Dibyesh Anand - Geopolitical Exotica

[52]Formally known as the "Agreement of the Central People's Government and the Local Government of Tibet on Measures for the Peaceful Liberation of Tibet," it was signed in Beijing on 23 May 1951.

[53]Even though religion and politics did not exist as separate categories, a genre of open political and social criticism existed in the form of "street songs" (see Goldstein 1982).

[54]Knaus further points out that the Americans operated with a frontier mentality, assuming the Tibetan situation to be the theatrical scene of a "frontier drama with the good guys trying to get rid of bad guys" (1999, 61). According to him, "The CIA men viewed their Tibetan pupils as Oriental versions of self-reliant, straight-shooting American frontiersmen who were under attack and seeking only the means to fight for their own way of life" (216). Ironically, this sentiment ignored that while in the American case frontiersmen were the invaders, in the Tibetan case the "Oriental frontiersmen" were the ones who suffered from Chinese invasion.

[55]This approach is exemplified in Ekvall's (i960) pioneering work in which he identified five common cultural traits through which Tibetans define themselves: religion, folkways, language, race (human lineage), and land.

[56]While most commentators consider Tibetans to be victims of forces of modernization and Chinese oppression, scholars like Lopez (1998) consider them victims of the Western perception of Tibetans as inherently religious, peaceful, and spiritual. In contrast, this chapter recognizes the need to consider Tibetans as agents in their own right. Interestingly, Neilson even argues that the Shangri-la myth itself is significant for facilitating "a critical utopianism that allows a reassessment of the Tibetan question outside the politics of territory" (2000, 95).

[57]Anderson's categorization of nations as imagined communities (1983) does not fully convey the sense of continuous imagination that goes into the making and existence of a nation, so I prefer to use "imagining." In the next chapter, I retheorize this as "re-imag(in)ing community."

[58]None of the prominent experts on nationalism speaks about Tibet, except Hobsbawm, who mentions Tibet only in passing as a possible exception to his theory: "It is difficult to judge how far purely divine authority may have nation-making possibilities. The question must be left to the experts in the history of Mongols and Tibetans" (1990, 72).

[59]Their role may be seen as that of the disgruntled traditional intelligentsia described by Gellner (1983, 14).

[60]Though some observers such as Grunfeld are of the opinion that "independence is an abstract notion which most Tibetans do not seem to think about very much" (quoted in Sperling 2004), others have provided a convincing rebuttal of such views (see Schwartz 1996; see also Barnett and Akiner i996).

[61]Tibetans have been successful in avoiding assimilation with the host society by following a policy of limited acculturation. In Nepal and in parts of north India, Tibetans contribute substantially to the tourism industry, especially in the regions in which they live. Elsewhere, they concentrate more on specialized craft industries (see Methfessel 1996). Rather than competing with local Indians or Nepalese over scarce resources, they have established new enterprises, which also benefit locals with their spill-over effects. This does not mean that the relationship between refugees and locals is totally harmonious. As 1999 riots against Tibetans in Manali (India) show, there are potential trouble spots that need to be addressed by community leaders as well as the Indian establishment. Since isolation is hardly a viable choice for most migrant communities (and individuals) when faced with the problems of adjusting in the host society, the Tibetan establishment opted for a policy of limited acculturation as opposed to assimilation. While influences of popular Indian cultures including Bollywood are marked among the lay Tibetans, a sense of separate and distinct identity is prevalent (see Diehl 2002). Both in rhetoric as well as in practice, the Tibetan refugee community has largely avoided the assimilative process of sanskritisation that affects most minority groups in India.

[62]A particular space-time projection of "homeland" is another constitutive factor in fostering Tibetan identity in the diaspora. Diasporic longing for the homeland is reflected in material as well as artistic production among exile communities. Images of Tibet, such as the Potala Palace, are favorite motifs. This nostalgia for space is complemented by nostalgia for time. It is not contemporary Tibet but pre-1959 Tibet, frozen in time, that defines the longing. As Harris points out, many Tibetan refugee craftspeople and artists are involved in "a nostalgic recreation of temps perdus; an inevitable process of conscious archaism" (1993, 112; see also Ahmed 2006). In the diaspora, the role of memory is central to imagining Tibet as a nation, since re-creating and preserving the memories of Tibet is crucial for maintaining the vision of "Free Tibet" as a common cause. These memories also provide the tools of expression, the language and the idioms of Tibetan unity and identity.

[63]"The Tibet cause has attracted an exceptionally diverse group of people, some of whom see their activities on behalf of the cause as connected with Buddhist belief and practice, while others are concerned with human rights, opposing communism, and a range of other motivations" (Powers 2000, 3). Among this range of other motivations, New Age Orientalism is prominent. Though often New Age and Western Buddhism are conflated, mostly by their critics, they are quite distinct. Even when criticizing the Western states for betraying Tibet, some supporters adopt a haughty view of a superior Western way of being. For example, Berkin in his book "about a lost state" mentions British imperial policy and weak and market-hungry Western states as part of the cause, but then talks about how the question of Tibet is also about "a clash of values; between western democracy and oriental absolutism" (2000, xv).

[64]Klieger further argues that diasporic Tibetan identity formation is a result of ideological convergence between the Western Shangri-la image and the self- perception of Tibetans: "[a] collision has occurred between the Occidental paradigm of an Eastern paradise, Shangri-La, and an indigenous utopia which constructs a distanced, sacred Tibetan homeland upon the established Shambhala, Mt. Meru, Mt. Potala and divine rule mythology" (1997, 61).

[65]Though the odds are stacked against Tibetans in the real world, in the virtual world the situation is radically different. An overwhelming number of Web sites on Tibet are pro-Tibetan. I searched for "Tibet" on 15 February 2001 using Google.com/. Out of the first one hundred links, only three were not connected to the Tibet movement. A similar search on 6 August 2006 yielded thirty-eight out of the first fifty links that were directly connected with the Tibet movement (the rest were either travel-related sites or pro-China sites). To a certain extent, Tibet Online, which claims to serve as a virtual community space for the Tibet movement, succeeds in its aim of leveling the playing field by leveraging the Internet's ability to harness grassroots support for Tibet's survival (About Tibet Online 2006).

[66]This is not to deny that elements of modern nationalism had started to emerge inside Tibet as early as 1913 when the thirteenth Dalai Lama's proclamation upon his return from exile showed a clear "awareness of Tibet as a distinct country, defined by its culture and history" (Dreyfus 2002, 40). Further, popular movements against the Chinese during the 1950s, including the "Four Rivers, Six Ranges" (chu bzhi gang drug), asserted distinct nationalism defined in opposition to Chinese occupation (see Shakya 1999).