Builders, Building, and the Built

Ladakh and the Eventfulness of Road Development

Abstract

Motorable roads have become such an essential part of the Himalaya that they are celebrated and prayed for. But who are the people who build them? The army, engineers, and the state are usually credited with the construction of high-altitude roads in India, but the road workers who often endure significant hardship while performing this labor have largely remained invisible in both national discourses and academic scholarship. This article centers on the lived experiences of road workers and argues for an analytical shift that accounts for them as infrastructure in order to highlight their importance to road building in Ladakh. Through an ethnographic methodology that includes poetry, this article studies their presence, labor, and livelihood to understand how road workers perform and produce road building. In doing so, it advances the notion of eventfulness—a generative register that encompasses daily routines that are mundane yet reveal the eventful performances of border building. Through this notion, I aim to show how the broader geopolitical processes are sustained through the localized routines of road workers: the infrastructure behind the infrastructure.