REVIEWERS sometimes come across books for which the respect generated is so undiluted, attempts to find deficiencies smack of pedantry and small-mindedness. Palden Gyatso's book is one such. Born in central Tibet in 1933 into a family of prosperous but not rich farmers in an obscure village, and becoming a monk who studied in the great monastery of Drepung, Gyatso got caught up in the March 1959 uprising in Lhasa when the Chinese shelled the Dalai Lama's summer palace in the Norbu Lingka gardens. Subsequently returning to his village monastery of Gadong, he refused even under torture to betray a fellow monk, his tutor, to the Chinese. Consequently, he suffered some 30 years in various prisons before finally escaping to India. The outpouring of writing—both personal and historical—since the Chinese colonisation and Tibetan diaspora of the '50s is considerable. Memoirs of individuals such as members of the Dalai Lama's family and great incarnate lamas such as Chîgyam Trungpa have also been published. Why do we need another testimony, however moving?
The Tibetan holocaust has always been denied by the Chinese regime and its apologists, among the most famous being the novelist Han Suyin in the 1970s. But no one can read this book and not be moved by it. Unlike even the most sophisticated apologias for the Chinese viewpoint, books like this have a ring of truth about them. Written with the help of the Tibetan scholar and activist Tsering Shakya based in London, it is a straight, unvarnished testimony to the life of a resilient and determined survivor of one of the world's longest-surviving and most systematically brutal regimes. In the life of Gyatso, not a member of the old ruling elite but a commoner, there emerges the spirit and resilience of a whole people under occupation for longer than the majority of people living today can remember.
The published writings of Tibetan exiles as rendered in English tend to have a characteristic style as anyone who reads the translations of such memoirs from the Dalai Lama downwards will discover: a simplicity, clarity and restraint in the use of language which has a peculiar poignancy precisely because these tales are ones of extraordinary violence, brutality, degradation and suffering. They could easily lend themselves to the most dramatic descriptions and the most baroque renderings of human mental and physical anguish without loss of verisimilitude. This enhances what the tale already has: an exceptional dignity and power to move by virtue of its content alone. One almost yearns occasionally for a little breast-beating, some modern angst which can relieve the agony by bringing one closer to the victim. But, the dignity and restraint of the author and his candour in his moments of strength and weakness, determination and despair, leave the reader awestruck and humbled.
Tsering Shakya has done justice to the remarkable character and strength of the author in his clear and masterful English rendition of hundreds of hours of taped interviews and conversations. This isn't purportedly a work of literature. It's a testament to a life and a political statement, and it sticks to telling it like it was, and is. This is biography as documentary and does its job well. Tibetans have as much cause as other colonised people to beat upon the breasts of an indifferent world and demand justice. Perhaps more so than most, because Tibet is among those few oppressed nations that have failed to achieve the pressure of the media on world public opinion, having the misfortune to be under the rule of a regime which all the world believes to be strong enough to be beyond the chastisement of international opinion, regardless of what it does within its own claimed boundaries.
