The Evolution of Tibetan English Literature in India: A Brief Survey

"Having been borne across the world, we are translated men. It is normally supposed that something always gets lost in translation; I cling, obstinately, to the notion that something can also be gained." (Salman Rushdie Imaginary Homelands 1992:16)

Literature and the location of its production exist in a syntactical relationship. The new locations of the displaced individuals or community, inevitably, have a bearing on their respective literary output. The long exile of Tibetans in India since 1959 has brought about a cultural, social and linguistic acculturation in the Tibetan-ness of the past, weaving new patterns through the fabric of their daily existence in exile, which get visibly posited in their myriad cultural expressions and art forms.

In this paper, I briefly explore the literary landscape of the generation of Tibetans who have been educated in exile in India. I focus on the evolution of Tibetan English Literature through a decade-wise survey of the literary works produced in the exiled Tibetan community. The survey highlights two important phenomena that the Tibetans have been undergoing simultaneously in exile-- the 'western Shangrilization' of Tibet (from James Hilton's depiction of a utopian ShangriLa in Lost Horizon in 1933 that came to be identified as Tibet) and the 'cultural fermentation' (through Tibetans cultural contact with non-Tibetans), both of which are seminal in the discourse of the identity of exiled Tibetans. This paper also illustrates that, though New Tibetan Literature in English is the product of Tibetans contact with the modern languages and literatures in exile, this new body of writing actively engages with the traditional Tibetan literary trends and the cultural heritage of Tibet, thus, reflecting the continuity of the past from old-Tibet (pre-exile) in the contemporary Tibetan identity.

English among Tibetans in the early 20th century

A number of Tibetan-English dictionaries compiled in the nineteenth century are the first visible signs of the need for the English language in the Tibetan context. However, most of these dictionaries (such as by Alexander Csoma de Koras in 1834, Heinrich August Jaeschke in 1881, Sarat Chandra Das in 1902 and Charles Bell in 1905) were compiled by non-Tibetans for missionary or imperial purposes.

The inroads of the English language in the Tibetan community can be traced back to the early twentieth century in the writings of a few individuals who came into contact with the European world outside of Tibet. Rinchen Lhamo, the first Tibetan woman to have married a European and settled in the West, published We Tibetans in English in 1926  to counter check the western romantic notions of Tibet in Victorian times. Lhamo articulates in her book (with the aid of her English husband who helped her in translation) the sophisticated issues of representation and culture, which were to emerge decades later through the vocabulary of post-colonial studies. The most abiding Tibetan English writer in the early twentieth century is the wanderer monk and scholar Gendum Choephel, who had traveled to India between 1934 and 1946 in order to learn Sanskrit, but became adept in English after having realized that Sanskrit had been replaced by other Indian languages and the supposedly more advantageous English under the influence of the British colonial rule. Choephel wrote in Tibetan and English in various genres including poetry, history, pilgrimage guidebook, erotic literature and travelogue besides translating Indian classics such as The Ramayana into Tibetan and Tibetan history of Buddhism into English.

Besides Lhamo and Choephel who wrote in English, there were a handful of Tibetans in India from the 1940s, who were the first ones to have received formal education in English. This émigré comprised of children from aristocratic or wealthy backgrounds, sent for modern education to the Indian schools, which were established by the British. Consequently, there was some literacy in English already among Tibetans in the early twentieth century. But for the larger Tibetan community, English was to become a common language only after the exile of Tibetans in 1959.

Translation of Tibetan Buddhist Texts into English in the 1960s

Hitherto known as the 'forbidden land' in the Anglo-narratives and the official records of the British Indian government, Tibet now became accessible to the inquisitive West through the latter's contact with the exiled Tibetans. The Dalai Lama was welcomed as the Buddha of the latter day and the Tibetan Buddhist scriptures, which were smuggled out from Tibet, were recognized for their spiritual, philosophical and historical value. There began a salvaging of the classical Buddhist texts through reprinting and translation into English in the 1960s.

The Western patrons of exiled Tibetans were primarily interested in the mysterious Tibetan Buddhism, and therefore, the old generation Buddhist monk scholars like Chögyam Trungpa and Karmay Samten traveled around the world teaching the philosophy of Buddhism. An overwhelming dissemination of Tibetan Buddhism in the West created a tendentious representation of Tibetan identity as synonymous with religion, and henceforth began, what can be referred to as, the Western Shangrilization of Tibet and all things Tibetan. Numerous films and books that have been produced on Tibet in the twentieth century depict Tibetans as an exotic race from a utopian land.

