Introduction

Chapter One Introduction “The [Balti] villages, then, are oases in so far as they represent islands of vegetation and human habitation … isolated from each other and well nigh lost in the midst of barren mountains” (De Filippi 1932: 77). “Politically Baltistan was thus a dead end, an Eastward-stretching tract of Pakistani- held territory without exit, pressed between Communist-controlled Tibet and the remote Buddhist corner of Indian-held Kashmir known as Ladakh” (Stephens 1953: 186). 1.0 Introduction The point of departure for this research is a broad interest in the process by which the Himalayan mountains have become part of, and dominated by, much larger political and economic entities. As has been the case throughout the Greater Himalayan Region since 19471, Pax Britannica has been replaced by hegemonic projects, whereby different parts of the mountain region have been claimed by India, Pakistan and China respectively. These political claims have been backed by military presence, so that most of the mountain region, previously a mosaic of semi-autarchic societies, has become integrated into these emerging territorial states (Kreutzmann 1991, 1995, Jodha 1992, Allan 1991, Sökefeld 2005). Baltistan is a high altitude mountain area, covering some 25,000 km2 and situated in the Karakorum Mountains. A part of the disputed territory of Kashmir, Baltistan is located immediately north of what is now known as the Line of Control, dividing Pakistani- and Indian- held Kashmir, and has been in Pakistani hands since 1948. As a result of the ongoing conflict over Kashmir, the local population in Baltistan has seen its traditional routes of communication, 1 By the Greater Himalayan Region I understand the Himalayas, the Tibetan Plateau, the Karakorums, and the Hindu Kush. 1 trade, and migration to southern Kashmir cut since the division. The Siachen glazier always blocked access to the east, but in addition links with Yarkand, in the Chinese province of Xinjiang, were severed after the communist take-over of China in 1949. Thereafter, Baltistan became a cul de sac, accessible only from lowland Pakistan via high altitude mountain passes, and only for 3 to 5 months a year. Map 1 Baltistan in the political landscape The princely state of Kashmir (pre-1947) 0 100 km The divided Kashmir territory, 2006 0 100 km 2 Then, starting in the late 1960s, the 1,300 km Karakorum Highway was built, an engineering masterpiece that connected the Pakistani capital, Islamabad, with Kashgar in north-western China. By the early 1980s, Baltistan’s district capital, Skardu, was connected by an all-year access route, along the Indus riverbed to the Karakorum Highway. Since then link roads have been constructed throughout Baltistan, connecting most valleys to Skardu and thus to the Pakistani road network. The journey to the Pakistani plains has been manageable in just over 24 hours, down from three weeks prior to Partition, and moreover unhindered by seasonal and physical constraints. These highly improved means of access and communication are, it can be argued, part of a territorialisation process, planned and implemented by the Pakistani government with the aim to exercise control over Pakistani-held Kashmir: Pakistani armed forces are numerous and highly visible throughout Baltistan; Urdu, the official language of Pakistan, is taught in local schools; and the population increasingly feeds on supplies of staple foods imported from the lowlands of Pakistan2. What does this mean for the population of Baltistan? Integration, marginalisation, domination, dependence – these are all keywords which serve to categorise and label different aspects of this development experience according to well-established theoretical frameworks. But they do nothing to explain the actual strategies and practices whereby the local population relates to the territorialisation process in the construction of their livelihoods. Nor are these questions, which are likely to be answered within existing traditions of mountain research. Images of mountain communities as islands, havens, or refuges have nourished the idea of populations confined to, and often defined by, specific natural resource bases. Focus on the utilisation of that specific resource base has often turned definition into typology, as terminologies developed in one mountain region are used to categorise mountain production systems in other parts of the world (Rhoades and Thompson 1975, Guillet 1983), e.g. the application of ‘Alpwirtschaft’ to characterise farming systems in the Northern Areas of Pakistan (Snoy 1993). In Baltistan, recent studies have been concerned with site-specific analyses of the processes of adaptation, contestation and negotiation related to the control of natural resources (MacDonald 1994, Nyborg 2002, Schmidt 