The Indian Equator

by Ian Strathcarron

  When we arrived, the usual immense turmoil and confusion of a great Indian station were in full blast. It was an immoderately long train, for all the natives of India were going by it somewhither, and the native officials were being pestered to frenzy by belated and anxious people. They didn’t know where our car was, and couldn’t remember having received any orders about it. Then Satan came running and said he had found a compartment with one shelf and one sofa unoccupied, and had made our beds and had stowed our baggage.

  The train started and Mr. Smythe’s opportunity was come. His bedding, on the upper shelf, at once changed places with the bedding - a stranger’s - that was occupying the lower sofa that was opposite to mine. About ten o’clock we stopped somewhere, and a large Englishman of official military bearing stepped in. We pretended to be asleep. The lamps were covered, but there was light enough for us to note his look of surprise. He stood there, grand and fine, peering down at Smythe, and wondering in silence at the situation. After a bit be said:

  ‘“Well!” And that was all.

  But that was enough. It was easy to understand. It meant: “This is extraordinary. This is high-handed. I haven’t had an experience like this before.”

  He sat down on his baggage, and for twenty minutes we watched him through our eyelashes, rocking and swaying there to the motion of the train. Then we came to a station, and he got up and went out, muttering: “I must find a lower berth, or wait over.” His servant came presently and carried away his things.

  Mr. Smythe’s sore place was healed, his hunger for revenge was satisfied. But the next day the English gentleman asked to travel with us, and he did. A pleasant man, an infantry colonel; and doesn’t know, yet, that Smythe robbed him of his berth, but thinks it was done by Satan without Smythe’s knowledge. He was assisted in gathering this impression.

  Livy too was enjoying the trip. She wrote to her youngest daughter Jean:

  We are so royally treated everywhere we go that I cannot begin to command the time to write to you beloved ones at home about it. On the trip the railway company put the fares at ½ rate and gave us the director’s carriage with a carriage attached for our servants. In the car were easy chairs & sofas & a good sized table &c &c.

  We left Calcutta at 4.30 and at 5.30 there was sent into our carriage tea & bread & butter & cake &c &c and servants to serve us who remained standing behind our table until we had finished our tea.

  At 8.30 we left this train and got into a boat to cross a river. The boat belongs to the same people. We were to be on the boat for about an hour. How I do wish you could have seen the pictures that presented themselves to us there. Natives in all the brilliant and pink dress costumes one could imagine, standing about the station and all the way down to the boat. On the boat was beautifully decorated and spread dinner table to receive us, where, as the guests of the president of the railroad we dined with him most sumptuously.

  ***

  The Darjeeling Mail leaves Calcutta at 10 p.m. every night and terminates at New Jalpaiguri, or NJP, at 8 a.m. the following morning. It is one of the best trains in India, refurbished and with crisp sheets and pillowcases and thick blankets in the two-tier second-class sleeper. One would hope that the Darjeeling Mail would tie in with the toy train so that one steps off one and onto another, but no. The toy train should leave from another station, Siliguri, a few miles away, but doesn’t. It should leave after 8 a.m. to enable Darjeeling-bound passengers to transfer, but is scheduled to leave at 7 a.m. - and then doesn’t leave there then anyway. It is one’s first experience of Darjeeling’s current turmoil, man-made and sorrowful. Instead of taking the toy train from Siliguri one now has to take a shared jeep up the mountain, bouncing and banging over a terrible road on a journey that leaves one as uncharmed as the toy train would have left one charmed.

  Before re-joining Mark Twain for a stiff recoverer at the bar at the charming Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling, where he stayed in one its early incarnations, your indulgence please for a quick look at why Darjeeling is going to the dogs.

  ***

  As we have been following Twain’s Grand Tour around India the political situation has been as stable for us now as it was for him then. India then had to contend with rule by the Raj but he was there at a peaceful point midway between the two great revolts, the Sepoy Uprising of 1857 and the post-World War 2 Gandhian Uprising that led to Independence in 1947. India now has to contend with rule by a particularly vile set of embezzling politicians, but if it is a scamocracy - as the equally corrupt Indian media insists on calling it - it is also a democracy in rude health.

