The Domestication of Geopolitics: Buddhist-Muslim Conflict and the Policing of Marriage and the Body in Ladakh, India

This paper approaches intimacy as a site of geopolitical practice. What happens when the body is the territory through which geopolitical strategies are played out? In the Leh district of India's Jammu and Kashmir state Buddhist/Muslim conflict is articulated at the site of the body and geopolitical strategies impinge on personal decisions. Over the past century religious identity has increasingly taken on political meaning in Leh, particularly since the 1980s. Interestingly, for average Ladakhis political conflict is described in terms of bodies – that is, through discussions of who should or should not eat together, get married, or have children. By destabilising the global geopolitical scale, we can arrive at a richer and more nuanced understanding of the everyday ways in which our bodies are incorporated into or reject incorporation into geopolitical strategies to control territory. In the past, the Buddhists were more. Now, it's the Buddhists, mostly, I think, who have used family planning. Among the Shia Muslims, if you look in Kargil and Chushot, even now, they have nine each or eight each. Rinpoches say that our Buddhists are getting fewer, and then our Hill Council, in the future it's going to be run by Shia Muslims. What the Buddhist Association did, it said to all the Buddhists, “You should think. Up to four, or up to six, or up to five, let them be born. Don't sterilize after two.” (Yangdol, 45-year-old Buddhist mother of three) 1 1. Names of research participants have been replaced with pseudonyms throughout. Yangdol uses here the term “Balti,” to refer to Shia Muslims. In Ladakh the terms Balti and Kache are frequently used to distinguish between Shia and Sunni Muslims. These terms however, are somewhat misleading as they are geographic markers – Balti means a person from Baltistan and Kache means Kashmiri. These terms are regularly applied to Ladakhis to denote their religious identity, but in my interviews I have found it is more common for Buddhists to deploy these words and that Muslims more often differentiate using the terms Shia and Sunni. In later interviews throughout this paper I have translated Balti and Kache as Shia and Sunni, however, I have bracketed the term to indicate this substitution. A rinpoche is a high monk, generally the reincarnated spiritual leader of a particular monastery. Kargil is the district to Leh's west, dominated by Shia Muslims, and Chushot is a Shia-majority village that meanders along the Indus River, just southeast of Leh. In the beginning, in the very beginning, the relationship was very good. We were like one person. There were Buddhists who married with Muslims, and Muslims who married with Buddhists. Now, times have changed, and things are different. Now people don't understand, and they have bad hearts. (Razia, 45-year-old Sunni mother of two)