Sikkim Read online

  SIKKIM

  REQUIEM FOR A HIMALAYAN KINGDOM

  First published in 2015 by

  Birlinn Limited

  West Newington House

  10 Newington Road

  Edinburgh EH9 1QS

  www.birlinn.co.uk

  Copyright © Andrew Duff 2015

  The moral right of Andrew Duff to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this book may be reproduced, stored or transmitted in any form without the express written permission of the publisher.

  Every effort has been made to obtain the necessary permissions with reference to copyright material, both illustrative and quoted. We apologise for any omissions in this respect and will be pleased to make the appropriate acknowledgement in any future editions.

  ISBN 978 1 78027 286 3

  eISBN 978 0 85790 245 0

  British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

  Typeset in 12¾ on 15pt Adobe Arno Pro by Iolaire Typesetting, Newtonmore

  Printed and bound by Gutenberg Press, Malta

  For my parents

  Ronald and Jane Duff

  And in memory

  Martha Steedman

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  A Note on Romanisation

  Maps

  Introduction

  Prologue

  Chapter One: A British Legacy

  Chapter Two: Under the Shadow of Tibet

  Chapter Three: Where There’s Hope

  Chapter Four: A Fragile State

  Chapter Five: The Bigger Picture

  Chapter Six: A Raw Deal

  Chapter Seven: We Also Want Our Place in the Sun

  Chapter Eight: ‘How Can We Fight With India?’

  Chapter Nine: ‘They’ve A’ Gane Clean Gyte’

  Chapter Ten: Death Must Follow Birth

  Epilogue

  Endnotes

  Timeline

  Acknowledgements

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  Black-and-white plates

  1

  The author’s grandfather in the Himalayas, c. 1928

  2

  Crown Prince Thondup as a young man with his family, c. late 1940s

  3

  Princess Coocoola on her wedding day, 1941

  4

  The Dalai Lama riding through Sikkim (travelling from Tibet to India), 1956

  5

  Crown Prince Thondup with Nari Rustomji (Dewan of Sikkim), c. late 1950s

  6

  Martha Hamilton with Crown Prince Thondup and Hope Cooke, c. 1963

  7

  PNG schoolchildren digging trenches against the Chinese threat, 1965

  8

  Chinese and Indian soldiers facing off on the Sikkim-Tibet border, 1967

  9

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke (Gyalmo), late 1960s

  10

  Hope Cooke (Gyalmo) dancing, late 1960s

  11

  Nehru and his daughter, Indira Gandhi, with the Kennedys, 1961

  12

  Hindustan Times cartoon mocking Indira Gandhi, 1974

  13

  Letter (extract) from Chogyal Thondup Namgyal to Martha Hamilton, 1974

  14

  The Kazi and Kazini with B.B. Lal, late 1970s

  15

  The Kazi and Kazini, mid 1970s

  16

  Beleaguered monarch – Thondup Namgyal, c. 1981

  Colour plates

  1

  Crown Prince Thondup with his father, Sir Tashi Namgyal, and Apa Pant (Sikkim’s political officer), early 1960s

  2

  Crown Prince Thondup and his first wife, Sangey Deki, c. 1956

  3

  Crown Prince Thondup and Hope Cooke, 1963

  4

  Hope Cooke and her step-children, 1963

  5

  Coronation of Chogyal Thondup and Hope Cooke (Gyalmo), 1965

  6

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal at his coronation, 1965

  7

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal, late 1960s

  8

  Chinese and Indian border emplacements at the Nathu La, late 1960s

  9

  Looking into Chinese-occupied Tibet from Nathu La Pass, late 1960s

  10

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke (Gyalmo) with their children, 1971

  11

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke (Gyalmo) with their daughter, Hope Leezum, c. 1971

  12

  Sikkim Guards in Gangtok, c. 1960s

  13

  Princess Coocoola and Martha Hamilton, 1964

  14

  Chogyal Thondup Namgyal and Hope Cooke (Gyalmo) with court, 1971

  15

  Indira Gandhi in Sikkim, early 1980s

  16

  Children at the funeral of Thondup Namgyal, 1982

  A Note on Romanisation

  For non-English words in the main text, I have used what I consider to be the most usual up-to-date romanised forms and focused on consistency rather than following one particular system. Where different spellings are included in quoted text, I have left these as they stand.

  Sikkim: at the heart of Asia

  Sikkim’s complex geopolitical position

  Sikkim

  Introduction

  April 2009, Pemayangtse Monastery, Sikkim

  ‘How much do you know about Sikkim?’

  The monk looked at me through the fading light, across the low table in his home on the grounds of Pemayangtse Monastery. A single bulb flickered as the electricity struggled up from the valley thousands of feet below. His maroon robes, trimmed with blue and gold brocade around the cuffs and buttoned front, contrasted with the peeling paint on the window behind him. He left the question hanging in the air as he picked up his soup bowl and slurped its contents. Through the window I could hear Buddhist chants floating out over the sounds of cymbals, horns and drums.

