Demographic anxieties and Indigenous futures in the Indian Himalaya

Even as India is on track to be the world's most populous nation, in the Indian Eastern Himalayan state of Sikkim, where I do research, a plummeting birth rate has fueled demographic anxiety that pervades social and political life. In early 2023, the Sikkim state government announced its plans to incentivize families with cash bonuses to have a second and third child, a yearlong maternity leave for government employees, set up fertility clinics, and also sponsor IVF treatments for interested couples (Yasir, 2023). At present, in Sikkim and across India's Northern ‘Threshold’, high rates of outmigration and fears of declining fertility among ‘local communities’ are being juxtaposed against the suspected rising numbers of ‘outsiders’ – primarily ‘mainland’ Indians, migrant populations, and ‘Bangladeshi’ Muslims. These fears have birthed a divisive and incendiary political climate in the region – from religious riots to demands for separate administration and hill councils to the expulsion of ‘outsiders’ and even calls for ethnic cleansing.

In Sara Smith's delicately crafted and evocative book that bridges scholarship in feminist and political geography, she considers such anxieties over population decline and territorial loss through the theoretical framework of ‘intimate geopolitics’, showing how ‘marriage and intimacy are entangled in and shape territorial struggle [in ways that] defies scalar distinctions between body and home’ (5). Her careful and moving ethnography set in Ladakh in India's Western Himalayan region reveals how territory and the geopolitical impinge on and are made through bodily and intimate decisions regarding love, marriage, birth, migration, and mobility. In this review, I focus on the following three themes in the book, placing them in conversation with my research in the region and relevant literature – the afterlives of imperial cartographic and enumeration practices; a vantage point from the ‘threshold’ of the nation; and young people's future talk. While much of my research focuses on indigeneity, hazards, and hydropower in Sikkim – a former Tibetan Buddhist monarchy much like Ladakh, Sara Smith, and I have worked together on writing and research projects. Our collaboration began when I was a doctoral student with Sara at UNC-Chapel Hill and later evolved into a project on young people pursuing higher education outside Ladakh, featured in the book's latter half. My insights here draw on my research in Sikkim and Ladakh and our collaboration with Ladakhi youth and the Ladakh Arts and Media Organization.

Afterlives of imperial cartographic and enumeration practices

While not part of British India, Sikkim was its protectorate, and in 1950, three years after Indian independence, it became India's protectorate. In the 1860s, the British encouraged the settlement of people from Nepal ¹ in the region, which served both a geopolitical and economic function. In addition to providing a vital labour force, the ‘pro-British-India-Nepalis’ addressed British anxieties about the pro-Tibetan Sikkimese population (Hiltz, 2003: 71). As Vandenhelsken (2021: 216) notes, ‘the colonial organization of Nepalis in Sikkim was not only driven by economic concerns but also aimed at turning the local Bhutia and Lepcha, whose elites initially opposed colonial rule, into a minority…. Nepali migration in Sikkim was ‘weaponized’ by the colonial administration, setting the ground for reification of antagonistic relations between the “settlers” and the “natives”.’ This antagonism was entrenched by the British in law and policy and adopted by the Namgyal monarchy who disallowed Nepalis from purchasing land belonging to Bhutia–Lepcha communities. While meant to protect Indigenous land rights it resulted in a large landless and discontented population of Nepalis in Sikkim. Nearly a century later, the Indian state would exploit these divisions by splitting the electorate into a single Bhutia–Lepcha and a separate Nepali constituency. In 1975, a referendum orchestrated by the Indian military saw the demographically larger Nepali constituency vote to abolish the Namgyal monarchy. Thus, British and later Indian political interventions laid the groundwork for perennial divisions among Bhutia, Lepcha, and Nepali communities.

In Sikkim, much like in Ladakh, struggles over land and territory have been shaped by both colonial cartographic logics (Krishna, 1994) and such legacies of colonial enumeration and categorization. During the British era, it was noted in the Gazetteer of Sikkim that ‘the Lepchas’ appear to be a ‘dying race’ by colonial officer and anthropologist H.H. Risley. He went on to note: ‘The cause of their decline is obscure. There is no lack of employment for them: labor is badly wanted and well paid; and the other races of the Darjeeling hills have flourished exceedingly since European enterprise and capital have made the cultivation of tea the leading industry of the district’ (Risley, 1894/1972: i, ii). Even as Risley laments the Lepcha's inability to transition into more productive and modern forms of employment, he juxtaposes them against ‘the other races’ of the region specifically Nepali migrant populations thus, deepening racialized distinctions within Himalayan communities.

