Symphonies of Tibetan Memory: Surviving in Exile Through Opera

Jahnvi Sharma*

Abstract

Violent experiences of annexation and consequent journeys into exile ruptures several kinship ties and identities; yet communities find many ways to survive. For Tibetans in exile, performance, most vividly their Ache Lhamo opera, has become a bridge between past and present, memory and history, tradition and identity. This essay moves within the memoryscape of Tibetan refugees living in India, tracing how their folk performance tradition of Ache Lhamo carries collective memory, sustains imagination, and strengthens community survival. Methodologically, it draws on ethnographic reflections, performance analysis and participant observation. The reflections are largely grounded in the exilic experiences of the Tibetan Buddhist community.

Keywords: exile, cultural memory, embodiment, repertoire, collective imagination

An Introduction to the Tibetan Exilic Landscape

The road from Lhasa in Tibet to New Delhi in India is about one thousand, four hundred, twenty-four kilometres long. The geographical distance, however, is not insightful enough to gauge the strenuous journey thousands of Tibetans have made across the Himalayas into exile, following their leader, His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso.

China’s decisive entry into Tibet in 1950, followed by the Seventeen-Point Agreement of 1951, reshaped Tibetan history by consolidating Beijing’s control over the region (Goldstein 1989; Shakya). Less than a decade later, the 1959 uprising in Lhasa ended in brutal repression and irrevocably altered Tibet’s destiny, compelling the Dalai Lama to flee into exile (Goldstein 2007; Shakya). After receiving asylum in India, Dharamshala was strategically established as the seat of the Central Tibetan Administration, tasked with both political reorganization and the preservation of memory, culture, and collective identity in exile.

Ache Lhamo performance (2024). Photo: Karma Lobsang Nyima

The stories of Tibetan exile cut through the linear continuum of time and disrupt a solid sense of history. Here, the road to survival in refuge meanders through memories both personal and collective, stories both autobiographical and mythological, thriving inside bodies of exile that are in a continuous search for a connection with their identity. The Tibet Museum in Gangchen Kyishong, Dharamshala, makes this visible in its permanent exhibition titled I Am Tibetan, and This Is My Story. Large portraits of multiple generations of Tibetans hang beside their testimonies of survival, each reiterating the same theme. This consciously emphasises that Tibetans who sought asylum did not completely sever their ties with Tibet. Tibet continues to be evoked in their consciousness every day, and there is a continuous engagement with both “Tibet” and “Tibetan-ness” in the contemporary scenario.

A wall of the Tibet Museum (2023), permanent exhibition *I Am Tibetan and This Is My Story*, Dharamshala. The photo shows portraits and testimonies of Tibetan exiles. Photo: Courtesy of the author

Performance practices from Tibet play an integral role in this engagement. Tibetan opera popularly known as Ache Lhamo or simply Lhamo, is one of the oldest forms of Tibetan performing art practices. A folk amalgamation of opera, music, dance, drama and storytelling, Ache Lhamo performance practice is at the heart of this essay. Apart from being a historically popular source of Tibetan entertainment, Ache Lhamo is also in exile an important locus of pre-exile collective memories and a repertoire that facilitates post-exile memory and knowledge transmission. The investigations that follow illustrate the same in a more comprehensive detail and are historical, ethnographic and spatial in nature.

Methodologically, this essay draws on ethnography, performance analysis, participant observation, choreographic and spectatorship analysis. I also attend to sensory dimensions—sound, smell, and atmosphere—as carriers of memory and affect. My close proximity to the Tibetan community, cultivated over years of engagement, makes me acutely aware of the sensitivities of working with an ethnographic community in exile. I have worked with translation in close collaboration with a community translator, ensuring that linguistic nuances and ritual contexts are conveyed with care. My working knowledge of Tibetan rituals further strengthens this process, allowing me to engage meaningfully while remaining attentive to the limits of my outsider position. These methodological choices foreground accountability and respectful engagement, highlighting opera as a vital site of cultural memory.

