Himalayan Masculinities

This book offers novel and valuable insights into the often abstracted and overlooked social worlds of men in the Himalaya. Long cast through colonial and nationalist imaginaries as martial warriors, agrarian patriarchs, or peripheral actors in the Subcontinent’s struggles over power, identity, and territory, Himalayan men have rarely been the direct focus of scholarly attention. Drawing on ethnographic and interdisciplinary research, Himalayan Masculinities foregrounds men’s lives, experiences, and perspectives across the Himalaya - a dynamic space shaped by shifting geographies, contested borders, postcolonial anxieties, ecological precarity, and global economic transformations.

Contributors examine how masculinities in the Himalaya are made and unmade through intimate practices, migration and mobility, caste and care work, militarization, digital culture, and uneven development. In doing so, the volume challenges essentialist accounts of gender and region, revealing masculinities as mobile, relational, and deeply embedded in place. Unfolding in a region that sits at the edge of nation-states and empires, and at the intersection of local and global pressures, this collection provides an important corrective to prevailing gender scholarship and opens new directions for the study of power, identity, and belonging in South Asia and beyond.

This book will be invaluable to academics and researchers interested in the intersections of gender, power, sociology, ecology and economics within the Himalayan region. The chapters were originally published as a special issue of the Journal of South Asian Studies.