Tsering Topden
English writing on Tibetan
An Overview
Western
fictionalization of the East makes for a formidable
oeuvre, bearing authorships of such diverse genre and
generation as Marco Polo, Rudyard Kipling, EM Forster,
George Orwell, James Hilton, and now William M Bueller.
In articulating the exotic, few have achieved that
balance between imagination and insight, fantasy and
fact, surreal and real. Fewer still have escaped
imposing patronizing paradigms upon the places and
peoples of their narratives, that prison in portraiture
to bring down which it would take the native
literary-conscience an eternity beyond past ? or
present, as in the Tibetan case ? realities of foreign
occupation and oppression.
Indeed, such works have fascinated many a reader back in
Europe
and
America marveling at these unseen worlds - perceptible
only on crisp, white pages. Stories of fairy tale on
earth, a staple fit for wanderlust: naked fakirs and
dancing cobras, Shangri-la and levitating monks, court
eunuchs and pigtails; dust, mountains and the Great
Wall. Imageries that lent themselves to stereotypes, a
blurring of truth into fantasy that made of fiction a
blackened suspect in the court of literary integrity.
This was, however, to change with the de-colonization of
the early 20th century. Thanks to a fertile
legacy in modern institutions left behind by the
obsolete empires, a new generation of educated natives
began to take roots in the newly freed countries. The
same people who had trembled under a foreign tongue now
found in it an ideal language with which to chart the
map of their being and becoming. The currency of
occupation had given way to a weapon of expression.
And so Salman Rushdie wins Booker of Bookers for
Midnight's Children, VS Naipaul his Nobel Prize for
Literature, unleashing a frenzy so alarming that God
of Small Things? Arundhati Roy complains about
Western publishers staging a "job-market" of sort for
Indian authors. And so Balzac and the Little Chinese
Seamstress earns for its exiled writer France's
highest literary honor, not far behind the Nobel for Gou
Xou's
Soul
Mountain.
The Filipino author?s When the Elephants Dance
continues its tango on the bestsellers list while
several Japanese fictions in English upholds Kurosawa?s
legacy in filmmaking.
The same, sadly, cannot be said about the Tibetans. Even
after their four decades into exile. Less than a handful
of novels constitute their corpus in fiction, among them
only Jamyang Norbu's Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
matching in standard, integrity and brilliance to the
renown of other established writers. As does in
non-fiction category, Tsering Shakya's Dragon in the
Land of Snows. But Mandala of Sherlock Holmes
is not, in a complete sense, a Tibetan novel.
Tablet of Gods
In such fiction-starved scenario as that of Tibetan
exile, William M. Bueller's Tablet of the Gods (Paljor
Publications, New Delhi) is a welcome fare. A compelling
evidence in story telling, the novel stands out not so
much for brilliance of prose or ingenuity of imagination
as for the author's attempt to cover in one ambitious
sweep Tibet's past and present, its mundane and the
magnificence. And paradoxically, here he falters.
Tablet of Gods fails to achieve a convincing
microcosm of Tibet?s confounding tapestry in occupation
and exile, a universe all by itself that spirals as deep
into past as it projects into future.
The book, like Jamyang Norbu?s Mandala, while
being set in Tibet is not fundamentally a Tibetan novel.
If Jamyang Norbu?s Sherlock Holmes novel is a masterful
pastiche of a highly reputable genre, Tablet of Gods
is a dubious attempt to compress into a linear
spreadsheet the story of Tibet?s unfolding entirety. Its
plot a germination of an actual event in 1943 involving
the crash-landing in Tibet of an American C-87 cargo
plane flying the ?hump? from China to India, the novel?s
narrative rides on several American characters high on
Himalayan adventures. And although he makes no
presumption of indulging Tibetan sensibility at its
pivot, the author barely avoids reinforcing Western
fantasies upon a country and a people about which his
knowledge is, otherwise, substantial.
Part inspired from Jame's Hilton's Lost Horizon,
partly from Jamyang Norbu's Mandala of Sherlock
Holmes, its influence owing mostly to Kipling
adventurism; the book is also a discomfiting peek into
Steven Seagal's mercifully shelved Dixie Cup. It
deviates little from the Hollywood morale: the American
hero inevitably defuses the bomb at the end. Only the
novel's Roger is a Bruce Willis who sneaks clandestinely
into Tibet with a band of resistant fighters and proudly
walks out having assured a Hu Jintao-Dalai Lama
reconciliation; all that without a whimper. And in
between, he woos a Tibetan girl, untangles a knotty
equation with an ex-girlfriend and achieves overnight
fatherhood over two "brown" races.
