ETHNOMAD
THE BALTI PEOPLE
High Country, Narrow Margins
Shamshed, a local guide and lecturer from Skardu University, walks with community elders in Hussainabad as the village opens its first guest house. Perched high in the remote valleys of Baltistan, the initiative marks a quiet shift, creating local livelihoods while offering visitors a rare entry into everyday Balti life shaped by mountains, kinship, and endurance.
Dr Tom Corcoran
2,000 words Published by ETHNOMAD
I first met Shamshad Hussain in Islamabad, far from the mountains that define his life. The city moved at a pace set by engines and deadlines. Heat rose from the asphalt in visible waves, traffic advancing in short, impatient bursts. In a place built for speed and negotiation, Shamshad carried himself with the measured cadence of someone accustomed to distance. He spoke without haste, pausing often, as if weighing each thought against a landscape that lay far to the north.
Over tea, he did not speak of peaks or glaciers. He spoke of responsibility. Baltistan, he said, was standing at a moment of decision. Roads were improving. Flights were increasing. Villages once reached only by days of walking now appeared on itineraries and screens across the world. Visitors were arriving in numbers unimaginable a generation ago. The question, as he framed it, was no longer whether tourism would come. That question had already been answered. What mattered now was whether local people would retain the authority to decide how it unfolded, and how much of their social order would bend in the process.
Shamshad had travelled widely. Years of guiding had carried him into the circuits of global adventure tourism, where remote places are consumed quickly and then replaced by the next frontier. He had watched communities reorganise themselves around visitor demand, rituals shortened to fit schedules, and generosity stretched thin as hospitality shifted from instinct to obligation. In those places, the loss was rarely dramatic. It arrived quietly, first as fatigue, then as resentment, and finally as withdrawal.
Baltistan, he believed, could not absorb that kind of erosion. Its margins were too narrow. Here, water rights, grazing access, labour exchange, and kinship obligations remained tightly negotiated within the community. Disrupt one element and the effects travelled outward, touching households, fields, and seasonal rhythms. What was at stake was not culture as performance, but the everyday systems of reciprocity that made life in the mountains viable.
In Skardu, Shamshad occupies an unusual position. He is respected as a guide and educator, yet often stands between elders cautious of rapid change and younger men eager for its rewards. His response has been neither resistance nor surrender, but preparation. By helping establish tourism and hospitality courses at the local university, he has worked to ensure that guiding, interpretation, and management remain local skills rather than imported ones. Education, in his view, is not a tool for growth, but a form of protection.
When he finished speaking, he lifted his glass of tea and waited before drinking, letting it cool. It was a small habit, shaped by colder places.
Within weeks, Shamshad drew me north. Not as a tour, but as an invitation, to Skardu, where his family lives and his commitments are anchored. Beyond it, into villages perched above rivers and fields, linked by footpaths etched into stone long before any road arrived. These were routes worn by necessity rather than commerce, connecting homes, pastures, mosques, and burial grounds. To walk them was to understand that Baltistan was not remote by accident. It was remote because life here demanded balance, patience, and restraint. Then I started to understand what people mean when they say that "the mountains begin to speak."
Peaks of the Karakoram rise above Baltistan. K2 (8,611 m) and Broad Peak (8,051 m) are visible alongside Gasherbrum I and Gasherbrum II, part of a dense concentration of the world’s highest mountains along the Pakistan–China border.
Beyond the plains of Pakistan, where agriculture spreads outward across heat-flattened ground, the land rises abruptly into a vertical world of stone, ice, and altitude. This is Gilgit-Baltistan, a region that holds more glaciers than anywhere on Earth outside the polar zones. Here, the Karakoram collides with the western Himalaya, forcing the planet upward into compressed valleys and narrow margins where weather, gravity, and restraint dictate the terms of life.
In this geography, excess is not possible. Every settlement, field, and pasture exists where it does because no other option is available. Villages cling to slopes just wide enough to hold them. Fields are built stone by stone, soil carried by hand, irrigation channels cut with an understanding that water is both life and threat. Avalanches, landslides, and glacial floods are not rare events. They are anticipated forces, factored into decisions that determine where people live and when they move.
