In Exile From the Land of Snows (20 page)

The first institute to be founded, three months after the Dalai Lama’s arrival in Swarg Ashram, was the Tibetan Dance and Drama Society. Its seventy-four members—only twenty of whom had been performing artists in Tibet—managed to conserve in their repertoire four abridged Lhamo operas (the often week-long spectacles performed in Tibet’s larger cities), two historical plays, numerous
cham
or monastic dances and even a reconstituted marching band which often played for the annual March 10 rally in Dharamsala, convened to commemorate the Lhasa uprising.

A year later, in October of 1961, the Tibetan Medical Center was founded under Dr. Yeshi Dhonden, one of only three Lhasa-trained physicians to escape. Tibet’s unique medical science, developed indigenously over 2,100 years, was salvaged in a small hospital, pharmacy, astrology department and school, which by the late 1970s had graduated enough Tibetan doctors to staff the larger settlements. The third major institute to be opened was the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, started in November 1971, in an imposing Tibetan-style building situated in the midst of the government’s new Secretariat compound, Gangchen Kyishong. Located halfway between Lower Dharamsala and McLeod Ganj it soon became a magnet for hundreds of Asian and Western scholars who previously had scant access to Tibetan culture. By 1984, the library’s numerous teaching and collection projects had amassed over 50,000 volumes, an estimated 40 percent of Tibet’s literature—the remainder having been destroyed both before and during the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. In New Delhi, Tibet House, founded in 1965, supplemented much of the
library’s work, while the Tibetan section of All India Radio was enlarged and a number of refugee publications appeared. But by far the most extensive and critical of the cultural projects lay in the school system. Created by the Dalai Lama to preserve the Tibetan identity while introducing the “exile generation” to the modern world, it was looked on by all the refugees, monks and laymen alike, as the most fundamental hope for the future of their cause.

T
HE BUS
on which Tempa Tsering left the road camp in Bawarna for the Nursery in Dharamsala arrived in McLeod Ganj early in the afternoon. Discharged into the hands of Mrs. Tsering Dolma, the Dalai Lama’s elder sister, and the Nursery’s principal, a monk named Thubten Nyingee, the children were led up a winding dirt road through the woods to Conium House, a barnlike building of whitewashed stone walls and zinc roofing inhabited for five months now by almost 200 orphaned and semi-orphaned youngsters.

The Nursery for Tibetan Refugee Children, as Conium House was formally known, had been founded by the Dalai Lama less than three weeks after his own arrival in Dharamsala. Its immediate catalyst was a report of children dying among a refugee group delayed by heavy snows en route from Missamari to work sites in Ladakh. Fifty-one children were taken from the group and housed with Tibetan government workers in their bungalows until, under the direction of the Dalai Lama’s sister, the Nursery opened on May 17, 1960. Removed from road work, few of the children died, though the majority were afflicted by a wide range of ailments from tuberculosis to dysentery, influenza, scabies and severe malnutrition.

Tempa’s own dysentery had long gone, yet he remained withdrawn and uncommunicative. Deloused and with a newly shaved head, he was issued his first Western clothes, a pair of shorts and two shirts, and seated in a long line of children for a dinner of rice and boiled lentils dished into beaten-tin bowls. Afterward, he and thirty others unrolled their blankets on the floor of a room in Conium House and prepared to sleep, the sick mixed in with the healthy, as there were too many to isolate. The next morning the day began with prayers, exercise and a class in the Tibetan and English alphabets, followed by an afternoon of unsupervised play. Throughout, Tempa refused to participate. A month later, however, with his room packed each night with 120 children, so crowded that no one could move, he finally began to focus on the present. One day a ball was kicked toward him during a game of soccer in the courtyard. Returning
it, he joined the other boys, from which time his incapacitating depression slowly began to lift.

Tempa’s interest in life was restimulated most by three encounters he now had with the Dalai Lama. One morning, the older children were taken through the forest to witness a prayer session at Swarg Ashram. It was Tempa’s first religious ceremony. As he sat on the steps of the Heavenly Abode’s porch, gazing at the Dalai Lama on a throne surrounded by monks enacting the graceful
mudras
or hand gestures of tantric ritual while they recited scripture, he experienced an unusual feeling of reverence that, far more than the modicum of physical well-being afforded by the Nursery, gave him a sense of security.

