Temptations of the West: How to Be Modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and Beyond

by Pankaj Mishra

  New government hotels aiming, not always successfully, at an international style have appeared in Lhasa. and the towns of Shigatse and Gyantse. There are fewer visa and travel restrictions for foreigners, and groups of nouveau riche tourists from the rich cities of coastal China throng the monasteries, posing with monks, clambering up steep metallined ladders to peer eagerly at the murals depicting Tantric sex.

  Encouraged by the government in Beijing, which wishes to open up Tibet, like the rest of China, to private enterprise and consumerism, hundreds of thousands of Han Chinese, the ethnic majority of China, have moved to Tibetan cities in order to take opportunity of tax breaks and incentives to small businesses. Han Chinese are said to outnumber the Tibetans in Lhasa by two to one.

  With its wide avenues, billboards with neon ideograms, shopping malls, discotheques, Sichuan restaurants, and brothels (usually disguised as massage parlors, as I discovered with some embarrassment), Lhasa now resembles a Chinese city on the make, as fanatically devoted to consumerist excess as it had previously been to Communist austerity.

  The Lhasa of my imagination—pilgrims with rosaries shuffling through a mist of incense, past old mud houses with painted wood window frames in narrow alleys—existed only for a few blocks around Jokhang Temple, the most sacred spot in Tibet. Here at least the hustling that gives much of Lhasa the raw vulgarity of a frontier town was relatively absent. Tibetans dominated the crowd of pilgrims, tourists, policemen, and trinket sellers flowing clockwise around the temple. The women from eastern Tibet, magnificently adorned with turquoise headdresses, necklaces, brooches, and bangles, mingled with young Tibetan city slickers in reversed baseball caps.

  But at the monastery of Sera, tourists clicked their cameras frantically as young monks debated Buddhist philosophy in the traditional way, underscoring their point by leaning forward and bringing their hands together with a loud clap. But the event seemed staged; an American woman with a money belt around her waist moved slowly through the crowd of tonsured men.

  The Potala Palace still appears fabulous, as it abruptly rises, tier by tier, above the city on its own steep hill and gazes equably at the mountains surrounding Lhasa. But looking directly down from the roof of the palace, I saw ugly squat blocks of concrete stretching to all four corners, and the palace with its vast magnificent hulk suddenly appeared marooned in the city. As I stood there one afternoon, a shampoo salesman harangued passersby on a megaphone in the huge Chinese-built square below the Potala, a desert of tarmac created out of razing the old quarters; the echo penetrated the melancholy empty apartments of the present Dalai Lama, still touchingly preserved.

  From this transplanted China that is modern-day Lhasa, I was relieved to return to Tibet. I rode in the ubiquitous Land Cruiser—essential vehicle in a country where there are hardly any paved roads. And every step of the way, trailing clouds of dust across barren white valleys, past the black tents of nomads, from which children emerged, waving, holding their happy mucus-smudged faces up to us, on the high passes where prayer flags rippled in the strong wind, and then bowling alongside a turquoise lake cradled by yak-encrusted hills, I again felt the enchantment of Tibet’s immense empty spaces.

  It was evening when we drew into the town of Gyantse, the place where Tibet had first encountered the modern world, in 1903 and 1904, in the shape of invading British troops. The British claimed that the Tibetans and the Russians were conspiring against the British Empire in India and that there were Russian guns in the capital, Lhasa. This turned out to be yet another imperial self-deception, reinforced in equal measure by arrogance, paranoia, and flawed intelligence. The Tibetan government, mostly run by monks, had geopolitical ambitions only to the extent that it wished its country to be left alone by its powerful neighbors. Certainly, the small Tibetan Army possessed no Russian guns and was armed with nothing more dangerous than matchlock rifles, stones, sticks, and amulets blessed by the Dalai Lama.

  Near Gyantse, the British trained two Maxim machine guns on the hapless Tibetan defenders. As one of the gunners later wrote, “The slaughter was terrible … the Tibetans fell in heaps where the Maxims struck them.” Instead of ducking out of sight from the hail of bullets, the remaining Tibetans slowly walked away from the battlefield, their heads bowed as if in mourning. The sight confused the British. As a journalist embedded with the British troops tried to explain later, “they were bewildered. The impossible had happened. Prayers, and charms, and mantras, and the holiest of their holy men, had failed them.”

