Sikkim Read online

  For the first four days of the trek, my guide had managed to procure rooms in the most unlikely of places: among others, a concrete cell-like room above a village bank, and a bed in the house of a local postmaster. In the village below the monastery, I struck gold. I was told that a former monk, who now ran a school offering a Buddhist-based curriculum, was willing to let me stay in his house, right by the monastery. It was on the first evening in his house that he tossed me the book, telling me we would speak the following day.

  That night, in a small wood-panelled room at the top of his house, I opened the book and began reading. At first I found the story hard to follow – it seemed to be an account of the funeral of the king, or ‘Chogyal’, of Sikkim. One thing was clear: the author was convinced that a great wrong had taken place against the king in the 1970s. Tiredness began to get the better of me. With the freezing air making the skin on my face feel numb, my eyes drooped and I struggled to focus on the page.

  Then I suddenly became alert. A few pages in, amid an account of the funeral procession, I read the following: ‘Finally [came] Sonam Yongda, the Sikkim Guards captain who had paid dearly for his patriotism, and returned to the monastery whence he began . . . clad in the lama’s maroon.’

  At first I told myself it was a coincidence. I had learnt in Pelling, the small village below the monastery, that my host’s name was Yongda. Surely there must be more than one Yongda with connections to a monastery in Sikkim. But curiosity took me to the index. There were multiple references under ‘Yongda, Captain Sonam’. I turned to the first:

  Captain Sonam Yongda . . . had passed out with distinction from the Indian Military Academy and had trained for more than a year with an Indian Gurkha regiment. The son of a senior lama at Pemayangtse Monastery, where he himself had also been ordained, Yongda came of sturdy Bhutiya stock.

  The odds were narrowing: this Yongda had been at Pemayangtse too. Another passage hinted at a man of some courage: ‘With Yongda behind bars, the Sikkim Guards were deprived of the only officer who could have forged commitment and fervour into resistance.’

  Curious, I returned to the main story and read on. It was obvious that the author held the king in high regard and was convinced that he had been badly mistreated, abandoned by all but a few loyal supporters, including this ‘Captain Yongda’. It was a compelling story of tragedy and intrigue. Even the piercing cold could not stop me reading till the small hours of the morning.

  I woke early and dressed quickly, donning fleece layer after fleece layer. I told myself again it must simply be a coincidence: the military man in the book must be a different Sonam Yongda, a brother or a cousin of the monk who was my host at Pemayangtse, nothing more.

  I made my way downstairs and into the kitchen area, past the wooden bed frames, towards the low tables and benched seating. Three girls were bustling around the kitchen, filling bowls and pouring tea. The monk was at the table, hunched over a bowl of porridge. He was dressed in an extraordinary outfit – it was hard to reconcile him with the maroon-clad monk of the previous evening. His monastic robe was gone, replaced by a turquoise shellsuit over which he wore a thick, dark-blue down bodywarmer. He had a bulky woollen hat pulled down over his brow. He glanced up from the bowl of porridge and nodded a greeting to me. I took a seat beside him. One of the girls brought over a mug of steaming tea and a bowl of porridge sprinkled with chilli flakes. The three girls also took seats at one end of the low table with their own bowls. I tucked in to the delicious porridge and, with no idea what to say, I waited for the monk to open the conversation.

  ‘So. How you sleep?’

  ‘Yes, well, thank you.’

  ‘Did you like the book?’

  I looked over at him but couldn’t read his face in the morning gloom.

  ‘Yes, I did.’ I decided to chance it. ‘I came across references to someone called Yongda from this monastery. I wondered if he might be a relative of yours.’

  I noticed that the girls were all suppressing giggles. I glimpsed the slightest of smirks as Yongda looked over at them.

  ‘You?’ is all I could think to say.

  He nodded, the hint of a shy smile on his lips, which quickly disappeared. It seemed barely believable that this was the man in the book. I could not hide my curiosity. I blurted out, ‘So you were the King of Sikkim’s personal bodyguard?’

  He nodded again, then looked up at me. ‘You must read the whole book. It is a very important story. A terrible story, terrible what they did to the Chogyal.’