Tibetan English Autobiographies

Besides the translation of the Buddhist literature, English also came to be used by Tibetans to write autobiographies, which served as a medium to introduce the story of the Tibetan exile to the international audience which knew little about Tibet. However, most of the autobiographies such as the Dalai Lama's elder brother Thubten Jigme Norbu's Tibet is My Country in 1960 and the Dalai Lama's My Land and my People in 1962 were written with the help of the western friends.

Autobiography is a well-rehearsed genre, by the name of rnam-thar , in the Tibetan literary tradition. If in old Tibet, life-records of only distinguished teachers and monk-travelers would gain currency, in exile, every Tibetan's life-story became eventful after they underwent the treacherous journey across the mighty Himalayas to exile. There are a plethora of Tibetan autobiographies in English that are written from the 1960s onwards.

The First Tibetan English Novel

Much of the initial Tibetan writings in English in the 1960s targeted the Western readers, who from their Occidental subject-position were mostly interested in the Oriental religions. It hence came to happen that the first Tibetan-English novel Idols on the Path by Pemba Tsewang, published in 1966 by Jonathan Cape, went uncelebrated because of its secular theme. Idols has a marked historical importance as it provides what would be otherwise difficult to obtain-- the authentic story of the fragility of Tibetan religion and culture before the exile of the Dalai Lama.

Tsewang, born in Tibet in 1932, was among the early Tibetan émigrés, who were sent to a missionary school in Darjeeling in India after which he studied medicine in London. His novel carries the imprint of his triple heritage- the Tibetan and the dual Indian-English. His experiment with the Tibetanized Indian-English in his novel is comparable to the nativization of English by writers such as Raja Rao in Kanthapura or Chenua Achebe in Things Fall Apart . His skillful nativization of English in the Idols, to suit the Tibetan context, foreshadows the new Tibetan identity that was to emerge among the generation of Tibetans who were being educated in exile in India.

Tsewang has a sole predecessor who had already attempted the genre of fiction-- the Tibetan historian Tsering Wangyal who wrote The Tale of the Incomparable Prince in 1727. It is significant that the idea of literary forms such as the novel, which are considered modern in European terminology, existed in the creative imagination of Tibetans as early as the eighteenth century. But in the highly ecclesiastical climate of old Tibet, in which only religious works gained currency, there wasn't a right platform for a fuller expression of this generic imagination until Tsewang wrote his novel in English in India.

English in the Tibetan Schools

The official introduction of English among Tibetans can be said to have begun after its adoption in the Tibetan schools for the exiled children in the 1960. Initially a few Western volunteers taught English in the day and residential schools that were set up for Tibetan refugee children, and later Indian teachers were appointed to teach different subjects through the medium of English (D. Norbu Tibet- the Road Ahead 1997). The curriculum in the Tibetan schools in India, modeled after the NCERT syllabus followed in the Indian schools, adopted English as the main language of instruction. Tibetan came to be taught as the second language and Hindi as the third language in Tibetan schools in exile.

The trilingual system of education was the beginning of what can be described as a 'cultural fermentation' in the Tibetan society, as this system of education brought to Tibetans the cultural nuances of their host country. However, the Tibetans, who were rehabilitating in India, had difficulties in learning English as they had no scope for practicing the language outside their schools in the Tibetan refugee camps, and their Western and Indian teachers did not understand their cultural context. Despite the lacunae in the educational system in exile, many students from Tibetan schools worked hard to become adept in English since "to be educated then (in the 1960s and early 1970s) meant to be conversant in English" (K. Dhondup1985:19), and consequently, they became educators and politicians within the Tibetan community in exile.

Tibetan Review, the Platform for Political Writings in English

A significant outcome of the multi-lingual education among exiled Tibetans was the launch of the first Tibetan-English magazine in exile- Voice of Tibet in 1967, which was renamed Tibetan Review . The magazine was established by Lodi Gyari (who was also among the founding members of the Tibetan Youth Congress in 1970) with the purpose of bringing a grassroots political awareness among the younger generation of Tibetans. According to Thubten Samphel, the Tibetan Review not only galvanized the Tibetan youth in exile with new ideas, but also had a planetary impact as it strengthened the worldwide Tibet movement through the opinions voiced in its several issues from the perspective of exiled Tibetans ("Virtual Tibet: The Media" 2004:178).

