Nation of Stories: Some Reflections on Tibetan Writing in English

Tsering Namgyal Khortsa

Over the past few years, Tibetan literature in English has witnessed a marked expansion due to the publication of several new books, including poetry, essays, short stories, and novels. This once fledgling field of writing has come a long way over the past decade, which is worthy of celebration.

It was not like that before. While I was growing up in India, my only source of written information about the Tibetan community was Tibetan Review, a magazine edited by Dawa Norbu, a Tibetan historian and writer, and later by Tsering Wangyal, a novelist.

The Delhi-based magazine offered a forum – the only one available in English at the time – for intellectual discussion and, for some future Tibetan writers, literary moonlighting. It provided an alternative space that the writers would not be able to otherwise find in mainstream Indian, let alone international, publications. Reading Benedict Anderson’s book, Imagined Communities, in graduate schools in the US made me realize the critical role publications such as Tibetan Review played in constructing the idea of the Tibetan nation. On the pages of the magazine, I read articles and essays by the leading Tibetan writers of the generation such as Jamyang Norbu, K Dhondup, Thubten Samphel, Dawa Norbu, and Tsering Wangyal.

Not surprisingly, Tibetan writing remained largely confined to journalism and essays. This mirrored the larger intellectual environment of India where we eked out a parallel existence as refugees. In India in those days, poets and writers usually doubled as journalists and public intellectuals, and in some cases, even public servants and diplomats, and the same was true in the Tibetan community.

A Brief History: Tibetan Writing in India

But something interesting happened in India in 1981. The publication of Midnight’s Children, a novel by the author Salman Rushdie, changed the literary scene of the Indian subcontinent overnight. The international success of Rushdie’s book not only sparked a worldwide interest in Indian and subcontinental literature in English, but it also encouraged other Indian writers to undertake ambitious literary projects. As pathbreaking novels often do, Rushdie’s book unleashed an entirely new breed of original and brilliant writers, marking a golden era of subcontinental literature in English. Indian writers were no longer just content writing in periodicals for a captive domestic audience but began to entertain larger dreams and even popular and commercial success as authors. Anyone who thought Rushdie was a one-off literary wunderkind had to look no further than two international bestsellers (Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy in 1991 and Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things in 1993) that quickly followed.

Tibetan writers in India were also not immune from this sudden boom in postcolonial Indian writing.  Jamyang Norbu’s pastiche of Sherlock Holmes, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, which was published in 1999, was noteworthy not just because the writer was a Tibetan living in Dharamshala, but because it went on to win one of the most prestigious Indian literary awards, the Crossword Award for English Fiction, in 2000. The book was very well-received (and it particularly appealed to Sherlock Holmes fans). I loved the book, written in old-fashioned and charming colonial English.

Midnight’s Children inspired an entire new generation of Indian writers from the subcontinent to find a voice in English, which heralded a new Renaissance in Indian literature in English. What was remarkable about Rushdie’s genius was not his narrative skill, but how he boldly reinvented and recreated the English language (a process that often came to be known as ‘chutneyfication’) to express Indian experience and Indian sensibility in a language of the erstwhile colonizers. If Gandhi and other freedom fighters had liberated India from Britain, Rushdie unshackled the Indian writers from the English of the colonizers. Both Rushdie and to some extent the other great writer of Indian origin, Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul – very different from Rushdie but equally influential – were essentially saying that you can write well in English without having to imitate the Victorian novelists or Romantic poets. The English language has evolved to a point (because of colonialism and other complex factors) that it is rich and supple enough to contain the entire swathe of human experiences and sensibilities. In other words, English is as much British as it is Indian and what the Indian authors were doing was merely, as Pico Iyer so memorably observed, “writing back to the empire.”

