The Creative Construction of the Past: ‘Treasure Texts’ in Tibetan-English Novels

Abstract

Tibetan English fiction emerges with Tibetan exile and, like other postcolonial writings, is deeply concerned with national construction and the retelling of Tibetan recent history. In their historiographic ways, both Tsewang Pemba’s Idols on the Path (1966) and Jamyang Norbu’s The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (1999), engage the Tibetan Buddhist heritage to tell the histories of Tibet in a heterodox, self-reflective and playful manner. More recent works of fiction are no exception and Thubten Samphel’s Falling through the Roof (2008) and Tsering Namgyal Khortsa’s The Tibetan Suitcase (2013) also engage their Tibetan Buddhist heritage to mediate the recent, and less often, the remote past. This paper focuses on how the singularly Tibetan Buddhist gter ma (lit. treasure, i.e. a text written in the past that has been ‘unearthed’ or ‘discovered’) is re-appropriated and re-engaged in contemporary Tibetan English fiction.