"We are Ladakhis first"

Plus: Introducing the Infinity Inklings Postal Club for PAID subscribers!

While being on the road these past months, I’ve rediscovered my childhood love for writing postcards and philately. There’s something magical about finding the perfect local stamp, crafting a message by hand, and knowing it will travel thousands of miles to surprise someone in their mailbox. While writing a couple of postcards the other day to friends and family, I realized I’d love to open this experience to others. I’ve heard from quite a few of you that you’d love to receive physical mail but never do — so now’s your chance!

And so — dun-dun-dun — I’m excited to launch the Infinity Inklings Postal Club, where you’ll get an actual physical postcard from me to you, anywhere in the world, every quarter while I’m on the road. Think of it as old-school live dispatches from wherever I happen to be exploring. To keep it manageable, this is only open to PAID subscribers.

How to join the Infinity Inklings Postal Club:

• Already a paid subscriber? Simply reply to this email with your mailing address.¹

• Want to upgrade? Subscribe below for just the cost of a good coffee per month (both monthly and yearly subscribers are eligible).

• If you subscribe by midnight tomorrow (Thursday, September 18th) and send me your address, I’ll post your first handwritten postcard from the world’s only floating post office in Srinagar, Jammu & Kashmir, before I head back. Rest assured, if you upgrade later you’ll still get a postcard, but it will just be from my next location.

The world’s only floating post office, located in Srinagar.

And now, let’s resume usual programming …

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"We are Ladakhis first"

From a distance, Lamayuru Monastery seems to hover above the desert like a mirage. Whitewashed walls streaked with burgundy-red cling to the cliffside, with multicoloured prayer flags fluttering in the mountain wind. The Himalayan peaks stand sentinel in the background, jagged and immense, while below, a zig-zagged strip of green willow and poplar interrupts the endless brown. Clouds build and dissolve against the bluest of skies, and on days like this, with the sun unrelenting and the air so sharp it almost hurts to breathe, Ladakh feels less like a place and more like a metaphor where landscapes and faiths, nations and identities, all collide.

For centuries Ladakh was an independent Himalayan kingdom, ruled from Leh by the Namgyal dynasty until it was absorbed into the Dogra state of Jammu and Kashmir in the mid-19th century. Its valleys stood at the crossroads of Tibet, Central Asia, and Kashmir, carrying caravans laden with silk and porcelain from China, spices and textiles from India, and salt and wool from Tibet. Ladakh was particularly famous for its own salt, harvested from high-altitude lakes and traded as far as Central Asia, and its pashmina wool from Changthangi goats that made Kashmir’s shawls world-famous. After 1947, however, the Partition of the subcontinent and the rivalry between India and Pakistan for the erstwhile kingdom of Kashmir resulted in Ladakh being divided: Gilgit and Baltistan went to Pakistan, while Leh and Kargil remained with India. It’s a rupture that continues to shape lives and longings.

Within India, Ladakh remained part of the state of Jammu and Kashmir, though its districts often felt neglected by Srinagar. That sense of marginalization explains why, when Article 370 was revoked in 2019 and Ladakh was carved out as a separate union territory, many Ladakhis initially welcomed the change, even if frustrations have since grown over the lack of a legislature and specific cultural protections. As the scholar Radhika Gupta wrote:

Unlike some separatist movements in the Kashmir Valley that call for azadi (freedom) from India, people in Ladakh — both Muslims and Buddhists — have remained resolutely pro-India and strive to make their distinct political voice heard in the national mainstream. The reiteration of patriotic sentiments in a contentious ‘border’ location is also an important claim-making device used to garner political and developmental support from the central government in India. Yet hidden beneath this overt discourse is the more delicate balancing act between a politics of belonging to India and a poetics of longing for a space unfettered by geo-political barriers erected by the Partition, which is expressed through the circulation of cultural forms sustained by shared linguistic and religious histories.

Ladakh, to outsiders, often lives as a postcard. A serene Himalayan landscape where people hike, trek, pose against monasteries, and meet locals whose faces look — as travel clichés have it — “more Tibetan than Indian.” It’s a place where spirituality is packaged in brochures and motorbikes are rented in every alley. And there is truth to that image; monasteries do gleam white against the mountains, and prayer flags do ripple across high passes like frozen rainbows.

But beneath this tourist imagination lies a Ladakh that is layered, restless, alive in ways that rarely make it into the guidebooks. In conversations with Ali, my Shia Muslim driver from Leh, I began to understand how Ladakhi identity works less as a single thread than as a quilt, weaving together a mosaic of diversity. He told me how easily faiths overlapped here: He grew up attending Shia ceremonies in Leh but also visited Buddhist monasteries with friends. Even in Leh, from the top of the Central Asian Museum, you can see a Buddhist monastery, a Sikh gurudwara, and the Muslim Jamma Masjid all sharing a wall, highlighting the syncretism inherent in the culture.² “We are Ladakhis first,” Ali said simply, when I asked him about this overlap.

A monastery, a gurudwara, and a mosque stand next to each other in central Leh.

That refrain returned again and again in my travels. From monks in Thiksey to villagers in Dha, from chefs in Kargil to shopkeepers in Leh, Ladakh seemed to carry a shared conviction: that identity here has always been multifaceted, more than the sum of religions or sects.

At the Central Asian Museum itself, I was reminded of this history. Ladakh as a crossroads; a node on the ancient Silk Road, where traders from Yarkand, Samarkand, Tibet, and Kashmir once gathered.

