High Frontiers: Dolpo and the Changing World of Himalayan Pastoralists

This chapter considers the question of who controls images of Dolpo’s culture, ecology, and landscape, and broadens the discussion of statemaking, conservation, and development in Dolpo to explore how this region is constructed and perceived on a global scale. There is a continuity between these issues and the matter of how and when Dolpo moved from the margins to “center stage”—such as when the area became a hotspot of ecotourism and biodiversity (as discussed in chapter 7), and when the film Himalaya (1999; aka Caravan) pushed Dolpo into the international limelight (to be described in this chapter).

The issues raised by the film Himalaya are economic, but they are also tied to a global economy of ideas—ideas about civilization and savagery that have a long history in the West and in Western encounters with things non-Western. Although the scale of the discussion expands far beyond Dolpo’s borders, the links between the film Himalaya and the themes covered in earlier chapters bear repeating. Everything about Himalaya and its global consumption has local implications, especially the connections between Dolpo and Tibet.

In a world weary of worthy causes, Tibet has captured special attention. The cause is in vogue: Hollywood stars and rock stars alike pledge allegiance and support to a “Free Tibet,” and the enlightened leader of an exiled government—the fourteenth Dalai Lama—is an international icon. His Holiness’s The Art of Happiness spent almost a year on the New York Times’s best-seller list. In the summer of 1999, the rock band Beastie Boys took their annual “Free Tibet” concert global, holding music events around-the-clock in the United States, Japan, Australia, and the Netherlands.

Quick to capitalize on and, perhaps, define this popular phenomenon, Hollywood produced a rash of new films about Tibet in the 1990s. Martin Scorcese’s adaptation of the Dalai Lama’s early life, Kundun (see kundun, in glossary), and Disney’s Seven Years in Tibet (both 1997), splashed the Land of Snows across screens (and headlines) everywhere. At the same time, independently produced films like Windhorse and The Saltmen of Tibet (both 1998) were well received by critics and widely seen by art house audiences. Tibet, it seemed, had become, “the cause célèbre of soul-hungry Hollywood” (McNett 2000). The infatuation had risen to such a level that almost a dozen feature and documentary films were in various stages of production by the late 1990s (cf. Schell 1998).

Suddenly, as is the wont of memes, all manner of media were projecting images and interpretations of Tibet. Chinese directors, too, had made and were making films about Tibet, notably The Horse Thief (1987) and Xiu Xiu the Sent Down Girl (1999; from Chinese-American actor-director Joan Chen). Clearly, film had emerged as the hot medium to present the meaning and the myth of “Tibet.” Meanwhile, Eric Valli, a Frenchman and National Geographic photographer, dreamed of making his own “Tibet” movie. That dream would become Himalaya, a film eventually nominated for an Academy Award (for Best Foreign Film) and the most successful release in Nepal’s cinematic history. This chapter examines the local repercussions that Himalaya had in Dolpo both during and after filming, and then traces the film’s release and marketing—surveying the responses of critics and audiences, and analyzing how Dolpo and “Tibetanness” were constructed in this unexpected international hit.

The filming of Himalaya in Dolpo would be a watershed—a rent in time—as its once peripheral population was thrust into new sets of economic, social, and symbolic relationships with outside actors and globalizing forces like film, development, and the politics of the Tibetan Diaspora. In observing the making of the film, we might glimpse the antecedents and consequences of the forces that are transforming Dolpo today.

The main protagonist of Himalaya is Thinle, a tradition-bound chief past his prime.¹ The chief’s son, Lhakpa, is expected to take over the reins of village leadership but dies in an accident while traveling back to their village with a caravan of yak. The dead man’s best friend, Karma, is the natural choice to become the next chief but Thinle refuses, suspecting him of having a hand in the death of his son. Himalaya’s plot revolves around the contest of leadership between these two men—Thinle and Karma—who lead competing caravans across Dolpo, defying the elements as winter closes in upon them. The community must decide who will be their chief and who will lead them over the high passes of Dolpo to the mid-hills of Nepal, where they exchange Tibetan salt for grain grown in the south.

Themes based on the universal myth of youth challenging authority play out in Himalaya. Karma, the impatient, modern nonbeliever, rounds up the young men and starts his caravan before the auspicious hour appointed by the village lamas. Karma’s archetypal opposite, Thinle is determined to follow the old ways by leaving on the day named by the village priests. And so Thinle forms his own caravan, made up of older men. Though he is no longer his youthful self, the chief leads these other men, along with his now-widowed daughter-in-law, grandson, and surviving younger son (a monk who has never traveled with the caravans), on a perilous trans-Himalayan journey complete with blizzards, landslides, and a (fake) yak plummeting to its death in Dolpo’s Phoksumdo Lake.

