Thresholds of territory,time,and intimacy

I began this author's response sitting on a plush red and pink Chinese blanket; the familiar Himalaya was in view across the Indus River, in Ladakh which is now a Union Territory, not part of Jammu and Kashmir State (J&K) as it had been when I wrote the book. Intimate Geopolitics is the story of the embodied life of territory in this mountainous former kingdom on India's contested northern borders with Pakistan and China. The book traces how the history of colonization and its post-independence reverberations set the stage for geopolitical life – for decisions about love, friendship, children, and intimate life to become a terrain on which geopolitical meaning is made.

In this setting, both familiar and strange, I found myself stumbling over words that seemed inadequate to the reviewers’ generosity, to the complexity of the scenarios unfolding, to everything that has happened since I wrote Intimate Geopolitics. Releasing a book in April of 2020 feels more like something that happened in a dream, with the pandemic overwhelming the experience – this makes me all the more grateful to Anu Sabhlok for organizing this forum, to Dialogues in Human Geography for hosting it, and to Rigzin Chodon, Mabel Gergan, Sneha Krishnan, and Rupak Shrestha for taking time to respond to the ideas and stories in the text. In particular, I am grateful for the selection of these scholars, who have generously spoken from fields of expertise grounded in the relevant literature, their own research, but also their own lived experience of Ladakh, the Himalayas, and South Asia – affording a more nuanced engagement that we sometimes miss in our efforts to speak to the discipline while remaining committed to building an ethical and meaningful relationship to a place.

I wanted more than anything to write a book that would resonate, that would ring true with the experiences of the people I spoke with, that younger generations of Ladakhis would find compelling, and that would make space for us to talk about the embodied life of geopolitics in ways that were more grounded, more familiar, and reflective of how ordinary people live geopolitical lives. Yet seeing this work reflected to me in these reviews is humbling and unexpected. I was struck most by how the authors connected the work to their own research or life, and in this reflection, I see the book through a different lens. In replying to their generous commentaries, I focus on how they coalesce around intimacy, the threshold, and temporality. As I further my research on the political uses of time and territory – or how we do tricks with time to claim territory or deepen political narratives of belonging and unbelonging, these reflections provide me with a newly expansive understanding.

Thresholds of territory and time

As Mabel notes, I picked up the term threshold as I stumbled away from the colonial language of frontier and borderland. In an earlier manuscript, I had unthinkingly used the word ‘frontier’ – terminology that reflects how Ladakh is read by outsiders. Fortunately, my Osage colleague Jean Dennison intervened, asking me why I would use such a colonial term; it is this blunt and generative question that set me on a different track. There's some feeling in Ladakh of being on the cusp, on a threshold, but, as Mabel and I are writing elsewhere, the language of frontier feels wildly inappropriate in Ladakh: as the threshold simultaneously feels like being at the centre – that is, embedded in the local context, in family relations, in a certain kind of distinctive place, one can only imagine it as an anchor point, as the place to which you return. This flips on its head the language of the frontier, which is always away from the centre of power looking toward unruly borders. As Mabel writes, ‘The threshold is after all hardly marginal to the rest of the home’.

It was my aspiration to use a word that signals a crucial but multivalent crossing of a border but is also alluding to the threshold of a home. Yet, somehow, I was startled when Rigzin picks up on the connections as they appeared at her own household threshold. When she recalls seeing the words ‘valid until marriage’, on her Scheduled Tribe certificate, so many thresholds appear (the Schedule Tribe certificate confirms her membership in a recognized ‘tribal’, or Indigenous group – accorded specific rights under article 366 of the constitution). Embedded in the laminated document we find the temporality of the assumed future marriage, the threshold of ST identity then being caught up in gender and marital status. This bleeds into how Rigzin describes her own orientation toward marriage – saying how this gave her a certain anxiety, and noting how she hasn’t yet changed her own address. This threshold goes back and forth in time, as she describes herself as being both from Changthang and Sham (the eastern part of Ladakh on the high plateau bordering Tibet, and the western part of Ladakh along the Indus with apricot and walnut trees). Rather than accept the logic that she is from the place of her father, she claims also her mother's place of belonging. Across these reviews, the question of what it means to be ‘from’, a place is central, gendered, tinged with religious identity, and politically complex – it's a different form of intimacy, a kind of intimacy with a place that is allowed or disallowed, fostered, or made contingent: who can belong to a place? Can a woman claim belonging to a place outside of marriage, outside of her father's birthplace?

