Overview

The Kashmir conflict, the ongoing border dispute between India and Pakistan, has sparked four wars and cost thousands of lives. In this innovative ethnography, Ravina Aggarwal moves beyond conventional understandings of the conflict - which tend to emphasize geopolitical security concerns and religious essentialisms - by considering how it is experienced by those living in the border zones along the Line of Control, the 435-mile boundary separating India from Pakistan. She focuses on Ladakh, the largest region in northern India's state of Jammu and Kashmir. Located high in the Himalayan and Korakoram ranges, Ladakh borders Pakistan to the west and Tibet to the east. Revealing how the shadow of war affects the lives of Buddhist and Muslim communities in Ladakh, Beyond the Lines of Control is an impassioned call for the inclusion of the region's cultural history and politics in discussions about the status of Kashmir. Aggarwal brings the insights of performance studies and the growing field of the anthropology of international borders to bear on her extensive fieldwork in Ladakh. She examines how social and religious boundaries are created on the Ladakhi frontier, how they are influenced by directives of the nation-state, and how they are shaped into political struggles for regional control that are legitimized through discourses of religious purity, patriotism, and development. She demonstrates in lively detail the ways that these struggles are enacted in particular cultural performances such as national holidays, festivals, rites of passage ceremonies, films, and archery games. By placing cultural performances and political movements in Ladakh center stage, Aggarwal rewrites the standard plot of nation and border along the Line of Control.

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Reviews

Beyond Lines of Control is a theoretically sophisticated, gracefully written ethnography about the politics of performance-and the performance of politics-in one of the most contested geopolitical landscapes in the world. -Piya Chatterjee, author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation Beyond Lines of Control is an informative book about a region that is understudied in both anthropology and area studies. By moving back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the memorialized, Ravina Aggarwal asks us to reflect on the politics of memory for a region that sees itself as forgotten and liminal in the history of the Indian nation-state. -Kamala Visweswaran, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography

"""Beyond Lines of Control is an informative book about a region that is understudied in both anthropology and area studies. By moving back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the memorialized, Ravina Aggarwal asks us to reflect on the politics of memory for a region that sees itself as forgotten and liminal in the history of the Indian nation-state.""--Kamala Visweswaran, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography ""Beyond Lines of Control is a theoretically sophisticated, gracefully written ethnography about the politics of performance--and the performance of politics--in one of the most contested geopolitical landscapes in the world.""--Piya Chatterjee, author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation"

Beyond Lines of Control is an informative book about a region that is understudied in both anthropology and area studies. By moving back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the memorialized, Ravina Aggarwal asks us to reflect on the politics of memory for a region that sees itself as forgotten and liminal in the history of the Indian nation-state. --Kamala Visweswaran, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography Beyond Lines of Control is a theoretically sophisticated, gracefully written ethnography about the politics of performance--and the performance of politics--in one of the most contested geopolitical landscapes in the world. --Piya Chatterjee, author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation

""Beyond Lines of Control is an informative book about a region that is understudied in both anthropology and area studies. By moving back and forth between the everyday and the extraordinary, the mundane and the memorialized, Ravina Aggarwal asks us to reflect on the politics of memory for a region that sees itself as forgotten and liminal in the history of the Indian nation-state.""--Kamala Visweswaran, author of Fictions of Feminist Ethnography ""Beyond Lines of Control is a theoretically sophisticated, gracefully written ethnography about the politics of performance--and the performance of politics--in one of the most contested geopolitical landscapes in the world.""--Piya Chatterjee, author of A Time for Tea: Women, Labor, and Post/Colonial Politics on an Indian Plantation

Author Information

Ravina Aggarwal is Associate Professor of Anthropology at Smith College. She is the editor of Into the High Ranges: The Penguin Anthology of Mountain Writing and the editor and translator of Forsaking Paradise: Stories from Ladakh, by Abdul Ghani Sheikh. She was a founding editor of the journal Meridians.

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