TIBET’S WINDING ROAD: MODERNITY, NATIONALISM, AND UNSETTLED EXILE
Restricted (Penn State Only)
- Author:
- Choedup, Ugyan
- Graduate Program:
- History (PHD)
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- June 01, 2023
- Committee Members:
- David Atwill, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Jyoti Balachandran, Major Field Member
Greg Eghigian, Major Field Member
Shuang Shen, Outside Unit & Field Member
Michael Kulikowski, Program Head/Chair - Keywords:
- Tibet
Nationalism
Exile Tibetan
Colonialism
Colonial Modernity
Nation-building
China
The Dalai Lama - Abstract:
- This dissertation is about the history of modern exile Tibetan nationalist discourse. In writing this history, this study traces its origin to the early twentieth century when the changing political and ideological landscape of the world around Tibet introduced new modern ideas, institutions, and practices into the Tibetan-speaking world that gradually transformed the conceptual world of Tibetan elites. However, this transformation in the Tibetan conceptual world was limited to a few nationalist elites and therefore remained at the margin of the Tibetan social world until the communist invasion of Tibet. The Communist invasion, which came as a modernizer in Tibet, brought these modern ideas, institutions, and practices to the center of the Tibetan world and forced the Tibetan nationalist elites to come to terms with the force of modernization. A decade-long modern Chinese colonialism radically altered the ways in which Tibetan nationalist elites think of themselves and the world around them. As a result, by the time Tibetans led by the Dalai Lama reached exile in India, modernization as an idea had achieved a hegemonic consensus among nationalist elites. Therefore, the nationalist elites took upon themselves the task of modernization and creation of the nation in exile. However, as this study shows, building a nation in exile was not straightforward. The new hegemonic vision of the future of the Tibetan nationalist elites was contested by those at the margins of the Tibetan social world since this nation, despite speaking of the language of equality, collective sacrifice, national unity, and liberation from without, hidden underneath such egalitarian discourse is the unequal demand for sacrifice for the nation from its varied historically constituted groups and unequal representation in the national order of things.