1960–1974
1960–1974
THE DALAI LAMA’S vision of exile society took root in his new headquarters, an abandoned British hill station called Dharamsala, located a day west of New Delhi on the northern margin of the Punjab. Perched across the lower ridges of the Dhauladar Range, a plumb barrier of snow-capped peaks fencing in the Kangra Valley, Dharamsala had been established by the British in the early 1860s as the summer seat of the Jullundur Division. Beginning with a military cantonment on the shoulder of the tallest crest, Mun Peak, they had gone on to found a small town, McLeod Ganj, on a slender ridge facing the plains below. A colonnade was erected to house shops, fronted by a genteel park of cedar trees, a birdbath and stone benches. Down the hill rose the rusticated belfry of St. John’s in the Wilderness, an Anglican church, while, scattered well apart over the slopes, more than a hundred bungalows sprang up, sporting turrets and gingerbread woodwork, vaulted ceilings and multiple wings, and dubbed with a bevy of romantic names such as Ivanhoe, Eagle’s Nest, Chestnut Villa, Wargrave and Retreat.
By the turn of the century, McLeod Ganj supported one of the most vigorous societies, outside the cities, of any in the Raj. With the rail line put through to Pathankot, seven miles from the foothills, bureaucrats from both Delhi and Lahore flocked to the mountains. In the spring the woods were blanketed with primrose, mistletoe and red and mauve rhododendron, followed in June, after the onset of the monsoon, by an explosion of buttercups, violets and honeysuckle. Wildlife abounded: leopards, panthers, porcupines, foxes, jackals, hyenas, red-faced monkeys and huge white-maned langurs roamed the lower hills, joined in the colder months, when they descended to forage, by black and brown bears. Above McLeod Ganj hawks and white-bellied vultures wheeled in wide gyres on all sides. Partridges, pigeons, ravens and snow pheasants flew tamely into town. Slated to become the summer capital of the Raj, Dharamsala’s future seemed secure until an earthquake struck in 1905. The British picked Simla instead and those local officials who remained relocated their offices 1,500 feet down the hillside to the less exposed Lower Dharamsala. On August 15, 1947—India’s independence day—they departed as well.
Only one man remained to preside over the spectral life of McLeod Ganj: N. N. Nowrojee. As proprietors of a general merchandise “Oilman” or “Europe Store” as they were called, the Nowrojee family had lived in Dharamsala since its inception. Parsees, they had journeyed to India themselves as refugees, fleeing religious persecution in Persia over a thousand years before. The family line had remained intact and, with the founding of their own business in McLeod Ganj, become, to generations of British bureaucrats, something of the hamlet’s guardian spirit. Entrusted now with dozens of abandoned bungalows, N. N. Nowrojee, fifth proprietor of Nowrojee and Sons, unsuccessfully sought to bring the village back to life. For twelve years he offered the buildings free of charge to schools and as tourist lodges to the state government, but there were no takers. Finally, on hearing through friends of the central government’s hunt for a permanent residence for the Dalai Lama, he approached New Delhi directly. His tale of a forgotten ghost town wasting in the woods proved intriguing enough to warrant inspection, following which, to his surprise, Delhi deemed it ideal. First, however, the Tibetans had to agree. “Pandit Nehru personally chose Dharamsala for us, based on what he called its ‘peace and tranquillity,’ ” recounted the Dalai Lama. “From our viewpoint, though, it had good as well as bad sides. Delhi is the nerve center. The nearer to Delhi, the better the communication. Dharamsala’s disadvantages, then, were clear. But we also saw its potential. It was open and there was more room to expand. Thus, after complaining at first that we were reluctant to move, once our officials visited and formed a good opinion, we decided to shift.”
On April 29, 1960, after a little more than a year’s stay, the Dalai Lama left Mussoorie. Traveling by overnight train to Pathankot, he was met at the station the following afternoon by state and municipal authorities, as well as a few thousand Tibetan refugees en route to Dalhousie for road work. Pausing to console the crowd, many of whom were weeping uncontrollably at the sight of their leader in such reduced circumstances, Tenzin Gyatso admonished them not to lose courage, promising that “one day we will go back to Tibet.” Then, led by an escort of police jeeps, he began the two-hour drive up the narrow, boulder-strewn valleys leading to Dharamsala, the shining white summits of the Dhauladar Range rising ahead.
“It was a very small town,” recalled the Dalai Lama of his first sight of Lower Dharamsala, “but the local people gave me a hearty welcome—all they had to offer.” Driving slowly past the old British post office, police station and district headquarters, Tenzin Gyatso’s motorcade entered the tumbling warren of fruit and vegetable stalls, open-air barbershops, tailors, cobblers and sweet-sellers cluttered around the main street bisecting Katwali Bazaar. Three thousand people, hill folk in their bright embroidered mountain caps, Sikhs in scarlet and blue turbans, bureaucrats and businessmen wearing black suits, their wives clad in diaphanous saris, and even Gurkhas, descended from the still-active army cantonment, lined the route showering their new neighbor with flowers, one of which carried a small caterpillar, which, as the Dalai Lama reminisced, rather ungraciously bit him on the leg. With the sun tinting the adjacent dome of Mun Peak violet, the column drove five miles more up steep switchbacks through the cantonment to McLeod Ganj, where at 5:00 p.m. it passed beneath a freshly hewn bamboo gate dressed in fir boughs and colored streamers, a big golden WELCOME written across its top. Behind it, 250 Tibetan refugees who had arrived a week before began performing full-length prostrations, while khaki-clad Indian police frantically urged them back. N.N. Nowrojee stepped forward, introduced himself and directed the Dalai Lama to a waiting jeep for the drive up the hair-raising track leading to his new home, Swarg Ashram. “When I arrived at Swarg Ashram it had become quite late, so I didn’t see much,” remarked the Dalai Lama. “The next morning I woke up at my normal time of five and the first thing I heard was a bird, peculiar to this place, chirping very loudly. Karakjok. Karakjok. Like that. Later I was told that one of our senior officials had been kept awake all night by this bird. Then I didn’t engage in a meditation session, but just looked out at the mountains and the view. It was the first day of May 1960. A very nice day and quite hot.”
