This paper is an investigation of ways in which recent Tibetan diasporic films powerfully challenge both Western and Tibetan exile versions of Tibetanness. Since James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon, the Western popular imagination has firmly connected Tibet with the hidden valley of ‘Shangri-La’, a place where all the wisdom and spirituality lost in the West was carefully preserved. This image of Tibet as a spiritually enlightened country has been successfully played on Western and Tibetan diasporic imaginations to create a narrative of Tibet which is both pervasive and seductive. This meta-narrative is used to sustain a stable collective identity in the ‘micropolitics’ of a Tibetan-nation state. In the fragile situation of the Tibetan community in exile, transgressing the boundaries of this official meta-narrative can easily be seen as undermining nationhood and putting the community at danger by severing the threads of an idealised ‘Tibetanness’. Nevertheless, recent self-representations of Tibetans in exile are deconstructing popular myths about and freeing themselves from the expectation to conform to an essentialised Tibetanness.
My analysis of Dreaming Lhasa (2005) and We’re No Monks (2004) is framed by the following three questions: How do the films portray the life of diasporic Tibetans in India? How do the films’ representations differ from popular Western and Tibetan exile images of the Tibetan community? Can diasporic Tibetans accept these alternative truths about Tibetanness in exile?