by Andrew Duff
Sikkim, he reflected, was history.
CHAPTER ONE
A British Legacy
1941–9
-1-
In late December 1941, 18-year-old Prince Palden Thondup Namgyal, second son of the Ninth Chogyal of Sikkim, returned to his family’s modest palace in Sikkim’s capital, Gangtok, with a spring in his step. Coming home to his family’s Himalayan kingdom always gave him a thrill, climbing steadily along the steep-sided valleys to the palace perched on a ridge above the tiny capital of Sikkim. But that December it felt particularly good to be back. Finally, after seven years at the Bishop Cotton School in Simla, he was free. He had enjoyed his time at the prestigious boarding school with its regimented life modelled on those in England; he had taken an active part in school life, showing academic promise and playing sports. But it had not all been easy. With his shy nature and slight stammer, he had been an easy target for the bullies. He had found it hard, too, not to fall under the shadow of his elder brother, Crown Prince Paljor, 18 months his senior. Now that Paljor was training with the Royal Indian Air Force, it was exciting to think that, at last, he might be able to carve his own path.
As he settled back into life in Gangtok, he started to think about what might come next. His teachers at Bishop Cotton had already helped him explore the possibility of studying science at Cambridge; perhaps, if the war eased, he might be able to travel in Europe or in the United States. If not, he could still travel across the mountain passes into Tibet, maybe visit the remote monastery on the Tibetan plateau where he had spent three years as a child living with his uncle, training as a Buddhist monk. He could even visit Lhasa, the Tibetan capital, where his mother’s family lived and where his younger sister had just got married. He could pay his respects to the six-year-old boy recently identified as the Dalai Lama, the spiritual head of his family’s Buddhist faith. But first he decided just to relax and enjoy feeling genuinely carefree for the first time in his life.
It was only days after arriving home that the telegram arrived. The news contained in it – that Paljor had been killed while serving with the Royal Indian Air Force – changed everything. Over the following few days the details of what had happened filtered up the official channels to the British political officer in Gangtok, Basil Gould, who relayed them immediately to the Palace. It had happened on 20 December, he told the grieving family. They could be proud of their son. Number 1 Squadron, based in Peshawar, had been training in Westland Lysanders as they prepared to transfer to Burma, where they would fight the expected Japanese advance. Paljor’s plane had crashed while coming in to land, bursting into flames on impact. The Crown Prince had been the Squadron’s first casualty.
Thondup watched as his father, Sir Tashi, now 48 years old, tried to cope with this latest family tragedy. Some believed the Namgyals were cursed: in the family’s 300-year history, the firstborn had rarely succeeded. A quarter of a century earlier, in 1914, Sir Tashi himself had been thrust unwittingly into the position of Chogyal after the untimely death of his own brother. Now, as he helped make the preparations for Paljor’s funeral, Thondup knew the wheel had turned once more.
His life, he realised, was no longer his own.
The immediate problem facing Sir Tashi Namgyal, the Chogyal of Sikkim, was how to prepare Thondup for the role that he knew would now define his young son’s life. He remembered how hard he had found it when he had been in the same situation. Sikkim was a more stable place now than it had been then; nevertheless, he wanted to give Thondup the best possible chance of success. As usual in matters of state, he turned to Basil Gould, the Political Officer.
Gould was one of a remarkable group of no more than a few dozen men, known collectively as the ‘Frontier Cadre’*, who had run the operations of the Empire in this region since an official British Residency had been established in Gangtok in 1890. By 1941 he was already in his late fifties and had known Tashi Namgyal for nearly three decades; he had briefly been political officer in Sikkim in 1913, when he had been the leader of an extraordinary social experiment, taking four sons of Tibetan nobles to England to be educated at Rugby School. The project had not been a success (one of the boys had died of malaria and the careers of the other three were somewhat blighted by their involvement in the project when they returned to Tibet), but it was an indication of the underlying attitude of the British in the region. The Residency in Gangtok acted as the political officer’s base, but it was the desire to open trade relations with and gain political influence in Tibet that was the primary reason behind Britain’s presence in the Himalayas.
