It's amazing. Another of those no words moments.
Friday, 3 May 2013
This is pure scenery
So while we were in Dharamsala we went to Triund. It's a very steep walk, but from the top you can see some of the Himalayan mountains.
It's amazing. Another of those no words moments.
It's amazing. Another of those no words moments.
Little Tibet
Dharamsala is an excellent place to go if you are ready for a break from India. I liked Dharamsala a lot but I soon found that I wasn't ready for a break from India. Dharamsala and in particular Mcleod Ganj, in the hills above the main town, is probably the most Western place we've been in India. We felt very comfortable wearing Western clothing there and everythng is very clean and fresh and you can get good coffee and hang out in a cafe. This combined with the very beautiful, green mountain setting where you can treck and visit waterfalls began to make me feel suspiciously like I was in New Zealand after the second day there. Which is not to say that Dharamsala isn't a fascinating place. How could a town that is the cultural centre of a community in exile be anything but interesting.
Mcleod Ganj is where Tibet's Dalai Llama settled after he fled Tibet in 1960 when the country was invaded by China, and so the place is the home of a culture separated from its homeland. Since the early 1960s Tibetan refugees have been arriving in the town and now there are more Tibetan residents than Indian. Prayer flags are strung fom buildings and flutter in the surrounding forest and small stone shrines can be found on secluded paths. Tibetan monks and nuns in their saffron robes are everywhere.
Central in Mcleod Ganj is Tsug Lakhang, the Tibetan temple, next to which is the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Llama's residence. Of course when you visit the temple it's mandatory to turn the brass prayer wheels and the sound of monks chanting in the shrines is soothing and magical. Outside in the courtyard when we visited, young monks were painting a geometric pattern on the bricks.
The town as a whole looks like a prosperous and well-organised place. The apartment buildings are well cared for and look spaceous and even the street dogs are almost obese in some cases because the Tibetans feed them.
But of course McLeod Gange is a shadow of a place compared to what the Tibetans have lost and we were quite sharply reminded of this when we visited the museum which describes the Chinese invasion iof Tibet, the resistance and the fleeing of many people to India and Nepal. It is a very moving place, especially when you realise how much love Tibetans have for their country and how much many of them went through to leave it. When crossing the high mountains between Tibet the freezing temperatures can be lethal.
We watched a documentary at the museum called WHAT REMAINS OF US where a young Canadian-Tibetan woman visits The Tibet Autonimous Region of China on her Canadian passport to show Tibetans still in the country a message from the Dalai Llama. Most people had not seen or heard him in years becuase it is illegal to broadcast him or even print images of him in China. Many wept as they listened and nearly every person interviewed spoke of how they hoped for him to return and how they believed his presence in Tibet would change things for Tibetans, which in occupied Tibet are pretty rough.
Most Tibetans describe what has happened under the Chinese as ethnocide. The ancient city of Lhasa has been filled with typical Chinese concrete apartments which the governemnt has filled with settlers from greater China. And in the documentary we saw Chinese tourists posing with tacky replicas of Tibetan traditional costume.
The Tibetan Panchan Llama, second to the Dalai Llama, was taken into custody as a six year old child, and is still apparently a guest of the Chinese government and the Beijing administration named a raplacement, who Tibetans call the false Panchan Llama.
In many ways it's an absolutely typical story of colonisation and control and Europeans coming to New Zealand and Australia did similar things to Maori and Aboriginal peoples. For instance Aboriginal children were taken away from their parents and it was forbidden to speak Maori in New Zealand schools for a number of years, which is similar to Chinese Tibet, where education is in Chinese language not Tibetan. It's easy to be angry with China, but our own recent history is not so different. And of course China tells a completely different story about liberating Tibet from traditional landowners and setting up educational institutes separate from monastries (although why should China be the county to do this and not Tibet itself?)
I think for Tibetan people the question becomes one of how a culture can survive when exiled from its own land. Although there are probably many other historical examples, the one that springs to mind is what happened to Israel and Jewish culture after the sack of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD and the destruction of the temple and of course the fleeing ofmany Jews into exile.But despite being cut away from traditional lands, Jewish culture survived in exile for nearly 2000 years before the new state of Israel was created in 1948.
When I was in Italy I was amazed by how prominent the Jewish communities in Venice and Rome were. So it's possible for a culture to survive in exile, but hundreds of years of persecution, segregation and being blamed for plagues, natural disasters and financial difficulties by Christian Europeans probably helped to keep Jewish identity strong. And if one day the Tibetans return home there is every possibility that it would result in a conflict as bloody as that between Palestine and Israel since I don't imagine that Tibet's new settlers would go meekly back to China, especially if they have been there for several generations.
