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ABSTRACT
The “Mongolian Fringe” extending from India’s Northwest Himalayas to the hill regions of the Northeast frontier, was conceptualized by British authorities as a site of geopolitical and racial anxiety given its proximity to China and Southeast Asia. Suspicion and anxiety continue to inform the relationship between the Indian state and its northern frontier territories. Drawing on a collaborative research project with college students from Ladakh in the Northwest Himalayas, we argue that racialization offers a crucial yet underutilized framework with which to understand contemporary tribal identity in India. Building on critical theorizations of race and indigeneity, we demonstrate how racism functions for those at the intersections of race, tribe, and nation in postcolonial India, and the broader functioning of racialization as a process both global and contextually specific that is inflected by movement: of colonizing forces, of state projects, but also of young people between home and away.
Acknowledgements
We can never repay our debt of gratitude to everyone at the Ladakh Arts and Media Organization for making this research possible. In particular, Monisha Ahmed, Tashi Morup, Rinchen Dolma, Mabel Diskit, and Rigzin Chodon have provided all manner of advice, suggestions, assistance and substantive changes to the larger research project, this article draws on. The young people we have spoken with have been insightful, engaging, and lyrical in the stories and ideas they have shared with us. Alongside many others, they include Namgyal Angmo, Fatima Ashraf, Tashi Namgyal, Kunzes Zangmo, Tundup Churpon, Tsewang Chuskit, Stanzin Angmo, Chozin Palmo, Faisal Qadir Abdul, Tsewang Norboo, Rigzin Angmo, and Stanzin Jidey. This work was funded by a National Science Foundation Geography and Spatial Science Program Grant (BCS–1561072), “Impacts of Education–Driven Urban Migration on Youth Aspirations and Identity”; and by a University of North Carolina Asia Center Faculty Travel Award with funding from the Jimmy and Judy Cox Asia Initiative. We thank the three anonymous reviewers and special issue editors for their constructive feedback. We are also grateful to Ishan Ashutosh and other participants of the Pluralizing South Asian Geographies virtual workshop, organized by Dr. Majed Akhter, who read an early draft of this paper and gave such generous feedback.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).
Notes
1 The research for this article is based on our project on education-driven migration of Himalayan youth, which included a series of 65 semi-structured interviews and 24 longitudinal interviews, two yearlong collaborative projects organized with the Ladakh Arts and Media Organisation (LAMO) – each including workshops and exhibition. Interviews presented in this article were conducted in English, unless otherwise indicated.
2 The students in our project are both racialized minorities from rural farming or working to lower middle-class backgrounds but also quite privileged in their access to university education, funding from scholarships and parents, and in the futures to which they aspire. Most students in our project were from Buddhists backgrounds along with a few Christian and Muslim students. All the students here are from Leh District; we did not interview any students from the Kargil District. Our use of the terms Ladakh and “Ladakhi” here functions only as shorthand and reference for how the young people themselves self-identify. It is not intended to gloss over the religious and ethnic diversity of Ladakh.
3 The Northeast consists of eight states: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Mizoram, Nagaland, Tripura, and Sikkim. These states are connected to the rest of India by a 14-mile-wide land corridor in Siliguri, West Bengal.
4 The Indian state has rejected the term Indigenous arguing all Indians are native to the land, hence Indigenous. However prominent scholars argue that Indian tribal communities right to self-identify as Indigenous must be respected. Tribal scholars and activists in India have reframed indigeneity from merely an understanding of “native” to describing self-contained communities whose culture and knowledge systems were subsumed under dominant nationalist historiographies and Hindu caste hierarchies following Indian independence (see Longkumer Citation2020).
5 The majority of the population qualifies as ST in Ladakh, Arunachal Pradesh, Manipur, Meghalaya, Mizoram, and Nagaland and a significant portion of the populations in Assam, Sikkim, and Tripura.