Furthermore, an environmental determinist logic informed the territorial governance of hills/mountains and the plains/valley wherein a racialized distinction was made between them; the former, the home of primitive tribes and the latter, the site of modernity and capital. In anthropologist, Dolly Kikon's (2019) ethnography on the carbon-rich Assam and Nagaland foothills in Northeast India – a landscape that straddles the hills and the valley, she shows how the discovery of oil and coal resulted in decades of violence and strife, pitting Assamese and Naga communities against each other despite a shared love of the landscape and oral histories of brotherhood. Much like Smith's attention to intimacy in her examination of fraying Buddhist–Muslim relations in Ladakh, Kikon shows us how morom (love), friendship, and marriage are entangled in and defy colonial territorial logics that hardened borders between Naga and Assamese people both on the ground and in the heart. Thus, demographic anxieties, and the politicization of intimate life, are not only shaped solely by the religious, ethnic, and linguistic make-up of these places but also colonial and postcolonial categorization and bordering practices.

A vantage point from the ‘threshold’ of the nation

As Gellner (2013) observed, studies of borderland spaces in South Asia have been marked by a pervasive ‘methodological nationalism’, a process whereby the nation-state is assumed to be ‘the natural context and container for all social and political processes’ (2). We see this tendency in how places such as Ladakh and Sikkim are characterized as ‘remote’ and ‘sensitive’ by the Indian state and exotic, spiritual, and supernatural by Indian and White tourists and academics. From the vantage point of the nation-state, the Himalayan frontier exists outside of modernity and civilization where law and order are prone to breakdown. More recently, scholarship on Indian borderlands, ethnographic and historical studies primarily, offer a corrective in how their analytical framings de-center the nation-state. Smith's choice of the term ‘threshold’ over frontier, margin, or borderland, for instance, takes on a dual meaning in her narrative as both the threshold of the home and the nation but also pushes back against the tendency to read the destiny and desires of those at the margins from the lens of the nation-state. The threshold is after all hardly marginal to the rest of the home.

But how do the region's Indigenous and tribal communities speak of their homelands, their past, and the future to come? The Tibetan name for Sikkim is Beyul Demajong – a scared hidden land of spiritual and material abundance. Beyul in the Buddhist Nyingma tradition refers to places of refuge for those fleeing religious persecution. Sikkim was a beyul for Tibetan settlers who founded the kingdom in the seventeenth century. The Namgyal dynasty was formed by incorporating the region's Indigenous Lepcha and Limbu communities who had their own conceptions and names for this landscape they revered as sacred. Sikkim's early history was shaped by its relations with Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, with Tibet emerging as an ally that heavily influenced its military, political, and religious life. These memories linger and have left a material remnant in the region's architecture, cuisine, and sartorial culture. Much like people in Ladakh who evoke memories of Gyal Kahtun and Sengge Namgyal as beloved royalty, a time of thriving trade and close ties with Central Asia, many Lepchas and Bhutias remember the Namgyal dynasty with fondness and lament Sikkim's annexation.

In Sikkim as in Ladakh, ‘perversely, perfectly, the past is evoked as a simpler time’ (98); as Smith alerts us these times were also rife with religious, class, and other divisions. The Namgyal dynasty, for instance, incorporated Lepcha and Limbu communities through religious conversions to Tibetan Buddhism which eventually led to the gradual loss of their Indigenous language and religious practices. While most Indian history textbooks will never carry these histories, they form a strong undercurrent in the discursive and material politics of the region. As formal decolonization birthed new nations with new borders, its bloody aftermath disrupted generations of trade networks, kinship, and intimate ties, turning friends, neighbours, and relatives into strangers and enemies overnight. Thus, attending to how those at the threshold remember/misremember the past can unsettle ‘methodological nationalism’ in both geography and Area Studies.

