Tibetan Exiles Research Articles

Burning from the Inside: Narrating Trauma of Self-Immolation in Tibetan Exile Cinema

Burning from the Inside: Narrating Trauma of Self-Immolation in Tibetan Exile Cinema

Nothing is ever lost or forgotten: Searching for the traces of Mo Dickyi Sangmo

AbstractThis ethnographic article provides glimpses into the everyday life of an elderly Tibetan woman, Mo Dickyi Sangmo, who used to live in the Tibetan exile capital of McLeod Ganj in northwest India. Old age for her was a falling apart of her life world, giving rise to a series of absences in her daily life. I always sensed in her a longing for that which was missing, gathered through her somber moods and constant complaints. While others emphasized Dickyi's annoyed and closed‐off persona, I sensed that there was more to her; something was hidden in the gaps between her words and the silences that rested in between us. This article grew from my attempt at lending Mo Dickyi a compassionate ear, in an effort to understand what had become of her. By combining words and images, it became an experiment in a type of seeing and listening that is like a tender and soothing touch. By sensing Mo Dickyi through my words and in my images of her, this contribution is also a call out to the reader's imagination to uncover the gaps, and to possibly connect with the loneliness of Mo Dickyi's heart.

Concentric memories, circular encounters, and post-Buddhist imaginations: contesting Dharamsala as ‘Little Lhasa’

ABSTRACT This paper analyses representations of Dharamsala, Tibetan capital in exile or capital of exiled Tibet, as a pool of signifiers for Tibetan exilic construction. Like Tibetan exile itself, Dharamsala carries the archival claim of preserving everything constructed as authentic about old Tibet. On the other hand, Dharamsala is also regarded as an avant-garde of Tibetan modernity. By focusing on Tenzin Tsundue’s short story ‘Kora. Full Circle’ (2002) and Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam’s film Dreaming Lhasa (2005), I explore various representational trends that expose the inner paradoxes and ambivalences of Tibetan exilic identities at the turn of the twenty-first century. Following Anand’s model of deconstructing and analysing the etymological possibilities of the word Dharamshala, I look at the Tibetan exiled capital as a disputed centre, hosting both nostalgic narratives of reproduction and their very opposite: attempts to reformulate Tibetanness in innovative and disruptive ways.

Understanding Tibetan Exile: a review of literature and bibliometric analysis (1960-2021)

ABSTRACT This research aims to use VOSviewer to undertake bibliometric analysis to map the primary areas of Tibetan Exile literature to create a taxonomy of topic subareas and a research plan on this issue. Two hundred eighty-one papers published between 1960 and 2021, which were extracted from the Scopus database, have been examined to evaluate their interconnection, clusters, and citations to build a text-based map. The study highlights the most cited document, essential journals publishing on the issue, important keywords, prominent authors, and discussions on Tibetan refugees; also classifying the subthemes and the leading author’s name. The findings will guide researchers interested in contemporary Tibetan studies. This categorization table of subthemes explored in the last 61 years comprises the following subjects: identity & human rights, immigration, government, media, health, international politics, Dalai Lama, nationhood, preservation of culture, resettlement, and a new generation of Tibetans.

Dialogical decoloniality and Tibetan conceptions of indigeneity

Current discourse on entrenched differences within the People’s Republic of China (PRC) is defined in terms of evolving concepts of nationality and ethnicity. Tibetans are recognised as one of the 55 ethnic minorities distinct from the dominant Han Chinese (who comprise over 91% of the total population). This majority-minority framework has been cemented in China’s normative thinking as a multi-ethnic nation-state. Political movements among Tibetan exiles based in India advocate for greater autonomy within the framework of the constitution of the PRC and the Law on Regional National Autonomy (LRNA). Based on ‘patchwork ethnographic’ work, this paper seeks to investigate the refusal among Tibetan exiles to associate Tibet’s collective self with the concept of indigeneity. The PRC does not recognise the existence of indigenous peoples, although it voted in support of the 2007 United Nations Declaration of the Rights of the Indigenous Peoples. These two divergent conceptions of indigeneity preclude the possibility of staking greater claims to indigenous sovereignty within China. By wading into debates in the Global South on decoloniality, this article is a call to revisit assumptions that have caused a reductive reading of indigeneity either exclusively as a derivative right or through the outright refusal to recognise it. I propose the notion of ‘dialogical decoloniality’ as opposed to selective osmosis in the uptake of theoretical concepts among states-in-waiting.

