Everyday Lives of Tibetan Women in Ladakh: Religious Labour and Preserving a Civilisation in Exile

• Tibetan women in Ladakh sustain Buddhism not only through formal religious practice but through everyday acts of caregiving, prayer, storytelling, and cultural transmission within families and communities.
• In the Tibetan settlement of Sonamling, women’s religious labour preserves language, traditions, and collective memory, enabling Tibetan identity to endure across generations despite decades of exile.
• By recognising women’s often invisible contributions, the article argues that preserving Tibetan civilisation in exile depends as much on domestic and community leadership as on monasteries or political institutions.

On a busy street in Leh, Sonam Dolma has spent nearly four decades behind the same shop counter. Customers know her as a familiar face in the neighbourhood, someone who weighs dry fruits, counts change on a calculator, and greets regulars with an ease born of repetition. There is little about the shop that immediately signals an extraordinary life. Yet every item on its shelves bears witness to a journey that began far from Ladakh.

In 1988, Dolma fled Tibet, leaving behind the only home she had known. Like thousands of Tibetans before and after her, she crossed the Himalayas in search of safety, eventually arriving in India with no certainty about what the future would hold. She built a livelihood from the ground up in Leh, where she has run her small business for thirty-nine years. 

Asked what Ladakh has given her after all these years, her answer is modest, peace. This answer shows a woman who has learned to make a life in a place that became home without ever replacing the homeland she left behind.

A Faith Beyond the Monasteries

Discussions of Tibetan Buddhism often travel familiar paths. They lead us to monasteries perched on mountain ridges, to eminent lamas whose teachings reach audiences across the world, or to the unresolved political question of Tibet itself. These stories matter, but they also risk overlooking another landscape of religious life, one located not inside monastery walls but within kitchens, family homes, neighbourhood associations, schools, and community gatherings.

Across the Tibetan settlement of Sonamling on the outskirts of Leh, women begin each day in ways that rarely attract public attention. Butter lamps are lit before family shrines. Children leave for school after receiving blessings from elders. Community halls prepare for religious gatherings, cultural programmes, or meetings organised by women’s associations. These acts sustain a community that has lived in exile for more than six decades.

Here, faith is woven into the routines of everyday existence, and women stand at its centre.

I’m  writing this article to show how Tibetan women in Ladakh are not merely preserving religious traditions inherited from the past. They are actively remaking faith as a practice of making a home in exile. Through prayer, caregiving, storytelling, mourning rituals, language, and community leadership, they transform Buddhism into a living archive that carries memory across generations. Their work reveals that exile is not sustained by political aspiration alone. It is sustained through the ordinary labour of women who refuse to let displacement become religious and cultural disappearance.

Building Faith and Communities in Exile

Exile, by its very nature, is often imagined as a condition of impermanence, a life suspended between departure and return. Yet for most Tibetans in Ladakh, exile has become a multi-generational reality. More than six decades after the first refugees arrived in India, Sonamling, on the southeastern edge of Leh, is a place where families celebrate births, mourn deaths, educate their children, build businesses, and imagine futures. The settlement has become a home, even as the idea of Tibet continues to occupy an irreplaceable place in the collective imagination.

Rather than erasing memories of Tibet, life in Ladakh has required the community to recreate fragments of it. During Losar, the Tibetan New Year, homes and community spaces become sites of collective celebration, where ritual, food, music, and language reaffirm bonds that geography alone cannot sustain.

In exile, faith does more than connect believers to the sacred. It connects generations to one another and to a homeland that survives as much in memory as in territory.

The women of Sonamling occupy a central place within this work of continuity. While monasteries remain important centres of religious learning and spiritual authority, much of Buddhism’s daily life unfolds within the home. Women prepare ritual offerings such as Tormas and Khapse, the fried biscuits, organise family observances, host communal prayers, and ensure that children learn the practices that give rhythm and meaning to community life. For young girls, it adds a memory of their homeland and a culture to carry forward. Their labour is seldom described in religious or political terms, yet without it many traditions would struggle to survive beyond a single generation.

This became increasingly evident through community initiatives led by Tibetan women themselves. The Regional Tibetan Women’s Association in Ladakh has spent decades fostering cultural preservation, social welfare, and civic engagement, demonstrating that women’s leadership extends well beyond the domestic sphere. The association has expanded the meaning of religious service beyond ritual observance. More recently, workshops on gender equality and gender-based violence organised in Sonamling by the Central Tibetan Administration have reflected another important reality: Tibetan women are not only safeguarding inherited traditions but also reshaping community life in response to contemporary challenges. Faith, in this context, is not a static inheritance. It is lived, debated, adapted, and carried forward by women who understand that preserving a community also means allowing it to evolve. 

Women’s Religious Labour and Preserving a Civilisation in Exile

Scholars of lived religion have long argued that faith cannot be understood solely through doctrine or formal institutions. Religion is equally expressed in the ordinary habits of everyday life.

In Sonamling, it is often women who perform this work.

Before children leave for school, mothers and grandmothers gather them before household shrines. Butter lamps are lit, bowls of water are carefully arranged as offerings, and prayers are recited with a familiarity acquired through repetition rather than formal instruction. These rituals occupy only a few moments of the morning, yet they teach children that faith is not reserved for exceptional occasions. It accompanies ordinary life. 

None of these tasks appear in official accounts of religious authority, yet they make collective worship possible. Without this largely invisible labour, the continuity of religious life would be difficult to sustain.

To recognise these forms of labour as religious authority requires widening our understanding of what authority itself means. It need not rest exclusively in institutional office or clerical status. 

Authority can also emerge through the patient work of nurturing others, transmitting ethical values, preserving cultural memory, and creating spaces where communities continue to flourish despite displacement. 

In Sonamling, women exercise this authority not through formal titles but through everyday practices that sustain both Buddhism and Tibetan identity. Their contribution is often overlooked precisely because it appears ordinary. Yet there is nothing ordinary about preserving a civilisation in exile. The future of Tibetan Buddhism in Ladakh depends as much upon these women as it does upon the monasteries that have long captured the world’s attention.