It is not surprising therefore that the arrival on the scene of Tenzin Tsundue as a poet was noteworthy, not only because he was the first Tibetan poet writing in English to gain popular fame, but also because his poems managed to give expression to the existence and the experience of Tibetans as subaltern citizens in India. In his writings, Tsundue was able to convey the angst of the Tibetan refugees in India and their dilemmas, and importantly, their identity crisis in a peculiar kind of language – we might call it Tibetan-Indian-English – that, he said, was influenced by some of the Indian poets (especially from Mumbai) that he admired. He went on to win the Outlook Picador Award for Non-Fiction in 2001. Despite his slim oeuvre, Tsundue inspired a generation of Tibetan diasporic writers with his ability to articulate the trials and tribulations of exile in English. At least one US-based Tibetan writer has said that Tsundue’s poem, ‘When It Rains in Dharamshala,’ which has been particularly influential, has moved her to take up writing poetry while in high school.

Tsundue, who doubles as an activist for Tibetan independence, remains an influential and colourful presence in the Tibetan (and now Indian) literary landscape, and he gives hundreds of readings at universities around India. He is particularly known for his activism and his much-publicized protests against the Chinese dignitaries on their visits to India, all of which gel well with his role as a revolutionary poet.

Another Tibetan poet to emerge on the scene and who has achieved much success is Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. She has also published a memoir and travelogue, Home in Tibet. Dhompa is known for her exquisite prose, which has to do with her background as a talented poet. She is the author of a forthcoming book of non-fiction on exiled Tibet, The Politics of Sorrow: A Story of Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile. Bhuchung D. Sonam, who is based in Dharamshala, is a well-regarded poet in his own right with several poetry collections and also considered a fine translator of poetry from Tibetan into English. He is perhaps more famous as a publisher of Blackneck Books. Among his role models include Tibetan scholar and monk Amdo Gendun Choephel and Chogyam Trungpa. Both Choephel and Trungpa wrote poems in English, the former during his travels in India during the Raj, and the latter in the 1970s in the United States. Choephel’s most famous poem in English is perhaps ‘Repkong,’ written during his time in India, in which he evokes nostalgia for his homeland. Trungpa who published several collections of poems, had even taken poetry lessons from his student – American beat generation poet Allen Ginsberg. He popularized such phrases as “spiritual materialism” and “idiot compassion.”

Indeed, it is hard to write about Tibetan life and literature without writing about Buddhism. Even the late Thubten Samphel, a lay Tibetan writer, featured a lama as a protagonist in his latest novel Copper Mountain published by Blackneck Books in 2021. Blackneck Books also published Samphel’s Tibet: Reports from Exile, a collection of his newspaper articles, which came out in December 2019. Samphel is best known for his novel Falling Through the Roof published in 2008, about Tibetans in India, partly set in Majnu Ka Tilla, the Tibetan enclave in North Delhi. Blackneck also published a posthumous novel, Another Place, a novel set in the exiled capital of Dharamshala, by the late Tsering Wangyal in 2020. In 2017, White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings by Tsewang Yishey Pemba was published posthumously by Niyogi Books. (The fact that some of these novels were published posthumously perhaps shows the limited infrastructure and support system for these writers working in English in those days.)

White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings is a book about Christian missionaries in Tibet. Pemba has a fascinating background, having studied in missionary schools in India before training as a medical doctor in London (the first Tibetan to do so). This was his second novel, having published his first novel as early as 1966, Idols on the Path (now out of print), purportedly the first work of English fiction by a Tibetan. Pemba, who spent much of his career working as a medical doctor in Bhutan and Darjeeling, remained a relatively unknown figure in the mainstream diaspora centered around Dharamshala, the exiled capital of Tibet. Not many Tibetans had read about him or his works until the publication of his 2017 novel. Attesting to his upbringing, he writes in an old-fashioned, colonial English style that it is quite charming and impressive.

The biggest dilemma facing most writers about Tibet, whether historians or novelists, is to find new ways to communicate the trauma of the defining moment in contemporary Tibetan history. Pemba addresses this conundrum by locating a new and as-yet-untold aspect of Tibetan history: the presence of Christian missionaries and their little-known peccadilloes in the Himalayas.