Lotus Fields, the First Tibetan English Literary Journal

In the late 1970s, some Tibetan students at St Joseph's College in Darjeeling, brought out a series of cyclostyled literary magazine in English called North Pointer . It was followed by the first formal literary magazine in English, Young Tibet in 1978. Kesang Tenzin, the managing director of the magazine, discovered a common interest in writing among his Tibetan friends, from where germinated the idea of Young Tibet as a platform for the collective expression of their Tibetan English writings. The second issue of the magazine in 1979 was given a new title Lotus Fields: Fresh Winds. The third issue in 1980 made an appeal to the Tibetan readers to come forward with "their critical admiration, not because Lotus Fields contains the best poetry in the world but because it introduces initial literary attempts by younger Tibetans in English" (Preface 2). It is evident that these enthusiastic writers considered their journal as nascent attempts in writing in English, but nonetheless important since the works featured in this journal seek to break the monolithic image of Tibetans as purely a Buddhist and traditional people, thus, providing fresh perspectives on Tibetan identity.

The Lotus Fields can also be seen as a point of collaboration between Tibetans who were educated in different schools in Dharamsala (the political centre of Tibetans), Darjeeling (the then intellectual hub of Tibetans) or other places in India. Tenzing Sonam, one of the contributors to this magazine, recalls, "When we all (the contributors) came together in Dharamsala from our different backgrounds, we recognized our common interest in poetry and discussed it for hours together. K. Dhondup was very well versed with Choephel's poetry and had an incredibly sophisticated interest in Western literature, and Tashi Tsering spoke from his voluminous fund of knowledge on classical Tibetan literature" (Personal Interview). The new Tibetan generation consolidated their ideas in Lotus Fields, thereby announcing the beginning of New Tibetan Literature in English.

While apparently the experimental writings in English in the Lotus Fields announced a break from the dominant traditional Tibetan literary styles, the journal also revisited those Tibetan writings from old-Tibet that were not given their due merit. The contributors of this journal looked back at their predecessors who wrote in secular forms and themes, like the sixth Dalai Lama and Chopehel, for inspiration. An article by T. Tsering that reviews the poetry written in Tibet by both the layman and lamas, debunks the myth that Tibetan literary tradition is exclusively religious.

The Random Sprouting of English Writings in the 1980s

The interaction with the outside world not only influenced the younger generation of Lotus Fields, but even the old generation of Dharma teachers. They began to realize the need of modernizing Buddhism in their new world. Trungpa, commonly held as the founder of Buddhism in the West, expressed his desire to present the path of meditation in secular terms. In 1983, he published First Thought Best Thought, the first Tibetan-English poetry book in the US, in which he yolks Tibetan spirituality with secular verse. In 1984, another first generation Buddhist teacher Namkhi Norbu wrote in English his long poem The Little Song of "Do As You Please". Kheme Sonam Wangdu too wrote his biography The Long-winded Story of an Old Man in English in 1982. Besides there were translations of Tibetan folk-tales, oral stories and the Tibetan epic Gesar Ling in English under the initiative of the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives in Dharamsala in the 1980s.

Jamyang Norbu, a significant Tibetan English writer-in-the-making from the 1970s when he first wrote the modern Tibetan play Chinese Horse (at the behest of the Tibetan Youth Congress) in Tibetan, went on to publish several plays in Tibetan as well as political prose in English in the 1980s. His English publications such as the prose book Illusion and Reality (1989), essays in Tibetan Review and short-stories in The Tibet Journal , Illustrated Weekly of India and The Hindustan Times stirred the Tibetan community with refreshing notions on Tibetan political ideology . His biography Warriors of Tibet: The Story of Aten and the Khampas' Fight for the Freedom of Their Country in 1987, made visible, through the story of two Khampa warriors of Tibet, the reality of the Tibetan Armed Struggled against China, which was otherwise suppressed in the Western discourse of peace-loving non-violent Tibetan identity.

