Peace and Conflict in Ladakh (Brill's Tibetan Studies Library)

Peace and Conflict in Ladakh

Brill’s Tibetan Studies Library Edited by

Henk Blazer Alex McKay Charles Ramble

VOLUME 13

Peace and Conflict in Ladakh The Construction of a Fragile Web of Order

by

Fernanda Pirie

LEIDEN BOSTON 2007 •

Cover photo: The Babar celebrating the exorcism of evil from Photoksar at the end of the New Year celebrations, December 1999 (Photo by Fernanda Pirie).

This book is printed on acid-free paper.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Detailed Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data are available on the Internet at http://catalog.loc.gov

ISSN 1568-6183 ISBN-13: 978 90 04 15596 1 ISBN-10: 90 04 15596 1 © Copyright 2007 by Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands Koninklijke Brill NV incorporates the imprints Brill, Hotei Publishing, IDC Publishers, Martinus Nijhoff Publishers and VSP. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, translated, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher. Authorization to photocopy items for internal or personal use is granted by Brill provided that the appropriate fees are paid directly to The Copyright Clearance Center, 222 Rosewood Drive, Suite 910 Danvers, MA 01923, USA. Fees are subject to change. printed in the netherlands

CONTENTS

List of maps and illustrations ......................................................... .... vi Note on transliteration .................................................................... viii Acknowledgements ............................................................................. ix Maps ................................................................................................... xi Chapter One

Introduction .............................................................. 1

Chapter Two

Ladakh ................................................................... 17

Chapter Three

Village organisation .............................................. 42

Chapter Four

Conflict in the village ............................................ 68

Chapter Five

The realm of the spirits .......................................... 88

Chapter Six

Losar .................................................................... 112

Chapter Seven

The sacred social order ........................................ 125

Chapter Eight

Ethnographic Tibet .............................................. 143

Chapter Nine

Urban process and political change ..................... 170

Chapter Ten

Conclusion ........................................................... 196

Glossary .......................................................................................... 209 Bibliography ................................................................................... 217 Index ................................................................................................ 227

LIST OF MAPS AND ILLUSTRATIONS Maps Ladakh ............................................................................................... xi Ethnographic Tibet ........................................................................... xii Photographs between pages 116 and 117 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28

The Potala palace. Tibetan government officials at the Potala. Leh palace. The mosque. Ridzong monastery. The winter cham festival at Likir monastery. The route from the Shi Shi La to Photoksar. A lhato protecting travellers on a mountain path. The gorge between Wanla and Photoksar. Descending from the Sengge La towards Nyeraks and Lingshed. Photoksar. The hamlet of Machu. Photoksar. Meme Sonam reading a Buddhist text. Paljor carving a block for a prayer flag. Meme Sonam pouring tea. Choron collecting water from the frozen river. Yangzes washing clothes. A yak herder. Threshing with yaks. Orsal and his brother learn to winnow. Paljor reads a chos before the first ploughing. Changing the juniper on the lhato. The komnyer performing a sangs at the lhato. Gyaltsen tending the lhato for the phalha. The lhaba possessed by the yullha. The bele. The boys’ alamdar and the girls’ patimo.

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

29 30 31 32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

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Village women dancing in age order. The onpo and the amchi at the front of the line of dancers. The onpo. The chos-sil. One of the older village women with her prayer wheel. Orsal taking leave of the goba before departing for Lamayuru. Village women listen to Chado Rinpoche’s teachings. Chado Rinpoche performing a skurims in Photoksar. The lama placing a pungpa in a new lhato. Morup and Api Rigzin with one of Morup’s sons. Khangltakh in the snow. Chortens above the village. A seventeenth century document.

Photographs 1 and 2 courtesy of the Pitt Rivers Museum, University of Oxford. All other photographs by the author.

NOTE ON TRANSLITERATION Ladakhi is a Tibetan language. Most words have a standard written form but local pronunciation often differs markedly from that of central Tibet. In this book I transcribe most Ladakhi words as they are spoken in the Photoksar dialect, which sometimes differs even from that of Leh. In the case of standard Tibetan terms, such as chösi zungdrel, however, I have retained the standard romanization. I do the same with Tibetan names, such as Sakya, pronounced Saskya in Ladakh, and adopt the individual’s preferred form in the case of Ladakhi names such as Thupstan Chhewang, pronounced Tupstan Tsewang. Where the spelling is relevant I have included the widely-accepted Wylie transcription (Wylie 1959) in the text. The glossary lists all the most frequently used Tibetan and Ladakhi words, together with the written Tibetan form and an English translation. The Ladakhi use of a word can differ markedly from that elsewhere in Tibet. For example trims (khrims) means ‘custom’ in Ladakh but generally has the sense of ‘law’ in central Tibet. The absence of a written forms means that the word does not appear in the dictionaries of either Das (1998), Hamid (1998) or Jäschke (1881) and the spelling is not obvious. The ‘-pa’ ending indicates a person, as in ‘Ladakspa’`, a Ladakhi. The same ending is found in yulpa, a person of the yul (village), and nangpa, a person of the nang (inside), that is a Buddhist. ‘I’ and ‘e’ are generally genitive endings, so onpe chos is the chos (rituals) of the onpo.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The fieldwork on which this book is based was funded by the Economic and Social Council of Great Britain and the Max Planck Institute for Social Anthropology in Halle. I am also grateful to the Max Planck Institute for funding the inclusion of the photographs in the volume. Nick Allen, Martijn van Beek, Martin Mills and David Parkin all read and made important and helpful comments on sections of the manuscript. Marcus Banks, Keebet and Franz von Benda-Beckmann, Clare Harris and Charles Ramble read and commented on earlier drafts of the material that has been transformed into this book. I am very grateful to them all. John Bray, among others at the International Association of Ladakh Studies, has been consistently helpful in providing information and materials on the region. I spent over twenty months undertaking fieldwork in Ladakh between 1998 and 2005. During this time Ladakhi people from far and wide were unfailingly helpful, friendly and supportive. Those of Photoksar, particularly the family in Khangltakh, were generous beyond measure. Wangchuk and Becky of SECMOL, Sonam Phuntsog of Hemis Shukpachan, Lama Tsewang Jorgas and Karma Namgyal of Lingshed, Tinles Angmo, Henk Toma, Sharif Bhat and Soso in Leh must, in particular, be mentioned for the help and advice they gave over a long period. For editorial assistance I am indebted to Eva Pirie, to Paul Honey at the Centre for Socio-Legal Studies of Oxford University and to Patricia Radder at Brill. Six months after I first visited Ladakh, while on a student holiday in 1983, a letter from my father was returned by the Indian post office, having lain uncollected in the poste restante in Leh. He had opened the atlas, he said, and could not resist sending off a missive to a place wholly represented by a swirling mass of purple. His letters, discovered in post offices throughout my journey, were evocative, inquisitive and thought-provoking, qualities which I can only aspire to as an anthropologist. Seventeen years later, when I returned to Ladakh, an array of friends wrote the letters that sustained the ups and downs of a long period of fieldwork. The envelopes that were waiting each time I returned to Leh

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from Photoksar contained thoughts and reflections, advice and admonishment, which greatly enriched my time in Ladakh. This book is dedicated to all the letter-writers. These include my father, Gordon Pirie, who did not live to write to me again in Ladakh, but who would, I hope, have been pleased with what I have done.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION ‘Crossroads of high Asia’, ‘a borderland’, ‘a vulnerable and strategic tract for India’, ‘positioned in the penumbra of the Line of Control ... part of the discord in Kashmir’. The images used in recent studies to introduce Ladakh, the Himalayan region of the Indian state of Jammu and Kashmir, emphasise its liminal position on the westernmost corner of the Tibetan plateau.1 Ladakh was, and still is, the meeting point of the Islamic and Buddhist worlds and of the Tibetan and Indic cultures. Historically it was a staging post on the formidable trade routes that crossed the Himalayas to connect central Asia with India and central Tibet. Now within India, but abutting its disputed borders with Pakistan and China, the region hosts army camps for the forces engaged in the Kashmir conflict. Over the centuries the Ladakhi people have become used to invasions and conflict, political interference, fiscal demands and religious proselytisation from east and west, north and south. The birth of the Indian nation state, with its programme of social and economic development, and the opening of the area to tourism mean that the forces of consumerism and material advancement have now reached even the remotest villages of the region. This book investigates the processes by which the Ladakhi people have constructed their own ideas of community and spaces of social order amidst such diverse influences. Ecologically, Ladakh is part of the high Tibetan plateau, an arid region, lying beyond the monsoon watershed formed by the Himalayas. Most inhabited areas lie at over 3,000m and the sparse population clusters around the pockets of flat land on which the water from melting glaciers or snow-fields makes irrigated agriculture possible. Apart from the nomads who herd their livestock on the Chang Tang plateau to the east, most Ladakhis live in geographically-bounded villages separated by acres of pasture and wasteland. Theirs is still largely an agricultural society; even the inhabitants of the towns rely upon the complex irriga1 The quotes are from Rizvi (1983) (title page), also cited in Bray (2005: 2), Srinivas (1998: 4) and Aggarwal (2004: 3, 7, 8). They are, it should be pointed out, matched by those, generally in earlier works, that emphasise Ladakh’s ‘seclusion’ and geographical position ‘encircled by the highest mountain chains in the world’ (Crook and Osmaston 1994: xxv; Dollfus 1989: 19).

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tion systems that provide water for their gardens, orchards and barley fields. The languages of the region are varieties of Tibetan, quite distinct from the Urdu of neighbouring Kashmir, a legacy of Ladakh’s historic links with early Tibetan civilisations. For centuries Ladakh was, however, an independent kingdom, governed by a long line of hereditary rulers. They were assisted by a small aristocratic elite who extracted taxes from the villagers and traders and raised armies for the kings’ wars with Kashmiri, Tibetan and Mongolian forces. Under the influence of religious leaders from Tibet the kings patronised Buddhist monasteries throughout the region and the major part of population in the east remains Buddhist. Several kings came under pressure from Kashmiri leaders to convert to Islam, however, and much of the population in the Kargil area to the west is now Muslim. This division has been associated with communal tensions and mistrust in the late twentieth century.2 In the 1840s, Ladakh was conquered by the Dogras, then rulers of Kashmir, and they undertook a series of administrative reforms, land settlements and development initiatives over the following century. Since Indian independence Ladakh has been subject to the administrative control of the Indian state and it is from the cities of India that a host of bureaucrats, entrepreneurs and, more recently, development workers and tourists now bring the values of modernity and the market economy into the region, as well as the ecological, political and ethical ideals of the west. During the time of the Ladakhi kingdom it was the aristocrats, the old Ladakhi elite, who were most closely involved in relations with the outside world. Those who had acquired high aristocratic or religious status tended to live along the Indus valley, close to the political and monastic centres. But traders, both Buddhist and Muslim, also travelled great distances on perilous journeys, often accompanied by pilgrims or monks who had been sent to train in the monasteries of Tibet. Their modern-day equivalents are the children of the upper classes and newly wealthy families sent for education to India, members of non-governmental organisations (NGOs), entrepreneurs and local politicians. Educated in Jammu, Delhi or the monasteries of India, making a living from tourism, development activities or western patronage, most cosmo-

2

Politically, the region is now divided into the Leh Block and the Kargil block with Buddhist and Muslim majorities, respectively. In 1999 each block had a population of around 115,000 (Census of India 1999).

INTRODUCTION

3

politan Ladakhis are acutely aware of the issues of development and modernisation as they affect their populations. Many are concerned about the effects on their small region of the new market economy, a changing cultural heritage and the divisive effects of party politics. Although the greater proportion of the Ladakhi population remains subsistence farmers scattered through the region’s remote villages, they, too, go on pilgrimage to Leh, some even to India and Nepal. They send their children to school in the towns; they visit Leh to buy consumer goods and negotiate with government officials; they vote in regional and national elections. They are far from being isolated from the forces of change and modernity sweeping through the Indus valley. The questions I set out to answer here concern the ways in which the Ladakhi populations, both urban and rural, maintain their social order in the midst of these influences. I draw on interviews conducted with people from all over Ladakh, but concentrate on the experiences of two distinct groups, the inhabitants of one of the remoter villages and those living in the urban centre, Leh. Their experiences of modernity are vastly different but there are common threads to be found in the ways in which they manage conflict and pursue peace, constructing fragile webs of order within the boundaries of their Himalayan communities.

The SECMOL dispute One winter’s day in 1999 on the dusty streets of Leh, under a sun that was still hot although the temperature had hovered below freezing for weeks, a group of Buddhist monks set upon a boy who was selling magazines at the main bus stand. They beat him up and destroyed a large number of his copies. The monks had taken offence at an article in the magazine which had made critical remarks about monks who behave in a ‘non-Buddhist’ way. Ladags Melong (Mirror of Ladakh), is produced by the Students’ Educational and Cultural Movement of Ladakh (SECMOL). This non-governmental organisation, founded in 1988, works for the improvement of education and to preserve the culture of the region. It was run by a group of young, educated Ladakhis, many of whom had obtained, or were studying for, university degrees and who were encouraged to take an interest in the changing social conditions brought about by modernisation and its effects on Ladakhi culture. The article in question had been written by Rigzin, one of the SECMOL students, in which he recounted, in critical terms, how a group of Bud-

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dhist monks had recently thrown him off a bus. The incident was the talk of the town for several weeks. When I investigated this incident the following summer, Tashi Mor up, the editor of the magazine, told me that he had advised the magazineseller not to take the case to the police. He felt that it could better be solved by dialogue with the monks. The case was taken over by Sonam Wangchuk, founder and Secretary of SECMOL, who wrote a letter to the monks asking for an apology. When none was forthcoming, he threatened to take the case to the court or to the Dalai Lama in Dharamsala. The SECMOL members were then invited to a meeting with the Ladakhi Gonpa Association (LGA), a body which represents the Buddhist monasteries of the region. At the meeting, the monks claimed that they had been sent by the LGA to beat up the sales boy because Rigzin’s letter had insulted their religion. They had destroyed the magazine, they claimed, ‘for the monasteries’ and ‘for the chos’, the Tibetan term used to denote religious rituals, doctrine and texts. In response, Wangchuk told me, he had decided to use a ‘traditional tactic’ and asked one of the monks to put a picture of the Dalai Lama on his forehead and repeat his claim. ‘I do not really believe in such things,’ Wangchuk told me, ‘but I knew the monks had enough sense not to lie with the Dalai Lama on their foreheads.’ At that, the monks’ attitudes had changed, he said, and they began to suggest that Ladakhis were a minority people and should not fight. Eventually they agreed to pay a fine to SECMOL, which they agreed at 500 rupees (Rs).3 Some of the monks argued that Rigzin should also pay a fine ‘because of the letter’. Wangchuk advised him to agree to a fine of Rs200, on the basis that the dispute would otherwise become ‘big news’, which would be bad for Ladakh. Rigzin told me that he did not consider the fine to have been just; this was India and he had a right to express his opinions in the media. However, he had accepted Wangchuk’s argument that such a small region could not afford internal fighting. Wangchuk also told me that he did not think the fine had been right. However, he had advised Rigzin to accept it in the interests of resolving the whole issue. When narrating these events to me Wangchuk expressed the opinion that the dispute was really about the freedom of the press. However, he said, SECMOL would have to have gone to the court to ensure that such principles were explicitly recognised. In the end, he thought, things had 3

In 1999 there were around 65 rupees to the pound sterling.

INTRODUCTION

5

worked out in a satisfactory way because the result had upheld, and had been seen to uphold, the right principles. Rigzin was less sanguine, reflecting that if he had known his rights better, he might not have accepted the fine. Wangchuk and Rigzin were both aware of the principles of freedom of speech and individual rights, that is, but had been prepared to compromise them for the sake of reaching a settlement. This case involved a number of the most well-educated, politically and socially aware young Ladakhis. The three SECMOL members had all had experience of modern urban Indian society. They associated frequently with international development workers, educationalists, ecologists and tourists, and Wangchuk, married to an American, had travelled widely in the west. Their education had been inspired by models and ideologies imported from modern India, many of western origin. Nevertheless, when they themselves became embroiled in a conflict, they had turned, for guidance, to Buddhist leaders. Under state law there would have been no case against the magazine and no justification for the monks’ assault. Yet the SECMOL members were prepared to submit to the mediation of their traditional leaders. The value and sanctity of religion were not overtly questioned during the mediation process, while the principles of freedom of speech and of the press were not raised. The importance of resolving the dispute and reaching a settlement in the interests of the wider community was both expressed and implied on all sides throughout the process. When I asked Wangchuk to explain why he had chosen to accept the LGA’s mediation his answer was that, ‘like all Ladakhis I do not like to fight; we like to settle our disputes because everyone knows each other; we have to get on and do not like lingering disputes.’ During our discussions, Tashi Morup, the magazine’s editor, also reflected more generally on Ladakhi attitudes to disputes. ‘Our society is close knit,’ he said, ‘and families are prepared to suppress crimes when they consider social relations; few cases go to the police and the majority are solved at family level with the use of apologies. Pressure is applied to make people settle, but the decisions are generally right because the older people understand the society.’ These young men were, thus, suggesting that they, along with other Ladakhis, are averse to conflict and place a premium on the settlement of disputes, conscious of the effects they can have on the community as a whole. Their sense that order must be maintained within their community, in other words, leads them to accept the mediation of elders and to compromise their individual interests, in this case by accepting a fine they patently did not consider to be just. The SECMOL

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men were choosing to set aside the values of freedom of speech as well, one might add, as freedom from physical attack, in favour of compromise and the restoration of order. The question that arises is, quite simply, why they place the interests of their community above their own rights. It is a question which goes to the heart of their ideas, both explicit and implicit, about the nature of order in their society. It raises issues which have been central to anthropological inquiry since the early days of the discipline, when scholars first began to discuss the ‘problem of order’. How is the anthropologist to approach these issues in the early twenty-first century?

The problem of order As Roberts (forthcoming) points out, two models of order recur in sociological theory, that of the leader and his following, often oversimplistically attributed to Weber, and that of the shared, articulated repertoire of norms, generally associated with the theories of Durkheim. Both have continued to be relevant to anthropological writings on order in the early twenty-first century (Benda-Beckmann and Pirie, forthcoming). The Indian legal system, the principal means by which the state seeks to impose social order within its borders, is not absent in Ladakh. In both Leh and Kargil there are courts and judges. A number of my informants had trained as lawyers and were practising as such within the Indian legal system. However, as I describe later, the laws, structures and officers of this system play little part in the processes by which most Ladakhis, either urban or rural, resolve their conflicts. Even in the towns, judicial practices have developed apart from the state. In the SECMOL dispute, for example, the state’s agents were distanced in favour of the religious elite, whose authority stems from long-standing political and religious structures. They were also, however, joined by Tsering Samphel, the President of the Ladakhi Buddhist Association (LBA). The LBA is a local political party which has been active in demands for regional autonomy and was at the centre of the communal tensions of the 1980s and 90s. It is dominated by members of the local elite, those with education and high status jobs or members of the old Ladakhi aristocracy. However, its aims and activities and, thus, the authority of its President, are very contemporary. He had played an important role in the mediation process, Wangchuk told me.

INTRODUCTION

7

In order to understand the dynamics of order in Ladakh it is, therefore, necessary to consider the history of the political, judicial and religious power exercised by these different groups, both secular and religious. This involves examining the nature of the authority their leaders have established which I do, in part, by reference to Weber’s categories of legitimate authority. It also involves examining the relationhsip between political, religious and judicial forms of authority. This requires consideration of the relationship between the political and religious domains in Tibetan societies, a topic which has been the subject of extensive debate among both Tibetan writers and western analysts. ‘Political’ is a broad term. In the context of the Ladakhi kingdom I use it to refer to relations between kings, aristocrats and the wider populations, the raising of armies and taxes, in other words, the business of rule. In reference to later periods, it concerns the exercise of power by the Dogras and their administrators and, subsequently, by Indian politicians and bureaucrats, including the processes of the Indian democracy. When used in the context of the village, it concerns events connected with the organisation of the village economy and relations with outsiders, events which are mostly directed by the village meeting and negotiated through the payment of village taxes. I use the term ‘judicial’ to refer to processes connected with the resolution of disputes and settlement of conflict.4 ‘Religion’ is a term I use in its widest sense to refer to activities directed towards the spirit world, as well as the practices of Buddhism. In subsequent chapters I discuss the complex relations between these realms. As well as the continuing importance of traditional forms of status, the SECMOL dispute highlighted the importance of the participants’ ideas about conflict. The norms invoked during the SECMOL dispute were dominated by an emphasis on the promotion of reconciliation, the ceremonial restoration of good relations and a rhetorical affirmation of the undesirability of conflict within the local community. In order to understand the nature and role of such norms I undertook fifteen months of fieldwork in Photoksar, a remote village in the Sham area of Leh District from the summer of 1999.5 Photoksar is two days’ 4

‘Legal’ is a term I use infrequently, save in connection with legal anthropology or the Indian legal system. Like Roberts (1994), I regard it as too closely associated with governmental or state processes and structures to be well-suited to informal processes of the kind I am more often describing in Ladakh. 5 Ladakhi villages range from those in the Indus valley with populations of around

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walk from the road and a long day’s journey over high passes to the nearest villages on either side. I interspersed this fieldwork with periods in Leh, where I was able to contrast the ideas and customs I observed in the village with the views and practices of my urban informants. Once I was in the village it quickly became apparent that all forms of fighting, arguing, quarrelling, abusive and insulting language were strongly condemned. They were unequivocally considered to be undesirable, even dangerous. If a quarrel was reported people would shake their heads and they shuddered at the mention of fighting. Even to express anger was considered to reflect bad personal qualities. The statements of my SECMOL informants that disputes had to be resolved ‘within the community’ were repeatedly emphasised by these villagers. People would use phrases meaning ‘inside’ or ‘within’, nangla or nangosla, as the context in which disputes had to be settled. This reflected a strong sense of local community, of the village as a place with boundaries beyond which disputes must not be allowed to emerge. The concerns with settlement and the restoration of order that were implicit in the attitudes of the SECMOL men, including the idea that conflict is harmful to the wider community, dominated in the village. Throughout my fieldwork in Ladakh certain fundamental attitudes to conflict and order recurred and these are reflected in the examples cited in this book. I am not suggesting that there was only a single, let alone a static, set of norms in Ladakh; there are sets of beliefs and practices that are accepted by different people at different times. Nevertheless, certain ideas dominated in these discussions. This raises questions about the origins of such attitudes and the relationship between them and the religious beliefs and practices of the Ladakhi people, particularly given their historic links with Tibet.

Ladakh and Tibet Ladakh is generally regarded as forming part of ‘ethnographic Tibet’, a large area encompassing parts of China, India, Nepal, Bhutan and Pakistan in which the major part of the population is ethnically Tibetan and shares numerous aspects of culture, language, social organisation and religion (Bell 1924: 5, 8; Samuel 1993: Ch 3). Many studies of Ladakh

1,000 down to hamlets with no more than a dozen. Photoksar’s population was around 200 in 1999 and that of Leh roughly 15,000.

INTRODUCTION

9

have rightly and profitably analysed the historic, religious and social processes found in the region by reference to Tibetan religion and culture.6 The early Tibetan empire of the seventh to ninth centuries incorporated what is now Ladakh, but after its dissolution in 842 the region became and remained largely an independent kingdom until it was conquered by the Dogras in the 1840s. Nevertheless, Mahayana (Tibetan) Buddhism was well established in the western part of the Tibetan region from at least the twelfth century and the religious links between Ladakh and Tibet remained close until the 1950s. As Buddhist monasteries established a politically dominant position in central Tibet all the major sects founded their own establishments in Ladakh. Right up until the Chinese invasion of Tibet in the 1950s, Lhasa and the central Tibetan monasteries exerted considerable religious control over Ladakh. During a series of wars and relations with Kashmir, a substantial proportion of the Ladakhi population in the Kargil area was converted to Islam, but even after a century and a half of rule by Kashmir most of the Buddhist population of Ladakh continues to emphasise its religious identity as nangpa. Literally ‘insiders’, this is the term used by them to refer to followers of Tibetan Buddhism. In the twenty-first century, monasteries are still major landowners and even the poorest families send significant donations and, often, their sons into these establishments. The monks are placed high in the social hierarchy and some have risen to senior positions within Indian politics. Buddhist leaders played a central part in the settlement of the SECMOL dispute. To what extent, therefore, have Buddhist leaders and ideas influenced the way order is maintained in Ladakhi society? Do the attitudes expressed during the SECMOL dispute reflect some sort of Buddhist morality or legal principles, whether deeply ingrained in Ladakh during centuries of contact with Tibet, or more directly influenced by contemporary leaders? Many studies of Tibetan communities have placed the practices and principles of Buddhism at the heart of their analyses of social forms (Stein 1972; Ortner 1978; 1989; Samuel 1993; French 1995). Dreyfus (1995: 119), for example, states that Buddhism, ‘is dominant both from religious and socio-political points of view’ in the region. The religious realm is eclectic and heterogeneous, having incorporated numerous 6

These include nineteenth century writers (Ramsay 1890), historians (Francke 1907, 1926; Carrasco 1959), linguists (Denwood 2005), scholars of religion (Samuel 1993), Ladakhi scholars (Nawang Tsering Shakspo 1997a, 1997b, 1999) and anthropologists (Riaboff 1997; Mills 2003; Gutschow 2004; Pirie 2005).

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elements of more local and indigenous ritual practices, but it is, nevertheless, fundamental to the shape of the ‘total social whole’ of Tibetan societies. Samuel (1993: 362) uses this phrase in his wide-ranging work on Tibetan Buddhism, for example, talking of the ‘cultural patterns’ supplied by the religion. The idea that legal practices in Ladakh might represent a form of Tibetan law, based on Buddhist practices and principles, gains considerable support from Rebecca French’s work on Tibetan law, The Golden Yoke: the legal cosmology of Buddhist Tibet. In a study which relates to the whole of ethnographic Tibet, she characterises Tibetan understandings of law in terms of a ‘kaleidoscope cosmology’ (1995:16, 21). One of the questions I set out to explore was whether similar ideas could be found in the remote villages of Ladakh, which might have suggested that Ladakhi attitudes to conflict could be traced to Buddhist principles. To my initial surprise, however, I did not find religious ideas to be central to legal practices, whether philosophical Buddhist concepts or more straightforward moral precepts. I concluded, after long months of fieldwork, that even though Buddhism, its practices and practitioners, have had a profound influence on many aspects of lay life in Ladakh, the influence of Buddhist principles on legal practices was nonexistent. It is one of the aims of this book to analyse the consequences of this finding and, in so doing, to challenge the unreflected equation of social practice in Tibetan communities with religious principles.

Harmony ideology in legal anthropology My Leh-based informants were generally quick to refer to the villages when discussing Ladakhi attitudes to conflict. One lawyer, explaining the region’s legal system to me, for example, spent some time describing the state courts and procedures. ‘But Ladakhis don’t often use the courts in Leh’, she continued, ‘they settle most of their disputes in their villages.’ ‘Ladakhis are peace-loving people’, she added, echoing the attitudes of my SECMOL informants, ‘they don’t like long-running disputes.’ Although the history of the late twentieth century in Ladakh has been characterised by unrest and disruption, the SECMOL men were concerned about the maintenance of good relations in their ‘small region’. To what extent might their attitudes and understandings simply reflect the historical structures of Ladakhi society, the division of the popula-

INTRODUCTION

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tion into small, clearly-bounded communities and the sense, even on the part of urban populations, that their region is a small and fragile part of a much larger whole? Were the SECMOL men simply articulating judicial norms developed in the small, isolated Ladakhi villages, which are lingering in the urban centre, not yet swept away by the counterforces of modernity? The emphasis on peace and conciliation apparent in these attitudes finds echoes in the legal practices described by anthropologists in many parts of the world. Nader (1990), for example, has famously described how the Zapotec of highland Mexico assert that ‘a bad compromise is better than a good fight’ (1990: 1), an attitude she labels a ‘harmony ideology’. As Just (1992: 392) points out, an ideology of harmony is, in fact, ‘a widely distributed sense of what justice ought to be and seems to be as common a mode of justice as the western adversarial/absolutist models of dispute settlement.’ (1992: 392)7 A similar emphasis on peace and harmony is often associated with small-scale, face-to-face societies. The papers in the volume edited by Howell and Willis (1989) Societies at Peace, for example, almost all concern communities of this nature, as do many of the others referred to by Nader and Just. A harmony ideology is by no means a universal characteristic of small-scale societies, however, as anthropological literature on Melanesia (Strathern 1985; Harrison 1989, 1993) and Amazonia (Chagnon 1968; Overing 1989), among others, graphically illustrates. Moreover, the ideas that have developed in the Ladakhi villages cannot be assumed to have arisen entirely autonomously of the political, religious and cultural influences that have swept across Ladakh over the centuries. During the Ladakhi kingdom, people from even the remotest villages were drawn into wars, conflicts and long distance trading activities, well before the region fell under the influence of Kashmir. Nor do they now exist in some sort of isolation from the modern world. The problem of relating the legal practices and understandings found in a local setting to wider political and economic processes and religious influences is far from new within legal anthropology. While early studies of social order often focussed on small-scale societies seemingly in isolation from the influence of colonial regimes and other external influences, and seemingly deliberately ignoring relations of leadership 7

The expression of similar attitudes to conflict are found, for instance, among the Dou Donggo of eastern Indonesia (Just 1990, 2001), in groups in Japan (Henderson 1965; Smith 1983) and Morocco (Rosen 1989, 2000), as well as among the Zapotec of highland Mexico (Nader 1990) and the many others referred to by Nader.

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and hierarchy, there has subsequently been considerable interest in the relations between them (von Benda-Beckmann and Pirie, forthcoming). All people are, at least theoretically, now governed by a framework of national laws and judicial structures designed to maintain order and resolve disputes. These are often influenced by international laws. In India, for example, the legal system is based on the British model and NGOs undertake campaigns explicitly designed to promote minority, women’s or child ‘rights’. The SECMOL men were familiar with such ideas. In recent years many legal anthropologists have focussed on the issues of hegemony and domination and the global spread of legal regimes: empire, colonialism and the establishment of state structures by a political elite (Starr and Collier 1989; Nader 2002). How, then, are such processes to be related to the concerns with order found in Ladakh and its villages? In her analysis of the Zapotec, Nader (1990) looks beyond their highland communities and attributes their ‘harmony ideology’ to the hegemonic colonial system of the Christian missionaries finding that ‘the culture of harmony is constructed as part of the development of Christianity as a messianic religion associated with a particular political economy.’ (1990: 291) That ideology was, therefore, ‘a product of nearly 500 years of colonial encounter,’ but it was also ‘a strategy for resisting the state’s political and cultural hegemony.’ (1990: 2) Similar styles and ideologies of harmony, she says, have been found in communities elsewhere in the world, and she concludes that ‘the discourse of harmony among the Zapotec is undoubtedly connected to the spread of Christian colonial policies,’ as it was elsewhere in the world (1990: 320). Can the Ladakhi judicial practices and attitudes be explained by reference to missionary, colonial or other similar activity? This would seem inherently unlikely, given that there was little missionary activity in Ladakh and the colonial encounter was mediated through the rule of the maharajah of Kashmir. For much of its one hundred and fifty years as part of India, the Ladakhi experience of government has been light, particularly in its remoter villages. Nader’s analysis of the Zapotec also relies upon a model of domination and resistance to explain the existence of a harmony ideology. This is a model which has been pervasive in many areas of political and legal anthropology, particularly in the seminal works of the Subalterns Studies school (Guha 1982), the writings of Scott (1985, 1990) and the many studies these writers have inspired. While many valuable insights can be gained from these analyses, I would suggest that in its simpler forms the model sets up an opposition which can obscure many of the subtleties

INTRODUCTION

13

and ambiguities in the relations between subaltern and dominant groups. Just (1992), for example, while praising Nader’s ethnography, has cogently criticised her final analysis by saying that it ‘does little justice to either the variety and subtlety of the missionaries ... or to the structural and moral imperative of indigenous solutions to the problems of “making the balance”.’ (1992: 392) Nader describes how the construction of harmony was used by the Zapotec to resist external control. However, she does not ask how that ideology might have reflected indigenous, pre-Christian, or at least non-Christian, ideas and how these ideas might themselves have been transformed by, survived or explain the Zapotec reaction to the colonial encounter. In Ladakh, representatives of the state’s legal system, as well as many of the old elites and religious leaders, are distanced from the judicial processes found in the villages. However, many of the attitudes and ideas that are central to such processes are also found in the urban centre and very similar ideas about community, order and the undesirability of conflict appear to underlie both. The SECMOL men actually turned to the authority of members of the local elite, including the LGA, in their attempts to resolve their disputes. While, as I describe in subsequent chapters, the villagers turn their backs on external elites, these urban disputants reaffirmed the supremacy of traditional statuses. They both embraced ideas of modernity, rights and justice and deliberately emphasised elements of tradition. A model of domination and resistance, I suggest, is too simplistic to explain these different, but clearly related, attitudes to conflict and the judicial process. The analysis of the ways in which judicial practices, norms and attitudes have emerged and are maintained needs to take into account a multiplicity of encounters: between Ladakh and Tibet, Ladakh and Kashmir, Buddhists and Muslims, laity and monks, monks and lamas,8 local leaders and Indian politicians, villagers and urban elite, as well as between Ladakhis as quasi-colonial subjects and their rulers. Whilst I cannot and do not attempt to map out all these forces, through a number of case studies this book demonstrates how different Ladakhi communities negotiate their order within this complex web of relations, distancing some power-holders, embracing others, relying on 8 A distinction needs to be drawn between fully ordained monks and lamas. The latter are teachers of Tantric practices and include incarnates, or trulku, whose status automatically qualifies them as such (Samuel 1993: 31; Mills 2003: 28). Ladakhi people tend to use the term to refer to all monks, but in order to avoid confusion I only use it in the more restricted sense in this book.

14

CHAPTER ONE

‘traditional’ values, adopting new ideologies and adapting to new forms of power and control.

Divisions and discord In recent years there has been considerable interest on the part of many anthropologists in Ladakh’s position as part of Jammu and Kashmir and its links to the south and west, both historically and in the contemporary period. Political developments, including the activities of the LBA, their demands for regional autonomy and the communal violence that erupted in the late 1980s and early 1990s, are the subject of a number of studies (van Beek 1996, 1997, 1999; van Beek and Bertelsen 1997; Bertelsen 1996, 1997; Srinivas 1998). These describe the processes of identity creation that accompanied the growing demands for benefits and, ultimately, for a measure of autonomy from the governments of India. Not surprisingly, such processes have been accompanied by a conscious valorisation of both the values of Buddhism and the ‘traditional’ culture of Ladakh. It could be said that in subtle ways modern Ladakhi leaders are using local concepts of community and religious authority to strengthen their own positions and pursue their own political agendas. The fieldwork on which this book is based was conducted some time after the worst of these communal tensions had died down, in the mid 1990s. Nevertheless, the violence of the previous decade was recent enough to be a powerful memory for most Ladakhis and there remains a lingering tension between the Buddhist and Muslim communities. The main organisations of each, the LBA and the Anjuman-e Mu’in-e-Islam of the Sunni Muslims in Leh, compete with each other to broadcast prayers through their loud speakers in the market. Aggarwal (2004) investigates the ramifications of such processes within a village with a mixed Buddhist and Muslim population close to the disputed line of control between Indian and Pakistani-administered Kashmir. She discusses the multiple influences of modernity in Ladakh and the forces of social stratification, gender divisions, regional politics and communal tensions. She offers an insight into the conflicts and divisions found in the village, the ‘intersecting struggles of religion, class, caste, gender, and ethnicity’ (2004: 8). However, this approach does not account for the processes of conflict resolution and the sense of local community I found in both Photoksar and Leh. During fieldwork I discovered, for example, that the LBA and the

INTRODUCTION

15

Anjuman, as well as undertaking semi-political functions, performed valuable social services for their respective communities. These included the provision of a forum for dispute resolution. The LBA runs a Shakhs Khang, literally, ‘house of resolution’, which considers disputes that village headmen have been unable to resolve themselves, and the Anjuman hears disputes that have arisen within the community of Sunni Muslims. Each provides an alternative to the formal processes of the state courts, which are said to be beset by delays, expense and, on occasion, corruption. These are mechanisms by which modern urban Ladakhis are deliberately creating means of restoring and maintaining order within the complex society of the urban centre. My suggestion is that such forms of conflict resolution are more than just the response to a history of domination or the political turmoils of the late twentieth century. They display attitudes, understandings and cultural elements identifiable in the village. The ways in which people react to the spread of legal and political regimes is profoundly affected by local understandings and expectations. Subsequent chapters describe the key aspects of such processes: the manner in which concepts of community are generated, the underlying moral principles, the relations between individual and community and the expectations of leadership and authority, both political and religious. Found in both rural and urban settings, these have been shaped, I suggest, by the history of relations between local communities and centres of power. In many cases the containment of conflict within a community’s boundaries and the resolution of disputes without reference to the police or other representatives of state authority acts as a means of keeping the state at bay. Monks and other members of the elite, although highly respected, have historically been distanced from the judicial processes of the Ladakhi villages. The SECMOL disputants also shunned the formal frameworks of the state’s laws and judicial procedures and submitted to the authority of political and religious leaders, asserting a type of regional autonomy in the face of the state’s political and legal authority. The issue of autonomy is one that recurs throughout this book. This is not simply resistence to domination, however. It is a more active, creative process involving both deference towards external power holders and the simultaneous maintenance of distance from them. In this study I analyse the local practices, epistemologies and moral understandings found in a remote village, but in the context of Ladakh’s religious and historical legacies, its historical position as an independent kingdom and as part of ethnographic Tibet, as well as its experiences

16

CHAPTER ONE

over the last 150 years as part of India and its experiences of modernity. Among these influences a variety of different dynamics of order can be found: the cultural order of Tibetan Buddhism; the controlling order of the kings; the order of the social hierarchy; the administrative order of the modern bureaucracy; the dynamics of the market economy with the associated opportunities for wealth, status and influence; the ideologies of the Indian democracy; the ideals of the international development community; and the processes by which village communities create their own forms of internal order. The SECMOL dispute, to which I return in my conclusion, illustrates the dynamics found at the intersection of these forces, in particular the creative attitudes of deference and distance adopted towards powerful elites, the acceptance and adaptation of new ideas and the creation of new spheres of order. My suggestion is that the construction of order needs to be regarded as a creative and dynamic process. Certain patterns of order can be imposed by the controlling hand of a leader or through the powerful ideologies of a religion; they can reflect deep-seated norms and values; disorder can be found in relations of domination and resistance and power struggles between competing groups and leaders; but order can also be creatively constructed by small communities caught in the midst of such heterogeneous forces.

CHAPTER TWO

LADAKH The Ladakhi chronicles, the Ladakh Gyalrabs, compiled in around the seventeenth century, refer to several dynasties of kings, some of which were said to be descended from Gesar, the mythical Tibetan hero (Francke 1998: Ch V; Petech 1977: 16).1 The account of Hye Ch’o, a Korean pilgrim who travelled through the Himalayas between 724 and 727, indicates that Buddhism was already being practised in Ladakh, having probably penetrated along trade routes from Kashmir, even before the Tibetans assumed control of the region in around 663 (Luczanits 2005). With the collapse of the Tibetan empire in 842 the area dissolved into a series of principalities, however, and the chronicles refer to warfare and raiding, which was particularly problematic during the harvest season (Petech 1977: 13). In the tenth century a new state was established in Purang, south of Mount Kailash in western Tibet, by descendants of the central Tibetan monarchy and this came to incorporate a large part of Ladakh. Buddhism re-entered Ladakh under the Dro clan, of elite central Tibetan descent, who established a small principality in Ladakh.2 This then became the basis of the Ladakhi kingdom, as the family extended its influence and local rulers were forced to pay them tribute (Petech 1977: 17-18; Luczanits 2005). As Buddhism flourished in central Tibet over the following centuries, its influence in Ladakh increased. King Lhachen Gyalpo is said to have established Likir monastery, probably in the early 12th century (Petech 1977: 18-19), and subsequent Ladakhi kings patronised new monastic establishments. By 1450 the Gelukpa sect, which had been established in Tibet by the great Buddhist teacher Tsongkapa, had penetrated Ladakh, and the monasteries of Spituk, Tikse, Karsha and Puktal, along

1

The chronicles, analysed by Petech (1977) and Francke (1926, 1998), are the best source, albeit not a wholly reliable one, for the period up to the 15th century. 2 In accordance with Ladakhi tradition (e.g. Nawang Tsering Shakspo 1997), Buddhism was re-introduced into the region by the great Tibetan teacher Lotsava Rinchen Zangpo (958-1055). However, the earliest surviving Buddhist monuments, such as the temple complex at Alchi, are now attributed to the twelfth or thirteenth centuries (Luczanits 2005).

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with the Sakyapa monastery of Matho, had all been founded (Howard 1997: 121). An edict carved on a rock at Mulbe, dating from this period, records an order by the king, in the name of Tsongkapa, that animal sacrifices be abolished. However, another inscription on the same rock by the people of Mulbe claims that the order was too hard to execute, for what would the local deity say if the goat were withheld from him? (Francke 1998: 79)3 This tension between the orthodox Buddhism of the religious establishments and more locally-rooted ritual practices is a recurrent theme in the history of Buddhism in both Tibet and Ladakh. Between 1394 and 1416, the Moghuls, who had recently conquered Kashmir, invaded Baltistan and the subsequent history of Ladakh is punctuated by invasions from Kashmir and wars with the Moghuls (Petech 1977: 23, 26-28, 30). The period 1450 to 1550, the interregnum between the Lhachen and the Namgyal dynasties of Ladakhi kings, was particularly troubled (Howard 1997). Baltistan was the first area of greater Ladakh to adopt Islam, probably in the early fifteenth century (Francke 1998: 90), and a number of mosques had been established in Purig and Baltistan by 1500 (Howard 1997: 122). Over the course of several centuries the majority of the population in what is now the Kargil Block adopted Islam. Kashmiri traders also established bases along their routes, bringing Islam to Leh and its surroundings. From the sixteenth century onwards Ladakh flourished under the Namgyal dynasty of kings, who extended their kingdom from Purig, in the east, to Guge, now part of Tibet, in the west (Petech 1977: 28). They were adherents of the Kargyud sect of Tibetan Buddhism and founded a number of monasteries, including Hemis, Phyang, Stakna, Hanle and Chemre. There were subsequent tensions between the Drukpa and Gelukpa monasteries in Ladakh, influenced by relations between the two sects in Tibet. However, Hemis, of the Drukpa Kargyud order, was patronised by the Ladakhi kings and remains the richest and most influential in the region today. The Namgyal kings engaged alternately in warfare and peaceful relations with Balti and Kashmiri rulers, on the one hand, and Tibetan leaders on the other. Jamyang Namgyal, for example, was disastrously defeated by Ali Mir, ruler of Skardu, in the early seventeenth century. Thereafter he patronised Tibetan monasteries and invited the great Drukpa monk Staktsang Raspa to Ladakh, under whose influence several

3 Petech is of the opinion that the reliability of Francke’s record of inscriptions is not great (1977: 3). However, the story probably represents a significant historical tradition.

LADAKH

19

monasteries were founded (Petech 1977: 33-37). His successor, Sengge Namgyal, who reigned from 1616 to 1642, is generally regarded as the greatest of the Ladakhi kings. His reign saw an extended state of tension with Guge in western Tibet. Having successfully resolved this, he entered into conflict with the forces of the Qoshot Mongols under Gushri Khan, who then exercised considerable power over central Tibet. At the same time the Moghuls were threatening Purig, then a Muslim chiefship. The king was successful in his counter-offensive against both Balti and Moghul forces but it interrupted Ladakh’s trade for several years with disastrous economic consequences (Petech 1977: 41-51). Deldan Namgyal (1647-91), for his part, became embroiled in Tibet’s conflict with Bhutan, which occasioned an offensive by Tibetan and Mongol forces against Ladakh. Eventually he asked for help from Ibrahim Khan of Kashmir and although the Moghuls forced the TibetoMongolian forces to withdraw they imposed stringent conditions on Ladakh, demanding tribute, monopolising the wool and pashmina trade and requiring the king to convert to Islam in 1683 (Petech 1977: 63-65). The following year the Tibetan Regent, concerned about the danger to Buddhism in Ladakh, sent a mission which succeeded in reconverting the king. His emissary also negotiated the Tingmosgam treaty of 1684, which fixed the frontier between the two territories. This treaty recorded Kashmir’s monopoly over the purchase of pashm, which amounted to the mortgaging of Ladakh’s only product of economic value (Rizvi 1999: 54). The treaty also established the triennial lopchak trade mission from Ladakh to Lhasa, which became one of the most important sources of commercial relations for Ladakh’s merchants. The mission continued until the 1940s, when economic and technological developments and the unrest associated with Indian partition made the arduous journey impracticable (Rizvi 1999: 261). The lopchak, significantly, took offerings to Lhasa for the Dalai Lama and other incarnates on the occasion of the mon lam, the great new year festival, as well as contributions to the Lhasa treasury. This symbolised Ladakh’s religious dependence on Tibet (Petech 1977: 78). In 1685, Deldan Namgyal pronounced his adherence to the Dalai Lama’s Gelukpa sect and sent his son to train as a monk in Tibet. Petech talks of Ladakh’s ‘subordination’ to Tibet by the end of the seventeenth century (1977: 87). Tibetan influence over Ladakh was again exercised in the mid eighteenth century when conflict broke out between Ladakh and Purig, a region which had established itself as an independent kingdom under

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Trashi Namgyal, uncle of the Ladakhi king, Phuntsog Namgyal, in 1734. This complex dispute was complicated by threats from Kashmiri troops, which interrupted trade through the region. The seventh Dalai Lama was called upon and sent his emissary, the incarnate lama Katog Rigzin Tsewang Norbu, to intervene. The lama succeeded in settling the dispute under a treaty dated 1753, which re-established workable relations between Ladakh and Purig and ensured the resumption of trade. One of the main players in this conflict was Gyalsas Rinpoche, brother of the Ladakhi king Phuntsog Namgyal, who acted as regent for the king’s son after his abdication (Petech 1977: 98-108; Schwieger 1997a) As Schwieger (1997b: 433) describes it, in the late eighteenth century Ladakh had to deal with two large foreign powers, Tibet on the one side and the Moghul Empire on the other. Both had an interest in maintaining the stability and independence of Ladakh, partly as a buffer against the other and partly to ensure the continuation of smooth trade links between India, Central Asia and Tibet, in which Leh was a centre of the utmost importance (Rizvi 1999). There is evidence that as well as the emissary sent by the Dalai Lama and subsequent visits by Drukpa lamas from Tibet, the Moghuls also sent diplomatic mediators to Ladakh (Schwieger 1997b: 434). The involvement of certain high ranking Ladakhi lamas in regional politics is also evident. Throughout this period the population must frequently have been mobilised for military campaigns. Under subsequent rulers the kingdom suffered attacks from both Baltistan and Kashmir eventually, however, falling to a sustained invasion by the Kashmiri Dogras which began in 1834. In 1842 the territory was formally merged with the dominions of Gulab Singh and in 1846 he became Maharaja of Kashmir under British protection.

Administration in the Ladakhi kingdom By the time of the Dogra invasion the Ladakhi king had established a position of considerable status and honour and he ‘was surrounded by a sacral aura’ (Petech 1977: 154). However, there was no very stable structure of authority. Petech describes a shifting pattern of power relations between the king, his senior ministers and the monasteries. William Moorcroft, who visited Ladakh in 1820-22, describes the then king, Tsepal Namgyal, as an individual with little real power who relinquished his affairs entirely to his kalon (Moorcroft and Trebeck

LADAKH

21

1841: 332-34). Cunningham, who came to the region in 1846 and 1847 after the Dogra invasions, notes that although there had been powerful kings in the past, in the last years of the kingdom king Tsepal Namgyal, ‘literally did nothing’, leaving the conduct of government to his powerful prime minister. He adds that, ‘the apparent power of the prime minister was absolute, but his real power was much curbed by the widespread authority of the monastic establishments, and by the partial independence of the petty Gyalpos and district kalons.’ (1854: 257-8)4 Carrasco (1959: 162) describes three grades of ministers in the Ladakhi kingdom: four or five hereditary ministers, kalon, from among whom the prime ministers were chosen, lesser hereditary minsters, lonpo, and a small number of elders, rgan sum, of standing and experience. The first two formed the class of nobility, skudrak. The kalon were district governors, often relatives of the king’s family and many of the lonpo families were the chiefs of districts that had once been independent. They remained in charge of their districts and acted as a sort of advisory council to the government, also supplying officers for the army (Petech 1977: 156). Monasteries representing all the major Tibetan sects had been established in Ladakh by the sixteenth century and they acquired large land holdings. Although a few high lamas, such as Gyalsas Rinpoche of Hemis, participated in affairs of state, the religious establishments never achieved the power that they did in Tibet, where the Sakya and Drukpa sects dominated a number of lesser states and the Gelukpas effectively controlled the Ganden Potrang government in Lhasa. This dominated central Tibet from the mid seventeenth century to the mid twentieth and its leader, the Dalai Lama, was regarded as supreme ruler and landholder, as well as the highest religious figure in the whole of Tibet. In Ladakh, by contrast, there were no equivalents of the monk officials who held government positions in Tibet (Carrasco 1959: 166-7). The Ladakhi government was largely organised by assigning additional duties to the kalons and lonpos, such as the offices of army chief (dmag dpon), treasurer (phyag mdzod), chief collector of taxes (shi gam phyag mdzod), master of the horses (ga ga rta rdzi) and judicial officers (gshags dpon and khrims dpon) (Carrasco 1959: 178; Cunningham 1841: 259; Petech 1977: 154-7). The income of these officials was basically derived from their estates and the only salaried posts were those of treasurer and

4 Francke (1926: 125), however, describes how the king later seized the prime minister’s seal and appropriated power to himself again.

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judicial officers. Unlike in Tibet, there were no provisions for the formal training of officials, no fixed scale of offices and promotions, no limitations on the period of tenure and no centralised system of local government (Carrasco 1959: 179). Local administration, therefore, remained largely in the hands of local hereditary chiefs, the lonpos, and officials were only occasionally sent from central government (Carrasco 1959: 164-5). These local rulers collected revenues, administered justice, oversaw the system of begar, transportation provided by local labour as a form of taxation (Grist 1994, Bray forthcoming), and were responsible for raising armed forces from their districts. Cunningham describes the inferior officers, mipon or goba, who were directly responsible to the kalon or lonpo on all criminal matters and most accounts of revenue (1841: 260). The titles of these officials varied, however, from one district to another, suggesting considerable regional autonomy. These mipon or goba were almost certainly the same village headmen, goba, that are found in every Ladakhi village today.

