Author Pankaj Mishra read a hilarious snippet of his memoir Butter Chicken in Ludhiana: Travels in Small Town India at the SAJA litfest earlier this year.
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Tenzing Tsundue, |
In the early 70’s, Norbu was among the young Tibetans who dropped out of school, picked up a rifle and joined the Tibetan guerrillas operating out of Mustang, a piece of Nepalese territory that juts into Tibet. The C.I.A. began financing these guerrillas in 1956 and arranged for more than a hundred of them to be trained in the Colorado Rockies in what was one of the most secret anti-Communist operations of the cold war.In 1958, the C.I.A. first airdropped arms, ammunition, radios and medical supplies into Tibet. Three years later, Tibetan guerrillas based in Mustang ambushed a Chinese military convoy inside Tibet and captured documents that revealed the low capacity and morale of the Chinese military. This turned out to be one of the C.I.A.’s most valuable intelligence hauls during the cold war.
American support for the Tibetans, however, was halfhearted at best, designed to undermine Communist China, not to achieve Tibetan independence. It began to peter out by the late 60’s and finally dried up altogether in the early 70’s, after Kissinger and Nixon befriended Mao. Then in 1994, much to the dismay of many Tibetans, Bill Clinton uncoupled trade agreements with China from the problematic issue of human rights.
India also began by helping the Tibetan guerrillas, after a border dispute with China ended in a humiliating military defeat in 1962, but by the early 1970’s had withdrawn its support. Abandoned by their sponsors, many Tibetan guerrillas were attacked and killed by the Nepalese Army. Finally, in a taped message in 1974, the Dalai Lama ordered the Mustang guerrillas to give up arms and return to India. [Link]
The guerrillas were based in Mustang, a region in Nepal:
Mustang (Mustan) is part of the Kingdom of Nepal, in the north-east of that country, bordering Tibet… It is roughly 80 km long (north-south) and 45 km at its widest… Mustang was once an independent kingdom, although closely tied by language and culture to Tibet. The monarchy still survives as the Kingdom of Lo… [Link]
Mishra’s essay points out the irony in Buddhists advocating violent revolution to overthrow Chinese rule, though Buddhists in Sri Lanka have been violent for quite some time. The dissident he profiles, Tenzing Tsundue, plays Udham Singh to the Dalai Lama’s Mohandas Gandhi:
“Our leaders quote Gandhi,” Tsundue said. “But Gandhi saw British rule in India as an act of violence and said that resistance to it was a duty. I see the Chinese railway to Lhasa as a similar act of violence. What’s wrong with blowing up a few bridges? How can such resistance be termed wrong and immoral?” [Link]
The piece is a corollary to Mishra’s new book on Buddhism, An End to Suffering. Mishra wrote an introduction to a new edition of a Booker winner about this blog’s namesake mutiny:
This time of convulsion is the subject of J. G. Farrell’s The Siege of Krishnapur… Farrell’s story is set in an isolated Victorian outpost on the subcontinent. Rumors of strife filter in from afar, and yet the members of the colonial community remain confident of their military and, above all, moral superiority. But when they find themselves under actual siege, the true character of their dominion—at once brutal, blundering, and wistful—is soon revealed. [Link]
He also has an interesting claim to fame on the publishing side:
Working as an editor for Harper Collins, he is credited with having discovered Arundhati Roy’s exceptional novel The God of Small Things. [Link]
Here’s Wikipedia on the history of Tibet.
