What can imperial but non-colonial subjects teach us about empire? They have stories to tell that challenge and complement understandings of empire drawn exclusively from colonialism. To be imperial but not colonial was, and remains, a historical and political reality in numerous places around the world, one worthy of our collective consideration. Tibet is one example of a state that was never colonized by a European empire, but was drawn squarely into the British imperial domain in ways that still matter today. Tibet's neighbor Nepal was also not a colony of the British (or of the Indians), but Nepali Gurkha soldiers still fight today in both the British and Indian Armies.Footnote 1 “Never colonized” status, however, is often presumed to signify the lack of a past imperial relationship or the absence of a postcolonial politics in the present. As historian Shompa Lahiri argues in the context of early twentieth-century England, both colonial and non-colonial subjects drew on strategies of mimicry presumed to be only available to the colonized (following Homi Bhabha's influential work).Footnote 2 Yet, to be an imperial subject is not the same as to be a colonial subject, and if we collapse the one into the other we miss the opportunity to assess what is meaningful about both their similarities and their differences.
In British India, Tibetans sometimes troubled the categories and worlds of British colonial officers. They did this in ways that were both intentional and not, and traces of the resulting discomfort persist in colonial files related to Tibet in the India Office Records. An example of how such discomfort might be domesticated can be found in a letter the Government of India Political Officer in Sikkim A. J. Hopkinson wrote in 1946 to his wife at home in England. “The great excitement,” he wrote, “is that we have just been having a roundup of naughty Tibetans, the Tibetan [Improvement] Party, but this is very hush-hush. One of the would-be revolutionaries keeps a diary, sometimes in English. One of his chief activities seems to be ‘wrote an anonymous letter.’ Now the Tibetan for ‘brother’ is ‘a-jo’ and in his interrogation without a blink he maintained that this really meant an AJONYMOUS letter, i.e., a letter to my brother.”Footnote 3
The “would-be revolutionary” and Tibetan wordsmith about whom Hopkins wrote was Rapga Pangdatsang (1904–1976). Rapga was the scion of a wealthy trading family, an avid radio listener and newspaper reader, an intellectual self-taught in Chinese and English, an anti-colonial Tibetan nationalist, and an admirer of both Sun Yat-sen and Subhas Chandra Bose. He was also founder of Tibet's first political party, the Tibetan Improvement Party, which he based in exile in Kalimpong, India.Footnote 4 The party was founded on anti-imperial, democratic politics, and designed to create a modern government in Tibet. British colonial officials, however, saw the party as a threat. They contended Rapga Pangdatsang was a Chinese spy plotting to overthrow the friendly neighboring government of Tibet. What is the truth of this charge? Was he really a Chinese spy? In contrast to British archival records, Rapga's own archives and testimonies say he was not. Given the ambiguous status of Tibetans in relation to British Empire, what sort of historical truths are available in imperial archives for non-colonial subjects?
The Tibetan Improvement Party is archived in the India Office Records in London in a medium-sized file bearing the title “Tibet: Chinese Intrigues (Rapga).”Footnote 5 It contains 103 documents in loose, reverse chronological order from 18 February 1947 to 18 August 1944. These range from Government of India Intelligence reports, weekly reports from the mission in Lhasa, and communiqués between New Delhi and London, to intercepted Chinese telegrams and papers confiscated from Tibetans resident in India. At the time, the Tibetan government was still in an unsettled, chaotic state between Dalai Lamas, British India was on the verge of becoming newly independent India, and China was embroiled in a civil war between Mao Zedong's communists and Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist forces.Footnote 6 British officials in both India and China worked hard to advance the British position in Tibet through diplomatic missions, trade agreements, and military might. A “forward policy” clearly marked Tibet as part of British imperial interests, and thus Rapga Pangdatsang's political intrigues as a concern for empire. When Rapga formed the Tibet Improvement Party there were no political parties in Tibet and opposition to the government was not well tolerated. This is why he based the party in India. He openly went about his political activities until British officials learned about them and decided they could not allow such “hostile” activities against a “friendly government.”Footnote 7 However, though they wanted to take action against Rapga, they faced the problem that he had broken no laws of British India.
The British resolution of this dilemma devolved into a colonial comedy of errors recast as imperial certainty and epitomized in the paternal pretense of the phrase “naughty Tibetans.” As with all comedies, the unreal increasingly approximated the real as British officials archived a two-dimensional portrait of Rapga and the Tibetan Improvement Party, which achieved its authority despite and through a fragmentary and sometimes dismissive understanding of Tibet. As Ann Laura Stoler argues, “dispositions of dis-regard” toward imperial subjects were sedimented into archival truths that in turn set certain histories into motion.Footnote 8 Understanding this history thus requires reading with and against imperial archivesFootnote 9 as well as beyond them. In order to tell a different story of the Tibetan Improvement Party, I will explore British colonial officers' records of the party, historians' writings about it, and materials from Rapga's personal archives: remembrances of him by friends and relatives, an interview he did with scholars Samten Karmay and Heather Stoddard in 1975, and his own diverse oeuvre of writings, including his diary, that most intimate and personal of texts. Drawing on these multiple sources, situated readings, and a joint ethnographic and historical approach, including oral history interviews, ethnography in the archives, and contemporary participant-observation fieldwork, I consider the histories the British imperial file on Rapga encourages alongside those that it discourages, but which are available elsewhere.
I ground this inquiry in two interrelated questions. In relation to the social and political contexts of this tumultuous period, how can we best understand Rapga Pangdatsang's Tibetan Improvement Party? In relation to British Empire in India, how does the story of an imperial, but non-colonial subject challenge how we understand the categories and practices of empire? In reconsidering Rapga Pangdatsang and his Tibetan Improvement Party, we are immersed in a complex yet hopeful world of Tibetan politics in a time of global change. This is the story of the idealism of a rebel intellectual living on the threshold of multiple societies, of the arbitrary nature yet very real effects of colonial categories and policies, and of multiple, but frequently overlooked subaltern genres of cultural and political expression. This history, unfolding at the geographic and historical edge of empire, reveals that even though Tibet was never colonized by Britain, Tibetan political status was, and remains, irrevocably affected by British imperial policy.
SPECULATIVE EMPIRE AND BRITISH HISTORIES OF TIBET
Imperial archives produce certain sorts of facts and truths. They reflect state categories and operations such that “the state literally produces, adjudicates, organizes, and maintains the discourses that become available as the primary texts of history.”Footnote 10 To write Tibetan history solely from British archival sources would be to ground this history in an imperial default in which historical possibility for a political actor like Rapga Pangdatsang was already pre-set within a particular domain or set of capabilities.Footnote 11 Operating political parties out of Kalimpong, for example, was not on the imperial list of things Tibetans were supposed to do. The non-colonial nature of Tibetans' experiences with the British left the latter with only uneven and incomplete knowledge, which they sometimes claimed to be coherent and complete.
