Forty-four years since….. the Tibetan community survives as best it can without actually giving in to outside cultural influences, argues Keith Fernandes as he glances through the lenses of Tenzin Choklay’s documentary.
Forget Sino-Indian relations and peacetime rhetoric.Two short films are casting Tibetan young people in a new light, showing them as seeking to understand their relationship with a country they’ve never been to, let alone one they can physically call home.
“There’s a huge sense of being uprooted among young people,” says 24-year-old Tenzin Choklay, the maker of ‘Beauty and the Beast: A Search for Miss Tibet’, a short documentary on the first Miss Tibet contest last year and the ensuing uproar. “They’re not Indian enough, they’ve never been to Tibet, they look Tibetan, they don’t have Indian accents, but they live in India.”
Having grown up in conservative Tibetan communities,like the one at Dharamsala, the seat of the Tibetan government in exile, these young people are seeking their own identities and value systems – and typically, often collide with the establishment.
“There’s a lot of confusion on the ground, ” says Pimmi Pande, whose 28-minute film, ‘Destiny’s Children: Voices of Tomorrow’s Tibet’, has just been selected for the Toronto International Film Festival. Pande spent several months in the country’s Tibetan communities, talking to people for the two films she has made on the exiles. “A lot of young people are frustrated with the Tibetan freedom struggle because it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere.
There are whispers among Tibetan youth that if the terrorist attacks of 9/11 got the world’s attention, perhaps something more proactive than the non-violent movement led by the Dalai Lama might focus attention on the Tibetan cause.”
While Tibetan young people abhor violence, the sentiment here seems to be that the international community focuses on violent struggles, while ignoring peaceful movements – this, despite several big-budget Hollywood films being made on the subject. But it is a bleak situation – those who do not go to Tibetan settlements in the West, seek r efuge in drugs. It is these frustrated young people that feel, taking up arms might give them a sense of direction – even as India looks set to capitulate to China on the Tibet issue.
Pande’s film, then, documents the story of those, who see war as the only way to achieving any sort of Tibetan nation state, whether as a part of China or not. She talks to members of the TYC, interviews both young people and freedom fighters such as Tenzin Tsundue, who scaled the walls of Mumbai’s Oberoi Hotel last year, where a Chinese political delegation were staying, to hoist the Tibetan flag. While Pande does get the Dalai Lama on film, much is to be desired, both in terms of questions asked as well as in the Lama’s approach.
Choklay takes a different track: that any publicity for the Tibetan cause is good publicity. “Culture is something that should evolve and change all the time,” he says, referring to the attitude that the Miss Tibet pageant was against the nation’s culture. “The pageant viewers aren’t regular protesters, they aren’t necessarily the kind of people who are politically aware, and if we can tap into newer audiences, increase awareness of our plight, why not?”
Both films are indicative of a changing Tibet. Or rather, of a changing Tibetan community in exile, since information of what is actually happening in Tibet is hard to come by – except in instances of brute murder, like this January’s reported execution of Lobsang Dhondup, on charges of ‘splitting the motherland’. Forty-four years since the Dalai Lama escaped Tibet and the communist Chinese, the community survives as best it can without actually giving in to outside cultural influences – whether in India, or in the smaller settlements in Nepal, Switzerland and USA.
“The solution to the confusion is to be as Tibetan as possible – being Tibetan is not about the clothes we wear or about the language we speak, but about human qualities, about compassion,” says Choklay. “Despite being born in India, if we actually start thinking of ourselves as Indian, the whole cause is jeopardised. It is the cause that gives us a sense of direction, a reason to live, the only thing that carries us forward. But again, every day forward is a diminishment of hope.”
