Notes Purchased

See Hopkirk 1994 and Keay 1996 for popular histories of the Great Game.

From now on, Gilgit-Baltistan and its surrounding region to the north will be referred to simply as the region. This region is the meeting place of the Himalayan, Karakorum, and Hindukush ranges. Further north at Hunza’s border, the Pamir range meets the Karakorum. This region has the highest concentration of the loftiest mountains on earth. Within a radius of one hundred miles, there are more than sixty peaks over twenty-three thousand feet. It is a spatially cutoff and isolated region, with few people and an abundance of crags and ice.

Hunza is also the name of the main valley of the region; however, when I use the term “Hunza” I will be denoting the wider Hunza state.

See Michael Dove’s discussion on these two types of other. An adversarial other is imagined in terms of economic and political interests, while the alien other is considered the cultural other whose economic and other characteristics are unfamiliar (2011, 231–32).

I use Anthony Giddens’ definition of modernity as it leaves room for individual experience with the structures of modernity at an institutional level. Giddens states, “Modern institutions differ from all preceding forms of social order in respect of their dynamism, the degree to which they undercut traditional habits and customs, and their global impact….Modernity radically alters the nature of day-to-day social life and affects the most personal aspects of our experience. Modernity can be understood on an institutional level; yet the transmutation introduced by modern institutions interlace in a direct way with individual life and therefore with the self” (1991, 1). Expounding on the role of individual imagination and modernity, Arjun Appadurai goes further in arguing that the condition of late capitalism, marked by mass electronic media and mass migration, makes it possible to understand modernity only through imagination (1996, 3).

See, for example, Tsing 1993 and Li 2000 on marginal areas, Hughes 2008 on frontiers, Neumann 2002 on wilderness, and Sturgeon 2005 and Scott 2010 on borderland.

Edmund Leach introduces us to the idea of topological space, which represents the level of connectedness of the elements of a system. Leach discusses society in structuralist terms as a figure whose shape changes at different points of connections (1961, 7–8). Thus, depending upon the connectivity, the “shape” of a culture may appear different from different vantage points. It is in this way we can think of remoteness as determined not only by topography but also by topology, that is, the level of connectedness experienced in cultural vocabulary. So two geographical locations may be equally distant in topographic space from a third location, but the connectedness of the two in physical and conceptual space may not be the same, and usually a remote place is topologically different from a nonremote one.

Eric Wolf writes of “remote” and “isolated” communities: “Rather than thinking of social alignments as self-determining, we need—from the start of our inquiries—to visualize them in their multiple external connections” (1982, 387). Arjun Appadurai, making the same point, states: “Natives, people confined to and by places to which they belong, groups unsullied by contact with a larger world, have probably never existed” (1988, 36).

One of the most important characteristics of remote areas is the singular effect of landscape on human senses and thinking, especially on the “enhanced defining power of individuals” (Ardener, 1989, 222). This phenomenological/affective character of encountering a remote area is well captured in the following description by Robert Shaw, a British trader who traveled north of Kashmir into Chinese Turkestan through western Hunza and back again in the early 1870s. “On those endless plains you never seem to arrive anywhere. For hours you march towards the same point of the compass, seeing ever the same objects in front of you. If you discover another party of travelers coming towards you in the distance, you may travel for half a day before you meet them. The air is so clear that there is no perspective, everything appears in one plane, and that close to the eyes. When, after threading these interminable valley-plains, you descend again towards the inhabited country of Ladak, the first bits of village cultivation seen on an opposite hill-side have the most singular effect. ‘Cela vous saute aux yeux.’ They seem to come right out of the surrounding landscape of desert, and to meet you with almost painful distinctness …with an atmosphere which acts like a telescope, bringing the most minute and distant objects into notice” (1871, 8). The quote reflects a sharp comparison between perceptions of traveling to and having arrived at a remote place. It describes the feeling of irrelevance and boredom of “seeing ever the same objects in front of you,” and it also reflects the loss of perspective, perhaps because of the vast scale of the landscape compared to humans. But the scene of arrival at a remote place is marked by feelings the opposite of boredom. Here the author acquires a keen interest in the most irrelevant things and starts to take notice of them, leading to an increased sense of observation, the thought that somehow the social logic of this place is designed differently.

I use Stuart Hall’s definition of discourse, which in turn is inspired by Foucault’s conception of it. Hall states, “It [discourse] is a group of statements which provide language for talking about—a way of representing the knowledge about—a particular topic at a particular historical moment. It governs a way that a topic could be meaningfully talked about and reasoned about” (1992, 291).

See Kürti’s (2001) work on how mainstream Hungarians think of Transylvania as a remote place and also as a repository of authenticity and mythical nationalism.

By “ethnic group,” I simply mean groups that are differentiated on the basis of language and political relationship with each other.

In total, Ismailis represent about one-third of the total population in Gilgit-Baltistan, with Shias and Sunnis making up the other two-thirds equally. In Pakistan generally, Ismailis are a tiny minority, less than 1 percent, with the only significant population outside Gilgit-Baltistan based in the city of Karachi in the south. Most Pakistanis are Sunni (about 75 percent) or Shia (about 20 percent).

Moreover, other readings of the same event could also shed new light. For example, Patrick French shows that Younghusband misreported his own follies during his interactions with the local people in his published accounts (1995, 78). But such instances of alternative accounts are rare in the history of the region.

During the mid-nineteenth century, the British increased their geographical explorations of the region that divided South, Central, and West Asia. By this time, the eastern and the central face of the Himalayan Massif had been surveyed, and toward the west, British geographical explorers and travelers were traversing the passes of the Caucasus Mountains. The northwestern edge of the Himalayas and the awesome Karakorum Range were too difficult to have been penetrated yet. Mountains rising to twenty-eight thousand feet, cut by deep and narrow river valleys with the longest mountain glaciers in the world, made it an inaccessible place.

James Lawrence, writing from a popular British perspective in contemporary times, likened Russian political intrigues against the British during this period to “maskirovka,” a chess maneuver that basically means instilling fears in your opponent’s mind that his major possessions are under threat (1997, 364).

Before Hunza’s strategic location was fully realized, the British accorded more importance to the neighboring valley of Yasin and planned its invasion in the late 1870s. It was only after a precarious treaty was signed between the maharaja of Kashmir and the ruler of Chitral and some geographical knowledge was obtained about the passes that Hunza’s importance was recognized. For a detailed and wonderful study of the settling of the frontier region, see Woodman 1969, 84–107.

At this time, the high mountain passes in the Karakorum, Pamir, and Hindukush ranges on the northern frontier of Kashmir were still unknown to the British.