2000, Schickhoff 1995). These are enquiries which, by and large, have been informed and demarcated by the habitat, the immediate physical environment, and whereas they provide insights into strategies and practices linked to agricultural 2 Despite the very heavy Pakistani imprint, it has remained a doctrine of the Pakistani government that the Northern Areas retains its designation as an internationally disputed area. 3 production and natural resource management in specific locations, they do not attempt to locate the enquiries within a larger political and economic picture. What in an Andean context has been referred to as a kaleidoscopic perspective (Paerregaard 1997: 20) – a reluctance to take into consideration the broader national context – is also a criticism that is even more valid in the Greater Himalayan Region, particularly Baltistan, where the political landscape has been entirely transformed since 1947. 1.1 Understanding migration The most tangible and visible impact of the integration of Baltistan within Pakistan is the emergence of a road network that has been gradually expanding since the early 1980s, so that the vast majority of villages in Baltistan now are accessible by motorised transport and access routes to lowland Pakistan are unhindered by seasonal constraints. Though the road network was established in order to facilitate access of Pakistani armed forces to contested border areas, it has opened up new opportunities to the local population. It has become possible for the Balti population to expand their spatial and temporal room for manoeuvre, as (male) Balti migrants are enabled to pursue livelihood opportunities in lowland Pakistan. But the nature of this migration remains largely unexplored. The more well-documented understanding of Pakistani labour migration is linked to the way in which migrants from especially Azad Kashmir and Punjab have left the country in several waves since the end of the 1940s (Ballard 1983, 1987, Addleton 1992). Migration to Great Britain during the 1950s and 1960s – a gradual process which over time involved entire families and communities – has been the subject of especially anthropological research, focusing on the nature of the emerging migrant communities and on the networks linking the migrants to the sending communities (Watson 1977, Werbner 1989). Migration to the Gulf States started in the mid- 1970s, but involved far higher numbers, usually men on their own. At its peak in the late 1980s, it was estimated that 11 % of the Pakistani population, mostly low income households, had benefited directly from migration to the Gulf States (Noman 1991: 83). This latter form of migration has been attributed to both the core-periphery relations within a world system, with Pakistan as the peripheral source of cheap labour, and to the understanding of the migrant as an extension of a household firmly based in Pakistan. These explanations should be seen in light of the nature of the migration, as most migrants to the Gulf are employed on time-limited, though extendable contracts, and without the option of bringing their families along (Addleton 1992). 4 In comparison, migration within Pakistan’s borders is an area that has attracted much less attention in terms of research (Selier 1988 and 1991, Hastings and Werbner 1991). Present day internal migration patterns in Pakistan have largely evolved since Partition in 1947, when existing migration routes within the larger British India were curtailed, and new routes emerged within the parameters of the emerging Pakistani state. Unsurprisingly, given the pressure on agricultural land and the high proportion of landless rural households, rural-urban migration has been most common throughout the country. While the overall Pakistani population increased by 250 % in the period 1947-81, the urban population grew by close to 400%, and by 1998 32.5% f the population were living in urban areas (Government of Pakistan 1999), compared with 28.3% in 1981. The assumptions behind explanations of domestic migration in Pakistan tend to be that the majority of those migrating are labour migrants pushed out from their native environments due to economic hardship and landlessness, or pulled by what was seen as actual or supposed opportunities in the cities due to rapid industrialisation. Analyses of these forms of migration have mostly been based on secondary data such as statistics and census data, thus without the necessary detail to focus on individual migrant trajectories, and without the ability to integrate data from the migrant’s point of origin with data concerning the actual migrant experience. There has been a tendency to reduce migration to the mobility of labour, and for the mobility of labour to be reduced

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