From Dharamsala to Little Lhasa How Three Generations of Tibetan Migration Have Transformed a Temporary City

Swati Chawla

Acknowledgments

To the following, in heartfelt gratitude and immense intellectual debt:

Gregor Thum’s Uprooted and Alon Confino’s Tantura—the fountainheads;

Students and friends in Dharamsala’s nunneries,

For sharing their rooms, food and life stories;

My grandparents for their Partition tales,

And for making their home in a strange place;

Papa, for inculcating humility and “good sense”; 

And Mummy who never left me, even in death.

To Alon Confino I owe my excitement about history;

And to Benji, his fun and stimulating company;

To Prof Goldberg, a brief but heart-warming conversation;

And to my cohort at UVa, a home away from home.

As for you, dear reader, I hope this book convinces:

You must experience Dharamsala, pay a short visit. 

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Table of Contents

Prologue: Dal ka Halvah, a short story

Introduction: Migration in a Temporary City

1. The City and the Cityscape

2. Grandparents and Grandchildren: Between Exile

and Homecoming

3. Pears and Tanks: What stories did they tell?

4. Books and Bollywood, Cricket and Football

5. The Diaspora Elsewhere: Tibetans in Bylakuppe,

Europe and North America

Epilogue: I Re-Member, another short story

Appendix A: Terms for Partition and Migration in

different languages

Appendix B: Timeline for Tibetan Migration in India:

1959-2013.

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4

Prologue

Dal ka Halvah (Lentil Halvah)A Short StoryBadima1 was only fifty when she became a grandmother. Since "dadiji"2 sounded awfully like the "mataji"3 she had been subjected to in public buses, we were instructed to call her "badima". After mummy died, badima took it upon herself to teach me to cook.

We had graduated to dessert. First up was sooji (semolina) halvah. I was pouring ghee (clarified butter) along the circumference of the pan. (Badima could never have enough ghee.) Hor pa, hor, utte pa. Asi koi bengali madrasi thodi haige aan? Koi kameen e? (Put more, more, on top of it, then some more. Are we from Bengal or Madras? Is there a dearth of things in our house?)

We are not Bengali-Madrasi. Important lessons those, and words of subtle caution: the Bengali boyfriend, and the palate that craved idli-sambhar (Madrasi cuisine) were unacceptable.

I don't like sooji halvah, I told her. Could she make dal ka halvah? Of course she could. But why had I never seen her make it...? That was because she hadn't made it for a while. For how long? Batware ke baad. (Since the Partition.)But that was 60 years ago! If she hadn't made it for 60 years, surely she didn't know how. Admit it! Badima was never one to concede defeat. I persisted: Kyun? Yahaan dal nahin milti? Ya ghee nahin milta? Ya cheeni? (Why? Don’t you get dal (lentils) here? Or you can’t find ghee here? Or sugar?)

Dal ka halvah was the last thing she had eaten in Sargodha before setting off for Delhi. She loved it, and had had a little too much. She didn't get her period for six months.

1 Badima: literally “big mother,” an affectionate term of address for a grandmother or an older aunt in Hindi.2 Dadiji: “dadi” means father’s mother and “ji” is an honorific term of address for someone who is older/ senior. “Ji” also emphasizes age, hence badima’s dislike for the term.3 Mataji: “mata” means mother; the term, like “dadiji”, emphasizes age.

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But the halvah had nothing to do with your period, I told her.No use. Sooji halvah it was.

Last summer, I was invited to organize discussions around Jawaharlal Nehru's Discovery of India for high school students. It was tough persuading badima to speak at the session on Partition: But what will I tell them? I don't know much of Gandhi-Nehru and azaadi (freedom). The school kids these days know so much more! Just tell them what you do remember, I told her.

As it turned out, the kids were not interested in Gandhi-Nehru-azaadi either. They asked her if she had gone to school. She had. How old was she when she got married? Nineteen. Had she met dadaji (grandfather) before? No. How much did gold cost then? 25 rupees a tola (ten grams). Then why didn't she buy 2-3 kilos? Badima quipped--kal ko tumhare pota-poti tumse poochenge. Tumhare zamaane mein 25 hazaar ka tha? Toh 2-3 kilo le kar kyun nahin rakh liya? (Tomorrow your grandchildren will ask you: in your time, was (10 grams) gold for 25,000 rupees only? Then why didn’t you buy 2-3 kilos to put aside?)