Speaking to the ways that Sikkim's future and past are discussed: a future marred by fears of low birthrates, a past Namgyal dynasty connected to Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan, a relationship to India shaped by ‘the afterlives of imperial cartographic and enumeration practices’, Mabel writes that ‘attending to how those at the threshold remember/misremember the past, can flip our orientation to both national time and territory’ (Gergan, 2023).

Intimacy

Where Rigzin claims both her father's and mother's places as her own, Rupak speaks rather to unbelonging – to his parents who have lived in the same neighbourhood in Patan, Nepal for 30 years, yet do not celebrate the local Newa tradition of Pāhān Charhe because, his mother tells him, they are not from there. Across the responses, I began to consider intimacy in relation to place: how do we become close to the social relations embedded in place? Are places in some contexts thresholds that can never be crossed? When I introduce myself in Ladakh, and then respond with an explanation of marriage to the immediate next question (‘why do you speak Ladakhi?’) reflexively, perhaps unconsciously repeating the words I’ve heard my husband and in-laws say countless times: I instinctively say I’m married to a family in Shenam (our Leh neighbourhood), and then add: but our family is from Sham, from Tia. Rupak describes his parents as considering themselves outsiders to their place despite living there for 30 years, and this recalls for me how my husband and his siblings, born in Leh, would never claim to be ‘from’ Leh. This question of ‘from’, runs throughout each of these commentaries, asking me the question, why didn’t I notice this theme as I wrote the book, even though because of my own childhood my own answer to ‘where are you from?’ leaves me feeling a liar no matter my answer. Sneha's narratives of interreligious friendship and conversion, and then of love jihad also speak to the ‘from’ ness of religion: how religious identity comes to mark whether someone is truly ‘from’ India imagined as a Hindu nation or Sri Lanka imagined as a Buddhist nation. It is also Rigzin's intimacy with a place that makes possible her excellent questions: how would this book be different if I had spoken to women from a wider range of backgrounds: from Nubra, from Changthang?

Rupak and Sneha take up intimate geopolitics with new language and into different contexts Sneha helps me see differently the intimacy marked by Soma and Mercy's friendship, which is compellingly tangled in the intimacy of religious belief, transgressing lines between Christian and Buddhist. Bringing my concept of intimate geopolitics in relation to Sara Ahmed's ‘skin’, Sneha allows for the imagery and theorization of how young people are made to grow a kind of geopolitical skin, that creates a border or borderland between young people (Ahmed, 2002; Krishnan, 2023). When they seek to make kin across religious lines, they face discipline precisely because of the possibility of how this kin-making remakes borders: ‘borderlands are made, like skin, in the moment of the encounter’. Sneha powerfully connects our work across place and time through the language of containment – telling how Hadiya was held against her will because of her romantic and religious transgressions – and speaking to the persistence of containment: ‘borderlands and sites of containment are thus brought into the intimate recesses of everyday life: turning homes into detention centers, and the body itself as a site of potential geopolitical transgression’ (Krishnan, 2023: 3).

Bringing my book in conversation with both the ethnic and religious entanglements of the Nepal context, and caste difference (which is something I should have grappled with more in Ladakh), Rupak connects intimate geopolitics to his own marriage, deftly laying out the gendered, temporal, and familial territorialisation of identity with a description of one single meeting. Both the composition of the meeting (the eldest sons representing families) and the content – in which a speaker states that in ‘modern times’, ‘because of intermarriage outside of their clan, there are issues of impurity in their population and territory’, are reflections of a geopolitics in which his own marriage, between a Hindu and Buddhist Newa family, ‘desecrates the lineage of the Buddha, and defiles the sacredness of territory that is supposedly carved at one's birth’ (Shrestha, 2023: 2).