In today’s context, Tibetan embodied traditions are doubly vulnerable. Within China, policies of cultural control and assimilation have long suppressed Tibetan performance traditions and ritual life (Shakya 312–18; Goldstein 485–90). At the same time, in academic contexts, too, Tibetan opera remains underrepresented, often overshadowed by broader narratives of exile and politics. This essay, therefore, seeks to essentially foreground Ache Lhamo not only as a performance form but also as a repository of cultural memory, survival, and resistance.

History of Ache Lhamo in Tibet

The origins of Ache Lhamo are largely attributed to Thang Stong Rgyal Po, a prominent cultural figure from fourteenth-century Tibet (Snyder 8-35; Tsering 36–61). Written records supporting these credits do not exist, largely because oral narratives have long been the primary mode of transmitting cultural values, histories, and memories in Tibetan society (Gyatso 91–104).

One widely shared oral legend recounts that Thang Stong Rgyal Po sought to construct an iron bridge but lacked sufficient funds. Encountering seven beautiful sisters, later venerated as the Ache Lhamo, translated as “Lady Goddesses,” he persuaded them to dance in order to raise money for the bridge. From this story, Tibetan opera is believed to have derived both its form and its name. Remarkably, this legend continues to circulate orally, and Thang Stong Rgyal Po remains celebrated as the founder of Ache Lhamo. Even today, every Lhamo troupe keeps his image or idol with them as an act of homage and cultural continuity (Snyder 8-35).

Thematically, all the major Lhamo stories like Nangsa Woebum, Gyasa Bhelsa, Drowa Sangmo, and Prince Norsang revolve around personal struggles of individuals, conflicts within families, and dichotomies around love, betrayal, loss, hatred, good, evil, and spirituality (Ross 45–52). Back in Tibet, before the Chinese annexation they served as major channels of educating the masses and were therefore an important part of knowledge reservoir and oral history (Attisani 12–3). Even in exile, the repertoire has largely remained faithful to this corpus. By continuing to perform these same stories, the Tibetan community sustains moral, religious, and social values rooted in depictions of pre-annexation life (Ross 60).

Until 1959, Lhasa hosted an annual official opera season called the Shoton festival. According to popular oral accounts, the festival originated in Drepung Monastery, where monks performed music and dance to ward off malevolent forces said to dwell on the overlooking demon mountain called Shung gyi bdud ri (Snyder 12–14). The term sho means curd and ton means banquet in Tibetan, hence it is also commonly translated as the “yogurt festival.”

Strategies of Revival

After the arduous journey into exile and the establishment of the Central Tibetan Administration, one of the first cultural institutions founded under the direction of the Dalai Lama was dedicated to performing arts. This institution, created in 1959, has since grown into the present-day Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts (TIPA). Its establishment signalled the recognition of performance as central to Tibetan cultural identity and as a key site of continuity in exile.

Two of the early opera revivalists in exile were Gyen Dorje and Norbu Tsering. While Gyen Dorje belonged to the Chung-pa opera company of Tibet, Norbu Tsering, who was appointed as one of the masters in TIPA’s early years, came from the Kyor-mo-lung-pa repertoire. Both were central to laying the foundations of opera training in exile, and the influence of their respective repertoires continues to be recognized in Lhamo practice today (Norbu “Wandering Goddess” 143–50). The rebuilding of Ache Lhamo was therefore not a wholesale revival of the past but a specific beginning, shaped by the embodied knowledge and stylistic nuances of particular lineages.

Jamyang Norbu, a Tibetan scholar and former director of TIPA, recalls that “all of the performing scripts (khrab-gzhung) had been kept in the Lhasa treasury office, and none had made their way into exile” (“Wandering Goddess” 145). Thus, the first repertoires in exile were pieced together from the memories of surviving masters and the recollections of long-time opera enthusiasts. This process was hindered by the dispersion of Tibetans across India and Nepal and compounded by irretrievable losses. For instance, the Ghyangkhara opera troupe perished entirely in exile, and with them vanished traditions such as the story of Rechung Dorje Ragpa (Ross 6). Even today, TIPA’s revival work remains ongoing. During summer months, students are sent to Tibetan settlements to document the melodies and old anecdotes from the elders. The institute sustains this process through its research and archives department, ensuring that the repertoire continues to evolve as a collective memory project.

