Gupta, Radhika.Freedom in captivity: negotiations of belonging along Kashmir's frontier. 290 pp., figs, bibliogr. Cambridge: University Press, 2023. £90.64 (cloth)

In Freedom in captivity, anthropologist Radhika Gupta examines how freedom is negotiated with the state by the Shi‘as of Kargil in India's frontiers. In this long-durée study, Gupta shows how the performance of patriotism of the Kargili Shi‘as needs to be analysed beyond the trope of resistance or submission to the state. Rather, freedom exists in expressions of creative agency espoused in negotiations with a Hindu majoritarian, yet nominally secular, India. Moving across multiple scales of analyses, Gupta studies what it means to be a ‘double minority’ (p. 21) for the Kargilis in India who are Shi‘a Muslims. The book implies that for the Kargili Shi‘as, the Indian administration in Kashmir haunts and limits their capacities of negotiation. However, the ethnography also argues that the Indian administration in Kargil contrasts the state's overall response to Islamic internationalism as a source of fundamentalism requiring absolute suppression. Interestingly, on 5 August 2025, along with twenty-four other books, Freedom in captivity was banned in the union territory of Jammu and Kashmir on the charge of promoting ‘false narrative and secessionism’, even though the book is about patriotism towards India in Kargil, which is now part of the union territory of Ladakh. The intertwining between Kargil and Kashmir signals the importance of ethnography to understand the contradictory forms of Indian governance. Gupta organizes the book into five chapters, concluding with an epilogue. Through a rich ethnographic narration, the chapters slide across themes of historicity, ethical reformation, Shi‘i internationalism-inspired political action, religious and cultural negotiations, and inhabitation of borderland spaces. Chapter 1 begins with a narrative account of Kargili discursive histories. Gupta weaves through the memories of the Partition of the region and explains how postcolonial governance furthered the socio-economic disparities between Kargil, Kashmir Valley, and Ladakh. This aggravated sectarian stereotyping and political tensions between Shi‘a Muslims, Sunnis Muslims, and Buddhists. However, relative competitiveness also produced aspirations of modernity and reform tied to ‘an alterity defined through religious and sectarian difference’ (p. 52). This aspiration is followed in chapter 2 to study how the Islamic revolution in Iran motivated the Kargilis to reform themselves by engaging in what Gupta labels Islamic modernity. Reform here pertains to inculcating the use of Aql (reason), English education, changes in ritual piety, engagement with religious media, and questioning Islamic religious authorities. Gupta pays special attention to the impact of Islamic modernity and the question of gendered reform. Agency for women was not just derived from ‘habitation of norms’ but their ‘perceptions of agency and freedom were deeply contextual and shaped by individual biographies such that the narrative arc of life of individual women becomes ethnographically important’ (p. 77). The third chapter examines how the Islamic revolution influenced Kargili politics as well. Rooted in the Karbala paradigm, politics was crystallized in a Shi‘i political theology echoing the need to fight for this-worldly justice (p. 98). Interestingly Gupta shows how Gandhi's call for non-violence and invocation of Husayn's struggles become a mediator for Kargilis to express their national and religious identity (p. 106). Gupta grounds the chapter by providing an ethnography of the Hill Development Council elections of 2008 in Kargil. In the field, Gupta deals with the classic anthropological conundrum of the spill-over produced in-between the categories of culture and religion in Kargil. The fourth chapter narrates how the Kargilis approach the limits of cultural politics established by the nation-state through pragmatic means – by promoting the pre-Islamic Buddhist imagination of their lands in lieu of attracting tourism. However, by examining a range of cultural practices and rituals reflective of Shi‘i material culture, Gupta shows how negotiations through culture do not erase an Islamic present (p. 156). Rather, Islamic traditions and the trans-Himalayan ecumene become intertwined in place-making. The final chapter studies the travel accounts of Baltis in Kargil, whom Gupta defines as ‘cross-border settlers’. Unlike refugees whose identities are shaped by the new borders of the nation-states, cross-border settlers embody ‘seemingly contradictory emotions, of longing for one place but belonging to another’ (p. 161). The epilogue ends the book through a narration of the tense atmosphere in Kargil after its bifurcation by the Indian government in 2019 from the autonomous state of Jammu and Kashmir. Kargil is now subsumed under the union territory of Ladakh. Freedom in captivity is a truly evocative book as it complicates the impact of transnational ideas, state surveillance, and sectarian identities over the lives of people in borderland spaces. Gupta's intellectually thoughtful writing style seamlessly blends the anthropologist's and the people's portrayal of life in Kargil. The book puts into words the messy, pragmatic, complicated, often contradictory affects and relations which people inhabit within a state. It would be interesting to see what forms the narrative of reform will take in the face of the changing political economy of the landscape, especially after the bifurcation of the state in 2019. This ethnography of a people and how they negotiate their belonging will appeal to scholars interested in the anthropology of religion, Shi‘ism, Indian politics, borderlands, the state, and Muslim lives in contemporary India.