From Dharamsala

to Little Lhasa
How Three Generations of Tibetan
Migration Have Transformed a
Temporary City

Swati Chawla

Acknowledgments
To the following, in heartfelt gratitude and immense intellectual debt:
Gregor Thums Uprooted and Alon Confinos Tanturathe fountainheads;

Students and friends in Dharamsalas nunneries,

For sharing their rooms, food and life stories;
My grandparents for their Partition tales,
And for making their home in a strange place;
Papa, for inculcating humility and good sense;
And Mummy who never left me, even in death.

To Alon Confino I owe my excitement about history;

And to Benji, his fun and stimulating company;
To Prof Goldberg, a brief but heart-warming conversation;
And to my cohort at UVa, a home away from home.

As for you, dear reader, I hope this book convinces:

You must experience Dharamsala, pay a short visit.

Table of Contents
Prologue: Dal ka Halvah, a short story
Introduction: Migration in a Temporary City
1. The City and the Cityscape
2. Grandparents and Grandchildren: Between Exile
and Homecoming
3. Pears and Tanks: What stories did they tell?
4. Books and Bollywood, Cricket and Football
5. The Diaspora Elsewhere: Tibetans in Bylakuppe,
Europe and North America
Epilogue: I Re-Member, another short story
Appendix A: Terms for Partition and Migration in
different languages
Appendix B: Timeline for Tibetan Migration in India:
1959-2013.

Prologue
Dal ka Halvah (Lentil Halvah)
A Short Story

Badima1 was only fifty when she became a grandmother. Since "dadiji"2
sounded awfully like the "mataji"3 she had been subjected to in public
buses, we were instructed to call her "badima". After mummy died, badima
took it upon herself to teach me to cook.
We had graduated to dessert. First up was sooji (semolina) halvah. I was
pouring ghee (clarified butter) along the circumference of the pan. (Badima
could never have enough ghee.) Hor pa, hor, utte pa. Asi koi bengali
madrasi thodi haige aan? Koi kameen e? (Put more, more, on top of it, then
some more. Are we from Bengal or Madras? Is there a dearth of things in
our house?)
We are not Bengali-Madrasi. Important lessons those, and words of subtle
caution: the Bengali boyfriend, and the palate that craved idli-sambhar
(Madrasi cuisine) were unacceptable.
I don't like sooji halvah, I told her. Could she make dal ka halvah?
Of course she could.
But why had I never seen her make it...?
That was because she hadn't made it for a while.
For how long?
1 Badima: literally big mother, an affectionate term of address for a grandmother
or an older aunt in Hindi.
2 Dadiji: dadi means fathers mother and ji is an honorific term of address for
someone who is older/ senior. Ji also emphasizes age, hence badimas dislike for
the term.
3 Mataji: mata means mother; the term, like dadiji, emphasizes age.
4

Batware ke baad. (Since the Partition.)

But that was 60 years ago! If she hadn't made it for 60 years, surely she
didn't know how. Admit it!
Badima was never one to concede defeat.
I persisted: Kyun? Yahaan dal nahin milti? Ya ghee nahin milta? Ya cheeni?
(Why? Dont you get dal (lentils) here? Or you cant find ghee here? Or
sugar?)

Dal ka halvah was the last thing she had eaten in Sargodha before setting
off for Delhi. She loved it, and had had a little too much. She didn't get her
period for six months.
But the halvah had nothing to do with your period, I told her.
No use. Sooji halvah it was.

