Building Blocks of Balti Ethnicity

The Baltis now have a global clientele on whose reflection they are beginning to fashion a new identity for themselves.

The summer 'window of opportunity' for the ubiquitous foreign tourists who want to see 'wilderness' has now opened for Baltistan, that cul-de-sac district in Northern Pakistan noted perhaps only for being a linguistic curiosity in Pakistan, because the inhabitants maintain a dialect of Tibetan.

For Tibet-i-Khurd (Little Tibet), as the Mughals called it, the window is open for economic entry into a cash economy. However, it is firmly closed and locked for political entry into Pakistani society. The national elections in Pakistan are set for 8 October, but the rules firmly prohibit participation by Baltis, as it is prohibited for their Northern Areas neighbours in Gilgit District.

This contemporary paradox (i.e., participation in society at one level but not at others) extends to the current cultural identity of the region, which is being moulded by foreigners through the popular books on mountains. Baltistan is in the midst of being manufactured by the Western media. For the Baltis themselves, their grasp of Tibetan Buddhist culture is limited to the petroglyphs of the surrounding culture and an English language text on the history of the "Northern areas" that foreigners keep writing about.

The reason why the Westerner is so interested in Baltistan is to be found in the circumstances elsewhere in the Himalaya. Travel in Tibet is sanitised because it is limited to supervised tour groups; Nepal's summer deluge seems to be getting greater even while its rambunctious citizens seek more political participation; India is still paranoid about its frontiers and prohibits ramblers on its boundaries; Kashmir, with its access to Ladakh, is a continuous bloodbath; Afghanistan is firmly in the grip of the 19th century; and the Pamirs in Tajikistan are now home lo malcontents ambushing Western trekkers.

Despite the India-Pakistan dispute on Siachen glacier, Balistan and the Karakorum mountains are seen as relatively tranquil places for the summer foreign tourists demanding a piece of the Himalaya. The slick brochures and glossy coffee table books beckon with panting prose and vapid photographs, and the tourist obliges.

Billed as a primitive place, unchanged, isolated, remote, with the greatest concentration of high mountain peaks in the world and the longest glaciers outside the polar areas, Baltistan actually has for centuries been the crossroads for trade and for Asian religions: Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, Hinduism and Islam. Despite their illustrious past, the Baltis today remain at the periphery of the Pakistani nation-state, smothered out by the cries of the plains´ Pakistanis. With a population estimated at 200,000, Baltistan would amount to no more than a neighbourhood in Karachi, Baltistan is indeed a long way from the hubbub of imperious Punjab and Karachi.

Hand-Eating Culture

Baltistan is more easily recognised in the West than it is in Pakistan itself. The adventurous Pakistani tourist who makes it up the Karakorum Highway to Gilgit in his 800cc diminutive Suzuki car and then along the Rondu gorge to Skardu is more impressed by the number of Westerners roaming around in Baltistan than with the mountains. They delight in having their photographs taken with foreigners.

Gradually, the plains culture is enveloping the mountains. Over the past five years, the foothill and midhill areas of northern Pakistan have developed as destinations for the plains' middle class in their Suzukis, much as Indian middle class is doing with their Marutis. The hill resort of Murree is swamped with summer tourists, as are the other smaller resorts along the ridge, while the Kaghan Valley towns and villages have seen a big building boom in hotels. Even in the isolated Kohestani community of Kalam in northern Swat District, the number of hotel beds has gone up from 26 in 1982 to over 600 today.

This process of popular integration has not yet reached the trans-Himalayan places. Distance is the limiting factor as far as Baltistan is concerned, for it is a two-day trip to reach Skardu and few city-bred Suzuki owners will risk their cars on the weather-plagued roads. When planes do fly during patches of good weather, foreign tour groups manage to command priority as they spend hard currency.

Distance, however, doesnot prevent all the desirable consumer goods from making it to the Skardu bazaar. Imported soft drinks, Pakistani soft drinks, confectionery and chocolate biscuits are all available at premium prices. Like Namche in the Khumbu, Skardu's shops stock a variety of imported tinned foodstuffs and clothing sold to local merchants by departing climbing expeditions.

Tsampa eating is out! Barley and bitter buckwheat, the few crops grown at high altitude, have now been supplanted by higher yielding wheat, either locally grown or imported from the plains at subsidised rates. But the shift in the local Balti dietary staple has yet to produce the impact that it had in Tibet, where the substitution of low producing barley by high production wheat (from a hand-eating tsampa culture to a chopstick-eating wheat noodle culture) dramatically reduced the incidence of gastro-intestinal disorders.

