DHARAMSHALA, India — Boys and girls harmonize together as their music teacher Tenzin Nordel leads them through a Tibetan song in a classroom overlooking an alpine forest. Theater kids practice Tibetan operas in the school hall. Even as they shoot hoops, teenage boys wear traditional shirts that button to one side, under the shoulder.
For decades, this is how the Tibetan Children's Village imparted Tibetan students with their language, culture and faith in their de facto capital in exile in the northern Indian city of Dharamshala. Except now, the number of children attending the school is shrinking, echoing the fate of the exile community itself.
"It's like taking water out of a bucket," says Bhuchung Sonam, a Tibetan poet and publisher, describing the city. "You take one jug or two jugs, that much, the bucket becomes that much empty, right?"
The Dalai Lama and his sisters set up Tibetan Children's Village in Dharamshala in 1960, after they fled Chinese-ruled Tibet following a failed uprising. It expanded as thousands of people followed their spiritual leader into exile. They enrolled their kids in the school so they'd be raised as Tibetans. The émigrés included parents who only found work in remote, hostile areas like isolated Himalayan villages, carving roads out of steep mountain slopes.
"It was difficult to keep their small kids with them. So they were sent to Dharamshala," says Penpa Tsering, leader of the Central Tibetan Administration, a government-in-exile in Dharamshala.
Tibetan parents, fathers mostly, also snuck into India to leave their children at the school. They include the 52-year-old poet Sonam, who was about 10 when his father left him in Dharamshala. He estimates that from 1980 to 2008, "something like 23,000 children came out of Tibet," where he says they formed a fifth of all exiles.
Educator Tindup Galpo was among them. "When I was just 7 or 8 years old, in 1984, I crossed the Himalayas," Galpo says. All he remembers of the journey is that he and his father "walked, and then he took me on his shoulder," he says. "From that day till now, almost 40 years, I never met my father."
Galpo, who guesses he is about 40 years old, was raised by his teachers, who also supervised the boarding houses. He says he didn't feel abandoned or lonely because there were "thousands" of other kids just like him. They were like "brothers and sisters," he says. "This is my home, really, this is my home."
After Galpo graduated from college, he began working as a teacher at the Children's Village. "After class, I'm a father of 32 children," he says, grinning.
He and his wife, who was also raised in the village, take care of the children once their school day is over, helping with their reading and putting them to bed.
The school has the capacity to serve 8,642 children across its seven Indian branches, but only 4,682 children are enrolled, according to senior administrator Kalsang Phuntsok.
For years, the village has been consolidating and shuttering classrooms.
"Everything is changing," Galpo says. The Tibetan Children's Village "is shrinking."
Even in Dharamshala, the largest branch of the Tibetan Children's Village is winding down.
Tenzin Choekyi, the branch's principal, says there aren't many younger children entering the system. Compare the first grade class, with only 12 students, to grade 3, with 61 students, she says.
That's partly because Tibetans are having fewer children. "Unlike our older generations," Choekyi says with a laugh, referring to her parents who had five children, "I have only two."
Tsering of the Central Tibetan Administration tells NPR that the exiled population appeared to peak around 2010, with just over 100,000 Tibetan exiles living throughout India. Now, he estimates, there are around 70,000 in India, with another 60,000 Tibetans living across Europe, North America and Australia.
Only a trickle of Tibetans have been able to reach India since China hardened its borders in 2008, following an uprising in Chinese-ruled Tibet ahead of the Beijing Summer Olympics. "That security apparatus never really got rolled back up once the games were over," says Sophie Richardson, co-executive director of Chinese Human Rights Defenders. And "the border has been much more heavily patrolled." Before 2008, she says, "there were at least a couple of hundred people coming out over the border every year, and I think we're down into the single digits now."
One Tibetan who managed to reach Dharamshala is 27-year-old Namkyi, who only has one name.
When she was just a teenager, Namkyi says she was sent to a prison work camp in Tibet for three years as punishment for brandishing a picture of the Dalai Lama. She had been plotting her escape from China ever since. It took her nine years to find the right people to smuggle her out, she says, and she finally made it in the spring of 2023.
But living in Dharamshala sometimes saddens her, she says. "Everyone is going abroad, there are no children here."
They're migrating to the West.
"These social and demographic changes are a huge challenge for us," says Tsering, explaining that Dharamshala was built as a "compact community, where all Tibetans live together." That has allowed Tibetans "to preserve our identity through our schools, monastic institutions, cultural institutions."
In the Tibetan Children's Village, some of the children are looking for the exits. Like 15-year-old Gawa, who met NPR reporters at the school library on a recent day, as the sound of children practicing an opera filtered through. Gawa said he spent most days between Buddhist worship, basketball and school. He wanted to be a poet — except he figured that studying medicine would provide him with a more stable future. So he's trying to get a scholarship to a university in the United Kingdom.
"I want to pursue my future abroad, where there are more opportunities, more facilities, more everything," Gawa said.
Gawa said he saw India as a place he'd return to for holidays — something he says his traditional Tibetan parents supported: His mother is a teacher at the school and his father works in a Buddhist monastery.
The slow unraveling of the Tibetan capital in exile comes at a precarious time. The Dalai Lama turned 90 in July. He says his successor — or reincarnate — will be born outside of China, but the Chinese government insists only it has the authority to select the next Dalai Lama.
"We are definitely concerned," says Lobsang Sangay, the former head of the Tibetan government in exile. He says historically, the period between the passing of the old Dalai Lama and the enthronement of the new is "our most volatile, sensitive, delicate period."
Sangay says Tibetans were heartened when President Trump, during his first administration, signed a law that sanctions Chinese officials who interfere in Tibetan religious matters. "The Secretary of State Rubio was a co-sponsor of the bill," he says of Marco Rubio, who was a Florida senator at the time. "Now he's in a position to implement it."
But in Trump's second administration, Rubio halted some $12 million of aid earmarked for Tibetan exiles as a part of broader cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development, according to the Central Tibetan Administration. Asked about the funds, the State Department told NPR it has resumed distribution of just over half the aid and continues to call on China to cease its interference in the Dalai Lama's succession.
Amid concerns about the future of the Tibetan movement for autonomy, Sangay says Tibetans have clung to a simple truth: "Our job is simple: We have to survive. As long as we survive, we will have our opportunities."
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