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Reviewed by:
  • Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War
  • Harris Mylonas
Carole McGranahan. Arrested Histories: Tibet, the CIA, and Memories of a Forgotten War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010.

Carole McGranahan has written an important book on the Tibetan resistance in China and the lives of the refugees in Nepal and India, as well as the politics of history and memory. This book is the product of extensive research conducted from 1994 to 2009 in Tibetan refugee communities in India and Nepal. Focusing on the history and politics of the guerrilla army Chushi Gangdrug, McGranahan combines ethnographic and historical material to narrate a history of Tibetan resistance and its complex relationship with Tibetan history, Tibetan culture, and the Dalai Lama.

In the book McGranahan coins the term “arrested histories,” which she uses to reconcile the conflicts between memories of a covert violent past and the official history of nonviolence, between secret links to the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and the homegrown nature of the Tibetan resistance, and between the different regional identities and the unitary Tibetan identity forged after the late 1950s.

McGranahan presents a wide range of “arrested” facts and interpretations, including important details about the Dalai Lama’s exit from China, the covert guerrilla operations, the lives of the refugees, and the politics of the community. Although the CIA’s involvement has been covered extensively over the past fifteen years (including in the pages of the JCWS), McGranahan sheds important light on the “arrested” voices of the Tibetan resistance fighters and retired CIA officers she has interviewed. She presents the local perspective rather than just the perspective from Lhasa or the Dalai Lama and a more complex relationship with the Guomindang and the Communists. For instance, we see that some Tibetans collaborated with the Nationalists and others with the Communists. The book also provides a comprehensive account of the involvement of a wide range of actors: India, Nepal, and even Taiwan.

McGranahan weaves together the lives of ordinary Tibetans with the diplomatic and military events in a superb manner—although sometimes this effort makes the text difficult to follow. In a way, McGranahan wants—consciously or subconsciously—to put the day-to-day lives of the fighters and their refugee experiences in India and Nepal on the same plane as the diplomatic maneuvering of elites and geopolitical developments. She provides a portrait of Chushi Gangdrug’s place in the overall geopolitical picture while at the same time illuminating the internal dynamics—including disputes over the chain of command, the important regional [End Page 154] cleavages that existed, and the tensions between the resistance and the Tibetan government—both prior to 1959 and later on while in exile.

The main problem with this unorthodox methodology is that some chapters lack a coherent narrative. The lack of coherence might not necessarily be perceived as a weakness—after all, life in every one of the book’s particular episodes is messy. At other points, however, the narrative is too coherent, coming directly from interviews with some of the participants. Because McGranahan recognizes that the interviews she has collected are fragments and are not authoritative or representative of the experiences of all fighters—she dedicates a significant portion of her introduction to reiterating this point—the occasional moments when she does rely on individual interlocutors are jarring within an otherwise complex and aware account.

McGranahan is (re)writing the history of the movement while at the same time helping to construct the untold history of the lives of Tibetan fighters living in exile and the politics surrounding the memory of the events from the 1950s onward. The differences in perspective among the various participants are instructive, if unsurprising. For the CIA, the capturing of “a Chinese army commander’s pouch, bloodstained and perforated by bullets” (p. 149), which contained extremely informative documents, remains the most important moment of the Tibet operation. But this event does not even come up in the narratives of some former guerrillas and is ranked as relatively unimportant by most of those who do mention it. As explained by McGranahan, this apparent disagreement resulted from the former fighters’ inability to interpret...

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