Inside Tibet: Through an adventurer’s lens
Wednesday, 27 August 2008, 2:36 p.m.
New Delhi: The year was 2006.
On board a Chinese railway train from Xiling to Gormo in Quinghai
province an Indian traveller stood out in contrast to his Chinese
co-passengers. At midnight, while he was trying to get some sleep like
the other passengers in the coach, a Chinese police officer came up to
him and asked him to show his passport. He took it away and returned a
good three hours later much to the relief of the Indian passenger.
This was Vijay Kranti’s closest shave with the law in the forbidden land of Tibet and it was on his second visit there.
The photographer-journalist-Tibetologist and daredevil
adventurer recalled that the train journey from Xiling to Gorma that
night could have sounded the end of his zeal to know more about
Tibetans. “I had with me a Nikon camera and around 90 film rolls with
tell-tale evidence of blatant demographic colonialism being perpetrated
by the Chinese inside Tibet through a systematic disfiguring of all
that has to do with Tibet, its people, its culture and age-old
traditions,” he told The Statesman on the sidelines of his photo
exhibition, Inside The Colony, held here recently.
Mr Kranti’s first visit to Tibet took place a year after the
Chinese government in a bid to project its humane face in Tibet opened
up the region to tourists in 2002. “Before opening Tibet to
international tourism, China took care to ensure that visitors can’t
see anything that China does not want them to see. It is like a
murderer throwing a party after cleaning up the murder site. Spotting
meaningful frames in such a situation is a great challenge to a
professional photo-journalist,” Mr Kranti said.
It was his first assignment as a freelance journalist with
Saptahik Hindustan that first brought Mr Kranti in contact with the
Tibetan spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama. “When I approached the Dalai
Lama for the first time in 1972 at his Dharamshala headquarters it was
with a kind of professional detachment, not out of any reverence or any
sense of spiritual allegiance. But when I met him I was greatly
impressed by him. He converted 80,000 Tibetan refugees in India into
one of the best organised refugee settlements,” he said. The love and
bonding with the Dalai Lama and Tibet has continued. Mr Kranti has
since held photo-exhibitions in various parts of Europe and America.
His first visit to Tibet in 2003 had a direct bearing on his
first contact with the Dalai Lama. Mr Kranti had long wanted to go
there. “It was to lend a sense of credibility to my Tibetan studies
that I decided to take advantage of the Chinese decision to open up
Tibet to tourists and entered the region for the first time in 2003 on
a tourist visa.
“There is no doubt that urban parts of Tibet have undergone
tremendous modernisation. Wonderful malls, wide roads, impressive
housing complexes and most lavish car brands are seen on the streets.
Only if you can distinguish between a Chinese and a Tibetan face would
you realise who owns these goodies and for whose benefit all this
development is being undertaken,” Mr Kranti said.
His photographs underline attempts by the Chinese authorities
to blur and obliterate anything that has to do with Tibet, its culture,
spiritual traditions and people. Every nook and corner of Tibet today
is replete with contrasting pictures: of beaming, happy and prosperous
Chinese faces versus Tibetan faces reflecting poverty and deprivation.
–Reproduced from The Statesman. Reporting by Dipankar Chakraborty.