When the exiled Dalai Lama arrived 43 years ago, Dharamsala was a remote Indian aerie. Today, Pico Iyer finds a safe haven transformed, as displaced Tibetans and international pilgrims—with more than a few celebrities in their ranks—alter the landscape

I drive along tree-lined avenues, passing villagers working in lush fields, camels, lipsticked girls with large bowls on their heads, road signs that read, in India's inimitable fashion, thanks for inconvenience. In the radiant spring sunshine, a few hours out of Jammu Airport, snowcaps come into view, shockingly clear against the high blue skies and hinting at the even higher peaks of the Himalayas just behind them. My rickety Indian-made Ambassador lurches over mountain streams on single-lane bridges that look ready to collapse, and then, as the car climbs the pine-covered slopes, I begin to see more people dressed in claret robes. The route traverses Dharamsala proper, the nondescript Indian town at the bottom of the Kangra Valley, and winds up a mountain, past monuments to soldiers, army cantonments, and an old Anglican church where Lord Elgin lies buried amid the mossy tombstones. Finally, I see out my window the scrappy line of stalls, run-down guesthouses, and spinning prayer wheels that the world thinks of as Dharamsala.

When you first see this unprepossessing place, thick with the scent of refuse and filled with pierced and beaded seekers drifting among the potholes, it's hard to believe that it is one of the great pilgrimage sites of the modern world, sought out by screenwriters, philosophers, and movie stars. But then you spot the golden turrets of a Tibetan Buddhist temple tucked among the trees and note the hill on which sits the modest yellow house of Tibet's exiled spiritual and political leader, the fourteenth Dalai Lama. You make out paths leading up through forests inhabited by bear and leopard. After dark, you hear chanting from a nunnery and drumming from the valley where the spiritual leader of Mongolia is staying. And you see, as the sun rises over the snowy peaks, scores of weathered Tibetans walking around and around the central temple. Murmuring and spinning prayer wheels, they seem to speak of all that exiled Tibet has achieved since the Chinese invaded in 1950 and took over in 1959—and all that it has yet to gain.

"It's okay," says the Dalai Lama, breaking into a high chirrup of infectious laughter when I ask him how he feels about his adopted home (seconds earlier, he was discussing how imperiled Tibetan culture is in its homeland). "Now we have been in India forty-four years, in Dharamsala forty-three years. Maybe thirty years from now everything will be fine." The Tibetan leader remembers the excitement, when he first arrived here in 1960 with his devoted community, of waking up and seeing the surrounding snowcaps and wildflowers for the first time. His new home allowed him to tinker with his garden and to take long hikes into the hills, leaving his bodyguards breathless behind him. Every summer, though, the withering monsoons for which Dharamsala is notorious destroy all the flowers he so carefully tends, he notes with characteristic honesty, making him homesick, for a moment, for the high, dry air of the Tibetan plateau.