The film’s director and driving force, Eric Valli, had lived in Nepal since the early 1980s and spent many months in Dolpo, producing two books of photographs about the region—Dolpo: The Hidden Land of the Himalayas (1987) and Caravans of the Himalaya (1994)—both in collaboration with freelance writer Diane Summers. The photographer recounted the beginnings of the film to a Nepali journalist: “You are deep in the Himalaya and suddenly you see two thousand yak crossing the highest passes in the world, and you say ‘Wow, what a story.’ … I came back and wrote the first screenplay” (quoted in Chhabra 2001). Valli peddled the film in the United States and Europe until Jacques Perrin, a fellow Frenchman and film producer, agreed to back the project with French, Swiss, and British funding.² Perrin put together a deal between two companies—Galatée Films in France and the Nepal National Studio, Ltd.—and production began in the fall of 1997.

Scouts were sent throughout Nepal and India to scour Tibetan enclaves for actors to play leading parts. Tailors were commissioned to sew traditional Dolpo outfits for costumes. Villagers were instructed to clean and ready their homes: the film crew of foreigners would soon arrive to begin a rigorous on-location shoot in Dolpo. Himalaya was filmed primarily in Dolpo’s Tarap and Tsharka Valleys, which lie outside Shey Phoksundo National Park. Valli and his crew were flown by chartered helicopter to Dolpo, while scores of porters carried the tons of equipment and food required to outfit such an expedition of foreigners to the Himalayas.³ Over the course of an eight-month shoot, the team would crisscross Dolpo and trek more than 1,400 kilometers.

Shooting was completed in 1998, and the film was released a year later. Himalaya debuted at Kathmandu’s Jai Nepal Cinema Hall on October 10, 1999, and proved immensely popular in Nepal. “The spectacular panoramic vistas in [Himalaya] has [sic] astonished everyone. The audiences are held spellbound, swayed, thrilled, and moved deeply,” wrote one Nepali film reviewer (Buda 2000). Another opined, “[Himalaya] is effective Himalayan cinema” (Dixit 1999).

I attended the film with Dolpo-pa, shortly after its release in Kathmandu. I heard positive remarks from them about the beauty of the images and saw the obvious pride they felt when their remote villages were projected onto the big screen in the capital. But they noted inaccuracies in the film, too—for example, in how yak were driven downhill or through blizzards, which they would never do. Above all, they looked forward to the benefits of development (bikaas) and the tourism they thought the film would bring to Dolpo.

Few in Nepal’s film industry anticipated the crowds that the film would generate. One theater manager commented, “Initially, we planned to screen it only for a couple of days. Now, even in the thirty-fourth day, it is running house-full” (Som Shrestha, quoted in Shrestha 1999b). The film would run in Kathmandu movie houses for more than a year, and Himalaya set off a stream of articles in the Nepali national media about Dolpo. A significant segment of Nepal’s urban population saw the film, often more than once. “The film has touched the cords of Nepali hearts,” said Diane Summers, who worked as production manager on the project (quoted in “‘Caravan’ Makes History …” 2000). The Nepali news media feted Valli with rave reviews and pronounced him the man who “put Nepal on the world map” (Wagle 2001b). The chorus of praise would only grow louder as Himalaya became the first film made in Nepal to be nominated for an Academy Award.

Yet, one might wonder, how could a film written, filmed, directed, and produced by a mostly French team be nominated for an Oscar as a “Nepali” film? The Academy Awards allow only a single entry from each country in the Best Foreign Film category, and that year France was already represented by its strong entry East West.⁴ Fortunately for the French producers of Himalaya, however, they had signed a coproduction deal with Nepal National Studio. Neer Shah, the studio’s executive chairman (and a relative of the Nepali royal family), had been listed as coproducer on the film’s credits even though the Nepalese studio had contributed less than $50,000 to the multimillion-dollar production (cf. Getachew 2000). Therefore, Himalaya qualified as a film from Nepal. Local newspapers explained: “The technical side of the film is handled by French [sic]. But its story, language, and location all are Nepalese” (“‘Caravan’ Makes History …” 2000). Yet the film did not even provide subtitles written in Nepalese.