I am using the word Orientalism differently than it is understood conventionally in literary criticism. Thomas Trautmann (1997), in his book Aryans and British India, identifies two kinds of Orientalism, which he calls Orientalism 1 and 2. Orientalism 1 is the “knowledge produced by the Orientalists, scholars who knew Asian languages,” and Orientalism 2 is “European representation of the Orient, whether by Orientalists or others” (23). Orientalism 1, the main focus of Trautmann’s book, is, in highly simplified terms, about the exploration of Indian ancient texts by European scholars using Asian languages (mostly Sanskrit). Urs App argues that Orientalism was not born in the eighteenth century; it had a long tradition in Europe. It basically meant study of the theology of the non-Abrahamic religions of Asia such as Hinduism, Brahmanism, Taoism, and others (2009, 9). My use of “Orientalism” means Orientalism 1; hence, the East Indian Company scholars are referred to as Orientalists because they studied ancient Eastern texts.

The main purpose of their studies was to find the code of governance upon which a better administration of the local affairs could be carried out by the company.

Thomas Trautmann (1997) argues that the project of eighteenth-century Orientalists was not linguistic in character but rather ethnological. Trautmann calls the ethnological project of early Orientalists Mosaic—“that is, an ethnology whose frame is supplied by the story of the descent of Noah in the Book of Genesis, attributed to Moses, in the Bible” (41). The work of East India Company scholars in the eighteenth century remained limited to texts; the British made no effort to locate this place in physical space. It was within the context of geopolitical imperatives that British officers and explorers of the late nineteenth century took it upon themselves to find these places in actual geographical space.

This region of the Pamir is one of the harshest places in the world. It is known locally as Bam-e-Duniya, or Roof of the World, and is a high-mountain tableland, about seven hundred kilometers long and one hundred kilometers wide, that stretches across what is today Afghanistan, Pakistan, China, and Tajikistan. It is divided into two areas called Big Pamir and Little Pamir. Here, the British identified the Oxus as the sacred river.

This aestheticization of the geopolitics of finding the boundary of the empire produced what Mary Louise Pratt has called the “anti-conquest” narrative. She describes it as “strategies of representations” of the innocence of European visions of their practices (1993, 7, 39).

Clearly I am simplifying here, as one cannot separate the application of a discourse from its production. Here “lifting the veil” also carries gendered connotations, as in “penetrating virgin land.” The British also framed their conquest of colonial lands as the sexual conquest of exotic females. This point is perhaps illuminated by Edwards (1989), who points out that the expression is “veil” rather than the more conventional term geographical “curtain.”

I argue that the metaphor “blank on the map” rhetorically displaced the region epistemically—that is, its knowledge was presented as nonexistent because of its remoteness. The metaphor of “blank on the map” set the stage for the extraordinary character of the place, and then the use of metaphors such as “lifting the veil” placed the region on the map.

During the second half of the nineteenth century, rising bourgeois work ethics had created a cultural discourse in which endurance and performance became new ideals for the British. Indeed, sports played a big role in inculcating this ethic (Mangan 1986). For a wonderful study of the influence of ideas of courage, competition, endurance, and risk in British mountaineering in the Himalayas, see Fallen Giants: A History of Himalayan Mountaineering from the Age of Empire to the Age of Extremes by Maurice Isserman and Stewart Weaver (2008). Exploration of remote areas provided an opportunity for the affirmation of these ideals as much as it offered avenues for thrills, riches, and fame. Writing about British explorations in South and Central Asia, Geoff Watson states that the difficulties of obtaining knowledge about territories beyond the boundaries of the British Empire in a place that posed serious dangers and stern physical challenges meant that exploration of Central Asia was presented as an affirmation of British prowess. The region also attracted explorers, tourists, and missionaries because of its isolation and exotic reputation (2002, 149–50). For most of the nineteenth century, exploration in Central Asia was a masculine endeavor, the majority of explorers having a connection with the military and the Royal Geographical Society.

A. L. Basham wrote, “The modest spherical earth of the astronomers did not satisfy the theologians, however, and even later religious literature described the earth as a flat disc of enormous size. In its center was Mount Meru, around which sun, moon and stars revolved” (1959, 488).

Tom Neuhaus (2012) has described a similar process taking place in the case of Tibet during the nineteenth century, when Tibet was beginning to enter the Western imagination as a “veiled” place.

A trip to the source of the river Oxus from Calcutta via Afghanistan rather than Hunza, as became possible later on, could take up to two months if one moved with full speed, given the available modes of transportation at the time. Often such exploratory trips lasted six to eighteen months, which also sometimes included periods of detention or arrest.

It is not clear if Macartney actually visited the region or, like Elphinstone, relied exclusively on native informants. Curzon’s (1896, 52–53) commentary on Macartney’s description of the source of the river Oxus suggests that he may have gathered this information from his native informants. There is no information on the route that Macartney took from Peshawar to Kabul and then to the northeastern region of Badakhshan where the Oxus rises.

This region of the Pamir Mountains is a high tableland, ideal for grazing during summer. In the local Wakhi language, “Pamir” means an open upland valley. This region is divided into two parts, Little Pamir and Big Pamir.

The native spy is an interesting historical ethnographic subject about which not much has been written.

Douglas Forsyth’s first mission visited Kasgharia in 1870.

This commission was responsible for demarcating the boundary between Afghanistan and Russia; the former belonged to the British sphere of influence and the region north of it to Russia’s.

Although the author of the report seems to agree with Curzon’s claim, the actual boundary was set on Lake Victoria, which was claimed to be the source of the Oxus by Wood.

Watson argues that the knowledge produced about Central Asia went through three phases, as described by Joseph Conrad:, “By the first, ‘Geography Fabulous,’ Conrad meant ‘the fantastic visions of mediaeval cartography.’ The second was ‘Geography Militant,’ paraphrased by Driver as ‘a rigorous quest for certainty about the geography of the earth.’ The third was ‘Geography Triumphant,’ which depicted a condition as the number of unknown spaces in the world diminished until no area was left unexplored” (2002, 101). Mathew Edney has also described a three-phased development of cartographic representation of India between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries (1997, 4–5).

Recall that the Royal Asiatic Society of Bengal was established by none other than Sir William Jones, the Orientalist scholar of the East India Company in the early nineteenth century, for studies of the ancient Hindu texts and traditions.

