BENGALURU: On 17 March 1959, the twenty-four-year-old Dalai Lama escaped Lhasa disguised as a soldier as night falls. Undetected, with a few loyal companions, he marched past the huge crowd of Tibetans that gathered to protect their leader with their lives. The fate of Tibet then changed forever. A week earlier, on 10 March, the Chinese military commander invited His Holiness the Dalai Lama to the army headquarters, but without his bodyguards. The Tibetan uprising broke out. The fear that their leader could fall into the hands of the occupying People’s Liberation Army was unbearable for the Tibetans.
They erected barricades in the narrow streets of Lhasa while the PLA positions artillery in the city. Leaflets called for resistance against the Chinese invaders. Rumours of treason and kidnapping made the rounds. Nomads passing through Lhasa whispered of tens of thousands of Chinese soldiers being in position at the boundaries of the city. In his summer residence, the Norbulingka, the Dalai Lama discussed the critical situation with his advisors. If he stays, there will be violence.
If he leaves, there will be violence as well. Two days later, on 19 March, when the word of the Dalai Lama’s escape became public in Lhasa, street fighting between Tibetans and Chinese soldiers broke out. Poorly armed Tibetans faced overpowering Chinese military might. The PLA stationed in Lhasa since 1951, brutally crushed the uprising. ‘The Tibetan problems must be solved by force’, telegraphed Chairman Mao Zedong. Tens of thousands of Tbetans died in the following days in hand-to-hand battles and under artillery fire.
Lhasa’s three main monasteries, Sera, Ganden and Drepung, were destroyed, thousands of monks were arrested or executed, their monasteries destroyed and irreplaceable Buddhist scriptures burnt. After a few days, the Tibetanresistance was shattered. Exhausted, the Dalai Lama and his companions arrived in India on 31 March. The adventurous escape, often at night, on foot or on horseback, in a small yak-leather boat across the Kyi Chu River (Brahmaputra) and in a snow flurry over the Sabo-La Pass, turned out to be successful. Still on Tibetan soil, the Dalai Lama revoked the infamous ‘17-Point Agreement’ of 1951, which Tibetan officials were forced to sign by the People’s Republic of China. The Indian prime minister, Jawaharlal Nehru, allocated available land to the Tibetans in the foothills of the Himalayas.
The Dalai Lama was permitted-as the spiritual, but not political head-to lead a Central Tibetan Administration in Dharamsala, but (officially) not a government in exile. Over the next few years, tens of thousands of Tibetans followed the Dalai Lama into exile and continued to regard him as their political leader as well. In the midst of these tragic events, little Tenzin Dolma, called Tendöl, was born in Lhasa under dramatic circumstances as the last child of the Namseling family.
Choekyi was in labour when Chinese armed officers came to arrest Tendöl’s mother, the wife of Tibet’s secretary of state for finance. They lifted the blanket, saw blood and left the mother alone at the time. But, shortly after Tendöl’s birth, a friend assisting Choekyi as midwife was arrested in place of the mother. (Excerpted with permission from Penguin India from A Childhood in Tibet by Thérese Obrecht Hodler)