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.
Infantilization – Gerontification
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:
While Western and Tibetan personalities share the complex of modernity of consciousness, they are diametrically opposed in outlook, one focused on matter and the other on mind… While the American national purpose is ever greater material productivity, the Tibetan national purpose is ever greater spiritual productivity. (1998, 10-11)
Self-Affirmation -Self-Criticism
The various strategies identified so far have been characterized by a sense of affirmation: affirmation of narcissism in the name of moral superiority. Landon, in the aftermath of the massacre of Tibetan at Guru during the British Tibet mission of 1903-4, said,
The resistance of the Tibetans had been blown away before us like leaves in autumn, and there was not a man in the country who did not realise that our care of the wounded afterwards, was as thorough as the punishment we inflicted at the moment. Trade and credit are proverbially plants of slow growth, and slower in the East than anywhere else. (in Sharma and Sharma 1996, 35)
The Orient is seen by the Europeans as "a pretext for self-dramatisation and differentness," a "malleable theatrical space in which can be played out the egocentric fantasies" thus affording "endless material for the imagination, and endless potential for the Occidental self" (Kabbani 1986, 11). Authority and control were justified by affirming inherently racist and self-serving ideas like the "white man's burden" and "manifest destiny" in the colonial period. Representation of the Other as irrational, immoral, inefficient, and duplicitous affirms self-representation as rational, moral, efficient, and honest. The sense of affirmation can be seen not only in overtly aggressive imperialist writings but also in those with more humanitarian and liberal content. The significance of essentialist and stereotypical representations of the Other lay not in the intentions of the representer but in the effects on the represented. In their own different ways, aggressive as well as liberal imperialist impulses established and institutionalized control through mobilization of similar yet contradictory representations, production of knowledge, bureaucratic modes of governance, and use of coercive force.
Though affirmation of the Western Self was the ultimate force behind most representations, some also used specific representations to question the Self. That is, representations of the non-Western Other have sometimes been deployed in the service of self-criticism. This can be seen in the case of Western representations of Tibet, especially after the turn of the nineteenth century. "I delightedly forgot Western lands, that I belonged to them, and that they would probably take me again in the clutches of their sorrowful civilization," said David-Neel in 1921 (1991, 61). However, the use of the Other to offer criticism of the Self is not necessarily emancipatory for the represented Other. The differing and even noble intentions of some of those who practiced positive stereotyping of the Other do not preclude the fact that their impact on the exoticized represented was often predictably the same-a prelude to control, dominance, and exploitation. They function in a variety of imperial contexts as a mechanism of aesthetic substitution that "replaces the impress of power with the blandishments of curiosity" (Said 1993, 159). Thus, Tibet
remains a service society for the West, offering resources by which the West can criticize itself, question its values. As Harrer reminds us, Tibetans have "a heritage superior to ours… [they] might bring succour to the pessimism of the West" (1985, 52). More recently, the actor Richard Gere, known for his advocacy of the cause of Tibetans, lamented: "I would say that the West is very young, it's very corrupt. We're not very wise. And I think we're hopeful that there is a place that is ancient and wise and open and filled with light" (Frontline 1998b).
CONCLUSION
Several strategies of representing the West's Other during the period of European imperialism remain integral to Western representations of the Other even in this postcolonial world, sometimes in more subtle ways. Blatant racism is couched in more acceptable liberal marketable terms. An approach that sees representation as a process is better placed to examine the ways in which the Western discovery and consciousness of the East went hand in hand with Western imperial rule over it. Today, the close link between knowledge production and "national interest" (Weldes 1999), between knowledge and power, remains as close as ever and requires more research and analysis from progressive intellectuals and academics. An understanding of the way non -Western people were represented within the colonial discourse can assist in identifying similar processes that continue in the contemporary world. It will highlight the essentially politicized nature of representations of the Other and representational practices within the political.
The representations of the non-West within Western discourses- both academic and popular-remain enmeshed in asymmetrical power relations. How the West represents its Other continues to be intertwined with its perceived interests and its sense of identity and has a productive impact on the represented. In the case of Tibetans, Western representation has been a crucial factor in shaping the identity of Tibet as a geopolitical entity as well as shaping the identity of the Tibetans. Before going into the significance of Western representations in chapters 4-6, the next chapter highlights some of the contours of Exotica Tibet by focusing on a selection of cultural sites.
3. Poetics of Exotica Tibet
The poetics of Exotica Tibet requires a critical postcolonial analysis of Western representations of Tibet, and this can be performed effectively by focusing on a few cultural sites commonly associated with Tibet and Tibetans. This is a (partial) story of Western interactions with Tibet during various historical periods-it is about the production of images of Tibet within these interactions as well as about how the interactions were in turn framed under specific imaginative regimes. The constitutive relation between Western interactions and imaginations of Tibet is the subject of this chapter. Following Doty, these Western interactions can be seen in terms of imperial encounters, which convey the idea of asymmetrical encounters in which "one entity has been able to construct 'realities' that were taken seriously and acted upon and the other entity has been denied equal degrees or kinds of agency" (1996b, 3).
Until the beginning of the twentieth century Tibet was seen as an absence on the map, as Landon puts it, the "last country to be discovered by the civilized world" (1905, xi). This was also because it "was never the actual place [of Tibet] that fired the imagination of romantic seekers: it was the idea of Tibet, far away, impenetrable, isolated in the higher spheres of the earth" (Buruma 2000). Preconceived facts about Tibetans were often of the proverbial kind. Tibet was seen as the quintessential Asia of the Western imagination, the poor oppressed land with an ancient culture and spirit (Feigon 1996, 22). Exotica Tibet has been full of contrasts and superlatives.
A significant characteristic of Exotica Tibet is its richness in terms of imageries and imaginaries (for a detailed treatment, see Bishop 1989, 1993; Lopez 1998). [26] "Tibet is, in Foucault's terms, a heterotopia, a plurality of often contradictory, competing, and mutually exclusive places simultaneously positioned on a single geographical location" (Bishop 2001, 204). Representations of Tibet range from extremely pejorative ("feudal hell") to unmitigatedly idealistic ("Shangri-la"). Tibet for some is a blankness [27] upon which they can write their desire; for others, it is an overcoded space mingling the fantastic with utter simplicity. Forman wrote, "In the heart of ageless Asia, brooding darkly in the shadow of the unknown, is to be found a veritable explorer's paradise-Tibet, the strange and fascinating, forbidden land of magic and mystery… where the opposites are kin and the extremes go hand in hand" (1936, vii).
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.
THE IMAGINAL ARCHIVE
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).
Shangri-La: The Utopian Archive
Hilton's Lost Horizon, which introduced the term "Shangri-la," was first published in 1933 and made into a film by Frank C
apra 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).
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