Introduction: Himalayan Masculinities

‘Where are the Himalaya(s), what are the Himalaya(s)?’ was a question asked to one of the editors of this special issue more than a decade ago at a Himalayan Studies conference in Boulder, Colorado. It was both an unsettling question, given the dozens of people around us sharing stories about the ‘subject’ in question, and, in retrospect, an unanswerable one. The interrogator, an elderly Tibetan monk from Himachal Pradesh, India, followed up this rhetorical query with, ‘It would be difficult beta [son], to explain to you [all the conference participants] the many different Himalayas that I have met in my life…some of which are my relatives’. As we introduce this special issue, the above exchange animates our narrative choices. It is at once a positional heaviness, echoing our unease around speaking ‘for’ the Himalaya despite not being ‘from’ the Himalaya, 1 and it is also an opportunity to nurture (and be nurtured) by inspirational regional voices which continue to trouble the legitimacy of historical (and ongoing) attempts at their spatial, material and discursive confinement. 2 Our invocation of the term Himalaya is as an invitation, but one with an agenda. It allows for the scholarly and political act of relating to (and with) this idea to be laid bare in all its insidious possibilities of elite appropriation and its tempered potential to aid the hundreds of ongoing human and non-human provocations, negotiating dignified lives. We present this, cognisant of the many unresolved scholarly threads lurking within regional stories. These weave through the ubiquitousness of rendering the region through a framework of ‘borders’, as both a borderland and a frontier. 3 They also explore similar statist anxieties around margins and security turned inwards, pursuing different forms of ethnic, linguistic and religious ordering (and othering). 4 Others illuminate the enduring colonially fortified attempts at drawing distinct binaries between mountains and valleys, 5 echoing empire-building logics of environmentally determined materiality and affect. 6 Finally, this looming presence of the unprecedented land and time scapes requires, in scholarly terms, its own cosmo/onto/epistemology, given its discomfort within the confines of South Asia and South Asian Studies. 7 These are, among many others, generative sites of contention, and we are mindful when using the term Himalaya, acknowledging that its invocation does not indicate any promises of resolution.