Mountains dominate the horizon, but they also govern imagination. K2 rises with an authority that resists metaphor, its reputation shaped not by conquest but by refusal. Nanga Parbat, isolated and immense, stands as a reminder that ambition here is always negotiated with consequence. Yet for the Balti people, these peaks are not trophies or symbols. They are reference points. They mark the passage of seasons, the movement of snow, the timing of planting and migration. They are constants in a world where much else is uncertain.
From these heights flows water that sustains the country below. Snowmelt feeds the Indus River, carrying glacial memory southward across thousands of kilometres. This annual release determines the success or failure of crops far beyond Baltistan, irrigating nearly all of Pakistan’s agricultural land. The Balti, who live closest to its source, understand this dependency not as an abstraction measured in policy or statistics, but as lived responsibility. A blocked channel, a damaged embankment, a misjudged diversion affects not only a village but also systems downstream that remain unseen yet deeply connected.
Water here is governed collectively. Irrigation channels are maintained through shared labour. Allocation follows seasonal agreements rather than individual ownership. Disputes are resolved through negotiation rather than the courts. These arrangements are not romantic survivals. They are practical responses to scarcity, refined through generations of trial and consequence.
High above the valleys, the plateau of Deosai National Park opens briefly each summer into a fragile abundance, and it was nothing like what I expected. I had come prepared for severity, for emptiness, for a place defined by absence. Instead, the land unfolded with a gentleness that felt almost disarming. Grasslands rolled outward beneath a wide, restless sky. Light moved slowly across the ground, shifting with each passing cloud. For a few short months, life gathers here before retreating again beneath snow.
There was something quietly mesmerising about it. The presence of brown bear, ibex, snow leopard, and migratory birds was not announced, only suggested. Tracks pressed into damp earth. A movement at the edge of vision. A sudden stillness that felt shared rather than empty. It was a landscape that asked for patience rather than attention, and in doing so, it drew you in completely.
Standing there, I felt an urge that surprised me in its simplicity. I wanted to shoulder a pack and walk without a destination, to follow the line of the land wherever it led, to stay long enough for time to loosen its grip. Deosai had that pull. Not the drama of conquest or achievement, but the quieter invitation of space and scale, a reminder that there are still places where the world feels open, unfinished, and capable of absorbing you whole.
For those who live here, that pull is never abstract. What feels to a visitor like freedom is, for the Balti, a daily negotiation with limits. When I spoke to Shamshad Hussain about Deosai, he listened carefully before answering, as if wary of letting the plateau drift into metaphor. He knows its beauty as intimately as its boundaries. The same openness that invites wandering also demands restraint. The weather closes in without warning. Distance stretches effort. A misjudged step, a delayed return, carries consequences not just for the individual but for those waiting at home.
Shamshad walks these landscapes not as an escape, but as an obligation. His work threads between villages, classrooms, and trails, translating the demands of the land into choices about how tourism should move through it. The plateau that drew me toward motion without end is, for him, a reminder that movement must always be accountable. Paths are not routes to be consumed, but connections to be maintained. Access, once opened, must be governed.
This is the tension Baltistan now inhabits. The land still calls, powerfully and without compromise. The question, as Shamshad frames it, is whether those who answer that call will learn to listen long enough to understand what the land requires in return.
Shamshed pauses on the rocky trail above Skardu, looking back toward the town as the path climbs out of the valley. From Skardu centre, the only way to go is up.
A History Often Misunderstood
Baltistan has never been as isolated as outsiders imagine. Long before borders were drawn and maps were fixed, its valleys were threaded into wider worlds through trade, pilgrimage, and seasonal movement. The Balti trace their roots to the Tibetan Plateau, arriving more than a thousand years ago with language, belief systems, and an inherited understanding of how life could be sustained at altitude. What travelled with them was not simply culture, but a body of practical knowledge shaped by thin air, short growing seasons, and the discipline of restraint.
