By Tenzin Choephel
I was born and schooled in Dharamsala, India, and I have fond memories of the place. But there is also another place that I come from, a place I have never seen with my own eyes. This is Tibet. In 1959, the Chinese occupation of our country forced many Tibetans including my parents to escape to India. They never got to return. But even after settling down in exile they never considered India to be their own country and still hold the foreigner’s registration certificate* issued by the Indian Government, which they renew every year, in the hope that they can return to their rightful homeland not too far in the future.
Exile is defined in the dictionary as a state or a period of absence from one’s own country or homeland. Perhaps, strictly speaking, this definition does not apply to me for I should have been there once to be absent subsequently. Besides, unlike my parents, I do consider India to be my home. I have considered India to be my home for as long as I can remember. I grew up eating rice and dal in school, admiring Sharukh Khan’s acting skills, eating idly sambar and sometimes-humming Tamil songs while in college and what not. However, if exile means anything to me, it means an amalgam of experiences. Exile means insecurities, regrets, confusions and resentments. It also means opportunities, growth, fulfillments and pride.
Exile is insecurity. The memories of the spring of 1994 in Dharamsala are still very fresh in my mind. That was the first time many of us young Tibetans born in exile experienced for the first time the fear and insecurity of exile; we found out what it felt like to be in a conflict zone. A misunderstanding between the local Tibetans and the Indians surrounding the death of a local Indian youth sparked off anti-Tibetan reprisal that led to the Indians attacking people and properties associated with Tibetans including my school. I can still recall that fateful night when we were sleeping in our dormitory and the faint sound of hundreds of people shouting grew louder and louder until it reached thunderous proportion and rocks and bricks started breaking through the window panes, by which time we were all frightened to death, running here and there for cover in sheer commotion. School properties were vandalized indiscriminately. Pipelines supplying water to the school were cut off. We had to spend weeks living off scarce resources. Thanks to the local authority, the school remained protected by the local police after that first day of violence until normalcy was restored.
We were angry but didn’t know how to react, for this is not our own land and the local Indians are essentially our hosts. And refugees, as guests are, I believe, always at the mercy of their hosts, dependent on hospitality, which can be revoked at any moment. With that, I think, I began to understand for the first time what our teachers meant when they said we were people with proverbial ‘R’ (Refugees) etched on our foreheads. Insecurity, I felt, was perhaps the best word that underscores the dimension of our condition as citizens to no nation. Nothing is secure for an exile. If due to some reason, we were asked to leave the host country tomorrow, we cannot complain but pack up and leave, but where…I wonder.
Exile is also resentment and animosity. We were often told when we were small kids that our real home was back in Tibet, the land of snows, and India was just our second home and we must one day return to our real home. As a kid, I had difficulty trying to make sense out of that. But I used to sing Longsho (stand up), the patriotic song that we used to sing during the morning assemblies and uprising days, with passion, stamping my foot as hard as I could when towards the end of the song the line that demands the ‘Chinese to get out of Tibet’ is sung out. In my mind, the Chinese were imaginary evil people, who invaded our country and tortured and killed our brothers and sisters back in the land of snows.
As I grew up and got wiser, things started making sense. The passing of every 10th March** made me more politically conscious of our national plight. Listening to many friends in school who had actually braved frostbites and numerous dangers crossing the frigid Himalayas to escape from Tibet in search of a better future in India made me more cognizant of the reality of my own identity and for that matter of my own existence. Although I have not experienced life in my own country first hand, the environment in which I grew up made me identify strongly with a nation and a people struggling for existence. The once imaginary evil Chinese people who invaded my imaginary homeland gradually assumed new reality in my mind. Growing up on the video footages of the Chinese police brutalizing the Tibetans back home and listening to tales of untold suffering and hardship from ex-political prisoners who had escaped into freedom would often inspire a deep sense of resentment and animosity against the Chinese government.