  His face turned impassive again. ‘But that was a long time ago. And I am now late,’ he said, standing up. He gathered his things and left.

  When I set out on the journey, my intention had been to write about my reconnection with my grandfather’s years living in India and his love for the Himalaya, particularly Sikkim. But the book that the monk gave me contained such an extraordinary story of political intrigue and wonderful characters in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s that my horizons soon broadened. I stayed in the monastery for a further three days, talking to Yongda about his memories of the king, and reading the account of the final days of the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim. I read how this tiny part of the world had survived as an independent entity after India gained its own independence; how King Thondup, the last Chogyal, had married an American woman, Hope Cooke, once talked of in the same breath as Grace Kelly, and how together they had believed they could revive the ancient kingdom; how (the author of Smash and Grab alleged) Indira Gandhi had used her intelligence services to bring that dream to a close, surrounding the palace with troops as she annexed the kingdom in 1975. And as if the drama of the story were not enough, the cast of supporting characters had names worthy of a James Bond novel: the Kazini, a shadowy Scottish woman who orchestrated events on behalf of her husband, the leading politician in Sikkim who harboured a lifelong grudge against the king; the improbably nicknamed Princess Coocoola, the king’s sister, who Heinrich Harrer (of Seven Years in Tibet fame) believed to be the most beautiful woman in the world. The most astonishing revelation was that Sonam Yongda, the monk who had given me the book, had played an important part in the climax of the story as a captain in the Sikkim Guards, the small body of military men who protected the king. In hour-long sessions, he slowly revealed the details of his role in this remarkable tale.

  It took me four days to trek back to the Sikkimese border. At one point I found myself walking along old moss-covered cobbled bridleways through ancient forests of deodar. Finally, I reached the river and climbed 5,000 feet back up to the ridge that Darjeeling straddles, returning to where I had started a fortnight before. I spent a week trying to process what I had read, looking for other accounts of Sikkim’s story in the best bookshop in the hill town, the Oxford Stores. I discovered that Sikkim’s name stemmed from a word meaning ‘happy home’. But in the few slim volumes that mentioned the events of 1975 most referred to it as a ‘merger’ between Sikkim and India, a triumph for ‘democratic forces’, the culmination of a popular rising by the Sikkimese people themselves – against a feudal monarch. Some even referred to Hope Cooke as a CIA agent. And of the few people I found willing to talk about their recollections of the time, none gave me the same account. The story seemed slippery, full of nuance and complication. Versions seemed to proliferate like subdividing cells.

  From Sikkim, I travelled through Nepal and into Tibet, where I began to understand the delicate political and religious connections and tensions between the countries across the Himalayan region. But it was Sikkim’s tale that now obsessed me. When I eventually returned to my home in Scotland, I immersed myself in finding out what I could about the place. I discovered that there was a small group of academics researching its early history. I learnt that Sikkim’s ties to Tibet and its position alongside the biggest chink in the Himalayan massif had made it geopolitically valuable for centuries.

  Most importantly, I understood that the history of Sikkim’s demise could not be seen in isolation. The British involvement
in Sikkim and Tibet in the early twentieth century had set up many of Sikkim’s problems. After the British left in 1947, the Himalayan region had been at the centre of a period of international intrigue across Asia, a second front for the Cold War. I began to realise that Sikkim never stood a chance.

  But I still felt I was some distance from getting under the skin of what happened in Sikkim. Smash and Grab was a valuable first-hand account, but the author was open about his close friendship with the Chogyal. I wondered if that had coloured his narrative. I longed for another perspective. My first break came when I was introduced to Martha Steedman (née Hamilton) by a friend of my parents. Martha, a bright, energetic Scottish woman in her late seventies with a distinguished teaching career behind her, had been headmistress of the main girls’ school in the Sikkimese capital, Gangtok, between 1959 and 1966. Sikkim was a small place, and she had direct access to the Palace. She showed me extraordinary photographs of the royal couple, of their wedding and coronation. The turning point came when she asked if I’d like to see the weekly letters she had written to her parents from Sikkim. Far from being ‘of little interest’, as she had suggested, the pale blue aerogrammes provided a unique perspective on the world of Sikkim. Life in the palace burst into full Technicolor. I began to discover references to Sikkim in travel memoirs and articles in magazines such as Time, Newsweek, National Geographic and Paris Match that illuminated matters further.

