“we're not home”: tibetan refugees in india in the twenty-first century

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“We're Not Home”: TibetanRefugees in India in theTwenty-First CenturyJessica Falcone & Tsering WangchukPublished online: 29 Aug 2008.

To cite this article: Jessica Falcone & Tsering Wangchuk (2008) “We're Not Home”:Tibetan Refugees in India in the Twenty-First Century, India Review, 7:3, 164-199,DOI: 10.1080/14736480802261459

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FIND1473-64891557-3036India Review, Vol. 7, No. 3, July 2008: pp. 1–27India Review“We’re Not Home”: Tibetan Refugees in India in the Twenty-First CenturyTibetan Refugees in India in the Twenty-First CenturyIndia ReviewJESSICA FALCONE and TSERING WANGCHUK

. . . We are refugees here.People of a lost country.Citizens to no nation.

Tibetans: the world’s sympathy stock.Serene monks and bubbly traditionalists;one lakh and several thousand odd,nicely mixed, steeped in various cultural hegemonies.

At every check-point and office,I am an “Indian-Tibetan”.My Registration Certificate,I renew every year, with a salaam.A foreigner born in India . . .1

Although Tibetan refugees first began settling en masse in India in1959,2 the refugees and their offspring rarely become Indian citizens.3

As Tibet proper is now governed as a part of the People’s Republic ofChina (PRC), Tibetans in exile are also not recognized citizens ofTibet or the PRC. Since the Tibetan government in exile, the CentralTibetan Administration (CTA), is based in India, to what extent, ifany, has India become a home away from home? Can a shelter everbecome home? To what extent have Tibetan refugees embraced Indi-ans, and conversely, to what extent have Indians embraced Tibetanrefugees? How important is legal citizenship (or the lack thereof) toTibetan refugees in India? What is the current character of Tibetan

Jessica Falcone is ABD in Anthropology at Cornell University. Tsering Wangchuk is ABDin Indo-Tibetan Buddhist Studies at the University of Virginia.

Tibetan Refugees in India in the Twenty-First Century 165

nationalism(s) and/or Tibetan cultural citizenship(s) in refugee commu-nities? Not surprisingly, there are no simple answers to these questions.

The preoccupation of the exile community with the preservation oftradition has resulted in a degree of “enclavement,” or “emplacement”from Indian society that has come with its own set of costs and bene-fits.4 Although Tibetans in exile tend to hold on tightly to certain for-mulations of Tibetanness, this paper will examine the actual fluidity ofcitizenship, home, native and stranger through the experience of thedisplaced Tibetan community of India. We will argue that the situa-tion of Tibetans in exile, despite their continuing political plight, orperhaps because of it, illustrates the truism that socio-cultural catego-ries are constantly shifting signifiers: “tradition,”5 “ethnicity,”6 and“nation”7 are socio-historical constructions, and not solid, un-changingnotions.

Based primarily on interviews conducted with Tibetans in exile invarious north Indian towns, cities and settlements, as well as publicdiscourse and media,8 we will investigate the relationship betweenTibetans in exile and Indians through attention to the documentationof refugees by the Tibetan and Indian administrations, by looking atborder crossings and closed borders (both real and imagined, physicaland cultural), by examining the dynamic contested space betweenIndian and Tibetan, and through citizenship, nationhood and identitydiscourse(s) emerging from the nearly 50 years of exile in India. Wewill also begin to discuss the potential for socio-cultural work or playin a “third space” between “Tibetan” and “Indian,” which may beginto close the gaps between seemingly disparate categories of ethnicities,linguistic groups, nationalities, etcetera.9

In this contribution, we will complicate the notions of home,citizenship, and national and cultural boundaries by demonstratingthat the impermanence, ephemerality and anxiety behind thesenotions undermine their vaunted solidity. Finally, we will draw oncertain philosophical notions from Tibetan Buddhist sources to helpus suggest that attachment to an overly essentialized conceptualiza-tion of Tibetanness is an example of the kind of thinking that can leadto even more suffering and apprehension. If one were to take Buddhistdiscourse seriously as social theory in and of itself, then it could beargued that cognizance about the contingency and impermanence ofthese social categories is of paramount importance to being fullypresent and mindful in the socio-cultural moment.

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Documenting ExileOfficial documents, government paperwork, identification cards –these material objects always play a part in the socio-political theaterof differentiating the native from the stranger. For Tibetans in exile,the details, technologies and effects of documentation have veryfar-reaching consequences.

In his essay “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heideggerexamines the enframing of technology as in some ways being respon-sible for the ensnarement of both nature and humanity.10 The articula-tion of technology’s hold involves a setting-upon, a domination of, asnature and humanity’s potentials are converted into standing-reserve.Heidegger’s critical appraisal of technology, which in turn spurredHabermas’ recognition that domination extends itself both throughand as technology,11 gestures towards the unintended consequences ofour creations, which can create and ensnare us in return. Nationalismand the techniques, technologies, and bureaucracies of nation-building can be conceived of as other types of enframing, other waysof being that “reveal” and “order” as they control us, even as wepretend to control them.

The nation, like the self, is a construct which is most directly for-mulated when one is confronted with a shift in consciousness ofteninspired by sudden differentiation, a new name, a new “enframing,”12

a new perspective, a new distance, and so on. In terms of nationalism,this differentiation is arguably most obvious in cases of migration andimmigration, so that the crossing of borders ultimately underminesthose borders. These borders, literal limits of the nation, also delineatethe limitations of the nation-state as borders are transgressed and con-tested. The “Tibetan nation in exile” struggles to identify itself byestablishing figurative “borders,” through various signs of the nation– documents, taxes, anthems and art – yet the technologies of differen-tiation must be contextualized and examined for their scope andlimitations.

In this section, we will examine documents issued by the Tibetangovernment in exile, such as Green Books,13 as well as documentsissued by the Government of India (GOI) specifically for refugees,such as Registration Certificates (RC) and Identity Certificates (IC).14

Documentation is one of the primary “technologies” of the nation,and we would suggest that it indeed serves to exclude as much as itincludes, and that this “reveals” much in the Heideggerian sense. If

indeed the “Tibetan nation” is constructed, then documents are animportant frame through which to explicate the robust performanceof conventional legal citizenship, and ultimately the paper-thinfragility of nationality itself.

CitizenshipThubten Dorje,15 a Tibetan in exile since the 1960s, has run two thriv-ing small businesses in Dharamsala for decades, raised two childrenand supported his extended family, but despite his many successesthere, he remains optimistic that India is merely a temporary refugefor himself and his family. He is frustrated that his talented son, whois ineligible for seats reserved for specific Indian minorities, will haveto pay an unthinkable sum of rupees to gain admission to a goodmedical college in India. He says,

We aren’t Indians. We don’t get benefits. We can’t buy land. There isno Indian citizenship for us. There is only a residential certificatethat we have to renew once a year. We can’t take loans, no buyinglands, and we can’t get good jobs. You can apply for Indian citizen-ship, but it’s very difficult to get. We pay taxes to the Indian govern-ment, and one tax to the Central Tibetan Administration too . . .Tibet is always in our mind. We are still hopeful. We want to betotally independent, but I don’t think there’s any chance of that.Time is fading and he [the Dalai Lama] is getting older day by day. . .

As Dorje dreams of a better life for himself and his family, either in afree Tibet (or in America), he underscores that he will never feel athome in India as long as he is a second-class resident, a non-citizen, aglorified guest.

In general, Tibetans in exile in India are not Indian citizens, nor aretheir children or grand-children. Why have Tibetans living in Indiafor nearly 50 years or their Indian-born progeny not taken Indian cit-izenship? Why remain stateless? Citizenship in this case, as always, isa highly charged political issue. The significance of remainingofficially “stateless,” has been debated at length in Tibetan refugeesociety, but there are highly divergent opinions about the directionthese policies should take in the future.

According to certain interpretations of Indian law, Tibetans inexile should be able to claim Indian citizenship. Pia Oberoi notes that

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second-generation Tibetans in exile are entitled to Indian citizenshipunder Section 3 of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1955, and asserts thatmost second-generation refugees refuse this entitlement.16 Oberoi alsocites an United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR)Executive Committee Report in which Indian officials reported thatTibetan refugees are technically permitted to become Indian citizens.17

According to Nangsa Choedron, a CTA representative with theDepartment of Education, Tibetans have chosen en masse to protesttheir Tibetan citizenship, even though it remains unrecognized:

The Tibetans could acquire Indian citizenship according toArticle Five of the Indian Constitution, which says: At thecommencement of this Constitution, every person who has hisdomicile in the territory of India – (a) who was born in the terri-tory of India; or (b) either of whose parents was born in the territoryof India; or (c) who has been ordinarily resident in the territoryfor not less than five years preceding such commencement, shallbe a citizen of India (Government of India, 1984, 4–5). TheGovernment of India does not recognize Tibet as an independentnation, but Tibetans in India claim their Tibetan citizenship.The choice of Tibetans to remain stateless is based on article nineof the Constitution of India which says “No person shall be a cit-izen of India by virtue of article five, . . . if he has voluntarilyacquired the citizenship of any foreign state” (Government ofIndia, 1984, 4–5).18

Oberoi and Choedron both describe the situation as if Tibetans inexile individually waive their right to citizenship as a formal assertionof Tibetan identity, or as a performance of resistance against theChinese occupation of Tibet. However, the citizenship story is not assimple as either Oberoi or Choedron suggest. Many Tibetans in exilehave sought Indian citizenship, but irrespective of the laws on thebooks, in practice Tibetans in exile, including the second and thirdgeneration, are routinely refused Indian citizenship. According to theHigh Commission of India in Ottawa,19 there is no established right tocitizenship for Tibetan refugees in India, even if they were born onIndian soil.

First, Tibetans in exile are systematically dissuaded from applyingfor Indian citizenship by CTA officials. Second, there is social

pressure from certain other Tibetan refugees to remain a refugee, andnot seek citizenship. Third, citizenship seekers are bureaucraticallyimpeded by Indian ministries: if paperwork for citizenship is filedwith the Home Ministry in India it is routinely rejected if theapplicant is proved to be a Tibetan refugee.

One rejected applicant, a second-generation Tibetan exile born andraised in India, told us that she was denied Indian citizenship, becauseshe had “no nationality proof,” that is, she had no voter’s identifica-tion, and no ration card; also, the government reviewers discoveredthat she had already been issued an Identity Certificate. Essentially,since there was a paper trail proving she was a Tibetan in exile, and nopaper trail to show otherwise, she was denied Indian citizenship. Ourinformant stated that she was unequivocally proud of her Tibetanidentity, and that she did not feel that she was betraying her Tibetan-ness by seeking Indian citizenship. Our informant and her family sim-ply noted that there were practical reasons for her to endeavor tobecome an Indian citizen, and that she would try again, seeking alter-native, under the table means to achieve citizenship if necessary.