Last summer, I was invited to organize discussions around Jawaharlal

Nehru's Discovery of India for high school students. It was tough
persuading badima to speak at the session on Partition:
But what will I tell them? I don't know much of Gandhi-Nehru and azaadi
(freedom). The school kids these days know so much more!
Just tell them what you do remember, I told her.
As it turned out, the kids were not interested in Gandhi-Nehru-azaadi either.
They asked her if she had gone to school. She had. How old was she when
she got married? Nineteen. Had she met dadaji (grandfather) before? No.
How much did gold cost then? 25 rupees a tola (ten grams). Then why didn't
she buy 2-3 kilos? Badima quipped--kal ko tumhare pota-poti tumse
poochenge. Tumhare zamaane mein 25 hazaar ka tha? Toh 2-3 kilo le kar
kyun nahin rakh liya? (Tomorrow your grandchildren will ask you: in your
time, was (10 grams) gold for 25,000 rupees only? Then why didnt you buy
2-3 kilos to put aside?)

The session ended and I took her to the office to sign for her conveyance
and honorarium. At 81, this was the first time badimas labor had been
rewarded in cash. Two thousand rupees. That was the sum her father had
given her when she left from Sargodha.4 That was all the money they had.
She was the eldest among the children, and he would be coming in a week's
time. She had lost the money. Or had it been stolen on the train? Her father
didn't come the next week. Or the week after. He didn't come for six
months.
Back home, my grandfather teased her. She had her first income. Where
were the sweets? I volunteered, "sooji halvah?"
No, badima said, it was time for me to learn another dessert.

4 Sargodha is a small town near Lahore, which is now in the Punjab province of
Pakistan.
6

Introduction
Migration in a Temporary City
This book attempts to tell the story of Tibetan migration into India
through three generations of refugees/ settlers in the North Indian city of
Dharamsala, the headquarters of the Tibetan government-in-exile. This is
not a history of the city of Dharamsala; but a history, like Alon Confino's
Tantura, S Yizhars Khirbet Khizeh and Gregor Thum's Breslau/
Wroclaw, through that city of a refugee community in its host country. While
Tibetan exile has been discussed in academic writing through a variety of
disciplinary approaches, this is (barring a short essay on the role of the
symbolic geography of Dharamsala in constituting Tibetan diasporic
identity)5 the first account that places the history of the exiled community
within the city, and asks how the city itself was transformed by the
community.6 The book, therefore, tells two stories: that of Dharamsala as a

5 Anand, Dibyesh. A Guide to Little Lhasa in India. In Paul Christiaan Klieger, ed.
Tibet, Self and the Tibetan Diaspora: Voices of Difference. Koln: Brill, 2002.
6 Keila Diehl's Echoes from Dharamsala: Music in the Life of a Refugee
Community also placed the Tibetan exile community within Dharamsala. But hers
is a story primarily of exile and the struggle for freedom (and not of migration and
settling), and is told through music (from Bollywood to rock and roll and protest
songs). The book was written in 2002, before the cityscape was transformed in
reaction to the Olympic games in China, and a fresh investment in democracy, with
the Fourteenth Dalai Lama stepping down as head of state in 2011.
7

palimpsest written over by series of migrations, and that of Tibetan

diaspora in India.
The first chapter will provide a focused background to the city of
Dharamsala and a brief history of Tibetan migration into India from 1959 to
the present. It will also look at present day Dharamsala through its
demographic composition and the interaction between three distinct
population groups: Tibetan refugees, local pahari or mountain population
(Indian citizens) and foreign tourists. The second chapter will talk about the
different meanings of exile/ refuge/ displacement/ statelessness on the one
hand, and homecoming/ belonging/ assimilation/ settling on the other for
three generations of Tibetan refugees in Dharamsala. In Chapter 3, I will
study at the oral and written histories of Tibets elders (those who migrated
in 1959 or soon after) and interviews with the third generation of refugees
(those who are in their teens and twenties at present), to tease out common
strands from what they remember about Tibet: through first-hand and
narrated experience. I will also place the history of institutional sites within
Dharamsala in conversation with this generational history. The fourth
chapter attempts a survey of the city of Dharamsala in the popular
imagination: in literary and travel works by Tibetans and tourists, and in
mainstream Hindi cinema. It will also look at the two sports that have, quite
literally, imprinted themselves on to Dharamsala: cricket and football. In the
final chapter, I will put Dharamsala in relation to other Tibetan settlements
and see how different relationships with land and space are forged in
8

