Mobilising language, imagining region: Use of Bhoti in West Arunachal Pradesh

Abstract

For more than a decade, the Monpas, a Tibetan Buddhist borderland community in west Arunachal Pradesh, have been demanding the status of mother tongue for Tibetan or Bhoti, as it is commonly known in the Indian Himalayas. Bhoti or Tibetan has provided the religious script as well as the language of the religious canon for Tibetan Buddhists in the trans-Himalayas, although the communities living in the Indian Himalayas and in Bhutan and Nepal speak different variants of Tibetan (‘Tibetan-related languages’). Rather than seeing the language politics of the borderland Monpas as the localised assertion of ethnic identity by a marginal group, this article shows that Monpa language politics is underlain by a spatial discourse corresponding not to a Monpa homeland, but instead connecting different Tibetan Buddhists of the Indian Himalayan region. This is not to argue that there is a move for territorial reconfiguration on the basis of the Bhoti language politics, but to allow the discourse around Bhoti to open up the idea of an imaginative geography among Buddhist groups in the trans-Himalayas.