On a Shoestring to Coorg
Page 5
As the sun was setting in glory we watched eighteen tractors being driven back to the workshop compound, while Tibetan songs and laughter rang faintly across ploughland and stubble; and I began to be aware that this settlement is successful beyond anything I had imagined possible. Then I felt more than ever curious to meet T.C., who is one of the few Tibetan aristocrats to have been influenced, as a refugee among refugees, by noblesse oblige. Since the first stampede into India fourteen years ago, after the tragic Lhasa uprising of March 1959, he has devoted his life to his compatriots – apart from three years spent in Germany, at the request of the Dalai Lama, acquiring a political science degree.
When we met at dinner I quickly came to understand why His Holiness regards Tsewang Choegral Tethong as one of his more dependable lieutenants. There is nothing facile about the leader of Mundgod – even his muscular, compact figure, which makes him look shorter than he is, has an uncompromising quality about it – yet he exercises that special brand of charm which is based on sincerity. Though never effusive, he is consistently kind; and after a few hours one has realised that he is also just, patient, obstinate when necessary and devout with that little-spoken-of yet deeply felt religious faith characteristic of educated lay Tibetans.
Now I long to explore Mundgod and examine in detail the Tethongs’ achievement. T.C. confirmed my suspicion that we should have come today via Yellapur, but I am glad we did not miss that drive to Kumta through the high green spurs of the Western Ghats, where they slope steeply to meet mile after mile of lonely golden beaches, washed by a sapphire sea.
24 November. Mundgod Tibetan Settlement.
In 1965, when the Indian Ministry of External Affairs offered the Tibetans 5,000 acres of virgin forest near Mundgod, T.C. came south with a small team to survey the possibilities; but for various reasons – mainly bureaucratic – reclamation work did not begin until December 1966. Four bulldozers were lent by Swiss Aid, the United Nations High Commission for Refugees and Oxfam, and for these the Government of India provided fuel, operators and mechanics. Of the 300 Tibetans who came from the Himalayan road-camps in November 1966 some 75 per cent were farmers and 100 per cent were eager beavers. A Government-sponsored transit-camp of tents was set up and the workers were paid Rs.1.25 a day plus their rations. Three years of bulldozing, clearing and building followed, and by the end of 1969 the reclamation had been completed and the fields were ready to be sown. (Though reclamation, one feels, is not quite the right word for subduing virgin forest.)
Meanwhile, at the end of 1967 sixteen British-made tractors had been presented by the World Council of Churches and 300 farmers had come from the Kulu valley; and a few months later another 300 or so arrived from the Kailasa region of West Tibet, via a detention camp in U.P. (The Indian fear of Chinese spies entering the country as Tibetan refugees has perhaps been allowed to become a phobia; yet such things have occasionally happened, and could happen again, and the Tibetans themselves are in favour of careful checking lest His Holiness might be assassinated when giving a mass-audience to newly arrived refugees.) In April 1968 another 700 men, women and children came from the road-camps around Simla, and in November 1968 over 500 Ledakhi nomads arrived, including a few lazy trouble-makers who sound not unlike the difficult Dolpo nomads I was once up against in Nepal. Early in 1969 a second group of newly escaped West Tibetans arrived via the detention camps, and throughout that year other small groups came from Bhutan, Rajput and Delhi. By the end of 1970 the population of the settlement had been officially completed, with over 3,000 Tibetans living in nine villages; but a trickle of individual refugees still continues to flow southward and no one in real need is turned away.
The villages vary considerably in size but there are a total of 397 double houses for almost 800 families, and each family has 120 feet by 60 feet of kitchen-garden where banana and papaya-trees flourish – and vegetables and flowers, if the owners are energetic enough and the water-supply is adequate. Each village has its own water-storage tank, providing clean water from deep wells, but there is no sanitation – just the fields – and Judy is trying to introduce the sensible system of human manure conservation traditionally used in Tibet. (Though obviously it would have to be modified to suit a hot climate.)
