In Exile From the Land of Snows

by John Avedon

  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 rehabil
itating 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.”