On a second less formal occasion he made contact with the Dalai Lama himself. At that time Tenzin Gyatso walked from Swarg Ashram to Conium House to share a traditional Tibetan dinner of
thukpa
or noodle soup with the children. Before his arrival, the Nursery was thrown into a state of high excitement, few of its adult teachers having had such close contact with their leader in Tibet. Marshaled like a regiment on a parade ground, the children greeted the Dalai Lama, who immediately asked to be shown what they were studying. Tempa was singled out before the gathering to write the letters
A, B
and
C
on a slate. The Dalai Lama watched carefully and, giving him a warm pat on the shoulder, said, “Very good.” “Of course,” recalled Tempa laughing, “I liked him from that moment on.”

A third meeting with the Dalai Lama marked Tempa’s departure from the Nursery. One hundred sixty of the oldest children had been chosen to attend the Mussoorie School, the first educational institute to be created in exile, founded one year before. In their company, Tempa hiked to Swarg Ashram, where the Dalai Lama, seated on the porch with the children gathered around, advised them to study hard so that later they could help those who would not have the same opportunity. At the conclusion of his remarks, Tempa led the group in reciting the eleven-verse Long Life Prayer of the Fourteenth Dalai Lama. “My friends said I was so nervous that I was shivering and forgot whole parts,” he recalled. “But I think I got the chorus right, at least where it says, ‘Bless Tenzin Gyatso, Protector of the Land of Snows. May his life not fail, but last a hundred eons, and may his will be effortlessly accomplished.’ ”

“In Tibet I had a great desire to establish a modern school,” said the Dalai Lama. “From the early fifties on, I felt the need very strongly. Without any knowledge of how such a school functions I just thought over and over, ‘We must have a modern school. We must have a school.’ But I didn’t even know how many classes to have.” Returning to Mussoorie
after his 1959 pilgrimage, the Dalai Lama scouted the town for a suitable building in which to begin his project. Eventually he found an old home called Kildare House, belonging to an Indian army officer who, convinced the building was haunted by the ghosts of Moslems killed there during the riots at India’s partition, was glad to sell at a low price. Located in a rocky clearing not far from Birla House, its eight decaying rooms opened on March 3, 1960, to fifty young men—monks, Khampa guerrillas and government officials—aged eighteen to twenty-five. Although the Dalai Lama was not versed in modern education, two recent expatriates were: Mary and Jigme Taring, among the first Tibetans to have been educated in India, to whose guidance the Mussoorie School was fully entrusted.

The Tarings were a pioneering couple. Jigme Taring was a prince, the nephew of the Choegyal of Sikkim; Mary was the daughter of Wangchuk Gyalpo Tsarong, a senior Cabinet minister under the Thirteenth Dalai Lama and a descendant of Tibet’s famous eighth-century physician, Yuthok Yonten Gonpo. With their background as surety against criticism from Tibet’s xenophobic establishment, the Tarings were the foremost proponents of modernization in their generation. In exile, they represented an invaluable asset to the fledgling government.

After arriving at the new school Tempa found in their guidance the first substantial explanation of his situation. “All of us children called them Mother and Father and they really acted like that,” he recalled. “After a while there were three or four hundred kids, but the Tarings took an interest in each and every one. They explained over and over, in classes, in meetings and alone, what had happened to us. Above all they said that we were Tibetans. We had been driven out by the Chinese, and somehow we had to get back, to regain our country. This was the responsibility children like us had. We had to work for all the Tibetan people, not just ourselves. From hearing this again and again I stopped being completely absorbed in my own tragedy. I began to see that I had a greater duty. The Tarings made sense of it all to us. They gave that to the children.”

