Thread by @Tweetistorian

🧵Two by @ChawlaSwati

1/ On #Tibet in the Indian imagination:

Yesterday, we looked at how #Tibetans perceived India+ how the @DalaiLama walked in the path of many of his countrymen before him when he came into exile in India.

Let's turn the gaze in the other direction today.

2/ Indians have at least two vantage points from where to view #Tibet. Parts of #Himalayan India border Tibet👇. Thanks to older connections of religious patronage, pilgrimage, and trade, the perspective from these regions is often v. diff from the capital in New Delhi.
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3/ Indian cities of Gaya, Sanchi+ Sarnath were imp pilgrimage sites for Tibetan Buddhists; as was Kailash Mansarovar in Tibet for Hindu+ Buddhist pilgrims from India. The imagination of an “Akhand Bharat” (Undivided India) often included #Tibet.

Map: columbia.edu/itc/mealac/pri…

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4/ Under colonial rule, ethnographers employed phrenological+ racial taxonomies from 19th C Europe-- e.g. "Mongolian"-- to classify diverse Himalayan communities as "primitive"+ "savage" and different from the ppl of "India proper" (aka North India).

See @mgergan+ @GeogSara
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5/ British Foreign Secretary Olaf Caroe conceptualized the "Mongolian Fringe" in 1940 as India’s "inner ring" of defense.
This included #Nepal, #Sikkim, #Bhutan +“North East Frontier Tracts"-- all areas w/ predominantly "Mongoloid" pop"ns.
Beyond these were Tibet+ China.

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6/ Echoing Charles Bell, who we met y'day 👇, Caroe wanted #Tibet "as a buffer to India on the north..." and argued that it was in India's interest to maintain Tibet as an "integral international unit."
This conceptualization has had a LONG afterlife.

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7/ Echoing colonial racialized thinking in the early years after Independence, India's first Home Minister, Sardar Patel (left, below), cautioned Prime Minister #Nehru about "pro-Mongoloid prejudice" along the country's northern and eastern frontiers in a 1950 letter:

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8/ "All along the #Himalaya+ north+ NE, we hv on our side of the frontier a pop"n ethnologically+ culturally not diff from #Tibetans+ Mongoloids... The existence... of a pop"n w/ affinities to Tibetans or Chinese hv all the elements of potential trouble b/w China+ ourselves.”
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9/ Anxieties over India’s border security on the eastern front continued to escalate through 1950s+ 1960s. India feared that Communist control over Tibet might have a cascading effect in the region on the survival of monarchies in #Nepal, #Bhutan, and #Sikkim.

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10/ Accounts of #Tibetans escaping into India fueled these fears. In 1955, Min of External Affairs heard a "rumor": the Chinese proposed to bring “500 girls trained in Communism” to #Lhasa who'll be made to marry monks+ “such monks... will be given loans to carry on trade...”
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11/ The issue of the deracination of Tibetan #Buddhist monastic institutions found a sympathetic ear in Indian govt+ media. #Mahayana litr from India was catalogued+ preserved in #Tibetan+ imp Buddhist texts no longer extant in any Indian lang are available in #Tibetan.
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12/ To this day, most reporting on Tibet in Indian media is from a geopolitical+ defence perspective. Among my own students over the years, I have observed that the only associations about Tibet are of the Sino-Indian relations, monks (not nuns) in red robes, + @DalaiLama.

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