Tibetan Women's Life Writing and the En-Gendering of National History in Exile
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Complex Conformities: Tibetan women’s life writing and the en-gendering of national history in Exile Isabella Heidi Ofner ORCID: 0000-0001-6472-4487 Submitted in total fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy October 2016 School of Culture and Communication Faculty of Arts The University of Melbourne Abstract This thesis examines the ways in which the life writing of Tibetan women in exile negotiates the place of gender in the (re)writing of Tibetan history, within the larger project of ideological nation building. Located at the intersection of literary, cultural and historical studies, this study is concerned with the alternative histories contained within women’s life stories and their relation to ‘official’ Tibetan national history and the structures of power that maintain the gendered nature of the historical archive in the Tibetan exile community. Engaging questions of gender, nationalism and life writing through the lens of postcolonial feminism, I use a historically contextualized close- textual analysis to show how five selected exile Tibetan women’s life narratives present previously neglected national histories that both challenge and uphold the dominant exile political history of Tibet during the first half of the twentieth century. This research project is thus also an inquiry into our understanding of what constitutes Tibetan national history and the possibility of transforming the Tibetan historical archive, within which women and their histories have mostly remained hidden from view. 1 Table of Contents CHAPTER PAGE Abstract 1 Table of Contents 2 List of Abbreviations 5 Acknowledgements 6 Introduction 8 Chapter One. Gender, Nation and Historiography 51 1.1 Nations and Gender 51 1.1.1 What is a Nation? 52 1.1.2 The Question of Gender in the Theory of Nations 55 1.1.3 Alternative Modernities 57 1.2 A Nation in Exile 62 1.2.1 Striving to be Emplaced 66 1.2.2 The Tibetan Exile 67 1.2.3 Historical Background to the Tibetan Exile 69 1.2.4 Setting up a Nation in Exile 76 1.3 History as a Weapon 81 1.3.1 Battling over History 83 1.3.2 Reinterpreting the Past: Tibet and the Discourse of Shangri-la 86 1.4 The Role of the Archive in Historiography 93 Chapter Two. Imagining Tibetan Women 98 2.1 Women in Tibetan Buddhism 99 2 2.1.1 Women in Buddhist literature 100 2.2 Women as Buddhist Practitioners 108 2.3 Socio-cultural representations of Tibetan Women 110 2.4 Conclusion 116 Chapter Three. Family Matters: Women’s spaces and quiet truths in House of the Turquoise Roof and Dalai Lama, my son 117 3.1 Daughters of the House: Relationality and female dependency 121 3.1.1 ‘What a girl does’—early gendering in Tibetan society 123 3.1.2 A Girl’s Education in Early Twentieth Century Tibet 125 3.1.3 Learning the architecture of the household—a girl’s position in the family 127 3.2 The curse of scripted femininity: women’s duties and men’s freedoms 134 3.2.1 Stepping over the Threshold 135 3.2.2 Playing by the rules, learning wifely duties 138 3.2.3 Like a Table with Broken Legs 146 3.3 Conclusion 155 Chapter Four. Re-imagining the Past: Tradition, change and ‘indigenous modernity’ in Daughter of Tibet 156 4.1 Self-authorization in life writing 161 4.1.1 Legitimizing the Self 163 4.1.2 An Illustrious Family Lineage 165 4.1.3 In the footsteps of her ancestors 173 4.2 Of Nation and Family 176 4.2.1 Tibetan Modernity: A complexio oppositorum? 177 4.2.2 Tibet’s Internationalization 181 4.2.3 ‘The Jealousy of a Few’: The assassination of Tsarong Shap-pé 190 4.2.4 Downfall, or the Conservative Factions in Tibet 200 3 4.3 Tibetan conservatism in the light of Buddhist Modernism 208 4.3.1 Bön versus Tibetan Buddhism, or, superstition versus Truth 210 4.3.2 ‘A modern Tibetan’: The re-selving of Rinchen Dölma Taring 217 4.4 Conclusion 225 Chapter Five. Voicing the Untold: Women, War, and Difference in Ama Adhe and Sorrow Mountain 227 5.1 Fitting Kham into Dharamsala’s historical narrative 231 5.1.1 Mapping the Unity of Greater Tibet 232 5.1.2 ‘The Violence of Liberation’: Tibet under Communism 238 5.2 A neglected story: reforms and resistance in eastern Tibet 244 5.2.1 ‘Words like Honey on a Knife’: early reforms in Kham and Amdo 245 5.2.2 The Great Rebellion of 1956 249 5.3 “Everyone has to fight until Tibet becomes free again”: Women and the Resistance 255 5.3.1 Transgressing Gender(ed) Boundaries 257 5.3.2 Troubled Times: Women and Leadership 264 5.4 Conclusion 267 Conclusion 269 References 274 4 List of Abbreviations CCP Chinese Communist Party CIA Central Intelligence Agency CTA Central Tibetan Administration DIIR Department of Information and International