Abstract
At the start of chapter 2, I imagined Bogle looking into a Tibetan adage as into a mirror, judging how his own image fit with the Tibetan prescription for a good man. When I look at the beginning of Younghusband’s India and Tibet, I can imagine a similar kind of mirror gazing: Younghusband begins by pondering Bogle, how the younger man related to Tibetans, what he was able to accomplish, and what kind of man he was. And tucked into the book is an image of the young Scot: an oval portrait of Bogle, framed in what appears to be gilt, gazes out from the pages of the first chapter. While Younghusband-like his readers-probably looked at the picture, there is a way that the representation can also be imagined as showing one’s own likeness in a mirror. It’s not an easy trick: the image is flat, the reproduction poor. It takes some creativity to imagine what Bogle might have looked like, how his earthly features might have been transposed to this flat mask with fluffy brown hair. The frame of this image, however, encourages such imagining, working as well for a portrait as for a looking glass.
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Notes
Patrick French, Younghusband: The Last Great Imperial Adventurer (London: Harper Collins, 1994), pp. 89–90.
Francis Younghusband, India and Tibet (London: John Murray, 1910), p. vii. Subsequent citations are noted by page number in the text.
For example, see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel and Transculturation (NewYork: Routledge, 1991), p. 6.
L. Austine Waddell, Lhasa and Its Mysteries (New York: Dover, 1988 [1904]), P. 2-
Walt Whitman, Stanza 1, “Song of Myself,” in Leaves of Grass (Brooklyn, NY: [s.n.],1855). The first edition of this poem was untided; the title ‘Song of Myself’ was added in 1881.
George Seaver, Francis Younghusband: Explorer and Mystic (London: John Murray, 1952), p. 113. Seaver wasYounghusband’s first biographer.
Qtd. in Charles Long, “The Study of Religion: Its Nature and its Discourse,” S ignifications (Philadelphia: Fortress, 1986), p. 16.
Monier Monier-Williams, Buddhism, In Its Connexion with Brahmanism and Hinduism (London: John Murray, 1889), pp. 4–5.
Ibid., p. 263, p. 281. This notion is echoed by June Campbell in Traveller in Space (NewYork: Braziller, 1996).
Bogle in Clements Markham, Narratives of the Mission of George Bogle to Tibet and of the Journey of Thomas Manning to Lhasa (New Delhi: Manjusri, 1971 [1876]), p. 84.
Victor Turner, “Betwixt and Between:The Liminal Period in Rites de Passage,” The Proceedings of the American Ethnological Society (Seattle: University ofWashington Press, 1964), pp. 4–20.
Perceval Landon, The Opening of Tibet: An Account of Lhasa and the Country and People of Central Tibet and of the Progress of the Mission sent there by the English Government in the Year 1903–4 (NewYork: Doubleday, 1905).
Rudyard Kipling, Kim (NewYork: Penguin, 1989 [19011), p. 337. Said suggests that the lama’s “encyclopedic vision of freedom strikingly resembles Colonel Creighton’s Indian Survey, in which every camp and village is duly noted.” Culture and Imperialism, pp. 142–3.
Phillip Almond, The British Discovery of Buddhism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), p. 104. See also Guy Richard Welbon, The Buddhist Nirvana and its Western Interpreters (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1968).
Edwin Arnold, Light of Asia (Adyar: Theosophical Society, 1980 [18791), p. 112.
Qtd. inYounghusband, T he H eart of a C ontinent (NewYork: Scribner’s, 1896), p. 387; this passage is from William Wordsworth, “Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798,” (lines 93–102), in T he C omplete P oetical W orks of W illiam W ordsworth: together with a description of the country of the lakes in the north of E ngland, ed. Henry Reed (Philadelphia: J. Kay, 1837).
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© 2001 Laurie Hovell McMillin
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McMillin, L.H. (2001). Younghusband: Arrivals and Departures. In: English in Tibet, Tibet in English. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780312299095_7
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