Description:

The 1960s was a critical time in Tibetan exile life. It was when the Tibetan exile government faced a dual challenge: gaining international recognition for its independence movement while establishing internal cohesion among  a recently dispossessed community. It is in this context that “unity” gained prominence as fulfilling the wishes of the exile government, protesting against Chinese colonization of Tibet, and marking a crossing to refugee-citizenship. In this talk Dr. Tsering Wangmo will examine a lesser-known chapter in Tibetan exile history through the story of the Group of Thirteen, a collective of Khampa chieftains and religious leaders who established settlements in India in the mid-1960s with a hope to protect their diverse regional and religious traditions. This decision set them apart from the majority Tibetan refugees who joined the settlements established by the Tibetan government. They were cast as being opponents to Tibetan unity. Dr. Wangmo will focus on the religious dimensions of her research for her book The Politics of Sorrow: what chigdrel, unity, signified to Tibetan Buddhist practitioners and how they interpreted the pamphlets and manifestos that were published in the mid-1960s.

Tsering Wangmo Dhompa is the author of The Politics of Sorrow, published by Columbia University Press (2025). She has several collections of poetry: My Rice Tastes Like the Lake, In the Absent Everyday and Rules of the House (all from Apogee Press, Berkeley).  Dhompa's first non-fiction book, A Home to Tibet was published by Penguin, India in 2014. She is an Associate Professor of English at Villanova University.