In the British imperial imagination, Thomas Richards contends, Tibet represented the possibility of unifying knowledge and the state in the archive.Footnote 12 This imperial archive “was a fantasy of knowledge collected and united in the service of state and Empire.”Footnote 13 Yet, if British imperial mythologists such as Kipling, Hilton, and Conan Doyle portrayed Tibet as the recuperative center of knowledge for British colonial officials (as Richards argues), Tibet was unknowable. This was not due solely to imperial fantasies, but also because the conceit of colonialism was absent in its imperial relationship. Non-colonial subjects of empire occupied unknown, and not just misunderstood, positions in ways that colonial subjects could not. Historian of British India Nicholas Dirks contends that “after 1857 anthropology supplanted history as the principal colonial modality of knowledge.”Footnote 14 Building on the work of Bernard Cohn, Dirks argues that this colonial transition involved new ideas about ethnographic knowledge as a requirement for effective governance, including a concern to know which natives were most loyal to empire.Footnote 15 The colonial ethnographic state and its claims to detailed knowledge of people and cultures did not necessarily extend to non-colonized peoples within empire. If the colonial state was historic and then ethnographic, what was the non-colonial imperial state? Empire without ethnographic governance was, at least in part, an exercise in political speculation.
Speculative empire did not rest on the detailed ethnographic knowledge, faulty or not, that defined late British colonial rule in India. Instead, outside of the colonial domain, subjects of concern were historical (possessing a nation and/or state) and political (possessing an orientation either toward or away from British Empire). Even if Tibet was not in need of colonial rule, British agents thought that it required imperial guidance and oversight. This was the preventative side of empire, politically hedging against a need for war by seeking to maintain friendly relations rather than colonial ones with neighboring peoples and polities. Still, while the detailed ethnographic enterprise was not pursued outside of the colonial sphere, there were unofficial attempts to know non-colonial subjects in ways that approximated how colonial subjects were known.
Two British officials exemplify how Tibet came to be known during and after the time of empire: Sir Charles Bell and Hugh Richardson. Bell served as Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan, and Tibet off and on from 1904–1921, and Richardson was sometimes Head of the British Mission in Lhasa from 1937–1947. Though they critiqued Tibetan civilization and government, both were closely aligned with the Lhasa elite in important ways. In addition, along with their official imperial appointments, both men were also lay scholars of Tibet. Between them they wrote numerous books and articles on Tibet's history with a primary focus on Lhasa and Central Tibet.Footnote 16 Their archival documents are central to the British Library's collection and their lay imperial scholarship has greatly influenced Tibetan Studies. More broadly, although neither the archives nor lay publications of British imperial officers represent neutral, uninterested documentation or scholarship, they have been influential in the writing of Tibetan history. One reason for this is that, while the archives of British India are open to scholars, Tibetan Government archives from the first half of the twentieth century are inaccessible or lost due to China's ongoing occupation of Tibet since the 1950s. With this in mind, let me turn to the existing historiography of the Tibetan Improvement Party.
Writings about Rapga and his party in English, French, and Tibetan fall into two camps, portraying him as either a Tibetan nationalist or a Chinese agitator. In the first group are scholar Heather Stoddard, who casts Rapga as an unsuccessful intellectual and Tibetan patriot,Footnote 17 missionary George Patterson, who views him as a Khampa Tibetan hero,Footnote 18 and writer Sampho Tenzing Dhondup, who tells Rapga's story as an anti-imperialist tale in which he and his colleagues tried to thwart British influence in Tibet.Footnote 19 Viewing Rapga and the Tibetan Improvement Party as pro-Chinese are anthropologist Melvyn C. Goldstein, who draws from British archives as if they present transparent truths in A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951,Footnote 20 and Taklha Phuntsok Tashi, who writes in his autobiography of being almost recruited into the Tibetan Improvement Party by Rapga.Footnote 21 Rapga's personal archives, his own body of writings, collections, and memories, offer the opportunity to tell the story of this crucial period in Tibetan history from a new perspective, what Raymond Williams' called an “emergent perspective.”Footnote 22 Emergent histories resist incorporation into dominant histories through their work to transform society. In his own words, Rapga presents a story composed not of political intrigue, but rather of political hopes, desires, and frustrations. Writing a history of the Tibetan Improvement Party now must take account of this affective side of history, as well as the anticolonial nationalism present in so much of the world in the 1940s.
TOWARD A POSTCOLONIAL HISTORY OF TIBET
What might a postcolonial history of a never-colonized people look like? Answering this question requires a robust understanding of the postcolonial as a relation, condition, or even location as much as a temporality experienced by all imperial subjects, colonial and not. In some ways, the category of the non-colonial but imperial is resonant with earlier scholarship in economic history on “informal empire,” those areas of financial interest and influence outside of direct territorial control and political jurisdiction.Footnote 23 While Patrick Wolfe argued that the concept of informal empire appeared “congenial … to postcolonial sensibilities,”Footnote 24 my focus here is not on the economic aspects of or conditions for empire, but instead on the subjective categories and experiences of empire beyond the colonial. Anthropologist and historian of Latin America Fernando Coronil contended that the postcolonial involves a “murky entanglement of knowledge and power” such that “the ‘post’ functions both as a temporal marker to refer to the problem of classifying societies in historical time and as an epistemological sign to evoke the problem of producing knowledge of history and society in the context of imperial relations.”Footnote 25 Recognizing this is to pause and ask what an exclusive focus on the colonial obscures about the larger imperial project.Footnote 26 What do we miss by not considering non-colonial relations within empire as meaningful parts of imperial formations?
For Tibet, one result is an underdeveloped critique of empire across all three twentieth-century imperial formations active in Tibet: American, British, and Chinese.Footnote 27 Yet, if Tibet's imperial turn has been particularly multifaceted over the last century, the “imperial turn” in scholarship has had no substantial impact in Tibetan Studies.Footnote 28 Our ability to think critically about empire as a Tibetan reality or about Tibetan experiences as distinctly imperial remains underdeveloped. Peter Hansen contends that the absence of a subaltern studies for Tibet—of a critical, theoretical, and subaltern engagement with empire and nation—is due to the general persistence of “Tibetan exceptionalism.”Footnote 29 Exceptionalism is a discourse of strategic dismissal. The imperial politics British officials used to dismiss Rapga as a historical figure continue to operate in the postcolonial present.
The Tibetan refugee community is one marked as exceptional. With the Dalai Lama at its head, it enjoys a coherence that other refugee groups can only envy. Furthermore, almost sixty years after its formation in 1959, the community maintains an exile government in India and an active political campaign to return to Tibet that enjoys significant international public support. Yet the Tibetan refugee community is also exceptional in ways others might not desire. While world powers celebrate the Tibetans' religious and cultural exceptionalism, they do not fully support their political struggle against the People's Republic of China. Exceptional also is the Tibetans' political-legal status in India and Nepal, the two countries that host the majority of Tibetan refugees. Neither country signed the 1951 UN Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees or the 1967 Protocol that updated the Convention, and as a result many Tibetans in India and most in Nepal lack sufficient or even any legal status or documentation.Footnote 30 They are neither citizens nor conventional refugees, but instead are undocumented across multiple generations and live in both countries without internationally secured rights. This lack of documentation and rights is the contemporary legacy of past strategic dismissal, a British colonial practice inherited by an independent India. To dismiss is to shirk responsibility, to deny possibility, or as Arjun Appadurai claims, to spatially incarcerate the native.Footnote 31 In the present for Tibetans, we see this not only in the persistence of the romantic Shangri-la myth of Tibet,Footnote 32 but also in the inability of some Tibetan refugees to either thrive in or leave India or Nepal.Footnote 33 Rapga Pangdatsang fought back against such dismissal for as long and as hard as he could.