Nevertheless, successive British political officers had got to know the Namgyals well. Gould, who had been appointed to Gangtok as political officer for a second time in 1935, had developed a particularly close relationship with the children. Shortly before Gould’s return, relations between Sir Tashi and his wife had reached breaking point; she had recently returned from a visit to Tibet pregnant with the child of a monk.† It had fallen to Gould to shield the children from the fallout of the scandal. He had done so by taking them to the sea for the first time and allowing them to travel with him on official journeys to Bhutan, becoming something akin to an uncle to them. ‘I remember a hot afternoon,’ he wrote later in his memoirs, ‘when, bumping along a dusty track on the Bhutan border in a motor lorry, we passed the time singing “Ten Green Bottles”, a hymn, “The Grand Old Duke of York” and a carol or two.’1
Gould felt qualified, therefore, to help Tashi, who now wore curious round, tinted glasses on account of his myopia, to decide on the best route for Thondup’s future. The aim of the political officer in an Indian state, one of his colleagues had once said, was to be ‘the Whisper behind the Throne, but never for an instant the Throne itself’. Gould agreed wholeheartedly: he believed his job to be ‘to interfere as little as possible, but to be able to give sensible advice if it was asked for’. The present situation was one in which he felt he could offer such sensible advice. Thondup, he suggested to Sir Tashi, was certainly an able boy, but he might benefit from attending the Indian Civil Service administrative course. It just so happened, Gould reminded Sir Tashi, that Thondup’s cousin Jigme Dorji, a member of the family who held the hereditary post of prime minister in neighbouring Bhutan, was due to attend the course starting in February.
It seemed too good an opportunity to miss.
A few weeks later Thondup arrived at the ICS school in Dehradun. Renowned as the training ground for aspirant Indian bureaucrats with an eye on the day the British would finally hand over the reins of the administration of their country, the school had also become popular with rulers of India’s Princely States keen to ensure their children learnt the ‘fundamentals of administration’.2
The tented camp, situated in the Doon Valley not more than a couple of hundred miles from Bishop Cotton in Simla that he had left only a few weeks earlier, was very different from the spires of Cambridge that Thondup had been hoping to attend. There was one consolation: his cousin Jigme Dorji would be on the course with him. Thondup loved Jigme, or ‘Jigs’ as he had been known at Bishop Cotton, where he had excelled, earning a place as a member of the school’s hallowed ‘Spartan’ club.
As the two settled down in the mess tent for lunch on the first day, they found themselves sitting next to a young Indian diplomat, Nari Rustomji. Rustomji, like Thondup and Jigme, had a strong affinity for the British Indian heritage. A ramshackle young man with an innate sense of fun and a deep love for European culture, Rustomji had been educated at Bedford School in England, and then at Cambridge, before passing the ICS exams in London. ‘My early influences were Plato and Beethoven,’ he wrote later. ‘It was through Beethoven, I think, that I was prepared, made ripe, for receiving the Compassionate Buddha’s message.’3
The three men immediately struck up a friendship. Jigme, Rustomji noticed immediately, was an ‘out-and-out extrovert’, but it was the young Crown Prince of Sikkim to whom he felt more ‘temperamentally akin’. For Rustomji,
Thondup appeared an endearingly ‘shy, timorous fawn, lost and lonely in the vast Indian subcontinent’;4 for Thondup, Rustomji’s love of antics and buffoonery was just what he needed. The two soon became firm friends. They spent most of the course riding and listening to Mozart and Beethoven on Rustomji’s old gramophone. Thondup was, Rustomji recalled, ‘quickly infected by my passion for music . . . It was not long before he asked me to select a nucleus for a collection of classical records of his own.’ In the evenings Thondup would regale Rustomji with tales of Sikkim’s colourful history; Rustomji in turn would conjure up the dreaming spires of his years as a Classical scholar at Christ’s College, Cambridge. Together they constructed a life of ‘little extravagances’ (‘I confess,’ Rustomji later wrote, ‘it used to give me quite a thrill to smoke his gold-tipped State Express 999’s’), as they made their way through the course. It was the start of a close 30-year friendship during which Thondup would often turn to ‘Uncle Rusty’ (so-called because he was the older of the pair by a year) for advice and guidance.