Most of what Tibetans have been able to revive in the Ache Lhamo repertoire is the result of intentional collective recollection. From remembering melodies to remaking costumes and instruments, revival has largely relied on the embodied knowledge of individuals. The personal memories of individuals have been extended, preserved and passed on as cultural knowledge. Extending Diana Taylor’s framework in The Archive and the Repertoire, these practices can be seen as deliberate Tibetan attempts to preserve Lhamo as an indigenous epistemology, an embodied knowledge system carried forward through practice rather than textual archives (Taylor 19–20). At the same time, the survival of this repertoire continues to support the community in exile, which is bereft of a physical and lived experience of “homeland,” by re-invoking the collective past, making space for a collective present, and re-envisioning a collective future.

Space of the Shoton Festival in Exile

The first major annual Shoton festival in exile was organized by TIPA in 1993. With only a few interruptions, it has continued annually, each year hosted in a different settlement across India and Nepal. This itinerant model strengthens community engagement by rotating responsibility for the festival, ensuring participation from diverse settlements. In 2023, I attended the 26th Shoton festival in Mundgod, Karnataka, where I witnessed the Kalimpong Opera Association perform Nangsa Woebum.

Invitation poster of the 26th Shoton Festival (2023), held in Mundgod Tibetan Settlement. Photo: Courtesy of the author

The performance space of the Shoton festival was imbued with the spirit of communal gathering. Most Tibetans who attended, whether as audience members or hosts, wore traditional dress, while the performers appeared in elaborate costumes with headgear, ornaments, character-specific attire, and the distinctive opera masks. The festival opened with a central ritual: the placement of the idol of Thang Stong Rgyal Po. This ceremony featured a dance performed by ten women representing the Ache Lhamo sisters and ten masked performers known as the Hunters. On subsequent days of the festival, the idol was installed at the start and removed at the close of each day, though without the accompanying dance.

Each Lhamo performance is usually a day-long affair and the entire festival is about ten days long. This significant temporal investment fosters continuous interactions and a deep immersion in stories shared among people with a common cultural history. Throughout the festival, the language of communication remains largely Tibetan. The Lhamo stage is set beneath a tent canopy, on the same level as the audience, who sit on three sides, allowing performers to engage with them directly. Audience members sit in close physical proximity for the duration of the day-long performance, pausing only for a brief lunch break. The performers frequently break the fourth wall, addressing spectators and leaving space for their responses within the unfolding drama.

Building on some of the ideas proposed by Paul Connerton in How Societies Remember, performance here is seen as “an important repository of the past, providing a framework for remembering” (72-104). In the absence of physical access to the homeland, the cultural festivals become markers of connecting with others in the diaspora. They function as temporary physical spaces where the collective is formed, recognised and re-invoked. That perhaps explains why a conscious choice has been made to keep the annual Shoton festival in a different settlement every year, encouraging active community engagement in the settlements spread all across India and Nepal. The facilitation of these festivals provides frameworks through which memories of a shared history, homeland and collective identities circulate and pass.

Audience at the 26th Shoton Festival (2023) in Mundgod Tibetan Settlement. The photo shows community members attending an Ache Lhamo performance. Photo: Courtesy of the author

The Lhamo performances are marked with specific movement patterns for male and female characters while chorus bodies come in at frequent intervals. The “chorus bodies” are groups of performers who support the solo singers through collective singing and movement. The entire troupe is conducted by the teacher of the troupe, usually a senior opera master, who is also the narrator and is responsible for binding the whole story together. While the dance sequences are largely inherited choreographies transmitted across generations, the teacher ensures their proper execution in each performance.

