From the Sublime to the Line of Control: Mountains, Aesthetic Modernity, and the Partition of Kashmir

Aazib Ahmad, University of Kashmir

This paper examines how mountains moved from marginal landscapes in European thought to central sites of aesthetic, spiritual, and geopolitical meaning by tracing a historical trajectory from the European Alps to the Himalayan region of Kashmir. The paper situates the eighteenth and nineteenth-century revaluation of mountains within the historical development of what Marjorie Hope Nicolson calls the “aesthetics of the infinite.” As ideas of infinity shifted from theological conceptions of God to the cosmos and eventually to terrestrial landscapes, mountains emerged as the most powerful embodiment of the sublime. Romantic aesthetics, scientific exploration, and changing artistic sensibilities embraced asymmetry and ruggedness transforming Alps into privileged sites of transcendence and discovery. However, when European explorers turned toward the Himalayas in the nineteenth century—particularly after the “Golden Age of Alpinism”—they encountered landscapes already embedded within deeply rooted cultural and religious traditions. Unlike the Alps, the Himalayas had for millennia been understood in South Asia as sacred geographies associated with divine presence and everyday cultural life. European aesthetic fascination with Himalayan landscapes therefore intersected with preexisting cosmologies that understood mountains not as newly discovered sublime spaces but as long-standing spiritual environments. The paper argues that these layered meanings were fundamentally transformed in the twentieth century when the partition of Jammu and Kashmir in 1947 converted Himalayan landscapes into militarized borderlands. The Line of Control now cuts through mountainous terrain historically inhabited and traversed by local communities. Mountains that once symbolized transcendence, sacredness, and exploration thus became sites of geopolitical division and violence. By placing the Romantic rediscovery of mountains alongside the long-standing sacred geographies of the Himalayas and the later militarization of these landscapes in Kashmir, the paper demonstrates that the modern European “discovery” of mountains was neither universal nor purely aesthetic but historically dependent on colonial encounters and subsequent geopolitical transformations.

See extended abstract

 Presented in Session 197. Mapping Perceptions of Space