About these sources, Clark writes, “The general reason these sources are quoted in current works is not the information they give on the people concerned but because they provide an introductory pedigree to a study. It is conventional to quote them; they are a scholarly reflex, used because they have been used. What is sociologically more interesting is that these classifications themselves have the potential of ‘creating’ the very people they apparently describe. In this way the classification can become a self fulfilling prophecy” (1977, 333).

By this treaty, Kashmir became a vassal state of the British Empire. This relationship was acknowledged in the shape of Kashmir’s annual payment of tribute of Kashmiri shawls to the British (Chohan 1985, 2).

Nagar was a neighboring state located east of the Hunza River.

For a wonderful discussion on the political and military origins of the term Dard, see Graham Clark’s (1977) “Who Were the Dards?”

Scott states, “We could say that ‘easy’ water ‘joins,’ whereas ‘hard’ hills, swamps, and mountains ‘divide’” (2010, 45). According to Scott, hard to get to places are state-resistant spaces because their difficult terrain and topography enable them to avoid the reach of centralized states.

C. E. Biddulph, writing in the late nineteenth century, criticizes accounts of explorers, which he thinks are based on the authors’ “imagination”: “The ground has been prepared for such exaggeration on their part by the daring hyperbolisms with which the various Orientalist writers on Central Asian matters …depicted the wonders and magnificence to be found there” (1891, 563–64).

Just as Tartary or Siberia offered images of the exotic that Russians mobilized in creating images of the self, so Ezo was a source of visions of otherness, which fed a slowly emerging consciousness of Japan as a nation. Perceived (following the Chinese model) as a “barbarian periphery,” Ezo was at first depicted in language full of magic and the monstrous. A fourteenth-century Japanese scroll described the “thousand isles of Ezo” (Ezo-ga-chishima) as inhabited by cannibals, shape-shifters, and female demons (Morris-Suzuki 1999, 65).

There is no truth to this claim.

Similar representations were made of neighboring tribes. For example, about the Kalash people, George Scott Robertson, the surgeon general of the Gilgit Agency, wrote that they were a race of “thieves” (1896).

Notice that when Younghusband traveled through the region in 1889, the road leading north from Srinagar to Chinese Turkestan through Gilgit and Hunza was in very bad shape. It was because of this that Younghusband set the boundaries of civilization in Srinagar. About three decades later, when the Srinagar-Gilgit road had been built and heavily used, Jenny Visser-hooft, a Dutch geographer, wrote, “Beyond Gilgit civilization ends” (1925, 29). So the construction of the road into this region symbolized the penetration of civilization into an otherwise civilizationless area because of its remoteness.

As in Zomia, as described by James C. Scott (2010), the friction of distance added to the ease with which local states remained on the margins of imperial states. The Russian frontier had moved steadily eastward with the building of roads and the construction of railways. The Persian Empire had also connected hinterlands with the regional and central institutions of power. Remote areas were increasingly coming under the orbit of imperial design, and Hunza was no exception.

Biddulph expresses admiration for the surefootedness of local people when he writes about the difficult terrain, “The roads are of the rudest kind, and necessity has made the inhabitants intrepid cragsmen; they pass with ease over places so dangerous that even experienced mountaineers would frequently hesitate to follow them” (1880, 2).

For detailed accounts of the events leading up to the establishment of the Gilgit Agency in 1889 and the subsequent invasion of Hunza in 1891, see Woodman 1969 and Chohan 1985.

Plowden to secretary of state, Government of India (GoI), September 9, 1886, R/2/1079/246.

Plowden to secretary of state, GoI, May 9, 1888, R/2/1079/245.

H. M. Durand to Colonel Nisbet Parry, May 22, 1889, R/2/1061/1–8.

There are two routes from Srinagar to Gilgit: Burzil and Kamri Pass. Durand preferred the Kamri Pass route because it was shorter and passed through an area with abundant forage available for the pack animals, but this route was in a horrible condition beyond the pass in 1889, so the British ended up using and improving the Burzil route (Landsdowne to secretary of state, GoI, May 6, 1889, R/2/1061/1–8).

From Baltit to the northern frontier of Hunza with Russia and China, at the source of the river Oxus, was another 110 miles, a terrain most unsuitable for any mode of travel other than foot.

The local headman of the village, or numberdaar, was to provide food items at controlled rates to the official travelers of the Kashmir state. A special parwanah (an official slip) was issued to any official travelers by the Kashmir state, upon the presentation of which local people were obliged to provide food and labor.

This was the name that was rejected by Leitner and replaced by Dardistan.

For example, in 1875, Frederic Drew stated, “Another route leads by a somewhat difficult pass on to the Shimshal Pamir, from whence a road goes to Ujadbai in the Sirikol Valley. On this Pamir dwell a number of Kirghiz, who pay tribute to the Tham of Hunza” (1875, 26). Another example comes from a report written by Lieutenant Manners-Smith, a military officer of the Gilgit Agency handpicked by Durand. Durand had sent a Chitrali prince to spy on the Russian movement in the Oxus region north of Hunza in 1890, and he reported on what the spy told him: “The Kirghiz version of Raja Safdar Ali’s [mir of Hunza] attack on the Kirghiz of Taghdumbash is, that the headman, named Kuch Mahabat, had been camping with his people at a place called Shakh Tuda, close to the Kilik Pass, and that Kuch Mahabat had enraged the Hunza raja by refusing to give the usual forced offerings of felts and dried apricots, so that the latter sent a party to coerce him” (Colonel Nisbet Parry to secretary of state, GoI, August 13, 1890, R/2/1079/248).

The struggle for control over the Kirghiz grazing lands was also particularly intense because of the excellent pasturage available there. With little cultivable land and very sparse pasture areas available in central Hunza valleys, the headwaters of the Raskam valleys were particularly attractive to the pastoralists and rulers of Hunza. The Earl of Dunmore, who traveled through the region in 1892 after Hunza had fallen to the British, left this impression: “They [the Kirghiz] live in their felt tents and wander about from place to place with their yaks, camels, sheep, and goats, cultivating here and there a little barley. As a rule they are tolerably well off, as they pay no rent to the Government for their grazing” (1894, 239). In a similar vein much later, Emily Lorimer nominated as the most important feature of the Yarkand River valley its luxuriant pastures. Of Shimshal, in northeastern Hunza, she wrote: “Food and pasturage are plentiful, and life in some respects more luxurious than in lower Hunza” (1939, 121).

Irmtraud Stellrecht, in his wonderful study of the evolution of a centralized political state in Hunza, argues that by 1800, the state had monopolized control over people and resources and the trade route between South and Central Asia (2006, 210).

We will discuss this point in detail in the next chapter.

