What is gone, however, is the richness, the profusion of Buddhist art spilling into public life that marks, for example, the ambience of a Bhutanese dzong, which served as both fortress and monastic center, with civil administration thrown in for good measure. Ladakh once had dzongs, too, built on commanding hilltops, but they faced operational obstacles that may have doomed them even in what should have been their days of glory. In this dry region, according to Alexander Cunningham, a colonial British military engineer who surveyed Ladakh in the mid-nineteenth century, the inaccessible dzongs, most now in ruins, had no internal water supply. Water carriers struggling up steep tracks from springs, wells, or a river below could not meet the needs of any significant population; a community’s growth was perforce constricted.
No glittering new temples and sturdy monasteries rise here nowadays as they still do in Bhutan, Sikkim, and Nepal. Surviving Ladakhi monasteries seem more spartan, even decrepit, when compared with the gompas of other Himalayan Buddhists. Where monastic communities remain, their populations seem thin and their temples and courtyards often lack the bustle and purposefulness of a Bhutanese dzong or a Tibetan-Nepali temple. Water is still a problem.
True, there are roadside chortens and many walls bearing the familiar incantation Om mani padme hum. Prayer wheels spin in the shadows of monasteries. Prayer flags flutter on garden poles and from corner to corner of flat rooftops, where small hearths for offerings to local guardian deities are also constructed. As in many other places in the Himalayas and the Tibetan plateau, such altars and the deities Ladakhis seek to appease antedate Buddhism but have been happily incorporated by it. In daily life there is often much more comfort to be derived from keeping the neighborhood spirits content than from contemplating the greater glories of Buddhism, which can wait for festival days. In Ladakhi homes, couch-beds are covered with Tibetan-style carpets and the furniture or woodwork may be painted with colorful designs incorporating one or more of the Eight Lucky Signs common in one form or another in all Tantric Buddhist decorative art: the treasure vase, the endless knot, the victory banner, the wheel of law, the protective golden parasol, the omniscient golden fish, the conch shell, and the lotus.
Still, Buddhist life in Ladakh bears only a pallid resemblance to the Bhutanese cultural environment, though both were almost equally steeped in an all-embracing Buddhist civilization when they began to modernize in the 1960s and open to tourism in the 1970s. Sikkim, too, seems a livelier place, its active temples full of monks and boisterous novices. Ladakhis, convinced that their mounting religious and material losses are by-products of politics and geography—forces beyond their control—alternate between panic and grief as they confront the erosion. Now and then, anger explodes into rebellion.
Historically, the Ladakhi capital of Leh was not only an important town on the trade routes to Central Asia and old Cathay, but also the center of an independent Tibetan Buddhist nation under a king, called a chogyal in Tibetan, for about eight hundred years before falling to Hindu rulers, the Dogras, in the 1830s. A few decades later, Ladakh was folded into the princely state of Jammu and Kashmir by the British. When India won independence in 1947, New Delhi incorporated Ladakh along with part of Jammu and Kashmir; the rest is under Pakistani control after several inconclusive wars and India’s repeated stubborn refusals to allow a plebiscite. The Kashmiri act of accession to India is still technically a matter of international dispute—the subject of unfulfilled United Nations resolutions—but in practical terms, Buddhist Ladakhis became a minority within a minority. Ladakh, with about 150,000 people and a slim Buddhist majority, fell under the jurisdiction of Muslim-majority Jammu and Kashmir, which in turn is part of Hindu-majority India.
Because a road links Leh to the Muslim Kashmir Valley, Ladakhis believe they are especially vulnerable to shrewd Kashmiri traders and hoteliers, who, they say, have moved into many areas of Ladakh in sufficient numbers to upset the economic, social, and religious structure. Ladakh, by virtue of its position on ancient trade routes, had a significant Muslim population for centuries, but these old families are not viewed with the hostility usually reserved for relative newcomers from Srinagar or Delhi who have parlayed their reasonably easy access into dominance in the tourist business, the largest money earner. Before the area was opened to foreigners, most Ladakhis lived on farming, growing grains, potatoes, and sometimes vegetables and fruit, wherever it was possible. Others kept livestock herds, especially goats and sheep for wool. Apart from the bazaars of Leh and Kargil, there were few market centers with the extensive service industries that give birth to a comfortable middle class. Medicine and law were the leading professions, though the ranks of doctors and lawyers were small. A handful of land-rich families lived, and still live, well—though not in palaces or mansions. The most luxurious home I visited had perhaps six or seven modest rooms, plus a simple kitchen and bath. A few pieces of handcrafted wood furniture, including some fine antiques, were crammed into a parlor and dining room each not much more than ten or twelve feet square. In other homes, where there was no inherited wealth, wooden platforms covered with Tibetan-style rugs served as daytime couches and beds at night in the one or two rooms inhabited by a family.