Under Nowrojee’s direction four bungalows had been renovated to accommodate the Tibetans. The original seat of the District Commissioner, Highcroft House, renamed Swarg Ashram or “The Heavenly Abode,” had been chosen as the Dalai Lama’s residence. Roughly a quarter of a mile above McLeod Ganj, the building occupied a small flat on the western edge of the mountainside. The view was astounding, the entire enclosure seemingly anchored on a buttress of rock flung into space, yet the house itself was almost windowless, a thirty-two-room behemoth, one-storied, with cavernous chambers lit by trap-like dormers and heated in winter by only a few diminutive fireplaces. On its front end—turned sideways, for lack of room, to the vista—two giant bay windows jutted into a covered porch overlooking a narrow walkway, beyond which a stone wall dropped twenty feet to a grass lawn, previously used as a tennis court but soon to become an audience ground. Behind, three outbuildings, including the kitchen, rose on progressively higher and smaller levels up the mountain. While the three villas prepared to house the eighty government officials, the Dalai Lama’s senior and junior tutors and New Delhi’s liaison officer were even more removed, Swarg Ashram received the benefit of guard huts, barbed-wire fencing and, in time, a tall concrete gate, standing incongruously amidst the dark green pine groves cloaking the hillside, the sole emblem of the hidden compound’s prestigious occupant.
From his first day in Dharamsala the Dalai Lama realized that he was very much alone in the woods. With the departure of the 250 refugees for road work a few weeks later, only Nowrojee remained in McLeod Ganj. Constantly on call, he supplied the Tibetans with everything from blankets, toiletries and thermoses to cooking oil and umbrellas. Life in Swarg Ashram itself was crowded. Behind the Dalai Lama’s monastic bedroom, prayer room and office—all at the front of the house—lived his mother, his two sisters, his brother-in-law P.T. Takla, the Masters of Robes, Ceremonies and Food, the Lord Chamberlain and an assortment of secretaries and translators. Both Tibetan and Indian guards patrolled the grounds, leaving the only free space beyond the gate. Soon after his arrival the Dalai Lama began trekking up the mountains, sometimes climbing as high as 16,000 feet to a pass below the pinnacle of Mun Peak, from where he would descend for the night to a hikers’ lodge called Triund. Only a few companions accompanied him. “We used to climb very steep hills,” remembered the Dalai Lama. “It would have been very difficult for the Indian guards to follow us. Poor fellows, they wore heavy boots, which had slippery nails in their soles, and they also carried large guns. So instead we had them put their rifles down and just wait below for our return. We were all very friendly. We often drank tea and ate together in a good meadow that I found in the woods. I really enjoyed it. That was one of my new experiences in Dharamsala and it had its own special beauty.”
The Dalai Lama’s life in Swarg Ashram was altogether different than that in Tibet. Its rigors included two to three buckets of water a day dripping during the monsoon from an unrepairable ceiling around his bed; its pleasures, snowmen and snowball fights the first winter, table tennis in the main sitting room, where Tenzin Gyatso took meals with his mother and, after office hours at five, a regular badminton game on the lawn before the porch. A novel series of pets including a young deer and a number of independent-minded Lhasa Apsos, added to the household’s informal atmosphere.
Though the Dalai Lama found more time in Swarg Ashram for spiritual matters, the bulk of his day focused on the refugees’ plight. By waging a constructive fight for Tibet, through the re-creation of Tibetan culture abroad, he was convinced that Peking’s efforts to legitimize its rule over his homeland would fail. Moreover, such an effort not only would prevent the collapse of the refugee community but would offer the chance to modernize, if in embryo, Tibetan society, fashioning a template of sorts for the Tibet of the future, once its freedom was regained.
As a first step, the government had to be reconstituted. Using Mortimer Hall for a Secretariat, the Cabinet divided its ministers and workers among six portfolios: Home Affairs, Foreign Affairs, Religion and Culture, Education, Finance, and Security. A bureau was established in New Delhi to serve as the Tibetan link with the Indian government and the various international relief agencies that were coming to the refugees’ aid. It was followed by four offices, in New York, Geneva, Tokyo and Katmandu, each in its way acting as an unofficial embassy for the government-in-exile. Ten civil service ranks, scaled up from the seven in Tibet, were created, while the Dalai Lama, assisted by Indian lawyers, set about drafting a democratic constitution upon which to found the first elected government in Tibet’s history. Rehabilitation, however, was the immediate task at hand. “At the beginning of our work,” related the Dalai Lama, “two factions existed among the community of our responsible people. One thought we Tibetans must concentrate in northern India; the other—including myself—felt that it didn’t matter where we lived. The important thing was to find a place and settle properly so that we could preserve the Tibetan identity, culture and race.” The Dalai Lama’s view eventually won out, as northern India, despite its desirable proximity to Tibet’s border, lacked large tracts of unused land. Once apprised of the Tibetans’ wishes, Prime Minister Nehru canvassed the chief ministers of India’s less populated southern states for vacant countryside. Karnataka responded affirmatively, offering an uninhabited stretch of jungle situated in gently rolling hills fifty-two miles west of Mysore. As a joint investigating team from Dharamsala and New Delhi soon discovered, the available land was wilderness, save for a single road running down from Mysore along which lay a few primitive villages. Regardless, its potential was equivalent to that of Dharamsala; whatever success the Tibetans managed to wrest from the land would be their own.
In the second week of December 1960, almost two years after their arrival in India, the first group of 666 Tibetan refugees left their camps along the northern thoroughfares to build permanent homes in the south. “No one had the slightest idea where we were going,” recalled Lobsang Chonzin, a sturdy, aquiline-featured farmer who became leader of the settlement’s first village. “A Tibetan government official told us that we had been chosen to pioneer new land. Then a few weeks later he came to put us on a special train that traveled south for three days. At the end, buses were waiting at a station in a big city. They took us straight into the countryside, further and further, until we finally saw our destination, a group of tents in a clearing in the middle of the jungle.”