Tibetans in exile living on the sub-continent have expressed manyreasons why they have desired to become Indian citizens: Indianpassports are easier to travel on than ICs, especially since they do notrequire that Indian visas be issued abroad for the return trip; Indiancitizens have political and civil rights that are denied to some Tibetansin exile;20 Indian citizens do not have to face the bureaucratic chaosof Foreigner’s Regional Registration Office (FRRO) offices, whileTibetans in exile must re-register regularly; certain jobs which mightbe attractive to the Tibetans in exile may require Indian citizenship, orat least a valid Indian passport; in many situations Indian citizens canpursue certain formal business opportunities with more freedom andless bureaucratic hassle than refugees; finally, Indian citizens can ownland.21

According to a high-placed source in the CTA, the GOI has gener-ally disallowed Tibetans in exile to become Indian citizens at thebehest of the CTA. Our informant noted that if all Tibetans in exile inIndia succeeded in securing Indian citizenship, then the Tibetan gov-ernment in exile would not have a constituency to govern. During thecourse of our research we found it difficult to determine conclusivelywhether it was primarily the CTA or the GOI who first insisted to theother that citizenship be systematically denied to refugees, but it is

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clear that it is a bi-lateral, though perhaps “unofficial” agreement. OneTibetan refugee informant told us that “everyone wants citizenship,”but even if this were an exaggeration it does seem clear that many ref-ugees would like the legislation and procedures on citizenship to berevisited and revised.

However, Tibetans in exile, like many others, have learned to workthe loopholes in the Indian system in order to thrive despite certainlegal roadblocks. For example, so-called “Gyagar Khampas,” orKinnauris, Spitis or Ladakhis, and so on, are Indian citizens, but byvirtue of their Tibetan “ethnicity,” or religio-cultural affiliations withTibetans, have been well placed to help Tibetan refugees as go-betweens and as brokers, sometimes legally and sometimes illegally,assisting Tibetans in exile to purchase land or to acquire Indian citi-zenship. For example, when one second-generation Tibetan in exilewas rejected for Indian citizenship, she decided to seek citizenshipthrough an alternative means: she intended to re-apply with newpaperwork, but this time, as many others have done before her, shewould pretend to be a member of a “Gyagar Khampa” family. SomeTibetan refugees have found it easy to launder their refugee statusthrough paid or un-paid associations with these families. OtherTibetans in exile might purchase Indian passports under the tablefrom Indian brokers, in order to help them conduct their businessaffairs with fewer restrictions, or to travel with fewer limitations.

In 2006, the going rate for an illicitly procured passport was in theneighborhood of 30,000 Indian rupees, but they were considered aninvestment by many who procured them. These passports are notlegally on the books, and therefore are non-renewable, so Tibetans inexile who need these documents may have to purchase them again andagain. In essence, out of necessity some individual Tibetans in exilehave showed innovation, creativity and “flexibility” in the procure-ment of citizenship or even just the documents thereof.22 AnnFrechette writes extensively on similarly “illegal” procurements ofNepalese citizenship by Tibetan refugees in Nepal.23

According to the Charter of the CTA, Tibetans in exile can be“dual citizens,” that is, they can take citizenship from a foreigncountry and still retain their status as CTA refugees as long as theysustain their affiliation with the CTA by maintaining the validity oftheir Green Cards. Seeking foreign citizenship is still politically con-troversial; CTA officials and some lay refugees have argued that

while dual citizenship is a right, it is a right which should not beexercised in haste or en masse. A highly-placed CTA official in Delhispoke to one of the co-authors at length about the importance ofmaintaining refugee status in order to protect the integrity of theCTA, and ultimately the CTA’s bid to (re)gain control of Tibetproper; he felt that the CTA’s strength would falter if refugees beganto take citizenship in large numbers. For some of our informants,remaining without citizenship was a sign of Tibetan patriotism, butfor others seeking citizenship was a practical necessity, which theyfelt did not obviate their Tibetanness or Tibetan pride. A few of ourrefugee informants felt that full legal Indian citizenship was an actrife with Tibetan patriotism, because they could, as citizens, havemore say in Indian government domestic policy regarding Tibetansand foreign policy regarding China, and thus resented the generalfeeling among refugees that seeking legal Indian citizenship is unpa-triotic or undermines the resistance of their Tibetan brethren underChinese control. This line of reasoning hits upon the central nerve ofthe citizenship debate: is legal citizenship really bad for the FreeTibet movement or not? If it is, then are there ways to mitigate thesubstantial costs of this policy upon the day to day lives of regularTibetan refugees in India?

Refugees who live outside of South Asia, either in Europe or NorthAmerica, have generally sought citizenship if they are eligible to do so.24

The CTA supports citizenship for those exiles who reside outside ofSouth Asia. A commentator for Tibetan Review writes that some of theproblems faced by refugees could be mitigated by taking citizenship,but this would mean that the CTA would have to reconfigure itself:

The present Charter of Tibetans in exile already has a provisionfor dual citizenship. Becoming citizens will of course open muchmore doors to the individual Tibetans in terms of careers and flex-ibility of movement thus relieving the frustration at that level . . .There are some people who criticise the double standards ofDharamsala in allowing Tibetans in the West to be citizens of theirhost countries while denying that opportunity to the Tibetans inIndia. If Tibetans in the settlements were to become citizens oftheir host countries, whether India, Nepal or Bhutan, they wouldcease to be Tibetan refugees, which is the reason why theyreceived settlement benefits in the first place.25

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In the same article, he notes that prior to the founding of Israel, theJewish community in exile was able to take on the citizenship of thenations they lived in without yielding their Jewish identity, and arguesthat this could be a useful lesson for Tibetans in exile.

The Dalai Lama was granted honorary citizenship by Canada,26

and the city of Paris, France; also, the Maha Bodhi Society of India hasbeen working to secure honorary Indian citizenship for the DalaiLama.27 Tibetans in exile have by and large experienced honoraryconferrals of citizenship to the Dalai Lama and others (such as his sis-ter, Jetsun Pema) with an outpouring of community support andpride. Honorary citizenships, therefore, are not seen as threatening orcontroversial in the least. On the contrary, they carry special politicaland cultural caché, even (or especially) when Chinese officials signaltheir anger at such gestures.

Taking legal citizenship abroad is not always, or even usually, meantto demonstrate ambivalence or resentment towards the CTA, but occa-sionally there are Tibetans in exile who choose citizenship against theCTA. An entire minority religious sect within Tibetan in exile society,the Shugden propitiators in India, broke away from the CTA, becausethey argued that they were being systematically discriminated against.In 2000, Tibetans in exile who had persisted in their worship of DorjeShugden held a press conference in New Delhi to publicly renouncetheir affiliation with the CTA,28 and to announce that they would sys-tematically seek Indian citizenship.29 They argued that the Dalai Lamahad banned Dorje Shugden practice, and therefore violated their rightto religious freedom. The CTA has denied that Dorje Shugden practiceis a legal ban, and clarified that the Dalai Lama has only “advised”Tibetans in exile to avoid the practice, and that only a sovereign statecould be reasonably accused of banning a religious practice.30 It is sig-nificant that the Dorje Shugden community has sought to distance itselffrom the Dalai Lama’s “advice,” through the rejection of involvementin the Tibetan government in exile and through the embrace of Indiancitizenship; the pursuit of Indian citizenship in this context is a publicreprimand to the Dalai Lama and his representatives.31

Official breaks with the CTA are not always so politically fraught.Occasionally, a Tibetan in exile family will break with the CTA, andthis is usually a quiet affair that manifests as failure to maintain GreenCard status; it also sometimes happens if a family is upset at the lackof transparency of the exile government, or even if they feel that the

family is no longer dependent on the CTA and no longer self-identifyas refugees. These are rare instances, as most refugees prefer tomaintain their connections with the CTA even if they have takencitizenship elsewhere.

In sum, citizenship is a complex issue for Tibetans in exile, irrevo-cably tied up with the cultural and the political, the symbolic and thelegal, the patriotic and the practical. “Citizenship” within the Tibetannation in exile via the CTA is unrecognized internationally, but legalcitizenship within India, America, or other recognized states offersmany socio-economic benefits that many refugees in India covet.Some of our Tibetan informants have wondered aloud why individu-als could not themselves choose whether to stay political refugees orto become Indian citizens; given the choice, many exiles would doubt-less choose to make the political statement to remain Tibetan refugees(especially, perhaps, in solidarity with Tibetans enduring politicalrepression under the PRC), while others would defer to practical con-siderations and endeavor to become legal citizens of India. While offi-cial statelessness has been chosen for the exiles by the policies of theCTA and the GOI, many Tibetans in exile advocate new strategicthinking about citizenship, and a reconfiguration of the status quo; inthe meantime, some refugees have found alternative means to acquirecitizenship, or its constituent documents.

Freedom Books: Taxing Towards TibetThe dynamics of “citizenship” within the Tibetan nation in exile hingeupon different documentation altogether: Green Books, also knownas Freedom Books. The Tibetan exile community in India, in coopera-tion with its host country and major international donors, has estab-lished a viable working long term government in exile, the CentralTibetan Administration. For all practical purposes the CTA is a fully-functioning government, despite the fact that the most Tibetans inexile are not legal citizens of any state, and despite the fact that theCTA remains an unrecognized government body. The CTA runsTibetan schools, issues birth certificates, researches and writes aboutenvironmental policy in Tibet, runs cultural programs, meets withdelegates from other nations, and so on. Officials elected every fiveyears debate and pass legislation in the Assembly of Tibetan People’sDeputies (ATPD), the parliament in exile; legislation is upheld as longas it does not violate any Indian or international laws. The CTA maintains

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itself through the robust donations of international donors, but alsoby requiring taxes be paid by exiles above the age of six. Officers ofCTA’s Tibetan Freedom Movement administer a program to disburseGreen Books and collect taxes.

Green Books, or Freedom Books, serve as the primary marker of arefugee’s affiliation with the government in exile. Green Books arestamped on an annual basis as one pays the required “voluntary tax”(Danglang Chatrel). According to a pamphlet issued by the Departmentof Finance in 2005, the Chatrel serves multiple functions: “It exhibitsthe Tibetan people’s support towards augmentation of the exilegovernment’s financial requirements. It also exhibits popular supportfor a stable Tibetan government-in-exile until Tibet regains its free-dom. From the legal point of view, those who contribute towardsChatrel are recognized as bonafide Tibetans in exile.”

Tibetans in exile who maintain the validity of their Green Book bypaying their Chatrel on an annual basis are entitled to certain benefits,such as pensions for the elderly, enrollment in Tibetan schools, eligi-bility for Tibetan in exile government posts and Tibetan militaryposts,32 grants, scholarships, and so on.

