Tsering Wangmo Dhompa. The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile. Columbia University Press, 2025. xviii + 349 pages, 2 maps, 4 illustrations. Hardcover, $115.00; paperback, $28.00; ebook, $27.99.

The Tibetan diaspora in India and elsewhere is frequently regarded as a homogeneous community, having a common national origin and a uniform religious tradition. The reality is, however, not so simple. While Buddhism was introduced by powerful monarchs in the seventh century CE in what was then an emerging Central Asian empire (the “Tibetan Empire”), Buddhism suffered a setback when that empire collapsed in the nineth century. Only gradually did Buddhism once again become the dominant social and ideological force on the Tibetan Plateau, starting in the eleventh century with the second introduction of Buddhism in the form of several different schools or traditions coming from India. Simultaneously, a narrative was created concerning the earlier introduction of Buddhism, maintaining that the Tibetan emperors were manifestations of divine beings (bodhisattvas) acting according to the prophetic will of Buddha Shakyamuni. In the seventeenth century, the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism, headed by the Dalai Lama, became the dominant power, creating a theocratic polity based in Lhasa and ruling over Central and Western Tibet, thus creating what has come to be called “the Tibetan government.”

This is the background against which the Tibetan diaspora and its development over the last seventy-five years must be seen. In the first decades of this diasporic period, conflicting forces—on the one hand, the striving for unity in the face of Chinese oppression and, on the other, a deep-rooted loyalty to different regional identities and religious traditions—created strife and sometimes violent confrontations. In her book, The Politics of Sorrow: Unity and Allegiance Across Tibetan Exile, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa explores this situation in which dissent from the policy of the Tibetan exile government was by many Tibetan refugees “seen as choosing a narrow, protective regionalism at the expense of a broader Tibetan identity” (viii). She points out, however, that this “broader Tibetan identity,” promoted as a national identity in exile, to a large extent “privileged Central Tibetan norms…transformed from being particular and a regional identity to being a general and a national identity” (xi), a process encouraged by the fact that a majority of the refugees hailed from Central Tibet, which was closer to India than the eastern parts of the Tibetan Plateau. Thus, the exile government was a continuation of the Lhasa-based Tibetan government with the Buddhist Gelugpa school, which had been the power base of that government, becoming paramount in exile. However, adherents of the older schools of Tibetan Buddhism, mainly hailing from the eastern and northeastern parts of the Tibetan Plateau (Kham and Amdo), which were traditionally largely outside the reach of the Lhasa government, were also numerous in the exile community. The emergence of political tensions to which this gave rise in the exile community is the topic of the introduction and, in greater detail, in chapters 1–4 and 7 and 8.

In chapter 1, the background of the Lhasa-based Tibetan government in pre-1959 Tibet is discussed, including the fact that its control of large parts of eastern (especially northeastern) Tibet was limited or even entirely absent. This was the cause of considerable tension in the refugee community as sizable groups of Tibetans from the aforementioned parts of the Tibetan Plateau were unwilling to abandon their regional independence and religious identity in favor of what they regarded as dominance by the former Lhasa government, which was established after the failed uprising in Lhasa against the Chinese rule in March 1959 and the Dalai Lama’s escape to India.

Chapter 2 describes the pressure to conform to a new pan-Tibetan identity highlighting national unity promoted by the Tibetan government in exile, later renamed the “Central Tibet Administration” (CTA), and the countermeasures taken by exile Tibetan groups which, while not opposed to the Dalai Lama as a religious leader, were not willing to entirely give up their traditional autonomy. Chapter 3 outlines how thirteen of these groups eventually formed an association (“The Thirteen”), opposing the supremacy historically as well as in the diaspora, of the Lhasa government as well as that of the Gelugpa school of Tibetan Buddhism. This theme is pursued in chapter 4, in which the same conflict is discussed as a political issue of national unity in exile, of which the touchstone, from the viewpoint of the diasporic elite, was unconditional loyalty to the CTA and its narrative of the ancient unity of the Tibetan nation and the supremacy of the Lhasa government over the entire Tibetan Plateau.

