HARMONY SIGANPORIA

7. FROM DRUNKEN-SAGE TO ARTISTE, THE MANY LIVES OF THE TIBETAN DEKAR

A man was found in Kollegaal refugee camp in Karnataka’s Mysore district. He wore a Chuba, and was clearly drunk. He was unkempt and would occasionally “expose” his genitals, letting himself hang loose. People were revolted by him. He lived with, among, and like the stray dogs: children would call him names and throw stones at him. Sometimes though, he would come to be surrounded by people. This man would rise. He would sing and dance, and when he did, he spared nobody. In the face of his jesting, no one would leave—he had them enthralled. The community saw to his basic needs: on Tibetan New Year (Losar) and at other times of celebration, he was the life of the party, praying, singing, and jesting in choicest turns of phrase. This was the last Dekar Tenzin Tsundue saw ‘living’ his creed. The Dekar did not survive translation into exile, and what was once a life lived now exists only in the form of set-pieces ‘performed’ on certain auspicious occasions. This article is an exploration of the life—and after-life—of the Dekar—an itinerant repository of Tibetan folk memory and knowledges.

INTRODUCTION

It was in 1959 that His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama Tenzin Gyatso, made his way to India. Alongside him and after him came thousands of Tibetans fleeing the abject persecution they were subjected to in their homeland in the wake of its invasion by Chinese forces in 1950. Today, 55 years after this first important ‘movement’ across borders—porous and dynamic as the Himalayan region has historically been— there is in India a thriving Tibetan community-in-exile, some 90,000+ strong.1 The nerve-point of this community is the town of McLeod Ganj, Dharamsala, the official residence of the Dalai Lama, and the headquarters of the community’s now democratically elected Government-in-Exile (formally known as the Central Tibetan Administration, or CTA). This introduction is intended to highlight the following premise: whilst crossing a physical border, one is also confronted with the fact of another barrier—the cleaving of a new dialectic with regard to a community’s sense of itself. When compounded with the burden of ‘preserving’ or retaining and perpetuating its many identities—religious, regional, ethnic, national—in exile, where the homeland is now merely notional or imaginary and ‘remembered’ as e. emerald et al. (Eds.), Global South Ethnographies, 93–101. © 2016 Sense Publishers. All rights reserved. H. Siganporia it were, this debate takes on a new and tenacious urgency. Displaced from their original context, the Dalai Lama and CTA have attempted to create a new locus and repository of Tibetan culture, outside Tibet, comprising its many artistic and religious practices—sacred and secular—which form the lived reality of the community in exile today. The CTA takes seriously the project of thinking through and understanding just what is meant by Tibetan culture, and who may today lay claim to it, speaking from a position of ‘authenticity’ as far as this culture is concerned. The very fact of their existence seems to suggest that they believe the onus for this falls rightfully upon the community in exile, for although they may be displaced from their homeland in terms of geographical distance, it is because of this separation that they remain a community untainted by Sinicisation, unlike their peers in the China-controlled Tibet Autonomous Region (TAR). Of all the many cultural artefacts which lay claim to re-presenting the cultures they emanate from, music, especially within the Tibetan context,2 does it with great effect because it straddles the realms of the sacred and secular with ease. It becomes a site where identity comes to be negotiated within the community, offering as it does an entry point into a plethora of debates which revolve around preservation and ossification; about whether performative practices remain dynamic and ‘live’ or come to be museumised, that is over time becoming empty signifiers. Any discussion on preservation also contains, after Bourdieu and Ranciere,3 discourses pertaining to how the ‘choice’ of what to save, what to ‘keep,’ is a deeply political one, determined by class and other subject positions. This partially explains why some old folk traditions were not necessarily considered worth holding on to when the Tibetan community set itself up anew in exile. It is for these reasons that this chapter , part of a larger project consideringthe role of music in the emplacement of identity in exile groups, specifically focusing on the Tibetan community in Dharamsala, seeks to locate and examine a once-lived, now performed life: that of the wandering minstrel-sage known as the Dekar.

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE IDIOT-SAGE

Of this character, CB Josayma writes: The Dekar of Tibet carries on the ancient traditions of the itinerant singer, who appears only on momentous occasions such as New Year’s morning, weddings, and occasions when new officials are appointed to the government. His verses are a mixture of devotional praises and ribald humour intended to inspire faith in the Buddhist religion and laughter at the amusing anecdotes of his life. (Josayma, 1987: 24) She adds that while Dekars have performed in Tibet for centuries, it was the fifth Dalai Lama (1617–1682) who first ‘patronised’ these bards, “creating new costumes for them of white masks ringed with goat’s hair, decorated with shells, and a mirror on the forehead,” (Josayma, 1987, 24). In addition to composing for them verses

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