This distinction in styles of killing and its reinforcement of who is and who is not civilized continues today, with beheadings of individuals by “terrorists” considered infinitely more savage than the killing of many thousands by the bombs of the “civilized.”

I am not arguing that the mir was deploying this counterdiscourse as a calculated effort in which he had figured out all the anxieties and fears of the British and was now trying to exploit them tactically. Rather, I am arguing that his discourse was a response, not a point-for-point, to the British discourse about him. In this way, I concur with Ferguson (1999) and Li (2000), who both argue that successful performance of an identity in politics and culture is not manipulation per se.

Colonel Charles Stoddard and Captain Arthur Connolly were killed by the ruler of Bokhara, Alexander Burns was killed by a mob in Kabul, Adolph Schlagintweit was killed by the chief of Kangra, and George Hayward was killed by the chief of Yasin.

The Indian government regularly sent the rulers and leaders of petty tribal states to military towns in India to show them the might of imperial military power and thus impress upon them the empire’s political objectives. For example, after the fall of Hunza in 1891, Dunmore met the rulers of Hunza and other tribal states in Rawalpindi, a military garrison town in British India. He writes, “The Government had sent them [the tribal leaders from Hunza and Nagar] down into India to give them some sort of idea of England’s power in that country, with a view to their returning to their native states and informing the hill tribes how absolutely futile it would be on their parts to ever attempt to measure strength with such a power as that of Great Britain” (1894, 3).

As well, his reference to Alexander played on popular contemporary European theories about the link between the Macedonian conqueror and certain northern Indian tribes that even today have conspicuously “Aryan” features and pale skin color. The popularized version of this theory can be seen in Rudyard Kipling’s (1899) The Man Who Would Be King.

By the end of the nineteenth century, the British had developed an elaborate system of governing the native states of India. Some of these states were fully incorporated into the imperial fold, others were brought under a direct tributary relationship, and yet others were made to acknowledge the supremacy of British power without actually surrendering their sovereignty (Lamb 1968; Robb 1997; Ramusack 2004). The princely state of Kashmir was an important frontier state that theoretically enjoyed autonomous status as far as its system of internal governance was concerned, but its external affairs were a different matter.

Chad Haines has argued that British frontier policies between 1850 and 1950 successfully reoriented Hunza’s relationship southward, as opposed to its previous northward orientation (2004, 536). This chapter supports Haines’s assertion and argues that British policies in the first half of the twentieth century were a turning point in the political history of Hunza.

In 1898, Hunza sent fifteen ounces of gold as tribute to China in return for the cultivation of Raskam. The British government in return received 1,070 rupees’ worth of gifts (Macpherson to Cobb, April 10, 1914, R/2/1082/265).

Extract from the North China Herald dated the May 22, 1891; abstract of Peking Gazette; tribute offering from Kanjut, R/2/1062/16.

Under the Madhopur Treaty of 1872 between the Kashmir state and the British, which led to the establishment of the Gilgit Agency, the British political agent was responsible only for the defense of the frontier (Gerard 1897). But the British were concerned that leaving the internal matters of the agency under the rule of the Kashmir state would lead to unrest in the region.

He describes Curzon’s travel to the Pamir through Hunza, describing Curzon as thoroughly inept at walking in the mountainous terrain. At one point Curzon had to be carried on the back of Hunza men to cross the Khunjerab River. Of course, Curzon does not mention any such events in his own writings (Nazeem 2001).

This practice is well described by Bayly (1999), who argues that contrary to the dominant theory of British-Indian interaction, in which little room is given to mutual adoption of techniques of governance and ruling styles, the British built on the existing Mughal political and cultural structures to claim legitimacy for their rule. For a popular elaboration on this concept, see William Dalrymple, who argues that many instances now show that the “steely dualism of the Empire had been broken” (2004, xlv).

About the British intermingling with the royal family, Schomberg wrote, “A Gushpur is a member of one of the ruling families who enjoys, owing to his social status (blood, kinship), a certain prestige with, unhappily, certain privileges: he belongs in fact to a decadent, arrogant, greedy, privileged class, which will not work but expects to be supported in idleness….Every European is pestered by these hungry drones. It is impossible not to feel sorry for them, for they are largely the victims of tradition and environment, but it is equally impossible to help them. They intrigue and cabal and, in their way, are a nuisance. In the good old days war, sudden death, and other eventualities, incidental to a wild and undisciplined existence, modified the problem. Now, alas! It increases with the blessings of peace” (1935, 22).

For a complete analysis of the internal political dynamics of the Hunza state, see Stellrecht 2006.

As Emily Lorimer wrote: “Everything the Hunzakuts do is beautifully done, and their methods are in greatest contrast to the slovenliness of Nagir; you notice this everywhere, down to the tiniest detail; it may be merely because water is scarcer and life harder that their fields are more scrupulously level, their walls more ingeniously perfect, their cut swathes more exactly aligned, but I incline to think that the cause lies deeper; in the difference of race and temperament” (1939, 72).

Leila Blackwell reported a similar experience of staying at Ye Olde Pigge Whistle at Bunji (1950, 23).

This discourse would later come to be known as organic farming, as described by Sir Albert Howard and Lady Eve Balfour (Heckman 2006).

In an attempt to prove the superiority of the northern diet, he fed different groups of rats a range of diets representing different areas of India for 140 days, a period equivalent to twelve years of human life.

In a later experiment, McCarrison fed the northern Indian diet to one group of rats and the diet of the “poorer classes in England,” comprising white bread, margarine, sweet tea, boiled cabbage and boiled potato, and tinned meat and tinned jam “of the cheaper sorts.” Again, he found that the first group flourished, both physically and socially, while the rats in the second group were unhealthy and fought among themselves (1961, 29).

It had been established in medical science that diseases were often caused by lack of vitamins, a view with which McCarrison entirely agreed, but he argued that the medical procedure of narrowing the causes of individual diseases down to particular vitamin deficiencies was a fragmentary approach to the overall problem (Aykroyd 1960, 416, citing McCarrison 1937, 1945). McCarrison called instead for a holistic approach in which overall nutrition was at the center, and in which it was not only important what food was consumed but also how it was produced.

The Indian Agriculture Service came into being in 1906, a result of the need for improvement in agricultural productivity and resistance to famines. Lord Curzon, who was the viceroy of India at that time (1899–1905), was the political will behind introducing such research and experimentation through science in Indian agriculture (Arnold 2000, 151). Two years after the establishment of the Pusa station, Albert Howard pioneered the idea of composting—returning to the soil its basic components to maintain its healthy structure.

