Why steel roofs in Ladakh are a sign of the region’s political and social crises

When I returned to my village of Hemisshukpachan in Ladakh in November after a hiatus of three months, I noticed a new architectural trend: steel roofing.

The next day, at a meeting in the community hall called by an NGO to distribute solar lamps, some villagers were in a rush to leave because there were workers at their homes installing steel roofs. This sparked a discussion about this new trend. There was a general agreement that all the residents should install steel roofs.

The impetus to build these roofs had come from the unprecedented rainfall we received in August. Leh recorded 80 mm of rain – roughly 930%. The flat mud roofs of the region’s traditional houses could easily withstand the historical average annual precipitation (both rain and snow) of around 100 mm. But my neighbours thought that steel roofing was necessary to face the changing weather patterns.

As a result, Ladakhis were spending their early winter getting ready for the summer instead of the phenomenon we have historically spent our time preparing for – the cold.

As I see it, the loosening ties of Ladakhis with the cold is responsible for the region’s new obsession with heritage preservation – and even our political anxiety.

Till the early 2000s, Ladakh’s winters (October-March) were harsh. Agricultural activities came to a halt. Everything froze: the rivers, streams, water canals, grassland and land with moisture in it. Precipitation mostly came in the form of snowfall. “In the past, winters were very cold and snowfall was abundant,” an octogenarian fellow villager told me.

In the shaded parts of the village, the early winter snow was transformed into sheets of ice. As residents shovelled the snow off their roofs, towers of sleet grew in the alleyways. In the winter, some parts of the village used to be covered permanently with ice.

These tough conditions entailed that there was always the looming danger of food and fuel scarcity. As a result, Ladakhis spent their summers preparing for the winter.

The summer months were used to cultivate barley and wheat (the main foodgrains), collect apricots and vegetables (both wild and cultivated) for dry preservation, and to secure essentials not found locally, such as salt, from distant outposts.

Talking to my Buddhist neighbours about the time before Ladakh joined the Republic and a couple of decades after it became part of India, they told me many stories about the cruel, cold months. The most prominent theme was food scarcity.

By mid- to late winter, pantries became empty, and people went to seek loans of grain from relatively wealthy neighbours. Stories of people venturing to the nearby monastery to steal from the granary are also remembered. Young men went on expeditions to hunt wild sheep, goats and birds for subsistence. People slept early so they would be under the covers during the freezing nights.

The local architecture reflected the necessity of tackling the frosty conditions. The older houses have thick walls that act as thermal insulation. Homes had a special winter chamber, called yokhang, on the ground floor. This floor also had rooms for the livestock. Moving nearer to the animals provided the much-needed warmth.

The preparations made for the dreary winter months underscore the intimate relationship Ladakhis had with the cold. Living in Ladakh meant getting ready, tackling and facing the icy circumstances head-on.

Ladakh’s social institutions reflect this. Elaborate systems of community cooperation in villages – norms related to water sharing, social groups that assist in ploughing, funerals and weddings – were the safety nets. A powerful village-level decision-making institution headed by the goba (chief) and representing all the households had authority on important aspects like water sharing.

Social practices were designed to negotiate the frigid landscape. For instance, polyandrous marriage, in which a woman had several husbands, controlled the population. In many families, younger siblings became monks and nuns, which secured their survival in monasteries with generous endowments.

One bit of small talk in Ladakh is “Thogs babs se rag, ta” (the warm has descended). Essentially, Ladakhis, at both the individual and collective level, had a fundamental purpose in this world – to survive the cold environment.

But geopolitics-related increase in military deployment, development programmes and tourism slowly began to upend this purpose. Food and fuel also became available from the civil administration and the military, which provided employment to Ladakhis.

Life became easier. But it made a social world designed to negotiate coldness inconsequential. Practices like agro-pastoralism, settlement patterns, mud buildings, mud stoves, livestock and much more became anachronistic.

The upending of Ladakh’s social world produced a sense of crisis. This became evident in the rush to preserve traditional architecture, pottery, metal works, dress, languages, festivals, monasteries, stupas, water-mills, heirloom seeds, animals, agricultural practices, water distribution systems, the institution of goba and even villages (which were being depopulated by outmigration).

The region now has an abundance of heritage-preserving individuals and organisations.

The looming planetary ecological crisis that has widespread public acknowledgement in the region adds another dimension to the threats. For example, the majority of families in Kulum abandoned their village due to water scarcity. After the 2010 floods, the village spring, the main source of water, dried up.

Due to rising temperatures, glacier-lake outburst floods (GLOF) have become frequent. A prominent example is the 2014 Gya village GLOF. Studies have shown a significant increase in temperature in Ladakh and neighbouring regions of around 1.6 degrees celsius in the last century, with winters heating at an increased rate.

All of these processes portray Ladakhi people as endangered. This atmosphere of risk underpins the recent political movement in Ladakh.

The sense of crisis in contemporary Ladakh is fundamentally an altered relationship with coldness, which provided a purpose to live. This relationship with the coldness is deeply ingrained in the social psyche of Ladakhis. These broken ties with frigidity finds articulation with the help of common discourses of heritage protection, tribal rights, and local governance.

If all the important heritage items and sites are protected, if all the tribal rights are recognised, if the region is empowered through extension of the Sixth Schedule of the Constitution and even statehood, the question is how do we live with our changed relationship with coldness on a dangerously warming planet even while enjoying modern amenities.

Steel roofs are only a temporary answer.

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropologist from Ladakh.

This is the first of a two-part series on Ladakh. Read the second part here.