Unlike the subtropical rain forests of Bhutan and Assam, through which most of the refugees had passed, this new jungle, at the very heart of the Indian subcontinent, was psychologically as well as physically remote. The few mud-and-wattle villages the refugees had glimpsed from the buses as they drove through, hung with brilliant clusters of red peppers, bananas and mangoes, sheltered a small, dark race of semi-aboriginal people who looked altogether alien. The Tibetans’ sense of displacement gave way to disorientation after the buses had gone and only a few Indian police stayed on to help organize homesteading. Aware that the primeval expanse surrounding them was the natural abode of elephants, tigers, wild boars and other dangerous animals, the settlers’ first act was to fashion tall bamboo stakes into a protective rampart around one of the larger tents. Inside, they built a makeshift altar upon which to place a precious image of the Buddha given to them by the Dalai Lama. As night fell they dug pits, lined them with stones and cooked their first dinner. “We forced ourselves to eat,” continued Chonzin, “but we all felt so frightened and forlorn that no one could speak. Many people sat helplessly on the ground crying to themselves. We could hear the calls of wild animals in the jungle and, unlike in Tibet, you couldn’t see a thing. Wherever you looked there was nothing but trees.”
Soon after dawn the following morning, a group of monks, seated before the sacred image in the tent, began praying for success. They continued for a week, after which the work of felling and burning the forest began. An ax, a saw and a machete were given to each family of five, and two rupees or twenty cents a day were paid out as salary by the Indian government. With new groups of 500 sent down from the north at six-month intervals the settlement, known as Byllakuppe, struggled into existence. “The heat was the worst,” said Chonzin, shaking his head. “For two years, day and night, smoke and fire covered everything—even during the monsoon. Then we would work all day in the pouring rain and come home at night to find our tents blown down. Under these conditions many people died. They would recall Tibet, look at where they were and just give up.” As fresh ground was broken a new danger appeared. Workers felling trees farthest from the tent camps repeatedly met and were often trampled to death by enraged elephants. A chain of guard huts had to be built around each clearing; these were manned day and night by sentries equipped with tin cans, gongs and firecrackers both to sound the alarm and to scare off intruders. The fight against the elephants took on almost mythic dimensions; settlers, armed with slingshots and other homemade weapons, walked warily through newly cut roads in the jungle, while those caught alone by an elephant not infrequently returned to their tents a day or two later, having spent the interim up a tree. In the midst of the besieged colony’s travail, the Dalai Lama arrived on a tour of inspection. “During my first visit to Byllakuppe,” he recalled, “the people made a special tent for me of bamboo walls and a canvas roof. Still, it could not keep out the tremendous dust produced by clearing the forest. Because of such circumstances, the Tibetans were quite low-spirited. The death rate was high and due to the heat of the sun and burning trees all of them had become quite dark and thin.” Confronted by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, the Dalai Lama offered the only encouragement he could—assurance of eventual prosperity. “Whenever I visited our larger settlements I always promised that we would prevail,” he observed. “I pushed and pushed and pushed and finally, year by year, the picture completely changed. Then, when things got better I teased the people about their once dark, thin faces, which now had become quite healthy and smiling. I told them that in the past I was only making empty promises, because I myself, poor things, could offer them nothing. But those Tibetans always followed my word without the slightest doubt. As a result, we succeeded. It was just like watering an old flower about to wilt. If you water it with some hope it will immediately become fresh and enthusiastic.”
Early in 1962, the first group of settlers moved into more than a hundred brick-walled, tile-roofed homes, taking their prized butter lamps, offering bowls and scarf-draped photos of the Dalai Lama with them. The first of Byllakuppe’s eventual twenty villages, housing 10,000 people on 5,500 acres, camp No. 1 served as the prototype for virtually every refugee settlement developed over the next two decades. Little more than a year after its establishment, the inhabitants watched, along with those of camp No. 2, as their names were randomly pulled from a container and they were allotted an acre of land apiece. Thereafter, the attempt to transform Byllakuppe into a full-fledged farming community began.
Despite the fertile soil, it was not easy. A crop of lentils, cotton, tobacco and coriander sown on twenty-eight acres in 1961 had not done well. Then almost fifty times as much cotton and tobacco was sown, all of which failed dismally. Farming in southern India was so different from Tibet’s unique high-altitude agronomy that it seemed the settlement would founder, until an agricultural adviser from a relief organization called Swiss Technical Co-operation arrived to offer guidance. Conducting soil tests, he determined that maize should be planted, sustained by fertilizer and farmed by tractors rather than the bullock plows the Tibetans were using. The new methods and crop worked. Maize proved so successful that by 1966, six years after its founding, the settlement was self-supporting. Three years after that, with 77,000 fruit trees planted, a dairy and poultry farm and a second crop of ragi (a cereal grass) raised to diversify the harvest, Byllakuppe was making a substantial profit on its produce.
By then 38 settlements harboring almost 60,000 people had sprung up throughout India, Nepal and Bhutan, all starting out on land too remote or inhospitable for local people to care for. After houses were built, farming often proved so recalcitrant that many settlements had to rely on traditional Tibetan handicrafts, such as carpet weaving, for their income. Yet by the early 1980s only 3,000 refugees remained on road gangs, while some 44 settlements, linked by commercial, political and religious ties, looking to Dharamsala as their capital, housed almost 100,000 refugees, the remnant having emigrated to twenty-four countries around the world.
The refugees’ rehabilitation was further enhanced by what many international relief agencies working closely with the Tibetans came to consider an economic miracle. While a number of industrial efforts, including a woolen mill, lime plant, limestone quarry and fiberglass factory, all failed, the exiles found that collective marketing and purchasing, carried out through agricultural cooperatives, had an immense potential in India’s chaotic economy. Once more Byllakuppe led the way. In 1964, the settlement’s first six camps inaugurated a co-op, Luksum Samdup Ling (“Preserving Tradition-Fulfilling Wishes”). Sixteen years later, Byllakuppe’s fourteen “new” camps founded a second co-op, Dickey Larso (“Revival of Happiness”). With funds from the Swiss Technical Co-operation and, later, from the Mysore Rehabilitation and Agriculture Development Agency, the co-ops transformed the settlement. Restaurants and stores were added to its villages; seed, fertilizer, trucks, a flour mill and dehusking machine purchased to boost production; and a large workshop built to fashion furniture, carts, knives, axes, and farming tools in the quest for self-sufficiency. Young men were sent to Norway, Denmark and Iran to be trained as tractor mechanics. On their return they expanded the settlement’s motley fleet of Escorts, Soviet Zetors and Ford tractors, creating in the process a repair and machine shop that soon took over all the business for fifty miles around.
