Mobile pastoralism is sustainable economic strategies to utilize the available natural resources by several communities around the world. In the Himalayan region of India it is the primary occupation of Gujjar communities of Jammu and Kashmir state, whose origin is traced to the Inner Asia region. Due to certain pull and push factors a section of these people migrated through Iran, Afghanistan, Central Asia and enter the plains of the Indus valley in India. Initially they occupied Rajasthan and Gujarat states and then migrated to the Himalayan states including Jammu and Kashmir, where they now constitute about 12 percent of the total population. They occupied the mountains, forests and pastures in the region and continued the pastoralism while adopting transhumace as strategy to utilize the seasonally available pastures of summer and winter in the Kashmir and Jammu regions respectively.
Since the Kashmir region has remained a disputed territory, it has suffered a continuous crisis, conflict, and violence over the past seven decades hammering socioeconomic development of the region, impacting the whole Kashmir society including the pastoral communities very badly. Over the past few decades, the Government of Jammu and Kashmir has introduced several development initiatives in which tourism is emerging as the key economic sector in the region. Tourism is expanding on large scale utilization of natural resources like forests, mountains, and alpine pastures, which are the grazing grounds of pastoral communities for their livestock. Given this pastoralism and ecotourism, contestations and negotiations have emerged as potential fields of research. In this regard, in this paper I will present certain insights from my fieldwork carried out for Doctoral thesis on how ecotourism/ and pastoralism interact and how ecotourism, as an external force, influences the cultural ecology of the pastoral communities and brings socioeconomic change among them.