It was a proud moment in Nepal and, on the night of the Oscars ceremony, newspapers predicted, “The whole nation or for that matter, the entire South Asian region, will be holding its breath before the winner is finally announced” (“‘Caravan’ Makes History …” 2000). As television cameras panned the audience at the Academy Awards ceremony that night, coproducer Shah stood out in the swarm of tuxedos and evening gowns by wearing his colorful national costume of Nepal. Though Himalaya would not prevail at the Oscars, the film’s nomination generated tremendous international exposure and a windfall at the box office for its makers.⁵

In France, the film earned (the equivalent of) $18 million in twelve weeks and was that country’s third top-grossing movie of 1999. The movie found enthusiastic audiences in Holland, Italy, Japan, South Korea, New Zealand, and Australia, among other countries, and was one of the hot tickets that season at international film festivals from Tokyo to Toronto (cf. Getachew 2000; “‘Himalaya’—a film …” 2001; Wagle 2001b). Outside Nepal and France, Caravan screened under the altered, and apparently catchier, title Himalaya. Billboards advertised it as: “An epic adventure from the most remote region of the world.” It ran for months in the United States, earned millions of dollars, and became the highest-grossing film of all time for its American distributor, Kino International.⁶ “It is very good to see that Hollywood has a heart,” remarked Valli (quoted in Chhabra 2001).

But what were these audiences, both in Nepal and internationally, drawn to in Himalaya? What notions of Dolpo did the film leave viewers with? Before assessing these impressions, it is instructive to listen first to what director Valli had in mind when making the movie:

I didn’t want to do a documentary. But I had in front of me an incredible culture … and it has been protected from the tourist invasion. I just wanted to show as much as I could of their incredible tradition without being boring. But always being true to their reality. (Quoted in Chhabra 2001)

Many reviewers remarked upon the film’s realism as its most convincing element. One critic wrote, “[Himalaya] may be simple, but it rings true; it powerfully captures a culture” (Fazio 2000). A review posted on the Web page for Human Rights Watch chimed in: “The most lingering aspect of Valli’s film is the record it creates of lives lived…. They have produced a filmic record of a vanishing culture” (Hornblow 2001). Another praised the film by saying, “Valli captures the stark and gorgeous scenery of the area as he would for National Geographic…. While the characters are archetypes … the script’s simplicity … keeps ‘Himalaya’ from becoming leaden or stuck in the realm of ethnography” (Talbot 2001).

That the line between fictional representation and ethnographic description in Himalaya is blurred seems to be part of the film’s success. “For me, it works as a documentary, a look at a way of life, at the people who live it, that would now be considered ethnographic,” read one review (Pretorius 2000). Another agreed, saying, “The film seems to achieve a fair degree of ethnological authenticity” (Dixit 1999). A Nepali newspaper put it more simply: “It depicts the harsh life of the mountain people and their strange rituals” (“‘Caravan’ Makes History …” 2000).

But how authentic is this representation of Dolpo? Even as he created the lives and histories of Dolpo in his own image, Valli contends that

It was essential that I remain true to my sources. I intentionally prefer to use the word “characters” instead of the term “actors” because these men and women essentially played themselves in front of a camera. I had to be as transparent as possible and let the force and richness of their own lives come forward. I was telling their story and history. They were the masters; I was their student. (Valli 2001)

It would have to include election posters, Maoist disturbances, wristwatches, Wai Wai noodles, green Chinese sneakers, a few plane loads of trekking groups, and many more trappings of the modern world…. That Valli chooses to leave out these less aesthetic aspects of contemporary life is perfectly acceptable, but then he must not labor under any misapprehension that he is portraying an ‘unromantic’ reality.⁷

Publicity materials for the film consistently reported that it had employed as actors only nonprofessional locals, many of whom had never seen a film in their lives. “Made in local Dolpeli [sic] language, the actors of the film are entirely Nepalese,” reported the weekly Nepali news magazine Spotlight (“‘Caravan’ Makes History …” 2000). A front-page article in the Kathmandu Post (a national newspaper) states: “The characters, chosen from the indigenous people themselves, have exhibited their excellent capacity for acting. The actors have done their part with such perfection that it looks real” (Shrestha 1999a:1).

The cast for Himalaya, however, actually comprised a mix of partly professional Tibetan actors from wide-ranging locales such as India (Darjeeling and Dharamsala) and Nepal (Kathmandu, Langtang, Mustang), in addition to nonprofessional actors from Dolpo. Some of the Tibetans had acted in other films about Tibet, notably Windhorse and Seven Years in Tibet. The diverse origins of the cast would, in fact, pose a challenge for the scriptwriters and translators.

Dolpo’s residents speak their own dialect of Tibetan, which made writing a screenplay in Tibetan quite complicated. According to the film’s production manager, Diane Summers, the story was originally written in French and then translated into central Tibetan for the actors to learn their lines. The Dolpo actors then translated their dialogues into their own dialect. “Tibetan friends tell me that the film is a hilarious mix of actors speaking their own maternal tongue. Tibetan friends said they had to read the English subtitles to follow the story!” laughed Summers (quoted in Getachew 2000). What we are hearing, then, in the film is actually dialogue made up of mutually unintelligible lines.

