Litmus DebayudhChatterjee
“The Tibetan in Mumbai”: Examining ‘Kora’, the Problematic Corpus of a ‘Political Refugee’
Debayudh Chatterjee
Introduction: “I’m more of an Indian except for my chinky Tibetan face”
Tenzin Tsundue, in an interview given to the Daily Star on 13th December 2003, says, “My growth as an activist and writer is because of the situation I was born into as a Tibetan Refugee.” He goes on further to remark, “I write because I have to, because my hands are small and my voice grows hoarse most of the time. Writing to me is not a luxury, it is a necessity. The Writer and the Activist live together in me, hand-in-hand.” His biography reveals that he was born in a makeshift camp sometime in 1959 when his parents were working as labors in the perilous locales of Manali after being driven out from their homeland, Tibet, by the Chinese Government. He has no certain birth-date just as he doesn’t have a nationality. Tibet has no official existence in the world map though Tsundue, like other Tibetans in exile, is formally taken as a foreigner from Tibet living in India. The corpus of his poetry coming up from such a background deals not only with an irresistible patriotic zeal of seeing a free Tibet but also with a larger and complicated question of placing himself in a heterogeneous geographical and cultural diversity.
During the second half of the twentieth century, when a lot of countries woke to political independence, the world also saw the growth of a parallel colonial force that can be exemplified by the Chinese usurpation of Tibet in 1949. Therefore the conventional model of the ‘West vs. rest’ does not operate in Tsundue’s case but a slightly different order, where one Asian nation takes over her neighbor for expanding her political territory and plundering the native’s ethnic resources, comes into vogue. Tenzin Tsundue thus belongs to a complicated existence of living in a ‘post-colonial’ country but writing about a land striving under foreign dominion.
Ashcroft,
Debayudh Chatterjee
Introduction: “I’m more of an Indian except for my chinky Tibetan face”
Tenzin Tsundue, in an interview given to the Daily Star on 13th December 2003, says, “My growth as an activist and writer is because of the situation I was born into as a Tibetan Refugee.” He goes on further to remark, “I write because I have to, because my hands are small and my voice grows hoarse most of the time. Writing to me is not a luxury, it is a necessity. The Writer and the Activist live together in me, hand-in-hand.” His biography reveals that he was born in a makeshift camp sometime in 1959 when his parents were working as labors in the perilous locales of Manali after being driven out from their homeland, Tibet, by the Chinese Government. He has no certain birth-date just as he doesn’t have a nationality. Tibet has no official existence in the world map though Tsundue, like other Tibetans in exile, is formally taken as a foreigner from Tibet living in India. The corpus of his poetry coming up from such a background deals not only with an irresistible patriotic zeal of seeing a free Tibet but also with a larger and complicated question of placing himself in a heterogeneous geographical and cultural diversity.
During the second half of the twentieth century, when a lot of countries woke to political independence, the world also saw the growth of a parallel colonial force that can be exemplified by the Chinese usurpation of Tibet in 1949. Therefore the conventional model of the ‘West vs. rest’ does not operate in Tsundue’s case but a slightly different order, where one Asian nation takes over her neighbor for expanding her political territory and plundering the native’s ethnic resources, comes into vogue. Tenzin Tsundue thus belongs to a complicated existence of living in a ‘post-colonial’ country but writing about a land striving under foreign dominion.
Ashcroft,
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