Judicial activities According to the chronicles, Jamyang Namgyal (ca 1595-1616) ‘equalized rich and poor three times ’ (Francke 1926: 106). As Petech (1977: 36) remarks, although this claim seems to be copied from the Tibetan chronicles, in which it is attributed to the eighth century king Mune Tsanpo, it probably indicates some form of widespread tax reform. Nyima Namgyal (1691-1725) was also known for his re-organisation of the judiciary. The chronicles (Francke 1926: 118) state that he appointed elders, rganpo, from each district to decide questions and established a tribunal of elder officers of the state. He consulted state officers whenever he delivered a judgment personally and requests for legal documents were referred to a tribunal consisting of three elder officers of the state who took oaths on the Three Jewels, the most sacred Buddhist symbols. Moreover, the roots of every case were carefully inquired into. Petech’s translation adds that, on the whole, this resulted in a sharp decline of crimes such as robbery and theft (1977: 83). Francke describes a case settled by Jamyang Namgyal in the seventeenth century, which was recorded in a document preserved at Khaltse (1998: 116-7). The previous king had, apparently, elevated the family of

LADAKH

23

one Gangva Gyatso, to be Dragchos or ‘chieftain’ of the village.5 However, Dondrub Sodnam, of the previously most powerful village family, had objected and petitioned the king in Leh. The edict then reads, ‘The elders of Upper and Lower Ladakh, having carefully listened to the case, cast lots to find exactly the truth, and made the king swear an oath. Gangva Gyatso won and my oath is...’. He then stipulates that the Dragchos was entitled to be treated as a member of the nobility, taking the place of honour and the dish of honour at festivals and a share of the harvest from the peasants and commanding the other noblemen to treat him accordingly. The use of lots and oaths in legal cases has historically occurred all over the Tibetan region, a phenomenon I discuss further in chapter eight. A document from 1822 also records a dispute between three villages over the use of some land, which was settled before the king and elders in Leh (Schuh and Phukhang 1979: Doc LIII). The actual provisions of the settlement are not mentioned in the document, but what is stated is that the parties are not to quarrel any further and that any individuals who do so are to have their property confiscated. It therefore seems that there were some attempts to systematise the administration of justice from as early as the seventeenth century, but there is little evidence of extensive, let alone independent, judicial structures. Cunningham (1854: 262-8) describes the administration of justice in the nineteenth century as being ‘truly patriarchal’. Anyone injured or aggrieved proceeded directly to the gyalpo, the kalon of the district or the goba of his village. An assembly of five to seven elders was then called, whose business it was to decide on the yul trims the customs of the land (Petech 1977: 157). In Leh, as Cunningham describes it, judicial procedures had some formality. A complaint had to be made to the lonpo, who reported to the kalon, who then gave instructions to the shakspon, the chief justice, who assembled a court with members selected from among the rgad po (undoubtedly the same as the rgan sum and rganpo referred to by Carrasco, above), joined by two or more trimspon or law officers. Punishments meted out included stripes, fines and imprisonment with banishment, an ignominious expulsion from society, being the punishment for murder. However, the commutation of a punishment was almost always procurable for money, near relationship with the judges might induce them to impose a lighter sentence and a

5 ‘Dragchos’ could be the title (drag shos), which Jäschke (1881: 260) gives as ‘an inferior officer or magistrate’.

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CHAPTER TWO

bribe judiciously bestowed might persuade the head lama of Hemis to appeal to the king’s mercy, which it was unusual for him to refuse. Punishments seem to have been more violent in theory than in practice. According to Cunningham, however, in a doubtful case where the evidence was considered to be unsatisfactory a decision was obtained by casting lots or by ordeal. In the latter case the accused had either to draw a red-hot iron through his hand or take a stone out of a pot of boiling oil without injury. The impression one gets is that although there was some formality in the administration of justice it was still organised on a rather ad hoc basis, as part of king’s business of rule, with the involvement of the kalon and other existing officials as appropriate. There does not appear to have been any reference to legal codes or other written precedents.6 The use of lots and ordeals in difficult cases is significant and finds echoes in legal processes and systems of governmental administration recorded throughout the Tibetan plateau. How, then, was this system of governance experienced in the villages? In response to my enquiries about historical events the people of Photoksar described a time of fighting, when their forebears suffered aggressive raids from other villages and had to gather in a walled area and defend themselves with slingshots. In this period, they said, one of the village households provided the goba, a chief with real power who could order the others around. A strong leader with power to give commands was obviously needed at this time in order to organise the defence of the community. They spoke of the kings’ power as marking the coming of peace in the region, by which they meant that it brought an end to inter-village raiding. At some point, they told me, their forebears had removed the power of their local leader. The excuse was that his family had been responsible for bringing smallpox into the village, but it is likely that they simply did not need a strong leader any more in peaceful times. Then, however, came the power of the lonpo. He was the head of one of the village families, who was appointed as lonpo by the king in around the fifteenth century.7 He was granted lands closer to Leh, nearer

6

Schwieger (1997b: 429) describes the repeated use of precedents in the LadakhPurig treaty of 1753, but not in the form of law codes. 7 The Alchi lonpo who died in 2002 told me that his family only stayed in Photoksar a short while after the appointment and that the move to Alchi was 20 generations ago, during the time of the early fifteenth century king Gyalpo Dragspa.

LADAKH

25

the Indus at Alchi, and moved his residence there sometime later. He still remained nominally in charge of the Photoksar-Lingshed area, however, and was responsible for collecting taxes for the king. The villagers’ oral histories recall the harshness of his rule and the retainers who wielded big sticks to enforce his orders. Having got rid of their internal leader, therefore, the Photoksarpa (the people of the village) found that a lonpo was imposed on them as a ruler by the king. Like the coming of the king’s own rule to Ladakh, which was established by virtue of military superiority, the lonpo’s authority was imposed on them from the outside. The Alchi lonpo told me that his ancestors ‘gave the law’ (trims tangs) in Photoksar and settled their disputes: he was the shakspon, the term used for law officials in the central administration. After his family moved its residence to Alchi people would still come to him for mediation from the whole region, he said. However, his main duties were as one of the king’s ministers and his contact with the remote villages was limited. There was clearly no systematic body of law that was imposed at local level and nor was the justice system easily accessible from the remoter areas. We can surmise that in villages like Photoksar the inhabitants were largely left to make their own decisions about internal matters and to settle their own disputes. They had to pay taxes to the lonpo and to provide labour for the king’s wars8 and other villages may well have been more closely dominated by the power of the aristocracy. But the rule of the kings was principally about wars, trade and taxes and penetrated very lightly into local affairs.

The legitimation of rule The earliest Ladakhi kings were outsiders from western Tibet and their rule was imposed on the area by virtue of their military superiority. Their regimes did not, however, remain solely dependent on the sanction of force for their authority. Tibetan myths concerning the early kings link them with divinity or divine qualities (Haarh 1969) and, as Riaboff (1997: 110) and Schwieger (1997b) have noted, both Ladakhi and Zangskari kings claimed descent from, and attributes of, early Tibetan

8

A document I found in Photoksar dating from the late seventeenth century records an order by the king, Deldan Namgyal, relieving two of the village households of their taxes because a member of each had been killed during his campaigns (photo 41).

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kingship. On the other hand, the political authority of the Ladakhi rulers did not develop out of their power as ritual specialists and guarantors of prosperity, in accordance with Hocart’s (1927) theory of the emergence of kingship. By the time the Ladakhi kings established their rule in Ladakh, Buddhism had already developed its own structures of power and influence and these did not merge, as they did in central Tibet with the rise of the Sakyapa and Gelukpa sects, to positions of political dominance. Rather, the kings patronised the monasteries in order to secure their support. Furthermore, from as early as the fourteenth century, under king Lhachen Morup, it became customary for novice monks to go to Tibet for training (Francke 1926: 98), which would have meant that local monasteries remained subordinate to the superior Tibetan establishments and ensured that they did not become too powerful in their own right.9 Whilst, therefore, the Dalai Lama in Tibet was, first and foremost, a religious leader, uniting ritual with secular authority, the power of the Ladakhi kings remained distinct from that of the monasteries. The kings established themselves as monastic patrons and only performed limited ritual functions, for example during the New Year and Spring festivals, which were not under the control of the monasteries (Ribbach 1986: Ch 7).10 The Ladakhi chronicles also attribute meritorious, as well as ritual, qualities to the early kings: After a council had been held by them all they said: ‘Now we must elect from among us a “lord of the fields”, a man who is able to distinguish between good and bad, a man of great diligence and courage, a man king towards all men, and great in merit generally, who is wise in all works as well as in speech, who is clever in administering judgment (literally, measuring)’. All of the field-owners offered him tribute and he received honour from the whole assembly of men..... (Francke 1926: 68)

This indicates that, at least by the seventeenth century, the time the chronicles were written, the Ladakhi kings were legitimising their

9

Petech (1977: 19) puts king Lhachen Morup into the thirteenth century and makes no reference to this practice, but it certainly became customary for monks to go to central Tibet for higher training. 10 Dollfus (1996: 13) describes how in the village of Hemis Shukpachan the annual ceremony to the village god used to be carried out by a representative of the king, thus establishing a ‘control of the social space’ of the village. This did not occur in Photoksar, however, and lapsed in Hemis Shukpachan with the demise of the kingdom.

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authority by reference to the wisdom of their predecessors and their response to the demands of their subjects.11 The attribution of tax reforms to the sixteenth century king Jamyang Namgyal similarly reflects an ideal of kingship: the good king uses his power to ensure equality among his subjects, reflecting mutual duties between ruler and ruled.12 As the narratives of my Photoksar informants also indicate, the kings achieved some legitimacy in the eyes of their people as the bringers of peace. These Ladakhi kings thus appear to have developed an authority that was a mixture of the divine (claimed descent from the gods, a limited ritual role and patronage of the monasteries) and the moral or contractual (their response to the needs of their subjects, assumption of obligations towards them and justness of their rule). Over the centuries this authority became institutionalised through the construction of a social hierarchy. An aristocracy was created by conferring a higher social status on a small, endogamous, ruling class of kalons and lonpos, collectively known as the skudrak, and the kings placed themselves at the head of this hierarchy. Petech describes an increase in the hereditary character of the highest offices of state under Nyima Namgyal in the early 18th century (1977: 93). The skudrak probably accounted for less than 5% of the population and below them in the hierarchy, which is still widely recognised on social occasions today, were the commoners, the mimangs. Below these were the rigsngan, three castes separated on the basis of impurity. This under-class of blacksmiths, garba, musicians, mon and itinerant performers, beda probably makes up less than 10% of the population.13 An extensive system of social status, comparable to the caste hierarchy in India, did not, there-

11 Documents concerning the early kings of central Tibet describe their descent from heaven at the request of people who were without a ruler, huddled into fortresses and unable to unite and settle their disputes (Stein 1972: 47-48) 12 The parallels with the Tibetan chronicles indicate that these may originally have been Tibetan ideas, which were adopted in Ladakh. 13 Gutschow suggests figures of 2% and 8% respectively, based on her fieldwork in Karsha village in Zangskar (1998: 62), while the neighbouring village of Stongde had two garba families, out of a total of thirty-one extended families, in 1980 (Attenborough 1994: 306-08). Erdmann (1990: 143) suggests that the upper and lower classes were roughly equal in size, each comprising less than 5% of the total population, although it is generally agreed that the lower castes together form a larger group than the upper classes. Aggarwal (2004: 177) refers to a ‘Scheduled Tribes census’ which lists 2,100 members of the lower castes, equivalent to 8.4% of the population. However, ‘unofficial estimates’, she says, are closer to 5,000.

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fore, develop in Ladakh.14 The Ladakhi social hierarchy elevated the king and a tiny group of aristocratic families, which helped to legitimate their political authority, but village leaders, goba and mirpon, did not form part of the hereditary nobility and neither, even, did the rganpo who advised the king. We can surmise that the kings were a very distant form of authority for the inhabitants of the remoter villages. They were at the head of a hierarchy, members of whose upper strata barely touched these communities, save when their representatives visited to collect taxes and throw an annual party, as they described it to me in Photoksar. They may have been a more immediate presence in the villages along the Indus valley, whose inhabitants also had greater access to Leh and the ceremonies associated with the king’s entourage. At best, however, the aristocracy were a small elite, clustered around the king, and this almost certainly has a bearing on subsequent attitudes to centralised power and authority on the part of Ladakhi villagers. As I describe in more detail in chapter four, the monasteries represented distinct centres of power, based upon the religious authority of their monks and reincarnate lamas. Although senior lamas, like the 18th century Gyalsas of Hemis, had their origins in noble or royal families and played a significant role in affairs of state, monks could be drawn from any of the social classes. They still take the top places in the social hierarchy, above the skudrak, today and certain high lamas have risen to prominent positions within political institutions of the Indian state. There was, thus, a dual system of power and authority, secular and religious, whose two strands were, in many respects, interconnected but also remained distinct. This dual system is still significant in Ladakh today, although it has become complicated by the advent of the Indian administration. It also remains significant, although in a different form, within the village.

14

As Quigley (1993: 16) points out, the elaborate Indian caste system evaporates above a certain altitude in the Himalayas. His theory (1993: Ch 6) is that it is linked to the emergence of complex, agricultural-based, surplus-producing societies, which were politically unstable and in which internecine conflict undermined structures of kingship. Caste, a structure based on kinship, emerged as a means of generating order in such societies. Whether or not he is right about this, caste gives many lowland Indian societies a radically different character from those of Ladakh.

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The Dogra period From 1846, when the princely state of Kashmir was integrated into the Indian Empire, Ladakh was governed by a Wazir, appointed in Kashmir. The Dogras’ initial activities consisted primarily in the imposition of another layer of taxes on the population (van Beek 1999: 436). William Henry Johnson, who held the office of Wazir from 1871 to 1883, began the survey that eventually led to the land settlements of 1908-9, by which every area of cultivated land in Ladakh was mapped and its ownership was recorded. The maps and records produced during this period are still the basis of the land records kept in Leh, according to which, land revenue officials decide cases of ownership. The chronicles, which were continued up until the early twentieth century, record that Johnson assembled the nobility and other people of high rank, including the monks of Hemis and Chemre monasteries, to obtain their agreement to the imposition of the new taxes and Francke (1926: 141-42) records that he was criticised for concerning himself more with the nobility than the peasantry. Old forms of status were not, therefore, immediately swept away. Grist (1994: 267, referring to Gordon 1876:12), says that the Dogras initially tried to implement a new system of local administration. However, this failed and they quickly reverted to a set of arrangements that were very similar to the old, albeit giving new names to their officers. As Bray (forthcoming) puts it, ‘the Dogra administration took over the existing system and, rather than making fundamental changes, reinforced it, to extract maximum economic benefit’. The preliminary land settlement report (Muhammad 1908), for example, records that until around 1901 the gobas, appointed and changed from year to year by the villagers themselves, had been responsible for the collection of land revenue, the provision of begar and the supply of provisions to visitors. It also indicates that a lambadar’s agency had recently been set up, with responsibility for the collection of taxes, and that the gobas were recognised as local lambadars, although under the supervision of the kardars (an Urdu term). Village administration and responsibility for the collection of taxes, therefore, remained with the gobas. Above the gobas were the kardars who, according to the preliminary settlement, ‘represented the gentry and in some cases the nobility’. The names listed in this report indicate that at least one of these was a Muslim and one a kalon (Muhammad 1908). It states that ‘all important services connected with judicial and revenue administration, supply of

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transport and provisions etc. were rendered by the Kardars’. ‘Some of them’, it continues, ‘possess considerable influence in the distant borders of the State.’ The report does not elaborate on the role played by these officials but it seems that their primary duty was to liaise between the villages and the central administration. The Alchi lonpo told me that his family had been appointed as zaildar or kalkar (which must be the same as kardar) under the Wazir, who gave him orders which he passed on to the goba. In Photoksar they remembered having to pay taxes to the kasdar or zaildar in Lamayuru. The main administrative changes brought about by the Dogras, therefore, appear to have been the recognition of the goba as a tax official and the replacement of the kalons and lonpos as officials with responsibility for tax collection to the centre, by kardars, many of whom were, in fact, the same people. Of course, the language of the new rulers was quite different from that of the Ladakhis, which must have posed further administrative problems. Relations between the administration and the people were far from happy. The chronicles report repeated petitions by the Ladakhi people to the Dogras to lessen their taxes and in 1886 there was a serious complaint about the unjust seizure of land, bribery by the rich, false accusations and beatings of the poor (Francke 1926: 141-5). van Beek (1996: Ch 4; 2001: 535) describes a letter of 1879 asking for the reinstatement of Wazir Johnson. This took the form of an appeal from the people of Ladakh on the grounds that earlier sahibs had taken all the edibles and pack animals without paying for them and punished people for no reason. Several attempts by different Wazirs to reform the tax system were opposed by Ladakhi delegations, notably the monks, whose establishments stood to lose revenue (Bray forthcoming). In the early years of the twentieth century, as described by the historian Shridhar Kaul (1992), district officials used their powers in a despotic way, especially tahsildaris, land revenue officials, but also the Wazir himself, who combined the roles of Superintendent of Police, District Magistrate and Judge. Local constables, he reports, invented crimes in order to be able to extract bribes and in Zangskar years were reckoned to be good or bad depending on the number of visits from officials. A similarly bleak picture of the pre-independence period was painted by a number of Leh families (Crook and Shakya 1983). The law was administered very harshly they said: people could be chained up for simple offences and state officials, especially patwaris, the lowest land revenue officers, were very domineering.

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The Dogras obviously saw themselves as being responsible for law and order in Ladakh and there does appear to have been a certain amount of judicial activity in Leh and Kargil during their administration. The chronicles indicate that Maharajah Rambir Singh, who governed from 1857 to 1883 created a ‘law book’, called the Kannun (from the Urdu qanun) (Francke 1926: 138-148), although I have seen no record of its content nor evidence of its application in practice. Hanlon (1894) refers to the Wazir’s court which sat once or twice a week, when required, and heard cases of petty theft, encroachment on a neighbour’s land, allowing livestock to stray onto fields and adultery. A description of a court case is given by Rassul Galwan (1923), a Muslim who lived in Leh and accompanied Francis Younghusband on several of his expeditions at the end of the nineteenth century. When he was a young man one of the Wazir’s soldiers accused Rassul of adultery. He was taken to the Wazir’s court where a number of people were called to give evidence. Although his mother tried to bribe the Wazir, Rassul was found guilty, ordered to pay a fine and spent a month in jail. Ribbach, a Moravian missionary who worked in Ladakh between 1896 and 1913, wrote a fictional account of the life and conversion to Christianity of a village head-man. In it, he describes one incident in which a thief was brought before the headman in his capacity as ‘village magistrate’, whereupon he held a short trial, not wanting to go to Leh to seek judgment. In a later incident, however, the head-man was, himself, arrested and tried while on a visit to Leh and was invited to offer a bribe to a police officer in order to obtain an appointment as a district official (Ribbach 1986). Probably as part of the land settlement process, a survey was undertaken by the Assistant Settlement Officer of Ladakh, Thakar Singh, to establish a ‘code of tribal custom’. The report (Singh 1912) attempts to identify local customs relating to marriage, succession, wills, gifts and so on. It also contains short reports of a number of cases that had been decided by the Wazir, Assistant Wazir or Tahsildar in the previous ten years. The report indicates that in many instances the officer had sent for evidence of local customs and decided the case accordingly. Twenty-two cases are reported, on matters of divorce, maintenance and entitlement to property, most of which originated in Leh, just a few coming from nearby villages. However, the survey does not appear to have been translated into a set of codified laws. It seems that the Wazirs simply continued to provide an informal dispute resolution service over which a variety of officers might preside, which was available for those who

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wanted to and were able to travel to Leh to use it, rather as the king’s administration had done earlier. In other colonial situations around the world, extensive exercises were undertaken to record and codify custom, or what was regarded as such by colonial officials. This was then developed into a corpus of regulation, or ‘customary law’, which was recognised in the courts and integrated into the colonisers’ systems of government and administration of justice (see, for example, Bloch 1971: 31-2 and Chanock 1985). The exercise carried out by Singh appears to have been a preliminary step towards such an exercise for Ladakh. However, it did not result in a code of ‘customary law’ that was applied in any systematic way. Rather, the pattern of light and unsystematised judicial control by the centralised administration continued. It is important, therefore, not to make assumptions about the Ladakhi experience of colonial rule by analogy with writings on the colonial experience in other parts of the world. The historical reports offer a picture of an administration primarily concerned with the raising of taxes, in money or kind, the provision of begar and the institution of certain limited improvements, such as irrigation and schooling (Kaul 1992). In the urban centres these decades saw a succession of administrative, fiscal and economic changes, which must have been unsettling, but also provided the opportunity for members of the old elite and enterprising individuals like Rassul Galwan, to obtain new positions of power and take part in new economic activities. Power relations must have been shifting and uncertain as a succession of outsiders, Kashmiri and British, came and went. The reports of my informants in Photoksar suggest that the villagers’ main experience of government during this period continued to be tax collection and the burdensome begar, which required that several men leave the village with their pack animals, to provide transport for officials, for two or three months at a time. From their perspective, the various officials, the sahibs, had the status of upper classes and the Wazir was a person to whom respect was due, whose family (and dog) had to be transported back and forth between Leh and Skardu, the summer and winter capitals, but who also rewarded service with generous tips. Many institutions of bureaucratic control - courts, police and land settlements - were introduced during this period. However, as regards the practical maintenance of law and order and the settlement of disputes, the picture one obtains from these accounts is that, particularly in the remoter areas, the structures of village organisation and the goba

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system continued to function relatively autonomously and the officials remained largely distant from the everyday life of the villagers.

Economic and legal developments in the twentieth century In 1934 the Young Men’s Buddhist Association (YMBA) was formed by a number of men from the Ladakhi elite, in particular members of the Leh kalon family, who were also renowned sponsors of Hemis monastery. They formed links with a group of Kashmiri activists, the ‘neoBuddhists’, who had adopted the cause of the Buddhist Ladakhi people and, in 1932, set up an association to represent the interests of Ladakh to the Glancy Commission. This was looking into the conditions of the people in Jammu and Kashmir.15 The two groups shared the view that a gradual shift in the demographic composition of Ladakh in favour of Muslims was occurring and in 1941 they secured the passing of the Abolition of Polyandrous Marriages Act by the state of Jammu and Kashmir (Bertelsen 1997; van Beek, 2001: 533). As Bertelsen (1997: 6768) remarks, this was the first collective representation made on behalf of a large segment of the people of Ladakh and it laid the ground for the practice of identification in Ladakh along religious lines. Shortly after the Polyandry Act the YMBA secured the passing of the Ladakhi Succession to Property Act 1943, which stipulated that all land should be divided equally between the sons of a land-owner on his death. This was replaced, in 1956, by the Hindu Law of Succession Act, which still applies to Buddhists and requires equal division between both sons and daughters. These laws initially had a negligible impact. Among the Buddhist Ladakhis it continued to be the norm to have one wife per household, per generation, which is the way in which the Ladakhis themselves describe their practice. In the remoter areas this continues today.16 Primo-geniture remained the norm until the 1980s, although it

15

These events have been extensively analysed by Bertelsen (1996, 1997) and van Beek (1996). 16 Practices of polyandry have been extensively discussed in the literature on Tibet (Prince Peter 1963; Goldstein 1971c; Levine 1988; Crook and Crook 1994). Practices vary considerably throughout the region. The official marriage of a wife to a number (but generally not all) of the sons of a pastoral family is found in Amdo, although the system is relatively rare. In Ladakh the wife is married to the eldest son and the arrangements between her and the younger brothers are informal. The essential element is that there is only one wife per generation, as it was in central Tibet (Goldstein 1971c), a practice

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depended very much on the area, and land division only became common-place in 1990s. Indeed, one of my most knowledgeable Leh informants even considered that these laws had not been introduced until the 1970s. The twentieth century has, therefore, seen an increase in legal consciousness among certain sections of Ladakh society, with the idea that social reform can and should be brought about through legislation. At the same time the agitation for autonomy and benefits for the region, such as the petition to the Glancy commission, was often pursued through the language of entitlements. Compared to these early legal activities, however, far greater changes were subsequently brought about by the social campaigns of the Ladakhi Buddhist Association (LBA) and the Ladakhi Gonpa Association (LGA). In 1950, after Indian independence, the LGA was formed by Bakula Rinpoche of Spituk monastery, primarily to resist the effects of the Indian land reforms, which would have decimated the monastic land holdings. In this it was successful and, together with the YMBA, it began a campaign against polyandry, animal sacrifice and the consumption of barley beer, chang (van Beek 1996: Ch 5; Mills 2003: 302, 320). In the mean time, a new administration had been established. After Indian independence some Ladakhis obtained seats in the Kashmir parliament but they were not, generally, considered to be capable or sufficiently educated to run their own affairs (van Beek 1999: 437) and the region continued to be administered by a District Commissioner appointed by the State government. Senior officials still tend to be sent from outside the region, although the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Council was established in 1995 to give the region a measure of autonomy. In 1949, the Indian Prime Minister Nehru visited Ladakh and declared his intention that the ‘backward’ Ladakhis should be assisted in developing their region as part of the modern Indian nation state. The results, encouraged by the demands of Ladakhi religious and political leaders, in particular Kushok Bakula Rinpoche, profoundly affected many aspects of Ladakhi life. The settlement and cancellation of debts shortly after independence led to considerable improvement in the living conditions of many Ladakhi villagers, who had been heavily indebted to landlords and money lenders (Phylactou 1989: 44; van Beek 2001: 534). Two important motor roads were constructed: the two-day link with Srinagar, along which truck-loads of subsidised foods, fuel and building materials are brought throughout the summer and subsequently a link

which served to maintain the landholding intact.

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with Manali much used by tourists and the army. A hydro-electric plant has been constructed, health and education services introduced and tourism has been encouraged since 1974. The army has been a huge presence since the Sino-Indian wars of 1962 and 1971 and because of the continuing Indo-Pakistani frontier conflict. It maintains the main roads and creates a demand for cash crops and opportunities for wage labour.17 From a village perspective many of these changes have been unequivocally beneficial. The importation of cheap food ‘rations’ of wheat-flour, rice and salt, along with kerosene and gas cylinders, has dramatically improved food security. In Photoksar they told me of times when food was so scarce that they had to travel to Lingshed, a good ten hour walk for a healthy, unencumbered man, and return with sacks of barley on their backs when supplies ran low in the spring. One house in the village suffered so badly that its family emigrated to Zangskar, to be followed some years later by its successor in the same household. Since the advent of rations, however, there has always been enough of the staple foods and the population’s fertility has dramatically improved since the 1980s. The government has established a primary school in every village that has more than ten children of school age and pays a trained medical assistant for each village. The larger villages have Middle and Higher schools and there are two or three boarding Higher Schools for children from remote areas, like Photoksar, who otherwise would not have access to secondary education. There is an excellent hospital in Leh. In practice, however, the provision of services to the remote villages is far from satisfactory. Trained teachers and medical assistants do not like these postings and fulfill their duties, at best, half the time. In fifteen months I did not see the Photoksar medical assistant once. A bureaucratic administration, marred by corruption, together with a reluctance to lodge complaints, allows this situation to prevail. The Public Works Department maintains the roads that branch off the main highways when they are damaged by floods and land-slips, but it does a poor job of maintaining the paths and bridges in the remoter areas. Nevertheless, the government provides a basic level of services which is beneficial to the villages, in theory if less so in practice.

17

van Beek (2001: 537) and Aggarwal (2004: 73-74) discuss some of the social effects of these changes, including the sense of dissatisfaction experienced by many of the newly educated youth, unable to find suitable employment.

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There is a debate in some quarters about the overall benefits of such development in Ladakh, led by Helena Norberg-Hodge whose book, Ancient Futures (1991), is much publicised and widely read. She paints a depressing picture of the pernicious effect that the government’s development efforts are having on the local ecology and the impact that new material values are having on village life.18 Many of the points she makes about damage to the environment, dependence on the central state and threats to village and family social structures from migration to the towns have much force. However, the picture is one-sided, failing to mention the benefits brought about by the introduction of rations, schools, health-care and roads.19 It is not my intention to enter into these complex debates about the effects of development, however. Their relevance to the subject of this book lies in their impact on village organisation and legal practices and in the relations between the villages, representatives of the central administration and development agencies. The fact that villages now look for the provision of services to the centre means that many issues which were formerly organised by the villagers themselves are now dealt with by government departments: agricultural improvements, the maintenance of paths and bridges and the provision of food and fuel. For pathway repairs and certain agricultural developments the villagers of Photoksar must, or at least can, travel to the relevant towns to find money and other forms of assistance. They are also entitled to educational and medical services, which are administered from Leh and Khaltse. Since those who should provide these services often do not care to travel to remote villages, securing development and progress depends upon finding a representative who can travel to Leh and negotiate with the authorities. This requires time, money and, most importantly, the confidence and skills to deal with officials who are often supercilious, rude and do not speak Ladakhi. These arduous tasks are generally deemed to be the responsibility of the goba and they represent new duties which demand a certain skill and education. This has had an impact on internal village organisation and the balance of power, but much more so in the villages closer to the centre, where the opportunities for obtaining material benefits are greater.

18 19

Her views are largely shared by John Crook (1994). For a thorough criticism see van Beek (2000b).

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Political agitation in Leh The YMBA started to become politically active again in the late 1960s and reformed itself as the LBA. It organised the first agitation in Leh in favour of regional autonomy in 1969.20 This was followed by an Action Committee for central administration which, in 1980, made its first demands for Scheduled Tribes status for Ladakhis, which would have resulted in reserved government jobs and educational opportunities, concessionary loans and other funds. This year also saw the first in a series of clashes between Buddhist and Muslims, which continued over a number of years. The LBA’s movement for autonomy continued throughout the 1980s and culminated in violent agitation in Leh in 1989 between Buddhists and Muslims. This was something of a watershed, the agitation diminishing in subsequent years as negotiations for autonomy took place and, finally, the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Council (LAHDC) was established in 1996. As well as its agitation for regional autonomy, the LBA began campaigning in the villages in the early 1970s. Its main aims were said to be (i) to preserve and promote the religious and cultural traditions of Ladakh, (ii) to disseminate and promote the teachings of Buddhism, (iii) to eradicate the social evils prevailing amongst Buddhists and (iv) to promote the Bodhi (Tibetan) language. At the height of its power and influence in the late 1980s, it established regional groups and village representatives and attempted to create its own administrative and judicial structures in the villages. In 1989 the Youth Wing was established and a wide network of committees promoted a new form of Buddhist morality, campaigning against the ‘social evils’ of alcohol and polyandry. In this it was supported by the LGA, which had a similar agenda to reform religious practices. This can be regarded as part of a long history of efforts by Buddhist leaders to establish what they consider to be proper Buddhist practices in Ladakh. The communal tensions that exploded in Leh were played out in divisions and conflict between such committees and other village organisations, especially in villages with a mixed Buddhist and Muslim population (Aggarwal 2004: 72, 7787).

20

The activities of the LBA and the issues of identity and communalism have been extensively analysed by van Beek (1996, 1999, 2001), Bertelsen (1996, 1997) and Aggarwal (2004).

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In order to ensure support for its own leadership, the LBA also encouraged the appointment of ‘a person of authority, competence and initiative’ as village headman, rather than allowing the post to rotate, as had been the norm (van Beek 1996: 323). Ahmed (1996: Ch 8.2) describes the way in which the LBA publicly criticised the practice of the Chang Tang nomads who elected their goba using dice. The LBA also encouraged its groups to become involved in dispute resolution. Srinivas (1998: Ch 6) reports from Nubra that in the early 1990s its committees had influence with the gobas and were mediating in disputes. The Alchi lonpo told me that there had been a regional LBA committee based in Saspol, close to Alchi, of which he had been the President and that, as such, he had become involved in resolving disputes throughout the area. In the late 1990s, however, the Saspol organisation, like most of the LBA’s regional committees, was disbanded and everyone I talked to, including current LBA officials, said that the organisation now wields less power in the villages. The LBA remains politically active in Leh, continuing to campaign for increased autonomy for Ladakh, but its direct influence is now limited to the issuing of social rulings from time to time.21 Whatever the former strength of the LBA, its power was linked to its political campaign for autonomy in the late 1980s and early 1990s and, with the creation of the LAHDC, this activity has diminished. At the same time, its influence on village politics has reduced to being negligible and authority over local affairs has reverted to the hands of the goba and villagers themselves. No-one I talked to would offer a firm view as to why the authority of the LBA in the villages had declined recently. However, its campaigns had obviously had no dramatic effect on village-level politics and its committees have not supplanted the existing structures of village meeting and headman. Consciously or not, the villagers were mostly able to resist a direct attempt on the part of the LBA to interfere in their internal organisation. It is, as I describe in later chapters, the activities of development organisations and entrepreneurs that have subsequently had a greater affect on relations of power and authority in the villages. It is clear from van Beek’s accounts that the LBA’s activities were much influenced by religious leaders, high lamas and rinpoches, who were able to use their authority to add to the movement’s power and

21

For example, one Leh-pa told me that the gifts and khatags, white scarves, given at weddings were gradually becoming very expensive and the LBA had usefully issued a ruling about the maximum amount that should be spent.

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influence. By the 1960s Kushok Bakula Rinpoche of Spituk, Togdan Rinpoche of Phyang and Khanpo Rinpoche of Tikse monasteries were all active in politics and variously formed alliances with other prominent Ladakhis, including members of the LBA. van Beek suggests that many of the concerns of the LBA were genuinely the same as those of the monks and the LGA. However, the LBA represents a new type of centralised power and authority in Ladakh, which has obviously been successful, at least in part, because of its identification with religious leaders. van Beek’s own informants expressed the view that in order to get the support of a significant part of the Ladakhi population the cooperation of religious leaders, both Buddhist and Muslim, was needed. ‘You cannot go against the ka, teaching or command, of a religious leader,’ he was told (van Beek 1996: 199). He also attributes the 1998 electoral success of the National Conference party in Ladakh to the skilful enlisting, by Kashmir Chief Minister Farooq Abdullah, of two ambitious Buddhist leaders, Khanpo Rinpoche of Tikse and Togdan Rinpoche of Phyang (van Beek 2001: 546). The LBA has also been able to use the social status of many of its leaders to add to its influence. Rigzin Namgyal, the second President of the YMBA, was from the powerful Leh kalon family and in 1988 Thupstan Chhewang, the nephew of Bakula Rinpoche, was elected as President. He is from the Shey lonpo’s family and married to the daughter of the Queen of Stok, descended from the old royal family. He had also been recognised as a reincarnate lama, which, although he had chosen to live a secular life, added to his status. Commenting on this, one Leh-dweller told me that Tsering Samphel, the current President of the LBA would eventually acquire a similar status himself but that this would take a while because he was not from an upper class family. A number of Ladakhis, particularly in Leh, suggested that the status of the upper classes has been very much in decline recently. At least one kalon family has accepted marriage with commoners and one of my informants, a man from the Nubra lonpo’s family, only mentioned his status to me, and with some embarrassment, after I had known him for a long time. However, it is evident that the old aristocratic statuses remain significant. Many still insist on using their titles of lonpo and kalon and some people told me that the importance of these titles has revived since the later 1990s. The Alchi lonpo’s elder son, for example, who worked for a development organisation in Leh, told me, with some embarrassment, of his difficulty in finding a wife. His family, still based in their village, does not have the wealth now expected by some upper

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class brides. However, it would be impossible for him to marry a commoner, he told me, because the people of Alchi would not accept it.22 Status is especially evident on social occasions among the women, who put great store by their position in the social hierarchy and may end up in tears if they feel their due status has not been respected. It was suggested to me by one Leh dweller that this is partly attributable to Thupstan Chhewang who publicly insists on the recognition of his social as well as his political position. There has been a strong movement on the part of the urban-based elite, including the LBA, to abolish discrimination against the lower castes (Aggarwal 2004: 174-75). This has had some positive effects with a few mon and garba men rising to high office. It is a more difficult task in the villages, however, and Tsering Samphel, president of the LBA, explained to me that he and a number of others had to physically place themselves below members of the lower castes in the social hierarchy in his village and to assist them in carrying their dead to the cremation ground, activities normally shunned by commoners. Only in this way could other commoner families gradually be persuaded to ignore the caste-based rules, he explained. At the same time, however, I heard the story of a group of commoners who were trying to deny the status of the upper classes in Leh. They were wrong-footed when the skudrak said they would give up their positions only if the commoners accepted the lower castes in their seating lines. The commoners hurriedly backed down. Patterns of power, authority and influence in contemporary Ladakh are, thus, complicated by the interaction between distinct forms of social, religious and political status, and the introduction of new forms of wealth, which have altered these patterns to some extent. In some villages this has led to changes in the authority structures and, often, to factionalism and power struggles, as I describe in chapter nine. However, old established statuses of the upper classes and respect for religious authority remain effective and potent forces. For the people of a village like Photoksar, the events I have summarised in this chapter have meant that Leh, the political centre of power in Ladakh, has changed from being an extractor of taxes, patron of the monasteries and a place of superior social status, to a provider of material benefits. The elite who inhabit it now fall into three categories -

22 In fact, when I returned in 2003, he was married to a girl from the lonpo family in Mulbekh.

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government officers (often sent from Jammu) and local Ladakhi politicians, including those involved in the agitation for autonomy; members of development organisations who can provide benefits for the village; and those with aristocratic status, who are often also members of one of the other categories. The monasteries represent a more diffuse power, but their lamas enjoy social status and, often, political power. Ladakhi monks are still sent to train in Tibetan monasteries in India, from where high status teachers, including the Dalai Lama, travel to give teachings in Ladakh. Buddhist ideas and ideologies are, thus, brought into the region, and further disseminated through local teachings and the monasteries’ support of small temples in each village. I consider the influence of religious practitioners further in chapter five. First, however, I turn to Photoksar and describe the villagers’ maintenance of internal social relations, their attitudes to the management of conflict and relations with outsiders and external influences.

CHAPTER THREE

VILLAGE ORGANISATION At 4,200m Photoksar is one of the highest villages in Ladakh. It is part of the Wanla region of Sham, lower Ladakh, and lies on the historic summer route that links the main Indus valley, via Lamayuru, with the trans-Sengge La group of villages. This route continues into Zangskar and used to be the main artery between the two regions before roads were built in the 1970s. Previously Photoksar was a week’s journey from Leh and it is still a long day’s walk from the end of the nearest road. The journey involves traversing either the difficult Shi Shi La pass which, at 4,900m, is snow-bound in the winter, or the rocky Askuta gorge, treacherous when the river rises in the summer. The nearest villages along either route take several hours to reach. Villagers from across the Sengge La, a pass of over 5,000m in the other direction, and monks from Lingshed, the small Gelukpa monastery in that area, still pass through Photoksar on their way to Leh. However, the Zangskaris now use the motor road to Kargil. As in most Ladakhi villages, the dwellings are scattered around an area of relatively flat land divided into fields irrigated by water channelled from the river. This is, itself, fed by snow fields and melting glaciers. The majority of the houses are clustered on the edge of a steep ravine above the main river, from which the women must carry up their household’s water along precipitous paths in the winter. There is a separate group of houses at Machu, forty-five minutes’ walk down the valley, but these are treated, to all intents and purposes, as part of the village (photos 11-13). Barley is the only grain that grows at this altitude. Peas provide winter fodder for the livestock and these are also dried and ground into a coarse flour which, when mixed with barley flour, provides the villagers’ heavy, but nutritious, staple food, paba. This is generally eaten with stored turnips and radishes or dried lettuce, in the winter, and with yoghurt or fresh vegetables in the summer. This diet is supplemented by stews based on noodles made out of the wheat flour that the villagers bring from Wanla, at the end of the road, and the meat of their sheep, goats and yaks. Photoksar is lucky in having access to large areas of good pasture, high in the mountains, where yaks are tended during the summer by herders living in tiny stone huts, who return periodically to

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the village with butter and cheese. These yaks, along with the flocks of sheep and goats kept year-round in the village, provide milk and butter, as well as meat and wool, which is woven into coats, blankets, mats, ropes and saddle bags. Women spin constantly throughout the long winter evenings, when they cluster in their dark kitchens, around the yak dung stoves. The diet is not rich and the villagers tell of serious food shortages in the past, when late snows or heavy rain destroyed their crops. The Indian government’s food rations have dramatically improved food security. A third of the barley crop can now be spared to make chang, the local barley beer, which is consumed in large quantities on all social occasions. Social events regularly punctuate the daily round of life, especially in the winter when temperatures fall to -30/C, or lower, and hover below freezing all day. When skies are clear the sun still provides warmth, however, and the villagers can gather on their roofs to celebrate weddings, births, the new year or one of the many religious festivals that punctuate the year. Most households still depend on their fields and livestock for subsistence and the opportunities for wage labour are limited. Some young men go into the army and are able to send money home. There is one carpenter in the village and a few of the younger people are, in the early 2000s, completing their schooling and seeking jobs as teachers or medical assistants or in business ventures in Leh. Otherwise, the sale of animals is the main source of income. Villagers travel regularly to Wanla to collect their ‘rations’ of flour, rice and kerosene, or to Leh where they buy household goods. Their social links, by contrast, are concentrated on other villages in the Wanla area, both those towards the road and those over the Sengge La, where marriages are contracted and kin links provide the excuse for social visits. Brides generally now come from the villages further into the mountains because the construction of the roads means that families in the better connected villages are unwilling to send their daughters to Photoksar. The village has just over two hundred inhabitants, divided into twenty-two main households, khangba and a fluctuating number of smaller khangu. In around half of the households all generations live together in the khangba, but in others the older generation or two has moved into a smaller, dependent house, the khangu, with younger children, leaving the eldest son, his wife and children in the khangba. This practice is found widely in Ladakh and distinguishes the region from other parts of the Tibetan plateau (Phylactou 1989; Dollfus 1989).

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Throughout most of my fieldwork there were eighteen khangu in Photoksar, but the number fluctuates, unlike that of the khangba, as families divide and older generations die out. Khangltakh, the household in which I stayed, is one of the largest in Photoksar, in terms of its landholding, the size of its house and number of family members. Three generations ago the family lacked children so the present grandfather and grandmother, Meme Sonam and Api Rigzin, were brought in from two different houses, Rigzin from Photoksar and Sonam from the village of Nyeraks, beyond the Sengge La. This is not an uncommon event and it does not affect the continuity in the identity of the household.1 The grandparents’ eldest son, Sonam Paljor (Paljor), is the village amchi, the practitioner of Tibetan medicine. Although this is a hereditary post elsewhere, it is not in Photoksar. Meme Sonam, therefore, sent Paljor to train at Ridzong, a Gelukpa monastery where there was a renowned amchi teacher who had trained at the Mentsikhang, the famous college of Tibetan medicine in Lhasa. Paljor is, consequently, well educated and knowledgeable. He took a great interest in my research and became one of my most valuable informants. His wife, Morup, who had come from the village of Lamayuru, was also a great source of information. When I first arrived in 1999 Paljor’s brother Tsewang was married to a village girl called Yangzes, but unusually they had not moved into a separate khangu. Their youngest brother, Jigsmet, had found a job in Khaltse. Paljor’s eldest son Gyaltsen had also just been married to Choron, a girl from Nyeraks. This union had been arranged, as most are, by their families and Meme Sonam had used his links with his natal village to do so. Choron had, thus, become the new nama, the in-marrying wife. Paljor and Morup also have two daughters, both of whom were attending the boarding school in Khaltse, and three younger sons.

The household To be a member of the village means to be a member of one of its khangba or khangu, by either birth or marriage. This involves being brought within the protection of the household spirits through the

1

There has been considerable discussion of the nature of the household in Ladakh (Phylactou 1989; Dollfus 1989) and the applicability of Levi-Strauss’s concept of the ‘household society’ (Kaplanian, forthcoming).

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ceremonies that accompany either birth or marriage, which establish the outsider as a full member of the new household. Even after I had been staying in the village for over a year and was firmly attached to Khangltakh, people would laugh if I referred to ‘our’ house. This suggested I must have married one of the sons, which was a source of great amusement. People are usually known by their household name: Chulampi Ama (the mother from Chulam), Takshe Meme (the grandfather from Taksha), Rdamte Nama (the in-marrying wife at Rdamta). Chortrakh, an unmarried man who spent most of his time outside the village in a small house in Askuta, a collection of fields and dependent dwellings two hours walk down the valley, was as independent as any individual in Photoksar. He lived essentially alone and hardly ever appeared in the main part of the village, but he was still uniformly referred to as ‘Onpopi Chortrakh’ (Chortrakh from Onpo). The importance of the household, the khangba, as the basic unit of village organisation cannot be over-emphasised. All non-communal land, livestock, agricultural and household goods are owned by the khangba and water rights and village obligations are allocated amongst them. It is the basic tax-paying entity of the village and all village meetings have to be attended by at least one man from each. Khangba take it in turns to assume the annual obligations to provide the village headman and his assistants, to guard the fields from livestock, to host the main ritual events and to provide the participants in the new year festival, as well as a host of other village duties. These are known as tral, village taxes. Photoksar’s number of khangba, twenty-two, has remained constant for many years. Since the land settlements of 1908 there has been only one change, caused by a failure in succession to Pilipa, a house which has subsequently remained empty. Its fields are still known as ‘Pili zhing’ (the fields of Pilipa), however. The villagers can name the heads of each khangba from over 200 years ago. They told me about a time, long past, during which an epidemic of smallpox had wiped out several of the households which thus required some reorganisation and consolidation, but that was an unusually traumatic and distant event. The idea of a fixed and unchanging collection of households is central to the villagers’ sense of their own community. Under what the villagers call the ‘old’ custom of having only one wife per household, per generation, the eldest son was married to the nama, but his younger brothers stayed with them in the khangba. This form of polyandry meant that the landholding passed, undivided, from one generation to the next, as it does elsewhere in the Tibetan region. It

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also meant that it was only in the khangba that children were born and the continuation of the household as an entity was ensured. When she enters the new household the nama is only, however, married to the eldest son. The way the custom works was explained to me by Sonam Phuntsog, the teacher posted in Photoksar from another village in Sham. As he put it, an elder brother is glad when he hears that his younger brother is having sexual relations with his wife, because it means that he is less likely to want to set up a separate family in a khangu. Nevertheless, some younger sons have now done so in Photoksar, causing a permanent division in the landholding. This is much more common in Leh and surrounding villages, where alternative forms of employment mean that a family can afford to divide its land.2 The Photoksar villagers are conscious that, by contrast, they follow the ‘old customs.’ Younger sons now generally move to a khangu, with their parents, instead of remaining in the khangba, but unless they become monks or marry a girl who has no brothers, thus becoming a makpa in her household, it is rare for them to marry. The identity of each khangu is still firmly attached to that of the associated khangba, whose name it bears. The khangba is still the larger house, with the greatest number of fields, finer household goods, the resources to host major social events and greater village obligations. The khangu do have certain village duties and they now have an equal vote with the khangba at village meetings, but the taxes weigh much more heavily on the khangba. The khangba, with their associated khangu, are grouped into a number of networks, including the phaspun, a group that is found widely in Ladakh. It is, as Dollfus says, an association of three to ten households which worship the same household divinity, the phalha, and help each other, especially at life-cycle events (1989: 170-181). It was originally assumed to be a kin group because the word itself is derived from roots meaning ‘father’ and ‘cousin’ and the explanation given to me in Photoksar was that phaspun were formed when two brothers set up separate households.3 However, it is now generally recognised as

2

Change can, of course, also lead to tensions. In Sankar, one of the villages into which Leh is divided, the khangba had been demanding that the khangu contribute equally to the local duties. In 2000 their continued refusal to do so resulted in the khangba imposing a social boycott on the khangu. 3 This would support the conjecture of some that the phaspun is a relic of an ancient lineage-based system that has long since given way to household organisation (Kaplanian 1981, forthcoming and cf. Crook 1994: 506 and Riaboff 1997 on Zangskar). The rules of exogamy for phaspun that apply in Photoksar, and used to apply elsewhere, also

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having become primarily a mutual assistance group. As Dollfus also found, the phaspun are seen as creating more permanent alliances that those of cousins. ‘After several years,’ said one man in Photoksar, ‘we forget our cousins but the phaspun remains’. As Mills (2003: 214) points out, however, its association with life-cycle events is significant. It is on the occasion of birth, marriage, death and during the new year and spring festivals that the protection of the phalha is particularly sought.. The two Machu khangba form a phaspun with three others in the body of the village. This binds them into an alliance with the main group of houses and counteracts the danger of the hamlet separating itself off from the rest of Photoksar. There are many other networks which also unite different groupings of households for other purposes. There are fixed groups of households that join together to undertake the larger agricultural events, such as the ploughing. Others jointly organise the large festivals or host prayer readings. These are different combinations from those of the phaspun and different again from those of the three chutsoks or khor. These are the three sections into which the village is divided for political purposes, which follow geographical lines: an upper, a middle and a lower section. Each has a representative, a membar,4 who is responsible for raising levies and calling householders to village meetings. There are other more informal networks which manage the communal herding of livestock in the mountains, for example, a task organised according to rotas set up between the households. The faces that appeared most regularly in the kitchen at Khangltakh were those of the khyimtses, the neighbours, in this case a group of four households whose members are called upon to lend food and utensils or to help drink up the remains of a barrel of chang which might remain from a party. Shnyen, relations, are also frequent visitors and they co-operate at demanding times such as the ploughing and harvest seasons and make loans to poorer relations. Each household is, thus, allied to several distinct groups of others phaspun, chutsoks, khyimtses, shnyen, ploughing, harvesting and herding networks - depending on the occasion. Between them there is, thus, a web of links, relations and networks through which religious, agricultural and social events are co-ordinated. The whole village is united through these cross-cutting alliances and there is no single household

support this theory. 4 This term is spelt mem bhar in village documents. It almost certainly derives from the English ‘member’.

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grouping that can dominate. This is fundamental to the sense the villagers have of their own community, how it is constructed and, ultimately, to their sense of local order. It is also one of the many ways in which village structures and practices counteract the emergence of hierarchies and dominant groups and promote relations of equality among both individuals and households.

The dralgo In every village household, whether the family are living in the big summer kitchen or have moved into a dark, windowless winter kitchen, there is an arrangement of mats and cushions around the stove. On one side sits the cook, normally the wife of the eldest son, maybe surrounded by his sisters and her own children. On the other side sit the elder men on a slightly elevated platform or, at least, on cleaner carpets. Other members of the household hover in between, depending on their tasks. In the winter the heat from the cooking stove may be supplemented by a separate iron stove or a pile of smouldering, face-blackening sheep’s droppings, around which other family members cluster. As soon as guests walk in, however, everyone leaps up and re-arranges themselves to give the newcomers the seats by the stove and one of the men will join them to pour tea and chang. On the occasion of a party, a common event during the winter, a full line, a dral, will form around the walls, starting by the stove. The dral is the line of seats or dancers into which Ladakhis organise themselves on every social occasion, the most senior men (or women, if no men are present) sitting at the top by the stove, the dralgo, and the most junior at the bottom, men above women, or in two separate lines at major events. Each new guest knows where to sit, depending on his age and gender (photos 29 and 30). Much has been made in the literature of the social stratification that is apparent in the dral (Kaplanian 1981: 171-90; Aggarwal 2004: 15455). Monks take the highest seats, according to their own hierarchies of seniority,5 followed by the skudraks (upper classes) and then the drongpa or mimangs (the commoners), with the rigsngan (the outcaste blacksmith and musician families) at the bottom. In most villages, however, the vast majority of people are drongpa. A village of 50 households

5 In the monasteries, the dral is based on monastic seniority, that is numbers of vows taken and entrance into the monkhood, rather than on age (Mills 2003: 34).

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might have one lonpo and one or two mon and garba families but in Photoksar there are no upper class or outcaste families. Unless monks or important guests are present three village men take the upper seats at the dralgo: first the onpo, the ritual practitioner, second the amchi, and next to him the goba, the headman. Below them people take their places in either the women’s or the men’s line solely according to the year of their birth. Differences in wealth, between older and younger sons, between members of richer and poorer households and between those from khangba and khangu are not recognised here. The symbolic importance of the dral cannot be over-emphasised. The Photoksar villagers are extremely sociable and for a man, at least, it is a rare day that he will not be involved in a dral at some point, either in his own or another household. Even in the tiny yak-herders’ huts a scrappy piece of a mat by the fire will indicate the dralgo. On larger social occasions everyone knows where to sit but must first try to take a lower place in the line. This is particularly pronounced among the women: even the most senior will make for a lowly place while the others protest loudly and there are physical struggles between peers, which are watched with amusement by the others. They were all delighted when I learnt to join in this game, although the women had been careful first to find out my age, so that they knew where my rightful place was. The dral is, therefore, a ranking system. It is used to recognise the social superiority of monks and skudraks, the superiority of gender and age, the statuses of the onpo and amchi. But it also represents equality between households, between elder and younger sons, between married and unmarried and between rich and poor. A younger son living alone in a tiny khangu, such as Onpopi Chortrakh, will take a seat in the line which is higher than that of the elder son from a large household, Paljor and Gyaltsen from Khangltakh, for example, given their differences in age. This is one of the most important ways in which relations of relative equality are marked between members of a single community who could, otherwise, be differentiated on the basis of wealth, literacy, position in the household and influence over village affairs.6 There is obviously a male social superiority within the village, as expressed in the dral (and this is never denied, even in jest) and within the household there is a certain hierarchy of men over women. However, this is expressed weakly amidst a host of roles, duties and expectations. 6

This is also remarked upon by Dollfus (1989: 154).

