So Close to Heaven

by Barbara Crossette

  The tale of Sikkimese victimization and helplessness that the gentleman told me in his formal parlor in Gangtok, so at variance with India’s official version of events, was familiar. Indeed, it was fresh in my mind, because a day or two earlier I had found, prominently displayed in a Gangtok bookshop, a copy of a book difficult to obtain in India, Smash and Grab: The Annexation of Sikkim. This riveting blend of chronology and personal observation was written a decade after the collapse of independent Sikkim by the distinguished Calcutta journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, who had reported on the kingdom for more than a decade and was, in the end, a friend of the last chogyal. Smash and Grab, a lot of it read by candlelight in my room at the old Nor-khill Hotel during an electrical blackout, brought alive the miserable story of a king doomed by treachery and finally cancer, yet trailed to the end of his days by graceless Indian intelligence agents. Still, the book hadn’t quite prepared me for the raw bitterness that welled up in the dark parlor of the aristocratic family whose son I was hearing out. Before I left, the gentleman walked around the room pointing out family portraits, some in ornate frames. The pictures also spoke poignantly of a lost world, but in those frames the past was safe and everyone smiled.

  Other Sikkimese told me similar stories of a people deceived and a country stolen. They pointed to silent, lingering signs of protest: the continuing use of the old Sikkimese coat of arms on the buildings of what is now an Indian state, the pilgrimages to the memorial chorten of the last chogyal, where foreigners cannot go. Not all the disaffected are Buddhists, and not all the complainants want to see a return of the monarchy. Over the years since the debacle of 1973–75, the criticisms of Indian rule have polarized around concerns that too many people have been pouring in from the overpopulated Gangetic plain and Nepal, both densely populated and strained in resources. Marwaris, Kashmiris, and other high-intensity Indian merchants (present in smaller numbers even a century ago) had muscled out local businesses, people told me. Aid was spawning corruption of unprecedented proportions. In many quarters there was the half-assertion, half-question: Why, when everyone had been so much poorer before the annexation, did the quality of life seem better? Those days are remembered as a bucolic time when Gangtok’s few streets weren’t choked with jeeps and concrete monstrosities did not spring up at every turn to mar the soul-healing, spirit-lifting mountain views.

  One morning on the way to Rumtek monastery—a roller-coaster trip from one side of the Ranipool River valley to the heights on the opposite bank—I stopped to pick up a well-dressed woman walking to work in some haste. She had missed a local jitney and was anxiously trying to flag down another ride as she struggled along in shoes not made for trekking. She wore a sari, and the red dot of a bindi on her forehead indicated she was a Hindu. “Nepali,” said the taxi driver with the certainty of taxi drivers everywhere as we slowed to give her a lift. She was a minor civil servant, she said in the course of a conversation in which she lamented the overbuilding of Gangtok and the hills around it as Indian development money for building projects and a few small agriculture-based industries poured in to keep the restive Sikkimese reasonably happy. By 1990, India, which had used the Nepali majority in Sikkim to overthrow a Buddhist monarchy, had to worry that millions of Nepalis concentrated across the Indian north and east wanted their own nation. They call it Gorkhaland. In the hill towns of West Bengal—Kalimpong, Kurseong, and most of all Darjeeling—a strong Nepali separatist movement, armed and unarmed, had created havoc and economic disruption in the 1980s. Among other effects, this sent a warning to the Bhutanese, who decided to take a now controversial census to see how much Nepali migration they had absorbed.

  The Gorkhaland movement for land and a national identity defined by the Nepali language took its name from the legend of the brave Gorkhas, soldiers from the lowlands of Nepal known for their ruthlessness, utter obedience to a cause or commander, and exceptional, legendary fighting skills. Gorkhas—they prefer that spelling to Gurkhas—were the people who produced the warrior-king Prithvi Narayan Shah, who united Nepal in the eighteenth century. They served the British well in several wars and now provide troops for the Indian army and paramilitary police. A dimestore novelist, Subhas Ghising, took up the Gorkhaland standard in Darjeeling. In Sikkim, a leading politician, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, leading another Nepali-nationalist party that eschewed the Gorkha label, responded with demands that Nepali-Sikkimese get special treatment—a quota of Indian parliament seats, for example—to keep them from being swept up in a Gorkha tide. The Gorkha movement naturally had an appeal in Sikkim among newer arrivals from Nepal and Indian hills and northern plains. Bhandari was beginning to drift toward quasi-separatism (while bogged down in lawsuits on charges of corruption). As chief minister of Sikkim before his personal and political troubles brought him down, he was regularly accused of autocratic behavior; tourists were told he chose which way the satellite dish was pointed (it made cable television possible in the isolated town) and everyone in Gangtok had to watch his programs.