While the co-ops marketed the settlement’s produce as far away as Bombay and Calcutta, individual settlers continued to ply a trade that came to account for the livelihood of almost a quarter of the refugee population: selling sweaters. Capitalizing on the success of a Tibetan hand-knit sweater business in Kalimpong, thousands of refugees began to sell gaudy green, purple, yellow and red machine-made products purchased from previously unpatronized Punjabi factories. Each winter they set up shop out of tin trunks on the sidewalks of bazaars and marketplaces all across India. Their success was such that by the latter half of the sixties a Tibetan sweater fad was sweeping the subcontinent. The sudden popularity of “Tibetan” sweaters enabled an average worker to earn up to 5,000 rupees or $626—seven times more than his or her wages on the road. The nomadic business of sweater-selling not only improved their diets, but also fulfilled the traditional Tibetan’s love of trade and travel. Introduced through it to their host country, they used the opportunity to promote their cause; every sweater, stocking-cap, or scarf sold contained a small card that explained how the refugees had been forced down “from the roof of the world” to the “hot plains of the subcontinent.”
A further resource came from the Dalai Lama’s personal funds. Over a thousand pack animals had followed the Tibetan ruler’s 1950 flight from Lhasa to Yatung, each laden with 120 pounds of treasure. Sent to Sikkim as a precaution in case Tenzin Gyatso would be forced to flee Tibet, forty mules bore gold, six hundred carried silver and the remaining animals, sacks of centuries-old coins. Though the Dalai Lama returned to the Potala, this relatively small share of his labrang or household treasure did not. Guarded by a single unknowing Lepcha sentry, it remained hidden for nine years in the Choegyal of Sikkim’s abandoned stables located on the hillside below the palace in Gangtok. When before dawn one morning in 1960 a long convoy of trucks departed the capital for Calcutta, half the population of Sikkim awoke to what most imagined was the sight of their king fleeing his own country. Only after the treasure was safely deposited in the underground vault of a Calcutta bank did the truth emerge, spawning rampant speculation in India’s press over the “God-King’s fabulous fortune.” In fact, after its conversion into currency and subsequent investment, only $987,500 materialized to form His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Charitable Trust, the resource from which virtually every exile project found seed money.
With economic security, the refugees’ cultural reconstruction was assured. The Dalai Lama had begun the work of preservation from his first days in Swarg Ashram. “We divided our culture into two types,” he explained. “In the first category we placed that which, we determined, needed to be retained only in books as past history. The second category included whatever could bring actual benefit in the present. These things, we resolved, must be kept alive. Therefore, many of our old ceremonial traditions I discarded—no matter, I decided, let them go. However, our performing arts, our literature, science and religion as well as those crafts from which we could earn a livelihood—painting, metalcraft, architecture, woodworking and carpetmaking—these, we took special pains to safeguard. To achieve this we employed modern methods although they were altogether new to us and posed many difficulties.”
As the wellspring of Tibetan civilization, religion had first priority. Unlike other Asian nations to which Buddhism had spread, Tibet alone contained the entire corpus of the Buddhist Dharma; the full scope of sutras, tantras, their accompanying liturgy and most critically the guru-disciple lineages, founded on oral transmission, which served as unbroken links to the origin of the oldest of the three world faiths. Only 7,000 of Tibet’s more than 600,000 monks and a few hundred or so of its 4,000 incarnate lamas had escaped. Those left behind had been defrocked, while new refugees brought word of the country’s 6,524 monasteries being gutted by Chinese teams specially assigned to ship their valuable artifacts to the homeland, either to be melted into bullion or sold via Hong Kong on the international antiques market. For each scholar who died on a road gang, centuries of learning were lost, causing the Dalai Lama to take emergency steps to remove them from the deadly labor, even before their lay compatriots.
By August of 1959, as its last inmates were shipped out to road camps, Buxa Duar began receiving groups of refugee monks, assembled to salvage the Dharma. By the following year, almost 1,500 monks were living in the barracks of the newly named Buxa Lama Ashram, rising at 5:00 a.m. for congregational prayers in its central courtyard, then breaking into their monastic colleges to conduct memorization, debate and tutorials with senior scholars and incarnate lamas. Scouring road camps, the monks collected as many scriptures as could be found, from which they began lithographing with stone and ink over 200 volumes of major works—only a small fraction, however, of Tibet’s 1,200 years of philosophic writing. With members of the Gelugpa sect predominating (those of the other three orders more often finding refuge at monasteries in Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal), examinations for the Geshé degree continued after only a year’s hiatus and it seemed as though the religion would rapidly mend. Then monks began to die. With their occupants sleeping sixty-six to a barracks and the bamboo beds only six inches apart, tuberculosis ran rampant. Each morning following prayers, 200 to 300 men would queue up behind the twenty-foot barbed-wire fence, waiting for hours in the broiling sun to be checked by the camp’s single medical worker. “We were eager to save our religion,” recalled Khentrul Rinpoché, a lama from Sera Monastery, who lived in the camp from its inception. “But after just a few years the number of monks dying increased to the point that the rest couldn’t help wondering whether or not we’d ever escape from that place alive. Watching our friends become dark and thin and their teeth turn black, we constantly had depressed, suffocated feelings. We could only endure this hardship because we knew that the religious tradition of Tibet depended on us alone.”
By 1968, the large settlements of Byllakuppe and Mundgod were finally ready to begin receiving survivors. Once moved south, the monks took up farming and started to gradually build over 150 new monasteries, filling them with young novices and creating the most vivid emblems of Tibetan life in exile. The monasteries in turn complemented a series of cultural institutes, primarily based in Dharamsala.
The first institute to be founded, three months after the Dalai Lama’s arrival in Swarg Ashram, was the Tibetan Dance and Drama Society. Its seventy-four members—only twenty of whom had been performing artists in Tibet—managed to conserve in their repertoire four abridged Lhamo operas (the often week-long spectacles performed in Tibet’s larger cities), two historical plays, numerous cham or monastic dances and even a reconstituted marching band which often played for the annual March 10 rally in Dharamsala, convened to commemorate the Lhasa uprising.
