1 - Territory before Borderlines

Summary

The first chapter draws on Ladakhi and trans-Himalayan sources to examine precolonial understandings of space, boundaries, and frontiers in Ladakh and the broader northwestern Himalayan region. Sources surveyed range from the earliest available records of the tenth and eleventh centuries to the beginning of British rule in 1846. This chapter provides both a historical background to the region and an exploration of four major facets of indigenous Himalayan space: cosmology, politics, language, and matter. In illustrating multiple historical modes of seeing by indigenous historical actors, I suggest that the single, bounded entity called Ladakh was primarily a product of imperial possession in the nineteenth century. I am not arguing that there was not an earlier political entity known as Ladakh but rather that indigenous conceptions of its space were more pluralistic than the subsequent territory envisioned by its imperial rulers. The commingling of cosmological, political, linguistic, and material ways of seeing, I argue, produced identities that failed to map neatly. This chapter draws not only on the limited extant precolonial Ladakhi sources but also on an array of anthropological, linguistic, and archeological sources.