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When ‘en famille’ men tend to take the higher seats at the dralgo by the stove, but even Meme Sonam will go round to the other side to help with the cooking if the need arises (photo 16). Men are responsible for any task that takes them away from the village, while women are tied by the daily routines of child-care and, in the summer, the irrigation and weeding of their fields. However there is no perceived ranking of work. ‘This is men’s work, that is women’s work’, they told me, without offering any explanation for the difference (see also Dollfus 1989: 147). Among the women in Khangltakh, Morup was in charge of most of the meals, making the chang and supervising the stores, having taken over this role from Api Rigzin. She allocated tasks among other people, but this was done almost imperceptibly and the obligation was on other people, especially Choron, the nama, to offer help. Although the running of this large household required divisions of labour and responsibility, the organisation was characterised by a fairly equal division of tasks, some by gender, others by habit, others by agreement. Authority and superiority were expressed to a minimum degree. Women do not attend village meetings but the men report their discussions in detail and the women comment freely on all subjects, both before and after the event. They are forthright and confident in expressing moral judgments on other members of the village (and those outside it) and on matters of village organisation, such as irrigation arrangements, that affect their household. The men expressly take their views into consideration when discussing village matters amongst themselves. Only boys used to be taught to read, before the introduction of schools, and it is generally only the men who take part in the chos sil, the recitation of religious texts, but now girls are just as likely to be encouraged to study. Among those sent to higher education in Leh there are now as many girls as boys.

The goba and yulpa The nominal head of the village is the headman, the goba. He controls the village funds and represents the village vis à vis outsiders. He organises meetings, ensures that everyone is aware of the onpo’s directions concerning the timing of agricultural events, as well as being responsible for settling disputes. However, this is not a permanent post. It rotates annually, as does that of the chief membar, his assistant, between all the khangba in the village. Any man can and every house-

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hold must take its turn. At most social events the goba is accorded social status and at the beginning of the year the two new office-holders each host a party at which they are complimented with khatags by the whole village. When I arrived in Photoksar in the middle of a year, however, it was a long time before I was able to work out who the goba was and even longer before I realised that Paljor was the chief membar. Although referred to by their titles when it comes to political matters, the postholders are accorded no day-to-day status and no-one in Khangltakh thought it important enough that I should know about Paljor’s position. Nor is the post considered to require special individual qualities. It is generally a younger man, rather than an elder Meme (grandfather), who assumes the post, but in his absence another male member of the household, even a boy, will carry out the requisite duties and be referred to as ‘goba’. It is a tax, one of the tral that falls on each household in turn, more than an individual appointment. For the villagers the post is unequivocally seen as a burden rather than a privilege. They say that a household has been ‘struck’ by this obligation, as it is struck by any tax. The goba’s duties are onerous and, in particular, the need to travel to Leh to negotiate with authorities takes up precious time and resources. The occurrence of a dispute may also require immediate attention by the goba and membar, who shoulder the responsibility for achieving a settlement. The goba’s powers are balanced by burdensome duties. The goba’s power is also limited, in practice, by the fact that all important and innovative decisions are taken at the village meeting, a forum attended by all the adult men, the yulpa. It is the yulpa, acting at the meeting, who are the political authority of the village, taking decisions about the village taxes and festivals, overseeing the water rotation and making new rules. They also act as ultimate arbiters in disputes, when a case is serious or the goba has been unable to resolve it. They impose fines and ensure that all arguments are ceremonially resolved, thus acting as the village’s ultimate judicial authority. The goba is, in effect, the agent of the yulpa.7 The yulpa were explained to me as being ‘everyone’. Membership extends to all village men, although women and children are, in fact, excluded. This group also excludes all outsiders and even the komnyer, the monk sent by Lamayuru monastery to tend the small temple it owns in the village, who is from Onpo, a village house-

7

This recalls Goldstein’s (1971d) comment that gen-bo (village elders) in central Tibetan villages were regarded as agents of the tre-ba (members of tax-paying households).

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hold. There are two such temples in Photoksar, unusually for a Ladakhi village, the other belonging to Hemis, which sends its own komnyer. The meetings of the yulpa are relatively informal. They are attended by all men who wish, sometimes several from one household. There is one important meeting held at the beginning of each year, when the goba’s and membar’s posts are changed and the tral for the coming year are determined, which all men are expected to attend. One of the central village fields is used for the meeting and men come and go throughout the proceedings, depending on their own interests, work obligations and the importance of the occasion. Women watch from a distance, especially if something is going on which directly concerns their own household, and departing men report to them on what is happening.8 At the meetings there is no fixed agenda and no seating plan. The dralgo does not apply here, thus denying even the superiority of age that determines seating order on social occasions. The goba takes a central seat with the membars (the chief membar and those from each chutsoks) and is in charge of business, but everyone has the chance to speak. If a consensus is not reached, a ballot will be taken, Paljor explained to me, one vote counted from each khangba and khangu. However, this is rarely necessary because in practice consensus is almost always reached. Differences of opinion may initially be expressed but people let an agreement emerge. There is no question of opposing camps forming, either before or during a meeting. Men never lobby their neighbours to secure support for a controversial proposal. In practice, certain men talk more than others at meetings, some go to more than others, some are listened to more respectfully than others, but when people discuss the events of the meeting afterwards the influence of such individuals is never acknowledged. Those who attend always report what ‘we’ agreed: ‘we decided that every household with more than one son must send one of them to the monastery,’ or ‘the yulpa imposed a fine on them’. Documents drawn up to record their decisions invariably stress the fact of agreement between the yulpa. In effect, therefore, divisions amongst the individuals who form this body are precluded by the procedure of the meeting and the rhetoric of agreement, which expressly deny any lingering differences of opinion. It is the yulpa, as a group, who have the 8 Since meetings were all male affairs and often dealt with sensitive subjects I would not have felt comfortable sitting among the men and tended to watch from a distance with the other women. However, Paljor and meme Sonam were happy to tell me in detail about the course of the meeting, as did they did the women of the household, who were always interested in the discussions and decisions.

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ultimate authority to control and organise the activities of the village. The will of the yulpa is expressed in the form of decisions said to have been taken by ‘everyone’, even when, as normal, only a proportion of the men actually attended the meeting. The idea is of absolute inclusion and unity amongst them.

Rules and customs Control over village affairs is, therefore, exercised by the yulpa largely through the imposition of tral, taxes. The concept of tral covers almost all village obligations imposed on households, from small contributions in money or kind for festivals, up to the most burdensome of all, assuming the post of goba. Other rotating tral obligations include being an assistant membar, responsible for relaying information to each chutsoks, being mon (village musician in the absence of any member of the mon caste in Photoksar), being lorapa, responsible for keeping livestock out of the fields in the summer, undertaking government work, such as looking after the medical assistant or being on the village education committee, organising one of the numerous village festivals and taking on one of the ritual roles during the new year festival. The most important of these duties rotate annually between the khangba, according to lists drawn up many years ago. Others are distributed between the khangba and khangu as a matter of agreement at the annual village meeting, but on the understanding that tasks are to be allocated fairly throughout the village. Yet others, such as providing transport for visiting lamas or government officials, still known as begar, and carrying out work on common property in the village (maintaining the helicopter pad, for example) are organised, as the need arises, by means of rotas. Both khangba and khangu also have to make contributions to village funds for certain festivals. Most tral can be passed over on payment of a fine, generally by providing chang for the village, but this is only accepted if it is recognised that the household is going to have genuine problems in fulfilling the obligation, for example if there are no adult males in the household to provide the goba. The irrigation system also operates like a tral, although it is not generally referred to in this way. Formerly, they told me, the field owners worked out an ad hoc arrangement so that each received a fair share of water. However, in the early twentieth century they established a rotation system for the two main channels, which

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serve almost all the houses in the village. Depending on the number of fields it intends to cultivate that year, each household will ask for one, two or three days in a cycle of ten to fifteen days. It then has to send as many people to help clear out the channel as it wants days in the rotation. The actual sequence is determined by lots. In the case of the smaller channels, which serve lesser numbers of fields, they still make informal arrangements.9 The yulpa occasionally decide upon new tral. During my fieldwork, for example, they decided that there were not enough monks in the village, the Lamayuru komnyer being the only one, and Hemis sending a monk who was only occasionally resident. They decided that each household with more than one son should send at least one into the monastery. This, of course, makes it less likely that the landholding will have to be divided at a later stage, but it also reduces the amount of manpower in the household and the potential for income. The household also has to support the boy in the monastery, which can involve many years of education if he turns out to be academically minded, so it was a burdensome new tax. In the case of most tral, like the irrigation arrangements, there is hardly ever a case of non-compliance. Everyone knows what everyone else’s obligations are and someone else would carry out the task if the person responsible did not appear, creating an obligation to reciprocate on the part of his household. The well-established nature of these tral and the sense of absolute obligation when it comes to these duties all contribute to ensure that failure to comply is, in practice, impossible. In the case of a new rule, however, like the obligation to send one son to a monastery, the yulpa might decide that any household which failed to comply would have to pay a serious fine. In this case it was set at Rs 5,000, a considerable amount in local terms, being almost the value of a yak. The yulpa also have the ultimate sanction of a social boycott at their disposal to enforce their will on recalcitrant individuals or households. However, both this and the imposition of fines require the decision of the yulpa which is, therefore, limited to cases serious enough to warrant the calling of a meeting. When I returned to the village almost 9

Each village has its own particular methods of organising water distribution. In Alchi and other villages where droughts are frequent the rules are complex and very strict. In Urtsi, a small village near Photoksar each day a number of houses is entitled to take water from the entire irrigation system and this effectively limits the number of fields a single household can comfortably cultivate (Cynthia Hunt – personal communication).

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exactly a year after this rule had been passed a number of households had still not complied. Gyaltsen reflected that it showed how many people in the village were tsokpo, bad, refusing to do what the yulpa decided. Paljor, who had been one of the more enthusiastic supporters of the rule and had already sent his son, Orsal, to Lamayuru, was more positive: ‘they will go’, he reassured me. This reflects a difference in attitude between father and son: Paljor is much more community-minded and had been active in securing the decision on this new rule; Gyaltsen is more representative of the slightly cynical, reluctant attitude of the majority of the villagers.10 However, it also demonstrates the fact that differences do arise between individuals and limit the nature and number of the innovations they can implement. The yulpa, therefore, have authority to impose and allocate tral and other village obligations and to control compliance through the imposition of fines. In practice, change is limited, however, by the practical necessity of securing agreement among the yulpa. It is also limited by the trims, the customs of the village. The concept of trims is one of something ‘we do’, not for any particular reason but simply because it is there, the custom. Some trims, patterns of dress, for example, are recognised as being followed everywhere in Ladakh, as opposed to in Tibet, or within the Tibetan exile community or by Kashmiris, for example. Other trims are particular to the Buddhist, as opposed to Muslim communities, certain marriage practices, for example. However, the strongest notion is that of the yuli trims, those of the village (normally just referred to as ngati trims, ‘our customs’). People explained that in the neighbouring Wanla, where there are many more khangu, the trims has changed so that all households contribute equally to the village tral. ‘But in Photoksar we still have the old trims,’ they said. Many trims are associated with festivals, weddings, and the new year celebrations and people generally talked approvingly about the former, snganme, trims of the area, which are different and older, they said, from those of villages closer to Leh. These trims govern many important matters of internal village organisation, khangba/khangu status in village politics, tax obligations, succession to property and its division when a new khangu is set up. These are all important because not only do they play a defining role in the political structures of the village but they limit the authority of the

10 In fact, when I visited the village in subsequent years it became apparent that the rule was, in fact, being implemented by almost all households.

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yulpa. When a family decides to divide, for example, it is invariably the practice that the older generations move to the khangu, not the younger.11 One day Paljor was called to see the grandmother in one of the Machu households, who was already living in a khangu with her younger son and his family. She was not getting on with the nama, he reported, and wanted to move out to a separate khangu. She would find it hard to set up a new khangu, however. ‘This is a trims tsokpo’, he reflected, referring to the fact that it was she, not her son and daughterin-law, who would have to move. I asked if the custom could change or be ignored in cases like this, but he said simply, ‘no, it is our trims.’ He was, thus, recognising that the trims would work injustice in this case, but accepted that there was no question of ignoring or trying to alter it. The trims also govern marriage and succession practices, including the practice of having only one wife per household, per generation and not dividing the landholding. The development of these practices can be explained in socio-economic terms, as suggested by Goldstein (1971c). Dividing a landholding would, until recently, have been economically disastrous and changes in marriage practice elsewhere in Ladakh have coincided with economic developments. However, it is important not to ignore the force of the trims. In Photoksar in 2000, although it was still not the norm, there were five younger sons who had married and were raising their own families in a khangu. Moreover, the fourteen unmarried younger sons had almost all moved into the khangu, too. This represents a considerable change from the older trims, in which younger sons remained in the khangba. Meme Sonam said that the change had come about because there is now more food and younger sons can afford a separate family, but he also acknowledged the influence of changing practices in Leh. Morup explained to me that previously everything used to go to the eldest son but ‘now we give some fields to younger sons, if they want, and, if they have a family in the khangu, their fields do not go back to the khangba. The trims is changing a bit’. She was quite specific about the new trims: the eldest son gets most, the next about half that amount and younger ones, if they want some, even less. This change, although prompted by economic development and changing practices elsewhere, is locally perceived as a change to the village trims.

11

Two of each household’s best fields are designated the Api’s and the Meme’s fields, the lto zhing, and these are taken to the khangu to provide for their subsistence, being transferred back to the khangba on their decease. Lto is a reference to food (Das 1998: 545), indicating the nature of the fields as security for subsistence.

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Although many trims are, essentially, immutable, marriage is also an area in which the trims is negotiable in practice. Shortly before I arrived in Photoksar there was a violent argument between the second and third (adult) sons in one household, apparently over the nama. The yulpa decided that both sons should move out to separate khangu. The older was given a small house but said he did not want any fields. The younger went to live with his father who was already in a khangu, but was only given a small additional field to take with him, ‘because of the argument’, Morup explained. By contrast, if Paljor’s younger brother Tsewang wanted to move out to a khangu, she said, ‘we would give him a lot of land, animals and household goods’. In practice, therefore, the circumstances of the move to the khangu are taken into account in each individual case. Although the trims appear to give sons rights of succession, therefore, in practice each situation is resolved according to its own particular circumstances. The trims act as a sort of standard, setting the starting point and limits within which a decision can be arrived at regarding what should be given to each person. Another case of negotiable trims is found in divorce arrangements. Morup explained to me that if the divorce is the man’s decision, implying that the wife is not working properly, then her family would have to repay all the bride price. If, on the other hand, it is the woman’s decision, on the basis of some sort of fault on the part of her new family, then, although her family repays the bride price, she also reclaims all her trousseau, the implication being that this would achieve parity. In practice, however, these rules are highly negotiable. In Khangltakh, Tsewang’s nama, Yangzes, had come with very little trousseau and only a small bride price had been paid. On their divorce she took all her personal possessions back but the bride price was not repaid. Rather, Khangltakh paid the equivalent of half a yak to her family. Morup described this as being ‘for the child’ that the wife’s family were taking, although other people suggested it was because Tsewang had been bad, tsokpo. Trims are, therefore, customs that have developed rather than rules decided upon in village meetings. They are seen as subject to gradual change, but they cannot be altered at will by the villagers. In some cases the trims is fixed and not negotiable. In others it merely provides a standard against which an individual case can be judged, according to its own circumstances. The trims, therefore, serve as limitations on the authority of the yulpa to make and enforce new rules and a framework within which their autonomy, as the political authority of the village, can be exercised. They also serve to centre the village organisation within

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the community itself, notionally denying the influence of outsiders. The changing succession practices that I have noted in the village are, for example, clearly linked to wider processes of change in Ladakh, in particular the developing economy but also the legal changes that occurred in the 1940s and 50s. Sonam Phuntsog also mentioned the campaign of the LBA to stamp out polyandry and the effects of education, which made people feel ‘embarrassed’ about the old trims. In Photoksar, however, the changes are almost exclusively discussed as changes to ‘our trims’. External influences are barely acknowledged and the existence of state laws was never mentioned. Even Paljor looked puzzled when I tried to ask about ‘government trims’. There is a strong narrative of autonomy in village organisation here, both in terms of the decisions of the village meeting, which exclude outsiders, and in the force of ngati trims, quasi transcendent rules, which bind the yulpa.

Hierarchy and equality The village community is, therefore, made up of a network of households between which there is, or should be, a web of co-operative relations, and it is governed by the yulpa, amongst whom there is an ideology of unity and agreement. There are, however, numerous tensions inherent within its internal structures, which constantly have to be negotiated. Relations between households and individuals are complex, often tense and fractious. Ideals of peaceful cooperation and united decision-making are based on an idea of equal relations, in a number of different contexts, between both households and individuals. These are needed, however, to counteract the emergence of hierarchies and inequalities.12 There are richer and poorer, larger and smaller households in the village, but the most significant status distinction is that between the khangba and khangu. It is found in all Ladakhi and Zangskari villages, although not, apparently, among the Muslims of the Suru valley in Kargil (Grist 1998: Ch 2), and many analysts have described, or implied, that the khangba is socially superior to the khangu (Kaplanian 1981: 133; Dollfus 1989: 156-57). Mills (2003:66), for example, describes the khangba as the place of surplus production, which is able to supply

12 Similar dynamics are described by Dollfus (1989: 224-25) in her account of Hemis Shukpachan.

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festivals and sponsor monastic rituals, while the khangu merely has sufficient for its own survival. The khangba is the place of reproduction, while in the khangu the (older) members are expected to live increasingly celibate lives. In Photoksar I found, however, that older generations were often keen to move out of their khangba into a khangu. In Khangltakh such a move was being contemplated during my field-work on the grounds that the younger couple were not pulling their weight in the house. When discussing this prospect both Morup and Api Rigzin expressed a certain pride in the fact that their two generations had not separated, but had lived together harmoniously for many years. Nevertheless, they talked about their move without expressing any resentment at having to move from their larger house and long-standing home. In a khangu their work loads would be lighter and the taxes lower, they explained.13 In other contexts, too, living in a khangu was presented as being a preferable option because of the lighter village obligations. One of the village khangba, Pili, had effectively been abandoned in the late twentieth century, having produced no heirs in a previous generation. This had happened twice and the first time, as is normal, a nama and makpa had been found from other houses. When it had happened again people began to suspect that bad spirits might be attached to the house. After explaining this to me the Khangltakh women also commented that it was always difficult to find someone in the village prepared to take on the burden of being a khangba householder. There were generally plenty of unmarried younger sons around, they explained, but such men generally preferred to remain, unmarried, in a khangu, where their work-loads would be lighter. The khangba is larger and richer than the khangu, therefore, but the social status that accompanies this is counter-balanced by the burden of greater agricultural responsibilities, heavier taxes and more extensive social obligations, so much so that, given the choice, many people prefer the latter. Between the khangba, while every household has enough land and livestock to support a family some do have a significantly greater number of fields and larger houses. Wealth is most clearly marked by the fact that the richer households are able to host the more elaborate social

13

Dollfus (1989: 57) does describe the strategies of younger sons to obtain greater status for their khangu and the possibilities now afforded by wage labour. However, she also remarks that as of the late 1980s most khangu had, in fact, been established for at least forty years.

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events, to which a certain prestige attaches. Paljor suggested that the reason that two of the village chutsoks are called ‘Khangltakh khor’ and ‘Chulam khor’, after the houses with those names, was that way back these were the first households to acquire more sophisticated household goods and to invite others to social events. Khangltakh also has a large landholding and during the harvest it sends out an invitation for manual help, providing two meals with plenty of chang for the workers. This clearly demonstrates the status of Khangltakh as one of the wealthier households. During my first harvest in the village, however, when the family were explaining the event to me, they described it as ‘just a party that we always hold’. Differences in wealth were always downplayed and it was some time before I was sure that Khangltakh was, indeed, one of the wealthier households. Such differences are generally historic, but fortunes do fluctuate according to size of family because a large family can cultivate more fields and tend more animals. Machu Gongma, one of the two khangba at Machu, for example, is a large house and in the 1908 land settlement records is listed as owning over 100 sheep and goats. This was by far the greatest number of any of the Photoksar households at that time. When I mentioned this to the family in Khangltakh, however, they laughed and asked if I knew how many sheep and goats the family now had. It was just twenty-five, considerably fewer than in Khangltakh. ‘They do not have enough people at Machu Gongma to look after them any more,’ they explained. They were obviously amused by this demonstration of fluctuating fortunes.14 Beyond the social events and livestock numbers there are few obvious markers of wealth. Dress, for example, is uniform in quality as well as style. The only clear symbol of wealth is the woman’s perak, the turquoise studded head-dress that she receives from her family on marriage. However, this is more an indication of the wealth of her natal home and that of her mother than of her new home. Whilst, therefore, there are marks of social superiority in the village, which are linked to the wealth of a household and the types of events it can afford to host, there are also rhetorical and social practices by which the villagers downplay the wider significance of such distinctions. Paljor and Morup told me that when a household obtains a new source of wealth and become richer, this causes khon, resentment, which can bring people into conflict. Wealth is not something the villagers boast about

14 This was the most dramatic change in fortunes demonstrated by the land records, however, which otherwise suggest a certain stability in wealth.

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and, on the contrary, Paljor was keen that if I found any Westerners willing to sponsor a Photoksar child to attend a school in Leh then one of the poorer families should benefit. Everyone is aware of the disparities in wealth but they resist discussing and even acknowledging them and in the vast majority of respects all households and their members are treated as being socially equal. This tension between the contrary forces of hierarchy and equality is matched by even more complex relations between individuals, both those within one household and those of different houses. As with the difference between khangba and khangu, some writers have seen the difference between older and younger sons in terms of social status. Gutschow, for example, describes the household as maintaining an authority structure with a clear head of household, a position which determines many social and ritual roles in the village (1998: 56). This position passes from father to elder son. Aggarwal (2004: 74) avers that when a male child is born to the eldest son, that son ‘stakes his claim as head of the main household ... requiring that his parents and siblings shift to an auxiliary dwelling’. This is vastly to over-dramatise the dynamics that generally arise (see e.g. Dollfus 1989: 154). In Khangltakh both the grandfather, Meme Sonam, and the father, Paljor, had lived under one roof for many years after the latter’s majority and there was no clear head of household. Meme Sonam was still very active during my fieldwork, even after his grandson, Gyaltsen, had reached adulthood and taken a nama, and none of the three men had any obvious superiority when it came to household affairs. In a few distinct areas, such as property division, any Meme, even one who has moved to a khangu, has a specific role to play.15 ‘When there is a question of succession he determines everything,’ they told me. In Khangltakh it was Meme Sonam who finalised the divorce agreement for his son, Tsewang. However, this status does not extend into other situations. Paljor made equally important decisions, deciding to spend a large amount of money on a small property in Leh, for example, against the counsel of both his parents. Tsewang took a minor role to that of his elder brother in household affairs, but this was primarily due to the fact that he spent most of his time in the mountains with the livestock. When he was back in the 15 This position has been formalised by the structure of the land records, which list the eldest man as head of household and owner of all the property. However, it is probably true that some concept of household head pre-dated these records. When discussing the longevity of households, for example, Paljor and Meme Sonam were able to recite the names of heads of households back into earlier periods.

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village he took part in discussions of household and village affairs and attended village meetings. Elder sons do, undoubtedly have a certain status in the village, therefore, but this is counteracted by the ways in which this is downplayed in practice. One of the main ways in which this is done is, of course, in the dralgo, which requires that a younger son from a poorer khangu will take a higher seat to an elder son from a richer khangba, purely because of his age.

Trelba One of the strongest, but least explicit, of the forces that promote equality in the village is an antipathy towards individualism and a corresponding expectation of conformity in daily life. All agricultural techniques are, for example, common to the whole village. Households are maintained, food is prepared and clothes are sewn in the same way. A village woman can sit down at anyone else’s stove and prepare a meal. At Losar guests are given meat, at the spring festival dras tuk (rice stew); skyu (round noodles) and chu tagi (bow-shaped noodles) go with meat while tukpa, vegetarian or cheese stew, contains long flat noodles. Neighbouring villages may have slightly different trims when it comes to their clothes or the tailoring of their shoes but within Photoksar even the colour and style of their knitted hats is standard. Turquoise is good for women, but not for men, Choron informed me. Each time I acquired a new piece of local clothing (including the turquoise acrylic hat that, I realised, had to replace the warm black wool I had brought from Leh) and began to look more and more like a villager, the women noticed and approved. Conformity, not individuality, is beautiful. Conformity also governs social events. Most parties are determined by the time of year or circumstances, such as a birth or marriage, and everyone knows what to expect from each event. Only small variations in the size, the quality of the food and the amount of chang offered are countenanced. There are rules, too, for who is invited to each event - the whole village or just the phaspun, relatives or neighbours. Whenever I returned from a social event, Api Rigzin would ask for a detailed account of the proceedings, who was there and what had been served. If I got something wrong a sceptical look would immediately cross her face. These expectations of conformity are generally expressed through the

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notion of trelba, which can mean all of embarrassing, shameful and contrary to social etiquette. It is much heard in everyday conversation and applies to such things as placing the small tables, choktse, the wrong way around, sitting too high in the dral, spending too much time visiting other people and accepting their hospitality, even writing a letter or speaking incorrectly. Clumsiness, but also breaches of eating rules, such as passing an individual plate above the serving dish are all trelba. Children learn their social and practical skills very young, which means that adults are not used to being teachers for each other and they were frustratingly averse to teaching me anything difficult. This reluctance was partly lack of habit but also a concern that they might have to point out that I was doing something wrong which they would have considered trelba, embarrassing for me. It was something that constantly marked me out as an outsider. I was exempt from participation in everyday tasks, but if I tried and failed, which I did repeatedly, the results were embarrassing.16 Trelba, therefore, stigmatises inappropriate behaviour. The contrary, socially appropriate behaviour, consists in knowing one’s place, acting appropriately in any social situation and knowing the right way to perform all household and agricultural tasks. Even greater merit is acquired by publicly downplaying one’s status, as happens, most obviously, in the fight to take a lowly dral position. Such merit could be characterised as a form of social capital. This capital is, however, acquired through conformity rather than the display of individual qualities attracting status and superiority. Trelba is one of several concepts and practices that promote a sense of unity and equality amongst the individuals who comprise the community. The rules of the dral, membership of the yulpa and significance of local knowledge, associated with the concept of trelba, also serve to mark out the insider from the outsider, a point I return to in the following chapter.

Leadership and autonomy in village politics The conformity in behaviour that is expected of individual villagers is mirrored in notions of unity and agreement, which are intrinsic to the

16

Of all the generosities that my hosts in Photoksar displayed towards me, learning to indulge my persistent desire to participate in mundane tasks, which meant overcoming this sense of embarrassment, was one of the greatest.

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political authority exercised within the village. The goba is more of an agent of the yulpa than an autonomous leader with personal power. Moreover, a sense of inclusion and agreement characterises the activities of the yulpa, the ultimate political authority in the village. Decisions are always represented as having been taken by ‘all of us’, suggesting equality in political participation. This is the way in which the village administration was always described and presented to me. In practice, too, it was almost impossible for me to identify any de facto leaders in the village or men with lasting influence on village affairs. Workers from a Ladakhi development organisation who were undertaking a project in Photoksar, for example, referred to some of the village men as ‘active’, Paljor in particular. They were the ones who first introduced me to the village and when I arrived I expected to be able to identify prominent and influential men. Paljor, I could easily see, was educated, clever and highly regarded in the village. However, when his term of office as village membar came to an end he strongly resisted attempts made by others to continue to involve him in the resolution of disputes. A group of men came to the house, one evening, to report a quarrel and instead of going to assist Paljor indicated a reluctance to give up further time to village duties: it was someone else’s turn, he protested. My attempts to identify effective leaders were constantly thwarted by counter-examples and denials, like this: the onpo, for example, is the most senior man socially, in the village, and his pronouncements with respect to the calendar are followed absolutely. He was the one called to Khangltakh to mediate Tsewang’s divorce. However, he only performed such a role once during my stay and it soon became apparent that he had no particular political authority. He generally talked very little in village meetings and when conversation turned to village politics he was one of the least vocal. In fact, there were no men who were called on more than others to be mediators. Meme Sonam was often deferred to within our household as a source of knowledge and experience and people would often come to seek his advice on practical matters, such as the tailoring of clothes and shoes. Even he, along with the other older men, however, did not have any obvious political influence. Indeed, he once complained to me that he now had less influence in the village because he was growing old. The villagers themselves never acknowledged the superior capacities and influence of any individuals. At one point a foreign development worker came to the village and called for a small meeting of influential

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men. Her Ladakhi interpreters, trained in the town to look for leaders and ‘active men’, translated this as mi gyalla, good men. However, the villagers simply sent the goba and membars. On another occasion Gyaltsen tried to throw his weight around by being physically aggressive to the school teacher. Sonam Phuntsog told me he thought that Gyaltsen was trying to rely on his father’s status. Paljor, however, disciplined Gyaltsen severely for this behaviour. He was ambitious for his children, but this took the form of a desire that they be well educated so that, as he explained to me, they might become amchis or onpos. These are the only forms of status to which individuals can properly aspire. Outspoken characters in the village, those that have ideas about what they want and are the sort of people who might become leaders in other societies, tended to get into arguments, thereby attracting strong disapproval. One woman impressed the same development worker, who had brought some dentists to the village, by gamely agreeing to undergo extensive treatment and then insisting that her daughter do the same, holding her head during the process. ‘This is just the sort of person we need to galvanise the villagers into action,’ commented the development worker. I had to demur. She was treated with suspicion by her fellow villagers because she was forthright and got herself into too many arguments. The women in my household had already told me she was tsokpo because of the number of times she had become involved in serious quarrels in the last few years. Ladakhi villagers are often strongly criticised by development workers (and not without justification if change and development are the goals) for their lack of leadership and innovation. As I have suggested elsewhere (Pirie 2002), this can be attributed to their reluctance to acknowledge and grant power or authority to individuals with leadership qualities and their corresponding practices of selecting a headman by rotation. This, of course, means that the goba is often one of the least politically capable men in the village. He also has to call a village meeting to secure approval for any controversial new proposal, which is a further barrier to innovation and change. It was, in the end, possible to see that some of the older men did concern themselves more in village affairs, were more ready to speak in meetings and had voices that were listened to with more respect than those of others. However, their influence over village politics was very subtle and, in the case of Paljor, the chance to take a more prominent role was actively avoided. There is a resistance to asserting status in this way. Social capital attaches to self-effacement and knowing one’s place

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in the village order. To an extent, status and respect are earned by those with age, education and knowledge of the chos, as well as those with the positions of amchi and onpo. However, these statuses are strictly limited in their significance and there is more merit to be gained by denying social superiority. Social status is also attributed to outsiders, most visibly in the structure of the dral. All visitors are placed high in the dral and I, too, was initially forced to take a seat here. I had to make deliberate and prolonged efforts to sit with the women while in Khangltakh, and according to my age in the dral on social occasions. Subsequently, when returning to the village, I was again required to take a high position. Respect is also paid by the use of honorific language, zhe skat, with which monks and members of the aristocracy are almost invariably addressed. This symbolic respect paid to outsiders serves to distinguish them from members of the village. Close relations and those who stay for any length of time, as I did, are eventually addressed in normal language and integrated into the age-ranking order of the dral, symbolising our partial integration into the social structures of the village. However, initially outsiders are physically set apart. These markers of respect subtly indicate the boundaries of the community. This is even more marked at village meetings. While the dral places outsiders, like monks, in higher positions, the body of yulpa excludes them completely. They never attend village meetings as members of the yulpa. Even the Lamayuru komnyer, who was from a village family and would, otherwise, have attended village meetings, was never invited. His status placed him outside the ranks of the yulpa. When outsiders, such as development workers, visit the village they often call for a village meeting, usually with the attendance of women. This is not, however, considered as a meeting of the yulpa and it is not regarded as an appropriate place for the villagers to discuss the tral or to mediate conflict, for example. The notion of the yulpa thus symbolises the boundaries of village membership and marks out an important separation between monks and lay householders. Order in the village is, therefore, the responsibility of the yulpa, acting in the village meeting. They have the power to make and enforce the tral and also, as I describe in the next chapter, to manage and punish those who engage in conflict. They are, however, bound by their own trims. There is, thus, a strong sense of autonomy in village organisation: this is found both in the composition of the yulpa, which excludes outsiders, and in the power of ngati trims, customs rooted in the village

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itself, but which represent a quasi transcendent force that binds the authority of the yulpa. The village, as a community, is, therefore, made up of a web of crosscutting ties, characterised by tendencies towards hierarchy and status, which are counteracted by processes of uniformity and equality. What is of constant concern to the villagers, however, is that relations between households and individuals should be cooperative and peaceful. Ensuring this is one of the most onerous and important responsibilities of the yulpa.

CHAPTER FOUR

CONFLICT IN THE VILLAGE During the first few months of my fieldwork, when I could still understand very little of what was being said around me, I would prick up my ears whenever I heard raised voices and run to catch a glimpse of quarreling people from the roof of our house or the window of my room. In my quest to gather data on disputes, however, I was invariably disappointed. Paljor’s tone of outrage turned out to be directed at a guest who was hastily tucking his empty cup into a pocket and tearing himself away from the chang jug and Paljor’s entreaties to stay. The neighbour’s cries were last minute instructions to a husband who was departing with his donkeys down the hill. Information, invitations and instructions were shouted from afar. It was never insults that were being flung around. The villagers seemed to be able to avoid quarrels and arguments when tiredness, frustration and displeasure might have provided reasons for bad tempers and cross words. They laughed easily at their own and others’ mistakes. The breaking of a thermos, a valuable item, was greeted with a shrug of the shoulders and a sigh.1 Tsewang would emerge out of a snowstorm in the mountains, where he must have spent a miserably freezing night, and laugh as he thawed his hands by the stove. A runaway donkey or a cloud of chaff blown into the face were greeted with laughter. Dignity, it seemed to me, did not need to be upheld by showing annoyance or blaming another person for one’s misfortunes. At Khangltakh I could occasionally sense tension in Meme Sonam’s sharp remarks or an exhausted Morup speaking crossly to Paljor. This was obvious even before I could understand the details of their conversations. But I never actually witnessed anything that could be termed a quarrel. Paljor would listen while the tone of Morup’s voice gradually subsided. Gyaltsen shrugged his shoulders and said nothing while Meme Sonam complained. Even mild expressions of annoyance were rarely directed at others. During the harvest, while the whole family worked 1

Tea should always be available when there are people in the house. Being able to store it in a thermos rather than a simmering kettle is one of the many advantages modern technology has brought to the village. However, the glass-lined vessels they buy in Leh are easily broken and tiresome to transport.

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long days to pull out whole fields of barley and peas by hand under a hot sun Gyaltsen and Choron spent a large amount of their time lying on their backs in the fields, eating the peas and young turnips they found there, while the others persevered with their back-breaking labours. It annoyed me to see them lounging around. ‘Why doesn’t anyone else remark on it?’ I wondered. Only once did I see Tsewang, the most outspoken of the family, tell Gyaltsen he might get back to work. It was not that the others did not notice and did not mind, however. It became apparent later that the older generations were seriously displeased with the extent to which the young couple were failing to contribute to the household’s tasks. As I became more integrated into the household both Morup and Api Rigzin divulged their disapproval of Choron to me: she was refusing to help and stealing food. But the extent of their displeasure was not even hinted at while they were together in the fields and they never treated Choron with anything but warmth and concern. Good personal relations were always maintained. When I visited Photoksar eighteen months later the family had decided to divide and both the older generations were going to move to a khangu, a disastrous occurrence for the young couple, who would have to maintain the large khangba, with all the related tax and social obligations, on their own. Nevertheless, they were all working together to build the new house and maintaining harmonious family relations in the meantime. Once, when I returned to the village from a visit to Leh, both Morup and Paljor told me privately that they had had an argument about some money. They were obviously concerned that someone else might tell me about the quarrel as, indeed, one of the village women did, and wanted to impress on me that it had all been resolved. There was obviously an element of shame in having a public quarrel. Earlier in my stay Tsewang and Yangzes had had a stormy argument. I did not witness this but people told me that she had reproached him for hitting their son, upon which he had hit her. As a result she had become angry (sho yongse) and taken her two children back to Wadze, her natal khangba in the village. Just days after the event Khangltakh hosted a party, however, which both Yangzes’s brother and father attended and I watched them chatting and laughing without any sign of tension. There had, indeed, been an argument; it was being treated seriously by both families and eventually lead to a divorce, but in the mean time the wider families were refusing to let it affect their social relations. Public displays of anger, discontent and disharmony were, thus, rare, and it gradually became clear that such behaviour attracted moral disapproval.

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The morality of anger Paljor quickly became one of my major sources of information about the village, its history and customs. The women in the family were, on the other hand, the most outspoken in their judgments of their fellow villagers. They were particularly critical of those who got involved in public quarrels. In the aftermath of one argument between two village women Morup and Choron told me that one of the protagonists was very bad because she got into a lot of arguments. They could list the number of people with whom she had quarrelled over the years. I never saw women being critical of their husbands in such a forthright way as when they suspected them of arguing and they were positively afraid at the thought of their men fighting. One evening Gyaltsen, who normally drank very little, came back slightly drunk from a party at which raised voices had been heard. He was immediately harangued by Choron, with the support of Morup and Api Rigzin: ‘If you get drunk you will start arguing,’ she said, ‘and then you will get into a fight.’ Gyaltsen took the criticism in silence. One of the most serious fights I saw occurred between drunken men at a wedding. As soon as her husband reappeared the young wife of one of the protagonists started shaking and berating him in floods of tears telling him very publicly to ‘go away, go home!’ The villagers talked about both fighting and arguing in the abstract as very bad. The phrase used to describe people who got into quarrels was usually tsokpo, a general word meaning bad or dirty but also used to signify strong disapproval. This is distinct from behaviour which is merely regarded as breaching the trims, which is greeted by amusement and the phrase jara met khan (I/you have been clumsy/stupid). The use of the words gyalla, good, and tsokpo, bad, in such contexts implies moral approval and disapproval. The condemnation of conflict was matched by the censure of those who expressed anger. Whenever anger, sho, was mentioned it was with a shake of the head. To get angry, sho yongse, was always tsokpo. The concept of sho can generally be translated as ‘anger’, but it was also used, with the same element of disapproval, to refer to people who merely expressed aversion or displeasure. A visiting foreign tourist, for example, had stayed in the main guest room in Khangltakh, the one I normally occupied, while I was away for a few days. After I had returned he came through the village again and was offered the second, smaller guest room. He thought this was inadequate and went off to try to find something better. As the Khangltakhpa described it, he had become

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cross, sho yongse, which they considered to be tsokpo and they refused to let me offer him my room as an alternative.2 Disapproval was also voiced of those who were perceived as failing to co-operate with others. As already mentioned, the young couple in Khangltakh were regarded as falling well below their implicit duties to contribute to the household tasks. Choron, Morup told me, should be relieving Api Rigzin of some of her work, by insisting, ‘no, I’ll do that.’ Any failure to comply with the obligation to help and co-operate with other households, particularly in agricultural matters, also attracted criticism. The sheep and goats were taken up to the mountains every day in two combined flocks, for example, and each morning someone from each household would milk the animals and then drive them to the meeting point. Very often, one person would ask a neighbour to take both groups together and it was expected that the other would agree. In one case a quarrel ensued from one woman’s refusal to do this and she was quietly criticised by Morup. ‘If someone else asks us to take their animals we should say ‘ya ya’* (OK), she told me. In other words, there is a clear social and moral obligation to assist others. A similar expectation of co-operation also ensures that water from the smaller irrigation channels and their maintenance is shared fairly. Along with anger, selfishness and laziness are, thus, readily criticised. When a development worker visited the village and gave out free toothbrushes Morup told me indignantly that she had seen a couple of women asking for more than they needed. ‘Some people always say nga nga’ (me, me), was the view of the others around the stove that evening. On another occasion the komnyer did not arrive when he was expected to perform a ceremony in Khangltakh, causing inconvenience to Morup. Paljor shook his head and said that the komnyer was lhende. Lhende can mean stupid or selfish but he meant lazy and unhelpful in this context. Such strong criticism is rarely voiced publicly of anyone, especially a monk, and Morup’s comments about the selfishness of the village women were equally unprecedented. The villagers’ reluctance to express sho means they are rarely openly critical of each other. They are more likely to talk about anger and fighting in the abstract. Nevertheless, after I had spent some time in the village and became integrated into the household, the Khangltakhpa expressed critical views to me which

2 When he failed to find a better room elsewhere and returned to Khangltakh they were not, however, too proud to offer him the second room again.

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indicated the implicit moral standards by which they were constantly appraising each other’s behaviour. Anger, laziness and selfishness are all, then, regarded as bad. Positive stubbornness is even worse. Apart from getting into arguments, simply stirring up trouble by talking badly of others was also described as tsokpo. For the most part, the villagers avoided behaviour which displayed such characteristics. The excessive drinking of alcohol was also frequently criticised in the abstract, being linked to the occurrence of quarrels and fights. Alcohol, in general, was mentioned with disapproval. However, the expectations of hospitality demanded that chang was brewed, offered and drunk in very large quantities. The drunkenness the villagers fear was regularly forced by them upon one another. In practice, when a man (much more rarely a woman) returned home drunk from a social event and fell asleep in front of the stove he was laughed at indulgently. What the villagers really fear is alcohol-induced aggression. As Meme Sonam once said to me, ‘most of us just fall asleep, but chang makes some men feel tall and then they start arguing.’ It is the resulting quarrels that are the real object of the disapproval of drinking in the village. Adultery was never discussed by the Photoksarpa in front of me but Sonam Phuntsog, the teacher posted in Photoksar, assured me it was common in the village. It is disapproved of, ‘but’, he explained, ‘a man will say, "it is OK because my wife has done the same thing," or, "her husband is proud"’. In practice, the child of a wife will always be regarded as her husband’s son or daughter and a child of her household, even when everyone knows the biological facts, and I never heard of any conflict arising out of adultery. It is the child of an unmarried woman that is a problem because a child must, above all, have a household. As with the chang, therefore, the underlying object of the behaviour that attracts moral disapproval is the social disruption that is liable to result. These moral judgments are directed at the overall good of a harmonious community.

Morality and the individual mind The moral realm is, therefore, a public one, directed at a public good. Any scheme of moral imperatives, however, implies a distinction between an ‘is’ and an ‘ought’. It implies that the person is, in certain crucial respects, an autonomous individual, responsible for his own acts,

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capable of choosing to act correctly and, consequently, worthy of opprobrium if he does not. The individual who gets angry in Photoksar ‘ought’ to restrain himself. When discussing anger in the abstract, the villagers would generally attribute it to having a sems chungun, a ‘small mind’. This involved a certain recognition that individuals have different sorts of minds, which affects their tendency to express certain sorts of emotions. Expressions of emotion are, on many occasions, matters of ritual display, particularly during the events of a wedding when a bride is expected to weep continuously over several days. The villagers also, however, recognise that some individuals tend to be more emotional than others. In Khangltakh, Api Rigzin would always cry easily, much more than Morup, and people laughed about this, although it was not something she was proud of. She was considered to have a sems chungun, which meant that she also quickly became afraid in the dark. All Ladakhis, but especially women, are expected to be afraid outside at night or when travelling alone because of the lhandre, the ghosts, and the evil spirits. The Khangltakhpa were always amazed when I wanted to travel alone and when they saw westerners trekking by themselves. Many men also refused to do this and some would not even spend a night alone in a house, a fact remarked upon during these conversations. Other men, however, generally those who do the yak-herding, spend long days relatively alone in their huts in the mountains. These men have sems chenmo, big minds, people explained. A large or small mind or, indeed, something in between, is what you are born with, therefore, rather than being the result of personal effort or practice. Paljor, for example, readily admitted that he had a sems chungun and his mother agreed that he used to get terribly afraid in the dark as a child while his brother, Tsewang, and son, Tundup, are afraid of nothing. Having a sems chungun, then, means that you tend to get emotional at leave-takings and are easily afraid in the dark. Paradoxically, however, the sems chungun is also equated with anger.3 In one conversation Paljor explicitly linked the two. ‘If you have a sems chungun you get angry; and you also get afraid easily’. This patently does not reflect the reality because individuals who were fearless could also be those who were quick to anger. Tsewang was a good example of this. Nevertheless,

3 People would also attribute anger to a sems lchinte, literally a strong mind, but they would use this phrase interchangeably with sems chungun.

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the fearful sems chungun was equated with the strong mind, prone to anger, while the fearless sems chenmo is the soft mind of patience. There is a conflation of the moral and the emotional worlds here. Anger attracts moral disapproval while fear and weeping are merely laughed at. The thread that links the two ideas is the notion of selfcontrol. Those who do not become angry are self-disciplined and an emotionally self-disciplined person should be able both to master the emotion of fear and to control the morally reprehensible expression of anger. This is to ascribe autonomy to the individual, however, which makes evident the conceptual paradox in the concept of the sems. It is something a person is born with and is unchangeable. Some people are inevitably liable to cry at leave-takings and to be afraid in the dark. Yet the sems is also supposed to account for the expression of anger, which is the object of moral opprobrium. The man who is tsokpo because he gets angry ‘ought’ to restrain himself, to exert a measure of self-control, implying the exercise of individual will. On the one hand, therefore, each individual has an unalterable propensity to a certain expression of emotion: the concept of sems expresses innate differences in individual personalities. On the other, however, there is a set of moral values with which the individual ought to comply: anger is a controllable emotion and the individual is a free agent to act appropriately. Mauss, in his celebrated essay (1985), discusses the different concepts of the person that have existed in different societies over time. He describes the social person identified with clan totems and ancestors among the North Americans, the jural person of Classical Rome, the moral person of the Greek Moralists and the Christian notion of the person as rational and indivisible. He also draws a distinction between the personne, the socially-constructed person, and the moi, the individual free agent. He is describing the different ideas encompassed in the concept of the person as it has evolved through time and across cultures. However, his essay becomes particularly enlightening if, as Allen (1985: 42) has suggested, it is allowed that several such aspects may exist synchronically. A person may be identified with his clan, but also be a jural individual and a rational being. To this complex we could add the coexistence of moi- and personne- oriented systems. As Carrithers points out (1985: 235, 236) Mauss draws a distinction between the personne and the moi, the social person and the individual, and then elides the

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difference.4 The moi- and the personne-oriented systems do, in fact, relate to and influence one another. The individual in Photoksar is, accordingly, defined in numerous, interlinking and not always consistent ways. The sems can be attacked by the evil spirits to cause physical illness;5 the physical person of the lhaba, the spirit medium, is liable to be possessed;6 membership of the yulpa is a jural position; the social individual in the dral-go has a status determined by gender and age; the fortunes of the person as a metaphysical being are influenced by astrological configurations; the fate of the soul in the next life is governed by the laws of karma; and there is the individual who is autonomous with respect to the dictates of morality. The moral, social, jural and metaphysical are all distinguishable, although interlinked, aspects of the Ladakhi person. Even the moi is a complex of ideas: on the one hand its nature is determined by the sems and on the other it is autonomous with respect to moral behaviour. It would be a mistake, I would suggest, to try to rationalise these different aspects. Despite the notion of the sems chungun, each individual is also a moi who inhabits a moral universe, responsible for keeping the peace and avoiding the evils of anger and conflict. In a similar way, as I suggest in the next chapter, Buddhist notions of the individual soul, subject to the moral laws of karma, do not eclipse the notion of the moi who inhabits the realm of village morality.

4

The moi-oriented moral systems of Stoicism, Christianity and Buddhism, for example, are based on images of man alone, ‘communing with nature of the German Romantics, acting according to his intrinsic human nature for the Stoics, meditating in the forest for the Theravada Buddhists, struggling in one’s room in prayer for Protestant Christians’. ‘There are theories found in complex societies which simply could not be characteristic of a simple society.’ (1985: 48-49) In other words, the moi-oriented systems are also social constructs. If the Ladakhi villagers do not participate fully in the philosophies of Buddhism, as I suggest in the next chapter, they do, nevertheless, have a sense of moral responsibility which implies individual will and responsibility. 5 The concepts of flesh (sha) and bone (rus) are also connected to ideas about the transmission of bodily substances from parents to children, which are part of the kinship patterns of the clan-based societies of Tibet, although not given any prominence in Ladakh. 6 Mills (forthcoming) stresses the physical elements of spirit possession in the Tibetan region.

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Order and responsibility The way the Photoksar villagers judge each other, which aspect of the person they invoke at any particular time, is very much dependent on context. When discussing fear and anger in the abstract, for example, these emotions are attributed to the state of a person’s sems. In the context of particular instances of conflict, on the other hand, one villager is more likely to pass a moral judgment on another, criticising him or her as tsokpo for getting angry. The attribution of moral responsibility to individuals within the village must also, therefore, be approached from the point of view of those who place the blame. In his comparative discussion of violence in an African and a British setting, David Parkin (1986) points out that two different views of evildoing and evil-doers can be distinguished. Referring to a study by Pocock (1985) he distinguishes between a relativistic or circumstantial view of evil, on the one hand, and a more absolute image, on the other. Those who adopt the first can excuse gross perpetrators, regarding them as individuals who might have excuses or who can, at least, claim reasons for forgiveness. The second view precludes such forgiveness. Pocock’s study, based on British data, had suggested that the second was the majority attitude: public attitudes to crime tend to condemn the perpetrators by reference to the effects of their actions on society, demanding punishment to fit the crime. However, as Parkin suggests (1986: 209), most people (in the west) probably alternate at some time between different attitudes to criminality. The more absolutist view, which characterises perpetrators as deviant and crime as a lapse from absolute standards of socially acceptable behaviour, is the attitude adopted by the Ladakhi villagers in many contexts. They do recognise that anger and violence can be caused by provocation - people worry if they think their remarks have made someone else angry. However, such provocation never excuses the other person’s anger. The expression of anger and use of harsh words are never considered to be morally justified within the village, so much so that the concept of revenge is unequivocally disapproved of. After a fight a man may try to justify his own aggression on the basis that the other person provoked him or struck the first blow, but this does not absolve the sin of fighting. This became apparent in the context of a discussions about the Sumde Gokpo, some old wooden Buddha statues in the village of Sumda

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Chenmo, about three days’ walk away from Photoksar.7 As I was about to leave to visit them Morup shuddered and said that the statues were tsokpo. ‘But are they not Buddhas?’ I asked. ‘Yes but angry ones (sho yong-khan),’ she replied. The statues turned out not to represent fearsome protector deities with bared teeth and weapons, of the kind depicted on many monastery walls, however, so I asked Paljor for an explanation when I returned. He told me that the Buddhas are angry, tsokpo, because people go to the statues and make offerings to ask the deities to wreak revenge for them.8 As far as he was concerned, therefore, the task of taking revenge could be entrusted to these angry, nonworldly beings. However, even on the part of such deities the act of taking revenge was tsokpo, being the work of anger. The concept of revenge, that is, is acknowledged but unequivocally disapproved of. When I discussed it with Sonam Phuntsog he used the expression lan tang-ba, literally: to give an answer. This can be either good or bad, a lan gyalla or a lan tsokpo, he explained. In other words, the phrase encompasses the returning of a favour as well as the answering of one bad deed by another. A bad answer, lan tsokpo, is always tsokpo, however. There is no concept of justified revenge. The idea of ‘an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth’ has no local equivalent. External events can, thus, give rise to tension in the mind, which makes people quick to express anger. However, responsibility for angry or aggressive actions is not absolved by these considerations. The use of the words tsokpo and gyalla to describe those who get into fights and arguments is an absolute moral judgment, implying that the person always ought to and always could, restrain himself. As Parkin (1986) suggests, we should not be surprised by inconsistencies in judgments of personal responsibility. Provocation, like the state of one’s mind, can give rise to anger. However, there is an over-riding moral responsibility on the part of all individuals to restrain themselves from expressing this emotion, which is central to the ways in which the villagers maintain relations of order within their community.

