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| Vol. 4, Issue 5 May 2012 |
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Arts & Reviews |
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Feature |
Rocking for a Free Tibet
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| A three-brother band in McLeod Ganj is giving voice to the angst of the Tibetan youth in exile |
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Published : 1 November 2010 |
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PHOTOGRAPHS BY SAMI SIVA |
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| An old picture of the JJI brothers seen on a wall at their rehearsal space.
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| "I |
HAVE A PROBLEM WITH MY HEAD. It’s like short-term
memory loss,” says Tensin Jigme, a sheepish
smile spreading across his face. “It’s here, in my
head, but I am not able to remember it exactly.
You are going to have a hard time talking to me.” I have just
asked him what music he is into while Jimi Hendrix bellows
from the café speakers in the background. |
Jigme is a part of a local three-brother band called JJI
Exile Brothers— their names in the order of age: Jamyang,
33 (bass and lead vocals), Jigme, 31 (lead guitar, vocals) and
Ingsel, 30 (drums and vocals). The brothers are second-generation
Tibetan refugees living in exile in McLeod
Ganj, a suburb of Dharamsala in Himachal Pradesh, the
headquarters of the Tibetan Government in Exile and
the official residence of the 14th Dalai Lama. The town is
home to several Buddhist monasteries and thousands of Tibetan
refugees.
JJI’s music—rock and blues fused with the acoustic melodies
of Tibetan instruments and Bob Marley-style protest lyrics—is giving voice to the un-Buddhist rage of this
troubled generation. The continuing unrest in Tibet has
immediate repercussions on the exiled community in
McLeod Ganj.
We are in the JJI Exile Brothers Café on Bhagsu Road,
run by the brothers’ mother and uncle, one of many bustling
spaces along the Bhagsu stretch where tourists come to buy
Buddha statues, thangka paintings and Free Tibet t-shirts.
Jigme disappears while I study the vibrant interiors,
struck by the imagery of numerous colourful posts stuck
to a bulletin board from visitors, fans and musicians with
whom the band has performed.
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Jigme plays his guitar before the Sunday show at their café. |
Acha Nyima-la, the brothers’ mother and band manager,
eases into Jigme’s place in the chair. The breakfast crowd
has left and it will be a while before the lunch-seekers start
trickling in. A lone customer sits at one of the six tables, leisurely
reading a newspaper and drinking his coffee.
Nyima, a petite woman with a short crop and wary eyes,
looks strikingly younger than her 50-something years (she is not sure about her exact age). She runs
the café, teaches Tibetan at an international
school and takes care of the band—from
renting sound systems for the local shows to
managing their international tours—not to
mention being a single mother.
As a child, she came to McLeod Ganj with
relatives soon after a group of refugees had
escaped Tibet in March 1959, following the
brutal invasion by the Chinese Red Army.
The group accompanied Tenzin Gyatso, the
14th Dalai Lama, who had fled Tibet after a
failed uprising against the Communist Party
of China. The Indian government offered
him refuge in Dharamsala, where he moved
the exiled government in 1960, after having
established it in Mussoorie.
Nyima has no memory of Tibet or her parents.
“I think they could have been killed
by the Chinese,” she says, fiddling with the
pockets of her chuba, the traditional Tibetan
dress for women, an ankle-length robe
bound around the waist by a long sash and
worn over a long-sleeved blouse.
She beams at the mention of her ‘rock star’ sons. “I realised
early that the all three boys were interested in music.
They have grown up listening to The Beatles, The Doors and
regular Bollywood songs that I played. When still in school
they used to sing while playing imaginary guitars, drums.
In 1998, they said they wanted to form a band and take to
music professionally. I said let me listen to your music before
I approve. We did a local show and some people came
and they liked the music. The second show we organised
was big. It was on the Tibetan New Year. We thought nobody
would come but 300 people turned up at the 500-seat
auditorium. Media from all over the world came for the celebrations—
CNN, BBC, Star TV, NDTV. The band became
popular after that event.”
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The rehearsal space of the band. |
She talks of the transformation of the town from a littleknown
hill station into a tourist hotspot for honeymooners
and pilgrims alike. Yet an undercurrent of conflict exists
between Indians and Tibetans in the town that hosts hundreds
of thousands of travellers every year, of whom a vast
majority come for the Dalai Lama’s teachings. The native
Himachalis feel the Tibetans try to dominate the tourism
business—hotels, taxis, guided tours—because they think
it’s their right. There is also a notion among the Indian
community that the Tibetans are flush with foreign aid and
do not need their support any more.
