Book cover of "Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas". On the image are pots with paint in different colours.

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Gokul KS and Gupta, Sonika: Loga’s gau in Dreaming Lhasa: Film objects as narrative devices in contemporary Tibetan cinema, in Martin, Emma, Brox, Trine and Lange, Diana (Eds.): Among Tibetan Materialities: Materials and Material Cultures of Tibet and the Himalayas, Heidelberg: Heidelberg Asian Studies Publishing, 2025, p. 323–343. https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522.c23989

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https://doi.org/10.11588/hasp.1522
ISBN 978-3-98887-015-5 (PDF)
ISBN 978-3-98887-016-2 (Hardcover)

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10/28/2025

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Authors

Gokul KS , Sonika Gupta

Loga’s gau in Dreaming Lhasa

Film objects as narrative devices in contemporary Tibetan cinema

This chapter uses thing theory to analyse a gau (protective amulet box) as a narrative device in the Tibetan film Dreaming Lhasa (2005), directed by Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin. The film takes the viewer on a journey with the protagonists as they search for a missing fighter of the Tibetan guerrilla resistance force, Chushi Gangdruk, which operated from 1956 to 1974 with covert CIA support. The filmmakers centre the amulet box to drive the narrative of the film, an aesthetic choice that is located in a Tibetan politics of struggle and identity. We argue that the amulet box occupies a multidimensional affective and political space that intersects to reveal contested histories of the Tibetan armed struggle in exile. The chapter combines textual analysis with insights from interviews with the filmmakers to present an analysis that goes beyond the visual text to examine subject–object relationships in the personal, aesthetic and political choices that informed the making of the film.

Keywords film objects, thing theory, Tibetan cinema, narrative device

Gokul KS is an Assistant Professor of International Relations at Amity University, Noida, India. He specialises in examining and interpreting socio-political issues and events through the lens of visual images and narratives. Gokul's doctoral thesis, titled Visual Narratives of Resistance and Liminality, is the first comprehensive study of films and documentaries made by Tibetan exile filmmakers.

Sonika Gupta teaches Global and Chinese Politics at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Her primary research interests are Chinese Foreign Policy, the Himalayan Borderlands, the Tibetan Exile Community in India and Minority Politics in China. Her current project is looking at the borderland communities in the Indian Himalayas.