Visualising The Himalaya With Other Coordinates

Context: Looking at the Himalayas only through the prism of geopolitics and security concerns ignores its other crucial frameworks.

Concerns over current visualisation of Himalayas

• Securitisation – Phobia centric perception: Largely shaped by the assumption of fear, suspicion, rivalry, invasion, encroachment and pugnacity.
  • If during colonial times it was Russophobia, then now it is Sinophobia or Pakistan phobia that determines our concerns over the Himalayas.
• Territorialisation – on par with imperatives of nationalism:
  • If extroversion in the field of knowledge production has resulted in academic dependency, in the case of Himalayan studies, it has given birth to the political compulsion of territorialising the Himalaya on a par with the imperatives of nationalism.
  • This led to an attempt to create a national Himalaya by each of the five nations (Nepal, Bhutan, India, Pakistan, and Tibet/China) that fall within this transnational landmass called the Himalaya.
  • For E.g. The National Mission on Himalayan Studies by India created policies only for the Indian Himalayan Region (IHR).
  • Cartographic fixations as the natural limit have overburdened Himalayan studies with concerns of States in place of people, culture, market or ecology.
  • Bearings of colonial legacy: The Himalaya’s territorialisation bears a colonial legacy that also sets up its post­colonial destiny as played out within the dynamics of nation-states.
• Borders and their differences: It needs to be recognised that political borders and cultural borders are not the same things.
  • Political borders are to be considered as space­making strategies of modern nation­states that do not necessarily coincide with cultural borders.
  • Culture, in a sense, defies the (political) idea of the border or at best considers it as permeable, penetrable, connective and heterogeneous.
• Links between traditional and non-traditional insecurities: It has often appeared as the fact that the measures to deal with traditional security threats from outside have, in fact triggered non-traditional insecurities on several fronts on the inside.

Way Forward: Geopolitical Re-conceptualisation of Himalayas - 

• Re-interpreting historical position of Himalayas: Himalaya is a naturally evolved phenomenon that should be understood through frameworks that have grown from within the Himalaya.
• The Himalayas is a space whose history defines its geography rather than the other way round. 
• Thus, we need to be careful about what kind of Himalayan history we are trying to inject or project in the way we imagine the Himalayas.
• Beyond the absolutist statist position: Concerns of trade, commerce, community, ecology and environment issues are no less important when we are to think of securing livelihoods, cultures and the environment in the Himalaya.