7

‘Gokpo’ is the word used to refer to things that are old and in disrepair, like the abandoned temple above Photoksar. However, Tim Malyon, who has studied these statues (Malyon and Denwood 1986) told me that gokpo can also refer to the long trance that Buddhist meditators enter into. The statues date from between 1000 and 1350 (Luczanits 2005: 84). 8 In fact, the explanation that the villagers of Sumda Chenmo, themselves, have given to others is rather different (Tim Malyon, personal communication).

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There are, therefore, paradoxes and inconsistencies amongst the multiplicity of concepts which concern the individual person and morality in Photoksar. To a large extent these reflect the context within which (moral) judgments are made. The fact that the villagers live with inconsistencies in their epistemological worlds is, however, of importance when examining their attitudes to the supernatural and their relations with religious leaders.

Disputes When anger leads to a quarrel but the protagonists walk away or make up their differences then the incident remains merely a talking point in the village. If animosity remains active, however, it becomes a village concern. An unresolved dispute is an ongoing problem for the households involved and, ultimately, for the village as a whole. It is primarily the goba’s duty to engineer a form of resolution. Whenever we discussed the role of the goba, both in Photoksar and other villages, people always also mentioned dispute resolution, very often first, among his list of duties. The primary concern of his intervention is to restore good relations between the individuals, shakhs choches.9 One day, for example, one of the village women came in a state of high indignation to talk to Paljor, who was then village membar. She had just had a quarrel with her daughter-in-law’s mother, a woman from another village. Paljor listened and a few days later accompanied the goba to a meeting to resolve the problem. Choron told me that the two women had argued and thrown stones and that the meeting was to make them shake hands so that they did not throw stones any more. She also used the expression chams chug. Chug means ‘to cause’ and chams was explained to me in terms of the affection that family members feel for each other. A relationship of chams was to be restored between them. No-one could tell me what the quarrel had actually been about, however. That was not the point. It was the argument that was the problem and Paljor’s responsibility, as village membar, was to ensure that good relations were restored. For the villagers, disputes are events of public significance and shakhs (mediation) is a conscious, deliberate process. It is a widely discussed village practice which follows a hierarchical pattern culminating in the meeting of the yulpa, the village’s ultimate judicial authority. 9

The same term is found in Shakhs Khang, the LBA’s mediation service.

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There are two phenomena here, which could be distinguished as ‘differences’ and ‘disputes’. The words used to describe disputes are roughly translatable as ‘shouting’, ‘flinging abuse’, ‘arguing’, ‘quarrelling’ and ‘fighting’, in other words overt forms of antagonism. Their public nature means that disputes affect the whole community. Mere differences that do not result in overt antagonism, by contrast, are dealt with as practical problems. On the border between differences and disputes are those bad relations between individuals who, nevertheless, avoid an open quarrel. I came across one of these in the village one winter, when I returned after my primary period of fieldwork. Two men had not talked to each other since the previous summer when an argument over livestock had occurred. Two other men had decided to try to get the disputants to sit down and shake hands, but without success. They were sure, however, that things would eventually be resolved. Some of the older men would get involved and ‘talk wisely’, they told me. The bad relations between the two men were not an urgent problem for the community, but generated a continuing sense of unease, both because of the disrupted household relations but, more importantly, because they could develop into a full-scale fight if they were not resolved. Differences or disputes that do not involve violence might be resolved by employing the services of a mediator, a barmi. As already mentioned, shortly after I arrived in the village Tsewang, Paljor’s younger brother, had had an argument with his wife, Yangzes, during the course of which he had hit her. It was reported to me that she had then ‘become angry’, sho yongse, and returned to Wadze, her natal home. In the days that followed there was much contact between the families. Meme Sonam, Gyaltsen and Morup from Khangltakh all went to Wadze to ask her to come back but she said that she did not want to return. Tsewang did not go and there was much shrugging of shoulders about his attitude. Maybe he did not want her back. Eventually they called in the onpo to act as mediator. According to Morup, he ‘talked wisely’. At first he told Tsewang to go and bring Yangzes back but Tsewang said he did not want to do so. The onpo, therefore, consulted Yangzes who also said she did not want to return. So he suggested a divorce: one of the two children should belong to Khangltakh and the other to Wadze. Later they drew up an agreement which included the payment of half a yak from Khangltakh to Wadze. The whole issue was resolved within a month. Tsewang and Yangzes remained on bad terms but the continuation of good relations between the two households was assured by this settlement.

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Although the resolution of disputes is ultimately the goba’s responsibility, others can, thus, act as mediators. There are no individuals who are particularly qualified to assume this role, however. It is generally older men who are asked to do so but, as with other matters of village politics, there is no status of ‘village elder’, or the like. It is considered to be more important that the mediator should know the parties and, therefore, the background to the dispute. Several families divided while I was staying in Photoksar. These are always problematic events involving the division of property, and they are sometimes acrimonious, although members of the khangba and khangu invariably continue to cooperate over social and agricultural events. On one occasion, for example, the old Meme from one household came to complain to Paljor about the situation in his khangba. He had been arguing with the Ama (the mother), and the children were stealing his things, he said, so he wanted to move to a khangu where he could lock the door. Paljor advised him not to move because of the extra work that would be involved in living by oneself, but he suggested that he should, in any event, consult a mediator. He named another older man, a relation of the family. If that mediator could not settle things, Paljor explained to me later, the case would have to go to the goba and membar and if they also failed it would be considered by the yulpa. There is a clear hierarchy in the levels of village mediation, therefore, which culminates in the yulpa.

The mediation of disputes Mediation is always a deliberate process, subject to public discussion and comment. One evening the family in Khangltakh were asking me about my own country. After questions about population, jobs and rates of pay Paljor asked if there was a goba and if people got into fights. ‘If so, do the neighbours intervene and resolve matters, as they do in Photoksar?’ he asked. This then led to a discussion of the Photoksar customs. He was quite specific about the hierarchy of mediation. First the family will try to resolve a dispute, he said, then the neighbours will get involved, then they will go to a mediator. If he cannot resolve the problem the goba and membar will be called and if they cannot solve it the case will go to a whole village meeting. As a last resort it could go to the police, he said. The occurrence of two fights on consecutive days at a summer wedding, for example, prompted the most decisive judicial activity I

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witnessed during my fieldwork, with a village meeting called immediately to deal with the problem. The root of one of the fights lay in the previous year’s New Year (Losar) celebrations, during which a fight had occurred between two men. There was long-standing animosity between them because the daughter of one had been married to the other man’s younger brother. He had, therefore, joined the father’s household as a makpa, but he had soon walked out and left his wife. The two men got into a fight after they had been drinking during the Losar celebrations and the following day the goba and membar were called upon to sort it out. Morup explained to me that the goba and membar were going to tell the two men that they had been drunk yesterday, that tomorrow they would not be drunk, and so they must get on, shake hands and have no more argument. I discovered, later, that the goba and membar had also drawn up an agreement for the men to sign, each undertaking to pay a fine of Rs1,000 to the village if he fought again. At a wedding, about six months later, the two men did, indeed, get into another drunken fight. Then, on the second day of the wedding another fight erupted, this time between some of the younger village men, three of whom ganged up against a fourth. At the time the men were restrained by those around them, including some of the women. This was the incident during which the young wife berated her husband publicly in floods of tears. Very early the next day, however, the goba came to see Paljor together with the beaten man’s father. It was agreed that an entire village meeting was necessary. Word was put about and the men gathered the same morning. All the protagonists were called, except the victim of the second fight who stayed in his house. First the yulpa dealt with the smaller fight. Because of the earlier agreement each man acknowledged that he had to pay a fine of Rs1,000 to the village and was made to sign another agreement to the effect that if he fought again he would pay a fine of Rs10,000 to the village, an astronomical amount in local terms. Even Rs1,000 was very significant and there was much discussion in the following days about how the men had managed to raise the money. They also went through a ceremony of yal. Yal is the term used for the pouring of chang from a changskyan, a ceremonial brass jug decorated with butter which is used on formal occasions. In this case the father had to give yal first by pouring and offering chang to the brother, because he had said the first harsh words. Then the brother had to give yal and also a khatags to the father, because he had struck the first blow.

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The meeting then dealt with the larger fight. From my position at a distance I could see that each of the protagonists was being questioned. Although there was no formality in the meeting, men coming and going all the time, there was a small core made up of the goba and membars who directed the questions. Paljor told me later that they had asked the men why they had fought. The men had said that the other had used harsh words towards them. Paljor shrugged at this, suggesting that he thought it a poor explanation: an insult does not justify retaliation. So, he continued, they had told the men they each had to pay a fine to the victim because he had been hurt. The men had offered Rs500; the victim had said that was not enough; the yulpa had then suggested Rs600 and after some to-ing and fro-ing everyone had agreed to this figure. All four also had to pay Rs100 to the village ‘because of the fight’ and to sign an agreement undertaking to pay a fine of Rs5,000 if they fought again. The goba and membar had then taken the three men down to the victim’s house for yal. The three had given yal and khatags to the fourth and he had then given them yal, but not a khatags, because he was the one who had been hurt. A little while later they all emerged from the house, laughing and talking. Good relations had, obviously, immediately been restored. I commented on this later to Meme Sonam who said, simply, ‘chams song, yal tangs’, a relationship of chams had been restored after the yal had been given. There was a perceived need to restore good relations, chams, in all these cases and in all of them the mediation of the goba and yulpa was ultimately successful. Lingering antipathy might have remained, as it did between the father and brother and between Tsewang and Yangzes, but workable relations were restored, most importantly between their respective households. Village life, with its networks of cooperation and assistance, could, therefore, continue as normal. Similar attitudes towards the restoration of good relations were expressed in conversations I had about disputes with informants from all over Ladakh. One striking example is reported by Kim Gutschow from Zangskar (2004: 140-42). A case of rape, which had resulted in the death of the girl, was dealt with entirely internally to that village. The girl’s father merely demanded and obtained, against an admittedly guilty party, a donation to the monastery and a payment for a sangs, purification ritual. Gutschow comments on the way in which the following year the father and his

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daughter’s attacker were again working side by side in the fields without any apparent residue of animosity between them.10 The resolution of fights in Photoksar can involve an element of punishment by the community of the individuals involved, with the protagonists called to justify themselves before the village meeting and fines being paid to the village, ‘for the fight’. When we were discussing the mediation carried out by the yulpa, for example, Paljor was quite specific about the sort of fines they would impose in different cases. In a bad case of fighting the protagonists would have to give khatags and yal and a fine of between Rs6,000 to Rs9,000, but the fine would only be around Rs1,000 if the case was less serious. If it was just an argument then they would only have to give khatags and yal. I never encountered any cases of theft but Paljor said that if they caught a thief then the goba and membars or the yulpa would beat him. This punitive authority on the part of the yulpa was readily apparent in the resolution of the most serious fight I came across in Photoksar, which had occurred a little before I arrived in the village. The two younger brothers of the three at Chushot, men probably in their 40s, had argued over the Mother of the house, a problem not uncommon in polyandrous relationships. Morup told me the background in some detail, suggesting that the Chushot Mother had been playing the two younger brothers off against each other, using bribery and flattery. There had been much conflict between the two, she explained, which had become violent, the older brother getting out his rifle at one point (he had been in the army for a while). After this incident the yulpa had intervened and decided that both men should leave the khangba and live in separate khangu. They also made each sign an agreement undertaking to pay a fine of Rs9,000 to the village if they ever returned to the khangba. They were required to pay a smaller fine to the village immediately, ‘because of the argument’. However, after some months, when I was in the village, the Chushot Mother enticed the younger brother back to the khangba, asking him to help with their work, and he was seen to be living there again. As a result he had to pay his fine to the village and another agreement was drawn up recording this.

10

Gutschow attributes this reaction to belief in the law of karma. However, for the reasons I give in the next chapter I consider this not to be a realistic or sufficient interpretation.

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The epistemology of conflict Despite this element of punishment and even when the yulpa have imposed fines on the parties to a dispute, conciliation is still needed before a dispute is recognised as having been resolved. Agreement between the protagonists is an absolute requirement. One summer, for example, an argument occurred over the lora, the duty of certain households to protect the fields from the animals. A large group of people gathered in the upper fields and after a while some of them passed by the place where I was sitting and told me that two women had been quarrelling over the animals. One of them was Rigzin, whose household had that year’s lora obligations. I learned later that some animals had got into the other woman’s fields and she had complained to Rigzin, whereupon Rigzin had used ‘harsh language’ against her. Rigzin was clearly seen by the villagers as having been at fault by turning the complaint into an argument and the goba and membar went to discipline her. However, Rigzin then started arguing with them and refused to apologise. Paljor later told me that Rigzin had been bad, tsokpo, because she was stubborn, khyongbo, and disobedient, kha ma nyan (literally, not hearing his words). Now the problem was considered to have become serious. It was discussed at the next village meeting and a group of the yulpa was sent to ask that she apologise to the goba and membar. They came back saying that she had refused to do so and further discussion took place. Eventually another party of people went to threaten her with a social boycott, chu len me len chad. This is a tactic commonly employed in a variety of different contexts throughout Ladakh. It was used by the LBA against the Muslims during the communal tensions which arose in Leh in the late 1980s, for example. In the village it is the ultimate sanction that can be applied since life would be impossible without cooperation from other households over agricultural and ritual events. Eventually, faced with this threat, Rigzin had agreed to give yal and say ‘jule, jule’, that is, to apologise to the goba, and everything was settled. In this case merely imposing a fine was not an option. The miscreant had to apologise for shakhs to have been achieved. Even in the case of a theft, Paljor told me, the thief would have to pay a fine as well as endure a beating. If he accepted the fine and apologised, by saying ‘jule, jule’, that would be an end of the matter, he explained. There is, therefore, an element of punishment in many of the settlements negotiated by the village and heavy fines might be imposed but the

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ideology of agreement pervades them all. A case is not settled until agreement has been achieved between the parties. Abel (1974), along with certain legal anthropologists, defines conflict as arising when parties develop inconsistent claims to a resource. Gulliver (1969), for example, defines a dispute in terms of disagreement between persons or groups in which the alleged interests or rights of one are claimed to have been infringed by the other. Indeed, some anthropologists have concluded that it is of the essence of dispute resolution that it involve a procedure of inquiry into guilt and responsibility and the process of adjudication between conflicting claims (Epstein 1967). In Photoksar, however, when a dispute or a fight occurs it is the fact of the conflict, not the clash between competing rights, that is the focus of attention. What are discussed by the villagers are the details of the argument or fight, not the underlying rights and wrongs of the situation. Indeed, an analysis of individual claims and interests is striking in its absence. In Rigzin’s case the focus of the villagers’ attention was on the course of the argument, initially that between the two women and later the attitudes expressed by Rigzin towards the goba. During the course of the yulpa’s involvement in this case the underlying cause of the quarrel between the two women and the question of who had been at fault for letting the sheep eat the barley was entirely forgotten. There was no question of the woman who complained demanding or receiving compensation. The same emphasis on the nature of the antagonism, rather than the underlying cause of the quarrel, can be seen in the context of another argument which arose one summer. Two women, one from Chushot and the other from Zurba, got into a disagreement over the res, the herding of the sheep and goats. The Zurba Mother came to tell her story to all those sitting at the stream, the village’s central meeting place, so it soon became the talk of the village. Apparently her daughter had asked the Chushot daughter to take both flocks together up to the mountains, but the Chushot Mother had come out and told her not to, reducing the Zurba daughter to tears. The Zurba Mother had then come to complain and a big argument had ensued between the two women. I met one of the village men later at the stream who confirmed these details, but when I asked him about the rights and wrongs of the situation, enquiring who had been tsokpo, he just shrugged his shoulders. ‘I don’t know’, he said, obviously feeling uncomfortable that I had even asked the question and not wanting to have to make any judgment on the matter. That evening Api Rigzin told me that the goba and membar had settled the problem.

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Paljor had sorted it out with khatags and yal, she said. But she could not tell me, and was obviously not interested in, who had given what to whom, who was right, wrong or at fault. It was only later that Paljor told me, because I specifically asked him, that the Chushot Mother had given yal first because she had been the first to use harsh words, but the Zurba Mother had given both yal and khatags because her language had been worse. The settlement, therefore, was determined according to the course of the quarrel, not to the underlying rights and wrongs of the disagreement. When I asked about the reason for the argument, Paljor told me that Zurba had been sending its animals to one area of the mountains but had asked Chushot to take them to another area with theirs. As part of the settlement they would now be taken to the second area together. What he was telling me was how the settlement had dealt with the future question of the herding, not who had been right or wrong at the time. Only later, when I was in the fields with Morup and Choron and the subject of this argument arose again, did I get any view on what had caused it. Morup volunteered the opinion that the Chushot Mother ought to have agreed to take both flocks. Every day people ask each other for help with their animals and we say ‘ya, ya’, ‘yes, yes’, she told me. In her opinion, therefore, the fault had lain with Chushot. This, however, was a very private opinion. The notion of fault was not the primary concern of the villagers and had not determined the giving of yal and khatags. Choron followed up what Morup had said by expressing the opinion that the Chushot Mother was tsokpo, bad, because she regularly got into arguments. This was the real focus of village disapproval, not how the res system ought to have operated, important though this is in the normal course of daily life. It is not that the villagers completely disregard the issue of the fault attaching to the differences underlying an argument. When Morup was explaining procedures that follow a divorce for the return of the bride price and trousseau, for example, she told me that it would depend on whose choice the divorce had been. The implication was that the party who chooses has some justification and that the settlement will reflect this. On the other hand, in the actual case of Tsewang’s and Yangzes’s divorce I got different accounts from the two families. Khangltakh told me that it was Tsewang’s decision and, rather than reclaim the brideprice, Meme Sonam had generously offered to pay half a yak to Wadze, Yangzes’ family. Other people, however, expressed the view that Khangltakh had been mean in only offering half a yak. When I stayed in a village on the way to Leh, my hosts, kin of Khangltakh, were keen to

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catch up on such events. They asked whose choice the divorce had been and whether Yangzes had not been working hard enough (the normallycited reason for a man to seek a divorce). They were, therefore, interested in the rights and wrongs of the situation. However, the settlement itself had not involved any determination of or judgment on these issues. All these cases could be analysed in terms of competing claims, interests and rights: the Chushot and Zurba women had competing interests in the herding of the sheep and goats; the divorce settlement involved a determination of the respective parties’ property rights and their entitlements with regard to the children. Similarly, relations between members of a household, between different households and between individuals and the community as a whole could be analysed in terms of rights and control over resources. However, this type of analysis is not the local one. It does not explain the villagers’ attitudes to and perception of what conflict is, its consequences and significance for the community.11 The villagers effectively preclude the expression of individual rights by concentrating on the course of the disruption and expression of anger and antagonism. What could be analysed as a clash of interests is, rather, described as a disturbance to order. This is what marks the distinction between differences (clashes of interests that require a pragmatic solution) and disputes (overt antagonism that requires reconciliation). It is the latter that disturbs the village order and requires the most immediate and deliberate remedy. According to this epistemology, all overt antagonism is a danger to the order of the community requiring resolution and the ceremonial restoration of good relations. This is supported by the local scheme of morality according to which all such behaviour is reprehensible on the part of the individuals involved, who are labelled tsokpo. The question I turn to in the next chapter is whether these epistemological and moral aspects have been shaped by the ideas and ideologies of Buddhism or whether any other cosmological concerns can explain the villagers’ anxieties about disorder.

11

As Cowan et. al. (2001: 1-4) point out, although ‘the model of rights is today hegemonic’, this discourse is animated by ‘a desire to establish universal rights’. Rights discourse constitutes a kind of culture, part of the global and transnational cultural order (2001: 11-13).

CHAPTER FIVE

THE REALM OF THE SPIRITS Several writers have suggested that a sense of cosmological order underlies the social and political structures of Ladakhi communities. Dollfus, for example, maintains that, ‘the observance of hierarchy and order is necessary for the maintenance of order, the success of a marriage, the efficacy of a ritual’. (1989: 98)1 This is expressed in seating plans, in language (the use of honorifics) in food and serving dishes. It reflects, she says, the hierarchical spatial ordering of the world in which east is superior to west and above over lower, which is also reflected in the physical structures of individual houses and the arrangement of the village itself (1989:102).2 Hierarchy is also said to be present in the worlds inhabited by the spirits, the lha, which are divided between the stanglha (an upper realm), the barsam (the immediate world) and the yoklu (the underworld) (Phylactou 1989: 55; Day 1989: 162; Riaboff 1997: 339; Mills 2003: 151-61). These writers suggest that the household is a similarly ordered social space, in which religious activities are related to productive and reproductive processes in a hierarchical relationship: the chod khang for the Buddhist deities is on the upper storey of the house, along with the lha khang for the phalha; in the middle are the rooms devoted to the pragmatic business of daily life and it is here that the spirits of the locality receive offerings from each meal prepared on the stove; while on the lower levels are the animals’ quarters and the shrines to the lu, the spirits associated with fertility. Protector deities are, thus, placed above humans who, themselves, inhabit a realm superior to that of the important, but problematic, lu. As Mills points out (2003: Ch 6), deity is superior to fertility. These writers, therefore, present a picture of a hierarchical cosmological realm, reflected in the structures of village organisation and in the relations between the human and supernatural inhabitants of the village, which symbolises village order and the sense of solidarity that unites its members. The existence of the community, Dollfus maintains (1989: 1

The translations from the French are my own. Aggarwal (2004: 153) likewise suggests that ‘to sit in a place (in the dral) is to embody and inhabit a material territory, a cosmological sphere, a social identity, a niche in the universe’. 2

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125), is ‘often defined by reference to either the village divinity or the gonpa,’ and she links this to the ‘strong sense of solidarity’ within the village. Srinivas (1998: 90) also suggests that, ‘the symbolic unity of the village ... the internal field of power and well-being, is affirmed in the presence of the god of the village settlement’. Conflict, it would seem, must pose a threat to this overarching cosmological order, dislocating the hierarchies which constitute it and which allow humans and spirits to live in harmony. Indeed, there is evidence that elsewhere in the Tibetan region disputes are, indeed, considered to give rise to drib, spiritual pollution (Schickelgrüber 1989). Other writers on the Tibetan region have linked religion and social practices in different ways. In his study of the Sherpas of Nepal, FürerHaimendorf (1967: 181) describes their local moral concepts as having been ‘shaped by’ the philosophy of Buddhism. Ortner (1978, 1989) describes Buddhist divinities and rituals as providing models for the social problems of Sherpa society. The symbolic meanings of these rites, she says, provide models for the problems of ageing, wealth, status, fighting and the contradiction between hierarchy and equality. Inspired by Geertz’s (1973c) description of religion as a cultural system, she argues that through its rituals, ‘the Buddhist mode of seeing, feeling, interpreting, categorising and so forth, are constantly and systematically fed into lay experience.’ (1978: 162)3 A related view is taken by Samuel (1993: 362) who suggests that other aspects of religious life in Tibet, not just the strictly Buddhist, provide the ‘cultural patterns’ that are fundamental to social forms. As he puts it (1993: 4): For Tibetans, the vocabulary and modes of thinking deriving from Indian Buddhism came to pervade many areas of experience that we do not necessarily think of as ‘religious’, while the concerns of Tibetan folk religion, such as the maintenance of good luck and good fortune, continue to underlie virtually all facets of life.’

Religion, that is, is multi-faceted and fundamental to social life. These writers, thus, suggest three distinct ways in which the religious or supernatural may be concerned with wider social and moral processes in Tibetan societies. Fürer-Haimendorf and Ortner concentrate on the moral content of Buddhism and the symbolism of its rites and deities. Indeed, Ortner has been criticised for over-interpreting her material in line with Buddhist doctrine (Ramble 1980). Samuel’s analysis of the 3

This view is substantially repeated in her later work (1999: 102-05).

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complexities of religious forms in Tibet finds cultural patterns in an array of religious practices. Dollfus and other writers on Ladakh focus on the structures of the spirit realm. My own thesis, however, is that neither the moral order of Buddhism nor the realm of the spirits is related to the moral and political order of the village that I have described in previous chapters. The monks and other ritual practitioners are firmly distanced from this realm, and the activities of the lha, complex and important though they are in daily life, do not have any direct bearing on the villagers’ concerns with conflict, nor the moral judgments by which they condemn the expression of anger.

Tibetan religions Samuel’s distinction between Indian Buddhism and Tibetan folk religion is one that structures many discussions of religion in Tibetan societies. At its starkest, Stein suggests that in Tibet the central religious activity: is the concern of monk and hermits. It is inaccessible to ordinary believers. Their deep faith depends upon the members of the monastic community. Lay Buddhists do not take part in rituals and religious services, save sometimes as mere spectators. They do not hear sermons and have no private prayers. (1972: 172)

The ‘nameless religion’, by contrast, is ‘the whole body of ideas and customs belonging to the indigenous tradition: a religion, but an unorganised churchless, doctrineless, priestless and almost nameless, whole.’ (1972: 164) As Samuel describes it, this ‘folk religion’ is concerned primarily with this-worldly concerns (1993: Ch 10). According to Tucci, ‘the numina ... assist [the Tibetan] in his difficulties, they stand by his side in his incessant struggle to defend himself against obstacles and dangers, open and secret adversaries, who everywhere threaten his existence, his well-being, his property.’ (1980: 165) Many writers suggest that by a long process of assimilation, Buddhism in Tibet came to incorporate local invocations and festivities into its own ritual world and to adopt local numina into the ranks of its protector deities (Tucci 1980: 163-6, 206). The notion of subjugation or taming, dulwa, is the metaphor found widely in Tibetan texts to describe the spread of Buddhism and the conversion of both human populations and local numina (Gyatso 1987). Having been tamed and brought into the service of Buddhism by Padmasambhava, among others, such local

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gods can now be called upon in monastic worship to perform a protective function (Snellgrove 1957: 239-42; Tucci 1980: 168). A range of practices is, thus, directed at the local gods, whose importance is justified on the basis of their subjugation and conversion to Buddhism. However, many of them command an uneasy respect from the more orthodox practitioners. As Samuel says: The Buddhist teachings repeatedly describe [the worldly gods] as foolish, vain, and untrustworthy, as not fit objects in whom to take refuge or seek protection, as involved only with the affairs of this world and not with salvation. Y et within the context of this life, as opposed to rebirth or Enlightenment, the gods can assist one or cause one harm, and relationships with them have to be negotiated properly. (1993: 190 )

There is, therefore, a tension between types of practice and the related numina. This has given rise to debates about the relationship between the orthodoxy and ideals of the religious elite and the practices those elites would not regard as ‘true’ Buddhism (Gombrich 1972: 488; Huber 1994: 32-3). Gellner (2001) describes the spectrum of views taken by anthropologists, albeit of Theravada Buddhism, concerning the relationship between these systems. At one end is the ‘the whitewash theory of syncretism’ according to which, high religion is seen as a thin veneer covering a mass of non-Buddhist practices. Gellner describes this as the ‘modernist position’, one taken by Tibetan Buddhist elites who, themselves, regard Buddhism as a quintessentially elite practice. Against this there is a populist position, which regards Buddhism as the practice of the masses, which has been ‘distorted’ by the middle class (Southwold 1982). A middle ground, the one taken by most anthropologists and many Buddhists themselves, is that Buddhism contains ‘a hierarchy of teachings and roles that coexist with other systems in a structured hierarchy.’ (2001: 50-1) The idea of a hierarchy is found in certain discourses in Ladakh, particularly those of the monks, who suggest that the rituals of the higher monastic practitioners, along with the deities of the orthodox Buddhist canon, are superior to local rites and deities, in whom the laity often place too much faith. While it is useful to distinguish between types of practice in this way, however, I would suggest that the differences between them cannot simply be viewed in terms of a hierarchy. Mills (2003) has re-analysed the relationship, suggesting that both village and monastery, laity and monks, exist within the power of local gods and their associated cosmologies. The relationship between local deities and Buddhist

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practitioners cannot, therefore, be regarded in terms of a simple hierarchy of power. Bearing this in mind, I turn to the ritual practices I observed in Photoksar.

Village practices Each Ladakhi household is allied to one or other of the main monasteries and most laymen’s primary contact with the Buddhism of these establishments is through the komnyer, the monks sent by the monastery to tend the small temples they have established in each village. In Photoksar there are two temples, belonging to Lamayuru and Hemis gonpas respectively, and normally two komnyer. Both are invited by individual households to do a monthly sangs, the basic purification ritual said to be ‘for everyone, for the animals, to make sure we do not get ill and do not have accidents’. They also carry out the ‘Guru Rinpoche’ chos on the tenth day of each Tibetan month and various annual rituals. The Hemis komnyer was particularly keen to introduce ‘proper’ Buddhist practice into the village and, when I arrived, had recently instigated a three-day ritual of devotion on the thirteenth to sixteenth days of the first month, one of the most holy, during which the villagers congregated to recite mantras, later circumambulating the village temples and associated monuments, making prostrations along the way. Each khangba has a shrine room, a chod khang, which contains Buddhist statues, tankas (painted hangings), offering bowls and the ritual objects that might be used by either the monks or the onpos, the local ritual practitioners. Most houses also have a lha khang for the household god, the phalha, a windowless room containing juniper branches, white scarves and skulls from the animal sacrifices of former years, in which daily offerings are made. The village roofs and nearby hillsides are dotted with lhato, cairns of stones topped with juniper branches, containing a jar of barley, gold, silver, turquoise and other precious objects, where offerings are periodically made to the different phalha or for the yullha, the village god. Each household also has at least one pang gong, a shrine for the water spirits, the lu, who are associated with springs and fertility. These are square, white-painted structures, containing pots of barley and other ‘treasures’. Within the village, the lha are a ubiquitous presence, responsible for the physical security of both people and livestock. All acts of eating and sleeping, the responses to birth and death, and all agricultural and

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pastoral activities are conducted in a way that will appease them, while sicknesses, misfortunes and deaths are unequivocally attributed to the pernicious influence of their malevolent counterparts. In Khangltakh, Api Rigzin renewed the offering bowls of water in the chod khang every morning and performed a number of prostrations, while Morup carried a small censer of burning juniper around the house, blowing smoke into every room and calling invocations to the local gods. Throughout the day, numerous small food offerings were made to the spirits. The first spoonful of any meal was placed on the side of the stove, ‘for the lha’,4 and before the meal that accompanies any ritual, of which there are many, a short mantra was recited while a chod (literally, food)5 offering was made. A small piece of barley dough, some flour and chang were tossed into the air for the lha, placed on the stove for the phalha and cast onto the ground to pacify the hungry ghosts. Chod were also offered when people ate out in the fields or up in the mountains, for the zhidag and sadag, the spirits that inhabit the locality (photo 19).6 Many of these spirits are directly implicated in the fertility and prosperity of village life. The zhisdag and sadag, for example, are primarily responsible for the fertility of the soil in the areas of land with which they are associated, both cultivated fields and mountain pastures, and they are appeased in many of the rituals which punctuate the year in accordance with the agricultural cycle. Spring, for example, sees a series of rituals, called the Sakha.7 In Khangltakh a two foot conical dough offering, bando, was prepared for the Sakha that occurred during my fieldwork and a small party was held for the phaspun group of houses. At the end of this, Meme Sonam made a three-part chod offering and then placed a plate of tagi (flat bread) with a portion of the bando, flour and chang on the kitchen shelf as an offering for the phalha, while another older man read a short prayer. Then a goat-skin filled with barley and topped with juniper was raised high three times, as invocations to the lha were shouted by all present, before it was taken up to the 4

Some writers describe this as being for the tap lha, the spirit of the stove (Mills 2003: 156) but this has, at best, a shady existence and in Photoksar they suggested that it was the phalha who received such offerings. 5 The same word root is found in chodpa, the general term for offerings made in all Buddhist rituals. 6 These words are compounds of zhi (gzhi, home, residence), sa (earth) and dagpo (bdagpo, lord or owner). Paljor also explained them as zhis-la shnase duk khan, meaning the original (sna) inhabitants of the place. 7 Literally, this means the mouth (kha) of the earth (sa).

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fields for a ceremonial ploughing of the first furrow (with a pick-axe) and scattering of seed from the bag. On the following day each household performed a ritual first ploughing of its own fields, with further dough offerings, shubla,8 decorated with ears of barley and pods of peas, and the recitation of another short chos (photo 22). My informants were unable to explain the meaning of either of these rituals to me, however, saying that they were for the zhisdag and sadag, ‘old customs’ performed for the sowing and the harvest. The involvement of the phaspun indicates the importance of the phalha in ensuring fertility during the following agricultural year. There are numerous other small rituals associated with the agricultural year, which all involve food offerings to the lha. Food always has to be shared between people and spirits. After the birth of the first yak calf in the Spring, for example, a custard, phrums, was made with the milk and an offering was created out of this (with the usual tagi, flour and chang) and placed by the stove with an incantation for the lha after further chod offerings. This was said to be ‘for the new calves, lambs and kids and for good grass in the mountains’. Further shubla offerings were prepared on the first day of the harvest, when the grass was cut in the mountains, and placed in the chod khang and lha khang, while another was taken to the phalha’s lhato on the hillside. The lu are connected with water and springs, where many of the shrines, the pang gong, are placed. These protect the whole village, while others are specific to individual households and can be found in their basements or on their roofs. The lu are generally associated with wealth and fertility but they are also easily offended and cause tsitu, an illness described to me as being like a cold. This is most likely to happen if their residences are disturbed and if married (so potentially childbearing) women from other households come too close to them. In some villages they live in trees, usually junipers, which must, therefore, not be cut and in others it is dangerous for any married woman to go close to their springs, shrines and trees. In Khangltakh the pang gong were in a room in the basement, which meant that married women from other households could not enter any room directly above them. Offerings to the lu are made at the springs several times over the summer, preferably by a monk who has not eaten meat or drunk chang for seven days. But lay people also make offerings at the springs, using milk that must have come from a red goat or a white sheep, as long as the offerant has 8

Shub means an unripe ear of grain.

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abstained from meat and chang for a day. The lu are sensitive to meat and chang while all the other lha enjoy these offerings. Other lha are more powerful protectors but they are, accordingly, more dangerous. The phalha, the household god, receives offerings in the lha khang and the lhato on the hillside, as well as the chod offerings placed on the stove. The lha khang and lhato are dangerous areas for married women from other phaspun, this group of households being united by having a single phalha. Paljor described these lha as gyalpe. Gyalpo is a word usually used to refer to the king, with the associated adjective, gyalpe, meaning victorious. Referring to lha (as Jäschke 1881: 109 indicates it can) the term, therefore, indicates a spirit with a wider domain than that of the yullha, suggesting that the phalha can protect individual people and animals in places beyond the realm of the village, the yul.9 The phalha have a multiple physical presence, associated with several lhato. Their activities are generally protective, as long as they are carefully propitiated, and a phalha seen to be a good one in Photoksar can be adopted by other households in substitution for their own. However, they remain dangerous and liable to cause trouble, particularly for married women, as are the lu, a point stressed by other writers (Riaboff 1997: 342). Many years ago one household in Photoksar had severe problems with food and crop failures and its family twice migrated to Zangskar. In the end the phalha was thought to be the problem and his lhato was move from the lha khang in the house out onto the hill. The family that subsequently moved into that khangba has prospered. The yullha, named Shpungsal, is the protector of the village and a powerful spirit who can offer all kinds of protection to the villagers and their animals against the host of malevolent forces that constantly threaten them. The shrine where he resides, the main lhato, overlooks the village from a high point on the opposite side of the valley so his presence is evident in almost all parts of the village. There are two associated lhato on the village side of the valley, at one of which a sangs, the basic offering ritual made to local deities, is performed three times a month, on the holy third, eighth and fifteenth days, in sight of the lha. This is preferably done by a monk, but can also be carried out by the 9

Riaboff (1997: 344-45) discusses the ambiguous place of the powerful and aggressive rgyalpo in Zangskar, who seem halfway between lha and dre (evil spirits). Kaplanian (1987) suggests that gyapo, probably the same term, are a class of lha who punish theft with madness. It would be a mistake, however, to assume that either of these descriptions necessarily holds true elsewhere. While some features of the spirit worlds are widespread, others are highly localised.

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village onpo. The other shrine is a simple cairn topped with juniper next to the much-used path that leads from the village to the fields. When they pass this spot all the villagers salute the lha opposite and, if they are carrying food or drink, they place a little on the top of the cairn. The yullha is, therefore, appeased both by food offerings and by the sangs, a ceremony performed by Buddhist monks. Machu, being at a distance from the main village, has a separate protective lha with its own lhato, at which members of the two households make offerings for the protection of that area. Twice a year a group of men climbs the hill to the main shrine of the yullha opposite the village accompanied by one of the village monks. Here they undertake the shukpa shpoches, the changing of the juniper (photos 23 and 24). This shrine is a square stone building with a sealed doorway topped with juniper branches wrapped in white cloths. Inside, they say, it contains jars with barley, wheat, precious things and clay figures of horses, other animals and people. The monk carries up his drum, cymbals and other ritual objects to perform a sangs while village men replace the juniper branches. The yullha is called Shpungsal because years ago he is said to have demanded the offering of human blood from the shoulder (shpungba) of a young boy who, therefore, had to be sacrificed every year. That custom is, however, said to have been changed long ago to the sacrifice of a yak and then to a white goat. Older members of the village remember the goat sacrifices, which were performed by a renowned onpo who came from Nyeraks. He was described as extremely powerful, trakpo, and the villagers told me that he would open up the lhato, sleep inside for a few days and renew the offerings. In around the early 1980s, however, Togdan Rinpoche of Phyang monastery, the highest Drigungpa lama in Ladakh, visited the village and told the people to cease their animal sacrifices. Instead they should perform a sangs twice a year. After some initial scepticism and fear that Shpungsal would be dissatisfied with the new offerings the villagers have accepted the new practice.10 There seems formerly to have been at least one other yullha in Photoksar, but it was not clear why he faded from prominence. The villagers still change the juniper on his shrine but told me that he no longer possesses anybody. This is another important feature of the

10

In fact, most of these ceremonies include meat offerings. Even if an animal is not sacrificed at the lhato, therefore, the villagers still share their most valuable foods with the lha.

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yullha. One of the older men in the village is a lhaba who is possessed by the yullha annually as part of the New Year celebrations and also when there is a sickness, and it is thought that the yullha, through the lhaba, might be able to exorcise the spirits responsible. In Khangltakh, Choron’s first baby was sickly for several weeks after his birth, as was Choron, and the lhaba was called to suck out the poison from her body, the standard practice of spirit mediums all over Ladakh (Day 1989). He also advised, while in trance, that the baby should be taken to the hospital in Leh. While the yullha is a powerful protector he is also, like the phalha and lu, a dangerous presence, capable of causing harm, especially to the vulnerable, particularly fertile women and new-born babies. All married women are in danger if they approach Shpungsal’s lhato too closely.11 Birth is considered to be a particularly dangerous time when mother, baby and, initially, father must be shielded from the yullha. All three are confined to the house for two or three days following the birth, after which a sangs is performed and the father is free to leave. Mother and baby must, however, remain in the house for at least another month, until after the performance of two more sangs, one in the house and one opposite the main lhato. The most auspicious date for these is determined by the onpo who will also perform the sangs if there is no monk present. During this period they must also be careful not to go onto the roof if it is overlooked by the lhato or else erect some sort of screen to protect them from the sight of the lha.12

The evil spirits Although they are, thus, dangerous, especially to fertile women and newborn babies, the yullha and the phalha offer protection to the villagers against the multitude of evil spirits that inhabit their surroundings and who are liable to cause illness and misfortune at any moment, the gegs and dre. Paljor told me that there were 80,000 of them (the number also 11

I was allowed to observe the shukpa shpowa ceremony in 2000 but they said firmly that they would not allow it another year if I were to be married. 12 Several writers have interpreted these events as indicating the presence of drib, the ritual impurity that arises on birth and death (Dollfus 1989: 178; Mills 2003: 212-13). In Photoksar, however, the notion of vulnerability to spirit attack was dominant. It was not so much that mother and baby might pollute external spaces if they ventured outside the house as that they would be likely to be harmed by the yullha.

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given in Das 1998: 279), of many different kinds. They are associated with shkyen, misfortune or ill-luck and, particularly in children, they cause semne shnamtok, aberrations of the mind, which make them physically ill. They are generally thought to lurk outside the boundaries of the village, beyond the protection of the lha, but people can carry evil spirits around with them. So, when Meme Sonam returned late one evening from Machu, Api Rigzin went out with a ladle of burning coals to scare off any lurking spirits that might affect the children when he entered the house. The rituals by which the protection of the yullha or phalha is invoked often involve the exorcism of these troublesome numina through the making and throwing out of storma. Storma are dough creations used in many Buddhist rituals, which are described, elsewhere, as ‘offerings’ to the spirits (Tucci 1980: 115-6; Samuel 1993: 265-6), ‘offerings made to malignant demons as a kind of exorcism or appeasing gift’ (Jäschke 1881: 210). Das (1998: 527) calls them ‘sacrificial objects offered as appeasing gifts to the gods, saints and evil spirits’, while Mills’ monastic informants described them as offerings to be scattered in order to remove, rather than destroy, influences inimical to religion (2003: 190-91).13 In Photoksar, however, the term was usually used in a way synonymous with bele, offerings thrown out as exorcisms. Paljor, for example, described them to me as lud, ransom offerings, to the protective deities, whose purpose was dra’o dulches, the conquering or subduing of dra (evil spirits), or gegs shadches, exorcism of the gegs. These are the fiercest of all the evil spirits, whose exorcism can only be achieved by the throwing out of bele. Storma rituals, generally known as skurims, are a frequent and important part of village life, signalling the people’s preoccupation with the dangers of evil spirits. When his youngest child was suffering from an extended illness during the winter, for example, Paljor made a storma with male and female dough figures who were smeared with soot and surrounded by old tea leaves, pieces of bone, salt and flour. These were placed on a plate and carried around the baby before being taken outside to be flung down the slope to banish the spirits that were troubling him. More elaborate storma rituals are performed during the New Year festival and, in one of the village houses where a young mother had died, the family sponsored an annual ritual, during which three large

13 Tucci (1980: 18) says that they symbolise the flesh and bones of enemies, which the protective powers can use to bring about their destruction.

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storma were thrown down the hillside at night. This was performed by the Lamayuru komnyer because, as they put it, the Hemis lama did not ‘know’ this ritual. Every household will sponsor a skurims from time to time, if there is a capable practitioner present in the village, simply for their general protection. There is a family of hereditary onpos at Sumdo, a tiny hamlet about a day’s walk down the valley, and the elder of these periodically tours the area to perform such rituals. The Sumdo onpo arrived during my stay in Khangltakh, for example, to perform a shesnying. This involved the creation of chodpa, the standard dough offerings found in Buddhist rituals, against which he lent pictures of Atisa, other great lamas and Buddhist deities. It also involved the creation of male and female storma, four rows of seven small figures (the shesnying themselves) and 100 small storma for the gyazhi ceremony, which formed part of this ritual.14 At the end of the ceremony Tsewang carried all the storma outside the house and flung them down the slope, Meme Sonam following with a brush, while everyone else shouted ‘gya-hor’, the cry normally used to banish evil spirits. The explanation was that the ritual was ‘for everyone in the house’ and that the shesnying were bele that were flung out to ensure that people would not get ill, that snow would fall in the winter, that the lu’s illnesses would be avoided and that the gegs and dre, the evil spirits, would be exorcised. A special form of gyazhi, the word applied to the strongest exorcist rites, these were particularly useful for casting out the evil spirits, Paljor explained. There are many different skurims, Paljor told me, some specifically directed at ensuring snow, others for clear weather in the Spring, but all of them for curing and averting sickness. The Sumdo onpo, he told me, was Drigungpa and so he used Drigungpa chos in his skurims, but he was often asked to perform rituals in households belonging to other sects, including those in Lingshed, which are all Gelukpa. His is trakpe las, strong or powerful work, he told me, which involves bele phangches (exorcism), dos tangches (specifically to give protection against illnesses), zhing shakhs (for the household) and shinon (a very trakpo ritual, good for warding off all sorts of evil).15 These sorts of skurims are also performed by the Nyingma and some Drigungpa tantric lamas but 14

Gyazhi literally means four hundred. They explained to me that this comprised 100 storma, 100 chonme (butter lamps), 100 tinglo (small discs of dough) and 100 changsbu (rolls of dough pressed between the fingers). 15 Tucci (1980: 176-7) explains that the mdos ritual is to give protection, in contrast to the gto (i.e. storma), which are exorcist rituals.

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the Gelukpa lamas do not undertake this trakpe las, he said. The Sumdo onpo, himself, gave me a similar explanation: the Gelukpa monks specialise in zhiwa, practices like abstinence from meat and chang, and reading the chos but they shun rituals involving gyazhi. A monk from Lingshed even claimed to me that in his monastery they do not do any gyazhi at all. While it is clear from Mills’s account that they do perform gyazhi, he does note (2003: 171-72) that there are other ‘wrathful’ rites which would breach monastic ethics and for which the Lingshed villagers, therefore, have to call in a different sort of practitioner. There is, thus, a tension between forms of practice here, the more ethical zhiwa practices performed by the monks and the more efficacious, ‘strong’ rituals demanded by the villagers to protect themselves against pernicious supernatural influences. For the villagers, an important component of their ritual practices is, thus, determined by overwhelmingly pragmatic concerns, which have little to do with monastic practice. For them, the hierarchies of Buddhist practice are not necessarily the best answer to the perils of supernatural chaos and they have no hesitation in calling in a skilled onpo if the komnyer is unwilling to perform the necessary ritual.

Hierarchy and protection It is not, however, that the monks’ rituals are without efficacy. In the fourth month of the Tibetan year, the villagers perform the bumskor, during which a procession of Buddhist texts is taken from the temples and carried all the way around the perimeter of the village, including the hamlet of Machu. The symbolism of the ascendancy of the chos over the natural forces in the valley and the protection they can afford the inhabitants is a recurrent theme in village rituals. Buddhist monuments, such as chorten, are dotted around the village and its fields, especially along the boundaries of cultivated areas and at the points where the village first becomes visible to the approaching traveller. According to Mills, the bumskor is one of several rituals that involves the re-ordering of village space, ‘the auspicious ordering of the natural environment as an adjunct of the social order.’ (2003: 185) In the weeks following the harvest a skangsol is sponsored by each household, an important ritual which takes at least two days and is said, in Photoksar, to require a monk or a good onpo. Its purpose is generally said to be to atone for the killing of the small creatures, which has

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inevitably taken place during the harvest, and to avoid the wrath of any local deities who might have been angered by these activities. The emphasis of the Photoksar villagers when describing these rituals to me was, however, rather more on banishing the harmful local spirits than atonement for sin or purification. For this purpose they asked for a gyazhi to be performed at the end of the skangsol. The Hemis komnyer did so, but unwillingly. Mills (2003: 189-196) explains the skangsol ritual as centred on the purification of space. It involves the act of dulwa, taming, which separates chthonic forces from religious, establishing each in their place. Harmful influences are exorcised, but this is not just a matter of protection through the negation of polluted or impure substances, it also involves the re-ordering of space through the purification of territory. Such purification flows downwards from the shrine in the form of blessings, which consecrate those things within the ken of the shrine. The bumskor, similarly, makes fertility the object of purification and augmentation and in so doing places the fertile below the (religious) sources of purification and blessing. In this way, it cures the disorder that may have resulted if the balance between religion and fecundity has become confused in any part of the village (2003: 181-85). This, he says, is similar to the effects of the chams, monastic dances based on the structure of the mandala, which, he suggests, re-order ritual domains around a sacred centre. During these processes, non-Buddhist elements are incorporated into Buddhist hierarchies as deities and spirits bound to protect the religion. According to this account of ritual efficacy, therefore, the villagers’ (and monks’) pragmatic needs for protection against harm and disorder are answered by rituals of purification. These are conducted according to an idiom of re-ordering which takes the form of a vertical Buddhist cosmological hierarchy. In Photoksar, however, it is the mandala, with its idiom of outside-inside, that is more appropriate to describe the villagers’ views of their supernatural world, although this image is never explicitly referred to. For them, danger lies not so much in disruption to a religious hierarchy as in the failure to keep the forces of evil outside their domestic spaces. Their descriptions of the skangsol and other skurims rituals centre on the straightforward need to rid their domestic spaces of evil influences, which must be banished outside the house and village. There is an order established by such rites, which connects divinity with fertility, but it involves the protection of the fertile in a safe internal space guarded by the powerful lha against the evil numina.

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During the related rites, the protectors are enjoined to guard these spaces and also not to harm those within them. The theories of Dollfus and others, including Mills, who emphasise the existence of a cosmological hierarchy must, I would suggest, be assessed in this light. The Photoksar villagers did talk to me about three realms and they described the stanglha as the place where the lha live. However, most of the local spirits have a physical presence in the village which is rooted in their shrines or physical features in the landscape, or associated with particular households and their members in the case of the phalha, which does not always accord with this hierarchy. The tripartite scheme places the sadags in the middle and the fertile lu at the bottom. However, the sadags inhabit the high pastures, way above the village, its temples and lhato. The pang gong, associated with the fertile lu, can be placed on the roof of a house in Photoksar, even above the chod khang, and the yullha and phalha, whose lhato can be at the highest points in the village, are just as much associated with fertility as are the lu. The spirit world does not represent a neat model of hierarchical order with divinity above fertility. Rather, I would suggest, it represents a model of centre and periphery tied to physical features of the landscape. Both Dollfus and Srinivas suggest that an idea of unity among villagers, as individuals and households, can be linked to the symbolic presence of the yullha. In Photoksar, however, Shpungsal has a geographically limited presence, which only extends to the territory within the purview of his lhato. It is for this reason that the hamlet of Machu, out of his sight down the valley, has its own separate lha.16 The villagers incorporate Machu into the village as part of a complex web of social and political relations but the two yullha, in fact, symbolise the physical separation between the two parts of the village. The spirit world that surrounds Photoksar is, therefore, characterised by a sense of outside-inside, defined by the sight of the yullha. Like other protective spirits, when properly appeased, he creates a safe space for the villagers. The domains and powers of these spirits are firmly linked to physical space. The presence of the spirits, therefore, defines the physical boundaries within which fertility and the biological continuity of the community is possible, but it is an area structured by the geographical features of the landscape and the placement of the lhato

16 Mills describes seven yullha in Lingshed, who are each associated with certain areas of the village where their lhato are built (2003: 151-53).

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within it, rather than by any cosmological hierarchy. Beyond these spaces of security the spirit world is overwhelmingly chaotic. It is a disordered universe teeming with a multitude of malevolent influences in constant battle with the stronger protectors, who turn up unexpectedly to prey on the weak and unwary, despite their best ritual endeavours. Even the protective lha are troublesome creatures, liable to cause harm, as well as offering protection.

