Uncovered: Tibet’s Forgotten Muslims
In a richly detailed history of Tibet’s largely forgotten Muslim community, the Khache, David Atwill spirits the reader to a cosmopolitan Himalayan plateau. Deconstructing the standard images of premodern Tibet as a “closed kingdom” and modern Tibet as bifurcated between Buddhist natives and Han settlers, Atwill documents a diverse and interconnected world radiating out from the central Tibetan city of Lhasa.
The Khache were well established in Lhasa by the 17th century and made up a tenth of the city when Mao Zedong established the People’s Republic of China in 1949. But the Dalai Lama’s flight to India in 1959 caused leading Khache, who had long felt Tibetan and been treated as such, to now “reclaim” Indian citizenship. Initially arrested, 1,000 Khaches eventually received exit visas from Beijing to “return” to India. Keeping allegiance to the Dalai Lama and speaking Tibetan, the Khache exile community settled in Kashmir and tried to embrace Indian citizenship — yet they remain outside the categories of Indian, Chinese and even Tibetan, as conventionally understood.
Atwill, a historian at Penn State University, traces the lost history of this marginalized community to challenge state-centric narratives and monolithic images, and replace them with an appreciation of the interconnected nature of inter-asian relations that links our world with the early modern one.
Atwill documents a diverse and interconnected world radiating out from Lhasa.