At the time of land-distribution four acres were allocated to each five adults, plus half an acre for each child, so already economic inequality is apparent as the households with expanding families become poorer. For many years the more sophisticated Tibetans have been deliberately limiting their families and in Tibet some spontaneous form of birth control, possibly connected with the effect of high altitudes on hormones, seemed to keep the peasant birth rate down. Now, however, the ordinary refugee is very chary indeed of operations, pills, loops, caps or even the condom, which throughout India may be bought almost anywhere for the nominal sum of 5 paise and has recently become quite popular amongst Indian men. Unfortunately Tibetan peasants seem to think birth control in some way shameful or ‘inauspicious’ and, as they are particularly vigorous gossips, fear of what the neighbours might say is enough to keep them away from family-planning clinics. There is nothing in their religion to support this bias, so it is possible that they are now under the influence of some deep instinct of self-preservation. No one wants them to get caught up in the Indian vicious circle of malnutrition and stunted intelligence, but at this stage in their history is it, in fact, desirable to restrict the replacement of those uncounted tens of thousands ‘eliminated’ during the past fifteen years?
Before land distribution took place the acres already cleared were farmed collectively but – Tibetans not being natural collectivists – the output was low. However, by May 1971 each family had its own plot and production promptly soared. Ever since, the settlers’ output per acre has been far above the local average, despite the poorish quality of the soil and a chronic shortage of fertilisers. In November 1967 the Co-operative Society was formed to handle crop selling, and seed and fertiliser buying. It flourishes, and very few members try to avoid paying their debts.
T.C. also runs a workshop where all the settlement’s mechanical repairs are carried out, the necessary spare parts being made from scrap-iron. Despite their non-technological cultural background, most Tibetan youths have a marked flair for this sort of thing. The workshop serves, too, as a training centre for boys from both the Mundgod and Bylekuppa settlements, and T.C. would like to be able to employ all the surplus Mundgod school-leavers by making small spare parts on a contract basis. One hopes he will succeed. Unless their leaders take some such action – and training programme funds are readily available from Refugee Year donations – many of the younger refugees will soon have no alternative but to beg. True, they are free to set up as traders or craftsmen in Mundgod bazaar, or to seek labouring jobs outside the settlement: but such jobs for hundreds of school-leavers will not be easy to find, though the local people – to their credit – are very well disposed towards Tibetans. These Indians surely have legitimate grounds, if such can be said to exist, for envy and jealousy. Nobody has ever given them free land, the free means to reclaim and till it, free seeds, free fertilisers, free food and free housing. But, of course, it may be argued that neither has anybody ever deprived them of all they once possessed – the flaw in this argument being that so many Indians have never possessed anything.
After breakfast, we walked across to the gigantic, noisy workshop where several groups of alert young Tibetans in greasy overalls were manipulating complicated tools. They looked happy and absorbed, these members of the first generation of refugees to grow up with few, if any, memories of their homeland. Yet watching them I felt a pang, when I thought back to the simple way of life their own fathers still knew, scarcely twenty years ago, beyond the Himalayas. Even if political developments were to make a return to Tibet possible, neither the refugees nor their country can ever regain the Age of Freedom when most journeys meant riding contentedly for many days over the silent steppes. (‘Freedom from what?’ my more irrit
ated progressive readers may inquire impatiently at this stage. And the short answer is, ‘Freedom from the abominable effects of industrialisation, the consumer society and the internal combustion engine.’)
Leaving T.C. in the workshop, the rest of us went on to the hospital, which is administered by Judy. These refugees have adjusted well to a climate which, though not hot by South Indian standards, is extremely hot by Tibetan standards; but tuberculosis remains a major problem. The most important members of the hospital staff are, of necessity, Indian, though the Tibetans would like to be able to supply their own doctors and nurses. Unfortunately, however, not all the young refugees trained abroad at vast expense are keen on returning to the relative hardships of life in India. The gadgets and glitter of the West have an almost hypnotic fascination for people in whose own country many peasants still use flint and steel to make fire; even His Holiness is not immune to this fascination, so it is absurd to expect adolescent refugees to withstand it.