Most of the opera performances involve semi-circle formations. Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy has mentioned five distinct performative modes of the Lhamo performances, which include:

“the recitation of the libretto (gzhung bsang-ba) and the narrative speeches (kha-bshad)”;
“lhamo songs (rnam-thar), delivered solo and accompanied by a tiled chorus (ram-skyor). This may occasionally be accompanied by the beating of a drum and a pair of cymbals, which are the only instruments used in traditional Lhamo”;
“the dances done by all the actors as interludes between the scenes”;
“the character’s dance when he enters the stage, accompanied by percussion, usually executed together with a rnam-thar, supported by the chorus, only upon first appearance”; and lastly,
“the improvised interludes between the scenes (srub-jug), always comic, either sarcastic or gross, featuring pantomimes and dialogues delivered in a natural voice” (Henrion-Dourcy “Explorations” 122-23).

The entire piece is then a whole made of these different performative modes, sewn together during the performance.

The performances consistently generate emotional affect that circulates through the audience. Laughter and tears accompany a shared engagement with a visual and physical representation of a long-lost life in Tibet. Most of the people who now comprise the older generation of Tibetans in diaspora, were too young when they crossed the borders and settled in exile. The memories of Tibet from that time are usually unclear. However, post exile, their relationship to the Tibetan culture and community has certainly transformed. Tsering Sangmo, a fellow audience member, expressed that because of being in exile she “feels eager and obliged to watch Lhamo and glimpses of everything related to Tibetan culture whenever possible.” While the Nepal Opera Association were presenting their snippet of the opera story- Life of Milarepa, Sangmo turned to me and by pointing towards a figure on her locket said that “this story is about him, a renowned saint figure” and further she added on, “these stories are like what Mahabharata and Ramayana are to you. They matter to the common people.”

In the South Asian context I come from, epics like the Mahabharata and Ramayana are deeply rooted in themes of exile, loss, and moral struggle. Although Tibetan opera narratives approach these themes slightly differently, they echo similar moral concerns and cultural values. These mythological stories have circulated for centuries, and witnessing their embodiment on stage offers a powerful moment of cultural recognition.

Interestingly, the intervals between the performances were frequently marked by the announcements of the donations received by the participating opera societies. This was accompanied by the fact that all the festival banners acknowledged the USAID everywhere. Most of these opera societies are dependent on donations and funds for their maintenance, even the entire Shoton festival is heavily dependent on the USAID. Back in Tibet too there are references of opera troupes having to travel across the villages to gather funds, but I have not found a reference of such announcements being made in the middle of the performances back then. These announcements interrupt the world of memory and communion at frequent intervals and serve as a reminder of changed physical circumstances of exile.

Live performances such as Lhamo function as crucial modalities for restaging and animating the historical past in the present. In the performance of Nangsa Woebum, for example, the coronation of Nangsa’s son featured characters representing all Tibetan provinces—U-Tsang, Kham, and Amdo—identified through distinctive regional costumes. When the nomadic characters appeared, Karma Lobsang Nyima, seated beside me, exclaimed with recognition: “that is where I am from.” Such moments reveal how performance operates as what Diana Taylor describes as a repertoire, a system through which embodied acts transmit collective memory across generations (20–22). Here, recognition was not only visual but also affective: the staging of regional dress elicited an embodied response of belonging. This illustrates what Erika Fischer-Lichte terms the “autopoietic feedback loop” between stage and audience, where representation triggers identification and emotional resonance (38–40). Through costume and enactment, Lhamo mobilizes theatrical tools to reference history while simultaneously producing a lived, collective experience of Tibetan identity in exile.

The demography of Shoton audience is an indicator of the complexity underlying the setup, as most of the people present there were in their mid-forties or above. Nyima had mentioned to me in one of the interviews that “the tonality and nuances of Tibetan used in the Lhamo performance are precisely different from the everyday Tibetan spoken in exile and so it is mostly only the older generations who understand the nuances of opera.” And with the influx of new forms of entertainment floating across the world, the relationship of the newer generations of Tibetans growing up in India is becoming increasingly complex with Lhamo.