agricultural settlements, and in countries that are considered more

foreign to the Tibetan way of life than India.
With help from colleagues and friends, I had started putting together
a list of terms for partition and migration in different languages. These
are mentioned in Appendix A. Though some of these languages may not
appear to be immediately relevant for our context, the experience of
Dharamsala is characterized by polyglossia (in Mikhail Bakhtins sense of
the contestation of languages and ways of thinking). Restaurant names and
graffiti in the city in languages such as Bangla, Chinese, Hebrew and
Spanish are evidence of this. Some of these terms are very revealing and
instructive: both of the difficulty of translation, and of the nuances that
particular linguistic and cultural contexts add to the displacement that has
become a commonplace of human experience. For example, the Chinese
(gua fen) and Hebrew (haluka) words for partition could mean dividing
melons, cakes and countries alike. And migration in Tibetan and Hebrew
could mean to ascend or descend based on where the person is going from/
to. In the final book, I hope to be able to incorporate insights from these
different renderings of the two terms. I must add here that I have not been
able to independently verify the translations offered by others.

I
The City and the Cityscape: The Three
Meanings of Dharamsala
9

I will begin by dwelling on the three meanings of the word

Dharamsala and its implications for an understanding of Tibetan exile. The
first (and literal) meaning of the compound word from dharam (or dharma)
and shala (house) is the home of religion. The second meaning which
makes dharamsala a common noun is temporary resting place/ shelter.
The third is the administrative term for the city Dharamsala which stands
for lower Dharamsala (where the local Indian population lives),
McLeodganj/ upper Dharamsala (primarily a tourist place with hotels,
bazaars and Tibetan sights) and Gangchen Kyishong (the office complex of
the Central Tibetan Administration). I will also briefly mention other
temporary dwellers of Dharamsala prior to the Tibetans: British
cantonments (that left Christian cemeteries and convent schools) and
Punjabi migrants from Pakistan, among others. My analysis of Dharamsala
will therefore cover all three population groups currently resident there:
tourists, refugees and citizens.
The second section will provide a brief history of Tibetan migration
into India from 1959 to the present. A timeline for the same will be attached
in Appendix B.
A third point of focus is the expansion of the city itself to
accommodate neighbouring villages and towns such as Sidhpur (where the
Norbulingka Institute of Tibetan Culture, and the Dolma Ling Nunnery and
Institute of Dialectics are located), Sidhbadi (which houses His Holiness the
Karmapas monastery), and Dharamkot (which offers more affordable
10

accommodation to backpackers and volunteers staying for longer

durations). This will be done by going through municipal records for
changes in demographic composition, property ownership (from local
population to entrepreneurs from other parts of India and, in some cases,
foreigners), and change in patterns of land-use from personal housing and
agriculture to commercial complexes. Since property ownership in parts of
Indias mountainous areas is legally restricted to the local population, I will
also study the attempts to circumvent legality in actual practice.

11

II
Grandparents and Grandchildren:
Between Exile and Homecoming
German teenagers now work as hard at constructing memorials as their
parents did in rebuilding the country after the war, as their grandparents
did in building the Third Reich itself.
-- James E Young, The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in
Germany Today7