Tablet of Gods,
however, is not without its moments of originality,
especially in the passages that deal with existentialism
tug-o-wars between science and spirituality, creationism
and evolution, Bible and Buddhism, Virgin Mary and
Reincarnation. Tugging at the heart of this book is the
weighty question of outer space intelligence. Amusing
enough, almost all characters have something or the
other to say on a subject of such academic proportion,
so much so that even the aged monk-guardian of the
remote monastery in Tibet volunteers the possibility of
alien hands behind the mysterious tablet's origin (If
not Cosmic Buddha, he figures, then it has to be an
outer space intelligence hovering around the distant
orbits). That the writer finds connection between such
extra-terrestrial puzzlement and the Buddhist belief in
after-death astral time-space (Bhardo) is
preposterous at best. Something like Swami Yogananda's
Autobiography of a Yogi meets Stephen Hawking's
Brief History of Universe.
Of death and third eye
Ironically, Bueller?s novel picks up on a note the
history of Western literature on Tibet began eight
decades ago with Walter Wenz?s The Tibetan Book of
the Dead. For Tibet?s Buddhist culture, with its
singular emphasis on life-after-death, it is of little
surprise that its introduction in the West began with a
book on the art of dying.
The 1927 publication of Walter Wenz?s The Tibetan
Book of the Dead was a result of the American
theosophist?s chance collaboration with a Tibetan
translator over an ancient Tibetan mortuary text he had
procured during his travels to the Far East. The Tibetan
was the same Dawa Kazi Samdup, an English teacher at a
Gangtok school in India, who had also interpreted for
Elaxandra David Neel, a stint well documented in the
latter?s Magic and Mystery in Tibet.
Walter Wenz?s snip-and-cut meditation on the ?treasure
text??supposedly secreted in Tibet by the mid-eighth
century?s Guru Padmasambhava?found among western readers
an avid follower. It became an instant bestseller
spawning, besides its own repeated editions, emulation
by numerous other Western authors and one Tibetan
reincarnate. One of them, a drug-induced interpretation,
The Psychedelic Experience, was for the
generations fed on Beat writers their experiment in
marrying Buddhist enlightenment with lofty heights
achievable on Ecstasy.
When, in 1956, another book on Tibet, The Third Eye,
topped the bestseller list, Western deification of Tibet
fantasy had been irrevocably confirmed. Cyril Hoskin?s
autobiographical impersonation as Lobsang Rampa?a
Tibetan monk-physician who encounters fantastic
adventures against the epic backdrop of Chinese
aggressions and Second World War, replete with
?man-kites? aviation and miraculous
jailbreaks?formalized the blurring of all lines between
fact and fiction. The book prompted two later sequels to
a trilogy and dozen other follow-ups. Besides amassing
an enormous fortune in royalty for the erstwhile
surgical fitter from England?s Dovenshire, the books
also placed him uncomfortably under the eye of the 20th
century?s biggest literary controversy.
After The Book of the Dead and before The
Third Eye, along came a novel in 1933 that was
single-handedly responsible for punching into Tibet its
Shangri-La tag: James Hilton?s Lost Horizon. Its
main characters all non-Tibetan, the book locates in
Tibet a Utopian land of eternal youthfulness and beauty;
those who step outside its boundary do so at their own
risks. This coloring of enthralling mysticism over the
canvas of Tibet?s reality was further glossed over by
subsequent authors, among them Lama Anagarika Govinda
and Alexandra David Neel. If Lama Govinda, a German
Tibetophile, during his Illustrated Weekly of India-sponsored
Tibet expedition chances upon a remote monastery and
procures from its head lama a nebulous initiation into
the Kagyu order, Alexandra David Neel, disguised as a
Tibetan woman, surveys flying ascetics in Tibetan
deserts.
Other works of popular fiction were Mark Winchester?s
In the Hands of the Lamas, Talbot Munday?s Om,
Douglas Duff?s On the World?s Roof, Mildred Cooke
and Francesca French?s The Red Lama, Lionel
Davidson?s The Rose of Tibet, Berkeley Gray?s
The Lost World of Everest, and two ?sequels? to
Hilton, Leslie Haliwell?s Return to Shangri- La:
Raiders of the Lost Horizon and Eleanor Cooney and
Daniel Altieri?s Shangri-La: return to the World of
Lost Horizon.
For Tibet?s personality to show itself in flesh and
blood, the West had to wait until the appearance of
Heinrich Harrer?s Seven Years in Tibet. Similar
works of travel reportage by many others, notable among
them Lowell Thomas Jr.?s Out of This World: Across
the Himalayas to Forbidden Tibet, Ekai Kawaguchi?s
Three Years in Tibet, William M McGovern?s To
Lhasa in Disguise and Harrison Foreman?s Through
Forbidden Tibet, focused more on the
country?s human reality than its super-human appeals.
