1959–1960
1959–1960
FOR EIGHTEEN DAYS the Dalai Lama rode down through the jungle-covered hills of Assam. Led by Gurkhas, the various groups in the entourage camped in the midst of lush rain forest, the sight of tropical birds, insects, monkeys and great flowering trees contrasting vividly with the arid plateau of Tibet just a few miles behind. Reaching Tawang, forward headquarters for the Kameng Division of the North-East Frontier Agency (NEFA), they settled temporarily in bungalows, where the outside world made its first contacts. On the day of their arrival an Indian air force transport flew in low over the large meadow below the town, dropped half-filled sacks of flour, shoes and fedora hats and then circled higher to unload heavier cargo by parachute. For three days the planes came, while below the Tibetans watched glumly, incapacitated by malaria, cholera and typhoid vaccines. Pressing on to Bomdila, a major town up to which roads had been dug and electricity laid, the Dalai Lama received a telegram from Prime Minister Nehru welcoming him and extending all “facilities” for his residence in India. Heartened by the official greeting he halted once more, recuperated from the last traces of his illness and prepared to meet the world press, which was gathered at nearby Tezpur, a tea-planting center on the Brahmaputra River.
Little more than two weeks before, Nehru had announced the Dalai Lama’s safe arrival to a standing ovation from the Indian Parliament. A week earlier, however, Peking had already issued a detailed communiqué presenting its view of the turmoil in Tibet. In it, the revolt was portrayed as a minor insurrection engineered by an “upper-strata reactionary clique” seeking to reestablish its rule over “the darkest feudal serfdom in the world.” “The spirit of these reactionaries soared to the clouds and they were ready to take over the whole universe,” stated the New China News Agency on March 28. “With the aid of the patriotic Tibetan monks and laymen,” it continued, “the People’s Liberation Army completely crushed the rebellion. Primarily this is because the Tibetan people are patriotic, support the Central People’s Government, ardently love the People’s Liberation Army and oppose the imperialists and traitors.” The communiqué declared that the Dalai Lama had been “blatantly abducted” and “held under duress by the rebels,” who, it implied, were acting under orders not just from Taiwan and the United States but from India as well. The small Himalayan trading town of Kalimpong, populated by Tibetan expatriates during the 1950s, was identified as “the command center of the rebellion” and the fact that India’s Parliament had recently discussed Tibet was referred to as an “impolite and improper” interference in the “internal affairs of a friendly country.”
Nehru responded mildly to Peking’s indictments. Conceding in Parliament that Kalimpong was indeed the focus of “a complicated game of chess by various nationalities,” he nonetheless dismissed the notion that India had played a role in Tibet’s revolt. He further sought to reassure China by citing his firm adherence to Panch Sheel, which precluded involvement by either nation in the internal affairs of the other. The Prime Minister’s position, though, as he himself termed it, was “difficult, delicate and embarrassing.” A ground swell of popular sympathy for Tibet had swept India, compelling its government to offer some gesture of support. Nehru accomplished this by granting the Dalai Lama asylum. Yet, as he was acutely aware, such an act left India open not only to accusations of violating Panch Sheel but also to the considerably more damaging charge of having fallen into the anti-Communist camp of the Cold War and thereby lost its nonaligned stance, the cornerstone of the Republic’s foreign policy. To forestall such criticism, Nehru stressed that his support of the Dalai Lama was humanitarian only, based on a “tremendous bond” growing out of centuries of spiritual and cultural exchange between India and Tibet. The Dalai Lama was not to be permitted to use India as a base for a Tibetan independence movement or to engage in politics of any kind. Above all, he was to be isolated from the press and public in an effort to soften Peking’s increasingly inflammatory posture. But the latter was not simply achieved.
Since the first word of fighting in Lhasa had appeared late in March, news of a revolt in remote Tibet had leaped into world headlines. Over a hundred correspondents flew in from Paris, London, New York, Africa and East Asia seeking what was already billed as the “story of the year.” Choosing Kalimpong as the best spot to begin their search, they converged on the Himalayan Hotel, run by David Macdonald, a former British trade agent in Tibet and an acquaintance of the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. While “Daddy” Macdonald took to his bed from worry on hearing of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama’s flight, the press scoured the surrounding peaks with binoculars, accosted the town’s more prominent Tibetan citizens, drove a hundred miles a day back and forth to Gangtok in search of leads and, under increasing pressure from their editors to provide front-page news on the whereabouts of the mysterious “God-King,” began issuing fabricated reports over Kalimpong’s antiquated Morse-key telegraph. Competition for a scoop was so stiff and genuine news so scarce that much of the reporters’ time was spent surreptitiously tailing one another for sources. With word of the Dalai Lama’s crossing into the NEFA, however, they could, just by looking at the map, infer that he would eventually emerge at Tezpur. Thereupon the press corps decamped en masse, first to Shillong, the capital of Assam, and then to Tezpur itself. Sleeping on the couches and billiard tables of the local Planter’s Club, they clogged the town’s tiny airstrip with single-engine planes hired to race exclusive photos of the “God-King’s” arrival to Calcutta’s Dum Dum Airport and the presses of the world’s periodicals beyond.
