Between Homelessness and Homecoming: Tibetan Nationalism and Citizenship in Late 20th century India

Since the Fourteenth Dalai Lama escaped into India in 1959, three generations of Tibetans have cultivated land, established small businesses, and built administrative and monastic institutions in settlements spread over South Asia. But even as these refugees kept alive a struggle for freedom and the memory of a lost home, they simultaneously evoked a longer history of lay and monastic movement across the Tibetan cultural region. I propose to approach Tibetan migration to Indian in the second half of the twentieth century by excavating these histories that bound the Tibetan cultural region in a network of monastic institutions, transcending colonial and postcolonial markers of identity, such as national borders, exclusive religious affiliations, and singular "places of origin."