This also gives Pemba the license to render Tibetan-set dialogue into perfect English. This novel tells of two invasions of Tibet, the first by missionaries from California who try to convert and proselytise the Tibetans, efforts which fail spectacularly when they don’t convince the battle-hardened Khampa warriors to give up Buddhism or their dharma in favour of the teachings of Christ; the second is the better-known one by Chinese troops, opposed here by some of these same missionaries as well as, of course, by the Tibetans.

Merging two storylines into one seamless narrative is always a challenge and the results here are mixed, with some Western characters failing to quite come alive at times. Some of the key protagonists in White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings are offspring of missionaries, such as Paul, who fights against the Chinese army, marries a Tibetan, and “thinks like a Tibetan,” speaks English only haltingly, and when offered cigars by the American diplomats after reaching Calcutta, “smokes them like cigarettes.”

But that is a small distraction for a story that is so richly detailed, and that features the author’s deep knowledge of Tibetan culture, religion, costume, cuisine, and multiple dialects, all of which bring to life the people of that era and, of course, the famously awe-inspiring landscape. The fighting scenes are particularly vivid: the body language, swagger, and gallantry of the Khampa warriors, as well as the Chinese, all wonderfully described.

White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings has as much exotica as erotica, the latter, as one might expect from a doctor, rendered in ethnographic detail, breaking all stereotypes of Buddhist puritanism. And the description of the Shanghai bathhouse decadence of the Kuomintang era must rank among the best there is.

Pemba’s knowledge of Tibetan culture and penetrating insights derive from his work as a physician working in the western Himalayas (a career in service of his people that was noted in The Times and Telegraph in London when he died.)

The book’s title White Crane, Lend Me Your Wings, which is borrowed from a famous song by the Sixth Dalai Lama, has particular resonance for Tibetans: it can be interpreted as a heartfelt plea by Tibetans to return home just as homesick Tibetan children in the colonial-era boarding schools in Indian hill stations (Pemba among them) would long to go back to their parents behind the snow-capped Himalayas.

Pemba traces, in fewer than 350 pages, the displacement of Tibetans from the beautiful towns of pre-occupied Tibet to the streets of Kalimpong, Rajasthan, and Calcutta.

New anthologies by Tibetan writers have also been published in the past few years. Old Demons, New Deities: 21 Short Stories of Tibet edited by New York-based writer and translator Tenzin Dickie was published by OR Books in 2017. It was the only second English anthology of short stories by Tibetan authors ever published and the only one that contains work by authors based in Tibet, India, and around the globe written in three languages (Tibetan, Chinese, and English). Tenzin Dickie also edited the ground-breaking Penguin Book of Modern Tibetan Essays in 2023, which received great reviews. Like her earlier fiction anthology, this volume also brought together a wide range of Tibetans into a single volume. The authors live in Tibet, India, Japan, the US, China, and Sri Lanka and write in different languages. Also in 2023, the Canada-based Tibetan writer Tsering Yangzom Lama published her novel We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, which became a bestseller and won several literary prizes. It is the first ‘immigrant novel’ – if one could call it that – to have come out of the Tibetan exile experience.  Jamyang Norbu’s ‘memory history’ of Tibet, Echoes from Forgotten Mountains: Tibet in War and Peace was published by Penguin India in 2023 to great acclaim.

Echoes from Forgotten Mountains is at least two books rolled into one and straddles multiple genres: a literary memoir and a history of Tibetan resistance against Communist China, a challenging task for a reviewer. The book begins with his matrilineal and patrilineal lineages, where Norbu gives detailed accounts of his illustrious ancestors. His great-grandfather Tenduk Pulger served as district administrator under the seventh king of Sikkim Tsugphud Paljor. “The British Raj turned out to be just the element for this energetic and forward-looking personality, and he thrived in it.” Along with the land grants, Norbu’s great-grandfather acquired much property and became the richest man in Kalimpong and Darjeeling townships. “The locals said that he could dam the Teesta River if he threw all his money off the Anderson Bridge.” While Norbu was born in India, he travelled to Tibet with his mother, a daughter of Tibetan aristocrats, when he was three months old, before returning to Darjeeling just as the Communists were advancing into Tibet.