Nyima, however, says refugee life is one of insecurity.
“There is no government support for us, in the way that
the Indian government supports their musicians. The
band can’t participate in music shows on TV or take part
in national music competitions because we are not Indians.
When we organise shows here, we book the hall, rent the
sound system ourselves. While the guitars are a gift from
my American students, I had to sell my jewellery to arrange
money to record their first album. But I don’t care. I grew up as an orphan and I wanted to make sure that my children
could pursue whatever they wanted to.”
| T |
HE NEXT MORNING, Jigme confesses he was a rebellious
teen, the sheepish smile still there. He has
a modest build and the eyes of a baby goat, his long,
straight hair parted in the middle. Small blue danglers
show in his ears every time he laughs, throwing his
head back. At 15, he and some of his “partners in crime” ran
away from his residential Lower
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Tibetan Children’s Village school. With whatever money they had on them, the gang took a train to Bombay where, having roamed the city and slept at the railway platforms, they proceeded to Calcutta to repeat the routine. But once there, they soon ran out of money and panicked on realising they had no way home. “There was no other option, we had to call the school administration,” he says. “They sent a teacher to Calcutta to get us back, and once there, we were punished in the morning assembly the next day, in front of the whole school. That, besides the beating from my mother, who had no clue I was missing.”
Jigme talks and pours cups of herbal tea, sitting in their
much-lived-in room; right beside the café, down a flight of
cement steps, under a corrugated tin roof. The two cushions
on the single bed are still warm with sleep. The old
TV plays the Discovery Channel. The walls are consumed
by Tibetan masks, prayer flags and freedom graffiti. The
adjacent practice room is packed with guitars, drums, microphones,
amplifiers and cables. Rolling papers and empty
cigarette packets occupy whatever space is left. On the table,
along with a big mug of tea and books of contemporary
Tibetan poetry, is an ashtray the shape of the mythological
Snow Lion, the national emblem of Tibet.
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The JJI brothers perform at their café. |
Jigme has just returned from the preliminary voting
to nominate candidates for the post of Kalon Tripa, the leader of the Cabinet of the Central Tibetan Administration,
and members of parliament. The main elections are
due in March next year. Since this morning, hundreds of
exiled Tibetans have cast their votes in the courtyard of
Tsuglag Khang (the Main Tibetan Temple). The 2011 general
elections are of strategic importance in respect of the
China-Tibet conflict, as they will decide the successor to
the incumbent Kalon Tripa, marking the first democratic
transfer of executive power in the history of Tibet.
The question of a world without the Dalai Lama looms
over the hill-town, as both Tibetans and the spiritual leader
himself, who turned 75 this year, ponder what will become
of the independence movement after he dies. China hopes
it will naturally lose steam. The more the Chinese officials
and the Dalai Lama’s representatives bargain over the conditions
of autonomy, the farther they seem from a breakthrough.
The exiled community has been demanding a young and
vibrant political leadership to replace the current rulers,
many of whom accompanied the Dalai Lama into India in
1959. “We need someone dynamic, modern, and definitely
not from the religious community to lead the community
in exile,” said Serta Tsultrim, editor of the McLeod Ganjbased
Tibet Express newspaper, to the Guardian at the time
of the Tibetan spiritual leader’s 75th birthday celebrations
in July.
Jigme won’t say who he voted for, though he is very concerned
about the future of the community. While a Tibetan
homecoming remains the ultimate desire, most exiles just
long for citizenship. Anywhere. Newly-arrived Tibetans in
McLeod Ganj are no longer able to legally obtain residence
permits, at one time given to Tibetan refugees “as a matter
of course,” according to a representative of the International
Campaign for Tibet quoted on UNHCR’s website. Legally
obtained Indian residence permits are now only automatically available to children of Tibetans who
arrived in India before 1979. Refugees who
have permits must renew them every year,
the renewal entirely at the discretion of the
Indian government. India’s official position
towards Tibetan refugees is not at all
straightforward. While it has supported the
demand for Tibetan independence for decades,
having hosted some 110,000 Tibetan
refugees as of late 2001, the government reversed
its stand between 2003 and 2006 in
exchange for China’s acceptance of Sikkim
as part of India. “I want to go back to Lhasa,
but only to a free Lhasa,” says Jigme, his
voice suddenly heavy.
