Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 | When the CIA came to India to support an armed Tibetan resistance movement

Lhamo Tsering (far left) with Tibetan resistance fighters. (Photo courtesy Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam/Kochi-Muzhiris Biennale)

Tenzing Sonam was 15 years old when he saw the newspaper headline on the school noticeboard. It read: Tibetan rebel leader Lhamo Tsering has been arrested in Nepal. Lhamo Tsering, a common name for a girl in Tibet, was an unusual name for a man. Tenzing stood confused in his Darjeeling school because his father was also called Lhamo Tsering. It was 1974.

Tibetan resistance fighters on the march at their base in Mustang, Nepal. (Photo courtesy Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam/Kochi-Muzhiris Biennale)

What Tenzing didn't know then was that his father was a key leader of an armed Tibetan resistance against the Chinese invasion of their motherland. Nearly half-a-century later, many in the world, including young Tibetans, are still unaware of an incredible piece of history associated with a traditionally non-violent people. Tenzing and his wife Ritu Sarin, both celebrated filmmakers and artists living in Dharamshala, who organise the Dharamshala International Film Festival, want to change that.

Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957–1974) is Tenzing and Sarin's new art project aimed at reminding the people of the sacrifices that the Tibetan people have made in their struggle for freedom, a struggle that continues today. Part of the new Invitations Programme of the Kochi-Muziris Biennale in Fort Kochi, Kerala, the exhibition at the Kashi Townhouse is both intimate and intriguing. It is also about how a humble, soft-spoken and unassuming man became a central figure in a clandestine armed operation against a mighty military.

Forgotten history

Shadow Circus gathers personal belongings of Lhamo Tsering, including reams of papers and documents, photographs and maps to recall a forgotten history of the Tibetan freedom struggle. First shown at the 2019 Berlin film festival's Forum Expanded programme that borders art and film, the exhibition is an intrinsic study of the journey of one man and the saga of a whole community.

It all began in 1956, six years after the Chinese invasion of Tibet, when a resistance began to take shape in eastern Tibet. Led by Andrug Gompo Tashi, a businessman in Lhasa, the resistance became an organised movement in 1958. While they were fighting the Chinese in Tibet, the resistance leaders sent people to India to try to get support. The Dalai Lama's brother, Gyalo Thondup, who was already in India, had already been contacted by the American Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). He put the resistance members in touch with the CIA. Sonam's father, a close confidant of Dalai Lama's brother, was appointed to be the liaison between the spy agency and the Tibetan resistance.

A CIA training camp for the Tibetan resistance. (Photo courtesy Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam/Kochi-Muzhiris Biennale 2022)

"The reistance was an important chapter, something we should remember," says Tenzing. "Even though now the movement is peaceful and non-violent, we must not forget that the resistance was an important chapter in the whole freedom struggle," he adds. "There was a time when the Tibetans resisted the takeover of Tibet. They didn't invite the Chinese in and said, 'Okay, take over'. The struggle still continues, Tibet is still under Chinese rule."

Shadow circus

The documents in the exhibition reveal the role played by the CIA, which ran a secret training camp in Colorado for the Tibetan resistance fighters. The operation was codenamed ST Circus. "We don't know why the CIA called it so," admit Tenzing and Sarin who named their show, Shadow Circus. The agency also parachuted several resistance missions into Tibet, most of them ending in tragedy.

Inside Tibet, there were many thousands who were members of the resistance. When the resistance relocated its headquarters to Mustang in Nepal, on the Tibet-Nepal border, many of them stayed behind leaving approximately 2,000 resistance fighters in Nepal. At that time the Nepalese government didn't have much control in its border areas and because America was involved, it turned a blind eye to what was happening within its territory.

Everything changed in 1974, when Nepal closed down the Tibetan resistance force based in Mustang under pressure from China. "The guerrillas who were in Nepal didn't want to surrender to the Nepalese army and were prepared to fight," says Tenzing. "But the Dalai Lama intervened and said now it is time we gave up. He told them there is nothing to be gained in fighting the Nepalese army."

The resistance members surrendered and Lhamo Tsering, Tenzing's father, was arrested by the Nepalese army. Lhamo Tsering and six other Tibetan resistance leaders were sentenced to life imprisonment. They spent seven years in prison in Nepal and were granted amnesty in 1981. After his release, Lhamo Tsering became a minister in the Tibetan government in exile and spent the rest of his life writing accounts of the resistance movement.

Tibetan resistance leader Lhamo Tsering, who was the liaison between the CIA and the movement. (Photo courtesy Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam/Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022)

"My father was a meticulous archivist. He kept a lot of material, photographs, maps and documents from the time that he spent with the operations from 1958 to 1974. He was in charge of the operations from 1958 to 1974," says Sonam, who heard the stories of the Tibetan resistance after his father's release from prison. "By the '70s and '80s, the resistance movement had become non-violent, so this chapter was kind of forgotten and nobody wanted to know about it," adds Sonam.

Life's project

The resistance would soon become a life's project for Tenzing and Sarin. Two decades after his father's release from prison, Tenzing and Sarin began researching the story of the resistance for a documentary film for BBC. During the research, the couple (they had a child by this time) tracked down a few CIA agents who trained the Tibetan resistance, and several more Tibetan resistance fighters. The central characters in the Tibetan resistance were now in their seventies and the couple felt it was their last chance.

The story didn't end with the documentary. When Tenzing's father died in January 1999, his personal archive came into the custody of Tenzing. "We thought, what can we do with this archive? How can we make it relevant?" say Tenzing and Sarin, who later met Natasha Ginwala, a young curator, who had heard about the archive. Ginwala and another curator, Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung, with assistant curator Krisztina Hunya, organised the first exhibition at the Berlinale in 2019. A slightly different version of Shadow Circus was shown later at the India International Centre. "The Fort Kochi exhibition in collaboration with Ginwala is very similar to the one we did in Berlin," says Tenzing.

The design of Shadow Circus, which is divided into chapters, follows the chronology of the Tibetan resistance movement. The first chapter shows the initial contact with the CIA, the training camp in Colorado and its missions while chapter two is mostly about the resistance movement in Mustang when the guerrillas relocated and formed a base in Nepal. Chapter three records the end of the resistance movement and the last chapter is about Lhamo Tsering and his personal life.

"My father was an unlikely resistance leader," says Tenzing. "He came from a very remote region of Tibet and his life trajectory was very strange. Then he ended up becoming so devoted to the cause," he adds. Shadow Circus also highlights how liberation struggles get caught up in global politics. After president Richard Nixon's historic 1971 visit to China to meet Mao Zedong, America stopped supporting the Tibetan resistance, one of the conditions set by Zedong.

The Tibetans felt betrayed, but Lhamo Tsering, who was called Larry by the CIA, thought the Americans came to their help when no one did, trained them and gave them arms, which was better than nothing. The exhibition, which also runs Tenzing's personal story, aims to help younger Tibetans understand a little known aspect of their history, because, as Tenzing and Sarin say, it shows you "there was a time when Tibet was independent".

Filmmakers Tenzing Sonam and Ritu Sarin. (Photo courtesy the filmmakers/Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022)

Shadow Circus: A Personal Archive of Tibetan Resistance (1957–1974) by Ritu Sarin and Tenzing Sonam in collaboration with Natasha Ginwala at Kochi-Muziris Biennale 2022 Invitations Programme, Kashi Townhouse, December 13, 2022 - April 10, 2023, daily from 10 am to 7 pm

Symposium: The Shadow Circus Archive, February 5, 2023, 5 pm - 7 pm Biennale Pavilion