A Mountain in Tibet

by Charles Allen

  Sir, the Chinese lama who was sent with me sold me to a Jongpon as a slave and himself fled away with government instruments that were in his charge. On account of this, the journey proved a bad one. However, I, Kinthup, have prepared 500 logs according to the order of Captain Harman and am prepared to throw 50 logs per day into the Tsangpo river from Bipung in Pemako, from the 5th to the 15th of the tenth Tibetan month of the year called Chhuluk of the Tibetan calculation.

  After seeing his fellow-Sikkimese safely out of Lhasa Kinthup returned to his monastery, passing up a third chance of escape to serve his head lama for another nine months. When it was time for the logs to be launched he again asked for leave to go on pilgrimage – and was told by the head lama that his devotion to his faith had won him his freedom. He made his way back to his cave and in mid-November 1883, over a period of ten days, finally launched his logs. Having completed his self-appointed task Kinthup then set out to close the ‘missing link’. He very nearly succeeded. He walked south alongside the river for several days until he came to the land of the Simong Abors, where the men wore little else beside breech-cloths and always carried swords and bows. Here he found himself being increasingly harassed and threatened as he passed through their villages and finally, at the Padam Abor village of Damroh, he turned back. By his own calculations he was only thirty-five miles from British territory.

  After an absence of four years, of which two had been spent in servitude, Kinthup returned to Darjeeling – where he learned that his message had never reached its intended destination: his logs must have floated unnoticed through Assam to the sea. Nem Singh had died some two years earlier of malaria and had never read Kinthup’s letter. Captain Harman was also dead. He had kept watch on the Dihong river for many months, still hoping to catch sight of the logs, but in the end had abandoned the project and returned to his surveying in the mountains. In the summer of 1882 he had suffered severe exposure while mapping the 18,000-foot Donkya pass leading from Sikkim into Tibet and had been brought back to Darjeeling with frost-bitten feet and lungs. He was invalided out of the service and died in Florence in the following spring.

  With neither his former employer nor his friend alive to support him Kinthup found that his story carried little weight. However, this scarcely explains his appalling treatment at the hands of Harman’s successors. His ‘dogged obstinacy’ was noted with approval but the contents of his report, which was taken down and translated into English, were almost entirely disregarded – apart from the reference to the 150-foot waterfall, which matched public expectations. There was no expression of thanks for Kinthup’s exceptional devotion to what he saw as his duty and no offer of support or compensation for what he had endured.

  According to popular legend, Kinthup disappeared into the backstreets of Darjeeling, where he scraped together a living working as a tailor – a skill that he had acquired as a slave in Tibet. However, the records of the Survey show that Kinthup continued to work for them on a casual basis; a year after his return from Tibet he accompanied another of the Survey’s Pundits on a circuit of Bhutan – although still working as a servant. Six years later, in 1892, he was being employed as an expedition sirdar by Dr Waddell on his reconnaissance of Mount Kangchenjunga. Waddell’s vivid portrait of the Sikkimese suggests that Kinthup bore his disappointments lightly and was more than capable of looking after himself, He describes him as:

  a thick-set, active man with a look of dogged determination on his rugged, weather-beaten features. His deep-chested voice I have often heard calling clearly from a hill-top some miles away, like a ship’s captain in a storm. He has all the alertness of a mountaineer and with the strength of a lion he is a host in himself.

  If there was anyone in India of Kinthup’s generation who could match him for ‘dogged obstinacy’ it was a contemporary of his named Jack Needham. For a period both men were actually working towards the same goal at the same time, Kinthup from the north and Needham from the south – although it is unlikely that either knew of the other’s existence.