Over time, the Balti people adopted Islam, predominantly Shia in orientation, a religious identity that further distinguished the region from surrounding Sunni lowlands and reinforced patterns of local governance, ritual life, and communal cohesion that remained largely inward-looking and autonomous.
Political authority passed through these mountains many times. Tibetan rulers exerted influence across the region, followed centuries later by Mughal administrators whose reach was often symbolic rather than structural. Eventually, control shifted southward in the mid-nineteenth century when Baltistan was absorbed into the Dogra-ruled princely state of Jammu and Kashmir, under the authority of Gulab Singh. This moment marked one of the first sustained attempts to govern Baltistan through external administrative systems rather than local custom.
Under Dogra rule, land and water were, for the first time, treated as taxable assets. Communities were subjected to begar, a system of forced unpaid labour imposed without regard for seasonal agricultural cycles or altitude constraints. Irrigation channels that had long been maintained through shared obligation now carried the added burden of extraction. Fields were worked not only for survival, but for revenue. British administrative records from the period later noted widespread hardship, population decline, and out-migration, consequences not of environmental failure, but of governance that failed to grasp how narrow the margin of life in the mountains truly was.
What this episode revealed was not resistance to change, but the fragility of misalignment. External authority disrupted systems that had evolved precisely to manage scarcity, risk, and cooperation. When British administrators later reduced their direct involvement in Baltistan, deeming the region marginal to imperial productivity, local systems quietly reasserted themselves, not because they were preserved, but because they remained necessary.
Beneath shifting political control, the foundations of Balti life endured. Land was not owned in the modern sense, but held through use and obligation. Irrigation channels were maintained collectively, their upkeep tied to seasonal labour and negotiated responsibility. Pastures were accessed through agreement rather than enclosure, adjusted year by year in response to snowfall, herd size, and weather. Water, the most critical resource of all, moved through channels governed not by written law, but by memory, precedent, and trust.
These were not informal arrangements awaiting modernisation. They were adaptive systems, refined through generations of observation, error, and correction. Survival in Baltistan depended on cooperation rather than accumulation. Excess was neither possible nor desirable. The margin between sufficiency and failure was too narrow. These systems required no improvement, only continuity.
It is this continuity that contemporary governance often struggles to recognise.
Modern conservation frameworks, introduced through protected areas and biodiversity legislation, tend to treat land as static space rather than lived system. Deosai National Park, now framed as wilderness, is governed through regulation and exclusion. Yet for centuries, the plateau was managed through seasonal use, restraint, and movement. Grazing followed unwritten rules. Absence in winter was as important as presence in summer. The land was protected not by separation, but by rhythm.
Tourism governance presents a parallel challenge. Roads, flights, and infrastructure bring opportunity, but they also introduce external logics of access, volume, and growth. Visitor numbers become targets. Landscapes become products. What risks being overlooked are the fine-grained systems that have long governed who moves where, when, and under what conditions.
In Baltistan, land has never been scenery. It has always been a negotiated relationship. Governance, whether imperial, conservationist, or touristic, succeeds here only when it aligns with that reality. When it does not, pressure accumulates quietly, first in strained water systems, overused paths, and rising costs, and later in the erosion of trust that binds communities together.
History in Baltistan is not something confined to the past. It remains embedded in practice, shaping how people live, move, and decide today. The challenge now is whether contemporary conservation and tourism can learn from this inheritance, recognising that resilience in the mountains has never come from control, but from balance.
Summer wildflowers spread across the Deosai Plains of Baltistan, Pakistan, where alpine grasses thrive at an average altitude of around 4,100 metres. Known as one of the highest plateaus on Earth, Deosai supports abundant wildlife, including marmots, wolves, and Himalayan brown bears, yet few visitors travel beyond the park’s entry point into its vast interior.
