Lobsang Tsering, my octogenarian fellow villager, was a voracious reader and traditional knowledge keeper. Before he died in 2024, he made it his mission to give me a clear sense of the social, political and economic histories of our village – the site of my fieldwork for my PhD thesis on snow leopard conservation and tourism – and Ladakh in general.
He would spend hours telling me who married whom and how those alliances had been effected, offering me a sense of the kinship networks in Ladakh. Moreover, he would tell me about the histories of the Namgyal dynasty, which ruled from 1460 to 1834, and of Tibetan Buddhism, the faith followed by half the population of Ladakh.
He would educate me about the succession of Namgyal kings, which Namgyal king had been afflicted by leprosy and how these medical tribulations had affected our village.
After some time, I realised that his stories did not have to say much about the century or so of Dogra dynasty rule in Ladakh. More often than not, Tsering’s social and historical vignettes dealt with the period before Dogra rule began in the 1830s.
Lobsang Tsering was not an anomaly. It would seem that contemporary Ladakh has blanked out from its collective...
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