Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains

by Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  Compared to the rest of Arunachal Pradesh, Tawang is a tourist mecca. They come here by the minibus-load in late autumn, when the weather is clear, trundling over the Sela Pass to be wowed by the views and the world’s second largest monastery (only Lhasa’s Potala is bigger). But now the giftshop owners dozed behind their glass counters, the few restaurants were a sea of empty tables and my Monpa guesthouse – a new concrete building off the old market – hadn’t had another visitor for weeks. Instead the town was overrun with dogs. They were everywhere. Mangy old mongrels lay on the steps outside shuttered shops. Shaggy, swaggering hounds trotted between parked cars. Half-starved bitches lay on piles of rubbish, bundles of puppies tugging at swollen teets. At night the feral packs roamed the empty streets, barking, howling and fighting, and the cold mountain air echoed with the canine hullabaloo. It was dangerous to walk alone after dark, someone told me, and I well believed them.

  It wasn’t difficult to find the monastery the next morning. It dominates Tawang and the surrounding mountains, a vast white and gold citadel raised high on its rocky plinth. Gold roofs gleamed wanly through the cloud and, below its formidable walls, the town straggled in obeisance. Built around 1680, under the orders of the 5th Dalai Lama, it was designed as both a fortress and a monastery – a two fingers up at the marauding Bhutanese. This is Tibetan territory, it said, and we’ve got twenty-foot walls, defensive ditches and an army of monks to prove it. The story goes that the Dalai Lama gave a local lama a ball of wool and instructed him to build a new monastery whose boundary walls were the same length as the wool. For months the lama searched fruitlessly for the right place to build this great edifice. Then one day, while meditating in a cave, he emerged to find that his faithful horse had vanished. Following its hoofmarks, he found it at the end of a rocky spur, pawing at the ground. Seeing it as a divine sign, the lama renamed the place Tawang, meaning ‘chosen by horse’, and began work on the Tawang Galdan Namgey Lhatse Monastery, meaning ‘Celestial Paradise of the Divine Site Chosen by Horse’. To further seal Tibet’s claim on the area, the 5th Dalai Lama chose to be reincarnated here and his successor was born in a nearby village.

  Despite British efforts to prise it away from Lhasa – including a 1938 expedition led by the fabulously named Captain Lightfoot – Tawang remained under Tibetan rule until February 1951. Only then, when an Indian Army delegation walked over the mountains from Assam, was it officially handed over to India. Fed up with the heavy taxes levied by Tibet, the Monpa agreed to India’s claim without the spilling of a single drop of blood.

  Inside, the monastery was like a town – not quite a medieval one, but close. Worn stone steps led me through a labyrinth of narrow alleys between high walls of rough, whitewashed stone. Stray dogs scavenged. Cocks crowed. Neat stacks of firewood were piled outside the painted wooden doors of the monks’ quarters. In the richly ornamented gompa a twenty-foot golden Buddha sat on a lotus leaf, looking sternly down over rows of empty platforms. There were no cars, or advertisements, or shops, or crowds; just an air of stillness and order. Of the almost 500 monks who lived behind those doors, I saw curiously little. They must have been studying, praying or sensibly sheltering from the cold. Occasionally the low, monotone chanting of a single ascetic would drift down from one of the brightly coloured windows, or I’d hear footsteps and a maroon figure would hurry past. Mostly boys of fifteen or less, they smiled shyly and hurried on, clutching their robes about them. Although it was no longer compulsory for the Monpa to send their middle child to the monastery (or nunnery), many poorer, rural families still did – some of these boys would have come here as young as five. Others, like Dorje’s son in Tuting, would have chosen to come themselves.

  For some time I sat on a step in the central courtyard, writing my diary and watching monastic life trickle by. A monk carrying a stack of tiles walked past and asked me where I was from, frowning in surprise when I told him.

  ‘Oh! Out of country,’ he said, as if he’d thought me Indian.

