Thus, a unified Tibetan-in-exile identity espoused on behalf of the Tibetan diaspora is a rhetorical device and an imaginary construct. At the same time, it would be naive to dismiss considerations of the identity question on this ground only, for all the identities are in the last instance a product of the imagination. Following Butler:
To take the construction of the subject as a political problematic is not the same as doing away with the subject; to deconstruct the subject is not the same as doing away with the concept… but to call into question and, perhaps most importantly, to open up a term, like the subject, to a reusage or redeployment that previously has not been authorized. (1992, 15)
Though Tibetanness is an imagined and contested construct, it has its own truth effects on those who consider themselves Tibetans.
Recognition of Tibetans as an "imagining community" problema-tizes simplistic interrogations of Tibetanness. It does not undermine the quest of a people for self-determination.
CONCLUSION
Tibetan national identity both inside and outside Tibet is a product of constant negotiation and renegotiation. Personal experience mediates national identity. The "transnational" element is as significant a part of Tibetan nationalism as is the "indigenous element." Tibetanness among those living in exile is as much a discursive product of displacement (conditions of diaspora) as of sense of belonging (to a "distinctive nation"). It is a productive process of creative negotiation with Exotica Tibet. My analysis of the poetics and politics of Exotica Tibet seeks to blur the distinctions between the cultural and the political and to underline the constitutive relations between identity and representation within world politics in the postcolonial world. In order to carry on a postcolonial examination of the politics of Exotica Tibet, we have to move beyond the conventional sense of the term "political" and challenge the boundaries between the political and the cultural. This is what I do in the next chapter, where I offer new ways of theorizing Tibetanness through postcoloniality-inspired symbolic geography and a discursive approach that foregrounds the constitutive and performative role played by representation in identity. This should be seen as underlining a postcolonial analytical approach that will help provide a critical reading of world politics, taking into account the centrality of representation.
6. Postcoloniality and Reimag(in)ing Tibetanness
The fish which lives in water
Pray do not draw it up on dry land!
The stag which grazes on the hills
Pray do not lure it down to the vale
– TIBETAN VERSE (TRANSLATED BY W. Y. EYANS),
wentz, modern political papers
Tibetanness, or Tibetan identity, is a contingent product of negotiations among several complementary and contradictory processes. These processes may be looked at in terms of different pairs of contrastive dynamics, such as the imperatives of a culture- in-displacement and the need to present an overarching stable identity; interaction with host societies and an avoidance of cultural assimilation into hegemonic cultural formations there; emphasis on tradition as the defining characteristic and the presentation of exiled Tibetans as "modern"; the desire to represent Tibetan culture as unique while at the same time highlighting its universal features; interaction with a sympathetic Western audience and emphasizing difference from Western cultures; and finally, the wish to project a sense of continuity with the past while distancing oneself from oppressive elements of history. These dynamics impact the theory and praxis of Tibetanness at several overlapping and hierarchical levels. [74]
By putting the symbolism of Dharamsala/dharmashala/dharam-shala (note the difference in the placing of the "a," highlighting different pronunciations) under a postcolonial critical scrutiny, I offer a deconstructive reading of the Tibetan identity problematic that, instead of jettisoning Tibetan agency, affirms it. The politics of Exotica Tibet-this politics is about the effect of representations on the represented and questions the arbitrary boundary between the cultural and the political-is evident both in the symbolic geography of Dharamsala and in Tibetanness. In the course of this inquiry, I emphasize the symbolism of Dharamsala/' dharmashala/ dharamshala as contested, put forward the dominant story of Tibetanness before offering an alternative reading, and finally, propose a new way of theorizing Tibetanness as discursively constituted by both roots and routes.
Before moving further, let me elaborate on Dharamsala/dharma-shala/dharamshala. Dharamsala is a place in north India that is currently the residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. The place-name Dharamsala comes from the Sanskrit word dharmashala composed of two parts-dharma (religion) and shala (house). So dharmashala means "abode of the gods" and "house of religion." But in everyday Hindi language, often pronounced as dharamshala, it means a "temporary station," a "guesthouse," lying usually on routes of pilgrimage. An important feature of dharamshala is that it provides free or sometimes inexpensive temporary accommodation to travelers. So Dharamsala is the place, dharmashala means "house of religion," and dharamshala stands for "guesthouse."
I examine the symbolic geography of Dharamsala. [75] Why Dharam-sala and not any other, even bigger Tibetan refugee settlement elsewhere? Why symbolic geography and not cultural geography? I focus on Dharamsala since it plays a very crucial role as a symbolic nerve center from which articulations of Tibetanness emerge. These articulations affect the perception of the international media. But even more important, they are reabsorbed into the exile community's self-perception. Thus, instead of representations as merely reflective of identity, they are constitutive of the very entity they seek to represent. The Department of Information and International Relations of the government-in-exile self-consciously presents Dharamsala as "Little Lhasa in India" (1999).
