185 A few years after returning from my fieldwork stint in India, I was chatting with a Tibetan Settlement Officer via WhatsApp. He informed me that the number of Indian passport holders was steadily increasing, but those procuring passports aren’t revealing it. He did not provide reasons for the secrecy, and I did not ask him. There are no public records to determine which Tibetans have obtained Indian citizenship; therefore Tibetans, as a liminal minority in India, are exercising the “right to opacity” (Glissant, 2009) by choosing not to disclose their status. This allows them to navigate the complexities of belonging, identity, and legal status in a way that resists assimilation into a system that does not accommodate their political realities. In the next section, I explore the “right to opacity” as a means to challenge state-imposed narratives that efface refugee realities. I demonstrate how second-generation Tibetans resist statist impositions by subverting categories of legitimacy used to define them. NOT CITIZEN, MERELY A PASSPORT HOLDER “Isn’t it racism?” Jamphel asked me. I spent many evenings in his hillside room, enjoying his company and the visitors sharing his studio apartment. A few glasses of Old Monk, the popular Indian spiced rum, usually elicited impassioned reactions to political issues affecting Tibetans: “When we take up citizenship abroad, in the West, they are okay with it, even happy. They believe that is how we will keep the movement alive, by having some sort of a political voice in the West.” The “they” was the CTA. Jamphel was born before 1987 in India and had lived his entire life there. He was a journalist, working for the English language version of Tibet Express (bod kyi bang chen), a Tibetan daily. Like Tsundue, he had studied in Tibetan schools and Indian colleges. Like many Tibetan refugees born in India, he was multilingual, but Jamphel had a particularly poetic flair for languages. He would switch between English, Hindi, and Tibetan, with an occasional sprinkling of Punjabi. His singing, in any language, conveyed the passions of a native singer. Jamphel’s family comes from Nangchen in Tibet, and his siblings are scattered in the West. Only he and his elderly mother live in India. He emphasizes that he is at home in India and does not sympathize with those who despair over their lives there. However, his political identity is unwaveringly Tibetan. “But isn’t it racist if they tell us don’t take up Indian citizenship but you can become a citizen of the United States? If you can be Tibetan-Canadian, then Tibetan-Indian should also be possible. How is taking up Indian citizenship meant to be giving up being Tibetan.” Jamphel felt resentful of the CTA’s implicit pressure. He was independent of their resources and facilities, so that did not factor in his decision. His dedication to the Tibetan cause was unquestionable, yet societal debates and government pressure caused him distress. In 2020, just before the pandemic, Jamphel was to accompany a Tibetan artist on a European tour. He was excited about it. He informed me that he had procured an Indian passport for the tour. I asked him, “Are you an Indian citizen now?” He seemed irritated by my question. He said, “Ask the Home Minister. Anyway, who cares?” He changed the conversation to his travel plans. “My IC had expired and was lost for the past seven and a half years. That’s why I made a passport—because it is quicker. An IC could take two years to make. At least I can travel now.” In saying “Ask the Home Minister,” Jamphel refused to answer my question, and in saying “Anyway, who cares,” he refused the premise of the question itself. He doesn’t care for the question, so why should I care about the answer, and why should anyone? Indeed, the only people for whom the question is relevant, Jamphel asserts, is the state machinery, as embodied satirically in the Home Minister, who in his quip becomes the chief and nitpicky enumerator of legal status. His words “Who cares?” turn away from the categorizing gaze—of both the Indian state, and of the anthropologist— who have not known statelessness. Jamphel’s is both an “epistemic refusal as well as an ethnographic one,” where he refuses to concede the terms through which his political subjecthood is construed (Shange, 2019). 15552934, 2024, 2, Downloaded from https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/plar.12580 by Test, Wiley Online Library on [07/03/2025]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License DISAGGREGATING CITIZENSHIP