Dr. B. R. Ambedkar’s Contribution to the Revival of Buddhism in Modern India: A Historical Perspective

Buddhism is one of the major religions in the world. It is a world religion, which arose in India, and is based on the teachings of Siddhārtha Gautama who was deemed a "Buddha" (Enlightened human being). Buddhism has been reemerging in India since the past century, due to its adoption by many Indian intellectuals, the migration of Buddhist Tibetan exiles, and the mass conversion of hundreds of thousands of Hindu Dalits led by Dr. B. R. Ambedkar. Ambedkar was greatly impressed by studying Tipitaka, the collection of Buddha’s sayings. He said that India would rise once again to its glory, when people turn to Buddhism and practice the high ethical principles preached by Buddha. After publishing a series of books and articles arguing that Buddhism was the only way for the Dalits to gain equality, Ambedkar publicly converted on 14 October 1956, at Deekshabhoomi, Nagpur. After receiving ordination, Ambedkar gave dhamma diksha to his followers. The ceremony included 22 vows given to all new converts after ‘Three Jewels’ and ‘Five Precepts’. Even though Ambedkar had been a follower of Buddhism for barely seven weeks, during that small period he contributed immensely for the promotion of Buddhism. At the time of his death around seven lakh Dalits had become Buddhists. He saw Buddhism as a religion based on wisdom and compassion, which supports tolerance and human rights, and fulfils the deep spiritual needs of people. Thus Ambedkar’s contribution to the revival of Buddhism in contemporary India is very significant

Resistance and Suffering

This article traces forms of resistance in the early Tibetan diaspora (c. 1959–79) in India as both political and emotional practices. It thereby seeks to make productive recent insights of research into the history of emotions for the study of migration and diaspora in general and Tibetan exile in particular. It zooms in on resistance and suffering as key concepts of Tibetan diasporic public discourse, both constituting complex semantic networks that entangle elements from Tibetan and Buddhist heritage as well as the refugees’ historical experiences. The article demonstrates the centrality of emotions to exilic morality and moral renegotiations, by probing into their historical effectivity and change. Furthermore, it will show how these concepts and practices are temporalised. This will uncover the ways in which key concepts such as resistance and suffering establish and negotiate multiple temporal relations to diverse pasts, presents and futures.

The paradox of citizenship and nationality among Tibetans living in India

ABSTRACT This article discusses the implications of a landmark judgement of Delhi High Court on 22 December 2010 which declared that Tibetans born in India between 1959 and 1987 were eligible for Indian citizenship. A majority of Tibetans in India steadfastly refuse to avail of this facility as a mark of patriotism to their fatherland Tibetan. The Tibetan Exile Government’s discouragement of Tibetans acquiring Indian citizenship needs to be understood as apprehensions based on erroneous conflation of citizenship with nationality. Drawing from ethnographic interactions with Tibetan Bhutias from Darjeeling and Kalimpong in West Bengal, who have always been Indian citizens, as well as Tibetan nomads in Ladakh, I argue that for Tibetans in India the choices of aspiring for citizenship or retaining refugee status are pragmatic, contingent ones as they navigate through bureaucracies, lived realities of their lives in India and their aspirations as Tibetans.

Transformation of education in the perspective of secular ethics

The article analyzes the preconditions for the transformation of the higher education system to the trinity of social, emotional, and ethical learning. The author considers the formation of education system with the use of secular Buddhist ethics on the example of Emory University (Emory, USA). The article pays great attention to the speeches of Dalai Lama and the influence of Buddhist philosophy of education on the system of socio-emotional and ethical education. The theoretical analysis of the curriculum of social-emotional-ethical training presents the methodology and the methods of the study. The object of the research is the Buddhist philosophy of education. The subject of the study is SEE Learning program (social-emotional-ethical learning) as a way of reception of the Buddhist philosophy of education in the higher education system. The author considers the implementation of SEE Learning program – social-emotional-ethical learning at Emory University (Atlanta, Georgia). This program is the result of the university’s collaboration with Dalai Lama XVI and the Tibetan Exile Community. The author concludes that the change of value orientations and the decolonization of education are factors that influence the development of educational systems. Social-emotional-ethical learning can solve the problem of lack of ethical education at universities. The introduction of ethics education will enable higher education institutions to produce not only practically and theoretically competent professionals, but also individuals who are able to understand the consequences of their decisions.

Disciplining Statelessness: Fragmentary Outcomes of the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy in India

ABSTRACT Tibetan settlements in India house the largest population of Tibetan exiles and are crucial repositories of Tibetan culture and nationalism in the political struggle for Tibet. The settlements privilege the moral narrative of statelessness as an integral part of the Tibetan struggle. However, given the precarity of land tenure, these settlements are steadily hollowing out, with an increasing number of Tibetans choosing to migrate out of India. In response, the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) and the Indian government have jointly framed the Tibetan Rehabilitation Policy (TRP) to consolidate the Tibetan population in India. The TRP functions as a disciplinary regime that is delivered through a centralised process for creating secure land tenure for Tibetan settlements, and aims to retain the Tibetans as a stateless population in India. Using three case studies of Tibetan settlements across India, we demonstrate that Tibetans are resisting this moral injunction of statelessness by opting out of the disciplinary logic of the TRP. This resistance includes processes of outmigration and pursuing citizen-like claims in India. These forms of resistance reflect the fragmentation within the exile community over the political value of statelessness, with many Tibetans exploring new ways to imagine their struggle as rooted in citizenship claims.