A focus on Dharamsala as a place will be complemented by an interrogation of the root words dharmashala/dharamshala in order to tease out the various possible alternative narratives of Tibetan-ness. My contention is that the symbolic geography of the place, along with a particular implication of the words dharmashala and dharamshala, supports the dominant story preferred by the exile elite and their non-Tibetan supporters. This story is consonant with Exotica Tibet, which has the effect of fostering a "salvage mentality," a strong preservation ethos (see Michael 1985). Here the emphasis is on the projection of Dharamsala as the "Little Lhasa in India," [76] a temporary home preserving a historical culture in its pure form before an inevitable return to the original homeland.
However, an alternative reading of Dharamsala/'dharmashala/ dharamshala provides a different story, one that affords a theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of Tibetanness and therefore challenges the dominant story. Such a reading not only looks at identity as always already in process but also affirms the diaspora experience as something more than a temporary aberration. The two different narratives of diasporic Tibetan identity I posit are not strictly contradictory since they can be retheorized together productively, through postcolonial IR theory, by combining a "decon-structive attitude" with an "agential politics of identity," which, as Radhakrishnan points out, "makes it possible for movements to commit themselves simultaneously to the task of affirming concrete projects of identity on behalf of the dominated and subjugated knowledges and to the utopian or long-term project of interrogating identity-as-such" (1996, xxiii). My alternative reading highlights several things within discourses of Tibetanness at once-the politics of place and the place of politics; the social construction of space and the spatialized social relations; and the rhetoric of essentialism and the practice of strategic essentialism.
SYMBOLISM OF DHARAMSALA: A CONTESTED TERRAIN
Conventionally, identity has been seen as primordial and natural, culture as organically rooted in a particular geographical space, and place as an inert space over which history is enacted. Place is held as providing "an inert, fixed, isotropic back-drop to the real stuff of politics and history" (Keith and Pile 1997, 4; see also Gupta and Ferguson 1997). On this vi
ew, Dharamsala is only a static stage for the theatrics of Tibetan diasporic culture and politics. However, this notion of fixity hides the fact that the geography of Dharamsala has had a changing symbolic role for the Tibetan diaspora. A transformation from a poor refugee settlement to one of the most popular tourist destinations in India, a change from a small, dilapidated village to a cosmopolitan small town-these are indicative as well as constitutive of changes within the Tibetan exile community. The questioning of the edifice of the conventional geographical imagination by a "cultural turn" within the field influenced by poststructuralism and postcolonialism makes it possible to study Dharamsala's symbolic geography. For place and space are now seen in social terms-not only do they shape social relations but, more important, they themselves are discursively constituted by social forces.
Spatialities, a term that recognizes the social construction of space and place, can be invoked to study how landscapes themselves are laden with multiple meanings. "Spatialities have always produced landscapes that are loaded with ethical, epistemological and aes-theticized meanings" (Keith and Pile 1993, 26). That Dharamsala has come to acquire multiple layers of not always harmonious meaning is therefore not surprising. While for some (the Tibetan refugees) it is a place of refuge from oppression, for others (the Chinese government) it is a center of seditious activities. For some (local Indians) it is a vital opportunity for material advancement; for others (many Western tourists) it is a spiritual refuge from the crass materialism of modern Western societies. For some (the Tibetans as well as non-Tibetan Buddhists) it is a center of pilgrimage; for others (many Indian tourists) it is merely a site of curiosity. All these ascribed meanings, some complementary and some contradictory, problema-tize any simplistic and holistic reading of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala. Rather than treating such tensions and contradictions as regrettable, we should rather see them as productive of the wider Tibetan diasporic identity-in-process.
Postcolonial criticality stresses the importance of recognizing the complexly intertwined and mutually constitutive relationship between imaginary and material geography. "Imaginary and material geographies are not incommensurate, nor is one simply the product, a disempowered surplus, of the other" (Jacobs 1996, 158). Instead of treating the symbolic in opposition to the material, a richer conceptualization recognizes that there is no "actual" that can be accessed independently of intersubjectivity, that there is no category of the "natural" that is not mediated through culture. This would facilitate an understanding of the spatialized politics of identity as well as the identity politics of space. The former might include a consideration of how particular imaginings of a unified homeland of Tibet shape the discourses of Tibetanness. A discussion of the identity politics of space might, on the other hand, consider how different groups, including the Tibetan government-in-exile, ordinary Tibetan refugees, Tibetans inside Tibet, the Chinese government, Western sympathizers, and the local Himachalis ascribe their own meanings to the place of Dharamsala.
