Building a Mountain Fortress for India: Sympathy, Imagination and the Reconfiguration of Ladakh into a Border Area

This article examines the relationship between affect and the state in post-colonial India, foregrounding sympathy as a feeling that arises from the embodied encounters and interactions between the state and a local population through state-building in the Himalayas. It establishes the emergence of sympathy in the materiality of the Himalayas and in the historical conjuncture of the passage to Indian nationhood in Ladakh, which was marked by the mobilisation of the local population in the defence of the territory of India amid the first Indo-Pakistani war (1947–48). This article argues that sympathy, in leading the state to reimagine the population of Ladakh, is integral to the reconfiguration of the region into a border area and to the rethinking of the sovereignty of the Indian state at its Himalayan frontier.