  The exception to this rule now is in the area around Darjeeling which is seeking its own independence, not from India but from the state of West Bengal. Calling itself Gorkhaland to reflect the indigenous Nepalese Gurkha population and lying across the ridges and valleys of the Himalayan foothills, this famously beautiful area has been in turmoil - and a downward spiral - since 1986. What once proudly hailed itself the Queen of the Hills is now an unplanned, overgrown, shabby, ugly, poor and edgy spread of fear and doom. The tourists have mostly disappeared, frightened off by the uncertainty of the transport strikes and the crumbling infrastructure, taking their tourism to more welcoming and accommodating Himalayan destinations.

  How did it come to this? In 1828 two British officers from the East India Company, surveying the uninhabited area with Gurkha guides, saw the Dorje Ling Buddhist monastery and decided to recommend the area for a sanatorium and military outpost. The land was nominally under the control of the King of Sikkim and a land-lease deal between him and the East India Company was soon arranged. By 1857, when control of India passed from the East India Company to the Raj, Darjeeling was a thriving town of 10,000 souls, mostly Gurkhas from Nepal brought in to man the new tea plantations and build the Scottish Highland-style colonial houses. Such was the new resort’s popularity as a hill station from which to escape the Calcutta summer that twenty years later the British bought the Maharaja of Cooch Behar’s summer palace to use as a Governor’s House and the Governors-General in effect ruled India from Darjeeling from June to September for the next thirty five years, until the government moved to Delhi. By the time of Twain’s off-season visit from 15 to 17 February 1896, Darjeeling was near its peak of prettiness and pleasantness and it was as a healing resort and summer hill station in spectacular yet reachable Himalayan surroundings that over the next fifty years its reputation was established. The fact that the best tea in the world was grown on nearby plantations did its reputation no harm either.

  The cause of the rot was two bungled attempts by the British to partition Bengal, firstly in 1905 and secondly at Partition in 1947. The northeast of India is now a hotchpotch of states and territories: Assam, Arunachal Pradesh, Nagaland,[58] Manipur, Mizoram, Tripura and Meghalaya. (Sikkim, half-encircled by the Chinese in occupied Tibet, was its own kingdom until 1975, when it asked to be joined to India as its own state.) None of these states or territories has any greater connection to West Bengal than Darjeeling, whether historically, tribally, racially, linguistically, religiously, culturally or commonsensically. As a result there are now over forty separatist movements in the northeastern areas. West Bengali propaganda suggests that some or all of them are sponsored by mischief-making, neighboring China, a theory discounted by well-informed foreign observers. Of these movements the one based in Darjeeling for an independent Gorkhaland is the most conspicuous because it is the best known, and up to now most visited, by the outside world.

  You can see the Gurkhas’ point. Darjeeling is now, just as it always has been, a Nepalese town on Indian land. In the British era that wasn’t important as Darjeeling was a small resort of only 35,000 at Independence and the Gurkhas and the British enjoyed mutual admiration and shared blood spilled in battle. Now under Bengali rule the Gurkhas are treated as Nepalese usurpers using up valuable Indian land. More to the point the Gurkhas look enviously at Si
kkim just to the north: a separate state for separate people with allegiance directly to Delhi and the recipient of a substantial amount of Delhi largesse as well.

  We will return to Twain’s time here soon but let’s see why his trip cannot be repeated today, why Darjeeling has slid down the proverbial mountain since the glory days of pre-Independence - and why matters will only become worse due to the lack of worldly-wisdom of the sinister separatist movement, the Gorkha Janmukti Morcha or GJM, who have taken a wonderful cause and somehow managed to alienate everyone who could help them achieve it.