The glass cases display coins from Tibet, Yarkand, and Kashgar, traditional Ladakhi robes alongside Central Asian clothing worn by traders, and the carved wooden saddles used by caravans traveling on camels and horses through the rugged mountain passes. There are sacred relics and religious manuscripts from both Islam and Buddhism as well as weighing scales and measuring tools used for trade, all reminders that Ladakh was never isolated. Like Lamayuru itself, where legend has it the 10th century Indian scholar Naropa caused a lake to dry up to build his monastery, these valleys have always been shaped by those who arrived with faith and purpose.³

A picture of a horse caravan crossing the Karakorum; courtesy: Central Asian Museum, Leh.

An early 20th century image of traders at Yarkandi Sarai in Leh; courtesy: Central Asian Museum, Leh.

Multiple routes through the Himalaya connected India and China from the Kushan era onward, with secondary Silk Road routes threading through Ladakh’s valleys — including the Nubra Valley — remaining operational until the mid-20th century.

The city of Kargil, that other district of Ladakh frozen in Indian imagination as the location of the 1999 war with Pakistan, for example, was always a place in-between: equidistant from Srinagar, Leh, and Skardu, a hinge between kingdoms. Even the name, which comes from Khar meaning ‘castle’ and rkil meaning ‘center’, stands for “a place between castles or kingdoms.”

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For a few days, I stayed in the remote border village of Dha, which is part of the so-called ‘Aryan’ valley, with a Brokpa family. The Brokpas, or Dards, claim to be the original inhabitants of Ladakh, and though scientists dispute their links to Alexander the Great, the legend persists in the village and the tourist imagination of the area.

“We were the first people of Ladakh,” my host Nami told me one evening as we sat together for dinner. “Now we are a minority. The Mongols came later, then the Tibetans. We came first and we still remain.” His features — sharper cheekbones, lighter eyes, longer nose — did look different from the Ladakhis I had met elsewhere.

A 2024 study of eighty individuals from Leh and Kargil found two distinct genetic lineages: the Leh region shows closer affinities with East and Southeast Asian populations like Tibetans and Sherpas, while the Kargil region clusters more with Indo-European groups including Kashmiri Muslims, Gujjars, and Nepali Brahmins. Both populations carry genetic markers of high-altitude adaptation, but their paths to these mountains followed different routes across different millennia.

This doesn’t invalidate the stories people tell about their origins — if anything, it suggests that Ladakh’s genetic landscape reflects its position as a historical meeting point, where Indo-Aryan occupation in Neolithic times mixed with later East-West gene flow consistent with Silk Road trade patterns. The Brokpa legends and the genetic evidence might both be true, but in different ways.

But it’s not just the genetic diversity that’s complex, but also the longing that comes with living in such proximity to the border. “You know we have relatives on that side, in Skardu,” he said, referring to the main town in Pakistan-controlled Gilgit-Baltistan. “Since Partition [in 1947], we cannot visit. But we know they are there.” The resignation in his voice made clear what the border had cost: not just ancient trade routes, but family ties that stretched back generations.

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The roads in Ladakh may not have the usual potholes like in other parts of India, but they haven’t strayed away from giving cows right of way.

Later, driving back toward Leh through landscapes that seemed to stretch beyond any reasonable horizon, Ali grew quiet for a while. When he spoke again, his voice carried a different weight:

You know, the roads we’re driving on — some of the best in India, despite the altitude — they weren’t always like this. Everything changed after 1999.

He gestured toward the perfectly maintained tarmac cutting through impossible terrain, then toward the distant ridgelines where, he said, you could still glimpse army posts if you knew where to look.

The Kargil conflict of 1999, when armed Pakistani insurgents crossed the Line of Control (LOC) — the de facto border between the two countries since the signing of the Shimla Agreement of 1971 — was a bloody affair. It was India’s first televised war and etched Ladakh into national memory. And although India won the conflict, both through sheer bravery and diplomatic pressure, its local legacy was (literally) concrete: the Border Roads Organisation launched an unprecedented expansion under Project Himank, blasting highways across Khardung La, Chang La, and Tanglang La. Later came the Darbuk–Shyok–Daulat Beg Oldi road, which cut a two-day supply run to just six hours, and the Nimmu–Padum–Darcha road, completed in 2024, linking Ladakh directly to Himachal Pradesh. Villages that once took weeks to reach by caravan were suddenly tied into all-weather networks that took just hours.

Ali’s voice softened:

Before the 1999 conflict, many Indians wouldn’t even have heard of us. Then came 3 Idiots in 2009 and Jab Tak Hai Jaan in 2012 and suddenly we were in the spotlight. Now we are connected — and that is great. People can study, run businesses, and tourism has boomed. But all this is decided in Delhi. We are happy for the development, but why not trust us to do it for ourselves?

I thought of the museum in Leh, with its displays of interrupted trade routes and artifacts of distant commerce, showing how Ladakhi culture had been influenced by the transmission of goods and ideas from cities as far as Samarkand and Bukhara; I thought of the 3 Idiots-inspired benches and replicas of the bike Shah Rukh Khan used in Jab Tak Hai Jaan dotting Pangong Lake, the tourist trail reducing the beauty of a pristine natural resource just as it also brings money to the local population who wove it into the tourist imagination of the place. And I admired Ali’s easy movement between Ladakhi identity and Indian belonging, although I didn’t have an answer to his question.

Ladakh, I realized, is never just the still postcard of mountains and monasteries. It is a place where stories of identity and survival spill into every conversation; one where people have embraced development and yet want representation. But more than anything else, it is a place that remembers being a crossroads even when borders try to make it a cul-de-sac.

Bollywood meets nature on the Ladakh tourist trail (this only has the 3 Idiots artefacts, the JTHJ ones are on another side).

1. Goes without saying, your address won’t be shared with anyone. If you prefer not to receive a physical postcard, a digital version can also be sent to the email address from which you’ve subscribed.

2. There is also a Krishna temple a few hundred metres away.

3. And many of these visionaries and traders stayed. Even today, most of the traders in Leh market are Kashmiris.