Survival of a Culture: Tibetan Refugees in India

Abstract

Throughout human history there has always been a flow of persecuted and dislocated people. Today, in the age of totalitarianism, that flow has become a flood. In our time, millions have fled from reigns of terror in their homelands seeking refuge and a new life in another society and culture. Most have no other choice but to escape from intolerable threat and danger, to break with the bonds of their heritage and try to become part of a different national tradition, contributing some of their own values to the new country of their choice. For most of them, their past is gone, their life has changed under the pressure of new demands caused by the need for assimilation. In that sense Tibetans who fled to India are not ordinary refugees. They have taken refuge not as individuals alone, but rather as a national polity that has escaped the destruction taking place in Tibet and has sought and been given the protective mantle of a neighboring friendly country. Both a people and cultural institutions have taken refuge in a host setting and have demonstrated both strength and survivability. That is the extraordinary and unique story of the Tibetans in India, a story that demonstrates the vitality of the Tibetan culture and of the people-the one hundred thousand who fled with their leader, the Dalai Lama, from Tibet across the Himalayas to the safety of a land with its own great religious tradition, a land originally the major source of Tibetan Buddhism. India, the land of Gandhi and the land where the Buddha once lived, was the best sanctuary Tibetan polity could have found. Clearly, the survival of Tibetan culture in the Indian diaspora is one of the wondrous and hopeful events of our time. Twenty-six years ago, when the Dalai Lama arrived in India after his incredible escape from Lhasa over the high Himalayan mountain passes,