In the early hours of April 18, Indian officials lifted a travel ban previously imposed on a small road camp called Foothills, thirty miles from Tezpur, where, shortly after dawn, the Dalai Lama was due to arrive. Those able to acquire transport caught their first glimpse of the exiled leader as, followed by his mother, sister, Ngari Rinpoché and the seventy-man remnant of the Tibetan government, he stepped from a jeep, walked down an impromptu carpet of tarpaulins laid between facing rows of Indian troops and entered an overseer’s cottage for a breakfast of cornflakes, poached eggs and toast. Emerging, the Dalai Lama was met by a shiny red Plymouth, the Tibetan and Indian flags mounted on bamboo splints above its headlights. An hour and a half later batteries of microphones and television cameras came to life before Tezpur’s Circuit House as once more he walked smiling, but silent, inside. While Tenzin Gyatso looked through hundreds of letters and cables sent by leaders and well-wishers from around the world, an Indian and a Tibetan official appeared before the press to read a statement composed by the Dalai Lama in the third person. Giving a capsule history of the key events leading up to his flight, the document revealed for the first time that the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 1951 had been signed “under pressure from the Chinese government” and that from the day of the PLA’s arrival in Lhasa “the Tibetan government did not enjoy any measure of autonomy.” It then denied Chinese claims that the Dalai Lama had been abducted, stating that he had come to India “of his own free will and not under duress.” “His country and people have passed through an extremely difficult period,” the statement summed up, “and all that the Dalai Lama wishes to say at the moment is to express his sincere regret at the tragedy which has overtaken Tibet and to fervently hope that these troubles will be over soon without any more bloodshed.”
China reacted harshly. “The so-called statement of the Dalai Lama … is a crude document, lame in reasoning, full of lies and loopholes,” declared the New China News Agency two days later. “Actually, Tibet’s political and religious systems were all laid down by the Central Government in Peking.… Not even the title, position and powers of the Dalai Lama were laid down by the Tibetans themselves. In modern history the so-called Tibetan independence has always been a scheme of the British imperialists for carrying out aggression against China and first of all against Tibet.… Indian expansionist elements inherited this shameful legacy.…” Citing as evidence of his abduction the fact that the Dalai Lama’s statement had not been written in the first person and that an Indian official had passed out copies of it to reporters, the dispatch upgraded Peking’s earlier accusations in what was perceived in New Delhi as an unwarranted and bellicose reversal of the facts. “The publication at the present moment of this so-called statement of the Dalai Lama, which harps on so-called Tibetan independence, will naturally cause people to ask: Is this not an attempt to place the Dalai Lama in a position of hostility to his motherland, thus blocking the road for him to return to it? What is meant by independence here,” it stated, “is in fact to turn Tibet into a colony or protectorate of a foreign country.”
At one o’clock in the afternoon of April 18, a few hours after his arrival in Tezpur, the Dalai Lama boarded a special train for the three-day ride to his newly designated residence, the former British hill station of Mussoorie in the mountains north of New Delhi. Riding in a private saloon, behind the long, black barrel-nosed steam engine of Indian Railways, a pilot train clearing the tracks in advance, the Tibetans headed west across the dusty northern edge of the subcontinent, traversing Assam, Bengal, Bihar, and finally Uttar Pradesh, where, turning due north, they approached Dehra Dun, the railhead eighteen miles from Mussoorie. Tens of thousands of white-clad Indian students and laborers lined the train’s route, choking the stations it passed through, chanting “Dalai Lama Ki Jai—Dalai Lama Zindabad.” (“Hail to the Dalai Lama—Long live the Dalai Lama.”) Along the empty tracks between towns, farmers waited for hours on the edges of their fields, palms pressed together in reverence, for a glimpse of the holy presence. At the major stops of Siliguri, Benares and Lucknow, Tenzin Gyatso left the saloon to address mass gatherings. It was not until early in the morning on April 21, as the Dalai Lama drove into the cool, pine-covered slopes of Mussoorie, the snow-capped peak of Nanda Devi visible in the distance, that his month-long, 1,500-mile journey concluded at Birla House, a summer resort owned by the powerful Birla family.
Located on a pine-and-oak-covered promontory overlooking Happy Valley on the outskirts of Mussoorie, Birla House was built in the style of an English country home: two stories marked by steep dormers above a prominent veranda and a terraced garden filled with irises, lilies and blue and white violets. Inside, it was furnished in deep-backed chairs and couches, portraits of Gandhi and Nehru interspersed with paintings of Hindu gods and goddesses on the walls. There was a large radio in the drawing room before which the Dalai Lama and his Cabinet soon began listening to news bulletins while a chamber next to the Dalai Lama’s bedroom on the second floor was converted into a shrine for meditation. With Tenzin Gyatso and his family isolated behind Birla House’s new fourteen-foot-high barbed-wire fence and the Tibetan government quartered mainly at the Happy Valley Club, headquarters of the Provincial Armed Constabulary, a thick security screen of roadblocks and undercover agents effectively sealed the Tibetans from all contact with the press or other visitors.