Exile also means regret. My father, very young at that time and before he even knew my mother existed, was in Lhasa when the great Lhasa uprising unfolded. In the resulting crackdown, when the Tibetan people were crushed by the Chinese military, he was among around eighty thousand Tibetans forced to flee along with the Dalai Lama to India. He had to leave his entire family back in Kham Dragyab in Eastern Tibet and he never saw them again. In fact, the first time he heard from them was when he received a letter from his home in native Dragyab sent through a new-arrival to India after almost thirty-five years. One of his dearest wishes was to go back to his home in Dragyab and see his only surviving brother and the home he had to leave behind fifty years ago. I promised him that I would help him fulfill his dream. This dream was to never materialize. My father passed away after a short illness two years ago. It was an immense personal loss for me. Now whenever I think of him, it is with an inevitable sense of guilt that I was not able to help him fulfill this dream of seeing his home and his brother. I am sure many other Tibetans have similar stories to recount.
The life of an exile is often characterized by moments of confusion, confusion for oneself as well as for others. The other day I joined a couple of students including my friend who were having tittle-tattle of sorts. My friend introduced me as a graduate student from India to the two new faces. Both of them were pleasantly surprised. The Indian asked me, “Are you an Indian?” I replied that I was a Tibetan born and raised in India. The Chinese student smiled and said I was technically a Chinese then (as according to him Tibet is a “part” of China). The Indian wasted no time and said that since I was born in India I had to be an Indian by birth. To save my self from the kind of identity debate I smelled we were getting into I immediately replied, “Well, I am more Indian than Chinese but more Tibetan than Indian.” My remark was greeted with a sort of confused acceptance. Can an exile ever escape the inescapable fact that he or she will have to live with the sense of un-belongingness that so characterizes the condition of an exile?
The life of an exile has many aspects that never cease to trouble him or her. Despite these unfortunate experiences accompanying an exile like shadows, the condition of exile often facilitates the development of an individual and by extension a community that acquires attributes, which may be nothing short of unique. It is interesting that although these unfortunate experiences trouble an exile often, there are many factors that enrich an exile’s experience and broaden his or her intellectual and social horizon. Edward Said put it succinctly: … exiles cross borders, break barriers of thoughts and experiences.’
My status as an exile has given me many remarkable things and has in many ways redefined the notion of exile, if at all it can be defined. For me and for many Tibetans of my generation, exile has also come to mean opportunities, growth, fulfillment and pride.
Exile is opportunity. My parents often used to tell me that I should never waste this newfound opportunity in exile to reach great heights academically and professionally, opportunities they never had. I feel fortunate not only to have been born to parents both of whom had escaped from Tibet and carried strong cultural roots but also to have the opportunity to be educated along the lines of a modern mainstream scientific culture.
My parents have instilled in me a sense of pride for our rich cultural heritage and hence have given me a reason to prize it and pass it on to my children and grand children. Thanks to the blessings of His Holiness the Dalai Lama, I had the opportunity to go to a Tibetan refugee school where I learned to truly appreciate the uniqueness and the value of the rich cultural heritage to which I belong.
The modern educational opportunities that were made available to us allowed me to expand my intellectual horizon and ensured that, like any other children born as citizens to free nations, I could also dream of becoming a doctor or an engineer or a scientist. I never felt that, being an exile, I could not achieve what non-exiles could and this has been one of the motivating principles that have brought me to where I am right now, actually in the process of living my dreams.
Exile is also growth, whether experientially or intellectually. Again Edward Said put it beautifully when he said, ‘Most people are principally aware of one culture, one setting, one home, exiles are aware of at least two, and this plurality of vision gives rise to an awareness of simultaneous dimensions, an awareness that to borrow a phrase from music is “contrapuntal”.’
My life has taken me to many places, allowed me to learn about and experience multiple cultures. At my hometown in India I used to speak with my friends in Nepali, the lingua franca; at school, in Tibetan; at college, mostly in English, Hindi and occasionally in broken Tamil. My friends in graduate school are often surprised and appreciative when I speak in different languages with different friends on campus. But to an exile, this versatility is not a big deal. It is but an inevitable consequence of the very condition of his existence. I had classmates back in school whose command over Hindi was better than the only Indian in our class!
