“WE must have been a pitiful sight to the handful of Indian guards that met us at the border – 80 travellers, physically exhausted and mentally wretched from our ordeal.”
The spectacle of Tibet’s god-king, the Dalai Lama, recovering from a severe bout of dysentery, advancing through the Karpo Pass on the back of a dzomo (a yak-cow hybrid) and leaving behind the Land of Snows, must indeed have been pitiful, as well as startling.
The gruelling journey from Tibet’s capital, Lhasa, had begun on March 17th, 1959, when the 14th Dalai Lama, fearing incarceration by the Chinese, escaped incognito from the heavily guarded Norbulingka summer palace. With the help of a small entourage he crossed some of the highest mountain passes in the world southwards into India and ultimately to the exile that has now lasted 50 years.
On the day of his escape, nuns at the Loreto convent in Darjeeling, which nestles in the foothills of the Himalayas in northern India, were busy organising the annual St Patrick’s Day jamboree. It was a significant date in the school’s calendar, the day when the convent celebrated its Irish roots. Founded by Irish nuns in 1860, it is a daughter house of Loreto Abbey in Rathfarnham, Dublin. For one student, however, the infectious enthusiasm of the nuns and her fellow students was overshadowed by some news she had read in the newspapers.
Jetsun Pema was the sister of the Dalai Lama and she was troubled by reports of the uprising in Lhasa on March 10th. Furthermore, there were rumours that the Dalai Lama was a prisoner in his own palace. She was unaware that her brother, the temporal and spiritual leader of Tibet, was making perhaps the most difficult decision of his life.
Attempts to negotiate a peaceful accommodation with China, which had invaded Tibet in 1950, had proved futile. China was in no mood for negotiation. Unable to guarantee his people protection – certainly not without relinquishing his philosophy of non-violence – the Dalai Lama was forced to flee his country as the first mortars began to fall outside the northern gate of the Norbulingka palace.
As word of the Chinese attack filtered through to Jetsun Pema at the Loreto convent, the nuns collected the newspapers for her and prayers were offered for her family. Despite the school’s Catholic ethos, 80 per cent of the school’s pupils were Buddhist or Hindu. Paradoxically, this cloistered setting seems to have been more willing to foster Tibetan culture than were the “liberating” revolutionary guards from China. At Loreto, Pema and her fellow countrywomen were permitted in their last two years to study Tibetan history and culture in the Tibetan language and present it in their final exam.
Three angst-ridden weeks passed before Jetsun Pema’s sister-in-law arrived at the school in Darjeeling to announce that the Dalai Lama had succeeded in crossing the Indian border and had reached Tezpur. The Mother Superior of the convent gave Pema and her niece, who was also a student at the school, a day off in honour of the momentous news. This allowed the two young girls and other family members living in Darjeeling to travel to Siligur to meet the Dalai Lama. There they witnessed thousands of Indians and Tibetans who had turned out to greet him, shouting “Hail to the Dalai Lama” and “Long Live the Dalai Lama”.
Jetsun Pema later became a minister in the Tibetan government in exile and was affectionately known as the ‘Mother of Tibet’. In her autobiography, Tibet — My Story, she envisages the possible outcome for Tibet if the Dalai Lama had been captured in 1959: “I believe. . .Tibet would probably have been wiped from the map of Asia and the Chinese would have been able to complete their genocide without the knowledge of the international community.” The work of the Dalai Lama and demonstrations within Tibet itself have continued to highlight the country’s plight. But the sad reality is that over the years Tibet has been sidelined by the exigencies of international trade and realpolitik.
Ireland was one of the few countries to speak up on behalf of Tibet at the United Nations debate on the Tibetan question in 1950. Expressing solidarity with the people of Tibet at the UN General Assembly, the then Minister for External Affairs, Frank Aiken, recalled how the Irish nationalist Michael Davitt had campaigned in 1904 in America on behalf of the Tibetans.
Defending the right of small nations like Tibet to exist, Aiken drew directly on Ireland’s own experience, to repudiate the theory “once a subject nation always a subject nation”.
During his visit to Belfast in October 2000 to lead a seminar entitled “The Way of Peace”, the Dalai Lama visited the peace line at Workman Avenue, an interface gate dividing the North’s two communities. In that highly symbolic location he urged the people of Ireland, North and South, to “use differences positively. Two contradictory forces can synthesise and find something more meaningful. Dialogue is important.”
St Patrick, our immigrant national saint, is Ireland’s own synthesis, affroding us the opportunity to celebrate who we were and who we are becoming through the matrix of emigration and immigration which has changed the cultural and social landscape of this island and will continue to do so. Reaching out to our own exiles abroad forces us to be more aware of exiles who have sought asylum here and elsewhere around the globe.