A year later, in October of 1961, the Tibetan Medical Center was founded under Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, one of only three Lhasa-trained physicians to escape. Tibet’s unique medical science, developed indigenously over 2,100 years, was salvaged in a small hospital, pharmacy, astrology department and school, which by the late 1970s had graduated enough Tibetan doctors to staff the larger settlements. The third major institute to be opened was the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, started in November 1971, in an imposing Tibetan-style building situated in the midst of the government’s new Secretariat compound, Gangchen Kyishong. Located halfway between Lower Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj it soon became a magnet for hundreds of Asian and Western scholars who previously had scant access to Tibetan culture. By 1984, the library’s numerous teaching and collection projects had amassed over 50,000 volumes, an estimated 40 percent of Tibet’s literature—the remainder having been destroyed both before and during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. In New Delhi, Tibet House, founded in 1965, supplemented much of the library’s work, while the Tibetan section of All India Radio was enlarged and a number of refugee publications appeared. But by far the most extensive and critical of the cultural projects lay in the school system. Created by the Dalai Lama to preserve the Tibetan identity while introducing the “exile generation” to the modern world, it was looked on by all the refugees, monks and laymen alike, as the most fundamental hope for the future of their cause.
THE BUS on which Tempa Tsering left the road camp in Bawarna for the Nursery in Dharamsala arrived in McLeod Ganj early in the afternoon. Discharged into the hands of Mrs. Tsering Dolma, the Dalai Lama’s elder sister, and the Nursery’s principal, a monk named Thubten Nyingee, the children were led up a winding dirt road through the woods to Conium House, a barnlike building of whitewashed stone walls and zinc roofing inhabited for five months now by almost 200 orphaned and semi-orphaned youngsters.
The Nursery for Tibetan Refugee Children, as Conium House was formally known, had been founded by the Dalai Lama less than three weeks after his own arrival in Dharamsala. Its immediate catalyst was a report of children dying among a refugee group delayed by heavy snows en route from Missamari to work sites in Ladakh. Fifty-one children were taken from the group and housed with Tibetan government workers in their bungalows until, under the direction of the Dalai Lama’s sister, the Nursery opened on May 17, 1960. Removed from road work, few of the children died, though the majority were afflicted by a wide range of ailments from tuberculosis to dysentery, influenza, scabies and severe malnutrition.
Tempa’s own dysentery had long gone, yet he remained withdrawn and uncommunicative. Deloused and with a newly shaved head, he was issued his first Western clothes, a pair of shorts and two shirts, and seated in a long line of children for a dinner of rice and boiled lentils dished into beaten-tin bowls. Afterward, he and thirty others unrolled their blankets on the floor of a room in Conium House and prepared to sleep, the sick mixed in with the healthy, as there were too many to isolate. The next morning the day began with prayers, exercise and a class in the Tibetan and English alphabets, followed by an afternoon of unsupervised play. Throughout, Tempa refused to participate. A month later, however, with his room packed each night with 120 children, so crowded that no one could move, he finally began to focus on the present. One day a ball was kicked toward him during a game of soccer in the courtyard. Returning it, he joined the other boys, from which time his incapacitating depression slowly began to lift.
Tempa’s interest in life was restimulated most by three encounters he now had with the Dalai Lama. One morning, the older children were taken through the forest to witness a prayer session at Swarg Ashram. It was Tempa’s first religious ceremony. As he sat on the steps of the Heavenly Abode’s porch, gazing at the Dalai Lama on a throne surrounded by monks enacting the graceful mudras or hand gestures of tantric ritual while they recited scripture, he experienced an unusual feeling of reverence that, far more than the modicum of physical well-being afforded by the Nursery, gave him a sense of security.
On a second less formal occasion he made contact with the Dalai Lama himself. At that time Tenzin Gyatso walked from Swarg Ashram to Conium House to share a traditional Tibetan dinner of thukpa or noodle soup with the children. Before his arrival, the Nursery was thrown into a state of high excitement, few of its adult teachers having had such close contact with their leader in Tibet. Marshaled like a regiment on a parade ground, the children greeted the Dalai Lama, who immediately asked to be shown what they were studying. Tempa was singled out before the gathering to write the letters A, B and C on a slate. The Dalai Lama watched carefully and, giving him a warm pat on the shoulder, said, “Very good.” “Of course,” recalled Tempa laughing, “I liked him from that moment on.”
A third meeting with the Dalai Lama marked Tempa’s departure from the Nursery. One hundred sixty of the oldest children had been chosen to attend the Mussoorie School, the first educational institute to be created in exile, founded one year before. In their company, Tempa hiked to Swarg Ashram, where the Dalai Lama, seated on the porch with the children gathered around, advised them to study hard so that later they could help those who would not have the same opportunity. At the conclusion of his remarks, Tempa led the group in reciting the eleven-verse Long Life Prayer of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. “My friends said I was so nervous that I was shivering and forgot whole parts,” he recalled. “But I think I got the chorus right, at least where it says, ‘Bless Tenzin Gyatso, Protector of the Land of Snows. May his life not fail, but last a hundred eons, and may his will be effortlessly accomplished.’ ”
“In Tibet I had a great desire to establish a modern school,” said the Dalai Lama. “From the early fifties on, I felt the need very strongly. Without any knowledge of how such a school functions I just thought over and over, ‘We must have a modern school. We must have a school.’ But I didn’t even know how many classes to have.” Returning to Mussoorie after his 1959 pilgrimage, the Dalai Lama scouted the town for a suitable building in which to begin his project. Eventually he found an old home called Kildare House, belonging to an Indian army officer who, convinced the building was haunted by the ghosts of Moslems killed there during the riots at India’s partition, was glad to sell at a low price. Located in a rocky clearing not far from Birla House, its eight decaying rooms opened on March 3, 1960, to fifty young men—monks, Khampa guerrillas and government officials—aged eighteen to twenty-five. Although the Dalai Lama was not versed in modern education, two recent expatriates were: Mary and Jigme Taring, among the first Tibetans to have been educated in India, to whose guidance the Mussoorie School was fully entrusted.
The Tarings were a pioneering couple. Jigme Taring was a prince, the nephew of the Choegyal of Sikkim; Mary was the daughter of Wangchuk Gyalpo Tsarong, a senior Cabinet minister under the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and a descendant of Tibet’s famous eighth-century physician, Yuthok Yonten Gonpo. With their background as surety against criticism from Tibet’s xenophobic establishment, the Tarings were the foremost proponents of modernization in their generation. In exile, they represented an invaluable asset to the fledgling government.