Yet the American press release for Himalaya advertised that “the people of Dolpo are in no way culturally, racially, or linguistically different from Tibetans.”⁸ Indeed, the villagers of Dolpo speak Tibetan, practice Tibetan Buddhism, and bear physical resemblance to Tibetans. Moreover, Dolpo was, at various points in its history, politically subject to the kingdoms of western Tibet. Yet Dolpo has belonged to the nation-state of Nepal since the eighteenth century. If Dolpo is indeed part and parcel of Nepal, why did the film’s makers and marketers downplay its “Nepaliness,” even as Himalaya was proudly billed as a Nepali film for the Academy Awards?

Like language, images can be made to seem “authentic” as well. For their appearances on-screen, villagers in Himalaya were costumed only in the finest traditional clothes, like felt shoes and leopard-fringed, woolen cloaks. Many of these had been newly made, commissioned by the film’s producers; the director, bent on creating the film’s aesthetic, admonished villagers for wearing Chinese jeans instead of traditional handmade clothes.⁹ Lavie records a similar set of dynamics during the making of a film among the Bedouin of northern Africa:

When those Westerners hired us on our camels, they were so surprised and angry that we didn’t dress like the Bedouin they had in mind, that they decided to ship these Touareg clothes all the way from somewhere called France. We can hardly move in them and they make our tongues hang out like dogs in summer heat…. And just because they couldn’t let us be Bedouin in our own clothes, they docked our wages. (Quoted in Lavie 1990:340)

Yet in the case of Himalaya, the result is, according to many reviewers, not only an ethnographically accurate film but a testimony of a receding culture. This theme—how film represents what is “authentic”—is almost a commonplace in the business of making movies, especially at the intersection of cultures.

As it happens, the producers of Himalaya deliberately exploited the shadowy line between documentary and feature film to their advantage. The production was initially given permission by Nepal’s Home Ministry to film in Dolpo as a documentary, which did not require the submission of scripts; only later, when the Academy Award nominations occurred, was that license changed to a feature film (cf. Getachew 2000). The extended shooting period in the restricted “Upper” Dolpo area “required the crew to play games with Nepali bureaucracy to get the footage it wanted” (Dixit 1999). Normally, foreigners pay seventy dollars each day they stay in the restricted area of Dolpo. These fees were waived for Valli’s crew, which numbered more than a dozen foreigners manning cameras, scouting locations, and costuming local villagers.

Bureaucratic games were critical in allowing the creators of Himalaya to film in the restricted area of Dolpo, but paled in importance to the negotiations they faced with the villagers, whose homes and lives would be displayed around the world. Valli had been traveling in Dolpo for more than a decade when he resolved to make a movie there. The director does not speak Tibetan, though, and communicates with locals using Nepali, their second language. A Sherpa man who had been Valli’s translator-cum-guide for years was a central figure in the negotiations that took place regarding wages, renting animals, finding extras, and supporting a large film crew in such a remote locale.¹⁰

Protracted discussions between the filmmakers and their hosts in Dolpo—especially the villagers of Tsharka, where a majority of the film’s village shots were taken—occurred before and during shooting. The director and his assistant negotiated hard: “Eric set daily wages much higher than ordinary day labor, so we could not refuse the work. Then he promised he would help the village once the film was finished,” recounted Tsharka’s headman.¹¹ In sharp contrast to their yearly trades in salt and grain, where negotiations are collective and all the households in a village agree upon the terms of interaction, Dolpo’s villagers engaged in individual negotiations with the filmmakers. Two years after the making of the film, local leaders repeatedly expressed to me the wish that, instead of being drawn into the divisive game of negotiating for daily wages, they had bargained collectively for proceeds from the film.

Community leaders recall how the director explicitly stated that villagers would share in the profits of the film, and specifically promised to build a school and renovate monasteries in Tsharka and other villages.¹² In a culture whose dominant means of expression is oral, villagers accepted these verbal commitments. Hospitality and reciprocation are the ethos of exchange in Dolpo: Valli had been a guest for many years, and local villagers presumed that he would reciprocate. But there were no written contracts or legal records of these transactions. Faced with largely illiterate villagers—a minority of whom can read in Tibetan and Nepali—it seems that Valli made deliberate choices about his accountability to his pledges. As a professional artist, the director was certainly no stranger to the distinction between written or verbal agreements and had to know that the Dolpo-pa would have very few legal avenues of recourse. In interview with the Los Angeles Times, Valli was asked what he likes most about Dolpo. He answered: “You cannot wear a mask there for long. You cannot fake it. You pretend less and lie less. If you’re not open to your neighbor and able to count on him, you cannot survive” (quoted in Schell 2001).