  After him came two young monks – no more than ten years old – who leapt about giggling as they tried to catch windblown flurries of dead leaves. They ran over when they noticed me, said ‘Hello!’, then rushed off again, boys in monks’ robes. It struck me, sitting there, how fortunate it was that India had claimed Tawang in 1951. Had it not, this great monastery would very likely have fallen foul of the ravages of China’s occupation of Tibet: by the end of the 1970s fewer than ten of Tibet’s 6,000 monasteries remained intact and unknown thousands of monks and nuns had been killed, imprisoned and tortured. The cultural genocide continues to this day.

  Tawang would be the centre of more controversy in October 2016, when the Indian government announced that His Holiness the Dalai Lama would visit the town in March 2017. The announcement sparked a diplomatic furore with China, who threatened a breakdown of border peace and bilateral ties if the visit goes ahead. The visit of a US envoy to Tawang in autumn 2016 similarly incensed the Chinese, but thankfully the Indians seem to have taken little notice of either tantrum.

  The benefit of coming to Tawang now, when it was grey and drizzly, was the absence of tourists. The only other layperson I saw was a tiny Monpa woman shuffling across the main courtyard, her yak-felt hat framing features that age had whittled to a husk of crinkled skin and angular bone. She wore the traditional maroon and white striped woollen dress with a red felt cape fastened over her shoulders and, around her neck, hung weighty necklaces of coral and turquoise beads. Drawn by her appearance, I followed her into a dark shrine room, watching as she slowly filled twenty silver bowls with water and lit some incense under a bronze Buddha. Noticing my presence, she gave me a handful of puffed rice, putting one hand to her mouth to tell me to eat it. Afterwards she hobbled, muttering, around the four ten-foot prayer wheels that occupied the back of the small room, while I sat on a bench and turned one by pulling on a worn leather strap attached to a well-oiled cog beneath it. Rocking backwards and forwards as I turned the wheel, the chimes clanging melodiously off the old stone walls, I could see the appeal of monastic life.

  *

  Shaven-headed and dressed in a maroon robe, Lobsang Gyatso looked like an ordinary monk. Kindly eyes twinkled from behind thick spectacles and his soft, round face exuded cheerfulness.

  ‘Come in! Come in!’ He greeted me enthusiastically, ushering me into the small house on a hillside below Tawang.

  But as we drank tea on a bench beside his wood-burning stove, I learnt that Lobsang was in fact no longer a monk at all. A Monpa from Tawang, his parents had sent him to a monastery in Mysore aged eleven. But in 2011, after twenty-three happy years, he decided there was something more important for him to do than to remain a monk. With the permission of his abbot he left his monastery, sold his house and land and – with the 25 lakh, around £25,000, he’d raised – set up the Save Mon Federation, an organization dedicated to preserving the fragile ecology of the Tawang region. A rash of hydroelectric projects was threatening Tawang’s rare wildlife and sacred pilgrimage sites, and Lobsang felt that something had to be done about it. And besides, it was madness to build so many dams in an area prone to earthquakes and landslides.

  Indeed, just after I finished my journey, the Northeast was hit by a magnitude 6.9 earthquake. Amazingly no one was killed or injured, but the combination of heavy rain and earthquake-loosened soil triggered massive landslides in Tawang a week later. Sixteen people were killed by a single landslide in a village just south of the town that I’d ridden through on my way.

  ‘There are already twenty-eight micro and mini hydroelectric projects in Tawang district – none of them working well due to bad work and corruption.’ He shook his head in weary disbelief. ‘Most of them haven’t lit a single bulb.’

  It was true the electricity situation in Tawang was dire. I’d spent the previous evening shivering under the blankets with no lights or hot water in my room. It was the same every day apparently.

  He nudged his spectacles up his nose and carried on.
‘The latest mini hydroelectric project was six megawatts and cost nearly one hundred crore [around £11 million], but after three and a half months the spillway collapsed and the local villagers had to flee for their lives. One local politician involved with the construction pocketed a lot of money.’

  In between fielding calls on his mobile, Lobsang told me that several far bigger projects were being planned: dams which would threaten the habitats of rare species such as black-necked cranes, snow leopards, Tawang macaques and red pandas. Not only that, in the same way as the Idu Mishmi feared for their culture, Lobsang felt that thousands of migrant workers brought here to build the dams would swamp the region’s 40,000 Monpa. But Lobsang had already succeeded in halting the forest clearance for one dam, and was determined to stop them all.