Recognition that all geographies have acquired contested meanings through continuous processes of individual and collective imagination does not preclude a consideration of the physical and structural factors at work. For instance, though the residence of the Dalai Lama and the existence of a government-in-exile are among the more important factors, the physical location of Dharamsala in the hills of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has also facilitated its projection and promotion as a "Little Lhasa." Given the reputation of Lhasa as lying on the "roof of the world," it is difficult to imagine a place in the plains (rather than the hills) of India being promoted in the same way. Travel writings that emphasize the relative inaccessibility of Dharamsala are quite common. [77] This resonates with the reputation of Lhasa as the "Forbidden City" at the "roof of the world." In a certain sense, Dharamsala acts as an accessible substitute for those travelers (often white and Western) [78] whose imaginations have been influenced by the earlier writing of imperialist adventurers, "the trespassers on the roof of the world" (to evoke the title of Hopkirk's 1983 book). Thus, the mountainous terrain of McLeod Gunj and its distance from any big city contribute to the symbolic geography of Dharamsala.
The most important structural factor shaping the symbolic geography of Dharamsala is the imperative of refugee status. The locations of Tibetan settlements have been decided entirely by Indian central and state governments. For instance, the Dalai Lama shifted from Mussorie to Dharamsala on Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru's advice in i960. An abandoned British hill station, McLeod Gunj was offered as a suitable quiet place for the Dalai Lama. [79] The transfer of the Central Tibetan Administration (the government-in-exile) followed soon after. Unlike in Lhasa, where the three big monasteries of the Gelugpa order were close to the Dalai Lama's seat, in India these monasteries have been reestablished in far-off places, due to the limitations of land available for settlement. The refugee status of Tibetans in South Asia prohibits them from owning immovable property unless offered by the host government. So any consideration of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala needs to keep these physical and structural factors in mind.
Before dwelling more on Dharamsala and the politics of identity, it should be pointed out that the place commonly designated as the Little Lhasa is actually McLeod Gunj (Upper Dharamsala). As the Himachal Pradesh Tourism Department board reads: "Welcome to Mcleodganj, the little Lhasa in India." The multilayered meanings in this name (McLeod Gunj) may be explored further (something not feasible within the space of this chapter)-British imperialism, the development of hill stations as places of refuge for the imperial class, the indigenization of names, and so on. [80] It can be read as indicating the important role played by British imperial practices in framing the various aspects of the Tibetan question. The distinction between Lower and Upper Dharamsala also reflects a gap between the local population and the refugees. While Tibetans here have generally managed to create their own niche in the wider society, the assertion of difference also leaves the potential open for conflict if the locals perceive the refugees to be a source of problems. [81] The government-in-exile promotes the name Dharamsala, and not McLeod Gunj, as the "Little Lhasa." This may be because Tibetan institutions and establishments are spread throughout the vicinity of Dharamsala. But how far the name "Dharamsala" itself may have inspired it is an open question, for the literal meaning of dharmashala-"the house of god/religion/dharma"-resonates well with the location of the Dalai Lama's residence and several religious institutions. Indirectly, the choice of name, with its association with spiritualism and faith, makes it more appealing to Western tourists too.
DHARAMSALA AS A TEMPORARY HOME: THE DOMINANT STORY
What are the specific ways in which the politics of place as embodied in Dharamsala inform the discourses of Tibetan identity? By drawing upon the usage of the words dharmashala/dharamshala, we can theorize Tibetan identity discourse in two broad ways-one offering the dominant story and the other allowing an alternative reading. Dharamshala in popular Hindi usage refers to a "temporary home," a "guesthouse." The dominant theorization, which has a wide currency among the Tibetan government-in-exile and nationalists as well as non-Tibetan supporters of the Tibetan cause, interprets the experience of diaspora as a temporary and regrettable phenomenon. And indeed, the place Dharamsala is seen as a temporary home with the final destination being the original homeland of Tibet. The exile is seen as a break in the evolution of an ancient civilization in Tibet, a time when it is vital to preserve a pure form of this civilization since it is under erasure in the original home. As my discussion of Exotica Tibet has shown, in journalistic and travel writings one often comes across eulogies to a lost Shangri-la in Tibet (particularly Lhasa) and observations on how the forces of modernization infused under the Chinese rule have spelled doom for the Tibetan culture. Such observations stand in contrast to those about the Tibetan communities living in South Asia, particularly in the area surrounding Dharamsala. In this case, though the cosmopolitan and eclectic
cultural scene of McLeod Gunj is recognized, often the emphasis is on the success story of Tibetans in preserving their culture. "Working hard to rebuild their lives and preserve their distinctive and timeless culture and lifestyle, these people… have become arguably the most successful refugee community in the world whilst continuing the non violent struggle for Tibet's freedom in exile" (Barker 1999). The maintenance of Tibetan identity is seen as a functional expression of this culture.
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