These issues—just compensation for local actors, the lack of contracts between the filmmakers and Dolpo villagers, and the granting of a “documentary” permit for a feature film—were raised in Nepal’s Parliament but dropped in anticipation of the Academy Awards. Human rights activists in Kathmandu picked up the story and gathered at an all-day program in March 2000 to criticize the makers of Himalaya for exploiting Dolpo’s villagers. Speakers at the program accused the filmmakers of “earning billions [of Nepali rupees], without providing even a small sum of the money for the development of the region” (“Programme Assaults “Caravan’” 2000).¹³ They also alleged that local people’s representatives had not granted permission, even if authorities in Kathmandu had given approval to film. Coproducer Shah defended the filmmaker: “I can ask him [Valli] to help on moral grounds. But they are not under compulsion to help Dolpa [District]” (quoted in Wagle 2001a). Of course, this response begs the question of what the Nepal National Studio, which earned a share of revenues from the film, could also have done for Dolpo. What happened after the Academy Awards? The issue of just compensation for people from Dolpo was never raised again in Nepal’s Parliament.

Though Himalaya cost $6 million to make, less than a fifth of that was spent in Nepal during filming (cf. Shrestha 1999a; Chhabra 2001; Holmes 2001; Thomas 2001). The impacts on locals, however, both during and after filming, were considerable and largely negative. Everyday life came to a halt during filming. Villagers abandoned their daily household duties and put religious festivals on hold (cf. Getachew 2000; also, author interviews with Tsering Gyaltsen [August 2001], Tenzin Norbu [November 2001], and Urgyen Lama [August 2001]). In Ringmo, Valli and the film crew caused the annual Matri Festival (a merit-making ceremony for the village) to be postponed, even though the astrological date for this event had been set long before. The film crew hired men, women, and even monks to porter supplies down to Dunai, forcing them to miss the dates of the festival.¹⁴ There is real-life irony here in that the contest of tradition and youth between Thinle and Karma in Himalaya turns on whether or not they will leave with the yak caravans on the date set by the astrological calendar, or whether they leave before and thereby break tradition.

Livestock loaned out to the production were overworked and yielded less milk; Valli moved herds of yak around Dolpo and precipitated a struggle over pasture areas in Phoksumdo, where the film’s animals were grazing scarce winter fodder. Harvest in Tsharka village was neglected and crops were trampled when the crew shot scenes of local agriculture.

Acting in the film put animals and local villagers at risk in other ways, too. In the middle of a blizzard, Valli insisted on shooting longer than anyone expected or wanted. According to one account, Thinle lost his temper and screamed, “We don’t even treat our yak this badly!” (Getachew 2000). During a lightning storm, Valli directed villagers to drive a staged caravan up a snow-heavy hill. The Dolpo-pa were staunchly opposed and refused to force their animals up the slope, with good reason: one actor tried to climb through the knee-deep snow and an avalanche, cut loose by his steps, nearly swept the film crew away (cf. Getachew 2000; Holmes 2001). But few could afford to forgo the cash the film crew offered them to march their animals over a ridge or stand still in a field of waving grains. While these economic inputs were short-lived, communities experienced long-term shortages of staples and an inflation of local prices.

There were a few individuals from Dolpo who benefited directly from Himalaya. Thinle Lhundrup, the film’s main star, became something of a pop figure in Kathmandu. At one reception organized in his behalf, Lhundrup was honored by numerous dignitaries and presented with a purse of NRs 27,000 (approximately $360).¹⁵ Thinle also appeared on the cover of a brochure entitled Nationalities of Nepal, which was published by the National Center for the Development of Nationalities, a government office in Kathmandu established to promote minority ethnic groups in Nepal.

Tenzin Norbu, the painter whose work was featured in the film and in Valli’s previous books, was commissioned to illustrate two children’s books based on the film. The painter’s reputation has subsequently grown internationally, and he was featured at an exhibition at the Senat Musée in Paris during the summer of 2002.

Beyond these two individuals, few concrete benefits flowed back to Dolpo. Galatée Films, the French producer of Himalaya, gave a donation to the WWF-Nepal Program, which was then offered to the film’s hero, Thinle Lhundrup, in the form of cash or solar panels. The film’s star arranged to deliver fifty of these solar light systems to his village of Saldang, though local political infighting between those who did and did not receive lights marred this act of reciprocation. Nevertheless, the Nepalese media was ready to give Valli the benefit of the doubt regarding his contributions to Dolpo. The Kathmandu Post reported that “the producers of [Himalaya] are set to open the first school in the region” (Chhabra 2001) In fact, a French NGO had opened Dolpo’s first boarding school almost a decade earlier.¹⁶

Villagers in Dolpo were not alone in hoping for an economic boon as a result of Himalaya. Urban Nepalis also expected to ride the film’s economic coattails, assuming that tourism revenues would get a boost from the images in the film. Travel experts anticipated that the movie would boost tourism in a country that still depends on its erstwhile reputation as a Shangri-la. The Nepali press was confident that tourism in Dolpo would grow, and one journalist suggested that “His Majesty’s Government and others would do well to make plans for the touristic [sic] fallout … so that the people of Dolpo, in particular, benefit” (Dixit 1999).

