For Tibetans living in Dharamsala, questions of belonging are still abound

An in-between place for Tibetans in exile, can Dharamsala sustain itself amidst the growing population, climate change and environmental hazards caused by tourism?

Nestled in the Dhauladhar range of the Himalayas, Dharamsala is the winter capital of Himachal Pradesh. It is also home to a large population of the Tibetan refugees in India and their Tibetan Government-in-exile and is widely known as “Little Lhasa”. According to Tenzing Wangdak, a doctoral candidate at the University of California and a Tibetan refugee, “Because of the presence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama and the Tibetan Government-in-exile, McLeod Ganj and Dharamsala have become the political centre for Tibetans around the world. The town has various Buddhist monasteries, archives, libraries, institutes and Tibetan government offices. Education is a big part of the Tibetan government’s work and the Tibetan Children’s Village school is also set up there.”

Back in the day

In the late 1800s, Dharamsala was a summer retreat spot for British officers. A terrible earthquake in 1905 wiped out most of the population and prompted the Britishers to abandon the town in search of greener pastures in the lower Himalayas. When His Holiness the Dalai Lama—whose name today is synonymous with Dharamsala—arrived in India with his contingent after the fall of Lhasa in 1959, he first settled in Mussoorie. Poet and translator Bhuchung D. Sonam says, “When the Dalai Lama and Tibetan government were asked to move from Mussoorie to Dharamsala in 1960 by the then Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, McLeod Ganj only had one weekly bus service. There was only one shop and maybe a couple of tea shops.”

Tenzin Lekshay, the spokesperson of the Central Tibetan Administration (CTA) states, “When I was young [during the 1960s-80s], Dharamsala was just forest and jungles, with less concrete buildings; it was a rare sight to see a vehicle running within Dharamsala. People seemed more content with a few buckets of water filled for a day’s utility. Walking on the McLeod streets was safe, without the fear of getting trampled by the cars. The shops closed before dusk, keeping family affairs an important component of daily life. The memories of Dharamsala are about its simplicity. It, however, became cosmopolitan over the years.”

Bhuchung D. Sonam, too recalls his earlier days in Dharamsala, stating, “There was only one road—the long one from lower Dharamsala to McLeod Ganj and that nine-kilometre stretch was the only motorable road. So, people used to walk everywhere. The stretch all the way from McLeod Ganj to the Dalai Lama temple and further down towards Jogiwara Road was just covered in forest. There was a sense of community in the absence of technology such as television sets. There used to be a lot of community gatherings, especially in the afternoons or after office hours. People would get together and partake in Gorshey, the Tibetan circle dance. That culture has now changed.”

The first tourists

Tenzing Sonam, co-founder of the Dharamsala International Film Festival (DIFF), was born in Darjeeling that had a sizeable Tibetan community even before the Chinese occupation of Tibet. Sonam first visited Dharamsala as a child in the 1960s and was fortunate to have an audience with the Dalai Lama at his former residence called Swarg Ashram. His earlier impression of Dharamsala was that it was like a small village, practically, a ghost town. He says, “I believe there was hardly anything in the main square except for a few buildings. And, of course, the famous Parsi shop Nowrojee and Sons that had been set up in 1860. But beyond that, it was just this dusty town with shacks, where Tibetan families lived. When I came back to live in Dharamsala in 1978-79, it was still the same. There was a central stupa in the main square. There was no concept of taxis and no tourists as such. Every time you had to go to McLeod Ganj, you had to walk up. The only tourists were Westerners who came to study Buddhism.”

Bhuchung D. Sonam adds, “A lot of foreign tourists from the flower-power generation during the Hippie movement of the 1960s arrived in Dharamsala in the 1970s-80s because of Tibetan Buddhism.” Four poets of the Beat generation—Allen Ginsberg and his partner Peter Orlovsky, Joanne Kyger and her husband Gary Snyder—too arrived for an audience with the Dalai Lama in 1962, as per Kyger’s letters and journals from that time. 

A sea change

There was an Orientalist interest in Tibetan Buddhism and the Himalayas during that time. But for several years, Dharamsala remained unchanged. So, what prompted this sleepy hamlet’s metamorphosis into the overflowing and overcrowded tourist spot? Bhuchung D. Sonam says, “It changed when His Holiness was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1989. Suddenly, the global media started paying attention to Dharamsala.” Indeed, the earliest written pieces in international media about Dharamsala are dated around 1990, including coverage by The New York Times. Subsequently, many found their way to Dharamsala for exchange between Tibetan and Western spirituality, Tibetan medicine, and Tibetan arts and crafts. Owing to this media attention, the state government began promoting it as a tourist spot. Infrastructure and roads improved. Multiple restaurants and hotels popped up. This economic growth embraced Dharamsala like mushrooms sprouting overnight in a dense forest. It now falls under the government’s Smart City project. 

In the town where rain used to be more frequent than tourists, it is impossible to imagine that it was once deserted. But even before the arrival of tourism, Tibetans had embraced the town as their own, sending their children to school, and working odd-jobs as daily-wage labourers due to lack of better opportunities hindered by factors such as language barriers, lack of proper legal documents, education and technical skills. Bhuchung D. Sonam says, “In the 90s, more Tibetans started coming from Eastern Tibet. Because they did not speak the language, they were unable to receive their legal papers on time. Here, in north India, if one doesn’t speak Hindi or English then they have a lot of trouble even while moving from one place to another or if you happen to go out late at night. You can change clothes but you can’t get used to the language overnight.”