7 Young, James E. The Counter-Monument: Memory Against Itself in Germany

Today. Critical Enquiry 18 (Winter 1992): 267-96. 267
12

I will begin the chapter with an analysis (like Vazira Fazila- Yacoobali
Zamindars in The Long Partition) of the different official labels for Tibetans
in India: refugee/ political asylum seeker/ displaced person/ (permanent)
resident/ citizen by birth or domicile. I will also give a brief account of the
laws pertaining to refugees in India, informed through our reading of G.
Daniel Cohen, Mark Mazower and Samuel Moyn. I hope to extend Moyns
idea of human rights within the context of the United Nations as the last
utopia through a discussion of the Unrepresented Nations and Peoples
Organization (which is now a part of the United Nations) co-founded by the
Tibetan government in exile in 1991. I will also refer to recent surveys
about the decisions of second and third Tibetan refugees to apply/ not apply
for Indian citizenship and asylum in Western countries.
Influenced by, and yet different from, these official labels are the ideas
of displacement and exile that come from Tibetans understanding of
Buddhist precepts. We can identify two lines of thinking within Tibetan
Buddhism. The first is the idea that the better one's karma, the closer one is
born to the holy land. Therefore, being born in exile is a result of bad
karma, and this is how many Tibetans (particularly elders) in India see their
condition. On a panel at the Tibet Museum in Namgyal Monastery, the
curator asserted that Tibetans would return to Tibet when they had
expiated their bad karma; homelessness, therefore, is indeed a step (albeit

13

painful) in the right direction.8 On the other hand, some also believe
that returning to the birth place of dharma (India) is a sign of good karma.
These conflicting understandings are similar to the tension in Yizhars
Khribet Khizeh between thinking of the Palestinian village as the promised
land of milk and honey, and as an uncivilized placestinking and rotting.
The second tendency within Tibetan Buddhism is to approach exile through
the idea of bardo-- the time between death and rebirth. The biography of an
eighteenth century nun (who had to spend time in India following an
invasion of her home town in Tibet) referred to her years in exile as bardo.
How would one account for time between death and birth, which seems to
be bracketed off from linear history?
Finally, I will trace the transition from exile to homecoming through
physical institutions built by three generations of exiled Tibetans, and the
shift in these structures from ephemerality to permanence. I will also
engage here with the theoretical literature on generational memory,
particularly Karl Mannheim (A generation is a social creation. Where novel
events are rare and change is slow, as in traditional peasant societies,
distinct generations may not appear. Only where events occur in such a
8 A display entitled Future Visions for Tibet reads: The law of karma is undecievable
[sic]. After suffering the consequences of our bad karma I think that we will regain our
independence under the guidance of His Holiness the 14th Dalai Lama. I request all
Tibetans to be united and keep the flame of our freedom burning (Long Look Homeward
52). The appeal to all Tibetans to keep the flame of our freedom burning as an exercise of
suffering and expiating karmic offenses treats individuals as historical agents. However,
inherent in the finitude (and implied cessation) of suffering is a belief in the internal order
and logic of the concept of karma. The attempt to mark this finitude on the lifetime of the
present Dalai Lama is what makes this vision most interesting.

14

manner as to demarcate a cohort in terms of its "historical-social"

consciousness, should we speak of a true generation)9, Jane Pilcher10 and
Howard Schuman11. The first institutions built by exiled Tibetans in India
are characterised by the impermanence and uncertainty of an exiled
population hoping for a speedy return home. The bare and functional
architecture of the office of the Dalai Lama (which houses the Tibet
Museum) is a contrast to the ornate architecture at Norbulingka Institute
which was built a generation later, with a tacit admission that the condition
of exile was more permanent than had hitherto been conceded, and a
simultaneous erasure of the present from its motto: preserving the past for
the future. The present is purely functional here: servicing the future by
being attentive to the past.

9 Mannheim, Karl. The Problem of Generations. In Kecskemeti, Paul, ed. Essays

in the Sociology of Knowledge. Boston: Routledge, 1952.
10 Pilcher, Jane. Mannheims Sociology of Generations: An Undervalued Legacy.
The British Journal of Sociology 45.3 (1994): 481-95.
11 Schuman, Howard, et al. The Generational Bias of Historical Knowledge. In
Pennebaker, James W, et al, eds. Collective Memory of Political Events. Mahwah:
Erlaum, 1997.
15

