A Tibetan window into the twentieth-century Himalayan world

Abstract

This article examines interconnections between parts of the Indian Himalaya and Tibet in the period encompassing the escape of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama to India in 1959. While Buddhism served as connecting tissue binding together communities across recently drawn national borders, networks linking families in Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet were also forged through monastic patronage, colonial education, intermarriage, seasonal migration and trade. Through a reading of colonial and postcolonial archives from Delhi, London and Gangtok, as well as the private papers of Indian political appointees in the Himalaya, the article shows how, far from blazing a trail, the Dalai Lama and the Tibetans who followed him into exile were treading well-worn migration routes and leaning on relationships forged over centuries. Archival evidence from press and parliamentary proceedings in the 1950s and 1960s reveals a shared religious history and information that India claimed to be the cradle of the subcontinent’s Buddhist heritage, which helped garner greater support for the Dalai Lama and his countrymen.