Dharamsala now a polluted dump filled with tourists Tibetans forsake cultural roots, political goals
By MARTIN REGG COHN
ASIA BUREAU
DHARAMSALA, India — Tibetan refugees trek for weeks across the frozen Himalayas, slipping past Chinese border guards in search of freedom and a glimpse of the Dalai Lama.
Yet soon after finding their way to this bucolic colonial hill station, the new arrivals search for a way out.
Enthusiasm wanes for the public audiences of their exiled spiritual leader. Instead of Buddhist blessings from His Holiness, they seek the wedding vows of Western women.
The stake-out begins every morning in the dusty town square, a short walk from the heavily guarded residence of the Dalai Lama who heads the Tibetan government-in-exile. Foreign tourists clamber out of crowded buses, sleepy-eyed after the 400-kilometre overnight journey from New Delhi to the northern Indian state of Himachal Pradesh.
Watching from nearby cafés, the men methodically size up single females coming off the bus: Israeli backpackers are the least desirable, low on cash and skeptical of scams. Single Europeans and North Americans, clutching their Lonely Planet guidebooks, are a better bet.
This wasn’t what the Dalai Lama had in mind when he established his temporary residence in India in 1959, eight years after the Chinese Communists conquered neighbouring Tibet. Dharamsala was meant to be a base for Buddhists seeking the Middle Way, not a way station for refugees seeking Western trophy wives.
The early years of political oppression in Tibet pale in comparison with the more recent threats from economic migration and globalization. As more Chinese workers take jobs in Lhasa, growing numbers of Tibetan youth are giving up on their homeland.
The surge of Chinese migrants, combined with the exodus of Tibetan youth, is creating a new demographic crisis for an embattled population of less than 3 million people in the Tibetan Autonomous Region of China.
Tibetan refugees in India, who number about 120,000, are now dispersing overseas. Tight-knit communities built around monasteries and traditional schools are losing out to the lure of big cities abroad.
The demographic hemorrhaging and spiritual atrophy have sparked profound soul-searching at all levels of Tibetan society.
Samdhong Rinpoche, the scholarly prime minister of Tibet’s government-in-exile, says that while previous crackdowns destroyed lives, the threat of assimilation undermines an entire civilization. At the height of China’s crackdown in the 1960s, “people died, but people did not change. The inner strength of Tibet very much remained,” says Samdhong, 64, who wears the yellow and maroon robes of a senior monk.
Interviewed next to his cabinet meeting room, flanked by a thangka (Buddhist scroll) and a large television, his face creases dejectedly as he describes the corrosive influence of consumerism on a society that once stressed personal sacrifice.
“Now Tibetans are disappearing so fast inside Tibet that their inner strength is being shaken and destroyed, so the materialistic challenge is much greater than repression,” he says, fingering his prayer beads.
“In Lhasa, it (assimilation) is imposed, while in Dharamsala it is voluntarily adopted or chosen, so the threat is almost the same.”
Yet despite its increasing vulnerability, the Tibetan ideal has never been more popular in the world’s imagination. Dharamsala attracts backpackers and wannabe Buddhists, upmarket cultural tourists in maroon robes, and Hollywood stars in baseball caps.
Richard Gere and Goldie Hawn make regular pilgrimages to see the Dalai Lama. A new synagogue holds Friday night sabbath services to meet the surging demand from Israeli visitors who come here after their army service. The Tibetan/Jewish Youth Exchange has set up an office.
For all its fame as “Little Lhasa,” Dharamsala is a dump. Garbage and manure litter the narrow alleys, which are clogged with jeeps and choked by pollution. Money-changers compete with fortune tellers for tourist dollars.
But it is the chaotic scene at the town’s main bus stop, beside the Baskin-Robbins ice cream parlour, that best symbolizes the profound shifts in the diaspora. This muddy landmark now serves as a “meet” market.
Courtship begins over cups of yak butter tea or spiced masala, and culminates with a symbiotic meeting of minds and bodies: Tibetans fantasize about escaping to the West with a foreign passport, while Westerners fancy a close encounter with stateless nomads who embody their Buddhist ideal.
For Kalsang Tsundue, the mystique of being a nomad from eastern Tibet helped capture the interest of a Canadian girlfriend. A 22-year-old who had never attended a day of school, he relied on his boyish charm to win the heart of 35-year-old Angela Clyburn from Enderby, B.C.
Tibetans are great storytellers. And Westerners make good listeners. Within a month of Clyburn’s arrival in Dharamsala, Tsundue had asked her to marry him. The 13-year age difference doesn’t bother them, nor is he sentimental about leaving.
“All my friends and family are in Tibet, and all my yak and sheep, but I will like Canada,” insists Tsundue, who cuts a dashing figure as an earring flashes beneath his shoulder-length hair.
