Before moving further, let me elaborate on Dharamsala/dharma-shala/dharamshala. Dharamsala is a place in north India that is currently the residence of the Dalai Lama and the seat of the Tibetan government-in-exile. The place-name Dharamsala comes from the Sanskrit word dharmashala composed of two parts-dharma (religion) and shala (house). So dharmashala means "abode of the gods" and "house of religion." But in everyday Hindi language, often pronounced as dharamshala, it means a "temporary station," a "guesthouse," lying usually on routes of pilgrimage. An important feature of dharamshala is that it provides free or sometimes inexpensive temporary accommodation to travelers. So Dharamsala is the place, dharmashala means "house of religion," and dharamshala stands for "guesthouse."

I examine the symbolic geography of Dharamsala. [75] Why Dharam-sala and not any other, even bigger Tibetan refugee settlement elsewhere? Why symbolic geography and not cultural geography? I focus on Dharamsala since it plays a very crucial role as a symbolic nerve center from which articulations of Tibetanness emerge. These articulations affect the perception of the international media. But even more important, they are reabsorbed into the exile community's self-perception. Thus, instead of representations as merely reflective of identity, they are constitutive of the very entity they seek to represent. The Department of Information and International Relations of the government-in-exile self-consciously presents Dharamsala as "Little Lhasa in India" (1999).

A focus on Dharamsala as a place will be complemented by an interrogation of the root words dharmashala/dharamshala in order to tease out the various possible alternative narratives of Tibetan-ness. My contention is that the symbolic geography of the place, along with a particular implication of the words dharmashala and dharamshala, supports the dominant story preferred by the exile elite and their non-Tibetan supporters. This story is consonant with Exotica Tibet, which has the effect of fostering a "salvage mentality," a strong preservation ethos (see Michael 1985). Here the emphasis is on the projection of Dharamsala as the "Little Lhasa in India," [76] a temporary home preserving a historical culture in its pure form before an inevitable return to the original homeland.

However, an alternative reading of Dharamsala/'dharmashala/ dharamshala provides a different story, one that affords a theoretically sophisticated conceptualization of Tibetanness and therefore challenges the dominant story. Such a reading not only looks at identity as always already in process but also affirms the diaspora experience as something more than a temporary aberration. The two different narratives of diasporic Tibetan identity I posit are not strictly contradictory since they can be retheorized together productively, through postcolonial IR theory, by combining a "decon-structive attitude" with an "agential politics of identity," which, as Radhakrishnan points out, "makes it possible for movements to commit themselves simultaneously to the task of affirming concrete projects of identity on behalf of the dominated and subjugated knowledges and to the utopian or long-term project of interrogating identity-as-such" (1996, xxiii). My alternative reading highlights several things within discourses of Tibetanness at once-the politics of place and the place of politics; the social construction of space and the spatialized social relations; and the rhetoric of essentialism and the practice of strategic essentialism.

SYMBOLISM OF DHARAMSALA: A CONTESTED TERRAIN

Conventionally, identity has been seen as primordial and natural, culture as organically rooted in a particular geographical space, and place as an inert space over which history is enacted. Place is held as providing "an inert, fixed, isotropic back-drop to the real stuff of politics and history" (Keith and Pile 1997, 4; see also Gupta and Ferguson 1997). On this view, Dharamsala is only a static stage for the theatrics of Tibetan diasporic culture and politics. However, this notion of fixity hides the fact that the geography of Dharamsala has had a changing symbolic role for the Tibetan diaspora. A transformation from a poor refugee settlement to one of the most popular tourist destinations in India, a change from a small, dilapidated village to a cosmopolitan small town-these are indicative as well as constitutive of changes within the Tibetan exile community. The questioning of the edifice of the conventional geographical imagination by a "cultural turn" within the field influenced by poststructuralism and postcolonialism makes it possible to study Dharamsala's symbolic geography. For place and space are now seen in social terms-not only do they shape social relations but, more important, they themselves are discursively constituted by social forces.

Spatialities, a term that recognizes the social construction of space and place, can be invoked to study how landscapes themselves are laden with multiple meanings. "Spatialities have always produced landscapes that are loaded with ethical, epistemological and aes-theticized meanings" (Keith and Pile 1993, 26). That Dharamsala has come to acquire multiple layers of not always harmonious meaning is therefore not surprising. While for some (the Tibetan refugees) it is a place of refuge from oppression, for others (the Chinese government) it is a center of seditious activities. For some (local Indians) it is a vital opportunity for material advancement; for others (many Western tourists) it is a spiritual refuge from the crass materialism of modern Western societies. For some (the Tibetans as well as non-Tibetan Buddhists) it is a center of pilgrimage; for others (many Indian tourists) it is merely a site of curiosity. All these ascribed meanings, some complementary and some contradictory, problema-tize any simplistic and holistic reading of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala. Rather than treating such tensions and contradictions as regrettable, we should rather see them as productive of the wider Tibetan diasporic identity-in-process.

Postcolonial criticality stresses the importance of recognizing the complexly intertwined and mutually constitutive relationship between imaginary and material geography. "Imaginary and material geographies are not incommensurate, nor is one simply the product, a disempowered surplus, of the other" (Jacobs 1996, 158). Instead of treating the symbolic in opposition to the material, a richer conceptualization recognizes that there is no "actual" that can be accessed independently of intersubjectivity, that there is no category of the "natural" that is not mediated through culture. This would facilitate an understanding of the spatialized politics of identity as well as the identity politics of space. The former might include a consideration of how particular imaginings of a unified homeland of Tibet shape the discourses of Tibetanness. A discussion of the identity politics of space might, on the other hand, consider how different groups, including the Tibetan government-in-exile, ordinary Tibetan refugees, Tibetans inside Tibet, the Chinese government, Western sympathizers, and the local Himachalis ascribe their own meanings to the place of Dharamsala.

Recognition that all geographies have acquired contested meanings through continuous processes of individual and collective imagination does not preclude a consideration of the physical and structural factors at work. For instance, though the residence of the Dalai Lama and the existence of a government-in-exile are among the more important factors, the physical location of Dharamsala in the hills of the Indian state of Himachal Pradesh has also facilitated its projection and promotion as a "Little Lhasa." Given the reputation of Lhasa as lying on the "roof of the world," it is difficult to imagine a place in the plains (rather than the hills) of India being promoted in the same way. Travel writings that emphasize the relative inaccessibility of Dharamsala are quite common. [77] This resonates with the reputation of Lhasa as the "Forbidden City" at the "roof of the world." In a certain sense, Dharamsala acts as an accessible substitute for those travelers (often white and Western) [78] whose imaginations have been influenced by the earlier writing of imperialist adventurers, "the trespassers on the roof of the world" (to evoke the title of Hopkirk's 1983 book). Thus, the mountainous terrain of McLeod Gunj and its distance from any big city contribute to the symbolic geography of Dharamsala.