  Jack Needham was possibly the most remarkable and least rewarded of the many British officers who worked on the North-East Frontier during the British period. His record of twenty-three years’ unbroken service at Sadiya suggests either that he refused to accept any alternative posting or that there was a strong reluctance on the part of the Assam Government to promote him. Indeed, what evidence there is suggests that he was just the sort of unorthodox figure who most upset those in authority. He was difficult to handle, he quarrelled with his colleagues and would not put up with what he regarded as interference, but at the same time he clearly had a genius for establishing a rapport with tribal peoples – so much so that it was noted, against him, that he allowed himself to be ‘cheeked by the men and pulled about by the young women’. Above all it was said of him that ‘he had a dash’, an enthusiasm and an energy that he concentrated on one particular subject: ‘Needham’s eyes were constantly turned towards the north and he lost no chance of gleaning information on the unknown tract.’

  Needham came from one of the established Protestant families of Northern Ireland, where the export of younger sons of the gentry had long been a vital ingredient in the shaping of British India. He was a grandson of the 1st Earl of Kilmorey and the eldest of a family of fifteen, several of whom followed him to India. He began his career in the Bengal Police and his appointment as Assistant Political Officer at Sadiya started a tradition of police service in political posts that was unique to Assam.

  In 1884 Needham became the first British officer to enter Abor territory for thirty years. He was received by the villagers of Membu in a relaxed, if not entirely friendly, manner. Having learned to speak the Abor tongue fluently he was able to communicate on a very informal level with his hosts. ‘They could not understand why I had come up empty-handed,’ he wrote in a characteriscally unguarded report. ‘No amount of even legitimate excuses seemed to satisfy them, for they grumbled out, “Oh you are a pretty Saheb to come here in this manner”.’ Like Wilcox and Burlton sixty years earlier, Needham and a ‘private gentleman’ who had come with him were then forced to submit to a very public examination of their persons:

  Each and everything we wore was felt, and then we were asked to take off our things. We took off our coats and explained that we had got nothing on under our banians [loose cotton shirts], but until we had opened these also the gaping crowd were incredulous, and they appeared to disbelieve their eyesight, as they put their hands on our skins and felt our chests. Then we had to take off our boots and socks, as they declared we had not feet, and when we had done so, the girls got hold of our feet and petted them as an old maid would a friend’s pet lap dog. The women, I may here remark, are excessively rollicky and jolly, and the unmarried girls have apparently any amount of latitude given to them. They are utterly shameless.

  The report must have caused a few eyebrows to be raised in government circles since Needham had no qualms about writing in explicit terms about Abor sexual practices. He displayed the same frankness in his private life, living quite openly with a tribal girl from the attractive Miri river people in his bungalow in Sadiya. Half a century earlier this would have caused no comment but now, in the era of high Raj, any form of sexual alliance between the rulers and their subjects was frowned upon. Such liaisons, it was officially argued, could only demean the former in the eyes of the latter and so undermine the prestige of the master race. Needham thought otherwise; when asked by a local missionary to get rid of his bibi, as it was causing a scandal, he replied that he was damned if he would – and married her instead.

  Needham found much to admire in the Abors’ social code: ‘Wives are treated by their husbands with a consideration as marked as it is singular in so rude a race.’ Cases of adultery were rare, but where they did occur the punishments were discriminatory to say the least. Male adulterers had to pay a fine that varied from four to eight mithun or domesticated Indian bison ‘according to the nature of the case’, with
the aggrieved party opening proceedings by ‘going to the adulterer and giving him a severe crack on the head with the back of his dao.’ But if the woman was held to be partly to blame she suffered a penalty that was very clearly intended to fit the crime: ‘Viz stripped and tied up and, a chillie having been inserted into her vagina, she is kept tied up until she is almost hoarse from roaring on account of the pain it causes, and this is done in front of the whole village.’