This book was central in providing the foundations for the establishment of the Soil Association, the United Kingdom’s leading organic organization today. The Soil Foundation’s founder, Lady Eve Balfour, met with Wrench and McCarrison before starting the organization in 1946. See http://homepages.tesco.net/~Haughley/soilass.htm.Lady Balfour wrote her own book in 1943, The Living Soil, which “presented the case for an alternative, sustainable approach to agriculture that has since become known as organic farming” (http://www.soilassociation.org/web/sa/saweb.nsf/Aboutus/History.html).

In the last chapter, we saw that Younghusband ascribed the mental fitness of Hunza’s Wazir Dadoo to the natural conditions of Hunza, and he even condoned caravan raiding as part of the natural fitness of the people’s physique. That was a different romantic discourse from the one that we are observing here. The earlier romantic discourse celebrated nature; this discourse celebrates culture.

Rodale is now a global media company that publishes a number of the world’s best-selling “health and wellness” magazines (see www.rodale.com).

This is similar to the Swiss village described by Robert Netting as “an island in the sky” (Netting 1981) with a perfect balance between humans and their environment, untouched by the changes that had taken place elsewhere. Netting later revised his analysis of the closed ecological system of the Swiss village of Torbel and confessed that he had been “guilty of ecosystemic fallacy” (1990, 229).

Jean Shor also wrote an article with her husband when she traveled to Hunza for the National Geographic Magazine in 1953. The title of the article was “At World’s End in Hunza.”

Contemporary research on Hunza tends to support the work of the Japanese doctors, showing that fear of famine and prevalence of disease were, in fact, common features of village life in the mid-twentieth century (Halvorson 2003). Nigel Allan argues that by fixing tax in the form of wheat, the state of Hunza had actually contributed to the poor health of Hunza. Allan argues that from the point of view of nutritional value, it would have been much more beneficial if vegetables had been grown instead (1990, 412).

For example, Leaf frankly accepts that his findings are based on “impressions” rather than actual verification of claims about long ages. “In Hunza the dating problem was particularly difficult. There is no written form so no record exists. In some instances, however, the Mir/ruler of Hunza could, from personal history, verify ages. In short, I was unable to confirm exact ages in Hunza yet I had the definite impression of an unusual number of very vigorous old folk clambering over the steep slopes that make up this mountain land” (1973, 96; emphasis added).

In official classification, a das would be identified as “wasteland,” but for the local people it usually represented uncultivated land, mainly used for winter grazing of sheep and goats but also having potential for growing crops.

Mir Jamal Khan was the mir of Hunza from 1946 to 1974. I will from now on simply refer to him as “the mir” rather than writing his full name.

For lack of a better word, I am using the term manage, but it could also be understood as performance, à la Ferguson (1999), Tsing (1993), and even Goffman (1959), who describe the way in which marginal players in particular put on performances to satisfy those with whom they are interacting.

An interesting feature of this period is the emergence of the cold war. Indeed, we see some visitors to Hunza during this period explicitly pointing toward the development of a possible flashpoint in this region. Ian Stephens, an English traveler, went on a journey in northern Pakistan in the early 1950s just when the traffic of foreign travelers and researchers on Hunza health began to increase. This was a time when Communist China was emerging as a major power in the East. Stephens’s “Introduction to the American Edition” opens: “This book is about Muslim countries—countries on the far side of the globe in which America until recently has taken little interest….The book concentrates on the northerly tract of West Pakistan and the neighboring lands to the East and West, a restless part of the world always, where many of mankind’s great affairs have been decided, and races and rulers have been made or smashed; where during the last ten years much bloody commotion has occurred owing to the break-up of British rule in India, and where now, threatening to move into the resulting partial power-vacuum, the forces of Russian and Chinese Communism stand close. Against them there is not much defense. The armies of the new India and Pakistan, such as they are, still point against each other, rather than towards the Communist North” (1955, foreword).

I used the word Culture with a capital C and in quotation marks to denote the popular meaning of the word as understood in the media and in official languages. This meaning is associated with material culture and its representation purposefully made for display, such as in museums.

I will discuss the issue of tourism in detail in chapter 7.

This development affirms Robert Chambers’s (1983) observation that development (and conservation) projects follow road networks.

This policy is tied to the concern of the Pakistani state that if Hunza is formally integrated into the Pakistani nation-state, it will imply that the state is conceding its claims over other parts of Kashmir still under Indian control.

Named Khyber-Pakhtunkhwa in 2010.

Unlike, say, in Indonesia, where nation and nationalism are tied through national language and state-led development, Pakistan does not see Hunza as a project for ethnic assimilation or development. Development from the Pakistani state perspective is a loose and malleable term (Errington 1998, 419).

As we know, during the 1980s, the United States and Saudi Arabia led the cultural indoctrination of radical Islamists in Pakistan as part of a strategic investment in developing resistance to the Soviets. Zia used this strategy to mount insurgency in Indian-held Kashmir.

We notice some parallels between the official Pakistani nationalist discourse on origins of nations and the British Orientalist discourse on the origins of the Aryan race and a golden civilization. Both rework Hunza into a remote and distant region, both in physical geography and temporally.

Toor also discusses the adoption by the Pakistan People’s Party of a report written earlier by Faiz Ahmed Faiz, the iconic leftist progressive poet, outlining a cultural policy that could accommodate Pakistan’s ethnic and cultural diversity (2005, 331).

As Crossley, Siu, and Sutton argue, “Nations have, as a historical necessity, only one ‘national’ group. Indeed all modern national republics can be shown to have defined their national populations through the backward process of identifying their ‘ethnic’ groups” (2006, 3).

As Pakistani political commentator Nadeem Paracha (2013) writes, “Indigenous Pakistani folk culture and music were aggressively patronised by the populist government of Z. A. Bhutto. Some analysts suggest that this was at least one part of his regime’s strategy to co-opt nationalist sentiments simmering among Sindhi, Baloch and Pushtun nationalists.”

It does not mean that Bhutto abandoned the Islamic slogan; rather, he used it in its more pluralistic and universal form, especially to attract the rural population.

The Gilgit Agency was combined with Baltistan, a former district of the Kashmir state, which also broke away from it in 1947 and came under Pakistani administration to form the Gilgit-Baltistan of Pakistan. This move was welcomed by the majority of the people of the Gilgit Agency and the states of Hunza and Nagar. A small portion of the region of the Kashmir state that was not part of the Gilgit Agency but came under Pakistani administration is known as Azad Kashmir. Pakistan has maintained a different position to the British policy of separating Gilgit-Baltistan (Gilgit, Hunza, and Baltistan) from the actual state of Kashmir.