Since the Nepal government and Kathmandu-based trekking operators control the revenues from tourism in Dolpo (and, in general, throughout Nepal), the contemporary importance of tourism to the state and state power should not be underestimated. Thus, as a global medium used to project images of mountain peoples and promote tourism, Himalaya introduced a new factor to the themes of statemaking, development, and conservation that I have developed here.

The power relations between nation-states, their peripheral populations, and global capital in the form of tourism have interesting inflections. While Dolpo had once been protected from the “tourist invasion” (in Valli’s words), there was a sharp increase in tourists—especially from France—who visited the region after Himalaya’s release. Valli’s own work, then, can be said to be ushering in the demise of this “traditional” culture by promoting tourism in Dolpo and through the global consumption of a projected image.

During junkets in Kathmandu, Valli played up the marketing potential of Himalaya for Nepal’s ailing tourism industry, even as he was brokering deals with the government to make a film among the Rana Tharu of the Terai region.¹⁷ As it was, though, tourist numbers in Nepal fell dramatically between 1998 and 2002, which could be attributed to several causes: the hijacking of an Indian Airlines flight out of Kathmandu (December 1999); the massacre of the Nepal Royal Family (June 2001); the growing Maoist civil war and the declaration of a State of Emergency (November 2001). Indeed, though locals in Dolpo had hoped for tourist money as a result of Himalaya, this economic bonanza did not materialize.

Commentators in Nepal’s popular press linked the film’s exposure of Dolpo with the need for development in this most remote and marginal region: “Valli’s film is bound to enchant viewers worldwide, but it will also generate better understanding for harsh livelihoods in the hidden valleys of the Himalayan rimland” (Dixit 1999). The film thrust Dolpo into Nepal’s national consciousness and into the rhetoric of Kathmandu’s development circles. But the attention that followed crossed the modern concept of “development” with a perception of Dolpo as being primitive and “timeless.”

By meticulously editing out and omitting any references to modernity in the film, Valli’s portrayal of Dolpo fueled these interpretations and characterizations. Discussions in Nepal’s national media were typical of the narratives of “progress” and the rhetoric of statemaking: there was the sense that Nepali viewers of the film were themselves just coming to realize the harshness and beauty of life in Dolpo, but this then fed into discussions of the need for more development and the expansion of state power there. Nepal’s national media responded with some truly bizarre conceptions of what development in “backward” Dolpo should look like.

It would be better to leave Dolpo intact and carry out plans of development that best suits [sic] its landscapes. Race courses and ski resorts that attract tourists can be opened. They would love to travel by horse pulled wagons that unknowingly connect them to nature, rather than mechanical transport system. Definitely, Dolpo would be enjoying the renaissance of its uniqueness with nature and animals once more as their intimate friends. I have no doubt that Dolpo will soon be recognized as a prosperous and an ideal district alluring the world to unravel its magical natural enigma. Dolpo would be an affluent and a sustainable society, an emblem of natural civilization. (Buda 2000:2)

Utopian visions like these suffer not only from the superficial contradictions—for example, the idea of building ski resorts at 20,000 feet or creating a “natural civilization” in a region whose inhabitants migrate every winter to the postmodern capital of Kathmandu. More important, they belie a set of projections about what Dolpo is, especially in relation to Tibet.

In his influential book on how myths of Tibet pervade both pop culture and scholarly works, Donald Lopez writes, “Since the Tibetan Diaspora that began in 1959 … Tibetan Buddhist culture has been portrayed as if it were … from an eternal classical age, set high in a Himalayan keep outside time and history” (1998:7). Likewise, Himalaya casts Dolpo and its inhabitants in a “timeless” light, where modernity does not encroach. Thus, in setting the scene for his review of the film, a critic for the Los Angeles Times wrote, “It is apparently the present but could just as easily be centuries ago, so unchanged—so far—is the Dolpopas’ [sic] ancient, rugged way of life” (Thomas 2001). Audiences and reviewers alike picked up on this theme, echoing Valli’s perhaps nostalgic wish that Dolpo remain changeless in the face of global transformations.