  The words, spoken in an accented English unlike any I’d heard elsewhere in India, were the first he had spoken for some minutes. I shifted uncomfortably in my bench-seat as I thought of my sparse knowledge. On the table between us I had placed a blue plastic folder from which spilled my grandfather’s notes and photographs of the trek he made through Sikkim to this monastery in 1922. I supposed, wrongly, that my inheritance gave me permission to discuss Sikkim with the monk. Now it was clear I had miscalculated.

  ‘Not much,’ I admitted. ‘But I would like to learn . . .’

  His hooded eyes rested on me impassively. The chanting had stopped and I could hear the steady sound of his breathing above the hum of electric current trying to feed the bulb. He picked up a book from beside him. I could just see its title: Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim.

  He tossed the book to me. ‘Read this. It is banned in India. We speak tomorrow.’*

  Looking back now, it seems a bit odd that I didn’t know more about Sikkim. By the time I met the monk, the place had been in my consciousness for over two decades.

  My journey to the beautiful hilltop monastery of Pemayangtse started in the 1980s. I was a teenager, living in Edinburgh. As my paternal grandparents’ minds began to fade, my parents moved them from St Andrews to live five doors down the road from us. I was happy: as their youngest grandchild, I had become close to them. Besides, they had around them the glow of something other, something different: they had spent most of their lives in India.

  The move prompted a house clearance in St Andrews. Among the belongings that found their way into
our house were a number of albums of photographs from India. I was captivated by all of them, but there was one album in particular that I would spend hours poring over. There was something physically pleasing about the weight and feel of this album. It was large and sturdy, about 18 inches wide by 12 inches tall. Inside the stout mid-brown leather cover, marked with over half a century of scratches, were two and a half inches of bound grey linen pages. It was, as my grandfather explained in a short note inside the front cover, ‘strong rather than artistic’ on account of its provenance: it had been made in Gourepore, the jute mill outside Calcutta where he worked in the 1930s.

  The photographs inside were absorbing: most were from my grandfather’s early bachelor years in Calcutta. Others showed by grandparents newly married in the 1930s. My father and aunt also featured, as small children soon to be sent home to Scotland as the prospect of war loomed.

  I wanted to talk to my grandparents about the stories behind the photographs. I felt there was something deeply unfair about the way they were declining just as I became a curious teenager. It was clear that my grandfather cared deeply for India, in his own way. Every image on every page had been carefully outlined in ink with hand-drawn geometric designs. But it was the carefully inscribed titles for each photograph that fired my imagination. I wanted to know what it felt like to jump from the back of a canoe and swim in the river at Falta, to watch the monsoon break at Parasnath, to mess around burying his best friend J. E. Osmond in sand to look like Tutankhamun at Gopalpur. I wanted him to tell me about the elephants on the tea estate in Bhooteachang, about bathing naked and picnicking on fish in the Sunderbans. I wanted to ask him about the Garhwal Himalayas, the Pindari Glacier, about places with strange names like Shillong, Kalimpong, Darjeeling, Ranchi, Phalut.

  But there was one word I wanted to ask him about more than anything else: Sikkim.

  Each time I opened the album, it was the first word that confronted me. On the right-hand page, encased in elaborate stencils, was a single black-and-white photograph of a river rushing under a flimsy-looking bridge. On one side of the photo in large letters was written ‘Sikkim’; on the other, ‘Pujahs 1922’. On the facing page six typewritten sheets of yellowing note-paper had been carefully glued by their edges so that they overlapped. At the top of the first sheet: ‘Notes on a Tour in Sikkim Oct. 1922’. The notes contained an account of a journey – a holiday – walking a ten-day circular route into the Sikkim Himalaya. The first eight pages were photographs of that journey, made when my grandfather was only 22 and had been in India for less than two years, but there had been other journeys through Sikkim, too, after my grandparents had married in 1929. There was a trip in 1932, again in 1934, and – perhaps most remarkably – one in 1938, when they trekked together over a 14,000-foot pass into Tibet.

  But it was the 1922 journey that captured my imagination most. I must have read the matter-of-fact opening a hundred times: ‘Our party consisted of four: Sinclair, who made most of the arrangements, Ewan, Ryrie and myself. We left Darjeeling after tiffin on October 15th, and arrived back there on the 25th.’ There were details of costs, kit, the maps they used, even the stores they took (supplied by the Army and Navy stores in Calcutta). As I read the notes and built an impression from the photographs, I felt as if I was venturing with them deep into the Himalayas. Soon I knew the route description by heart. Place names such as Chakung, Rinchenpong and Dentam became embedded in my memory. I loved reading about the physically challenging landscape: there were constant reminders of ‘steady tiring climbing’, ‘steep descents’, more ‘stiff climbs’, descents of 5,000 feet that were described as ‘likely to be very tiring to the walker’. But the rewards were spelled out, too: rows and rows of tea plantations (‘very pleasing after Bengal’), roaring rivers with ‘the jade green water rushing amid massive boulders between the mountainous banks on either side’, ‘the snows peeping over the hills to the north’ and finally, as they progressed deeper into the Himalayas, ‘a magnificent view of the sun peeping over the whole range’.

