Berkeley: University of California Press, 2018. xiv, 238 pp. (Tables, maps, B&W photos, illustrations.) US$34.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-520-29973-3.
Histories of the Himalayan region frequently remark on its position between great powers. Less often do they examine the distinctive and interconnected regional identity. David G. Atwill’s Islamic Shangri-La: Inter-Asian Relations and Lhasa’s Muslim Communities, 1600 to 1960 provides a detailed account of Himalayan Asia that steps outside of the perspectives of great powers like India, China, and Britain to describe the region’s dynamism and multiculturalism in the modern era. Atwill examines the “arrested history” of the Khache (Tibetan Muslims), a group whose place in the history of Tibet he claims is “intact but inaccessible” (11). In doing so, Atwill provides an illuminating look at the history of state-formation Himalayan Asia itself. Through the prism of Lhasa’s historically multicultural populace, Atwill evokes the networks of cultural, economic, and diplomatic exchange that traversed the world’s highest mountains unconstrained by hard borders.
Atwill’s book documents how relatively open borders allowed Lhasa’s Barkhor (ancestrally tied to Indian Muslims from Kashmir) and Wapaling Khache (ancestrally tied to Chinese Muslims), Khatsara (people of Nepali and Tibetan descent) and Koko (people of Chinese and Tibetan descent) communities to at once integrate into Tibetan society while also moving easily throughout the region. The third and fourth chapters examine the position of these “half-Tibetans” within the institutional and legal framework of Tibetan society and describe the disruption borne out of imperial collapse, decolonization, and state-building. Shining a spotlight on cases like that of Sherpa Gyalpo, a Khatsara whose arrest by Tibetan authorities became the subject of a legal dispute with Nepal who claimed him as a citizen, Atwill illustrates the ambiguous citizenship status of those in Lhasa in positions of in-betweenness (41–44). Through such examples Atwill provides compelling evidence of Lhasa’s multiculturalism and status as locus for cross-Himalayan interaction, while also pointing out the difficulties facing the Tibetan government in solidifying Tibet as a nation-state.
Chapters 5 and 6 further reinforce the precariousness of the Khache’s place in Tibetan society. Atwill explains how the occupying PRC’s official designation of Tibetans as a “nationality” strongly centered around Buddhism flattened heterogeneity within Lhasa and rendered the Khache position as Tibetan Muslims untenable. In turn, Khache, finding themselves labeled as “Hui” (Chinese Muslims) by virtue of their faith, became vulnerable to reprisal from Tibetan Buddhists who saw them as collaborators with the occupying Chinese. The examples of Abdul Ghani Shakuli and Hamidulla (Rapse) Masle, both imprisoned for attempting to claim Indian citizenship for the Barkhor Kache, exemplify the ways in which the community incurred the suspicion of the Chinese state as part of its geostrategic rivalry with India. The book’s description of the violence visited upon Khache both during and after the 1959 March Uprising in Lhasa starkly exemplifies the incompatibility of the communities’ self-expressed Tibetan Muslim identity with the PRC’s classification system (93–110).
In its final chapters, the book documents the struggle of the Barkhor Kache to navigate an exodus from Tibet and integrate in India. In one moving passage, Atwill recounts the correspondence between the Khache leader Faizullah Chisti and the Fourteenth Dalai Lama (129–132). Having gained exit from Tibet by being designated Kashmiris—and thus Indian citizens—Chisti’s apologetic distancing in response to the Dalai Lama’s invitation to continue to work for the freedom of Tibet provides a poignant reminder of how the Khache’s path diverged from their Buddhist counterparts. Distanced from their Tibetan Buddhist counterparts for taking Indian citizenship and ostracized by the Kashmiris who considered them alien, the Khache fell into a position of double exclusion, neither refugees nor fully at home.
Atwill’s history adds two major contributions to the body of knowledge on Tibet, and on the politics of state-formation. Firstly, by establishing the history of the Lhasa Khache as “an arrested history,” Atwill challenges readers to reconsider popularly held understandings of Tibet and the larger Himalayan region more generally. In emphasizing the Khache’s political loyalty to the Dalai Lama and their linguistic and cultural identity as Tibetans, he eschews notions of early modern Tibet as isolated and monolithically Buddhist and presents a picture of Lhasa as integral to greater regional networks of exchange. Atwill’s deep descriptions of differentiation between Barkhor and Wapaling Khache illustrate a diversity in people who could claim Tibetan identity and exemplify Lhasa’s status as a crossroads of Himalayan Asia.
Secondly, Atwill’s account lays bare the disruptive, forceful, and often violent process of state-building, and the perils it poses to those in places of in-betweenness. In retelling the history of the Barkhor Khache and their struggle to find a place between the centralizing projects of twentieth-century China and India, Atwill illustrates how the hardening of the boundaries of Himalayan Asia created conditions of inclusion and exclusion that obviated the Khache’s position as Tibetan Muslims, instead attempting to box them into categories that conformed to state interest. Through the example of the Khache, Atwill captures the dilemmas of identity and belonging that challenged numerous communities throughout the region, brought on by the efforts of centralizing states to claim territory, count citizens, and harden boundaries. However, rather than adopting the view of the distant metropole, Atwill recounts the effects of standardization from the position of those caught in-between, providing a rare and vital perspective. In recounting the Khache’s struggles to adapt to the rigid formalizations of state-building, Atwill’s history offers lessons about the ways of life which state formation eliminates as incompatible.
It is tempting to read Atwill’s account as a tragedy. Persecuted in Tibet and unable to become citizens of a centralizing China, the Khache’s flight to India provided little to remedy their position of in-betweenness. However, the book concludes in noting that while decades of struggle to integrate in Kashmir have led many Khache to disavow or historicize their Tibetan identity, their linguistic and cultural ties to Tibet remain. The passage of time has also narrowed the differences in circumstances between the Khache and Tibetan Buddhist refugees, offering hope that while obstacles of borders and citizenship may strain these ties, it cannot eliminate them entirely.
David R. Stroup
University of Manchester, Manchester