Flight and Adaptation

Forced to leave their country after it was invaded by China in 1959, about a hundred thusand Tibetans followed His Holiness the Dalai Lama into exile in India. Since then Tibetan civilization as a whole has been the subject of many studies. And studies on Tibetan refugees as socio-anthropological subject are many, but most of the earlier scholars have confined their studies on the Tibetans living in the settlements below the northern belt of the Indian sub-continent, which is physically, culturally, linguistically and climatically completely different from what is obtained in Tibet. In this book the author makes an in-depth study of the adaptation process of the Tibetan refugees who started their exile life on the Darjeeling-Sikkim Himalaya, which is physically, culturally, climatically and linguistically, to a large extent, similar to what exists in Tibet, and shows that the process of rehabilitation and adaptation of Tibetan refugees in these areas has been less problematic than those in other parts of India. Very well researched and divided into eight well defined chapters, this book should be of immense help to the students of socio-anthropology and Tibetology.