  How ironic, I thought, if some kind of autonomy should be restored to Sikkim at the insistence of a politician like Bhandari and his Nepali-Sikkimese followers, who were largely responsible for the overthrow of the stubbornly nationalist Buddhist king. From the early days of Sikkim’s final crisis, Nepali-Sikkimese were having second thoughts about what a monster they had unleashed. The personal Sikkimese valet of B. S. Das, the Indian sent to Gangtok effectively to engineer the signing of Sikkim’s death warrant, asked his master anxiously if this meant he would have to become an Indian. “I hope not,” Das remembered him saying. To be Sikkimese then meant being a Buddhist Bhutia or a Lepcha who spoke a Tibetan dialect, and not the Nepali language, which is closer to the Hindi of North India. Das did not think total absorption of Sikkim by India was inevitable when he left in 1974, after gaining an agreement on an associate status for Sikkim. But things rapidly fell apart after his departure, and New Delhi moved swiftly and ruthlessly.

  On the road to Rumtek, our hitchhiker gestured to this or that substantial concrete house that she swore had been constructed with the inevitable creaming off of development assistance. She sailed with some enthusiasm into a general condemnation of India and the destruction that had ensued since Sikkim was pried open to the people of the plains. The harshness surprised me, since she had no doubt been the beneficiary of a Nepali-led state government. About then, we passed a construction crew at the side of the narrow road. The faces were hard to identify and the saronglike garments some of the laborers wore were intriguing, so I interrupted to ask where those people had come from. “Maybe they are Nagas, or are coming from somewhere in Nepal,” she said. “So many people are brought here to work on lowly jobs, too many people. A lot of Nepalis. None of these people belong here.” But aren’t you Nepali? I asked. “Nepali!” she replied with a hard look and a stage laugh. “No, no. I am Sikkimese. The Nepalis are foreigners.” The late chogyal might have smiled sadly at the sound of history falling on itself.

  “THIS OFFICE is belong to Sikkim,” a cheerful young person at the Sikkim Tourism headquarters told me, explaining why she could not provide information on taxi fares direct from various Bengali gateways to Gangtok, the only routes in for foreigners since an ambitious helicopter service from Bagdogra, in West Bengal, was grounded for safety soon after a very scary opening. “Taxi are in West Bengal, so I can’t tell.” But she could tell me that because of the “trouble” in Kashmir—then approaching a fully developed war for independence—New Delhi was planning to open more of Sikkim to tourists, especially trekkers and those who wanted to visit mountain monasteries. For years, Indian security constraints had kept large areas of the country off-limits to foreigners. By the early 1990s, the numbers of tourists (many of them trekkers) began to rise significantly; Gangtok had as many as two hundred small hotels or guesthouses.

  An outsider coming to Sikkim for the first time years after its incorporation into India has a tough time making independent judgments about the chang
es that have taken place. To me it all seemed a very un-Indian place, with a few exceptions, from the moment my taxi from Bagdogra reached the Sikkimese border at Rangpo. An archway welcomed visitors to Sikkim as if it were a foreign country. We were obliged to stop and register with local authorities; the Indians require special passes for foreigners traveling to Sikkim. While I waited for the inevitable paperwork to take so inexplicably but routinely long to complete, I had coffee and a snack in a cheerful lodge where flowering shrubs and trees added color to the green hillside beyond the windows. The spacious tourist center, which also had about eight guest rooms, was built in the largely concocted Sikkimese style, with elements of Tibet in the slope of its outer walls, tall windows wider at the bottom than the top, and an ornamented central tower. The rooftops of the lodge, the tower, and a freestanding shelter over the entrance were neither flat, as they might have been in Tibet or Ladakh, nor pitched, as in Bhutan, but somewhere in between, giving the green metal panels a pagodalike slope that blended nicely with the hills. The countryside all around was luxuriously overgrown and seemed devoid of people.

