Brox, Trine and Miriam Koktvedgaard Zeitzen 2017 “Prince Peter's 7 years in Kalimpong: Collecting in a Contact Zone”. In Markus Viehbeck (ed.) Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’, Heidelberg: Heidelberg University Publications, pp. 245-272. (original) (raw)
Related papers
SALESIAN JOURNAL OF HUMANITIES & SOCIAL SCIENCES
This book depicts Kalimpong during the early 19th century. It focuses upon the cultural interchange that took place before the Sino-Indian war. The migration of Tibetans, the trade activities between Tibet, China and India are the main concern of the book. The articles contained in the book also discuss some important figures such as Reverend John Anderson Graham, Thomas Parr, Dalai Lama, Charles Bell, Prince Peter's, Rindzin Wangpo and many more who played an essential role in the phase of transcultural activities. Further, the book is an amalgamation of cultural history and introduction of western education, and it dwells upon the importance of Kalimpong as a contact zone due to its location. However, the book only focuses upon the early phase of 19th century and overlooks the cultural variation that is witnessed in the district. Especially because apart from Tibetans, Bhutanese, and Lepchas it fails to record the arrival of the other cultural groups that migrated to Kalimpong and also played a significant role during that period. However, the book does help us to familiarise with the Tibetan history that is still unknown to many.
The late-nineteenth century was a time of Protestant missionary enthusiasm for the "great closed land" of Tibet. Their prodigious, oftentimes proto-ethnographic, writings continue to provide scholars with archives that document missionary perspectives on Inner Asian society and religion, but few sources have yet emerged that allow for these to be read alongside Tibetan accounts of Christian-Buddhist encounters. This article undertakes such a parallel reading of four accounts of an unsuccessful attempt by the British missionary Cecil Polhill to convert an eastern Tibetan Buddhist abbot, Māyang Paṇ ḍ ita, in late 1889. Understanding these texts as conflicting sacred historiographies, we note that these Christian and Buddhist writers shared a commitment to writing and to particular modes of emotional, material, and logical mediation as the "correct" path to religious certainty. Differences in genre, however, lead more to mockery and misunderstanding than to each side's desired transformation of the other..
2016
Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.
2016
Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.
Global Encounters, Local Places: Connected Histories of Darjeeling, Kalimpong, and the Himalayas
Transcultural Studies, 2016
Darjeeling and Kalimpong, British imperial towns in the eastern Himalayan borderlands at the juncture of Bhutan, China, India, Nepal, Sikkim, and Tibet, played a vital yet under-studied role as transcultural hubs of a hybrid modernity. This themed section explores “connected histories,” paying particular attention to these Himalayan towns as a modern crossroads for empires, ethnicities, religions, and cultural and economic mobilities. It offers alternative approaches that connect and intersect the history of local places and spaces with broader narratives of global history. Contributors draw upon a range of perspectives to frame their historical explorations of Darjeeling, Kalimpong and the eastern Himalayas in terms of local, regional, and global circulation, transnational connections, and transcultural encounters.
Transcultural Encounters in the Himalayan Borderlands: Kalimpong as a ‘Contact Zone’ , 2018
On 18 June 1912, Charles Bell, Political Officer of Sikkim, paid his final visit to the thirteenth Dalai Lama at Bhutan House in Kalimpong. The significant gifts presented that day were the culmination of a series of object exchanges between the two men during the lama’s exile in British India. These gifting moments were not only characterized by the mobility of the objects in question, but by the connoisseurial and empirical knowledge regularly offered with them. Using the concept of “object lessons,” this paper traces out how Bell was taught things with Tibetan objects. Furthermore, these exchanges are not only placed within the context of the Dalai Lama’s exile in Darjeeling and Kalimpong between 1910 and 1912, but they highlight the potential to make alternate readings of histories and encounters if one closely follows things.
Changing Imaginaries of Geographies and Journeys in Kumaun & Tibet VASUDHA PANDE
Focus South Asia Chronicle, 2019
Translocal studies are becoming increasingly important, especially with reference to historical subjects. The overwhelming concern with the history of nation states in South Asia and beyond - as elsewhere - has obscured many translocal histories of moving people, goods and wares as well as artefacts, devotional objects and forms of religious rituals. With the latest research on media/film, historiography, syncretism and imaginations of geography, the present section pays tribute to the recent developments in historical, social and anthropological studies that highlight trans-Himalayan studies. The articles provide new insight into a mountainous world that has never been static.