Relations GOI Government of India PLA People’s Liberation Army PRC People’s Republic of China PWA Patriotic Women’s Association TAR Tibet Autonomous Region Tib. Tibetan THF Tibetan Homes Foundation TPIE Tibetan Parliament in Exile TWA Tibetan Women’s Association TYC Tibetan Youth Congress Skt. Sanskrit 5 Acknowledgements Over the course of this research project at the University of Melbourne, I benefitted enormously from the generosity, knowledge and support of many academics, fellow graduate students, friends and family. First, I would like to thank my supervisors, Professor Nikos Papastergiadis and Professor Kevin Brophy, for their guidance and encouragement. Without their unwavering belief in this project, their insights and advice, this dissertation could not have been completed. I would like to express my gratitude to the Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences and the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne for the generous financial assistance I received during the course of my graduate studies as well as to the Norman Macgeorge foundation for funding my research in India. Warm thanks to my colleagues and fellow graduate students in Melbourne, Dr Lynda Chapple, Dr Elin Evangelista, Dr Suzanne Hermanoczki, Dr Shermal Wijewardene, Anna Varghese and Tinonee Pym for their friendship, company and support throughout the years. Most of all, I would like to thank Dr David Templeman of Monash University for sharing his wealth of knowledge on Tibetan history, for his enthusiasm in my research, for countless hours of on-and off-topic conversation, and for years of the most generous support and wonderful friendship. Furthermore, I would like to offer my gratitude towards my parents and my maternal grandmother who have always provided me with the best educational opportunities and encouraged me long-distance from Germany throughout these years. Last but definitely not least, I am immensely grateful 6 to my husband Peter Donaldson for supporting me through the good and bad times of thesis life, for his intelligence, wit, and warmth. Thank you for making this journey with me. In Dharamsala, I wish to thank Zamlha Tempa Gyaltsen for all his help during my research trip in 2013/2014 and for introducing me to the staff at the Environment Desk and the Tibet Policy Institute at Gangchen Kyishong. Thanks also to the staff at the Tibetan Library of Works and Archives and to Nyima Lhamo of the Tibetan Women’s Association for their valuable assistance. Finally, I wish to thank Adhe Tapontsang for inspiring me beyond words, for giving generously of her time and for encouraging me to create a platform from where Tibetan women’s stories could be heard. It is to her and her generation of Tibetan women that I would like to dedicate this thesis. 7 INTRODUCTION At the Fourth International Tibetan Studies Association (IATS) seminar at Munich in 1985, anthropologist Barbara Aziz appealed to the scholarly community to re-think and re-examine “the entire range of Tibetan traditions” (1985, 27) to bring into purview the so-far neglected voices of Tibetan women past and present. Despite growing attention to women’s place in history, and to gender history more generally, in a range of academic disciplines since the 1970s, Aziz deplored the general lack of academic insight and interest regarding the lives of Tibetan women in Tibetology. Although certain perceptions about the role of women in Tibetan societies and some positive portrayals of their social status could be gleaned from Western travel writings, and some ethnographic accounts and studies in Tibetan Buddhism, no sustained effort had yet been made to map “Tibetan women’s contributions to this extraordinary civilization: to art, literature, economy, religious thought, and all those events that together make Tibet a special place” (Aziz 1985, 25-26). Aziz’ sentiments are also shared by number of exile Tibetans, including the younger sister to the Fourteenth Dalai Lama and Head of the Tibetan Children’s Village Jetsün Pema Gyalpo (1997), the late Director of Ngoenga School for Tibetan Handicapped Children Namgyal Lhamo Taklha (2005), and life writer Dorje Yudon Yuthok (1995), all of whom point to the scarcity of material on women in Tibetan history and literature: 8 I regret that so little has been written on the role of women in our society. In fact, one can infer from this that the activities and aspirations of half the Tibetan population have not been accorded the importance they merit. Our ancestors have left us what is probably the richest collection of religious literature in the world. On the other hand, writings on the role of women in the evolution of Tibet over the last 2,000 years are very few (Gyalpo 1997, 204).