In Exile From the Land of Snows (19 page)

Unlike the subtropical rain forests of Bhutan and Assam, through which most of the refugees had passed, this new jungle, at the very heart of the Indian subcontinent, was psychologically as well as physically remote. The few mud-and-wattle villages the refugees had glimpsed from the buses as they drove through, hung with brilliant clusters of red peppers, bananas and mangoes, sheltered a small, dark race of semi-aboriginal people who looked altogether alien. The Tibetans’ sense of displacement gave way to disorientation after the buses had gone and only a few Indian police stayed on to help organize homesteading. Aware that the primeval expanse surrounding them was the natural abode of elephants, tigers, wild boars and other dangerous animals, the settlers’ first act was to fashion tall bamboo stakes into a protective rampart around one of the larger tents. Inside, they built a makeshift altar upon which to place a precious image of the Buddha given to them by the Dalai Lama. As night fell they dug pits, lined them with stones and cooked their first dinner. “We forced ourselves to eat,” continued Chonzin, “but we all felt so frightened and forlorn that no one could speak. Many people sat helplessly on the ground crying to themselves. We could hear the calls of wild animals in the jungle and, unlike in Tibet, you couldn’t see a thing. Wherever you looked there was nothing but trees.”

Soon after dawn the following morning, a group of monks, seated before the sacred image in the tent, began praying for success. They continued for a week, after which the work of felling and burning the forest began. An ax, a saw and a machete were given to each family of five, and two rupees or twenty cents a day were paid out as salary by the Indian government. With new groups of 500 sent down from the north at six-month intervals the settlement, known as Byllakuppe, struggled into existence. “The heat was the worst,” said Chonzin, shaking his head. “For two years, day and night, smoke and fire covered everything—even during the monsoon. Then we would work all day in the pouring rain and come home at night to find our tents blown down. Under these conditions many
people died. They would recall Tibet, look at where they were and just give up.” As fresh ground was broken a new danger appeared. Workers felling trees farthest from the tent camps repeatedly met and were often trampled to death by enraged elephants. A chain of guard huts had to be built around each clearing; these were manned day and night by sentries equipped with tin cans, gongs and firecrackers both to sound the alarm and to scare off intruders. The fight against the elephants took on almost mythic dimensions; settlers, armed with slingshots and other homemade weapons, walked warily through newly cut roads in the jungle, while those caught alone by an elephant not infrequently returned to their tents a day or two later, having spent the interim up a tree. In the midst of the besieged colony’s travail, the Dalai Lama arrived on a tour of inspection. “During my first visit to Byllakuppe,” he recalled, “the people made a special tent for me of bamboo walls and a canvas roof. Still, it could not keep out the tremendous dust produced by clearing the forest. Because of such circumstances, the Tibetans were quite low-spirited. The death rate was high and due to the heat of the sun and burning trees all of them had become quite dark and thin.” Confronted by a pervasive sense of hopelessness, the Dalai Lama offered the only encouragement he could—assurance of eventual prosperity. “Whenever I visited our larger settlements I always promised that we would prevail,” he observed. “I pushed and pushed and pushed and finally, year by year, the picture completely changed. Then, when things got better I teased the people about their once dark, thin faces, which now had become quite healthy and smiling. I told them that in the past I was only making empty promises, because I myself, poor things, could offer them nothing. But those Tibetans always followed my word without the slightest doubt. As a result, we succeeded. It was just like watering an old flower about to wilt. If you water it with some hope it will immediately become fresh and enthusiastic.”

Early in 1962, the first group of settlers moved into more than a hundred brick-walled, tile-roofed homes, taking their prized butter lamps, offering bowls and scarf-draped photos of the Dalai Lama with them. The first of Byllakuppe’s eventual twenty villages, housing 10,000 people on 5,500 acres, camp No. 1 served as the prototype for virtually every refugee settlement developed over the next two decades. Little more than a year after its establishment, the inhabitants watched, along with those of camp No. 2, as their names were randomly pulled from a container and they were allotted an acre of land apiece. Thereafter, the attempt to transform Byllakuppe into a full-fledged farming community began.

