Verses of Praise and Denigration: Finding Poetic Creativity in the Tibetan Election in Exile

Between October 2015 and March 2016, over ninety-thousand Tibetans in exile prepared to elect either Lobsang Sangay or Penpa Tsering as the new political leader of the Tibetan government in exile. In a negative campaign style, which was unprecedented in the history of the Tibetan democracy in exile, the two candidates were pitted against each other. Many Tibetans now reminisce with some remorse about how this election campaign stirred up tensions and animosity in the exile community. The campaign offered a germane platform to many Tibetan poets all over the world to express their opinions about their potential future leaders in the Tibetan language. One forum where they disseminated their poems about the two candidates was an exile-based Tibetan-language website devoted to poetry, news, essays, and songs. In this piece, I offer an English translation of four of these poems and discuss the issues and themes that concerned the poets as well as the Tibetan electorate

Disciples of a crazy saint: The Buchen of Spiti

The Buchen are specialist religious performers from Spiti, a culturally Tibetan valley in North India. They are widely known for performing an elaborate exorcism ritual that culminates in a slab of stone, marked with images of demons, being smashed on a man’s belly. In winter groups of Buchen perform their religious theatre, a localised form of Ache Lhamo, the Tibetan Opera. This book, published in conjunction with an exhibition at the Pitt Rivers Museum at the University of Oxford is the result of a research project and substantial fieldtrip funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Council, with project partnership from the Pitt Rivers Museum. Patrick Sutherland has been photographing in Spiti for nearly two decades and working with the Buchen for several years. The book consists of a self-reflexive essay by Patrick Sutherland illustrated with historical photographs and his own photographs, followed by four sections of photographs and captions by Patrick Sutherland. It concludes with a substantial essay, placing the Buchen into a wider cultural and historical context, by Tashi Tsering, founding Director of the Amnye Machen Institute (Tibetan Centre for Advanced Studies) in Dharamsala. This essay is also illustrated with historical photographs

Rahul Sankrityayan, Tsetan Phuntsog and Tibetan Textbooks for Ladakh in 1933

In 1933 the Indian scholar and social activist Rahul Sankrityayan (1893-1963) compiled a set of four Tibetan-language readers and a grammar for use in Ladakhi schools, together with his Ladakhi colleague Tsetan Phuntsog. The readers contain a mix of material from Western, Indian, Ladakhi and Tibetan sources. This includes simple essays about ‘air’ and ‘water’, selections from Aesop’s fables, Indian folk stories, biographies of famous people in Ladakhi and Tibetan history, poems by Ladakhi authors, and extracts from the Treasury of Elegant Sayings by Sakya Pandita Kunga Gyaltsen (1182-1251). This essay begins with a review of earlier Tibetan-language schoolbooks published in British India, and then discusses the circumstances that led to Sankrityayan’s involvement in the Ladakh project. The second part of the essay examines the contents of the readers and the grammar, including—where possible—the authorship of particular sections. Finally, the essay briefly reviews linguistic developments in Ladakh since the publication of the textbooks

Tibetan Woodblock Printing: An Ancient Art and Craft

Trinlé, Dungkar Lobzang. "Tibetan Woodblock Printing: An Ancient Art and Craft," Himalaya, the Journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies 36, no. 1 (2016