In chapters 5 and 6, the author presents and discusses in detail two crucial and dramatic episodes in this conflict, one in 1966 and the other in 1978. Although some scholars have drawn attention to these episodes before, the present study provides a unique in-depth presentation of their context, unfolding, and repercussions. The first episode is discussed in chapter 5, “Against the Grain of History: Mutiny at the Ockenden School.” The Ockenden School was established in 1965 by a small English NGO, the Ockenden Venture, in Mussoorie, a north Indian “hill station.” The school, strictly for boys, was at the time the only Tibetan refugee school in India offering a post-primary English-medium education. In early 1966, it shifted to the town of Dharwar in Karnataka State in south India. However, after only a few months a mutiny erupted among the pupils, led by members of the Tibetan staff, resulting in their precipitate departure from the school and its subsequent closure. The reason for the upheaval was ostensibly the anti-Tibetan government and anti-Buddhist views of the Tibetan headmaster, a monk who was not only a follower of the Bön religion, regarded as distinct from Buddhism, but who was, moreover, a native of the Amdo region, which he maintained (correctly, as a matter of fact) had never been under the direct control of Lhasa. Pressure was allegedly exerted on the pupils to adopt similar views.

At the time, this event created a considerable stir in the Tibetan diasporic community and exacerbated the difficult relationship between the Tibetan exile groups from the eastern and northeastern regions of the Tibetan Plateau. While the Bön-Buddhist tensions were gradually resolved and are now more or less forgotten—largely due to the efforts of the Dalai Lama, resulting in Bön being finally officially recognized as the “fifth religious tradition of Tibet”—the regional tensions remained. These came to a head with the assassination of Gungthang Tsultrim, a prominent Amdo member of The Thirteen, who was shot in his home in Dehradun in 1978 and died a few days later after claiming to have recognized the assassin. The importance not only of religious but also of regional conflicts in the diaspora is shown by the fact that Gungthang Tsultrim was not only a lama but belonged to the Gelugpa school, the same school as the Dalai Lama. This event, and the subsequent series of acrimonious accusations and counteraccusations (154–67), remained without a transparent and final conclusion. In the end, the CTA was able to impose, and continues to impose, full control of the diasporic community.

Dhompa characterizes this period—the 1960s and 1970s—of the Tibetan diasporic history as “the politics of sorrow.” With this phrase, she wishes to epitomize the fact that “people from Kham and Amdo had made up the majority in Tibet. Now, in contrast, they were minorities among Tibetans living in exile” (109). This minority came under intense pressure during “the broader process of building the nation in exile, in which the writing of national history demands amnesia about certain events and people” (162). In exile there was, in fact, no place for loyalty to traditional local chiefs or sovereigns, clans or non-Central Tibetan dialects, and only a marginal place for non-Gelugpa religious traditions. Dhompa develops this theme in chapters 7 and 8, nevertheless concluding that a balance may seem to have been struck in recent years in the sense that some of those who witnessed the past conflicts between The Thirteen and the CTA now feel that they ensured not only the survival of their regional identity, but also, crucially, that of the various traditions of Tibetan Buddhism as well as of Bön (262).

The early period of the Tibetan diaspora in India, with its process of suppression of dissent and of alternative historical narratives, has received scant attention from historians. The author, however, is uniquely qualified for undertaking the broad research underpinning her narrative. Coming from a family hailing from Kham and with a mother who had been a member of the Tibetan diasporic parliament (vii), she has been able to interview some of the remaining persons, now elderly, who participated in the dramas discussed in her book (ix–xii). Dhompa has collected a vast range of relevant sources, some of them very difficult to find today, and writes with ease and elegance. The result is a book that highlights conflicts which the diasporic political and religious elite later tried to reduce to oblivion, and which hence is of absorbing interest for anyone engaged in Tibetan diasporic studies.