During the summer break of 1942 the Prince invited Rustomji back up to Sikkim. They took the train to Siliguri, where Thondup, bursting with pride, picked up his gleaming new Sunbeam Talbot and drove his friend through the foothills of Sikkim to Gangtok. Rustomji was immediately struck by the unpretentious lifestyle of the Palace, where the two men listened to music, read, wrote letters and relaxed. No less striking were Thondup’s two beautiful and improbably nicknamed younger sisters, Coocoola and Kula, who ‘captured every heart, mine included’.
But it was the wilderness of Sikkim’s peaks that Rustomji loved most. As the pair trekked through deep valleys and up steep mountains, there was, he noted, ‘none of the pomp and fanfare of the “democratic” leaders of today. We slept in bamboo shacks hastily erected within minutes of our arrival at our halting-place and ate the homely fare provided by the villagers amongst whom we happened to be travelling.’
Rustomji was utterly captivated by the simple lifestyle of the people of Sikkim and the Tibetan traders who passed through on ‘gaily decorated mules with tinkling bells’ heading up into the mountains with their goods bound for Lhasa. The troubles of the European war seemed a distant nightmare.
At the end of the summer the two returned to continue their course, this time to an army base in Lahore. Word had got around the city about the handsome ‘young Sikkim’ who ‘was considered, in the matrimonial market, to be quite a catch’. Rustomji noticed that all too frequently ‘objects of delight were put in his way, with studied casualness, and he had to tread warily to steer clear of entanglement’.5
At the end of the course the two bid each other a sad farewell. Twelve years would pass before Rustomji would be reunited with Thondup, serving as dewan (prime minister) in the tiny Himalayan kingdom at Thondup’s request; by that time, Sikkim would be in very different circumstances – the British would be gone, replaced by representatives of a very different India; and there would be a communist regime on Sikkim’s doorstep.
But in 1942, as Rustomji headed for a posting in Assam,* Thondup returned to Gangtok a more confident young man.
-2-
Life for Sikkim’s royal family in Gangtok in the 1940s was, as Italian writer Fosco Maraini† put it, something of a ‘fairy tale’.
The place had an otherworldliness that captivated and entranced the ‘travellers, mountaineers, geologists and plant-hunters’ – Americans, British, Italians, German and French – who made their way up to the Sikkimese capital. Even if they were just passing through, perhaps heading to Tibet via the neighbouring Chumbi Valley (at that time the preferred approach to Mount Everest), they invariably dined at the Palace with the Namgyals. It was hard not to be fascinated by the combination of a simple lifestyle and complex religious beliefs set against the awe-inspiring beauty of the landscape.
Most could not help noticing the inherent contrasts and contradictions in Sikkim. ‘In this Himalayan landscape, with its dizzy extremes and excesses,’ Maraini wrote, ‘it is appropriate that by way of contrast there should be a toy capital, with a toy bazaar, toy gardens and toy houses, set among tree-ferns and wild orchids on a hillside among the clouds.’6
Gangtok in 1942 was, indeed, still tiny, a suitable capital for a miniature kingdom. The town, nestled into a hillside against a majestic landscape, consisted of not much more than a few hundred buildings and a bazaar strung out across one side of a wooded valley. A smattering of houses crept up to a low-slung ridge that stretched up towards the mountains on one side and ended in a promontory on the other, beyond which the ridge fell away steeply.
