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Switching back and forth from trickster Glenn Mullin's The Fourteen Dalai Lamas to the unread portions of Kiran Desai's novel (The Inheritance of Loss for those who came in late) is an illuminating experience in some odd ways.
Mullin, who has devoted his career to unsettling the expectations of his hearers and readers and exhibition viewers, takes the Tibetan sources as worthy of straight reportage when they are all that exists, but switches to historical comparisons when Chinese and European sources offer different perspectives. He quotes incredibly lovely poems that he translated from the Tibetan. And he gives his own opinion of why the 1947 murder of the regent by a political rival was even grimmer than Tibetologists make it out to be, setting the stage for the utter unreadiness of the Lhasa aristocrats for the Chinese invasion. Then he discusses how the Dalai Lama in exile re-invented Tibetan politics (in democratic directions) and restored Tibetan culture, and has let it be known that he does not plan to reincarnate as a Dalai Lama, just in case anybody was wondering.
An extract from one of the most intricate poems in the book, by the Seventh Dalai Lama:
"The mind, hard as wood, is slow to improve.
"The spirit, weak and uncontrolled,
Staggers with the three psychic poisons
Whenever an object appears to it:
A golden vessel full of shit."
...Putting down the book at my left hand and turning to the book at my right hand, Desai's description of the workers in Indian restaurants in New York conforms to every impression I have ever had of the back-kitchen politics of Indian waiters and restaurant owners.
Then I attempt to return to sleep, thinking of how Desai's novel also sheds light on one of the two questions I had in high school that led me to many postcolonial issues long years later:
"Why are there Nepalese Gurkhas in the British Army when Nepal was never a British colony?"
"Why do the officers' tables at Annapolis still follow the tradition of hiring their wait staff from the Philippines?"
Mullin, who has devoted his career to unsettling the expectations of his hearers and readers and exhibition viewers, takes the Tibetan sources as worthy of straight reportage when they are all that exists, but switches to historical comparisons when Chinese and European sources offer different perspectives. He quotes incredibly lovely poems that he translated from the Tibetan. And he gives his own opinion of why the 1947 murder of the regent by a political rival was even grimmer than Tibetologists make it out to be, setting the stage for the utter unreadiness of the Lhasa aristocrats for the Chinese invasion. Then he discusses how the Dalai Lama in exile re-invented Tibetan politics (in democratic directions) and restored Tibetan culture, and has let it be known that he does not plan to reincarnate as a Dalai Lama, just in case anybody was wondering.
An extract from one of the most intricate poems in the book, by the Seventh Dalai Lama:
"The mind, hard as wood, is slow to improve.
"The spirit, weak and uncontrolled,
Staggers with the three psychic poisons
Whenever an object appears to it:
A golden vessel full of shit."
...Putting down the book at my left hand and turning to the book at my right hand, Desai's description of the workers in Indian restaurants in New York conforms to every impression I have ever had of the back-kitchen politics of Indian waiters and restaurant owners.
Then I attempt to return to sleep, thinking of how Desai's novel also sheds light on one of the two questions I had in high school that led me to many postcolonial issues long years later:
"Why are there Nepalese Gurkhas in the British Army when Nepal was never a British colony?"
"Why do the officers' tables at Annapolis still follow the tradition of hiring their wait staff from the Philippines?"
