By Yana Banerjee-Bey
July 14 : It was a Chinese expatriate living in the US and travelling as a tourist on the first train from Beijing to Lhasa last week who hit the nail on the head. He remarked that change in Tibet was inevitable and that people could not be expected to continue living as they did a thousand years ago.
There are many reasons to mourn the inauguration of the world’s highest railroad but they relate to the political agenda of the rulers in Beijing, not the loss of the traditional way of life of the Tibetans. For, the “traditional way of life” is a harsh one, bereft of such simple comforts as cooking gas, electricity and modern bathrooms. Sadly, it has become fashionable on the part of those who take these amenities for granted to lament the march of modern civilisation into the world’s remote inhabited regions.
The truth is, no community deserves to be treated like a museum piece. It is only the animal world that needs guarding against change wrought by visitors.
Certain elements of tradition are best jettisoned. For example, traditional toilets. Even those tourists who view the Ladakhi dry toilet – a hole in the floor of a first-floor room with a pile of loose earth which you throw down after you’re done – as quaint would probably not champion its cause. On the other hand, changing societies must pick out those vital elements of culture that need informed preservation from generation to generation. Because cultures must be kept alive for mankind, no matter how much a community’s dwellings, education and work change – as they will, as, indeed, they must.
Yet, holding on to culture is fraught with identity crises. If one disagrees with elements in one’s traditional culture, one tends to move away from it faster. If modern education has made one an atheist, or even an agnostic, religious rituals pass out of one’s life. Language, which keeps a culture alive, is one of the first casualties – and not just because education and work involve English but also because speaking the traditional tongue of one’s community becomes unfashionable and young people stop making the effort to keep in touch with it.
The danger is that such societies sometimes focus on comparatively trivial aspects of change, such as Western clothes. In the 1980s, an alarmed Bhutan decreed that everyone must wear traditional dress and you had the unsavoury sight of young men donning the gho over jeans. Culture is about more than clothes.
Paradoxically, there are factors stemming from Chinese rule that favour the preservation of Tibetan culture. Western tourists have been travelling – in supervised groups – in the region for years yet contact between them and the local people is minimal. Eagle-eyed policemen even reprimand Tibetan shopkeepers for chatting with tourists after a souvenir has been sold. The accursed influence of Western tourists may spare Tibet a while yet!