BETWEEN DALAI LAMAS: ON POLITICS, PATRONAGE SYSTEMS, AND THE PANGDATSANG FAMILY
In the last decades of British rule in India, relations with Tibet were always defined in relation to China. China symbolized all that could go wrong in Tibet, and therefore policy towards Tibet was constructed as a contest of sorts between India and China. Along with trade, the most important component of the British Tibet program was propaganda and the cultivation of pro-British sentiment among the Tibetan elite. Counter to this was the presence of pro-Chinese factions, and for many Tibetans connections to China ran longer and deeper than those to British India.Footnote 34 Rapga Pangdatsang was among this latter category, but as with those termed “pro-British,” both affinities were far more complicated than British understandings of them. Rapga's interest in politics had but one purpose: to be applied to his own country, Tibet. Limiting Tibetan political statuses to either pro-British or pro-Chinese positions denied other avenues for political accomplishment and allegiance in Tibet. It rendered the Tibetan political world two-dimensional and dependent on external relations and set a dangerous precedent for future political arrangements. Nonetheless, for the British, Tibet was never neutral or strong enough to guarantee subcontinental safety from the Chinese.
Rapga's attempts at political reform were supported by the Kuomintang, the Chinese political party founded by Sun Yat-sen, but Rapga was not a KMT stooge. Instead, he was a Pangdatsang, and the Pangdatsangs were one of the wealthiest families in all of Tibet, traders from the eastern Tibetan region of Kham who had offices throughout China, India, and Tibet. In Tibet, however, wealth did not necessarily equal power. Lay status was not achieved but rather ascribed through family name and lineage, specifically through the central Tibetan aristocracy. In being from eastern rather than central Tibet, the Pangdatsang family members were seen as nouveau riche traders whose entry into Lhasa society was through what Tibetans call the ltag sgo, or the back door. Rapga's elder brother Yamphel was the Government of Tibet Trade Agent who controlled all trade between Tibet and India, and his younger brother Tobgyal ruled the family estate in Markham. While social status and religious stature were still of primary importance in early twentieth-century Tibet, the Pangdatsang family represented the rise of a Tibetan bourgeoisie.
The Pangdatsang family members were devotees of the 13th Dalai Lama Thubten Gyatso (1876–1933) and supporters of his progressive visions to modernize Tibet. During his tenure, the 13th Dalai Lama declared Tibet's independence from China in 1913, took control of the country's foreign relations, negotiated treaties with the British, built a new medical college in Lhasa, and worked to modernize the Tibetan police, army, education, and communication systems, among other endeavors. His efforts at modernizing Tibet were mostly unsuccessful or only small in scale due to unrelenting opposition from the conservative monastic officials who comprised over half of the Tibetan Government. In 1933, the Dalai Lama unexpectedly died, and in the ensuing political chaos Rapga and his brother Tobgyal led a rebellion against Tibetan Government troops in eastern Tibet. With the help of their older brother Yamphel, they ultimately settled their dispute with the government, but Rapga remained frustrated with Tibet's conservative, premodern politics.
As a member of an elite family, Pangda Rapga was a product of the Tibetan patronage system in which both vertical and horizontal social networks provided financial and other necessities to those born to such privilege. These networks were not limited to Tibetans, but were part of a broader (and often politically strategic) system incorporating neighboring peoples in Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, and China. Rapga's association with the Kuomintang through its Tibetan and Mongolian Affairs Office was on some levels an example of such patronage rather than political subservience. On another level, it was also a politically directed undertaking. Following his and Tobgyal's 1934 revolt against Tibetan Government troops, Rapga went to Nanjing en route to Kalimpong and met there with Chiang Kai-shek. Disgusted with politics in Lhasa and critical of British imperial rule, it is not surprising that he turned to the Kuomintang for aid in his plan to transform Tibet. At the time, political rhetoric in China included support for the self-determination of all nationalities. Rapga's personal archives, unlike British colonial ones, suggest he was intent on using the Kuomintang to achieve his goals, rather than or perhaps in spite of their intentions for him.
KUOMINTANG CONNECTIONS AND KALIMPONG POLITICS
Rapga's dreams for Tibet were modeled on those of Sun Yat-sen for China. Sun Yat-sen was a political reformer dedicated to keeping China free from outside domination and elevating the country “to a position of freedom and equality among the nations.”Footnote 35 These twin goals required two strategies: first, overthrowing the Qing dynasty that had governed China for three centuries, and second, waking the masses to the struggle. In 1911, the Qing dynasty fell and Sun Yat-sen became the first president of the Chinese republic, resigning after three months to work on the second goal of political outreach to the Chinese people. His successor as president, Yuan Shi-kai, had differing opinions about how to develop the country, and in time the ensuing political split in the Kuomintang party turned into a military dispute. Sun continued his educational work, and in 1924 he gave a series of lectures outlining his vision for China, which would become his book San-min Chu-i, or The Three Principles of the People.
These three principles are those of nationalism, democracy, and livelihood. Sun argued that China needed to develop nationalism out of local identities such as family, clan, and native place in order to save both state and nation from foreign encroachment. The knowledge and unity required to develop nationalism, he said, was also a key part of democracy. For Sun, democracy was equivalent to “people's sovereignty,” that is, the control of the government by the people. It needed to fit the Chinese situation rather than be blindly adopted from the West. Additionally, while the political power of the people might build the state, it was to be administered by experts. Sun's third principle of livelihood links the welfare of society, the nation, and the masses to the ability of the people to control socioeconomic development. He emphasized that different countries required different methods to solve their problems of livelihood. Sun Yat-sen's vision of the nation, democracy, and socialism laid the groundwork for the Kuomintang under his inheritor, Chiang Kai-shek, as well as for the Communist Party under Mao Zedong. Sun's vision also greatly influenced Rapga Pangdatsang, who translated The Three Principles of the People into Tibetan. As his friend and admirer Scots missionary-turned-journalist George Patterson recalled, “Rapga's ideas were fundamentally based on Sun Yat-sen's The Three Principles of the People. It was his bible.”Footnote 36
Rapga translated the The Three Principles of the People into Tibetan as Mi ser don gsum ring lugs. His niece's husband, Sampho Tenzin Dhondup, writes about receiving a copy of the translation from Rapga, and observes that he admired Sun Yat-sen so much that it seemed as if he had dad pa toward him—faith and devotion as if he were a lama or god.Footnote 37 In a 1975 interview, the year before he died, Rapga explained why he had translated The Three Principles of the People into Tibetan: “The Three Principles of the People was written for all people under foreign domination, for all those who had no human rights. But above all it was conceived for the Asians. These were my reasons for translating it. At the time, many new ideas were spreading through Tibet, but only among the elite and educated people, who would only make use of it for themselves. The masses were too ignorant to be receptive and they had no rights whatsoever.”Footnote 38 Sun Yat-sen's advocacy of an Asian response to foreign domination attracted Rapga, but was not welcomed by the British. Drawn to intellectual currents in China and India, and especially to newly emergent Asian forms of nationalism, Rapga went into exile in Kalimpong. In 1939, he founded the Tibetan Improvement Party to work toward political change in Tibet, but the party did not become active until 1945.