An hour from Skardu airport, a single dirt road climbs steadily toward the village of Hussainabad. There are no alternate routes. When rain cuts the road or snow closes the pass, the village closes with it. Movement here has always been conditional, shaped by weather rather than schedule. That reality alone has long limited the pace of change.
It is along this road that Hussainabad’s first community-owned guesthouse now stands, a quiet experiment in how tourism might enter without overwhelming what already exists. The building is modest by design. Three bedrooms. Two bathrooms. A shared room anchored by a blackened Bukhari stove. There is nothing decorative about the space. Its purpose is warmth, shelter, and gathering. In winter, this room becomes the heart of the house, a place where meals are shared, stories exchanged, and visitors folded into the rhythm of daily life.
In Balti homes, warmth is collective. Privacy is secondary. Guests are not managed. They are absorbed. Hospitality here is not learned. It is inherited, practised from childhood, and extended without calculation. A stranger arriving at the door is offered tea before questions. Food before explanation. This reflex has sustained life in isolated valleys for generations, where today’s guest may be tomorrow’s lifeline.
Tourism unsettles this instinct in subtle ways. Introducing prices, booking schedules, and service expectations requires a shift not only in practice but also in perception. Hospitality becomes something that can be evaluated, compared, and, at times, refused. The danger is not exploitation, but erosion, the slow thinning of generosity as obligation replaces choice.
Shamshad Hussain is direct about the challenge. Tourism, he says, cannot be allowed to hollow out the values it depends upon. A guesthouse should not turn hosts into performers, nor should it turn guests into consumers of intimacy. The aim is not efficiency, but alignment, ensuring that the rhythms of village life remain intact even as outsiders pass through.
Ownership here is collective. Income is shared. Decisions are taken locally, debated in kitchens and courtyards rather than offices. This structure is deliberate. It prevents the concentration of benefit and spreads responsibility alongside reward. When repairs are needed, labour is shared. When guests arrive, duties rotate. The guesthouse does not belong to an individual but to the village.
Scattered across nearby hillsides are abandoned houses, their roofs sagging, walls intact, remnants of families who have moved south in search of education and work. These structures hold possibilities. Restored carefully, they could form the backbone of a dispersed network of community-run accommodation, linked by walking routes rather than roads. The vision is not expansion for its own sake, but diffusion, spreading visitors thinly across space and time so that no single village absorbs the full weight of attention.
Village elders speak openly about the changes already underway. Young people leave earlier now and return less often. Education draws them outward. Employment keeps them there. Tourism offers a counterweight, a reason to remain or return, but only if it offers dignity rather than dependency. A future that ties young people to service roles without agency would repeat the very patterns this model seeks to avoid.
In Hussainabad, hospitality is being renegotiated, not abandoned. The question is not whether to welcome outsiders, but how to do so without surrendering the terms of welcome. If this experiment succeeds, it will not be because the village learned to host tourists, but because tourism learned, however imperfectly, to behave like a guest.
Early morning breakfast in the Hussainabad community guest house. Seated on the floor, tea, bread, and locally prepared food are shared before the hike to Masur Rock.
In Baltistan, food is not about cuisine. It is a system of survival organised around altitude, season, and collective responsibility. What is eaten here is determined less by taste than by endurance. Wheat, barley, and maize form the staple base of most meals, cultivated on narrow terraces built and maintained through shared labour. Meat comes from sheep, yaks, and goats raised on high pastures, where access is negotiated annually , and losses due to weather or disease are expected rather than exceptional.
Cooking follows the logic of conservation. Fuel is scarce, gathered slowly, and used with restraint. Meals are prepared in ways that maximise heat retention and minimise waste. Stews are placed on the stove early and left to simmer for hours, not only to deepen flavour, but also to avoid reheating. Dumplings are filled with minced meat and herbs gathered from the surrounding slopes, shaped by hand in sizes calibrated through habit rather than recipe. Flatbreads are rolled thin, cooked directly on the iron surface of the Bukhari stove, then stacked and covered to retain heat.
