Tibetans in Exile: Uprisings and India (video)

Billy Kung (artasiapacific.com); CC Liu, Seth Auberon, Wisdom Quarterly; BBC; UprisingArchive

Nun Namdak Choeying, 44, prays in room she shares with two other nuns in Dharamsala. In Tibet she aspired for full ordination and escaped to India in 2006. She dreams of being reunited with five siblings and parents in Tibet and immerses herself in prayers to keep her mind occupied (A).

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Monk Dorjee, 38, and his father, 27 years apart.

In 1959, following the failed Tibetan uprising, the 14th Dalai Lama sought refuge in [Himalayan] India. Soon after that, thousands of Tibetans followed suit in order to escape religious and cultural persecution [by the Chinese].

a Tibetan photographer currently working for the Associated Press based in New Delhi, has produced a body of work documenting the plight of Tibetan exiles now living in India.

A car drives along a road that snakes beneath snow-capped peaks near Zoji La in Indian Kashmir. Many Tibetans say that being in the mountains makes them miss their homeland.

(Uprising Archive) Documentary overview of events in Tibet in the spring of 2008 as reported to the Tibetan Centre for Human Rights and Democracy by verified sources. Not an exhaustive account. More: tchrd.org; uprisingarchive.org.

   

Kalsang, 19, studies Buddhism near Dharamsala.

Like so many other Tibetans before him, Topgyal was 8-years-old when his parents paid a smuggler to take him across the Himalayan mountains on a week-long journey by foot from Tibet to Dharamsala, in the state of Himachal Pradesh in northern India. He has not seen his family since.
 

In 2007, while studying English literature at a college near Mumbai, Topgyal took photography classes in the evening and began freelancing for the AP in New Delhi a year later.

He began photographing his schoolmates and others who were smuggled out of Tibet at an early age, and he soon realized that the photo document was a powerful tool to show the world the difficulties Tibetan exiles faces.

“The great tragedy of my life is not being separated from my family,” he said to the New York Times, “but being separated from the sensibility of missing them after living without them for decades.”