Had my parents remained in Tibet I would have ended up growing up with my vision blinkered and my mind indoctrinated with lies and distorted information, and worse being relegated to the life of a second class citizen. Like many Tibetan refugees and émigrés, I too feel that the condition of exile, though unfortunate in many ways, has been a blessing in disguise. The freedom that I enjoy and the expanded worldview that has resulted from my having been in contact with multi-cultural environments allow me to develop to my fullest capacity as a person.
At no point in my life in India have I felt that I have been discriminated against the rest of the Indian students. I could compete with them for academic opportunities on equal footing. I have had the opportunity to work on many research projects in my academic field for which at no point I have been questioned on the grounds of my Tibetan, or more technically non-Indian, background. My supervisors thought I was as Indian as any other Indian and treated likewise, though they knew I was a Tibetan refugee. This is perhaps one of the reasons why I feel strong connection to this land and feel that it is the home I have known, if not the home I belong to.
Fulfillment is another word I choose to highlight my kind of exile. When my parents came to India in 1959, they owned literally nothing to start with. They were among the hundreds of thousands of Tibetan refugees who worked as laborers involved in making many of the high altitude pucca roads in the state of Sikkim. My mother tells me of how their life changed from being homeless refugees, having compelled to live with bare minimum, to one with a decent standard of living today, being able to provide their children with at least a decent education.
Like most émigrés, Tibetans are hard working. It was sheer hard work that changed the destiny of my parents ever since they came to India fifty years ago. They never went to school themselves. But their dogged perseverance has produced at least an aerospace engineer and a law graduate. When my father was in the hospital the day before he left us, acquaintances and friends assured him that he still had time to live and that he would be fine. But what my father told them moved me to tears. He said he had nothing to regret if he died, saying that he had at least made sure that none of his children were uneducated and hence disadvantaged. As I held his hand, I shared in the sense of fulfillment that gave him solace and composure in spite of his failing heart.
Exile is pride. It is ironic that being an exile can be a source of pride when there are many reasons –political, social and cultural- to feel demoralized. I remember someone, an Indian dignitary perhaps, saying that we are lucky to be born at this critical juncture of our nation’s history when we have so much to contribute towards a cause that is not only as just and worthwhile to pursue as any but also an unavoidable moral responsibility. My generation must produce the Bhagat Singhs and Suchdevs of Tibet’s freedom struggle. We have the opportunity right before us to create history for the Tibetan nation. Our elders tell us that unlike students of free nations, we have extra responsibilities. An average Indian student’s ultimate goal in life may be to do well academically, get a well paying job and live a high quality life. A Tibetan’s is not just that but to work with our national cause on mind. This is our burden and our privilege. So, when my Indian friend back in India, told me that we Tibetan students were not just any other students but also freedom fighters, I felt special and proud.
To an exile-born like me, who has never seen the land from where he is supposed to have been exiled from, it is perhaps difficult to explain in definitive terms, what exile is. My parents and many of my schoolmates who actually came from Tibet can perhaps answer this question more clearly. To them, exile is as real as anything. Exile is something that happened to them in real physical sense. To me, though still a by-product of this phenomenon, exile is more of a state of mind that can be best spoken of in terms of personal experiences. But what may be interesting is that exile is not always an unfortunate state of existence, as non-exiles often tend to assume. As much as exile can be defined by insecurity, regret, confusion and resentment, exile can also mean opportunity, growth, fulfilment and pride.
* Foreigners registration certificate is a residency document given to Tibetan refugees in India that has to be renewed every year for them to be able to legally reside in India.
** 10th March is the Tibetan national uprising day
Tenzin Choephel is an alumnus of the Tibetan Children’s Village schools at Lower and Upper Dharamsala, India. He is currently a PhD student at the Department of Aerospace Engineering, the Pennsylvania State University, USA.
[OPINION-DISCLAIMER]