The Tibetan Improvement Party represented Rapga's dream to modernize and democratize Tibet through educational and monastic reform, literacy programs, and reform of the conservative political system. Its leadership was an impressive and eclectic group. Rapga was president, and the secretaries were two Tibetans sent into exile in the chaos following the death of the 13th Dalai Lama: Kunpel,Footnote 39 a monk who had been the favorite of the Dalai Lama, and Changlochen, an aristocratic poet who had been involved in reform politics in Lhasa. Both had been banished to Kongpo, southeast of Lhasa, and together they had escaped to Kalimpong. Associated with this trio, although he did not join the party, was Gedun Chophel, a brilliant and eccentric monk from northeastern Tibet who had traveled extensively in India.Footnote 40 This group of rebel scholars and nationalist would-be politicians were in good company in Kalimpong.Footnote 41
Nestled high on a ridge, Kalimpong was an international, cosmopolitan town. It was one end of the India-Tibet-China trade route, a center of political intrigue, and among its residents were exiles and adventurers, royalty and muleteers, and merchants and missionaries. Rapga's circle of interlocutors there included aristocratic Lhasa Tibetans, Khampa traders, Bengali intellectuals, and Christian missionaries. It was also, as Jawaharlal Nehru was later to infamously claim, a “den of spies.” From Tibet, wealthy aristocrats sent their children to school in Kalimpong and neighboring Darjeeling, and a number of Bengali intellectuals and political activists, including Tagore and Sarat Bose, had homes in the area. Progressive political ideas were a hot commodity in Kalimpong, and so Rapga's political party fit right in.
WATCHING THE DETECTIVES: IMPERIAL INTELLIGENCE AND THE TIBETAN IMPROVEMENT PARTY
On 8 February 1946, Rapga ordered application forms and membership cards for the Tibetan Improvement Party. Both were in Tibetan and Chinese and modeled on those of the Kuomintang. Thacker Spink, a British firm in Calcutta, printed the order, and Rapga himself placed and picked it up. Employees of Thacker Spink would later recall that he presented himself well, and official reports state: “Rapga was invariably well-dressed in English style and is described as speaking good English. He was accompanied on one or more occasions by his son of about twelve years of age, dressed in English style, and speaking English.”Footnote 42 It was not until Rapga's second order that suspicions were raised. After returning to Kalimpong from Calcutta, Rapga decided to add the party's badge to the forms and cards. The badge showed a loom with crossed swords above and snow covered mountains behind, with printing below in Tibetan, English, and Chinese. With the addition of the badge and English text, which read “Tibetan Improvement Party,” print shop employees decided to contact the police since things seemed suspicious.Footnote 43 British Intelligence agreed, deciding immediately that Rapga was a Chinese agent working to stir up trouble in Tibet. As the news traveled, action against Rapga began. On 27 March 1946, nine days after submitting his revised order and seventeen months before the British would quit India, Rapga became an enemy of empire.
The Thacker Spink print shop's suspicions about the Tibetan Improvement Party set cross-empire political and detective teams to work. Hugh Richardson, Chief Officer of the British Mission in Lhasa, and A. J. Hopkinson, Political Officer in Sikkim, discussed how to proceed in informing several governments, including their own, whose policies on Tibet and China they did not always support. Such cracks in the colonial project were not uncommon.Footnote 44 In Tibet and the British Raj, Alex McKay shows that the policy ideas of the men on the ground and those back in England were often incompatible.Footnote 45 Richardson had been suspicious of Chiang Kai-shek and Kuomintang China's motives towards Tibet, afraid that Chinese anti-imperialist rhetoric did not apply to China's own expansionist desires, and the news about the Tibetan Improvement Party only fed his fears. When Whitehall decided that the “Rapga case” was not of great interest, Richardson and Hopkinson disagreed, and they set into motion a plan to undo the party and thus, they hoped, the Chinese threat.
The idea that China was a threat to Tibet, and thus to British India, was the foundation of their case against Rapga's Tibetan Improvement Party. The India Office file on Rapga includes an English translation, but not the Tibetan original, of the “Concise Agreement of the Tibet Improvement Party, Kalimpong.” This manifesto gives a brief genealogy of the party, confirms the receipt of “maintenance allowances” from the Kuomintang, and supports the “translating into action” of Sun Yat-sen's three principles of the people and cooperation with Chiang Kai-shek's government. The Agreement had seven points, of which the key one was number two, which the British translated as follows: “2. Recently President Chiang has declared to allow autonomy for Tibet. According to this we must exert our efforts mainly for liberation of Tibet from the existing tyrannical government. Also we must act in the light of other progressive and democratic nations of the world and especially democratic Central Government of China for which all members of our party must work as men on the same boat.” This agreement, along with the membership form, cards, and badge, seemed to reveal a clear connection between the Tibetan Improvement Party and China. In his top secret note on the case, W.A.B. Gardener, Additional Deputy Commissioner of Police, Security Control, Calcutta, saved the most dramatic piece of evidence for last, what he claimed should have been the real translation of the political party's name, as not the Improvement Party, but the Revolutionary Party.
The translations of the Chinese text of the original form, and of the revised version … show that the heading of both forms is for the enlistment into the TIBET REVOLUTIONARY PARTY.… the Chinese characters for ‘Revolutionary Party’ are the same characters as designated SUN YAT-SEN'S Revolutionary Party in China, which overthrew the Manchu Dynasty in 1911. This Revolutionary Party subsequently became the Kuomintang, at about the end of the first decade of the Chinese Republic. I do not think it can be without significance that the Chinese characters used suggest an historical anti-Imperial Party formed for overthrow of an existing Governmental order.Footnote 46
Gardener's translation from the Chinese is accurate, but Rapga's translation of the party title was from Tibetan, not Chinese. In Tibetan, the disputed word is legs bcos, a noun meaning repair or improvement; translation into English as the Tibetan Improvement Party is therefore not misleading, but correct. Using British logic, the translation under dispute should be the one from Chinese into Tibetan rather than into English. Rapga's substitution of improvement for revolutionary is a conceptual rather than literal translation. At the time, pre-communist Tibet did not have a word for revolutionary and the Tibetan verb ngo log/to revolt does not include the same meaning as Sun Yat-sen's term “revolutionary.” Thus, while Gardener was correct in inferring a connection to the Kuomintang, it was both more and less of a relationship than he and other British agents envisioned.
Three decades later, Rapga explained: “The party was not dependent on the Kuomintang. We created it to introduce reforms into Tibet, since if the country did not change its government it would be incapable of resisting an attack from outside, like that of the Chinese communists. We did not even have the time to organize the party properly.”Footnote 47 In 1946, when he brought the print orders to Thacker Spink in Calcutta, the party was just beginning to gain momentum. In the file on the party in London, British civil servants relish Rapga's “stupidity” in publicly placing his print order and thereby coming to their attention. For his part, though, Rapga considered the Indian public domain open to political parties. He says:
In 1945, in Kalimpong … I was trying to gather the greatest possible number of intelligent men … to organize the party.… It was a question of a secret movement, bringing together three to four hundred people in Kalimpong and Lhasa.… In India, I had not really tried to keep the party secret, because at the end of the war there was a great debate in the papers in India about the freedom to form political parties. I was not given permission, but I nonetheless set to work. That is why I sent my orders to Thacker and Spink. The British were keeping the people in a position of inferiority. They did not wish for any improvement. That is why the printers Thacker and Spink informed the police. The party was disbanded.Footnote 48
The Tibetan Improvement Party was only just getting started when it was shut down. The Kuomintang provided an ideological model, as well as stipends for Rapga, Kunpel, and Changlochen. As Rapga saw it, inspiration and support might have come from China, but this was a Tibetan political undertaking.