The bulk of Norbu’s last ambitious book, not surprisingly, details the Communist Chinese invasion of Tibet and the Tibetan response to it. The resultant fights between the Tibetan resistance and the People’s Liberation Army, especially in Eastern Tibet and elsewhere, are provided in a vivid, gut-wrenching, and novelistic manner. The book provides flamboyant accounts of life in Lhasa, its customs, architecture, especially its bars, which are presented in picturesque abundance. “My memories of the Holy City are, of course, those that have been passed on to me, over the years, by friends and relatives, especially my mother. It has given me a perspective of Lhasa that though not first-hand, is fairly intimate, and at times satisfyingly vivid.” A significant portion of the book is based on research and interviews, especially oral history, of those who witnessed the Tibetan resistance against the Communist occupation and the brief involvement of the CIA in supporting Tibetan resistance fighters. Inspired by Hemingway’s novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, a novel about the Spanish Civil War, Norbu himself joins the force in Mustang at the Nepal-Tibet border. He drops out of school and goes to fight there with a mule-load of books to read. Upon returning to Dharamshala, the exiled capital of Tibet, he works in intelligence gathering, performing arts, activism, and journalism. Throughout the book, he critiques the Dharamshala government’s failings, especially what he believes is its “near-exclusive focus” on the propagation of Buddhism and its lack of spine in dealing with its counterpart in Beijing.

Despite its Tolstoyan length of about 1000 pages, as the subtitle of the book suggests, Echoes from Forgotten Mountains is, for the most part, a breezy read, filled with personal anecdotes and memories. Norbu carries his erudition with a light touch while sprinkling the book with just the right amount of details and references from his wide reading. Some of the military history (particularly the arms, ammunition, and guns) is often presented in encyclopaedic detail. These, and other sections about the history and idiosyncrasies of Tibetan aristocrats, not least their infamous revelries, are of great historical value. It is indeed hard to find a book that has so much detail about the Tibetan elite, not least those who had moved to Kalimpong and Darjeeling with their treasure troves, leaving Tibet behind. The most memorable and heartfelt parts are sections in which the author recounts his childhood and youth in Kalimpong and Darjeeling and the life in those colonial outposts in those years, a vantage point that affords Norbu with a front-row seat to observe the fall of his ancestral homeland. Some of the nuggets about the spies of all nationalities in the border town of Kalimpong are priceless, especially the two Japanese spies who, having fallen on hard times, end up working at the famous Tibetan language newspaper, Tibet Mirror.

Books on Tibet roughly fall into the following categories: Western romanticized versions, communist propaganda, academic treatises, and sentimental accounts by Tibetans and some sympathizers. Norbu’s book aims to provide a scholarly middle way, a balance between objectivity and subjectivity that is uncommon in accounts of Tibet. True to its ambition, this is perhaps the only reason why the text lacks some of the emotional resonance of Dawa Norbu’s memoir about Tibet before 1959, Red Star Over Tibet, or Patrick French’s Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land.

Echoes from Forgotten Mountains is an apotheosis of Norbu’s long literary career. A judicious blend of memoir, ethnography, and historical writing on a grand scale, the text stands as a testament to his formidable autodidactic drive, which is inspiring, especially for writers from all provincial and marginalized communities. Precisely because such historical narratives on Tibet are so rare and the urgency and the need to document them so dire, it would not be an overstatement to say that the book will be considered a significant and original contribution to Tibetan literature in the years to come.