III
Pears and Tanks: What stories did they
tell?
One night, for instance, their country was invaded by the tanks
of a gigantic neighboring country. That had been such a shock and
brought such terror that for a long time no one could think of anything else. It was August, and the pears in their garden were ripe. A
week earlier, Mama had invited the pharmacist to come and pick
them. But the pharmacist neither came nor even apologized. Mama
was unable to forgive him, which infuriated Karel and
Marketa. They reproached her: Everyone else is thinking
about tanks, and you're thinking about pears. Then they moved
out, taking the memory of her pettiness with them.
But are tanks really more important than pears? As time went
by, Karel realized that the answer to this question was not as obvious
as he had always thought, and he began to feel a secret sympathy for
Mama's perspective, which had a big pear tree in the foreground and
somewhere in the distance a tank no bigger than a ladybug, ready at
any moment to fly away out of sight. Ah yes! In reality it's Mama who
is right: tanks are perishable, pears are eternal.
--Milan Kundera, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting12
My primary sources for this chapter will be the interviews with Tibets
elders conducted by the Tibet Oral History Project, and interviews with
Tibetan youth in Dharamsala that I will be conducting myself. The latter will
be identified through youth organizations such as Friends of Tibet and
Students for a Free Tibet. I will also be studying history and language
text-books in schools under the Department of Education of Central Tibetan
Administration, as well as the history curricula in nunneries and
monasteries in Dharamsala. The first part of this chapter will compile the
12 Kundera, Milan. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. New York: Harper
Collins, 1996. 40-41.
16

motifs about Tibet from these sources, and try to understand them through
the binary of pears (personal history: paint colours for Thangka art, clothing
and food staples) and tanks (political history: invasion of Chinese army,
flight from Tibet, struggle for freedom) from these sources. Furthermore, I
will analyze accounts about settling in Dharamsala in relation to both
personal and political histories and the anxieties about being out-of-place.
I offer here a brief reading of extracts from Kim Yeshis memoir about
building the Norbulingka Institute as an example: Kim Yeshi, the Institutes
Project Director, points out in Norbulingka: Ten Years of an Adventure that
a ritual clearing of the land preceded its construction. It was intended to
encourage subterranean creatures that resent human encroachment to
move elsewhere. The excavation at the site of Chonor House, a guest house
under Norbulingka Institute located in McLeodganj, began at about the
same time and revealed the foundations of the previous building that had
stood on the site; a British courthouse. This simultaneity of excavation and
construction in the memoir is symptomatic of Tibetan exile at large:
documenting what was there before, and building a new life in exile; while
the apprehension both of subterranean creatures and other terrestrial
encroachers reflects the problems in constructing these narratives in any
uncomplicated manner. The unearthing of pottery and other quotidian
objects from the site is further evidence of Dharamsala as a palimpsest of
multiple histories.

17

In the second section, I will be posing two questions from Gyanendra

Pandeys work on the Partition of India: how will life and community be
constructed out of contradictory and different memories (among different
generations or of different emphases la pears and tanks); and, how do
societal structures and (gender/ caste/ class) hierarchies change when
whole communities migrate en masse? The second question can be
addressed with particular reference to the Tibetan Nuns Project in exile,
which is attempting to bridge the historic inequalities of access to
education, full ordination, mobility and employment between nuns and
monks.

