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32 4 THE DALAI LAMA’S TREASURE the 26th of january is one of india’s grandest holidays. This is not to be confused with the anniversary of the end of British rule. That is celebrated on August 15, the date in 1947 when Jawaharlal Nehru proclaimed that India had made “a tryst with destiny. . . . At the stroke of the midnight hour, when the world sleeps, India will awake to life and freedom.” On each subsequent August 15, in the coolness just after dawn before another blistering day, the current prime minister mounts the parapet of Moghul emperor Shah Jahan’s seventeenth-century Red Fort in old Delhi. The prime minister repeats Nehru’s unfurling there on the first day of independence of the green, white, and orange national flag before a crowd stretching back into Chandi Chauk, the main street of the ancient city. But August is too hot and sticky for proper celebrations. By delightful contrast , winter on the north Indian plain is a glorious time of 70-degree daytime temperatures, 40 or 50 at night, not a cloud in the sky for months, and multitudes of flowers in bloom. So when, on January 26, 1950, India adopted a constitution that broke its last legal ties to the British Crown, replacing King George VI’s governor-general with a president as the chief of state, that date was proclaimed to be the main annual national day, Republic Day. Republic Day involves several days of celebrations. These culminate in two events. One is the spectacular “beating retreat” of military bands on January 25. Keeping up the best traditions of the British empire, the bands perform—perfectly timed slow-step marches, trumpets blaring, bagpipes skirling, drums rattling between flourishing twirls of the drumsticks—as the sun sinks behind the army camel corps lining the walled backdrop of the massive central secretariat buildings that the British built on Raisina Hill in the 1920s. These office blocks of pink sandstone with Moghul trimming became the administrative center of the replacement for Calcutta as the capital of imperial India, New Delhi. The Dalai Lama’s Treasure 33 The other event is the parade on Republic Day itself, January 26. Men march, tanks rumble, the camel corps sways, and many others pass by, while jets flying low overhead stream out clouds of the flag’s three colors. The parade goes down the central vista of the British empire’s Indian jewel, the old King’s Way that is now renamed Rajpath (government way). It runs between vast lawns and up Raisina Hill to the central secretariat and, beyond it, Rashtrapati Bhavan (President’s House), the great palace built for British viceroys and now occupied by India’s figurehead presidents. This is a time when senior officials from all over India seek excuses to be in New Delhi, ostensibly for consultations but primarily to enjoy the social life and renew acquaintances. So it was in 1960 that, upon asking around, I learned that Apa Pant would be in town for Republic Day from his post in Gangtok, where he was India’s civil servant supervising Sikkim’s government. After the Dalai Lama fled from Tibet and settled in exile in north India in April 1959, the Tibetan story had continued to be important. The following month, I had gone back to Tezpur, to interview refugees who followed him across the Himalayas. They were a pitiful people. Most were poor but devout Buddhists who had fled their homes with only a few personal possessions, especially sacred objects that they later had to sell in order to eat. Clothed in heavy woolens appropriate for the eleven thousand-foot altitude to which they were accustomed, they sweated in Assam’s tropical heat and oppressive humidity. Even worse, diseases that had been retarded by the thin air and dry climate of Tibet suddenly exploded into major medical problems for many. Goiter was one, and health workers found rampant venereal diseases and many other complaints. Most of my interviews were conducted with the help of an Assamese lad of about fourteen years who spoke Tibetan and Hindi, plus one of the Indian Army officers responsible for building and managing refugee camps of split bamboo huts who spoke Hindi and English. Exact quotes this double translation did not produce, but the refugees’ vivid statements of hardship and abuse by the Chinese were put in quotation marks anyway. After the first wave of Tibetan refugees—some one hundred thousand...

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