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Imperial but Not Colonial: Archival Truths, British India, and the Case of the “Naughty” Tibetans

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 January 2017

Carole McGranahan
Carole McGranahan*
Affiliation:
Anthropology and History, University of Colorado
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

What truths are available in imperial archives for non-colonial subjects? Tibet was never colonized by the British, and yet was drawn into the British imperial domain in ways that impacted both political history and historiography. In the 1940s, Tibetan intellectual Rapga Pangdatsang based his Tibetan Improvement Party in Kalimpong, India where he soon ran afoul of colonial officials who thought he was a Chinese spy. By drawing on multiple archival, ethnographic, and historic sources, I show how the story of Rapga Pangdatsang and the first Tibetan political party enables a recalibrating of both Tibetan and British imperial history. It also opens up a consideration of empire beyond the colonial, and speaks more broadly to a consideration of the non-colonial as a thus-far overlooked aspect of empire.

Type
Research Article
Information
Comparative Studies in Society and History , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , January 2017 , pp. 68 - 95
Copyright
Copyright © Society for the Comparative Study of Society and History 2017 

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References

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54 I thank Rapga's granddaughters and daughter-in-law for sharing the diary with me, and Tenzin Phuntsok Bhagentsang for translation assistance.

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60 McGranahan, Carole, “ Sa spang mda’ gnam spang mda: Murder, History, and Social Politics in 1920s Lhasa,” in Epstein, Lawrence, ed., Khams pa Local Histories: Visions of People, Place, and Authority (Leiden: Brill, 2002), 103–26Google Scholar.

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