After arriving at the new school Tempa found in their guidance the first substantial explanation of his situation. “All of us children called them Mother and Father and they really acted like that,” he recalled. “After a while there were three or four hundred kids, but the Tarings took an interest in each and every one. They explained over and over, in classes, in meetings and alone, what had happened to us. Above all they said that we were Tibetans. We had been driven out by the Chinese, and somehow we had to get back, to regain our country. This was the responsibility children like us had. We had to work for all the Tibetan people, not just ourselves. From hearing this again and again I stopped being completely absorbed in my own tragedy. I began to see that I had a greater duty. The Tarings made sense of it all to us. They gave that to the children.”
Following the Tarings’ lead, two more residential schools, one in Simla, the other in Darjeeling, were begun. The Dalai Lama then approached the Indian government to propose a long-range plan. Consulting with Nehru at a private luncheon in New Delhi in May 1961, he received the Prime Minister’s support for the founding of an autonomous body within the Indian Ministry of Education, called the Tibetan Schools Society; its purpose would be to run a network of residential and day schools staffed jointly by Indian and Tibetan teachers. Education being one area in which Nehru could freely aid the Tibetans without political consequences, his support was so generous that by 1964 the system included seven residential schools housing, in the main, over 500 children each, four day schools in the settlements, three transit schools at road-construction sites and a number of grant-in-aid schools indirectly supported by the Society. Nevertheless, there were obstacles. In organizing the large residential schools, the dearth of such basic necessities as flat land caused immense difficulty. Situated in mountainous regions that offered few buildings with surrounding grounds, the schools were compelled to adopt whatever facility was available, while the children themselves, for the most part, converted it: in Darjeeling, an old barracks of the North Bengal Mounted Rifles; at Mount Abu, the abandoned palace of the Maharaja of Bikaner; in Panchmari, the defunct Royal Hotel; at Kalimpong, a woolen warehouse unused since the heyday of Tibetan trade. By 1966, almost 7,000 young people had been saved from road gangs. Half, however, were overage, and many of those who would have failed to complete high school by the age of 20 were forced to withdraw. There were also troubles with the faculty. Because the TSS was not a full-fledged component of India’s school system, teachers were concerned over tenure, reluctant to work in remote settlements and as only university-level faculty could instruct in English—the medium chosen by the Dalai Lama—hard to find to begin with. Those finally hired could not even talk to their Tibetan counterparts until a vocabulary list of 500 Hindi and Tibetan words was circulated from New Delhi.
The children, though, were learning, and they were the first generation in Tibet’s history to see maps of the world and hear of other nations. As Tempa reflected, “When we were first taught geography, it was almost unbelievable. The teacher showed us a globe and pictures of different peoples, but until it was thoroughly explained, I found it hard to accept that the world was really so large. I just couldn’t comprehend it. In Tibet, India had always been the end of the earth for us.” The young Tibetans’ curiosity was particularly stimulated by the bizarre objects represented by the Western aid workers, who, as the first Caucasians they had seen, were jokingly nicknamed “yellow heads” for their blond hair. Meanwhile, their own Tibetan instructors were now being systematically readied in a Teachers Training School established in Dharamsala, and a textbook committee and a printing press were soon issuing a syllabus covering Tibetan language, history, literature and religion from first grade through the end of high school. By the time the Tibetan Schools Society changed its name to the Central Tibetan Schools Administration in the early seventies, 9,000 children were attending its thirty-two institutions; ten years later 15,000 studied in fifty-two schools, the majority of whom chose to continue on to a university. Advanced studies in Tibet’s own academic tradition were provided by the Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, founded in January 1968 in Benares, as well as the Buddhist School of Dialectics, begun in Dharamsala five years later. To continue care for orphaned children, a system of Tibetan foster homes was created, beginning in 1962 with the Mussoorie Homes run by Mary Taring. By the end of the decade, with 600 children in twenty-five Tibetan-style households staffed by live-in parents, Mussoorie was outdone only by the Nursery in Dharamsala, which changed its name to the Tibetan Children’s Village. Placed under the direction of the Dalai Lama’s younger sister, Pema Gyalpo, it relocated to Egerton Hall above the military cantonment and began rapidly expanding over the hillside. At the close of the seventies its city-like campus housing over 1,000 destitute children six months to eighteen years old was regarded by UN agencies and others as a paradigm for rehabilitating refugee children and was indisputably the most successful enterprise in exile.
At the age of fourteen, after two years in Mussoorie, Tempa was accepted at St. Gabriel’s Academy, a secondary school outside Dehra Dun. In company with many of the older refugee children, whose age made them ineligible for the Tibetans’ burgeoning institutions, he was compelled to spend the next decade in the alien environment of Indian schools. “After arriving at St. Gabriel’s,” he recounted, “even though there were six Tibetans, the sense of being an outsider just grew deeper and deeper. The more contact we had, the more we felt removed. Only a handful of people had heard of Tibet. The rest kept asking, ‘Where is your father? What does he do? Who are your brothers and sisters?’ Each time they asked, you couldn’t help but recall your past—that you are a refugee and you have no country—but still these people remained very ignorant of what we were. Overall it inculcated in me a further awareness of being Tibetan. My desire to have Tibet back, to regain my own country, just increased.”
After he was transferred to Dr. Graham’s Homes, a missionary school in Kalimpong, Tempa’s anger at what he perceived to be a popular disregard for Tibetans, the notion that they were “backward and uncivilized,” manifested itself in competitive drive. Excelling in academic work, he became, during his five and a half years at Dr. Graham’s, head of virtually every sports team, earning the titles of proctor, vice-captain and finally captain of the school, under whom the entire student body was administered. With his name inscribed on the school’s commemorative plaque listing outstanding students, Tempa’s success was such that a special convocation—the first in Dr. Graham’s history—was convened after graduation to honor him. “I had to be independent,” he commented, appraising the reversal in his character following the shock of his sisters’ and mother’s deaths. “Deep down I realized that I didn’t have anything unless I created it for myself. And I think that kept pushing me; the loss of Tibet, of my parents, the breakdown of the family—all of it. For my own good as well as the Tibetan people’s—there was so much personal as well as national loss—I just had to succeed in building it back up.”
