Imparting and (Re-)Confirming Order to the World: Authoritative Speech Traditions and Socio-political Assemblies in Spiti, Upper Kinnaur, and Purang in the Past and Present

Abstract

Imparting and (Re-)Confirming Order to the World:Authoritative Speech Traditions and Socio-political Assemblies in Spiti, Upper Kinnaur, and Purang in the Past and Present Christian Jahoda (bio) This paper1 deals with authoritative speech traditions in the Tibetan-speaking areas of Spiti (in Tibetan transliteration [henceforth T.] sPi ti, sPyi ti, and so forth) and Upper Kinnaur (T. Khu nu) in eastern Himachal Pradesh, India, and in Purang (T. s/Pu hrang/hreng, and so forth), an area in the southwest of the Ngari Prefecture of the Tibet Autonomous Region (PR China) (see Fig. 1). In the distant past these areas belonged to Ngari Khorsum (T. mNga’ ris skor gsum), a high-altitude region that was more or less congruent with the realm of the West Tibetan kingdom of the tenth to twelfth centuries. To a great extent it was also identical with the areas under the control of the later kingdoms of Purang, Guge (T. Gu ge), and Ladakh (T. La dwags) (see Vitali 1996; Petech 1997; Tshe ring rgyal po 2006 for accounts of the history of these kingdoms). This means that in historical, geographical, political, and cultural terms, Spiti, Upper Kinnaur, and also Purang share a lot of common ground. Therefore, in addition to exploring the social and political dimensions of authoritative speeches, I am also including the historical dimension of authoritative speech in these areas. This is also the main reason for referring to authoritative speech traditions. Despite the fact that oral traditions represent a salient feature of the societies of Western Tibet that permeate various cultural spheres and activities, they have not received the attention and scholarly interest they deserve. This is also true of formal oratory in particular and also of the authoritative speech traditions that represent an important element of Tibetan oral culture. Notable exceptions are, for example, works by Charles Ramble (1998) and Berthe Jansen’s unpublished M.Phil. thesis (2010). While two earlier important studies of Tibetan speech-making (Tucci 1966; Jackson 1984) were based exclusively on literary sources, the present study is the result of a combination of textual and fieldwork study that uses both oral and written texts, and primarily draws on social-anthropological and historical methods. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig 1. Map of Historical Western Tibet; drawing by Christian Luczanits, adaptation by Christian Jahoda, 2012. In the Tibetan-speaking societies of Spiti, Upper Kinnaur, and Purang, performances of authoritative formal and ritual speeches usually took and take place within the framework of certain socio-political assemblies, as I would like to call them. These assemblies comprised in the past, for example, more or less regular royal dynastic meetings and assemblies of high-ranking religious and secular figures that took place amongst others on the instance of consecration ceremonies of Buddhist temples. In the present we find examples of such socio-political assemblies in certain religious rituals and festivals, village festivals, wedding ceremonies, and also in performances of religious plays. In accordance with the structural setting, contexts, and functions of these assemblies, different authoritative speech traditions can be identified that were related to these assemblies in the past and present. In Tibetan literary and colloquial language, there are various words, such as skad cha, bka’ or mchid (both honorific forms),2 that are used in different social or religious contexts to refer to speech or authoritative speech. In Western Tibetan honorific language, authoritative speech is commonly referred to as molla (T. mol ba, literal meaning: “to say, to speak”), both in historical and contemporary written sources as well as in present oral usages.3 Authoritative speeches represent an essential feature of various forms of such socio-political assemblies. Therefore, they constitute an essential element in the analysis of the social dimension of these secular and religious speech performances. In terms of context and function, the speech traditions in the societies of Spiti, Upper Kinnaur, and Purang can provisionally be differentiated into a few main varieties: 1) those with a state-related political function that occurred in ancient periods, mainly in royal dynastic contexts; 2) those with a primarily communal political function that is mainly associated with local village contexts; 3) those with primarily...