In Hussainabad, food preparation is largely the work of women, but it is not confined to the kitchen. Decisions about storage, slaughter, and distribution are made collectively, often in conversation with elders who remember seasons of shortage and adjust quantities accordingly. Preservation is as important as preparation. Meat is dried. Grain is stored in measured amounts. Apricots, abundant in summer, are halved and laid out on rooftops and stone walls to dry, then packed away for winter. Their use months later, folded into stews or eaten with bread, is both nutritional and mnemonic, carrying the memory of warmth into colder seasons.
Meals are eaten communally. Bowls are placed in the centre of the room, and people gather where space allows. There is no formal division between host and guest once food is served. Eating follows no strict order, but it does follow expectations. To share food is to affirm belonging.
Refusing it disrupts the social fabric. Hospitality here is not generosity displayed, but obligation fulfilled.
Seasonality governs everything. In summer, food is more varied, workdays are long, and preservation dominates domestic labour. In winter, diets narrow, portions are adjusted, and shared meals take on greater importance as points of social cohesion. Hunger is not romanticised, but managed. Restraint is learned early, reinforced by observation rather than instruction.
For outsiders, Balti food may appear simple. For those who live here, it carries consequences. Each dish reflects decisions made months earlier about planting, storage, and reserves. Each shared meal reinforces networks of reciprocity that extend across households and valleys. In a landscape where margins are thin, food is foresight made material.
To eat in Hussainabad is not to sample local fare, but to participate, briefly, in a system refined through generations of adaptation. What lingers is not the flavour alone, but the discipline behind it, a quiet reminder that endurance here is built one meal at a time.
Yet the rhythms that govern food and household life are increasingly shaped by absence. Children leave early each morning for school, their days stretching far beyond the kitchen and the fields. Young people spend long hours away from home, their labour redirected from tending animals, gathering fuel, and learning by participation toward classrooms and examinations. What was once absorbed through proximity is now balanced against an education that pulls them outward, reshaping how households organise time, responsibility, and expectation.
"Imran, is a young boy from the high mountain village of Hussainabad, Baltistan. Childhood here is shaped by steep terrain, long winters, and livestock grazing above the valley floor. Few boys remain to work the herds. When schooling ends, most leave the mountains for towns and cities in search of more lucrative work."
In Baltistan, childhood now leads almost universally to school. This alone marks a profound shift from a generation ago. In villages scattered along steep slopes and narrow valleys, mornings begin early. Children shoulder bags and set out on foot, often before the sun has fully cleared the ridgelines. Reaching secondary school can involve hours of walking each day, along paths cut into rock, across streams, and over ground that demands balance and stamina. This daily trek is not symbolic. It is physical, exacting, and unforgiving of fatigue or illness. Education here is earned with effort long before it is tested in examinations.
High school introduces a new threshold. For some, it means relocation to Skardu, where access to better facilities comes at the cost of distance from family and land. Beyond that point, choices narrow sharply. To pursue higher education often requires leaving the region altogether. Young men, in particular, move south toward Islamabad, Karachi, or Lahore, drawn by universities, employment, and the promise of opportunity. Many succeed. Many do not. What is certain is that leaving is easier than returning.
Opportunities within Baltistan are, however, expanding. Skardu now hosts multiple higher education institutions, including Baltistan University, offering programmes in tourism, hospitality, environmental studies, and cultural heritage. These courses represent more than vocational training. They are an attempt to translate inherited knowledge into recognised qualifications, allowing young people to remain connected to place while engaging with a changing economy.
Tourism education here serves a distinct purpose. It is not designed to produce a mobile workforce for distant markets, but to anchor skills locally. Students learn guiding, interpretation, and hospitality alongside the history of their own region, its ecological limits, and its social systems. The aim is to ensure that as tourism grows, it is shaped by those who understand the land not as a commodity, but as a lived system.
This approach echoes older forms of governance. For centuries, Baltistan’s survival depended on knowledge passed through practice rather than institutions, governing water, pasture, and movement through collective agreement. Tourism education now functions as a contemporary extension of that logic, formalising stewardship without severing it from place. Authority, once embedded in custom, is being reframed through curricula that emphasise restraint, responsibility, and long-term consequence.
