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The lure of India

By Tsering Namgyal

Sunday, Mar 12, 2000, Page 9

Illustration: Sweet Watermelon

Every year, an estimated 3,000 Tibetan refugees arrive in India to join its own billion-strong population. Risking their lives, they follow the footsteps of the Dalai Lama's own arduous trek into freedom in March 1959 to join what Salman Rushdie has so aptly called "that inexhaustible horn of plenty." Not plenty as in terms of economic opportunity, but as in the country's "plentiful" cultural and religious mosaic.

"He is here to stay," India's sprightly Defense Minister George Fernandes said when asked for his response to Chinese demands to hand over the Karmapa Lama. Only six months before the Karmapa's arrival, Fernandes, an Indian Christian who makes no secret of his fearless sympathy for the Dalai Lama, risked his career by referring to China as India's "No 1 enemy."

My own experience with India, the land of immense beauty and lush landscapes, began when I was born in a Himalayan town to Tibetans. In India, they have found a home away from home, which at times is more spiritually developed and geographically habitable than rugged Tibet itself.

birthplace of buddha

India is the birthplace of Buddhism and, for that matter, home to the most coveted of Buddhist temples and sacred pilgrimage sites, which the average Tibetans would not even dream of visiting if it was not for the Chinese brutality.

Indeed, many Tibetans say that the exile is a "blessing in disguise" or due to their good karma, for only the Tibetan elite would have the wherewithal to travel to India in the past. Centuries ago, adventurous Tibetan scholars crossed the Himalayas to come to India to study at the great Buddhist University of Nalanda and the more privileged spent enormous energy translating the Buddhist canons from Sanskrit to Tibetan.

Thumi Sambhota, a scholar-aide to the great seventh century Tibetan King Songtsen Gampo (whose claim to fame in Chinese history is his marriage to a Tang dynasty princess) created the Tibetan alphabet and grammar modeled on Sanskrit.

For more evidence on this Indo-Tibetan nexus, a popular Tibetan saying is a good place to start: "There were three who were most kind to Tibet: the Precious Guru (Padma Sambhava), the Lord Master (Atisha) and the Precious Master (Tsong Khapa)."

All but one of the trio were Indians. The legendary master Padma Sambhava, was an adopted prince of Afghanistan, then called Odiyana -- at the time a cultural part of the Indian subcontinent -- while Atisha, who played a major role in bringing Buddhism to Tibet, was born in Bengal.

Not for nothing did the former Indian Prime Minister Moraji Desai call India and Tibet "two branches of one bodhi tree." Thanks to famous Indian secularism, this Buddhist tradition, in all its ceremonial pomp, continues to this day. Every winter, Buddhists from all over the world go to Bodhgaya in the Central Indian state of Bihar to attend the teachings that the Dalai Lama gives at a monument which houses the great Bodhi tree, meditating under which the Buddha attained enlightenment some 2,500 years ago.

But the Tibetans' ease in India may be attributed more for its sheer diversity than to the spiritual bond. Hinduism has now all but replaced Buddhism as India's predominant religion. This inexorable Indian multiplicity continues to enthrall me even after two decades of traveling through the rambling subcontinent. The country stretches from the beautiful Buddhist state of Ladakh to the violent Sikh state of Punjab to the former Portuguese colony of Goa. India is a world in itself -- or, to paraphrase Indian novelist Pankaj Mishra, "many worlds." ("India is split into a great many separate worlds," Mishra wrote recently, "you can live in without knowing anything about others.")

There is so much Indian diversity that traveling in South India, which remains adamant in its refusal to learn Hindi, I am no less a foreigner than Japanese tourists.

cultural avoirdupois

Tibetans, therefore, could easily pass for someone from Ladakh or Manipur -- another Indian state bearing a more Mongoloid race. This sheer cultural avoirdupois has helped Tibetans create their own little Tibet in India, or their "own world," replete with its communities and monasteries, an indispensable accessory to the Tibetan life. During its four decades in exile, Tibetans have also set up their schools within the Indian education system where Tibetan language is taught, and continue to maintain and freely practice their religion. To illustrate but one benefit of being educated in India, Tibetans brought up there speak fluent Tibetan -- a privilege non-existent to those born elsewhere.