The session ended and I took her to the office to sign for her conveyance and honorarium. At 81, this was the first time badima’s labor had been rewarded in cash. Two thousand rupees. That was the sum her father had given her when she left from Sargodha.4 That was all the money they had. She was the eldest among the children, and he would be coming in a week's time. She had lost the money. Or had it been stolen on the train? Her father didn't come the next week. Or the week after. He didn't come for six months.

Back home, my grandfather teased her. She had her first income. Where were the sweets? I volunteered, "sooji halvah?"No, badima said, it was time for me to learn another dessert.

4 Sargodha is a small town near Lahore, which is now in the Punjab province of Pakistan.

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IntroductionMigration in a Temporary City

This book attempts to tell the story of Tibetan migration into India

through three generations of refugees/ settlers in the North Indian city of

Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. This is

not a history of the city of Dharamsala; but a history, like Alon Confino's

Tantura, S Yizhar’s Khirbet Khizeh and Gregor Thum's Breslau/

Wroclaw, through that city of a refugee community in its host country.

While Tibetan exile has been discussed in academic writing through a

variety of disciplinary approaches, this is (barring a short essay on “the role

of the symbolic geography of Dharamsala in constituting Tibetan diasporic

identity”)5 the first account that places the history of the exiled community

within the city, and asks how the city itself was transformed by the

community.6 The book, therefore, tells two stories: that of Dharamsala as a

palimpsest written over by series of migrations, and that of Tibetan

diaspora in India.

5 Anand, Dibyesh. “A Guide to Little Lhasa in India”. In Paul Christiaan Klieger, ed. Tibet, Self and the Tibetan Diaspora: Voices of Difference. Koln: Brill, 2002.6 Keila Diehl's Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Refugee Community also placed the Tibetan exile community within Dharamsala. But hers is a story primarily of exile and the struggle for freedom (and not of migration and settling), and is told through music (from Bollywood to rock and roll and protest songs). The book was written in 2002, before the cityscape was transformed in reaction to the Olympic games in China, and a fresh investment in democracy, with the Fourteenth Dalai Lama stepping down as head of state in 2011. 

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The first chapter will provide a focused background to the city of

Dharamsala and a brief history of Tibetan migration into India from 1959 to

the present. It will also look at present day Dharamsala through its

demographic composition and the interaction between three distinct

population groups: Tibetan refugees, local pahari or mountain population

(Indian citizens) and foreign tourists. The second chapter will talk about the

different meanings of exile/ refuge/ displacement/ statelessness on the one

hand, and homecoming/ belonging/ assimilation/ settling on the other for

three generations of Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala. In Chapter 3, I will

study at the oral and written histories of Tibet’s elders (those who migrated

in 1959 or soon after) and interviews with the third generation of refugees

(those who are in their teens and twenties at present), to tease out common

strands from what they remember about Tibet: through first-hand and

narrated experience. I will also place the history of institutional sites within

Dharamsala in conversation with this generational history. The fourth

chapter attempts a survey of the city of Dharamsala in the popular

imagination: in literary and travel works by Tibetans and tourists, and in

mainstream Hindi cinema. It will also look at the two sports that have, quite

literally, imprinted themselves on to Dharamsala: cricket and football. In

the final chapter, I will put Dharamsala in relation to other Tibetan

settlements and see how different relationships with land and space are

forged in agricultural settlements, and in countries that are considered

more “foreign” to the Tibetan way of life than India.

8

With help from colleagues and friends, I had started putting together

a list of terms for “partition” and “migration” in different languages. These

are mentioned in Appendix A. Though some of these languages may not

appear to be immediately relevant for our context, the experience of

Dharamsala is characterized by polyglossia (in Mikhail Bakhtin’s sense of

the contestation of languages and ways of thinking). Restaurant names and

graffiti in the city in languages such as Bangla, Chinese, Hebrew and

Spanish are evidence of this. Some of these terms are very revealing and

instructive: both of the difficulty of translation, and of the nuances that

particular linguistic and cultural contexts add to the displacement that has

become a commonplace of human experience. For example, the Chinese

(gua fen) and Hebrew (haluka) words for partition could mean dividing

melons, cakes and countries alike. And migration in Tibetan and Hebrew

could mean to ascend or descend based on where the person is going from/

to. In the final book, I hope to be able to incorporate insights from these

different renderings of the two terms. I must add here that I have not been

able to independently verify the translations offered by others.