  More than four hundred Tibetans were killed, and many more wounded, in what was only the first of several massacres in Tibet enabled by the Maxim gun, whose usefulness to imperial conquest was commemorated by Hilaire Belloc (“Whatever happens, we have got / the Maxim gun, and they have not”). As Francis Younghusband, the Central Asian expert and leader of the punitive British expedition, acknowledged, it was a “terrible and ghastly business.” He forgot to add, probably because he took it for granted, that it was also a necessary business, the work of empire, intimidating weaker peoples, preempting present and potential enemies.

  Tibet’s isolation had not been much disturbed during the nineteenth century, when the imperial states of Europe—Britain, Russia, Germany, France—exported their rivalries to Asia and Africa and conquered native peoples in the name of a superior civilization. As the Europeans saw it, the country was too big and sparsely populated, and nothing much seemed to grow in its empty spaces apart from a ritualistic, lama-ridden Buddhism. Its importance was, and has remained, largely strategic.

  The massacre near Cyantse initiated Tibet into the modern world, its new rivalries, and its newfangled weapons of mass destruction. After the British invaders imposed humiliating terms upon the Tibetans and withdrew, Tibet suffered another invasion in 1910, this time by the doddery Manchu rulers of China. It recovered its independence the next year, as the Manchu Empire collapsed, and then held on to it for Almost four decades. In 1950, however, it was invaded by Chinese Communists attempting to “unify” a China they claimed had been carved up by foreign imperialists.

  As part of the Chinese “motherland,” the area once controlled by the Dalai Lama and his government in Lhasa. is now called the Tibetan Autonomous Region (TAR), and its past is partly rewritten by Chinese ideologues. At the fort of Gyantse, a Chinese-built “Memorial Hall of Anti-British”describes the bloody events of 1903 and 1904. It lauds, in broken English, Tibetan soldiers for their efforts on behalf of the “motherland” and denounces Tibet’s British violators. A tombstone marks the spot from where Tibetan soldiers, bewildered by the superior firepower of the British, allegedly plunged to their death.

  The suicides, which have never been proved, seem a figment of the Chinese nationalist imagination, designed to reinforce the idea that the Tibetans were a weak, barbarian race and uniquely vulnerable to greedy foreigners. This is a common theme in Chinese writing about Tibet: that before its “peaceful liberation” it was a benighted country where “feudal” and “reactionary” aristocrats together with monasteries and monks oppressed a majority population of serfs and slaves, mostly by addling their minds with ritual and religion. This unholy ruling elite was unable to modernize and develop Tibet and didn’t even learn the lessons of the rout near Gyantse, the importance of secular education, a modern army, transport, administration, and a productive population.

  Before the Chinese invasion in 1950, Cyantse had been an important town on the trading route to India, then Tibet’s closest trading partner. Now, cheap Chinese-made goods fill the shops and the stalls that spill onto the dusty pavements, and in the lobby of my resoundingly empty hotel, very young Chinese girls stood smiling vacantly in identical red silk dresses under a barbershop sign offering “24-hour massage service.”

  China is developing and modernizing Tibet, taking the country into a glorious future; it was hard to get away from this message, which was garishly advertised on the welcome arches and billboards along the empty roads, and which my Tibetan guide a
lways pointed to with a wry smile. But the extreme youth of the prostitutes was proof that although the future might be glorious, the present was an ordeal for many people, the Tibetans as well as the large number of drifting Chinese, who sought work in what to them was a remote, strange, and inhospitable land.

  I had read in several books and articles on the post-Mao China about its “floating population,” estimated to be over a hundred million, looking for work away from home. Such large-scale uprooting was said to be one of the effects of the country’s economic policies. However, Chinese-led modernization and development appeared to have affected only the few urban areas in Tibet, where most economic migrants from China lived. It seemed to have left untouched the laborers repairing the roads, the farmers in the small villages, and the idle Tibetans playing pool everywhere in roadside dwellings. And it had not diminished, and may even have reinforced, the role of religion in Tibetan society.

