‘We Lost Our Homeland, We Don’t Want to Lose Our Language and Culture’
Six decades since Dalai Lama sought refuge in India, scores of Tibetans have escaped to India, until China permanently sealed the border in 2009 that effectively stopped such movement. The national capital’s New Aruna Nagar was allotted to the Tibetan refugees in 1960, and the settlement has since emerged as the community’s economic and cultural hub. The settlement, popularly known as Majnu ka Tila, is dotted with stalls and shops selling Tibetan food, handicraft, and literature, and they can make you mistake it for Kathmandu’s Thamel.
Language is critical to one’s culture, and therefore when the question of the their children’s education came up in 1960, Dalai Lama made it clear that they needed a Tibetan way of education for their people. Despite that, it wasn’t until 2009 that the community got such a school in Delhi.
Tibetan Children’s Village Day School in Majnu ka Tila functions with twin aims of preparing the community’s children for the 21st century and of keeping their language and culture alive. When Migmar Tsering, the school’s current headmaster, joined in 2009, the school was run by the Indian government and was open to all, having classes up to eighth.
‘Till 2009, this school had students from all backgrounds along with Tibetans, such as Nepali and Indians,’ the headmaster said. ‘We then took up the issue and got the school under the Tibetan Village School, which is a Tibetan non-governmental organisation, to make the school exclusively for the Tibetan community.’
This was done so that the mixture of student does not dilute their Tibetan identity.
‘We had lost our land, and we do not want to lose our identity, language, and culture,’ Tsering said. ‘There are 25–26 such schools in India, with most of them being in the South and in Himachal Pradesh. Ours is the only such school in Delhi.’
The curriculum is based on the Tibetan education policy, as per which children are taught only in the Tibetan language until class third. This is done so that children are rooted in their language and culture. Hindi and English are introduced in class fourth. After class fifth, students either go outside to CBSE schools or they join their sister-schools in Dharmshala, Himachal Pradesh. In addition to this curriculum, there is another custom Migmar Tsering introduced.
‘These children were born outside Tibet and they have never been there either, so we started this custom that all the students would come dressed in the traditional attire of their region in Tibet on Wednesday and would have Tibetan traditional food for lunch,’ the headmaster said. ‘This way, they learn about the country that’s their homeland.’
Migmar Tsering himself escaped Tibet in 1994 when he was a child. He reached India after an arduous journey through the length and breadth of Tibet and Nepal, and he has been here since. The Chinese occupation of Tibet has almost eroded their identity, he says.
He said, ‘India is the most democratic and free country. There is religious and linguistic freedom here, none of which is there in Tibet under the Chinese rule. Here I have never felt like a refugee. We keep our language close to us as we have already lost our land, and we don’t want to lose our culture too. One day, we hope, we will return to our country and our language and culture will be with us.’
As Mr Hamel said on the eve of German imposition in Alsace and Lorraine in The Last Lesson, people ‘must guard it and never forget it, because when a people are enslaved, as long as they hold fast to their language, it is as if they had the key to their prison’.
