By Eunice de Souza
Tenzin Tsundue’s poems are about exile from Tibet and the longing for home
It was at a conference in Delhi some months ago. The first half a dozen or so writers I met all bragged with their first breath: I am…, Winner of the … award, said one. A woman said to me, “I may have read your work but you have certainly read mine.” I was beginning to think of Delhi as a foreign country when I came across another fact that sent me further into decline. The writers at this conference were accommodated in various kinds of hotels: five star for some, exile in Karol Bagh for others.
But the conference was at the India International Centre. One could sit out in the lovely garden during the more tedious papers, and sneak out for yet another stroll in the Lodi Gardens which was just around the corner, and return in time for the tea-break. It was during one of these tea-breaks on the first day that I ran into Tenzin Tsundue, a young Tibetan poet dedicated to the cause of freeing Tibet, and Bhuchung Soman who had just published an anthology of Tibetan poetry, Muses in Exile, which he very kindly gave me, inscribed Peace and Freedom. Bhuchung was born in Tibet but came to India in 1984, Tenzin was born to refugee parents in Manali.
Tenzin, who is general secretary of Friends of Tibet now lives in Dharamsala, though his bio-note says he has “no permanent address.” He won the first-ever Outlook-Picador Award for non-fiction in 2001. He read some fine poems at the conference, and read them well. What is more, though he was Guest of Honour at that particular part of the event, he kept to the allotted time schedule, which is more than one can say for most of the participants. He mentioned that many of the Tibetan poets born in India, and now spread across the globe, studied in English and now write in English. “I used to write poetry at Bombay University while doing my MA Lit,” Tenzin says. “My classmates who were mostly girls appreciated my idioms and poetic images, This show of literary antics later became a serious exercise after finding my own ways of creating magic with words, music and images.”
The Introduction to Muses in Exile mentions that this writing in English is relatively recent. Some writers still use Tibetan. It also mentions that the post-’50s Tibetans were not the first to learn English. “A few highly privileged sons and daughters of Lhasa aristocrats, powerful chieftans and rich businessmen received modern education in Christian boarding schools in Darjeeling and Kalimpong, and in the 1920s four boys were sent to an English public school by the Thirteenth Dalai Lama. But neither the aristocratic heirs, nor the schoolboys educated at Rugby, left behind any literary output worth mentioning.”
Many of the poems in the anthology are about exile, and the longing for home:
beans sprouted and
climbed down the vines,
money plants crept in through the windows, our house seems to have grown roots.
The fences have grown into a jungle
now how can I tell my children
where we came from?”
(Tenzin Tsundue Exile House).
Good causes of course do not always make for good poetry, and the anthology is inevitably uneven. But, beautifully produced, with a cover featuring a painting by a Tibetan painter, it is worth reading.
Much remains to be done. According to Bhuchung Soman’s introduction, the “global awakening of interest in Buddhist studies has somewhat overshadowed our unique secular creative heritage in dance, opera, music, folklore and poetry, which remains barely explored.” And, of course, they have still to go home. A recent e-mail from Tenzin says that he was imprisoned for three days after his protest in Bangalore.
* Eunice de Souza, who has introduced many to the delights of the English language, writes on books, reading and writing