Following the Tarings’ lead, two more residential schools, one in Simla, the other in Darjeeling, were begun. The Dalai Lama then approached the Indian government to propose a long-range plan. Consulting with Nehru at a private luncheon in New Delhi in May 1961, he received the Prime Minister’s support for the founding of an autonomous body within the Indian Ministry of Education, called the Tibetan Schools Society; its purpose would be to run a network of residential and day schools staffed jointly by Indian and Tibetan teachers. Education being one area in which Nehru could freely aid the Tibetans without political consequences, his support was so generous that by 1964 the system included
seven residential schools housing, in the main, over 500 children each, four day schools in the settlements, three transit schools at road-construction sites and a number of grant-in-aid schools indirectly supported by the Society. Nevertheless, there were obstacles. In organizing the large residential schools, the dearth of such basic necessities as flat land caused immense difficulty. Situated in mountainous regions that offered few buildings with surrounding grounds, the schools were compelled to adopt whatever facility was available, while the children themselves, for the most part, converted it: in Darjeeling, an old barracks of the North Bengal Mounted Rifles; at Mount Abu, the abandoned palace of the Maharaja of Bikaner; in Panchmari, the defunct Royal Hotel; at Kalimpong, a woolen warehouse unused since the heyday of Tibetan trade. By 1966, almost 7,000 young people had been saved from road gangs. Half, however, were overage, and many of those who would have failed to complete high school by the age of 20 were forced to withdraw. There were also troubles with the faculty. Because the TSS was not a full-fledged component of India’s school system, teachers were concerned over tenure, reluctant to work in remote settlements and as only university-level faculty could instruct in English—the medium chosen by the Dalai Lama—hard to find to begin with. Those finally hired could not even talk to their Tibetan counterparts until a vocabulary list of 500 Hindi and Tibetan words was circulated from New Delhi.

The children, though, were learning, and they were the first generation in Tibet’s history to see maps of the world and hear of other nations. As Tempa reflected, “When we were first taught geography, it was almost unbelievable. The teacher showed us a globe and pictures of different peoples, but until it was thoroughly explained, I found it hard to accept that the world was really so large. I just couldn’t comprehend it. In Tibet, India had always been the end of the earth for us.” The young Tibetans’ curiosity was particularly stimulated by the bizarre objects represented by the Western aid workers, who, as the first Caucasians they had seen, were jokingly nicknamed “yellow heads” for their blond hair. Meanwhile, their own Tibetan instructors were now being systematically readied in a Teachers Training School established in Dharamsala, and a textbook committee and a printing press were soon issuing a syllabus covering Tibetan language, history, literature and religion from first grade through the end of high school. By the time the Tibetan Schools Society changed its name to the Central Tibetan Schools Administration in the early seventies, 9,000 children were attending its thirty-two institutions; ten years later 15,000 studied in fifty-two schools, the majority of whom chose to continue on to a university. Advanced studies in Tibet’s own academic tradition were
provided by the Institute of Higher Tibetan Studies, founded in January 1968 in Benares, as well as the Buddhist School of Dialectics, begun in Dharamsala five years later. To continue care for orphaned children, a system of Tibetan foster homes was created, beginning in 1962 with the Mussoorie Homes run by Mary Taring. By the end of the decade, with 600 children in twenty-five Tibetan-style households staffed by live-in parents, Mussoorie was outdone only by the Nursery in Dharamsala, which changed its name to the Tibetan Children’s Village. Placed under the direction of the Dalai Lama’s younger sister, Pema Gyalpo, it relocated to Egerton Hall above the military cantonment and began rapidly expanding over the hillside. At the close of the seventies its city-like campus housing over 1,000 destitute children six months to eighteen years old was regarded by UN agencies and others as a paradigm for rehabilitating refugee children and was indisputably the most successful enterprise in exile.

At the age of fourteen, after two years in Mussoorie, Tempa was accepted at St. Gabriel’s Academy, a secondary school outside Dehra Dun. In company with many of the older refugee children, whose age made them ineligible for the Tibetans’ burgeoning institutions, he was compelled to spend the next decade in the alien environment of Indian schools. “After arriving at St. Gabriel’s,” he recounted, “even though there were six Tibetans, the sense of being an outsider just grew deeper and deeper. The more contact we had, the more we felt removed. Only a handful of people had heard of Tibet. The rest kept asking, ‘Where is your father? What does he do? Who are your brothers and sisters?’ Each time they asked, you couldn’t help but recall your past—that you are a refugee and you have no country—but still these people remained very ignorant of what we were. Overall it inculcated in me a further awareness of being Tibetan. My desire to have Tibet back, to regain my own country, just increased.”