Adapting to circumstances

According to Dr Tenzin Lhadon, whose parents left her in the care of her grandmother soon after she was born in Dharamsala and returned to Tibet, it is not easy for everyone to adjust to life in exile. Lhadon says, “I could tell that my parents went back because they could not acclimatise with the climatic condition and the food habits. But for us, the present generation that was born and brought up in India, we have not faced the same issues as our parents.”

Bhuchung D. Sonam adds, “Initially, I found the weather difficult, especially in the summer. Twenty-five years ago, winters were quite cold with a lot of snow so if you arrived in the winter, then you would have a few months to get used to the Indian summer. Tibetans prefer to arrive here only in the winter because they realised that it can be hot here. But for me, I found it more difficult to adjust to the change in food habits.” Despite the culture and climactic shock that greets the Tibetan exiles when they arrive in Dharamsala from Tibet and elsewhere, they’ve not only created a space for themselves in Dharamsala but also created local businesses, founded restaurants that specialise in regional cuisine such as food from Amdo and central Tibet. Their efforts have been boosted by the tourism economy and the construction of the international cricket stadium in the Kangra district. Even though Tibetan refugees (unless those born in India between 1959-1987 apply for Indian citizenship) can’t own properties and most of the businesses and workspaces are either leased or rented, Dharamsala has been built on the backbone of Tibetans’ hard work. 

For Bhuchung D. Sonam, co-founder of TibetWrites (2003) and the indie publishing house Blackneck Books, there was a need to create an alternate literary space in Dharamsala that could provide a platform to the secular Tibetan voices in a space dominated by literature on Tibetan Buddhism. Sonam says, “For 1300 years, Tibetan Buddhism has been in existence and to a large extent, the literature and awareness around it has been taken care of. What we wanted to focus on was secular Tibetan expression. The Buddhist influences are crucial for Tibetan lives. But the younger generation does not have the same inclination towards religion as the older generation in the community. So, we focus on secular expression and publish the works of different Tibetan writers. An important part of this work is holding reading sessions and book discussions here in cafes. A lot of young people participate so we have created a literary community for them. We now have a large network of writers in Nepal, the US and Canada as well. We are based in Dharamsala but we have connections with the Tibetan community elsewhere.” Sonam himself has written largely on Tibet and translated poetry smuggled across the Tibetan borders into India. He runs the self-sustained operations at Blackneck Books, in collaboration with Tenzin Tsundue, which is a feat in itself. 

A similar creative outlet that brings film enthusiasts to Dharamsala is Dharamsala International Film Festival (DIFF) founded by Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin in 2012. The project started with showcasing films in a community setting to taking cinema to playing DVDs at the TIPA hall (Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts). The festival grew when the film community and known personalities such as Hansal Mehta, Umesh Kulkarni and Israeli filmmaker Guy Davidi visited the earlier editions of the festival. The founders hadn’t anticipated the indie festival to grow exponentially; funding remains a crucial part of running it from one year to the next. The growing interest in world cinema by Tibetans and the residents of Dharamsala, nurtured by DIFF founders and filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sonam, directors of The Sweet Requiem and Dreaming Lhasa, has contributed immensely to the Tibetan cultural landscape in Dharamsala. The younger crop of Tibetan filmmakers, such as Tenzin Tsetan Choklay, director of Bringing Tibet Home, Tenzin Dasel and Sonam Tsetan, who are telling their own stories on celluloid, is also a hopeful sign of Tibetan cinema's growth. 

In search of hope

“We must continue to sing of the snow and of returning home to our own free land” writes Bhuchung D. Sonam in his 2012 essay, Exile is a Lonely Pen. While Dharamsala is the now-adopted home of thousands of Tibetan families, their main hope is a return to their homeland, Tibet. Sonam says, “Throughout human history, things change. The powerful and pious have fallen so we do hope that things will change.” He pauses and adds, “If not in my lifetime, then perhaps in my children's lifetime. Maybe they will be able to go back.”

For Tenzing Wangdak, this hope means having a choice to go back. He says, “My father would want to return. For someone like me who has never seen Tibet, we do have a deep connection and political stake in the matter, but we still have careers and lives outside Tibet. For the generation that has memories of Tibet, a return would be more substantial and meaningful. I would want to visit Tibet but my life is here in exile, in India. So, the word ‘return’ itself needs to be contextualised between paradigms.” 

Dharamsala itself then occupies an in-between space for Tibetans—between past memories and hope for the future—as they continue to shape this town into their own and this town, too, influences their stories and lives in exile with each passing year. The question remains whether the town can sustain itself amidst the growing population, climate change, the pressure on its environment caused by overcrowded tourism and deforestation to allow construction of seven- to eight-storeyed buildings in the name of rapid development in an earthquake-prone zone. Dharamsala is no longer a 20th-century ghost town. Now, it is a 21st-century “smart city” perpetually under construction.

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