I

The City and the Cityscape: The Three Meanings of Dharamsala

I will begin by dwelling on the three meanings of the word

Dharamsala and its implications for an understanding of Tibetan exile. The

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first (and literal) meaning of the compound word from dharam (or dharma)

and shala (house) is the “home of religion”. The second meaning which

makes “dharamsala” a common noun is “temporary resting place/ shelter”.

The third is the administrative term for the city Dharamsala which stands

for lower Dharamsala (where the local Indian population lives),

McLeodganj/ upper Dharamsala (primarily a tourist place with hotels,

bazaars and Tibetan “sights”) and Gangchen Kyishong (the office complex of

the Central Tibetan Administration). I will also briefly mention other

“temporary dwellers” of Dharamsala prior to the Tibetans: British

cantonments (that left Christian cemeteries and convent schools) and

Punjabi migrants from Pakistan, among others. My analysis of Dharamsala

will therefore cover all three population groups currently resident there:

tourists, refugees and citizens.

The second section will provide a brief history of Tibetan migration

into India from 1959 to the present. A timeline for the same will be attached

in Appendix B.

A third point of focus is the expansion of the city itself to

accommodate neighbouring villages and towns such as Sidhpur (where the

Norbulingka Institute of Tibetan Culture, and the Dolma Ling Nunnery and

Institute of Dialectics are located), Sidhbadi (which houses His Holiness the

Karmapa’s monastery), and Dharamkot (which offers more affordable

accommodation to backpackers and volunteers staying for longer

durations). This will be done by going through municipal records for

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changes in demographic composition, property ownership (from local

population to entrepreneurs from other parts of India and, in some cases,

foreigners), and change in patterns of land-use from personal housing and

agriculture to commercial complexes. Since property ownership in parts of

India’s mountainous areas is legally restricted to the local population, I will

also study the attempts to circumvent legality in actual practice.

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II

Grandparents and Grandchildren: Between Exile and Homecoming

German teenagers now work as hard at constructing memorials as their parents did in rebuilding the country after the war, as their grandparents did in building the Third Reich itself.

-- James E Young, “The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today”7

7 Young, James E. “The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany Today”. Critical Enquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267-96. 267

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I will begin the chapter with an analysis (like Vazira Fazila- Yacoobali

Zamindar’s in The Long Partition) of the different official labels for Tibetans

in India: refugee/ political asylum seeker/ displaced person/ (permanent)

resident/ citizen by birth or domicile. I will also give a brief account of the

laws pertaining to refugees in India, informed through our reading of G.

Daniel Cohen, Mark Mazower and Samuel Moyn. I hope to extend Moyn’s

idea of human rights within the context of the United Nations as “the last

utopia” through a discussion of the “Unrepresented Nations and Peoples

Organization” (which is now a part of the United Nations) co-founded by the

Tibetan government in exile in 1991. I will also refer to recent surveys

about the decisions of second and third Tibetan refugees to apply/ not apply

for Indian citizenship and asylum in Western countries.

Influenced by, and yet different from, these official labels are the

ideas of displacement and exile that come from Tibetans’ understanding of

Buddhist precepts. We can identify two lines of thinking within Tibetan

Buddhism. The first is the idea that the better one's karma, the closer one is

born to the holy land. Therefore, being born in exile is a result of bad

karma, and this is how many Tibetans (particularly elders) in India see their

condition. On a panel at the Tibet Museum in Namgyal Monastery, the

curator asserted that Tibetans would return to Tibet when they had

expiated their bad karma; homelessness, therefore, is indeed a step (albeit

painful) in the right direction.8 On the other hand, some also believe

8 A display entitled “Future Visions for Tibet” reads: “The law of karma is undecievable [sic]. After suffering the consequences of our bad karma I think that we will regain our independence under the guidance of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I request all

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that returning to the birth place of dharma (India) is a sign of good karma.

These conflicting understandings are similar to the tension in Yizhar’s

Khribet Khizeh between thinking of the Palestinian village as the promised

land of milk and honey, and as an uncivilized place—stinking and rotting.

The second tendency within Tibetan Buddhism is to approach exile through

the idea of bardo-- the time between death and rebirth. The biography of an

eighteenth century nun (who had to spend time in India following an

invasion of her home town in Tibet) referred to her years in exile as bardo.

How would one account for time between death and birth, which seems to

be bracketed off from linear history?