The Collective Trauma

Evidently, Tibetan writers are diverse in terms of their education, upbringing, background, and geographical location. However, one common condition that they all share is the collective trauma of the Chinese occupation of Tibet, which is invariably a leitmotif in Tibetan literature. Tibetan authors continue to grapple with the consequences of the Chinese invasion of Tibet and it is nearly impossible for them to write about anything else. Yes, there are other writers, for instance, Sri Lanka-based Chhimi Tenduf-La, who has specifically written that while he is a Tibetan at heart, he is against any form of “overt nationalism.” Then there are others in Tenzin Dickie’s anthology (the father-son-duo Tenzing Sonam and Mila Samdub, for example) who write with great panache on lighter aspects of colonialism such as the influence of Chinese food on Tibetan cuisine. While Chinese colonialism continues to provide most Tibetan authors with ready material to write about, an inexhaustible reservoir of tragic stories, it has presented the writers with its challenges, not least aesthetic. German writer and critical theorist Theodore Adorno once observed that there is “no poetry after the Auschwitz.” Critic George Steiner has also written that “It is by no means clear that there can be or that there ought to be, any form, style, or code of articulate, intelligible expression somehow adequate to the facts of the Shoah.”[i]

Indeed, how to write poetry about Tibet that is able to articulate the tragic experience of Tibet without sounding moralist or didactic, or being overtly political or sounding blatantly polemical are some of the questions that all writers, not least Tibetan writers, constantly face. The art of fiction is often about inhabiting the grey area where writers allow readers to resonate ethically and morally, where moral lessons are suggested and hinted at, rather than sermonized. Scholar Tsering Shakya has pointed out how the Tibetan obsession with politics of statelessness “inevitably constrains subject matters and gives an overt political tone to their writings. The desire to express a collective sentiment often sullies creative potential.”[ii] Sometimes perhaps it is more effective to be able to induce emotion and be able to communicate through humour rather than anger and indignation. But is it ethical for writers and poets to even talk about an artistic middle-way in the face of such a grave tragedy as the Chinese invasion and the loss of homeland, one might ask. Or perhaps Tibetan writers could find more satisfaction as polemical essayists and political writers of non-fiction, which many of them indeed do. These are individual choices that writers have to make and how they do so will determine the future direction and the fecundity as well as the shape and the form of the emerging Tibetan literary landscape.  

The Post-Coloniality of Tibetan Literature in English

On the whole, Tibetan literature in English as a field is on a much stronger footing now than it was, say ten or twenty years ago, as the field gradually expands as more Tibetans write and publish books in English, especially in the West as a new generation of well-educated Tibetans come of age. More Tibetan writers are being translated into foreign languages, including English. This is good news because it will provide future writers with a roadmap to follow and predecessors to emulate or imitate when writing about Tibetan lives in the world.

Naturally, as a young writer, given the dearth of Tibetan fiction in English, for inspiration I mostly read non-Tibetan writers, such as Rushdie and Naipaul, two very different writers. I liked how Rushdie Indianized the English language; and I admired Naipaul’s writing largely because he wrote in a peculiar kind of global English, often known as the “middle-style.” It is almost the opposite of the highbrow and old-fashioned prose (as well as what is known as Babu English) that I was so used to reading when I was growing up in India.

While much of Rushdie’s earlier work mainly dealt with migration and multiculturalism, Naipaul was writing about diasporic, uprooted communities. He was born in Trinidad as a descendant of Indian indentured laborers just as I was born as a child of Tibetans in India. In a way, both these de-territorialized communities were in their peculiar ways trying to hold onto the cultural remnants of their lost homelands and recreate their new avatars in the diaspora. One of the things that struck me when reading Naipaul’s masterpiece, A House for Mr. Biswas, was his descriptions of Hinduism, pundits, and esoteric Hindu rituals that were so central to the life of the Indians in Trinidad. Exiled Tibetans are not the only people who held on so intensely to their past (especially Buddhism and its cultural paraphernalia). Such an exercise in nostalgia can be found in almost all diasporic communities. But the Tibetan émigrés are different in that we even yearn and dream for an eventual return to our homeland.

Even though Naipaul may be Indian in terms of his ethnicity, his book A House for Mr. Biswas, or for that matter, his non-fiction trilogy on India is not part of Indian literature. They are considered ‘postcolonial’ literature. As a result, much of the English literature, irrespective of whether they were produced by Indians, Pakistanis, Africans, and even to some extent by Malaysians and Singaporeans (even though some of them may be Chinese or mixed in terms of their ethnicities) are categorized under the large umbrella of postcolonial literature. It is a broad and eclectic church. It includes such varied personalities from the novelist Peter Nazareth, a Goan from Uganda, to Edwin Thumboo, a half-Tamil, half-Chinese poet from Singapore, but all speaking in the same language and almost all of them in one way or the other dealing with the consequences of British colonialism.