THE CASE AGAINST RAPGA: IMPERIAL CATEGORIES FOR THE NON-COLONIAL
What were the rights and status of Tibetans in British India? As non-colonial subjects of empire, Tibetans had a categorical non-status that was an immediate problem for both Rapga and colonial officials alike. Under British rule, non-citizens were legally categorized as “foreigners,” yet Tibetans were not subject to this categorization and thus lived in India without documentation as either citizens or foreigners.Footnote 49 This in-between status was a position of both power and vulnerability, enabling Tibetans to live mostly free from the regulation of the Foreigners Act, but also leaving them without the security of any state-awarded rights (or the burden of accompanying obligations). Yet, in not classifying Tibetans as foreigners, the British were also left without grounds for disciplining Tibetans who transgressed colonial law or sensibilities. This categorical dilemma offers insight into the colonial disciplining of those who were not colonized, those who were not subject to the law because they were categorized as residing outside of it.
Upon learning about Rapga's political party, the Tibetan Government requested that the Government of India extradite him to Tibet. Officials of British India turned down this request because plotting against a friendly government was not a chargeable offense, nor was there an extradition treaty between India and Tibet. British officials tried to determine an appropriate punishment for Rapga, but nothing in the criminal law codes fit. Instead, inspired by the discovery that he carried a Chinese passport, they turned to questions of citizenship and nationality. As a Chinese citizen, Rapga would be liable to Indian laws that did not apply to Tibetans. Colonial officials debated Rapga's nationality and decided that they could legitimately categorize him as Chinese rather than Tibetan. This categorization was a bureaucratic convenience for the colonial state rather than an instance of pre-postmodern flexibility regarding nationality or citizenship.Footnote 50 Rapga's political affinity with republican China was genuine, as was his affiliation with the Kuomintang through the Office of Mongolian and Tibetan Affairs. In the context of the times, though, his possession of a Chinese passport did not forfeit his Tibetan nationality, heritage, or subject-citizen position.Footnote 51 In 1946, the Tibetan Government had no passport system, and for Tibetans who traveled abroad, possession of a Chinese passport could signal a travel convenience, political affinity, or employment arrangement—it was not necessarily a cancellation of Tibetan nationality or citizenship. While political change was dangerously imminent in Tibet and its borderlands, this was one part of the world in which geopolitical borders and identities remained locally defined and contested.
Rapga's understandings of nationality and citizenship did not match those of Government of India officials. He saw his passport and employment with the Chinese government as enabling but not defining or directing his political activities. So far as his national identity, he considered himself a Tibetan citizen who worked for the Chinese Government. Upon learning that he was being charged as a “foreigner” and faced potential deportation, Rapga consulted a lawyer and proposed giving up his employment with the Chinese Government:
I have considered over the matter and I believe that the Government of India has been placing much stress on my departure as I am the holder of an Official Passport and under the employment of the Chinese government. The Consul General might now clarify from Government whether they are prepared to allow me to stay in India if I give up employment under the Chinese Government. My opinion is that as I am a natural Tibetan born and brought up in Tibet, I have not given up the Tibetan nationality, I do not come under the Foreigner's Act. It is the question of my employment under the Chinese government which is causing all this difficulty. I shall consider over the desirability of propriety of giving up the job if that will prevent my departure from India.Footnote 52
His efforts to be re-categorized as Tibetan were futile. Rapga was charged, as a Chinese citizen, with routine violations of the Foreigners Act of 1940 and the Registration of Foreigners Act of 1939. On 4 June 1946, he was served with deportation papers, and on 19 July 1946 he left India for China on a Chinese National Airways plane bound for Shanghai.Footnote 53
PERSONAL ARCHIVES: DIARY OF A REBEL INTELLECTUAL
All the Khampa chieftains were at a banquet and all the speakers were Chinese.
———Rapga diary entry, Chengdu, 3 March 1949“Got up early in the morning and read and wrote as usual.” During his time in China, Rapga often began his diary entries with this sentence or some variation on it. He was a faithful diarist, who wrote in small, black leather-bound books, including one covering the period from 15 August 1948 through 15 November 1950.Footnote 54 India had just gained independence, and in China, Mao's communists defeated the Kuomintang and began their conquest of Tibet. During this period Rapga was in Shanghai, Nanjing, Chengdu, and Tibet. While the diary referred to by British officers, the one with Rapga's “ajonymous” letters to his brother, is not available to me, that from the period following his deportation to China provides access to the political sensibilities that motivated his actions in India. It is also an invaluable new source for our understanding and writing of this history.
Among the very small number of literate lay Tibetans in the 1940s, diary keeping was common. Rapga's version of the genre fits a type called brjed-tho, or literally a “list [to prevent] forgetting,” or a “journal of activities, finances, and legal affairs.”Footnote 55 His entries record a combination of the minutiae of his daily life, prices of goods, details about trade shipments he made and received, political events of the day, and, in a departure from the Tibetan norm, his feelings and opinions, especially about the situation in China and Tibet. In addition to entries about such things as what he ate, the weather, the price of Kodak film in Shanghai, and the dates of Hitler's suicide and the American evacuation of Nanjing, Rapga used his diary to take notes from books he was reading and paste in newspaper clippings. The diary also contains extensive lists he compiled of English vocabulary, including words and phrases such as “confounded,” “bland temerity,” “effeminate,” “religious zeal,” “chronic misrule,” “ethnological justification,” “mediocre gain,” “infectious liberalism of the West,” “concealing truth,” and “insidious tactics.”
Rapga's friends and relatives remember him as a man who loved politics, good food, debate, and reading. He read newspapers faithfully, and later in life he subscribed to Time, Life, and Readers' Digest. Rapga was always surrounded by books, and one of his former servants told stories of him reading even while on horseback, so immersed in his book that he would not even notice when his horse was crossing a river.Footnote 56 Rapga believed that increasing literacy in Tibet would be a key to introducing reforms there. Among his ideas for accomplishing this was to open the monasteries to the lay population for education.
Rapga was frustrated that Tibet lacked any educational system outside of the monasteries, especially given the advances in education in neighboring countries. Privately, he voiced his frustrations in his diary, writing on 21 October 1949: “Purchased a book called China's Fate … and read it. Considered what the book said about Tibet and borders, and felt very upset that our Tibetan scholars—alas (kyi hud)—spent their time without having any plans and writing any useful literature. Thought about what could be done for the ignorant and powerless Tibetan brothers and sisters.” Publicly, Rapga proposed the creation of a vernacular language to supplement the scriptural Tibetan used in all written documents. Hu Shih had led a similar and successful development in China, and English, Rapga's other language, was certainly open to the written vernacular. In an explanatory supplement that Rapga wrote for the Tibetan grammar book “The Light of Speech,” or Dag yig ngag sgron la, he called for a modern Tibetan literature and for scholars to “match contemporary meaning and language.”Footnote 57 For Rapga, as for Sun Yat-sen, literacy was a necessary part of nationalism, and in addition to advocating for a written vernacular he exhorted scholars to praise suitable parts of Tibetan culture, writing, Rang zas rang gis bza’ rang mi rang gis bstod—”Eat one's own food, praise one's own people.”Footnote 58
Rapga arrived in China in the summer of 1946 to find himself in a politically disturbed country. Toward the end of his diary he kept a list of important personal dates, which documents his political activism on behalf of Tibet while in Nanjing, including his growing dissatisfaction with and resignation from the Kuomintang:
28 April 1947: The letter I sent about Greater Tibet (Bod chen po) was published in the newspaper.
29 October 1947: I sent my opinion to Tobgyal [his brother] in Kham, telling him that we should no longer be representatives for the Kuomintang, but should work for Tibet's cause.