  Almost all reports about contemporary Tibet attest that despite being under continuous assault for almost three decades, Buddhism remains central to most Tibetan lives. For most Tibetans, the Chinese liberalization that began in the early eighties primarily meant the freedom to worship their old gods rather than play the new stock market in Lhasa. Some of the pilgrims I saw at Gyantse’s famous octagonal stupa had traveled hundreds of miles. Half bent under the weight of their wooden-frame rucksacks, they walked around the monastic complex, feeding the mangy dogs, reflexively doling out money to the beggars, while spinning their prayer wheels. Inside the dark chapels, they squeezed yak butter out of yellow plastic bags into lamps burning at altars, and with greasy hands they stuck one- and five-yuan notes in the shrines, their small-denomination notes with idealized pictures of Chinese peasants easily outnumbering the big-denomination notes left by tourists from Buddhist Taiwan, Japan, and Thailand.

  The Chinese overlords of Tibet weren’t without good intentions. It is mostly due to them that many Tibetans enjoy better education and health care. But the majority of Tibetans are still peasants and nomads, and even the educated Tibetans I spoke to seemed discontent with Chinese rule. Like all traditional people faced with modernization, their choices are drastically limited. To embrace the glittering new world of China is to become as ruthlessly materialist and secular as the post-Communist Chinese. It is to lose what was still precious to them, their religious and cultural identity.

  The fear of “Sinicization” seemed to weigh most heavily on the Tibetan refugees I met in Dharamsala after returning from Tibet. They were convinced that Han Chinese settlers would overwhelm the Tibetans with their alien ways and that soon, with the new rail connection to China, Tibetan society and culture would cease to exist.

  Although these Tibetans are a politically diverse group, they mostly agree that since the Chinese Communists invaded Tibet in 1950, they have kitted—mostly through execution, torture, and starvation—up to 1.2 million people and have destroyed tens of thousands of Buddhist monasteries and temples.

  In May 1980, four years after Mao’s death, the general secretary of the Chinese Communist Party, Hu Yaobang, visited Tibet, where he apologized for these “earlier errors” and promised Tibetans greater religious freedom and economic development, along with a measure of political autonomy. But the Tibetans insist that the Chinese regime in Beijing continues to treat Tibet as a colony and has consistently sought to undermine its society and culture, and exploit its economic resources without much regard tor its physical environment. They were supported by the Human Rights Watch report in 2004, which claims that the Communist regime in Beijing continues to behave brutally in Tibet, often detaining without trial, torturing, and executing those it suspects of being separatists or sympathizers of the Dalai Lama.

  Many of these Tibetan exiles see their political leaders as being constrained by too many religious scruples. They may be right. As Samdhong Rinpoche, the prime minister of the Tibetan government in exile, explained to me in an interview in the spring of 2004, he has reservations about even such a commonplace tactic of resistance groups as economic boycott since this hurts ordinary people more than the governments. He pointed out that the Dalai Lama supported a ban on Chinese toys only because they were produced by force in prison camps and boycotting them did not impair the livelihood of Chinese laborers.

  Religion is poison,” Mao Zedong informed the Dalai Lama in 1955. He probably meant that religion saps a nation’s will to struggle and succeed in a competitive world. Rupert Murdoch, one of the overeager investors in the liberalized Chinese economy, seemed to agree with Mao when he asserted that”the main problem in Tibet is that half the population still thinks that the Dalai Lama is the ‘son of God’ [sic].”

  Such dismissals of Tibetan religion and culture are not confined to ultraleftists or free market libertarians. The Indian prime minister Nehru once confided to a British diplomat that the Tibetans “were rather difficult people to help, for they were so ignorant of the modern world and its ways.” In a speech in 1997, Chen Kuiyuan, one of the hard-line Chinese technocrats to have ruled Tibet in recent years, pointed out that “when the Dalai ruled Tibet, there was not a single regular school; children of the working people had no right or opportunity to receive an education, and more than 90 percent of the Tibetan people were illiterate.”