The moral order The activities of the spirits might, therefore, be re-ordered during the Buddhist rituals discussed by Mills, but even then they do not provide a template for the ideas of harmony and solidarity which dominate interpersonal relations. The lha are, in fact, supremely uninterested in the moral behaviour of the villagers. During all the processes of conflict resolution described in the last chapter and in the discussions that surrounded them there was never any suggestion that conflict angers the lha or disturbs the cosmos. At first I simply assumed that my lack of language skills meant I was missing some of the sense of the conversations. On the other hand, people were very keen to ensure that I understood the significance of the lha in other contexts, during the sangs rituals and New Year celebrations, for example. Eventually, when I tried to ask directly about the spirits in the context of conflict or processes of dispute resolution people would simply look at me as if I had failed to understand a basic point. ‘No, this does not concern the lha,’ was the normal response.17 Finally it became clear that the lha are not involved or invoked in any way during processes of dispute management. The resolution of conflict requires the restoration of harmony through the enactment of respect towards other villagers, symbolised in the giving of khatags and yal, but not through any ritual directed towards the spirits. Whilst the local lha are overwhelmingly responsible for fertility and the biological continuity of the community, therefore, and while they demand regular propitiation with appropriate offerings, they take 17 Kaplanian (1987) suggests that a certain class of lha, the gyapo, punish theft with madness, but this was never mentioned in Photoksar. Dollfus (2003: 15) suggests that the lu cause damage as a result of the breach of the yuli trims, village customs, but this is a reference to activities that specifically offend the lu, such as polluting their shrines. Hemis Shukpachan, where she undertook fieldwork, is renowned for its sensitive lu.

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no interest in inter-personal relations. It matters not one bit to them whether the villagers are living harmonious or disordered lives. It is a series of human relationships that defines the community as the place of social interaction. A host of complex relations between households and individuals ideally produces a peaceful, cooperative community. This order is, for the villagers, vital to the successful survival of their community, but it is wholly unconnected to the activities of the lha. There is a separation between two realms here, that of the spirits connected with the physical fortunes of the villagers, their livestock and environment, and that of the political and moral relations between the villagers and their households. For the villagers this separation is simply conceptualised as what does or does not concern the lha. However, it is a separation that also relates to the structural organisation of the community: the villagers’ participation in most social and political activities is organised by the dral and by household and yulpa membership. These are the organisations that constitute the village as a place of social and political interaction. By contrast, the activities by which the villagers venerate their lha and protect themselves from supernatural harm, including the way they move around it, are organised by the phaspun and by reference to the physical placement of the lhato, a different set of organising structures. As I have discussed at greater length elsewhere (Pirie 2006a), the spirit world of the Photoksar villagers accords with Obeyesekere’s account of ‘pre-literate’ religions. According to his model such religions are ‘non-ethicized’, that is, characterised by the absence of a notion of sin (1968: 12-14). The associated salvation beliefs, that is, do not incorporate a conception of sin as violation of religious ethics. In such societies there is, therefore, a separation between the secular morality that underpins the norms of social life and the ideas connected with religion.18 In Photoksar the lha, for example, are not concerned with inter-personal relations within the village or with the ethics of the villagers’ conduct towards one another.19 According to Obeyesekere (1968: 12), it is primarily world religions that have ‘ethicized’ religious life, offering accounts of the supernatural which reinforce the demands

18

He also distinguishes between pre-literate religions that include, or not, a notion of reincarnation, but that distinction is not relevant to my analysis. The Photoksar villagers’ notion of reincarnation is firmly connected with Buddhism. 19 Fürer-Haimendorf’s survey of non-Hindu peoples in South Asia supports this model (1967: 216).

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of what comes to be construed as a religious morality. The secular moral world is thus transformed and associated with religious concerns. Tibetan Buddhism is one of these religions, its moral scheme being linked to its eschatological theory: under the law of karma an individual’s moral activities in this life substantially determine his reincarnation in the next. What is significant about Photoksar is that the people maintain a secular morality despite their long conversion to Buddhism. They have accepted the law of karma and the idea that certain quotidian activities affect the fate of their souls in the afterlife, but it is a different set of activities that are condemned as morally ‘bad’, in that they adversely affect the social order of the community. The reasons for this, I suggest, lie in the distinctly physical influence they continue to attribute to the inhabitants of the spirit world and the indifference of these numina to the moral order of the community. The Buddhist deities and the powers of the lamas have largely been assimilated by them into their amoral spirit world where their rites assist in the constant battle against demonic forces. Like the lha, however, they are not regarded as having an impact on their realm of social order.

Buddhist morality While it should be no surprise that the moral attitudes expressed by the villagers and their condemnation of anger should not be connected, by them, with the activities of the lha, capricious, dangerous and greedy as they are, what of the more ethical practices and principles offered by the monks and their zhiwa practices? Although the Buddhist rituals carried out in the village are largely associated with the veneration of local protectors, the religion also offers straightforward schemes of morality of relevance to the laity. Most important of these are the ‘three poisons’, duk sum, of anger, jealousy, and ignorance said to underlie all immoral behaviour. The ten prohibitions, mi gewa rchu, and the mi chos, the sixteen moral rules, also contain practical injunctions for the daily lives of the religion’s adherents.20 The Photoksar villagers were mostly aware of the basic Buddhist precepts while the more literate, such as Paljor, could recite the longer lists. Moreover, they have unequivocally accepted the principle of karma, whereby their actions in this life deter-

20 French (1995) regards these moral rules as the basis for the legal codes, on which she founds much of her analysis of Tibetan law.

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mine the nature of their rebirth. The Buddhist schemes of morality enumerate the sins that have karmic effects. The villagers never, however, made an express connection between the Buddhist schemes of morality and the Buddhist law of karma, on the one hand, and their own moral condemnation of fighting and anger, on the other. Just as they conceptually separate their moral concerns from the activities of the lha, so do they regard these concerns as falling into a different category from the moral injunctions of Buddhism, which relate to the long path to enlightenment. In order to make sense of these conceptual distinctions we can turn back to the tension between the pragmatic needs of the villagers for trakpe rituals and the zhiwa practices offered by the Gelukpa monks. From the villagers’ point of view some monks simply do not ‘know’ the more powerful rites. However, from the point of view of the more orthodox Buddhist practitioners many of the laity in Ladakh place too much belief in their local lha. The Hemis komnyer in Photoksar, for example, repeated the opinions expressed by the Dalai Lama that too many minor lha are revered and allowed to possess the lhamos and lhabas, to whom the people then go for advice. Many of these are merely spirits wandering in the bardo which have not yet found a re-birth, he said. The Photoksar villagers are too afraid of the yullha’s capacity to cause harm and it is only the people’s beliefs that create this power. One of the monks at Spituk, a Gelukpa monastery, told me that the local lha should be treated like rokspa, friends and helpers, and they are not suitable for full veneration as Buddhist deities. As we walked past the lhato above his monastery he made a point of raising his hand and giving the common greeting ‘jule’, as opposed to the more reverential gesture with both hands clasped, which people use for religious monuments.21 Despite this disapproval, however, all the gonpas have lhato for their local deities and these are generally prominent on the hills above the main monastery buildings. Moreover, no-one was prepared to discount the importance of these lha completely. When I specifically mentioned the yullha, the Hemis komnyer was quick to reassure me that this lha was a good one. Even in the urban centres in Ladakh, where there is a greater proportion of educated people who self-consciously follow more orthodox forms of Buddhist practice, every house has a

21

Mills (2003: 228-31) also describes the sangs as an offering to local deities which is regarded as a veneration by the laity but is construed by monks as encouraging the rokspa spirits to remain compliant.

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lhato for their phalha. Most also have a pang gong for the lu.22 Sonam Phuntsog explained that most monks and some lay people consider these onpos’ chos, particularly the gyazhi, to be harmful for Buddhism and do not want to have an onpo in their family because theirs is ‘bad’ work. His own view was that the onpo do the more ‘powerful’ gyazhi which are ‘dangerous’ because, while good practitioners can change the natures of the evil spirits, that is, subjugate them, the less skilful will leave them unreformed but strengthened in this world, where they will pose a renewed threat to humans. However, many of the monks do perform the gyazhi, and the Lingshed monk who had expressed disapproval of the ritual was not prepared to say that it was not a nangpe (Buddhist) chos.23 There is a narrative here that expresses a hierarchy in ritual practices and in the pantheon of spirits to whom they are directed, which echoes the hierarchy proposed by Gellner. As Mills (2003) points out, however, the ordinary monks are not able to rise above the influence of the lha. Only the incarnates can do so. The Photoksar villagers, similarly, regard the highest Buddhist lamas as being the most powerful to deal with their troublesome local spirits. Togldan Rinpoche from Phyang, was, for example, called upon by the Photoksar villagers when it was thought that Shpungsal, their yullha, was causing trouble. The lhaba went into trance in his presence and the Rinpoche was able, the villagers told me, to enjoin him to behave more favourably.24 The villagers regard the high lamas as the practitioners with the greatest powers to deal with their problematic lha.25 The ordinary monks are far 22

The head of one household in Leh described to me the day-long chos which is performed to accompany the erection of new namgo and sago, the dogs’ and sheep’s skulls filled with the precious objects said to protect the household members and their livestock. But, he complained, it was difficult to get the lamas to undertake this chos. ‘Only the Nyingma lamas ‘know’ it’, he told me, ‘because it is really an onpos’ practice’. 23 This tension between forms of practice is not particular to Ladakh. A ritual to prevent malevolent spirits from sending hailstorms was carried out by Nyingmapa lamas in Tibet, for example, although one of them spoke of it as ‘dirty business’, non-virtuous activity designed to harm the spirits contrary to the dictates of Buddhism (Klein and Khetsun Sangpo 1997: 539). 24 I was subsequently able to discuss this issue with the Rinpoche in Leh and, far from belittling the villagers’ superstitious beliefs in the powers of their lha, he said he was pleased to hear that there had been no further trouble since his visit. This meant, in practice, that after a death in one of the khangba closest to the lhato the family could remain in their house where they had previously been thought to be in danger from the lha. 25 It is one of the central contentions of Samuel (1993) that the higher tantric practitioners have much in common with the local ritual practitioners in Tibet, as he

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less efficacious in this regard. They simply do not ‘know’ many of the rituals that the villagers need. They are, therefore, inferior to both lamas and onpos, in different ways. Examining this relationship, Mills suggests that both village and monastery exist within the power of local gods and their associated cosmologies, which is why the relationship between local deities and Buddhist practitioners cannot be regarded in terms of a simple hierarchy of power (2003: 163). It is only the incarnate who can implement Buddhism’s ascendancy over local domains by effecting the ritual transformation of places, merging them with a divine realm (2003: 259-62, 30507). Ordinary monks are embedded in their physical environment and do not have the authority to effect changes to the spirit world. There is, thus, a tension between the static and dependable world of monastic ritual and the fluid and capricious world of local chthonic deities within which they work and over whom they maintain a tenuous ascendancy. If a monastery (or any locality) is cut off from higher sources of institutionalised power, the local spirits can rise up and take back their former powers, demanding again to be propitiated in the old ways. Reciprocity between man and god, rather than the ascendancy of Buddhism over local forces, then becomes the dominant relationship (2003: 319-22). According to Mills, therefore, the order of the Buddhist cosmology, which is imposed on local space through the skangsol ritual, is only a contingent one, dependent on the continual intervention of ritual practitioners and, ultimately, the authority of the incarnate lama. Without them, local deities again become ascendant, in a more chaotic and divided landscape. This is the context in which, I would suggest, the Photoksar villagers are acutely aware that they live. Safety can be provided by local ritual practitioners, either monks or onpos, if they are able to perform the powerful exorcist rituals which invoke the protectors to banish the evil spirits. In cases of great danger, however, it is the incarnate lama who must be called upon. The more ethical ritual practices of the monks, particularly those of the Gelukpa sect, are only of limited benefit. In a village like Photoksar, therefore, the ritual order of monastic Buddhism and its moral codes are largely irrelevant to local cosmological concerns. They are part of the more ethical religious practices which the villagers admire, but do not regard as efficacious to deal with their own troublesome numina.

explains elsewhere (2005: 11-13).

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This distinction between forms of ritual practice, in terms of their purpose and efficacy, is the same distinction that the villagers make between their realms of morality. The moral attitudes by which the villagers judge inter-personal relations are all oriented towards the community. Individuals are expected to co-operate with others, maintain good relations and ensure that community life proceeds smoothly. The ideal individual is patient, calm, obedient, helpful and generous. All of these qualities concern an individual’s social relations with others and the consequences of his actions for the community. It is a pragmatic scheme, according to which individuals are judged more by the consequences of their actions for the community than by any sense of personal degeneracy. The content of this scheme is very similar to that of the Buddhist moral codes, the duk sum and gewa rchu, but the latter have a different significance in their eyes. They express the laws of karma, which determine the fate of the soul in the after-life, not the harmony of the village community. It is not, therefore, that the rituals performed by the monks and their zhiwa practices are irrelevant to the villagers. While it is true that the philosophical content of large swathes of religious practice is only accessible to monks well advanced in their studies, lay people rely upon religious specialists, including onpos, to perform such rituals on their behalf. The villagers send their sons into the monasteries and support them there, they make substantial donations to the monasteries and sponsor rituals, which ensure blessings and protection. Contrary to Stein’s (1972) depiction of Buddhist practice being ‘inaccessible’ to ordinary people, in Photoksar all the laity recite mantras and the literate men participate in the periodic reading of the Buddhist texts, the chos sil (photo 32). Before going to sleep and on waking, everyone performs the standard three prostrations and recites the skyabdro prayer by which individuals ‘take refuge’ in the Buddha, the Dharma and the Sangha. Older members spend moments of leisure reciting the om mani padme hum mantra with their prayer beads or spinning prayer wheels. This, they explain, is to increase their good karma, which is particularly important at this time of their lives. There is, therefore, a set of ethical practices which the villagers associate with the laws of karma. Killing, alcohol drinking and smoking have negative karmic consequences, while prayers, prostrations, pilgrimage and donations to the monasteries are seen as having a countervailing beneficial effect. These are the activities which the lamas enjoin them to avoid or undertake and which are exemplified in the zhiwa practices

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of the monks. This is a different set of concerns from those of their secular moral realm, by which the villagers strive to uphold the social order of their community. Killing and drinking have karmic consequences, while pride, sloth and antagonism affect the order of the village.

Morality and the spirits There are, for the Photoksar villagers, three different sets of concerns and three associated realms of village activity: the laws of karma determine the fate of the soul in the after-life and require ethical practice, according to the gewa rchu; the lha directly affect the physical fortunes of the villagers and require a host of propitiation and avoidance practices, many of which can only be undertaken by specialist ritual practitioners; the maintenance of the community as a realm of political and moral order requires cooperation amongst individuals and, above all, the avoidance of anger and conflict. The higher Buddhist deities and the incarnate lamas have superior powers to intervene directly to assist a soul in the afterlife. They also have the ability to deal effectively with the inhabitants of the amoral spirit world. By contrast, although the rites and deities invoked by the ordinary monks help to ensure a favourable rebirth and assist in the constant battle against demonic forces, they are far less efficacious in this regard. Nevertheless, the twin objects of ritual practice remain distinct for the villagers and neither directly impinges on their realm of secular morality. It would be easy, therefore, to read into certain activities and discourses in Photoksar the influence of the practices, principles and cosmologies of Buddhism. The pragmatic need for cosmological protection can be expressed through the esoteric idioms of Buddhist ritual hierarchies. However, as Mills says (2003: 198), it is problematic to view the performance of skangsol rites as simply being ‘about’ Buddhist values. They are ritual actions, designed with contextual, rather than universalist, goals in mind. Each ritual is located in a particular physical context, which embodies the pragmatic needs of those who inhabit it. Similarly, the anger that the villagers criticise in one another can be regarded as one of the fundamental Buddhist poisons and the cause of negative karma. However, meaning is context dependent and what may be a legitimate interpretation in the case of certain classes of people, the monks and educated elite, for instance, can make no sense in the

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epistemological world of another, such as that of the lay villagers. The condemnation of anger can be interpreted as an expression of the duk sum on the part of many Tibetans, but anger is simply regarded as tsokpo and dangerous to the community in the eyes of the Photoksar villagers. I would, therefore, suggest, that the ways in which certain authors have attributed different aspects of the religious, supernatural and cosmological worlds with social significance become problematic if read too widely. The moral and ritual content of religious texts is not regarded by the Photoksar villagers as having any relevance for the moral and political organisation of the village. Nor do the activities of the lha or the ordering of the supernatural realm impinge directly upon this sphere of activity. The social world of the Photoksar villagers, that which is upheld by their moral injunctions, is a secular, non-cosmological realm, of no concern to the lha and of little relevance to the fate of the soul in the after-life. As the villagers go about their daily lives this separation of realms is, for the most part, imperceptible. Some of their activities are directed towards the lha, others are not. They might recite mantras, toss food to the spirits and discuss a recent case of conflict on the same social occasion. However, there is one time of the year when the underlying tensions between the realm of the lha and that of the villagers’ social organisation are highlighted. This is Losar, the New Year festival. The events which occurred on one occasion that I participated in the Photoksar Losar also highlighted the strained relations that exist between the villagers and external forces, in this case the powerful Buddhist establishments. Such tensions, I would suggest, are intrinsic to the web of order that the Photoksar villagers maintain within their community. It is this festival to which I turn in the next chapter.

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LOSAR Losar is the height of the villagers’ ritual calendar in Photoksar and celebrates the passing of the old and onset of the new year. Within the nine days (and more) of dances, rituals and sheer enjoyment there are exemplified, in subtle ways, the dynamic between the social organisation of the village and the inhabitants of the spirit world, an underlying tension between the yulpa and the resident monks, and a self-conscious suspicion of modernity and resistence to change. It is generally agreed that the central themes of the Losar celebrations are the chasing away of the old year, with its bad or inauspicious elements, and the welcoming in of the new (Rigal 1985:95; Dollfus 1987: 64). Kaplanian (1981: 277), for example, says, ‘Le Nouvel An ladakhi est réellement une deuxième naissance où le groupe rejette l’ancien et accueille le nouveau’.1 Similar interpretations were offered by a number of my informants in Leh. The rituals chase out the bad elements of the past year and welcome the good of the new. Specifically they are intended to ensure that people do not become ill, that livestock does not die, that snow falls, babies are born and everyone flourishes. Losar is undoubtedly a rite of passage, from the old year to the new, involving the deliberate exorcism of the evil spirits which threaten life. It also involves a symbolic denial of the processes of ageing and death, a feature of rite of passage rituals throughout the world. However, the symbolism of evil and age that pervades the festival, that which is to be chased away with the past year, is surrounded by music, dancing, eating and drinking, masquerade and pantomime. There is a constant juxtaposition of the forces of age and sickness with symbols of youth and fertility. In this, I would suggest, it is possible to detect a subtle challenge to the established social order. It occurs at several points during the festival, particularly in the more exuberant activities of the youth.

1 The Ladakhi New Year is really a second birth when the group rejects the old and welcomes the new (my trans.)

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The events of Losar Losar, itself, runs a course of nine days in Photoksar, as it used to elsewhere, beginning on the first day of the eleventh month, but preceded by a number of preliminary events. There are significant differences in the form that the celebrations take here from those now found in other Ladakhi villages, but most of the important events and the significant aspects of the festival as I describe them, seem to have been present in the celebrations that occurred throughout the region.2 The Galden Ngamchod commemorates the day on which Tsongkapa, founder of the Gelukpa sect of Buddhism, achieved enlightenment. It is observed on the twenty-fifth day of every month and is not, therefore, directly linked to Losar, but its occurrence in the tenth month marks the start of the celebrations. In Photoksar this is the first day of the meto, the bonfire lit after dusk by the boys of the village. On this and subsequent nights, up to and including the twenty-ninth, a group of boys visits each village house, collecting flat bread, which they divide up between them while they warm themselves and sing songs around the fire. The most important song describes Bagatam, a mythical figure who journeys into Ladakh from the mouth of the Indus and who needs to be banished along with the evils of the old year. On the last two days, burning branches from the fire are flung down the hill to cries of ‘gya khor!’ the imprecation with which evil spirits are always banished, here directed at Bagatam. There is a considerable party atmosphere around the bonfire which develops into a general round of singing and dancing, along with the telling of licentious jokes, at which point any watching women become embarrassed and run away. The annual changing of the juniper on the shrines of the phalha deities takes place on the twenty-ninth. Formerly, there was a blood sacrifice at these shrines, which were smeared with blood and decorated with skulls and horns. However, following the intervention of Togdan Rinpoche, this practice has been replaced by a simple purification ritual, normally carried out by the local komnyer. As part of this sangs, a dough ibex figure, flat bread, flour, chang and juniper are offered to the spirits, as they are repeatedly throughout Losar. 2 The historical and mythological elements of Losar have been discussed by Rigal (1985), Kaplanian (1981) and Brauen (1980), along with the reasons it is celebrated in the eleventh, not the first month, of the year. Dollfus (1987) concentrates on the festival’s affirmation of internal unity and social relations. I participated in the Photoksar Losar twice, in 1999 and 2002.

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On the afternoon of the thirtieth, a large plate of food, including meat and offal from the yak killed by every household specially for Losar, is taken up the hill to be offered to the dead ancestors, the shimi tsalma (literally, meal for the dead). A smaller plate, with a little of each food, is placed on a rocky outcrop with a recitation to ‘the ancestors who have died’ and the imprecation ‘khye-khar’, which always accompanies offerings made to placate troublesome ghosts. The remaining food is then fried up over a fire and enjoyed by the participants along with jugs of chang. As in so many of the offerings made to the numina of the village, the element of sharing between men and spirits is strong. In the evening each household hosts a stonzang, a dinner for the other members of its phaspun. There is a round of tea and chang, ending with meat from the Losar yak. The eldest man makes an elaborate food offering to the local spirits, placing a piece of bread and meat, sprinkled with flour and chang, on a plate for the spirit of the hearth and tossing more flour and chang into the air and onto the ground for the benign spirits of the earth, as well as the more unwelcome ghosts. These gatherings, therefore, affirm social relations within the phaspun, the group associated with life-cycle events. However, at the end of the meal, the children, together with a few adults, make balls of dough which they fling at each other, boys against girls. At no other event is this sort of behaviour expected, or even tolerated. This is not quite an act of subversion on the part of the children, but an unusual licence to waste food and temporarily to step out of line. The first day of Losar itself, the first day of the eleventh month, is devoted to the veneration of the higher Buddhist deities and to a celebration of the family within the household. In the morning one man from each house takes offerings up to each of the two small temples above the village. The Hemis komnyer resident in 1999 disapproved of meat and chang and so the villagers brought only tea and bread to his temple. Meat and chang, more precious foods, are otherwise the norm. Later in the day more offerings are prepared and taken by the women of the household to the Buddhist deities and household spirits in their respective shrine rooms. That done, the mother of the household goes through a small ritual, by which she greets every member of the family with a changskyan of chang. In Khangltakh, Morup was followed by Api Rigzin in this. One of the men then takes the changskyan to pay his respects to the onpo and the goba and later in the afternoon all the villagers go to the goba’s house for a party with food and drink, singing and dancing.

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The new year is, therefore, welcomed with a propitiation of the protector deities and an affirmation of family and phaspun relations and of the central, albeit subordinate, position of the mother. It is also an affirmation of the social and political order of the village, as the onpo and goba are complimented and the latter hosts his party. It is later the same evening that elements of evil and misfortune are brought into the midst of the celebrations with the appearance of the first of the ritual figures. The festival now enters a new phase as the community is brought into direct contact with the forces of the spirit world. On this evening the two Babar make their entrance. These roles are played by two of the village men, an annual obligation which rotates between all households. The men are dressed in heavy yaks’ hair carpets, associated with dirt, and wear plaited crowns of straw around their caps. They also put smudges of soot on their faces. People told me that until around 1990 the Babar used to blacken their faces completely and represented storma, the ritual offerings that are flung out at the end of many rituals to banish the evil spirits. The Babar, acting as such storma themselves, would visit each household during Losar, put a foot on top of the stove, something that would normally be considered an extreme and dangerous insult to the resident deities, recite a litany of illnesses and declare that they were carrying them all away with their black horns. Then they would run out of the door, while the household members would shout ‘gya khor’ after them and whistle. Sometimes people even threw stones, they told me, as they do at other storma. Now the Babar do not blacken their faces completely and do not represent storma themselves. One informant told me that the highest lamas had disapproved of this practice. However, people still say that the Babar are ‘expelled’ (sha-de) at the end of Losar, when they take a ritual bath and change into fine clothes. Until that time they unequivocally represent forces of evil. On the first day of Losar the Babar simply make an appearance in the centre of the village by the mani, the small central temple and prayer flag, with the mon (musicians) to orchestrate an hour or two of singing and dancing. A similar party led by the Babar and principally attended by the young men, who dance with considerable enthusiasm and indecorum, ends each of the subsequent days of Losar. On this, the first day, the Babar then go to be entertained at the house of the goba. The second day of Losar sees the appearance of the three other ritual figures, the Api-Meme, grandmother and grandfathers, all played by village men. The two Meme wear sheepskin jackets turned inside out and

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carry bows and arrows. The single Api wears a black hat, formerly standard dress for old women who had given up their peraks. The Api also wears a baby’s coat tied to his back, ‘to symbolise the bog’, the sheepskin back-covering worn by married women. He carries a branch of juniper and a long stick which he rides like a horse, using the juniper as a whip. At other times he uses the juniper like a broom, sweeping away the dust on the ground and finding it on other people’s clothes. Like the Babar the Api-Meme are expelled on the last day of Losar, when they ceremonially fling away their arrows, juniper and stick and change their clothes. One of the villagers explained to me that as old and decrepit figures they represent the passing year. While the Babar represent the ill effects of the evil spirits, therefore, the Api-Meme symbolise the natural, biological processes of ageing and decay. Both cosmological evil and natural decay are, thus, brought right into the centre of the celebrations, where they remain until the ninth day. Like the Babar, however, on the first day of their appearance, the Api-Meme go with the Babar and Mon to be entertained by the goba. On all the following days the Babar and Api-Meme are at the centre of the celebrations, the Babar acting as masters of ceremonies and the Api-Meme as their assistants, always accompanied by the musicians. They visit each household at least once, where they are entertained to a meal. The Babar sit at the head of the dralgo, while the Api-Meme act as hosts for the party, pouring out the chang and serving food. They also symbolically steal a piece of food from every household. In this way the Babar and Api-Meme circulate throughout the village, and bring their representations of evil and decay into the centre of each household. On the third day, when the new moon makes its appearance, there are special celebrations, for which the women dress in their best clothes and turquoise peraks. In the morning the whole village waits for the appearance of the village god, the yullha, who has entered into possession of the lhaba. He arrives, dancing around and waving a white scarf, and addresses the assembled villagers, giving them instructions. On one occasion these concerned the way they should treat dead bodies, which were interpreted, for the villagers, by the komnyer. The lhaba continued to rant, more or less comprehensibly, while the musicians began to play, eventually dancing round the circle of villagers, who all bowed in front of him, before running off to collapse as he came out of his trance (photo 26). The villagers then all proceeded to the fields above the village where the young men competed in horse races. On the fifth to the eighth days there are dances for the whole village in the afternoon. The first is led by the goba and his wife, who have been

TERMINALHISTORIESANDARTHURIANSOLUTIONS



1. The Potala palace, seat of the Dalai Lamas’ Ganden Potrang government in central Tibet between the seventeenth and twentieth centuries. 1936. 2. Tibetan government officials entering the Potala for the enthronement of the Dalai Lama in 1940.



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3. Leh palace, seat of the Ladakhi kings until the mid-nineteenth century, which still dominates the old town. 4. The mosque, at one end of the main street in Leh below the palace.

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5. Ridzong monastery. 6. The winter cham festival at Likir monastery.





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7 7. The route from the Shi Shi La to Photoksar. 8. A lhato protecting travellers on a mountain path. 9. The gorge between Wanla and Photoksar. 10. Descending from the Sengge La towards Nyeraks and Lingshed. 8

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11 11. Photoksar. 12. The hamlet of Machu, physically separate but socially integrated into the social community of the village. 13. Photoksar.

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14. Meme Sonam reading a Buddhist text. 15. Paljor carving a block for a prayer flag. 16. Meme Sonam pouring tea. 17. Choron collecting water from the frozen river. 18. Yangzes washing clothes.

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19. A yak herder high in the mountains during the summer. 20. Threshing with yaks. 21. Orsal and his brother learning to winnow. 22. Before the first ploughing Paljor reads a Buddhist text next to an offering for the local spirits.

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23. Changing the juniper on the lhato, from where the yullha protects the village. 24. The komnyer performing a sangs at the lhato. 25. Gyaltsen tending the lhato for the phalha.

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26 27 26. The lhaba possessed by the yullha. 27. The bele which are to be thrown out by the Babar. 28. The boys’ alamdar interrupting the girls’ patimo.

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29 29. Village women dancing in age order. 30. The onpo and the amchi at the head of the line of dancers. 31. The onpo at the head of the dral next to the chang.

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32 32. The chos-sil. 33. One of the older village women with her prayer wheel. 34. Orsal taking leave of the goba before departing for Lamayuru.

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35. Village women listen to Chado Rinpoche’s teachings.

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36. Chado Rinpoche performing a skurims in Photoksar. 37. The lama placing a pungpa in a new lhato.





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38. Morup and Api Rigzin with one of Morup’s sons.

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39. Khangltakh, painted white, in the snow. 40. Chortens above the village.





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41. A seventeenth century document exempting two Photoksar households from taxes after Deldan Namgyal’s campaigns.

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invited to dance by the Babar and the Api-Meme. They are led around by the Api, brandishing his juniper, and are complimented with khatags by the other villagers. The next dance is led by the panch, the next by the membar and the next, on subsequent days, by the onpo and the amchi. Thus, the socially important figures in the village are honoured in these dances and they are expected to reciprocate by giving money to all the ritual figures of Losar. On a later day it is the newly-wed couples who are asked by the Api-Meme to lead the dances and to be honoured with white scarves. There may also be one dance primarily made up of the young and unmarried. Thus, there is a conjunction of the forces of ageing with those of youth and fertility. The latter are celebrated but have to pay tribute to the former. The evening parties at the mani are also lead by the Babar and ApiMeme. These are more enthusiastic and exuberant events, at which the dancers are not under the constraints of decorum which attend the more formal afternoon dances. All the festivities by which the villagers welcome in and celebrate the coming of the new year are, thus, hosted and directed by the symbolic figures who represent the forces of age and the evil of the past year, which are to be exorcised at the end of Losar. The humans, those alive and well, the young and fertile, are brought into direct contact and under the influence of the old and the evil, who positively encourage their celebrations. Their vitality and high spirits are encouraged by the forces of degeneration. On the fifth to eighth days these dances are preceded by displays, ltanmo, by the boys and girls of the village. The girls, known as patimo, dress up in the embroidered shawls their mothers wear for festivals. They cover their faces with thin scarves and dance under the directions of the Babar. This was explained to me as being something that the girls do ‘to please the lha’ and ensure that there will be plenty of babies in the village in the following year. Their rather decorous movements are, however, interrupted by the arrival of a gang of boys who have removed their locally made coats in favour of combat style army-surplus clothing and rush in brandishing wooden swords, also with their faces covered. This is the alamdar. The boys leap around the dancing area for a while and then run at the onlookers, especially the women, actually hitting them with their sticks in some cases, while the patimo girls are shielded by the Babar (photo 28). The alamdar was explained to me by saying that the boys represented lha trug, child spirits, who are chasing away evil demons. The boys, thus, demonstrate their prowess to deal with the local spirits and exemplify the capacity of the protector spirits to control the forces of evil. On another level, however, the alamdar represents a

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defiance of the normal child-adult and men-women relations. Their faces masked, the boys have a licence to overstep the normal markers of behaviour, acting with disrespect towards women and adults. On the eighth day, there is a more elaborate pantomime, involving the enactment of a wedding by the patimo girls, which the audience greatly enjoys, but which is again interrupted by the alamdar boys. This completes the central dances of Losar. The Babar, Api-Meme and Mon then retire for food and drink and, when they return, as evening approaches, the Api-Meme have a last dance in the central field where the ltanmo has taken place. At the end of this they suddenly produce a lamb which someone has given them. The onlookers find this highly amusing, but it is an important ritual, and people were concerned that I should not have missed it. Giving the Api-Meme a new-born lamb, they told me, will ensure that plenty of lambs and goat kids are born in the new year. Here again, fertility is represented as a product of the process of ageing and decay. The culmination of the events of Losar lies in the creation and destruction of a series of storma. The first is made by the onpo on the seventh day. Called a dradzor (or drador) and taking the form of an elaborate spindly figure, it is placed on the ground in the centre of the village, in front of the assembled villagers, who whistle and insult it. It is then carried off by the goba, along a trail of specially laid flour, to be flung down the slope below the village, to cries of ‘gya khor’ from the assembled crowd. On the morning of the last day of Losar the Api-Meme make a final appearance at the mani, dance with their bows and arrows and then shoot the Memes’ arrows down the slope and fling away the Api’s juniper and stick, before going away to change out of their ritual clothes. The ApiMeme have, thus, been expelled, they explained to me. Subsequently, the Babar and Mon, with a large retinue of men, visit every house in the village to perform individual storma rituals. Unlike the rituals of the past, when the Babar carried off the evil of the house as storma themselves, special rounds of bread are prepared, to represent male and female elements. These are flung out of the door, or off the roof, to cries of ‘gya khor’. At the same time, the onpo is making two more storma figures, a white male belpo and a black female belmo (photo 27). These are placed outside at the centre of the village, where people come to jeer at them. As a large number of people gather, the Babar raise the two storma aloft. To a chorus of abusive shouts, cries and whistles they carry them away through the village and out to the steep slope which falls away beneath the houses. Here they are held high and everyone

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watches from a distance as they are smashed onto the ground. The Babar’s carpet robes and straw head-dresses follow. While their retinue continue to shout and whistle in the direction of the smashed figures the Babar take a short ritual wash and change into celebratory clothes. They then return to lead the last dance around the fire in front of the assembled villagers, before disappearing to divest themselves of their finery. This is the final celebration of the villagers’ triumph over the forces of evil, which have now been dramatically expelled.

The rite of passage The ritual figures who represent the bad effects of the evil spirits and the processes of ageing and decay, thus take centre stage in the village for nine days. For the villagers, however, Losar is also a time for celebration, led by the young and vital, surrounded by the imagery of birth and life. Fertility and gender differences are constantly represented during Losar: the boys banish the evil forces at the meto, but embarrass the girls with their sexual jokes as they do so; the stonzang dinner is a celebration of the phaspun, which is responsible for all life-cycle events; the boys display their prowess as horsemen while the women dress in their finest clothes on the third day; the patimo girls supplicate the yullha for fertility and act out the events of a wedding. These elements are all brought into association with age and vulnerability, in the form of the Api-Meme. The grandfathers and grandmother sweeping away the dust of the past year represent the inevitable process of age and decay, and yet they are frequently and explicitly linked to images of youth and fertility. The Api wears a child’s coat on her back. They constantly encourage the youth to dance and specifically honour young married couples. On the eighth day they publicly parade a lamb ‘to ensure fertility’. It is they who, therefore, appear to be responsible for bringing forth and nurturing the new life of the new year. A similar juxtaposition of the symbols of fertility and sexuality with those of sickness and death in rites of passage has been noted by anthropologists elsewhere (Bachofen 1861; Frazer 1890; Hertz 1907; Leach 1961: 125; Huntington and Metcalf 1979). As they describe, this juxtaposition can be interpreted as a symbolic reversal of the process of ageing. The forces of life and fertility are depicted as flourishing alongside, and despite, the degeneration of age, nurtured and encouraged by its representatives. In their final act of producing a new-born lamb the Api-Meme demonstrate birth to be the product of age.

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In other ways, too, the festival follows the form of the classic ‘rites of passage’ famously delineated by van Gennep (1960). Most of the Losar events take the same form as the many other parties and celebrations by which the village Ladakhis punctuate their year. What is different about Losar is that all these events are hosted and directed by the Baba and Api-Meme, ambiguous figures who ‘steal’ the food which they distribute and bring evil and death into every household. The community is, thus, placed into direct contact with the effects of the natural and numinous forces which transcend the human world. It enters what could be called a liminal period between the old and new years, before the ritual figures are banished at the end of the celebrations. The basic scheme outlined by van Gennep of a three-stage process from old to new, though a stage of liminality during which masquerades, revelry and role-reversal are prominent, is apposite for Losar. The meto can be seen as a preliminary ritual, prefiguring later events. Then, in the first stage of Losar itself, the normal social order is represented in the veneration of the deities and affirmation of family and social relations. During the following nine days there is an extended liminal period, dominated by the Baba and the Api-Meme. Challenges to the social order and the role-reversals found in the alamdar, the patimo and in the male Api, all contribute to the sense of unreality, a community temporarily separated from the normal world and its social order. The expulsion of these figures and exorcism of evil from the community mark the return to normality and promise a positive beginning to the new year. One thing that Losar does not do, however, is affirm the supremacy of the social order. It does not unambiguously state, reiterate or reinforce traditional social ties or delineate social roles, as many other forms of ritual are said to do (Moore and Myerhoff 1977:5) and which Dollfus asserts to be the final object of Losar (1987: 94-95). The festival represents the undoing of the well-established pattern of the village’s social and political order as much as it affirms it. That order is evident at many points during Losar. The fact that the Babar’s meals are hosted by each household in turn, even though nominally directed by the Api-Meme, confirms their equality within the community, and as equal contributors to the village tral. The goba and onpo are honoured in the dancing, along with others who have status in the village. The headman is also the first port of call for the Babar and Api-Meme and carries off the first storma. Throughout the dancing the villagers line up, as they always do, in the dralgo. This social and political order, whilst it thus underpins the whole organisation of Losar, is often symbolically challenged, however. The Api-Meme go around stealing food, indicating a flagrant disrespect

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for household property. The youth have a particular licence to transgress the social order at several stages. The seniority of age and adulthood, in particular, is flouted as they throw their food around after the stonzang dinners and attack the women and onlookers during the masked alamdar. These challenges to the social order are prominent in the central, liminal stage of the festival. Dollfus (1987: 92) regards these as markers of that liminality but I would argue that there is considerably more at stake in this festival. What Losar represents is the triumph by the villagers over the two major threats to life, the evil spirits embodied in the Babar and the process of ageing represented by the Api-Meme. However, this triumph is only achieved at the expense of the social order. The events surrounding the Api-Meme, in particular, represent and affirm the constant renewal of the biological order, the old giving way to and nurturing the efflorescence of youth and vitality. This is embodied in the celebrations of the young, their masquerades, the demonstration of their strength and prowess in the horse races and the alamdar. At these times their exuberance breaks through the normal hierarchies and boundaries and overcomes the normal deference to age and seniority, which is supposed to be observed by the young. Losar is their time for taking centre stage, actively encouraged by the Api-Meme in a public display of vitality and exuberance. It would appear, I suggest, that the hierarchy of age represented in the dral has to be transcended if the finality of the biological process is to be denied. As well as the biological processes represented by the Api-Meme, the world of the spirits - to which it is related - also appears to transcend and overshadow the moral and political order of the village during Losar. The protector deities who can assist in the struggle against the evil demons are constantly propitiated and directly invoked by the girls’ and boys’ masked patimo and alamdar. The youth take centre stage during the ltanmo in the battle to prevent the chaotic cosmic forces from intruding on the lives of the community. It is the physical fragility of the village community and the threats to its biological continuity that are highlighted during Losar, symbolised by the Babar and the Api-Meme. For the evil spirits, who represent an important part of that world, to be vanquished, the social order has, temporarily, to be overturned. The youth have to display their powers. It is also they who must triumph over age, asserting their vitality and exuberance in the face of the processes of ageing and decay. The social order, which grants status to age, must, therefore, temporarily take second place in the representation of the struggle over the biological continuity of the community.

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The social order is, thus, represented and affirmed during Losar, but not unequivocally. The tensions between the supernatural and the social realms of the village are also dramatically symbolised during the festival.

Change Throughout the Lingshed area, remote from the Indus valley, Losar is celebrated in similar ways to the Photoksar festival, although with many small differences. In villages closer to Leh, like Lamayuru, however, the ritual figures of Losar have disappeared. Neither Babar nor Meme appear any more here (they never had an Api). In Leh people say they spend the first few days of Losar cooking large meals and visiting friends and relations; they make offerings and throw out storma and rilzan, but there are few of the more elaborate and pantomime elements left to the festival. It could well be that it is the monastic influence and a disapproval of the old roles of the Babar as storma, that has caused such customs to disappear. In Photoksar during my first Losar in 1999 the Babar and Api-Meme hardly dressed up at all. There were no carpet robes, head-dresses or soot-smudged faces and they did not symbolically go around stealing food. By 2002, on the other hand, the villagers had decided to revive the old customs. Paljor explained to me that they had decided the old customs were ‘good’. They were, therefore, self-consciously going against the trends of modernity followed in villages closer to Leh. The revival of these customs, however, caused the flaring up of an old conflict between the villagers and the Lamayuru komnyer. This became apparent on the seventh day, when the onpo was creating the first storma. The komnyer entered the room and soon launched into a diatribe against ‘old customs’. He frequently referred to the disapproval voiced by the lamas and eventually raised the issue of the old practice by which the Photoksar villagers (supposedly) used to sacrifice an eight-year old boy to the yullha. The implication was that if the villagers started reviving the old customs then where would it end? Discussing these events in Khangltakh, Choron told me that the komnyer had recently given up chang and meat. In other words, he was on a reforming mission. Later, Paljor explained that there was a long-standing conflict between this komnyer and himself, along with certain other villagers. In around 1990 Togdan Rinpoche had visited the village and told them to set up a committee to reform the ‘old customs’, particularly those relating to

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(non-Buddhist) rituals, like Losar. Paljor and the komnyer had both been on the committee. However, they had fallen out when Paljor had argued in favour of keeping many of the old customs. The komnyer was now trying to reassert his authority. While he was holding forth during the storma preparation, several of the older village men objected vocally. One, in particular, referred to the annual meeting at which the revival of the old customs had been decided upon. It was a decision made by ‘mi sakh’, all of us, he insisted. The komnyer, he was suggesting, did not have authority to override the decision of the yulpa. The ongoing tension between the reforming forces of establishment Buddhism and the autonomy of the villagers’ own practices was developing into a struggle for control over the most important ritual of the year. When I returned to Photoksar in 2005, however, Paljor told me that they had again dropped the old customs. ‘But why?’ I asked. Paljor shrugged. ‘The komnyer threatened to leave the village’, he told me. ‘Now the Babar do not dress up any more. You were lucky to see the last Losar when this happened.’ Paljor was expressing a reluctant resignation to the forces of modernity and the power of the Buddhist establishment, which had eventually prevailed through the komnyer’s reforming campaign. In these events, I would suggest, one can detect many of the inherent tensions within the social order of the village, in particular that between its moral and political organisation and the realm of the spirits. The elemental demands of the physical world mean that the youth, those who represent the biological future of the village, have to triumph, temporarily, over the structures and hierarchies of its social order. The tension between local ritual forms and the modernising impulses of establishment Buddhism was also played out in the conflict and discussions surrounding the re-establishment of the ‘old customs’ in favour of the rites approved by the senior lamas. This was also a conflict between the yulpa and outsiders, namely the external power of the religious establishment, here represented by the komnyer. The decision to revive the ‘old customs’ represented a conscious valuation of tradition by some of the villagers over the forces of modernity; but the subsequent reversal of that decision indicated the ultimate power of the latter to change the course of the events in Photoksar, as it had already done in communities closer to the urban centre. Such are the tensions and processes found in one of the many fragile webs of order that constitute Ladakhi society.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE SACRED SOCIAL ORDER If the moral and political order, which must be maintained at all costs, is not to be interpreted in religious or cosmological terms, then how is it to be understood and explained? This order is described by the boundaries of the community, which are themselves defined by the fixed number of households and the web of cooperative relations that should exist between them. It is not, however, an order symbolised or idealised in any abstract way. There is no Ladakhi word readily translatable as ‘order’, for example. In the case of a resolved dispute the Photoksarpa merely say ‘drig song’, meaning, ‘it is OK again’. Drig is a very commonly heard word meaning ‘all right’ or ‘satisfactory’. The restoration of order is simply, then, a return to normality. A certain oblique light was shed upon the implicit notions of order underlying such concerns during conversations I had about notions of justice in Photoksar, notions for which my Ladakhi and Tibetan dictionaries suggested various terms. The Ladakhi dictionary (Hamid 1998: 131, 31) gives drang po (trangpo) as ‘straight, honest, candid, fair’ and khrims drang po (trims trangpo) as ‘justice’, while Das (1998: 649), the Tibetan dictionary, gives drang po as ‘right, truthful, straight, sincere, honest’, khrims drangpo as ‘righteous judgment, justice’ and las drang po as ‘good actions, righteous deeds’ (las means work, but is also the general word used to refer to karma in Tibetan languages). When I raised the concept of trangpo with Paljor, however, he gave me a rather different set of explanations. Trangpo, he explained, means straight, like a piece of wood. But a mi trangpo (mi is man) is someone who does not lie. Spera trangpo (spera is speech), likewise, means to tell the truth. I then asked about trims trangpo and his explanation was that if you have a quarrel and a mediator achieves a settlement, shakhs, that is trims trangpo. The idea is, therefore, not of some abstract justice but of achieving settlement, making things ‘straight’ in the community, one might say. Las trangpo, he said, meant yulpe las, community work, which he went on to explain as nangla nyams mi cho, not causing injury or suffering (nyams) inside (nang). Nang is the shortened form of nangosla usually used in Photoksar to refer to the village. The idea of las trangpo, then, is of work or actions that do not harm us, the yulpa, inside our community.

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Looking for a concept of justice I was, therefore, met by a series of expressions which referred back to the community, to the yulpa and the nangosla, as opposed to any abstract scheme of right and wrong or fairness. The resolution of disputes is conceptualized not as a case of discovering the truth, nor of determining individual rights, let alone applying laws that enshrine some abstract principle of natural justice. It is, rather, conceptualised as making things straight in the community by restoring order within it. There is, then, a vision of an ideal community here, one that is free from any form of conflict and anger. When I suggested to Paljor that the Photoksar villagers did not quarrel very much he was quick to disagree: ‘Oh no, we have a lot of arguments, which is very bad,’ he said, shaking his head. ‘We drink too much chang,’ he explained. This was not just a criticism of the villagers as individuals but an admission of failure and poor standards on the part of the community as a whole. On another occasion he was looking through my Tibetan dictionary, as he often did to help me with my language, and came across the term snyigs ma, which is translated there as ‘degenerated’ and ‘grown worse’ (Das 1998: 501). He asked me what the dictionary said and I explained the English entry for snyigs ma lnga ni, the ‘five impurities’.1 He then explained his understanding of the concept as being a state in which people die young, they have too much work, bad minds (sems tsokpo) and there is fighting. According to his understanding, therefore, fighting is something which afflicts a community in which people have bad minds and it accompanies a physical struggle to survive. Conflict is a sign of a degenerate society. The sense of order that underlies attitudes to conflict and the yulpa’s practices of dispute resolution is founded, therefore, on the idea of the peaceful, united, harmonious community. It is a similar idea that, I have suggested, underlies the villagers’ moral judgments of each other, including the criticism of those with a sems tsokpo. Order is, therefore, the responsibility of each individual. It is a human order, one found in the activities of individuals, rather than a cosmological or divine order, such as the Hindu order of caste, or an abstract order, such as the jurisprudential idea of ‘natural law’. It is not something to be imposed

1

The dictionary lists them as (1) a decrease in the duration of life, (2) perversity in thoughts and religious disbeliefs, (3) the five poisons, (4) difficulty to convert and (5) degenerate ages or times.

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from above and it can only be restored through the voluntary acts of those involved. The ideal community is made up of individuals between whom and between whose households there is a network of harmonious relations. Cooperation, sharing, hospitality and collective work are their manifestation. It is a spider’s web of delicate, cross-cutting, inter-linked relationships. Like a spider’s web, however, this order can easily be ruptured. Two individuals exchanging harsh words and one woman refusing to cooperate with another are enough to damage the web and a full-scale fight will create a tear which the whole community must combine, if necessary with a social boycott, to mend.

The sacred social This notion of order accords with the concept of the sacred social community found in Durkheim’s (1912) discussion of religion. He suggests that it is the distinction between the sacred and the profane that is fundamental to any form of religion (1912: 50). The sacred, he explains, is that which is to be protected (1912: 56), set apart and out of bounds (séparées et interdites) (1912: 65).2 Religion is a unified system of beliefs and practices relating to sacred things, which unites its adherents into a single moral community (un système solidaire de croyances et de pratiques relatives à des choses sacrées ... qui unissent en une même communauté morale ... tous ceux qui y adhèrent). (1912: 65) It is this, rather than any notion of the supernatural or the mysterious, including the existence of gods and spirits, that defines religion. Ultimately, it is the idea of society, itself, that is the soul of religion. It is the social that is sacred, albeit an idealised society, something superimposed upon the real (surajouté au réel) (1912: 602). A similar sense of the sacred, I would suggest, characterises Ladakhi notions of the ideal community, that referred to as the nang, the nangosla or the yul, a concept which is superimposed upon or transcends the real. The village community is not here the subject of worship, or even the veneration directed at a crown, flag or other symbols of kingship or nationhood elsewhere. Nor is it in any real sense ‘set apart’. However, the community is sacred in the sense that it is something that must be

2 The English translations are, for the most part, those of Cosman (2001). However, she translates ‘interdites’ as ‘surrounded by prohibitions’, which is somewhat loose.

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preserved, kept intact and not disturbed or disordered by conflict. It is surrounded by prohibitions to the extent that conflict is both morally and judicially sanctioned. It is also a moral ideal and the foundation of the judicial epistemologies and moral practices I have described in previous chapters. Moreover, it unites the people into a single moral community, elevating common above individual interests, that which Durkheim characterised as profane (Cosman 2001: xxii).3 It is an ideal that gives rise to moral forces, the subject of aspirations and the sense, on the part of individuals, of something beyond or transcending the world of experience (1912: 600-04). Durkheim also discussed the ritualised nature of the sacred and ‘the cult’ (le culte) which supports it (1912: 611). In Photoksar many of the rituals I described in the previous chapter concern the realm of the spirits or the dictates of Buddhism, spheres from which, I have argued, the moral community remains distinct. However, there is symbolism and formality in the dralgo and the fight to deny social status by which, I have suggested, people constitute themselves as proper members of that moral community. The meetings of the yulpa, informal though they are, and the way in which their activities are reported, symbolise the boundaries of the community and the ideal of unity amongst those who constitute it. Durkheim, himself, also emphasised the meetings and congregations (les réunions, les assemblées, les congrégations) (1912: 610) which, as others have pointed out (Just, forthcoming) are more important in the construction of small communities than the elaborate symbolism that characterises more complex societies. The social and moral order of the community in Photoksar is, therefore, defined by the notion of the ideal community in which everyone lives harmonious lives. The social is sacred. What Durkheim’s theory does not account for, at least on the face of it, is the separation described in the last chapter between the realm of moral and social relations amongst the villagers and that of the spirits, who affect their physical fortunes. Although Durkheim was at pains to stress that notions of the divine and the supernatural did not form the basis of religion, he did give an account of the way in which such notions could develop from the concept of the sacred social, leading to the formation of the established religions as we know them today (1912: Bk II, ch 9). The notion of the soul, too, and the associated eschatologi-

3 As Cosman (2001: xxvii) points out, Durkheim does not, however, reduce religion to morality.

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cal beliefs derive from the more fundamental concepts of religion (1912: 343). A notion that appears to be central to this account is that the fundamental categories of thought have religious origins: It has long been known that until a relatively advanced time in evolution, the rules of morality and law were indistinguishable from ritual prescriptions. In short, it maybe said that nearly all great social institutions are born of religion. (On sait depuis longtemps que, jusqu’à un moment relativement avancé de l’évolution, les règles de la morale et du droit ont été indistinctes de prescriptions rituelles. On peut donc dire, en résumé, que presque toutes les grandes institutions sociales sont nées de la religion.) (1912: 598)

There is, in this passage, an implicit model of an original, undeveloped society in which religion is the eminent form and epitome of all collective life. It is a theory which is echoed in the writings of several other anthropologists. Mauss, for example, describes the ‘total social phenomena’, in which ‘all kinds of institutions are given expression at the same time - religious, juridical, and moral’ (1990: 3)4 while Douglas describes ‘primitive cultures’ in which there is a ‘lack of differentiation’ between persons, their physical environment and the cosmos, and in which ‘physical forces are thought of as interwoven with the lives of persons. ... The universe discerns the social world and intervenes to uphold it.’ (1966: 88) Although their theories are, in many respects, different, the legal anthropologists Maine (1883, 1909) and Gluckman (1955) base their accounts of the origins of law and judicial practices on a similar model of an original, undifferentiated society. Gluckman talks of ‘the general lack of differentiation’ in simple society, the extent to which custom is sacerdotalized to provide the basis for law, and the fact that morality is a source of legal rulings in adjudication (1955: 264-67). Samuel’s notion of the ‘total social whole’, as the basis on which religious forms are to be understood in Tibet (1993: 362), similarly suggests that religion provides the cultural forms that shape the whole gamut of social processes. Photoksar is a small-scale society in which the spirit world is clearly interwoven with the lives of person, deeply implicated in their physical and environmental fortunes. However, this world does not have any 4 As Allen (2000: 143) points out, Mauss was thinking of gatherings that bring together the whole of society, past, present and future, and everything associated with it. Losar could be seen as such a gathering in Photoksar, where humans and spirits, judicial, moral, political and familial relations are brought together. However, as I described in the previous chapter, the festival also highlights certain tensions between these realms.