18

IV
Books and Bollywood, Cricket and
Football
This chapter is intended as a survey of representations of Dharamsala
in popular culture. Taking cues from Gregor Thums study of how Breslau
became Wroclaw, I will use travelers accounts and the governments
tourism brochures as my primary sources, along with works of fiction and
poetry based in Dharamsala. I will also analyze the (rather stereotypical)
portrayals of Tibetan settlements in mainstream Hindi cinema (for example,
as the exotic and colorful background to a song in the 2007 romantic
comedy Jab We Met). The chapter will also dwell at some length on the
controversy surrounding the representation of Tibetan flags and Free
Tibet slogans in the counter-cultural film Rockstar (2011).
The second section will study the impact of sports, or more rightly the
obsession with/ investment in sports as cultural occupations among the
Tibetan population in Dharamsala. I will focus on football, which has
become an emblematic protest sport with its signage, merchandise and
slogans linking it to the cause of Tibetan freedom; and briefly discuss the
peripheral presence of Tibetans in the story of the elite Indian Premier
(cricket) Leagues team Kings XI Punjab decision to designate the Himachal
Pradesh Cricket Association stadium in Dharamsala as one of their home
venues. The co-existence of a mainstream and a marginal sport is an
19

interesting analogue to the co-habitation of Dharamsala by Indians and

Tibetans. My primary sources for this section will be the video footage and
commentary of Indian Premier League matches in Dharamsala, and
interviews with players and local press coverage of football matches in the
last 5 years.

20

V
The Diaspora Elsewhere: Tibetans in
Bylakuppe, Europe and North America
Our tiled roof dripped
And the four walls threatened to fall apart
But we were to go home soon.
We grew papayas
in front of our house...
Our house seems to have grown roots.
Now how can I tell my children
Where we come from?
--Tenzin Tsundue, Exile House

13

Alon Confinos Miracles and Snow in Palestine and Israel: Tantura, A

History of 1948 is my first inspiration for this discussion. I will ask what it
is to make a home in foreign place through a comparative analysis of
Tibetan settlements in Bylakuppe (South India), Europe and North America
(I will be selecting one settlement for each continent). In the first case,
since the primary source of employment is agriculture, I will dwell upon the
relationship with the land: sowing, reaping and growing roots. Of particular
interest is the understanding of growing roots as a betrayal of the struggle
for freedom, and an admission of the impossibility of return. In the last two
cases where there is arguably little in common with Tibetan culture, I will
ask what it means to be a Tibetan refugee. In all instances, however, the
idea of homelessness and statelessness will be informed by Tibetan

13 Tsundue, Tenzin. Exile House. Kora. Dharamsala: Tibet Writes, 27.

21

Buddhist understandings of the human condition as characterized by

impermanence and the inevitability of change.

22

Epilogue

I Re-Member
Another Short Story
A professor very fond of the word "provenance" was telling me the route to
her house. That is where the re-membering began.
I re-membered the tikozi-- didn't know what it was called in English. My
nani (maternal grandmother) used it. They had a kettle. One with a long
necka long curled neck. Wisps of steam would rise out of it in perfect
white curls every time nani poured tea and put the lid on. Then she covered
the kettle with a tikozi and called us to the table. Chai thandi ho jayegi.
Jaldi aao. (The tea is getting cold. Get here soon.) The tikozi had on it a
girl's perfectly balanced pirouette and rose flowers. It was conical and it
folded neatly. It had to be dry-cleaned.
My nana-nani (maternal grandparents) are dead now. The house they built,
with its garden in which they kept the tea table also got re-membered. My
mama (maternal uncle) sold it off. My widowed masi (maternal aunt) who
stayed with nani, despite my mama's attempts to re/de-member her, moved
into his new house. She took the tikozi along. I hadn't known.
At my professor's house. She made some Chinese tea and put it in the kettle
nanima wallah kettle (a kettle just like my nanis) to "brew", a verb I had
not encountered in action before. And lo and behold, as my Eng Lit prof is
fond of saying in exclamation, she pulled the tikozi out. (To assist the
"brewing" I presume.)
I said, "You have one of those! My nani had one. What is it called in
English?"
Tikozi.
Could you spell it?
Tea and cosy, she said.
(It had been an English word all along.)
23

Some remnants of our colonial past that I like to preserve, she said.
(Oh, it is actually English then?)
I asked my masi if she knew where one could buy one of those. She said she
might still have my nani's. It had been in the family for four generations. My
nanis father had bought it in London to ease long English afternoons with
hot tea, taken it to their house in Lahore, and then carried it with him to
Delhi, where it still sat, forgotten in a bed box.
But don't you need it? I asked my masi.
No, no one uses them anymore.
Give it to me!
The tea cosy, having found a spelling, is now re-membered on my dining
table. Some remnants of my colonized memory that I like to preserve.