An additional source of appreciation of Hunza and its distinct “mountain culture” within the Pakistani state is derived from Westerners’ attraction to this region. Hunza is a popular tourist destination in the diplomatic and foreign community in Islamabad. To many Westerners, especially western Europeans and Americans, it is the one place in Pakistan that is most unlike Pakistan. Today, one of the main markers of a Pakistani ethnic society’s rating criteria is its level of “fundamentalism.” The people of Hunza are considered relatively liberal, tolerant, and nonviolent, which is an accurate representation of them, among most middle-class and upper-class Pakistanis. Hunza in this way is connected, in its outlook toward life, to the minority liberal and educated classes of Pakistan. Because of their relatively apolitical stance, managed very astutely and highly politically, the people of Hunza remain outside the current poisonous national discourse of who is a real Muslim and hence eligible for Pakistani citizenship. Their Ismaili identity as Muslims in Pakistan is precariously maintained, subject to scrutiny and rejection, as is happening in the case of the Shias of the region.

During the reign of the Persian Qajjar dynasty in the eighteenth century, the ceremonial title of “Aga Khan” was given to the Ismaili imam of the time and has continued to the present date. In the 1840s, the first Aga Khan moved to Bombay (Daftary 1990), where the community established itself, and in the early twentieth century, Aga Khan III, Sir Sultan Mohammad Shah, played a major role in financing the Pakistani movement. He was also the president of the All India Muslim League between 1906 and 1913 (Aziz 1998). The present imam, Prince Karim Aga Khan, lives in Aiglemont outside Paris. In addition to his role as spiritual leader of the Ismailis, he is the head of a number of philanthropic institutions under the umbrella of the AKF. Today’s Ismailis in Hunza were converted to Ismailism from Twelver Shi’ism in the sixteenth century by da’i (Ismaili religious missionaries) sent from Central Asia.

Print capitalism is a concept forwarded by Benedict Anderson (1991), who stated that nations emerge as imagined communities by sharing a common language and discourse generated by the printing presses of capitalist societies.

Some local people in Hunza, particularly those who had been active in the struggle during the 1960s and 1970s to abolish the mirdom and achieve provincial status for the Gilgit-Baltistan, argue that although the AKRSP has brought welcome economic development to the area, it has had a negative impact politically. Ghazi Mohammad, the hotel owner who was actively involved in politics in Karachi in the 1960s and who had told me that the local council structure had a depoliticizing effect, made similar charges against the AKRSP. He complained to me that many of his radical colleagues and friends from those days ended up working for the AKRSP and other local AKF institutions, becoming depoliticized not only in their actions but also in their thinking. Thus, according to Ghazi Mohammad and others I spoke with, the process of political maturation and consciousness has actually been stymied by the introduction of “development” into the area. For Ghazi Mohammad the AKRSP literally represented the Fergusonian “Anti-Politics Machine” (1990). As Ghazi Mohammad told me, the goal of full political rights, of being seen as equal to other provinces in the nation, a goal that is not only a matter of material gains but also of dignity and self-respect, has been overshadowed by the short-term gains of infrastructural improvement and economic development.

Shimshal has a historical reputation that the mir used to send criminals and political prisoners there because of its remote and isolated location.

Perhaps the most effective definition of a transhumance economic system is given by John Myers in his 1942 essay “Nomadism.” “In transhumance the community has a fixed abode, and may be maintained, to some extent, by some form of plant cultivation; but the herds have distinct seasonal pastures, and are transferred from higher to lower, and back again. Either the higher or the lower pasture, and usually the lower, is adjacent to the settlement and the fields; but sometimes there is a secondary village, or scattered summer huts, on the upper, and often a crop of hay is taken here before the cattle are admitted to graze; this serves for winter fodder, to supplement or replace winter grazing” (16–17).

This is the same area that once had significance in the context of the Great Game in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Anthropological literature on the role of women in pastoralism shows that control of animals and women goes hand in hand because they represent the two most important sources of power: economic resources and human labor. Evans-Pritchard’s (1940) insight that pastoralism is a male-dominated activity in which men’s control of livestock allows them to control women and their reproductive capacity and labor, mainly through the institution of livestock as bride wealth, is a case in point. For men to control livestock and women, they must prohibit women from the pastoral economy and activities. This point is further elaborated by widespread studies that show women are considered ritually impure and thus are forbidden to herd in many pastoral societies (Schneider 1980). Peter Parkes’s (1987) study of the Kalash transhumance economy shows that it is the men who control the livestock, and women’s presence near the livestock herd is considered taboo, creating a sharp opposition and antagonism between sexes. Parkes argues that such a worldview is common in the Mediterranean, where the natural environment is divided into the pure realm of herding by men and the impure realm of the women in the village (638). Other studies from the region show that either because of the strict Islamic tradition of purdah (Glatzer and Casimir 1983), or because of socioeconomic pressures (Goldstein and Beall 1989), women are forbidden from going outdoors for herding practices although they may engage in milking and shearing livestock. Shimshal, then, represents an exceptional case in which the role of women in herding yak is not only appreciated but encouraged.

Indeed, I have seen many Punjabi and other Pakistani tourists from “down-country” mistake them for foreign trekkers and initiate conversation in English.

Pamer is referred by the Shimshali to the undulating alpine plains between twelve and seventeen thousand feet surrounding Shimshal Pass. This should not be confused with Pamir, the mountain range and geographical region in Pakistan Afghanistan and Tajikistan, which is located northwest of Pamer. The similarity in names is due to the same kind of landscape, that is, high tableland, in both regions.

This is the term used to refer to small power-generation systems that harness energy from small streams.

I will discuss the design of the house in detail in the next chapter.

The danger of lake burst had posed a substantial threat not only to Shimshal but also to communities downriver. There existed a unique system of warning whereby the people down the valley were informed about the bursting of the lake. In times of danger, people were deployed at various viewpoints on mountaintops all the way to Baltit. When the lake started to spill over the glacier, the persons on duty close to the lake would make a fire that would be visible from the next viewpoint. The person there would then light a fire visible from the next, and so on. In this way the message was conveyed to Hunza in a few minutes. This reminds me of The Lord of the Rings, in which Gondor summons the help of Rohan against the armies of Sauron using the same system.

Indeed, this was the case in a legal sense as well. As we shall see, the boundary of the Khunjerab National Park started exactly where the village ended.

According to the version produced by Butz (1992, 7–11), this man fled Hunza during the political crises that led to the breakup of the Nagar and Hunza states. He came to Sarikol looking for a wife.