On April 24, three days after the Dalai Lama’s arrival at Birla House, Prime Minister Nehru drove through the streets of Mussoorie, dressed in his traditional tight white pants, black knee-length coat, buttonholed rose and Congress Party cap, to loud cheers from thousands of hill folk and vacationers. Stopping to address a convention of travel agents, his ostensible reason for making the trip, Nehru commented that he had come to fulfill “an old engagement,” not realizing he would “meet a big traveler.” In response to a reporter’s question he pointed out that India’s interest in Tibet was “historical, sentimental and religious and not essentially political.” “Our entire policy,” Nehru said, his words clearly directed to Peking, “whether it relates to cooperative farming, community development or industrial expansion, is based on cooperation.” After inviting the Panchen Lama and other Chinese officials to visit the Dalai Lama and see for themselves that he was not held “under duress,” Nehru drove past the police tent pitched at the gate of Birla House and posed with the Tibetan leader for a brief round of photographs on the lawn. The two men then retired inside, where they conferred for almost four hours, assisted only by an interpreter. “I explained the full situation to Nehru,” recounted the Dalai Lama. “His advice was to rest and consider things well without being hasty. Like a true, old friend he showed every sign of sympathy. It gave me happiness and hope. Yet at the same time, he cautioned me in line with reality. So because of this I felt a little discouraged, somewhat helpless, in fact.” The “reality,” Nehru made clear, was that, although offering “sympathy,” India would never substantially support the cause of Tibetan independence. “I mentioned casually to Pandit Nehru,” continued the Dalai Lama, “that we had established a temporary government in southern Tibet. He became slightly agitated. ‘We are not going to recognize your government,’ he said immediately. You see, I think we came from Tibet with some blind, unreasonable hope that with support we could still make a stand. But after discussing these matters with the Indian government we realized that, in reality, it was not so easy. Despite their sympathy they had to follow their policy of complete nonalignment. Of course, Pandit Nehru was a very knowledgeable and a greatly experienced person. But I think because of the Tibetan crisis he must have gotten a lot of headaches.”
Nehru indeed found himself in an increasingly complex situation. The initial discussion of Tibet in the Indian Parliament took place in late March and early April and gave way, in May, to a lively, often acrimonious debate. While India’s Communist Party articulated China’s view of the crisis, accusing the government of entertaining designs on Tibet, virtually all of the other opposition parties labeled Nehru’s stand as one of appeasement. The previous year, Acharya Kripalani, leader of the Praja Socialists, had condemned Panch Sheel as “born in sin to put the seal of our approval on the destruction of an ancient nation.” Now India’s leading politicians castigated their Prime Minister for failing to stand up to Peking, whose successful conquest of Tibet paved the way for a direct attack on the country’s northern regions, parts of which China already claimed as properly belonging to itself. “I cannot understand how it is possible to be friendly with this nation with this mentality,” said Kripalani. “Yet our efforts to save it [friendship] will only result in this: They will not give us credit for good intentions. They will only give us credit for cowardice.” “The tragedy of Tibet hangs heavily on our conscience,” asserted K. M. Munshi. “For a young independent nation like ours, with its spiritual heritage, our handling of the Tibetan situation has been a crime in history.”
While admitting shock “beyond measure” at Peking’s charges, Nehru refused to alter his position, insisting it was of “the greatest consequence” that India and China get along. Indispensable to this was the Dalai Lama’s good behavior. Given the current atmosphere, a Sino-Indian war could be sparked by the slightest provocation—a conflict India was utterly unprepared to fight. Recognizing that as a guest in India his position, and with it Tibet’s sole hope for an independent future, hung in the balance, Tenzin Gyatso temporarily took Nehru’s advice to “rest” and “consider things well” and set about adjusting to his new state in life.
The great changes in the Dalai Lama’s circumstances soon became apparent. By public demand, he commenced giving a weekly darshan or blessing from a silk-draped chair on a rickety wooden stage at one end of the Birla House lawn. As summer began, Tibet’s exiled “God-King” turned into Mussoorie’s greatest tourist attraction until, on June 3, after being showered with rose petals by an audience of five thousand well-wishers and called to reappear twice on a balcony by latecomers chanting “Darshan! Darshan!“ his ministers, already in a storm over many Indians’ attempts to shake hands with “the Presence,” canceled all future appearances. Tenzin Gyatso, though, took eagerly not only to shaking hands but also to abolishing almost all of the centuries-old protocol surrounding him. “In the past there was too much formality. You couldn’t talk, you couldn’t even breathe freely,” he commented. “I hate being formal. Now, the new circumstances made it easier for me to change things. In this way, you see, becoming a refugee was actually useful. It brought me much closer to reality. And also it deepened my understanding of religion, particularly impermanence. Although the world is always changing one never notices it. Then suddenly your home, friends and country all are gone. It showed how futile it is to hold on to such things.”
