By Dilip D’souza
Mumbai May 23 – Tenzin Tsundue won the 2001 Outlook/Picador non-fiction writing prize. I was on the shortlist for the prize then, and was naturally disappointed that I had not won. Then I read Tenzin’s winning essay, and the disappointment disappeared. I didn’t mind losing to the passion and eloquence of his ‘My Kind of Exile’: a stirring, wrenching statement about the sadness of exile, the meaning of being uprooted.
Even though Tenzin was born and grew to manhood in India, he calls himself Tibetan. He is Tibetan in his fierce yearning for a free country – that particular free country, of course – he can call home.
There’s a paragraph in his essay about watching the Sydney Olympics on TV, watching athletes from the world’s various countries march past under their flags. Read it and feel Tenzin’s Tibetan loss, though hardly as acutely as he must feel it every day: “I couldn’t see clearly anymore and my face felt wet. I was crying … I tried hard to explain to those around me. But they couldn’t understand, couldn’t even begin to understand… how could they? They belong to a nation. They have never had to conceive of its loss, they have never had to cry for their country.”
What must it mean to hold on like this to something as ephemeral, yet always real, as longing for a nation? Somehow today, in these uncertain times of Iraq and terrorism and hatreds, that question cuts closer than it ever did. How close must it cut for Tenzin?
Besides his writing, Tenzin has repeatedly held up a metaphorical lantern for whoever cares to look at what it lights up. He does things that are designed to remind the world of one thing and one thing alone: how China has treated Tibet.
You might think these are weak reminders, or that that they barely matter to most people. You might even think Tibet itself hardly matters. But it matters to Tenzin. Three years ago, Tenzin chose a spectacular style for his lantern act. When the then Chinese premier, Zhu Rongji, visited Bombay, Tenzin climbed up the outside of the Oberoi Hotel, where Zhu and his entourage were staying – all the way up to the 14th floor.
There, he unfurled a banner and a flag. “Free Tibet” was Tenzin’s message, close enough for the Chinese guests to see, impossible for them to ignore, large enough to be visible on lakhs of front pages the next day. He was led away by security, but that was just a detail. He had made his point: China and its leaders would be reminded of Tibet wherever they went in India.
Last month, he did it again. When Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiaobao visited the Indian Institute of Science in Bangalore, Tenzin was there too. He appeared high on an institute building, again with his flag and red “Free Tibet” banner. India Today reported that “he may have climbed the building three days in advance” to elude Wen’s tight security arrangements.
Security men took him away again. The embarrassed Indian authorities offered their “regrets” – for what, I have to ask – to the Chinese contingent, and the Bangalore police is tying itself in knots trying to understand how this “breach of security” happened. Tenzin had made his point again.
In between, Tenzin continues putting his passion into words: “I feel I am a deity with multiple hands,” he wrote to me recently. In an edit-page piece just before the IISc incident, he actually criticised the Dalai Lama – not a thing lightly done, for a Tibetan – for saying he is now willing to negotiate with China so that Tibet gets “genuine autonomy” within that country.
Whatever that phrase may mean, this much is clear in it: it is a dispiriting comedown from the aspirations exiled Tibetans in India, like Tenzin, have nurtured for 50 years.
Their hope has been for nothing less than full independence from China. Now watered down, thanks to the Dalai Lama, to “genuine autonomy”.So, wrote Tenzin, the Dalai Lama, “Does not go unopposed within the Tibetan community, especially among the youngsters who do not cow down … I can never think of being party to the corrupted Communist China, which has brutally massacred her own children on Tiananmen Square when they demanded freedom and democracy.”
For Indians who have long believed Tibet must be free, it is galling to watch Indian courtship of the Chinese. These leaders must, at least, be steadily reminded of China’s treatment of an entire people, and there was a time we would have done just that. In fact, the way we gave exiled Tibetans a home spoke of our sympathy with their plight, our determination to see them get their land and freedom back, our disgust with China.
But today, that beast called ‘realpolitik’ dictates that we fall over ourselves to welcome and pamper the Zhus and Wens. It’s simple: we want China to recognise our annexure of Sikkim. In return, we offer silence on Tibet. Which is just what has happened. We reacted with glee when Wen handed over a map he had brought. It acknowledged our claim on Sikkim. We were also thrilled when China said it would “support” our hankering for that ultimate sign of India’s arrival at the big boys’ table – a permanent seat on the Security Council. (With the veto, naturally). The crumbs for which we are craven enough to shut up about Tibet.
Fortunately, there are Tenzins out there, men neither craven nor willing to shut up, and unaffected by the demands of ‘realpolitik’. Power to your flag and banner, Tenzin. May they fly from a thousand places, unexpectedly.