Regional rates for Chatrel are differentiated between “TibetanResidents in India, Nepal, and Bhutan,” and “Residents of foreigncountries other than the above,” although dues vary according to ageand income. Recent immigrants to affluent countries in Europe andNorth America sometimes prefer to have their families pay theChatrel on their behalf in India, Nepal or Bhutan, where requiredrates are significantly lower. For example, a Tibetan refugee living inthe United States of America might be asked to pay $100 per annumfor Chatrel by their local Tibetan Association (which collects it forthe CTA), whereas if they get their family to maintain their GreenBook for them in India, they may only be required to pay the rupeeequivalent of a few dollars. This disparity has given rise to some classtension between Tibetan refugees in communities abroad.

Most long-time Tibetan exile residents of Switzerland pay theChatrel in Swiss francs, but some of the newer arrivals who haveimmigrated more recently have resisted paying the full foreign ratesand continued to pay Chatrel in Indian rupees. Consequently, theyargue that since they have only recently immigrated they often sufferunstable employment and poor job security, even as they struggle torepay the loans they may have taken in order to migrate in the first

place. However, for some long-time residents in Switzerland theamount that a refugee pays in Chatrel signifies their level of commit-ment to the Tibetan cause. New arrivals to Switzerland, bolstered bytheir own association, have argued that it is unfair for people of suchdisparate means to be required to pay such high rates of Chatrel, andthat their commitment to the Tibetan government should not be mea-sured in monetary terms, especially since some new arrivals considertheir own Tibetan language skills and understanding of TibetanBuddhism to be superior.

Occasionally, non-Tibetans in exile have sought and receivedGreen Books, which they have maintained in order to partake in cer-tain Tibetan exile programs. One of our informants, Rajesh Thapa,immigrated to India from Nepal about 15 years ago, and eventuallyfound accommodation in a Tibetan settlement area where he attendedTibetan school and became fluent in Tibetan. Later, in order to gainsteady employment, Rajesh used his contacts in the settlement to gaina Green Book in order to join the Tibetan regiment of the Indianarmy. He acquired a Tibetan name, and found a refugee willing toclaim him as a family member. Also, some pre-1959 Tibetan immi-grants to India (“Gyagar Khampas”) have sought informal entranceinto the Tibetan exile community through Green Book acquisition,but not all of these bids have been successful. The Green Book systemhas recently been streamlined, perhaps in part to ensure that these“non-refugees” cannot claim any of the benefits reserved forCTA-affiliated Tibetans in exile.

Even as some non-refugees attempt to acquire Green Books inorder to benefit from certain Tibetan exile privileges and benefits (orto show their solidarity), there are Tibetans in exile who remainambivalent about the Chatrel as a mandatory form of “voluntary”giving. These members of the Tibetan exile community continue tofaithfully pay their Chatrel, but quietly wonder how the money isused, why the gifts are mandatory,33 and why one’s Tibetanness inexile is defined by one’s Green Book status.

Registration Certificates: Still Foreigners?Formal registration is required of most foreign visitors residing inIndia for over six months, but it is required of all Tibetan refugeesover the age of 17 who are living in India, even those who were bornthere.34 Every Tibetan refugee in India must periodically renew their

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Registration Certificate from the Foreigner’s Regional RegistrationOffice of the GOI, either once or twice a year (depending on thelocality). The procurement of an RC is mandatory for Tibetan refu-gees, yet it has the effect of rendering RC holders ineligible for Indiancitizenship. Although it rarely happens, the GOI could choose not torenew an RC, and thus the renewal process lends an air of uncertaintyto the exile experience.

In the past, the CTA’s Tibetan Welfare Offices or Tibetan Associa-tions could collect the relevant Tibetan exile documents and take themen masse to be processed at the nearest FRRO, but within the pastseveral years the GOI has determined that all paperwork must be sub-mitted individually in person. One Tibetan family, waiting in longlines at the FRRO in Delhi in December 2006, expressed theirimmense frustration at having to give up at least one working dayevery six months in order to re-register. One could see from theirtense, tired faces that they loathed this activity, and they themselvesnoted that frequent appearances at the office did not improve itscharms, but had quite the opposite effect. In Dharamsala and at manysettlements, Tibetans only have to report to a FRRO once a year, butstill it is considered a bureaucratic cross to bear, especially since thenearest FRRO may be located many hours’ drive away from thesettlement.

During an interview in 2007, a CTA official based in Delhiexplained that these “inconveniences” played a role in reinforcingcommunity solidarity, and maintained that the bureaucratic discom-fort of dealing with the FRRO was necessary to maintain focus on thedream of a free Tibet: “This is reminding us that we are refugees.We’re not home.”

Identity Certificates: Borderline Border CrossingsTraveling outside of India can be a difficult, or even impossible,undertaking for refugees. Even the Dalai Lama had to wait for abouteight years before managing his first trip outside of India as a refugeein 1967.35 As non-citizens, Tibetans in exile in India are not eligible forpassports; therefore, would-be travelers must apply for Identity Cer-tificates issued by the GOI. In order to apply for an IC, an applicantneeds a letter of approval from the CTA, valid RC and proof of dateof birth; the CTA processes individual applications and works withthe GOI to secure the ICs. The fact that the CTA regulates IC

applications for Tibetans in exile can also complicate matters at times,such as when the Tibetan parliament in exile decided that if the pro-spective host of a Tibetan in exile applying for an IC was behind intheir Chatrel contributions, then the applicant would not be allowedto apply for an IC.36 The CTA has been criticized for thus putting theintegrity of the exile community’s coffers ahead of an individual’sright to travel.

Identity Certificates have made international travel possible forTibetans in exile, although such travel often poses its own challenges.ICs are not a familiar class of documentation to many airline staff,who may in turn view Tibetans in exile with undue suspicion as theytry to check in for flights. Travel on ICs is tightly regulated, and onemust apply for an Indian visa in order to make the return trip back toIndia. Occasionally, return visas are denied, thus even Indian-bornrefugees travel abroad at their own risk.

Given that traveling on ICs can be such a challenging endeavor,Bhutan, a small kingdom in South Asia that has long claimed affilia-tion with Tibetan culture, religion and literature, and taken in manyrefugees,37 has periodically issued Bhutanese passports to certainIndian-based Tibetan refugee religious figures and their attendants.38

A Bhutanese government official in the aforementioned article notesthat the maintenance of a good relationship between the Bhutaneseand the Tibetan lamas made the issuance of passports enabling travelfor religious teaching a particularly desirable course of action.

Even with a valid IC, travel within South Asia can be especiallytricky, since these borders are at turns corrupt, porous or completelyimpenetrable. Tibetans in exile generally prefer not to use ICs totravel to Nepal, as it is a significant bureaucratic effort to obtain a per-mit from the Embassy of Nepal; therefore, Tibetans in exile living inIndia usually prefer to illegally cross the border by land (that is, with-out the required permits), despite frequently levied bribes. Except fora few diplomats, Tibetans in exile have not been permitted to enterTibet with an IC. However, since Tibet has increasingly opened overthe past few decades, some refugees have been able to travel to Tibetby making application to the Chinese embassy in New Delhi for spe-cial travel documentation.

A CTA official from the Bureau of H.H. the Dalai Lama inNew Delhi observed during an interview that since the Tibetan exilegovernment is not recognized as a national government by other

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nations, they cannot issue passports themselves: “We are looking for-ward to a time when we can travel on our own passports.” Passportshold a place of symbolic importance as signs of national identity thatare recognized by other countries.

In conclusion, documents such as Green Books, Registration Cer-tificates, and Identity Certificates play an important role in the negoti-ation between native and stranger, and yet the corporeality of these“technologies” of differentiation stand in sharp contrast to the fragilecomplexity of national self-identification. In the world of paperwork,money can buy an Indian passport, an India-based exiled Tibetanlama can carry a Bhutanese passport, influence can gain a non-TibetanNepali a Green Book that marks him as a Tibetan refugee, and aTibetan in exile can pose as a “Gyagar Khampa” to try to achieveIndian citizenship. The policing of the boundaries between “us” and“them” is precisely the act that exposes the weakness of both catego-ries. The arbitrary nature of documenting, identifying and recognizingthe Self vis-à-vis the Other begins to shed light on the ephemerality ofcategories like “nation,” and “citizenship.” What, if anything, is lost ifnationality, Tibetan or otherwise, is as thin as paper, if citizenship isfor sale, and if they are all just documentation nations?

“Shambhala Beams in Front of Me, and I Become”: Refugees on “Home”What is the “homeland” for Tibetan exiles today? Are Tibetans inexile among the ranks of the transnational homeless, or conversely arethey home-full? This section will look carefully at exile views on theputative Tibetan homeland, the state of the Tibetan refugee, and Indiaas a home away from home.

The Tibetan homeland is carefully crafted by Tibetans in exilethrough practices of nostalgia, patriotism, and resistance to assimila-tion. In this era of globalization, when the boundaries between “us”and “them” are constantly shifting, Appadurai observes that newsocial technologies are employed to construct affective certainty.“Nostalgia without memory,” as Appadurai calls it,39 has effectivelyreinforced the notion of an unchanging, reified nation, and anessentialized modern other which stands in sharp relief.

“Nostalgia without memory,” the act of remembering what onehas never known, is akin to Baudrillard’s “precession of simulacra,” inwhich the copy has no original: “Simulation is no longer that of a

territory, a referential being, or a substance. It is the generation bymodels of a real without origin or reality: a hyperreal. The territory nolonger precedes the map, nor does it survive it. It is nevertheless themap which precedes the territory – precession of simulacra.”40 Forbetter or for worse, Tibetans in exile (and their international well-wishers) do tend to enable a vision of a romanticized Tibet, and this isnot uncommon even among second- and third-generation Tibetans inexile who have never been to Tibet. Tibetans in exile must maintain ahigh degree of tension about maintaining and passing on this idyllicversion of Tibet: “Children born in exile – second- and third-generationrefugees who have never actually had to leave anywhere – must betaught to remember the experiences of others.”41

There is unwillingness to concede publicly that the Tibet of old isgone forever, but the wrangling between the early waves of refugeesand the more recent exiles in Dharamsala and elsewhere42 demonstratethat the Tibetans in exile “here” and Tibetans “there” are now quitefragmented by such disjointed historical experiences. The newcomerscoming from Chinese-occupied Tibet today are taught that theirversion of Tibet is less authentic and less real than the version(s)preserved by the Tibetan exile community writ large.

Yeh discusses the complex formulation of “authentic” Tibetannessby highlighting how the tension between those who fled and thosewho stayed behind becomes a crucial element in contemporaryTibetan identity politics.43 Yeh narrates a tense confrontation inCalifornia between two Tibetan exiles from India and a Tibetanwoman whose family stayed in Chinese-occupied Tibet (and had beeneducated in Chinese), in which the Tibetan exiles from India vocallycast aspersions on the latter’s Tibetanness. Exiles sometimes argue thatthey have taken the true Tibet with them, out of the reach of Chineseinfluence, yet if Tibetans in Tibet proper are no longer true Tibetans,but more and more Chinese, then the exiles’ current claim on Tibetwould seem especially specious.

