by Andrew Duff
I do not know how the Prince found out that I was back at the Windamere Hotel. This time I was sipping tea alone and unesthetically munching a cookie when he entered the chintz-curtained parlor. I looked up, startled, and could think of nothing to say. Through the silence, I could hear myself chewing with embarrassing loudness. My teeth kept thudding in what sounded like a deafening ‘boom-boom.’
The Prince, an honorary officer in a Gurkha regiment, had come from Gangtok to attend a military affair. He invited me to a dance that evening at the private Gymkhana Club. He was in a gay mood that night . . . He murmured that someday we would be waltzing together in Vienna.13
During that first night of dancing Thondup asked Hope if she would consider marrying him. The young American, still a few days short of her 21st birthday, was bowled over. It was not quite a marriage proposal – but it was close.
Within days Thondup had whisked her up to Gangtok. Hope immediately fell in love with the palace. The centrepiece of the building was now an annexe-type extension, ‘a cheerful, white-walled room with a curved bay window and a fireplace . . . furnished in a simple Sikkimese style. A continuous divan, made of a double-layer of almost rock-hard, coral-colour cushions, rings the walls. Small, brightly lacquered tables face the divan at intervals.’ In this room she sat and ate with the court of Sikkimese and Tibetan noblemen, many of them with perfect English, whose ‘weather-beaten faces made quite a contrast against their earrings – a turquoise stud in the right ear and as a symbol of their standing as prosperous citizens, a much fancier, long pendant in the left’. To Hope, they looked like ‘dashing pirates’. After dinner, the Prince brought out his record collection, playing Brahms’ Hungarian Dances and Bach’s Brandenburg Concertos as the court danced the night away.
She was only in Gangtok for six days, but it was enough to convince her that Sikkim was her destiny. She had stayed in the Royal Apartments; the romance of it all made her feel like she had entered some kind of fairy tale. But even during this short stay there were signs of some of the difficulties to come; at one party, she met the Crown Prince’s sister, Princess Coocoola. Their first encounter did not go according to plan. When Hope recalled the story in her autobiography nearly 30 years later, she painted a vivid picture of royal life at the time:
Maharaj Kumar’s [Thondup’s] family is being quite warm to me . . . Even his sister Coocoola is being sweet, although sometimes I get the feeling she is just being kind to me for her brother’s sake, that she too thinks I’m a beatnik eccentric, possibly an adventurer. I’m in awe of her for several reasons; first of all she is so strikingly beautiful and sophisticated that often I feel boorish. I had a disaster at the palace the very first time I went there. People had been drinking a lot. (People drink too much here – sycophants are always pushing drinks at Maharaj Kumar – ‘Just one more, Prince, just one more!’) Many toasts in my honor. Maharaj Kumar’s brother drinking champagne out of my scruffy shoe. Anyway as I don’t drink as a rule, I threw up in the hall as M. K. was getting out of the car to take me back to the guesthouse. Threw up! Can you believe it? And there was no one to apologize or explain to. I lay awake for hours in agony thinking of what I’d say the next morning. When I did meet Coocoola the next day, I shuffled out an apology. ‘Er, er, Your Highness,’ I blurted out, ‘I’m very sorry about last night.’ She took my hand, and, gazing straight in my eyes, said in this silky voice, ‘Oh, that’s all right, Hope La. You must treat this house as if it were your own.’ I didn’t know what to say – ‘I don’t throw up in my house, only in others’?’ It was mortifying. I couldn’t take my hand back.14
Despite Coocoola’s silky smooth reassurances, it was not an auspicious start.
For Thondup, a critical part of the attraction was the relationship that Hope struck up with his children from the moment she met them. Yangchen, the youngest, was only five years old. When Hope left Gangtok to return to Darjeeling at the end of the week, Thondup sent Yangchen and her nanny with her, making Hope guardian to his daughter and putting her and the nanny up in the room next to Hope. It was a remarkably bold move.