Despite the fertile soil, it was not easy. A crop of lentils, cotton, tobacco and coriander sown on twenty-eight acres in 1961 had not done well. Then
almost fifty times as much cotton and tobacco was sown, all of which failed dismally. Farming in southern India was so different from Tibet’s unique high-altitude agronomy that it seemed the settlement would founder, until an agricultural adviser from a relief organization called Swiss Technical Co-operation arrived to offer guidance. Conducting soil tests, he determined that maize should be planted, sustained by fertilizer and farmed by tractors rather than the bullock plows the Tibetans were using. The new methods and crop worked. Maize proved so successful that by 1966, six years after its founding, the settlement was self-supporting. Three years after that, with 77,000 fruit trees planted, a dairy and poultry farm and a second crop of ragi (a cereal grass) raised to diversify the harvest, Byllakuppe was making a substantial profit on its produce.

By then 38 settlements harboring almost 60,000 people had sprung up throughout India, Nepal and Bhutan, all starting out on land too remote or inhospitable for local people to care for. After houses were built, farming often proved so recalcitrant that many settlements had to rely on traditional Tibetan handicrafts, such as carpet weaving, for their income. Yet by the early 1980s only 3,000 refugees remained on road gangs, while some 44 settlements, linked by commercial, political and religious ties, looking to Dharamsala as their capital, housed almost 100,000 refugees, the remnant having emigrated to twenty-four countries around the world.

The refugees’ rehabilitation was further enhanced by what many international relief agencies working closely with the Tibetans came to consider an economic miracle. While a number of industrial efforts, including a woolen mill, lime plant, limestone quarry and fiberglass factory, all failed, the exiles found that collective marketing and purchasing, carried out through agricultural cooperatives, had an immense potential in India’s chaotic economy. Once more Byllakuppe led the way. In 1964, the settlement’s first six camps inaugurated a co-op, Luksum Samdup Ling (“Preserving Tradition-Fulfilling Wishes”). Sixteen years later, Byllakuppe’s fourteen “new” camps founded a second co-op, Dickey Larso (“Revival of Happiness”). With funds from the Swiss Technical Co-operation and, later, from the Mysore Rehabilitation and Agriculture Development Agency, the co-ops transformed the settlement. Restaurants and stores were added to its villages; seed, fertilizer, trucks, a flour mill and dehusking machine purchased to boost production; and a large workshop built to fashion furniture, carts, knives, axes, and farming tools in the quest for self-sufficiency. Young men were sent to Norway, Denmark and Iran to be trained as tractor mechanics. On their return they expanded the settlement’s motley fleet of Escorts, Soviet Zetors and Ford tractors, creating
in the process a repair and machine shop that soon took over all the business for fifty miles around.

While the co-ops marketed the settlement’s produce as far away as Bombay and Calcutta, individual settlers continued to ply a trade that came to account for the livelihood of almost a quarter of the refugee population: selling sweaters. Capitalizing on the success of a Tibetan hand-knit sweater business in Kalimpong, thousands of refugees began to sell gaudy green, purple, yellow and red machine-made products purchased from previously unpatronized Punjabi factories. Each winter they set up shop out of tin trunks on the sidewalks of bazaars and marketplaces all across India. Their success was such that by the latter half of the sixties a Tibetan sweater fad was sweeping the subcontinent. The sudden popularity of “Tibetan” sweaters enabled an average worker to earn up to 5,000 rupees or $626—seven times more than his or her wages on the road. The nomadic business of sweater-selling not only improved their diets, but also fulfilled the traditional Tibetan’s love of trade and travel. Introduced through it to their host country, they used the opportunity to promote their cause; every sweater, stocking-cap, or scarf sold contained a small card that explained how the refugees had been forced down “from the roof of the world” to the “hot plains of the subcontinent.”

