Tibetans Inside and Outside

Almost every Tibetan refugee talks about that hope of the “return” which will happen, according to the conventional wisdom, when the Dalai Lama and Beijing come to a compromise. In that event, how many refugees will actually return to the old country? Would the refugees be received open-heartedly by Tibetans who never left? The answers are by no means obvious.

There are presently about 120,000 Tibetans in exile. Most of them are in India, living in refugee camps or independently in places like Darjeeling, Kalimpong, Mussorie and Dehra Dun. There are more than 12,000 in Nepal, mostly in Kathmandu and some in refugee camps such as in Pokhara, Dhorpatan and Solu. In Bhutan, there are probably less than one thousand. In addition, there are 2000 or so Tibetans in Europe, 1500 in North America and smaller numbers scattered all over, from the Nordic countries to New Zealand.

One Nepali anthropologist believes that no more than fifty per cent of the diaspora will actually return in the ever… of a Chinese opening. He says, ‘The more educated they are, the more westernised they become, the less likely they are to return. This is the experience of all South Asians who have settled abroad and Tibetans can be no exception.”

But non-Tibetans who see well-adjusted, successful Tibetan refugees probably misjudge how deep the longing to return to one’s own can be. While it is true that the younger refugees who were either born in exile or left Tibet in 1959 as infants have only their parents’ memories to lead them back, it is clear that the pain and the insecurity of exile can never be entirely neutralised by economic security or a western-style education.

Says Tenzin Tethong, recently elected kalon in the Dharamsala government, “Living in exile is not easy even after so many years.” He believes that “between 80 and 90 per cent of refugees will return if the Dalai Lama returns.” Rather than go back to their village of origin, many returnees might settle down in or near metropolitan Lhasa. Also, he said, many might return but continue to maintain business bases that they have spent a lifetime setting up in Nepal or India.

The Dalai Lama himself expects those Tibetans who presently serve in the Chinese bureaucracy to run the government bureaucracy, with the better educated returnees making their contribution in many other fields.

WELL MET?

The possible reunion between the returnees and the Tibetans within Tibet may not be without problems. Certainly, there will be a painful adjustment process. There is naturally some resentment among those in Tibet who suffered through the Cultural Revolution and other humiliations while the exiles became refugees but free. There is also the Tibetan nomenklatura which has worked in the Chinese-dominated administration for 30 years, whose attitude towards a future political upheaval and redefinition of roles may be somewhat ambivalent.

Some of the future divide may already be evident in exile among the old refugees (“kyapchoba”) and the “new arrivals” (“sanjor”), Tibetans who came out in the early 1980s and never returned. On the main street of Mcleodganj in Dharamshala, the sanjor (a term some of them dislike for the hint of condescension it carries) tend to stick together, a little apart. The kyapchoba are at ease with Hindi and many in the exile government have convent English. The new arrivals, on the other hand, are at a loss with their Chinese, which is of little use in India and Nepal.

Tibetans refugees were forced to be overnight entrepreneurs when they crossed over in 1959. In Nepal, they created a whole new industry in carpets. In India, they found a niche in the competitive marketplace as wool merchants, buying sweaters wholesale from Haryana factories and peddling them from Madras to Meghalaya and as far as Sri Lanka. They also got busy re-establishing their monasteries, their institutes of higher learning, Tibetan medicine and the performing arts, all of which are in better health than their counterparts in Lhasa.

Compared to this beehive activity in exile, Tibetans within Tibet were mired in the rigid traditions of a Beijing-inspired centrallised economy. A senior official who accompanied a Dharamsala delegation into Tibet in 1980 came away feeling that Tibetans he met had lost the “vitality” of Tibetans.

Says the official, ‘The Chinese occupation seems to have really harmed the psyche of the Tibetans. The scars are telling. The work ethic is not there. They are sullen, not cheerful, and extremely cynical about everything. There is also a streak of dogmatism. We refugees had the Dalai Lama with us, while they were without religion, without a leader and without guidance.”