Hope would stay in Darjeeling for seven months in all, struggling into a suit of British tweed to go and collect Yangchen at the end of each day, as she tried to fit in with the smarter end of the Darjeeling set of ex-patriates who had ‘stayed on’ after independence.*
She lived for Thondup’s visits, listening awestruck as he talked of his plans for Sikkim. He was open, too, about the problems he faced, in particular from the Kazi and his wife in Kalimpong. He told her how the Kazini was writing articles wrongly portraying the situation in Sikkim as one of conflict between Thondup and his Nepali subjects. He laughingly told her that the Kazini had even described him as ‘the Lumumba of Sikkim’ and ‘a most despotic, miscreant ruler’ who physically persecuted the Nepalis.15
For Hope, the drama of the opposition to this handsome prince only made her adore him more. ‘It’s his foreground I love, his immediacy . . . It’s so extraordinary what this man can do. Sikkim is a flower of his care,’ she wrote. When the time came to return to Sarah Lawrence College, she ‘simply could not go. I felt that I just couldn’t, and soon afterward, the Prince and I became engaged.’16
He proposed at the Gymkhana Club, where they had first met. Thondup ‘was like Peter Pan with the lost boys. I felt like Wendy.’17
The engagement became a political issue as soon as it was announced. Earlier in the year, Thondup had introduced legislation entitled the ‘Sikkim Subjects Regulations’ aimed at clarifying who was and was not a Sikkim subject, restricting future Nepali immigration and making a further statement about Sikkim’s separate identity. The legislation also stressed that marriages between Bhutia-Lepchas and Nepali could undermine the solidarity of minorities. It was necessary, the regulations implied, to adhere to customary practice in order to ensure the survival of Sikkim’s fragile identity. By marrying an American, as Nari Rustomji put it, he ‘laid himself open to the charge of acting against his own widely proclaimed principles’. The Buddhist monastic community agreed, and laid down a condition for the marriage: if Hope was to marry Thondup, she must give up her American citizenship (something she did eventually do).
It was clear that the announcement of Thondup’s engagement to Hope Cooke was ill timed, to say the least. It gave the Kazini ammunition for her articles printed in the newspapers in Kalimpong; meanwhile it alienated elements of the Bhutia-Lepcha constituency, who felt that a marriage within the community would have sent a more appropriate message.
Hope, who had returned to America after becoming engaged to complete the final year of her university course, noticed that more sinister stories were emerging in the newspapers in the US and in India:
The New York Times notice said ‘Miss Hope Cooke, who has been in Darjeeling studying typing . . .’ No wonder people think I’m a CIA agent . . . Worse than the gossipy whore rumours are the political allegations. Although the CIA cover joke concerning my typing is funny, it isn’t completely a joke. Some people here would do anything to unseat the Maharaj Kumar politically – and if he goes, so does Sikkim. I love Maharaj Kumar and Sikkim too much to jeopardize them. I can just see them using me as a wedge to help destroy his rule. It’s a squeeze from all sides.18
If that was her view in 1961 (although the memoir was written with the benefit of hindsight in 1980, it is penned in an engaging present tense) it was remarkably prescient. Sikkim was about to be slowly squeezed.
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Hope Cooke had entered Thondup’s life at a critical juncture. His father, in his late sixties, was still theoretically the Chogyal, but in reality it was the younger man who had taken over in all but name: it was Thondup who was setting his mind towards the future of Sikkim, representing the country at an increasing number of conferences and events in a bid to further emphasise Sikkim’s independent status. He was under no illusions that he needed Indian support to defend his borders, but he feared the potential ‘Indianisation’ of Sikkim’s adm
inistration. During the 1950s he had become used to avuncular support and advice from his old friend Rustomji; the man who replaced him, Baleshwar Prasad, was not cut from the same cloth at all – he was much more in the mould of the new Indian bureaucracy, with no hint of the colonial past.
To emphasise Sikkim’s separate identity, he approached Delhi with a plan for Sikkimese soldiers to play a role in the defence effort, proposing that Sikkim should form an indigenous ‘Sikkim Militia’. Nehru initially approved the idea in principle, but in Sikkim, the Kazi, who was starting to organise a nascent political opposition, was implacably opposed to the idea.