Periodically, Ladakhis agitate to break free of domination by Muslim Kashmir. They know there is scant hope of regaining the wealth and independence they once enjoyed as subjects of a Buddhist kingdom, but many hope for some kind of special territorial status within India, separate from the rest of Jammu and Kashmir. When I first went to Ladakh in 1989, the Ladakh Buddhist Association was in the throes of an intense civil disobedience campaign. “Kashmiri dogs go back!” read one banner, an ironic echo of the slogan Kashmiris use in expressing their views of New Delhi’s occupying troops: “Indian dogs go home!” For centuries in the Kashmir-Ladakh area, the image of a dog was associated with unwanted miscreants forced into banishment. Cunningham noted in the 1800s that Ladakhi criminals were sometimes branded with irons bearing a dog’s head and the inscription “dog marked—expelled” before being run out of town with taunts and threats.
Although Ladakh had been under almost unending curfew for weeks, daily demonstrations intended to force arrests took place outside the Soma Gompa in the heart of Leh, which served as a command post for the Buddhist Association of Ladakh. The protests went like clockwork. The Jammu and Kashmir state police would line up buses at an intersection near the rallying point. In the monastery compound, demonstrators (sometimes all women) would form into a flying squad and march briskly through the gompa’s gates into the street and, half a block later, into custody. With some struggle, they were herded aboard the waiting buses and driven away for a brief incarceration.
The short main street of Leh, its small, scruffy shops shut tight by the curfew, was a desolate place that day. As I waited for more action from the gompa, I could see above and beyond the police bus the facade of Leh Palace, a Tibetan-style skyscraper thought to be modeled on Lhasa’s Potala. Hollow with disuse, it loomed over the bazaar like the ghost of a forgotten age, its windows like the eye sockets of so many skulls. The palace, on a rocky mountain outcropping that seems to hover above the town, is empty of courtly life. Leh’s royal Namgyal family, long stripped of tides and power, is headquartered now at Stok, eight miles away, where a museum displays the defunct kingdom’s remaining treasures. A scion of the Namgyal family recently found his way into the Ladakhi Buddhist Association and was urged by a new generation to become an active figurehead for their campaign of separate identity. He is, in a sense, the once and future king in a dynasty whose lineage flows from the rulers of a lost Tibetan empire.
The level Buddhist militancy can reach in Ladakh surprises outsiders accustomed to the image of a meek and pious people committed to a peaceful life of prayer and reflection. Even more startling than the demonstrations in 1989 were reports by Muslims that some of them had been captured and forcibly converted to Buddhism by having chang, the popular fermented barley drink, poured down their teetotaling thro
ats. Muslim homes were surrounded, their inhabitants taunted. “There is terrible psychological pressure on Muslims,” a businessman said over tea on his veranda. “No Muslim can sleep properly these nights.” At his house, set in a wild garden on a winding back lane in Leh, no one in his Muslim family wanted to come out and sit with us in the sun on a warm autumn morning. The women had heard of Muslim homes in rural villages being surrounded and attacked by Buddhist gangs. An imam’s house had been stoned near Leh, they said. Muslims had been forced on pain of death to fly multicolored Buddhist flags.
