Religious identity and gender on the edges of the nation: The leh district of india’s Jammu and Kashmir state

Abstract

At the intersection of politics and religion, gender can become a point of tension and concern. This chapter explores the complex and contradictory ways that gender becomes a site for the politicization of religious identity in the Leh District of India’s Jammu and Kashmir State. As global and national understandings of what it means to be Buddhist or Muslim have gained circulation, religion has become a political force in post-partition South Asia, the relationship between Leh’s Buddhist majority and Muslim minority has deteriorated. Political conflict between Buddhists and Muslims has been articulated in part through women’s bodies, and new interpretations of religious identity are emerging. Both groups are developing an embodied religious boundary by forcibly preventing interreligious marriages and new interpretations of religious doctrine that discourage women from using family planning. These emergent practices attend and sometimes conflict with new expressions of religious identity from dress to vegetarianism. Drawing on ethnographic work including interviews, survey data, and participatory oral histories in Leh District, I engage with the ways that Buddhist and Muslim women and men contend with the politicization of religion and life as a religious minority on the contested borders of the Indian nation.