Young people's future talk

In the last two chapters, Smith brings into focus Ladakhi youth and how they relate to the recent history of Buddhist–Muslim relations that led to a ban on intermarriage. Some of these young people were part of a collaborative media project on the lived experiences of Ladakhi youth studying outside Ladakh. Tsering Motup, one of the young people we met through this project, shared with us this personal and vivid assemblage of images (Figure 1). Taken from a family album and Motup's passport size photos, these images speak to ‘an interpersonal journey of self in time away from home until return. Trying to capture memory, people, and its landscape to address isolation, nostalgia, re-migration, and other associated feelings of discomfort’. Whether it was the experience of racial discrimination in the city or exposure to feminist theory in the university, young people shared how ‘feelings of discomfort’ during their time outside Ladakh had transformed them. They spoke of being more critical of their parents and grandparents’ generation and reflective of the kind of future they wanted for Ladakh. The increased mobility of Ladakhi youth, their exposure to new ideas and people has led to older generations of Ladakh to experience what Smith theorizes as ‘generational vertigo…. a sense of being on the cusp of a strange and unknowable future, a generational change fraught with danger in its very uncertainties’ (109). Though romantic relations and marriages across the religious divide were still rare, young people were hopeful of their own generation's ability to enact a different future.

Figure 1.

‘Memory of people in landscape' by Tsering Motup.

In Sikkim, anxieties over generational change are especially pronounced among Indigenous communities like the Lepchas due to high rates of youth outmigration and the threat to ancestral lands from development projects. In the early 2000s, it was announced that a series of hydropower projects would be constructed in the Dzongu reserve, a place revered as sacred by the Lepchas. During this time, I spoke to many Lepcha youth about their thoughts on the planned development in the region and the labels of ‘primitive’ and ‘vanishing’ assigned to their tribe. In the 1980s, colonial ideas of Lepchas as a ‘dying race’ found new life in the book ‘Lepcha, my vanishing tribe’ written by A.R. Foning, a Lepcha author from neighboring Kalimpong. Within Sikkim, Lepchas are recognized as the ‘Most Primitive Tribe’, a designation that some Lepcha leaders demanded hoping to get affirmative action benefits within the state. But many Lepcha youth were not too fond of both these labels.

In the linear narrative of national time, tribal and Indigenous communities have been written into constitutional existence as a ‘backwards’ people, a historical remnant who will not survive the onslaught of civilization and modernity. To be Indigenous within the modern nation-state is to live with a profound sense of territorial and temporal displacement (Gergan and McCreary, 2021). Against ideas of the ‘vanishing tribe’, young people read hope in ancient prophecies claiming Lepchas would outlast all rulers including even the Indian state. In the Lepcha youth's narrative of their tribe's future, they spoke of deep ancestral ties to the land predating the Namgyal dynasty. This relation to the landscape became central to the social movement against hydropower projects led by Lepcha youth from Dzongu that led to the cancelation of four proposed dams. While Indigenous youth struggle to find their place in the present, in Lepcha youth's future talk, we find an orientation to time and place that sets their communities at the center of their own destiny.

Closing

Today, in India, we find the ascendance of Hindu nationalist conspiracy theories like ‘Love Jihad’ that tell us Muslim men are luring Hindu women to fall in love with them to enact a demographic change. We also find new variations of these fears in ideas of ‘Land Jihad’ and ‘Vyapar (Trade) Jihad’, that show us how love, land, and trade are inextricably bound. In the past decade in the Indian Himalaya, large infrastructural development and extractivist projects have accelerated alongside the escalation of geopolitical tensions in states bordering China including Ladakh and Sikkim. Meanwhile, constitutional protections for tribal land ownership are being gradually eroded often with the collusion of local tribal elites and politicians. The 2019 abrogation of Article 370 that offered just such a constitutional protection to the residents of Ladakh, Jammu, and Kashmir, sent a wave of panic across many Himalayan states with similar laws in place. While Ladakh was granted Union Territory status, a long-standing demand, it lost constitutional protections that disallow the sale and purchase of tribal lands by non-tribals.

In India where caste, religious, ethnic, and other differences are mapped onto bodies, territory, and space, demographic anxieties will only sharpen the lines between insiders/outsiders, migrant/Indigenous, and Hindu/Muslim as land becomes scarce and people fall in love across these lines. Yet, as Smith reminds us ‘territory is part of the story but does not determine it completely’ (97) and that love and desire are an ‘unstoppable force’ (94), urging us to attend to the intimate in our analysis. Our intimate choices regarding friendship, love, desire, and mobility can both reify and challenge notions of purity and authenticity. In this Intimate Geopolitics invites us all to consider how in ‘our small choices – about love, about loss, about children’ we are all, ‘participating in the lively life of territory’ (142). The book's theoretical and empirical insights on territory, geopolitics, temporality, and intimacy will be of great interest to feminist and political geographers, scholars of South Asia, and anyone invested in this region's future.