  Their first mistake was to take their example from Mahatma Gandhi and not, talking Gurkhas, from Joanna Lumley.[59] Gandhism led to Indian Independence through a policy of non-violence and non-co-operation. The GJM’s policy of non-co-operation with West Bengal takes no account of the external circumstances that made Gandhism such a potent force. Britain had just finished an exhausting war and was tired of conflict - and tired of exchequer. India was a massive administrative burden and to restore it to its pre-war honey-pot status would be an enormous and unpopular undertaking. Furthermore, every Briton knew that India had played a gallant part in the Allied victory and the nation’s sympathy was if not with Gandhi, certainly not against him. There was yet something bigger if less tangible afoot: a post-war change of the world order was in the air, a time for the United Nations made up of independent nations. India and its partition were ideas whose time had come; the sense of inevitability made its achievement not so much “if” but “when”.

  The GJM are trying to apply this model to their dispute with West Bengal but cannot see that all the roles are reversed. Britain is small, India is huge; West Bengal is large, Gorkhaland is tiny. Britain was tired of dispute, India was in the mood for more; West Bengal is indifferent, Gorkhaland is desperate. Britain was broke, India could live on nothing; India is booming, Gorkhaland is throwing itself into poverty. Britain and India had emotional, institutional and military ties to each other: they cared for each other - personally - underneath the dispute; West Bengal couldn’t care less if the foreigners in Gorkhaland self-destruct or not, in fact rather hopes for it sooner than later. There is no sense of inevitability, no “if” nor “when”.

  Then there is one further GJM variation on the Gandhi example of non-violence and non-co-operation. Gandhi would never use violence against his own people, whereas the GJM have terrorized the Gurkha opposition out of existence. The opposition leader was assassinated in May 2009, his throat cut by a Gurkha dagger at a public rally in the centre of town. One wanders around the back alleys and sees burned out houses, including the Tourist Office. People one meets as a travel writer - taxi drivers, hoteliers, shopkeepers, teachers, tour guides, librarians - are frightened into being seen to support the GJM; all of them support independence, far from all of them support the GJM’s tactics.

  Gandhi’s non-co-operation was against the British not against his own people. Gorkhaland’s only three businesses, tourism, tea and teaching, have been particular targets of the GJM. The endless and random strikes cut access to and from Darjeeling. The last one lasted for ten days and trekkers returning to base found they couldn’t leave. Meanwhile word has spread around the travelers’ forums and tourist operators: give Darjeeling a miss. The next target is the tea plantations, the area’s biggest employers: the first flush crop is the most valuable and they’ve just been told it can’t be transported. The new school term starts late February; students come from afar but now have to sit in untaught classrooms.

  There are endless other stupidities: a mobile phone ban on under eighteens; result: teenage uproar, Gandhian style non-co-operation and a swift reversal. A six-month alcohol ban because alcohol taxes were going to West Bengal; result: disaster for the legal wine and beer shops, an instant black market for the racketeers and no drinker deprived. A decree that all cars should have Gorkhaland number plates; result: no one could drive in West Bengal so they had to have two number plates; result: another rebounded brainwave. The claiming of Gorkhaland’s boundaries not just for the foothills but also for pockets of land in the plains; result: an ideal excuse for West Bengali ridicule. The latest nonsense is a teaching ban; it’s too soon to know the result but one wonders how many feet these people think they have in which to shoot themselves.

  So one sees all this, sees the streets full of unemployed young men, sees the fear in people’s eyes and thinks: why? Does the end justify the means - the rationale behind every dictatorship’s hatred for humanity? One concludes that this nascent Pol Pot-ism is just plain stupid then one hears more. The policy of non-co-operation with West Bengal goes further than the symbolic. The world famous toy train can only complete the last section of its journey because of a landslide down-line three years ago. The toy train experience, as taken by the Twain party on 15 February, is a World Heritage Site and the West Bengal government and Indian Army have proposed clearing the landslide; the GJM has refused because it means taking West Bengal money. The road up to Darjeeling is in terrible condition and the road from Darjeeling to Tiger Hill is even worse, and will not be passable after this year’s monsoon. There is a West Bengal budget to maintain the roads but the budget remains unsullied by GJM hands. The phone lines to the plains are too old to support broadband but upgrading would mean taking Indian technology so businesses and visitors cannot communicate commercially with the outside world. Then one thinks: this is something beyond stupidity, this is purity and thus rather admirable... and then one thinks again of Pol Pot and the vanity of purity. As my contact at the American Consulate in Calcutta said, the movement is run on a mixture of emotion and amateurism, a dangerous combination.