Finally, I will trace the transition from exile to homecoming through

physical institutions built by three generations of exiled Tibetans, and the

shift in these structures from ephemerality to permanence. I will also

engage here with the theoretical literature on generational memory,

particularly Karl Mannheim (“A generation is a social creation. Where novel

events are rare and change is slow, as in traditional peasant societies,

distinct generations may not appear. Only where events occur in such a

manner as to demarcate a cohort in terms of its "historical-social"

consciousness, should we speak of a true generation”)9, Jane Pilcher10 and

Tibetans to be united and keep the flame of our freedom burning” (Long Look Homeward 52). The appeal to all Tibetans to “keep the flame of our freedom burning” as an exercise of suffering and expiating karmic offenses treats individuals as historical agents. However, inherent in the finitude (and implied cessation) of suffering is a belief in the internal order and logic of the concept of karma. The attempt to mark this finitude on the lifetime of the present Dalai Lama is what makes this “vision” most interesting. 9 Mannheim, Karl. “The Problem of Generations”. In Kecskemeti, Paul, ed. Essays in the Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Routledge, 1952. 10 Pilcher, Jane. “Mannheim’s Sociology of Generations: An Undervalued Legacy”. The British Journal of Sociology 45.3 (1994): 481-95.

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Howard Schuman11. The first institutions built by exiled Tibetans in India

are characterised by the impermanence and uncertainty of an exiled

population hoping for a speedy return home. The bare and functional

architecture of the office of the Dalai Lama (which houses the Tibet

Museum) is a contrast to the ornate architecture at Norbulingka Institute

which was built a generation later, with a tacit admission that the condition

of exile was more permanent than had hitherto been conceded, and a

simultaneous erasure of the present from its motto: “preserving the past for

the future”. The present is purely functional here: servicing the future by

being attentive to the past.

11 Schuman, Howard, et al. “The Generational Bias of Historical Knowledge”. In Pennebaker, James W, et al, eds. Collective Memory of Political Events. Mahwah: Erlaum, 1997.

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III

Pears and Tanks: What stories did they tell?

One night, for instance, their country was invaded by the tanks of a gigantic neighboring country. That had been such a shock and brought such terror that for a long time no one could think of any-thing else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were ripe. A week earlier, Mama had invited the pharmacist to come and pick them. But the pharmacist neither came nor even apologized. Mama was unable to forgive him, which infuriated Karel and Marketa. They reproached her: Everyone else is thinking about tanks, and you're thinking about pears. Then they moved out, taking the memory of her pettiness with them.

But are tanks really more important than pears? As time went by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the foreground and somewhere in the distance a tank no bigger than a ladybug, ready at any moment to fly away out of sight. Ah yes! In reality it's Mama who is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal.

--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting12

My primary sources for this chapter will be the interviews with Tibet’s

elders conducted by the Tibet Oral History Project, and interviews with

Tibetan youth in Dharamsala that I will be conducting myself. The latter will

be identified through youth organizations such as “Friends of Tibet” and

“Students for a Free Tibet”. I will also be studying history and language

text-books in schools under the Department of Education of Central Tibetan

Administration, as well as the history curricula in nunneries and

monasteries in Dharamsala. The first part of this chapter will compile the

motifs about Tibet from these sources, and try to understand them through

12 Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Harper Collins, 1996. 40-41.

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the binary of pears (personal history: paint colours for Thangka art, clothing

and food staples) and tanks (political history: invasion of Chinese army,

flight from Tibet, struggle for freedom) from these sources. Furthermore, I

will analyze accounts about settling in Dharamsala in relation to both

personal and political histories and the anxieties about being out-of-place.

I offer here a brief reading of extracts from Kim Yeshi’s memoir about

building the Norbulingka Institute as an example: Kim Yeshi, the Institute’s

Project Director, points out in Norbulingka: Ten Years of an Adventure that

a ritual clearing of the land preceded its construction. It was “intended to

encourage subterranean creatures that resent human encroachment to

move elsewhere.” The excavation at the site of Chonor House, a guest house

under Norbulingka Institute located in McLeodganj, began at about the

same time and “revealed the foundations of the previous building that had

stood on the site; a British courthouse.” This simultaneity of excavation and

construction in the memoir is symptomatic of Tibetan exile at large:

documenting what was there before, and building a new life in exile; while

the apprehension both of subterranean creatures and other terrestrial

encroachers reflects the problems in constructing these narratives in any

uncomplicated manner. The unearthing of pottery and other quotidian

objects from the site is further evidence of Dharamsala as a palimpsest of

multiple histories.

