The "Renunciation Clause" and the Making of a Loyal Citizen in Postcolonial India

Recent refugee crises and the increasingly polarizing debates around immigration have placed the experience of movement at the heart of contemporary public discourse. This is an opportune moment to reassert that the experience and regulation of migration is central to the self-definition of a nation-state. The newly independent Indian state tasked itself with this definition in the 1950s, and the process got to the core of what it meant to be Indian. The establishment of the People’s Republic of China (1948) on the other side of Himalayan mountain range, and its increasing control over Tibet led to a larger influx of Tibetans into India in the 1950s than had been customary for centuries. These migrants, and those that followed His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s escape to India in 1959, were retracing older routes of pilgrimage, trade, and inter-marriage that had long tied the peoples of both sides of the Himalayas. In the imagination of many of these migrants, Tibetan-speaking parts of India were still imagined as belonging to the larger Tibetan cultural region, and not as a “foreign” country to which they had “migrated.”

The poster will present instances of Tibetan applicants for Indian Citizenship from the Indian Home Ministry’s Citizenship Section records to underscore the importance of establishing a person’s loyalty to only one state in the adjudication of citizenship claims. The Ministry insisted on a “proof of renunciation” of their Tibetan nationality, despite difficulties of acquiring such proof after the People Liberation Army’s established control over Tibet.

The poster approaches Tibetan migration to India in the second half of the twentieth century through the longer history of lay and monastic movement in the region to ask new questions of nationalism and bureaucratic regimes of citizenship in South Asia and how they interacted with itinerant populations such as monastics, beggars, and performers (Indrani Chatterjee, 2013; Niraja Gopal Jayal, 2013; Wim van Spengen, 2000; Vazira Fazila-Yacoobali Zamindar, 2007).

Through detailed maps interspersed with personal histories of negotiating this requirement of a renunciation certificate, displayed in a visual timeline, I attempt to show how the imagination of a Tibetan cultural region (comprising large parts of northern and eastern India, Bhutan, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet) for these applicants was at odds with the quickly tightening borders of these nation-states, and to bring out the difficulties of traversing one of the most challenging escape routes in the world. The maps will also include important monastic sites, geographical features such as natural passes, border posts, and administrative centers, as well as the most common pilgrimage, escape and settlement routes of Tibetan migrants in the Indian subcontinent. Although presented in a static format for the conference, the poster components will be prepared with the digital geospatial humanities tool ArcGIS. The accompanying two-page handouts will include basic facts about Tibetan migration to the subcontinent, brief descriptions of the larger project and the two cases, and an A4 size printout of the poster.