PatriotismThe patriotism of Tibetans in exile is still very strong, yet it is almostcompletely directed at the Tibetan nation proper, that is, occupiedTibet as opposed to the Tibetan “nation” in exile. There is someambivalence about demonstrating patriotism for the Tibetan nation inexile, except as it is embodied in the Dalai Lama, perhaps because

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celebrating exile may be a bit too close to accepting exile. Furthermore,there are differing opinions regarding the degree to which patrioticfeelings pertaining to the adopted nations of the Tibetan diaspora aredesirable or appropriate.

There is no dearth of Tibetan patriotism amongst Tibetans in exilein India, but it is not always an uncomplicated matter of flag-wavingand singing the Tibetan national anthem. There is extraordinary patri-otism for Tibet, but most enthusiastically for unoccupied Tibet, theonce and future Tibet, the idea of Free Tibet. There is more measuredpatriotism for occupied Tibet. This complexity derives from the prob-lem of where the real Tibet now exists: many scholars have observedthat to varying degrees exiles and the foreign media have constructedthe Dalai Lama as the true body of Tibet,44 so that respecting hisgovernment, the CTA, is a patriotic duty; some argue that the heart ofTibetan culture has been carried into exile,45 and therefore real patrio-tism is steadfast preservation work; some see social work in Tibetproper as an important form of patriotism for exiles;46 others, likemany of those in the Tibetan Youth Congress, advocate for nothingless than a return to armed struggle against the Chinese.47

Tibetans in exile have constructed a community in exile by recon-figuring and re-“enframing” Tibet. The idealized Tibet is the Edenic“memory” and nostalgia for the Dalai Lama installed upon his seat atthe grand Potala Palace in Lhasa. In much of Tibetan exile discourseauthentic Tibet is past and future, but definitively not present.Tradition is constructed, bounded and de-historicized, as if traditionin pre-1959 Tibet was not always already in flux as well.

Are all Tibetan refugees waiting to return to Tibet? Nowak arguesthat Tibetans in exile are in a liminal stage, a betwixt and betweenspace, in which they ambiguously await a desired “reintegration.”48

Palakshappa, an Indian anthropologist working in a small Tibetansettlement in Karnataka in the 1970s, writes that the construction ofthe settlement society had been undertaken with the assumption thatexile would be of temporary duration.49

A very small minority of exiles have already returned to Tibet(despite the Chinese condition that they agree not to carry out the“separatist” agenda of the CTA), but most would-be returnees areholding out for genuine autonomy or independence. Many of ourinterviewees say that they would eventually return, once the pangs oftransition had subsided: “Tibet is the motherland, so I would go back.

Some people are well settled, so I think they would think twice, but Ithink most Tibetans would go back,” said a small business owner inDharamsala. “We would go back immediately,” said another infor-mant, a politically-active Tibetan book-store owner in India. But thissentiment is not universal amongst Tibetans in exile in India.

However patriotic they might feel towards Tibet, many olderrefugees have settled permanently into their lives in India, and cannotimagine uprooting themselves and their families again. Many second-and third-generation Tibetan refugees would be ill-equipped to moveto Tibet, especially if the Mandarin Chinese language were to remain adominant language for business, politics, education, etcetera. Someexiles seem to feel that starting over in Tibet is a risky proposition,especially since the standard of living for Tibetan refugees in India isstill better than that of many Tibetans in Tibet. One informant, a first-generation refugee, who visited his hometown in Tibet in the mid-1980s, felt that while India could never be home, it offered a betterlifestyle than one could expect upon return to even a newly freed Tibet:

But India itself, the situation is better for us. Life in India is moreconvenient. For instance, meat is really difficult to get in my home-town [in Tibet.] In India, meat is easier to get. There it is more dif-ficult to have sha tsampa mar.50 There is more abundance in India.The living standard in India is better – enough to eat, good electricity,weather is much better. There the houses are very dark. Before[1959], there was no electricity, you would have to go into thisvery dark house. Unless you had a lamp in your hand it was com-pletely dark . . . If the living conditions were as good in Tibet, thenwe would return. But everything is already here in India.

Tibetan exiles in India seem to yearn for return in theory, but manywould not leave India, since they have invested themselves in startingover there. The fact that many Tibetan refugees would choose not togo to Tibet if autonomy (or independence) were granted to Tibetspeaks to the insecurity of their current state of non-citizenship. Whatwould happen to refugees who choose not to go/return to Tibet?Would they be allowed to stay in India? In this situation, would theybe given Indian citizenship if they asked for it?

The Tibetan exile community in India does not live in a makeshifttent city; refugee families have spent long decades settling in, building

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up, and living in certain settlements in India. Yet even this level ofaccommodation to India has been cause for alarm in some quarters.One Tibetan exile living in America argued that since Tibetans inTibet have been Sinicized and Tibetans in India have been Indianized,the only authentic Tibetan culture left would be that carried by exilesto America. Bracketing out the wholly problematic logic of the previ-ous assertion (America as a cultural non-entity, for example), we haveto wonder – what does it mean to suggest that Tibetans in exile inIndia have been Indianized?

Hindi Tibeti Bhai Bhai?51

Tibetans living in India have demonstrated patriotism for India often,and in a multiplicity of ways, but Tibetans’ ambivalence about Indiamanifests itself often as well. India is a home away from home, but it ishosting Tibetans as guests, not adopting them for posterity.

While it is true that many Tibetans in exile in India will readilyadmit their fondness for the Hindi movies of Bollywood, will as soonorder a Punjabi thali as a plate of momos, and will demonstrate thesame familiarity with both the Tibetan national anthem and theIndian national anthem from their school days, there is evidence thatTibetans in exile have a fraught, somewhat ambivalent relationshipwith India. As Tibetan youth are not encouraged to feel increasinglyIndian in order to fit into the cultural mores of the adopted nation ofIndia, they rarely self-identify as “Tibetan Indians,” and more oftensay that they are “Tibetans in India.” We have encountered only afew informants who shared the opinion of one second-generationTibetan in exile (non-Indian citizen), who exclaimed in defiance tothe question of which identity he preferred: “I am 100% Tibetan,100% Indian. . . !”

The CTA is feverishly grateful to India, and hastens to remind itsconstituency how much the refugees owe to Indian policies allowingthe Dalai Lama’s government in exile to flourish. During an interviewin 2007, a CTA government employee praised India for the kindness ithas shown to Tibetans in exile, and said that “India is our secondhomeland.” This sentiment is also illustrated by the fact that whilemany Tibetans in exile joined the Indian army to fight for their inde-pendence, even after it became clear that the regiment would only beserving India’s national interests, many Tibetans in exile stayed andmade the army a career.

Yet Tibetans are not always in India’s corner. Tibetans in exileoften root for India when watching international cricket, but it is notunheard of for Tibetans in exile to choose to root against India. Whilemany Tibetans in exile do root for Indian cricketers as a matter ofnational pride or gracious courtesy, others find that they feel no spe-cial connection to India. One Tibetan exile informant noted thatTibetans in India often root for India at international sporting events,but he felt that Tibetans in Tibet would probably root for theChinese; he was challenged by another informant who said that manyTibetans in exile would root primarily for the countries of theirforeign financial sponsors.

“The Pakistani team was just cooler when I was growing up. Thecaptain back then was this cool guy. . .” said one Tibetan exile bornand raised in India, trying to explain why he had rooted for rivalPakistan over India. In another town, a Tibetan in exile monk and hisfriend were watching India play cricket against Pakistan on televisionin 2006, and chose to root for Pakistan; “I don’t trust Indians,” themonk said, when he was questioned about his preference for thePakistani cricket team. Rooting against India (and especially, rootingfor India’s arch rival, Pakistan) can be akin to a social safety valve – itis a non-confrontational way to alleviate some of the day to day ten-sions that emerge between guest and host.

At times, Tibetans in exile have demonstrated prejudice againstIndians; rumors persist about Indians being hopelessly dishonest anddirty, and about their bad treatment of women, or that they often killoff their girl children. Inter-community dating is universally discour-aged. There are a few instances in which inter-racial marriagesoccurred, however Indian–Tibetan relationships are extremelyuncommon and remain controversial.

Sometimes Indians are also guilty of prejudice against Tibetan refu-gees, as is clear from certain derogatory slurs and comments. OneTibetan exile who grew up in a settlement in Himachal Pradesh remem-bered that Indian village children in the 1970s and 1980s were oftenunkind to Tibetan refugees, and would chant disparaging epithets suchas, “Tibeti Log Chamar Cho!”52 However, he noted that over the past20 years the relationship between Tibetans and Indian villagers in hissettlement has generally improved: “Now villagers are making moremoney, they have seen outside of their village and with that exposure ithas become better. Now the villagers never say those things to us.”

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“Chinky” is a derogatory term now being used by Indians in cer-tain metropolitan areas to denigrate Tibetans in exile. “Chinky” wasoriginally used to refer to Indian citizens from outlying states likeManipur, Nagaland, and Mizoram, whose features have more in com-mon with many “East Asians” than most “South Asians.” Such preju-dice has had the effect of strengthening the boundaries betweenTibetans in exile and others. One young informant living in Delhicontradicted another informant when he said that living in India wasgood; she said, “But . . . here they call us ‘chinky.’ You don’t know,because you live up in a small village.” A third informant in theconversation later expressed her own sense of frustration withIndo-Tibetan dynamics: “Indians are Indians and Tibetans areTibetans. There is not that much between Indians and Tibetans.Tibetans, we are all alike. Indians make fun of us, they look down onus, they scorn us.”

Indians living in Tibetan settlement areas have generally profitedfrom the proximity of the refugee community, but the relationshipbetween Indians and Tibetan refugees in these areas remains complex.Besides taking advantage of the new business opportunities whichemerged as Tibetans arrived in small hamlets around the country,53 theforeign aid and foreign tourists which came in their wake have helpedmany local Indians to improve their economic situation, although per-haps not as much as they all expected.54 While Tibetans and localIndians have co-existed peacefully most of the time, the pressures ofinter-cultural misunderstandings, inter-community jealousies andpersistent mistrust have periodically given way to violent outbursts.

In April 1994, there was widespread rioting in Dharamsala, whichwas sparked by the killing of a local Indian youth by a Tibetan in exileover the results of an India vs. Pakistan cricket match.55 The tensionswhich erupted into violence, looting and the destruction of Tibetanshop-fronts and property emerged over time from various culturaldifferences, divergent notions of community identity, unresolved legaltensions, and especially socio-economic disparity.