Although there are multiple layers of challenges, opera master Tsering Lodoe emphasized in an interview that “in order to involve the younger generation it will become important to engage with their interests, encourage more young opera performers to grow into popular stars whom others of their age can relate to, and make use of technology, while at the same time remaining faithful to the authenticity of the opera tradition.” His insight points to the critical negotiation that life in exile demands, particularly for younger generations. They are often compelled to find a middle ground between change and continuity, adapting to new contexts while striving to remain connected to what it means to be authentically “Tibetan.” The present experience of exile is therefore not lived in isolation but is deeply entangled with the journeys of preceding generations, journeys that the younger Tibetans were not direct witnesses to yet are asked to remember and embody.

The Ache Lhamo performance depends upon the collective presence for its survival; the rules, nuances, demands and layout of the performance structure are such that it can never be an individual project. It is not meant to be one. At the same time, festivals around it such as the Shoton bring together in one place, different generations of Tibetan refugees, otherwise growing up in different physical, emotional and cultural spaces across the settlements. It offers them a space to sit together and engage with a re-presentation of their shared history and culture. These bodies are not passive and continuously engage with different responses and reactions. The space of the Shoton festival has always been something that belonged to the people even in Tibet. For instance, Jamyang Norbu mentions that performing art practices served as a space of social criticism and “certain Europeans who visited Tibet in the past seemed to have noticed such social criticism even of revered institutions such as the oracle and monks and nuns in the performances of the traditional Lhamo” (Norbu “Introduction” 2). Even today, these performances are thoroughly enjoyed by people who identify with the struggles of Lhamo protagonists and the satire of its antagonists. There most certainly is an agency that the secular spaces of entertainment and humour continue to offer to the people of Tibet in otherwise uncertain conditions of refugee life.

Toward the end of the performance of Nangsa Woebum, juniper leaves were burnt, filling the performance space with their aroma. As the final prayers began after the last rnam-thar was sung, audience members rose to their feet; some, even without material offerings, performed hand gestures symbolic of ritual donation. Here, sensory perception, hearing the chant, seeing the action, smelling the juniper, elicited embodied participation. The performance thus activated a doing in the audience (Schechner 28), transforming spectators into participants through culturally resonant gestures.

Surviving Exile through Performances

Yana Meerzon’s work on exile and complexity of relationship between exile and performers has been instrumental in leading my research into a nuanced direction. Drawing from the terminology of Meerzon, I use the term “exilic performer” to refer to the bodies of the Ache Lhamo performers as the ones devising, creating performances in exile (Meerzon 75–92).

One of the Ache Lhamo performers I worked closely with is Karma Lobsang Nyima, a TIPA student who also volunteered to be my translator. He is currently 23 years old and has been working with TIPA since he was 18. He has never been to Tibet and is the third generation of Tibetans living in exile. His mother has been an active member of local opera in the Odisha Phuntsokling Tibetan settlement located in Odisha, India. This is also where he got introduced to Lhamo before joining TIPA, mostly by the encouragement he received from the memories of his grandparents. While introducing me to the nuances of opera, he talked elaborately about the rnam-thar style of opera singing which is unique to the Tibetan tradition. He said that the kind of training the students go through in TIPA is intense and requires working with each opera rnam-thar for months. In the early years, he elucidated:

Most of the opera masters from before, used to emphasize learning without paper and stressed upon memorizing all the rnam-thars and movements. It is only recently that the scripts are gradually taking over. So up until recently most of the knowledge of opera has been transferred through embodied learning, which has also facilitated its survival in exile despite all the odds. The Chinese cannot perform the rnam-thar like Tibetans do, it requires specific technique and years of training under the opera masters, a knowledge that the Chinese do not have access to (Nyima, personal interview, 12 Jan. 2023).

