hHow do you make a museum without any objects? Imagine—you have a bag, the clothes you are wearing, some food, and are walking across the high Himalayas in the dark of night. You shouldn’t be seen by the Chinese patrolling guards, and it’s so cold that if you stop and rest, you’ll starve to death. If you get stuck in Tibet – ‘prison and torture’. Caught in Nepal – ‘deported and handed over to Chinese authorities’. On these brutal winter nights of escape, do you carry essentials or historical items? This is the reason why the Tibet Museum at McLeodganj in Dharamsala is the ‘Museum of the Absence’.
It is built for and by Tibetans, and is housed in the premises where the ‘Tibetan Government in Exile’ works. The glass boxes in the museum are not all filled, there are more photographs (30,000) and testimonials than objects. Emotions cover everything like dust.
Funded by the Central Tibetan Association, the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) and the National Endowment of Democracy, the Tibet Museum is world-class unlike most museums in India. Tubelights and colonial-era placards do not welcome you. The display is modern, digital and direct. The iconic museum merchandise is T-shirts, postcards and bags. Most importantly, the museum has room for the future.
A future with climate change (you are told that Tibet’s glaciers are melting at a faster rate than anywhere in the world), a future with more Tibetan goods (the ‘free Tibet’ bags you buy in Dharamsala are part of the tour) , and a future with a more powerful China. Of course, it’s no irony that the museum with the strongest feelings against China is partly funded by Americans.
Not on the Magi-mountains-and-waterfalls tourist trail, the Tibet Museum is easy to miss. But the next time you’re in the Dalai Lama’s country, take an hour. As Nobel laureate Orhan Pamuk says, “The real museums are the places where time turns into space.”
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pants, painting, split
witness paintings, patched clothing, political slogans, and sampa-Grinder, the Tibet Museum inaugurated in February 2022 is the clearest example of ‘personal is political’. And why shouldn’t it be? Most of the museums I’ve visited in India tell tales of royals, oil paintings once commissioned by a white man, and gaudy ornaments that have no bearing on my life. They seem stuck in time – as if their placards contain a date and a clinical description. They tell the story of a select few, most of whom are not Dalits.
do museum passed To become the hallmark of ‘Once Upon a Time, Long, Long Before’?
Here, in this one-floor Dharamsala museum, are the last words and testimonials of the monks who self-immolated to liberate Tibet. For example, Dorji, who was only 15 when he burned himself in 2012, said, “Let the Dalai Lama return to Tibet.” There are knives, handcuffs and electric sticks donated by the ‘Security Department’ to show the brutality of the prison against Tibetans. A National Geographic magazine from 1934 showing the Tibetan flag under ‘Flags of the World’ to prove the country’s independence before the march of the Chinese in the 1950s. There is no Indian flag in the magazine version as we were under British rule at that time. And the Dalai Lama has answers to what I think are ‘frequently asked questions’- ‘how do you relax’, ‘can violence be used as a last resort’, and so on.
There is also a copy of Mao Zedong little red book who belonged to a political prisoner, Lobsang Yongden, Most Tibetans in Lhasa took the book with them because they would be suddenly stopped and asked to recite it.
You could say this is prime stuff for a museum, steeped in nostalgia and nostalgia for any truth, but there is often oral history for refugee museums to rely on. It is stories that become facts, and memories that become hand-drawn paintings and evidence. For example, in the Tibet Museum, hangs a portrait of a 10-year-old boy who, as recently as 2006, had seen Chinese border guards fire at his group from behind as they fled Tibet through the icy Nangpa Pass. Were were One nun (Kelsang Namtso) was killed, while the others were injured. The boy was later part of a refugee arts program. You can dismiss the painting. But the Chinese guards did not notice that a group of climbers on Mount Cho Oyu was recording the entire incident. They smuggled it to show the world.
Most of the objects in this museum of absence, along with empty glass boxes, are things that will fit in your pocket, bag, trunk. Or they were wearing, like the drapachi uniform, the Tibetan army swore to protect the Dalai Lama.
The building next to the Tibet Museum, which houses the archives, houses some heavy objects of Tibetan life and culture: brown pamphlets, intricate Buddhas and tantric goddesses. With a government and an enigma of history, all hidden and taken piece by piece to a new country.
It will remind you of the Partition Museum in Amritsar, commemorating the world’s largest exodus. it shows people’s experiences, through their stories and the sentimental objects they made. Words and actions fill in the gaps in refugee museums. These museums are based on donations, not aggressive acquisitions.
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Big Boss Season Tibet
When you leave the Tibet Museum, there is an interactive shock. You are projected into a row of nine security cameras.
‘Be careful… someone is watching you,’ the museum tells you. Then it asks will you change your behavior if you are being monitored 24×7. It claims that the new prayer wheels in Lhasa come with in-built 24-hour cameras.
Outside the museum, in the sweet sunshine of 22 degrees Celsius and the Himalayan peaks in the distance, a mother and daughter spin a row of Buddhist prayer wheels for luck. She holds her baby up so that her face can reach them.
(Edited by Ratan Priya)