Intimate Geopolitics is a timely and important intervention in Himalayan studies. Sara Smith explores how territorial politics is enacted on the body through the intimate spaces of love and marriage. When religio-territorial boundaries and international conflicts define whom one may or may not love, marry, and have children with, this leads to intimate geopolitics. In Ladakh in North India, intermarriage between Muslims and Buddhists was common until the 1990s but waned over the years. The bodies of women, in particular, are the sites on which territorial battles are waged. At the same time, bodies can resist geopolitical territorialization because of bodily flows (breast milk, semen) that transgress boundaries and because of the materiality of the body (health, disease, reproductive functions, etc.) that deters full conscription into a territorialist design. I see intertextual resonances between Smith's concept of geopolitical bodies (p. 9) and Thai historian Thongchai Winichakul's concept of the “geo-body,” which shows how nations became bounded entities like bodies,Footnote ¹ as well as between Smith's contention that maintaining bodily boundaries (by preventing interfaith unions) is analogous to maintaining religious and geopolitical boundaries and anthropologist Mary Douglas's notion of the body as a model that can stand for any bounded system, for its boundaries represent all boundaries that are threatened or precarious.Footnote ² The spatial insights in the book and the notion of Ladakh as a subjective space also connect with my own work on imagined geographies in western Arunachal Pradesh along the India-China border.Footnote ³ Questions of love, marriage, origins and migration, and language in these disputed Himalayan borderlands become so entangled with questions of territoriality and security that they necessarily manifest as everyday forms of geopolitics.

Smith uses a wide range of methods, including interviews, surveys, oral histories, and close participant observation facilitated by her own kinship connections in the field. Chapter 2 discusses how geopolitics enters and shapes decisions about contraception in Ladakh. Organizations such as the Ladakh Buddhist Association (LBA) cite the population problem as the historical reason for Ladakhi Buddhists’ marginality vis-à-vis Muslims in Jammu and Kashmir, using stereotypes about the lack of birth control and contraceptive use among Muslims. They urge Buddhist women to give up family planning and have more children, although the women may have other inclinations for personal or practical reasons. Smith highlights how such representations of Muslims as a demographic threat when, in actuality, they are numerical minorities in India are the regional version of a national, Hindu, right-wing discourse. The events in Ladakh also compare with similar events across the world where majority communities represent themselves as at risk, demographically, from beleaguered minorities, and adopt various narratives and policies to curb cross-border or intercommunity marriages.

Chapter 3 speaks about Buddhist-Muslim coexistence and connections forged through trade, marriage, and political alliances. Collective memory recalls the seventeenth-century Shia Muslim queen Gyal Khatun, who married a Ladakhi Buddhist Jamgyang Namgyal and was the mother of Ladakh's most famous king, Senge Namgyal. Despite such connected histories, antagonism toward Muslims has become more pronounced since 1989, when the LBA declared Ladakh a Buddhist region, boycotted local Muslims, and raised the demand for union territory status, which was eventually granted in August 2019.

Chapters 5 and 6 discuss geopolitical futures through the embodied practices of younger people—how their loves, desires, marriage decisions, and reproductive choices represent a break from the past and awareness of a future circumscribed by geopolitical forces. The dizzying list of familial expectations, inheritances, and injunctions, on the one hand, and the range of choices, views, and experiences offered by their studies outside Ladakh, on the other, create in them uncertainty and insecurity—which Smith calls “generational vertigo” (p. 119). Many elderly people reminisce about times past, when Buddhists and Muslims participated in each other's festivals, shared harvest work, and protected each other during crises (p. 109), but they also recognize that these ties cannot be revived in the present. Younger Ladakhis, urban and more mobile, who study or have studied in cities outside Ladakh, hold secular views, but I wonder whether these views are shared by younger people in rural parts of Ladakh, who may influence the course of future politics but whose voices are missing here.

There are a few other elisions elsewhere in the book. Smith mentions that when ordinary people with possibly peasant pasts narrate folk memories, “they speak of taxes, of owing grain to the monasteries” (p. 54). A female informant narrates how, during the Muslim boycott from 1989 to 1992, people who were caught making purchases in Muslim stores were taken to a town gonpa and beaten up by monks (p. 84). Yet there is no other reference to the monasteries’ historical and contemporary role in the region's politics, which is surprising. There is also not much written about the history of the Ladakhi Muslims in Ladakh, apart from brief notes about how in Ladakh, Kache, a general term for Muslims, are distinguished from Kachulpas, who reside in Kashmir (p. 105). Could Smith have explored the position of the Kache/Khache or Tibetan Muslims in the larger Tibetan Buddhist identity? At times, the book's narrative becomes repetitive as the tropes of love, marriage, and intimacy recur in a circular manner. These, however, are small lapses in an otherwise engaging and ethnographically rich narrative, which treats a geopolitically loaded question with a great deal of sensitivity and understanding.