Tibetan community in exile has reconstructed their identity on a collective and at an individual level. The present generation, who is born in India and hasn’t seen Tibet ever, have the responsibility to protect and pass on the culture and the ethnic identity to the coming generations, in a way to preserve the connection with the homeland. While the Tibetan in exile’s construction of the Tibet is largely from the memories of the idyllic past fixed in the pre-1959 era, which was once their home, the contemporary construction of their identity creates a diasporic space of belonging.

Mainpat, one of the oldest Tibetan settlements, is situated on a plateau 400 km north of Raipur in Chhattisgarh. It was established by the Government of India in 1962 to rehabilitate 1400 Tibetan refugees who came to India with Dalai Lama in the aftermath of the Chinese annexation of Tibet in 1959.  But today refugees have little time for nostalgic reminiscence, and in order to assimilate into the host nation, they have been obliged to forget much of what they left behind and focus on the construction of a new Tibet in exile.