This assertion has been prevalent in the undertones of all opera masters or performers I have interviewed so far. Currently, there are two kinds of opera happening on both sides of the Himalayas, one under the direction of the People’s Republic of China and the other reconstituted and rebuilt in exile (Henrion-Dourcy “Introduction” 3–7). The claims to authenticity in such a case are not only cultural or artistic but essentially political.

The reliance on an intricate master-student pedagogical structure with an emphasis on embodied learning situates TIPA’s pedagogy within what Diana Taylor described as the repertoire (19–22). Such training underscores Connerton’s claim that societies remember most powerfully through “incorporating practices” enacted by the body (72–104). In this light, the embodied discipline of TIPA not only preserves technical mastery but also functions as a cultural strategy of survival in exile, binding younger performers to the memory of lineages carried by their teachers. For performers like Nyima, who belong to the third generation born in exile, this pedagogical intimacy ensures continuity with pre-1959 repertoires while adapting to contemporary circumstances.

Nyima also emphasized that preparing for each role within the context of its story requires intense physical and vocal discipline to embody the spirit of the character. This process of embodiment demands sustained engagement from the performer, both in rehearsal and in performance. As Isabelle Henrion-Dourcy explains, the vocal techniques specific to Lhamo are particularly challenging, requiring the full coordination of bodily and mental capacities to achieve the demanding librettos and precise rhythm of movement. She notes that, “as Lhamo is meant to be performed outdoors, the sound is projected out vigorously and quite loudly, from the head register, using the full torso and head resonance cavities, and with an accentuated tension in the throat” (“Explorations” 119–141).

However, my analysis affirms that the rigour of this training is not limited in its scope to just achieving a great performance but is inextricably tied to the experience of exile. It has been important to uphold the authenticity of Lhamo as a tradition deeply tied to Tibetan identity while at the same time ensuring its popularity within the diasporic community. The performer’s physical capacity to embody elements of the collective imagination is central to Lhamo’s role as an alternative strategy of survival. Since much of this imagination is rooted in memories of a bygone history and displaced geographies, the cultural authenticity of that embodiment becomes all the more vital.

Conclusion

The revival of Tibetan opera in exile has been a long cultural process happening in the backdrop of the disruption of an entire generational repertoire, destruction of previous archives or lack of access to homeland. This process has a dual significance and seems to involve: firstly, the reconstruction of a performance practice such as Ache Lhamo in exile, from the remnants of the past such as individual and collective memories and secondly, the reinstatement of the collective through the very performances shaped in the present. The Lhamo repertoire draws performers into an intense intergenerational transmission of knowledge, serving as a marker of both Tibet and Tibetan-ness.

The live experience of these performances allows the collective to manifest physically, in close proximity to memory, history, and other bodies in exile. Through them, Tibetan identity is not only preserved and celebrated but also continually reimagined and reconstituted in exile.

The survival of the Ache Lhamo in exile is therefore a result of the strength of Tibetan collective cultural memories and the conscious act of constructing spaces to repeatedly invoke those memories. Every time they continue to perform the Lhamo in their own “Tibetan way” they offer a counter to the erasure of their indigenous knowledge systems. The know-how episteme of the performance becomes in this case, not just the marker of performance repertoire but gets inevitably tied to the “Tibetan-ness” of the Tibetan identity. By practicing and witnessing those performances, the collective is consistently reminded of a shared past and the essence of still being together is successfully revitalised amidst the uncertainties of exile.

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*Jahnvi Sharma is an independent performance researcher and theatre practitioner based in India with a postgraduate degree in Performance Studies. She is co-founder of the community-oriented art collective Dreamers 1903 and has been actively engaged with the Tibetan performing arts for the past three years. Her research interests include Asian diasporic performances, exile as embodied experience, and engaging with performance as an episteme. She is an aspiring PhD scholar and is currently developing her doctoral project, Embodied Remains: Ache Lhamo Symphonies in the Continuum of Tibetan Exile.