So Close to Heaven (17 page)

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 throats. 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 recognition 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.