I strolled through a few of the villages today and visited several homes. Although these 397 houses started out as identical bungalows, with red-tiled roofs, whitewashed walls and concrete floors, hardly any two are alike by now. Most families have added one or more rooms, using their own cash and labour and sometimes improvising rather impermanent walls of bamboo-matting plastered with cowdung. On the whole such building efforts add little to the beauty of a village, but they certainly preserve it from the drabness of uniformity. Each family has built its own mud stove but as usual there are no chimneys so every room is impregnated with wood smoke. Western-type furniture is rare, Tibetan couches and carpets being used instead. Every living-room has an altar in one corner, more or less elaborate but always with a decorated picture of His Holiness and a row of silver butter-lamps.
The two monasteries here are the pathetic remains of Drepung and Ganden, to which are attached small groups of Nyingmapa and Sakyapa lamas. In all, 600 monks came to Mundgod from their notoriously unhealthy camp at Buxa and many of them are still plagued by lung diseases contracted there. The monks live in little houses like everyone else’s but the temples are fine buildings, in the traditional Tibetan style, and there is also a Drepung debating hall. The villagers give just as many sons to the monasteries as they did in Tibet, so one sees dozens of little monks around the place; from The Palace we can hear their treble chanting carried on the breeze at prayer-times. Each monastery has 300 adult monks who have been granted plots at the rate of two acres to three monks – a meagre ration indeed, when one thinks of the old days. The monks still farm collectively, but with them the system works well because of monastic discipline. Their relations with the lay-people are essentially as they were in Tibet and they perform the same ceremonies, in addition to cultivating their land. However, though time could be found for both ritual and agricultural activities it was soon realised the student monks could not also be expected to do the amount of intensive studying needed to keep their religious tradition alive. So His Holiness has just started a scheme whereby the twenty brightest students will be supported by their communities, by the settlement and by the Tibetan Government-in-Exile while completing their studies. Then they will take to the fields with the rest, leaving their juniors to concentrate on the awesome courses of philosophy and metaphysics which, after many years slogging, entitles a Tibetan monk to be called a ‘lama’, or teacher. This seems an excellent scheme and some people feel it may even herald a religious renaissance amongst the refugees. But this is perhaps being too optimistic.
25 November. Mundgod Tibetan Settlement.
Yesterday Rachel several times begged to be taken to the near-by jungle to monkey-watch, so early this morning we set off, armed with ‘rustling sticks’ against the local cobras, kraits and vipers, all of which are said to be numerous. A brisk fifty-minute walk across pale gold stubble-fields, and up slopes entangled in green scrub and coarse reddish grass, took us to the settlement boundary. We crossed a narrow stream of cool, quick water, and then were in a green meadow that sloped slightly up to the edge of the trees. Against a clear sky the parakeets were emerald streaks, harshly warning the forest of our approach, and in the distance I could see the branches of a conspicuously tall banyan-tree moving agitatedly as a troop of langurs heeded that warning.
Our monkey-watching was not nearly as successful on that isolated hillside as it had been on the road from Mundgod, where the monkeys are accustomed to human traffic. But during our wanderings through the thin forest, interspersed with grassy glades, I felt no less thrilled than Rachel to be surrounded by such a variety of exotic birds, butterflies, beetles, trees, vines, shrubs and flowering plants. According to T.C., the most troublesome local animal is the wild pig, which can wreck a whole maize crop in one night, and we saw much evidence of porcine rootings in the glades. (We have just had wild roast pork for supper – delicious.)