  ‘One hundred per cent we will succeed in stopping these projects. The government can’t do the forest clearance without the agreement of the local villagers.’ He opened a folder and showed me a piece of paper covered in thumbprints – the signatures of illiterate villagers. ‘See, all the villagers have signed this resolution against the clearance.’

  Until Lobsang stepped in, villagers were routinely bullied and tricked into signing agreements with dam companies. For these largely older, illiterate people who’d lived in the mountains herding yaks all their lives, understanding issues such as environmental impact assessments, dam heights and compensation was beyond them.

  In Laos and Cambodia, where I’d last travelled, outspoken environmental campaigners like Lobsang were harassed, abducted and even killed by their governments. I asked Lobsang if his efforts had placed him in any danger.

  He laughed, a quiet, rueful chuckle that lit up his whole face. ‘Oh yes, we face so many difficulties. I’ve been beaten up and received more death threats than I can remember. But I have to face the consequences of my actions – whether they are positive or negative.’

  ‘Have you ever been in prison?’

  More laughter. ‘Yes, I’ve been put in prison twice. But both times there was so much protest they had to let me out the next day.’

  On another occasion, when he was organizing a peaceful rally in Tawang about the poor state of their roads and rampant corruption within the Border Roads Organisation – ‘They’re the worst!’ – a man turned up at his house the night before with a suitcase full of money.

  He shook with mirth as he recounted the story. ‘They tried to bribe me to stop the rally, but I told them I didn’t want the money and we went ahead anyway. Four thousand people attended.’

  As he showed me out, I asked him if it had been hard leaving his monastery after all those years. For a moment he looked wistfully across the foggy valley.

  ‘Oh yes, it was very emotional for me. I loved my life there. But my monk’s training has helped me so much. I’m always happy, whatever difficulties I face.’

  At that we shook hands and he climbed into the battered blue van he used as a taxi. ‘I have to earn money somehow!’ he said, smiling.

  Just two weeks after we met, Lobsang was arrested again, this time charged with some dubious allegations about insulting the abbot of Tawang Monastery. When several hundred local people gathered outside the police station to protest peacefully against his arrest, the police opened fire on the crowd. Two people were killed and several others seriously injured, among them a young monk and a woman. Lobsang was released soon afterwards and continues his campaigning. What an incredible human being he is.

  19

  SISTER ACT

  The weather wasn’t kind to me in Tawang. At 3,000 metres the air was thin and cold, and most of the time the surrounding mountains were shrouded in a hoary quilt of gun-metal grey. Venturing for a ride along the Tawang Chu Valley one morning, I ended up racing back to town in a storm of bouncing hailstones, watching curtains of rain and hail sweep down the valley and forks of lightning streak across the angry sky. In the villages sodden dogs trotted along the road with their tails between their legs and cows sheltered against the houses, their heads lowered in sullen patience. What I would have done to have been in a hot bath at that moment, with Marley feeding me gin and tonic and slabs of salted caramel chocolate.

  With no heating, and infrequent electricity, it was too cold to linger in my room, so much of my time in Tawang was spent with my Monpa hosts, huddled around a gas fire in their large modern house. We sat on blankets in the small white room, warming our hands around cups of tea and talking, the various family members wandering in and out. The elderly parents – doughty villagers with farmers’ hands, their faces broad and kindly under knitted woollen hats – had been born when Tawang belonged to Tibet. People were happy when Indian soldiers arrived in 1951, they told me; the Monpa were fed up with Tibetan tax collectors arriving each spring to levy a share of the harvest. Apart from access to the Tibetan salt trade, they gained nothing in return. Life under India was better. They had never gone to school and grew up helping their parents farm and look after the family’s yaks. But how things had changed since then: their two daughters were sassily dressed women with iPhones and painted nails who were planning a shopping trip to Bangkok; one ran a prosperous travel agency, the other taught English at a local school. Their son, Chopa, owned a Sumo business and had a house in Itanagar, where he spent most of his time.