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direct impact on its moral and judicial organisation. The spirits and their associated rites and rituals have little or no bearing on what I would characterise as the sacred social. The judicial processes I have described are part of a separate social realm. Religion, in this sense, provides the basis for law. However, that form of religion, the sacred social, is not the realm inhabited by the spirits, and with which the vast majority of the practices of Buddhism are associated by the villagers. Custom has not been sacerdotalized. As I mentioned in the previous chapter, this separation corresponds to distinct forms of social reorganisation within the village: the ranking order of the dral, the division of the population into households and the status and activities of the yulpa all relate to organisation of political and moral relations between individuals. The notion of a sacred order is found in peaceful and harmonious relations between people and their households. By contrast, the phaspun comes together to organise people’s relations with their phalha and their involvement in life-cycle events, during which the protection of the lha is negotiated. Similarly, much of the physical organisation of the village and people’s movement within it, around religious monuments, in and out of the sight of the yullha, maintaining an appropriate distance from certain shrines, is determined by the presence of the spirits. Of course, there is some overlap between these forms of organisation. Phaspun membership is defined in terms of household membership. The timing of many agricultural events is determined by the onpo and preceded by rituals, but the event then depends on patterns of co-operation between households. It is the same with many religious rituals. However, the group of khyimtses gathering for an informal party has a completely different significance from the members of the phaspun, often the same people, who gather to organise a birth celebration.

The separation of realms As Obeyesekere (1968) noted with regard to what he termed ‘pre-literate’ religions (using the term ‘religion’, contrary to Durkheim, to refer to the supernatural rather than the social world), there is a separation between the secular morality that underpins the norms of social life and the ideas connected with religion, that is the rites and practices concerned with the supernatural and the afterlife. I would suggest that in Photoksar the sacred nature of the social accounts for the extent to which

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it has been protected from external influences, including those of establishment Buddhism, and also kept apart, in significant ways, from the controlling hand of the former kings and aristocrats and their equivalents in the modernday world. In several other parts of ethnographic Tibet, particularly the remoter Himalayan regions, a similar sense of a transcendent social whole has been noted. von Fürer-Haimendorf (1964: 104), for example, remarks of the Sherpas of Nepal that, ‘whatever the composition of a village community, the guiding principle for its government everywhere is that authority is vested in the totality of its inhabitants’. Ramble (forthcoming), in his study of a village in Mustang, also describes the ‘reified entity that transcends the community as an assembly of individuals and households’.5 It would, thus, seem that other Tibetan populations maintain the idea of a community that transcends the status of the individuals and families within it, an idea that also founds the authority of those charged with responsibility for maintaining order. But that community is also vulnerable to the encroachment of external forces. Ramble (forthcoming Ch 7) describes a degree of incompatibility between aspects of the cults of territorial deities found in this village, and the soteriological Buddhist creed, to which they nominally subscribed. As he puts it, the villagers do not ‘struggle with the problem of irreconcilable systems, but deal with the component fragments of these systems according to whether they are beneficial, harmful, salient or irrelevant’. They do not treat Buddhism as an entire system, rather as raw material, ‘divisible stuff’ which is employed in the construction or elaboration of the local tradition (1990: 194). It is similar, I would suggest, in Photoksar. The villagers regard the rites carried out for them by Buddhist practitioners in terms of their efficacy within their own supernatural world, whose numina are implicated, above all, in their physical fortunes. The moral condemnation of drinking, adultery and other sins, which is preached by the monks, represents a distinct set of concerns, directed at the fate of the soul in the after-life and associated with the ethical, but largely esoteric and obscure, zhiwa practices carried out by the monks. Both of these are separate from the set of moral concerns by which they maintain the social order of their community. 5 Among communities of nomadic pastoralists in Amdo, I found a certain similarity in ideas of order to those I observed in Photoksar. However, the fluidity of such communities and the feuding relations between them, as well as the very different historical trajectory and forms of political organisation in Amdo, have resulted in the emergence of very different dynamics of order (Pirie, forthcoming).

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The Photoksar villagers, like those of Mustang described by Ramble, are, thus, pragmatic and somewhat selective in their acceptance and interpretation of Buddhism: they have assimilated it according to their own needs and world views. But when the lamas are held in the highest regard and when they visit the villages to give teachings, why do the same villagers not accept and assimilate their cosmologies and moral teachings more readily, especially when these would appear to support their own moral concerns? In the summer of 2005 Chado Rinpoche, from Sera monastery in India, visited Photoksar on his way to Lingshed and stayed for two days to give teachings and perform a skurims ritual (photos 35-37). During the teachings he laid considerable emphasis on the merits of helpfulness, selflessness, and the Buddhist moral virtues, explicitly referring to the gewa rchu. When I asked a number of people to tell me what he had been discussing, however, they were vague and merely mentioned his injunctions about alcohol, the importance of saying prayers and the benefits of education. They were interpreting his words, that is, in terms of what they believed to be the activities relevant to their karma. His teachings were being understood by the villagers in a way which synthesised with their local understandings about the significance of karmic morality. His explanations did not entirely fall on deaf ears, however. The more educated villagers, such as Paljor, are knowledgeable about Buddhist doctrine and attempt to synthesise its teachings with their more pragmatic village concerns. At the same time, thoughtful monks constantly attempt to interpret local ritual ideas and practices in more orthodox Buddhist terms. These efforts lead to more or less successful syntheses and heterogeneous understandings. The contradictory attitudes towards alcohol found in Photoksar are one example of this: the villagers both accept the lamas’ condemnation of alcohol, in the abstract, and reserve their effective criticism of each other for those whose drunkenness leads to antagonism and violence. Spiritual pollution, drib, is also thought, in some Tibetan contexts, to arise from conflict (Schickelgrüber 1989). Drib is a phenomenon found widely amongst Tibetan communities and is generally regarded as arising after birth and death, negatively affecting relations between humans and spirits. In Photoksar the concept implies vulnerability to spirit attack: it is because of their susceptibility to drib that babies, mothers and the family of a deceased have to avoid proximity to, and even sight of, the shrines of the powerful protector deities, lest they be struck by illness. The village concept is a pragmatic, supernatural one.

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Even Paljor shook his head over the explanations of my Tibetan dictionary which link drib with blood, oaths, chastity, and fighting (Das 1998: 244). In Leh, both the monks and other educated informants were dismissive of the villagers’ understandings, however. One monk told me that these were ‘old forms’ of drib which were not so relevant any more. What is important is the purification rituals ‘which make everything clear with the gods’, he asserted. In order to explain the practices and attitudes he found among his monastic informants in Lingshed, Mills (2003: Ch 8) elaborated a complex theory of drib based on the idea of dislocation from a world in which divinities, the Buddha, and humans are in harmony. The notion of drib is simultaneously, then, a concept with pragmatic, supernatural significance for the Photoksar villagers and a concept with religious and moral implications for Tibetan elites. A similarly complex concept, also open to multiple interpretations, is that of the sems, the mind, which, as discussed in chapter three, has at least two different connotations in Photoksar. A third is the Buddhist concept of the disciplined, educated mind that is only achieved after long training. One Ladakhi monk told me that the Photoksar villagers do not receive enough teaching about Buddhist morality, as a result of which they have sems lchinte, ‘strong’ minds and cannot control their anger. In the village, on the other hand, the sems lchinte is equivalent to the small sems chungun, which explains why some people are liable to anger and fear. When I raised this subject with Paljor, whilst agreeing with the local description he also told me that education, by which he meant knowledge of Buddhist texts, leads to a good mind and characterises those who control their anger. He did not acknowledge the apparent contradiction between the Buddhist idea of knowledge as the foundation of proper conduct and the local idea of the biologically determined mind. Numerous practical and moral concerns of the laity are also the subject of ritual texts within the Buddhist canon. ‘Idle speech’ (ngag *chal) is, for example, one of the mi gewa rchu, the ten Buddhist moral prohibitions. There are also texts which concern gossip and jealousy, mi kha (Kapstein 1997: 527-37).6 Lopez presents several texts that address

6

Kaplanian (1988) describes mi kha as arising from the jealousy of wealth and new babies. The Photoksar villagers told me it arises from gossip, with similar effects to a mild spirit attack which can be cured by a short prayer reading. Mi kha, thus, has cosmological connotations. The gossip need not be malicious, however - it could even include speculating about how the anthropologist is faring back home. Paljor, moreover, made a firm distinction between mi kha and the enmity that arises when two people quarrel, which he referred to as khon. The distinction is subtle but, in my view,

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quotidian concerns of the laity with the object of correcting the image of Buddhism as ‘a disembodied philosophy’ (1997: 36). The extent to which the content of such documents penetrated lay consciousness is not clear, however. They may simply have been regarded as texts for recitation. Certain ideas - the pollution associated with birth and death, the evaluation of the mind and the dangers of gossip - are, therefore, connected by members of the elite with the principles of Buddhism and represent a combination of moral and religious ideas. The same concepts retain an almost wholly pragmatic significance for most of the Photoksar villagers, however. The Photoksar villagers have incorporated certain ideas and practices of Buddhism and the authority of the Buddhist practitioners into their local world in a way which synthesises, albeit not without tensions, with their own pragmatic, physical and cosmological concerns. This apparent triumph of pragmatism over religion can be attributed, at least in part, to the sacred nature of the social from which these supernatural concerns remain distinct. It is something that needs to be preserved from the hegemonic power of Buddhism, whose establishments and leaders, of course, extracted taxes from the lay populations. But such leaders also offer notions of order, morality and religious authority which compete with local understandings. There is a fundamental resistence to allowing outsiders and those with power, whether religious, economic or political, from encroaching on the internal spaces of the village, whether the sacred social or the web of relations they maintain with their lha. The ongoing process of religious assimilation is increasing as Ladakh is incorporated more firmly into the modern world and communications with Buddhist centres in India are made ever easier. Monks and wealthy individuals can now easily travel to Dharamsala and other centres of Buddhist learning to hear the teachings of senior lamas. The Dalai Lama, in particular, deplores ‘non-Buddhist’ spirit veneration and promotes a morally-based form of Buddhism. At the same time, organisations like the Maha Bodhi Society, a Theravada Buddhist organisation, distribute short, readable texts within Ladakh concerning Buddhist principles. Some young development workers were reading these when they visited Photoksar. They disparaged the villagers, to me, as ‘igno-

significant. Mi kha can be caused accidentally but khon is a sign of bad personal relations and has no cosmological connotations.

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rant’, attributing their lack of cooperation with a new development project they were trying to implement, to alcohol drinking. This, they said, was a sign of their ‘bad minds’. At the same time, however, even the most educated Ladakhis retain a reverence for their religious texts which places them beyond the realm of practical relevance. Young people would typically express reluctance to explain religious principles to me, referring instead to the monks or elders who ‘knew’ them better. Even for these groups, therefore, the Buddhism of the texts remains esoteric. This reification of Buddhist texts serves to distance the ethical codes, in the eyes of most of the Ladakhi laity, from matters of practical morality. At the same time, it serves to distance the religious powerholders from the practical business of village politics. Deference and distance, I would suggest, characterise all these relationships. The autonomy of the sacred social in the Ladakhi village is, thus, threatened by the powerful narratives of Buddhism, as well as internal tendencies towards hierarchy and conflict. The villagers need actively to maintain and preserve the autonomy and unity of their community. Although its achievement is an impossible task, however, they maintain the ideal. In so doing they pursue patterns of autonomy and deference by which they distance external forces from their internal spaces of order.

Autonomy The villagers take it upon themselves to settle even the most serious cases of internal conflict. A striking example of this occurred in Lingshed, a considerably larger, but more remote, village than Photoksar. One summer a group of four boys, ages six to ten, had gone up to the mountains to herd the sheep and goats but only three had returned. They would not say what had happened to the fourth so search parties were sent out. They eventually found the missing boy’s body, partly buried in the ground. It was not clear what had happened, the boys claiming that he had fallen and hurt himself and that they had buried the body in a panic. The family of the dead boy asked the goba and membars to intervene and a village meeting was called. It was decided that the families of the three should pay compensation to the family of the fourth and they were instructed to ‘take care’ about their children in the future. Compensation of around Rs100,000 was originally decided upon, a truly astronomical amount, but the three asked for another meeting to agree a reduction and it was eventually lowered to something in the region of

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Rs60,000. According to my informant from Lingshed, this was in consideration of the wealth of the families and the fact that the boys were still young and irresponsible. The families of the older two had to pay more than that of the younger, on the basis that they must have been more responsible. The villagers obviously considered that the boys were in some way responsible for the death but the truth was never firmly established. Nevertheless, the boys’ families did not attempt to take the case to a higher authority, to the police or to the court in Leh, even though they were not at all happy, other informants told me, with the level of the fines. In the end they accepted the authority of the village meeting and agreed to pay the fines. This is a dramatic example of a remote village’s maintenance of autonomy and distance from the central administration by resolving a serious conflict internally. Like the Zangskar rape, mentioned in chapter four, it was not referred to the police by the families of the deceased boy or by the goba, nor by the families of the accused boys. The police have theoretical status as an external authority and they were often mentioned to me during conversations we had about village disputes in Photoksar. When I asked Paljor about the meaning of the phrase shakhs, for example, he used the police as the ultimate example of a body which can achieve shakhs. Likewise, after the meeting that had resolved the two major fights in Photoksar he explained that if there was any more trouble between the same men then the yulpa would be able to show the agreements to the police as a record of exactly what had happened. The police were, therefore, talked about, at least to me, as the ultimate arbiters in matters of village conflict. In practice, however, it was quite clear that they were not regarded as either a welcome or a realistic source of judicial authority. When I asked Paljor, during the same conversation, what the police would do if they were called to the village he shrugged his shoulders and said they would probably just beat people up and take money. Once or twice in the past people had been to the police, he said, ‘but now we try to settle everything nangosla’, among ourselves. Despite their official status as guarantors of law and order in Ladakh, the villagers are keen to avoid their involvement as far as possible. The villagers pay lip service, therefore, to the supremacy of the state’s authorities, in the form of the police and government officers. In practice, however, these are treated as little more than distant powers, whose interference in village affairs must be avoided. It is the yulpa who have the ultimate authority to maintain order in the village, both by deciding the tral and by settling conflict. The villagers rhetorically

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acknowledge the authority of the government’s representatives, as they probably did that of the lonpo, but the idea that conflict must be resolved with a ceremonial reestablishment of good relations serves to confine all disputes within the village. External power-holders are effectively distanced from the internal affairs of the village. The resolution of conflict is very much an internal matter, one which is defined by and also reinforces the sense of the village as an autonomous community. This becomes particularly relevant when considering the dynamics of order in the urban centre, where similar ideas are found among much more complex social networks, as I describe in chapter nine. There are also reports from elsewhere in Ladakh of cases in which the police or other government officers were called to settle conflict and found themselves drawn into practices of mediation determined by local expectations. Srinivas (1998: 111-16), for example, records a number of cases from villages in Nubra, a region to the north of Ladakh, over one of the many high passes that were traversed by the trading caravans on their route into Central Asia. Although most of the disputes were resolved internally, one involved a violent conflict between two villages which resulted in the intervention of the police. They were, however, unable to stop the violence until local officials joined with village representatives to undertake a process of mediation between the two villages. Pascale Dollfus (1989: 119) records a similar event in the village of Hemis Shukpachan. A fight was reported to the police by one of the protagonists. A group of neighbours, with the assistance of the goba and membar, persuaded the police to come to the village but with unsatisfactory results and the villagers had to bribe them, collectively, to achieve the result they considered appropriate with fines, apologies and khatags. In each of these cases the police acted not as independent agents of the state but, rather, found themselves drawn into local processes of conflict resolution. Returning to consider the historical developments discussed in chapter two, it is possible to understand the ways in which the Photoksar villages must have negotiated their village order under previous regimes. We know that representatives of the lonpo, who became an official for the Dogras, visited the village regularly to collect taxes. The villagers told me of the harshness of these taxes and the way the lonpo’s retainers used to enforce their demands with big sticks. These were doubtless treated with the greatest social respect and the annual party which, the lonpo told me, his ancestors used to throw was welcomed. It is, nevertheless, probable that the villagers organised the vast majority of their

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internal affairs without interference from these representatives. There is certainly no evidence of any great involvement in village organisation on the part of these or any others, save for the extraction of taxes, the enforcement of begar obligations and the recruitment of men for the kings’ armies. While the lonpo told me that his ancestors used to ‘give the law’ to the villages, it is almost certain that the villagers, under their yulpa and goba, maintained order by settling conflict internally, much as they do today. The nature of administrative control changed considerably under the Dogras, particularly after Kashmir was incorporated into the British Empire. The mapping of agricultural land and the creation of the land settlement records was, as described by van Beek (1996: Ch 2), one of the ways in which the villagers’ resources became subject to closer control. From a legal point of view the land settlements had a significant effect on the definition and organisation of property relations throughout Ladakh. However, although the Photoksar villagers were well aware of the maps and records held in Leh they did not regard them as having altered their property relations in practice, and they never have recourse to them in cases of doubt. I saw two written records of disputes that had occurred over property boundaries in the village during the second half of the twentieth century, although these were few in comparison to the records of other forms of disagreement. One had concerned a piece of land that was claimed by one household as its own, but by others to be communal property. Certain of the older members of the village had been called upon to give evidence as to the historic use of the land. They had not referred to the land officials in Leh, however. Nevertheless, the land records still reflect, remarkably well, the current pattern of household landholding. There are just a few areas in which fields have been washed away or abandoned or new ones have been created and the villagers were not at all surprised that maps created almost a hundred years previously should closely mirror their contemporary pattern of land ownership. The sense of immemorial continuity is strong. Doubtless the land records were drawn up to reflect closely the villagers’ own property relations at the time and these have remained the same, with only minor changes, into the twenty-first century. As far as the villagers are concerned, therefore, their patterns of land ownership, household organisation and internal village administration have remained substantially the same despite, and during the course of, the dramatic changes that have taken place in the political regimes of Ladakh since the 1830s, when it changed from a kingdom to an annexe

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to the Dogra state, to a part of the colonial empire, to a marginal region in the Indian nation state. This sense of internal continuity, also reflected in the notion of the local and unchangeable trims, is one of the ways in which they maintain the autonomy of their community against the influence of outsiders. There is, I have suggested, a pattern of deference and distance towards external sources of power which runs through these historic relations between villagers and outsiders. This is exemplified in their relations with Buddhism, whose deities and lamas are accorded the highest respect and whose religious power is practically unquestioned, but who are not allowed to impinge on the moral and social relations that are at the heart of the construction of their own community.

Autonomy and equality The root of the practices that distance the influence of outsiders from these internal village processes is often, I would suggest, to be found in the same processes by which the villagers maintain a sense of unity and equality amongst themselves. The dralgo, for example, as well as symbolising relations of equality between members of village households, also differentiates members of the village from the aristocracy, monks and outsiders. Monks are invariably elevated in the dralgo and even when they are from village families they are also excluded from meetings of the yulpa. This includes the youngest novices. While I was staying at Khangltakh, Orsal, Paljor and Morup’s second son, was chosen to be sent to Lamayuru monastery, in compliance with the new tral. He and another village boy, both around eight years old, were despatched with a touching ceremony which saw the villagers gather on the roof of one of the houses over-looking the rocky path that descends steeply into the gorge below the village (photo 34). As they paid their respects with changskyan and khatags, Morup was typically dry-eyed, but Api Rigzin wept copiously. Even Paljor wiped away tears as the two small figures took their leave and receded into the distance behind the donkey carrying their small packs down the valley and towards their new lives in the monastery. Some months later they returned on a visit, now proudly wearing the maroon robes of the novice monk. Paljor had reported tears on Orsal’s part when he had visited Lamayuru and this was his first chance to be reunited with his family. The boys were greeted outside the village by

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their mothers and neighbours carrying changskyan and as soon as they entered the kitchen they were placed at the head of the dralgo. Meme Sonam fussed around them, pouring tea and deliberately using zhe skat, the formal mode of address. As a westerner, my heart bled for the young boys who, to my eyes, must have wanted desperately to be ‘at home’, just to be boys in their families again after the uncomfortable surroundings of the monastery. They were being denied this comfort by the formality of their treatment. What was happening, however, was that their new status was being publicly and symbolically marked. As long as they stayed in the monastery they would never be the same as the other villagers; they would also never enter the ranks of the yulpa.7 The dral and honorific speech are, thus, used to elevate all monks socially but also to distance them from village politics, which means they will never be consulted in connection with disputes and never attend village meetings. Both symbolically and physically the politicomoral order of the village is, in such ways, protected and set apart from the powerful authority of the religious establishments. Maintaining this sense of distance from the political and religious centres of the region does not, however, amount to the rejection of established social statuses. The respect shown to monks and aristocrats in the dralgo and in a myriad of small hospitality rituals is not cynically or reluctantly bestowed. Rather, there is a subtle system of deference and distance here with regard to those in superior positions. They are elevated in the social hierarchy but not allowed political influence within the village. As well as the aristocrats and monks, all visiting officials are placed in higher positions in the dral, as are social visitors from other villages. Those that are relatives or members of nearby villages soon fall into the age-ranking order if they stay for any time. The villagers, thus, mark a certain affinity with them, as they also did, eventually, with the anthropologist. However, the initial placing of outsiders in superior positions represents their exclusion from the internal processes of village organisation. When politicians, local officials and workers from non-governmental organizations visit the village to rally political support or institute development projects they are, likewise, placed alongside the aristocrats and monks in the seating plan. This symbolic respect is matched by 7 In fact, in the next few days, Orsal joined his brothers and friends in their normal activities and seating places and was soon being scolded by his mother and grandmother for his pranks. In subsequent years he and his companions learned how to shift easily between statuses, sitting with the monks during festivals and dancing with the other children in the evenings.

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deference and acquiescent attitudes on the part of the villagers. However, when they leave very little effort is normally made to comply with their directions. Although the villagers may have promised faithfully to dig the foundations for a new school, which will then be funded by a development organisation, for example, its representatives are likely to return the following year to find few, if any, signs of progress. This was the experience and the object of considerable complaint on the part of organisations in both Lingshed and Photoksar during, or shortly after, my fieldwork. It can partly be seen as a function of rotating leadership in the village and the need for the yulpa to achieve unanimity in major decisions, which are barriers to decisive leadership and innovation. However, the physical respect accorded to outsiders also sets them symbolically outside the cohesive group of villagers and reinforces the latter’s passive resistance to external control. The dral is, thus, used by the villagers to reinforce relations of equality between households and, to a large extent, between the individuals within them. The same hierarchy supported the authority of the old political elites and continues to support the social status of monks and upper classes. It has been adapted to accord similar honour to modern political and economic leaders, but at the same time it symbolically distances such leaders and potential authority figures from the bounded internal structures of village order. Photoksar, as one of the more remote Ladakhi villages, retains a greater autonomy than villages closer to Leh, where external influences are much greater. It is not that the villagers do not engage with external forces, however. They welcome food supplies, schools and health services and the maintenance of the roads and paths (such as it is). It is not just that old forms of autonomous organisation are lingering here, not yet swept away by the forces of modernity that come through greater contact with the external world. The Photoksar villagers have always engaged with this world, changing as it is, but when it comes to internal organisation their relations are structured in a way that protects the autonomy of their sacred social space, their own yul. The greatest social respect is paid to outsiders, monks and representatives of the government, but leadership and authority over their internal affairs is limited to the insiders, to the inclusive group of yulpa. The Photoksar villagers are, therefore, distancing a number of powerholders and their associated ideological frameworks from their internal spaces of social order. They are keeping at bay external frameworks of order. To put this in Redfield’s (1960) terms, the little tradition, with its

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moral and legal domain and associated rituals, is being safeguarded against the great tradition, or great traditions, with their associated moral, legal and ritual frameworks. As Mills’s work demonstrates, however, aspects of authority may be established by the great tradition without overwhelming the autonomy of the little. As he shows, the practitioners of the great tradition of Buddhism, the monks, are themselves embedded within the local cosmological domains of the little tradition. One of the sources of the incarnates’ authority is their ability to transcend and re-order that cosmological domain. When it comes to economic and political relations, the aristocracy and monastic establishments of the ‘great tradition’, the Ladakhi kingdom, established superior positions for their members within the overall Ladakhi social order. These are recognised in the social order of the little traditions, the dralgo formed within the villages, which supported their economic and political power. However, neither they, nor their successors in the modern state, have firmly established judicial authority over the internal organisation of these villages. They are distanced from the moral and legal orders of these communities who are, thus, continuing to retain a measure of the autonomy, even from the ‘great tradition’ of the Indian state. In the next chapter I turn to the wider region to look, in particular, at the legal practices and ideas that developed within the ‘great tradition’ of central Tibet and to assess whether they have had any impact on the ‘little traditions’ of either the Ladakhi kingdom or the modern Ladakhi village.

CHAPTER EIGHT

ETHNOGRAPHIC TIBET The Gelukpa sect, which came to dominate the government of central Tibet under the leadership of the Dalai Lamas, was founded by Tsongkapa in the late fourteenth century. In 1641 the Mongol leader Gushri Khan helped the Gelukpa defeat the Tsangpa kings to become effective rulers of central Tibet. Their leader, the ‘Great’ fifth Dalai Lama exercised administrative control by re-organising the system of taxation, in particular by endowing monasteries with landed estates (Carrasco 1959: 24). The system of succession by reincarnation, which had been developed by the Karmapa sect and recognised by the Mongols,1 was expanded to apply to a large number of influential monastic positions. The death of the fifth Dalai Lama was followed by a period during which the Chinese Manchu regime exercised almost complete control over Tibet, having defeated the Mongols in 1724. They subsequently established the seventh Dalai Lama as formal head of government in 1751. With continuing Manchu support he established a stable, although limited, bureaucracy based on the exercise of a certain amount of financial and administrative control and this became what is known as the Ganden Potrang government. Through this government the Gelukpa effectively remained in power in central Tibet, under successive incarnations of the Dalai Lama or his Regent, until the Chinese occupation of the 1950s. Within this administration, positions of responsibility and authority were divided between monastic and lay officials. Before the reforms of the thirteenth Dalai Lama in the early twentieth century, however, the central government remained small. As Goldstein summarises it: the government did not maintain a national police force or internal postal services, and it kept only a very small permanent military force which, in any case, served as a corvée tax obligation. Most of the government’s income was earmarked not for government activities but, rather, for religious ceremonies. The traditional Tibetan government needed little income because it did very little. (1989: 85)

1 This initially occurred in the fourteenth century, during a brief period in which they patronised this sect, before the rise of the Phagmodru (Wylie 1978).

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Even after international events, including the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-04, had prompted the expansion of the bureaucracy and military by the thirteenth Dalai Lama, the primary focus of government continued to be the collection of taxes and maintenance of peace (Goldstein 1971a: 175). The majority of Tibet was divided into estates under the control of local lords, monasteries or officials sent by Lhasa. The latter administered the government’s own estates whose revenues were paid directly to Lhasa. Two officials, one lay and one monastic, were appointed for a period of years, mainly to collect revenue. They also had to ensure the functioning of the corvée labour system, the obligation to provide both men and livestock for transport, which was essential to the administration of this vast and sparsely populated region.2 Similar functions were carried out by the rulers of the private and monastic estates. As Carrasco summarises it (1959:25), there was a wide variety in systems of administration through time and across the geographical spread in Tibet, with an underlying pattern of more or less formalised patron-client relationships. The larger estates, principally Sakya, Trashi Lhunpo and Lhagyari, enjoyed a considerable degree of autonomy, particularly over revenue collection, which was their main administrative concern. In the outlying areas, where the lords remained further from governmental control, many administrative functions were delegated to local hierarchs, who worked under the loose control of the central government (Carrasco 1959: 133-37). As Geoffrey Samuel describes it (1993: 62-63), centralised power remained fragile throughout Tibetan history. Drawing on Tambiah’s (1976) model of a ‘galactic polity’, he describes the Dalai Lamas’ regime as a ‘mandala-type structure based on an exemplary centre and regional administrations that replicated the structure of the centre’. These drifted historically between periods of attachment to one or another centre and periods of autonomy: ‘central rule is as much a matter of performance (as in the elaborate rituals of the Lhasa administration) as administration.’ (1993: 62) The primary focus of the whole enterprise was the extraction of produce and control of personnel. Michael (1982) and Dreyfus (1995) argue for a model of bureaucratic control but Goldstein (1971a) suggests that there was a balance or oscillation between centralisation and decentralisation of political, economic and

2 The begar system in Ladakh operated in a similar way and the two systems were linked in the case of trade between the two regions (Rizvi 1999).

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administrative control. In any event, it is generally accepted that the raising of revenue and funding of rituals were the main concerns of government and that a considerable number of its administrative concerns, including the organisation of the corvée system and the maintenance of order, were delegated to local lords, monasteries and administrators. Kyirong was one of the estates administered directly by Lhasa. One of French’s informants was appointed as a senior official there and he told her that his main duties were the collection of taxes, the management of border controls and customs (1995: Ch 19). Legal cases brought to him for resolution mostly involved land - inheritance, monastic disagreements, land disputes between monasteries and lay people - but also serious theft and robbery. Officials from the central government in such places obviously, therefore, carried out considerable judicial functions. These were only loosely controlled by Lhasa, however. Carrasco (1959: 93-4), for example, describes an edict circulated by the central government to district officials every year, which required impartiality in the administration of justice, in the levying of taxes, the treatment of the serfs (mi ser),3 the protection of government lands and the regulation of trade. Shigatse, location of Trashi Lhunpo monastery and seat of the Panchen Lama, could be called a semi-autonomous polity, although it had close ties to Lhasa. Charles Bell made a record of an edict posted in a district office in Shigatse in the 1920s, which describes the duties of district officers answerable to the Lhasa government. These primarily concerned the collection of taxes, the organisation of supplies, the transport that could be demanded by officials and the maintenance of order. Crimes, particularly theft, were to be reported by both lay and monastic estate owners and limits were set on the punishments they could hand down. There were also restrictions on the interest that could be charged on loans, provisions for festivals, the reading of chos and the killing of animals (French 1995: 233-35). At least in theory, therefore, the Lhasa government exerted control over crime and punishment in such polities. Nevertheless, it could not be regarded as having a centralised and bureaucratic legal system by which it managed the administration of justice, even in central Tibet. Rather, 3

The use of the term ‘serf’ to translate mi ser is contentious. Goldstein (1971b, 1986, 1988, 1989a) argues, against Michael (1982) and Miller (1987, 1988) for an analogy between the Tibetan peasantry and the serfs of Medieval Europe, primarily on the basis of the hereditary ties that bound them to their estates.

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it issued guidelines and left considerable discretion in the hands of local officials.

The legal codes The founding king of the empire, Songtsen Gampo, is said to have been responsible for the bringing of Buddhism into the region in the seventh century.4 The Old Tibetan Chronicle, dating from the late eighth or early ninth centuries, credits him with the creation of a system of laws and simultaneously glorifies him for his practice of good religion (Stein 1972: 52-3; Kapstein 2000: 36, 56). Later histories, such as the rgyal rabs gsal ba’i me long, compiled in the fourteenth century, and the mkhas pa’i dga’ ston (the Khepa), compiled in the sixteenth, also describe him as the source of the ‘Sixteen Pure Popular Rules of Conduct’ (mi chos gtsang ma bcu drug) (the mi chos), a code of ethics. The legal codes used in Lhasa until the mid-twentieth century are described as being based on the mi chos of Songtsen Gampo, as well as the mi gewa rchu, propounded at the same time (French 1995: 41-42). The fragments of legal documents that survive from the time of the empire contain no references to Buddhism, however, nor traces of the influence of Buddhist ethics (Kapstein 2000: 56-57). For the most part they are ‘rather functional, dry, hard-nosed statements of offences and punishments’ (Huber 1998: 85). There was, therefore, some system of centralised laws, of a largely administrative and punitive nature, in the early Tibetan Empire (Richardson 1989, 1990; Dotson forthcoming) but an explicit connection between legal provisions and religious principles did not appear until later. The death of King Langdarma in 842 led to the collapse of the Tibetan empire and little is known about the period up to the thirteenth century, when Mongol forces began to exercise influence in Tibet. The region had, by then, dissolved into a series of petty states and local dynasties, often allied to Buddhist sects.5 Prominent among these were the Sakya, whose ruling family came to exercise political control over a significant area in the thirteenth century and provided the head of the 4

It did not, in fact, spread widely until the time of Tri Songdetsen, in the eighth century, and it had to be re-introduced after the collapse of the empire in 842, under what is known as the ‘second diffusion’ in the tenth to eleventh centuries. 5 The historical details in this section are drawn from Shakabpa (1967: Ch 6), Fairbank (1994: Chs 2 & 5 and 1998: 245) .

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Buddhist sect of that name. The Sakyapa Pagspa lama was largely responsible for converting the Mongol’s leader, Khubilai Khan, to Buddhism and was, in turn, rewarded with political support. Sakya remained a substantially independent polity into the twentieth century, although its wider power was overshadowed by that of the Pagmodru kings, allied to the Drigunpa sect, in the fourteenth century. The Mongols may have introduced some sort of legal codes into Tibet, based on the Yüan (Ming) imperial codes, but their political organisation was not highly centralised and they did not establish any significant administrative structures. The Sakya are reported to have used the Mongol laws (Tucci 1949: 37) but it was the Pagmodru leaders who, in the fourteenth century, established the legal codes that were later to became widespread in Tibet. The Tsang dynasty, based in Shigatse, which enjoyed power until its defeat by the fifth Dalai Lama in 1641, is said to have produced its own complex system of laws. These were designed for a military administration and included provisions for the duties and promotion of officers and the maintenance of borders (Dreyfus 1995:35). The fifth Dalai Lama adopted the legal codes of the Pagmodru kings (Schuh 1984b). These are generally referred to as the zhal che churukpa or chuksumpa (the zhal che), the sixteen or thirteen laws, depending on the version (Jäschke 1881: 473; Das 1998: 1068). The existing copies are largely similar in their provisions (White 1894; Meisezahl 1973; Dawa Norbu 1974; Schuh 1984b). They make rules for officials and official procedures. They provide for the use of the death penalty and mutilation punishments in cases of patri- or matricide, the murder of a monk or high status individual, death caused by poisoning or magic, robbery, offences against the property of the church or state and insurrection in times of peace. They also set out the compensation payments to be applied in a large number of cases, including death, injury, damage to property, divorce, adultery and the non-return of borrowed animals. The longer versions add provisions about warfare and the treatment of the populations of border areas. The vast majority of these provisions are also found in documents dating from the time of the empire, although this historical legacy is not made explicit in the later documents and histories. Rather, they claim that the zhal che are based on the mi chos, themselves attributed to Songtsen Gampo (Meisezahl 1973: 225; Schuh 1984b: 298). As Schuh (1984b: 299) points out, however, the practical and often punitive nature of the zhal che is, however, very different from the statements of general moral principle found in the mi chos. In any

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event, the mi chos were customs (religion) of men, as opposed to the religion of gods (lha chos) (Stein 2003: 535). The influence of Buddhism was ‘a retrospective, purely fictitious, ideological construction’. (Schuh 1984b: 300) As Sørensen (1994: 35) suggests, the moral basis claimed for the codes was part of a project to create ‘a vivid symbol of Tibetan dynastic history,’ initially undertaken by the Pagmodru leader Changchub Gyaltsen. As Dotson (2006) explains, the later rulers were appealing to the legacy of their predecessors by projecting religious laws (and the mi chos) onto the religious kings of the empire. Tibetan historiography initially glorified Songsten Gampo as a great administrator, for his legal practices and statecraft and his deeds only later came to be interpreted in Buddhist terms. By the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, good customs and a great and heroic kingdom (chos bzang srid mthos) were replaced by the unity of politics and religion, chösi zungdrel (chos srid zung *brel) as a legitimating narrative (Stein 2003: 534-39). This model of the harmony between political power and religious authority, chösi zungdrel, came to function as the ideological template for the legal and political systems of Tibet (Dreyfus 1995: 168).6 Legal documents typically proclaimed that: ‘Tibet is a country in which political and religious affairs are carried on simultaneously, with its chief aims the propagation of Buddhism and the seeking of happiness for all souls on earth.’ (Carrasco 1959: 80) The process by which existing legal provisions came to be legitimised in religious terms is evident in the structure of the sixteenth century Khepa, which has a lengthy section on law and state (Uray 1972). As Dotson (2006) suggests, the authors were probably aware of the dissonance between these provisions, which have little to do with Buddhism, and the legacy of Songsten Gampo as a great religious king. The story of the Khotanese monks in the preamble to that section acts as an apologetic for what follows. In this story Songsten Gampo appears as an incarnation of Avalokitesvara and explains the evidence of draconian legal punishments as mirages, manifestations designed to convert his resistant subjects to Buddhism. A comparable, and more explicit, attempt to legitimise the legal codes is found in the chronicle written by the fifth Dalai Lama. He explains that the laws of the Mongols, which provided that the murder of one

6

As Kapstein puts it (2000: 58), albeit referring to the Empire, the foundation of a universal state, ruling many different people necessitated a framework of universal law, which Buddhism was able to supply.

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person was to be repaid by the death of another, were sinful and required re-writing to reinstate the old Tibetan practice of compensation (Schuh 1984b: 303). In fact, the principles of both compensation and retribution are found in the codes, and this statement, like the parable of the Khotanese monks, must be regarded as part of the programme to provide religious legitimation for the structures and legal practices of the Tibetan government. The codes and legal system, as a whole, Dreyfus says, reflected the ‘semi-bureaucratic’ nature of the Tibetan state, which was ‘more substantive than formal’. ‘Rather than insisting on procedures, Tibetan law emphasized the importance of social harmony, moral and religious values ... they also stressed the importance of conciliation, and the relevance of religious doctrines.’ (1995:136-7)7 ‘Law’, in this sense, was a tool of government. It was a mixture of specific directions aimed at officials and general principles and values supposed to guide their activities. It did not amount to a ‘rule of law’ system, with clear laws and procedures on which ordinary people could rely, both in their dealings with one another and with the government.

Legal principles The legal codes did contain a mixture of administrative directions and stipulations for severe punishments. Schuh (1984b: 300-02) suggests that these provisions conform to two fundamental principles. The first is that of punishment on the basis of retaliation, which is to be found in the list of crimes said to merit the death penalty or mutilation. The second is that of reparation by compensation, found in the several sections that provide for fines in respect of crimes as serious as murder, along with injury, theft, divorce and adultery. Referring to evidence from eastern Tibet, where principles of compensation have long been used to settle nomad feuds (Shih -Yü Yü Li 1950:132), Schuh’s hypothesis is that

7

Dreyfus’s theory is less convincing when it comes to the administration of justice. He agrees with Samuel that ‘Tibet could be thought of as a loose federation overseen by a small bureaucracy organized around the charismatic figure of the Dalai Lama’, while the increased bureaucratisation of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries marked a transition to a more bureaucratic polity, at least for the central part of Tibet dominated by Lhasa. ‘This evolution’, he says, ‘is clearly marked in the Tibetan legal system and the development of mechanisms of enforcement.’ (1995: 133) However, as described here, the administration of justice in Tibet was far from systematic.

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compensation is the oldest Tibetan legal principle (1984b: 302). He considers that the ‘criminal provisions’, based on the principles of deterrence and retaliation, were developed later by the rulers of the small Tibetan kingdoms in order to protect their state and religious establishments. As evidence from eastern Tibet indicates, however, practices of compensation invariably formed part of developed systems of revenge (Ekvall 1964; Pirie 2006b). Mi stong, blood money, is a substitute for retaliation, as it usually is throughout the world (Stewart and Strathern 2002: 11-13). It is almost inconceivable that the subjects of the Mongols’ rule or the early Tibetan polities would have exercised one without adopting the other. Moreover, concepts of retaliation were still found in the legal practices taking place in twentieth century Lhasa, as I describe later. Neither retaliation nor compensation, I would suggest, should be accorded any primacy. Both were part of legal practice in Tibet at different times and in different places. A more relevant, but also problematic, distinction is that between the punitive and physical nature of the justice meted out by Tibetan authorities and practices of conciliation, which were also widespread and accorded more with religious ideals. There is evidence that justice was administered in a harsh and punitive manner by Tibetan courts right into the twentieth century. Luciano Petech (1950: Ch 15), for example, describes the legal procedures of the eighteenth century as being swift and that the criminal law was very severe, with capital punishment being imposed for a large number of crimes. As Dieter Schuh (1984b: 291-93) points out, there are numerous reports of draconian punishments imposed by both local lords and central government to be found in the accounts of travellers to the region in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Capital punishment was officially banned in Lhasa in the twentieth century (Huber 1998: 87). However, Charles Sherring, a British officer who toured Tibet in the 1900s, records the use of torture to extract confessions in western Tibet: if the accused did not confess then the accuser was tortured for bringing a false charge (Sherring 1906: 194). In contrast to these accounts, in The Golden Yoke, French (1995) emphasises the moral principles of the mi chos and the Buddhist principles of gewa rchu as the foundation of the Tibetan legal codes and, thus, of Tibetan legal practice. She claims that ‘many of the traditional words, phrases and proverbs that the Tibetans used in their legal proceedings derived from the ancient law codes.’ (1995: 99) She frequently cites the

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‘Neudong code’, of the Phagmodru, which apparently contained statements of general moral principle, as well as fifteen substantive laws (1995: 43) and a collection of ‘law stories’ and ‘law codes stories’, which illustrated the mi gewa rchu (1995: 83, 92, 95-97).8 French, thus, presents the mi chos, the zhal che and Buddhist principles, more generally, as part of an intellectual legal whole. She suggests that certain ‘basic Tibetan concepts’ affected the law, including the Buddhist ideas of reality and illusion, karma, rebirth and non-duality (1995: 61). She asserts, for example, that Tibetans considered that ‘disputes were engendered by mental affliction that hinder one from understanding the perfected aspect of the world’ (1995: 62), that ‘conflict was defined as relating to incorrect visions, to affliction in the perceptions and abilities of humans’ (1995: 73) and that ‘conflict was an inevitable part of samsara...the goal of legal proceedings was to calm the mind, relieve the anger of the disputant through .... catharsis, expiation, restitution and appeasement and to rebalance the natural order.’ (1995: 73) ‘Litigants often analysed their involvement in a lawsuit....in terms of the religious - in particular karmic - consequences of conflict’ (1995: 74). French claims to be describing legal processes from a ‘mundane perspective’: ‘the daily operation of the law in administrative offices and courts as understood by individual Tibetans - the average as opposed to the spectacular and influential.’ (1995:15) French’s informants were, however, primarily members of the central Tibetan elite who had crossed from central Tibet into exile when the Dalai Lama fled from the Chinese army in 1959. As Huber comments (1998: 88-89) ‘Buddhism is .... full of contradictions and syncretisms which the anthropologist finds in the rituals of a poor village household in Lho kha, or in the values and views of the A mdo nomadic shepherd’. As he puts it, any Tibetan ‘cosmology’, ‘is saturated with values and categories that are manifestly nonBuddhist’. French does not suggest any social or cultural explanations for legal practices that are not directly referable to Buddhist doctrine. She describes, for example, a case of a ‘wandering monk’ (1995: 65-7) in which a headman from the Sakya region dealt with a mendicant monk by absorbing him into his own family and reads underlying notions of ‘karma, radical particularity and illusion’ into the ‘particularist’ response

8

She also suggests, implausibly, that Tibetan criminal jurisprudence, including considerations of karma, evolved from the administrative rules of the eighth century (1995: 316).

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of the headman. However, it could just as well be interpreted as involving a simple and pragmatic solution to an individual problem. By introducing each of her ‘Reports from the countryside’ (1995: Pt 3) with an extract from a law code, French is, therefore, imposing on the narrated events a sophisticated philosophical interpretation based on complex legal documents which were probably unfamiliar to many laymen, without evidence that they represented local understandings.9 Moreover, most Tibetan legal documents are characterised by ‘the total absence of anything that might remotely be construed as Buddhist, except for their propagandistic introductions written for purposes of legitimation and authority (van der Kuijp 1999: 288). French’s analysis of Tibetan legal history, including the uncritical attribution of the mi chos to Songtsen Gampo, has been justifiably criticised (Frechette 1996, Huber 1998, van der Kuijp 1999). However, her account highlights a striking contradiction between the ideas about justice found in the codes themselves, with their legitimation of the death penalty and physical punishment, and the religious ideas which were presented as underlying them, which emphasise the mental causes of conflict and its karmic consequences.10 I would suggest that there was a tension between the punitive and conciliatory aspects of Tibetan legal procedures, and between the promulgation of rules as a means of enforcing governmental control and as a means of enacting religious and moral principles, which remained significant until the 1950s. There are, however, other principles to be found within the codes, which also reflect practices of law found widely within the Tibetan region. These include a preference for mediation, the use of dice and ordeals to make decisions and the use of torture to extract confessions.

Legal practices By the mid twentieth century there were three courts in Lhasa, (French 1995: Chs 21-23): the nangtse shak (snang rtse shag), which had limited jurisdiction but also acted as a prison, the lhasa nyertsang (lha sa gnyer tshang), which heard all cases arising within the city boundary, and the

9 As Anne Frechette (1996) puts it, more theoretically, the lack of social and political context means that legal ideology is conflated with legal processes and legal structures. 10 In French’s (1995: Ch 24) discussion of crime and punishment, for example, she highlights the restorative and karmic aspects of criminal procedures (1995: 319).

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sherkhang (gsher khang), which heard cases of murder and appeals brought from the provinces. The second and third of these also carried out extensive administrative functions, so there does not seem to have been a clear separation of judicial from other governmental activities. French (1995: Chs 21 & 22) gives accounts of a number of cases heard in Lhasa and it is clear that there was some formality in the proceedings and the presentation of petitions. However, there was also flexibility in terms of who carried out the investigation into the case and who could present a petition and each of the cases she records was settled in a pragmatic way without any explicit reference to legal codes or even to moral principles. Goldstein also confirms that ‘there was actually no set of written laws against which behaviour was compared’ in legal proceedings (1971a: 175). Evidence from Sakya suggests that there was an ornately bound copy of the ‘Thirteen Pronouncements’ ascribed to Songtsen Gampo, which the Law Officials ceremoniously consulted on complicated or delicate points of procedure, but to which only the highest officers had access (Cassinelli and Ekvall 1969: Ch 6). Dawa Norbu, a historian who lived there into the 1960s, refers to the Thirteen Pronouncements as the khrims yig zhal lce bcu gsum, which, he says, were highly respected but only accessible to a few lawgivers and officials. He is able to cite the code in detail but it is not evident that it was actually referred to during the course of either of the two cases in which his family was involved. In a chapter headed ‘The law’s delays’ (1974: Ch 4), he describes how there was no separate Court or judicial body in Sakya, the Governor simply appointing two senior officials to investigate each case. The cases he describes, a theft from his family and a defamation of its social status, both suffered long delays caused by officials who would deliberately prolong the proceedings in order to extract bribes. There were some impartial and conscientious law officers, he says, but others had a ‘big stomach’ for gifts. Despite these reservations, Dawa Norbu is relatively positive about the result of the proceedings, saying: Though a case might take time and money and cause anxiety, the verdict seldom went against the innocent ... Even corrupt judges knew that ultimately they had to restore justice, and that they must heed public opinion if they were to retain their reputation. (1974: 87) 11

11

Although Dawa Norbu uses the word ‘corrupt’ it is not evident that taking gifts was illegal. Rather it seems to have been expected, on the understanding that it ought to be done in moderation. That is, such practices were subject to the general moral principles

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The defamation case was resolved with a ceremony which took place outside the gate of the Sakya monastery in which the accuser acknowledged that his accusation had been false and gave chang and a khatags to Dawa Norbu’s mother, who had instigated the case.12 Further evidence of how court cases were handled is found in legal documents collected by Dieter Schuh (Schuh 1976, 1984a; Schuh and Phukhang 1979). One of these (1984a: 227), dating from 1861 during the minority of the twelfth Dalai Lama, records the settlement of two disputes involving Samtenling monastery and neighbouring villages in Kyirong, a government estate in southern Tibet. One concerned grazing rights and the other the ownership of a field claimed by the monastery, whose harvest, the village maintained, should be used to finance a local ritual. The parties had originally appeared in Lhasa but had been sent away to undertake mediation to settle their differences (dpyad mchams). The parties having failed to do so, the court asked the governor of Dingri district (in which Kyirong lies) along with two district officials, to investigate, visit and talk to the parties. When they also failed to achieve a settlement, the case was heard by the Regent in Lhasa, assisted by district officials. The Lhasa court was, therefore, reluctant to assume jurisdiction until all other avenues had been exhausted. The document records a certain amount of procedural formality with a summary of the documents put before the court and of an oral examination and it stipulates penalties for any contravention of the final agreement. There is also a statement of legal ideology in the opening section, apparently typical of such documents. It refers to the religious and civil duties (chos dang srid kyi khrims) of the monks and peasants respectively. It declares that the parties are living in auspicious times during which all should be content and relations between monks and lay donors should be of mutual benefit and solidarity. Even where there is controversy and hate between the parties, it is said, relations between them are not to be severed. The document also explicitly refers to the possibility of examination under torture and the imposition of physical penalties for the parties’ disrespect for the laws. Both of these had been considered but rejected, it was said, on account of the status of the monastery’s founder and the poverty of the villages, lying as they did on of fairness and proportionality. 12 It is also interesting to note the limits of the Sakya government’s jurisdiction. The thief in the first case escaped justice by fleeing to the city of Shigatse and even residents of Sakya who offered their allegiance to Nepal and Kashmiri Muslims were said to be beyond its jurisdiction.