While the Dalai Lama adapted, Indian officials paradoxically did their best to maintain past protocol. Three years after his arrival confusion still reigned, demonstrated by the experience of one journalist who having been instructed not to touch or to turn away from the Dalai Lama, stumbled backwards toward the door at the conclusion of his audience. For a moment the Dalai Lama looked on amused. Then he strode quickly after the reporter, took him by his shoulders, turned him around and gave a friendly push.
Within two months the Dalai Lama’s self-imposed silence ended. Since early April thousands of refugees had begun streaming over the Himalayan passes leading into Bhutan, Sikkim, Nepal and India. With them came news of a wholesale effort on the part of China to uproot Tibetan society and culture. As they had been in Kham, “democratic reforms” were about to be imposed: collectivization of property and labor, class division, daily political “reeducation,” dismantling of the clergy, as well as plans for an influx of Han settlers to begin the Sinicization of Tibet. In addition, there were reports not just of mass imprisonment and execution but of repeated atrocities, torture, rape and dismemberment, carried out directly by the newly established Military Control Committees in each region. The full dimension of Tibet’s tragedy now compelled the Dalai Lama, against Nehru’s admonishments, to launch a campaign for international support.
On June 20, Tenzin Gyatso held his first news conference. Under a large shamiana or open-sided tent, pitched on the lawn of Birla House, scores of reporters listened to the Dalai Lama read a lengthy statement cataloguing the destruction in Tibet, while identifying China’s ultimate aim as “the extermination of the religion and culture and even the absorption of the Tibetan race.” He called for an international commission to investigate the reports of atrocities, made clear that the Seventeen-Point Agreement was abrogated and stated: “Where I am, accompanied by my government, the Tibetan people recognize us as the government of Tibet. I will return to Lhasa,” he added, “when I obtain the rights and powers which Tibet enjoyed and exercised prior to 1950.”
The Dalai Lama’s most immediate concern, however, was the problem of refugees. By the end of June almost 20,000 Tibetans had fled their homeland, the first of repeated waves of exodus, eventually totaling 100,000. While those closest to the border had been compelled to scale the world’s highest and least frequented passes, others, traveling inland from Kham and Amdo, had fought their way free in running battles lasting three and four months. These saw their ranks drastically reduced; a typical group of 125 survivors, who reached Assam in June, reported that they had set out 4,000 strong. Most of the refugees were starving or wounded, ill from the low altitude and stunned by a profound culture shock on descending to an alien world. “During the summer of 1959 my immediate task was to somehow save the refugees,” said the Dalai Lama. “They came just as the hot season started, wearing heavy boots and long robes which had to be burned, as they were completely useless. It was necessary to take very close care of their health. Then, with the little knowledge we possessed, we took it as our duty to tell these ‘fresh’ refugees that it was not so easy to return to Tibet. ‘We will have to remain in India for a longer period than expected,’ we said. ‘We will have to settle mentally as well as physically.’ ”
Two large transit camps had been established to handle the influx: one called Missamari, located ten miles from Tezpur; the other, Buxa Duar, a former British prisoner-of-war camp situated near the Bhutanese border in West Bengal. The camps represented an effort not only of the Indian government but also of the opposition parties, who, led by Acharya Kripalani, united to create a Central Relief Committee that was instrumental in obtaining food, medical supplies and international aid. Disinfected, fingerprinted, interrogated by Indian intelligence, issued blue-green trousers and brown bush shirts, the mixture of monks, guerrillas and families waited in barracks to be dispersed for road work to the cooler regions of northern India, a plan the Dalai Lama and New Delhi had jointly devised to check the growing number of fatalities. As July began, the first group left Buxa, to be followed shortly by hundreds more, deployed over a twelve-hundred-mile arc across the Himalayas. With their own limited chances for survival lay the sole hope for Tibet’s eventual self-determination.
AFTER THREE DAYS of tramping over the 25,000-foot mountains dividing Tibet and Bhutan, Tempa Tsering, his parents and two younger sisters faced their goal. Beneath them stretched the heavily wooded slopes of the southern Himalayas, breaking for the first time in days the uncharted wilderness of brilliant snow-capped summits, ridges and defiles that they had struggled through. Six months earlier, the revolt had been crushed. Tempa’s father, Chopel Dhondub,* together with all the able-bodied men in the village of Drumpa, had been imprisoned by the PLA. Released, he was rearrested after only a few weeks, and then freed again, just in time to see his wife beaten and denounced in thamzing or public “struggle session.” He then received notice that Tempa, though only ten years old, was to be sent away with thousands of other Tibetan children for education in China. Frightened of losing their only son, Tempa’s parents decided to flee.