For young women, these programmes open cautious but significant pathways. Studying close to home allows participation without complete rupture from family responsibilities. Hospitality management, cultural enterprise, and tourism services create roles that can be navigated within existing social frameworks, even as they slowly expand them. Change remains uneven, but it is visible.
For young men, local education offers an alternative to permanent migration. It does not remove the pull of the cities, but it complicates the equation. Staying no longer signals a lack of ambition. It can represent a deliberate choice to invest skill and labour in the region's future.
Shamshad Hussain describes this moment not as a transformation, but as an alignment. Tourism, he argues, must be governed with the same care that once regulated water and pasture. Education is the mechanism through which governance becomes possible, ensuring that authority remains local even as connections widen.
For the young people of Baltistan, the question is no longer simply whether to leave or stay. It is whether the paths opening before them allow both movement and return. In the long daily walks to school, and in the choices between distant cities and nearby classrooms, Baltistan’s future is being negotiated quietly, step by step, through education that seeks not escape, but continuity.
A local guide steps onto Masur Rock, overlooking the valley below. Beyond him rise the high peaks of the Karakoram, part of one of the world’s most elevated mountain landscapes.
Walking the Lines That Remain
In Baltistan, movement has always carried meaning. Paths were never simply routes between places, but agreements with the land, shaped by season, weather, and need. Long before roads arrived, people walked to fields, pastures, schools, mosques, and neighbouring villages along lines worn slowly into stone. These routes encoded knowledge: where snow lingered longest, where rivers cut deepest, where animals grazed safely, where avalanches fell.
Even now, walking remains the measure of distance. Children walk to school. Shepherds walk to summer pastures. Elders walk to fields and burial grounds. These journeys are not recreational. They are functional, repeated, and accountable. To walk here is to know where you are and why you are there.
Tourism introduces new kinds of movement. Visitors arrive by plane in Skardu, then by vehicle along roads that compress time and distance. What once took days now takes hours. The risk is not access itself, but acceleration, the loss of friction that once regulated how many people arrived, when they came, and how long they stayed.
Community-led tourism in villages like Hussainabad is deliberately attempting to reintroduce that friction. Walking routes link guesthouses. Time slows again. Visitors move at the pace of the land rather than the transport schedule. These paths disperse attention, spread income, and reduce pressure on any single place. More importantly, they reframe travel as participation rather than consumption.
Walking also shapes how young people imagine their futures. The long daily trek to school is an education in endurance before any lesson is learned. The choice to walk toward a local university or toward a bus south carries different consequences, but both are understood through movement. Leaving is not abstract. It is measured in steps away from home. Staying is not inertia. It is a commitment renewed daily.
For Shamshad Hussain, walking remains the throughline. His work moves between classrooms, villages, and trails, translating inherited knowledge into contemporary governance. He understands that paths, once opened, shape behaviour. A trail can sustain a village or overwhelm it. A road can connect or extract. The difference lies not in infrastructure, but in who decides how it is used.
The high plateau of Deosai National Park offers the clearest lesson. Its openness invites movement, yet its survival depends on restraint. For centuries, it was protected not by fences or regulations, but by rhythm: seasonal absence, negotiated access, and shared understanding of limits. That logic still holds, even as conservation and tourism impose new frameworks upon it.
Baltistan now stands at a threshold familiar to mountain regions across the world. Roads will continue to improve. Flights will increase. Attention will grow. What remains undecided is whether movement here will continue to be governed by knowledge rooted in place, or by external logics of speed, volume, and return.
The paths above the Indus are still walked each day. They carry children to school, women to fields, men to work, and visitors into landscapes they do not yet understand. These lines on the land are not relics. They are living infrastructure, holding together past practice and future possibility.
If Baltistan manages what lies ahead with care, it will not be because it resisted change, but because it learned to walk with it, step by deliberate step, keeping sight of the ground beneath its feet.