As if that is not enough, India has helped and continues to help, financially and otherwise, the emigre Tibetan community, all in the face of its own grueling poverty. Few Indian politicians of any weight have criticized the Tibetan community or the Dalai Lama, who is accorded treatment fit for a most distinguished guest by the government and highly respected by the famously spiritually oriented Indian populace. Tibetans are grateful. While appearing on CNN's "Larry King Live" talk show recently, the Dalai Lama, when asked how the Indian government is treating him, said in his rather Indian-accented English: "Very happy, very well, indeed."

Such Indian hospitality, however modest, has greatly helped the Tibetans. Indeed, despite any breakthrough to the Tibetan problem, the proverbial Tibetan optimism shows no sign of exhaustion.

During a visit to India last month, I met an elderly and frail Tibetan on a bus from Delhi to Dehra Dun, a town located in the foothills of Himalayas. We talked incessantly for all the six hours of the bus trip.

"Would you return to Tibet, if it gets independence," I asked at one point, trying not to sound too condescending.

"Of course," he replied. "Wouldn't you?" he snapped.

Although he looked all of his 55 years, a certain sense of serenity never escaped his face. His naturalistic attitude was a welcome relief from the never-happy-until-your-stock-prices-go-up East Asian entrepreneurs that I am so used to meeting in my daily life.

As the bus coughed and whined across the hills, he bragged about how well things are going in India, how much he has enjoyed all the four decades of his prime years here.

"I really don't remember much about Tibet, actually," he said, saying that he came when was 15 years old.

Such is the typical Tibetan attitude towards exile. Karmapa's recent arrival in India, he said, is a major boost to the morale.

"It is hard to imagine that several newspapers had Karmapa's pictures on the front page for at least a week," he said. "It is really good for us, and good for the Dalai Lama."

a break in meerut

As the bus stopped for a break in Meerut, I bought a copy of The Indian Express newspaper, hoping to see something about the Karmapa. Predictably, as I flipped through the paper, I saw the paper's Sunday features section with a full page about the Karmapa -- an Indian journalist's account of his visit to Sikkim's Rumtek monastery, a seat of the former Karmapa, two decades ago.

"There you go, again," he said, his finger pointing at the pictures. Both of his children, he said, are in Canada, "where the younger generation seem to have more opportunity for personal growth."

Despite the lure of the West -- where an increasing number of Tibetans are now willing to be "twice exiled" -- most Tibetans are at ease in India.

While much is made of India's nuclear adventurism and its religious fundamentalism, its humanitarian gestures often go unreported and unacknowledged.

Unfortunately, however, much publicity is reserved for the pro-Tibet movements in the Western superpowers, which are not only exaggerated but often wrongheaded -- measures aimed to fulfill their own strategic or economic ambitions.

The Tibetan issue and the Dalai Lama has now become another card for the Western superpowers to shuffle when dealing with the Chinese regime or as a price for their trade relations with China. Besides some financial aid and a bountiful of pro-Tibet rhetoric, they continue to ignore the Tibetan reality.

But India, in its own way prosaic way, nevertheless is doing all it can to sustain the Tibetan soul. As befitting a nation which gave birth to Buddhism, India is one of the few countries in the world -- as exemplified in its unconditional reception of the Karmapa last month, and of the Dalai Lama four decades ago -- which still has the guts to put "principles above politics."

proud civilization

As a great country with a proud civilization, India hardly sees the need to let its strategic interests interfere with its own code of conduct, shaped, in no small measure, by its ancient philosophy.

Over the centuries, this elaborate system of thought has helped transform Tibet from a militaristic state to a practitioner's paradise.

Traveling in modern India, one could not help but rejoice in what one sees: China may have succeeded in destroying the Tibetan monasteries and killing the monks and nuns, they have failed to suffocate the Tibetan soul.

It is very much alive and kicking in small-town India.

Tsering Namgyal, a Tibetan writer, is based in Taipei where he is working on his PhD.
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