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the borders of Tibet. These statements, thus, assert a religio-political ideology but also reflect the possibility that physical coercion might, nonetheless, have been needed both during the collection of evidence and as a means of punishment. The outcome is a mixture of judicial decision and compromise. The evidence in the dispute over the field was held to be clear and led to a decision in favour of the monastery. However, the court also directed that the rituals that the village had claimed were being paid for by the harvest should be continued. It therefore declared that both parties, monastery and village, should henceforward share the cost, a decision obviously not consistent with the monastery’s ownership of the field. In the case concerning the grazing the evidence was inconclusive. Rather than reach its own decision on the basis of the evidence, the court gave the parties a choice: either they could pay for a ritual in which dice would be used to decide who was entitled to the grazing or else they could agree that neither party would use the pasture. In both cases the parties had to agree to the outcome and sign the document accordingly. The court, therefore, refused to assert its own authority to decide the disputed facts. The document records that the parties rejected the dice but that another minister in Lhasa eventually summoned both parties to his residence and worked out a compromise. The approach of the Lhasa authorities to this case is significant in a number of ways, both procedural and substantive. First is their attitude that the case should be settled locally, even a reluctance to assume judicial authority until all other avenues had been exhausted. Secondly, the document refers to the potential for torture and physical penalties. However, the court found reasons not to invoke these provisions and highlighted and invoked the religious principles that were supposed to govern the behaviour of the parties and guide the ultimate solution. The third is the emphasis on the need for agreement to be reached between the parties and the suggested use of a dice ritual in the case of disputed evidence. All these features recur in the reports of legal cases from throughout Tibet and point to the existence of a number of important principles, both explicit and implicit.

Legal principles: adjudication and conciliation Melvyn Goldstein describes the central Lhasa authorities of the twentieth century as forming a court of last appeals for the whole Tibetan

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polity, including semi-independent states like Sakya.13 On the basis of his research among Tibetan refugees he states that: Although lords held primary adjudicatory rights over their serfs, in cases where the serfs of different lords were involved, or even in cases where the Serfs of a single lord were not satisfied with their lord’s decision, the case could be brought to the central government for adjudication. All Tibetans living within the Tibetan polity had the right to appeal decisions rendered by their lords or by lower government officials such as district commissioners. There have been numerous examples of serfs bringing cases against their lords and of the central government adjudicating in favor of the serfs. If the central government reversed an earlier decision of a lord, the lord had no recourse but to accept it and perhaps reappeal in the future. (1971a: 177)

Goldstein, thus, insists on the adjudicatory role of the Lhasa courts and authorities, although intermediate lords also exercised juridical control within their own estates. He does acknowledge, however, that ‘the adjudicatory role of the centre was a passive one’ in the sense that it did not initiate proceedings itself. Goldstein is focussing, here, on the extent to which the exercise of judicial authority reflected the essence of the Tibetan political system which involved ‘the delicate balance between centralized and decentralized (feudallike) political authority’ (1971a: 171). Reports from the semi-independent polity of Sakya indicate a similar approach to legal cases. Goldstein’s summary of the judicial power of the nobility here is that: Lords held primary adjudicatory rights over their serfs, but did not maintain any force in their territory whose primary, or even secondary function was to seek and apprehend violators of criminal and civil norms. In other words, they maintained no police force. The adjudicatory rights of lords were, thus, passive. W hile lords had the right to issue decisions and impose even corporal punishment and imprisonment, they acted only on cases brought before them. Civil disputes were initially handled through mediation and it was only when this failed that cases were brought to the lord for adjudication. In criminal cases, the initial responsibility for the apprehension of the criminal suspect fell on the victim, and the case only reached the lord if the victim was successful in catching the suspect. (1971a: 175)

13

This is one of his reasons for arguing that Sakya was subordinate to the authority and rule of central government, disagreeing with the claims of Cassinelli and Ekvall (1969) that it had ‘independent’ status.

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Although Goldstein insists on the word ‘adjudication’ rather than ‘mediation’, to describe the practices and authority of the Lhasa and Sakya judges, there is, therefore, even in his own account, evidence that mediation was preferred over adjudication. The local lords exercised a passive, rather than an active, authority over the people within their polities, who were encouraged to settle cases through local mediation. This point is supported by Cassinelli and Ekvall’s account (1969), derived from interviews with members of the ruling families of Sakya who had fled into exile and described the situation immediately prior to the Chinese occupation. The system of government involved, at its lowest level, headmen who were supposed to be selected by consensus. One of their duties was to solve disputes. As the authors’ informants put it: In Sa Skya there was always a strong preference for resolving all problems without reference to formal governmental action; even the very important Law Officials at the capital welcomed the opportunity to refer to private mediation cases that they had already begun to investigate. The less frequently a Headman had to refer issues to his superiors the more valuable he was considered.....Once again the society emphasized harmony and consensus. (1969: 92-3)

The preference for devolving cases to local levels for mediation is also mentioned by Henderson, who worked with Cassinelli and Ekvall’s informants. He says that although there was a specialized court and a considerable body of written law and records in Sakya, conciliation (Bar aDum) was the chief method of settling both civil and criminal disputes in Sakya. Minor civil disputes were usually settled locally and privately with ... some neighbor or friend, ... or brought to the attention of the village headman who would appoint a mediator or in some cases might try himself to bring pressure to bear on the parties to settle by agreement. (1964: 1101)

In the urban centre of Sakya instead of headmen there were ‘Group Officials’ at the lowest administrative level who, although they had no authority to make final legal decisions, in fact solved almost half the cases referred to them (Cassinelli and Ekvall 1969: 122). At a higher level the same ‘Law Officers’ would hear disputes that had not been solved through mediation. Cassinelli and Ekvall describe the practice of these governmental judicial authorities as follows:

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The government was willing to ignore situations in which it was assumed that harmony and regularity could be restored by extragovernmental methods. W hen it did intervene, on the request of someone involved in the dispute....its purpose was not to punish anyone but to obtain a just settlement between the people directly concerned. Justice was here less a matter of abstract principle than something acceptable to the disputants; social harmony was to be restored and future disputes forestalled. (1969: 66)

Cassinelli and Ekvall (1969: 119) thus emphasise the importance of the principle of social harmony, saying that ‘the emphasis on harmony’, which led to the attempt to resolve minor disturbances through the process of mediation without resort to the power of government, was one of the two basic beliefs about the nature of government. The other belief was the need to concentrate power, leading to the rather pronounced autocracy of the highest officials. While the first of these statements undoubtedly reflects the official ideology of the elite, keen to portray their polity in the best possible light to the authors, the emphasis on the restoration of social harmony cannot be dismissed. It does, of course, go against Goldstein’s description of law proceedings as a form of adjudication, rather than mediation, but it supports his theory of conflicting tendencies between centralisation and decentralisation. On the one hand there was a concentration of formal judicial authority in the central government and an assertion of adjudicatory judicial power by them. On the other, there was a preference for devolving power to local officers, to whom the task of conflict resolution was, in practice, entrusted and an emphasis on conciliation and agreement. While the judicial promotion of agreement is always easier to achieve at more local levels, where the parties and mediators know each other and the context of the dispute, in Tibet a preference for conciliation was also evident at the centre. Goldstein, for example, suggests that although judges had the power to make decisions they tended to settle cases by finding a compromise to which both parties would agree (1968: 93). French’s informants also told her that in twentieth century Lhasa a ‘thick’ case, where the parties were unyielding or hard in their opinions, would take a long time to decide: if the parties could not agree, truth could not be reached (1995: 138). She describes the ceremonial restoration of good relations that took place after a case involving a dispute between a monastic hostel and an adjoining Lhasa family. This ‘getting together’, was a process of ‘reharmonizing after the dispute’, in which three of the monks went with khatags, tea and bread to the family and also presented them with money to use for offerings, saying, ‘We have

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both fought for the sake of our houses, not for individuals. We have both used harsh words and created strife. Now it is over. Let us be patient and friends in the future.’ (1995: 278-88) There were also provisions for such payments in the law codes she cites, which made specific provision for conciliation (1995: 122). Henderson suggests that in Sakya homicide was an exception to this rule. He describes the legal process in such cases as ‘very much an adversary proceeding’ between the accuser and accused (1964:1103). At the same time, however, the judge (khrims dpon) acted as a conciliator between the families of the two parties because, as he says, a case could only be settled by agreement between them. Even at the higher levels the procedure might have been adversarial in form, therefore, but it was mediatory in practice and aimed at promoting agreement between the parties. Similar dynamics have been noted in imperial China, where the rulers historically favoured substantive over procedural justice, punishments were often draconian and the formal system was complemented by a large informal system and practices of mediation (Peerenboom 2002: 3868). Informal methods of resolving conflict are clearly necessary when a legal system does not have a well-developed set of procedures for decision-making and when it favours the application of general principles to particular cases, rather than the uniform application of legal rules. In China such practices were supported by what has been called a traditional preference for mediation over litigation. There was, moreover, never any claim to a divine basis for written law; at best there was an appeal to a transcendent moral order (Peerenboom 2002: 162). In Tibet, by contrast, an apparently comparable preference for mediation was promoted, at least on the part of some, by reference to the religious ideals of harmony and consensus. Thus, the pragmatic requirement for effective methods of mediation could be used to support the government’s ideology of religious and political harmony.

Legal principles: the search for truth Mediation and conciliation were, therefore, described as the preferred methods for resolving conflict. As French puts it, if the parties did not agree, truth could not be reached (1995: 138). At times, however, torture of the parties by flogging was resorted to in order to obtain an agreement. The judge, that is, was not able simply to pronounce a verdict,

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even though the state would doubtless have had the power to enforce it. There were also cases when agreement could not be reached even after flogging, in which case, as a last resort, the judges could resort to dice or forms of ordeal. Cassinelli and Ekvall (1969) give a detailed account of a homicide case in which neither accuser nor accused would relent, even after being flogged. The judge, therefore, resorted to the use of dice. A yak hide was spread bloody side up on the floor and the two men knelt to roll dice on it. ‘Appealing to the supernatural, calling for vindication and vilifying the opponent, the two men each threw two dice’. (1969: 176) After three rounds the accused won and so was declared innocent. As well as the dice ritual offered to the parties to the Kyirong dispute, there are numerous other references to the use of such methods in legal cases (French 1995: 134-35; Francke 1998: 116-17). Cassinelli and Ekvall’s informants, for example, referred to the possibility of drawing pebbles from a jar of opaque oil in order to achieve a decision (1969: 75-76) and Della Penna refers to the use of boiling oil (Markham 1876: 324). Provisions are also found in the legal codes themselves. At least some versions provide for the resolution of insoluble cases by oaths, the roll of dice or picking out pebbles from a bottle of water or oil (White 1894: 5; Dawa Norbu 1974:75; French 1995: Ch 11). At times it seems that the use of such methods was associated with spirits and supernatural forces which could work through dice, as when the parties to the Sakya murder case made direct appeals to the supernatural to punish the guilty party. At others, however, that link does not appear to have been made. The essential fact is that the decision was taken out of the hands of any human agent. Justice was not found in the decision of a judge but in the achievement of conciliation or by reference to some extra-human authority. The problem of how to determine the truth raises issues of both method and authority that are universal to judicial processes worldwide. In the legal systems of the west that problem has been resolved by the development of rules of evidence and standards of proof. These are to be applied, in criminal cases, by the jury, a quasi-transcendent body representing ‘the people’. In earlier centuries a system of judicial torture to extract confessions was developed in medieval Europe, where it was promoted by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 to replace trial by ordeal, duels and sacred oaths. As Asad (1983) analyses it, ordeals produced truth, often by means of an appeal to the supernatural. Justice was found in the outcome of the physical test. The use of torture to

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extract a confession, on the other hand, was a step towards establishing truth through the spoken word. The physical pain produced the words on the basis of which the facts could then be established and justice pronounced. Some writers have regarded the development of judicial torture, in this way, as a step towards the promotion of a rationally-based form of justice, found in the establishment of truth, rather than direct appeals to the supernatural (Southern 1959: 101-02; Peters 1973: viii). Asad also, however, stresses the links between the promotion of torture by the Lateran Council and the development of bodily practices of asceticism, penance and physical hardship within Christian practice and doctrine at around the same time. In Tibet, asceticism has a certain place within Buddhist practice, but it is not possible to draw such clear links between religious and judicial practices of bodily discipline. It is evident from the remarks of the judge in the Kyirong dispute, for example, that torture, along with physical punishment, remained a problematic practice for the Tibetans. In the case of intractable disagreement, flogging was presumed to be the solution and physical punishment was the remedy for many crimes. These were particularly employed in Lhasa, where the government resorted to both in order to enforce its authority, especially at times of political conflict and power struggles. However, this continued to trouble the authorities involved. Following the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1933, for example, there were political struggles in Lhasa, during which two contenders for power were deposed and punished (Goldstein 1989b: Chs 5 and 6). The first was Kumbela, who had been the personal attendant to the Dalai Lama. He was accused of having played a part in the death of the Dalai Lama and was tried before the National Assembly, an advisory body consisting of the highest government officials in Lhasa. He was found to have been partly responsible for the death by failing to summon medical assistance but also by deliberately having engaged in black magic. He was exiled and all his property was confiscated (1989b: 16577). A later contender for power was Lungshar, a talented government official and military commander who had, himself, played a central role in the fall of Kumbela. His subsequent attempts to secure power were contested by Trimön, a powerful member of the Kashag, the highest body under the Regent and Lönchen. Lungshar was arrested and tried by a committee appointed by the Kashag, who found him guilty of a plot to kill Trimön and assume power. He was sentenced to blinding and imprisonment and had all his property confiscated. He sons were also barred from government office (1989b: 199-212).

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It is, therefore, evident that the Lhasa government had the power to exercise severe punitive authority and that there were institutions which supported this, namely the National Assembly and the Kashag’s investigating committee. There was also an untouchable caste who carried out mutilation punishments.14 On the other hand, there was considerable ambivalence about the exercise of such power. The Regent, a reincarnate lama, clearly endorsed the punishment but refused to sign Lungshar’s mutilation order on the basis that, as a monk, it would have been inappropriate for him to do so. He was concerned that the exercise of punitive judicial powers was contrary to the religious principles of his religion (1989b: 208). Even more significantly, however, the members of the Kashag’s investigating committee were ambivalent about their own authority to act as the final arbiters of justice. Despite the fact that capital punishment had officially been banned, they considered that execution would be appropriate in Lungshar’s case. However, they were afraid that if they ordered execution his vengeful spirit might hinder the search for the new Dalai Lama, or even harm his reincarnation (1989b: 207). It was not just that execution might have karmic consequences for them, but that the vengeful nature of Lungshar’s spirit might have an effect on more immediate events. While these government authorities were, therefore, prepared to mete out justice as a direct exercise of power, rather than by promoting conciliation, they were concerned about supernatural interference in the judicial process. There were, therefore, four distinct ways in which cases could be resolved in Tibet. The first was by accord, that is, the resolution of a case by conciliation. This was found widely at lower levels, in reports from Sakya and central Tibet (French 1995: Ch 16).15 There were also related provisions in the legal codes and it was promoted at higher levels, as in the Kyirong case, where there was an emphasis on the ceremonial restoration of good relations. The second was the employment of ordeals and dice. The use of dice is reported widely, while references to ordeals are found more often in statements about practice,

14

The removal of eyeballs was, however, so rare that they had no experience of this procedure when they carried it out on Lungshar and the execution went badly wrong (Goldstein 1989b: 209-09). 15 She describes how the headmen of Shelkar district called a yearly meeting to draw up the rules to specify appropriate conduct in the fields during the growing season. Transgressions and also, apparently, other cases of dispute, were heard by the whole committee. In two cases the parties reached agreement for the payment of fines and exchange of khatags.

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such as those of the codes themselves. In such cases the legal result, or truth, was determined by the method itself, rather than by agreement between the parties. These were, however, methods which were said to be used only as a last resort, after attempts at mediation had failed, as directed in the Sikkhim code, for example (White 1894: 51). The third was the use of torture to extract a confession. This followed a different principle, that is, the establishment of facts through verbal concession. It was used as a prelude to the making of a judgment, possibly a punishment order, on the part of the judge. However, it sometimes failed, when it had to be succeeded by the use of dice, as in the Sakya homicide case. The fourth was adjudication by a judge, who decided matters of both fact and punishment, as they did in the cases of Kumbela and Lungshar. Lungshar had previously suggested the use of flogging to establish the truth. No one method obviously prevailed. The use of ordeals, oaths and dice seems to have been rarer in the peripheral areas, where legal practice was less systematic and reports of conciliation are widespread. However, a preference for conciliation was also expressed at the highest levels in Lhasa, while unease was evident about the use of both inquisitorial torture and punishment. Asad (1983: 299), emphasising the importance of socio-economic background in explaining judicial practice, points out that the establishment of truth by inquisition allowed a more persistent, more pervasive exercise of centralised control by a dominating, rationalising power, than did appeals to the supernatural through the use of ordeals. In Tibet, likewise, it is in Lhasa, where the government had the most securely-established centralised power, that we find the rare cases of adjudicatory authority, notably in the cases of Kumbela and Lungshar. Similarly, the use of torture to extract confessions has most often been noted on the part of government officials and lords. However, Tibet never developed a systematic set of legal practices that allowed judges secure methods of establishing the truth, comparable either to the procedures established by the Lateran Council or to the rules of evidence and jury systems developed in the west.

Dice and chance The use of dice to decide problematic cases reflects the use of similar methods of chance to select leaders and make decisions throughout the Tibetan region. Such methods date back to the time of the Empire, when

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the use of dice to make administrative decisions was formalised and enshrined in ‘statutes’, whose correct use was the subject of instructions granted by the central authorities to those in the provinces (Dotson, forthcoming). The use of lots has already been noted in the Kyirong dispute and rotation was commonly used to select leaders and make political decisions throughout the Tibetan region (Goldstein 1973; Jest 1975; Dargyay 1982).16 Similar processes have been described in Amdo and Nepal (Walsh 1906; Sagant 1990). Among the Sharwa of Amdo, for example, Sagant found that the leaders of their expeditions were nominated according to prowess, seen as a gift from the gods, but that the final choice was made by lot. The Manangi in Nepal also chose their headmen by lot.17 Even within the central Lhasa regime, as Ramble (1993) notes, high ranking individuals were chosen by lot or, as in the case of the Junior Tutor of the Dalai Lama, by putting candidates’ names into dough balls. As Goldstein (1973: 447) points out, even the selection of the Dalai Lama was, at times, partly effected by lot. Ramble (forthcoming: chapter 11) discusses the elaborate, but ultimately random, game by which the headmen of Te, a village in Mustang, were chosen. This complex ceremony, he suggests, ‘contributes to the creation of a reified entity that transcends the community as an assemblage of individuals and households.’ The selection is, then, ‘the result of human action but not of human design.’ The method, nevertheless, has ‘qualities normally attributed to divinity, namely, exteriority, transcendence, unpredictability and inaccessibility’. As he points out, the supernatural is an inconsistent element within such practices (Ramble, forthcoming: chapter 11; Pirie 2005). A more indeterminate form of transcendent authority was, rather, appealed to, in the form of dice, lots and games of chance. However, as Goldstein (1973: 447) notes, the use of lots in the selection of the Dalai Lama was not regarded as ‘chance’ by the Tibetans themselves, who were confident that even when the Manchus were interfering in the process the right candidate was chosen.

16

In her study of villages in Dingri, central Tibet, Dargyay describes a headman who was elected from among the tre-ba every year. His duties were not extensive, however, and he could only make decisions in consultation with the rest of the tax-payers and she talks of selection by an oracle in difficult cases. 17 Their political system, as Sagant describes, was similar to that found in Photoksar, in that it incorporated ideas of rotation, of equality between clans and ages, and the headmen did not wield effective power.

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Judicial principles and political authority The Ganden Potrang government in Lhasa, therefore, evolved a form of political power based on a religio-moral ideology and economic control and backed by a certain amount of military force. As Just (forthcoming) suggests, there is a deep-seated desire on the part of the public, wherever it may be, to see the legal, civil order correspond to a cosmic order. The ruler can, himself, make claims to divine authority (Hocart 1927).18 The supernatural authority and religious principles to which the Tibetans could appeal, however, were either more concerned with the fate of the soul in the after-life, in the case of the bodhisattvas and the laws of karma, or dangerously vengeful, in the case of the local spirits and their practices of revenge. The Lhasa authorities, instead, appealed to the religious status of the Dalai Lamas and their predecessors and relied upon the rather vague principle of chösi zungdrel, the harmony between politics and religion. By claiming that the law codes were based upon the mi chos of Songtsen Gampo they promoted the moral religious foundations of judicial practice and their connection with the founding father of Tibetan civilisation. French’s informants, when explaining legal practices and the significance of the law codes, clearly articulated the judicial preference for mediation and conciliation in terms of Buddhist principles of karma and non-duality. Such principles could hardly, however, form a basis for the legal activities of a centralised government, concerned with the practical business of maintaining order, which often required the use of force, nor a basis for the principles of punishment found in the codes themselves. Ideas about mental afflictions, samsara and non-duality were not of great use in the practical maintenance of order. Despite the twentieth century development of a more rational form of government (in a Weberian sense), the Ganden Potrang did not develop a coherent body of laws, nor a systematic set of legal procedures. There were never clear and certain rules that could be relied upon by ordinary citizens, as well as members of the government, let alone laws that they could use to control the exercise of administrative power. Government officers were allowed considerable autonomy in the making of decisions, including the resolu18 Thus, the model court house in the United States replicates a Greek temple, with architecture designed to produce an atmosphere of awe, reverence and majesty, appropriate to a house of worship (Just, forthcoming). Civil order can also appeal to a secular principle, for example, the justice symbolised by the blind Goddess of Justice who tops the Central Criminal Court in London with her scales.

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tion of conflict. Their activities were primarily controlled through the guidelines issued from Lhasa, while they were also supposed to abide by moral principles, as reflected in the instructions to the Kyirong and Shigatse officials. In this way the courts were also able to rid themselves of judicial burdens, sending cases back to lower levels where, as the evidence from Sakya indicates, there were effective methods of mediation. The central governments could then claim moral authority over the subordinate units without having to engage in the time-consuming business of mediation. They could claim moral credit, that is, for the judicial practices carried out by others. Moreover, they could assert, as the informants of Cassinelli and Ekvall did, and with some justification, that they were supporting the principles of harmony and conciliation. The centre, thus, asserted moral supremacy over the provinces, while allowing them to retain a certain degree of political and judicial autonomy. To a large extent this resolved the problem of the ideological clash between the monastic status of many officials and the punitive authority needed to support a centralised government. However, it did not resolve it completely. In particular, the use of torture and physical punishment, although widespread, caused unease in many quarters. In this, the Tibetans contrasted with the members of the Lateran Council for whom bodily pain was, according to Asad, already integral to religious practice. It was, maybe, the reluctance on the part of the Tibetan elite to order physical punishment that prevented the development of more systematic judicial procedures, which would have allowed the truth to be more readily established as a prelude to punishment. Tibetan ideas about the nature of justice also retained a darker aspect alongside its moral and religious ideologies. There were vengeful and capricious supernatural forces that could be stirred up by the enactment of judicial power. The legal system in Tibet, therefore, remained undeveloped and unsystematic, with a great deal of discretion devolved to individual officials, who received loose guidance from Lhasa about the need to act fairly and impartially in their administration of justice. The practice of mediation was widespread and promoted by some as a means of achieving the religious ideals of harmony and consensus. At the same time, however, dice and other methods of chance were widely used, albeit not in a very systematic way.

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Ladakh: judicial practices, autonomy and power What can, then, be said or inferred about the ‘great’ legal tradition of Tibet and its relation to Ladakhi practices, or about the existence of wider cultural patterns within judicial practices? Firstly, it is apparent that the appeal to Buddhist principles in judicial proceedings was not systematic, nor integrated in any rational way into Tibetan procedures for conflict resolution. There is, in any event, no evidence that such principles flowed down from the centre and made their way out to the periphery in the form of texts or the instructions of monks and lamas or otherwise. They certainly did not form part of a single, coherent, let alone Buddhist, cultural system, as both Samuel (1993) and French (1995) are inclined to suggest. Secondly, there was a comparable devolution of power to local hierarchs in both Ladakh and Tibet. The Ganden Potrang government in central Tibet was a much more centralised administration than that of the Ladakhi kings, with a more elaborate bureaucracy, legal codes and political ideology. Nevertheless, it remained relatively uncentralised and unbureaucratic, as did the polities that emerged throughout Tibet. Comparable ecological factors, of course, made communications tortuous and centralisation impracticable. It was, therefore, a matter of necessity that responsibility for order was devolved to local lords and village communities or allowed to remain with them. It should not, therefore, be surprising that the Ladakhi phenomena I have described appear to be rooted in local social patterns, in practices of autonomy and regional political events, rather than in pan-Tibetan judicial principles, with religious or other origins. Thirdly, and despite these reservations, it is apparent that dice, lots and methods of chance were employed widely in legal proceedings throughout the plateau. The use of lots is only mentioned once in the (very sparse) reports I have been able to track down of legal cases decided at higher levels in Ladakh. Nevertheless, dice are used frequently among the Chang Tang nomads to determine positions of responsibility (Ahmed 1986: Ch 8) and the use of rotation to select leaders is still widespread in Ladakhi villages, as it is in Photoksar. When it comes to judicial decisions, the yulpa in Photoksar, with their ideology of unity and agreement, are able relatively easily to make decisions and to promote agreement between the parties to a dispute, often using a certain amount of coercion. They also do not wrestle with the fear of the supernatural consequences of their judicial decisions.

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However, they appeal to lots or simply to a list of names to make administrative decisions. Such methods involve appealing to a transcendent, but generally non-supernatural, form of authority. Evidence from Mustang and Nepal suggests that similar practices here supported the authority of local communities over their own political affairs. Finally, the patterns of deference and distance, hierarchy and equality, that I observed in Photoksar also have some resonance with relations of power and autonomy that have been noted in the wider Tibetan region. Some authors have regarded such phenomena in terms of cultural patterns. Stein (1972: 94), for example, suggests the existence of two general principles which, as he says, ‘are interdependent and antagonistic: egalitarian joint ownership and hierarchy’. These principles, he says, are found both in family relations and in structures of authority. ‘The hereditary authority of one person and a keen sense of hierarchy’ tends to be matched by ‘cohesion and the strength of the group’. (1972: 125) When one threatens to dominate, the other appears to counterbalance it. Samuel also suggests that there was a tendency within Tibetan institutions to avoid giving power to one person, for example through the appointment of two men, one lay and one monastic, to many official positions (1993:152). He refers to Ter Ellingson’s (1989) work on monastic constitutions, which he describes as carefully defining and controlling the power and authority of monastic office holders and which, he says, can be seen as part of a tendency to specify and distribute rights and responsibilities. This resulted in what Ellingson describes as ‘the deconcentration and distribution of authority’ (1989: 217-8) and which, Samuel suggests, is true of Tibetan societies more generally (1993:153-4).19 All three authors, therefore, point out the existence of conflicting tendencies between hierarchy, centralisation and the concentration of power, on the one hand, and equality, decentralisation and the distribution of power on the other. Tibetan society was not deeply stratified, in 19

To talk about the ‘deconcentration’ of authority, of course, presupposes a certain amount of concentration or centralisation. The operation of the principle of reincarnation can also be mentioned here. Carrasco remarks that, ‘although reincarnations are often found among the nobility, a given post is never monopolized by any single family,’ and ‘reincarnation in a commoner always kept the noble families from gaining too much power.’ (1959: 23-24) However, the system could also be turned to the advantage of the upper classes. The succession of Regents who held power until the majority of the thirteenth Dalai Lama in 1895 became ‘fantastically wealthy’ (Goldstein 1973: 449), and of the highest lay officials in government, the Shapes, 86% were from aristocratic families (Goldstein 1989b: 17).

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a way comparable to caste-based Indian society. Nor is there evidence of egalitarian individualism. Economic, religious and political power certainly came to be concentrated in the hands of a few, both monastic and aristocratic elites, but countervailing forces took the form of the devolution of power and its distribution through rotation and methods of chance. Ideologically there were principles that counteracted the systems of reincarnation and aristocratic superiority, which could legitimate the concentration of power in the hands of a few. What has resulted is a certain attitude to leadership and centralised judicial control, which is still found in twenty-first century Ladakh. The statement of the Alchi lonpo that his ancestors ‘gave the law’ to villages like Photoksar mirrors the assertion of adjudicatory judicial authority over the regions by Lhasa officials described by Goldstein (1971a). In both cases this turns out to have been more of a theoretical than a practical reality, however. In central Tibet the peasants could take their complaints against the lords to Lhasa and there is evidence that some did so (1971a: 177). In Ladakh the Photoksar villagers could take their complaints to Alchi and can, now, have recourse to the police or the courts in Leh. However, they rarely, if ever, do so and containing and resolving disputes internally is one of their ways of maintaining a measure of local autonomy against the great traditions of the centre. Such practices continue to be a significant force within the urban dynamics in Ladakh. It is to these to which I turn in the next chapter.

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URBAN PROCESSES AND POLITICAL CHANGE The social and moral order maintained in the village of Photoksar, to which the practices of conflict resolution I have described here are oriented, is defined by an implicit sense of a sacred social community. This community, I have suggested, is itself maintained by patterns of equality, which serve to counteract tendencies towards hierarchy. The containment and resolution of conflict within the village, as well as safeguarding and preserving that sacred social space, can be seen as part of a larger pattern of deference and distance towards the religious and political centres in the region. This explains the measure of autonomy maintained by the villagers against the powerful influence of kings, religious forces and development projects. It also, I would suggest, helps to make sense of the dynamics of order found in the urban centre, Leh. The attitudes to conflict and dispute resolution that I have described in Photoksar are found widely throughout Ladakh. The importance of settling disputes locally was expressed to me repeatedly by members of different villages, Ladakhi NGO officers and urban dwellers. Informants were always able to give me examples of disputes that had been settled through the mediation of family and neighbours or at the instigation of the goba or village meeting. Such informal procedures even extend into the socially fluid atmosphere of modern Leh, where concepts of legal rights are widely accepted but the authority of the Indian legal system impinges only very lightly on legal practices. The educated classes are familiar with the political and legal arena of the Indian state and those who find work with NGOs quickly become adept at using the language of international development, with its emphasis on ‘child rights’, ‘women’s rights’, ‘the right to education’ and so on. Nevertheless, when it comes to their own disputes, such language quickly becomes muted. One of the major sources of conflict in the urban centres of Ladakh, particularly Leh, is now land. With the new economy have come a great many employment and economic opportunities. Government jobs, in particular, are secure, well paid and sought after, but there are also some who take their chances in business, and others, particularly from the Chang Tang, who simply come to work as labourers, hoping to escape the hardships of life in the remoter areas (Goodall 2004). Leh has, in consequence, become a target for migration.

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There has been considerable development on what was previously waste land because property is in short supply and the older, irrigated areas of Leh, where houses have the potential for gardens and can be turned into guest-houses have become particularly valuable. As a result, children of Leh families are keen to share in their household’s property and have become conscious of their inheritance rights. Even daughters insist on their shares, especially if they marry a man from outside the capital. In general, property is the most common cause of serious conflict here, accounting for the greatest number of civil court cases. As one Leh resident put it, ‘formerly people did not care about boundaries but now the slightest dispute is liable to end up in court’. I came across more than one case in which a dispute between two children had resulted in longstanding, unresolved animosity between their respective, immediate families. This, in turn, has resulted in the gradual acceptance of the ideology of individual property, as enshrined in the State laws, in social obligations, as it still is in Photoksar and many other villages. However, it is still rare to hear people talking in terms of their ‘rights’ to land. Tinles Angmo, a Ladakhi lawyer based in Leh, told me that members of the older generation often insist that the elder son should still receive a larger share. The unease with which many Ladakhis regard the changes in the nature of their property relations is illustrated by the case of Rinchen, a man from Nubra now working as a teacher in Leh. His father was a khardar and a member of an aristocratic family in Sabu, a village close to Leh. However, his father had abandoned his first wife and daughter to marry a Nubra girl as a makpa. The Nubra girl’s family were lonpos so finding a suitable husband for her had been difficult, Rinchen explained. They had had five children, including my informant. Since he was working in Leh, Rinchen wanted to establish a house there and had asked his half-sister for a share of the Sabu property. She had refused so he had brought a case in court which had, ultimately, been successful. However, he narrated his story to me with some embarrassment and was anxious to stress the fact that he had not been greedy for land. He genuinely needed it for his family to live on, he emphasised, and it would have been wrong if he had sold it. Having won the case he had returned half his entitlement to his sister and they had re-established good relations. In Nubra, by contrast, his family khangba’s land had not been divided yet. His mother was still alive and she would not like it; she tells her sons to stay together and would regard a division of the land as a sign that they were going to fight, he explained.

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Rinchen’s concern to maintain good family relations and reluctance to be seen to have been asserting his ‘rights’, exemplifies the prevailing attitudes towards property and property disputes. The question that arises is whether it is possible to see any connection between these attitudes and the concern with the restoration of order and re-establishment of good relations that I have described in Photoksar. It would seem, prima facie, unlikely that the latter, bound up, as it is, with notions of community, is replicated in Leh. Rinchen’s attitude primarily concerned the status of his family. Nevertheless, I would suggest that something similar is at work, even in the far more fluid social structures of Leh, where people can be seen actively to be creating small spheres of order.

Leh After Indian independence, as Leh grew in size, the administration divided it into separate wards. These largely corresponded to the existing social units, then known chutsoks or mahalla, an Urdu word introduced by the Dogras. More recently new housing areas have been developed. The biggest of these, the Housing Colony, was established on nonagricultural land. It is treated as a single unit by the administration, but within the Colony the people have organised themselves into smaller ‘village’ groups. These select their own goba and also, generally, a committee, tsokspa. The duties of these representatives include liaising with authorities over the provision of services and building projects and organising festivals and ceremonies for the local lha. These are spirits of the locality which have been established as protectors of these new communities. One resident explained that if a dispute occurs within the village then the goba has to sort it out with the help of the tsokspa or some of the older men. Disputes have to be settled inside, nangkuli, she insisted, and not allowed to go outside the village. Nangkuli (of uncertain etymology and orthography) is the Leh equivalent of the term nangosla, used by the Photoksar villagers. The same sense of community, as a place with boundaries within which disputes must be contained, as well as with its own lha, has, therefore, been established here. Each of the villages in the older areas of Leh, where there are fields and irrigation channels, now has a number of representatives. Typically these include one chupon, an official in charge of water, one nyerpa, in charge of festivals and religious activities, and one membar, who is responsible for calling meetings. There is no man known as goba, but

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the membar reports to the chief goba for the whole of Leh. A man who had recently been chief goba told me that the post used to be hereditary, but that in the early 1960s the next in turn declined to take up the position and it had remained vacant for over twenty years. Then, in around the early 1980s, a delegation of men, including the Leh kalon, the head of the highest aristocratic family, had persuaded him to take up the office, initially for one year, and then to continue in the post. Ultimately he had held the job for 14 years. The government departments and Deputy Commissioner (‘DC’) consult the goba on matters such as the building of roads, bridges and other infrastructure developments and the allocation of new areas of development land. His duties also include liaising with the chief onpo over the days on which agricultural activities should take place and settling disputes, principally those which concern land. Another member of Leh town told me that the goba was selected on the basis that he knew the fields, knew the irrigation system, knew how everything worked and ‘could sort out any problems’. Tsewang Dorje, a former Assistant Commissioner, the second highest government officer in Ladakh, spoke very highly of this goba: ‘He was a very good man. He knows every village, every field, every street and malla (irrigation channel) in Leh.’ Although he had no official status, the kalon who died around the turn of the century was also informally regarded as a representative of the town by the administration and sometimes known by them as ‘chief citizen’. He was often consulted by government officials, including the DC. Although, therefore, the administration of Ladakh is officially under the control of a government bureaucracy, headed by the DC, informal Ladakhi posts, including that of the kalon, are still recognised and have considerable significance for the day-to-day maintenance of order. Serious arguments and fights, the former goba told me, are his biggest responsibility. It is often difficult to resolve them, he said, because he does not have much power: he can only impose fines of Rs 400 or Rs 500 and some people are selfish and will not accept his advice. The problem, therefore, is that he has to find a solution with which everyone agrees. However, if cases go to court they are usually sent back to him to resolve. In the end, he thought, he was generally successful in his job because he knew and understood the people. As well as the goba there are twelve chupon in Leh, one from each village, selected on the basis of rotation between households. They used to be paid in kind by the villagers, as did the goba, but now they receive a small government allowance. They choose a chief chupon among

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themselves every year when they organise the ceremony that marks the beginning of the agricultural year. This system, one of the chupon told me, was a matter of mirabs tradition, and the complex system of water distribution represents the chui trims, water customs, that had been laid down by the kings.1 Every year the chupon are called upon to settle minor disputes over the water distribution but, he said, there is rarely a question of who is in the wrong because everyone knows the trims. His job is to make the wrong-doer apologise, pay a fine, and, if there has been an argument, sign an agreement not to quarrel in the future. This is generally confirmed with an exchange of khatags. He can threaten to beat an offender or ask the village membar or some elders, rgadpo, to assist him and if there is a serious problem he will call in the Leh goba who, in turn, can call other membars to assist him. Cases are almost always settled, he told me, because the wrong-doers are ashamed, trelba, and they do not allow disputes to go to the court because this would be even more shameful. Disputes have to be settled internally, nang kuli, he insisted. The Leh goba made similar remarks when talking about the new panchayat system that was being introduced at the time, which I discuss further below. When I asked him whether the new panchayats would, if they replaced the old goba system, undertake dispute resolution he replied that they would ‘have’ to do so. Disputes must not be allowed to extend beyond the village boundaries, he emphasised. If a dispute goes to court it can take four or five years to decide and usually ends up back in the village for the goba to sort out anyway. In practice, therefore, the police, courts and lawyers are marginal to the majority of the processes by which conflict is resolved in Leh. They get involved in high profile fights, property and marital disputes, but the day to day business of maintaining order is organised by these semiofficial Ladakhi post-holders.

Conflict and community The statement that disputes should be solved within the village community was emphasised by all these informants. It was also evident from the chupon’s descriptions that, in practice, the community, including the goba, membar and elders, puts pressure on any wrong-doer to come into 1

Tiwari and Gupta (forthcoming) describe the system and its recent evolution.

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line. The idea that wrong-doing and quarrelling are shameful, trelba, is also a potent force. Within the communities into which Leh is divided, even the relatively new structures of the Housing Colony, therefore, a dispute is conceptualised as a problem for the community which must, at all costs, be contained. At the same time, the existence of long-running disputes can often be traced to structural divisions within or between communities. Although the villages in the remoter regions, such as the Lingshed area of Sham, tend to be distinctly bounded, separated by acres of waste land, good relations, cemented by kinship ties, are generally maintained between them. This means that disputes can be resolved in a similar manner to those arising within the village. The Photoksar villagers, for example, told me of one dispute that had arisen between a Photoksar household and some villagers from the neighbouring Nyeraks, a village with which Photoksar has many kin ties. A yak had been lost from herds grazing together and it was not apparent to whom it belonged. The Photoksar goba was called in to find a solution and, unable to determine which of two animals was missing, decided that the Photoksar household should keep the remaining animal but pay half of its value to the Nyeraks house. His decision was accepted by both parties. In this situation, where there were long-standing relations of cooperation over pasture-land as well as extensive kinship ties between the two villages, it was possible to mediate between the two distinct communities, despite the lack of an overarching judicial authority. On the other hand, there is a history of animosity between many villages in other areas and even dissent between village sections. The document published by Schuh and Phukhang (1979: Doc LIII), mentioned in chapter two, indicates that there had been a conflict between the different parts of Shara, a village close to the Indus valley in upper Ladakh, in the early nineteenth century. In the late twentieth century, I found that an extended dispute was also dragging on between the three sections of this village. These had come to function, in many respects, as separate communities. The primary bone of contention was the benefits of a development project undertaken by the Ladakh Ecological Development Group (LEDEG), an NGO set up by Helena NorbergHodge, a prominent western environmentalist, to promote ecological development in Ladakh. One of my informants from the village claimed that this was not a historic problem, rather attributable to three or four of the current leaders. However, it does seem as if the cleavage between village sections has historic antecedents. In Sabu village, closer to Leh,

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there was also a conflict between village sections over the distribution of water. This lead to a boycott against one section of the village by the other two, who refused to cooperate with it over ritual and agricultural activities. A Leh-based NGO worker, who had undertaken numerous projects for LEDEG, told me of several other cases in which the advent of development projects had caused rupture between the semi-autonomous sections of a village or groups of villages. In most of these cases it is, therefore, possible to trace conflict to existing cleavages in community structures. Most Ladakhis’ sense of attachment to a wider community outside their immediate village, is weak, save when it comes to their religious identity. This was also apparent in Photoksar. One evening, for example, a group of men was enjoying some chang around the stove. One of them began to make up verses in antonyms about the villagers: ‘tellers of truth, is what we are; tellers of lies, is what we are; builders of our yul, is what we are; destroyers of our yul, is what we are,’ and so on. He used the phrase ngatang mi, literally ‘we people’, but when someone challenged him to explain exactly who ngatang mi were he hesitated, ‘Photoksarpa, no Ladakhspa, no Shamma (the area of lower Ladakh)....’, he suggested. Beyond the village he was unwilling to assert any firm sense of identity. This, I would suggest, accounts for what occasionally seemed like contradictions in the attitudes to conflict expressed in the village. Anger and conflict are unequivocally condemned and when we discussed fighting in the abstract or All India Radio reported on the conflict in Kashmir, for example, Paljor would always shake his head and declare it to be tsokpo. One day, however, he returned from Leh, proud to have taken part in a demonstration organised by the LBA to demand autonomy for Ladakh. This was occasioned by the move, on the part of certain political parties in Kashmir, to obtain a measure of self-rule from India. He described the demonstration in surprisingly aggressive terms as having been ‘against Farooq Abdullah’, leader of the Jammu and Kashmir State government. At other times he joked that he would not eat the bread I had bought for the journey back to Photoksar from the ‘Balti’ bakeries in the town. His willingness to express opposition and even antagonism towards the Ladakhi Muslims, despite the general horror of all forms of conflict articulated by the villagers within their own community, reflects his lack of a sense of attachment to a wider political entity, Ladakh, encompassing both Buddhists and Muslims. He identified, rather, with his religious community. Fighting, in the abstract, might be bad, but he was not slow to identify with the communal antagonism

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expressed towards people with a different religious identity. The Photoksarpa identify themselves as Shamma and nangpa, rather than Ladakhspa. Among certain members of the elite in Leh, I did, by contrast, find an idea of community which extended to encompass the wider region of Ladakh. These urban elites would talk about Ladakh itself, as a small community and the need to maintain harmony within it. Wangchuk had, for example, described his decision to settle the SECMOL dispute as one taken in the interests of ‘our community, in which everyone knows everyone else’. He was, thus, expressing an ideal of harmony within even the heterogeneous community of Leh. Tinles Angmo, my lawyer informant, also talked about the impossibility of polyandry prosecutions in the ‘small’ Ladakhi society. She explained that polyandry had been officially abolished by the Act of 19412 and would now be charged as bigamy or adultery. However, she added, she had not known a single prosecution in Ladakh. Such a thing ‘would not be possible’ in such a small society, she said. Even Tsering Samphel, President of the LBA and supporter of his organisation’s anti-Muslim policies, used the phrase yul chig, one country, when mediating in a conflict between different villages. In all these cases my informants were, therefore, expressing a sense of belonging to the wider region of Ladakh, a community which would be disrupted by conflict. The history of Ladakh has been punctuated by warfare with external forces, which might have been thought to have created a sense of regional unity under the king. However, there has also been antagonism between its constituent parts and their rulers and a constant movement of traders, monks and other outsiders coming from all directions through the Indus valley. For a multitude of reasons, political, historical and ecological, there is little sense or symbolism of unity or of regional boundaries around Ladakh as a whole. Even today, Kargil Block has an ambiguous status. Is it part of greater Ladakh, in which the people share linguistic, ecological, agricultural and cultural similarities, or is it a separate Muslim area? The political division between Blocks seems to be pushing it towards the latter. The communal tensions of the 1980s and 1990s are just the most dramatic example of the divisions that characterise the Ladakh population. The question, then, is, what impelled these elites to create a sense

2 She was referring to the Abolition of Polyandrous Marriages Act 1941, mentioned in chapter two.

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of regional unity, and with what effects? It was in fact, the President of the LBA, the body most responsible for the communal tensions, who acted as mediator in the SECMOL dispute, and his organisation had been running the Shakhs Khang, an important forum for the resolution of conflict in Leh, since the 1980s.

The Shakhs Khang In the 1980s and early 1990s the LBA became, and has remained, a campaigning organisation whose activities also led to drastic divisions between the Buddhist and Muslim populations of Ladakh and to violent, communal antagonism between them (van Beek 1996, 1999, 2000a, 2001; Bertelsen 1996, 1997; Aggarwal 2004). Nevertheless, the LBA has always carried out a certain amount of dispute resolution. In their early days considerable time was devoted by the LBA and its predecessor, the YMBA, to arbitrating in disputes concerning etiquette, in particular the difficult question of seating hierarchy (van Beek 2000a: 176). LBA officials told me that at first people simply used to consult the President, Vice-President or Secretary with their problems. However, in 1990, following the LBA’s rise to power and the setting up of regional groups, and as part of a boycott of the state’s bureaucracy, a formal dispute resolution committee was formed. Its hearings, which continued after the end of the boycott in 1992, are popularly referred to as the Shakhs Khang (place of mediation). Cases are heard weekly at the LBA’s offices in Leh. These are generally brought by the sending of a letter setting out a complaint, after which the committee summons all relevant parties to a hearing. Three of the elder members of the LBA generally conduct the hearings but the President and other members may join or replace them. The majority of the cases, they say, concern family matters and land division and they do not deal with criminal matters.3 However, this statement was little more than a gesture towards the authority of the police and the courts. One case I saw had involved an assault and the committee was concerned to resolve it themselves so as to ensure, they expressly said, that the police complaint was dropped. Like the Photoksar villagers, the LBA is ready

3 Five out of the nine cases I saw concerned marriage and children, one concerned inheritance to land and the others miscellaneous disputes.

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to acknowledge the authority of the police but quick to ignore it in practice. The hearings are always informal, the parties sitting around a room, with no particular place for the mediators or either party and no set procedures. When a dispute comes to them from within a village they often call for the village’s goba to attend the hearings and they defer to his knowledge of the context and the people involved. The parties are allowed to have their say and the mediators ask them to speak in turn, but they often interrupt each other or the mediators intervene and friends and relations contribute to the discussion. The mediators are accorded an astonishing (to me) lack of formal respect, allowing themselves to be interrupted and contradicted. There are no references to precedent, law or custom but the mediators seem quickly to reach a common view without consultation, even in cases of disputed evidence. The bulk of their work then consists in trying to persuade the parties to accept whatever solution they suggest. Acceptance is crucial and they may put considerable moral pressure on both parties to agree. In one case a woman had made an allegation that she had become pregnant by a man from her village, a charge he denied. The mediators clearly thought that the man was lying and spent most of the hearing trying to make him admit this, pointing out the weaknesses in his story. Eventually they sent everyone away and told the two principal witnesses to look at themselves carefully in a mirror and realise that if they lied once they would have to lie another hundred times. As in most of the Tibetan cases, there is no question of simply making a judgment against one party. The whole ethos of the hearings is to get the parties to agree to a solution. The concept of individual rights and claims never enters the discussion. The mediators are primarily concerned to find a workable arrangement for the future. So, in one case, a woman was saying that she wanted to divorce her husband on the grounds that he was a drunkard but the mediators exerted considerable pressure on her to stay with him for the sake of their four children and discussed how she might deal with his alcoholism by locking up the drink. In another, a couple had already separated but were arguing over the children and the wife was, again, complaining of her husband’s alcoholism. The husband, on the other hand, had promised not to drink any more and the mediators were suggesting that he sign a written undertaking to this effect. In yet another, the wife was spending time away from home, because of her work, which was making her husband suspicious. The mediators told me later that the real problem was that the husband had a ‘straight mind’,

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believing whatever pernicious gossip people suggested to him, so they were trying to make him understand the wife’s position. The informality of the hearings and the rhetoric of the mediators both represent an orientation towards agreement and towards the wider community. The parties are encouraged to see their dispute in the context of its effects on their family and village but also, in appropriate cases, on Ladakhi society as a whole. The mediators evidently see their Shakhs Khang as a type of court of appeal for disputes that cannot be solved at village level and they were anxious that I remind the Photoksar villagers that they should follow this route in similar cases. However, the President was quite frank about the LBA’s recent decline in power. Between 1989 and 1995, he told me, when the LBA was strong, and had to be strong for its political fight, the committee could simply give a judgment and people would comply. Now they have to use more negotiation in the process and cases take a lot longer to resolve. They are using the ‘traditions of the people’ more, he said. Although the LBA had initiated the most dramatic political agitation undertaken in Ladakh in the recent past, its concern, when resolving disputes, was said to be to prevent the escalation of any conflict that could have political overtones. The most serious case that I saw, in that every hearing was attended by the LBA President, Tsering Samphel, had started as a simple assault on a bus driver by a group of youths in the village of Nimmu, where his bus had temporarily halted. One of the driver’s relatives was in the Khaltse police force and had, they said, used his influence to secure a letter from the chief goba of Khaltse block alleging a history of harassment by the Nimmu youths. This letter was sent to Nimmu village, to the police, the LBA, the bus drivers’ union and a number of politicians. The LBA committee took the matter very seriously and called not just the Nimmu villagers who were very keen to resolve the affair, but also the chief goba of Ladakh, the chief officer of the Khaltse police and the head of the bus drivers’ union to a series of hearings. The President told me before the first hearing that he was anxious to prevent this from becoming a big dispute and that his primary interest was in correcting any misunderstandings between the chief goba and the Nimmu people. During the hearing the President, backed up by the other LBA members and the Nimmu villagers, put pressure on the chief goba and the driver’s father to settle the matter then and there. They told the parties that the dispute should first have been brought to the LBA, who could have resolved it by calling evidence. This was supported by the Nimmu villagers who said that they could have in-

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volved the village elders and made the boys responsible understand and apologise for their misdeeds. The President talked, during the hearing, about the size of the dispute and how bad it was that two villages should be in conflict, frequently using the phrase yul chig, one country. The head of the Nimmu tsokspa backed this up by saying that it was the goba’s action in going to the police that had been trelba, shameful. All these speakers, thus, expressed a concern about unity within the general Ladakhi community. The case was ultimately resolved by a letter to be written by the chief goba to the Nimmu villagers in which he acknowledged that he had used harsh language in his previous letter, that he did not want to cause bad relations between the villages and that it was important to maintain peace and harmony. The Shakhs Khang provides the Ladakhi population with an effective alternative to the state’s courts which, as my informants invariably commented, are expensive and prone to delays and corruption. Ahmed (1996: 305), for example, describes a long running disagreement between the nomads of Rupshu and those of Kharnakh over the salt lake, Tsokhar, on the Chang Tang plateau. This dispute, she says, was settled by an agreement in 1982 but erupted again with fighting in 1987. The Rupshu nomads then took the case to the Leh court, which decided that the land records demonstrated Rupshu’s ownership and determined that Kharnakh should pay a fine. However, the Rupshu nomads were still dissatisfied so they approached the LBA. The LBA engineered a compromise under which Rupshu would make a fixed supply of salt to Kharnakh for a small payment. It also achieved a settlement on the question of access to the grazing land around the lake. The nomad communities eventually, therefore, accepted the mediation of the LBA in the interests of settling their dispute, having rejected the authority of the court to determine the question of ownership. The interests of harmony within Ladakh were presented as a persuasive reason for reaching agreement in the Nimmu case. By using the phrase yul chig the LBA mediators were taking an ambiguous concept, yul, normally applied to a village community, and extending it to apply to the whole of Ladakh. In this way they were actively promoting a sense of Ladakh as a unified whole. This clearly suited their purposes as a body agitating for regional autonomy, which finds it difficult, as Tsering Samphel admitted to me, to encourage a sense of regional identity. While the former kings could use their military power, backed by their social status and religious patronage, to extract taxes and muster armies,

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contemporary leaders have to use different tactics to carry out the activities they see as being in the best interests of Ladakh. The resolution of disputes can be seen as one of the ways in which they establish their moral authority to do so. In the process they have to strengthen the sense of community identity by drawing on and expanding the sense of order and harmony found within the smaller village units.

