Before the lights went down, Tibet Theatre group’s Lhakpa Tsering announced to the houseful Prithvi Theatre that this production of the play “Pah-Lak”, is the first time that an entire Tibetan troupe is telling their story in their language, and taking it through India, in 63 years (since the 1959 Tibet uprising against Chinese rule that led to the Dalai Lama’s exile in India).
In the play, a young Tibetan rebels against her father (a bitter, CIA-trained resistance fighter) and joins a Buddhist nunnery.
But when she loses the nunnery and her peace-loving mentor to Chinese political “re-education”, she immolates herself as an act of non-violent resistance—only to survive and find herself deeper in a world of brutality.
Though fictional, Pah-Lak draws from shocking real-life events and painstaking research by Bangalore playwright Abhishek Majumdar, who journeyed in Tibet and also interviewed the Dalai Lama among others. This is a play where the conversations are richer than the plot. And the dialogue is indeed thought-provoking and much-needed in our times. This production, co-directed by Tsering and German director Harry Fuhrmann, feels like a privilege to watch: in Tibetan, with their traditional music and mask dance, and their chants for compassion and peace threading a story that is heavy with conflict. I also loved the simple beauty of the set, centred around a massive, mobile gate that symbolises a piece of Tibetan culture destroyed by China.
I watched Pah-Lak partly because I too had once written questions for the Dalai Lama—how do Buddhists bridge detachment and striving for a free Tibet?—and Majumdar’s script and this production itself are rich with answers. Pah-Lak is on tour until August 2023, hitting Europe next year; it has English subtitles. As Majumdar says in Deepali Singh’s piece in Mint: “What is it that makes [Tibetans] non-violent in a world that is increasingly becoming violent? Why is it that an act of terror such as 9/11 makes such big news but multiple self-immolations in Tibet don’t? …If Tibet loses its struggle for independence, then the great idea that non-violence can be more powerful than violence will be lost for a very long time.”
—Saumya Ancheri