Tsering Wangyal and Dawa Norbu were other contemporaries of Norbu whose political essays created ripples among the members of the exiled Tibetan community. D. Norbu, who was a professor in the International Relations Center of Jawaharlal Nehru University, became a role model for the students in exiled Tibetan community, who were inspired from his autobiography Red Star over Tibet (1974). Wangyal's essays in the monthly magazine Tibetan Review of which he was the editor, made him very popular among Tibetans, who nick-named him as 'editor'. He is said to have written a novel in English, but he did not live long enough to publish his work.

The Intellectual Evolution in the 1990s

The decade of 1990s was crucial in the evolution of new Tibetan writings in exile because of the wave of intellectualism brought about by the new exiled Tibetans in the 1980s (especially by those who came from the Amdo region of Tibet) and the numerous initiatives of the Amnye Mache Institute (AMI)) in the field of Tibetan studies.

In the 1980s when China became liberal in its policies, many Tibetans were allowed for the first time to travel to India to be able to meet their exiled relatives. The new arrivals from Tibet did not feel satisfied with the prevailing literary scenario in exile, for they compared it to the throbbing literary activities under the Chinese Communist Party inside Tibet in the 1980s. Pema Bhum from Amdo took the initiative of introducing the Tibetan literature that had developed inside China's Tibet through his paper "Heartbeat of a New Generation: A Discussion of the New Poetry." In his paper, Bhum urged the Tibetans to look beyond their classical view of poetry to the modern forms that are more apt in the present times. He also translated the poems of Dhondup Gyal, who is heralded as the father of modern Tibetan poetry. The first literary Tibetan language journal, Jangzhon that had been established in 1980, now began to be succeeded by the publication of several independent periodicals and books by individual poets writing in Tibetan in the 1990s.

AMI-- the Tibetan Institute of Advanced Studies, set up in 1992 by T. Tsering, Bhum, Norbu and Lhasang Tsering, had an abiding influence on the literary activities in exile. It established many important journals in Tibetan language and also the English Language Journal- Lungta . The members of AMI also made available the world classics in Tibetan for the benefit of the Tibetan speaking people. So far the thrust in Tibetan literary activity had been upon translation of Buddhist texts into English and other languages, but now AMI took the initiative of translating classical English texts such as Orwell's Animal Farm , Gandhi's Hind Swaraj, Aung San Suu Kyi's Freedom from Fear , Brown's Bury my Heart at Wounded Knee and Thomas Paine's Common Sense into Tibetan.

AMI also contributed to the intellectual growth of Tibetans-in-exile through the conferences it organized on Tibetan literature, which rolled a debate on topics such as the modern versus classical literature, literature versus propaganda, prison literature, modern Tibetan women writers and Tibetan writing in English and other languages. A Tibetan Writers Abroad P.E.N. Centre came to be set up in 1999 to preserve Tibetan literature and to promote the standard Tibetan language among the exiled Tibetans. Most of the publications that came out after the AMI 1995 conference were in Tibetan language since many of these writers belonged to the new wave of refugees who were familiar with only Tibetan and Chinese. Besides, if English was taking roots among Tibetan community, it was deemed equally important to preserve the Tibetan language and to encourage those who were writing in Tibetan. It is significant that the Tibetan community in exile, at the turn of the century, began to chart its discourse of identity which was contra the Western representation of Shangrilized Tibetan identity.

The Budding Flowers in the Lotus Fields of the Twenty-first Century

At the turn of the century , Norbu succeeded Tsewang as the second Tibetan English novelist, with the publication of The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes (1999). The Mandala is based on cross-cultural characters drawn from Arthur Doyle, Rudyard Kipling and Sarat Chandra Das' works . The pastiche character of the novel can be seen as symbolic of the blend of cultures in the life of Tibetans-in-exile. Norbu's method of writing the novel resembles the Tibetan literary tradition of the scriptural Kagyur (the word of the Buddha) and Tengyur (commentaries on Kagyur ) as he explores the Sherlock series as the primary material and critical works related to the Sherlock character as the secondary material. So the novel, while being English in its generic form, is nonetheless Tibetan in its method, thus placing it in both the Tibetan and English literary traditions. The novel also successfully combats the western exoticization of Tibet by treating its western protagonist with Asian subjectivities during his travel to India and Tibet. Norbu's novel is considered to be one of the finest works on Sherlock Holmes and it won the prestigious Hutch Crossword Book Prize in India in 2000. Norbu has also published several prose books and he blogs regularly for the netizens.

