Tenzin Tsundue is a restless young Tibetan who, after graduating from Madras, South India, braved snowstorms and treacherous mountains, broke all rules and restrictions, crossed the Himalayas on foot and went into forbidden Tibet! The purpose? To see the situation of his occupied country and lend a hand to the freedom struggle. Arrested by China’s border police, he was locked up in prison in Lhasa for three months, and was later “pushed back” to India.
Born to a Tibetan refugee family who laboured on India’s border roads around Manali, North India, during the chaotic era of Tibetan refugee resettlement in the early seventies, Tenzin Tsundue is a writer-activist, a rare blend in the Tibetan community in exile. He published his first book of poems, Crossing the Border, in 1999 with money begged and borrowed from his classmates while doing his Masters degree in Literature from Bombay University. His literary skills won him the first-ever “Outlook-Picador Award for Non-Fiction” in 2001. His second book, Kora, is already in its sixth edition, and his third title, Semshook, is in its third edition.
Tenzin Tsundue joined Friends of Tibet (INDIA) in 1999 and remains its General Secretary. In January 2002, while the visiting Chinese Premier Zhu Rongji was addressing Indian business tycoons in Mumbai’s 30-storey Oberoi Towers, Tsundue scaled scaffolding to the 14th floor to unfurl a Tibetan national flag and a FREE TIBET banner down the hotel’s facade. In April 2005 he repeated a similar stunning one-man protest when Chinese Prime Minister Wen Jiabao was visiting India’s tech capital, Bangalore.
Because of these daring protest actions, during Chinese President Hu Jintao’s visit to India in November 2006 the Government of India restricted his movements at Beijing’s request. He was detained under police surveillance within Dharamshala jurisdiction for 14 days. Then, in Beijing’s Olympics year, 2008 — as the March 10 1959 Lhasa Uprising anniversary triggered spontaneous uprisings against China’s occupation across the Tibetan Plateau — Tsundue and other youth leaders led a march across north India to attempt a crossing to their homeland. Despite police detentions en route, the march and subsequent other attempts remained on the world’s news agenda until the Olympics were staged in August.
Tenzin Tsundue’s writings have been published in The International PEN, Sahitya Akademi’s Indian Literature, The Little Magazine, Outlook, The Times of India, The Indian Express, Hindustan Times, Tehelka, The Daily Star (Bangladesh), Today (Singapore), Tibetan Review, and other publications.
As a poet he represented Tibet in the Second South Asian Literary Conference in New Delhi in January 2005 organized by Sahitya Akademi, Poetry Africa 2005 in Durban, and KATHA Asia International Utsav 2006 in New Delhi. Both as an activist and a writer, Tsundue fights tooth and nail for the freedom of his country and plays a high-profile role among Tibetan youth. His writings are collected online at this site, and at FriendsofTibet.org/tenzin/ and TibetWrites.org