In the second section, I will be posing two questions from Gyanendra

Pandey’s work on the Partition of India: how will life and community be

17

constructed out of contradictory and different memories (among different

generations or of different emphases à la pears and tanks); and, how do

societal structures and (gender/ caste/ class) hierarchies change when

whole communities migrate en masse? The second question can be

addressed with particular reference to the Tibetan Nuns Project in exile,

which is attempting to bridge the historic inequalities of access to

education, full ordination, mobility and employment between nuns and

monks.

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IV

Books and Bollywood, Cricket and Football

This chapter is intended as a survey of representations of Dharamsala

in popular culture. Taking cues from Gregor Thum’s study of how Breslau

became Wroclaw, I will use travelers’ accounts and the government’s

tourism brochures as my primary sources, along with works of fiction and

poetry based in Dharamsala. I will also analyze the (rather stereotypical)

portrayals of Tibetan settlements in mainstream Hindi cinema (for example,

as the exotic and colorful background to a song in the 2007 romantic

comedy Jab We Met). The chapter will also dwell at some length on the

controversy surrounding the representation of Tibetan flags and “Free

Tibet” slogans in the counter-cultural film Rockstar (2011).

The second section will study the impact of sports, or more rightly the

obsession with/ investment in sports as cultural occupations among the

Tibetan population in Dharamsala. I will focus on football, which has

become an emblematic protest sport with its signage, merchandise and

slogans linking it to the cause of Tibetan freedom; and briefly discuss the

peripheral presence of Tibetans in the story of the elite Indian Premier

(cricket) League’s team Kings XI Punjab decision to designate the Himachal

Pradesh Cricket Association stadium in Dharamsala as one of their “home

venues”. The co-existence of a mainstream and a marginal sport is an

interesting analogue to the co-habitation of Dharamsala by Indians and

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Tibetans. My primary sources for this section will be the video footage and

commentary of Indian Premier League matches in Dharamsala, and

interviews with players and local press coverage of football matches in the

last 5 years.

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V

The Diaspora Elsewhere: Tibetans in Bylakuppe, Europe and North America

Our tiled roof drippedAnd the four walls threatened to fall apartBut we were to go home soon.We grew papayasin front of our house...Our house seems to have grown roots.Now how can I tell my children Where we come from?

--Tenzin Tsundue, “Exile House” 13

Alon Confino’s “Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, A

History of 1948” is my first inspiration for this discussion. I will ask what it

is to make a home in foreign place through a comparative analysis of

Tibetan settlements in Bylakuppe (South India), Europe and North America

(I will be selecting one settlement for each continent). In the first case,

since the primary source of employment is agriculture, I will dwell upon the

relationship with the land: sowing, reaping and growing roots. Of particular

interest is the understanding of growing roots as a betrayal of the struggle

for freedom, and an admission of the impossibility of return. In the last two

cases where there is arguably little in common with Tibetan culture, I will

ask what it means to be a Tibetan refugee. In all instances, however, the

idea of homelessness and statelessness will be informed by Tibetan

13 Tsundue, Tenzin. “Exile House”. Kora. Dharamsala: Tibet Writes, 27.

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Buddhist understandings of the human condition as characterized by

impermanence and the inevitability of change.

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Epilogue

I Re-MemberAnother Short Story

A professor very fond of the word "provenance" was telling me the route to her house. That is where the re-membering began.

I re-membered the tikozi-- didn't know what it was called in English. My nani (maternal grandmother) used it. They had a kettle. One with a long neck—a long curled neck. Wisps of steam would rise out of it in perfect white curls every time nani poured tea and put the lid on. Then she covered the kettle with a tikozi and called us to the table. Chai thandi ho jayegi. Jaldi aao. (The tea is getting cold. Get here soon.) The tikozi had on it a girl's perfectly balanced pirouette and rose flowers. It was conical and it folded neatly. It had to be dry-cleaned.

My nana-nani (maternal grandparents) are dead now. The house they built, with its garden in which they kept the tea table also got re-membered. My mama (maternal uncle) sold it off. My widowed masi (maternal aunt) who stayed with nani, despite my mama's attempts to re/de-member her, moved into his new house. She took the tikozi along. I hadn't known.

At my professor's house. She made some Chinese tea and put it in the kettle—nanima wallah kettle (a kettle just like my nani’s)— to "brew", a verb I had not encountered in action before. And lo and behold, as my Eng Lit prof is fond of saying in exclamation, she pulled the tikozi out. (To assist the "brewing" I presume.) I said, "You have one of those! My nani had one. What is it called in English?" Tikozi.Could you spell it?Tea and cosy, she said. (It had been an English word all along.) Some remnants of our colonial past that I like to preserve, she said. (Oh, it is actually English then?)