Temporality

Temporality flows through these reviews as it moves through the primary text – one of my driving agendas is to try to understand how people do tricks with time to claim territory. However the contributors’ reflections refract temporality differently. Mabel notes the imperial afterlives of enumeration that drive future-oriented anxieties between Nepali and Bhutia-Lepcha communities in Sikkim, and how those imperial afterlives also emerge in ‘linear narratives of national time in India’, through which, ‘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’ (Gergan, 2023: 4). This, however, does not overwrite Lepcha youth's ‘future talk’, that ‘places their communities at the center of their own destiny’. In a different vein, Rupak describes the murder by stoning of Dalit men when one of them seeks to marry an ‘upper caste’ woman in Soti, a village in Western Nepal: ‘Here, the fatal violence on Dalit lives became a means through which to sustain a “pure” territorial futurity for ‘upper-caste’ Hindu peoples’ (Shrestha, 2023: 3).

This summer in Ladakh, everything was the same and different. Everyone is talking about the future, and what it might hold, now that Ladakh is a Union Territory (UT). In August 2019, while the book was in the copyediting stage, the state of Jammu and Kashmir (which included Ladakh), was broken into two, and Ladakh was made a UT; article 370, which had given special protections to J&K residents was revoked. At this moment, while the valley was cut off from the world in a communication blackout, in Ladakh there were images of celebrations in the street. As the book describes, spearheaded by the Ladakh Buddhist Association, the territorial struggle for greater Ladakhi autonomy had saturated day-to-day relations between Buddhist and Muslim Ladakhis, with religious identity being marked as the difference that mattered and required Ladakh to have more autonomy. In a sense, it's this thing, UT, which animated all the events of the book – and yet now the old concerns persist but in new shapes – as the language of tribal rights is now everywhere in the demand for sixth schedule inclusion, which would give a recognized tribal territorial status for the region that could provide protections against ‘outsiders’, particularly in the purchase of land. In casual conversation, this now is framed as the land being overwhelmed by ‘Indians’, or gyagarpa, that is, people from India below the Himalayas.

This moment in India is one in which perhaps one long to be wrong: As Sneha writes, ‘Friendship and intimacies shared among neighbors of different faiths, and the practicing of more than one religion in a family all engage bodies in acts of touching skin – edging across boundaries – whose danger is heightened in the present moment of Hindu Nationalist demographic anxiety’, one in which we are constantly asked, ‘Who is ours and who is theirs – how skin forms against the other as a line…’ this is always a temporal question – from the specific ways that timelines are distorted (for instance, in ‘Love Jihad’, case of Hadiya in which her conversion before marriage is erased – to stories about who can claim the past and how demography can determine the future – dangerous politics I’ve described in the book and elsewhere as demographic fever dreams (Gökarıksel et al., 2019). In my book I suggest that young people's embodied life is made to hold a geopolitical charge, as Sneha writes working with Sara Ahmed, ‘this is a matter of how the body is turned towards forging livability: whether on the terms that are legible to religious and national community, or not’ (Krishnan, 2023: 3). And yet, in Rigzin's comments, we see a self-consciously optimistic uncertainty, a mention of utopia, a hope that the transitory time she finds her generation in can find different forms of relation.

Across these reviews, I’m most moved by the subtleties of a different kind of generative intimate geopolitics: that in which experiences of heartbreak and friendship as geopolitical are connected back to the ways that readers work to understand their own lives, research, and, for Rupak, pedagogy. Writing this book was a struggle for me most of all because of the slow-building sense of anxiety that I could not do justice to all that had been shared with me. I wish I could remember who told me not to fear anxiety, but to take it as information that you care deeply about something. Intimacy requires work and commitment to be worthy of the stories that people so generously share, and I often felt or still feel that I had failed in this regard, that I hadn’t done enough with the lives that had been shared. What a gift, then, for these readers to show what they have been able to do through this shared conversation, and how ideas drawn from lived experience can shift and travel within and across worlds.