Everyone driving must turn around at the bus and cab station. Dharamsala is actually car-free, peaceful, chaotic and characterised by an astounding pioneering spirit. The street scene is dominated by monks in wine-red clothes and a remarkably great number of beggars with leprousy. On this dangerous, Himalayan slope, fantastic architectural constructions, often hotels, are being built. But they are said to collapse quicker than they have been built, when heavy rains or glacier-melt water come down in torrents.

Everything is beautiful around here, except the trees. It is forbidden to cut down their very trunk, but everywhere people have climbed up and chopped off all their limbs. After all, they need firewood. Power cuts happen on a daily basis and, of course, electricity is rationed – except when the governor of the federal state of Himachal Pradesh, to which Dharamsala belongs, descends on his subjects for an official visit. At those times water and electricity is available around the clock. Apparently he is not supposed to get an excessively realistic picture of the local peoples’ everyday life!

There are different ways to meet the Dalai Lama. When he is at home, you can just go up to his flat in the temple block and seek an audience with him. If you come to McLeod in March, he is giving his “teachings” to thousands of listeners, many of them Tibetans for whom he is nothing less than god. Unfortunately, my visit happened to take place during his annual three-week “retreat” in February when he does not receive visitors. My friends told me that they felt as if they were floating some five to seven centimetres above the ground after having met him personally some weeks earlier.

There are lots of things worth seeing in this beautiful region: small ecological cooperatives, shops selling health-care medicine and handmade paper, spiritual book stores, and exquisite restaurants ranging from the plainest to Chonor House, the exclusive hotel with a view over McLeod. In the latter is served the best of Tibetan cuisine whilst monkeys swing from tree to tree and sometimes even throw themselves down on the tables in a Kamikaze-like manner.

The Tibetan Museum of McLeod is dedicated to the history of Tibet focussing on the fate of the exiled Tibetans. It is a beautiful and simple museum, which can also be found on the Internet: http://www.thetibetmuseum.org/

Downstairs in the government quarters you can find the Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, an extensive collection of books and periodicals that contains 40 % of all Tibetan writings by hand. On the first floor of this temple-like building is situated the Tibetan Cultural Museum, where I became fascinated with the collection of tangkas.

No, they’re not underwear. These are sacred Buddhist paintings on cotton canvas made with a technique that is somewhat reminiscent of tempera. The details are so minute that you need a magnifying glass to see them. The tangka is also a multicoloured, harmonious composition in front of which people stand whilst praying or meditating. They often have a naturalistic motif or depict some historic event – the Wheel of Life or the Buddhist gods and fantastic figures from the Tibetan mythology. Another category is mandhalas, which always have severely geometric or non-figurative motifs with a central point that one is expected to concentrate intensely upon, maybe even get lost in.

The finest tangkas and mandhalas are usually framed by a large passe-partout of silk or silk brocade. They hang on transverse pegs. In front of the painting with its silk frame is a covering cloth, which protects the tangka when it is being rolled up or moved around from temple to temple or carried around by its owner. This fascinating form of art has been described by, among others, Anjan Chakraverty in Sacred Buddhist Painting, Lustre Press, New Delhi, 1998. Illustrated examples can also be found at, for example,
http://www.iol.ie/~taeger/thkas/thgk-gal.html.

Visit the Norbulinka Institute! You can start with the Internet (http://www.tibet.net/eng/norling/) but it is much better if you travel there! Once there, one believes that one has come to a Japanese garden, with large stones, plants, pavilions, cafeterias, hotels, conference centres, etc. There are murmuring brooks, varying types of architecture, temples, and workshops for textiles, clothes, wooden products, handicrafts, dolls, paintings, embroidery, wood engravings, goldsmiths, and so on. Tibetan cultural workers are educated at Norbulinka. The skills and traditions of the (exiled) culture are being kept alive and innovations are thriving. I have seldom seen such stylish, super-modern shirts and jackets, nor such lovely silk fabrics and home furnishing articles.

Norbulinka’s varying exhibitions and pavilions contain a conglomeration of the arts and crafts’ school, the academy of fine arts, the design centre, the art gallery, the temple and the place for meditation. You can walk straight through and come out on the other side. I leave this Tibetan oasis behind me through a small gate and enter an Indian village where pretty young farm-girls smile shyly at the stranger with a camera. Here can be found cows, goats, monkeys, clay huts, fences with artfully arranged haystacks – a picturesque idyll with the only negative being an old, faded sign which says that once there was a World Bank project at this place. Fortunately, the bank failed to destroy this village with its “development” philosophy.

Dharamsala and Norbulinka give witness to the great life and cultural expression of an oppressed people. No one, not even Westerners or the Chinese, could possibly ever destroy it.

Translated by Alice Moncada
Translation edited by Sara E. Ellis