According to Butz, they fled the country because some Sarikoli men became jealous of Mamu Shah’s flock and planned to murder him. Khadija heard the plan and they both fled Sarikol (1996, 8).

It is interesting to note the implication of this, which is that this place was settled before. I tried to find out who could have been there before Mamu Shah’s arrival, but Shimshalis claim not to know.

The term saint in the Pakistani context means a living holy person with miraculous God-given powers.

A stage is officially described as the distance a porter should cover in a day for a set fee, a definition that leads to endless tensions between outside tourists and local porters. The former, usually, argue that whatever distance is actually covered should count as a single stage, regardless of any predetermined idea of what distance constitutes a stage. Porters, however, insist—correctly, I am sure—that their daily wages should not be determined by the ground covered in a day but by the total length of the distance covered. Thus, if more than one stage is covered in one day, which often happens, as two stages are usually about three to four hours apart, then they should be paid by the stage, not by the day. This formulation of wages is based on the fact that distance alone does not capture the difficulty of the terrain covered.

Pareeans are usually made along the path to the Pamer, where there are only a limited number of such sections, and a family after whose deceased relative a particular section has been named has the exclusive right to that section’s future improvement and maintenance. For example, there are a total of nineteen pareeans between Shimshal and Pamer settlement, and there are 120 families in Shimshal. If another family wants to dedicate improvement work to a deceased relative on a particular section that has already been named after someone else’s deceased relative, that family has to first seek permission from its current name holder. The entitlement to maintain a pareean is then traded on a permanent basis.

There are two paths the lead up to Pamer from Shimshal village.

This path was one set aside exclusively for human use or smaller livestock. The yaks took a different, longer route.

The argument was originally made by Myers in his Man article in 1942.

Kooch is a Persian word that means “departure.” In the context of the Shimshali transhumance economy, it means the seasonal migration of animals and people to and from the pastures. So there is a summer kooch, when Shimshali women leave with goats and sheep in mid-May for the Shimshal Pass to spend the summer, and then there is the return kooch in October when they return with them to the village.

The term mergich, the realm, and mergichon are polysemous. Mergichon could also mean spirits of holy people such as Awliyas, saints with miraculous powers. So their help is sought not only when on pasture but also when one embarks on a journey or a difficult task. Mergich, in addition to being a realm, a spatial concept, can also mean a duration or period and is hence a temporal concept. So the one-week period after which women arrive on the pasture and during which they don’t consume fresh milk is also called the period of mergich.

The mergichon can also be a girlfriend of a shpun, this alerting us to masculine desires in a separated realm of the female world.

Descola reports a similar belief among the Achuars of the Andes, who believe that wild animals belong to the spirit of the forest (2013, 41). Descola claims that the Achuars do not make strict distinction between the wild and the domesticated; the Shimshalis, however, actively mark this distinction.

Marcel Mauss (1979) has discussed similar social organization among the Eskimos, whose “social morphology” varies with seasonal variations based on the dispersal and coming together of the band.

Shahrani (1979) describes a similar practice among the Kirghiz nomads of the Pamir region, where the surplus animals were redistributed among poorer members of the society. He disagrees with Spooner’s (1973) claim that rich farmers often sell their surplus animals to buy immovable property and ultimately become sedentary. The situation in Shimshal today is more in line with Spooner’s observation.

Writing about a small isolated community of Toraja in Sulawesi, Indonesia, Kathleen Adams states that such representations by the tourism industry often overlook other features of a community such as hierarchical social organization and orientations toward money and land. She states that these outsider representations of Torajas’ otherness have been manipulated by the touristically enculturated Toraja; “Local communities are hardly passive, and touristic phenomena are actively manipulated by local community members for their own objectives” (2005, 47). Millie Creighton, writing about the marketing of furusato, or “hometown,” by Japanese travel companies to urban Japanese, identifies the same dynamics. “In the pursuit of nostalgia, furusato has been decontextualized. It is frequently portrayed by images of rustic landscapes, dilapidated shrines, and remote anonymous train stations. With the mass marketing of furusato, specific place identity is masked, so that any rural location may symbolically be experienced as anyone’s furusato—even for those who grew up in cities” (1997, 239).

I am referring here to the transhumance migration cycle in which women returning from the summer pastures and men returning from the winter pastures, who have temporarily become strangers to the villagers, are reintegrated into the village and domestic life.

Though not quite as isolated as Shimshal, Hushe is a small village located at the furthermost end of a valley in Baltistan; it is clearly not only its mountainous vistas that make it comparable to Shimshal but also its isolation from outside influences.

This number increased to eighteen thousand in 2012.

Ironically, it is the company based in Nepal that notes Shimshal is a Wakhi village, whereas the Pakistani companies represent it as part of Hunza culture.

There are, of course, regional variations between what is generally called a Wakhi house in the Wakhi villages in Hunza and in neighboring countries (Afghanistan, Tajikistan, and China). But within Pakistan, as I have observed, these are minor and do not alter the basic “superstructure” of the house.

Other nonconsumptive uses include research and education.

As William Cronan stated about wilderness, “Far from being one place on earth that stands apart from humanity, it is quite profoundly a human creation” (1995, 69).

But intellectually wilderness was understood as many different things and was appreciated for variegated reasons. One central meaning attached to the idea of wilderness was its removal from mainstream society and civilization and its position as an escape from them.

As Donald Worster (2006) shows, the early conception of ecology was driven by utilitarian and Arcadian views of nature, both of which saw nature through an anthropocentric lens.

Indeed, wildlife was seen as supporting the Native Americans, so it was also exterminated in an overall effort to wipe out the Native Americans.

In the case of the KNP, Schaller wanted to save the Marco Polo sheep but not, say, the ibex or the blue sheep, because the former held a special aura and status in Victorian sportsmen circles and the literature they produced, in which Schaller was well versed; moreover, he worked for an organization, the Wildlife Conservation Society, whose intellectual genealogy could be traced to that era.

Schaller wrote, “On my return I wrote a report to the government in which I proposed the establishment of Khunjerab National Park. Dr. Rizvi, who first helped me to obtain permission to visit northern Hunza, now made certain that my report reached Prime Minister Zulfikar Ali Bhutto. The Prime Minister read my notes, agreed with the concept and the proposed borders, and ordered the park established” (1988, 99).

For a critique of the role of environmental organizations in the establishment of the KNP, see Knudsen 1999. Are Knudsen argues that neither Schaller nor IUCN used any scientific data to prove that there was actual degradation taking place in the KNP area due to grazing and human impact. Moreover IUCN ignored some of its own policies in the designation and management of the KNP.

