I recently attended a set of programmes entitled, ‘The Spirit of Tibet: Celebrating Culture and Compassion.’ The programmes included a panel on ‘Exile Stories: Crafting Resilience.’ Various panellists, working in the arts, described a life of resistance and what it meant. The panellists described their efforts at contributing to the exile community, the importance of memory, and, finally, how survival is itself a contribution, even success.
Sitting on my home turf, surrounded by familiar sights and sounds, people who look like me (ahem!), I would not be expected to identify with exile. And, yet, listening to this panel triggered a close identification with the state of exile.
An exile from reason in public life, from an ingrained respect for nature, a sense of all-pervasive gratitude, from the memories and the loving care of a fortunate childhood, from family supports that have inevitably drifted apart, from friends who live very far away, from elders taken before time, from unconstrained times in the wilds, from imbibing so much of the idealism of earlier days…mature sensitivity accepts these have all passed from this life. Leaving behind a pervasive sense of loss only leavened by philosophy.
Contrast this with the braggadocio of the growing numbers who have lapped up the formulaic responses to Huntington’s questions of identity, those looking for simple solutions to layered challenges in public policy, for binaries to understand complex problems, for heroic leaders to wave magic wands and solve all our problems, for news that comes pre-digested in social media fit for short attention spans, from the repeated highs of unending professional success, from the pleasures of an ever-expanding array of material possessions, trophies, and marks of despoliation left upon this world.
There is no minimising the despair that comes from losing one’s connection to one’s land and culture. The way Tibetans have worked to keep their culture alive in the diaspora with positivity and compassion is impressive. But aren’t the rest of us in some kind of exile? For constitutionalists, for highly sensitive people, for environmentalists, for those suffering from ecological grief, or even solastalgia, for those from whom history and its lessons matter (based on facts, not caricatures), and for the rare few who have reconciled rationality with love.
We live, as the Tibetan artists spoke, ‘in a life of imagination, where we can imagine the lost nation (or the lost idealism).’
To do so, I would state, is to be in internal exile. The Russians capture it best as “vnutrennaya emigratsia,” or internal emigration. An escape inward from a malevolent world; an embrace of one’s alienation.
The environment
When I think of the 6,500 ancient deodar trees to be cut for the doubling of the tourist road from Uttarkashi to beloved Harsil, bypassing the mandatory environmental impact assessment and community hearings, and ignoring simpler alternatives like expanding embankments for overtaking, my biggest concern is the loss of agency for the community. The arms of the state simply do not see the need for dialogue.
We can seek refuge in the memory of the ancientness and beauty of the Taknaur valley, and imagine a more enlightened life of consultation, mediated by an economics which internalises externalities, and even prayer at the ancient Mukhba shrine. Refuge in memory, imagination, and prayer, how different is this from the story of Tibetan exile? Has the much-touted Chinese Communist Party regime at last come to India to deliver ease of doing business?
From west to east, the Himalayas are being bombed for development, completely rejecting community consultation, alternative approaches, or ancient wisdom. Highway doubling to the Char Dham in Uttarakhand fronted by imperatives of national security, dams too close to glaciers in Sikkim, the prospects of limitless solar parks for Ladakh, and ‘cutting’ everywhere, the cutting of mountains for roads without embankments or water channels, and tunnels without escape adits.
Scanning the landscape south from the Gangotri Valley to the Nicobar Islands where we plan to cut almost a million tropical trees, attempting to compensate for this with a Dubai-inspired safari park in arid Haryana, is an unfolding story of unexamined destruction.
The heart of this dystopian journey is in central India: the Ken-Betwa river inter-linking project, which would construct a dam in the heart of Panna National Park to pump an imagined water surplus, uphill, to another drying river basin, at the cost of Rs 45,000 crore. For 20 years, ever since I heard about this fantastic scheme, I have persevered to question it. Still at it: there is no movement, compromise, or exploration of alternatives.
I just read the elephant population of India has been reduced by 20%, or nearly, 4,000 souls, in just a decade, and the shocking report on this has been withdrawn even as it is getting dated. We privilege cows and revere elephants but save neither cows nor elephants.
In the face of such enormous one-sided destruction, it seems even the divinities have abandoned us, there are no checks left. Exiled from the public arena, where multi-dimensional planning, consultation, and inquiry are impossible, how does one live in such times? The response varies from collaboration with the regnant evil to an internal exile of resistance.
Collaboration
Anne Applebaum wrote an intriguing essay in The Atlantic, ‘History will judge the complicit.’ In this essay, she explored what it took for two people from similar backgrounds to part ways: one to become a collaborator and the other to reject the cruel, unfair, and unequal communist regime they both grew up with.
In a series of personality sketches, Czeslaw Milosz explores the diverse rationales for collaboration by intellectuals. The leading tropes set out were: ‘We can use this moment to achieve great things’; ‘We can protect the country from the (lunatic) President’; ‘I, personally, benefit’; ‘I must remain close to power’; ‘Nothing matters’; ‘My side may be flawed, but the political opposition is much worse’; and, ‘I am afraid to speak out.’
None of these follows the prescription of the Polish foreign minister, Wladysaw Bartoszewski, who had spent a lifetime in dissent: ‘Just try to be decent,’ he exhorted. In Applebaum’s view, history will only remember the effort at decency, none of the self-serving excuses.
Or resistance
At the Tibet forum, the artists reminded us how important sheer survival is for resistance. To give shape to resistance by imagining the lost community. To plan the return. Using the time gained to tell stories, to keep memory alive. In the evocative turn of phrase by Milan Kundera, ‘the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory over forgetting.’
When I speak with peers, I am always shocked at how shallow the roots of liberal democracy are in this country, and how few people care about joining the dots between the ever-expanding talons of the state and condition of liberty, or remembering why this country was created, impossibly (and imperfectly) dredging from its hoary civilization the very best for the young Republic.
Sitting in India, we have become internal exiles. We live in the interstices ignored by the state: remote places in the mountains and forests, now getting rapidly ‘developed’; the dying, private institutions and academic refuges, all being yoked to the national project. Seeking solace in books, and, still, the power of connecting with the external world.
A Tibetan activist, Tenzin Tsundue, rightly describes home as ‘not a house but the purpose that takes its places, and sometimes away from our own home. Reasons to live can make strangers a family and no country foreign.’ Global citizenship provides exiles, both the internal and external versions, greater understanding and wider access to remote interstices to help preserve culture and memory. Alas, even this notional global home, and engagement with global confreres, only reveals the retreat of liberty and reason elsewhere.
In conclusion…
Pamela Swanigan wrote an interesting essay in NOEMA, cautioning against the hope that human behaviour will change and return to values that sacralise nature. Asking us instead to appreciate J.R.R. Tolkien’s view in accepting reality and looking for acts of heroism against the ‘earth-and-sky destroyers,’ and to achieve small victories that postpone the inevitable defeat of the natural world that sustains us.
Frankly, if the choices are between the ‘long hope’ and the ‘long defeat’, I think internal exile is a natural waystation till faith is realised or humanity itself changes course, and we start to heal ourselves and the planet we are burning.
Himraj Dang writes on environmental issues.