Tibetan Medicine, Buddhism and Psychiatry: Mental Health and Healing in a Tibetan Exile Community, written by Susannah Deane

Tibetan Medicine, Buddhism and Psychiatry: Mental Health and Healing in a Tibetan Exile Community, written by Susannah Deane

Children Displaced: Deinstitutionalisation of Child Care Institutions in Tibetan Exile Settlements in Dharamshala, India

This study assesses the present situation of the deinstitutionalisation and alternative care arrangements in exile settlements concerning various cultural and socio-structural factors. It explores how elements of social structure and culture operate to transform the residential care institutions to community-based alternative care arrangements for 10,000 young Tibetans uprooted from Tibet and presently settled in India. Their day-to-day problems of repatriation and resettlement in an unfamiliar demography with distinct ethnic values are pushing them to the margins. The dependence of these children on their exile government, the host community and the uncertainty of going back to their country makes them depressed, dependent and vulnerable to trauma and negligence. The study uses cross-sectional, descriptive, exploratory and qualitative methods. Primary data were collected through in-depth, semi-structured interviews. Open-ended questions were used for interviews in order to gain in-depth information from the respondents. Twenty-five informants were selected on a purposive basis to facilitate a focus on information-rich cases that illuminate the research questions. The selection criteria of informants apply to their professional experience of deinstitutionalisation in Tibetan settlements, professionals having experience of heading care institutions, officials of the Central Tibetan Administration, people from non-government organisations, development agencies and government officials who were a part of the interventions. Respondents from both state and non-state agencies were selected for the study to avoid bias.

Decoloniality, power and ideology in the social studies textbooks of Tibetan exile schools

ABSTRACTHistory is often deemed essential to the construction of national identity. However, the issue of how refugee communities construct their national identity and the image of their historical legacy via the teaching of history is an understudied one. As such, this study examines the role of history teaching in the construction of national identity in the context of Tibetan refugee schools in India. By employing critical discourse analysis of the primary-level social studies textbooks with a focus on power and representation, this paper analyses the key features of nation-building project of the Tibetan exiles, and how nation-building project manifests itself in the curricular and pedagogical practices of social studies education. The findings show presence of an overriding political and cultural agenda in the social studies textbooks. The paper argues that refugees and other communities in diaspora live in an unstable socio-political climate where the use of history for the construction of collective national identity is even more pertinent and urgent.

Enduring liminality: voting rights and Tibetan exiles in India

ABSTRACT This paper examines the location and production of liminality with regard to voting rights of Tibetan exile community in India. Liminality is related here to the legal and bureaucratic ‘inbetweenness’ that characterises and orders the life of the Tibetan exiles in India. Tibetans born in India have been registered as voters in India’s electoral list albeit without an accompanying claim or path to citizenship. The paper argues that these voting rights are simultaneously contested and embraced by the Tibetan exile community. Responses of the exile community to voting rights are produced by the interaction between (a) the lived experience of statelessness and (b) complex constructions of cultural, political and legal identity. Both these factors are fundamentally informed by the liminal space that the exile community inhabits in India.

Positioning Sowa Rigpa in India

The years leading up to the recognition of Sowa Rigpa (Tibetan medicine) by the Government of India in 2010 saw unprecedented interaction between various branches of the tradition and the state apparatus. These interactions grew particularly intense during March 2008, when two conferences focusing on related issues took place. The first referred to ‘Tibetan medicine’ and was organised by Tibetan exile institutions, while the second spoke of ‘Sowa Rigpa’ and was hosted by a coalition of Himalayan Indian associations. Through detailed ethnography of these events, this article examines the way in which a medical system was discursively constructed and positioned on the brink of state enfranchisement. It shows how ‘discourse coalitions’ and antagonisms formed during these events, and enquires as to the implications of these for the balance of power in Sowa Rigpa and for its positioning in relation to the Indian state, technoscience, and the growing market for traditional medicines.