Five years later, in 1999, more than 100 Tibetan exile shops weredestroyed and looted in Manali by local Indians simmering overanother incident between a local Indian and a Tibetan in exile. In thefollowing months, the Tibetan Review published two letters byTibetans in exile representing some of the divergent voices in the com-munity as they processed this latest outburst of anti-Tibetan violence

by Indians; one letter writer used the violence in Manali to express hissense that their welcome had been overstayed – “it is high time werealize that we cannot remain perennial guests” – and that the incidentshould inspire Tibetans in exile to renew their apparently flaggingefforts toward returning to Tibet; conversely, another letter to the edi-tor argues that the “uneducated mob mentality” of Manalis had likelybeen fueled by the tendency of Tibetans to mistreat local Indians:“It is absolutely true that Tibetans in India who have done financiallywell tend to look down upon local host Indians, treating them likerefugees!”56 The first opinion-writer advises Tibetans to leave Indiaoutright, perhaps beginning a “Long March to Tibet,” while the latteradvises the Tibetans in exile to begin training all Tibetans in “culturaland religious sensitivity (multicultural study).”

While many local Indians in settlement areas have a fraught rela-tionship with Tibetans in exile, many prominent educators, politiciansand others have worked to maintain a positive relationship betweenTibetans in exile and Indians. There have been many public statementsby both Tibetans and Indians about the sense of connection betweenTibet and India. Pia Oberoi argues that the political response fromIndians about the invasion of Tibet hinged upon a feeling of “kinship”between Indians and Tibetans.57 One Indian writer waxing nostalgicabout the essential similarity between Tibetan and Indian religiousbeliefs58 even seemed to declare Tibet the closest of all of India’sneighbors,59 perhaps to reify the specious claim that India is a Hindunation:60 “It is no exaggeration to say that the culture of Tibet comesfrom the common womb of Himalayas and no country has so muchsimilarity with India in its culture as Tibet.”61 A few public voicesseem to emphasize the connection between India and Tibet as a wayto express their primary anti-China sentiment. This perspective isespecially manifest in some of the Indo-Tibet Friendship groups.62

Between the Dharamsala rioters and the Indo-Tibetan FriendshipSociety membership there are a vast number of Indians, the largemajority in fact, who remain indifferent to the political situation ofTibetan refugees. We would surmise that this apathy has manifesteditself primarily due to a lack of information in Indian mainstreammedia regarding the plight of Tibetan refugees, the enormity of theIndian population in contrast to the relatively small number ofTibetans in exile in India, and the separation of Tibetans from themainstream Indian education system, amongst other factors. When an

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exile Tibetan activist publicly questioned the apathy of Indian activistsregarding the Tibet issue, an Indian activist replied that since Tibetanactivists had rarely showed interest in popular grassroots movementsin India, Indian activists had felt little inclination to show solidaritywith Tibetans in exile.63 While some educated urban Indians tend toexpress sympathy for the position of the Dalai Lama and the Tibetanrefugees, they remain ambivalent about the degree to which their gov-ernment should aggressively advocate for an independent Tibet. Whenthe Indian government hosted China’s President Hu Jintao in fall2006, India pressed for economic and political cooperation betweenthe two Asian superpowers without ever making the Tibet question areal issue of contention.

“Indo-Tibetan Friendship” is an oft-repeated, oft-cited, oft-printed slogan amongst Tibetans in exile, but despite the mantra, it is aburdened friendship, a somewhat disjointed relationship that isbursting with anxiety at the well-patrolled divide between the two.The gap, carefully maintained through a “process of enclavement,”64

includes Tibetan-only schools and self-segregation, in tandem withIndian indifference, has played a role in the racism and mistrust thatremains present (though not ubiquitous) on both sides.

Seeking a “Third Space”: Identity, Art and AnxietyHannerz has written that “A . . . genuine cosmopolitanism is first ofall an orientation, a willingness to engage with the Other . . . It is anintellectual and aesthetic stance of openness toward divergent culturalexperiences, a search for contrasts rather than uniformity.”65 Genuinecosmopolitanism is rare, but since not everyone slips into easy provin-cial fantasies, one could argue that a “third space”66 between the mar-gins of seemingly concrete ethnic or national identities remainspossible. The “third space” is no hybrid of concrete ethnic or culturalgroups, nor is it a bridge between actual states of “traditionalism” and“modernity,” but we would like to think of it as a more fluid becom-ing of something new. The “third space” moves towards enlighten-ment with its internalized acceptance of interdependence, flux andbeing-as-becoming. If the “third space” is in the hyphen, as Lavie andSwedensburg suggest, then is there anyone playing with the spacebetween “Tibetan-Indian”?

There is evidence of a “third space” in the Tibetan in exile experi-ence in India, but in general the exploration of this cultural space

seems tentative, anxiety-provoking, and often highly contested. Thereis a good deal of acceptance and tolerance of certain adopted “Indian”customs and aesthetics by Tibetans in exile (affection for cricket,Bollywood, curries, etcetera), but since “Tibetanness” is oftenenforced with vigor sometimes bordering on brutality, the “thirdspace” remains a controversial and tension-inducing space. It seemsthat a certain amount of flirting with fluidity, hybridity, or change ispermitted, but there are often social checks on those who would actu-ally embrace that state of being. Would embracing the “third space”really threaten the integrity, the unity, of “Tibetanness”? One couldactually argue the counterpoint that the misrecognized concretenessof “Tibetanness” threatens its own integrity at a more profound level.

Second- and third-generation Tibetans born in India are often themost perplexed about the contours of their national identity, and theshape of future opportunities; rising alcoholism, drug use and depres-sion amongst Tibetan exile youth, in Dharamsala and elsewhere, canbe considered symptomatic of the constant uncertainty faced byIndian-born Tibetan refugees. As asserted by two Tibetan exileyouths in their article, “Shattering the Shangri-la Stereotype,” there ispressure on Tibetan exile youth from international media and “tradi-tional” Tibetan exiles alike to conform to a certain palatable version ofTibetanness: “We are rebelling against the expectation that all Tibetansfit the stereotype. We resent the idea that there is only one way ofbeing truly ‘Tibetan.’”67 There is no one standardized version ofTibetanness for people (or even things or places) that does justice tothe diversity of experience amongst those which might fit the appella-tion “Tibetan.”68 There are countless examples of cultural moments inwhich Tibetans in exile have policed themselves into an ever narrowerversion of Tibetanness, for example the stand of the head of the CTAagainst the Miss Tibet pageant in Dharamsala.69 We now will turn ourfocus upon young artists, but Tibetan exiles of all ages often seem tobe restricted and bounded by an overly narrow idea of Tibetanness.

Diehl’s ethnography of the Tibetan in exile music group, theYak Band, operating out of Dharamsala, shows that a careful culturalnegotiation between Tibetan, Indian and Western music genres has tobe carefully performed in order to avoid offending certain Tibetanexile sensibilities.70 At the risk of over-simplifying Diehl’s multi-layered narrative of performing with the band, on the one handher readers cringe at the limitations being foisted upon the creative

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process by the mandate of “cultural preservation,” even as theydevelop compassion for Tibetan exile desires to remain somehowessentially Tibetan. While Diehl notes that cultural preservation canbe done with innovation and creativity, the tensions and pressuresfaced by creative exiles clearly show that the mandate to “stay thesame” can be a repressive agenda.

Diehl reports that upon first impression it seems that Tibetans inexile are changing enormously as their culture is being reconstitutedfar from home, yet in the end she rejects the notion of hybridity,because her informants see such adaptation as “the very unfortunateconsequences of refugee life, as embarrassing failures rather thansources of pride.”71 By and large Tibetans in exile have not embraced“creole culture,”72 and although they may in fact embody it, manystruggle fiercely to resist it.

In a similar vein, Kimberly Dukes writes about the culturalanxieties and complexities surrounding the scripting, making andcontroversial release of “We’re No Monks,” an independent Tibetanexile film.73 Dukes shows that such filmmaking itself is enacting“cultural citizenship” as opposed to legal citizenship: “Exile filmmak-ers perform their citizenship, identifying themselves on a world stageas ‘Tibetan,’ whether or not they have ever seen their homeland; theyshare aspects of a common project of expanding notions of whatTibetanness is.”74 In the film, Tibetans in exile, struggling with theirliminal status as youth refugees, openly play with the notion of vio-lent resistance against the Chinese occupation of Tibet. The end of themovie in particular, which shows a young exile building a bomb, wasmet with criticism by some Tibetans in exile, because of their concernthat such a portrayal may contradict the reputation that Tibetan refu-gees have cultivated with international supporters as “inherentlypeaceful” Buddhists;75 for example, on www.phayul.com, a popularexile community website, one Tibetan refugee writing about the filmangrily entitled his contribution, “Shame,” and noted that, “RichardGere would not be proud of us now.”76

Much of the poetry coming out of the Tibetan community inrecent years has reflected this desire to remain concretely, essentially,perhaps narrowly, Tibetan. Muses in Exile: An Anthology of TibetanPoetry is rife with romantic poems about the motherland, and pro-vides another example of the way that Tibetan art is being corralled tosome extent by the independence effort.77 Most, though not all, of the

poems in the collection read like love poems to Tibet, or else reaffirmthe poet’s commitment to Tibetan independence or “rangzen”: “i longfor yesteryear, i long for future, i long for my Tibet”;78 “Before I fadeaway, I will find a way, To make you FREE . . . Wait for meMOTHER, I will set you FREE”;79 “Along a dark tunnel I walk, Notknowing where it leads, Dampness makes me sneeze, my body aches.A lamp glows at the far end, a sign of hope, a sign of survival, andthen, Shambhala beams in front of me, and I become.”80 The refugees’host countries, in this set of poems, are mentioned only for their alien-ness, and are generally characterized as odd places that will soon beleft behind. Indianness is a foil against which the deprivation of Tibetis made manifest. The strangeness of Indian tastes, smells, and sightsexpressed by Tibetans in exile in this volume is remarkable since morethan half of the contributors were born in India. Rangzen poetry is anextremely popular genre in Tibetan exile communities. Many Tibetanexiles seem to forward the aesthetic that Tibetan poetry is rangzenpoetry.

An Indian Buddhist monk of a Tibetan order, who lectures at theCentral Institute for Higher Tibetan Studies in Sarnath, expressed hisown frustration at the perceived anxieties over cultural creativity inthe Tibetan in exile community, saying that his students seemedfettered by the narrow view of Tibetan culture as that which was pre-1959 Tibet.81 He writes that the Shangri-la image of Tibetanness that isbeing carefully packaged and policed by exile society should bequestioned and surmounted:

But culture is a constantly evolving thing. The poems and storiesthat you yourselves write in English are now part of “Tibetan”literature. New forms of music that modern Tibetan musicianscreate constitute “Tibetan” music . . . Anxieties about loss of thepast may be forgiven only to those who lack the imaginativeprowess to sculpt the future. You must not allow yourself to beheld hostage to such anxiety. Otherwise the present will foreverbe a second rate replica of the past . . . A certain insularity in theearly years of exile was both understandable and perhaps neces-sary, but now your identity is sufficiently well-established. (Anddispel all further anxiety about the fluidity or nebulousness ofsuch identity; identities are inevitably fluid and uncertain even forthose of us who inhabit our “own” country.)82

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Rigzin is challenging his Tibetan readers to create anew, rather than tobe limited by an excess of nostalgia for the past.