I asked my masi if she knew where one could buy one of those. She said she might still have my nani's. It had been in the family for four generations. My nani’s father had bought it in London to ease long English afternoons with hot tea, taken it to their house in Lahore, and then carried it with him to Delhi, where it still sat, forgotten in a bed box.But don't you need it? I asked my masi.

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No, no one uses them anymore.Give it to me!

The tea cosy, having found a spelling, is now re-membered on my dining table. Some remnants of my colonized memory that I like to preserve.

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Appendix A

Terms for Partition and Migration in different languages

Bangla:

The word for migration is abhiprayan which emphasizes movement.

Transfer, or moving from one place to another, could also be sthanantar,

literally meaning “different place”. Partition is deshbhag or division of

country.

Chinese:

Partition has several meanings. It can be translated as 划分. 划 means to

draw a line, 分 means to divide. A second translation could be 分割 or fen ge.

Fen means to divide, and ge means to cut. Partition could bear negative

connotations when used in describing political situation, in which case, the

translation would be 瓜分 or gua fen. It means a whole entity is being cut

and distributed to different parties, just like what people do to a watermelon

(gua). The term “cutting/ carving of the Chinese melon” was used to

describe European “spheres of influence” in the nineteenth century.

Migration is translated as 移民 (Yi min) or “moving people”. Another

translation is 搬家 or ban jia which means “moving home.”

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German:

One translation of partition is aufteilung which carries the meaning of

dividing up; the main verb teilen can mean to divide, but also to give out,

pass out something, and the root, teil simply means piece. 

The English word “migration” is also used in German. We can also use

ausflug. But this word, while it can mean migration, can also be used for

departure, flight outwards, or vacation. If the migration is more aimless one

could use wanderung, or auswanderung (noun of auswandern), which

means to leave, depart or migrate, but is often used to describe the Central

Asian peoples’ entry into Western Europe, or the children of Israel in the

Hebrew Biblical narrative. “moving home”

Hebrew:

Partition is haluka in Hebrew. It comes from the verb "to divide". The words

haluka can also mean division of any physical object (like dividing a cake). 

For migration, if we mean the word as immigration, the word is hagira. It

comes from the verb "to live" which describes the act of changing residence

from one country to another. However, when a Jewish person immigrates to

Israel, he is making an alyia, which literally means ascending. This might

relate to the concept that Zion being “up there”. A Jewish Israeli who

immigrates to another country would be called by some as yored, meaning

descending, while others would call him mehager

(immigrating/migrating). Another word for migration is nedida, which

26

means moving from place to place, not in the sense of moving once but

continuing to move. It's also linked to the word “hobo”. 

Marathi:

Partition is vibhajan or division.

Migration is sthalantar or change of place.

27

Polish: 

The Polish term for partition is rozbiór. It has strong historical connotations,

since Poland was under partitions for over 120 years (occupied by Russia,

Germany and Austria). The word itself comes from a verb rozbierać, which

is composed of a prefix (roz-), signifying a perfect form and a verb brać – to

take. Rozbierać means therefore to take apart, and rozbiór (commonly used

in a plural form rozbiory) is a noun denoting an action of taking something

apart.

The Polish word for migration is the vernacularized version of the

Latin: migracja (imigracja = immigration, emigracja = emigration).

Spanish:

Partition as a noun is tabique which means partition wall, room divider, or

screen. The word comes from an Arab-Hispanic term and makes reference

to a thin wall that divides spaces. The original Arab word is tashbik. As a

verb partition is dividir which means to divide, or to split something.

The word migration comes from the Latin migrationem or “a removal,

change of abode, migration"; a noun of action from past participle stem

of migrare "to move from one place to another". Most modern day

dictionaries also include desplazamiento in their definition, which means "to

displace." La migra is the name undocumented immigrants use for ICE

(Immigrations and Custom Enforcement). 

28

Tibetan:

There are no equivalent terms for either word in the language, and my

Tibetan teacher described the terms Undivided India and the Partition of

India into India and Pakistan respectively through the phrase: Gyakar khaka

ma che nang la or “India before/ after the act of making different

(countries)”.

Migration is lung pa, a compound from lung (country) and pa (move).

29