Lending themselves to irony were the subsequent, and
more popular, books by Sir Charles Bell and Hugh
Richardson, both of them at various times British
political officers in Tibet. The historical accuracy of
their personal reflections was but a flickering tribute
to the independent country that Tibet once was.
Wind from the East
The relevance of Tablet of Gods, a Generation X
avatar of its early predecessors, lies primarily in the
realm outside its cover jackets: It lodges in the
precedence the book offers to Tibetan novel in English
that has yet to find its voice, but which must in the
next few years be an established reality if the exile
Tibetan community is to rework traditional symbols in a
modern context; if it is to achieve for itself a
national narrative with which to chronicle the
angst-ridden convulsions of its people?s past, present
and future.
On the other hand, the contemporary literary scene
inside Tibet makes for an astounding observation. Its
prolific outpouring of literary magazines, short
stories, poetry and novels somewhat defeats the general
belief that Tibetan language in Tibet is a victim of
China?s linguistic onslaught. Not only are such works
exceptional in their forays into hitherto unexplored
themes but their language is reminiscent of early 20th
century?s South American writers whose criticisms
against dictatorial regimes were shrouded in brilliant
hues of magic realism and allegories.
Above all others, they point to a creative abridging of
widening chasm between Tibet?s colonial reality and its
exile experience, between their competing versions of
history and politics, of perception and faith, of hope
and despair. A case in point being the tact with which
most writers reconcile the two extremes of
state-enforced subservience and an individual urge to
rebel: their defiance of China?s destructions of symbols
Tibetan, be it Buddhism or the Dalai Lama, on the one
hand and an instinctive rejection of all influences
Chinese on the other. Hence, the cross-cultural leaps in
imagination, the overnight literary sophistication of
these Chinese university-educated young men and women,
exposed at best to literary works of Chekov and Tolstoy.
The late Dhondup Gyal's novels are one such
quintessential symbol. His stories abound with
conflicting nuances, in characterization as well as
social depiction, set against a realism that is tragic
and humorous by turns. Their brilliance is best captured
in passages detailing the intricate complexity of
ordinary human angst. In the words of Tsering Shakya, a
clever use of a double-edged sword with which to prod at
the imperfections of one's socio-economic past and cut
through the hypocrisy of Communist China's "progress" in
present-day Tibet.
Secular Tibetan literature from exile, however, deviates
little from the conventional trademark of self-flattery.
Two years ago, a Higher Institute of Tibetan Studies
alumni from Banares came out with Warm East and Cold
West, a novel tracing an exile?s journey through
childhood, adolescence and adulthood, straddling across
such diverse landscapes as India and the US. A narrative
in emotional and intellectual coming-of-age, the novel
culminates in a sort of moral discourse on values of the
East and the West.
Though the language is absorbing, the characterization
is rendered unconvincing by clich鳠in
mouthful; everyone from the exile bureaucrat in
Dharamsala to the illiterate dishwasher in the US speaks
honorific Tibetan, perfectly structured and bejeweled
with one scintillating aphorism after another.
The book is an unabashed bias in juxtaposition; its
simplicity of worldview does little justice to the scope
of the chosen theme. And so what promises to be an
honest evaluation into such antipodes as idealism v/s
reality, community v/s individuality, tradition v/s
modernity, conformity v/s dissent saturates into mere
amplification of general presumptions: East is warm and
good, West is cold and bad. A classic example of Donald
S Lopez's contention in Prisoners of Shangri-La
that Tibetans are, at once and both, the jailers and
inmates of the prison that is Shangri-La.
Red Poppies
The Tibetan exile scene is a chapter in glaring
contradictions, a theatre in shifting priorities, a
struggle between preservation and change, a reflection
on half-truths of past history and gaping holes of
present reality; it's where loss of yesterday meets
uncertainties of tomorrow. And here runs wild tangents
of stories told and untold. Hence a group of giggly
girls in Dharamsala gyrate to Britney Spears crooning
"Oops, I have done it again!" before changing into
chupas for their stage performance of a traditional
Tibetan song; a US-born Tibetan youth makes a daily
ritual of discussing Tibetan politics on internet before
retiring to bed, ?It like sustains my being, gives
meaning to life,? he says. Exile is where Tibetan
identity is reworked and deconstructed both at the same
time.
And if literature is the handmaiden of history?an
uncharted record of widowed mother and orphaned
children, of shadows across streets, of exultation in
absurdities, of blossoming love?It?s also the story of
the common man's trials behind the shifting fortunes of
empires and governments: an index to individual angst.
As such, the miniscule fare that makes up secular
literature in exile explains the narrative void, which
renders difficult the task of reconciling Tibet's
celebrated aspects with its inconsistent. It explains
the Tibetan inability to articulate, in clear terms,
their dislocation of identity, their tight-rope walk
over competing lines of self and the idea of it; their
indifference to a past beyond Buddhism and their failure
to repair the fractured premises of a future yet to
come.