  After a tribal dance in their honour in the evening Needham and his companion retired to their tent, both sleeping with revolvers under their pillows. The next morning they were summoned to a conference in the morang or tribal long-house, which Needham measured by pacing it out and found to be eighty yards long and ten wide, with twenty-four fireplaces laid out along the floor. Its side walls were crammed with hunting trophies and all down the centre were bamboo trays containing arms and cane armour of every description. When Needham protested about the heat and smoke from the fires and asked if they could gather under the shade of a tree instead he was met with a howl of protest and told that he would have to put up with it whether he liked it or not. So he sat it out and talked for the best part of a day, determined that nothing would prevent him from building up friendly relations with the Abors.

  Eventually a dialogue of sorts was re-established between the Abors and the Government, but it was not an easy one to maintain. The Abors had asked for wire to strengthen their cane bridges, but when Needham returned to Membu with the wire and an engineer to help install it the villagers refused to accept it. Subsequent visits only confirmed Needham’s fear that the tribe was ‘so excessively suspicious’ that the chances of a non-military expedition being allowed to explore up the Dihong were minimal.

  Needham’s hopes of leading a peaceful expedition through Abor country had come no nearer to fruition when, in December 1893, Padam Abors from Bomjur village raided a Miri settlement and made off with a number of captives. While negotiations were in progress for their release three sepoys from the military police were killed in an ambush. On Needham’s advice a punitive force of five hundred infantrymen and police was assembled, under the military command of a Captain Maxwell but with Needham as its political officer. It advanced on Bomjur village but, finding it to be deserted, moved against a neighbouring village, Dambuk, which was stormed and taken after fierce hand-to-hand fighting. Several other settlements in the vicinity were razed before Needham settled down to peace negotiations with local headmen.

  These talks convinced Needham that the real source of all the trouble among the Padam Abors was to be found some distance to the north at Damroh, the village where Kithup had been forced to turn back on his one-man expedition down the Tsangpo. If Damroh could be subdued then Needham believed that effective resistance among the Abors on the left bank of the Dihong would be ended for good. He telegraphed the Chief Commissioner of Assam for authority to proceed to Damroh, adding that if he would also give him permission to go on northwards from Damroh it would allow the question of the Tsangpo-Brahmaputra connection to be solved once and for all. The Chief Com missioner’s reply was brief and to the point: ‘Advance on Damroh but no further.’

  Because of a shortage of porters Needham and Maxwell decided to leave the bulk of their food and supplies behind, taking with them only enough food to last them eight days. These supplies, together with a small force of some sixty sepoys and camp followers, were left at the small Padam Abor village of Bordak, on the river bank not far above Pasighat.

  The column spent a week hacking its way through the jungle before it became obvious to his joint commanders that they were still nowhere near their goal. Then as the column was preparing to retire, runners arrived with the news that the supply depot at Bordak had been destroyed. Returning by forced marches with an advance party Needham found the camp completely gutted. There were twenty-seven dead bodies lying scattered over the site and a further nine were later recovered from the jungle. From a wounded dhobi who had managed to jump into the river Needham learned that a group of Abors had entered the camp pretending to be porters and at a given signal had drawn their daos and rushed the guard.

  The massacre at Bordak not only destroyed Jack Needham’s career but also his chances of further exploring Abor territory, for he was never again allowed to exercise any local initiative in his dealings with them. While he and Maxwell blamed each other, both were publicly censured by the Government of India, the one for failing to take elementary military precautions and the other for his ‘want of judgement and political foresight.’

  Apart from the ending of the annual tribute of posa, no action was taken against the perpetrators of the Bordak massacre; once again the Abors had got away with it. Jack Needham’s disappointment and bitterness are shown in a private letter sent to a cousin in England in 1895, a year after the massacre: ‘I told you in my last [letter] about Maxwell having received a brevet! Does not this show how poor wretched uncovenanted devils, like myself, are treated! Had I been a covenanted man I should have been made a CSI for the frontier work I have done since I came here long ago!’

  Despite the setback of the Bordak massacre, Needham still had hopes of leading an official expedition up the Dihong to Tibet. Throughout his second decade of frontier service he went on drawing up plans and lobbying for support and official sanction, but even the Royal Geographical Society was powerless in the face of the disapproval of the Government of India. Only the intervention of the Viceroy himself could change the situation.