In our elucidation of the disciplining of creativity by often over-enthusiastic cultural preservationists, we echo Rigzin’s sentiments,and seek not to condemn appreciation for tradition, but to proposethis tack in moderation. Tibetan artists, musicians, and writers seem tobe in constant and needlessly painful negotiation between inspirationand social pressure. Artists should be able to make whatever they areinspired to create without being silenced by an intractable ethno-national identity; they seem too often pressured to portray a certainTibetanness that reverberates with the desires of both internationalsupporters and peers, and at the same time they face the task of tryingto preserve and represent a specific essentialized, traditionalTibetanness.

We are All Home/There is No Home: An Invitation to Rethink the NationFrom Leh to Bylakuppe, from rangzen poetry to Green Cards, fromresisting “chinky” to watching Indian cricket, the daily trials of theTibetan exile experience are rife with intense longing for an ever elusiverecognition and certainty. If Tibetan nationalism is a construction justlike other nationalisms, and Tibetanness is as fraught an identity asmost others, then perhaps these notions should be held more lightlyinstead of grasped ever more tightly. Although we recognize the sig-nificance of celebrating Tibetan culture(s), we challenge the prevalenceof the notion that just because Tibet is currently under occupationTibetanness is therefore concrete, unchanging, pure or infallible.

Much of the insecurity of exiles is apparent when one realizes thatthe Indian government and most other governments in the world donot recognize the CTA even as an official exile government, much lessan official national government. The tensions apparent as Tibetans inexile try to cross borders, represent themselves as nationals or as art-ists, or vigorously identify “us” versus “them,” show that recognitionby the Other is at the crux of cultural tension. Yet what exactly isgoing unrecognized, and by whom?

Benedict Anderson observed in “Long Distance Nationalism” thatit is only once home is far away that “home” manifests itself.83 It isupon leaving home that home is finally essentialized, reified and mostexplicitly desired.84 Anderson’s remark that “the nativeness of natives

is always unmoored” challenges the conceit of a real, ultimate home,since the native only becomes native once s/he has left. Before thenative departs, home is amorphous and undifferentiated, and it is onlyfinally bounded once the native has experienced distance or alienation.Nation is most explicitly constructed in its absence, and it is a conven-tional construction, not an ultimate one.

What would Tibetan Buddhist philosophers make of these tenden-cies to construct the social fiction or “imagined community” of thenation? We believe that Tibetan Buddhism would uphold this formu-lation, since, to borrow the language of Tibetan Buddhist philosophy,nothing exists inherently from its own side. In most recognizedschools of the Tibetan Buddhist Madhyamika system, nothing existsin the ultimate sense, and it is crucial to meditate towards an under-standing that the conventional truth that human beings perceive on adaily basis has no true substance. Recognition that the conventional“nation” is simply a construction without inherent existence is consis-tent with this formulation of Tibetan Buddhist ontology. If Tibetansin exile place such a high premium on preserving Tibetan nationalidentity, what effect would it have to argue that Tibetanness itself isonly a conventionally existing state, and not an ultimately existing state?

While maintaining hope for a free Tibet is an understandable,irreproachable attitude, especially in view of the current politicaldisenfranchisement of Tibetans in Tibet proper, we wonder at the ten-dency of some Tibetans in exile to remain so fixated on a future possi-bility that is ultimately out of their control. Perhaps a moremodulated hope would be preferable to the unmitigated desire/need/attachment for Tibetan freedom that seems to be prevalent (althoughnot ubiquitous) amongst Tibetan refugees today. The seeminglynever-ending liminality and bureaucratic “inconveniences” of refugeelife, the dearth of career opportunities and of contemporary Tibetanhero figures and the sense that real Tibetanness must remain fixatedon specific articulations of Tibet past85 may eventually become sointolerable that groups like the Tibetan Youth Congress couldbecome militant in their resistance against Chinese occupation ofTibet.86 Some activists have vehemently questioned the CTA/DalaiLama’s Middle Way politics of diplomacy, and have begun threaten-ing sabotage or campaigns of economic disruption inside the TAR.Working towards, or hoping for a free Tibet, has a dramatically differ-ent valence than needing a free Tibet right now, or at any cost.

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Attachment to overly reified identities can lead to more emotionalsuffering, and also more violence, despite the fact that the idealizedTibet future, whether free or not, probably has as little in commonwith what will actually evolve, just as the actual historical Tibet pasthas little in common with the romanticized Shangri-la version ofitself. Even if Chinese authorities were to withdraw soon from Tibet,then those Tibetans living in Tibet, those Tibetans in exile who wouldreturn, and the Chinese immigrants who have since settled in Tibetwould have a seriously traumatic period of renegotiating space andpower, not wholly unlike the peaceful, but somewhat harrowing andfraught reunification of East and West Germany.87 In the more simple,romantic, and prevalent narratives of a free Tibet, there is no account-ing for the complexity of return. What is more, in the shuffle of docu-mentation by the CTA and the GOI the assumption, the promise, of afree Tibet future remains, but what happens to the exiles and theirprogeny, dare we ask, if Tibet is never freed?

In the end, it seems that most Tibetans in exile have reified thenation, instead of deconstructing or meditating on the impermanenceof the conventional social reality until it no longer has the capacity toevoke such profound anxiety. As long as the dynamics between thenative and the stranger, the Self and Other, the home and the world,us and them, are reinforced and constructed as concrete binary oppo-sitions then the result is social fiction that can have dire consequences:living in the past; antagonism to creativity and innovation; bureau-cratic barriers that impair refugees’ abilities to pursue successful,meaningful lives in the present; the tendency to disparage differencewithin one’s community and to exaggerate the differences confrontedoutside of it; an ultimately frustrating battle against inevitable change;exaggerated emotional suffering, guilt, or the inclination to self-medicate with addictive illegal substances; at times, even violence(or the threat thereof) against self or others.

It seems to us that Tibetans in exile, like most contemporary peo-ples, have been thus ensnared by the “technologies” of national, ethnicand cultural borders, and with considerably more trauma given theirpolitical predicament of the last half century. But since a communitycollectively holding its breath will never be able to take a step in anydirection, we look forward to the possibility of a Tibetan refugee soci-ety poised to celebrate a multiplicity of Tibetannesses, and withoutundue attachment to any one particular manifestation of Tibetans’

many potential futures. Tibetans in exile today might benefit if morerefugees can develop more tolerance for socio-cultural work and playwithin a “third space,” in which the trappings of nationalism are ques-tioned and reconstituted with more genuine appreciation for, andmindfulness of, “inter-subjectivity,”88 historical contingency, as wellas certain Tibetan religio-cultural concepts such as non-attachment,impermanence, and interdependence.

We would like to gratefully acknowledge the assistance, time and insights of all of our infor-mants in India and elsewhere. Many thanks also to Carole McGranahan and Elliot Sperlingas well as our anonymous reviewers whose comments and suggestions helped us to improvethe quality of our submission. Finally, we would like to express our gratitude to theAmerican Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) for the two junior fellowships that allowed us topursue this research.

1. Tenzin Tsundue, “My Tibetanness,” Tibetan Review Vol. 35, No. 8 (August 2000),pp. 20–21, at p.20.

2. Here we refer to the Tibetan government in exiles’ definition of Tibetan refugees asthose who fled Tibet post-1959 and their progeny. In this article, we focus on “Tibetanrefugees”/“Tibetans in exile” as opposed to those Tibetans living inside occupied Tibet.As defined by the Tibetan government in exile, the following groups are not consideredTibetans in exile: pre-1959 Tibetan immigrants to India called “Gyagar Khampas,” andculturally or ethnically similar communities in India such as Ladakhis, Kinnauris, etc.The appellation “Gyagar Khampa” is sometimes taken to mean “Indian Khampa”(“Khampa” refers specifically to someone originating from the Eastern Tibetan provinceof Kham), but it is possibly derived from “Gyagar Khyampas” meaning “Wanderers toIndia.” Tibetans in exile often express ambivalence about “Gyagar Khampas,” as theyare citizens with different subject positions vis-à-vis the state. On the other hand, thesepre-1959 Tibetan immigrants to India sometimes resent being thus differentiated fromthe exiles, and sometimes object to the term “Gyagar Khampa,” since it is used toemphasize their exclusion from the refugee community proper. In sum, we are using thedesignation of Tibetan as a self-determined national appellation, with full cognizance ofthe over-simplifications thus entailed. For an excellent treatment of the complexity ofacademic distinctions between “Tibetan” as a “national” and “ethnic” category, see SaraShneiderman, “Barbarians at the Border and Civilising Projects: Analysing Ethnic andNational Identities in the Tibetan Context,” in P. Christiaan Klieger, ed., TibetanBorderlands (Proceedings of the Tenth Seminar of the International Association ofTibetan Studies (Leiden: Brill, 2006), pp. 9–34. For more on how the government ofIndia has made it increasingly difficult for post-1979 “newcomers” (sarjorwa) to receiveproper refugee documentation, see Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, “India/China: Whether a Tibetan whose birth in India between 1950 and 1987 was not regis-tered with the authorities would be recognized as a citizen; whether the Indian govern-ment accepts birth certificates issued by the Tibetan government-in-exile; whether theIndian government issues birth certificates to Tibetans born in India,” February 6, 2006.Accessible via www.unhcr.org. For more on CTA’s policy on “newcomers,” see KevinGarratt, “Tibetan Refugees, Asylum Seekers, Returnees and the Refugees Convention –Predicaments, Problems and Prospects,” Tibet Journal Vol. 22, No. 3 (1997), pp. 18–56.Garratt writes that even the CTA has altered its official policy post-1994 to encouragemost new arrivals to eventually return (except in cases of political harassment or impris-onment, etc.) instead of settle in India. Garratt goes on to observe that the CTA has

194 India Review

offered the explanation that if a few thousand Tibetans continue to flee Tibet to Indiaeach year, then the effect will be the slow draining of the Tibetan population from Tibetproper; this would essentially play into the reduction of the percentage of Tibetans inTibet vis-à-vis the Chinese migrants, and hence make the Tibetans’ claim to the regionincreasingly tenuous.

3. Tibetan exiles settled in many countries in and out of South Asia, but this paper willfocus on Tibetan refugees in India.

4. For “enclavement,” see P. Christiaan Klieger, “Accomplishing Tibetan Identity: The Con-stitution of a National Consciousness” (PhD Dissertation, University of Hawaii, 1989),p. 55. For “emplacement,” see Keila Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of aTibetan Refugee Community (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002), p. 4.

5. For more on “tradition,” see Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala, and Eric Hobsbawm and Ter-ence Ranger, The Invention of Tradition (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983).

