Review: Echoes from Forgotten Mountains by Jamyang Norbu

Jamyang Norbu is an elder statesman in the world of Tibetan letters in exile. While he is well-known in the Tibetan community as an ingenious playwright, provocative essayist, firebrand polemicist, and indefatigable blogger, his major claim to fame in the international arena is his novel, The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes, published in 1999. The book – in which the author takes Sherlock Holmes to Tibet – won India’s Crossword Book Award for Fiction, often touted as “India’s Booker.” Norbu’s latest magnum opus, Echoes from Forgotten Mountains: Tibet in War and Peace, aims to unravel the mysteries of Tibet’s tumultuous history once and for all.

This is at least two books rolled into one and straddles multiple genres: a literary memoir and a history of Tibetan resistance against Communist China, a challenging task for a reviewer. The book begins with his matrilineal and patrilineal lineages, where he gives detailed accounts of his illustrious ancestors. His great-grandfather Tenduk Pulger served as a district administrator under the seventh king of Sikkim Tsugphud Paljor. “The British Raj turned out to be just the element for this energetic and forward-looking personality, and he thrived in it.” Along with his land grants, he acquired much property and became the richest man in Kalimpong and Darjeeling townships. “The locals said that he could dam the Teesta River if he threw all his money off the Anderson Bridge.” While Norbu was born in India, he travelled to Tibet with his mother, a daughter of Tibetan aristocrats, when he was three months old, before returning to Darjeeling just as the Communists were advancing into Tibet.

The bulk of this ambitious book, not surprisingly, details the Communist Chinese invasion of Tibet and the Tibetan response to it. The resultant fights between the Tibetan resistance and the People’s Liberation Army, especially in Eastern Tibet and elsewhere, are provided in a vivid, gut-wrenching, and novelistic manner. The book provides flamboyant accounts of life in Lhasa, its customs, architecture, especially its bars, which are presented in picturesque abundance. “My memories of the Holy City are, of course, those that have been passed on to me, over the years, by friends and relatives, especially my mother. It has given me a perspective of Lhasa that though not first-hand, is fairly intimate, and at times satisfyingly vivid.” A significant portion of the book is based on research and interviews, especially oral history, of those who witnessed the Tibetan resistance against the Communist occupation and the brief involvement of the CIA in supporting Tibetan resistance fighters. Inspired by Hemingway’s novel For Whom The Bell Tolls, a novel about the Spanish Civil War, Norbu himself joins the force in Mustang at the Nepal-Tibet border. He drops out of school and goes to fight there with a mule-load of books to read. Upon returning to Dharamshala, the exiled capital of Tibet, he works in intelligence gathering, performing arts, activism, and journalism. Throughout the book, he critiques the Dharamshala government’s failings, especially what he believes is its lack of spine in dealing with its counterpart in Beijing.

Despite its Tolstoyan length of about 900 pages, as the subtitle of the book suggests, it is, for the most part, a breezy read, filled with personal anecdotes and memories. Norbu carries his erudition with a light touch while sprinkling the book with just the right amount of details and references from his wide reading. Some of the military history (particularly the arms, ammunition, and guns used) is often presented in encyclopaedic detail. These, and other sections about the history and idiosyncrasies of Tibetan aristocrats, not least their infamously lavish parties, are of great historical value. It is indeed hard to find a book that has so much detail about Tibetan elites, not least those who had moved to Kalimpong and Darjeeling with their treasure troves, leaving Tibet behind. The most memorable and heartfelt parts are sections in which the author recounts his childhood and youth in Kalimpong and Darjeeling and the life in those colonial outposts in those years, a vantage point that affords Norbu with a front-row seat to observe the fall of his ancestral homeland. Some of the nuggets about the spies of all nationalities in the border town of Kalimpong are priceless, especially the two Japanese spies who, having fallen on hard times, end up working at the famous Tibetan language newspaper, Tibet Mirror.

Books on Tibet roughly fall into the following categories: Western romanticized versions, communist propaganda, academic treatises, and sentimental accounts by Tibetans and some sympathizers. Norbu’s book aims to provide a scholarly middle way, a balance between objectivity and subjectivity that is uncommon in accounts of Tibet. True to its ambition, this is perhaps the only reason why the text lacks some of the emotional resonance of Dawa Norbu’s memoir about Tibet before 1959, Red Star Over Tibet, or even Patrick French’s Tibet, Tibet: A Personal History of a Lost Land.

The book is an apotheosis of Norbu’s long literary career. A judicious blend of memoir, ethnography, and historical writing on a grand scale, the text stands as a testament to his remarkable autodidactic drive, which is inspiring, especially for writers from all provincial and marginalized communities. Precisely because such historical narratives on Tibet are so rare and the urgency and the need to document them so dire, it would not be an overstatement to say that the book will be considered a significant and original contribution to Tibetan literature in the years to come.

Tsering Namgyal Khortsa is a Tibetan writer and journalist based in Dehra Dun. He is the author, most recently, of the novel, The Tibetan Suitcase.