10 November 1947: I paid for news about Greater Tibet, Kham, and the troubles of Chinese control to be published in the newspaper.
27 February 1948: My statement of resignation from the Kuomintang was published in the newspaper.
During these years in China, Rapga remained very much a part of Tibetan political and social worlds. He recorded meetings with Tibetans resident in Nanjing, received Tibetan visitors, including members of the Dalai Lama's family, and acted as unofficial advisor to Tibetan religious and political missions to China, including the Tibetan Trade Mission of 1948 that was in route to the United States and England. Tsepon W. D. Shakabpa, head of the Trade Mission, later stated that it was Rapga who advised them to use their Tibetan passports for their travels rather than accepting Chinese ones.Footnote 59 The Tibetan Government would later use this example of Tibetan passports being accepted in the United States and the United Kingdom as evidence of Tibetan independence. Yet, as with the entire Pangdatsang family, Rapga's place in Tibetan historiography remains troubled.Footnote 60
PEER REVIEW: THE POLITICS OF TIBETAN HISTORIOGRAPHY
In 1995, Taklha Phuntsok Tashi, a former high-ranking Tibetan government official, published his three-volume autobiography, Mi tshe'i byung ba brjod pa (Telling the story of my life), in which he provides a first-hand discussion of the Tibetan Improvement Party.Footnote 61 On a visit to Calcutta and Kalimpong from Lhasa while in route to China, Taklha had “close connections” with Rapga, whom he describes as “especially interested in politics.”Footnote 62 In Kalimpong, Rapga invited Taklha to his home, where he told him about the Tibetan Improvement Party and explained the need for political change in Tibet correspondent to changes in world politics. Taklha recounted Rapga's speech as follows:
Whether it is for a nation or for a race of people, the original system never stays the same. Even if we try to keep the current system, one day we will either be forcefully occupied by another race of people, or face a bloody conflict within our country. China and India, our neighbors, will not leave us alone as they did before. From the 7th century to the 9th century, our country, the Land of Snows, became a very powerful nation. According to our ancient history, Tibet occupied two-thirds of the world. After that, as the Tibetan royal families separated, Tibet broke up into pieces. The country deteriorated, surrounding countries took parts of Tibet, and the size of the land and population grew smaller. I think there is a danger that someday the whole country will be destroyed.
Although the lamas and leaders of the Tibetan Government are all-knowing, they are currently facing an uneasy situation. Today, after the end of World War II, the Chinese Kuomintang is becoming a world power. England is said to have no choice but to give India independence. When Chiang [Kai-shek] and his wife visited India … at the invitation of Mahatma Gandhi, Chiang requested the British Government to give India her independence now that the world war was over. The British Government seriously considered his request. Since Japan lost the war and surrendered to China, America, Britain, and Russia under the leadership of Chiang, there is now no doubt that China will become a powerful country in Asia.
If we leave Tibet's political condition neglected as the rest of the world develops, then there is no use in being human. We must carry the weight of history on our shoulders. If we look back to history, it is in order to acknowledge the past, and prepare not to let the same [deterioration] happen again in the future.Footnote 63
Rapga then invited Taklha to join the Tibetan Improvement Party, and told him that they had “nearly one hundred members … spread about here and in Lhasa.”Footnote 64 Although Taklha was tempted, and considered Rapga a “friendly, knowledgeable, and skilled observer of modern international politics,” he declined the invitation. He does not explain why, saying only that at the time he thought the party neither “good nor bad.” It was not until later, he reveals, that he learned of Rapga's connections to the Kuomintang and realized that the party was to be a branch office of the Kuomintang in Tibet.Footnote 65
The transformation in Taklha's narrative of Rapga from worldly politician to Chinese dupe renders Taklha's interpretation of the Tibetan Improvement Party similar to that of the British colonial officials discussed earlier. His interpretation, however, was from a distance of almost fifty years. To be allied with the KMT in the 1930s or 1940s meant something very different than it did in later decades. In the years following this scandal, many things changed for Tibet, and for the Pangdatsang family. As the situation in Tibet worsened, Tibetan views of China in relation to Tibet began to approximate British views in that any and all things to do with China were labeled bad. Exiled Tibetans are politically selective in their negative portrayals of Tibetans who associated with Kuomintang officials (for example, they are not always applied to Tibetans who managed to garner political power in exile), but association or cooperation with the rgya gung khran, the Chinese communists, are always condemned. The Pangdatsang family fell into the latter category and they were collectively branded as traitors to Tibet. Taklha Phuntsok Tashi's sensitive portrayal of Rapga and his concerns for Tibet is thus not easily followed by his abrupt revelation of Rapga's Kuomintang connections. Taken together with Taklha's own close associations with power-holders in exile from Tibet, including those with whom the Pangdatsang family had disputes, his uneasy disruption of his narrative about the Tibetan Improvement Party suggests that he held doubts about whether Rapga's Kuomintang connections were really “pro-Chinese.”
REMEMBERING RAPGA: HIMALAYAN MISSIONARIES AND COLONIAL COUNTERPOINTS
Rapga Pangdatsang himself knew more of international politics than the whole of the Lhasa Government put together.
———George Patterson, Tibet in Revolt, 59Empire and Christianity went hand in hand, and the Himalayas saw no exception to this rule. The Kalimpong-Darjeeling area was home to missions from many Christian denominations, but was dominated by Scottish Presbyterians. Their successes were generally with the poorer segments of the local Nepali and Lepcha communities, and Tibetans were considered extremely difficult to convert. One missionary in town stood out precisely for this reason: the Reverend Tharchin, a Ladakhi Tibetan converted as a youth by German Moravian missionaries. In Kalimpong he ran not only his own mission, but also a Tibetan language newspaper, Yul chog so so'i gsar rgyur me long (Tibet Mirror), founded in 1925, whose subscribers included the Dalai Lama.Footnote 66 Deeply committed to a modern vision for Tibet and trusted by Tibetans in Kalimpong, Tharchin was not above providing select information for a fee to the British. Christian, publisher, and secret political player, Reverend Tharchin was also a close friend of Rapga Pangdatsang.
From his house in the center of Kalimpongk, Rapga would often walk to visit Tharchin at the Tibet Mirror Press in MacKenzie Cottage or at his home on the ridge above Tenth Mile. Tharchin's office and home were gathering spots for many Tibetans who came to discuss politics, world events, and news from home. The friendship between Tharchin and Rapga is not acknowledged in colonial reports, and instead the two are juxtaposed as good Tibetan/bad Tibetan, one representing pro-British sentiment and the other pro-Chinese.Footnote 67 The misplaced caricature of Tharchin as good Tibetan suggests that Rapga's bad Tibetan persona is the product of similarly incomplete intelligence work. Tharchin's newspaper was partially funded by the British, and advocated a strong but not British-influenced Tibet. Thus, although Tharchin played informant for the British, his heart was “with Tibet,” as he would later tell scholar Dawa Norbu.Footnote 68 Tharchin was among the people interviewed by historian Heather Stoddard in Kalimpong in 1975. His views of Rapga were of a man who was misunderstood and ahead of his time: “He is a subtle and very intelligent man. He was looking for Kuomintang support, without wanting to be under its control. The aim of the group was the unification of Tibet, but the nobles did not understand him.”Footnote 69 This view is similar to that espoused by a second missionary important to Rapga's story, George Patterson.