  The paperwork over, we were back on the road and on the way to Gangtok, a route that at first follows the valley of the jade-green Teesta River before it veers away toward its origins in the hills. The Teesta, flowing down to the plains over and around white sandbanks and through rocky rapids, has always been an important symbol of Sikkim—though it hasn’t been very useful as a waterway for transport; it is not deep enough for long enough stretches for boats. Its valley is serenely beautiful, neither wild nor overcultivated. As we passed through villages en route to Gangtok, I savored what made Sikkim so instantly different from the Indian state of Himachal or many stretches of the Himalayan foothills in Uttar Pradesh, where hillsides grow yearly more barren of vegetation and every roadside stop is a full-time bazaar broadcasting the ubiquitous warbling whine of Hindi cinema soundtracks. On the road to Gangtok we passed through hamlets that seemed all but deserted. In one, a woman stepped out on her roadside porch and stretched, face to the sun, to yawn and scratch about her person. Buddhist prayer beads dangled from one hand. There was so much silence. In the valleys we followed into the hills, there were occasional farming hamlets, clusters of whitewashed one-story buildings with tin or thatch or wood-shake roofs.

  As we neared Gangtok, my initial enthusiasm at finding that Sikkim still had a singular character within the Indian union began to wane. The town was cacophony itself by late afternoon. Traffic crawled around the switchback roads and steep side lanes, much as it would in any Indian hill station. There was no serenity here, no unmistakable Sikkimese character or atmosphere left in the town or its dozens of shops and offices. When the first British political delegation came to Gangtok in the 1880s, they camped on open land in the area that is now the vehicle-choked bazaar, terminally polluted by fumes, sewage, and soiled old plastic bags. In the 1970s—according to photographs I found in an old book at the General Stores, near the crossroads that passes for downtown—the bazaar was still a somnolent, relatively open space with shade trees. People were using footpaths, not taxis.

  The bazaar is no longer one stretch of road, but rather a winding affair that snakes up the face of a steep hillside in several stages, a pattern common in the Himalayan foothills, where towns rarely have flat surfaces to work with. Along both sides of the original main strip (some called it the Purana, or Old Bazaar), merchants pushed Indian textiles and processed foods and soaps—Amul and Nivea and all their kith and kin—as well as garish plastic housewares and Indian-made Bata shoes. At one end of the old bazaar, a bust of Mahatma Gandhi mounted on a tasteless concrete plinth was protected by a nasty metal fence about five feet high, its gate secured with a padlock, and a further cement-and-chain-link barrier. I asked why the Father of the Nation had to be so heavily fortified, and was told vaguely that there might be miscreants about.

  There was very little that was identifiably Sikkimese about the bazaar; what lowland Indians weren’t selling, Kashmiris or Tibetans were. Hope Cooke tells a good story about how an American television crew filming her little palace wanted to shoot a few Sikkimese treasures; she had to forage for something that wasn’t Tibetan, Indian, or otherwise foreign. The experience helped fuel her interest in promoting the crafts of Sikkim. Behind the bazaar, however, in the alleys and on the steep hillsides, Buddhist prayer flags fluttered. Passing under a huge banner proclaiming an “International Year of Tibet,” I escaped in a taxi to look for the official Sikkimese state handicraft center, away from the bazaar at the dead end of an alley near the Indian governor’s residence. All was gloomy there, owing initially to the lack of electricity. The Sikkimese sales staff, gossiping merrily when I surprised them at the open door, fell utterly silent and unsalespersonlike.

  There were no other customers, so I tried hard to find something to buy, watched as I was by at least four pairs of hopeful Sikkimese eyes. All manner of goods were brought out from glass cases for my perusal, but only at my request. Blankets and rugs were too unwieldy to cart away; so were the colorful little carved and painted choektse tables that are the coffee tables and often dinner tables in Himalayan homes from Ladakh to Bhutan. I settled on a rough, handwoven woolen jacket handsomely embroidered down the front in a kind of braid. The jacket was a nice browny tweed; unfortunately, someone had lined it in glaring sky blue. Lining notwithstanding, the garment proved later to have the qualities of a hair shirt, as shards of wool designed for alpine temperatures burrowed through a synthetic interior to inflict torture. Over a sweater, though, it’s good for shoveling snow.