  George Nathaniel Curzon was not yet forty when he was installed as India’s youngest and most dazzling Viceroy. Not for him the ‘sordid policy of self-effacement’; despite the handicap of spinal curvature, he had already built up an unrivalled knowledge of the countries bordering on British India, infuriating fellow MPS whenever the fate of some exotic country was debated in the House of Commons by announcing that he had ‘been there’. During five extended journeys through various parts of Asia – which included the tracking of the Oxus river to its source in the Pamirs – Curzon had acquired not only a passionate belief in Britain’s ‘sacred’ mission in the east but also a deep-rooted fear of the ‘Russian peril’. It was said of Curzon’s six years as Viceroy (1899–1905) that his ‘special obsession as to the advance of Russia in Central Asia marred his judgement.’ Nowhere was this obsession more obvious than in his aggressive dealings with Tibet, where the Viceroy’s unfounded fears of Russian involvement finally led to the dispatch of the Younghusband Mission to Tibet in 1903.

  The mission amounted to an armed invasion and as it fought its way through to Lhasa it brought fierce protests from many quarters. One of Curzon’s strongest critics was also one of his most ardent admirers, the Swedish explorer, Sven Hedin, who compared his action to the ‘victories’ of Cortez and Pizarro. Hedin was better placed than any to champion the Tibetan cause and he had no illusions as to what his stand might cost him: ‘I am quite prepared to lose 50 per cent of my English friends but I cannot help it,’ he wrote to the Viceroy. ‘I should regard myself as an ass and a poltroon if I remained silent when I can and must talk. War against Tibet? Why? The Tibetans have never asked for anything better than to be left alone.’ It was the first in a series of defiant gestures that would eventually turn nearly all Hedin’s friends in England against him.

  By occupying Lhasa the Younghusband Mission did indeed – as a member of the expedition put it – destroy the isolation of the one mystery that the nineteenth century had left to the twentieth to explore. But before the mystery could be explored any further Frank Younghusband had drawn up the Anglo-Tibetan Convention of 1904, which effectively put Tibet out of bounds to all the great powers except China. Its purpose was to ensure that Russia kept her nose out of Tibetan affairs, but its effect was once more to place Tibet off limits to explorers. However, Colonel Younghusband had with him a number of young army officers who were determined to make something of their privileged position in the heart of Tibet and he himself was anxious to give them as
much leeway for exploration as he could. As the British forces prepared to pull back to the Indian frontier he gave the go-ahead for three light expeditions, each of which would strike from Lhasa in different directions.

  The most important of these three expeditions was to head down the Tsangpo to Assam, and it was to be led by the most experienced of the three British officers involved, Captain C. H. D. Ryder, who five years earlier had already made an unsuccessful effort to approach the Tsangpo from China. In the event, his second attempt was also doomed to failure. Just as the three expeditions were preparing to set off, news was received in Lhasa of an attack on a mail party on the road back to Darjeeling. As a consequence Younghusband decided that it would be safer to combine the three lightly armed parties into one stronger expedition, which would follow the safest and best known of the three projected routes, the Tasam highway up the Tsangpo valley.

  His decision was a bitter blow both to Captain Ryder and to Lieutenant F. M. (‘Eric’) Bailey, who had hoped to travel from Lhasa to Peking. What made it all the harder to bear was Bailey’s discovery that it was not Tibetans but Indians who had ambushed the mail caravan. Visiting the scene of the attack he found the frozen corpses of the mules and their Tibetan drivers still lying where they had fallen. He examined the bodies and found that they had been killed not with Tibetan weapons but with modern rifles; the murders had been committed by frustrated soldiers from an Indian Army unit which had arrived too late to participate in the general looting. With this ugly little episode in an even uglier war the best chance of exploring the Tsangpo gorges from the Tibetan side was lost.