Museum Transformations. Группа авторов

Then the climb into the Himalayas begins. Soon the air cools, and neem and peepul trees give way to pine forests. You are winding your way up to “Little Lhasa,” the small Himalayan town of Dharamsala that is the spiritual and political center of the Tibetan exile population in India. Here, among the many museums, cultural centers, and monasteries dedicated to preserving Tibet’s traditions lies a second museum in India that has been inspired by Yad Vashem. What an odd coincidence that these two institutions, genealogically connected to each other by their common ancestor in Jerusalem, yet utterly dissimilar from each other in every respect, should lie 100 miles apart on the same highway, as though threaded together like two beads on a string.

In Hindi “Dharamsala” literally means “refuge,” and since 1960 this little Himalayan town has been a home to a nation of refugees. After a failed uprising in Lhasa in 1959, the Dalai Lama and one hundred thousand of his followers fled from Chinese-occupied Tibet to India. Dharamsala and its suburb, McLeodganj, eventually became the nerve center of the Tibetan exile community. The Central Tibetan Administration (the Tibetan government-in-exile) built its headquarters here, through which it cares for Tibetan refugees and disseminates information in support of the Tibetan cause. This has made Dharamsala the political hub of the Tibetan exile community. Over the years, this town and its surrounding hills and valleys have come to house scores of Tibetan Buddhist monasteries and nunneries, schools teaching Tibetan language, literature, and religion, orphanages for children who have been smuggled out of Chinese-occupied Tibet by their parents so that they can grow up within the fold of the Buddhist faith and Tibetan traditions, as well as numerous institutions dedicated to the documentation, study, and transmission of Tibetan cultural forms. This is also the place that the Dalai Lama has made his home. Dharamsala, then, has also become a place of pilgrimage for Tibetans, for sympathizers of the Tibetan cause, and for a global community of New Age and other Buddhists who come here seeking the salvaged remnants of the “authentic” Buddhist culture of old Tibet.

      Many places in Dharamsala are proffered as substitutes for irrecoverable originals left behind in the motherland. Businesses are named “Shangri-La Hotel,” “Yeti Cafe,” “Stitches of Tibet Clothing Store,” invoking a real or imagined Tibet for the tourist or the exile. A nearby cultural complex in which apprentices learn the arts of thangka painting and icon-making is named Norbulingka, after the Dalai Lama’s looted summer palace just outside Lhasa.¹³ And the monasteries here are monasteries-in-exile, founded by refugee monks to continue the rituals and practices that were once performed at parent monasteries in Tibet destroyed during the Cultural Revolution. In Dharamsala, thus, there is the Namgyal monastery which replaces the one that used to be outside the Potala in Lhasa; the Tibetan State Oracle who once advised the Dalai Lama from the Nechung monastery in eastern Tibet now lives in the New Nechung monastery here; the Kirti monastery of Kham has been rebuilt in Dharamsala, and the Tse-Chokling monastery, which was formerly near Lhasa, preserves its traditions and teachings in a village nearby. These are but a few of the approximately two hundred monasteries-in-exile situated in south Asia – in India, Nepal, and Bhutan – many of which are named after the lost originals in Tibet.

      In this geography that is haunted by loss, a thing is not simply itself but represents the salvaged fragment of something that used to be whole in an earlier time, in another place. If, in Clare Harris’s words, Tibet is the “museum on the roof of the world” – a place that has for so long been presented as a remote and isolated “domain of undisturbed traditionalism” – that it appears like a museumized relic (2012, 6), then Dharamsala presents itself as the “museum of the museum” – the place that salvages the cultural essence of Tibet-in-exile, even as the land called

“A long look homeward”

      In its temples and monasteries, its cultural complexes, and its architectural ambience, the Dharamsala memoryscape seems dedicated to forms of cultural revivalism. Museums and archives supported by the Tibetan government-in-exile preserve sacred relics, icons, and manuscripts smuggled out of Tibet. A performing arts center revives Tibetan music, dance, and opera. Religious institutions train young monks in philosophy and ritual. The central project of exilic Tibet seems to be the recovery and revival of traditional knowledge and practices. Lately, the Dalai Lama has even said that achieving political independence for Tibet is not as important as this task of preserving Tibetan Buddhist culture (Norbu 2001, 377).¹⁴ The virtual survival of Tibetanness in the diaspora has taken priority over the political sovereignty in the place called Tibet.

      This focus on Tibetan cultural revivalism gathered force after 1985, following the breakdown of important negotiations between a Tibetan exile delegation and the Chinese government. After this point, scholars observe, the Dharamsala leadership reconsidered its strategy (Barnett 2001, 273). Instead of pursuing a political settlement with China, the leadership decided to focus on gaining sympathy from a larger international community. Representatives of the government-in-exile programmatically began to participate in global networks devoted to peace, environmentalism, and interfaith harmony, representing Tibet as an essentially spiritual, unmaterialistic, and nonviolent nation overrun by an implacable materialistic foe. In this process, Toni Huber (2001, 360) observes, “customs, practices, habits, and laws long taken for granted became selected and then eloquently objectified as (the Tibetans’) unique culture.” Many aspects of the exile Tibetan condition receded from view and “Buddhism (became) the newly erected central pillar of contemporary Tibetan nationalism (and took) center stage, as though this religion were the mainspring of the claimed identity” (Huber 2001, 360).

      For some critics, this process eventually turned exile Tibetans into “prisoners of Shangri-la” (Lopez 1998), trapping them in an identity that was exclusively religious and spiritual, and barring them from partaking of modernity or assuming full political agency. More sympathetic observers saw the Shangri-la image as the result of a sophisticated process in which the Tibetan exile community intelligently instrumentalized a Western myth of Tibet to garner sympathy and support for their cause. After all, in Robert Thurman’s memorable words, the image of Tibetans as essentially spiritual people has made them “the baby seals of the international human rights movement,” innocent victims unquestionably deserving of support (quoted in Dodin and Räther 2001, 410). If the construction of an exclusively religious identity for Tibetans has been a form of self-Orientalization, at least it is one that has brought the community significant gains.

      In contrast to the many Tibetan organizations that seem dedicated to the etherealization of Tibet, however, there is one museum in Dharamsala that directly addresses issues of history and politics. This is The Tibet Museum (Figure 2.4). Opened in the year 2000, it is Dharamsala’s newest museum and was set up by the Department of Information and International Relations (DIIR) of the Tibetan government-in-exile. The DIIR has played a key role in sponsoring research and gathering data that support the Tibetan exile position in international arenas. Concerned as it is with empirical information and verifiable facts, it is only natural that a museum sponsored by the DIIR would be very different in its approach from the monasteries and other institutions that are overseen by the exile government’s Department of Religion and Culture. Secular, and dedicated to recounting the facts of recent history rather than invoking a timeless tradition, this museum brings a different kind of memorialization to the fore.

FIGURE 2.4 The Tibet Museum, McLeodganj, upper Dharamsala. Gallery view with panels from the section on “Sinicization.”

      Photo: Hope Childers © Kavita Singh and Saloni Mathur.

The Tibet Museum is housed in a modest-sized, elegant building on the street that leads to the main temple complex and the Dalai Lama’s home, the chief visitor attractions in Dharamsala. Displayed inside this museum is A Long Look Homeward, an exhibition that recounts the history of Tibet and Tibetans since 1949. Beginning with an account of Tibet as it was immediately before the Chinese occupation, it describes the invasion, as well as Tibetan attempts at resistance, before relating the terrible consequences of occupation for the Tibetan people and their way of life. Sections on the refugee experience speak of the difficulties of escape and look back on the achievements