24

Appendix A
Terms for Partition and Migration in
different languages
Bangla:
The word for migration is abhiprayan which emphasizes movement.
Transfer, or moving from one place to another, could also be sthanantar,
literally meaning different place. Partition is deshbhag or division of
country.

Chinese:
Partition has several meanings. It can be translated as . means to
draw a line, means to divide. A second translation could be or fen ge.
Fen means to divide, and ge means to cut. Partition could bear negative
connotations when used in describing political situation, in which case, the
translation would be or gua fen. It means a whole entity is being cut
and distributed to different parties, just like what people do to a watermelon
(gua). The term cutting/ carving of the Chinese melon was used to
describe European spheres of influence in the nineteenth century.
Migration is translated as (Yi min) or moving people. Another
translation is or ban jia which means moving home.

25

German:
One translation of partition is aufteilung which carries the meaning of
dividing up; the main verb teilen can mean to divide, but also to give out,
pass out something, and the root, teil simply means piece.
The English word migration is also used in German. We can also use
ausflug. But this word, while it can mean migration, can also be used for
departure, flight outwards, or vacation. If the migration is more aimless one
could use wanderung, or auswanderung (noun of auswandern), which
means to leave, depart or migrate, but is often used to describe the Central
Asian peoples entry into Western Europe, or the children of Israel in the
Hebrew Biblical narrative. moving home

Hebrew:
Partition is haluka in Hebrew. It comes from the verb "to divide". The words
haluka can also mean division of any physical object (like dividing a cake).
For migration, if we mean the word as immigration, the word is hagira. It
comes from the verb "to live" which describes the act of changing residence
from one country to another. However, when a Jewish person immigrates to
Israel, he is making an alyia, which literally means ascending. This might
relate to the concept that Zion being up there. A Jewish Israeli who
immigrates to another country would be called by some as yored, meaning
descending, while others would call him mehager
(immigrating/migrating). Another word for migration is nedida, which
26

means moving from place to place, not in the sense of moving once but
continuing to move. It's also linked to the word hobo.

Marathi:
Partition is vibhajan or division.
Migration is sthalantar or change of place.

27

Polish:
The Polish term for partition is rozbir. It has strong historical connotations,
since Poland was under partitions for over 120 years (occupied by Russia,
Germany and Austria). The word itself comes from a verb rozbiera, which
is composed of a prefix (roz-), signifying a perfect form and a verb bra to
take. Rozbiera means therefore to take apart, and rozbir (commonly used
in a plural form rozbiory) is a noun denoting an action of taking something
apart.
The Polish word for migration is the vernacularized version of the
Latin: migracja (imigracja = immigration, emigracja = emigration).

Spanish:
Partition as a noun is tabique which means partition wall, room divider, or
screen. The word comes from an Arab-Hispanic term and makes reference
to a thin wall that divides spaces. The original Arab word is tashbik. As a
verb partition is dividir which means to divide, or to split something.
The word migration comes from the Latin migrationem or a removal,
change of abode, migration"; a noun of action from past participle stem
of migrare "to move from one place to another". Most modern day
dictionaries also include desplazamiento in their definition, which means "to
displace." La migra is the name undocumented immigrants use for ICE
(Immigrations and Custom Enforcement).

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Tibetan:
There are no equivalent terms for either word in the language, and my
Tibetan teacher described the terms Undivided India and the Partition of
India into India and Pakistan respectively through the phrase: Gyakar khaka
ma che nang la or India before/ after the act of making different
(countries).
Migration is lung pa, a compound from lung (country) and pa (move).

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