  ***

  So, back to join Mark Twain at the bar at the Windamere, or Ada Villa as it was then. He tells me he had a very different trip to our harrowing four-hour bone-shaker through the potholes in a shared jeep.

  We changed from the regular train to one that skimmed along within a foot of the ground and seemed to be going fifty miles an hour when they were really making about twenty. Each car had seating capacity for half-a-dozen persons; and one was substantially out of doors, and could see everywhere, and get all the breeze, and be luxuriously comfortable. It was not a pleasure excursion in name only, but in fact.

  After a while they stopped at a little wooden coop of a station just within the curtain of the somber jungle, a place with a deep and dense forest of great trees and scrub and vines all about it. The royal Bengal tiger is in great force there, and is very bold and unconventional. From this lonely little station a message once went to the railway manager in Calcutta: “Tiger eating station-master on front porch; telegraph instructions.”

  It was there that I had my first tiger hunt. I killed thirteen. We were presently away again, and the train began to climb the mountains. In one place seven wild elephants crossed the track, but two of them got away before I could overtake them. The railway journey up the mountain is forty miles, and it takes eight hours to make it. It is so wild and interesting and exciting and enchanting that it ought to take a week. As for the vegetation, it is a museum. The jungle seemed to contain samples of every rare and curious tree and bush that we had ever seen or heard of. It is from that museum, I think, that the globe must have been supplied with the trees and vines and shrubs that it holds precious.

  The road is infinitely and charmingly crooked. It goes winding in and out under lofty cliffs that are smothered in vines and foliage, and around the edges of bottomless chasms; and all the way one glides by files of picturesque natives, some carrying burdens up, others going down from their work in the tea-gardens.

  At an elevation of 6,000 feet we entered a thick cloud, and it shut out the world and kept it shut out. We climbed 1,000 feet higher, then began to descend, and presently got down to Darjeeling, which is 6,000 feet above the level of the Plains.

  He is no less enthusiastic about the local people.

  We had passed many
a mountain village on the way up, and seen some new kinds of natives, among them many samples of the fighting Ghurkas. They are not large men, but they are strong and resolute. There are no better soldiers among Britain’s native troops. And we had passed shoals of their women climbing the forty miles of steep road from the valley to their mountain homes, with tall baskets on their backs hitched to their foreheads by a band, and containing a freightage weighing - I will not say how many hundreds of pounds, for the sum is unbelievable.

  These women porters[60] one can still see today using exactly the same carrying techniques as they did then. One whisked my suitcase out of the back of the jeep and ignoring the case’s four wheels threw it over her shoulders, tied a haystack knot around its middle and attached the band Twain mentioned to her forehead. I know it was just over 55 pounds as I’d had to decant some books from my checked into my carry-on at the airport in Bombay. She then sherpa-ed up the steep hill alleys to the Windamere with your correspondent puffing and panting behind wheeling his distinctly light-weight carry-on and feeling distinctly ungallant.

  Twain had a more exotic and unusual ride up to the hotel: “At the railway station you find plenty of cab-substitutes - open coffins, in which you sit, and are then borne on men’s shoulders up the steep roads into the town.” At the jeep stop there are now dozens of real cabs, little Japanese microbuses, so many dozen that they have jammed up the only road so that it is quicker to pant-trot along behind the mountain goat porters.

  The railway station is at the lower level of the town and the hotels, clubs, smarter shops, temples and the town square are high up on the ridge. Mark Twain’s party and their open coffin made the climb up the steep lanes and “Up there we found a fairly comfortable place, the property of an indiscriminate and incoherent landlord, who looks after nothing, but leaves everything to his army of Indian servants. No, he does look after the bill - to be just to him - and the tourist cannot do better than follow his example. I was told by a resident that the summit of Kinchinjunga is often hidden in the clouds, and that sometimes a tourist has waited twenty-two days and then been obliged to go away without a sight of it. And yet went not disappointed; for when he got his hotel bill he recognized that he was now seeing the highest thing in the Himalayas.”