Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

[18]See Enloe 2000; Jabri and O'Gorman 1999; Parpart and Zalewski 1998; Peterson and Runyan 1999; Pettman 1996; Steans 1998; Sylvester 2002; Tickner 1992.

[19]Feminists have taken the lead over others in their expositions on negotiating between essentialisms and antiessentialisms. One recalls here

Butler's "contingent foundations" (1992), Ferguson's "mobile subjectivities" (1993), and Fuss's strategy of "deploying essentialism" (1989).

[20]Here one may point out Said's method of contrapuntal reading, which involves a way of reading texts (of literature) so as to reveal their deep implication in dominant systems (imperialism and colonial process). Examples are found in Said 1993.

[21]This is linked to the frequent criticism of poststructuralism that it kills off the subject of knowledge and leaves no room for agency. As Spivak clarifies, the poststructuralists "situate subjecting rather than kill the subject or pronounce it dead" (1999, 322). It recognizes that "I am not outside the language that structures me, but neither am I determined by the language that makes this 'I' possible" (Butler 1999, xxiv).

[22]Interestingly, since 2002 British supermarkets have sold a "Tibet" line of haircare products (with names such as "Rebirth" and "Balance"), promising "beauty through balance" (http://www.tibetbeauty.com). Indeed, Tibet has come a long way from being a "country of the great unwashed."

[23]For Tibetophiles such as Heinrich Hensoldt and Madame Helena Blavatsky (theosophists), the veil was an important metaphor too. But for them it was the Tibetans, especially the Dalai Lama, who lifted the veil, the other veil, the mystical veil of Isis (Bishop 1989, 182).

[24]Sociologically, most of the European travelers to Tibet were men operating with specific notions of masculinity. British officials explicitly discouraged female travelers, who were seen as a threat to British prestige. Basil Gould, the political agent in Sikkim and later head of the 1936 Lhasa mission, decreed that women were not permitted to travel in Tibet without a male escort (McKay 1997, 172-73).

[25]Daily Mail, 12 September 1904, gave the following description of the signing of the Lhasa Convention at the culmination of the Young-husband mission: ''The monks wandered about the hall, smiling and laughing in the faces of the British officers and eating nuts" (in IOR: MSS EUR/ F197/523). It is not too far-fetched to see the description of the monks as similar to that of monkeys.

[26]Representations also differed slightly among Western states. For instance, in the first half of the twentieth century (except during the Young-husband mission in 1903-4), American perceptions of Tibet tended to be less positive than the British representations of Tibet (for American popular perceptions of Tibet before the Second World War, see Miller 1988).

[27]One aspect of the story of Tibet as a blank space is the denial of any quintessential Tibetan civilization, especially before the twentieth century. Many commentators opined that what passes as "Tibetan" is merely a mix of "great" neighboring civilizations (Chinese and Indian). Rockhill is typical: "Present advanced degree of civilization is entirely borrowed from China, India, and possibly Turkestan, and Tibet has only contributed the simple arts of the tent-dwelling herdsmen" (1895, 673).

[28]Who would count as competitors in this race was of course to be decided by the Europeans. Native explorers and spies (known as pundits) like Sarat Chandra Das who managed to reach Lhasa and made possible the geographical mapping of Tibet (see Das 1902; Waller 1990; Rawat 1973) were ineligible, even though they too had to travel in disguise. Observers cited multiple possible reasons: native surveyors "become so engrossed with the details of their work that they forget to use their eyes and make those general observations on the people and the scenery about them which is a most important objective of their journeying" (Holdich 1906, 233); or "though very intelligent, [they] had no special qualifications for observing those facts of natural science which would be observed by Englishmen" (Delmar Morgan in Walker 1885, 25); or "suffering from the limitations of disguise and the need to move principally among the lower orders of society, [they] produced more valuable reports on topography and communications than on social, economic, and political conditions in Tibet" (Richardson 1962, 74); or "it was easier for the Asiatics and therefore the race was among the Europeans" (Hopkirk 1983, 157). This comes as no surprise because in the imperialist imagination, exploration was a possession of "civilised man." In his 1963 biography of Richard Francis Burton, Farwell begins by stating that ''the explorer is always a civilized man; exploration is an advanced intellectual concept" and therefore exploration is "a concept unknown to primitive peoples, and one that remains incomprehensible to women" (see Kabbani 1986, 86).

[29]Today "Shangri-la" is the name of a chain of resort hotels. Shangri-La hotels advertise that although mythical in origin, their name epitomizes "the serenity and highly personalised service" for which it is renowned (Shangri-La Media Centre 2001).

[30]Interestingly, while the Chinese state has always insisted that "Old Tibet" was feudal and oppressive, in recent times there have been moves by some Tibetan regions to compete to be represented as Shangri-la for tourism. On the use of the Shangri-la myth for ethnic tourism, see Hillman 2003; Kolas 2004.

[31]An example of this can be seen in Lonely Planet's (2002) introduction to Tibet: "Locked away in its Himalayan fortress, Tibet has long exercised a unique hold on the imagination of the West: 'Shangri-La,' 'the Land of Snows,' 'the Rooftop of the World,' Tibet is mysterious in a way that few other places are. Tibet's strategic importance, straddling the Himalayas between China and the Indian subcontinent, made it irresistible to China who invaded in 1950." No mention is made of the British imperial invasion to "open" Tibet.

[32]Within the Orientalist frame of thinking, expertise in cultures of the Other lies with the imperialists, not the natives of the culture. Younghusband's mission had "scientific" staff consisting of surveyors, naturalists, geologists, anthropologists (Younghusband in Hayden 1927, vii); their military and scientific roles overlapped. For instance, Waddell was an authority on Tibetan Buddhism, a medical officer, as well as a collector of texts, plants, and birds. Waddell, along with Captain Walton, is credited with "discovering" the Lhasa poppy (see Fletcher 1975, xxi). Similarly, the blue poppy's scientific name is Meconopsis baileyi, after its "discoverer," Lieutenant Colonel F. M. Bailey; the wild sheep argali and Tibet antelope chiru are Ovis ammon hodgsoni and Pantholops hodgsoni after Brian Hodgson, the British resident at the Nepalese court. This practice reflects the view of the Orient as a passive object to be discovered and appropriated by the West. Tibetans (and maybe many non -Tibetans too) were of course familiar with the poppy. But it required a Western man to name it, taxonomize it in a "universal" scheme of things, and thus become its discoverer. Interestingly, in the movie The Face of Fu Manchu (1965), the eponymous villain learns how to distill a vicious poison from the "Black Hill poppy" of Tibet thanks to the papers of the Younghusband expedition, where the complete secret of the plant is meticulously laid down. In some instances scientific names of Tibetan flora and fauna are hybrids, such as Ovis ammon dalailamae przevalskii (1888) (named after the Dalai Lama and the Russian explorer Nikolai Przhevalsky) for one variant of argali, the wild sheep.

[33]In fact, after his Lhasa expedition Younghusband involved himself in nonconventional mystical activities. In an obituary for Younghusband, the New York Times merged the man who had led the British invasion with the Hollywood myth: "If as James Hilton strongly suggests in Lost Horizon, Shangri-La is somewhere in Tibet rather than merely somewhere- anywhere… then Sir Francis Younghusband probably came closer than anyone else to being Robert Conway" (French 1995, 202).