Though a few years later a lot of this hostility had cooled and there was more cooperation between Buddhists and Muslims, many Ladakhis still insist they are in a long-haul fight for cultural survival. Cut off from Tibet by a prolonged dispute between India and China over their trans-Himalayan border, Ladakhi Buddhists are stranded and isolated—“driven into a small corner between Islam on one side and Chinese Communism on the other,” say the scholars David Snellgrove and Tadeusz Skorupski in their Cultural Heritage of Ladakh. Meanwhile, the Ladakhi homeland has become the base for a huge Indian army border force. The military makes most of the rules along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, where trade has been largely curtailed in the name of security. The army is everywhere in Leh—at the airport, in dusty jeeps on the few roads, along the passes, and in the mountains, where foreigners are not infrequently stopped and asked a little intrusively what brings them here.
The Chinese, intent on suppressing all forms of Tibetan nationalism after a 1959 rebellion (and continuing unrest ever since), are no friendlier. Ladakhis no longer move freely into and out of Tibetan monasteries, which are themselves being diminished and altered under Beijing’s control. Trapped between the fears of India and China, the Ladakhis can no longer trek freely along the Himalayas through Nepal, Sikkim, and Bhutan to buy domestic and temple treasures from Buddhist artisans the likes of whom this barren land can no longer support. Families here once hung Tibetan thangkas, wore Chinese brocades, and treasured the creations of Bhutanese silversmiths. Without spontaneous travel, Ladakhis cannot easily refresh themselves at other spiritual wells of their faith or share in the life and worship of other Himalayan Buddhists.
All legal travel out of India into other nations in the Himalayan region must be by air through Delhi or by land through a limited number of border crossings into Nepal and Bhutan, though some routes into Tibet may open soon if peace prevails. Sikkim is more accessible to Ladakhis as Indian citizens, but then Sikkim is not only hundreds of miles distant but also caught in its own crisis of spirit and thus has scant solace to offer. In Nepal, where Tibetan Buddhism flourishes and draws devotees from all over the Himalayas, the Ladakhi presence is virtually nil, and few lamas immersed in the monastic life of Nepal have any idea of the status of the religion in Ladakh; some will say vaguely only that they heard it seemed to be in decline.
Denied an autonomous status in India, where they inhabit the only Buddhist-majority area, Ladakhis have no way to mitigate the dominance of Muslim and Hindu Kashmir at the state level or the economic and military control emanating from Delhi. They have limited hopes for Delhi’s plan to establish a local governing council with some former state functions under its control; they would not, for example, have authority over the police.
“The Kashmir government has done us many injustices,” said Tondup Sonam, an assistant to His Holiness Kushok Stakna, the Leh gompa’s head lama and leader of the Buddhist Association. (A kushok in the Ladakhi language, a dialect of Tibetan, is the same as a tulku in Bhutan or Sikkim—an incarnate lama.) “We have been tolerating these things for too long,” he said with passionate conviction. In a cluttered room above the gompa courtyard, Tondup Sonam had been watching the day’s demonstration getting organized below, where banners were being unfurled and assigned. Many in the crowd were young people, motivated by a widely held fear that Kashmiri—specifically Sunni—Muslims were intent on capturing the economy completely and seizing all the jobs in tourism and commerce in Ladakh. “We are smelling that the Sunnis want to dominate people here,” he said. “There have been intrigues for several years. The youth have to organize.”
At Sankar monastery, a short drive through a valley running northeast of Leh, a lama talked about the roots of the Ladakhi Buddhist rebellion and why it had focused on only one Islamic community, the Sunnis. Around the Sankar gompa, families were living on the thin edge of subsistence. A number of children ran barefoot in the cool fall air, dressed in castoff foreign tourist clothes. A little girl of about seven or eight wore an oversize seersucker dress and the remains of a trekker’s down-filled vest. Over her matted hair she had tied a brightly patterned bandanna. Her face was expressionless; malnutrition stunts the growth and robs the vitality of millions of children in poor parts of India. This is one such place, though far from the worst.
“When India opened Ladakh to tourism in 1974, shopkeepers from outside began to come here,” the lama said. “Kashmiri Sunnis began to get a hand in everything. Travel agents in Srinagar or Delhi creamed off most tourist revenues, because the outsiders come through those places. The majority of local people in Leh, who are Buddhists, are not benefiting. But at the same time, costs are higher for our daily needs. We also think the Shia Muslims who have been living here peacefully for four or five hundred years are being incited by Sunni Kashmiris to turn against us.”
