Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans

Abstract

What truths are available in imperial archives for non-colonial subjects? Tibet was never colonized by the British, and yet was drawn into the British imperial domain in ways that impacted both political history and historiography. In the 1940s, Tibetan intellectual Rapga Pangdatsang based his Tibetan Improvement Party in Kalimpong, India where he soon ran afoul of colonial officials who thought he was a Chinese spy. By drawing on multiple archival, ethnographic, and historic sources, I show how the story of Rapga Pangdatsang and the first Tibetan political party enables a recalibrating of both Tibetan and British imperial history. It also opens up a consideration of empire beyond the colonial, and speaks more broadly to a consideration of the non-colonial as a thus-far overlooked aspect of empire.

The Intimate Life of Dissent Ánthropological Perspectives

“…Imperial speculation about the condition, form and audience of Rapga's dissent paled in comparison to his actual project; in other words, the British got much wrong (McGranahan 2005(McGranahan , 2017. But in the hierarchical operations of empire, lack of substantative knowledge was not an insurmountable obstacle for imperial officials.…”

Regimes of temporality: China, Tibet and the politics of time in the post-2008 era

“…Tibetan counter discourses can at times present problematic readings of Tibet’s past. There is, for example, a largely uncritical and even rosy treatment of the British imperial presence in 20th century Tibet, which was influential in enabling the PRC to eventually claim Tibet in the way that it did (McGranahan, 2017: 94). Some Tibetans also criticise these online practices for what they see as a tendency to glorify Tibet’s past.…”

Afterword

“…Within the P.R.C., at times Tibetans creatively push back on their state ethnic (minzu) categorization, and other times they operate within proscribed limits (Germano 1998 Tibetan experiences with Chinese neighbours long precede contemporary empire. Traders, intellectuals, monks, and others regularly travelled to China and other neighbouring countries such as India and Nepal, and resided there sometimes by choice and other times as forced exile (Jagou 2013;McGranahan 2017;Stoddard 1985;Yongdan 2019). The city of Chengdu in Sichuan, for example, has long had Tibetan residents, and is currently being reimagined anew as a Tibetan place within China (Xu, Kou, and Wall 2018) ).…”

“…They are orally narrated, and written and published by Khampa individuals and communities inside Tibet and also in exile. From hagiographies and local histories to diaries and political testimonies and more (e.g., Galli, this volume;Hartley 2013;McGranahan 2017;J. Norbu 1986;Pemba 2017;Schwieger 2002;Thargyal 2007;Wangmo 2017), available sources are not always accessible inside Tibet.…”