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

by Pankaj Mishra

  “Some people don’t want to be enlightened, at least not immediately,” Norbu said in a PBS television documentary on Tibet; “they are really happy in their landscape and in Tibet. They have a kind of affinity to their place they live in. And, they don’t want the Chinese there. And his Holiness cannot understand this … .”

  Norbu rejects the Western stereotype of Tibetans as an innately nonviolent people, a romantic notion which he thinks gratifies many Western people discontented with the aggressive selfishness of their societies but obscures the political aspirations of the Tibetan peoples and the variety of means available to them to achieve independence. In 1989, he published a book about one of the Khampa warriors of eastern Tibet, who fought the invading Chinese Army in 1950 and then initiated the bloody revolt against Chinese rule that eventually led to the Dalai Lama’s departure for India.

  “We are ordinary Tibetans,” Norbu told PBS. “We drink; we eat; we feel passion; we love our wives and kids. If someone sort of messes around with them, even if they’re an army, you pick up your rifle.”

  In the early seventies, Norbu dropped out of boarding school in Darjeeling and picked up a rifle and joined the Tibetan guerrillas operating out of Mustang, a piece of Nepalese territory that juts into Tibet. The CIA secretly funded these guerrillas and arranged for them to be trained in Colorado. American support was halfhearted at best, intended to undermine Communist China, not to achieve Tibetan independence; it ended in the early seventies after Kissinger and Nixon decided to befriend Mao, initiating the appeasement of China which culminated in 1994, when Bill Clinton decided to separate trade with China from the problematic issue of human rights.

  Abandoned by their sponsors, many Tibetan guerrillas were attacked and killed by the Nepalese Army. Finally, the Dalai Lama told the Mustang guerrillas in a taped message to give up arms and return to India.

  Lhasang Tsering, who is now a bookseller in Dharamsala, was one of the Tibetan guerrillas in Mustang. He later headed the Tibetan Youth Congress and even worked for the Tibetan government in exile before resigning in protest against the Dalai Lama’s decision to drop the demand for full independence.

  He told me what I have heard from many other Tibetans, that in the last decade, the Chinese government has encouraged Han Chinese. the ethnic majority of China, to migrate in large numbers to Tibet, with the result that the Tibetans are a minority in their own country. Tibet faces a cultural genocide, Tsering said, and will be wiped out unless some radical and quick action is taken.

  He didn’t specify what form that action should take. But he reminded me that Tibetans had fought fiercely for their rights even during the exceptionally fearful days of the Cultural Revolution. Armed with swords and spears, Thrinley Chodron, a young nun, and her followers had attacked their local Communist Party headquarters, killing Chinese officials and their Tibetan collaborators. Tsering was convinced that the freedom struggle for Tibet would become militant after the Dalai Lama, who will be seventy next year, passes away.

  Many younger refugees I met in Dharanrsala also stressed the need for immediate and extreme action; they complained that the Buddhist methods of dialogue and negotiation advocated by the Dalai Lama had proved futile. They pointed to the world attention given to the radical Islamists in Palestine and elsewhere after their spectacular acts of violence.

  I knew that such views were popular among many Tibetan refugees; they were part of their Westernized general outlook. But I didn’t argue with them; I didn’t feel that I had earned the right to do so. My own views were as timid and mixed as those of any traveler to a beautiful country under a despotic regime.

  When I think of Tibet now, I first remember that morning on the Tsangpo: the austere landscape, where small things—the water slapping against the boat, the bare hills brown against a blue sky, and a man in a trilby hat twirling his prayer wheel—possessed the power to bestow happiness.

  I remember watching snow blow off the rocky summit of Mount Everest one chilly and windy evening on the half-collapsed mud roof of Rongbuk Monastery. I remember the peasant Tibetan women in Lhasa., the garish symbol of Chinese capitalism, slowly circumambulating the Potala Palace, measuring the miles of concrete in a series of energetic prostrations, lying on their bellies on the ground one moment and then rising up, their bangled arms outstretched before them, ready to plunge again onto the hard ground.

  These images are commonplace in the books I read before visiting Tibet; the Tibetan landscape and people always appear in them with a religious aura of humility and compassion. I liked to think that I was immune to these stereotypes, which often managed to hide Tibet’s harsh political reality. I didn’t believe that all Tibetans were apogees of loving-kindness and nonviolence. But it was hard not to feel that I had traveled to the heart of a unique civilization, one whose achievement lay not in imposing monuments and museums but in the refined personal culture—the humility and warmth—of its men and women. I had little doubt that Buddhism had helped create a distinctive and sophisticated civilization in Tibet.