From the outside it looks like there is another influence working away at traditional Tibetan culture and that is Western culture, which since coming to India I've begun to see far less as 'normal' and far more as a culture with as many strange and bizarre attributes as any other. I've seen a number of young Tibetans (including monks) with iphones and Nikes and this is strange to me since a point of contention Tibet has with the West is that while many people pay lipservice to the idea that Chinese occupation is wrong, nations still buy billions of dollars worth of stuff from China. Where the Nikes and iphones are made. Well, I'm merely an ill-informed observer so I probably can't even hope to understand this but I do wonder how Tibetan culture would have changed and modernised if the country had remained unoccupied. I suppose we'll never know and that is a terrible pity.
Well, all I can say is, like many before me - Free Tibet! I just hope there might be a peaceful way.
Mcleod Ganj is where Tibet's Dalai Llama settled after he fled Tibet in 1960 when the country was invaded by China, and so the place is the home of a culture separated from its homeland. Since the early 1960s Tibetan refugees have been arriving in the town and now there are more Tibetan residents than Indian. Prayer flags are strung fom buildings and flutter in the surrounding forest and small stone shrines can be found on secluded paths. Tibetan monks and nuns in their saffron robes are everywhere.
Central in Mcleod Ganj is Tsug Lakhang, the Tibetan temple, next to which is the Tibetan government in exile and the Dalai Llama's residence. Of course when you visit the temple it's mandatory to turn the brass prayer wheels and the sound of monks chanting in the shrines is soothing and magical. Outside in the courtyard when we visited, young monks were painting a geometric pattern on the bricks.
The town as a whole looks like a prosperous and well-organised place. The apartment buildings are well cared for and look spaceous and even the street dogs are almost obese in some cases because the Tibetans feed them.
But of course McLeod Gange is a shadow of a place compared to what the Tibetans have lost and we were quite sharply reminded of this when we visited the museum which describes the Chinese invasion iof Tibet, the resistance and the fleeing of many people to India and Nepal. It is a very moving place, especially when you realise how much love Tibetans have for their country and how much many of them went through to leave it. When crossing the high mountains between Tibet the freezing temperatures can be lethal.
We watched a documentary at the museum called WHAT REMAINS OF US where a young Canadian-Tibetan woman visits The Tibet Autonimous Region of China on her Canadian passport to show Tibetans still in the country a message from the Dalai Llama. Most people had not seen or heard him in years becuase it is illegal to broadcast him or even print images of him in China. Many wept as they listened and nearly every person interviewed spoke of how they hoped for him to return and how they believed his presence in Tibet would change things for Tibetans, which in occupied Tibet are pretty rough.
Most Tibetans describe what has happened under the Chinese as ethnocide. The ancient city of Lhasa has been filled with typical Chinese concrete apartments which the governemnt has filled with settlers from greater China. And in the documentary we saw Chinese tourists posing with tacky replicas of Tibetan traditional costume.
The Tibetan Panchan Llama, second to the Dalai Llama, was taken into custody as a six year old child, and is still apparently a guest of the Chinese government and the Beijing administration named a raplacement, who Tibetans call the false Panchan Llama.
In many ways it's an absolutely typical story of colonisation and control and Europeans coming to New Zealand and Australia did similar things to Maori and Aboriginal peoples. For instance Aboriginal children were taken away from their parents and it was forbidden to speak Maori in New Zealand schools for a number of years, which is similar to Chinese Tibet, where education is in Chinese language not Tibetan. It's easy to be angry with China, but our own recent history is not so different. And of course China tells a completely different story about liberating Tibet from traditional landowners and setting up educational institutes separate from monastries (although why should China be the county to do this and not Tibet itself?)
I think for Tibetan people the question becomes one of how a culture can survive when exiled from its own land. Although there are probably many other historical examples, the one that springs to mind is what happened to Israel and Jewish culture after the sack of Jerusalem by Rome in 70 AD and the destruction of the temple and of course the fleeing ofmany Jews into exile.But despite being cut away from traditional lands, Jewish culture survived in exile for nearly 2000 years before the new state of Israel was created in 1948.
When I was in Italy I was amazed by how prominent the Jewish communities in Venice and Rome were. So it's possible for a culture to survive in exile, but hundreds of years of persecution, segregation and being blamed for plagues, natural disasters and financial difficulties by Christian Europeans probably helped to keep Jewish identity strong. And if one day the Tibetans return home there is every possibility that it would result in a conflict as bloody as that between Palestine and Israel since I don't imagine that Tibet's new settlers would go meekly back to China, especially if they have been there for several generations.
From the outside it looks like there is another influence working away at traditional Tibetan culture and that is Western culture, which since coming to India I've begun to see far less as 'normal' and far more as a culture with as many strange and bizarre attributes as any other. I've seen a number of young Tibetans (including monks) with iphones and Nikes and this is strange to me since a point of contention Tibet has with the West is that while many people pay lipservice to the idea that Chinese occupation is wrong, nations still buy billions of dollars worth of stuff from China. Where the Nikes and iphones are made. Well, I'm merely an ill-informed observer so I probably can't even hope to understand this but I do wonder how Tibetan culture would have changed and modernised if the country had remained unoccupied. I suppose we'll never know and that is a terrible pity.
Well, all I can say is, like many before me - Free Tibet! I just hope there might be a peaceful way.
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