When he arrived at Madras Christian College, however, one of India’s most prestigious schools, Tempa found himself, as the first Tibetan in the city, the object of constant racial harassment. Within a week the taunts became so frequent that he contemplated withdrawing. Instead, he walked into the principal’s office and requested permission to address the college. “I just told him that I was so disappointed and embarrassed,” stated Tempa. “Not only the students but even the teachers hardly knew the first thing about Tibet. ‘I can’t continue explaining to people where I come from,’ I said, ‘so I’d like to address the whole school at once.’ ” A few days later, Tempa walked alone onto an empty stage, a packed auditorium of amused undergraduates seated before him. Nervously he read a speech outlining Tibet’s recent history until, reaching the uprising in Lhasa and the subsequent flight of the refugees, he suddenly found himself departing from the text and relating the events of his own life. Save for a brief account he had given to a close teacher two years before, it was the first time that Tempa had spoken publicly of his personal tragedy. Overwhelmed by a standing ovation at the talk’s conclusion, Tempa went on to duplicate his success at Dr. Graham’s, studying now to become a doctor, there being at that time only three or four Western-trained Tibetan physicians. Despite three years of applying to aid organizations, though, he was unable to locate a sponsor for medical school. As a result, irrespective of his long record of outstanding academic work, Tempa Tsering faced the world with no prospects. It seemed a great defeat. The only option remaining was to join his father, now living in Byllakuppe, and become a farmer.
Tempa traveled inland by train, journeying from India’s eastern seaboard to Mysore. Boarding a battered country bus, he rode fifty miles south to the Cauvery Valley. On either side the country turned increasingly wild, until even the roadside fields gave way permanently to jungle. At the small town of Cauvery, he disembarked and set out on foot for the settlement. Crossing the Cauvery River, he saw men and women from Byllakuppe spreading their washing to dry on wide boulders painted in bright, primary colors with the national mantra of Tibet, Om Mani Padme Hum. Turning off the main road by the settlement workshop, he entered a wholly Tibetan atmosphere. Lush, undulating fields stretched to the horizon, crisscrossed by neat rows of haystacks crowned by prayer flags. At high points rose the maroon and white walls of Byllakuppe’s six monasteries, including the rebuilt Sera and Tashilhunpo, interspersed by villages, schools, the old settlement office and a hospital. On the long roads uniting the camps, fringed in brilliant mauve and yellow flowering bushes, a cavalcade of monks, farm workers and women with babies tied to their backs, rosaries in hand, passed by. Only the heat and the jungle-covered hills circling the settlement’s perimeter remained as evidence of Byllakuppe’s un-Tibetan locale.
Tempa had visited Byllakuppe often since taking up his studies in Madras. Before, he had seen his father on only three occasions in the eight years subsequent to departing the road camp at Bawarna. Now, for the first time since leaving Tibet, father and son lived together. The changes in both were instantly apparent. Chopel Dhondub, like most of the elder refugees, had clung to all the old Tibetan views. Physically, he had altered by turning smaller and darker; emotionally, due to the strain of work, by becoming more temperamental—a trait usually suppressed in Tibetan society. Tempa, on the other hand, was now a hybrid, the product of circumstances and learning beyond his father’s understanding. Their differences reflected a threshold in the refugee experience: the maturation of the first generation in exile, and with it, a change in the Tibetan character. “As soon as I started living with my father again he immediately pressed for an arranged marriage,” said Tempa. “In Tibet this was normal, but I told my father that it was none of his business. It wasn’t his marriage but mine.” Though Chopel Dhondub couldn’t prevail, other families continued to arrange marriages for their children, life in the settlements, far more so than that of Dharamsala or other urban centers, clinging to conservative ideals even, on occasion, to the point of violence. As Tempa related, “When long hair and bell-bottoms came to India all the young Tibetans naturally took them up. The elders couldn’t understand it. They thought it looked disrespectful. In Byllakuppe, when we danced to the Beatles, our parents actually came out and threw stones at us. But we never reacted. We never said even a word to them. We just took it. Then, when things cooled down, we explained, ‘You have to change. We’re living in the world now. This is the way things are.’ Gradually, after lots of patient discussion, they began to accept it.”
A more fundamental shift concerned religion. Under the demands of exile life Buddhism’s all-pervasive influence was naturally reduced. Though they had studied the Dharma in their TSS syllabus, the younger generation found little occasion for its practice and they grew critical of Buddhism’s social function in a heretofore inconceivable manner. As a monk from Byllakuppe observed, “Many of these young Tibetans won’t return my smile on the street. They see that I am a fellow Tibetan but these robes are just like a prison suit. The monks, they think, are the reason we lost Tibet.” “Too much religion, too little politics,” remarked Tempa, describing the widespread belief among his peers that religion, carried to the extreme it was in Tibet, had undermined the organization of the state. “Basically the younger generation is more political than religious. For my father, religion came first, politics second. But I think this generation, for the first time in centuries, feels the opposite.”
Young and old never differed, though, in their commitment to Tibet’s cause. “When I first began to visit my father in Byllakuppe,” said Tempa, “every time we met he would say, ‘I was born and bred in Tibet and I want to die in Tibet. I want my body buried there—not in India.’ I learned a lot from this. After my mother saw His Holiness she said, ‘That’s good enough for me. Now let me die peacefully.’ Then she gave up. But not my father. He’s never stopped fighting. All those that lived—the survivors—they’re all like that.”
Tempa remained in Byllakuppe for a year. In search of a more stimulating pursuit than farming, he volunteered to work part-time at the settlement office, while joining the local branch of the Tibetan Youth Congress. Founded in 1970 by a small group of young Tibetans, the Congress had quickly grown into the largest political party in the exile community. At its week-long inaugural conference in Dharamsala, Tempa had discussed for the first time his long-held thoughts on Tibet’s political struggle. Now, given the chance to work for the Congress, he enthusiastically took over its local adult education program, lecturing in the evenings on health care, still a major problem among the refugees. He obtained a film projector to show documentaries on Gandhi’s nonviolent fight for national liberation, the Satyagraha movement. Next, he requested books from the schools he had attended, assembling, a parcel at a time, the settlement’s only library. Within a few months his disappointment at failing to become a doctor passed as he was elected general secretary of the Byllakuppe chapter, the largest of the Youth Congress’s forty branches, containing between them 10,000 members.
