When Religion meets Modernity: Tibet Enters the World System

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At a time when many former European colonies in Asia, Africa, and Latin America successfully fought to become independent nation-states, Tibet faced a different fate as it became a colony of the People’s Republic of China (1959). Assuming no prior knowledge of the region, this course offers an in-depth introduction to the political trajectory of Tibet’s relation with China from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. Yet, at the same time as Tibet was subsumed into a political unit within China, Tibetan Buddhism as a religious ideology continued to spread across both the Himalayan regions of Nepal and Northern India as well as Mongolia. This course explores how Buddhist knowledge systems and cosmologies continue to interact with contemporary themes of modernity, secularism, and nationalism in East/South Asia.