  With the help of Martha Hamilton’s letters, I started to piece together the story. But she also gave me my second break. Perhaps, she suggested, I might like to speak to her successor as headmistress at the school, Ishbel Ritchie, another Scot, who had served in Sikkim between 1966 and 1996. A fortnight later I was walking out of Ritchie’s home in Dunfermline laden with another box of weekly letters home. As I put them into order, I realised I had stumbled across another treasure trove. Ritchie’s letters (which she had to hide from the Indian censors operating in Sikkim) were just as insightful as Hamilton’s. I now had first-hand, contemporaneous accounts of the years from 1959 to 1975, during which Thondup and his queen, Hope Cooke, had tried to reinvigorate the Kingdom of Sikkim.

  A project that I thought would take a year had already taken 18 months. But there was one big problem. I was now so immersed in the local story of Sikkim in the 1960s and 1970s that I had missed the other vital part of the story – the geopolitical context within which Sikkim had existed, located on the frontier between India, which had emerged from British rule in 1947, and Tibet, occupied by China since 1950. I began to delve into the motivations of the Indian and Chinese governments in this period, understanding that they were deeply influenced by the Cold War politics swirling around Asia at the time. I realised that understanding the motivations of one woman in particular – Indira Gandhi, the Indian Prime Minister from 1966 to 1977 and then again from 1980 to 1984 – was critical in telling the story of Sikkim.

  Suspecting that official records of the UK government might also shed light on the story, I turned to the Foreign Office records in the National Archives. Every year, under what is called the ‘30-year-rule’, the UK government releases secret files from three decades previously. I realised that files from the 1970s would be available. I discovered a remarkable set of documents demonstrating that the UK government had shown a keen interest in the events in Sikkim, a place that was clearly dear to many Foreign Office mandarins, some of whom had been intimately connected to Sikkim’s royal family. Secret reports and memos added to the sense of intrigue in the story.

  Meanwhile I returned to Sikkim on a number of occasions, tracking down some of those who had been involved in the events I was writing about. As they entered their seventies and eighties, some welcomed the opportunity to unburden themselves, talking openly of their role in the events of the time, often admitting to a sense of embarrassed guilt.

  Finally, in early 2013, just as I thought I had completed the final draft of the book, Wikileaks released a tranche of US government cables from the early to mid-1970s. With some trepidation (I had by now had enough of ‘revelations’) I decided to do a word search within the documents for ‘Sikkim’. The computer revealed 500 secret cables that brought to life the extraordinary Cold War background to Sikkim’s demise. It was the last piece of a complex puzzle, putting the events of Sikkim into their proper global context.

  At last, I felt I had a complete story to write.

  The story of Sikkim is a cautionary tale of what can happen when a small kingdom tugs at the tailcoats of the Great Powers. But it is also an intensely human story – about King Thondup and his wife Hope Cooke. He was the scion of a Buddhist ruling family; she, 17 years his junior and a teenager when they first met, the orphaned granddaughter of a New York shipping company president. That they met at all was remarkable enough; the way their relationship developed – often in the public eye – I found fascinating. As I researched their story in Sikkim, no one I spoke to was shy about giving an opinion. Navigating through those opinions was never easy.

  Thondup died in 1982, but Hope Cooke still lives in New York today. I contacted her in 2010. At first she offered to talk about the ‘cultural context’ to Sikkim, but then decided (after consulting with her children) that she should leave her 1981 biography to stand as her record of the period. Although this was initially disappointing, as time passed I understood that decision. I was pleased that we reestablished contact in 2015. Her enthusiasm for Sikkim remains undiminished.