Cultural activities in this society are often
used as a potent means to fight the Chinese
influence in Tibet and to pre-empt the drift
of exiled Tibetans fading away into their
host societies, says Keila Diehl in her book Echoes from
Dharamsala. A cultural anthropologist who spent years in
McLeod Ganj studying the power of music in the re-creation
of Tibetan culture in exile, Diehl explores the popularity
of Western rock and roll among Tibetan youth, and
the emergence of a new genre of modern Tibetan music.
“Earlier, Tibetan songs were too poetic. No one understood
them. We wanted to create music that the Tibetan
youth identified with. Everyone understands our music,”
says Jigme. JJI Exile Brothers’ music draws generously
from three musical streams: traditional Tibetan, contemporary
Hindi and Western music of the 1940s and 50s. I ask
him how their songs came to be so political and nationalistic.
“We grew up hearing stories of the Chinese atrocities
on our people from our parents, teachers, textbooks. The
cause is not something we took up consciously. Freedom is
in our blood.”
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Nyima and Jamyang sing along as Ingsel
opens the show at the café. |
They released their first album in 2002, on the Dalai Lama’s
birthday. The album did well locally and the brothers
became a rage among the exiled youth. The nine tracks on
the self-titled album are a mix of traditional songs, rock,
blues, country, and poetic ballads, most lyrics in Tibetan.
The band refuses to slot their music under any category,
and it is difficult to define their sound. A local fan calls it
“Tibetan blues.”
The theme running through the songs is the frustration
and anxiety of the exiled Tibetans, except in ‘I asked
her,’ in which a guy, well, asks a girl out, and in ‘Hey Mom,’
dedicated to their mother, in which a guy complains to his
mother about his meagre pocket money.
The first song, ‘If,’ a rock number, is about what life
would have been like for their people if the Chinese never
invaded Tibet. Loosely translated, the lyrics are, “If there is
no Chinese/if no one is killing Buddhists/I don’t have to sing
this freedom song.” ‘Kharakri,’ a deep-voiced traditional Tibetan song played with the dranyen, a kind
of Tibetan guitar, is about the Dalai Lama’s
escape to India.
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Readers' Comments |
Total Comments
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Javed Iqbal
24 April 2012
03:15 PM
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YOUR STORY ON TIBET IS INCOMPLETE WITHOUT THE MENTION N REVIEW OF THE DOCUMENTARY...
One Night In Delhi: The making of a police state, by Ms. Jharna Anurag Singh (who was not only bashed up n detained by the Delhi Police n the woman SP Ms. Sunita (Chankyapuri) but they broke her camera n her arm. She and her assistant were kept in detention for more than 7 hours... and only endless phone calls from journalists n an army officer got them out. Much to the dislike of the police they managed to smuggle the tapes n make this documentary that no TV channel nor human rights groups have used. Only two screening of the film one in Dharmashala n one at Majnu ka Tilla were held.
Currently she is working on a film on Chattisgarh n against Coca Cola Company (both the issue linked n close to my heart...I have been reporting on Chattisgarh for almost five years now http://moonchasing.wordpress.com/) n here's also the link to a 2 mins video YOU MUST WATCH n Recommend your reads as well... (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RfhgLzRZQE4&feature=player_embedded)
Your story remains incomplete also because there is no critique against China.
"This documentary peeks into the psyche of the police force in the world’s largest democracy, keeping Olympics of 2008 as the backdrop. The growing lure for militarization and the apathy of national and international media towards the making of a police-state is dwell upon in this thirty-three minute narrative.
On the night of 16th of April 2008, the Olympic Torch, on it’s way to Beijing, arrived at New Delhi - India’s capital. For its safety, the Government of India deployed 20,000 police personnel.
The Olympics of 2008 was watched by three billion people (consumers) across the world while China continued to abuse and violate every United Nations norm against the people of Tibet. As expected the International Olympics Committee too turned a blind eye to this worldwide protest. Since then neither China, nor the United Nations has taken any steps to stop the abuse or the violation of every possible norm.
With the help of Olympia, a documentary film on the 1936 Berlin Olympics by Leni Riefenstahl, ‘One Night in Delhi: The Making of a Police State’ takes the viewer on a journey that blatantly beds sports to an old unwanted bedfellow - wars."
https://vimeo.com/8451387
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PKGUPTA
8 December 2010
09:37 AM
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GOOD
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