Red Poppies
is not so much a literary work from exile as it is a
novel by a Tibetan inside Tibet. Yet it bears all the
marks of wistful observation from the periphery, an
unbiased study in the hindsight. First written in
Chinese by Alai, a Tibetan from Kham, the book was
rejected by numerous publishers for its sensitive
political contents before it finally made its way in
1998 to China?s most prestigious publishing company, the
People?s Literature Publishing House. An immediate
bestseller thereafter, it went on to win, two years
later, China?s highest literary award, Mao Dun Prize.
Four month ago, Houghton Miffin published its English
translation in the US. Bound in glossy-jacketed covers,
this English translation of its Chinese original written
by a Tibetan about his native country, Red Poppies,
today vies for readers? attention alongside such
heavyweights as Jonathan Frenzer?s The Corrections
and VS Naipaul?s Half a Life.
An ambitious tale sumptuously told, Red Poppies
recreates pre-1949 Chieftain rivalries amid a panoramic
sweep?with the doom of Chinese invasion hovering at the
horizon?of lust, greed, humor, courage and faith in an
eastern Tibetan region of Kham. At the center of this
fictionalized epic is a narrator modeled upon Aku Tonpa,
a legendary wise buffoon, who, in the author?s words,
represents ?the Tibetans? aspirations and oral
traditions?.
The protagonist sets the book?s tone thus: ?The
Chieftain?s true wife had taken ill and died. My mother
was brought by a fur and medicinal-herb merchant as a
gift to the chieftain, who got drunk and then got her
pregnant. So I might well be happy going through life as
an idiot.?
The novel?s recurrent features are its dark humor,
savage brutality and a delightful sexual frenzy; a
combination told in a self-deprecating language high on
ironic perceptiveness.
For all its retrospection on semi-feudal reality of
Tibet?s past, Red Poppies is also an off-hand
expose of China?s sweet-mouthed infiltration into Tibet;
the idea of red poppies?seeds from which opium is
extracted?providing metaphorical allusion to China?s
initial enticement of high-placed Tibetans with silver
coins in abundance.
As opposed to traditional self-flattery, Red Poppies
is a wild ride through incorrigible irreverence. The
passages shine where the narrator describes his father?s
sexual appetites, the intoxicated reverie of villagers
high on opium smell and poppy seeds growing from ears of
decapitated heads. Remarkable is the portraiture of a
geluk lama who loses both his tongue and his freedom
for uttering truths too painful for the chieftain?s
liking but who even in his muteness provides the only
voice of sanity, a sort of only redemption amid a
guilt-ridden multitude. It?s not hard to guess the
symbolic significance of this marginal character.
The narrator?s father, the chieftain, encapsulates the
novel?s shrewdness with this line: ?You?re smart because
you?re an idiot.? The narrator?s pathetic buffoonery,
his deriving of joy from acts of self-negation, somewhat
signals the arrival of Victorian protagonist: the common
man whose character is rendered wholesome by his very
flaws.
The way forward
Immature though the overall Tibetan English writing, for
Tibetan fiction writers the time, it seems, has finally
arrived. Alai?s winning of the highest Chinese literary
award for Red Poppies and the conferment last
year of the Crossword Award, India?s Pulitzer
equivalent, for Jamyang Norbu?s Mandala of Sherlock
Holmes vindicates this seeming verbosity.
That Tibetan fiction had to make its mark in languages
non-Tibetan is an inescapable irony. It?s a phenomenon
that, closer to home, finds its counterpart in Indian
literary scene. Perhaps it owes to the fact that like
Indian writers in English, Tibetan fiction authors are
mostly those perched, in many cases precariously, on the
ladder of bourgeois upward-mobility. Or it might be
something about their comfort level in articulating a
sensibility culled from exile experiences.
Amitava Kumar, author of Passport Photos,
explains thus the emergence of diasporic Indian writing:
?The failures of the Indian state in the years after
independence have, paradoxically enough, freed the
writers from carrying the twin burdens of idealism and
impotence. New promises and new contradictions now
demand the writer?s attention. These are the problems of
the writer?s own class rather than someone else?s. These
are matters on which the writer can also exercise his
will.?
In the Tibetan case, it?s not so much a failure as the
necessity to reconcile disjunctions between our
grand-sounding institutions of the past and the shoddy
reality of the present, between the way we live now and
the borrowed ideas we use to look at ourselves. And
this, according to The Romantics? Pankaj Mishra,
is ?the truest function of a national literature: it
holds up a mirror in whose unfamiliar reflections a
nation slowly learns to recognize itself?
.
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