  It was the description and the photographs of the hilltop monastery that was their final destination – Pamionchi – that took the firmest hold on my mind. After five days of arduous trekking, the final approach at dusk– ‘through dark and eerie woods, wind and silent’, with monkeys ‘the only animal life of any kind’ – had clearly spooked my grandfather and his companions. That night they had been able to see ‘the twinkling of the lights in Darjeeling . . . a pretty sight’. But it had not been till the following morning that they had fully appreciated the spectacular location of the monastery. They could see for miles in every direction. Most spectacularly, to the north, not more than a dozen miles, lay the peaks of the third-highest mountain in the world, Khangchendzonga, sacred to the lamas of Sikkim. The monastery, too, had made an impression – of a slightly different kind. They had found the temple a ‘weird place’ and the wall paintings ‘extremely crude and pagan’. Nevertheless, it was clear from the black-and-white pictures that the imposing building, the monks and their houses had sparked the young men’s curiosity – although there were limits: the monks failed in their effort to entice them into the upper floors of the monastery to see the ‘treasures’ for a fee of ten rupees: ‘Remembering we were Scotch, and had a reputation to keep up, we contented ourselves with seeing downstairs only.’

  The four men spent two days at the monastery before returning together to Darjeeling, staying in the Government of India-owned dak bungalows that the British had built across the Himalayas to allow a sufficient level of control. It had taken less than a fortnight. But the notes and photographs survived to fire my imagination more than half a century later. When my grandparents died within three months of each other in 1988, a seed was planted in my mind.

  It took two decades for that seed to germinate.

  In late 2008, I decided it was time. The first thing I needed to do was to look for Sikkim once again in the atlas. I almost missed it.

  Nestled in between Nepal and Bhutan, Sikkim is tiny, about a third of the size of Wales. In most atlases, the space is not even big enough to hold the six letters of Sikkim’s name. It lies about two-thirds of the way along the Himalayas, the great white crescent of mountains that stretches for more than 1,800 miles from the steppes of central Asia to the tropical forests of Myanmar and South-east Asia. As I peered at the atlas I could see one very good reason why it had appealed to my grandfather: Sikkim lies almost due north of Calcutta.

  In early 2009, I packed photocopies of the notes and photographs into my rucksack and set off for northern India. From Calcutta I travelled up to Siliguri, the junction town from where the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway snakes up into the hills, chugging gently into the mountains, covering no more than 50 miles in six hours. By the time we reached Darjeeling, the heat of the plains had been replaced by a persistent drizzle and a penetrating chill in the air, part of the attraction for the inhabitants of steamy Calcutta. Today the hill station still retains a few signs of its colonial past, managing somehow to stay just the right side of faded grandeur.

  It took me a few days to arrange for an Inner Line Permit* and to establish that I would be able to follow my grandfather’s route into Sikkim. Numerous guides tempted me with offers of trekking along the Nepali border to see Mount Everest, but slowly I started to piece things together. There was one thing that still puzzled me, though. I could not find any reference to the monastery that had been the apex of their journey: Pamionchi.

  The turning point came when I found a 1917 book that mentioned it. I cross-referenced the book’s map with a 1981 military one I had acquired in Calcutta. Everything fell into place: Pamionchi, I realised, was an early twentieth-century effort to anglicise the word Pemayangtse – this was the modern name for the monastery that was now my destination. The following day I met a guide willing to help me find accommodation along the way. I knew there was little chance of staying in the government-owned dak bungalows that my grandfather and his friends had use
d.

  The landscape turned out to be even more spectacular than I’d expected. The first day and a half consisted of a steep knee-crunching descent of over 5,000 feet to reach the river Rangeet, which separates modern West Bengal from Sikkim. Crossing the river, the footbridge that I had looked at so many times in my grandfather’s album was still there, spanning the glacial water. I used the photocopied notes and photographs that I carried with me to help navigate my way into the Himalayan foothills. After following the river upstream for a few miles, I finally entered Sikkim on 4 April 2009.

  Over the next three days I covered more than 50 miles on foot, ascending and descending a few thousand feet each day to cross the concertina of ridges that define the southern area of Sikkim. As I passed through every hill pass, I could see, less than 30 miles away, the magnificent massif of Mount Khangchendzonga and the other snow-capped ranges than separate India from the Tibetan plateau.

  It was hard not to feel a sense of destiny as I retraced my grandfather’s footsteps from 87 years before. At times the challenging terrain almost defeated me. His party had numbered more than 20 (including all the porters). They had even taken a pony – my grandfather had made an aside that ‘it is a help in climbing to hang on to the pony’s tail if someone else is riding’. As I zigzagged up steep slopes by myself, I could understand what he meant.

  Finally, as dusk fell on the fifth day, I walked high along the side of the Kulhait Valley, climbing up the steep road to the hilltop monastery of Pemayangtse, and my meeting with the monk.