6. For more on “ethnicity,” see Fredrick Barth, Ethnic Groups and Boundaries: The SocialOrganization of Culture Difference (Prospect Heights, IL: Waveland Press, Inc., 1969);Richard Handler, “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis: Problems in NarratingNationalism and Ethnicity,” Journal of Anthropological Research Vol. 41, No. 2 (1985),pp. 171–82; Lisa Malkki, Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory and National Cosmologyamong Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995);Shneiderman, “Barbarians at the Border and Civilising Projects”; Brackette Williams,“A Class Act: Anthropology and the Race to Nation across Ethnic Terrain,” AnnualReview of Anthropology Vol. 18 (1989), pp. 401–44.

7. For more on “nation,” see Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on theOrigin and Spread of Nationalism (New York: Verso, 1983); Benedict Anderson, “LongDistance Nationalism,” in The Spectre of Comparisons: Nationalism, Southeast Asia and theWorld (London and New York: Verso, 1998); Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large: Cul-tural Dimensions on Globalization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996);Arjun Appadurai, “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization,” inB. Meyer and P. Geschiere, eds., Globalization and Identity: Dialectics of Flow and Closure(Oxford: Blackwell, 1999); Richard Handler, “On Dialogue and Destructive Analysis:Problems in Narrating Nationalism and Ethnicity,” Journal of Anthropological ResearchVol. 41, No. 2 (1985), pp. 171–82; E. J. Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780:Programme, Myth and Reality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990).

8. Formal and informal interviews for this paper were conducted between January 2006and December 2006 (with some follow-up interviews conducted in later months) in sev-eral Tibetan communities in North India. Therefore, this article does not address theheightened sense of Tibetan patriotism which emerged in the exile community after theriots and subsequent crackdown in occupied Tibet in the spring of 2008. As one ofthe co-authors is himself a Tibetan refugee born and raised in India, we have also drawnon his life experience, and thus have had to negotiate the complex benefits and pitfalls of so-called “halfie” anthropology. For more on “halfie” anthropology, see Lila Abu-Lughod,“Writing Against Culture,” in Richard G. Fox, ed., Recapturing Anthropology: WorkingIn the Present (Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press, 1991).

9. Lavie and Swedenburg argue that the “third space” is a potential realm of creativitybetween the hyphens of one or more ethnic or national identities, which are often mis-taken for solid categories in and of themselves. For more on “third space,” see SmadarLavie and Ted Swedenburg, Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1996). We will revisit this notion in greater detailin later sections.

10. Martin Heidegger, “The Question Concerning Technology,” in The Question Concern-ing Technology and Other Essays (New York: Harper, 1977).

11. Jurgen Habermas, Towards a Rational Society; Student Protest, Science and Politics(Boston: Beacon Press, 1970).

12. Heidegger. The Question Concerning Technology.13. Green Books, identification used for CTA tax-collection purposes, are more commonly

known as Lagdeb Janggu (Green Book) or Rangzen Lagdeb (Freedom Book).

14. RCs are renewable temporary residence permits, and ICs are issued in lieu of passportsto refugees for traveling abroad.

15. All proper names of interviewees have been changed to protect their confidentiality.16. Pia Oberoi, Exile and Belonging: Refugees and State Policy in South Asia (New Delhi:

Oxford University Press, 2006).17. Oberoi, Exile and Belonging, p. 95.18. Nangsa Choedron, “Tibetanization Program: A Proposed Change in the Language of

Instruction in Tibetan Schools in India,” 1999. Accessible via www.tcewf.org.19. Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada, “India: 1) Legal status of Tibetan refugees; 2)

Rights of Tibetans to Indian Nationality,” July 1, 1992. Accessible via www.unhcr.org.20. Indian citizens have the right to vote and to seek representation on bodies of government

whose legislation affects Tibetans in exile. Some citizenship-seekers we interviewed arguedthat as legal citizens they would have greater political leverage to encourage India to bothhelp the cause of Tibetan freedom, and to dissuade Sino-Indian partnerships. For an exam-ple of violations of civil rights, during the diplomatic visit of PRC’s President Hu to NewDelhi in 2006, the GOI issued a letter stating that a particular Tibetan exile activist couldnot leave Dharamsala to join in legal, organized protests. For more regarding howTibetans in India are allowed to stay refugees contingent on non-violent and non-politicalactivities, see Immigration and Refugee Board of Canada 1992, and Robert Thurman,“China Continues Crack Down on Tibet Protests” March 20, 2008. Accessible viawww.democracynow.org. In a Democracy Now interview, Thurman recently noted that,“there is an agreement between the Tibetan government in exile and the Indian govern-ment not to do political things on the soil of Indian territory where they are refugees.”

21. The state government of Himachal Pradesh only recently legislated that Tibetans in exilecould own land, but in most of India refugees are prohibited from owning land. Tibetansin exile have long been forced to rent land, or to buy land illegally through Indianbrokers.

22. Aihwa Ong, Flexible Citizenship: The Cultural Logics of Transnationality (Durham,NC: Duke University Press, 1999).

23. Ann Frechette, Tibetans in Nepal: The Dynamics of International Assistance Among aCommunity in Exile (New York: Berghahn Books, 2004), p. 128.

24. Tibetans in exile coming from India are sometimes prevented from taking legal refugein a second foreign country of choice, since they are coming from India, not Tibetproper. Refugees carrying identification documents from India sometimes have toeither “lose” such documents, or work through networks back in Tibet to acquiredocuments that say that they were born there (even if they were not). This is to saythat Tibetans in exile in India cannot easily seek refuge abroad, as they appear to beresidents of India, and since India is not overtly politically oppressing them, theycannot take refuge from India.

25. Bhuchung K. Tsering, “Tibetans at Crossroads,” Tibetan Review Vol. 37, No. 7 (July2002), p. 24.

26. Honorary citizenship is not political citizenship, and is therefore not accompanied withthe legal documents of citizenship, such as passports, voting registration, etc.

27. Press Trust of India, “Give Dalai Lama Indian Citizenship,” December 19, 2006.Accessible via www.expressindia.com.

28. For more information about the Dorje Shugden controversy, see Georges Dreyfus,“The Shuk-Den Affair: History and Nature of a Quarrel,” Journal of the InternationalAssociation of Buddhist Studies Vol. 21, No. 2 (1999), pp. 227–70, and Martin A. Mills,“This Turbulent Priest: Contesting Religious Rights and the State in the TibetanShugden Controversy,” in R. A. Wilson and J. P. Mitchell, eds., Human Rights in a Glo-bal Perspective: Anthropological Studies of Rights, Claims and Entitlements (London:Taylor & Francis Ltd, 2003).

29. Pema Thinley, “Shugden Takes an India Turn,” Tibetan Review Vol. 35, No. 12(December 2000), p. 1.

30. “Exile Govt Refutes Shugden Allegations,” Tibetan Review Vol. 35, No. 12 (December2000), p. 11.

196 India Review

31. At the time, Tibetans in exile commenting publicly and in private about the DorjeShugden community’s threat to secede from refugee society noted that there was noguarantee that the GOI would grant citizenship in this case.

32. An all-Tibetan refugee unit of the Indian army has operated since the 1960s. No longermandatory for the bulk of refugee men after high school, army service is still a careeroption for refugees. Originally founded with the aim of training Tibetan refugees tofight against the Chinese incursion in Tibet, the regiment has never seen action in Tibet,but has instead been deployed to protect Indian border areas.

33. There are other institutionalized forms of voluntary tax in the Tibetan in exile community.The CTA’s Department of Finance prints and distributes booklets for the sweater-sellers,in which their annual “voluntary donation for the welfare of Tibet” is recorded. It is notcompulsory, but each year people are socially compelled to give money. According to onesweater-seller, this voluntary donation is very important for people in terms of their self-identification as Tibetans. There is some competitive generosity, since even though dona-tions are supposed to be private, the word invariably spreads about sizable donations. Onthe booklet’s cover the CTA notes that the donation is essentially an investment in regain-ing Tibet from China: “It is important to have a stable Tibetan government in order toregain Tibetan independence, so for that reason this is the voluntary donation book forthose with positive motivation, as regulated by Article 14 of the Tibetan Charter.”

34. Newcomers (sarjorwas) from Tibet to India in recent decades have sometimes had moredifficulty obtaining GOI documents, such as RCs and ICs. See Julia Meredith Hess,“Statelessness and the State: Tibetans, Citizenship, and Nationalist Activism in aTransnational World,” International Migration Vol. 44, No.1 (March 2006), pp. 79–103.Hess has argued that the newcomers have been allowed to enter India, but subsequentlydenied RCs and proper documentation as a way for India to hide the numbers of incom-ing Tibetans, and ultimately mitigate Sino-Indian political tensions. However, this is notto say that many of these “newcomers” do not find ways to officially or unofficiallyacquire the necessary documentation. Still, many newcomers remain off-the-grid, invisible,unrecognized and therefore exist in a doubly tenuous situation – both officially andunofficially stateless.

35. Claude B. Levenson, The Dalai Lama: A Biography, translated by Stephen Cox(New Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978).

36. Pema Thinley, “The Long Road to Democracy,” Tibetan Review Vol. 35, No. 5(May 2000), p. 1. The GOI has dropped their requirement for Sponsorship Affidavitssince that particular CTA legislation was initially passed.

37. Bhutan gave refuge to several thousand Tibetan refugees post-1959, however it gavethem an ultimatum in 1979, which entailed either taking Bhutanese citizenship or beingdeported to India. This led to over 4,000 Tibetan refugees taking Bhutanese citizenship,and over 3,000 Tibetan refugees moving to India. Since the 1980s, Bhutan has officiallydisallowed the influx of new Tibetan refugees. See Andrea Matles Savada, ed., Bhutan: ACountry Study (Washington: GPO for the Library of Congress, 1991).

38. Bhuchung K. Tsering, “Passports for the Lamas,” Tibetan Review Vol. 37, No. 9(September 2002), p. 29.

39. Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large, p.30.40. Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan

Press, 1994), p.1.41. Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala, p. 66.42. Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala. The newcomers from Tibet, called “sarjorwa” by the

earlier waves of Tibetan refugees, are often degraded and distanced by virtue of theirperceived “Chineseness.”

43. Emily Yeh, “Will the Real Tibetan Please Stand Up!: Identity Politics in the TibetanDiaspora,” in P. Christiaan Klieger, ed., Tibet, Self, and the Tibetan Diaspora: Voices ofDifference (Boston: Brill, 2002).

44. See Thierry Dodin and Heinz Rather, Imagining Tibet (Boston: Wisdom Publications,2001); Margaret Nowak, Tibetan Refugees: Youth and the New Generation of Meaning(New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1984); P. Christiaan Klieger, Tibetan

Nationalism (Berkeley, CA: Folklore Institute, 1992); A. A. Shiromany, ed., The Spirit ofTibet (New Delhi: Allied Publishers Limited, 1995); T. B. Subba, Flight and Adaptation:Tibetan Refugees in the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya (Delhi: LTWA, 1990).