In the middle of October 1959, Chopel Dhondub led his family out of Drumpa. Departing after midnight, his wife and their five- and eight-year-old daughters hurried from the village in silence. A short while later, he and Tempa followed, leaving the door of their home unbolted so as not to arouse suspicion. Trailed by their dog, who refused to be turned back, the family walked east, carrying a few bags of food and clothing, before heading south, off the track, into the mountains separating Lhoka from Bhutan. Climbing all night, they ascended to 18,000 feet. The two girls clung to their parents’ backs, Tempa walked between, holding their hands. With each step forward the adults sank waist deep into freshly fallen powder that rendered the ascent extremely difficult. As dawn broke, they stopped to sleep behind a boulder, huddled together on a blanket on the snow. Only then did they realize that their dog had disappeared, stuck, most likely, in a drift and unable to free himself.
On waking at sunset, Tempa’s family gazed out over a vaulted world of jagged peaks and indigo sky, the sere umber-colored hills of Tibet beginning to glow in the fading light far below. After a brief meal of melted snow, dried meat and roasted barley, they moved upward again, the moonlight so bright on the snow and ice that their eyes had to be shielded every few steps. By dawn all were exhausted. Tempa’s youngest sister had started vomiting from the thin air and altitude; the others had lost their appetites. Without eating, they fell asleep under an overhang in a depression between spires. The next night the trek continued. At three in the morning a needle-thin ridge suddenly loomed ahead. One at a time, Chopel Dhondub led his children and wife carefully across an invisible chasm dropping away in the darkness to either side. Once the ridge had been safely negotiated, however, the incline gradually descended. Camping again in the snow, they awoke the following afternoon and, less fearful of capture, traversed a wide, saddleback slope until, with the sun setting and the wall of mountains they had passed through now rising behind them, the foothills of Bhutan came into view. The family would have been greatly relieved if it was not for the condition of their youngest child. For two days she had refused to eat or drink. Throughout the last march she had lain limply on her mother’s back, unresponsive to attempts at reviving her. Listening anxiously to her daughter’s labored breathing, Tempa’s mother called out toward four o’clock that the child was “not keeping well at all.” The group came to a halt about an hour above the tree line. Sitting down, Tempa’s mother lifted her daughter from her back and began to rock her. At that moment, while the others looked on, the little girl stopped breathing. “It was a shock,” recalled Tempa. “One moment she was alive and the next, just when the worst of the climb was over, she died.”
As the sun sank below the last ranges, Tempa and his family wept over the corpse. Finally, Chopel Dhondub took his youngest daughter’s extra clothes from one of the bags they had brought, dressed her small body in them, and scooped out a shallow grave. He then buried his child, covering her face with packed snow. Still weeping, the family set off down the mountain. Four hours later, among boulders and waist-high shrubs, they laid out their blanket, made their first hot tea in three days and fell asleep.
Tempa and his family now lay on the edge of a world that in every respect was unknown to them. Once before Chopel Dhondub had traded in Bhutan. He, at least, had seen a forest. The others never had. As with many of the refugees coming from Tibet, their knowledge of the globe consisted of a vague image of China and India, beyond both of which, they thought, stretched only the great ocean. Unaware that the Dalai Lama had escaped—the Chinese having kept his departure secret—the family, now that its flight was complete, had no further goal. As a result, on the following day they simply took the first path they found, which, after another night’s camping in the forest, led to a village.
To the Tibetans, the local Bhutanese, wearing knee-length checkerboard robes and short, braidless hair, looked like fellow countrymen who, lost for generations, had fallen into an odd, half-remembered mimicry of their ancestors’ ways. To the Bhutanese, however, the refugees were anything but strange. Since early spring thousands had already come this way, disoriented and sick, not a few of them starving. In the immediate aftermath of the uprising, the Bhutanese government had closed the main passes, fearful that China would exact reprisals if the refugees were permitted to enter. But with the great influx of religious and political figures, some of whom were related to the royal family itself, they finally modified their policy. Tibetans were subsequently permitted to pass through the kingdom on condition that they proceed to India. Although some 4,000 refugees eventually remained in Bhutan, the rest were forced to beg their way across the country, bartering the few pieces of jewelry, images and thankas they possessed, so that, on their egress a month later, most were destitute. Following the pattern, Tempa, his parents and sister traversed Bhutan, camping in the woods by night, begging in hamlets each day.
Within a week a routine emerged. Arriving at the outskirts of a village, the family divided into two teams, mother and daughter in one, father and son in the other. Passing from house to house, they appealed for whatever leftover food, mainly rice and vegetables, the inhabitants would spare. Returning to their camp outside the town, they ate and then continued traveling. Discovering that people were more generous to the children, Chopel Dhondub instructed his son to beg alone, but this, though profitable, only increased Tempa’s already persistent fear of getting lost, an anxiety they all shared. Unlike Tibet’s limitless vistas, the abundant forest, so thick that it often blocked out the sky, created intense claustrophobia worsened by the constant fear of separation. Dread of what lay hidden among the trees increased the Tibetans’ unease. Tigers, wild boars and poisonous insects were all present. Tempa’s father warned the children about snakes, describing them as creatures who resembled the black and white ropes used by Tibetan traders but who moved. No vigilance, however, was sufficient to guard against the omnipresent leeches. Each day they would latch on unnoticed and gradually swell with blood up to two inches in length. Salt and fire were the sole antidotes. Preserving their few matches for campfires, Tempa and his family begged for salt for the leeches and wrapped themselves in their hot Tibetan clothing. Through it all, Tempa’s mother wept continually over the loss of her daughter. In the few words they exchanged before sleep each night, the others never mentioned the tragedy for fear of upsetting her more.
