This video shows the effects of modernization on traditional life in Ladakh. It depicts how traditional local communities, centered on villages and extended households, with values of cooperation and sharing, are changing largely due to the effect of market institutions and modern values. The intellectual background to this work is an anthropological concern with other values and with Ladakh, as well as with the movement toward appropriate technology of the early 1970s (Ernst F. Schumacher,
Small is Beautiful: Economics as if People Mattered, Harper and Row, New York, 1973).
Questioning the value of socially disembodied labor and capitalist progress has, of course, a far older pedigree than Schumacher's book, and is represented in environmentalism and "Green" politics today. This video, correctly, does not seek to enter this debate as such, but restricts itself to a visual study of the Ladakh case, with our Western values and experience in mind. Of the two related arguments, the first is that such traditional communities simply cannot be dismissed as backward: the people are well-adapted to local natural conditions in Ladakh, and provide material and psychological support for human needs; modern individualism, markets, and growth in production, by contrast, do not. The second is that the traditional social forms of Ladakh are a suitable baseline against which to judge the success of Western, technological society: in general, the West is found to be wanting, especially in terms of the appropriate human scale of organization.
This environmental focus on scale may have promoted a historical error in the use of the name "Little Tibet." In Tibetan cultural geography, Ladakh possibly was part of Maryul, the "red land," and was included as Ladakh along with Purang and Zangskar as part of a western or upper division of a nested three-way classification of Tibet (stod mnga'ri skor gsum). In Western sources the title "Little Tibet" was more usually applied to Baltistan, the region immediately to the west of Ladakh in the Karakoram, than it was to Ladakh, which in the nineteenth century was usually known as "Western Tibet," "Greater Tibet," or even "Indian Tibet" (John Briggs, 1829, The History of the Rise of Mohammedan Power in India, Vol IV, Murray, London, pp. 459, 501; August H. Francke, 1907, A History of Western Tihet, S.W Partridge, London).
The video is based on the book of the same title by Helena Norbert-Hodge (U.S.A., Sierra Club Books, 1991; London, Rider, 1992). That book was written in the first person and is an accurate and captivating account of the changes she observed in Ladakh over a fifteen-year period. During that time this northernmost part of Kashmir Province, culturally Tibetan and on the edge of the Tibet plateau, began to be integrated both politically and economically into the plains of India and the twentieth century. Norbert-Hodge reflects, intelligently and with a great deal of local sensitivity, on the implications of material notions of progress and changes in values for Ladakh and ourselves.
In its short hour, the video covers the same broad sweep as the book through agriculture, transport, education, health, markets, and trade. All the same, some omissions are apparent: the idealized presentation of traditional society will leave viewers curious about how people coped with sickness, and they also will be curious about life there apart from the four summer months on which the footage appears mainly to be based. The emphasis is on the systemic effects of modernizing changes on traditional local communities and the family and the values and feelings of the people themselves in the face of such changes.
Although Norbert-Hodge occasionally appears on camera to present some background, her reflections and experience no longer serve as the linking strand, as in the book. Sometimes there is a commentary off-camera, sometimes there are subtitles for local dialogue, and sometimes there are subtitles for a local commentator. This combination gives a genuine, vernacular feel to the video and presents the changes in Ladakh as a whole rather than from a particular point of view.
Yet, though true to the book in content, there are problems in scope and style; the transposition between mediums is not altogether successful. Visual media have limitations in conveying abstract ideas, and the varieties of style combine with over-frequent changes of scene and context to obscure the central theme. Overall, viewers may be left with the feeling of an encyclopaedic introductory lecture with rapid illustrations rather than of a film that presents material from which they can draw their own judgments and conclusions. This has further unfortunate results. Since this is not a lecture or a studio discussion, the commentary that accompanies these summary visual scenes also has to be concise. Given the proliferation of public, political slogans on the environment, it may be that some viewers will come to think of Ladakh as just another example that conveys well-known environmentalist clichés. If a film on Ladakh is intended as a vehicle to introduce an environmentalist political agenda, then this should be done in a more media-sensitive and professional manner.
The material indicates that Ladakh is also of great interest for an ethnographic film-study in its own right. It has an extreme ecology to which its particular domestic organization is adapted, and until recently was a living, preindustrial, urban civilization superimposed on an agrarian base. One other theme introduced by the video that deserves its own elaboration is the way that the leisure culture of Western tourism and the individualistic style of the hero in the cinema have come to produce a role model for the young male in the Third World. Most others who have filmed in Ladakh have produced more than one film.
Cinematographically, this video would benefit from fewer styles, fewer contexts, and a clearer visual story line. It would also benefit from clarifying who was the particular audience in mind. As it stands, the video would be useful as part of an introductory teaching course on the Third World if taken together with the book and classroom discussion. It would also be useful for advanced students of cinematographic technique and Third World studies, that is, as a subject for critical discussion and analysis. With more adequate resources and time, the ISEC could build on the material they already have to produce a suitable range of films covering different themes intended for differing audiences.
