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 view, 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.
[74] My contention is that drawing upon critical social and cultural theories and deploying them contextually is a better approach than shying away from them out of a fear of theoretical imperialism. Often well-intentioned scholars avoid using Western theoretical ideas in the case of the non-West in general and Tibet in particular since history is replete with examples of similar moves to the detriment of local people. However, moving toward a purely empirical study is not the right solution since this idea of pure empiricism is the most hegemonic of Western paradigms. It is complicit with dominant regimes of patriarchal and racialized power. So in my opinion it is better to adopt the critical theory-inspired idea of theorizing everything since it reveals all practices as political and therefore contestable. Even though these themes have originated in the West, they question the assumption of the superiority of the West and thus leave room for alliances with "progressive" ideas from the non-Western world. Approaches that deny a role to theory often operate on unconscious theoretical assumptions that are left uninterrogated.
[75] Though the "government" (in exile) in Dharamsala is not recognized by any state in the international community, for Tibetan people themselves, especially those living in diaspora, it is a legitimate representative. The place-name is spelled either Dharamsala or Dharamshala, but the government-in-exile, following Indian government surveys, uses the former spelling.
Dharamsala is a common name used for Dharamsala proper (the Kot-wali Bazaar area) or the Lower Dharamsala, McLeod Gunj (also spelled Mcleodganj and McLeod Ganj), or Upper Dharamsala and Gangchen Kyishong (the complex of Central Tibetan Administration). Lower Dharam-sala is a predominantly Indian area. While most Tibetan establishments are located in McLeod Gunj, there are some important ones in the vicinity of Lower Dharamsala (for instance the Norbulingka Institute). Dharamsala is used as a generic name for all of these. In terms of location, it can be characterized as a hill station in the north Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.