On the one hand, the use of the term postcolonialism in the context of Tibetan writers writing in English is problematic for Tibet was never directly ruled by Britain. On the other hand, it would also be impossible to entirely deny the fact that the works of Tibetan writers working in English are not influenced by colonialism and that many Tibetan elites of the past sent their children to colonial-era Christian missionary schools in India. Even the monastic elites were not spared from this influence as seen in the case of savant and writer Gendun Choephel who studied English in India during the British Raj. Chogyam Trungpa was educated at Young Lamas Home School in the North Indian hill station of Dalhousie in the 1950s. He later won a scholarship to study comparative religion at Oxford. It is not surprising that perhaps the first Tibetan poet to have published in the West was, in fact, Trungpa (who also earned a reputation amongst his followers for his stiff upper lip and his charming Queen’s English.)

After arriving in India, Tibetans began to study in missionary schools and the Tibetan schools built in the hill stations of India. While they may not be ‘postcolonial’ in the strictest sense of the term, thousands of Tibetans have graduated from these schools, most of them better equipped to write in English than in Tibetan.

Take, for example, the two best-known writers of Tibetan origin in India, the poets Tsering Wangmo Dhompa and Tenzin Tsundue. Dhompa attended a missionary school in Mussoorie while Tenzin Tsundue studied at Tibetan Children’s Village in Dharamshala. While they were born in India, it would be more than a stretch to call them postcolonial writers. On the contrary, it can perhaps even be argued that because of our complex relationship with the British Empire, and because of the subsequent occupation of Tibet by China and the sufferings we endured as a result, Tibetan elites and writers (like Jamyang Norbu and Tsewang Yeshe Pemba, for instance) can perhaps be forgiven if they were seen to be exercising a certain nostalgia for the Raj in their works.

A New Kind of English: Tibetan Sensibility  

For me, writing fiction about Tibetans is often as much about writing as it is about translation: an attempt to render this peculiar sensibility into a language that was not our own. I could have just told a story about Tibetans in India – just a recollection of events – but that would not have been as challenging. I wanted to set myself a goal of writing about the entire exile experience – including melancholy, sadness, longing, trauma, confusion, and even the silences, and of course, the humour – into English since fiction writers, due to the nature of their form, are required to deal with human ‘experience’ (and the interior lives) of the characters rather than just the plain events.

The question of language is an important one. I was constantly made to reflect upon the issue of language not just because of my hyphenated identity but also due to my early training as a journalist which trained me in writing in an accessible manner. I wish I could write in Tibetan, but my Tibetan is worse than my English.

Soon, I realized to write about Tibetan experience and Tibetan sensibility I needed to create my own language. Whereas Indian writers can find Hindu culture and imagery described beautifully in novelistic detail in A House for Mr. Biswas, where do Tibetan writers go? I discovered in the works of Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche some early attempts at conveying Buddhist concepts and ideas from Sanskrit and Tibetan into contemporary, everyday English. Trungpa has been able to articulate Tibetan culture and Buddhist experience in plain jargon-less English in such books as Born in Tibet, Meditation in Action, and Spiritual Materialism, amongst others. Tibetan lama and filmmaker Dzongsar Khyentse Rinpoche, himself a writer, has mentioned how Trungpa miraculously used the English language to translate foreign ideas of Tibetan Buddhism and its paraphernalia into everyday English idiom. This is precisely the reason why Trungpa found a popular audience for books despite his somewhat abstruse themes like Mahamudra meditation and bardo states. For this, Trungpa continues to remain a pioneering personality in Tibetan literature in English and continues to remain influential even though not many Tibetan authors seem to read him.