Thondup considered the Kazi and his cronies a troublesome minority. In a letter to Rustomji, he wrote of his distrust of the Sikkim National Congress, the Kazi’s party:
They seem to be following the popular communist tactics of trying to make people believe they have a grievance and that they are martyrs with the object of breaking down the established system and social order. At the same time they are making out that Sikkim is on the verge of revolt and the Chinese are about to invade it.19
When Thondup refused to give the Kazi a position on the Executive Council in 1960 (despite his new party being the second largest party on the council), the Kazi immediately took a delegation to Delhi to convey all his grievances (there had also been arrests and suspensions of some of the Sikkimese politicians) to Prime Minister Nehru. Nehru promptly shelved the idea of the militia, although a few years later Thondup would gain approval for an increase in the size of the Sikkim Guards.
In fact, the attitude of many Indian politicians to Sikkim was changing. Nehru, somewhat chastened by the collapse of his dreams of a pan-Asian federation with the Chinese, was now coming under political pressure to tighten up security across the entire northern frontier of India. The ambiguity that had been left by the British in terms of the border with Tibet was no longer acceptable to Nehru’s increasingly hawkish advisers. The strategic importance of all three Himalayan states – Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal – was becoming all too apparent. Sikkim, as the smallest, was the most vulnerable of all.
Despite the opposition to the formation of a Sikkim Militia, Thondup was confident that as long as Nehru was in power, India would respect Sikkim’s position as an independent Buddhist monarchy. But he also recognised that there were some in India who saw Sikkim’s independence as a weak defensive link in the Himalayan chain and were advocating change, even incorporation. In that context, he was very conscious of the need for Sikkim to have friends outside the immediate realm of the Indian subcontinent. No harm, he felt, could come from his marriage into Hope Cooke’s family, with its distinguished American diplomatic connections.
So, in December 1961, he flew off to a Buddhist world conference in Cambodia and then on to Rome’s Flora Hotel, where he was to meet his future in-laws, Selden Chapin, now retired from the US Foreign Service with a heart condition, and various other Foreign Service colleagues of Chapin’s. Despite Thondup being more than an hour late for a Christmas Day lunch at Alfredo’s Restaurant, he charmed the assembled guests; for Uncle Selden, the fact that ‘he holds his own in every way – even in drinking martinis’ was quite enough evidence of his suitability.20
If winning over his future in-laws was simple, convincing the monastic community in Sikkim of the virtue of the marriage proved to be more of a challenge. After a meeting of the Bhutia-Lepcha monastic community, it was declared that the following year was to be ‘a black year’ and therefore the marriage must be postponed.
Somewhat unsettled, Cooke returned once again to New York to continue her studies.
Hope concluded her university course in New York at the end of the spring term of 1962. She had not enjoyed the intercontinental nature of the relationship, developing a deep belief that her new fiancé was still involved with other women.* When he flew to New York to reassure her, she was convinced that he had arranged the itinerary so that he could spend time with another woman in Paris on the way. Whether this was in her imagination or not hardly mattered.
For the rest of the year, the couple entered what she later called a ‘kaleidoscopic’ period of travel back and forth between New York and Sikkim. In the summer of 1962 she returned to Sikkim for a visit, along with a friend. At a party held at the palace, Martha Hamilton, now well settled into Gangtok life, watched as Hope demonstrated the latest trends and crazes from the USA:
We were asked to the palace. It was a party for Miss Hope Cooke and the younger officers – very few and great fun. They were teaching me to do the twist (at which Kumar and Kumari are very good) so I borrowed the record when I left at 12 (they all stayed till 2) . . . Kumari rang to say she’d bought it for me in Calcutta so I now have my daily exercise in the late evening doing the twist.21
But while Hope Cooke, Thondup and Coocoola twisted the night away, the tensions between India and China were about to reach fever pitch.
