Tibet: The Road Ahead
by Dawa Norbu Harper Collins Publishers India, New
Delhi, 1997 INR 395, pp 378, ISBN 81 7223 238 1
Contemporary books about pre-1950 Tibet tend to present one or the other of two broad representations. According to the first, Tibetan lamas were subsumed in Buddhist holiness, ordinary peasants were poor but unwaveringly earnest and morally unimpeachable, and the formal institutions of state did not exist because they were unnecessary. This might be dubbed the "orthodox Shangrila school".
According to the other representation, the monks indulged in all sorts of obscure tantric rites and exploited the peasantry, most commoners eked out a life of bare subsistence, and the existing institutions of state were undermined by continual and rampant intrigue. This, "the perverse-realist school", has an extreme variant found in Chinese official literature which says that the dominant characteristics of Tibet´s religious orthodoxy were cruelty and venality, and that human sacrifice and barbaric practices of torture were frequently resorted to in order to maintain an unjust theocratic regime.
Each of these constructions of Tibet serves a political ideology. Indeed, each of them is connected with a specific view of the kind of future Tibetans want for their country, its politics, its society and economy, as well as a characteristic set of prescriptions to achieve those goals. Sadly, informed descriptions of how ordinary Tibetans view the complex issues behind such simplistic and exaggerated positions have been comparatively rare.