its patronizers and whitewashers undoubtedly have their shoulders dented by the yoke of imperialism (see generally Moyn, 2018: 173–211). Condescending activism is surely not the most we can ask for (Brown, 2004). But, perhaps, shunning the fatalistic confinement of human rights to Western rule-of-law jurisdictions is indeed the least that can be asked.
There is a middle, a broken and disjointed one at that. As Kirsten Hastrup (2002) puts it, capturing human rights as a discourse dirempts its locution into designative and expressive languages without properly bringing lived experiences to the fore. In Garkone, however, the expressive is the designative. The land and nambardari rows precipitate the mention of human rights, but the strife this speech references is not inscribed in the inventory of the dispute. Human rights designates a social topography of disrespect which draws on this ‘inability to find a single job in Kargil’, as Tashi says, or that ‘insult of being a hairy, smelly Hanu-pa in Leh’, as Stanzin does. Personal biographies of disrespect become accusations of injustice when similar individual stories constellate around a common vocabulary and a shared subtext of social exclusion. The skirmishes in Gargardoo serve as just that sort of political axes to rally around. Expressive idioms of human rights in this context are concurrently generative of the civic space where dispersed embodiments of disrespect cultivate normativity – summarily, hermeneutically – through tense and tentative relationships with state officials.
We need not wipe the dust off any dog-eared cognitivist, linguistic, semiotic or constructionist pages from the anthropological textbook. The language of human rights is not inevitably doomed to objectify and deform the ‘culture’ that it denotes. Hastrup (2003: 320) is spot-on once again: if we want to grind our ‘feeling for fellow-humans onto the language of (universal) human rights’, we better spurn the ‘discussion of ‘culture’ and diversity’ for ‘a discussion of experience and representation’. Are the two really dissimilar? If we were dealing with a relentlessly juridical discourse, then no doubt they are. But not all claims of rights are made in a legal mould (see, e.g. Canessa, 2018; Chua, 2022). The lexis of human rights in Garkone, we may recall, becomes legible only when law closes on itself due to its bureaucratic and formalistic compulsions. When Tashi and Stanzin conflate culture with human rights, they do not quite ossify a vibrant part of the Brokpa people's life-worlds for the sake of representational ease. Talking thus of culture leaves the signifier as it is – in the spirit of an invitation to expand the political struggle over more and more socially coded experiences of discrimination that they and others in the village carry as memories of injustice, or at least unfairness. No one wishes to surrender the prerogative over this public dialogue to courts, regional leaders or any other juridical surrogate.
Such a semi-autonomous nexus between selfhood and human rights should not be an enigma. Harri Englund (2012), in writing about a controversy surrounding Madalitso Mpofu's ascendancy to the headmanship of Malawi's Azunga village in 2006, notes how opposition from the DC, NGO executives and other local chiefs was perceived by his supporters as a menace to their self-determination. They used a Chichewa concept of human rights to install the headman of their choosing. Likewise, the residents of Garkone do not bank on any institutional instrument, and though their representations pass through village-level power brokers, reifying impositions from the outside are ardently resisted. Their glossary of human rights emanates from the breath with which they speak about it and also dies when their voice quietens. To rephrase Englund's conclusion, there is no vernacularization in these articulations (cf. Levitt and Merry, 2009; Merry, 2005, 2006b; Merry and Levitt, 2017, 2019). That would require dependence on international law for doctrinal genesis or the reverse transit of locally produced norms to global organizations – none of which has happened in Garkone.
This works in Garkone, although it may not elsewhere. The disputes in Gargardoo disclose how normative claims of recognition can develop contextual moral praxes to yield political will. Changing locations will also change the narrative of representation. But now that we are familiar with the theoretical tools of recognition and non-identity thinking, a communicative re-evaluation of human rights does not seem too far-fetched. To go anywhere from here is to remember Tashi's, Stanzin's and Norbu's chronicles as comparatives.
Footnotes
Acknowledgements
This article and its earlier versions have benefited from the thoughtful readings and comments of Harri Englund, Thibaut Lesseliers, Jaideep Singh Lali, Harshita Jain and Vivianne Yen-Ching Weng, among others. I wholeheartedly thank them all. Parts of it were also presented at conferences at the University of Hong Kong, Jindal Global Law School and the University of Zurich.
Funding
Research for this article was conducted as part of a PhD project funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council and the Harold Fry Fund at King's College, Cambridge. The fieldwork was specifically funded by the Smuts Memorial Fund, the Ridgeway Venn Fund and the School of Humanities and Social Science Fieldwork Fund.
Ethics declarations
The fieldwork for this paper was approved by the Department of Social Anthropology, University of Cambridge after an ethics review and risk assessment.
Competing interests
The author states that there is no conflict of interest.
Author's contribution
The corresponding author is the sole author of this paper. The fieldwork, research and writing for this paper have been conducted entirely by him.
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.