  My first day in Sikkim—half of it spent tangling with Indian Airlines and another five hours of it on the road in a small taxi from West Bengal—was saved by the Nor-khill Hotel. The Nor-khill, which once belonged to the royal family, is a rattling old two-story lodge that was almost empty, even though Gangtok’s annual orchid festival was in progress and it was still tourist season. The old building, bright white with a red metal roof and a red-painted cement veranda to match, was in good shape, but its spirit was certainly sagging. There was much more verve in the Hotel Tashi Delek nearby, and the lavishly decorated Hotel Tibet, near the bazaar. But the Nor-khill had a good location and a nice garden (straggly potted plants and wobbly metal chairs aside) for reading and writing. It also had provocative historical associations: it overlooked the Paljor Stadium, the site of antimonarchy demonstrations in 1948 and again in the 1970s.

  Inside, the hotel was a mix of faded European style with bright splashes of Himalayan art. A corner of the long lobby-lounge had half a dozen or more small tables painted with the symbols of Himalayan Buddhism scattered among regal chairs covered in locally woven fabric. Warm rugs covered the floor, and on the wall a three-panel, almost-Chinese-style painting showed a scene of rural life in the hills. The effort to give the lobby a Himalayan personality didn’t extend to the spartan dining room or the guest rooms upstairs, however. I was pretty much resigned to another spell of mild discomfort in the mountains, the hallmark of rugged hill station sojourns. Then, arranging things in my room, I opened the faded curtains hanging unevenly over a chest-high window above a rickety table and there, of course, were the Himalayas. There was Kanchenjunga itself, the holy Sikkimese mountain. I poured myself a drink from my Bag of Necessities for Traveling in India, and stood in its presence until darkness fell, as if before an altar.

  The death of a nation is a terrible thing anywhere. And the demise of the kingdom of Sikkim was all the more tragic because it meant another important piece torn from the map of the historical Tibetan Buddhist world. It was the end of Sikkimese independence that left Bhutan the lone defender of that distinctive culture. In Sikkim, Himalayan Buddhism and a monarchy of Tibetan lineage had coexisted for many years with a Hindu population of Nepali origins and the communities of Lepchas, people thought to be related to today’s Burmese or Assamese, who settled in the hills and practiced a localized animist faith long before the arrival of the Tibetans who would be
kings. The Lepchas claim to have given Sikkim its first name, Denzong. Insignificant pockets of Lepchas, a name they say was given to them by outsiders, also live in Bhutan, Nepal, and the Himalayan foothills of India. But only in Sikkim, with a land area under 7,300 square miles, much of it difficult mountain terrain, were they a relatively substantial presence for centuries. The Nepalis came later, encouraged by British colonial administrators looking for people to make more intensive and productive use of the land. But the Nepalis multiplied quickly as new families arrived. The Lepchas and the Tibetan-Bhutias could not override the demographic tide.

  Sikkim’s ill-fated monarchy ruled longer and had deeper roots than the Wangchuck dynasty now on the throne of Bhutan. Although, as always in this part of the world where mythology and history slide effortlessly into each other’s territory, there are some critical questions about the Sikkimese version of events, it is pretty much accepted that the royal Namgyal family could trace its ancestry to the Minyak dynasty established in eastern Tibet in the ninth century. Some say an even earlier ancestor of the Sikkimese Namgyals once reigned in what is now Himachal, an Indian state next door to Ladakh, later ruled by another branch of the Namgyal clan. The Minyak dynasty and its heirs were based in the Chumbi Valley of Tibet, at least part of which was Sikkimese territory until barely a century ago. Many generations after the founding of the Minyak kingdom, one member of the royal family, Mipon Rab, drifted down to the vicinity of Gangtok. Three or four more generations on, Phuntsog Namgyal, a prince of the Minyak line, became Sikkim’s first acknowledged king, or chogyal, to use the Tibetan title. Palden Thondup Namgyal, the last ruler of independent Sikkim, was twelfth in that royal line. Bhutan’s hereditary monarchy began only in 1907, and there have been only four kings, who do not call themselves chogyals, at least not to English-speakers.