In the devastating legacy of Dogra domination are the roots of Ladakh’s anxiety for autonomy

Lobsang Tsering, my octogenarian fellow villager, was a voracious reader and traditional knowledge keeper. Before he died in 2024, he made it his mission to give me a clear sense of the social, political and economic histories of our village – the site of my fieldwork for my PhD thesis on snow leopard conservation and tourism – and Ladakh in general.

He would spend hours telling me who married whom and how those alliances had been effected, offering me a sense of the kinship networks in Ladakh. Moreover, he would tell me about the histories of the Namgyal dynasty, which ruled from 1460 to 1834, and of Tibetan Buddhism, the faith followed by half the population of Ladakh.

He would educate me about the succession of Namgyal kings, which Namgyal king had been afflicted by leprosy and how these medical tribulations had affected our village.

After some time, I realised that his stories did not have to say much about the century or so of Dogra dynasty rule in Ladakh. More often than not, Tsering’s social and historical vignettes dealt with the period before Dogra rule began in the 1830s.

Lobsang Tsering was not an anomaly. It would seem that contemporary Ladakh has blanked out from its collective memory the period of Dogra domination in the region. This erasure partly helps us understand the roots of the political movement for self-governance in Ladakh.

Ladakh was an independent kingdom till the 1830s. But from the 1830s to 1947, Ladakh was a colonised territory. Its colonisation began in 1834, when Gulab Singh of Jammu, a commander of the Sikh empire, dispatched Zorawar Singh Khaluria to invade Ladakh. Zorawar’s forces defeated the haphazardly organised defence of the region by the Ladakhi king.

A decade later, the East India Company defeated the Sikh empire in the first Anglo-Sikh war, during which Gulab Singh sided with the British East India Company. As a reward, the Company signed the Treaty of Amritsar with Gulab Singh in 1846. For Rs 75 lakh, Gulab Singh got the kingdom of Jammu and Kashmir, including the Ladakh region.

Gulab Singh became the Maharaja of Jammu and Kashmir. With the treaty, Ladakh formally lost its independence and became a province in the Dogra-ruled territory. It was called the Ladakh Wazarat.

The takeover of Ladakh by Gulab Singh’s Dogra dynasty was a bloody affair. Around 15,000 Ladakhis died during the conquest between 1834 and 1841. Several monasteries were plundered and destroyed, and monastic estates were confiscated. An estimated 9,000 monks fled to Tibet. Others sought refuge in Baltistan.

To strengthen the Dogra position, Zorawar constructed a fort, now called Zorawar Fort, after the defeat of the Ladakhi king, who did not have a standing army.

As a result of the conquest, elite Ladakhis lost their power while the commoners got buried in high taxes. In the mid-19th century, the annual land revenue collection in Ladakh was around Rs 28,000, By 1912-’13, it had increased five times to Rs 152,621. It has to be kept in mind that Ladakh is a cold desert at high altitude, where only one crop per year could grow in small terraced farms.

Despite high extraction of revenue, the maharaja spent a minuscule amount on the local people’s welfare. For instance, it was only at the turn of the 20th century that a small amount was spent on establishing the first primary school in Leh, with only one teacher. When it was upgraded to a middle school in 1908, a second teacher was appointed.

Elders told me about the humiliations of the period. I heard accounts of officials slapping the goba or village head to assert dominance. Similarly, residents had to provide begar or forced labour to transport the official across Ladakh. Begar often involved carrying the officers, their families and even their pets in a palki.

“The Dogra administration introduced the res system by which a village or group of villages was bound to supply transport for certain stages on certain roads for any passing official,” writes Ladakhi scholar Abdul Ghani Sheikh. “At Leh and Kargil, fifty horses and twenty coolies had to be kept ready in summer, and twenty horses and thirty coolies in winter. Each house had to supply a man and animal to fulfil the begar carriage obligation.”

The Dogra regime was such a blow on the social psyche that Ladakhis judged a year as bad or good based on the number of visits by officials to their hamlets.

Ladakhi historian Rinchen Dolma writes: “A century of Dogra rule is considered as the darkest chapter in the history of Ladakh.”

Those 100 years were a psychological and emotional wound that was passed down the generations. But instead of acknowledging it, there seems to be an unconscious attempt to erase this traumatic past.

I think that it is important not only to acknowledge the scars of the past, but to recognise how this distressing legacy continues to mould our contemporary politics. This period of Dogra rule unconsciously manifests itself as never-ending anxiety about people from the “mainland” taking over Ladakh’s land, jobs and resources.

In addition, the region’s demand for autonomy under the sixth schedule of the Constitution and even statehood could be seen as an urge to regain power that Ladakhis lost in the 1830s.

As a first baby step to acknowledge this past, Ladakhis could ask the army to hand over the fort that Zorawar Singh built to station his troops in Leh. The fort could be given to the combined authority of the Ladakh Autonomous Hill Development Councils of both Leh and Kargil.

The councils should convert the fort into a museum, so that we can prepare the next generation of knowledge keepers to break the cycle of erasing a substantial chunk of history and validate our ancestors and, by extension, our suffering.

Padma Rigzin is a social anthropologist from Ladakh.

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