  I had become aware too of the great dignity and inner strength with which Tibetans have protected their tradition and identity while living amid the physical rubble of this civilization, the rubble of destroyed monasteries and temples over which a profit-driven and still repressive Chinese regime is building a Disneyland of Tibetan culture.

  Many dejected Tibetan exiles probably agree with Jamyang Norbu when he says that the Chinese are turning the Tibetans into a “sort of broken third-rate people, who like ten, twenty, thirty, forty years from now will just be someone who’s begging from tourists.”

  Samdhong Rinpoche too is convinced that time is running out for the Tibetans. But he firmly rejects using violence as a tactic against the Chinese, saying that it couldn’t be an option even if he was certain that it would win independence for Tibet overnight. “You cannot achieve a good end through the wrong kind of means.”

  He added that it would be wrong to think of an armed struggle as the difficult option and satyagraha as the weapon of the weak. It is easy to respond to injustice with hatred and violence, but harder to persuade one’s adversary of the wrongness of his actions. Nonviolent protest isn’t for the fainthearted, he said; it is an arduous practice, requiring much effort and discipline.

  Perhaps, this is why monks and nuns currently form the most visible resistance to Chinese rule in Tibet. According to Tsering Shakya, the leading historian of modern Tibet, monks and nuns “command the loyalty and respect of the local population,” which sees them as “defenders of Tibetan culture and traditions.” In September 1987, monks from Samdhong Rinpoche’s alma mater, Drepung, unfurled the Tibetan flag in central Lhasa., the first major political demonstration in Tibet in years. Monks and nuns from other monasteries followed. They were arrested and severely beaten, sparking clashes between Tibetans and the police, which in turn provoked Hu Jintao, the Chinese administrator in Tibet, now China’s president, to declare martial law in Tibet.

  Correctly identifying monasteries as a source of trouble, in 1996 the Chinese government began to subject them to “patriotism education,” asking monks and nuns to denounce the Dalai Lama. But in Tibet, as I talked to ordinary Tibetans and watched the great crowds of pilgrims in the rebuilt monasteries and temples, it seemed clear to me that despite official restrictions, Buddhism was flourishing in Tibet.

  Chinese heavy-handedness merely confirms the Dalai Lama’s political and spiritual authority in Tibet. But it is not easy for Tibetan exiles to translate this reverence for the Dalai Lama into political advantage. It looks unlikely at present that the Chinese Communist Party will suffer the fate of its counterparts in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe. In any case, its successors may not look too kindly upon the prospect of an independent Tibet, the likely playground of “foreign imperialists” on China’s border. Given this, the Dalai Lama’s scaled-down demand for Tibetan autonomy within China appears based on a realistic assessment of the strength of Chinese nationalist feel
ing. For even such Chinese dissidents as Wei Jingsheng, who have suffered greatly at the hands of the current regime in Beijing, assert that Tibet is and will remain part of China.

  This is partly why Tibetan leaders in exile rule out a militant nationalist movement, despite the fact that Buddhism in Tibet is “a powerful nationalist ideology,” as Tsering Shakya acknowledges, and has the “ability to mobilize the public and to contest the authority of the [Chinese Communist] Party.” As Samdhong Rinpoche explained to me, violence against China is likely to make it harder for the Dalai Lama to persuade Chinese dissident intellectuals to support autonomy for Tibet. And the Chinese government would be likely to severely punish the entire Tibetan population for the acts of a few armed dissenters. This seems a fair supposition; the Chinese regime has dealt brutally with its restive Muslim minorities in the northwestern province of Xinjiang.

  In any case, as Samdhong Rinpoche sees it, the Tibetans are fighting not so much to gain political freedom as to preserve their unique Buddhistic culture. “What will we gain,” he hold me, “if we win political freedom but lose the culture that gives value to our lives? It is why we reject violence, why the Dalai Lama has said he will resign his leadership of the Tibetan community if it took to violence. For nonviolence is an inseparable aspect of the Tibetan culture we are fighting for.”

  He explained that the Gandhian political method of satyagraha wasn’t aimed so much at achieving large-scale results such as national independence and autonomy as at helping powerless individuals achieve dignity and confidence in their daily encounters with repressive authority. He said that satyagraha properly begins with small, achievable things, at the grassroots level; it seeks large-scale structural change through a profound change in basic human attitudes.