The Anjuman At the same time as the LBA is providing mediation services for the Buddhist populations, parallel activities are being undertaken by the Muslims’ organisations. Leh has a substantial Sunni and a rather smaller Shia Muslim population. The Sunnis have an Anjuman-e Mu’in-e-Islam, which is the main policy-making body for their community, and a Shariat committee which includes all the Molvis, religious leaders of high status. The Shias have an Anjuman-e Imamia, equivalent to the Sunnis’ Anjuman-e Mu’in-e-Islam, and there is a Muslim Coalition Committee, which includes members from both and is chaired by the Presidents of each Anjuman. Mohammed Shafi Lassoo, the president of the Sunni Anjuman, told me that his organisation exists to promote religious and cultural ideas and harmony, both within the Muslim community and between that community and others. Both the Shariat Committee and Anjuman are involved in the resolution of disputes, the Committee’s formal role being to interpret and decide upon the application of Shariat law, and the Anjuman being more concerned with implementation. Several people told me that disputes that occur amongst Muslims in the villages are generally solved at local level, with the help of family, neighbours and elders. Village Muslims generally have a village Muslim committee to whom they can turn for help, but they often use the village goba, and only resort to the Shariat committee or Anjuman in Leh in extreme cases. I did not witness the hearing of any such cases, but three of the Sunni Anjuman members, the President, Mohammad Shafi Lassoo, the Chairman of the Shariat Committee, Molvi Abdul Qayoom Nadvi, and the Anjuman Secretary, Shabir Bande, were very willing to talk about their procedures for dispute resolution. Before they get to the stage of a formal complaint many disputes are taken to one of the community elders for resolution, they told me. The Committee hears property, family, maintenance and commercial cases, around twelve in

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every year. The law applied is Shariat, said Shabir, but they do not mete out harsh punishments, as in Saudi Arabia. Lassoo said that they applied a lenient, moderate form of Shariat, using their own discretion and incorporating local, customary law. Qayoom also confirmed that they cannot adopt the whole method of Islamic law but have to recognise elements of custom and tradition, many of which have come from the Buddhists. Even though the Shariat Committee is talked of as a court, giving verdicts in accordance with Shariat law, it is evident that its procedures for dealing with disputes are primarily designed to make the parties themselves reach agreement and many of the practices and ideals are similar to those of the LBA’s Shakhs Khang. Qayoom, in particular, told me that although the principles of land distribution are fixed by the Koran, the Committee tries to reach a settlement on the basis of mutual understanding. They do not go too deeply into religious decrees, he said, but aim to find a solution that maintains good social relations. The Committee acts like an investigator, calling evidence, contacting the goba and other members of the parties’ village. They tell the parties who they think is right and wrong but then suggest a middle point that will be best for all concerned. Shabir said that the Committee hearings were designed not to feel like a court, with the parties all accorded respect rather than treated as opponents. The important thing, he said, is to get the parties to shake hands, to say that what has passed has passed and that they are now brother and sister again. The Anjuman, for its part, is concerned with implementation and acts like a negotiator, said Lassoo, bringing in other members of the parties’ families and communities, aiming to keep the parties together and bring them to an agreement. Qayoom stressed the fact that they cannot force the parties to comply with any ruling and they have to use persuasion, explaining the draw-backs of a divorce, for example, and often involving other people in the solution. Shabir told me that it acts by persuasion, by making recommendations, but he also said that it also used forms of persuasion that are similar to those employed in the villages. They can use harsh words and threats and bring in the relatives to persuade the parties. They cannot use physical force, he said, but the ultimate sanction of a social boycott is stronger than any physical threat. He has only seen it used once.4 These solutions are similar to the village and LBA’s

4 In fact, Martijn van Beek, who has undertaken research in Leh over several years, has seen cases where both physical force and threats of exile have been employed

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practices, a point expressly made by Lassoo. Where an apology is appropriate khatags and tea (rather than chang) are given or exchanged. Agreements and decrees may also be drawn up in which conditions are imposed. Like the Tibetan cases and the LBA’s practices, therefore, the idea is to get the parties to reach an agreement, even if strong tactics are necessary to achieve this. Likewise, the orientation is outwards, involving other members of the family and the larger community, appealing to the interests of others and relying on the ultimate threat of a social boycott. The existence of the separate bodies, the LBA and the Anjuman, which both carry out quasi-political functions is, of course, an indication of a divided population in Ladakh and people’s sense of religious, rather than regional, identity. Nevertheless, the LBA, in particular, uses narratives of a single Ladakh, yul chig, during its practices of mediation, thereby strengthening its authority within the Ladakhi population. The same idea is reflected in the rhetoric of the elite mentioned earlier. At the same time the urban dwellers are creating small new communities in the expanding and heterogeneous capital. In all these ways, different sections of the Ladakhi population are actively creating new forms of community, both small and large, and associated spheres of order. They are also creating boundaries which serve to exclude, to some extent, the state’s forces of law and order.

Ideals of order A sense of community as a social space which is to be protected from harm, both internal divisions and external threats, is, thus, to be found, I would suggest, in the urban as much as the rural setting. The overriding concern is with the harm that conflict and antagonism will inflict on that community and the harmonious relations that have to be maintained within it. At the same time, however, the goal of peace or harmony, as an abstract ideal, is remarkably weak. Largely absent in Photoksar, it is only heard occasionally in elite circles in Leh. For example, I had many conversations with Tinles Angmo, the lawyer, about the courts, legal system and practices of dispute resolution, during which she invariably expressed the opinion that Ladakhis do not ‘like’ to be in conflict, they

(personal communication).

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‘like’ to settle their disputes. She said that she herself always encourages her clients to try to settle their cases, especially those that concern maintenance for children and other family matters, because of the time and expense involved in the court procedure. She also uses the radio to appeal to families to give their daughters their due shares in property so as to avoid lengthy court cases. Like Rinchen, therefore, she was keen to paint a picture to me of the ideal Ladakhi society. Spalzes Angmo, a lawyer turned politician, expressed similar sentiments and told me that older practices of land division (or non-division) persist because children are prepared to compromise and adjust to the views of their parents. They ‘respect’ their elders, she said. She was also concerned to present the Ladakhi people as ‘peace-loving’, telling me that Ladakhis generally wanted to avoid disputes. She attributed this to the principle of compassion at the root of Buddhist society: ‘you cannot have peace without compassion,’ she explained. This was the only time that any of my Ladakhi informants made an explicit, or even implicit, connection between attitudes to conflict and religious ideals. Having done so, however, Spalzes paused. ‘Of course my brother is a high lama,’ she admitted, ‘so my attitude may have been influenced by the Buddhist view.’ In other words, she was expressly acknowledging that her views had been influenced by the ideas promoted by contemporary religious leaders and doubting the legitimacy of offering a religious explanation for local attitudes towards conflict. Other educated Leh-based Ladakhis were more pragmatic. One told me that it is the immigrants to Leh who are usually the ones who end up taking their disputes to the Court or to the LBA. The problem is that if their relatives try to intervene, he explained, they do not know the people involved, they do not understand the rights and wrongs of the case and cannot make proper judgments. In the villages, he said, it is as if everyone is related. Other people can then make ‘unbiased decisions’, they care for all the people. A similar opinion was expressed by Tashi Morup, the magazine editor, who told me that Ladakhi society was close knit, that disputes tend to be solved at family level with the use of apologies and that decisions made at community level were generally right because the elders understood the society. His reflection on the Shakhs Khang was that as a court it was ‘primitive’, and it was never certain that the result would be ‘right’, but that it still performed a valuable function. Sonam Wangchuk, of SECMOL, was also quite sceptical about the Ladakhis being ‘peace-loving’. Leh used to be like a big village, he said, with fights resolved through the intervention of the goba, the giving of

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khatags and chang, but now it has grown enormously and is no longer such a close-knit community. There are fewer fights because there are not so many neighbourhood parties, he said, but those that occur are not sorted out and people tend to remain enemies. A similar attitude was expressed by my informant from Shara describing the conflict within his village. He commented that the problem was that people in the village who stand to gain most from the project are ‘bad, selfish and prone to fighting’. This is attributable to three or four of the current leaders, influential men who dominate the village committee, the tsokspa. They have ‘negative attitudes’, he thought. Whilst in some of these accounts, therefore, the Ladakhis are idealised as ‘peace-loving’, other informants were quite prepared to be negative about the fighting and animosity that breaks out among their compatriots. The Leh goba and chupon, described earlier, and many development workers expressed similar attitudes. The process of dispute settlement, moreover, was invariably described to me in pragmatic terms, with doubts expressed by the English speakers familiar with the western notion of justice about whether the ‘right’ results were usually achieved. Settlement is simply something that ‘has’ to be achieved. The implicit idea of order tends, therefore, to be more closely expressed in the negative appraisal of conflict, rather than being directed at any idealised form of justice or fairness or the maintenance of a form of harmony inspired by Buddhist morality. As in Photoksar the sacred social is a largely implicit ideal. Nevertheless, it is a potent one, I would suggest, which shapes the attitudes to conflict and practices of resolution which are found throughout Ladakh.

Status and power Old forms of status are still strong in Ladakh. Aristocrats and rinpoches dominate the political positions, membership of the Ladakh Hill Council and even higher administrative positions. In Photoksar the villagers successfully distance most such power-holders from their internal political organisation. Nevertheless, when the SECMOL dispute erupted, the parties involved turned to both political and religious leaders, in the form of the LBA and LGA for mediation. The issues of status and power affect the processes by which Ladakhis maintain order in the urban centres and surrounding villages to a much greater degree than they do in Photoksar.

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The development of the economy and the new opportunities it has provided for the acquisition of wealth have lead to new forms of status and power for a number of Ladakhis. Money does not tend to bring status and influence, per se, but the power and opportunities of the centralised economy mean that the ability to deal with the centre and to negotiate with development organisations and government representatives gives certain individuals an important position within their villages. This is largely effected through the tsokspa, the village committee, which is now a common feature of village life and allows them to exercise power without the responsibility that traditionally attaches to the posts of goba and membar. Originally set up by the LBA as cultural committees, and used by it to try to obtain a measure of control over the villages and support from their leaders, the tsokspa are now usually concerned with development matters. In the larger villages close to Leh there has been a proliferation of youth tsokspa, ame tsokspa (women’s committees), tsokspa responsible for festivals and others for agricultural development. Many of these only concern themselves with development work and defer, in the case of important decisions, to the village meeting. Elsewhere, however, the tsokspa, especially the youth groups initially set up by the LBA, are politically active and have become a source of village conflict. Some young Ladakhis working for a local NGO in Leh, for example, told me that in their three villages the youth groups were taking an assertive stance, demanding changes to certain rituals. In one, it was making new rules and regulations, stipulating that every household was allowed to have only two light-bulbs, for example, and taking it upon themselves to break any others.5 Another told me that in his village there was a conflict between the youth and development tsokspa, which the goba could not resolve because half the village was behind each. Previously, one of my informants told me, when the goba had managed everything, things had gone ‘in a straight line’. Aggarwal (2004) describes numerous forces of disruption and division which, she says, have characterised Ladakhi society in recent years. As well as the activities of the LBA, which cause communal tensions in several villages with mixed populations, she discusses the divisive force of caste, including inter-caste conflict, gender divisions, which are exacerbated by modern Indian stereotypes, and the rivalries

5 This was part of the LBA’s education campaigns of the early 1990s (van Beek and Bertelsen 1995).

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engendered by Indian party politics.6 She demonstrates the ways in which such tensions are played out at local level in the mixed Buddhist and Muslim village of Achinatang, close to the disputed Kashmiri line of control. Elsewhere, as I found, similar tensions can be exacerbated or supplemented by the activities of the NGOs, who have considerable influence in even the remotest villages and are usually regarded as an important source of money and other benefits. They invariably channel their resources through the tsokspa or elected village committees, whose membership is not generally marked by burdensome responsibility. It is inevitably men who are already used to dealing with the centre, because they have education or government jobs or are from upper-class families, who obtain these positions. In the opinion of local NGO workers this has enabled, or even encouraged, many of them to use their positions to wield power and influence to their own advantage. Photoksar, further removed from the opportunities offered by Leh and from the attentions of development organisations, has not experienced the factionalism that occurs elsewhere. However, even here, external funds have been abused. The Education Department had given the contract for the construction of the local school to a village man, in consultation with the teacher. The school had not been properly finished, however, and a couple of villagers told me they thought that the teacher and contractor had been dishonest over the money. ‘But what can we do about it?’ they shrugged. On the one hand it was not their money to control, but on the other, they obviously did not want confrontation with a member of their village. This unwillingness to enter into confrontation is, I would suggest, crucial in explaining many of the tensions and conflicts that have occurred as a result of economic development and NGO activity. The dominant idea in development circles is that the elected committee is the most suitable type of village organisation to oversee and manage projects and take charge of funds. However, Ladakhi villagers often seem unable to operate a simple committee system, electing inappropriate representatives and failing to vote unsatisfactory members

6

Aggarwal highlights important aspects of Ladakhi society, in particular the effects of the LBA’s campaigns and continuing caste divisions. I consider, however, that she overstates the nature of such divisions in many ways, alleging that women are ‘ritually repressed’ in their natal homes (2004: 137), for example, and characterising the dral as a site of ‘subversion’ and ‘struggle fraught with political activity’ (2004: 163). One of the aims of the present work is to balance out this picture by focussing on parallel processes of community construction and conflict resolution.

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off the committee. Given their traditions of inclusion and agreement that I described earlier and the means they employ, along with Tibetan populations elsewhere on the plateau, to rotate power and counteract forces that promote status and hierarchy, why is this so difficult? The unwillingness to criticise, expressed to me by the Photoksar villagers, is, I would suggest, crucial. The villagers’ use of rotation to choose their leaders is a particular method of controlling the use of power, similar to the principles of government and selection that founded the participatory democracy of the Athenian city-state. Here, laws were made by the Assembly, open to the whole body of citizens, who numbered between 30,000 and 45,000, amongst whom unanimity was preferred. There was also a Council of 500, whose members were selected by lot, but membership was restricted to two terms and there were very few elected officers. Athens was, of course a large and complex society with disparities in wealth, patronage and de facto leaders (Hornblower 1992). Similarly in Ladakh, practices of consensus and inclusion do not rule out conflicts, gender differences and inequalities in wealth. Neither lives up to any ideal of participation and equality. However, the ideologies that guide their political processes - rule by the demos, the authority of the yulpa, the principle of inclusion, the duty on citizens to participate, the ideal of unanimity and the use of lots to fill positions of authority - are the same. Representative government, by contrast, is based on the use of the ballot box. The idea is that elections should clarify matters of public interest and the elected few would be likely to be competent and capable (Held 1993: 19). Yet such a system relies upon the electorate being able and willing to criticise and deselect incompetent leaders. Some Ladakhi NGO workers told me of a village meeting in which people had gone as far as opposing the election of their headman to a new committee. However, although they had articulated their complaints to my informants in private they had not been prepared to explain their reasons publicly. In response to a challenge to do so, one of them had quoted a Ladakhi saying: ‘if you talk at night you will not be heard.’ They consider there is something shameful, my informants explained, in talking about past conflicts or bringing them into the open. This fear can be linked, I would suggest, to the perception that all disputes are dangerous to the social order. As I found in Photoksar, even expressing distaste and disapproval were frowned upon. Yet this is what is required, as a matter of public activity, in order to implement a successful committee system. Bad leaders must be criticised and pub-

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licly removed from office. Selection by rotation, lot, games and dice, on the other hand, abnegates responsibility for choosing and deselecting to an external force. It does not require the villagers to select on the basis of merit nor, even more significantly, to depose on the basis of performance. In Leh and the surrounding villages, those close to modern developments and the economic opportunities of the capital, therefore, old forms of status remain strong and new ones are emerging. Moreover, opportunities for wealth creation and development activities are giving rise to new forms of status within established communities, which disrupt older forms of organisation and controls on the exercise of power. Nevertheless, the emphasis on conflict resolution remains an important component of the sense of community found at different levels throughout the region, often promoted by the elite. Elitism and hierarchy have long characterised many aspects of Ladakh society, therefore, and old forms of status continue to be drawn upon by those who become involved in modern politics. The 1980s and 90s saw the worst communal tension for decades. Moreover, economic and administrative developments, coupled with the introduction of new micro-processes into village politics, have had the effect of creating new factions and power struggles. Nevertheless, in the midst of these processes, the groups I have described, both in Photoksar and the villages closer to or within the urban centre, maintain a sense of community boundaries and, at times, create new ideas of belonging. In each case the idea of community imports a sense of order and a feeling that conflict needs to be contained and resolved inside, nangkuli, and ultimately gives rise to the practices of dispute resolution that are still, as I found, widespread within Ladakh. Such practices also serve to reinforce the boundaries of the community and to safeguard it from the interference of external power-holders. This, I would suggest, should be understood in the light of the relations of deference and distance I have described on the part of the Photoksar villagers and which doubtless characterise many local communities in Ladakh, towards the power-holders in the political, economic and monastic centres of the region. All these processes are evident in the collective reactions of local communities to the introduction of the new panchayat system of local government.

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The Hill Council and panchayats The resilience of the goba system of local organisation and conflict resolution was recognised by many of my informants. However, talking to certain members of the elite in rather different contexts yielded almost diametrically opposed views. NGO workers, when discussing recent administrative changes, told me that the gobas now have ‘no power’ and I heard the same view from several other people. The context was generally an explanation of or reference to either the Ladakh Hill Development Council (LAHDC) or the new panchayat system of local government. Each body is supposed to manage matters of local administration to some extent, thus taking over the ‘traditional’ role of the goba and supplanting his authority, at least in the eyes of the central administration. The LAHDC was established in 1994 as a result of the extended campaign led by the LBA for a measure of regional autonomy for Ladakh. In theory, matters such as rural development, health and education are all under its control. This means that it can give directions to officers in the relevant government departments, although there can be power struggles between the Council and other government officers. The Council is made up of elected representatives from each area of Ladakh. Photoksar, for example, is represented by the Wanla councillor, who has very little knowledge of or interest in the village according to my informants. The panchayats are supposed to act on a much more local level. Under the Panchayat Raj Act 1989, a halqa panchayat has been established in each village, or group of small villages, with elected members and a leader, sarpanch, who is supposed to sit on the District level adalat council. Representatives of each of the district bodies are supposed, then, to make up a Block-level panchayat council. Powers to draw up development plans and to organise education, health, agricultural and irrigation services are supposed to be devolved to the panchayats. In practice, by 2005, there were just a few programmes that had already been devolved: ‘watershed’ (agricultural and pastoral) development, ‘SGRY’ (Sarvodaya Gram Rozgar Yojana, a rural employment scheme) and ‘CD’, community development. Elections for the panchayats were held in April 2001 and some had already proved to be effective in obtaining benefits for their villages. Photoksar, however, forms part of the Wanla area, with a single panchayat, and Paljor was critical of the results. ‘It has not worked’, he told me in 2005, ‘the sarpanch is no good,

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he does not achieve anything for us.’ He regarded the panchayat as a form of liaison with the central authorities, whose business it was to secure what funds and resources are available. In Lingshed, by contrast, the former Hill Councillor had been elected as sarpanch and, skilled at negotiating in Leh, he had achieved many things for his area. The idea that the panchayat members have to fight for what is due to them was echoed by members of the Ladakhi Development Organisation (LDO), a local NGO that has taken it upon itself to educate the public about the new system and advise the councils on how to proceed, in the absence of useful information and assistance from the authorities. ‘They have to keep pushing and shouting or else nothing will happen’, one told me, describing the role of the panchayat members. This means travelling to Leh to negotiate with the Chief Executive Councillor of the LAHDC to obtain the funds they are due. Of course, this is just the type of activity for which people in the remoter villagers, such as Photoksar, are ill-prepared, in terms of time, money and experience. The legislation also makes provision for a panchayat adalat, a body that is supposed to administer justice in each panchayat area. The Panchayat Raj Act 1989 contains provisions for the selection of members (all of whom have to be literate, a qualification that would rule out the majority of the female population) and for the types of cases that should be heard by them, while the Jammu and Kashmir Panchayati Raj Rules 1996, provide for procedures. The framework is supposed to be informal, but it follows the adversarial format of the state courts, with statements from each party, evidence and judgments. The names of prospective members of the panchayat adalat have to be put forward by the sarpanch and this has now been done, LDO told me, although they were not aware of what activities, if any, they had yet undertaken. There is, therefore, a confusing proliferation of positions and responsibilities in the villages. There are Hill Councillors, panchayat members, a sarpanch, members of the panchayat adalat, the tsokspa, the goba and membars. The Councillors and halqa panchayat are supposed to be in charge of development, while the panchayat adalat takes care of justice and the goba remains in charge of social relations.7 It was in this context that several of my informants told me that the goba now has very little 7 There is also considerable overlap between the powers and duties that are supposed to be exercised by each body and the existing government departments. This is one of the reason for the very slow implementation of the panchayat system. In particular, it would seem that the Block-level council would be a direct rival for power to the LAHDC and, as of 2006, it had not yet been established.

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power. ‘He is just a tax collector’, said one member of the LAHDC, reflecting his official government position, which is now practically insignificant given the very limited taxes that most villagers pay. From an official point of view, therefore, the system of village administration has been almost completely transformed by these new developments. Nevertheless, when I pressed my informants, they always acknowledged that the goba do still play a role in conflict resolution, the implementation of the ‘old trims’, as one of them put it, and that a good goba can do very good work in his village. The members of LDO said that the halqa panchayat and panchayat adalat were now supposed to be playing the political and judicial roles that had formerly been the responsibility of the goba. The problem, they thought, is that the legislators were not properly aware of the ‘traditional system’ and Ladakh now faces a dilemma of whether to reject the panchayat system or do away with the goba. Ideally, of course, they should work together, they said. This dilemma is not, maybe, so stark in reality as it seems on paper, however. In practice, as the examples given above have shown, Ladakhi villagers are quite capable of distancing officials from their internal affairs, even in the urban centre. There is, in fact, no evidence that the panchayat adalats have begun to take a proactive role, displacing the social and judicial roles of the goba and yulpa, and it is not considered to be a priority by bodies such as LDO to encourage them to do so. In Photoksar they have chosen one of the few young men with a modicum of formal education to be the panchayat member and he is now honoured, along with the goba and membar, at the new year celebrations. However, the villagers clearly see his role as being quite separate from that of the yulpa, who are more concerned with internal relations. Moreover, although panchayat members are supposed to be elected, the Panchayat Officer in Leh, recognising the limitations of the ballot box within village politics, has allowed villages to present their members to him according to their own methods of selection. For the most part, village meetings have unanimously agreed on these appointments and it is only in a few cases, generally those in which a panchayat’s constituency crosses village boundaries, that elections have been necessary.8 It is important, therefore, not to regard the new political structures implemented in Leh as representative of the reality everywhere, which is what 8

One of these is, in fact, Photoksar, where the panchayat includes all the villages in the Wanla area, some of which are more than a day’s walk apart and normally maintain little contact. It is recognised by both villagers and officials that this is unsatisfactory, but whether the panchayat will be divided in the future remains to be seen.

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is being done by those who declare that the goba and the ‘old trims’ are no longer relevant. The panchayat system is based on quite different principles from those that historically govern the organisation of the village meeting and the selection of the goba. Instead of rotation and inclusion they demand election, representation and forms of justice handed down by an educated elite. They also demand the involvement of women.9 In practice, panchayat members also have to work within the structures of state government. The ideology of the legislation, as set out in the preamble to the Act, is local self-government, participation in decision-making and the better implementation of development programmes. The new representatives have to fight for funds, however, and to ensure the proper implementation of the panchayat structures. This requires people with knowledge, time, money and, above all, experience in dealing with Lehbased authorities. As with the committee systems introduced by NGOs, this will favour the individuals and villages with easier access to the centre, thus reproducing existing patterns of inequality between remoter and more central communities and between better and less well-connected individuals. It also reinforces the dependence of most villages on the centre and on the few individuals able to deal with it. One can, therefore, see the new system coming into conflict with existing expectations, providing opportunity for personal gain on the part of a few individuals, but also being adapted according to local expectations (in the villages) and the assessment of needs (by local NGOs). Quietly and unobtrusively, and throughout decades of political change, Ladakhi villagers have been continuing to maintain their own form of judicial practices, linked to their ideas of community and order. This is not to say that their forms of village organisation will not, in the long

9

LDO thinks this is very important and a material change to the old system. In fact, in some villages, like Likir, the village meeting is now dominated by women, although in others, like Hemis Shukpachan, the meeting has rejected the possibility of admitting women and in Photoksar the issue has not even been raised. As LDO told me, in many villages the men are practically absent, with jobs in the town or army, so women should be on the panchayat. However, in Photoksar, men are very much present and well aware of the needs of the women, such as the demands of water collection and spinning. Moreover, at present, women still have far less experience of and confidence in dealing with outsiders, matters in which even the men mostly feel inadequate. Demanding women representatives runs the risk of exacerbating the differences between remoter and less remote villages, whatever the laudable aims in terms of elevating their position in the villages.

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run, be affected by these new developments. But nor should it be assumed that the changes will be unequivocally negative. The Photoksar villagers have already accepted the idea of a new village post, someone responsible for dealing with the panchayat system, and have incorporated his status into the social hierarchy during the new year celebrations. These new systems are undoubtedly forces for change, but the old pattern of deference and distance towards external influences remains. The chances are that Ladakh’s villages will strive to safeguard, or to create anew, a sense of local order, a sacred social space from which the multitude of external forces is distanced. The extent to which they succeed in doing so remains to be seen.

CHAPTER TEN

CONCLUSION Ladakh is a region that has long been pulled in different directions by political, economic, religious and cultural forces on all sides. For centuries Tibet, to the east, was the source of the religious and cultural influence of Buddhism. Its texts and teachers offered the Ladakhi people a sophisticated philosophical framework, with elaborate images of moral and cosmological order, and its leaders interfered in Ladakh’s internal power struggles. The all-powerful Tibetan monasteries have now substantially been relocated to India, but the identity of Ladakhi Buddhists with their religion is strong and they are conscious of a shared religious and cultural heritage with Tibet. Kashmir, to the west, was long seen as a military threat, whose leaders not only tried to dominate the region but also to convert its people to Islam. The resulting interface between the Buddhist and Islamic worlds has created a sense of split identity for many Ladakhis, especially those of the Kargil region, who feel culturally and linguistically part of Ladakh but tied by religion to Kashmir. This religious divide has been exploited by Ladakhi politicians agitating for regional autonomy, giving rise to communal violence and lingering mistrust. Despite these historic tensions Kashmir has always been a source of trading opportunities. The descendants of Kashmiri traders form a distinct group in and around Leh, where they mingle with contemporary entrepreneurs and governmental administrators. From the north and east traders used to arrive from central Asia and Tibet, having crossed monumental passes with their horses, donkeys and sheep before travelling on into India, bringing salt, pashm, cloth, rice and exotic goods and bearing away apricots, barley, wool and butter. These routes also provided the opportunity for Ladakhi traders and monks to travel, bringing back religious knowledge, foreign ideas and wealth. Now the old trade routes have been closed and consumer goods are trucked in from the south and west, along roads that also take Ladakhi pilgrims south into India and transport tourists in large numbers during the short summer months. The construction of the airport means that politicians and development workers, traders and administrators can fly in throughout the year, bringing opportunities for business and employ-

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ment and the values of consumerism and international development, as well as the democratic processes and ideals of the nation state.1 Among all these influences Ladakhis have found numerous sources of order, both in the controlling hand of leaders and in the more ideological influence of iconic events and ideas. The Ladakhi kings’ struggles with their powerful neighbours shaped the nature of the polity and the power they wielded over its population; Buddhist monks, colonial leaders and Indian administrators have all sought to impose their own models of order on the region. Order has, at times, been imposed as a matter of command, as part of the control exercised by a powerful leader or state. In Weber’s (1968) terms these have included patriarchy (in the case of aristocratic families), feudalism (in the case of their relations with the kings), charisma (in the case of certain influential lamas) and, now, the rational bureaucracy of the modern nation state. Wars, communal tensions and the region’s incorporation into India have shaped a Ladakhi sense of identity or, rather, given rise to multiple and varying ideas about regional autonomy, religious allegiance and communal differences. There has been a simultaneous distancing of external powerholders and the embrace of the economic opportunities provided by trade, the market economy and tourism. There is both distrust and acceptance of consumerism, competition and the new forms of status they provide. Nevertheless, more localised forms of order have simultaneously been maintained within the numerous small communities of which Ladakh is composed, supported by local social and moral norms. These, in turn, have developed alongside the powerful ideological forces of Buddhism and the economic, ecological and material values of the late twentieth century. In this book I have not attempted to map out all these forces. Rather, my task has been to investigate the ways in which Ladakhi people have

1

Baltistan must not be forgotten. The Balti people share considerable linguistic and historical features, especially with the people of Kargil and they previously represented important trading partners for the whole of the western part of Ladakh. My older informants in Photoksar recalled taking grain to trade in Baltistan, where they could just about understand the dialect, returning with locally-made earthenware pots. Since the war between India and Pakistan, the line-of-control has severed the two regions but in the summer of 2005 some Balti scholars were, for the first time, able to travel to Kargil. They made the arduous journey via Islamabad, Lahore, Amritsar, Delhi and Leh, to arrive, after three days, at a point less than 140 kilometres (via the old Indus valley trade route) from Skardu. Here they were greeted with immense excitement by the Kargilis, who were soon listening enraptured to their songs and stories, all familiar from their own cultural heritage.

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negotiated their own order amongst them. Looking from the inside outward, I have analysed the experiences of members of two very different populations, those in a remote village and those of the urban centre. My ethnographic focus on disputes and processes of conflict resolution has been the means by which I have explored fundamental ideas about order on the part of the Ladakhi populations and their expectations of how it is to be maintained.

The hermeneutics of order Living in Leh, the young men of SECMOL were caught in the midst of these influences when they found themselves in conflict with members of the powerful religious establishment. The approach taken by different members of their organisation to the resolution of this dispute illustrates the dilemmas and opportunities faced by many urban, educated Ladakhis. Their social values had been shaped by ideas of belonging and identity formed in their local communities, the values of the modern world, their own organisation’s agenda for the preservation of Ladakhi culture and their relations with both the ancient and the modern elites of the region. Their approach to this dispute highlights the paradoxes of their situation: that they have embraced the secular ideas of justice and individual rights, while self-consciously turning to religious leaders and employing ‘traditional tactics’ during the mediation process; that they were prepared to accept the primacy of the interests of their community, in this case ‘the small region of Ladakh’, over their own individual interests and rights; and their acceptance of the authority of both religious leaders (the LGA) and modern political elites (the LBA), while avoiding representatives of the state and the authority of its courts and lawyers. This event is just one example of the ways in which urban Ladakhis negotiate their modernity, in this case by maintaining what they see as the order that should characterise their region. My suggestion is that, to make sense of the way this dispute was handled, we need to analyse the processes, dynamics and epistemological, moral and ontological concerns that govern Ladakhi ideas concerning conflict. The attitudes expressed by the parties to the SECMOL dispute reflected the procedures I observed in Photoksar, a remote Ladakhi village, where the people are physically, economically and intellectually far removed from the social milieu of the urban elite. Analysing the sense of sacred community found here sheds light on the

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way in which both rural and urban Ladakhis draw upon and construct ideas about conflict and disorder, actively creating spheres of order in their own communities and distancing themselves from the influence of centralised power. There are similarities, I have suggested, between the ways in which both populations negotiate their way amongst the intersecting spheres of power and influence that make up their worlds. The attitudes towards conflict that I found in Photoksar were dominated by a perceived need to resolve any overtly antagonistic dispute with a ceremonial restoration of order. Good relations between individuals had to be publicly re-established in order to return the community to a state of normality. Conflict was approached by considering and elevating the interests of the community above those of the individual, restoring harmony rather than determining individual rights. Resolution, therefore, needed agreement between the parties, not a judgment by some form of judicial authority. This order was supported by a strong sense of the moral duty each individual was under to maintain harmonious relations within the community. It was a similar set of concerns that was apparent in the attitudes of those involved in the SECMOL dispute, namely the need to restore order in the interests of the community as a whole, rather than to determine the respective rights of the parties. Similar concerns and ideas about conflict were influential in the proceedings of the Shakhs Khang and the attitudes of its mediators. Indeed, they were apparent in almost all the descriptions and discussions about conflict that I had in Ladakh, whether with members of the educated elite in Leh or villagers from one of the even more remote communities I passed through on my journeys. Implicit in these concerns was the idea that conflict represents ruptured social relations, a dangerous tear in the fabric of the community and the web of order that constitutes it. The nature of the judicial process among these Ladakhis, the ways in which they understand, approach and react to conflict and antagonism, is, therefore, shaped and defined by their epistemology of conflict, itself supported by ontological and moral concerns. This is to regard law, or legal practices, as a matter of ‘local knowledge’ (Geertz 1983). In Local Knowledge: fact and law in comparative perspective, Geertz advocates the adoption of a ‘hermeneutic’, rather than a ‘functional’ approach to the study of law, arguing that ‘law is a distinct manner of imagining the real’ (1983: 184). ‘Different adjudicative styles have imaginative power ... They do not just regulate behaviour, they construe it.’ (1983: 214-5) As Just (1992) points out, however, this ‘hermeneutic’ approach to the study of law contrasts with

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the ‘hegemonic’ approach, which analyses law in the context of wider relations of power, domination and political control, and has characterised much legal anthropology of the late twentieth century. A number of writers in this tradition have been critical of Geertz’s approach. Moore, for example, has said that: [it] does not take one very far in understanding what people actually do on the ground or why they do it at particular times and places. Presenting the ‘traditional’ categories of legal discussion without the context of discourse offers statements without speakers, ideas without their occasions, concepts outside history. (1989: 278)

Yngvesson (1989: 1690) makes similar points, while Fuller suggests that this approach ‘is open to the familiar criticism that it is also idealistic; after all, law is about repression just as much as imagination.’ (1994: 1112) It does not, in other words, take into account the wider power relations that surround the legal process and the ways in which these constitute and support or oppose one another.2 He does not, however, present this as a ground for dismissing the hermeneutic approach altogether. Ideally the anthropologist should take into account the political and the repressive as well as the imaginative reasons for legal behaviour. As Just (1992) points out reviewing the literature in legal anthropology, however, this is rarely done. It seems, he says, that we must choose ‘between moving outward into the grand historical machinations of class and cash, power and privilege, or moving inward to the nubs and slubs in the fabric of meaning and belief.’(1992: 376) In the present study I have sought to do both, on the one hand to investigate the ideal aspects of judicial processes and their consonance, or not, with the moral and religious world of the Ladakhis amongst whom I lived. On the other hand, I have analysed these same processes in the context of the power, gender and economic relations in the village, as part of the relations between local communities and centres of power in Ladakh and, ultimately, as relating to the macro-political processes that have impinged upon the region. Nevertheless, at least to some extent, the two ap2

Fuller does not elaborate on what type of study would avoid such criticism, although he cites with approval certain work on legal pluralism and studies, such as that of Nader (1990), which place law within a wider political context. It should also be pointed out that Geertz, himself, emphasises Weber’s insistence that ideas must be carried by powerful social groups in order to have social effects; that they must be institutionalized to find a material existence in society (1973a: 314).

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proaches remain opposed. They suggest alternative means of analysis, alternative insights into the processes of order, and it would be a mistake to try to unify them into a single, overarching explanatory model.

The sacred in the social To puruse the hermeneutic approach, it is apprent that the sense of order that underlies judicial processes in Photoksar remains largely implicit and unexpressed. There are powerful, but inexplicit, ideas about order, the realms in which it is defined and their boundaries. Nevertheless, these give shape to a set of ideas about how such order can and must be maintained and how the disputes that threaten it must be resolved. These, in turn, relate to ideas about the status and duties of the individual within the community, the role of the yulpa as representatives of the whole community and the relationship between them. The judicial processes I observed in Photoksar were defined by implicit understandings about what conflict was, that is, by an epistemology of order; but they were also shaped by ontological understandings and moral concerns. The best way to make sense of this web of ideas is, I have suggested, in terms of a sacred social space. In this case it is the local community, whether the village of Photoksar, the village sections of the Housing Colony in Leh or the ‘small region’ of Ladakh invoked by my SECMOL informants, that represents the social. In Durkheim’s terms the social is sacred to the extent that it is that which must be preserved, that which is supported by ritual, namely the dralgo, the village meeting and the ceremonial resolution of disputes. It is also that which unites people as a moral community, here exemplified in the attitudes which, as I have described, are directed at maintaining integrity and order within it. In the case of Photoksar, that community is represented by the ‘us’ of the yulpa, who exert authority over the individuals who constitute it, most notably when called to restore good relations after conflict. This body has a transcendent quality, able to exert authority over the individuals within it. It is one of the central findings of this study that the sacred that defines this social community is distinct from the sacred of the religious realm associated with Buddhism, in all its various forms. It is also distinct from the realm of the spirits who exist outside the Buddhist pantheon. The multitude of practitioners, rituals, deities and ideas of

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Buddhism have, over the centuries, been assimilated and are continuing to be assimilated deeply into the lives of the Ladakhi populations. Buddhism has provided them with a soteriological framework and a set of ritual practices and prohibitions which now define their concerns with the afterlife: its rites and deities can assist the soul in the vital process of rebirth. Nevertheless, the spirits are still closely linked with the pragmatic concerns of the villagers, their health, fertility and physical fortunes. The Buddhist protectors have come to occupy superior positions within the realm inhabited by these numina and they are here primarily concerned with the physical and environmental fortunes of the villagers. The community as a moral whole, by contrast, is maintained through a host of social and moral norms, expectations and practices, with which the spirits have little or nothing to do and which remain distinct from their concerns with the afterlife.

The autonomy of the social This separation of realms and the tensions it sets up is central, I would suggest, to the dynamic way in which order is maintained in Photoksar. The sacred social has to be actively constructed and maintained in the face of competition and conflict between the individuals who constitute it. It also has to be preserved against hegemonic external influences, including the moral framework of Buddhism. This accounts, I would suggest, for the resilience and re-emergence of distinct social spaces in the much more fluid and complex world of the modern urban centre of Leh. Within the village a complex pattern of hierarchy and equality is found and there is a constant need to achieve a balance between the two, in order to maintain the community as a body of equal individuals. Similar tensions have been noted by other writers in different contexts throughout the Tibetan plateau (Stein 1972; Samuel 1993). The widespread emphasis on conciliation and agreement for the resolution of disputes and the methods employed to control and distribute power, principally those of rotation, games and other forms of chance, contribute to these dynamics and serve to counteract the influence of more powerful hierarchies. In the Ladakhi kingdom a centralised, hierarchical form of judicial power was asserted by the king and his ministers, while in central Tibet the Ganden Potrang government developed a centralised, bureaucratic administration with complex structures of political and

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economic power, matched by monastic hierarchies. Nevertheless, the use of dice and chance to make judicial decisions and appointments within these structures served, to some extent, to counteract the tendencies towards centralisation and hierarchy. In Tibet, moreover, despite moves towards a Weberian type of rational bureaucracy, a correspondingly rational legal system never developed, whether based on Buddhist principles or otherwise. Rather, there was a preference for devolving power and discretion to regional offices and lower bureaucratic levels and an emphasis on the value of mediation, which came to be expressed in terms of Buddhist ideology. In Ladakh, as in Tibet, those at the judicial centre, such as the Alchi lonpo and representatives of the Indian legal system, asserted and assert authority over judicial processes but local communities have always maintained considerable autonomy over their own practices. In Photoksar, village autonomy against external forces constantly has to be maintained but individuals also actively engage with many of them. There has always been a stream of individuals who have left the village to take part in the king’s wars and in trading expeditions, to negotiate with the king’s representatives and to enter monasteries. Now they go back and forth to the town to trade, to buy household goods, negotiate with authorities, pursue education and go on pilgrimage to India. Such activities, of course, can give status to those who engage in them and they also serve to import the influence of outsiders into the village, the superiority of aristocrats, the religious ideas transmitted by senior monks, the material values of traders, the requirements of government administrators and the ideals of NGO workers. I have described the relations of deference and distance that characterise the villagers’ relations with many of these outsiders. In particular, while adopting the social and religious hierarchy that was established over the centuries, they have also adapted it to distance the aristocracy and monks, those to whom it gave status, from their own internal procedures. It is a dynamic and continuing process, by which they maintain the integrity of their own social community. There are parallels between these processes and the ways in which local forms of religious practice are safeguarded from the hegemonic influence of Buddhism. The religious superiority of the Buddhist establishments and practitioners has been accepted by the villagers. So was the social superiority of the kings, aristocrats and monks. The statuses of the emergent political and economically successful classes in twentieth-century Leh are now recognised in the dral and the use of zhe

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skat. Nevertheless, such individuals are distanced from internal village processes, not invited to the village meeting, ignored when it comes to internal decisions and symbolically set apart through the use of the same markers of respect. The economic, ecological and democratic ideals of the late twentieth century are only cautiously adopted. In a parallel process, the philosophical and moral ideas of Buddhism have been accepted, but adapted to supplement, and only partly to replace, the ideas associated with the local spirit world. There is deference and distance in all these realms. The dynamism found in these processes goes a long way, I would suggest, to explaining the events now taking place in the urban centre and the emergence of the new spheres, patterns and processes of order that I have described there. These are clearly derivative, in many respects, of village processes and concepts. There have always been hierarchies and inequalities in the urban centre, in wealth, social status, political power and religious connections. Now, as the result of political and economic developments in the late twentieth century, new forms of status and economic opportunities are adding to the inequalities and imbalances. Different individuals are able to dominate while old statuses are reinforced and new divisions are created. However, the processes of equality, autonomy, deference and distance that I observed in Photoksar allow the creation of new forms of community and the strengthening of existing ones. Thus, attempts by the LBA to create new forms of village administration and leadership have been resisted, disputes are contained and settled nangkuli, within both the old and the new communities that have emerged in Leh. The goba and chupon are recognised as having the authority to take charge of disputes in the town outside the structures of the government administration, including the potentially serious irrigation disputes that arise every summer. In a similar way, members of the Shakhs Khang and the Anjuman committees ensure that disputes are kept away from the courts. At the same time, the LBA is promoting a new form of Ladakhi identity in its mediation processes, drawing on the concept of yul found in the villages. New instances of the sacred social, the place within which disputes must be contained and resolved, have been created in the midst of the divisions and power struggles of the late twentieth century.

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Legal processes and political relations There has been no shortage of power relations in Ladakh. The Ladakhi kings, foreign invaders, aristocrats, traders, religious leaders, modern bureaucrats, development workers and foreign ecologists have all exercised influence in the region, through military might, bureaucratic control and economic power. Each has shaped the dynamics of power and order, bringing wars, foreign influences, religious idioms, economic development, bureaucracy, democratic processes, communal tensions and the glitter of modernity to the populations of Ladakh. However, none of these has been defining or dominant in the construction of order amongst the Ladakhi populations. Nader (1990) analysed the ‘harmony ideology’ that she found among the Zapotec of Mexico as an ‘anti-hegemonic’ force, one developed in response to the hegemonic influence of Christian missionaries, as well as to that of more recent state control. To an extent, a similar dynamic can be identified in Ladakh. The containment and resolution of disputes within the local community distances the authority of the police, lawyers and courts from the internal organisation of the remote village communities, as well as those of the newer configurations in Leh town. A similar attitude to conflict served to avoid the involvement of state agents in the relations between those caught up in the SECMOL dispute. Comparable dynamics almost certainly characterised the villagers’ internal organisation at the time of the kingdom, distancing the aristocrats from village administration. The Leh goba and chupon, like their counterparts in the village communities and the members of the Shakhs Khang, quietly maintain their own forms of authority over processes of order. However, there is much more going on here than a dynamic of domination and resistance. There are more complex interactions found in the creation of new communities and more positive processes in the formation of the new spaces that come to be regarded as the nangkuli. Dynamics of deference and distance, not just domination and resistance, characterise the relations between these internal and external forces. The village community, even one as remote as Photoksar, cannot, therefore, be regarded as some sort of village republic, as a ‘bounded, self-contained, wholly autonomous dorpsrepubliek’, successfully resisting the domination of the centre, to cite the image of the Balinese village thoroughly discredited by Clifford Geertz in Negara (1980). Geertz’s descriptions of the theatre state in Bali, with its expressive, elaborate, exemplary centre, is famous but his fine ethnography also

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contains a compelling analysis of the relations between the centre and local spheres of influence. He describes the ‘interlocking spheres’ of influence - notably the ritual, economic and political - that made up ‘a composite political order’ at the local level (1980: 47). For each there were separate, although not unrelated, institutions to manage the public aspects of community life, the regulation of irrigation facilities and the organisation of popular ritual. In a similar way in Ladakh, I would suggest, the village communities with their yulpa and ideas of internal order, the monasteries with their lamas, komnyer and Buddhist ideals and, now, the NGOs with their local development workers and notions of rights and development ideals, provide separate, but related, forms of ordering. The yulpa distance the monks and development workers from some, but not all, aspects of village organisation. Geertz describes the relations between the centre and local institutions in Bali as a complex and interlocking web of power. The ritual organisation was matched by the technical, the centripetal was matched by the centrifugal and the integrative by the dispersive (1980: 85). Custom flowed down from the elaborate exemplary centre while power was ‘surrendered’ up and ‘cumulated’ from below (1980: 63). In Ladakh the kings performed significant ritual functions (Ribbach 1986: Ch 7) and the Indian state sponsors new ceremonies and festivals as part of its process of rule (Aggarwal 2004). The exemplary role of the centre is far less elaborate than that of the extravagant Balinese state, but there is a comparable, selective granting of authority to outsiders. As in Bali, those exercising power in the centre have never fully established the type of authority characteristic of those in a Weberian, ideal-type of state, whether bureaucratic, feudal or patrimonial. On the contrary, there are parallel and overlapping spheres of order - the aristocratic, the religious, the village yulpa, the NGO committees, the modern democratic structures - which create a web of specific claims and interests. As Geertz describes it, ‘the political centre of gravity sat very low in this system, as it does in all such systems.’ (1980: 85) In Ladakh the authority of the yulpa, the goba, the chupon, the mediators of the Shakhs Khang and Anjuman committee derive from local spheres of order. Adjustment and consensus characterise their activities, as they did the hamlet and irrigation groups of Bali. Authority is claimed by outsiders, often successfully in the cases of those with new status in the urban economy. However, such individuals are in many, if not all, contexts distanced from local spheres of power: they are only selectively allowed to claim authority over local social organisation.

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The insights of Durkheim and Geertz need to be brought together, I would suggest, to make sense of the way in which order is constructed and maintained amidst the complex pattern of political, economic and religious forces that characterises contemporary Ladakh. Doing so combines the different traditions inspired by Durkheim and Weber (within which many of Geertz’s writings can be counted),3 the different models of order identified by Roberts and the hermeneutic and hegemonic approaches to law distinguished by Just. The aim is not to unite or synthesise such approaches, which would fail to do justice to any of them. Rather, it is to draw on aspects of each, in order to provide complementary insights into the subtleties and complexities of the Ladakhis’ own webs of order. As Durkheim suggests there is a sense of the sacred in the social which I found among all the Ladakhi groups I studied. A sphere of order is actively constructed and maintained in the village, in the new urban communities in Leh and also in Ladakh as a whole, particularly by those conscious of its position within the Indian nation state. The sense of community and order found in these spheres is maintained from below, with a power-base in the community itself. It is a precarious order, easily disrupted by the powerful forces of government intervention, money and status, but it can be adapted to incorporate or distance new powerholders, such as the new panchayat members in the villages. It can also be created anew in complex situations, such as the new Housing Colony of the urban centre, with its diversity of inhabitants. On a more abstract level the sense of community embodied in the concept of the yul can be drawn upon by those in positions of power, those involved in the SECMOL dispute and the mediators of the Shakhs Khang to create a new sense of identity and belonging defined by the image of a pan-Ladakhi community. In Photoksar it is the gap between this sense of the social, as a moral community, and the realm of the spirits, involved as they are in the physical fortunes of the villagers, that is the main reason, I have suggested, that Buddhism has not been able to dominate its social order. The principles and practitioners of the religion have been physically, politically and conceptually distanced from the sacred sphere of social order. 3 Geertz repeatedly acknowledges his debt to Weber (e.g. 1983: 233). In his (1973b) article, Politics past, politics present, which foreshadows much of his analysis in Negara, he explicitly draws upon Weber’s (1968) discussion of ‘patrimonialism’ and subsequent writings in the same tradition for their insights into the nature of traditional polities and their authority structures (1973a: 328-29).

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In Ladakh, as a whole, the power structures of successive rulers, religious leaders, those at the top of the social hierarchy and the new educated classes who staff the NGOs, intersect with and influence the organisation of the village community, but none is able to dominate it as the locus of order. They are distanced from the processes by which conflict is contained and resolved, placed outside the moral order of the community, just as the monks have always been kept apart from such processes. Likewise, in the urban centres new spheres of order are being created in which, almost imperceptibly, people are insulating themselves from the interference of external forces. These are dynamic processes, as new forms of community are added to the interlocking spheres of order. A constant tension between the opposed forces of control and autonomy, hierarchy and equality, characterises their internal structures. Processes of deference and distance have long dominated the Ladakhi populations’ relations with the holders of power and are continuing to do so amidst the manifold changes of the twenty-first century.

GLOSSARY

Romanized Ladakhi and Tibetan words are followed by the Tibetan or Ladakhi spelling, where known, and then the sense in which they are used in the text. aba alamdar ama amchi api babar bando

           

father boys’ masked dance at Losar



mother practitioner of Tibetan medicine grandmother ritual figures representing storma offerings at Losar offering for the lha

barmi barsam beda begar bele, belpo, belmo bumskor

 

mediator middle/between world itinerant musician transport labour tax male/female storma offerings

cham chams chang changskyan chig chowa chod khang chodpa

       

ritual procession with religious texts religious dances love, affection Tibetan beer vessel for pouring chang one to do/make shrine room religious offering

210 chösi zungdrel choktse chonme chorten chos chos-sil chu chu len me len chad chug chupon chutsoks dra o dul dralgo dras dre drib drig drongpa duk sum dulwa garba gegs shad genbo goba gokpo gonpa gyalla gyalrabs (r)gyalpo gyazhi gyongpo

GLOSSARY

  

the harmony of religion and politics (Tib.)

 small table   butter lamp !  stupa (Buddhist monument)  religion, doctrine, text, ritual  chos reading " water "    social boycott (literally to stop # " $%& ' () '  *  ' ' ' () ()     + ,   - -  - -. /

the lending of water and fire) to cause water official village division to conquer or subdue (head of the) seating or dancing line rice evil spirit spiritual pollution all right commoner the three poisons to subjugate blacksmith to exorcise the evil spirits (gegs) elder (Tib.) headman old, ruined, damaged monastery good history of the royal genealogy king exorcist ritual stubborn

kalon kha khangba khangu khatags khon khor khyimtses komnyer lama lan las lha lhaba/lhamo lha khang lhandre lhato lha trug lhende/lhenpa lonpo lopchak

0 1    2    3% 04  1   5 5/5 5 5 *  56 578 9  1  

lora

membar

  : ; > >  

perak

  

pha lha pha spun

?5 ?@