Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Tibetan Refugee Community

5. THE NAIL THAT STICKS UP GETS HAMMERED DOWN: MAKING MODERN TIBETAN MUSIC

175 5 The Nail That Sticks Up Gets Hammered Down Making Modern Tibetan Music The task for the exile, especially the exiled artist, is to transform the figure of rupture back into a figure of connection. Michael Seidel As Raymond Williams always insisted, culture is ordinary. It is the extraordinary in the ordinary, which is extraordinary, which makes both into culture, common culture. We are thinking of the extraordinary symbolic creativity of the multitude of ways in which young people use, humanize, decorate and invest with meanings their common and immediate life spaces and social practices—personal styles and choice of clothes; selective and active use of music, TV, magazines; decoration of bedrooms; the rituals of romance and subcultural styles; the style, banter and drama of friendship groups; music-making and dance. Nor are these pursuits and activities trivial or inconsequential. In conditions of late modernization and widespread crisis of cultural values they can be crucial to the creation and sustenance of individual and group identities, even to the cultural survival of identity itself. There is work, even desperate work, in their play. Paul Willis From the moment I arrived in Dharamsala, I kept a binder of original Tibetan song lyrics and music that eventually included quite a remarkable collection of compositions, some recorded, some popular, most the result of private moments of creativity never shared before. I hoped to publish a songbook in tandem with my dissertation (a project that unfortunately remains on my “to do” list). Despite the fact that by the end of my stay in Dharamsala the binder’s rings had broken and its contents—everything from tidy computer printouts to photocopies of squiggly handwriting to notes on napkins—were spilling out on all sides, I decided to leave no stone unturned and formally solicit original Tibetan songs from the community, just in case I had missed anyone. Eager to see who would come forward, I plastered the town with Tibetan and English versions of the following flyer: Have you written a song or poem lately? We are making a songbook of new, original Tibetan songs. We would like to include your songs in it! All styles are welcome: traditional, rock, pop, country. Any subject matter: political songs, love songs, songs about Dharamsala, Tibet, the environment, anything! Tell your friends! This book is a chance for everyone to share his or her songs with Tibetans everywhere. Please sign up at Friend’s Corner Restaurant before Friday, June 16th. June 16, the deadline for submissions, found me leaning on the counter of Friend’s Corner Restaurant, a cool yogurt lassi in hand, feeling depressed that everything I had either determined on my own or had been directly told about Tibetan social pressures appeared to be true. I had hoped that the young people in town, many of whom were by now familiar with me and my project, would come through. However, the only submission I received was from a monk friend who, in the process of helping me translate the poster into Tibetan, had been inspired to return immediately to his monastery and compose a short praise song (really just a poem, since he wasn’t a musician) for the young reincarnation of the Panchen Lama being held under house arrest in China. The owner of Friend’s Corner further dashed my stubborn hopes and offended my lingering faith in the situation by insisting that the problem was that I had not offered to pay people money for their songs. Later in the afternoon, I consoled myself, as I had many times before, with the thought that things that don’t happen, people who don’t show up for appointments, news that’s not spread, sounds that aren’t made, are all “data” too. The revolutionary consciousness as manifested in nonaction, I wrote that evening in my field notes. ■ ■ ■ The story behind “modern Tibetan music” is largely a story about the social and artistic challenges young Tibetan refugee musicians face in their efforts to convince their community-in-exile that there is room for a new 176 / Making Modern Tibetan Music musical genre alongside, or even within, the politically charged paradigm of cultural preservation presiding in Dharamsala and elsewhere in the Tibetan diaspora. It is, put more generally, the story of determining what it means to be “modern” in Dharamsala and, further, what the role of contemporary music might be in answering this question. As...