Vijay Kranti
AS Dalai Lama’s name and Buddhism dominate most of popular narratives on Tibet, it has led to a misplaced belief that occupation of Tibet by China in 1950-51 was a cakewalk. China’s systematic and concerted propaganda about presenting the colonial grabbing of Tibet as ‘peaceful liberation’, too, has made outsiders believe that Tibet was a land of the timid and that the Tibetan masses have never had either the desire, or the capacity, to push back the Chinese Communist aggression.
Famous Tibetan writer Jamyang Norbu’s book ‘Echoes From Forgotten Mountains’ effectively demolishes such beliefs by giving a detailed historic account of how people of Tibet fought back China’s occupation force – the dreaded People’s Liberation Army (PLA) and the Communist Party of China (CCP).
This book is going to be very useful for coming generations of Tibetans, living in exile or suffocating under China’s colonial dominance, as well as world governments and researchers would need to know the real story of Tibet’s occupation by China and the valour of those Tibetans who fought back bravely even if they lost the game against an exceedingly more powerful and ruthless occupying force.
Years-long research
Jamyang Norbu is a renowned Tibetan political commentator, historian, thinker, novelist and a popular playwright. His earlier books like ‘Illusion and Reality’, ‘Buying the Dragon’s Teeth’, ‘Shadow Tibet’ and ‘Don’t Stop the Revolution’ have been received quite well, both by Tibetan as well as non-Tibetan scholars on China and Tibet. His novel ‘The Mandala of Sherlock Holmes’ won the Crossword Book Award in 2000 and has been translated in over a dozen languages.
The strongest point of this book is that it is based on Jamyang Norbu’s years-long research of most of available published material on the Tibetan resistance movement and his one-to-one meetings with innumerable surviving Tibetan soldiers, guerrilla fighters and their CIA trainers, secret agents, peasants, merchants and even some surviving beggars who were either direct participants or were first-hand witnesses to many important developments.
Moreover, what makes Jamyang more effective in telling the story is that he himself has been a Tibetan guerrilla fighter of ‘Chu Shi Gangdruk’ which stands defunct and disbanded today but has been the most respected and fearsome national guerrilla freedom army of Tibet between 1950s and mid-1970s.
Personal life story
Jamyang has liberally used his personal life story and the history of his own family to make this massive narration, running into 891 pages, interesting, authentic and easy-to-understand history of Tibetan armed resistance. Another attraction of the book is a good number of old and historic photos and maps included in the book which make it a collectors’ item.
A nearly complete set of photos of the CIA-trained Tibetan guerrilla paratroopers who were secretly airdropped in Tibet is worth mentioning. Besides telling the stories of many brave men, women, nomads, Lamas and nuns who fought against China’s occupying PLA, the writer has also gone into reasons of their defeat at the hands of Chinese.
