Read any dictionary and it will tell you what Shangri-La is: an imaginary paradise, a remote and exotic haven, more often than not found somewhere in the Orient. But, before 1933, it didn’t exist. It was invented by the British author, James Hilton, best known now for Goodbye, Mr Chips. In his novel, Lost Horizon, he describes a mystical valley in Tibet called Shangri-La, where Hugh Conway, his protagonist, finds love, inner peace and a sense of purpose. The book was made into a film by Frank Capra, and the word has passed into popular culture, finding its way into songs, films and TV shows, including Led Zeppelin lyrics and The Simpsons. Before the US presidential retreat in Maryland became known as Camp David, it was called U.S.S. Shangri-La.
The new temporary exhibition at the Slovak National Museum, Shangri-La: India-Nepal-Tibet-Bhutan, takes you on a journey to the world that influenced Hilton’s book. Taking as its starting point the expeditions of the Czech photographer and mountaineer Rudolf Švaříček, the exhibition explores the four countries, as well as various Czech expeditions to the area, including the Mayor of Prague’s 2007 Everest climb. Švaříček has spent seventeen years in the Himalayas, and the exhibition brings together over 500 photographs, along with film projections and models of temples and homes, flora and fauna, and a display of National Geographic photos.
As soon as you enter the exhibition, you leave Bratislava behind. The first room contains photographs of a woman in a bamboo hat; a Sadhu pilgrim, his head ornamented to show which sect he belongs to; and a holy man, his legs comically contorted over his back and head. The ceiling is crisscrossed with Lungta Prayer flags representing the five elements and, as you walk around the various exhibits, you find yourself confronted by photographs and objects both bizarre and strange.
In the section dedicated to Nepal one of the first things you see is a photograph of an old Apatani women, a small black plate inserted into each of her nostrils. According to the caption, they are defaced in order to prevent them from becoming the unhappy wives of an enemy tribe. The India room includes information on Islam, Sikhism and Hinduism, as well as Bollywood. A set of photographs show the cremation ghats at Varanasi where the bodies of the deceased are burned before being ceremonially placed in the sacred River Ganges. In Tibet you find prayer wheels and chortens, people dressed as gargoyle-like deities and wall-hangings decorated with dragons. There are photographs of semi-naked men blowing conches, women giving photographers eggs as a sign of respect, walls made from dung, and a mass of men clambering onto a camel.
All this strangeness, however, leaves you wondering where the real Shangri-La is. For many Shangri-La represents an earthly paradise, an Eden that they spend their whole lives trying but failing to find. Yet the exhibition, perhaps deliberately, fails to explore this, focussing instead on the real, and in the end it becomes more about the West’s engagement with the East than man’s search for a purpose.
One of the exhibits concerns the story of the Czech cameraman Josef Vaniš and his compatriot Vladimir Sis. In 1953, as a show of friendship between Czechoslovakia and China, the two were invited to film the building of a road from Sichuan to Lhasa, the capital of Tibet. When they arrived, however, they soon found themselves restricted to filming what the Chinese authorities wanted them to film and, when the film of the expedition was released, it came out in three versions, Chinese, Czech and director’s cut. In the room dedicated to the Mayor of Prague’s Everest climb, which on the surface seems innocent and worthy, you discover that the trip was at first held up by China as he was forbidden to enter Tibet.
These isolated incidents, however, are only small events in a much larger story that the exhibition deals with. It is almost a truism that the West misrepresents the East, that it appropriates its images for its own ends, and at points as you walk through the exhibition you become acutely aware of viewing the East through Western eyes, so much so that the objects and photographs on display begin to lose their identity and vitality. They don’t live on their own. They are merely something for us to gape at, which at times reinforce perceptions and stereotypes of the exotic East.
The photograph of a group of women wearing burkhas, for example, is not just a photograph. It is a symbol of religious oppression. The photograph of a group of monks protesting at the lack of human rights in Tibet, which is in the same room as a photograph of Švaříček and the Mayor of Prague looking carefree and casual, is not innocent. It speaks of the suppression of the kind of religious and political freedoms that the West takes for granted.
Yet the photos of the monks and the members of the Mayor’s 2007 Everest climb could also be seen as a representation of the moral weakness of the West. While Tibetans fight for their freedom, we climb mountains. We take up a cause but fail to see it properly, preferring instead to view it as something which shows the inherent superiority of the West.
Fortunately, one of the photographs from National Geographic seems to be aware of this. It shows a Nepalese man in Kathmandu holding up a pair of broken glasses, only one of the lenses remaining. The caption says he is waiting to go to the opticians, and that the smudged and scratched glasses are the only way he can see. It is impossible for someone from the West not to see the world through the eyes of a Westerner. The exhibition cannot show what the East is like. It can only hope to give a glimpse, a snapshot, of what it is. As Švaříček comments in a caption accompanying a photograph of a group of monks blowing trumpets at a celebration at Chodey Monastery in Lo Manthang: ‘the photographic paper cannot transport the impressive atmosphere of the place’.
No one knows exactly where Hilton got the word Shangri-La from. Some say he may have heard of shambhala, the Tibetan equivalent, while others think that it is a combination of the Tibetan words ‘tsang’, district, and ‘la’, mountain pass. Shangri-La: India-Nepal-Tibet-Bhutan doesn’t answer this question, but, apart from being an impressive introduction to these areas, it does tell us what the West and the East do to each other.
For more information see http://www.sangri-la.sk or http://www.snm.sk
