Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

In this chapter, I expand my analysis of the poetics of Exotica Tibet by focusing on a selection of cultural sites most commonly associated with Tibet during the twentieth century. I examine the sites in the context of images they portray.

An archive of preexisting images and imaginaries as well as the archiving of new ones were central to the way initial encounters between the Westerners and Tibet were made sense of. "Archive" is commonly understood as a place or collection containing records, documents, photographs, film, or other materials of historical interest. But "archive" can also be taken to refer to a repository of stored memories or information, often outside the purview of statist discourses. As Bradley writes, the "archive is the repository of memories: individual and collective, official and unofficial, licit and illicit, legitimating and subversive" (1999, 108). These memories and information can be based on "real" encounters or on fictional ones.

In situations where the culture was relatively unknown-like the Tibetan-hearsay, legends, and fantasies performed an ever more important archival function. Representers of Tibet, especially before the twentieth century, drew upon these archives, supplementing the rare missionary and travelers' accounts. The legendary traveler Marco Polo refers to "Tebet" in the late thirteenth century. Apart from other things (such as the cannibalizing of human beings put to death by the authorities, "canes of immense size and girth," natives as idolators and "out- and-out bad"), Marco Polo fetishizes Asian promiscuity. He highlights a marriage custom where "no man would ever on any account take a virgin to wife" for "a woman is worthless unless she has had knowledge of many men," and therefore Tibetans offer their women to travelers to "lie with them" and thus make them fit for marriage (but once marriage takes place, it is a "grave offence for any man to touch another's wife"). He jokes: "Obviously the country is a fine one to visit for a lad from sixteen to twenty-four" (1958, 79-80, 142, 144, 142-43). A similar, though less fantastical, characterization of Tibet as the strange, tantalizing, available East inviting (by forbidding) Western men persisted during the colonial era. During most of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Tibet was off-limits for the Europeans. This led to a "race for Lhasa," [28]competition among explorers and adventurers to be the first into the "Forbidden City." The Queen, The Lady's Newspaper on 12 December 1903 published a brief account of a visit to the "Forbidden Lands" by "a Lady" (just before an article on "fashionable marriages"). When stopped by monks from entering a religious establishment, she fumed: "It was very tantalising and not a little galling to the independent Briton to be stopped in the fair way by a few dirty old lamas" (in IOR: MSS EUR/F197/523).

Richardson argued that the early allusions of Westerners reveal little more than that the Tibetans had a reputation in neighboring countries for "strange ways and rare magical powers" (1962, 61). This reputation persisted during the twentieth century as the production of knowledge about Tibet continued to be inspired by Tibetophilia, fascination with religious and social practices of Tibetans, the spread of Buddhism in the West, countercultural movements in the West, and so on. The fantastic has always been a part of image/knowledge about Tibet, and works have drawn upon an archive of preexisting representations (see Bishop 1989; Klieger 1997; Lopez 1998). The fact that Tibet was never colonized by Europeans facilitated creation of a utopian archive best evident in James Hilton's novel Lost Horizon (1933).

Hilton's Lost Horizon, which introduced the term "Shangri-la," was first published in 1933 and made into a film by Frank Capra in 1937. "Shangri" has no meaning in Tibetan; "la" means "mountain pass." The name is apparently inspired by "Shambhala," a mythical Buddhist kingdom in the Himalayas according to Tibetan legend (see Allen 1999; Bernbaum 2001; LePage 1996; Trungpa 1995). [29] The main character in the novel is a British Indian official, Robert Conway, who, along with the younger official Charles Mallinson, a missionary, Miss Roberta Brinklow, and an American businessman, Henry Barnard, is hijacked and taken to an unknown mountainous region somewhere in Tibet. They are transported to a hidden valley of the blue moon. The valley has a lamasery named Shangri-la that combines the best of Western technology with Eastern luxury. The head priest, who is several hundred years old, wants Conway to take over his position. Conway is told that the valley affords a very long life to selected people and the main purpose of the establishment is to act as a sanctuary when the outside world is in chaos. Conway falls in love with a quiet Chinese woman, Lo-Tsen, not knowing that she and Mallinson are becoming lovers. While Barnard and Miss Brinklow agree to stay in the valley (the former to help in gold mining and the latter to convert Tibetans to Christianity), the impatient Mallinson persuades Conway to accompany him and Lo- Tsen to safety outside the valley. Conway departs in despair, all his hope lost as he realizes that he is forever a wanderer between two worlds: "he was doomed, like millions, to flee from wisdom and be a hero" (Hilton 1933, 264).

Though Hilton's Shangri-la has come to be associated with Tibet, in the book itself (unlike a later movie adaptation), apart from its probable geographical location, there is little that is Tibetan about the place. According to Conway, the atmosphere is Chinese, rather than specifically Tibetan (Hilton 1967, 52). Tibetans are the inhabitants of the lower valley who sing in "lilting barbaric tunes" (46), work in the fields, provide entertainment, and live a subaltern life. The inhabitants of the valley are a blend of Chinese and Tibetan and are cleaner and handsomer than the average of either race (Hilton 1933, 129). The high lama is from Luxembourg and most inhabitants of the lamasery are Europeans. In order to keep the lamasery populated, outsiders have been brought in. Father Perrault, the High Lama, explains that they once had a Japanese who was not a fine acquisition; "Tibetans are much less sensitive than outside races and die sooner, even though they are charming"; Chinese are slightly better; the "best subjects, undoubtedly, are the Nordic and Latin races of Europe" (1967, 110).

Hilton's Shangri-la has central heating and combines the mechanics of Western hygiene with much else that is "Eastern" and "traditional." For instance, after his arrival Conway enjoys a bath in a porcelain tub from Ohio, while a native attends to him in a Chinese fashion (1967, 51). Shangri-la is always tranquil yet always a hive of "unpursuing occupations"; the lamas lived "as if indeed they had time on their hands, but time that was scarcely a featherweight" (1967, 139). Inhabitants of the lamasery indulge in various intellectual pursuits-writing, doing pure mathematics, coordinating Gibbon and Spengler into a vast thesis on the history of European civilization, formulating new theories on Wuthering Heights, and so on. This is in line with the principal rationale for the existence of Shangri-la: to act as a sanctuary, to be a "war refuge" for preserving the best of modern civilizations (1933, 191-92).

Thus, Lost Horizon creates a utopia placed somewhere in Tibet. The utopia is an archive that seeks to preserve the best of the world from the world itself. As the High Lama says to Conway in the film version: "Once the world has spent itself, we shall be here with their books, their music, their way of life" (1937). Shangri-la for Hilton is a secret "archive state" hidden somewhere in the mountains of Central Asia. The High Lama here has a strategic conception of a utopian archive (with the best of Western and Eastern worlds), a fortress as well as a museum, a survivalist archive (Richards 1992, 124-25).