Inside Tibet: Through an adventurer’s lens

Dipankar Chakraborty 
The Statesman
Wednesday, 27 August 2008

NEW DELHI, Aug. 27: 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.