The highest building on the mountainside, set back in the trees looking down over the ridge and the promontory, was the British political officer’s Residency, deliberately emphasising the pecking order in the Kingdom over which the British had established a loose protectorate. The role of political officer in Sikkim was a complex one (the officer was responsible for relations with Tibet and Bhutan as well as Sikkim), but it was never taxing. As a result, it was highly sought after by a certain type of British administrator. Sikkim itself was the attraction: one PO, Arthur Hopkinson, thought the Kingdom ‘altogether too good to be true, with its lovely country, its charming people, including such a charming family at the palace . . . such friendly relations between the communities.’7
But it was the Residency – and its garden in particular (recognised as one of the finest in British India) – that made the posting so unique. The brick-built house, constructed in the 1890s by local labourers under the guidance of Sikkim’s first political officer, looked as if it could have been transported to Sikkim from England’s Home Counties. To the political officers, it was a ‘divine place . . . beautifully furnished, terraced garden, full of lovely trees, trim beds, all sorts of roses, hydrangeas, a wild cherry in blossom . . . ponds with fountains and goldfish, a lovely aviary full of shrubs, a peculiar brace of geese, Dalai Lama birds, grouse, partridges, pheasants.’8 By the early 1940s it was even possible to get BBC broadcasts in the isolated Residency, when they weren’t ‘distorted by atmospherics’.9
Further down the ridge, on the promontory below the Residency, sat the ‘small and rather simple’ Royal Palace of the Namgyals. Constructed in the 1920s, it was, at first glance, no less ‘a corner of old England’, with its ‘fine great timber beams, panelled walls, period furniture and lovely garden stocked with the homely flowers of England’. By contrast, the rooms inside were full of Buddhist decoration. The walls of the formal entertaining rooms downstairs were lined with vivid Tibetan tangkas from Kham in Eastern Tibet (the Namgyals had migrated to Sikkim in the 13th century and were established as rulers in the 1640s). The floors were covered with a large beige carpet, 30 by 35 feet and bearing the Namgyal arms, in the centre of which stood an ‘exquisite . . . small, round white lacquer table, supported by three finely carved male skeletons, thirty inches high’.10 Even in this Himalayan Buddhist atmosphere, however, British influence had deeply permeated. Life in the Palace was run ‘on European lines – morning tea in bed, with breakfast, lunch and dinner as family meals in the dining room . . . Hot scones, strawberries and cream, Cheddar cheese, apple sauce and the illusion was complete.’11
By 1942, this curious mix of Tibetan and British influences was considered perfectly normal. During his reign Thondup’s father, Sir Tashi, had developed into the perfect example of a submissive British Indian ruler, presiding over a gradual blurring of the lines between his own position and that of the British political officer. The British had maintained a constant presence in Sikkim since 1890 and increased cooperation had evolved naturally between two parties whose interests had unexpectedly converged. The British needed an acquiescent ruler in this vital part of the Himalayas; Tashi had learnt to value the protective cover and stability that the British presence provided. Successive political officers treated the Namgyals with respect and affection, while Tashi and his family in turn admired (and adopted) many elements of the British imperial system, and
the lifestyle that went with it. The king’s birthday was celebrated each year; the dead from the Great War were commemorated with two minutes’ silence; a large hall had been built to commemorate the first British political officer in the region. Just as in other Indian Princely States, Sir Tashi was showered with honours to bring him further into the fold. In 1918, he was made a Commander of the Indian Empire; in 1923, he was elevated to a Knight Commander. On the eve of the Second World War he received the Star of India, the highest honour available in the Indian imperial honours system. Relations between the Palace and the Residency were warm, friendly and civilised. Tashi positively encouraged Thondup and his brothers and sisters to develop an understanding of the British way of life to complement their Buddhist heritage. There was an English governess; they all attended British-run boarding schools; Thondup and his sisters had even attended a college run by Jesuits in the late 1920s. ‘Their parents took the view,’ Gould wrote in his memoirs, ‘that if they went to chapel services at school they would be all the better Buddhists.’
It was a satisfactory arrangement for all concerned and, for the British political officers, represented the very best of what could be achieved through laissez-faire rule. Each year the incumbent PO would file a short report on the progress in the kingdom. It always contained the same short paragraph. The system of governance in Sikkim, the report stated with some admiration, was ‘based on the good old patriarchal monarchy of ancient days of oriental civilisation where subjects stand as children of the Ruler; and with the simple hill people unaffected by the virus of democracy and elections, the system works excellently’.12