Contact is taking a holiday!

Narayan K, Times of India, 09 August 2015

Is it possible to preserve a way of life in a world that demands transformation?

National Highway 275 is a long ribbon of road running from Mysore to Mangalore. You wind your way through Hunsur and Periyapatna, through corn and tobacco fields. As you approach the bridge over the Cauvery, the point where Mysore district gives way to Madikeri, you begin to see pennant streamers. The flags on the streamers repeat the same colours, in the same sequence: blue, white, red, green and yellow. The blue flags represent the sky; white: clouds; red: fire; green: leaves and yellow for the earth. Each colour is a sound as well. Blue is om. White is ma. Red is ni. Green is padme. Yellow is hum.

Om mani padme hum.

“India is the guru”

Karma Damdul is the officer in charge of the Lugsung Samdupling Tibetan Settlement – the official name of the oldest Tibetan settlement in India. But no one calls it that. For locals and visitors, the place is Bylakuppe.

Damdul’s room looks like the office of any senior small town bureaucrat.

The desk is cluttered, but tidy.

There is a sofa set, arranged around a small coffee table, and the furniture emphasizes economy and function over comfort. There’s a wooden board in one corner, with the names of previous setement officers and their periods of tenure.

The portraits on the walls are different, though. There’s a picture of the Mahatma. There’s a picture of the Dalai Lama. And, in pride of place, complete with sandal wood garland, is a large framed photograph of Siddavanahalli Nijalingappa.

“When the Chinese government cracked down on Tibet, there were many Tibetans who fled to India, and Prime Minister Nehru asked the chief ministers if they could help accommodate the refugees in their home states. Nijalingappa was the first to offer us a home. Around 3,000 refugees needed homes, and he offered us 3,000 acres in Karnataka,” he says.

Nijalingappa is revered among India’s Tibetans. As recently as 2011, the Dalai Lama paid tribute to the late politician, calling him “an honest politician wedded to principle.”

In Bylakuppe, the Dalai Lama is every where. His face beams down from pic tures in every house. “His Holiness says”, “His Holiness believes” are phrases used to emphasize a point phrases used to emphasize a poor forestall an argument. “His Holiness says that all knowledge flows from India,” says Damdul. “He says India is the guru, and Tibet is the chela. And who else can the student turn to at times of trouble but the guru?”

Re-establishing a tradition

In the 14th century, Lama Tsong Khapa established the Gelug Order. It’s the most significant school of Tibetan Buddhism and the Dalai Lama is its spiritual leader. Before he died, Tsong Khapa dreamed of a great centre of Buddhist learning. One of his pupils, Jamchen Choje Shakya Yeshe, founded the Sera Monastery in 1419 to fulfil his master’s dream. In 1959, Chinese forces destroyed the monastery and killed hundreds of monks studying there.

In 1970, 197 monks from Sera Je, one of the colleges in the Sera monastery , came to Bylakuppe. They were allocated land within the settlement and the Indian government sponsored around 40 one-room, tiled houses to accommodate them.

The monks cleared the forests and cultivated the fields. They subsisted on what they grew. And piece by piece, they rebuilt.

Today , the Sera Je monastery is a place of peace in the heart of the settlement. You can hear birdsong and the soft music of wind chimes as you make your way to the imposing assembly hall. The hall itself is dimly lit, with row upon row of maroon and yel low striped mat tresses facing a stage domi nated by a statue of the Buddha in all his fabled se renity.

27 years to monkhood

Acharya Rinchen Tsering is the headmaster of Sera Jey Secondary School. He is dressed in the traditional robes of maroon and orange, but he looks fit and tough, the kind of monk who would give footpads lessons with a few powerful blows of a quarterstaff.

His school has more than 600 students, and most of them will go on to enter the monastery, and try to be come monks.

Tsering was born at Mundgod in Uttara Kan nada, and was once a student here. The focus of education at the school is philosophy, with students learning dialectics as early as class 6. “In fact, the percentage of Tibetans studying here is declining slightly, because students from all over the Buddhist world – Sikkim, Bihar, Arunachal, Himachal, Nepal, Bhutan, even as far away as Mongolia – are coming here to study.”

Thupen Chodak is the only person in the Sera Je assembly hall. He is a geshe, a fully qualified monk. Chodak was born in India, a couple of years after his parents fled Tibet. Both his parents passed away before he was ten, and by the age of fifteen, he found himself in Bylekuppe, studying to be a monk.

Becoming a monk here is serious business. The path to becoming a path to becoming a geshe makes a PhD look like half an hour at a play school. “You study the Prajnaparamitas for seven to ieight years. You spend four years on the Madhyamaka.

I’ Three years for the Vinayas. Then you spend a couple of years on the Abhidharma-kosa. Then you study epistemology – Pramanavarthika. After that, you spend six years on examinations. And then, you complete your education by writing a book. You can also prove yourself by debating the leaders in the field,” says Chodak.

Despite – or possibly because of – the demanding nature of the curriculum, Chodak says a number of non-Buddhists come to the monastery , wanting to convert. “His Holiness says that people should stick to their own religion – it is part of them, and there is wisdom in all religion. They are welcome to learn Buddhism, of course. But they can take what they learn and apply it to the way they live their lives.”

Life as a tourist attraction

In the evening, the Namdroling monastery is crowded with tourists, mostly people from small towns nearby . A crowd of women gather near the gate wonder whether the “devasthanam” is open. People pose for photographs every few yards in front of the monastery’s main building. A small crowd gathers around an open window, peering through the darkness to see what’s inside a room that’s obviously closed to the public.

