Dibyesh Anand

Strategic Hypocrisy: The British Imperial Scripting of Tibet's Geopolitical Identity

The protests in and around Tibet in 2008 show that Tibets status within China remains unsettled. The West is not an outsider to the Tibet question, which is defined primarily in terms of the debate over the status of Tibet vis-a-vis China. Tibets modern geopolitical identity has been scripted by British imperialism. The changing dynamics of British imperial interests in India affected the emergence of Tibet as a (non)modern geopolitical entity. The most significant aspect of the British imperialist policy practiced in the first half of the twentieth century was the formula of “Chinese suzerainty/Tibetan autonomy.” This strategic hypocrisy, while nurturing an ambiguity in Tibets status, culminated in the victory of a Western idea of sovereignty. It was China, not Tibet, that found the sovereignty talk most useful. The paper emphasizes the world-constructing role of contesting representations and challenges the divide between the political and the cultural, the imperial and the imaginative.

The Violence of Security: Hindu Nationalism and the Politics of Representing ‘the Muslim’ as a Danger

This paper conceptualizes security as a discourse of violence that masks violence in the name of counter-violence, killing in the name of protection. As the case of Hindutva in India illustrates, violence against minorities is normalized in the name of personal, communal, national and even international security. The will to secure the Self has as its corollary the will to make insecure the Other, the desire to control and use violence. Using the example of anti-Muslim violence in Gujarat in 2002, the paper examines some of the ways in which a stereotypical image of Muslim men (the figure of ‘the Muslim’) is seen as constituting the danger against which the Hindu body politic needs to be secured. The violence against minority Muslims is facilitated and justified in the name of achieving security for the Hindu Self at individual, community, national as well as international levels.

Western colonial representations of the other: the case of Exotica Tibet

Cultural representation of the non-Western Other lies at the core of Western colonial and neocolonial discourses. A critical political analysis of the Western imagination of the Other involves a recognition at two levels—the practices of essentializing and stereotyping that provide the backbone as well as various strategies (such as infantilization, eroticization, debasement, idealization, and self-affirmation) that put flesh to the imagined Other. The strategies are not fixed ahistorically but nevertheless remain stable over a period of time. In this article, I identify significant rhetorical strategies that characterize Western representations of the (non-Western) Other, focusing mainly on Western colonial representations, and substantiate it through the empirical study of Exotica Tibet (a shorthand for exoticized Western representations of Tibet).

China and India: Postcolonial Informal Empires in the Emerging Global Order

The recent debates within and beyond Marxism around empire and imperialism focus on deterritorialization, but fail to see non-Western states as anything other than collaborators or victims. Highlighting the importance of center-periphery relations within the territorially bounded political space of the nation-state, this paper puts forward a new concept of the Postcolonial Informal Empire (PIE) to characterize the emerging powers of China and India. The greatest paradox of PIEs is that a postcolonial impulse—to critically appropriate Western ideas and technologies such as sovereignty, nationalism, and the free market to build the multinational state and combine it with an affirmation of stories of historical greatness and long existing, pre-Westernized, civilizational-national cultures—enables the political entities to consolidate and discipline their borderlands and reduce diverse inhabiting peoples to culturally different but politically subservient subjects. It is predominantly a nationalist politics, and not economic calculability or financial interests, that shapes PIEs’ center-borderlands relations.

Diasporic subjectivity as an ethical position

The paper highlights some of the ways in which diasporas challenge the dominant narratives of belonging that give primacy to the bounded community of nation‐states. It argues for a critical appropriation of diasporic subjectivity as an ethical position that reveals the contested and constructed nature of culture. This position requires analytical frameworks that recognise power relations behind cultural claims and allow us to appreciate the silenced and marginalised voices subsumed under the categories of diaspora and culture.

A disruptive ethnography of Tanzanian-Indians

This paper is a disruptive ethnography of Indians in Tanzania (Tanzanian-Indians). It uses narratives of individuals to challenge the popular ethnographic categories within which the individuals are usually subsumed. This paper analyses three critical questions concerning Category, Homeland and Community. Is the category Mhindi (‘Indian’ in Kiswahili) exhaustive as a cultural identity? What is the relationship of Tanzanian-Indians to their ‘homeland’ India? Does a community-based approach map on to the realities of everyday lives of Tanzanian-Indians? The focus will be on Zanzibar and Dar es Salaam. Both these neighbouring places have significant Indian presence and through ethnographic research using conversations, semi-structured interviews and the self-presentation of individuals through temples, mosques and clubs, we highlight the diversity of experience that lies behind the specific identity category of Mhindi.

Hindu Nationalism in India

Hindutva (“Hindu-ness,” shorthand for Hindu nationalism) in India is a chauvinist and majoritarian nationalism that conjures up the image of a peaceful Hindu Self vis-a-vis the threatening minority Other. Hindu nationalism normalizes a politics of fear and hatred by representing it as a defensive reaction to the threats supposedly posed by Muslims to the security of the individual Hindus as well as of the Hindu collective. Hindutva is porno-nationalism in its obsessive preoccupation with the predatory sexuality of the putative Muslim figure and the dangers to the integrity of the Hindu bodies. The proponents of Hindutva mobilize and generate negative stereotypes of Islam and Muslims to legitimize violence against actual Muslims living in India. This book investigates myriad ways in which the discourses of culture, insecurity, nationalism, gender, identity, and violence intersect in Hindu nationalism’s reactionary and right-wing politics of fear and imagination. While scholars and commentators have focused on different aspects of Hindutva in India and within the Indian diaspora, there is no other book-length ethnographic study of the centrality of fear, insecurity, and imagination in the Hindu nationalist project.

Politics of Fear

Hindu nationalist politics of imagination geared around the dangerous Other and an awakened Self facilitates a number of processes. It allows political mobilization in the name of cultural defense, promotes a majoritarian nationalism in the name of challenging “pseudo-secularism,” justifies anti-minority-violence, promotes homosocial bonding, provides a vision of India as a Hindu nation purged of minorities, and legitimizes themselves perpetually in the name of defense of the Hindu nation (because the reality is that India is not a Hindu nation).

Sarao, K.T.S, Pilgrimage to Kailash: The Indian Route (Aryan Books International, New Delhi, 2009), pp. 145, Rs. 1450.

As its title suggests, this book talks about the importance and history of pilgrimage to Mt Kailash and the nearby Lake Mansarovar, important pilgrimage centres (tirath sthan) in Tibet venerated by devout Hindus, Buddhists, Jains and Tibetans, all of whom regard Kailash as Mount Meru, the centre and birthplace of the entire universe. The author writes at length about the several different routes that can be taken to reach Kailash–Mansarovar, and about the spiritual benefi ts believed to accrue from the arduous pilgrimage into this relatively inaccessible region. Of course, as the author points out as an aside, not every person who goes to Kailash does so for spiritual salvation. Sometimes criminals and bandits go there to loot the pilgrims or evade the law. According to Sarao, the word tirath in the Rig Veda refers to a sacred spot associated with water. The tirath is believed to be imbued with special spiritual powers, ‘acting as a threshold between the earth and heaven’ and conferring nirvana on the pilgrim. Similarly for the Tibetans, all aspects of their society have become deeply entrenched in pilgrimage. The author remarks that