A Symposium: Spatial Politics across the Indian Himalayas

Aditi Saraf

Hifazat: Law, land and ecology

“Hifazat” delves into the complex terrain of land rights in Kashmir, juxtaposing present-day disputes with historical efforts to keep land as “immovable property” beyond the reach of the market. Using archival evidence, I show how Kashmir’s former princely rulers vigilantly preserved land as “inalienable wealth” (Weiner 1985)—a demand surprisingly granted under British rule and despite colonial land hunger, even as private agents freely bought and sold land in other states. During fieldwork in Kashmir, traders used the term hifazat  (“stewardship/protection”) for praising this element of princely rule despite viewing their former rulers as extractive tyrants. Showing how hifazat becomes a rallying idea against land expropriation, environmental destruction and the developmentalist rhetoric of the Indian state, this chapter outlines claims to land anchored not solely in notions of indigeneity, but in the twists and turns of legal history and practices for asserting sovereignty.

Khusdeep Kaur Malhotra

“When there is memory, there is history”: Navigating precarity and scripting belonging through the memorialisation of the Chittisinghpora massacre

On March 20th, 2000, thirty-five Sikh men were gunned down by unknown perpetrators in Chittisinghpora village in South Kashmir’s Anantnag (East) district. Twenty-three years later, a makeshift memorial to the shaheeds (martyred Sikhs) was finally converted to a permanent structure, giving the event its “rightful place in history”. In this paper, I examine the memorialisation of this massacre through field visits conducted between 2018 and 2024. Through memorialisation, I argue that Kashmiri Sikhs not only render themselves visible, they strategically use their precarity, as a micro-minority caught ‘in between’ the political aspirations of Kashmiri Muslims and the Indian state, to mobilise in the absence of any political representation. Intimately connected to the socio-spatial context of living in Kashmir, I also show how memorialisation becomes a device with which they forge their own political subjectivities and carve out a distinct history of belonging within the dominant political imaginaries that characterise Kashmir.

Suchismita Das

Amphibious life in the Anthropocene: Landslides and the governance of land-water dynamics as a form of risk management in the Eastern Himalaya

Water scarcity in deserts, sea-level rise, recurrent floods, and as this paper shows, rain-induced landslides in mountain regions, are all reshaping material and social life across the globe. Anthropologists thus call for a political, cultural, ecological examination of the resultant “amphibious” conditions of life, created by the dynamic, unpredictable interplay between water and land. This literature sometimes attributes a “terrestrial”mode of attunement to the world to western, modernist, scientific thought, and an amphibious thinking to “othered” populations who live in fluid environments. Beyond such binaries, drawing on fieldwork since 2022, this paper asks: how do scientists, state functionaries and common citizens differently attune themselves to the land-water dynamics in Sikkim, Kalimpong and Darjeeling – where water constantly threatens to exceed its boundaries and precipitate landslides and other disasters? And how does a condition of livability, in this “risky” Himalayan “waterscape” emerge at the intersection of these different perceptions and the specific governance agendas they engender?

Maya Ratnam