A further resource came from the Dalai Lama’s personal funds. Over a thousand pack animals had followed the Tibetan ruler’s 1950 flight from Lhasa to Yatung, each laden with 120 pounds of treasure. Sent to Sikkim as a precaution in case Tenzin Gyatso would be forced to flee Tibet, forty mules bore gold, six hundred carried silver and the remaining animals, sacks of centuries-old coins. Though the Dalai Lama returned to the Potala, this relatively small share of his
labrang
or household treasure did not. Guarded by a single unknowing Lepcha sentry, it remained hidden for nine years in the Choegyal of Sikkim’s abandoned stables located on the hillside below the palace in Gangtok. When before dawn one morning in 1960 a long convoy of trucks departed the capital for Calcutta, half the population of Sikkim awoke to what most imagined was the sight of their king fleeing his own country. Only after the treasure was safely deposited in the underground vault of a Calcutta bank did the truth emerge, spawning rampant speculation in India’s press over the “God-King’s fabulous fortune.” In fact, after its conversion into currency and subsequent investment, only $987,500 materialized to form His Holiness the Dalai Lama’s Charitable Trust, the resource from which virtually every exile project found seed money.

With economic security, the refugees’ cultural reconstruction was assured. The Dalai Lama had begun the work of preservation from his first
days in Swarg Ashram. “We divided our culture into two types,” he explained. “In the first category we placed that which, we determined, needed to be retained only in books as past history. The second category included whatever could bring actual benefit in the present. These things, we resolved, must be kept alive. Therefore, many of our old ceremonial traditions I discarded—no matter, I decided, let them go. However, our performing arts, our literature, science and religion as well as those crafts from which we could earn a livelihood—painting, metalcraft, architecture, woodworking and carpetmaking—these, we took special pains to safeguard. To achieve this we employed modern methods although they were altogether new to us and posed many difficulties.”

As the wellspring of Tibetan civilization, religion had first priority. Unlike other Asian nations to which Buddhism had spread, Tibet alone contained the entire corpus of the Buddhist Dharma; the full scope of sutras, tantras, their accompanying liturgy and most critically the guru-disciple lineages, founded on oral transmission, which served as unbroken links to the origin of the oldest of the three world faiths. Only 7,000 of Tibet’s more than 600,000 monks and a few hundred or so of its 4,000 incarnate lamas had escaped. Those left behind had been defrocked, while new refugees brought word of the country’s 6,524 monasteries being gutted by Chinese teams specially assigned to ship their valuable artifacts to the homeland, either to be melted into bullion or sold via Hong Kong on the international antiques market. For each scholar who died on a road gang, centuries of learning were lost, causing the Dalai Lama to take emergency steps to remove them from the deadly labor, even before their lay compatriots.

By August of 1959, as its last inmates were shipped out to road camps, Buxa Duar began receiving groups of refugee monks, assembled to salvage the Dharma. By the following year, almost 1,500 monks were living in the barracks of the newly named Buxa Lama Ashram, rising at 5:00 a.m. for congregational prayers in its central courtyard, then breaking into their monastic colleges to conduct memorization, debate and tutorials with senior scholars and incarnate lamas. Scouring road camps, the monks collected as many scriptures as could be found, from which they began lithographing with stone and ink over 200 volumes of major works—only a small fraction, however, of Tibet’s 1,200 years of philosophic writing. With members of the Gelugpa sect predominating (those of the other three orders more often finding refuge at monasteries in Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal), examinations for the Geshé degree continued after only a year’s hiatus and it seemed as though the religion would rapidly mend. Then monks began to die. With their occupants sleeping sixty-six to a barracks
and the bamboo beds only six inches apart, tuberculosis ran rampant. Each morning following prayers, 200 to 300 men would queue up behind the twenty-foot barbed-wire fence, waiting for hours in the broiling sun to be checked by the camp’s single medical worker. “We were eager to save our religion,” recalled Khentrul Rinpoché, a lama from Sera Monastery, who lived in the camp from its inception. “But after just a few years the number of monks dying increased to the point that the rest couldn’t help wondering whether or not we’d ever escape from that place alive. Watching our friends become dark and thin and their teeth turn black, we constantly had depressed, suffocated feelings. We could only endure this hardship because we knew that the religious tradition of Tibet depended on us alone.”

By 1968, the large settlements of Byllakuppe and Mundgod were finally ready to begin receiving survivors. Once moved south, the monks took up farming and started to gradually build over 150 new monasteries, filling them with young novices and creating the most vivid emblems of Tibetan life in exile. The monasteries in turn complemented a series of cultural institutes, primarily based in Dharamsala.