Published by: World Tibet Network News 97/05/18 24:00 GMT

The Dalai Lama's relations have been no help either to him or to his

country, finds Patrick French

Kundun: A Biography of the Family of the Dalai Lama

by Mary Craig HarperCollins, GBP17.99, 392 pp

UNTIL THE Chinese invasion of 1950, Tibet was ruled by a reincarnated

deity. When a Dalai Lama died, usually hav-ing left some cryptic testa-ment

as to where he might be reborn, a stately search party of senior monks and

abbots would be sent to locate his replacement. Peculiar tech-niques were

used to encourage His Holiness to choose rebirth from a particular womb.

There was, for instance, a Lhasa street song about a hopeful noblewoman who

burnt in-cense under her skirts, the final line being: "But all she got was

soot on her arse."

Other families used more prosaic methods, and although Mary Craig does

not make the fact explicit, it is apparent that the selection of the

present incumbent was influenced by the high status of his great uncle and

elder brother within Tibet's monas-tic hierarchy.

Although reincarnation is intrinsically no stranger than heredity as a way

of choosing a leader, it was a system that could be manipulated, since the

identity of the new ruler was open to debate. It also had a disastrous

impact on political continuity between adminis-trations, given the time lag

before the new Dalai Lama reached the age of majority. In several cases,

the chosen boy died young, having received the same treatment as the

Princes in the Tower.

After the enthronement of the five-year-old 14th Dalai Lama in 1940, his

parents were awarded extensive wealth and lands, in accordance with

tra-dition. His father, a boorish farmer and coper from the Chi-nese border

areas, soon used his pre-eminent position to corner Lhasa's second-hand

horse trade.

Making good use of India Office records, Mary Craig does not disguise his

extreme unpopularity among Lhasans, or the disastrous consequences of his

links with some of the country's more dubious politi-cians. By the time he

died from poisoning in 1947, Tibet was in a state of administrative chaos,

with a number of different regents, aristocrats and reli-gious factions

fighting each other so busily that they scarcely noticed the looming

arrival of Mao Tse-tung's "lib-eration" army.

It is unclear why a book that is ostensibly about the Dalai Lama's family

should be called Kundun (one of the var-ious honorifics by which he is

known), but it may be related to the news that Martin Scor-sese is shortly

to release a film of that name.

Craig's difficulty is that there is little worth saying about the family

after their escape into India in the 1950s. With the exception of his elder

brother Gyalo Thondup, who appears to have inherited a paternal facility

for dodgy

financial dealings and unwise political alliances, the Dalai Lama's six

siblings and their descendants are no more interesting than the minor

sprigs of any other royal fam-ily. Most of them have taken official roles

of some kind within the Tibetan govern-ment-in-exile, where their

performance has not been especially impressive.

Mary Craig gets round this to some extent by concentrat-ing on the

ever-fascinating fig-ure of the Tibetan leader himself, and by telling the

ter-rible story of China's oppres-sion of his country. As in her previous

book, Tears of Blood, she draws on the Dalai Lama's ghost-written

autobiography, Freedom in Exile, but supplements it with extensive

per-sonal interviews.

One of the saddest conse-quences of old Tibet's unbal-anced social

structure was that the refugees' accounts of Chairman Mao's genocidal

experiments in the 1950s and 1960s were apt to be dismissed by western

journalists as "the whinings of a dispossessed privileged class". It is

only more recently that the world has begun to acknowledge that Tibetan

monastic feudalism has been replaced by an infinitely more damaging form of

dictatorship.

Still, the old regime was not an edifying sight, and nor are the higher

reaches of its lead-ing family. I got the impres-sion that Mary Craig had

set out to write a morally uplift-ing tale of resilience in the face of

suffering, but had stumbled in a sad and rather squalid story of human

frailty and strained loyalties. The only character to emerge from Kundun

with his integ-rity and reputation intact is the Dalai Lama himself.

Patrick French is the authoer of "Younghusband: the Last Great Imperial

Adventuer" (Flamingo).