Contemporary Tibetan Literature in English: Witnessing Exile

Abstract

For a very long time, Tibetan scholarship had been much focused on mysticism, spirituality, philosophy and religion. Tibetan medicine had also found its due place in the vast corpus of Tibetan studies. This linearity of development of Tibetan literature that had started with the advent of Buddhism in the 7th century,was brought to an abrupt pause and the course of its progress was altered when Tibet was violently occupied by the People’s Republic of China in 1959. Although a major portion of this tradition has Buddhist teachings as its chief motif, the diversity within the Tibetan literature is easy to observe. It includes subjects such as linguistics, literature, biography, history, philosophy, astronomy, medicine etc. The translations of Indian Buddhist treaties that are occuping the maximum of the Tibetan literature corpus. The present research intents to explore how the contemporary Tibetan literature has arisen in exile has brought the issue of Tibetan displacement on a global platform fetching much support for cause of ‘Free Tibet’, offering an opportunity to observe and contemplate on the problem of exileas perceived by the Tibetans living outside of Tibet.