A New Year Some Tibetans Have Chosen Not to Celebrate

Losar observance inside Tibet has become entangled with contemporary politics in a way most of the other holidays in this atlas are not: following the widespread protests and subsequent crackdown across Tibetan areas in 2008, many Tibetans inside Tibet and in exile communities abroad deliberately muted or entirely boycotted public Losar celebrations in the years that immediately followed, treating quiet mourning rather than festivity as the appropriate response to the deaths and continued restrictions reported in the aftermath, a form of protest documented by international human rights organisations and foreign news coverage at the time.

Public Losar celebration in Tibetan areas of China has since resumed in most years, but the underlying tension between Losar as an ordinary cultural and religious new year festival and Losar as a potential occasion for political expression, whether of celebration, quiet dissent or enforced normalcy under close official monitoring, remains part of the holiday's lived reality for Tibetans inside China in a way it generally is not for the Gurung, Tamang, Sikkimese and Bhutanese communities elsewhere in the Himalaya who keep their own related new year observances without the same political weight attached.