“We don’t play modern music as much as before. Not since 2008,” Lharik says.
For an ordinary person, this may not sound dramatic, but Lharik is a senior student at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA) in Dharamsala, India. For the past 18 years he has trained in music, opera, dance, and drama with the express purpose of preserving and passing on Tibetan culture in exile. He is referring to the widespread oppression of the Tibetan people following Beijing's 2008 Olympics.
“Why not?” I ask him. “Have your teachers made you stop playing?”
Again, he only speaks collectively, not personally. “We wouldn’t want to play now. If we played joyful songs—songs about love, drinking songs—that would be disrespectful. We have to stand with our brothers and sisters suffering in Tibet.”
He shrugs to indicate humility, as if his opinion were irrelevant. But this is the most he has said in the past hour.
We are sitting in the storage room at TIPA and playing with the Institute’s drum set. Dusty instruments and dated electronics sit here cramped and unused. The monsoon has not been kind to the equipment. The drums sound dank. The cymbals echo against the room’s concrete walls.
We walk outside to TIPA’s main courtyard. Everything is wet. A lone basketball hoop next to the performance hall drips rainwater on our heads. Puddles have gathered on the warped outdoor stage. For now the monsoon has paused, enough for me to walk home. The air feels fresh. We kick at some fallen leaves while we make plans to meet again next week.
Dharamsala during monsoon
Elsewhere in Dharamsala, the story is largely the same. The town's musical tone has shifted since 2008. On another day, as we sit for tea to escape the rain, a monk friend of mine named Choklang mentions that music used to be performed publicly much more often, but it has slowed since the Beijing Games.
In an ethnography from the mid-90’s, Echoes from Dharamsala, Kiela Diehl describes the refugee town's music scene. Street buskers were once more common. During the new year’s celebration, groups of older women would do a circle-dance in the middle of the town square. Now in 2013, public music making is on the decline. Or, at the very least, it has moved away from the town square.
I ask Choklang whether one might point to the passage of time or a lack of resources. If steadily fewer people are fleeing Tibet for India, eventually exile culture will lose certain traditions. With resources lacking, exile governments and organizations are forced to distill what they deem culturally essential. Anything nonessential is lost, if not intentionally forgotten.
My monk friend, however, shakes his head at this idea. No, he says, musicians don’t perform in public anymore because we are mourning. We have no occasion to sing.
And he has a point. The protests of 2008 saw some of the harshest incidents of brutality against Tibetans in recent memory. These incidents have been captured on mobile devices and have made their way past censors to exile communities in India and into documentary films abroad. Tibetan refugees have seen their brothers and sisters at home endure horrible acts of suppression and violence.
And, since 2009, deprived of religious freedoms and other basic human rights, over 120 Tibetans have set themselves aflame. In Dharamsala, these acts are seen as a plea for the international community to recognize Tibet’s suffering and take effective action.
Anyone would be demoralized at this. What is so striking is the collective decision in Dharamsala to give up certain types of music. In public space, music has been replaced with displays of mourning—candlelight vigils, marches, and protest actions—with every new report of self-immolation from Tibet.
And mourning has its own music. A shrill megaphone cuts through the morning air with news of another fiery death. After sunset, you hear mourners’ steady footfalls and solemn chanting, invoking a commitment to do no violence to the enemy. By nightfall, they gather in the Dalai Lama’s main temple, where speeches are broadcast over a tinny PA system and the crowd sings the national anthem in unison.
Lharik, my friend at the Tibetan Institute for Performing Arts, tells me that music is only encouraged if it raises awareness of the Tibetan cause. There is, however, a place where performance and consciousness-raising are blurred. Where activism becomes entertainment. This is in the context of the tourist economy.
One day, Lharik is slated to perform with the other senior students for a group of 50 Vietnamese tourists. The travel group is visiting Dharamsala to see the Dalai Lama teach at the Main Temple, and they have requested a private music performance as a kind of cultural diversion from their religious activities.
I have already seen a performance the previous month for a different group of Vietnamese pilgrims on a different occasion of Dalai Lama teachings, so I ask Lharik which song-and-dance number they are performing. Will I recognize any of the music?