Yet the last half of the twentieth century has inarguably seen profound changes in both Dolpo and Tibet. Borders have been redrawn, new nation-states have absorbed the peripheral areas along the Indo-Tibetan frontier, and pastoral peoples throughout the Tibetan-speaking world are today situated in wholly changed economic networks and political contexts. Nonetheless, Valli seems unwilling to acknowledge these changes in his vision of Dolpo: “These are the last free people on earth. Thinle is the last of the Mohicans. I am in no hurry to see my Dolpo friends change … [Y]ou see some Chinese boots and down jackets and things like that, … [but] the caravans still go, the same as 1,000 years ago” (quoted in Chhabra 2001). Even more, the director claimed that the impetus to record Dolpo’s “vanishing” culture came from his friends there: “Thinle and Norbu said that it is important to make this film before their culture melts like snow in the sun” (quoted in Holmes 2001). And so the film seems bent on an agenda of rescuing from obscurity the dying ways of a culture through a fictional format.¹⁸

Ironically, the very week that Himalaya premiered in Kathmandu, UNICEF and His Majesty’s Government began an advertising blitz for their campaign against goiter and cretinism.¹⁹ Iodized salt, imported from India rather than Tibet, was being promoted as the best means to prevent these disorders throughout Nepal. Yet the provision of government subsidies of Indian salt is one of the driving factors in the increasing lack of profitability of salt caravans in Dolpo. “You cannot stop change,” admits Valli. “The best thing will be to hope that the Dolpo people open by themselves from the inside, rather than to have the outside forced upon them” (quoted in Chhabra 2001). Here Valli may be cited for being disingenuous, as he himself has been one of the most powerful outside agents of change in Dolpo. Still, the question of why this nostalgic yearning—to cast this ethnically Tibetan region backwards and frozen in time—remains. I have found Dolpo’s contemporary story anything but boring.

There is a long history of exploiting images of South Asia in the Western media. Studies like Edward Said’s Orientalism (1979) and Ronald Inden’s Imagining India (1990) note patterns of imagemaking that are integrally linked to securing state control and expanding administrative power.²⁰ This has been a feature of “globalization” and global contact with the subcontinent for much longer than just this century. It is important to mention this in the context of conservation and development, since these circles still tend to project romantic—and ultimately damaging—images of indigenous peoples: the Noble Savage dies hard.

Likewise, Ajay Skaria’s work on conceptions of wildness in India also deals with these issues: how Western civilization has always sought its “wild” opposite, and South Asia has often provided its source of images.²¹ Further, that trope—“the last free people on earth”—has deep roots, too, and is especially common in the rhetoric of traditional anthropologists who claimed to be watching and recording civilizations and cultures before they disappeared. What is weird and unsettling about the case of Himalaya, then, is how literally history is repeating itself.

In his commentary on Himalaya, and its relationship to Tibet and the West, Sinologist Orville Schell writes: “Genuine or not, Hollywood’s most recent spasm of infatuation seemed to say as much about us as about Tibet…. [H]e [Valli] and many other Westerners like him are inclined to see traditional Tibetans and their religious culture as a cure for the malaise of Western civilization” (Schell 2001). The larger critique being leveled here by Schell is akin to Said’s arguments in Orientalism about capitalist guilt: this film’s romantic and nostalgic notions of Dolpo are not based in reality but rather on the reassurances needed—as capitalism goes on its way transforming cultures—that there remains something “timeless” and therefore not transformable. The romantic projections of this film offer a classic case of how the West needs a foil for its own excesses—a foil that is still “wild” and as yet uncorrupted by global consumption.

Valli himself provides evidence of these sentiments, a spiritual emptiness kindling his representations of Dolpo and “Tibetanness”:

In the big cities of the world, our lives have become easy but hollow. We’ve lost our identity and sense of nature. The Tibetans have much to teach us…. You look at TV in America and Europe; it is so brainwashed by consumerism, by advertising and what you should do and not do…. Now, I look at all the billboards on Sunset Boulevard and I wonder: “What’s it all about? Don’t we understand that what they represent won’t make us happy?” … Maybe this film didn’t change the lives of the Dolpos [sic], but it changed our lives.²²

Audiences and reviewers responded, in kind, to this yearning for “authentic” culture.

In the film, as in life, the Dolpopas [sic] triumph by dint of their physical strength, endurance, and faith, concepts too far removed from the lives of most Western audiences. But for all of the material comforts and conveniences available here, “Himalaya” does a wonderful job of showing us what our culture too often lacks. (Hornblow 2001)

Yet the mystique that surrounds things Tibetan speaks less to the realities of this region and more to outsiders’ need for the solace such refuges provide (even if they are only imagined ones). Schell comments that Tibet, or what we think of as Tibet, fulfills “our postmodern yearnings for a place that … somehow managed to remain apart from the fallen state of grace of our own neo-industrial world and lives…. Wishing to believe in the myth of Tibet, we dress it up with our own projections” (Schell 1998:42). Likewise, Donald Lopez argues that “to the Western imagination, Tibet evokes the exotic, the spiritual, and, since its invasion by China, the political: a fabled land, sheltered from modernity, endowed with all that the West has lost, now threatened by extinction” (1998:10). Beginning in the 1930s, with James Hilton’s 1933 novel Lost Horizon and its 1937 film version, and continuing through Himalaya today, film has played an important role in the West’s imaginings of Tibet. These constructions of “Tibetanness” may be a mirror image of our needs and desires, but it is a gaze with little discrimination, one that avoids directly engaging the faces of change.