As the family’s trek across Bhutan progressed, they met other refugees, flowing like so many rivulets down through Thimbu, the capital, and thence to India. Finally, after five weeks of walking, they entered a large meadow in the woods filled with Tibetans preparing to cross the Indian border two days beyond. Among them, Tempa’s father found a family he knew. He joined their cooking fire, and the two groups exchanged accounts. Entering India together, they arrived a few days later at Buxa.
Located in an airless pocket between three jungle-covered hills, Buxa’s thirty concrete barracks, enclosed by a high barbed-wire perimeter, presented a dismal setting. At the time of Tempa’s admittance, thousands of refugees were bivouacked inside and outside the camp’s gates, the majority incapacitated from the heat and low altitude. To relieve overcrowding, the Indian government had begun shipping out sizable contingents, either for road work or to the more spacious transit camp at Missamari, where, after two weeks, Tempa and his family themselves were transferred. “We left Buxa in a large group and walked about two miles to the railroad,” recalled Tempa. “Everyone was discussing the train. No one had ever seen one; we had only heard its new Tibetan name, rili, from the English word ‘rail’ I was very excited listening to people talk about big houses that moved, but when we first arrived there was so much rushing that I had no chance to look.” Herded by Indian police into a narrow passage dividing two stacks of triple-level wooden bunks, Tempa managed to get a window seat, from which vantage point he soon received a terrific shock. “It was so funny,” he remembered. “When the train started I actually thought the mountains were moving out, not us. I was staring through the window and thinking, ‘How do these mountains move so quickly?’ I just couldn’t understand it.” By nightfall, though, as the train turned south and the Himalayas vanished, he had begun to adjust. Then, after a second night, they arrived at a town called Rangapari from where the refugees were driven in trucks to the new camp.
Externally, Missamari was larger and less depressing than Buxa. Built on a sandy flat by a river in the jungle, the camp comprised 150 bamboo barracks laid out in neat rows. Up to 100 people lived in each. Around them grew a profusion of kitchen vegetables; cucumber vines, which had blanketed many of the buildings’ roofs in only a few months, offering a modicum of shade against the tropical sun. Up until the arrival of Tempa’s family, Missamari’s almost 15,000 inhabitants had been predominantly men: Khampa fighters and monks who had fled Lhasa in the midst of the uprising. They had already experienced the worst of camp life. At Missamari, erected for the Tibetans in little more than two weeks, the water supply was contaminated, sanitation was inadequate and the rations of potato curry, rice and lentils, though plentiful, were detrimental to a people accustomed solely to a diet of barley, butter and meat. The result had been an epidemic of deadly amoebic dysentery. Smoke from the cremation ground on the riverbank five hundred yards away drifted over the barracks daily. Old and young died first, unable to resist the infection, succumbing usually in a day or two. Weeping was the most noticeable sound in the campground, occasionally mixed with the rapid hum of a sutra, recited by a lone monk now dressed in government-issue clothing like all the rest.
Tempa spent almost three months in Missamari. Each day his family sat listlessly on their beds, hearing of a new death. Their sole consolation was the hope that soon, led by the Dalai Lama, they would return to Tibet. Constantly, illogically, they spoke of it. There seemed little doubt that their stay in India could only be temporary. By late winter of 1960, however, a Tibetan official in the camp announced that they would soon be sent north for road work. Chopel Dhondub deduced that a return to Tibet was far less likely from a road gang than from Missamari itself. With this realization the family lost their resolve. Unaffected till now, both Tempa and his remaining sister contracted dysentery. In spite of the small white tablets given to her at the camp’s dispensary, the little girl’s health failed rapidly. Her periodic outdoor playing—from which she often ran inside, frightened on seeing a dark-skinned Indian—ceased. She stayed in bed all day, too weak to move or eat. A short while before the family was to leave for road work, Tempa’s second sister died.
Two days later, Tempa and his parents were put on a train, their destination unknown. During the ride Tempa’s mother refused to let go of him. Too distraught to eat, she wept continually, repeating over and over, “We escaped the Chinese only to bury our bodies in a foreign land.” Tempa’s father sat listlessly beside his wife, speechless from the loss. After three days on the train, the 160 refugees on board disembarked at a small town before the foothills of the western Himalayas. A Tibetan government official greeted them at the railway station, but his Indian counterpart had failed to show up. For three days more the travelers camped on the platform, during which time their first Tibetan New Year’s in exile came and went without celebration. When their presence was eventually discovered, they were taken by truck to a group of old army tents, torn and patched after years of use, pitched in uneven lines on a rocky slope near an Indian village called Bawarna. A few hundred yards distant, down a path through pine trees, lay the head of the road construction.