“Actually, we are doing the same songs,” he confesses. “Nothing has changed. It will be quite boring for you.”
When I ask why they do not change the program and learn new songs, he simply shrugs his shoulders. The Artistic Director sets the program. "We have hundreds of songs memorized, but we have to play the same seven songs. It is quite boring for us too.”
He then tells me that they will embark on a one-month performance tour across India, playing the same seven songs in the same order, in the same fashion, wearing the same costumes. No deviation.
This speaks powerfully to the changing role of music performance among Tibetan refugees since 2008. The very best musicians are trained at TIPA and made into human archives of cultural knowledge, yet their desires as living artists are a distant second to their first function of raising awareness of the Tibetan cause. Heritage has been frozen for the entertainment of affluent foreigners, and few performances are reserved for Tibetans. Music has become, in certain contexts, a form of propaganda.
But all of this is only true insofar as the individual residents of Dharamsala allow it. Yes, there is tremendous demand from outsiders for the parts of Tibetan culture that embody an idyllic “Shangri-La.” Yes, parts of Dharamsala’s local economy depend on this myth. Yes, communal mourning makes opportunities for joyful music scarce, while musical propaganda continues.
Despite all this, I see reason for hope. Proactive musicians and organizers find ways to create joyful music. And the longer I looked, the more musical spontaneity I witnessed. And although TIPA can be a stultifying force, the organization plays another crucial role as a public space for independent musicians.
One cold October evening, I follow a group of young Tibetans ambling up the forested road to TIPA, whose warped outdoor stage has been donated for a concert of local musicians. The monsoon is over, and cold nights have settled into the foothills. Luckily, a few women sell hot, salty tea, which I sip for warmth as I set up my camera in the back corner of the courtyard.
One of the musicians, a metal singer with a penchant for design, has created an enormous poster as a backdrop for the evening. It shows a map of Tibet in flames with the evening’s performers striking poses of prayer on the lower border.
As the crowd fills out, I find myself no longer nestled alone in the back corner but instead surrounded by a group of rowdy boys dressed up in leather jackets. They buy bottles of Pepsi from the refreshments stand and pour it into cups with some kind of moonshine. It smells homemade.
Their conversations leak into my recording, but I am not bothered. One of the boys even gives me his cup of tea. Having high quality sound does not seem to matter. These performances are different from the tourist shows. They are not fully rehearsed. No one is interested in debating the quality of any particular song or singer. This show is not about aesthetics. Nor is it about preserving Tibetan music and culture. Instead, it is about the little details that make up this moment, and the moments that make a community:
The show starts an hour late. People come and go. A din of conversation, cheering, and laughter persists through every performance and interlude. The refreshments stand is completely makeshift: two fold out tables to the left of the audiences, thermoses full of tea, extension cords powering electric steamers filled with dumplings, and handwritten signs showing prices in three languages. There are not enough chairs for everyone, but this does not mean some people stand and some sit. Instead, everyone both stands and sits. Someone will take a seat then immediately offer it to someone else. How can you sit while your fellow concertgoers stand next to you? One of the inebriated boys nearby gives me yet another cup of tea, thoughtfully left unspiked. I did not have to ask. I did not even shiver. I am simply outside in the cold wearing a woefully thin sweater. Anyone can see it. I make friends easily and instantly with everyone around me. One of my new friends staggers onstage in the middle of a song, poses behind a singer, and performs what he believes is an erotic dance. People are annoyed, but no one takes him offstage for several minutes. Finally, after the night has yawned on and many people have left, all of the program’s performers get up and play together.
The event is not a perfect escape—some people sell merchandise; there are moments of communal mourning; and there is rhetoric of cultural preservation—but the escape is good enough.
Standing here on a wet afternoon, Lharik first told me—“If we played joyful songs … it would be disrespectful. We should stand with our brothers and sisters suffering in Tibet.”
Yet here in the same courtyard the monsoon has passed, and at least one group of musicians has made a case for moments of joy and moments of song. In these brief moments, you can feel the community’s heartbeat.