  This, he said, had already happened in Tibet, where many monks and nuns saw nonviolent politics as a spiritual duty, a form of self-control and carefully measured action. Samdhong Rinpoche said that it is partly because of the Dalai Lama’s principled adherence to nonviolence that Tibet remains a presence in the world’s consciousness and that Buddhism grows attractive to many people in the West.

  This sounds right. But although many people see Tibet as a distinctive nation with an admirable religion and culture, no Western government dares lose lucrative business in China by recognizing the Tibetan right to self-determination. As China grows economically stronger, the great Tibetan dream—that the Dalai Lama will return to his homeland—appears unlikely to be fulfilled soon.

  The Dalai Lama himself seems to know this. In a recent interview he said that he would die happily in India if Tibet’s political status did not change in his lifetime. Such statements are what make him seem insufficiently political. But the Dalai Lama’s stance is in line with his Buddhistic distrust of immoral means and imaginary ends, the distrust, essentially, of violence and utopias, which another great exile, Alexander Herzen, expressed when he asserted that “the end of each generation is itself” and that no generation should be asked to sacrifice itself for the sake of an unknown future.

  In September 2004, the Dalai Lama’s representatives visited China for the third time in two years and discussed Tibetan autonomy with mid-ranking Communist leaders. The meetings between Tibetan and Chinese representatives were held again in June 2005. It is not clear whether these talks will lead to anything other than some diplomatic respectability for China as it prepares for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. However, given that they face a notoriously prickly opponent, the Tibetans have done well to keep alive the possibility of dialogue and negotiation.

  And perhaps the Dalai Lama’s insistence on nonviolence will appear more fruitful over time, especially if China experiences democratic reform. It has been the strange fate of Tibet, once one of the most isolated places on earth, to function as a laboratory for the most ambitious and ruthless human experiments of the modern era: the Great Leap Forward, the Cultural Revolution, and now a state-imposed capitalism. After having suffered totalitarian communism, Tibetans now confront a dissolute capitalism, one that seeks arrogantly, and often violently, to turn all of the world’s diverse humanity into middle-class consumers. But it seems wrong to think of Tibetans, as many outsiders do, as helpless victims of large, impersonal forces.

  It is no accident that the Tibetans seem to have survived the large-scale Communist attempt at social engineering rather better than most people in China itself. This is at least partly due to their Buddhistic belief in the primacy of empathy and compassion. And faced with an aggressively secular materialism, they may still prove, almost alone in the world, how religion, usually dismissed, and not just by Mao, as “poison,” can be a source of cultural identity and moral values; how it can become a means of political protest without blinding the devout with hatred and prejudice; how it can help not only heal the shocks and pain of history—the pain that has led people elsewhere in the world into nihilistic rage—but also create a rational and ethical national cultune, what may make a freer Tibet, whenever it comes about, better prepared for its state of freedom than most societies.

  Also by Pankaj Mishra

  NONFICTION

  Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Truvels in Small Town India

  An End to Suffering: The Buddha in the World

  FICTION

  The Romantics

  Pankaj Mishra was born in North India in 1969. He is the author of An End to Suffering and The Romantics, which won the Los Angeles Times’s Art Seidenbaum Award for First Fiction, and he is a regular contributor to The New York Review of Books.

  TEMPTATIONS OF THE WEST. Copyright © 2006 by Pankaj Mishra. All rights reserved. For information, address Picador, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.

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  First published in the United States by Farrar, Straus and Giroux

  Designed by Jonathan D. Lippincolt

  eISBN 9781429954648

  First eBook Edition : April 2011

  Some of these essays first appeared in slightly different form in The New York Review of Books, Granta, The London Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine, and The Guardian Weekend magazine.

  Grateful acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint an excerpt from “Continuities” from Middle Earth by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra, copyright © 1984 by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra. Published in 1984 by Oxford University Press. Reprinted by permission of the author.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Mishra, Pankaj.

  Temptations of the West: how to be modern in India, Pakistan, Tibet, and beyond / Pankaj Mishra.

  p. cm.

  ISBN-13: 978-0-312-42641-5

  ISBN-10: 0-312-42641-0

  1. South Asia—Description and travel. 2. South Asia—Civilization—Western influences. 3. Mishra, Pankaj—Travel—South Asia. I. Title.

  DS337.M58 2006

  954.05—dc22

  2006011987