Seeking Dhasa; Finding Lhasa: Liminality and Narrative in the Tibetan Refugee Capital of Dharamsala

This article explores the role of narrative and narrativity in stabilising identity in an exile setting, read here as a way to avert what Bjørn Thomassen calls the ‘danger’ inherent to liminality. It does this by analysing the shape and visualscape of the little Himalayan town of Dharamsala, which serves as the secular and religious ‘capital’ of Tibetan exile. It attempts to decode the narratives which allow ‘Dhasa’, as Dharamsala is colloquially known, to cohere and correspond to its metonymically aspirational other – Lhasa, the capital of old Tibet. There can be read in this act of assonant naming the beginnings of a narrative geared towards generating nostalgia for a lost homeland, alluding to the possibility of its reclamation and restitution in exile. This article explores how this narrative is evidence of the fact that it is in indeterminacy; in liminality in other words, that the ‘structuration’ that Thomassen proposes, becomes possible at all. Even as it alludes to the impossibility of transplanting cultures whole, the article also examines closely the Foucauldian notion of ‘trace residue’ inherent to ruptures in prior epistemes, treating this idea as central to creating new-‘old’ orientations for this refugee community in exile. Following Thomassen and Szakolczai, liminality is here treated as a concept applicable to time as well as place; individuals as well as communities, and social ‘events’ or changes of immense magnitude. It is this notion of liminality that the article proposes has to be a central concept in any exploration of exile groups which have to live in the spaces between the shorn identity markers of the past – rooted as these must be in a lost homeland – and the present, where they must be iterated or man-ufactured anew.

Locating music in capitalism: a view from exile Tibet

AbstractSince the late 1990s, a thriving scene of pop music has developed among the numerically very small and globally highly dispersed Tibetan exile community. This clearly connects it with globalisation and the spread of what is termed the neoliberal phase of capitalism to India and Nepal where most Tibetan exiles live, and the related spread of digital recording technology and facilities – commodities produced by often large, multinational corporations. Yet this micro industry is not profitable, and even though it is pop music and monetised, it is not ‘commercial’, and in fact is seen and structured more as ‘community work’. Exile Tibetan pop music thus cannot be located outside of capitalism, yet at the same time it is not in and of itself capitalist. In this paper, the author explores new ways in which we can locate music in capitalism, looking beyond the ideas of commercialism or commoditisation and takeover or resistance that have dominated theoretical approaches since Adorno and have fixed popular music especially with a still-enduring ‘capitalist’ image. The author draws in particular on the historian Fernand Braudel's model of capitalism as an ‘anti-market’ that lies ‘on top’ of other social and economic layers. Thus capitalism exerts global hegemony, yet there remain uneven spaces such as exile Tibetan pop music, which are in and of themselves not capitalist, existing within it and because of it.

Preparing for the Future: Reassessing the Possibility of Violence Emanating From Tibetan Exile Communities in India

In his 1997 analysis of the history of Tibetan and Chinese relations (The Snow Lion and the Dragon), Melvyn Goldstein advised in his concluding chapter that Tibetans were unlikely to indefinitely put up with the Chinese occupation of Tibet without resorting to violence. However, despite continuing speculation, more widespread or sustained campaigns of violence have largely failed to materialize. The principle objectives of this study are to establish why the scale of violence that Goldstein warned about has so far failed to emerge; and to assess whether existing evidence supports or undermines claims that violence may in the future emanate from Tibetan exile communities in India. It will be argued that previous analyses have been premised on a relatively narrow assessment of the situation and context, and that a more informed and nuanced evaluation of the potential for future violence requires comprehensive analysis of a much wider range of factors.

Oral History in the Service of Communities

The narrative turn has several applications in therapy, education, medicine, and gerontology. Oral history, as the collection of individual life stories for the purpose of preserving and promoting the collective memory of communities, is another such application. This article describes the resurgence of oral history and its various genres. In this context, four international oral history projects are described: in India for the Tibetan exiles, in Japan for the tsunami victims, in South Korea for North Korean refugees, and in Israel for a binational Jewish-Palestinian village. The article discusses the changes that occur in the lives of interviewees and interviewers and highlights the role and the challenges of qualitative inquiry as a humanitarian endeavor.1

Trauma and the Making of Flexible Minds in the Tibetan Exile Community

AbstractMental health in the Tibetan refugee community has been studied extensively, but like most research on political violence, these studies focus almost exclusively on trauma. Studies suggest this exile community seems to be unusually resilient; but from where does this capacity to thrive stem? On the basis of ethnographic research in Dharamsala, India, conducted over 14 months, this article demonstrates how Tibetans conceive of resilience as a learned and active process of making the mind more “spacious” and “flexible.” Drawing on extended participant observation and in‐depth interviews with 80 Tibetan refugees, this work explores why negative emotions associated with trauma exposure are considered toxic and how many Tibetans exposed to political violence engage in a Buddhist practice known as “mind training” (lojong in Tibetan) to abate its harmful effects. Attending to culturally sanctioned responses to political violence and displacement, this study challenges the notion that trauma is a universal experience.