In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  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, howev
er, 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.