Work began a week later. A whistle blew at 7:45 each morning and the refugees proceeded through the woods to the road. Standing for roll call taken by Indian overseers, they were divided into groups of ten; men were given axes and crowbars to cut and clear trees, women shovels to dig the roadbed, children baskets to remove dirt and stones. With an hour’s break for lunch, they labored until 5:00 p.m., receiving little more than a rupee, or 10 cents, a day, just enough to purchase rice and once a week some meat and vegetables. Shopping in the village after work, the refugees had their first unofficial contact with Indians.
As they discovered, in common with one road group after another, contact with the local people, though necessary, was often hazardous. Whatever infectious diseases were present among the inhabitants—tuberculosis in particular—passed indiscriminately to the Tibetans, who, lacking the proper antibodies, most often died. Within a few months of the exiles’ arrival in India it became clear that the task of transition was not only more threatening than that of escape, but so universally destructive, affecting virtually every family, that the survival of the refugees as a coherent group was itself called into question. In many cases, a visible illness could not even be found as the cause of death. The Tibetans themselves attributed such fatalities simply to heartbreak and the shock of exile. Tempa’s mother now appeared afflicted by just such a malaise. After two weeks on the road she lacked the strength to work and took to the straw and blanket the family used for a bed in their tent. Compelled to labor in order to eat, Tempa and his father were unable to tend to her. In the evenings they carried her to Bawarna’s small clinic, but the medical worker in charge could find no specific symptoms to treat. Still devastated by the loss of her two daughters, she lingered alone until, one Sunday, the Tibetan official in charge of the road camp arranged for a visit to nearby Dharamsala, the Dalai Lama’s new residence, to which he had shifted from Mussoorie a few months before.
After driving for two hours, the road workers were let off in a small hillside hamlet called McLeod Ganj just above the main town of Dharamsala. From there, Chopel Dhondub carried his wife on his back up the steep cobblestone path leading to the Dalai Lama’s residence. At its entrance, the group passed through a security check and then were directed onto a narrow strip of lawn before a veranda on the south side of a large house. The Dalai Lama appeared and they all prostrated. The young leader spoke of plans and improvements underway, after which they filed by to receive his blessing. Then the brief audience ended. Two days later, back in Bawarna, Tempa’s mother looked up at her husband and son from bed and said, “Now that I have seen His Holiness I feel relieved. If I die, that is my fate. I’m satisfied.” The next day Tempa’s father sent him to work alone. That night his mother held his hand and remarked, “Now you must take care of your father. One day, I know, you will go back to Tibet.” When Tempa returned from work the following day, his mother was dead.
Two weeks later Chopel Dhondub began vomiting. As with the children, his state quickly deteriorated. He was taken to a hospital in Palampur, an hour’s drive away. Tempa, just approaching his eleventh birthday, was left alone in the tent his mother had died in. In the mornings, the Tibetan government official collected him for work, telling the Indian overseers not to demand too much labor from him. In the evenings, he walked the boy into Bawarna to buy him sweets. Each night Tempa lay alone crying, terrified that his father would die as well and leave him orphaned. Miraculously, Chopel Dhondub returned a week later, enervated but alive.
Yet another separation was in store. There were forty children in Tempa’s road gang, all of whom, it was decided, were to be sent to the newly established nursery in Dharamsala, set up in the spring of 1960 to care for the hundreds of young people left bereaved on the roads. On hearing the news, Tempa refused to leave his father. Even when Chopel Dhondub assured his son that he was out of danger, insisting that there was no future for him carrying dirt and stones on a road gang, Tempa remained obdurate. But the adults were not dissuaded. Distraught, Tempa was packed onto a bus and driven in tears to Dharamsala, separated, finally, from everything he had known. It was a year before he heard from his father again. In the interim, a new life, pieced together by the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan government-in-exile, began to take shape for him and the others of his generation.
WHILE REFUGEES CONTINUED to descend throughout the summer and autumn of 1959, the Dalai Lama pushed forward his effort to obtain international support for Tibet. Responding to his call for an impartial inquiry, the International Commission of Jurists launched an investigation into the manifold accounts of Chinese atrocities as well as Tibet’s international legal status. After compiling an initial document by the end of July, a full report was issued one year later. In it, the commission concluded that, despite the ambiguity shrouding its legal status, Tibet had, in reality, been a fully sovereign state, independent in both fact and law of Chinese dominion. Regarding violations of human rights, the commission determined that Red China was guilty of “the gravest crime of which any person or nation can be accused—the intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnic, racial or religious group as such”—genocide.
Bolstered by the International Commission of Jurists’ preliminary findings, the Dalai Lama left Mussoorie by train on September 8. Arriving at the Old Delhi station by six o’clock the next morning, he was greeted by thousands of Indian supporters, driven to Hyderabad House, the Indian State Guest House, and then on to confer with Nehru at the Prime Minister’s residence Teen Murti. There, he disclosed the reason for his trip. “It was my decision, despite strong opposition from India, to approach the United Nations,” recounted the Dalai Lama. “To begin with, I personally met with the Prime Minister to explain our stand. After listening, Nehru said, ‘Now that you’ve decided to appeal, all right, go ahead.’ At that moment, I really felt how beautiful freedom is. Our right was accepted although we had been discouraged against this whole idea of approaching the UN. Because of my past experience with the Chinese it was almost unthinkable; an extraordinary surprise within my lifetime.”
