by Shashwat Malik
A short walk down the hill from the Dalai Lama’s residential complex in the North Indian town of Dharamsala is the Jampaling Elders’ Home, a retirement community run by the Central Tibetan Administration, the Tibetan government-in-exile. Jampaling houses a hundred and forty-five residents, many of whom are part of the first wave of refugees who fled Tibet in 1959, in the wake of a failed uprising against Chinese rule.
The early years of exile in India were a struggle for those who had left behind their traditional nomadic ways of life and found work building roads, as cooks, or in the Indian army. Many never married, and, having grown old, now have nobody to care for them. Jampaling Home is the final refuge for these refugees. This August, I went to Jampaling to photograph its residents and seek their perspective on the Tibetan conflict.
During my visit, police in Sichuan province opened fire on a group of Tibetans protesting the arrest of a respected village elder who had been urging local officials to allow a prayer ceremony as part of the Denma Horse Festival. According to reports, four of the ten protesters who were wounded died in detention. Another committed suicide.
Shortly after my visit, in September, a twenty-two-year-old student, Lhamo Tashi, immolated himself in front of a police station in Gansu province; since 2009, more than hundred-and-thirty Tibetans have resorted to this form of protest against Chinese rule. An old Tibetan man in Dharamsala told me that hearing such news from Tibet made him feel like a parent who has to see his child drown from afar; unable to save him, he can only watch.
For residents at Jampaling, the despair of the conflict is part of their daily experience of old age. And for many, their miseries are explained by Buddhist doctrine as retribution for acts of past lives; enduring them is meant to provide hope for being born into a better afterlife.
Thupten Rabten
“This is the end of our lives; there is nowhere to go from here. It is straight to the cremation ground,” Thupten Rabten said to me as we sat on a bench outside Jampaling. Thupten had just finished his afternoon prayers and could overhear the administrator-in-charge talk about preparations to be made for two residents who had died the day before. Sixty-three-year-old Thupten suffers from hand tremors. He was seven when he fled Tibet in 1960. “I was one of the kids picked out by the Chinese authorities to be sent to Peking to study,” he told me. “My father feared that I’d learn Chinese and forget the Tibetan language, that I’d be indoctrinated and turned into a communist. He thought I’d become somebody who would break the Tibetan nation. So he brought me to Dharamsala.”
Yangkey
Thupten’s roommate, ninety-four-year-old Yangkey, is unable to speak and spends most of her time counting her beads. Her husband was also a resident at Jampaling, until his death in 2006. Having no children, she has no surviving family.
Amdo Thubten Tsering
Two years short of being a centenarian, Amdo Thubten Tsering is the oldest resident at Jampaling. He said he fought as a guerrilla against the Chinese army in 1958. A year later, after the uprising failed, he was one of the eighty thousand Tibetans who fled across the Himalayas, following the Dalai Lama’s own escape. “I’m here, but my heart is still in Tibet,” he told me. “That is my country, that is what I fought for. I have grown old, and when I hear the news coming out of Tibet, I’m now not as hopeful about the situation as I used to be.”
Lobsang
“I’m about to die,” Lobsang said. “Going back to Tibet wouldn’t be possible, it seems.” He continues to look to the Dalai Lama for a resolution to the political deadlock with China. Since 1988, the Dalai Lama and the government-in-exile have slowly scaled back their demands for total independence, or “Rangzen.” They now agitate for what is known as the Middle Way, a demand for “genuine autonomy” within China, which is seen as an unacceptable compromise by many young Tibetans born in exile in India. It is also rejected by some elderly Tibetans, like the Khampa warriors of eastern Tibet, who fought the invading Chinese army in 1950 and then led an armed uprising in 1959.
Tenpa Tsering
But amongst those who took up arms at one stage or the other, there are some like Tenpa Tsering, who, out of reverence for the Dalai Lama, has followed his lead on the MWA. Eighty-two-year-old Tenpa, who lost his vision to cataracts, said he fought in Lhasa in 1958 and 1959, and then served in the Indian army for more than two decades. When I asked him how he views the possibility of the Tibetan struggle turning violent, he replied, “The Dalai Lama has shunned violence, and that settles the matter.” But he also isn’t terribly sure about the efficacy of peaceful protests. “That’s the way forward, but it may not yield results.”
Ngodup Palden
Ngodup Palden said he participated in the uprising in Lhasa in 1958. He also rejects the option of an armed uprising. “It just doesn’t make sense. We would be crushed too easily,” he said. “They are just too many and too strong.” He worried China’s economic clout has left foreign governments unable to talk about human rights in Tibet.
Early in October, the Dalai Lama cancelled a visit to South Africa over visa troubles for the third time in five years. It is widely assumed that his presence at the annual summit of Nobel peace laureates in Cape Town, to which he had been invited, would have been awkward for South Africa, which is pursuing stronger trade ties with China. (The summit itself was cancelled after several laureates withdrew their participation in protest over the denial of visa to the Dalai Lama.)
Jampa Nyichung
Jampa Nyichung broke his back and lost his legs in an accident, so he is mostly confined to his bed. He used his mirror to converse with me through the window, before inviting me in. He said that he misses the Tibetan landscape where he grew up in a family of nomadic herders. “When the Chinese first arrived, they lied that they would make things better,” he told me.
Beijing continues to sell Tibetan nomadic communities the promise of raising their living standards. According to a 2013 Human Rights Watch report, between 2006 and 2012, hundreds of thousands of nomadic herders in the eastern part of the Tibetan plateau were relocated or settled in new permanent villages. The report raised concerns over the ability of those resettled to maintain their livelihood over time; their nomadic way of life has been radically altered by China’s attempt to build a “New Socialist Countryside”, a development program planned in Beijing that is aimed at improving the economy and living standards in the Tibetan region.
“People inside Tibet are helpless, monks are getting jailed, and the army is brutal,” Jampa said. “We know this, these are facts, and yet the Chinese continue to lie. With their propaganda they tell the world that everything is fine.”
Samdup Paljor
Samdup Paljor kept dozing off fitfully, while chanting the prayer mantra, “Om Mani Padme Hum.”
Tsering Thundup
Proximity to the Dalai Lama means a lot to the residents. After Tsering Thundup completed his kora — a circumambulation of the Dalai Lama’s temple complex — he told me, “I have to say it’s nice here, but it’s not my country. I still want to return to Tibet. A day doesn’t go by when I don’t think about it.”
Tsamchoe Dolma
Tsamchoe Dolma, who had a fever, shared her fantasy with me: the Tibetan issue has been resolved, and everyone at Jampaling is filing out, to return to Tibet.
