The history and future of Kham: Perspectives based on a historical anthropological reading of Alai's four novels

Abstract

Up to the present, the distinguished Tibetan writer, Alai, has published four full-length novels – King Gesar, Nyarong (Zhandui), Red Poppies, and the Hollow Mountain series – which have, to a great extent, shaped outsiders’ impressions of Kham, or Eastern Tibet, one of the three traditional divisions of ‘cultural Tibet’ or ‘ethnographical Tibet’. Based on a historical anthropological perspective, this article examines the spatial and temporal dimensions of Kham history reflected in these four novels. On the one hand, it shows how the native Khampa's senses of space, referring to surrounding political entities, changed first from an ancient model of ‘four regimes in four directions’, then to a dual model of the central Han and local Tibetan polities on opposing sides during late Imperial China and the Republican Period, and finally to the unitary model of a single central government in the contemporary period. In addition, this article shows how Khampa have experienced changing senses of time, from circulatory Tibetan Buddhist time to the dynastic time of Chinese Empires to modern linear time. Beyond revealing the transformations in the spatial and temporal senses of the Khampa people, Alai also implicitly describes the alternative models in Sino-Tibetan relations as both historical reality and ideality: Spatially, in the process of forced integration, Han Chinese and Tibetan people have simultaneously experienced ethnic distinction, which has been recognized by elite Khampa agents; Temporally, free borderland markets, acting in the role of historical transcendence, have been protective and under control, especially for the sake of the Tibetan side. The above narratives are both empirical facts and Alai's expectations and construction. On the one hand, as an ethnic-minority writer and native speaker (Tibetan dialect rGyalrong), Alai loves his fellow Tibetans and tends to understand their conditions from the bottom up; on the other hand, raised in a peripheral Tibetan village near a Han area, educated in modern Mandarin schools and a Mandarin college, and unable to practice writing in his mother language, Alai has a conception of history that has been generated from the top down. It is easy to understand how, faced with issues of frontiers and ethnic minorities, native elites like Alai are quite likely to develop a historical construction of literary complexity. This complexity further diversifies outsiders' impressions of Tibet.