Winter sunshine warmed the corrugated roofs of the Tibetan houses, as if compensating for the cold of the night before. A horn of an occasional car echoed within the valley. After a long writing streak the previous night, I had woken slightly late and was sitting outside, enjoying the view of the snow-clad mountains and flipping through the newspaper. I heard the sound of people marching and shouting slogans. The noise grew louder as the crowd marched closer, the sound of protests already filling the area. They were, as expected, anti-Chinese slogans. But I could not immediately figure out the purpose of the gathering. Curiosity led me to step out of the house, to see what grievances they were vocalising that morning.
Coming down the steep road from the Dalai Lama’s main temple, often called Tsuglagkhang after its splendid seventh century namesake in Lhasa, were a group of Tibetans. In the first row were mostly nuns, followed by female students both young and old, wearing the Tibetan chuba, the traditional dress. The men folk brought up the rear. They were carrying anti-Chinese placards, some of which had the usual slogans: “China Get Out of Tibet”, “China Release Political Prisoners in Tibet”, as well as pictures of someone who seemed to be a bespectacled monk.
The rally had apparently started at McLeodganj, about three kilometres away, and was headed in the direction of Gangchen Kyishong, where the secretariats of the government-in-exile were located. I soon realised they were protesting China’s announcement that it was going to execute, without trial, Tenzing Delek Rinpoche, a high-ranking Tibetan lama from Eastern Tibet, and Lobsang Dhondup, a layperson. They were accused of allegedly masterminding a bombing incident in the Sichuan Province. The pictures on the placards held aloft by the protesters were those of Tenzing Delek Rinpoche. Looking at the pictures, however, he seemed more like a high school teacher than a terrorist bomber.
Quite unwittingly, I became part of the crowd and walked with them. I did not know the destination nor did I ask: the power of the crowd was bewitching as it forced me – not usually a joiner of crowds – to suddenly become party to the morning gathering. The rally was huge.
Group leaders first shouted slogans into their microphones, in Hindi and English, followed by the rest of the demonstrators. While many of the Tibetan elders could not speak English, it did not seem to impede their ability to articulate the slogans with amazing fluency in a language they had never formally learned. Some of them were carrying little Tibetan flags: it was a symbol of Tibetan sovereignty. To me they seemed relatively calm and quite at peace, despite the gravity of the issue at stake: the lives of two prisoners of conscience, languishing by now in some Chinese prison. Perhaps this is the reason why the participants were mostly monks and nuns.
The ease with which they were protesting showed that they were used to this ritual of peaceful dissent. As we neared the bazaar in lower Dharamsala, Indian shopkeepers and onlookers watched silently – some quite pensive, some just indifferent – as the crowd gradually moved past the fruit sellers, through the streets, and towards Kacheri, where they stopped and gathered together. As I looked behind me, I could see the number of demonstrators growing larger, filling the narrow, hilly road leading up to Gangchen Kyishong.
Every year, pilgrims and tourists from all over the world travel to this picturesque north Indian hill station to catch a glimpse of the Dalai Lama. For weary travellers, the rock-strewn roads, heavy traffic jams and choking exhaust fumes are far from spiritually uplifting: they are a reminder of the rugged realities of life in the Indian Himalayas. The poor infrastructure is hardly befitting of the international repute of this hill station where India’s colonial rulers escaped the scorching heat of the plains and sought respite in the shadows of the mountains. But the town has come a long way since 1959 when Tibet’s exiled leader set up his government-in-exile after fleeing Tibet as the Chinese Army moved into the region.
When the Tibetans first came to live here, they did not know that the location had Buddhist roots dating back 1700 years. The Kangra Valley is rich in unexplored archaeological sites of great importance to Indian Buddhism. In 635 AD, the Chinese monk pilgrim, Hsuan Tsang, recorded fifty monasteries with around 2,000 monks in this fertile region. But a century later, Buddhism and all its sites were eliminated from the valley during an upsurge of Brahminical revivalism. In 1849, the British posted a regiment in Dharamsala, but the place was not to remain a military cantonment for long. By 1855, it was a small but flourishing hill station and the administrative headquarters of Kangra District, which had been annexed by the British in 1848. The two main areas at the time were McLeodganj, named after the Lieutenant-Governor of Punjab, David McLeod, and Forsyth Ganj, named after a divisional commissioner.
Lord Elgin, Viceroy of British India and a former Governor-General of Canada, reportedly loved the forests of Dharamsala so much that before dying there in 1863, he asked to be buried in the graveyard of St John’s Church, located deep in the wilderness. Had he lived longer, Dharamsala might have become the summer capital of British India. And the great Frances Younghusband, leader of British India’s fateful incursion to Lhasa in 1904, also had Dharamsala connections. Both his parents, Clara Shaw and John Younghusband, lived there in a pine forest above St John’s Church and later bought land in Kangra Valley to pioneer a tea plantation. Clara’s brother, Robert Shaw, was a renowned explorer of Central Asia and an early Kangra tea planter.
In 1905, a severe earthquake changed the face of Dharamsala. Many buildings collapsed and the whole settlement, once ravaged, was never re-occupied. The earthquake measured 7.8 on the surface wave magnitude scale and killed more than 20,000 people. McLeodganj then became a sleepy village until the Dalai Lama made it his home in exile and moved the headquarters of his exiled government from Mussoorie, another north Indian hill station now in the state of Uttarakhand, in 1960. Located in the lap of the breathtaking Dhauladhar Range, which stands 5,200 m above sea level, McLeodganj, at nearly 1,800 m, has all the attributes of a great hill station. And over the years, the place, with its pine-clad hillsides, charming villages, snow-clad peaks, and the wide expanse of fertile Kangra Valley below has attracted tourists from all over the world.
Now, Dharamsala has become the beating heart of exiled Tibet. If you stand long enough in McLeodganj, the whole world, it seems, would eventually pass by you. High-profile visitors have included the Duke of Gloucester and the Duchess of York, the first ladies of France and Peru, supermodel Christy Turlington, actors Pierce Brosnan, Richard Gere, Steven Seagal, Goldie Hawn, Jet Lee, Harrison Ford and Sunil Dutt, not to mention the scores of writers and scientists who come to the town. Notwithstanding the glamour of the tourists and celebrity visitors, the place continues to be the capital of Tibetan dislocation. This is where they have seen their imaginary and real homes merge subconsciously to give birth to an entirely unique entity called “Exiled Tibet”; just as writers see their vivid imagination intersect with hard facts to produce works of creative non-fiction.
Excerpted with permission from Little Lhasa: Reflections in Exiled Tibet, Tsering Namgyal Khortsa, Speaking Tiger Books.
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