“I want to live in a big city, because I’ve never been to a big city, and I’ve never been to school,” he says, chewing on a wad of bubble gum. “When I was in Tibet it was so boring, I wanted to leave. But when I got here, it was so noisy and dusty and polluted, I couldn’t stay here. I worked as a waiter in a restaurant, but it was only 500 rupees ($14 Cdn) a month, so I quit.”
That’s when he found Clyburn, his Canadian sweetheart. A horse trainer and actress back in Canada, she came here to discover a world that had once seemed so distant.
“I started reading books about Tibet when I was 20, and like, wow, it’s so interesting,” says Clyburn, wearing a blue “Free Tibet” T-shirt and a baseball cap. “He’s so good looking. He has such an interesting face!” she adds, gazing affectionately at her husband.
The adoration of foreign women for Tibetan men seems a welcome contrast to the cold shoulder that these refugees get from established residents of Dharamsala. The dirty secret of the diaspora is that Tibetan newcomers and old-timers are at each other’s throats.
Despite the popular stereotype of Tibetans as pacifists in the mould of the Dalai Lama, longtime residents barely conceal their antipathy for their newly arrived brethren from across the border.
“They are very short tempered and take to knives, causing lots of injuries over minor things,” complains Nyima Dondhup, an Indian-born Tibetan who works in the tourism sector.
“We’ve grown up in India and we’re well educated. They don’t behave in a civilized way. We’re the same people, but with different attitudes. We’re attached to Western culture, and they’re more Chinese.”
Yet Tibetan exiles share a common goal regardless of whether they were born in India or across the border: They want to leave for greener pastures.
In an earlier era, the exodus had a higher purpose. Young men escaped oppression in China and endured hardship in refugee camps or the underground resistance in order to defend their culture and reclaim their homeland.
The embodiment of that ethos was Lhasang Tsering, now a gray-haired bookseller and poet. In a previous life he was one of 2,500 guerrillas fighting for the National Volunteer Defence Force from secret bases out of Nepal, with support from the CIA.
He still remembers the veteran fighters who couldn’t countenance the Dalai Lama’s taped appeal to give up their arms. They killed themselves rather than quit.
“I had the honour to serve with Tibet’s armed resistance,” he says softly in his cluttered shop. “We should never have surrendered the struggle.”
Faded portraits of the Dalai Lama and Mohandas Gandhi are on the wall, beside books on meditation, Buddhism and politics. Tsering respects His Holiness, but considers his Nobel prize-winning campaign of pacifism to be pointless in the face of China’s military might and unyielding occupation.
By backing down from the fight for independence and settling for the Dalai Lama’s proposed compromise of “full autonomy,” Tibetans have become disillusioned, Tsering argues.
“A lot of them try to go to the West out of a sense of purposelessness,” he says bitterly.
The more Tibetans leave Tibet, the more Chinese will take their place. He calls it a form of “demographic aggression” that will be “China’s final solution.”
But not every one who has grown up in exile has given up on the right of return.
Unlike the young refugees who flee Tibet and flock to the West, Tenzin Tsundue quite literally marched in the opposite direction — crossing the border from India back to his homeland.
Born in exile, Tsundue, 29, attended school at the Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamsala where the right of return was inculcated in him. He grew up “believing in an independent and free Tibet, and that we were all going back home.”
So off he went: After a daring trek to the Sino-Indian frontier, he slipped across the border into Tibet — illegally, but out of a sense of entitlement.
The trip was cut short when Chinese guards tracked him down and threw him in jail. Tsundue’s interrogators beat him in hopes of extracting a confession of espionage, but ultimately came to respect his unusual persistence.
Keen to show off the achievements of China’s Socialist modernization, his jailers drove him to the imposing Potala Place where the Dalai Lama once lived, and showed him around the shops and markets of bustling Lhasa.
“The Potala Palace was like a dream,” he remembers fondly. “So big.” But Lhasa wasn’t what he had imagined.
He glimpsed Tibetans trudging along the streets doing the dirty work of their Chinese employers. And he saw the new construction projects that have wiped out most of the traditional architecture his parents had talked about. His guards offered to let him stay. He could start a new life in Tibet.
This was what Tsundue had always wanted. Yet at that moment it was the last place in the world he wanted to be.
“I didn’t feel this was Tibet — it was so disturbing to see the big Chinese buildings,” Tsundue recalls. “I couldn’t say that I was in Tibet if I couldn’t buy something in my own language from a shop. Everyone was speaking Chinese.
“I was afraid that if I stayed there, I wouldn’t feel at home,” he says dejectedly, still struggling to be defiant.
“I had reached a strange land.”