But cash-cropping steadily creeps northwards, as turnips and cabbages are grown in rotation with the now widespread potatoes. Was George Orwell correct when he said in The Road to Wigan Pier that a change in diet was more important than a change in dynasty? The demise of barley coincided with both the importation of subsidised wheat and the assumption of central control over the petty rajas of the region.

Goats and sheep, once kept for their role as dung machines to replenish soil fertility, are now sold for meat in the bazaars. While yaks roam the high altitude pastures well above 3000 metres, the demand for meat is such that old oxen — some even obtained illicitly from India — are now trucked up from Punjab and slaughtered in Skardu.

The net result of the conversion to the cash economy has been that the local Baltis are much more at the mercy of outside middlemen. These traders, mostly Chilasis from further down the Indus or Pushtuns from elsewhere in northern Pakistan, often clash over commercial territory, or the monopoly over brokering certain products. Periodic clashes between the outsiders and the locals are also common. Shops of opposing groups are set ablaze as the Kalashnikov culture, so widespread elsewhere in Pakistan, takes over.

These altercations take on a more sinister tone because the intrusive traders are Sunni Muslims and the Baltis are Ithna Ashariya Shias. In neighbouring Ladakh, of which Baltistan was once a part prior to the partition of 1947, Shia Muslims and Buddhist Tibetans used to live together in Leh, one of the junctures of the caravan trade between India and Turkestan. This coexistence was shattered in August 1988 after Sunni Muslims from the Vale of Kashmir intruded into the old trading arrangements and strife broke out. The foreigners marooned at that time in Ladakh were extracted and within a week T-shirts proclaiming "Free Ladakh from Kashmir" were being sported around the Indira Gandhi International Airport in New Delhi.

Perhaps the same process of the foreign 'invention' of ethnicity and the creation of 'place' — seen at the most flagrant level in the invention of a single Tibetan "ethnicity", or even worse, national territory including Qinghai and western Sichuan — is being produced in North Pakistan. The most extreme example is the Kalash Kafir community in southern Chitral, which has two NGOs, a self-appointed English headmistress, and, of course, the obligatory resident anthropologist — all this for 3000 people. While the Kalash were in rapid decline two decades ago, with outside recognition their numbers now remain stable and their rights are being 'invented'. So much so that they even requested parliamentary recognition by a special representative.

But the Baltis are changing their stripes too, as the foreign goodwill that is accorded to the people of Hunza is now granted to them.

Global Aspirations

The Canadian cultural geographer Ken MacDonald has documented how Baltis were perceived by the Europeans at the turn of the century. Their image then was of a people hardly belonging to the human race. That model has now been changed.

From being colonial dependents of the British a hundred years ago, in addition to being the subjects of local petty despots who forced them into corvee labour and tithing. Macdonald sees the Baltis now becoming the subjects of the 'neo-colonialists' — the foreign tourists, trekking groups, and climbing expeditions, as well as world travellers checking off another place in those endless Lonely Planet guides.

The exposure to foreigners on the ground is now multiplied by exposure to foreign culture on satellite television. Portable generators, bought with Gulf labour cash earned by somebody's cousin brother, power the glowing television sets. In addition to the prudish censored fare of Pakistan's CNN, Baltis can zero in via their bazaar-made antennae on to the concoctions of Doordarshan from India, and the five channels of Star TV from Hong Kong.

The direct exposure to foreigners whose goal is the Karakorum mountains, along with increasing direct links to extra-territorial culture, means that Baltis can leapfrog over the efforts of Islamabad to make them obedient servants of the state. Foreign attention means they now have a global clientele to lobby for their interests, and access to global culture raises aspirations for a consumer lifestyle far beyond their current capabilities. Both the local elites, many of whom are remnants of the petty states, and the military-administrative officials (in substantial numbers because of the continued carnage in Kashmir), now have to´ deal with sophisticated Baltis who can get by in English, French, German and a smattering of Japanese.

The Baltis, almost singularly identified because of their Tibetan language connection, now find it possible to promote their ethnicity by the territory they occupy. Once seen to belong to the locational periphery, the frontier, by the British (and one might add, by their 'primitiveness'), and on the political periphery by the dominant Punjabi culture of Pakistan, the Baltis are capturing attention of the outer world by accessibility from roads, airwaves, and the skies.

N.J.R. Allan teaches Geography at the University of California, Davis. His edited book, Karakorum Conquered: North Pakistan in Transition, will be published next year by St. Martin's Press.