  This tiny piece of land, no more than 70 miles by 40 miles, has dominated my life for five years. The pursuit of the story has taken me back to Sikkim and India many times, drawing me into fascinating corners and cul-de-sacs I never dreamed of visiting. I have researched in Gangtok’s Institute of Tibetology, the Tibetan Government-in-Exile’s archive in Dharamsala in northern India, the Bodleian Library, the British Library and the London Library. I have interviewed former Indian diplomats in Delhi, and former (and current) Sikkimese politicians in Gangtok. But the keys to unlocking this story were the letters of Martha Hamilton and Ishbel Ritchie. Both have been unfailingly generous.

  On my desk as I write this, there is a small cardboard head-and-shoulders cut-out picture of my grandfather taken in India. He is wearing a shirt and pullover, a pipe hanging out of his mouth. It may even have been taken in Sikkim. It is strange for me to think that without him none of this would have been written.

  To him, and to my parents, enormous thanks.

  * In fact, the book was never banned, although, as the author Sunanda Datta-Ray explains in a new 2014 edition of the book, it was cleverly sidelined by the Indian authorities.

  * Regulations governing access to Sikkim today are remarkably similar to those introduced by the British in 1873.

  Prologue

  On 15 May 1975 a curious letter appeared in the pages of The Times. The title was ‘Chogyal of Sikkim’ and it was signed by ‘JOHN CLARKE, G8KA, Tanyard, Frittenden, Kent’. Clarke’s letter was in response to a flurry of correspondence about Sikkim that had appeared in The Times over the past month, which had caused him to recall a bizarre conversation he had overhead a month earlier in April.

  Clarke was a 56-year-old local solicitor and county coroner, looking forward to an early retirement. It was common knowledge that he would slip away for odd afternoons in the local garden centre to catalogue the rhododendrons,1 but his other hobby, amateur radio communications, was less well known to his colleagues and friends. The G8KA in his signature on the letter was his callsign.

  At 15:18 hrs GMT on 11 April he had just finished chatting with a fellow enthusiast in Australia, callsign VK2DA, when another station broke in saying there was an ‘AC3’ station on 14151 kilocycles making a distress call. Clarke could not resist returning to his radio set.

  As he honed in on the right frequency he could hear a conversation fading in and out. He could only just make out the callsign of one side of the conversation: AC3PT. He immediately looked it up in his amateur radio callbook. Establishing that AC3
was the country code for Sikkim, he saw that only one name was listed, PT Namgyal. The address: ‘The Palace, Gangtok, Sikkim’.

  Intrigued, Clarke refocused on the signal. Through the static, he strained to hear the high-pitched voice speaking accented but very good English at considerable speed. It was a weak signal, but the message was unmistakeable.

  AC3PT was saying that his country was being invaded and urgently requested that someone tell the ‘International League for the Rights of Man’.

  Then suddenly the signal faded to nothing. Wondering if AC3PT had moved to another frequency, Clarke called his Australian friend VK2DA back on the line. Both tried to re-establish contact with the signal, but to no avail.

  It was very strange. At 15:54 GMT it was just as if callsign AC3PT had vanished into thin air.

  Four and a half months later on 26 August, Oliver Forster, Acting British High Commissioner in New Delhi, put the finishing touches to a report on the events in Sikkim. The report had been urgently requested by the Foreign Secretary, Jim Callaghan, in London. With a state of Emergency still in place across India, it wasn’t exactly priority number one, but it did present an opportunity for Forster to demonstrate his ability to see through the confusing mire of politics on the subcontinent. He titled it ‘The Indian Takeover of Sikkim’.

  His closing paragraph read:

  All in all, the world may be a little worse off for the loss of a Shangrila, ruled benignly but in the interests of a small minority by a Buddhist prince with an American wife and a liking for alcohol. The Indian action may seem a little crude and Indian self-justification somewhat nauseating, but no British interests were involved, no deep moral issues were at stake and only one life was lost, probably accidentally. In the days of British India we would have done just the same, and frequently did with recalcitrant Maharajahs, though one may hope a little earlier and with fewer exclamations at our own virtues. In the event, we successfully kept out of the whole business and such support as the Chogyal has received in the correspondence columns of The Times has not been sufficient to offend Indian sensitivities.2