British citizenship and Christian faith did not necessarily make one an accomplice to empire. Along with the Reverend Tharchin, the Scots missionary George Patterson provides an unofficial counterpoint to that of British officials in northern Bengal. He was a member of the Plymouth Brethren, a sect that “rejected the missionary practices of imperialist Christianity.”Footnote 70 In 1947, with fellow missionary Geoffrey Bull, he traveled to Tibet via China and found himself in the eastern Tibetan border town of Dartsendo [Kangting], where he met Rapga and his brother Tobgyal. Invited by the brothers to journey inland with them to their home in Markham, Patterson's introduction to Tibet was through the Pangdatsang family: “The Kham and Amdo tribesmen stood in much the same relation to each other and to Lhasa as did the Scots and the Irish to one another and the Government in London some two centuries before.”Footnote 71 Patterson's acquaintance with the Pangdatsang family followed Rapga's deportation from India. Several years later, Patterson turned his skills to journalism and he wrote newspaper articles and a series of books about Tibet, including several focused on the Pangdatsang brothers.
As described by Patterson, Rapga was a brilliant intellectual misunderstood by a mostly provincial Tibetan government, and an “astute and far-sighted politician” whose plans for Tibet fell afoul of British attempts to maintain a weak status quo in Tibet.Footnote 72 Patterson's commentary on Rapga includes one of the only discussions of Rapga's plans for Tibet, a crucial aspect of Tibetan Improvement Party thought not uncovered by British colonial detectives. According to Patterson, Rapga's plan to bring Tibet into the twentieth century hinged on education, specifically on the need to transform monasteries into educational centers to deal with Tibet's problem of almost total illiteracy outside of the monastic population.Footnote 73 He wanted to introduce roads, hospitals, and schools, and through education of the general population reduce the power of the monasteries.Footnote 74 Patterson provides an important foil to official British impressions of Rapga. While Richardson and Hopkinson's favoritism of central Tibet is matched by Patterson's empathy for eastern Tibet, the latter's personal association with Rapga in Kham and later in Kalimpong provides for a fuller and more complex view of Rapga than that found in the British colonial archives.
Fifty years after Patterson first met Rapga, we sat together at his home in California, discussing Tibetan history and the Pangdatsang family. “Rapga,” he said, “was very extreme—with him, it was all or nothing.… Everything needed to be changed. And in that, he was more or less on his own. All great leaders are like that—all or nothing.”Footnote 75 There was no doubt for Patterson that Rapga's interest was the welfare of Tibet. Fellow Plymouth Brethren missionary Geoffrey Bull agreed with him, and in a letter from Kham to Patterson in Kalimpong, wrote the following:
Rapga, being the brilliant man that he is, with the very highest interests of his country's complete independence at heart, will compromise no principle and endanger no enterprise by haste or impatience. He has just been reading Marx's Dialectial Materialism but, while interested from the point of view of philosophical discussion, he nevertheless repudiates and rejects completely the Communist system. Co-operation with the Chinese, in any form, is obviously repulsive to him and he feels that such a policy must eventually result only in Tibetan extinction.Footnote 76
The disparity between the man described by Patterson and the one portrayed in the British colonial archives is striking. While Christian missionaries are often taken to be agents of empire, these missionaries depart from the imperial. Their histories, however, remain renegade and unofficial, while those of colonial officials are just that: official.
RAPGA'S RETURN TO TIBET: ON EXCHANGING THE DHARMA FOR A CHOICE PIECE OF MEAT
As the communist threat grew, Rapga and his family headed west, leaving Nanjing on 31 January 1949 for Chengdu. Rapga recorded that upon arrival there his first action was to check into the hotel and make some tea and spags, Tibetan roasted barley flour.Footnote 77 After fourteen years in exile he was finally on his way home to Tibet. The family stayed in Chengdu for three and a half months, and Rapga spent his time there strategizing for Tibet, reading, discussing things with other Tibetans, and meeting with local Chinese officials. The communists had not yet taken over this area, and there was hope that the Sichuan troops would prevail. In his diary, Rapga wrote about advising Chinese leaders about Tibet, emphasizing to them the importance of giving dbang, power/rights, to the Tibetan people.Footnote 78 He did not believe they would follow his advice, and on 21 February he despondently wrote that the Chinese seemed ready to assimilate Tibet, and “gradually it will naturally flow like a small river into the ocean.”Footnote 79
The political situation would ebb and flow over the course of the next eight or nine months, and while Rapga's moods changed accordingly, he seemed to always hold on to the hope that things would turn out well. Twice in April he wrote about reading “International Law” and “looking for points that would be helpful for Tibet.”Footnote 80 International Law, published in 1935 by George Grafton Wilson, Professor of International Law at Harvard University, was one of the books I found in Rapga's library in Kalimpong. Rapga read with ruler, pen, and dictionary beside him, and like all of his books this text is full of underlines and marginalia commentary. The part of the book that interested him most was Chapter 5 / States, especially the section on “recognition of states,” which he appears to have gone over on several occasions judging from the five different inks used to underline sentences and write notes in Tibetan. Chapters on treaties and the amicable settlement of disputes also appealed to Rapga as important for the Tibetan case vis-à-vis the Chinese.
In May of 1949, Rapga returned to Tibet, reading Stalin's Problems of Leninism during the journey from Chengdu to Dartsendo.Footnote 81 His time in Dartsendo was spent in activities similar to those in Chengdu, meetings with Chinese officials and Tibetan chiefs for discussion, argument, and advice.Footnote 82 Many of these meetings involved social events such as dinners, and parties with “Western-style dancing.” However, Rapga's personal version of the exile dream of return was marred by the worsening situation as the communists conquered Chengdu and began to make their way toward Tibet. One week before Rapga left Dartsendo to head into Tibet, there was a joint Chinese-Tibetan political meeting. Rapga attended, noting that it started at 6 p.m., ended at 1 a.m., and “everyone talked about the communal cause of the Tibetans.”Footnote 83 He left town on a high note.