Tibetan language is vague and poetic and it does not lend itself so easily to translation, definitely not literal or direct translation. I believe what made Trungpa a successful writer is primarily his brilliance as a translator. For Tibetan writers, as mentioned earlier, writing in English is ultimately an act of translation. Indian poet and translator Ashok Vajpeyi lamented that some of the poems that he was trying to translate from Polish to Hindi were not translatable because of the richness of the Christian imagery in the original poems. Translators from Tibetan to English face a similar challenge, if not a greater one. Translators could perhaps look into the works of Trungpa for guidance and inspiration.

Given the difficulty of cultural translation, Indian poet Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has remarked how he had to create his language when he first began as a poet half a century ago. He calls his language, partly influenced by the Beat Poets, “American,” and which he continues to ‘invent and reinvent’ to suit his purpose.

Making what is seemingly old or traditional contemporary and relevant to the present generation is an important task, when it comes to people such as Tibetans who have lost their homeland and to some extent their language. Fiction, as said by sinologist and writer Simon Leys, is a story of the present, while history is the story of the past. Language is a bridge that links the past with the present, and language must constantly be reinvented to make stories become relevant and come alive.

Linguistic conservatism, unfortunately, is common amongst Tibetans. Most Tibetans find it hard to play with language as the ornate and archaic prose of the religious texts, and Tibetan language writings often testify. The literary merit and beauty of the language notwithstanding, it hinders the development of contemporary storytelling. Tibetans writers in English are also not immune to such lack of originality which stunt their creativity, and, as a consequence, hinders the emergence of novel narrative techniques and new literature. As Arvind Krishna Mehrotra said, if you want to make poems of Kabir, who lived more than 600 years ago, understandable to the present-day readers, his poems must be translated into contemporary language. Certain reluctance and hesitation on the part of Tibetan writers in English in embracing new writing techniques is worthy of debate.

For human cultures and societies to survive, their experiences and narratives need to be reflected in stories. Tibetan writers should embrace new and bold storytelling techniques. They should not hold themselves back from innovation and experimentation so that new narratives and stories are told and retold. As the 2018 Nobel Laureate Polish writer Olga Tokarczuk has said, whatever is not told ceases to exist. Similarly, it can be said that for the Tibetan nation to exist, her stories must be told and retold. 

Notes

[i] Steiner, George “Postscript” (1966), in Language and Silence: Essays 1958–1966 (London, 1967), 199, and “The Long Life of Metaphor: An Approach to the Shoah,” in Writing and the Holocaust, Berel Lang, ed. (New York, 1988), 154–71.

[ii] Shakya, Tsering. Tibetan English Writing in India. Delhi: Muse India, 2009. Accessed May 21, 2024 https://museindia.com/Home/ViewContentData?arttype=feature&issid=57&menuid=5138

Tsering Namgyal Khortsa is a writer and journalist. He has also published widely in some of the leading publications in the region and around the world, including The Asian Wall Street Journal, The Financial Times, Religious Despatches, Asia Sentinel, South China Morning Post, OpenDemocracy.org, India Today and the Hindustan Times.  Born and brought up in India, Tsering was educated at the National Taiwan University (Taipei), University of Minnesota and University of Iowa, where he earned an MA in journalism and also studied creative writing (fiction and literary non-fiction).  In 2007, he was awarded the Dorothy Mueller Writing Scholarship from University of Iowa. His short stories have appeared in Yellow Medicine Review: The Journal of Indigenous Literature, Arts and Culture (Southwest Minnesota State University), Asia Literary Review (formerly Dimsum, Hong Kong), and Himal SouthAsia. One of his short stories was anthologized in Old Demon, New Deities: 21 Short Stories from Tibet, edited by Tenzin Dickie (Navyana, 2017). His first book, a collection of essays, Little Lhasa: Reflections on Exiled Tibet, was published in 2006 (Indus Source, Mumbai). His biography of the 17th Karmapa Ogyen Trinley Dorjee was released in India on May 20, 2013 (Hay House India). His novel, The Tibetan Suitcase, was published in 2019 (BlackneckBooks).  He currently lives in Dehradun, India.