At last I suggested that if we wanted more than a glimpse of the langurs we had better sit very quietly behind a screen of shrubs and wait for them to reappear. Sitting quietly is altogether against Rachel’s principles, but today the motive was strong enough and after not many minutes we saw a fine male langur loping across the grass, his silver coat gleaming where the sunlight fell through the trees. He was followed by two females, and then chatterings and screams made us both look up to see a whole gang of adolescents at play in that giant banyan. Forgetting herself, Rachel squealed with excitement and at once the tall male reappeared and raced across the grass not ten yards from us, swearing angrily, his white whiskers bristling against his black face. As he swept up the banyan the youngsters leaped on to another tree, and then another, and gradually the scoldings and rustlings died away. I looked at Rachel and quoted:
“His hide was very mangy and his face was very red,
And ever and anon he scratched with energy his head.
His manners were not always nice, but how my spirit cried
To be an artless Bandar loose upon the mountainside!”
My literal-minded daughter frowned. ‘Their hides weren’t mangy,’ she said. ‘And their faces were black.’
On the way home I told her the story of Rama and his wife Sita, and Ravana and Hanuman, the monkey-king who was also a langur and probably the first detective in world literature. Then I told her that many Indians used to – and perhaps some still do – believe the English to be the descendants of Hanuman and a female servant of Ravana, the demon-king who held Sita a prisoner. This servant treated Sita so well that Rama promised her she should be the mother of a race who would one day rule India. And then Hanuman married her.
‘But human beings and monkeys don’t mate!’ protested Rachel. ‘Anyway, I think some of the Indians look more like monkeys. The English look like us.’
‘Ssh!’ I said. ‘You’ll have the Race Relations Board after you.’
‘What is the Race Relations Board?’ – and that kept us going until we got back to a late breakfast.
Mundgod’s atmosphere is an excellent antidote to the affluent society; one sees many poor people, yet never a discontented face. I enjoy standing at the main settlement crossroads, just looking and listening. Usually a few figures are moving along the tracks: maybe an old man with braids across his head, twirling his prayer-wheel, on his way to gain merit by walking around the new stupa near the hospital; or a young woman with baby on back going to the Tibetan-run store to buy material for a new chuba and also twirling her prayer-wheel; or a group of children, clutching dog-eared copybooks, chasing each other home from school. Then a tractor will come busily bumping along to plough another field, or a Tibetan-owned truck, loaded with surplus rice for the market, will drive towards the public road, or one of the richer farmers may be seen manoeuvring his bullock-team with the assistance of a Harijan servant. The local Indians consider the Tibetans very good employers. And, judging by appearances, the local cattle find the Tibetans very good owners; all the settlement cattle are in markedly better condition than their Indian-owned brethren.
I do not find it easy to convey the elation I feel this evening. During previous visits to India I have known the Tibetans only as penniless, landless, homeless wanderers, often separated from their children through death or misfortune. Therefore to see them tilling their own fields, repairing their own machinery, sweeping their own floors, selling their own produce and – above all – playing with and loving their own children is an eminently heart-warming experience. It seems to me that here, miraculously, the authentic spirit of Tibet has been revived. All the qualities that made the Tibetans so admirable and lovable and enviable when first one knew them flourish throughout this settlement. The fact that most of the villagers have never been exposed to any but the most superficial non-Tibetan influence is no doubt partly responsible, and Mundgod’s isolation must also help. The whole settlement is Tibetan-run – which of course means that it is, in a refugee context, artificial, and what I have called ‘the authentic spirit of Tibet’ may soon be quenched here as elsewhere. I remember Professor Tucci making the interesting point, in one of his tomes, that whereas Hinayana Buddhism can co-exist with the most advanced social theories, Mahayana Buddhism, of which Tibetan Lamaism is an eccentric offshoot, is virtually incapable of surviving in the modern world. He concluded that when its formalism broke up it would be hard to find a substitute, and I suppose one feels Mundgod to be such a special place because here this formalism has been successfully, if only temporarily, re-established.