Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

First, the space for a different reading is afforded by the word dharamshala itself. As pointed out earlier, the word indicates a temporary home and this temporariness has been a central motif in Tibetan diasporic identity discourses. Tibet, the original homeland, is foregrounded as the final destination in these discourses and it also permeates the material as well as the performative cultural expressions of the Tibetans in diaspora. While focusing on the starting and finishing stations, such a reading ignores the crucial element of the travel itself. Dharamshala is not only a temporary home but also a temporary stop on the way to somewhere else. It is a house offering temporary hospitality to travelers on their way. One does not travel from home to dharamshala to return back to the home. Travel is transformative and constitutive. Rather, dharamshala is a temporary shelter to facilitate travel from one place to some other new place. If instead of focusing solely on the theme of return, we look at the process and experience of journey itself, we may be better placed to appreciate the conundrum of Tibetan identity politics.

As Clifford points out in a different context, "Practices of displacement might emerge as constitutive of cultural meanings rather than as their simple transfer or extension" (1997, 3). Instead of concentrating solely on the essence, the roots of Tibetan identity, we should look at the processes that constitute the routes traveled, including the creation of a pan-Tibetan exilic identity. Adoption of such a view allows us to appreciate the ambiguities involved in the project of cultural preservation as well as the changes that come about in the life of a community of people. While understanding the need to espouse one's cause in terms of an essential identity, [89]the contingency of such claims is not papered over-and herein lies the strength of the alternative theorization. Therefore, instead of framing an artificial opposition between the roots of culture and the routes of culture, we may look at them as complementary, for this false dichotomy is sustained only by the conventional view of culture as rooted in a particular place. If we look, on the other hand, at the roots as contingent foundations that are always already contested, we can begin to appreciate the complementarity.

Second, recognition of the contingent nature of identity does not delegitimize identity claims marshaled by Tibetans for their cause. It simply draws attention to the strategic nature of such claims. This position is possible if one adopts a discursive approach to identity that sees identification not as an artifact or an outcome but as a construction, as something always in process. Though not without its determinate conditions of existence, including the material and symbolic resources required to sustain it, identification is in the end conditional, inevitably lodged in contingency. "Identification is, then, a process of articulation, a suturing, an over-determination not a subsumption" (Hall 1996b, 3). We need to recognize that its popular usage notwithstanding, the concept does not signal a stable core of self, unfolding from beginning to end through all the vicissitudes of history without any substantial change (see Kaul 2007). On the contrary, we should accept that identities are always and already fragmented and fractured; they are never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic discourses, practices, and positions.

Butler's idea of performativity is helpful here. As she succinctly puts it, "Identity is performatively constituted by the very 'expressions' that are said to be its results" (1990, 25). [90]The production of the (gendered) subject is not a singular or deliberate "act," but rather the "reiterative and citational practice by which discourse produces the effects that it names" (Butler 1993, 2). Applying this idea to the Tibetan case, we may see Tibetan identity as constituted by particular processes and practices and not as some universal, timeless fixed thing. Tibetan nationalism is conjured up by the anticipation of an essential Tibetanness, and to be effective, it needs to be repeated again and again; it is a process, not a product. It is this "anticipation" of the essence of Tibet, an essential Tibetanness, that is constitutively linked up with Exotica Tibet and Tibetanness.

Rather than seeing the identity question as a matter of simple historical investigation, we can deal with it in terms of the deployment of resources of history, language, and culture in the process of becoming rather than being. The idea of symbolic geography encapsulates such a discursive approach since instead of considering the ideas of locality and community as naturally given, it focuses on social and political processes of place making in Dharamsala. A discursive approach does not deny acts of communal political activism. It only reveals it as contingent, as strategic rather than as something unambiguously natural. The Tibetan claims to "an essential identity, while understandably deployed to serve as foundational identity claims" (Venturino 1997, 108), must be seen as always already imaginary, reified, constructed, and teleological and problematic.

Third, connected to the issue of a discursive approach to identity questions is an explicit recognition of the constitutive role played by Exotica Tibet. Representations, especially Western ones, have had a significant impact on the symbolic geography of Dharamsala and Tibetan identity discourses. The desire to secure patronage from sympathetic outsiders, elicit support for the Tibetan political cause, and make a living through commercial processes-all these forces have contributed to a self-reflexive adoption of Western representations of Tibetans as a part of Tibetanness. Image has been translated into identity. The representation of Tibetans as inherently religious and spiritual has certainly contributed to the mushrooming of yoga classes, retreat centers, and meditation schools in Dharamsala. At the same time, we must keep in mind the fact that the Tibetan exiles are not unique in that Western representations have a major effect on identity practices. As Huber (2001) argues, recent reflexive notions of Tibetan culture and identity witnessed in exile should be understood as products of a complex transnational politics of identity within which populations such as the Tibetan exiles are increasingly representing themselves and being represented by others. One such identity discourse, which Huber (1997) highlights, is connected to environmentalism. The presence within Dharamsala of the Green Hotel and Green Cyber Cafe, Vegetarian Health Food, and the like may be understood as a conscious desire to appropriate this particular discourse as a part of identity formation. The symbolic geography of Little Lhasa questions the premise that Tibetans are innocent victims-"prisoners of Shangri-la." Instead, even while acknowledging the unequal power relations, one must recognize that the Tibetan exiles possess agency and subjectivity (Klieger 2002a, Klieger 2002b; Korom 1997a, 1997b). This "agency is always and only a political prerogative" and "the constituted character of the subject is the very precondition of its agency" (Butler 1992, 13, 12, 17; emphasis in original).

Fourth, an integral part of Dharamsala as well as Tibetan dia-sporic identity is the crucial role played by the personality as well as the figure of the Dalai Lama. His smiling face adorns almost every establishment in the town, including the shops owned by non-Tibetans. [91]More than anything else, it is his residence here that contributes to the transformation of Dharamsala into Little Lhasa. He has a central position as the symbol of Tibet among Tibetan refugees and in the international media. Within discourses of Tibetanness, the Dalai Lama is "neither wholly transcendent (and thereby out of this world) nor wholly immanent (enmeshed in temporalities like the rest of us), but an ambiguous symbol imbued with the qualities of both" (Nowak 1984, 30). The fourteenth Dalai Lama has come to acquire an unprecedented position. He combines the role of the supreme leader of the entire Tibetan Buddhist community with the role of the chief spokesperson of Buddhist modernism. He is as much a world spiritual leader as the undisputed leader of the Tibetan political cause (Lopez 1998, 181-207). This mix of uniqueness with universalism and of a national cause with transnationalism is also underlined within Dharamsala's symbolic geography.