The identity, both political and cultural, of Tibetans has been much contested in the past fifty years, most profoundly by China’s Communist Party and the Dharamsala-based Tibetan government-in-exile. I quote Tsering Shakya, who writes eloquently and bravely on this point:

For the Chinese it has been a political necessity to paint a dark and hellish picture of the past in order to justify their claim to have “liberated” Tibet…. The logic of the argument is the same as the belief held by Western colonial powers that their rule had been a civilizing influence on the natives in their dominions. For the Tibetans, particularly for those who experienced firsthand the oppression of the past four decades, regaining the past has become a necessary act of political invocation. They find meaning and identity in the glorification of the past, when the Land of Snows was the exclusive terrain of the Tibetan people. Neither the Tibetans nor the Chinese want to allow any complexities to intrude on their firmly held beliefs: a denial of history that necessarily entails negation of responsibility. (Shakya 1999:xxii)²³

[It is] … a political film in the sense that it shows what Tibet was like before the Chinese invasion. What I have tried to show is the traditional untouched Tibetan culture. It doesn’t exist in Tibet anymore…. Protected by political and geographical barriers, Dolpo is truly hidden country, guarding the inviolate heart of Tibet.²⁴

Indeed, the makers of Himalaya deliberately drew parallels between Dolpo and Tibet to capitalize on the social and political cache associated with Tibet. In anticipation of the film’s release in America, the film’s distributors contacted organizations working on behalf of Tibetans-in-exile to hold fund-raisers. In return for the proceeds of the film’s opening night, these organizations advertised the film to their extensive support networks, thereby generating donations not for Dolpo but for exiled Tibetans.

Has the film boosted “Free Tibet” politics in any tangible way? There is a body of literature that argues that indigenous groups often knowingly deploy positive images of themselves in order to achieve an important political objective: for example, a Tibetan nodding to an overly romantic view of old Tibet if it will get the Westerner to help in the political fight.²⁶ Yet the fact that Himalaya was made in Nepal—and called a “Nepali” film when it was expedient—highlights the contradictions in contemporary constructions of “Tibetanness.” Through these constructions of “Tibetanness,” we deny history and abrogate human agency. We may even be changing history through powerful media like film, for the emotions that movies stir “seem to have a sanctifying effect that makes fantasy and fictionalized detail even more real than historical reality” (Schell 2000:22).

Flattened into a stereotype, Tibet—and by extension, Dolpo—has become “not particular to a unique time and place, but universal…. Tibet is everywhere and hence nowhere, functioning as an element of difference in which anything is possible” (Lopez 1998:13). Responding in this vein, one reviewer of Himalaya wrote:

Despite Valli’s undoubtedly good intentions, and his rightful decision to tell a story of Tibet without some white man outsider to guide us through, his straightforward film feels entirely Western…. I felt I could be watching any tribe, anywhere in the world. But the truths … are not so much universal as they are homogenized … pleasant ideology, postcard cinematography, easily digested story. (Mills 2001:63)

But this story should not, perhaps, be so easily digested. Further ethnographic work on this episode in Dolpo would generate a more nuanced understanding of the players (both local and external) and the long-term implications of this film. But the local fallout of the film—economic inflation and social tensions—can already be observed within Dolpo’s villages.

How does Valli respond to charges that his practices were financially expedient and unethical? Is Dolpo just too “remote” and “culturally intact” in his mind for it to matter? Through Valli’s actions and his words, its seems he views the Dolpo-pa as primitive and naïve—a fitting object for aesthetic and romantic projections, as well as commercial exploitation, in a global market seeking “authentic” others.

After a half century of dramatic transformations, the manner in which Dolpo is most “unchanged” is in its external economic and political relations. It remains an isolated, underserved region of a country strapped for resources, where a Hindu hierarchy dictates the life of a nation composed of many ethnic and religious groups. This story of asymmetrical power and financial relations, of no binding contracts or written records, is not unlike a colonial encounter and is continuous with the patterns of statemaking and development I have described in previous chapters. Dolpo’s historically asymmetrical relationships with outside actors enabled the makers of Himalaya to apply “source force”—power derived from capital—to secure permission from central authorities to film, to represent Dolpo as they saw fit, and to escape the binds of reciprocation upon which life there depends. While the cultural and economic repercussions of Himalaya continue in Dolpo, they play only a part in its evolving story. In this book’s concluding chapter, I cast my glance forward, and observe Dolpo at the outset of the twenty-first century.