The community-based conservation approach did not emerge from an anti–protected areas approach, although this was the political context in which it became popular. The seeds of this were found in the early conceptions and legislation about the national parks, according to which some native people were allowed to stay and continue their lives inside the park because they were considered part of nature (Nash 1967; Neumann 2002, 125). Neumann, for example, writes that colonial officers, while enforcing parks regulations in Africa, maintained that “sometimes a ‘naïve’ presence in the parks may be tolerated” (125).

The SNT established a comprehensive park management plan that it presented as a community-based alternative to the government-backed management plan for conservation in the KNP. The Shimshalis claim that rather than having the management of the park in the hands of the directorate of the KNP, it should be managed, including responsibility for finances, by the SNT. SNT has a president, secretary, treasurer, task force, and a board of governors.

Undoubtedly, the association of organic, community-oriented society with rural areas and of alienated and disenchanted society with urban areas, the latter a center of a capitalist base, is a continuation of an enduring theme of changing conceptions of nature and culture. It found a new expression in environmental conservation and policy arenas in the 1980s, one in which local communities emerged as the stewards of nature against the onslaught of modern civilization.

Despite having opposite material consequences, these two discourses—one advocating nature conservation by removing people from land and the other advocating working with them—existed and continue to exist, side by side, with one never completely able to overcome the other and both states and local communities using them opportunistically.

Peter Parkes (2000) notes in the case of Kalash that internationally funded development and minority environmental projects make romantic representations of natural resource management practices of the Kalash, an animistic group in the Chitral, yet at the same time represent such practices as under threat, thus justifying intervention. Such representations also appear in the writings of many researchers who come to do a short stint in the mountains on “research tourism.”

The effects of such a discourse were documentation, cataloguing, and ordering of local knowledge in an attempt to preserve it before it was lost. This romantic discourse was, then, opposite to Schaller’s wilderness romanticism in which the people of Hunza and Shimshal are represented as careless and unsophisticated people whose actions regarding local nature are detrimental and who need the guiding and authoritative hand of a disciplining state.

As described earlier, the shpuns are the nine men who graze the village yaks during the winter months near the Chinese border.

Of course, these were not the elders of Shimshal; rather, they were the young blood of Shimshal. I use the term tribal elders to show the similarity of the role that Tsing’s (1999) tribal elders and members of the SNT task force play. Like the tribal elders of the Dayaks of Indonesia, the SNT task force members articulate a particular communal identity in environmental and development discourse.

Despite a universal opposition to the KNP, the Shimshalis are not united on one platform against it. Internal tensions, especially those having their origins in shifting tribal and clan alliance and in local and regional politics, are held side by side with the tendency to unify against the park. Most Shimshalis know of these tensions and seldom tried to give me an impression otherwise. The numberdaar of the village, for example, told me candidly that the members of the SNT were corrupt and ineffective. According to him, the members of the SNT Task Force are looking for funds, status, and networking for personal gain and do not really have the concerns of the community at heart. He said the SNT had deceived the simple Shimshalis by exploiting their cause for their personal benefits, such as trips to foreign conferences and the opportunity to meet people in power and land lucrative jobs.

I am using the term indigenous people for Shimshal in a very broad sense. Though Pakistan does not have an official or popular category of indigenous people, as countries such as Indonesia, Australia, and others have, the general characteristics of the Shimshalis and their concern for cultural survival make them quite similar to indigenous people.

Indeed, as Tsing (1993, 14) states, such claims find their potency in a lack of imagination in modern urban culture, which is unable to find difference within itself—hence, it has to construct a chasm of time and space across which a unique and different culture can exist.

Indeed, many scholars have critiqued the movements for indigenous rights for focusing too much on remote and isolated—but exotic—groups while ignoring very common forms of marginality and powerlessness among peasants and nonexotic peoples (Gupta 1998).

The only thing that seems to change the legal status of the KNP and hence give the Shimshalis real strategic advantage is the political economy of conservation itself. In the late 1990s, the regional government started a trophy-hunting program in the region surrounding the KNP, in which communities benefited financially by protecting game animals such as the ibex and markhor. Pressure from the local sports outfitter, working in conjunction with local communities, led to the opening of certain portions of the KNP for trophy hunting in order to provide economic benefits to the Shimshalis. This change in practice is likely to bring change in the policy toward management of the KNP by the government of Gilgit-Baltistan.

I am not arguing that remoteness as a social category did not exist before the height of the age of European modernization in the mid-nineteenth century, marked by industrialization, urbanization, commodity production, and the spread of colonialism and markets. Many scholars have shown how the Greeks (Regar 2002) and Romans (Freedman 2008) imagined distant places and markets and what kinds of conceptions they held about them. However, I suggest that remoteness has a particularly enduring association with modernity.

He wrote, “The very shaping of history now outpaces the ability of men to orient themselves in accordance with cherished values. And which values? Even when they do not panic, men often sense that older ways of feeling and thinking have collapsed and that newer beginnings are ambiguous to the point of moral statis. Is it any wonder that ordinary men feel they cannot cope with the larger worlds with which they are so suddenly confronted? That they cannot understand the meaning of their epoch for their own lives? That—in defense of selfhood—they become morally insensible, trying to remain altogether private men? Is it any wonder that they come to be possessed by a sense of trap?” (2000, 4).

For Mills (2000), sociological imagination is a positive mental attribute geared toward some action. It is a methodology that explains facts better because one is looking at facts from an alternative perspective. For Mills, then, it is a reflexive approach to understanding social reality.

Here I mean that it is generally in faraway and distant places, rather than in near and proximate ones, that the effects of modernization are studied. Hence, these faraway, remote places are universalized as “local” places in development and academic literature.

At the global level, a nuanced understanding of northern Pakistan remains sketchy, so the entire mountainous northern region is often termed as the hotbed of al-Qaeda and the Taliban. A recent best seller in the United States, Three Cups of Tea, about the humanitarian work of an American, painted Baltistan and parts of Hunza as the backyard of the Taliban, when the fact is that the Taliban is a mainly Pashtun and Punjabi movement. Thankfully, the inaccuracies of the book were exposed in Three Cups of Deceit, a book by John Krakaur, and in a piece by CBS’s 60 Minutes.

This fact that remoteness no longer provides as solid a tactical advantage to insurgents and rebels as it did for the last 150 years may be one reason why Osama bin Laden was found not in the remote and rugged terrain of the Pakistan-Afghanistan borderlands but rather in the city of Abbotabad, deep in the heart of Pakistan and close to its capital city.