Rigzen is around nine years old. He’s in class four, and has a Tibetan history textbook in his hand. He wishes he was elsewhere, but he’s been surrounded by a group of tourists. He’s dressed in maroon robes, and some of the tourists want to have their pictures taken with him. One pinches his cheek and the boy winces and twists away. “I’m sorry, I am too busy ,” he says as he finally makes his escape.

There is a prayer hall at the basement of the monastery , and there is a sign requesting “non practitioners” to keep out. The sign doesn’t work well. Tourists saunter in, gawking at a monk en gaged in prayer, until another monk politely, but firmly, escorts them out.

A tale of two cities

Where Bylakuppe is green and graceful, Kushalnagar, just across the Cauvery is your typical highway town. It may be part of Madikeri, but it’s crowded, noisy and polluted. Kushalnagar has grown because of the tourist traffic that Bylakuppe brings in. Shops have signs in English, Kannada and Tibetan. The Dalai Lama shares a signboard with Sai Baba. Restaurant menus list momos next to Kerala mutton fry and ‘mulayam murgh kababs.’ But there’s an undercurrent of unease, of resentment here. “They come here and marry our women,” says one local. “We need the land,” says another.A cashier at a local restaurant is more balanced. “We like the business they bring to the city. But if a Tibetan tries to set up a business here, outside the settlement, he’d be stopped,” he says.

Maddu Madeva is the sub-inspector at Bylakuppe police station. He has nothing but praise for the people in the encampment. “The Tibetan community is very law abiding. A very peaceful people. Most of our problems are with the locals, not with them.”

There’s an idol of the Buddha on Madeva’s wall shelf, and it’s the first thing that you see as you enter his office. Madeva point to it and says, “I put it there for the Tibetans. They’re so polite, folding their hands as they enter the office. Sometimes, it gets embarrassing. That’s why I put the idol there. It may make them feel more comfortable, and I like to think that when they fold their hands, they’re saluting the Buddha, and not me.”

Madeva says that apart from official reasons – police verifications on passes and the like, Tibetans only come to the police station when one of them is involved in a traffic accident. “Once in a while, these things happen. Not often, though,” he says.

Working on a dream

Within the community, the old ways are changing. Cars and bikes have replaced yaks and horses. Superhero T-shirts, tattoos and mohawks are com monplace. But there is a conscious at temptonceto hold on to what was.

“There are two liness things that His Ho says are most important,” says Damdul. “One is that the Tibetan people should stay together. The other is that we should preserve our culture.”

Tibetan carpets used to do well, says Damdul, but these days, competition from Indonesia has made things difficult. Thangka paintings are sought after. Prayer flags and jewellery, handicrafts and incense, all do a brisk trade with visiting tourists.

Another tradition that seems likely to survive is Tibetan medicine. At Dr Dhondup’s clinic, a small crowd of patients wait.Dhondup is attending to a patient, a local woman. She’s here because of joint pains.”Most of my patients are Tibetans, but I’ve been seeing an increase in the number of Indian patients as well,” he says. To practice Tibetan medicine officially requires five years of study , followed by two years of training.

“It’s completely herbal,” says Dhondup. “The problem, of course, is that herbs that are native to Tibet don’t grow here. So, they’re cultivated in Dharamsala and sent to doctors around the world.”

But if Tibetan culture is about anything, it is about Buddhism. And the growing popularity of the religion in the West offers some hope. The Dalai Lama remains a potent voice for the plight of Tibetans. The Tibetan Oral History project attempts to document life before the Chinese invasion by talking to the older refugees who still remember life as it used to be on the plateau before 1959. The Tibetan Aid Project funds the production, shipment, and distribution of sacred texts, art, and prayer wheels. And there are several projects that raise funds for the refugees.

However hard Tibetans in India try to hold on to the past, parts of the culture are gone for ever. How many people remember how to put up a ba, the huge yakskin tents that could house people and cattle? How many people remember how to harvest salt from the mountain rocks? How many people remember what it was like to race horses on the roof of the world? How many people remember the songs that were sung while milking the dri (female yaks)? The generation of Tibetans who remember what life was before the Chinese have mostly died out. The only thing that the refugees scattered around the world can do is to preserve what they can. And wait for the day they return.

“We will return”

“One day , I hope to see the original Sera,” says Tsering. “We must have hope. And there is reason to hope. His Holiness has been highlighting the cause of the Tibetans all his life, and there is much greater awareness about the suffering of our people,” he says. “My dream is to go there. Whether or not it’s independent, I want to go to Lhasa sometime in my life.”

All Geshe Chodak knows about Tibet is from other people. “If Tibet gets independence, I really wouldn’t know if I’ll feel at home. I’ve lived outside all my life. It would be… strange,” he says.

Tenzing Dolma is the head of the Bylakuppe Women’s Association. “We’re an NGO. It’s the only women’s association in exile,” she says, proudly . The single mother speaks fluent Kannada. Her son studies psychology in Mysore’s St Philomena’s college. Her daughter is a nursing educator, now in Germany .

Dolma is sure about one thing. “We will return to Tibet,” she says. “I know we will go back. We were nomads once, and we will go back to that way of life. We can make things the way they were.”

Dolma’s tone becomes increasingly emphatic, as if she is trying to convince herself, more than anyone else.

But that’s the thing. Even if they return, things have changed, and cannot be put back. The current generation of Tibetans has integrated more and more with the outside world, even as they try to hold on to what they consider the essence of being Tibetan. And they have made some corners of the world their own; little green enclaves with an emphasis on peace and quiet and harmony .

As dusk falls, the tourists’ cars and buses leave the settlement. The monasteries close. The monks return to their dormitories and prayer halls. The prayer flags flutter in the breeze – forlorn yet hopeful.

Om mani padme hum.