Description

In his autobiography, Young Days in Tibet,
Tsewang Pemba provided a unique view of his country, describing from his own experience the actuality behind the veil of mystery shrouding the ‘Roof of the World’. In Idols on the Path he extends this personal knowledge into the area of the novel so as to encompass the broad span of modern Tibetan history.Until the year of the Wood Dragon,1904, when the Younghusband Expedition invaded their land, the Tibetans had lived in total seclusion from the rest of the world,
wholly content with their feudal and
theocratic Shangri-La. But the British
who brought their football and filtertips
to Tibet also brought education and
medicine, and the new generation of
Tibetans began to react against the im-
pervious ignorance of their fathers. The
growing might of China menaced their
borders but still the old Tibetans refused
to prepare themselves except with prayers and rituals. Then, in the Earth Bull year,1950, the Chinese invaded Tibet. The
‘honeymoon period’ followed in which the
Communists wooed Tibet with new roads,schools and hospitals, but this soon gave way to the harsh realities of oppression and brutality, culminating in the Lhasa massacre following the escape of the Dalai Lama to India.
The history is told through the lives of
many characters-Rinzing, the restless
young doctor finding his peace nursing
Tibetan refugees ; Kunga, the saintly
monk meditating for three years alone in
a cave and reaching the ultimate achieve-
ment in Tibetan mysticism ; and Saring,
the haughty aristocrat, dying after fourteen days of torture with his pride intact and his body broken.Idols on the Path is a novel of vivid contrasts: in the Tibetans themselves with their gentle, spiritual nature and crude, cruel sense of humour ; the suffering of the refugees and the Western opulence of their exiled countrymen over the mountains; the wealthy the businessmen in Calcutta gambling carelessly with their fortunes while beggars lie on the pavement outside.