Tibetan-English poetry too came to be written by a new crop of exiled Tibetans following the generation of Lotus Fields poets. Tenzin Tsundue, a student of literature in Mumbai University, began to be noticed as a Tibetan English poet among his academic circle after he self-published his first collection of poetry, Crossing the Border in 1999. It was followed by his prose essay 'My Kind of Exile' that won the Outlook Picador Award for non-fiction in 2001. The generation of Tsundue was greatly influenced by those of the Tibetan intellectuals of the twentieth century who were fluent in English and whose works embodied an idea of both a secular and religious Tibet. The twentieth century Tibetan intellectuals like Choephel, D. Norbu, K. Dhondup, Wangyal and Norbu had in fact, "set the ball rolling for Tibetan writing in English" (Tsundue, Shemshook 2007:74).

Tsundue joined his other compatriots in order to organize a number of literary activities such as 'Celebrating Exile', an event held independently of the exiled government by organizations such as 'Friends of Tibet' and 'Students for Free Tibet'. Such events introduced new Tibetan poets as public figures and initiated public debates on literature, which would otherwise be a rare thing. As Tsundue recalls, these debates were often dominated by arguments on the comparison between the literature in exile with that inside Tibet, which was felt more grounded and rich by virtue of regional dialects in Tibet such as Amdo or Rebkong (Personal Interview).

In exile, the Tibetan languages have undergone metamorphosis as Tibetans from different regions mix with one another. Besides, the influence of foreign languages corrupts the standard Tibetan language's sentence structure, in which the object is followed by verb and subject. The sentence structure in spoken Tibetan is now reversed as it follows the pattern of sentences in Hindi and English. Such syntactical changes create difficulties for exiled Tibetans in their communication with the new members in their community, who have grown up in Tibet and have come to exile recently. Both the former pastoral and nomadic languages and the classical literary language are now lost to the young Tibetans. What the ordinary Tibetans are left with is a non-standard Tibetan dialect, English that they learn at school, and Hindi that came to them through their contact with Indians. The articulation of the experience of being a new generation of Tibetan in exile is thus challenging for the Tibetan writer.

In the year 2002, the three major Tibetan English poets after Trungpa published their first books of poetry respectively-- Tsundue's Kora , Bhuchung D. Sonam's Dandelions of Tibet and Tsering Wangmo Dhompa's Rules of the House . It was obvious that Tibetans spread across the globe had been writing comfortably in English by now. D. Sonam took two significant initiatives to bring the scattered voices of Tibetan English writers on a common platform. First, he commenced www.tibetwrites.org, the first website where Tibetans writing in English publish their articles, prose essays, reviews and poems. Second, he compiled the first Tibetan English anthology Muses in Exile in 2004 which covered three generation of Tibetan English poets, who have been scattered across the globe.

There are several books of Tibetan poetry and prose in English that have been published since the last decade, besides various Tibetan English journals and magazines in print and online. Samphel succeeded Norbu as he published the third Tibetan English novel Falling through the Roof in 2008, followed by Tsering Namgyal, who embraced the 'kindle' technology provided by Amazons in today's global scenario, to publish The Tibetan Suitcase. Dhompa is recognizably the most prominent contemporary Tibetan English writer, whose poems are taught in creative writing curriculums in the West. Her first anthology was shortlisted for the Asian American Literary Awards in 2003, and her third poetry book My Rice Tastes like the Lake (2011) was a finalist for the Northern California Independent Bookseller's Book of the Year Award for 2012.

Tibetan English Literature, though a nascent field dating back to the last few decades, is a promising site for the negotiation, articulation and exploration of the identity of Tibetans-in-exile. The Tibetan English writers present a confluence of the Tibetan past and present through thematic concerns, linguistic appropriation, narrative and other literary techniques that they employ in their respective works.

To conclude, what is left of the Shangrilization of Tibetans, who no longer play the exotic for the West, and what has culled out after the cultural fermentation of Tibetans-in-exile, is the self-conscious Tibetan identity that is capable of negotiating the challenges it meets in the current times of globalization.



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