  When I quoted this speech to Samdhong Rinpoche, he did not fundamentally disagree with it; he readily admitted that Tibet under the ancien regime was no Shangri-la. In 1959, Samdhong Rinpoche was twenty years old and training for a degree in philosophy at the Tibetan monastery of Drepung, when he heard that the fourteenth and present Dalai Lama had fled Chinese-occupied Tibet to neighboring India. Samdhong Rinpoche joined the thousands of Tibetans who followed the Dalai Lama and has not been back to Tibet since. In India, where he has spent most of his life, he is known for his learned advocacy of nonviolent politics and his admiration for Gandhi and the Indian freedom struggle against the British.

  In 2001, his election as prime minister, with an impressive 80 percent of the votes cast, signaled the growing democratization of the Tibetan community in exile, of which the Dalai Lama has been the undisputed supreme leader. His vigorous self-criticism reveals the depth of introspection among the Tibetan community in exile.

  As a young monk from the provinces in Lhasa, Samdhong Rinpoche saw how “members of religious order failed to follow their moral codes and in both public and in private they were mostly occupied with sales, profits, usury, economic affairs, and other unspiritual matters.” Much of this occurred in his own monastery in Lhasa, Drepung. He also has little time for the Tibetan aristocracy that collaborated with the Chinese. “Most of our leaders were involved in immoral practices aimed simply at fulfilling their own self-interests.” Predictably, when the Chinese came, “Tibetans unhesitatingly sold off their country, for the sake of money and goods and their own narrow self-interests.” Samdhong Rinpoche attributes the sufferings of the Tibetan people to their “collective negative karma.”

  Dressed in a maroon robe, Samdhong Rinpoche spoke softly and precisely, in unaccented Hindi. He described to me how as a young, inexperienced refugee monk in India he first came across Gandhi’s writings and began to clarify his political thinking. He said that he did not oppose the Chinese people or even Chinese sovereignty over Tibet. What he objected to was the quality of Chinese rule, its injustice and violence, which he called upon all Tibetans to actively reject through acts of noncooperation and disobedience, without hating or harming the Chinese people.

  Nonviolence, he said, wasn’t a tactic or a means to a predetermined end. As a form of self-control and carefully measured action, it was an end in itself. A whole way of being in the world, it entailed respect and compassion for all living things.

  He sees a free Tibet as a demilitarized zone of peace, devoid of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons. He claims his government will do all it can to restore Tibet’s ecological balance, which has been upset by Chinese-built dams and mining projects. He also said that one of h
is priorities was to educate more Tibetan refugees in the philosophical underpinning of satyagraha, the respect for human life, and the natural environment. He has already made a beginning by reorienting agriculture-based Tibetan settlements in India to organic farming.

  This sounds appropriately small-scale and achievable. But it is still hard to avoid the question, Can Buddhistic nonviolence have any role in a world ultimately shaped by brute force and economic interest?

  In 1987, the Dalai Lama dropped his earlier demand for full independence for Tibet, describing it as “unrealistic” and saying that he was willing to negotiate an autonomous status for Tibet within China. His desire to seek a “middle way” of compromise did not result in any significant concessions from the Chinese; it also angered and alienated many Tibetan intellectuals and activists, who want to settle for nothing less than independence.

  In Delhi in 1998, a former monk called Thupten Ngodup publicly immolated himself after Indian police forcibly ended a fast unto death undertaken by six Tibetan activists. The Tibetan Youth Congress, a radical group, had organized the hunger strike, despite the initial disapproval of the Dalai Lama and Samdhong Rinpoche.

  Many Tibetan exiles I met concede that the Dalai Lama has internationalized the Tibetan issue and helped make Buddhism more popular in the West. But they increasingly question his effectiveness against a political opponent as apparently hard-nosed as the Chinese regime in Beijing, which becomes more ever more respectable and attractive internationally as China’s economy grows at the extraordinary rate of 10 percent each year.

  The award-winning novelist Jamyang Norbu, one of the founders of the Tibetan Youth Congress, is one of these Tibetans who believe that the Dalai Lama’s religious commitments diminish his political role and that his Buddhistic desire to compromise with the Chinese does not serve the Tibetan cause.