Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

The Other is both a prisoner of time (frozen in a certain stage of history) and an escapee (outside the time grid, timeless, outside history). The West is the present, the now, and it has the duty/right to bring progress to the Other. The entire range of timeframe available under chronopolitics can be illustrated through European representations of Tibet and Tibetans at the turn of the nineteenth century. The world is divided into chronological reserves, and when we enter Tibet, we reach a different age, as if the "tracts of past time persisted here and there which could be visited" (Spufford 1996, 212).

The most prevalent representation of Tibet was that it was medieval. Candler's impression about Tibet being medieval was "confirmed" as a result of the only incident in 1904 in Lhasa, when a Tibetan monk attacked the soldiers of the occupying British Indian force. He described how a lama "ran amuck outside the camp with the coat of mail and huge paladin's sword concealed beneath his cloak, a medieval figure who thrashed the air with his brand like a flail in sheer lust of blood. He was hanged medievally the next day within sight of Lhasa" (Candler 1905, 246, 265; emphases added).

The monk was hanged in full public view to act as a deterrent to any other Tibetan contemplating resistance. It is interesting that the British justified their own barbarity by blaming it on the medieval quality of their field of operation, by putting the responsibility on the victims. We see ambiguity and nostalgia as the twentieth century unfolds. Chapman muses in his account first published in 1940, "Tibet is in the position of European countries in the Middle Ages-in many ways a position which we are bound, nowadays, to envy" (Chapman 1992, 193).

Apart from medievalism, Tibet also was imagined as parallel to the ancient archaic world. Potala palace, for Landon, was "an image of that ancient and mysterious faith which has found its last and fullest expression beneath the golden canopies of Lhasa" (1905, 262). As in the writings of theosophists, precursors to New Age movements, Tibetan Buddhism began to be imagined as forming a direct connection with ancient Egyptian religion. The Western imagination of Tibet also flirted with the prehistoric and the primitive (see Bishop 1989, 156). Grenard was reminded of "American Redskins" (1904, 72), while Chapman wrote, "I sang an Eskimo folk-song and Norbhu [a Tibetan companion] said it was exactly like Tibetan music-a doubtful compliment, but interesting, seeing that the Eskimos and Tibetans are, ethnologically speaking, fairly closely related" (1992, 52). One significant emblem of Tibet's association with the prehistoric in the Western imagination is the figure of Yeti, made popular through works such as Tintin in Tibet.

Chronopolitics entails not only a fixing of cultures and groups of people in particular chronological reserve but also detemporal-izing, releasing the imagination from the confines of time and history. In Western representations, places such as the Potala palace of Lhasa represent the timelessness of Tibetan life: "To me the Potala represents the very essence of the Tibetan people. It has a certain untamed dignity in perfect harmony with the surrounding rugged country; a quality of stolid unchangeableness-it seems to say: 'Here I have been for hundreds of years, and here I intend to stay for ever'" (Chapman 1992, 7).

The idea of Tibet as located back in time and hence lower on the scale of evolution, as well as timeless, offered space for two mutually contradictory representations-Tibet as irrational and childlike and Tibet as repository of wisdom.

The Orient is the space for the "wisdom of the East" in some representations, while in others it is essentially irrational, emotional, uncivilized, childlike. Infantilization is a crucial representational strategy through which the Other is rendered incapable of making decisions for itself. Not surprisingly, Rudyard Kipling, exhorting Americans to take up their "responsibility" of civilizing the Philippines, wrote in "The White Man's Burden" (1899): "Your new-caught, sullen peoples, Half-devil and half-child" (in San Juan 2000, 99; emphasis added). As Doty points out, complementary to the childlike attributes attached to the Filipinos in the American counter-insurgency discourses were ineptitude and inefficiency (1993, 313). Infantilization justifies guardianship, patronage by the adult, more enlightened, rational West. Tibetans would prosper "under British auspices and assistance" (Sandberg 1904, 14)-such sentiments were rife during the time of the British invasion.

During lengthy negotiations preceding and accompanying the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-4, Tibetans were commonly compared to obstinate, illogical children. Younghusband found them "very much like big children" (Uncovered Editions 1999, 105, 148). While discussing the Tibetan attitude during the pre-Lhasa negotiations, Fleming observed in 1904 that "logic was a concept wholly alien to the Tibetan mind." The Tibetans' "power of reasoning did not even extend to that of a child"; they did not evade issues but simply declined to recognize their existence (1961, 221). Landon qualified this by saying that Tibetans had their own sense of morality in that they were industrious and capable of "extraordinary physical activity" though "it is true that this activity finds its vent rather in the muscles of the legs than in those of the fingers, but this is only to be expected" (1905, 45; emphasis added).

A good illustration of the effectiveness of infantilization in clearing the conscience of European imperialists as aggressors, as perpetrators of violence, comes from the massacre of Tibetans at Guru. Younghusband found "Tibetans huddled together like a flock of sheep" (Younghusband 1910, 177) and later put the blame on the Lhasa priest: "Ignorant and arrogant, this priest herded the superstitious peasantry to destruction" (178-79). The imagery of Tibetans as children or as dumb animals (sheep) allowed the British to visualize that had it not been for some "selfish" elite (priests in the case of Tibetans), ordinary people would have welcomed European dominance. [25]

The Orient is not only a place where the mental development of people is arrested at the level of a child; it is also a place of sages, an old place. As Zizek writes, "What characterizes the European civilization is… its ex-centered character-the notion that the ultimate pillar of Wisdom, the secret agalma, the spiritual treasure, the lost object- cause of desire, which we in the West long ago betrayed, could be recuperated out there, in the forbidden exotic place" (2001, 67-68; emphasis in original).

Association of the East with wisdom and spirituality, through the technique that may be called gerontification, is well exemplified in the case of Tibet. It is often the place, not the people, that is rendered wise on account of its age. Though Madame Blavatsky (1892) and Kipling (through his lama figure in Kim) were instrumental in bringing together the idea of Tibet with the search for wisdom and spirituality, it is in the twentieth century that this association gathered a momentum of its own. After living the life of Tibetan mystic for a few years, David-Neel felt that the natural edifices like mountains and valleys in the Himalayan region conveyed a mysterious message to her and wrote in her account, originally published in 1921: "What I heard was the thousand-year old echo of thoughts which are re-thought over and over again in the East, and which, nowadays, appear to have fixed their stronghold in the majestic heights of Thibet" (1991, 24). Describing his escape from the Spanish prison camp to Tibet, Riencourt equated it "as an escape from the inferno of wars and concentration camps, searching for this forbidden land of mystery, the only place of earth where wisdom and happiness seemed to be a reality" (1950, 4). Many well-intentioned liberals in the West today are likely to agree with Thurman's extolling of the virtues of Tibet as a uniquely spiritual civilization: