Author: Thubten Samphel
Publisher: Rupa
Year: 2008
Language: English
Pages: 308
ISBN/UPC (if available): 9788129114341
Description
A group of Delhi University students decide to form the Tibetan Communist Party (TCP), with Tashi, the new chairman of the TCP, planning liberate his beloved Tibet with the same weapons which caused its downfall. His plans, however, do not fall in line with those of Drubchen Rinpoche who believes him to be the reincarnation of Drubtop Rinpoche. His first incarnation, according to the Lamp, invented the Word, the Tibetan alphabet on a hill in Kashmir, some fourteen hundred years ago. According to the Lamp, the invention of the Tibetan Word enabled the Tibetan people to take in the whole of the wisdom of ancient India.
Who will succeed in claiming Tashi’s beleaguered soul? The modern world that intruded into Tibet in the form of communism or the traditional world of Tibet as epitomized in the person of the Lama?
Thubten Samphel lives and works in Dharamsala.
COMMENTS
‘At last, the book on the Tibetan exile experience that so many of us have been waiting for! Thubten Samphel knows the Tibetan situation as closely and informedly as almost anyone; and yet he also feels the frustration and restlessness of his fellow refugees with uncommon conviction and sympathy. His debut novel mixes passion with intelligence, great knowledge with real pathos, and allows us, for the first time in fictional form, to feel the predicament of displaced Tibet from within. Now we can begin to act accordingly.’
-PICO LYER
Contents
Acknowledgements
THE DELHI DAYS
Prologue: Majnu Ka Tilla
Changistan
Tibet Memories
Different Dreams, Different Tibets
The Old China Hand and the Avenging Golok
Farewell to All That
Hint of Inheritance
THE LAMA’S STORIES
Lost Pieces of a Jigsaw Puzzle
The First Literate Tibetan and His Mastery of the Word
The Death of the Nineteenth Drubtop and Beijing Flies
The Ancestors of the One-Eyed Golok
THE PROTEST DEMONSTRATION GENERATION
Plans for Demonstration
Tashi and Metok
ON THE SILK ROAD TO SHAMBALA
In Search of a Cave in Srinagar
Professor Bamzai’s Tibetan Theories
Shambala Dreams
The Ladakh Interlude
The Enthronement of the Twentieth Drubtop Rinpoche
Mutton Leg in Bodh Gaya
DHARAMSALA
Homecoming
The Lama Visits Dharamsala
The Year of Protests and Other Years
Glossary