45. “‘Today Tibet lives, not within Tibet but outside Tibet. Everything that is Tibet – theculture, the religion, every aspect of Tibet lives outside Tibet,’ Kasur Lodi Gyari, theDalai Lama’s Special Representative in Washington.” For the quote, see Mary Craig,Tears of Blood: A Cry for Tibet (New Delhi: Indus, 1992), p. 322.

46. Chokey Tsering, “A New Threshold to Save Tibet,” Tibetan Review Vol. 36, No. 5(May 2001), pp. 16–20.

47. Claude B. Levenson, The Dalai Lama: A Biography, and Tseten Norbu, “Rebels: TheTibetan Youth Congress,” in Dagmar Bernstorff and Hubertus von Welck, eds., Exileas Challenge: The Tibetan Diaspora (New Delhi: Orient Longman Private Limited,2003).

48. Nowak, Tibetan Refugees.49. T. C. Palakshappa, Tibetans in India: A Case Study of Mundgod Tibetans (New Delhi:

Sterling Publishers Pvt Ltd, 1978).50. Sha tsampa mar is a Tibetan expression roughly equivalent to “bread and butter,” but

literally meaning, “meat, barley flour, and butter.”51. The Jawaharlal Nehru government coined the slogan “Hindi Chini Bhai Bhai” (Indians

and Chinese are Brothers) to underscore the significance of Sino-Indian relationship inthe early years after Indian independence and before war broke out between the twonations in 1962.

52. Meaning “Tibetans are Chamars” in a local Indian dialect, the phrase seems to equateTibetans with low caste cobblers; one would infer that the dietary habits of Tibetans liv-ing in India (who eat cow meat) is being related to the caste impurity of the cobbler caste(who work with leather). Another informant believes that the epithet was specificallymocking Tibetan accents and ways of speaking.

53. In areas of high Tibetan concentrations there are many Indian shopkeepers who haveestablished excellent business relationships with Tibetan refugees. One Indian shop-keeper, an informant from Himachal Pradesh, said that “Tibetans are honest,” and oftenextended generous lines of credit. We found several examples of such sentiment betweenIndian shopkeepers and their Tibetan customers.

54. Tibetans in exile were not the only ones convinced that their refuge in India would be ofshort duration, local Indians were told by their federal government that the Tibetanswould reside in the area only for a short time, and then all of the infrastructure whichhad been installed on their behalf would be inherited by local Indians. See Palakshappa,Tibetans in India.

55. Sandra Penny-Dimri, “Conflict Amongst the Tibetans and Indians of North India:Communal Violence and Welfare Dollars,” Australian Journal of Anthropology Vol. 5,No. 3 (1994), pp. 280–93.

56. Norbu Wangchuk, “Manali, a Wake-up Call,” Tibetan Review Vol. 34, No. 8 (August1999), p. 26, and Woeser Jongdong, “Lest There Be More Manalis,” Tibetan ReviewVol. 34, No. 9 (September 1999), p. 26.

57. Oberoi, Exile and Belonging, p. 84.58. This perspective treated Indian as a synonym for Hindu, which of course erases the tre-

mendous religious diversity of India. Similarly, it glosses the fact that not all Tibetansare Buddhist; some Tibetans profess the Bonpo or even Muslim religion.

59. This is a glaring, and quite politically loaded omission of Pakistan, Bangladesh, etc.,given the shared borders, regional languages, sub-cultures, and sometimes religions thatare shared with India.

60. Hindus generally consider the Buddha an avatar of Vishnu, and therefore many Hindusconsider a Buddhist to be a kind of Hindu. The Hindu Sangh Parivar, Hindu extremistswho believe that India should be a Hindu state have embraced Buddhists, Sikhs andJains as part of the Hindu family.

61. G. Venkateswar, “Tibetans’ Plight – an Indian’s Empathy and Appeal,” Tibetan ReviewVol. 37 (2002), p. 29.

198 India Review

62. In 1959, as the Dalai Lama and thousands of other Tibetans fled the Chinese occupationof their homeland, an All-India Tibet Convention was held in Kolkata. Following con-ventions led to the formation of several Indian support groups for Tibet, such as theTibet Swaraj Committee (formed in 1962) and the Indo-Tibetan Friendship Society(formed in 1978). Indian support groups have generally maintained the right of Tibetansin exile to return to an independent Tibet, emphasized Indo-Tibetan cultural and politi-cal cooperation, and the importance of a free Tibet for Indian polity. For example, aftera recent All India Tibet Support Group (TSG) Conference the Tibetan Review reportedthat the groups seemed focused on re-orienting Indian policy towards China: “The NewDelhi based India Tibet Coordination Office (ITCO) said there was evident acceptanceduring the conference that the issue of Tibet is linked with the security of India and thatsupporting Tibet is supporting the cause of India more than Tibet.” For the quote, see“Indian Supporters Demand New Gov’t Tibet Initiative,” Tibetan Review Vol. 38, No.10 (October 2003), pp. 16–17.

63. Tenzin Rigzin, “The Indo-Tibetan Bond Is Greater Than Mere Friendship, But . . .,”Tibetan Review Vol. 40, No.4 (April 2005), pp. 16–17.

64. Klieger, “Accomplishing Tibetan Identity,”, p. 55.65. Ulf Hannerz, “Cosmopolitans and Locals in World Culture,” Theory Culture and Society

Vol. 7 (1990), pp. 237–51, at p. 239.66. Lavie and Swedenburg, Displacement, Diaspora, and Geographies of Identity.67. Tenzin Metok Sither and Dechen Khando, “Shattering the Shangri-La Stereotype:

Tibetans Re-Branded,” Tibetan Review Vol. 39, No. 9 (September 2004), p. 25.68. One Tibetan exile commentator suggested an official standardization process for

material Tibetanness. He advocated for a Tibetan brand stamp, possibly a “yellowdouble-dorje” which would be “monitored and implemented by cultural and academicinstitutions like the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives.” For this discussion, seeBhuchung K. Tsering, “Establishing Standards for Things ‘Tibetan,’” Tibetan ReviewVol. 35, No. 2 (February 2000), p. 23.

69. The disapproval of the elected head of the CTA, Samdhong Rinpoche, has made theMiss Tibet contests in Dharamsala rather controversial. Samdhong Rinpoche hasclaimed that he speaks for the exile government in condemning the pageant; a newspaperarticle paraphrased him as saying it was, “un-Tibetan, being not a part of the Tibetantradition and culture.” Samdhong Rinpoche apparently does not consider himself anti-modernity: “Rather, he insisted, he was a post-modern thinker and was expressing hiscriticism in consideration of the scheme of things in the next century. ‘I say this verymuch in terms of the 22nd and 23rd centuries,’ he has said.” For the interview with Sam-dhong Rinpoche referenced above, see Pema Thinley, “Miss Tibet Crowned Amid Ran-cour,” Tibetan Review Vol. 39, No. 11 (November 2004), p. 18.

70. Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala.71. Diehl, Echoes from Dharamsala, p. 4.72. Ulf Hannerz, “The World in Creolization,” Africa Vol. 57, No. 4 (1987), pp. 546–59.73. Kimberly Christine Dukes, “Cultural Citizenship in the Tibetan Exile: Movies, Media

and Personal Stories” (PhD Dissertation, Temple University, 2006).74. Dukes, “Cultural Citizenship in the Tibetan Exile,” p. 269.75. For more on the complex historical revisionism that temporarily erases or “arrests” the

histories of certain militant Tibetan resistance from mainstream histories in order topropagate certain stereotypes of an inherently non-violent Tibetan society, as well as theDalai Lama’s agenda of non-violent resistance, see Carole McGranahan, “Truth, Fear,and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance,” CulturalAnthropology, Vol. 20, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 570–601.

76. “aku from Minneapolis,” Readers Comment on “‘We Are No Monks’ Premiered inLondon”: Shame, July 17, 2004. Accessible via www.phayul.com/news/discuss/view.

77. Bhuchung D. Sonam, ed., Muses in Exile: An Anthology of Tibetan Poetry (New Delhi:Paljor Publications, 2004).

78. Tsoltim N. Shakabpa, “My Tibet,” in Sonam, ed., Muses in Exile, p. 47.79. Thupten N. Chakrishar, “A Pledge,” in Sonam, ed., Muses in Exile, p. 158.

80. Dhargyal Tsering, “Shambala,” in Sonam, ed., Muses in Exile, p. 171.81. Rigzin, “The Indo-Tibetan Bond Is Greater Than Mere Friendship, But . . .”82. Rigzin, “The Indo-Tibetan Bond Is Greater Than Mere Friendship, But . . .,” pp. 16–17.83. Anderson, “Long Distance Nationalism.”84. For a significant variation on Anderson’s formulation of home, see Georg Simmel, The

Sociology of Georg Simmel, translated by Kurt H. Wolff (New York: Free Press, 1985[Reissue]). Simmel backgrounds the traveler, and focuses instead on the stranger whostays, noting that it is this more permanent alienness that causes acute anxiety for theersatz native. Simmel writes “the stranger is near and far at the same time, as in any rela-tionship based on merely universal human similarities. Between these two factors ofnearness and distance, however, a peculiar tension arises, since the consciousness ofhaving only the absolutely general in common has exactly the effect of putting a specialemphasis on that which is not common” (p. 148). Simmel’s argument may help explain(but not excuse) some of the tension and even racism evinced by Indians regarding theTibetan exile “strangers.”

85. Hero figures (or revered public figures) in Tibetan exile society are often considered tobe either religious icons or freedom-fighters. Self-immolators often receive high honors,for example, Thupten Ngodrup is posthumously referred to as “pawo,” meaning “thecourageous one.”

86. The Tibetan Youth Congress and some other Tibetan activists have threatened increasedmilitancy. One Tibetan refugee activist was recently quoted saying that only militancycould win the day: “I’m calling upon Tibetans to go inside China and sabotage their eco-nomic structure, but I cannot go into details. I call it the strategy of the mosquito. Tohurt China’s economic infrastructure inside China. The aim will be not to take life, butwe will be realistic enough to understand that it is not in our power and our control tothe consequences of our every action. If we are about to blow up a bridge and a truckcomes along the way, that is not in our hands to decide.” For the quote, see “Trouble inExile,” STS TV (2006). Accessible via www.tibet.ca. See Norbu, “Rebels,” for furtherdiscussion of increased unrest amongst Tibetan refugee youth.

87. See Dominic Boyer, “Ostalgie and the Politics of the Future in Eastern Germany,”Public Culture Vol. 18, No. 2 (Spring 2006), pp. 361–81, and Andreas Glaeser, Dividedin Unity: Identity, Germany, and the Berlin Police (Chicago: University of Chicago,2000).

88. Henrietta L. Moore, A Passion for Difference: Essays in Anthropology and Gender(Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1994).

“we're not home”: tibetan refugees in india in the twenty-first century

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