Rapga was welcomed home with great honors throughout eastern Tibet. Local leaders and old friends came to see him, many to ask his advice about the political situation. In one of his last diary entries before the communist troops entered eastern Tibet, he relates advice he gave to a group of Tibetan leaders in Batang. They asked him whether it would be better for Tibet to be under the guidance of another country or to be independent. He answered that if others could not control the country well then there would be conflicts. It was important, therefore, that Tibetans remain united to preserve the “Tibetan race, religion, and language produced through the efforts of past generations, the Dharma Kings, scholars, and translators.” They should therefore act for the greater good rather than for personal gain. “You should not,” he said, “think of exchanging the dharma for a [choice] piece of meat.”Footnote 84
As the situation escalated, Rapga was enlisted by the Communists as a mediator and sent to Chamdo to talk with the Tibetan Governor there. However, in Chamdo he secretly aligned himself with Governor Ngabo, and on leaving town swore on oath that he would do everything possible to prevent harm to the communal cause of Tibet.Footnote 85 In Chamdo he also met Robert Ford, a British wireless operator and employee of the Tibetan Government. In February 1999, in London, Ford recalled Rapga as a very complicated figure, a highly intelligent man capable of expressing himself well in English, and knowledgeable of political concepts entirely foreign to Tibet.Footnote 86 In their conversations, Rapga told Ford that the Khampas saw themselves as downtrodden and exploited by the Lhasa Government and wanted more say in running their own affairs locally.Footnote 87 After Rapga's departure from Chamdo, Ford was imprisoned for being an “imperial agent” in Tibet, as was the English missionary Geoffrey Bull.Footnote 88 Just prior to Bull's arrest he received a letter from Rapga that stated, “The nation is lost. It may be many years before we shall rise again.”Footnote 89
In the early 1950s, distraught over the communist takeover of Tibet, Rapga returned to Kalimpong and to an India that was no longer British. He took up residence in his former home and started a transportation company covering the Kalimpong-Darjeeling route. He spent his years quietly going about his business, listening to the BBC, reading as much as he could, and preaching about Tibetan history to anyone who would listen. His diary reveals that he was also a caring father as well as scholar, businessman, and politician; entries express his sadness at bidding his son farewell on several occasions, and he later pasted in a newspaper clipping about his son's soccer team which noted that although “S. Dorji … played pluckily,” the team lost their championship game. Sonam Dorji, Rapga's late son, was for many years a history teacher at St. Augustine's School in Kalimpong. His students recall him fondly as “Mr. In-Kham,” explaining that he would always begin examples in class with the phrase “In Kham, ….”
Rapga's library in Kalimpong included books his friend George Patterson wrote about Tibet and Rapga's family. In the book God's Fool, Rapga underlined just one sentence: “Rapga sat silent and inscrutable.” It was this silent and inscrutable Rapga that British Intelligence was not able to know: the Rapga who would stay up all night reading, who had a series of secret meetings with Bengali nationalists, and who resigned from the Kuomintang and returned to Tibet in 1949. While the anxieties of empire along the Indian-Tibetan border await further study, the story of the Tibetan Improvement Party demonstrates the need to consider the non-colonial as an overlooked but key component of empire. This tale of rebel Tibetan intellectuals in British India is thus also a story of empire itself.
CONCLUSION: ARCHIVAL TRUTHS AND OTHER CAUTIONARY TALES OF EMPIRE
No one told the truth. Or at least no one told the truth to British Indian officials, though the officials seemed unaware of this. Their reports about Rapga Pangdatsang and his Tibetan Improvement Party were written in confident, authoritative tones. Scripted as truths from which political actions would be taken and histories would be written, these reports about Tibet's first political party offer but a partial version of the story but claim to present its entirety. This was speculative empire at its finest. In 1975, Rapga recalled community efforts to thwart the British investigation:
As we began in 1945, we did not have time to publish books. We had only party membership cards, membership forms, copies of the manifesto and a list of members. Everything was burned just before the inquiry, along with papers, letters, etc. A number of people in Kalimpong had their houses searched and they were then interrogated at the Dak Bungalow by the most important CID officer in India, E. [Eric] Lambert. With the help of Tibetan and Indian police in Kalimpong, he collected a huge file of useless witnesses, because no one told the truth. Changlochen and Kunpel were interrogated, as well as myself. For one whole week, I myself answered Lambert's questions.Footnote 90
Nonetheless, despite the falsehoods and gaps of evidence, and the fact that “no one told the truth,” British colonial archives are full of pretenses to the truth—in this instance, to have solved the case of “the naughty Tibetans.” Rapga's own archives demonstrate otherwise. They show that there are multiple truths to the Tibetan Improvement Party and to relations between Tibetan intellectuals and British colonial officials. They demonstrate that some truths are more elusive than others.
This Tibetan experience of British Empire is not composed of the usual colonized-colonizer dialectic.Footnote 91 Regardless, it involves familiar issues of authority, discipline, and imposed subject positions while also raising under-examined imperial issues such as extra-colonial spaces within empire and the non-colonized category. Again, alongside and underscoring all of this was not the imperfections of the official colonial ethnographic state, but rather a different imperial effort at management and prevention, alongside tactics of disinterest and even dismissal. The residence, not just temporary presence, of non-colonized individuals such as Tibetans poses new questions for our understandings of British India and for thinking through global aspects of empire in general. The delicious gossip and intimate sharing of imperial secrets in Hopkinson's letter home are perhaps not surprising, nor is his evident satisfaction in assessing himself as intellectually ahead of these “naughty Tibetans.” What might have surprised Hopkins, though, was that the Tibetans involved felt a similarly smug superiority toward him. From a non-colonial space within empire, they attempted to maneuver within and past the bounds of British Empire. In this and other ways, considering British-Tibetan relations as imperial but not colonial sheds new light on the confidences and shortcomings of empire.
This story is also important for Tibet. At stake is nothing less than the political status of Tibet. For a country never colonized by the British Empire, Tibetan history and its current political status are heavily impacted by the British. Thus, although Rapga's personal problems with colonial terminology might have been resolved with the advent of Indian independence, those of Tibet writ large continue. The myopia and narcissism of the British Empire haunt historical possibility for Tibet. The undefined nature of British relations with Tibet both created and crystallized a politically ambiguous status for Tibet. With the British out of India, the new People's Republic of China took immediate advantage of this political ambiguity by moving into Tibet and calling it an anti-imperial act of benevolence. In independent India, the uncertain status of Tibetans under the Raj was translated into similarly uncertain and inconsistent political statuses for Tibetan refugees in India from the time of Jawaharlal Nehru to the present day. Rather than being bound to the UN Convention on Refugees, the status of the Tibetan community in India remains individually negotiated between the Dalai Lama's exile government and the Government of India. In this context, the narratives of Rapga's contemporaries and his diary enable other histories of the Tibetan Improvement Party to circulate and in so doing open new possibilities for past, present, and future. Rapga's history, like that of Tibet itself, remains emergent. At the very least, Rapga's personal archives disrupt the colonial fantasy of total knowledge in the form of the archive.Footnote 92 At the most, they provide us with new insight into imperial and Tibetan history through the story of a man once reduced to a parenthetical afterthought.
Reading history from a diary is a very intimate act. Born in 1902, the Year of the Water Tiger, Rapga died at age seventy-four on 26 February 1976.Footnote 93 Having survived an assassination attempt, the disgrace in India of his elder brother, and the deaths of both brothers in Lhasa during the Cultural Revolution, Rapga is said to have died with a broken spirit, lifted only by the joy of his family in India and a personal visit with His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama in the year or two before his death. His diary offers invaluable insights into this period as well as into an actor who is flattened in the archives. While diaries are not necessarily intended to be read by others, there is always the chance that Rapga Pangdatsang may have anticipated that someone, someday, might read his. In notes he kept toward the end of the diary he copied several Tibetan sayings and proverbs. Among them were the “Three Arts of Speech.” The second art of speech might be the one that captures Rapga's hopes for Tibet and for himself: lo rgyus kyis dge ba thon pa, or, “the art of telling history produces virtue.”
