A Newspaper for Tibet: Babu Tharchin and the "Tibet Mirror" (Yul phyogs so so'i gsar 'gyur me long, 1925-1963) from Kalimpong
URI
http://hdl.handle.net/20.500.12424/499480
Online Access
Abstract
The study examines the beginnings of a Tibetan-language newspaper history by analyzing the Yul phyogs so so’i gsar ‘gyur me long, i.e. the “Mirror of News from Various Regions [of the World]” (in short: Melong), in a socio-historical context. The Melong was produced between 1925 and 1963 from the Indo-Tibetan border town of Kalimpong, by the Christian convert Babu Tharchin. It developed into one of most influential early newspapers in Tibetan-language. Different from its precursors, the Melong was not mainly envisioned as a medium to propagate religious contents (such as Christian missionaries had done) or political propaganda (such as the Republicans in China had done).
The Melong’s main editor Tharchin attributed value to the newspaper itself: as a medium of an active public of a nation state. After giving a concise history of mediated communication on the Tibetan plateau with a focus on print media, the production environment of the Melong’s print shop “Tibet Mirror Press” in Kalimpong is examined. Here, Tharchin, with his workshop, is identified as one of the first commercial print-publishers for the Tibetan language. His partly commercial outlook gave way to a new agency of a mass audience, in theory levelling people as equal potential customers, disregarding traditional socio-cultural hierarchies.
A detailed content analysis of editorial comments published in the newspaper underlines this trend. The same data allows insights into how Tibet as a nation state was imagined within the Melong, at the same time appropriating contents in language and style to specific communicative protocols established amongst Tibetan-language speakers. Five case studies based on the general content of the newspaper further highlight the strategies for making foreign concepts understood; whilst in the process changing the newspaper.
These are: religion (Christianity), knowledge production (discourses on the shape of the earth), world politics (coverage of the Second World War), economics (advertisements), and time (the newspaper as prophecy). On one hand, the study thus investigates transformation processes of the participating community, Tibet. On the other hand, it investigates, how, in the process, the global product newspaper was adapted for a Tibetan-speaking audience, analyzing transformation processes of the genre newspaper. Due to the state of available source material, the study focuses on the imaginations of Tibet within the contents of the newspaper and thus combines Benedict Anderson’s theses of “imagined communities” with a transcultural approach.
Date
2018
Type
Identifier
oai:archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de:25156
http://archiv.ub.uni-heidelberg.de/volltextserver/25156/1/Dissertation_Sawerthal_After%20Review_25062018_final.pdf urn:nbn:de:bsz:16-heidok-251568
Sawerthal, Anna (2018) A Newspaper for Tibet: Babu Tharchin and the "Tibet Mirror" (Yul phyogs so so'i gsar 'gyur me long, 1925-1963) from Kalimpong. [[[Wikipedia:Dissertation|Dissertation]]]
