📚 Southasia Review of Books - August 2023
The Southasia Review of Books is a monthly newsletter that threads together our latest reviews and literary essays, curated reading suggestions on all things books-related from Himal’s extensive archive, as well as interviews with select writers and their reading recommendations.
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Hello reader
Welcome to another edition of the Southasia Review of Books!
This month, Amish Raj Mulmi looks at how a new generation of Tibetan writers is laying claim to the voice of exile by emphasising the realities of displacement, Tibetan identity and nationhood, and challenging the longstanding fetishisation of Tibet and its culture by the West.
As Amish writes, “Reading contemporary Tibetan literature feels like a dagger to the soul, a gut punch to those who have a place they can feel at home.” The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies and Bhuchung D Sonam’s edited volume Under the Blue Skies, like so much new Tibetan writing, sketch out these hard truths of exile, expressing feelings of loss, of old separations and new anxieties.
Take a look below for a special interview with Amish, plus his recommendations for further reading.
Hoque reviews Shabna Begum’s From Sylhet to Spitalfields, a searing history of the lives of Bengali squatters in 1970s East London. Ashraf explores how this historic struggle for housing by Bengali migrants in London is a chilling reminder of how migrants in the United Kingdom were – and continue to be – treated by local authorities and the wider state machinery.
Ashraf highlights Begum’s concluding words: “the 1970s Bengali squatters’ movement is not a glimpse into a remote past – the challenges of the hostile environment policy, the potential for austerity 2.0, and the complexities of the intersections between race and class are as pronounced now as they were half a century ago.” He notes that the story of Spitalfields – both past and present – sits at the nexus of unyielding global capital and the precarity of disenfranchised communities.
Interview with Amish Raj Mulmi on exile, mobility and the Western imagination of Tibet
Shwetha Srikanthan: In the review, you write that contemporary Tibetan writing is challenging the longstanding Western imagination of Tibet and its culture. Could you tell us more about how these books mark a change?
Amish Raj Mulmi: Colonial imaginations of Tibet as a “lamaist” state enforced the idea that anything related to Tibet had to be seen from the lens of Tibetan Buddhism. Such imaginations fuelled both how Western scholarship engaged with Tibet and vice-versa. But these books mark a distinct change in that there seems to be a collective emphasis on a secular way of looking at “Tibetan-ness”, whether in exile or in Tibet under China, and a reclaiming of the voice of Tibet itself. Here, both the individual and larger Tibetan identities permeate the writing. And a conscious effort to define Tibet beyond what Tibetan historian Tsering Shakya has called “the myth of Shangri-la”.
SS: Looking at The Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays, Tsering Yangzom Lama’s We Measure the Earth with Our Bodies and Bhuchung D Sonam’s edited volume Under the Blue Skies, what is your assessment of exile as a point of reflection in these works?
ARM: I cannot presume to speak on behalf of Tibetans, but as a reader, perhaps the first question is of home and belonging, as is always apparent when reading such literature, and the relative privilege of those who have one. More importantly, after 60 years of exile and without a resolution in sight, Tibetans in exile are faced with a host of questions that will increasingly be difficult to answer in contemporary geopolitical realities. Several generations of Tibetans have been born in exile and have sustained themselves on an idea of Tibet that is, on the ground, drifting further and further away because of China’s efforts towards homogenisation and expanding state control over the region. As a Tibetan exile told me a few years ago when I asked him whether his Nepal-born sons thought about Tibet, “It’s very difficult for them to identify with Tibet. It’s difficult for us now [after so many years in exile]. We look at photos and we have to imagine Tibet in our minds.” This disconcertment is visible in the writings as well.
SS: In the review, you also note that mobility is a perpetual feature of Tibetan lives in exile, and this is also a theme that features heavily in all three books. Could you tell us more about this?
ARM: Historically, the Himalaya has always been a site of longitudinal mobility. It was regular for Tibetan drokpas [or nomads] to regularly travel long distances both inside Tibet and down south, as it was for Himalayan communities like the Nyishangba traders of Manang and the Bhotias of Garhwal and Kumaon. But this was all before the 1962 India-China war, which upturned the Himalayan way of living in its entirety.
What these books bring out is the reframing of that historic mobility within the trauma of exile, whether enforced or by choice, and whether in the exile settlements of India and Nepal or in the West. We also see a sort of equanimity emerge – whether due to a religious or secular worldview – despite the absence of a homeland, a new community whose foundations are built on memories and longing. The Tibetan exile experience then is also revealing of the human desire, like with all migrants to new places, to seek out communities where a sense of home can be found.
Amish Raj Mulmi’s reading recommendations for notable works of Tibetan writing
Tsering Shakya and Wang Lixiong’s The Struggle for Tibet outlines contemporary realities of the Tibet issue, including a discussion on why China continues to struggle in Tibet. Shakya’s The Dragon in the Land of Snows is an excellent insight into Tibet’s modern political history, while Tsering Woeser’s Forbidden Memory builds on the ravages of the Cultural Revolution on the plateau through photographs and lived memories. Tenzin Tsundue’s Kora remains the fundamental text on the Tibetan exile experience in India, while Old Demons, New Deities, an anthology of stories edited by Tenzin Dickie, opens up a whole new world of contemporary Tibetan writing. Although not contemporary, a recent favourite has been Grains of Gold, early modernist writer Gendün Chöphel’s ruminations on his travels in India and Sri Lanka in the 1940s.
This month in Southasian publishing
This August, marking Women in Translation Month, an annual celebration of women writers from around the world writing and translating works in languages other than English, we’re highlighting a few new releases:
On the Edge: 100 Years of Hindi Fiction on Same-Sex Desire, edited and translated from Hindi by Ruth Vanit, is a first-of-its-kind collection of sixteen short stories and extracts from novels (published between 1927 and 2022) depicting same-sex desire in Hindi literature.
The Bengali writer Nirupama Devi’s 1915 novel Didi, translated by Alo Shome, explores widowhood, desire, polygamy and female friendship, navigating the hold of tradition and social customs in a patriarchal society.
From the Himal archives, take a look back at Ammu Joseph’s reflections from the South Asian Women Writers’ Colloquium held in Delhi in 2007. Women writers from across Southasia, including Kamila Shamsie, Taslima Nasrin and Geetanjali Shree, discuss the power of writing, caste and creativity, language and loneliness, and more.
76 years on, this month also marks Partition and Independence. For our latest edition of Screen Southasia, we hosted a conversation between the director of the documentary Taangh (Longing) Bani Singh and the political scientist Ishtiaq Ahmed, along with our founding editor Kanak Mani Dixit, on the topic of ‘Two Punjabs, One Southasia’.
In this wide-ranging discussion, the panel reflects on Ishtiaq Ahmed’s books The Punjab: Bloodied, Partitioned and Cleansed (2011), Pre Partition Punjab’s Contribution to Indian Cinema (2023) and Jinnah: His Successes, Failures and Role in History (2020), which are extensive both in the breadth and the depth of their examination of an excruciating moment in the Subcontinent’s history. And this, of course, is a legacy that the film Taangh highlights as well.
Watch the full discussion or read excerpts from the transcript on our website. Sign up here to catch monthly online screenings and discussions on compelling documentaries from the region.
Until next time, happy reading (and viewing)!
Shwetha Srikanthan
Assistant Editor, Himal Southasian