Imam Mohammed Omar Nadvi—a Ladakhi Muslim whose family has lived around Leh for centuries, intermarrying with Buddhists—objected vigorously to that charge, which he classified as another provocative rumor intended to fan resentments against all Islamic families. Stories, all unfounded, were also circulating about gompas being desecrated or robbed by Muslims. A hotelier, a Ladakhi Buddhist, seconded the imam in discounting these incendiary reports. He said that more often than not, local Buddhist families and sometimes even monks had willingly sold religious treasures from their straitened monasteries to Kashmiri dealers or tourists. More important economically, he argued, was India’s failure to ensure that Ladakh enjoyed at least relative prosperity within the growing national economy. Ladakhis see the difference in Sikkim, another former Buddhist kingdom, but one incorporated into India under much more recent and controversial circumstances. Millions of rupees pour into development in Sikkim, while in Ladakh, apricots fall from the trees and rot in the orchards because of inadequate transportation for marketing this highly perishable fruit. A middle-class couple talked about this one morning as they showed me their small farm, which they struggle to irrigate. Over the stone wall encircling the trees, a looming monochrome landscape of rocks and dry earth heightened the sense of hopelessness.
Two years after the 1989 outburst in Leh, tourism collapsed in the Kashmir Valley as a revolt against New Delhi by Kashmiri Muslims turned Srinagar into a battlefield. Fewer outsiders or Kashmiris came to Ladakh overland from Srinagar. Tensions dissipated a little in Leh, while the Indian government looked for ways to increase flights or improve alternative roads to the Ladakhi capital. With Kashmir effectively gone and hill stations like Simla and Darjeeling overcrowded and ecologically devastated, India needs new Himalayan tourist centers, and Leh is one prime candidate, along with previously closed areas east toward the Tibetan border and south in pristine Spiti, a Buddhist enclave on the upper edge of Himachal Pradesh. The prospect pleases many cash-strapped Ladakhis but worries others. Islam crept up the Indus, Kashmiris poured across the Zoji La. Both have altered the face of Buddhist Ladakh. But how much more damage to a fragile culture and ecology would large numbers of tourists—foreign or Indian—do?
Helena Norberg-Hodge, who in her most recent book, Ancient Futures, looks back over nearly two decades of life in Ladakh, says that tourism has already introduced begging and the growth of a get-rich-quick mentality. For Helena and her Ladakhi colleagues, there is a special sadness in this. She and her local partners have been working hard through a small foundation called the Ladakh Project to improve life without altering it beyond recogni
tion by dependence on imports from the outside world. Dressed in her ankle-length Ladakhi robe, Helena and Tsewang Rigzin Lakruk, the project’s president, showed me around their headquarters, which also served as a model building for demonstrating what developers like to call “appropriate technologies”—small, inexpensive, and fashioned of mostly local materials. Several hundred Ladakhi householders were learning from the project how to warm their homes with sunshine by constructing and placing windows to maximize light while insulating against drafts. Ladakhi carpenters had developed an efficient solar oven, which was on display in the project’s garden, along with greenhouse frames that could extend growing seasons for fresh vegetables. Ladakhis, Helena said, were people born in extreme scarcity. This contributed to the high level of cooperation she found in villages. There was also a high level of tolerance for new ideas, an attribute foreigners find wherever Buddhism orders life.
Alas, that tolerance also makes Ladakhis too responsive to the lures of tourism, some say. “In one day, a tourist would spend the same amount that a Ladakhi might in a year,” Norberg-Hodge, who speaks Ladakhi, writes in Ancient Futures. The impression left on local people was that the visitors enjoyed untold wealth that could easily be shared. She tells the story of Dawa, a fifteen-year-old village boy who in a matter of a few years had drifted to Leh and gone into business as a tour agent. She asked him how life in his mountain village looked to him now. “Boring,” was the reply, in English. The people didn’t have electricity, he complained, and some didn’t even want it. He dismissed such thinking as out of step with the age: “We’ve worked in the fields long enough, Helena; we don’t want to work so hard anymore.” And off he went in search of his Dutch girlfriend.
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