  One evening, as we drank hot arag – a clear, potent rice wine poured from a silver teapot – I asked the father, Thutan Lama, if he remembered the events of 1959. On 17 March that year the Dalai Lama, along with twenty of his closest aides and family, had slipped out of the summer palace in Chinese-occupied Lhasa and begun a perilous journey to India. Nine years after China’s ‘Peaceful Liberation of Tibet’, scattered revolts had turned into a full-scale uprising and it had become too dangerous for the 23-year-old spiritual leader to remain. Travelling at night, so as to avoid detection, he walked for fifteen days across the blizzard-driven Himalayas, reaching the safety of the Indian border on 31 March. The next day, when Jawaharlal Nehru announced to parliament that he would be granted asylum in India, his speech was met with cheers and applause. Two days after this the Dalai Lama arrived in Tawang.

  ‘We must have been a pitiful sight,’ His Holiness later wrote, ‘physically exhausted and mentally wretched from our ordeal.’

  I was lucky. The old man didn’t just remember the Dalai Lama’s stay; he’d played a part in his journey. Thutan was eighteen then, he told me, and working as an errand boy for the Deputy Commissioner of Tawang. As he spoke, his youngest daughter – the glamorous English teacher – translated what he said.

  ‘The Dalai Lama stayed at the Deputy Commissioner’s office for a night and I was the only one allowed into his room to take him his food and make his fire.’

  ‘What was the Dalai Lama like?’ I asked eagerly, wondering if he’d seemed tired or afraid.

  Thutan laughed at the memory of his younger self. ‘I was only a teenager and too shy to talk to him – he was so important! But I don’t remember him seeming scared or upset.’

  The Dalai Lama and his entourage had left for Assam the next day and Thutan was instructed to follow with his mother, brother, two sisters and their Tibetan porters, plus nine ponies for their luggage. For five days they walked south to Bomdila, greeted in every village by crowds of Monpa bearing khatas, tea and food.

  His eyes lit up at the thought of it. ‘They were so happy to have their Kundun and his family among them. It was like one big party!’

  At this he poured me another fiery cup of arag and ushered me to drink. After taking a swig, I asked him how the Dalai Lama’s family had felt, knowing they’d almost certainly never return to Tibet.

  ‘They seemed happy, to be enjoying the journey,’ Thutan told me. ‘I remember his mother fussing over me because I was the youngest. I didn’t appreciate the importance of what I was involved in at the time, but now I look back at it as one of the key experiences of my life.’

  Until then, despite the simmering border disagreement, relations between Ch
ina and post-colonial India had been cordial. But Mao Zedong was incensed at Nehru granting asylum to the Tibetan leader and bilateral relations rapidly deteriorated. Three years later, China invaded Arunachal Pradesh – a war that cost an estimated 2,000 Indian lives, many of them from the cold.

  By the time the war broke out Thutan was working as a porter for the Indian Army, carrying air-dropped rations up to the border post north of Tawang.

  ‘We knew something was wrong when we saw injured Indian soldiers being carried down from the border and, a few days later, the main Chinese force invaded on foot. The Indian soldiers were poorly trained and badly equipped, and the Chinese quickly drove them back. Our group of porters hid in a forest, but two of them became afraid and ran away – they were later shot by the Chinese. And a female porter had a lucky escape when a bullet hit her thick silver bracelet.’

  Thutan was leaning towards me now, talking animatedly. ‘When it got dark the rest of us left the forest and ran through the night, reaching our village by the morning. The next day everyone in the village, except a few old people who refused to leave, loaded our belongings onto ponies and fled to Assam.’ He swept one arm through the air to indicate their flight. ‘Our village was just below Tawang and, as we left, we could hear gunshots and see people running away from the approaching Chinese. Everyone was panicking. The Chinese were already attacking the Sela Pass, so we trekked over the mountains into Bhutan, and then on to Assam, where we stayed in a refugee camp for three months. When we returned home we crossed the Sela Pass and saw dead Indian soldiers everywhere. They were rotting and dogs were eating the bodies. But there were too many of them to bury.’