LADAKH STUDIES 12, Autumn 1999 - International Association for ...

in caves en route, to sell butter—an estimated 4000 kilograms in 1977—and buy with the proceeds
goods of daily use like tea, cooking-oil, spices and kerosene (Crowden 1994).
This necessarily abbreviated account may yet, I hope, give some indication of the complexity of
the pattern of trade in subsistence commodities that was a critical factor in giving Ladakh economic
independence. (Much more, in my opinion than the more famous and glamorous-seeming longdistance
trades with Yarkand and with Lhasa.) For centuries the unceasing effort of generations of
peasants and herdspeople—selling, buying and bartering their own and each other’s produce,
increasing its value by carrying it to where it was in short supply, which ipso facto means to where it
would fetch them a reasonable profit, travelling literally hundreds of miles, themselves on foot and
their merchandise loaded on sheep, horses or donkeys or sometimes on their own backs—breathed
life into Ladakh’s economy, lifting it just a fraction above the margin. Up to the middle of this
century, the various trades survived political and other shifts, adapting and evolving according to
circumstances. But between 1947 and 1960 they came to an abrupt end, as a result not of organic
change within Ladakh’s economic system, but of political upheavals in a wider world—the partition
of India, and the communist revolution in China followed by the occupation of Tibet. Their demise,
together with population-growth and the often inappropriate forms taken by Government-sponsored
development programmes, spelt the end of the region’s self-reliance, and the start of an era of
dependence on outside economic forces over which Ladakh has no control.
This paper summarizes part of the author’s Trans-Himalayan Caravans: Merchant Princes and
Peasant Traders in Ladakh, published by Oxford University Press New Delhi.
Bibliography
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