Having obtained Nehru’s assent, Tenzin Gyatso cabled the United Nations Secretary-General, Dag Hammarskjöld, the same day, prepared a delegation to follow and then embarked on an unprecedented round of diplomatic calls, attempting to raise support for the appeal. “Compared to the Dalai Lama of today, I myself was a bit confused,” said the Dalai Lama, reflecting on his visits to New Delhi’s diplomatic corps. “It’s always more useful to talk person to person, but sometimes it was hard to know how to start. Then, gradually, my own style grew. I had more courage to express myself and was less concerned about diplomatic formalities. During 1959, though, I lacked this confidence in myself. Therefore it was very difficult sometimes. I used to be quite anxious.”
His efforts, nevertheless, proved out. As a result of them, Ireland and Malaya co-sponsored Tibet’s case to the Steering Committee of the General Assembly, where, unlike its cursory dismissal in 1950, the issue was now debated in depth. In many respects the discussion reflected that of India’s Parliament. As introduced by the sponsoring nations, Tibet’s plight was depicted primarily as one involving human rights; the underlying issue of its nationhood was ignored, as the Chinese Nationalists on Taiwan, though not in occupation, also claimed sovereignty. In his opening comments, Dato Ismail Kamil, Malaya’s representative, cited the conclusions of the International Commission of Jurists’ initial report, which maintained that “almost all the rights which together allow the full and legitimate expression of human personality appear to be denied to the Tibetans at the present time, and in most cases for some time past.” “On the basis of the available evidence,” the report concluded, “it would seem difficult to recall a case in which ruthless oppression of man’s essential dignity has been more systematically and efficiently carried out.” In his rebuttal, Vasily Kuznetsov, the Soviet Union’s representative, dismissed the report’s validity, accused the appeal’s sponsors of attempting to “utilize the United Nations in order to intensify the Cold War,” and maintained that “a nonexistent Tibetan question has been fabricated in order to worsen the international situation and the atmosphere in the Assembly.” Like India’s own Marxists, the entire Communist bloc, following Russia’s lead, voiced Peking’s view of the Tibetan issue as a matter “wholly and completely within the domestic competence of the Chinese People’s Republic,” even the discussion of which “would constitute a gross and wholly unjustified interference” into China’s internal affairs. Thus, Tibet’s case—just as Nehru had predicted—fell immediate victim to the broader global conflict. Nonetheless, by meeting’s end a large majority voted to include the issue on the agenda of the 14th General Assembly, where many Third World countries joined Western democracies in passing a resolution in Tibet’s favor by a vote of 45 to 9 (with 26 abstentions). Though not identifying the People’s Republic of China by name, it called for “respect for the fundamental human rights of the Tibetan people and for their distinctive cultural and religious life.” As continued reports of atrocities and wholesale destruction were brought out by repeated waves of refugees from Tibet, two more resolutions were passed in 1961 and 1965. In these the United Nations considerably stiffened its language. It not only registered, as in the second resolution, “grave concern” and “deep anxiety” over the “severe hardships” imposed on the Tibetans through the “suppression of their distinctive cultural and religious life,” but “solemnly” renewed its call “for the cessation of practices which deprive the Tibetan people of their fundamental human rights and freedoms, including most importantly their right to self-determination.”
In December 1959, with the initial UN appeal behind him and the end of his first year in exile drawing near, Tenzin Gyatso went on pilgrimage. At Bodh Gaya, site of the Buddha’s enlightenment, he stayed in the Tibetan monastery within sight of the great second-century Mahabodhi Temple next to the Bodhi Tree, under which the Buddha had attained nirvana. Here the Dalai Lama met with some sixty representatives of the refugeees, who pledged their continued efforts to fight for Tibet’s freedom. Afterwards, for the first time in his life, he ordained a group of 162 monks. Then, traveling on to the Deer Park at Sarnath, where the Buddha’s first sermon had been delivered, the Dalai Lama drove with a typically reduced entourage of sixteen through a crowd of 2,000 weeping Tibetans who were camped around tea stalls beneath the trees, selling old clothes and a few of the valuables that they had managed to retain. Remaining for two weeks, he gave religious teachings in the traditional Tibetan style, seated on a high brocade-draped throne before the crowd. At their conclusion, Tenzin Gyatso spoke for an hour in the advisory manner he would address his people with from now on, presenting a long-range plan he had conceived, in which the exiles’ reconstruction and their struggle for Tibet’s independence would be combined. “For the moment Tibet’s sun and moon have suffered an eclipse,” said the Dalai Lama, “but one day we will regain our country. You should not lose heart. The great job ahead of us now,” he revealed, “is to preserve our religion and culture.”
*Most Tibetans lack a shared family name and are known by personal names only.