path through the forest. Themonsoon was monsooning even more than usual and we were soaked to the skin after the fifteen-minute climb. But the lunch was worth it – a banquet of over a dozen savoury dishes, followed by bowls of delicious soup. The idea is that you drink the soup out of the bowl and then daintily extricate the residue of choice morsels with your chopsticks: but already I’d been so demoralised by the intractability of said chopsticks that I threw etiquette overboard and furtively fished the bits out with my fingers. It’s fascinating to watch Tibetans handling these elegant ivory sticks – they can unerringly pick up one grain of rice with them. In Tibet they are used only by the nobility, so a surreptitious survey of my fellow-guests soon revealed which individuals had risen from the ranks: if you haven’t learned the art from babyhood you can’t ever really master it.
Herr Eggler – a famous mountaineer and lawyer – has a delightful sense of humour, and during lunch we amused ourselves by considering the effect polyandry would have on European officialdom. It’s a lovely thought; imagine the passport – Name of Husband (add an ‘s’ with pen): Sonam Dorje, Tsiring Sonam, Dorje Chumbe. Name of Wife: Dolma Tsiring. Children’s names: (here follows a long list) and then the bemused passport officer asking, ‘Whose father is which?’ or ‘Whose child is which?’ depending on the way it struck him. And Dolma Tsiring replying gaily in Tibetan, ‘Who knows – and who cares?’ Actually, of course, all such children are traditionally accepted in Tibet as being the eldest brother’s (among the Tibetans the husbands in polyandric marriages are always brothers) and Herr Eggler said the small minority of family units already built on this basis would be allowed to remain intact, though the young people who are settling in Switzerland would have to obey Swiss law and restrict themselves to one partner at a time. To me this seems unfair. It may suit a Tibetan peasant to have two or three husbands simultaneously, whereas a rich European woman may prefer to have two or three in rapid succession, but why should Tibetans be forced to conform to European standards? However, I’m sure this is now a purely academic question, as the social conditions which caused polyandry in Tibet will not obtain in Europe.
In this camp and the surrounding area Tibetans live together in a virtually uncontaminated Tibetan atmosphere. Apart from the 1500 who are temporarily settled in Macleod Ganj and Forsythe Bazaar there are also many adults attached to the camp as lamas, cobblers, tailors, weavers, carpenters, cooks and ayahs, so one is able to study them as an ethnic group, though their community life is of course artificial in some ways.
The first thing to impress me when I arrived here was the complete equality between the sexes, a phenomenon which seems all the more remarkable when one has just spent six months in Muslim and Hindu societies. Watching the Tibetans together I could easily believe that I was in a modern Western community and it is salutary to remember that this equality, so new to our society, has always been taken for granted in Tibet. Even in the religious field women can gain the preeminence of being regarded as a Bodhisattva, like Pol-den Lha-mo, Abbess of a monastery on the shores of Lake Yamdrok, who is considered to be a special protector of the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama. Incidentally, her Sanskrit name, when translated into English, is somewhat startling – ‘The Adamantine Whore’.
One of the chief joys of my life here is the chanting of the ayahs’ night-prayers. These girls assemble near our door to pray from 8.00 to 8.30 p.m. and anything more beautiful you couldn’t wish to hear. Normally, Eastern music doesn’t move Europeans – at best one is neutral to it, at worst irritated by it – but this chanting really means something to me. It sounds oddly un-Eastern; my personal
Herr Eggler – a famous mountaineer and lawyer – has a delightful sense of humour, and during lunch we amused ourselves by considering the effect polyandry would have on European officialdom. It’s a lovely thought; imagine the passport – Name of Husband (add an ‘s’ with pen): Sonam Dorje, Tsiring Sonam, Dorje Chumbe. Name of Wife: Dolma Tsiring. Children’s names: (here follows a long list) and then the bemused passport officer asking, ‘Whose father is which?’ or ‘Whose child is which?’ depending on the way it struck him. And Dolma Tsiring replying gaily in Tibetan, ‘Who knows – and who cares?’ Actually, of course, all such children are traditionally accepted in Tibet as being the eldest brother’s (among the Tibetans the husbands in polyandric marriages are always brothers) and Herr Eggler said the small minority of family units already built on this basis would be allowed to remain intact, though the young people who are settling in Switzerland would have to obey Swiss law and restrict themselves to one partner at a time. To me this seems unfair. It may suit a Tibetan peasant to have two or three husbands simultaneously, whereas a rich European woman may prefer to have two or three in rapid succession, but why should Tibetans be forced to conform to European standards? However, I’m sure this is now a purely academic question, as the social conditions which caused polyandry in Tibet will not obtain in Europe.
In this camp and the surrounding area Tibetans live together in a virtually uncontaminated Tibetan atmosphere. Apart from the 1500 who are temporarily settled in Macleod Ganj and Forsythe Bazaar there are also many adults attached to the camp as lamas, cobblers, tailors, weavers, carpenters, cooks and ayahs, so one is able to study them as an ethnic group, though their community life is of course artificial in some ways.
The first thing to impress me when I arrived here was the complete equality between the sexes, a phenomenon which seems all the more remarkable when one has just spent six months in Muslim and Hindu societies. Watching the Tibetans together I could easily believe that I was in a modern Western community and it is salutary to remember that this equality, so new to our society, has always been taken for granted in Tibet. Even in the religious field women can gain the preeminence of being regarded as a Bodhisattva, like Pol-den Lha-mo, Abbess of a monastery on the shores of Lake Yamdrok, who is considered to be a special protector of the Panchen Lama and the Dalai Lama. Incidentally, her Sanskrit name, when translated into English, is somewhat startling – ‘The Adamantine Whore’.
One of the chief joys of my life here is the chanting of the ayahs’ night-prayers. These girls assemble near our door to pray from 8.00 to 8.30 p.m. and anything more beautiful you couldn’t wish to hear. Normally, Eastern music doesn’t move Europeans – at best one is neutral to it, at worst irritated by it – but this chanting really means something to me. It sounds oddly un-Eastern; my personal
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