Karanjit Singh
Gu Chu Sum
Dharamsala, India
“Exile
is a memory of a beloved
bleeding somewhere behind the
high mountains”
So wrote K. Dhondup (1952-1995), a Tibetan poet and historian attempting to describe the nature of Exile. High up in the Dhauladhar range in Himachal Pradesh India, the question of their current disposition presents itself like an unending nightmare each day to over 80,000 Tibetans who fled their homeland after the Chinese occupation began in 1959. The thought crosses the mind of a little boy, as he sits in his orphanage bedroom looking out the window where he sees a snow laden mountain and mistakes it for a Tibetan landscape because it reminds him of the half forgotten journey he took as a baby tucked cozy in his aunt’s rucksack. The thought invades the mind of a nun, as she takes a break from her daily monastic chores to go to a local police station for the third time in a month so she can renew her refugee certificate despite the fact that she was born in India; the word “REFUGEE” screaming out of the legal documents reminding her that homelands are after all, like everything else, impermanent. The thought troubles the mind of a young boy as he attempts to burn his hand with a candle at the wee hours of the night after he watches videos of self-immolations in Tibet on YouTube to try and understand the pain these martyrs feel as they light themselves on fire in protest.
Dharamsala, a small hill station tucked between major Hindu pilgrimage destinations, is now a home to thousands of Tibetans who have, along with their religious leader HH. Dalai Lama, embarked on the daunting journey of building their lives from scratch since the community was displaced by the unjust occupation of their homeland by the people’s republic of China. Since then , the once abandoned town has now become the center of the exiled Tibetan community, and the frontier of a rising democratic exiled government and grassroots activism. Before the Tibetans were granted a refuge, Dharamsala was widely known for its eerie ghost stories left behind since a massive earthquake that struck the region in 1905, leaving hundreds of the local population dead. Now as swarming numbers of foreigners and Indian tourists have started to turn to the region, development has accelerated over the past few years. However, current structures are still not strong enough for another earthquake, which the region is prone to.
Dharamsala is also where my host organization Gu Chu Sum operates in to help political prisoners who have recently escaped from Tibet.
Historians have long argued about the independent status of Tibet, even before the Chinese invasion in the Tibetan regions began. Since the invasion, the Tibetan diaspora led by His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama has now petitioned several times for a larger space for autonomy for Tibetans under the Chinese government. Through the Middle Way policy, the government in exile hoped to achieve a genuine democratically elected Tibetan administration in the T.A.R. region through strictly non-violent means, whilst recognizing its common future under the leadership of People’s Republic of China. The idea garnered a lot of international attention, as countries that didn’t or couldn’t agree on the sovereignty of Tibet as a nation at the time openly came forward to support the renewed peace talks. The idea however has failed to reach any substantial outcome from the Chinese who see providing more autonomy to Tibetans as a sign of a future struggle for independence. Thus HH Dalai Lama and his followers have been deemed terrorists by the state attempting to split China.