Echo From Dharamsala Summary

Reading Keila Diehl’s Echoes from Dharamsala was, personally, an emotional ride. Her narrative does a phenomenal job of transporting the reader into a first-hand experience of “movement and being moved” (Diehl, 2002). Published in 2002, the book traces the nuances of life and music (as it is received and performed) in the Tibetan refugee community in North India during the last decade of the 20th century through the eyes and ears of Diehl. She set out to conduct research in Dharamsala in 1994 on the back of a conference paper she wrote on the Tashi Delek Blues, a cassette tape of ‘modern’ Tibetan music that cemented her desire to carry out “anthropological fieldwork on the other side of the world” – a desire fuelled by wonder at the ability of the ‘other’ to play the blues, and a curiosity
While folk performances generate much nostalgia and feelings of being away from home yet at home in exile, in a town geographically (and through performance of pure culture) and culturally likened to Tibet itself, performance of modern rock and roll or even Hindi music is largely frowned upon as it threatens the larger ideal of preserving the distinct Tibetan culture that refugees are in a sense bound to protect.

Overall, Echoes from Dharamsala paints an exhaustive portrayal of life and cultural reproduction of the Tibetans living in Dharamsala in the 1990s. Diehl does a brilliant job of mainstreaming the cultural preservation paradigm with reference to communities and especially youth growing up in exile. Her book ties together issues of identity, nationalism, language and tradition, and cultural appropriation of new musical influences into a flowing narrative interspersed with anecdotes and experiences of her time as an Inji living in Dharamsala – in her own sort of exile with the