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The Dalai Lama’s flight to India had changed the relationship between India and China irrevocably. For India, and Nehru in particular, it was a wake-up call. The Himalayan states – Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal – all took on a new, more prominent role for Indian foreign policy-makers. Dealing with fully independent Nepal was a matter of diplomacy, but Sikkim and Bhutan were different. A Border Roads Organisation (BRO) was set up to make the two countries more accessible. Nehru also reiterated that India was the ‘only competent authority’ to deal with Bhutan’s – and by inference Sikkim’s – external relations.
China’s occupation of Tibet had also increased the USA’s interest in Himalayan politics. In Camp Hale, the reopened high-altitude training school for Tibetans in the Colorado mountains, there had been a subtle change in the programme. English lessons became mandatory and there was even an attempt to use Plato’s dialogues to instil a greater understanding of the value of political freedom in the young men.22 (It all had a faint echo of an earlier experiment in 1913, when the British had taken four Tibetan teenagers to Rugby School ‘to produce a type of man, fitted for some kind of useful public service in Tibet, who will be united to England by ties of affection and esteem’.)
The airdrops, of course, were both expensive and, after the U2 incident, increasingly impractical. The USA needed another solution. In late 1960 the Dalai Lama’s brother Gyalo Thondup (now a primary liaison with the resistance fighters and the growing numbers of refugees) proposed a new approach. Nestling up against the Tibetan border in the north of Nepal, not more than 100 miles from Sikkim, lay the small kingdom of Mustang. Gyalo Thondup and Gompo Tashi were convinced that it was the perfect base for operations.23 President Kennedy’s administration was quick to back the idea.
As word emerged of the new base, Tibetan refugees in Sikkim started to flood south to Darjeeling, from where they could proceed across the Nepali border to Mustang. It was another echo from the past: more than 120 years earlier Thondup’s great-grandfather had been faced with an exodus of his Lepcha subjects to Darjeeling in search of economic prosperity. Now the Tibetan refugees (who had become a valuable and cheap source of labour, working as gangs on Indian road projects) were treading the same path for different reasons.
In March 1961, Kennedy secretly sanctioned an initial drop of 29,000 lbs of arms and ammunition over the valley. Not everyone was in favour: it was not until two weeks after the drop that J. K. Galbraith, the newly appointed American Ambassador to India, was briefed on the wider Mustang operation. Galbraith ‘took an instant dislike for the whole thing’, which he called a ‘particularly insane exercise’.24 He was particularly wary of the potential negative effect on the USA’s relationship with the Indian government, which had not initially been informed. But Kennedy was insistent that support for the Mustang project must continue. He had seen ‘no evidence that Mao was relaxing his hostility to the US’ and saw it as a great example of the kind of unconventional warfare that could be developed as an alternative to a nuclear stand-off.25 Kennedy did, however, put a requirement on the project
that Indian approval should be sought for the supply drops. (The CIA interpreted this in its loosest form, taking it to mean that they merely had to make sure there was no explicit Indian opposition.) Galbraith’s opposition eased a little when a raiding party operating out of Mustang managed to capture 1,600 classified documents intact from a pouch carried by a Chinese patrol. The documents revealed some of the weaknesses in the Chinese control in Tibet, and in particular the low morale of many of the PLA soldiers serving there. It gave impetus for a second major arms drop in December, which included a helpful colour catalogue of the weaponry that the Mustang project might want to choose from.
The Chinese were well aware of – and concerned by – the newly established Tibetan rebel base in Mustang, but for them it was only part of a wider picture of rising tensions across the Himalayas. There were specific problems in two highly contested areas. One was Tawang, to the east of Bhutan, which had been the subject of the convoluted partial agreements made by Sir Henry McMahon in 1913–14, and had also been brought up in discussions about supply routes during the Second World War. The other was a vast barren tract of land, where China, India and Pakistan meet, known as the Aksai Chin. The latter was of such limited strategic interest to the Indians that it was not until the completion of a two-year Chinese road-building project in 1957 that the area had come to the attention of the Indian government – via notices in the Chinese press.26 For the Chinese, the Aksai Chin held significantly more strategic import, providing a potential solution to the endless problem of how to supply and resupply the troops in Tibet (from the outer reaches of Western China).