Not long after Tempa’s election, the Dalai Lama came to Byllakuppe to offer the Kalachakra Initiation, a religious event attended by the entire settlement. At an audience with the Youth Congress, Tempa once more encountered the Tibetan leader: the first time he had met him in person since his childhood days at the Nursery in Dharamsala. “The example of His Holiness had the strongest effect on me,” said Tempa. “As the leader of his people he was so uplifting and farsighted. We all know how simply he lives and how hard he works and cares for the Tibetans, but when I actually saw this in practice, I felt personally inspired to do something more for my country.”
A few months later, the entire government-in-exile appeared in Byllakuppe to hold its annual report meeting in the settlers’ presence. Attending the event as a Youth Congress observer, Tempa was captivated by the proceedings, conducted according to the democratic constitution promulgated by the Dalai Lama in 1963. During a break one day he was approached by Mr. Kundeling, a Cabinet minister whom he had known slightly in the past. On hearing that Tempa had graduated from college only to be a farmer, Mr. Kundeling insisted he leave Byllakuppe and join the government in Dharamsala. He then instructed the secretary of the Information and Publicity Office to give him a job. A few weeks later, a letter arrived from the office offering him a position as an assistant secretary. “After receiving the letter I discussed it with my father,” Tempa related. “I had just finished school and I felt a responsiblity to look after him. I told him this. I also told him that the Byllakuppe settlement office would not be happy if I left. Then I said, ‘This time you make the decision. So far, I’ve made almost every decision in my life without your knowledge. Now this is up to you.’ He replied immediately, ‘From our point of view Dharamsala is the central government, whereas here it’s just one office, looking after three thousand people in the old camps. So obviously, if you go to Dharamsala, you’ll be of more service to all the Tibetan people. For myself, if I know you are sincerely working for His Holiness, then, even if I have to die alone, with no one to pour cold water in my mouth in the last days, I won’t have a single regret.’ When he said that, everything was clear. I said, ‘O.K.’, and I went to Dharamsala.”
A few weeks later, still, after fourteen years in India, with few more possessions than his own clothing, Tempa said farewell to his father for what would be another six years. Taking a bus from Cauvery to Mysore, he boarded a northbound train to Pathankot in the Punjab, from where another bus deposited him on the fringe of Katwali Bazaar, Lower Dharamsala. There, he caught the local bus for the half-hour ride five miles farther up the hill to McLeod Ganj. On the way he watched intently through the barred windows as the road zigzagged up the pine-covered slopes leading to the military cantonment and the Tibetan Children’s Village above. After driving through Forsythe Ganj, another hamlet in the hills, the spindle-like ridge on which McLeod Ganj sat drew into view. In a few minutes more, St. John’s in the Wilderness passed, alone in the woods, and then the galvanized canopy of Nowrojee’s front porch hove in sight, a characteristic press of Tibetan monks, gaddis, or hill folk, and a few local tourists from lower in the valley beneath it, idly watching the commotion at the head of town. As the bus halted, Tempa jumped off, retrieved his bag from its roof and entered the energetic press of “Little Lhasa,” as Upper Dharamsala had rather wistfully come to be known.
Since the first days of the Dalai Lama’s tenure, McLeod Ganj had shuddered through an onslaught of development. Its permanent population now approached 4,000, with hundreds of pilgrims, traders, government officials and foreign visitors in periodic residence. The serene colonial park at its center had been obliterated without a thought by the Tibetans. Three rows of buildings housing shops, restaurants and hotels had replaced it. At their center rose a tall gold-crowned chorten, dedicated, as its plaque explained, to the memory of all those suffering under Chinese occupation in Tibet. Day and night it was circled by a stream of faithful, spinning two lines of prayer wheels and reciting mantras. Outside of town stood their homes: an impromptu jumble of tin and stone shanties, ascending floor over roof like a ziggurat up the hill, graced by marigolds in the windows and hundreds of faded prayer flags strung between the trees overhead. The people of Little Lhasa were mainly sweater sellers who left their unheated huts in the cold winter months to ride the rails between Indian cities in search of commerce. When in Dharamsala, they made full use of their closeness to the “Precious Protector” by each day circumambulating a reconstituted Lingkhor or Holy Walk, similar to the one in Lhasa, surrounding his new residence, Thekchen Chöling. It was toward this that Tempa proceeded, walking out of the far side of town and turning down a narrow road to the knoll-like crest capping the farthest of the ridges surrounding McLeod Ganj.
Built in 1968, Thekchen Chöling or “Island of the Mahayana Teaching” enclosed a great expanse of forest and hillside through which the Dalai Lama could stroll, tend his flower gardens, look after wild birds and meditate. The green corrugated roofing of his modest private cottage dominated a kitchen complex, office building, security and secretarial quarters all located at progressively lower levels leading to the front gate.
Across a flagstone chöra or debating courtyard, used by the young monks of the Dialectical School and flanked along its southern end by the cells of Namgyal Dratsang, the Dalai Lama’s personal monastery, stood the new Central Cathedral, a three-story lemon-yellow hall topped by gold pinnacles and designed by the Dalai Lama himself in a modern idiom. Turning the battery of prayer wheels that lined its outer walls, Tempa entered the bright interior to offer prayers before its giant images of the Buddha and Tibet’s patron saints. Then, continuing down the hill via a rocky shortcut through the trees, he approached the new Secretariat compound of the government-in-exile, Gangchen Kyishong or “Abode of Snow-Happy Valley.” Halfway to Lower Dharamsala, Gangchen Kyishong had been built out of the same necessity as Thekchen Chöling: to replace the cramped, perennially leaking quarters of the old British bungalows. On the white pillars that framed its front gate the government’s emblem—two turquoise-maned snow lions holding the eight-spoked wheel of the Dharma before snow-capped peaks, the sun and moon—proclaimed its identity. To maintain congenial relations with New Delhi, no Tibetan flag was flown. Within, on a long flat, surrounded by the more temperate foliage of the lesser slopes, rose the monumental edifices of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives and the Cabinet building, its ground floor an assembly hall for government meetings. The library was flanked by an amphitheater of dormitories for its hundred resident scholars and the Cabinet, by tiers of buildings lodging the government departments, on the uppermost of which, set back in typically Tibetan style with a wide roofscape before it, were the two rooms of the Information Office. Tempa’s quarters, which he was shown after reporting to his new superior, lay in a chalet-like log building facing the secretarial mess, not far away. With the knowledge that he had arrived at the very heart of the political struggle for Tibet, he settled in his first night, eager to begin work the following day as an active member of his government.