Discerning Religious Nationalism Among Tibetans in Exile in India (Chapter 31)

Abstract

While nationalism, like nation, is an essentially contested concept, its elusive nature gets even more interesting when it occurs in exile. Though scholars like Said find exile to be a natural home for the birth of nationalism, the constraints of exile may impede the full expression of exile. This chapter examines the dialectics of sustaining nationalism, particularly religious nationalism, among the Tibetans in exile. In 1959, the spiritual and temporal Head of Tibet, the His Holiness the Fourteenth Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, and thousands of Tibetans sought refuge in India following the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1950. Given the predominant role of Tibetan Buddhism in determining the culture, polity as well as lifeworlds and public sphere of Tibet, it is only natural that religious nationalism would be the glue providing social cohesion to the disparate refugee population. While there are differing views on whether primordial identities like religion could be the organising axis of nations and nationalism, scholars like Dawa Norbu argue that the structure of third world nationalism includes traditional data like religion as well as egalitarian ideology like fraternity. This chapter seeks to discern the nature of this religious nationalism created and sustained in exile. On the basis of field data gathered from Tibetan settlements in Karnataka, Himachal Pradesh and Ladakh in India from November 2023 to May 2024, as well as secondary data, this chapter documents the pre-eminence of Tibetan Buddhism from the time of the formation of the Tibetan ethnie to the development of nationalism in exile. It also elucidates the challenges of sustaining nationalism, particularly religious nationalism in exile.