Paper short abstract:

Through the case of a Trans-Himalayan borderland, this paper investigates how configurations and shifts in geo-climatic and geo-political conditions can provide important insights into the uneven, creative, and transformative effects of connectivity infrastructures, particularly roads.

Paper long abstract:

In the recent decades, road and telecom networks, especially in developing countries, have been increasingly connecting places hitherto often considered remote and marginal - such as mountainous regions and borderlands - to regional, national, and trans-national spheres and flows of political-economies and material-cultures. During the same period, anthropology as a discipline has been making concerted efforts to better understand the complex embeddedness of intertwined cultural, economic, and political processes in geographies at different scales. Among the various media that engender different forms of connectivity, roads in particular have been seen as paradigmatic vectors of change, enabling the spread of governmentality, and the 'flows', especially the spread of electronic media and migrations, that usher modernity. This paper seeks to interrogate the practices, experiences, representations, and articulations in statutory governance, everyday lives of local communities, and tourism engendered by the gradual coming of roads into Spiti valley - a Trans-Himalayan, high-altitude, culturally Tibetan borderland in India - over the last five decades. By alongside looking at the valley's geographic layout, its climate patterns, and its proximity to the both the western Himalayas of India and to the western Tibetan plateau of China, the paper attempts to shed light on how the geo-climatic and geo-political particularities of Spiti valley need to be closely considered to be able to better understand the kinds of transformations, negotiations, and anxieties that roads have been vitally mediating in this region. This paper draws upon several phases of field and archival research conducted from mid-2018 to early 2020.