Tales of Tibet and Tibetans continue to sell well to an English-speaking readership. Home to the mysterious, the demonic, the keys to the mind and humanity's redemption, ever since Herodotus wrote of gold-digging ants there, Tibet has been 'a land simply like no other', in the words of Alexandra David-Néel, the first European woman to win the 'race' to Lhasa during the early 20th century. Like places of fable everywhere, armchair explorers far outnumber their more intrepid counterparts, and even today, when railroads and highways crisscross the plateau, books continue to be the vehicle for the majority of would-be Tibet explorers, due to restrictive and expensive permits and frequent lockdowns imposed by the authorities.
For the past few decades, discourse on Tibet in the English-speaking world has largely been produced outside of it. The nature of this discourse, too, has undergone a sea change since Tibet first entered the general lexicon of news, politics and travel during the late 19 century, from one concerned with geographical exploration and geopolitics to one largely dominated by spirituality, and, more specifically, how those in the West can learn from Tibet, and why they should. The Tibetan side of this conversation is led by a formidable entourage: a Nobel Peace Prize winning spiritual head who has topped Watkins' 100 Spiritual Power List since 2012; jet-setting incarnations and teachers joining prominent neuroscientists in the search for universal happiness; monks volunteering for their experiments and giving TED lectures. Today, more than any other major world religion, Tibetan Buddhism appeals to (or is marketed towards) the hip, the environmentally friendly, and those slightly disenchanted with the consumerist ways of Europe and North America, and increasingly, of China too. The rest of lay Tibetan society has been swept along to complete a chic portrait of kindness and non-violence. Tibetans are the "baby seals of the human rights movement", according to scholar and translator
Robert Thurman.
Such wide-eyed focus on the spiritual and compassionate ignores the fact that parts of Tibet's history have been as violent, and its society as militarised, as anywhere else in the world. "In a land as lawless and as uncertain as ours, a rifle was an essential part of a man's life," one inhabitant of Kham, in east Tibet, wrote of the early 20th century. The arrival of communism on the plateau did not go unchallenged. When, by the end of the 1950s, it had become clear that the collection of farmers and nomads who had taken up arms against the communists could not defeat the People's Liberation Army (PLA) in the field, the resistance leadership regrouped in India and Nepal and resorted to conducting guerrilla raids on Chinese troops and infrastructure inside Tibet. In this they had the support of the CIA, which provided training, weapons and funds from 1956 until the early 1970s.
The activities of the guerrillas sat uneasily with much of the Tibetan exile leadership, and were eventually brought to an end in 1974, after the Dalai Lama recorded a speech commanding the fighters to lay down their arms, and had it carried up to be played at their base in Mustang. Since then, the narrative of those who fought the first waves of the communist advance, and the CIA-backed guerrillas has been, for the most part, absent from the Tibetan story propagated by the exile government in Dharamsala. Twenty years after the disbanding of the Mustang force, Jamyang Norbu, a prominent activist, writer and former member of the resistance, wrote of his hope: