Echoes
from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community.
By Keila
Diehl. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
2002, XXV + 337 pages, ISBN 0-520-23044-2 (paperback), US $19.95;
ISBN 0-520-23043-4 (cloth), US $50.00.
Reviewed by
Jan Magnusson
Director of Studies at Centre for East and Southeast Asian Studies
Lund University, Sweden
jan.magnusson@ace.lu.se
In
his ground breaking book Prisoners of Shangri-la. Tibetan Buddhism
and the West, Donald Lopez (1999) outlines the architecture
of a mythological prison from which everything Tibetan seems unable
to escape. The present image of Tibet, Lopez argues, is supported
by a romantic wish that the Tibetans somehow hold the power to save
the Western world from its cynical and materialist self by restoring
its spirit. All things Tibetan seems to fit into this mould, making
the Tibetans the "teddy bears" of the modern world. Other
observers, such as Dodin & Ræther (1997) have named this
syndrome "Mythos Tibet" pointing to the impact of the
myth on Tibetan self-identity as well as on the Tibet researchers
themselves. The mechanism of this myth is neatly captured by the
cover of Lopez's book; a photograph of a Tibetan monk wearing robes
and a pair of shades. Looking at the photo one cannot help feeling
that it is inappropriate for a monk to wear the shades (Magnusson
2002). A similar perception is apparent in the happy crowd of Western
visitors congregating in the exile Tibetan headquarters in Dharamsala,
in north India, where one can hear comments like: "I can't
get over the sight of Tibetans driving cars!"
Mythos Tibet makes
it hard to write academically about Tibet and the Tibetans today.
Reading American anthropologist Keila Diehl's book about the exile
Tibetan soundscape, Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the life
of a Tibetan Refugee Community, I was again reminded of its
spell. In her extensive study Diehl looks at the power of music
in the re-creation of Tibetan culture in exile. But despite her
attempts to get square with the myth, I can't help finding myself
trapped in Lopez's prison: the exotic sight and sound of Tibetans
playing amplified rock music in the shadow of the Himalayas. Perhaps
unintentionally, Diehl begs for the readers' attention by telling
us what an unlikely setting an Indian village is for rock and roll,
and how perplexed she was the first time she heard a Tibetan singing
the blues.
Leaving the spell
of the prison aside, it must be emphasized that Echoes from
Dharamsala is an ambitious book that takes the reader deep
inside the Tibetan exile community and explores the tension between
a political strategy of cultural preservation and an active dialogue
between local and global flows of cultural expressions. Diehl's
study can be divided into three major parts. The first part discusses
how Tibetan cultural heritage is reconstructed in exile. The second
investigates the exile community's relationship to the popular music
of Indian so-called "Hindi" films. The third part is an
ethnographic study of an exile Tibetan rock band called the Yak
Band, a band in which Diehl herself sometimes played keyboard during
her fieldwork.
Music, just as any
kind of Tibetan exile cultural expression, has to be contextualized
within an exile Tibetan official paradigm of cultural preservation,
Diehl argues. This paradigm has become something of an iron cage
(another prison?) from which new cultural expressions seem unable
to escape. Cultural activities in the exile society are often used
as means in the battle against Chinese influence in Tibet and to
minimize the risk of exile Tibetans disappearing into their host
societies. The official position here is that pre-Chinese occupation
Tibetan practices are more authentic and traditional than what goes
on culturally in present day Tibet. In fact, many exile Tibetans
perceive themselves as more Tibetan than the sinicized Tibetans
living in Tibet. Recent arrivals from the homeland are often seen
more as a liability than as a cultural resource. In the context
of religion the Chinese authorities' control over of monastic administration
has bred a deep-rooted suspiciousness against institutionalized
Buddhism in Tibet. The last decade's battle between "Tibetan"
and "Chinese" reincarnations of important religious leaders
is a case in point.
Diehl asserts that
what is represented as pre-1950 Tibetan culture is not a factual
past that can be upheld and constantly re-implemented in exile,
but something that, in reality, is continuously reconstructed through
memory, fantasy, narrative, and myth. In that sense the efforts
of the exile-Tibetans to stay the same may actually be as innovative
as they are conservative. One of her important points is that the
cultural preservation paradigm has professionalized the reconstructive
practices. Trained experts select and nourish certain cultural elements
as authentic and discard others. Ordinary people more often become
spectators than participants in public cultural activities.
Other researchers
have noted how "authentic" cultural elements appear to
have been manufactured quite recently, such as the image of Tibetan
society as traditionally eco-friendly (Huber 1995). Within the context
of Tibetan Buddhism, one finds an innovative Gelugpa modernism.
A good example is the XIV Dalai Lama's way of rephrasing Tibetan
Buddhist doctrine into modern concepts such as "universal responsibility"
(see, for instance Gyatso 1988) and introducing it as a part of
a new global ethic (Dalai Lama 1999). Another is the fusion of liberal
democratic and Buddhist doctrine in the exile community's democratization
project (Magnusson 1999).
Diehl's study works
theoretically from the idea that music/songs operate as "sonic
icons of places," and that modern Tibetan exile music is created
from three major sources/places: Tibetan music as it is remembered
by the exiles, contemporary Hindi music, and contemporary Western
music. Like the recent arrivals, contemporary Tibetan music is considered
to be too sinicized and is discarded.
In India, popular
Hindi songs have become the cherished everyday music of most exile
Tibetans. But how is this justified in relation to the cultural
preservation paradigm? Diehl argues that the exiles separate their
cultural sphere and personal identity into a traditional identity
and a modern identity. They can thus pursue new and modern ways
without jeopardizing the traditional. Her point here is that exile
Tibetans are freer to experiment with Indian tradition than with
the Tibetan tradition they are supposed to preserve and protect.
Another important distinction made about the paradigm is that it
is acceptable for a Tibetan in exile to display a personal passion
for Hindi songs, but it is not acceptable to express it collectively
in public as a community preference.
Just as the Hindi
songs are an important part and icon of the exile Tibetan soundscape,
so too is Western rock music, Diehl continues. During her fieldwork
in India she was met by a Western rock song in every exile Tibetan
place she went. An interesting detail is that almost all of the
rock songs she mentions, both the ones she heard and the ones she
played with the Yak Band, were from the 1970s. Why this was the
case remains unexplained in the book. Perhaps it is because the
best songs were written during that decade? Seriously, these days
trance and hip-hop (which, if one does not care about place of origin,
are global), rather than the retro-Western music of the 70s, have
taken the field. A new period of fieldwork would perhaps reveal
an altered soundscape.
Although definitely
considered an inauthentic public expression, Tibetan-made rock music
has been justified in the community by its contribution to popular
awareness and activism, and through its political and nationalistic
lyrics. Much of the early exile Tibetan rock music originated in
the government-sponsored Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA).
For instance, one of the modern evergreens is the former TIPA director
Jamyang Norbu's Tibetan text to Woody Guthrie's "This Land
Is Your Land." TIPA also produced the first modern record,
an EP including the popular love song "Dzaypa’i Rinzin
Wangmo" (Beautiful Rinzin Wangmo). Dharamsala was the scene
of more loosely organized rock bands, such as the legendary Vajra
Hammer, drawing members from Western Buddhists living in the area.
Although there were some independent projects such as Rangzen Shönu
(Freedom Youth) and Ultra Vires (based in Darjeeling, in West Bengal),
the first established exile Tibetan rock band was the TIPA based
Ah-Ka-Ma Band. What was unique about this band was its mix of traditional
Tibetan instruments with the basic rock combo line-up (guitar-bass-drums),
and its "official" cultural status. The band was often
hired to perform at different community events.
In an interesting
chapter, Diehl analyzes the role of language in the cultural preservation
paradigm, and how it conditions the crafting of song lyrics in exile.
I will briefly mention one of these conditions here. The invention
of literary Tibetan as a vehicle for translating Buddhist texts
from Sanskrit gives the Tibetan language a distinct sacred quality,
Diehl argues. Apart from being the script that made Buddhist texts
available to Tibet in the seventh century, a number of syllables
are used in esoteric chants and mantras. When spoken or sung they
become "sonorous icons" to laypeople who are unaware of
their secret meanings. In this capacity the icons ritually confirm
the exile community's identity. It is thus crucial for a songwriter
to get the words right, and without any formal errors. Given that
most exiles have to struggle with their literary Tibetan or simply
do not know it, songwriters often have to turn to individuals who
are proficient in literary Tibetan. Today, most of them are older
religious scholars or nobility. In her fieldwork, Diehl discovered
that many of the lyrics of the Tibetan rock songs were in fact written
as perfect, formal poetry by scholars such as, for example, the
distinguished Drepung Geshe, and former abbot of Tharpa Choling
Monastery in Kalimpong, India, Ngawang Jinpa, and that understanding
the meaning of the lyrics is often far beyond the linguistic capacity
of ordinary exile Tibetans.
Personally, I find
Diehl's brief history of modern Tibetan music one of the most useful
parts of her book, and only wish that it had been more extensive.
But Diehl has chosen to focus this part of her study on the story
of one of the bands. It was started as The Snow Lions by Tibetan
soldiers enlisted in the Indian army. After leaving the army, the
band resettled in Dharamsala, started a cable-TV business, and changed
its name to The Yak Band. The band's career culminated in a series
of concerts during the 1995 Kalacakra initiation in the Tibetan
settlement Mungod, in south India. Gradually giving in to the audience's
preference for Hindi songs rather than nationalistic Tibetan rock
songs, the band ended up being subjected to a devastating critique
for "selling out" to Indian pop culture and this eventually
led to its break-up.
In Diehl's analysis,
the band's performance of Hindi songs in public violated the official
paradigm of cultural preservation, and the band was punished for
it. The exile Tibetan love of Hindi songs should have been kept
at a private and individual level, and should never have been expressed
in public.
Diehl's explanation
for the fall of The Yak Band is competent but put into the context
of the global market for popular music where bands and artists come
and go according to trends in styles, the waning of its fame and
consequent break-up is not exceptional. When I recently visited
a Tibetan settlement in South India, I tried to compare the experiences
of the exiles themselves with Diehl's analysis, only to find that
most of the people I asked did not really remember The Yak Band
very well. Instead it was the JJI Exile Brothers' new album that
was being dubbed "a new style of Tibetan song" and labeled
as "Tibetan blues" (compare TibetNet 2003). Formed in
1998, JJI Exile Brothers released the album on the Dalai Lama's
birthday, and describe their music as a weapon to raise awareness
of the plight of the Tibetans.
What I miss in Echoes
from Dharamsala is a critical analysis of the writer's own
role in her study. For one thing, there is something disturbing
about an anthropologist joining a rock band to do fieldwork. Somehow
this seems just as likely as a paleontologist joining The Stones
for purely scientific purposes. Moreover, Diehl never systematically
discusses how her own participation in the band, performing in public
with it, and hanging out with its members, affected the exile community's
perception of the band and its music. It is not very likely that
her presence passed unremarked. But in this area the reader is left
with a number of unanswered questions: Did her appearance on stage,
dressed up in a traditional Tibetan dress, lend credibility or credulity
to the band? Did it reinforce any un-Tibetan influences in its music?
Diehl wants to generalize about modern Tibetan music from the story
of The Yak Band, but it is also possible that her contribution to
the band was to make it different from others.
What stands out
in Echoes from Dharamsala is the remarkable tension between
the "tyranny" of the cultural preservation paradigm and
a creative, aspiring, politically conscious music making use of
the rock format. The policing of dissident expressions can be ardent,
and often mutilating to cultural innovation.
References
Dalai Lama. 1999.
Ethics for the New Millennium. New York: Riverhead Books.
Dodin, Thierry &
Heinz Ræther, eds. 1997. Mythos Tibet. Wahrnemnungen,
Projektionen, Phantasien. Köln: Dumont.
Huber, Tony. 1997.
"Green Tibetans: A Brief Social History." In Korom, Frank,
ed. Tibetan Culture in the Diaspora. Papers presented at
a panel of the 7th International Seminar of Tibetan Studies, Graz,
1995.
Lopez, Donald. 1999.
Prisoners of Shangri-la. Tibetan Buddhism and the West.
Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Magnusson, Jan.
2002. "A Myth of Tibet: Soft Power and Reverse Orientalism."
In Klieger, P. C., ed. Tibet, Self, and the Tibetan Diaspora.
Leiden: Brill.
Magnusson, Jan.
1998. "Organization, International Legitimacy and Sociopolitical
Change: Some Aspects of the Human Rights and Democracy Activity
in the Tibetan Exile Community." Paper presented in the proceedings
of the 8th Seminar of Tibetan Studies, Bloomington, Indiana, July
25-31, 1998.
TibetNet. "JJI
music is the wine to Tibetan musical taste bud." Available
online: http://www.tibet.net/flash/2003/0803/040803.html