The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  The Himalayan Arc

  Journeys East of South-east

  Edited by

  Namita Gokhale

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Namita Gokhale

  A Himalayan Citizen

  Sujeev Shakya

  The Making of the Gorkha Empire

  Amish Raj Mulmi

  Operation Mustang

  Thomas Bell

  The Quake

  Sushma Joshi

  Dharma in a Changing Landscape

  Sudhindra Sharma and Kanak Mani Dixit

  Meals in the Mountains

  Pushpesh Pant

  A Young Monarch’s Dream for His Country’s National Happiness

  John Elliott

  Gangkar Punsum

  Tshering Tashi

  A Poet’s Impressions of Nepal and Bhutan

  Abhay K.

  Tibet, India and China

  Manoj Joshi

  Little Lhasa

  Catherine Anderson

  There’s a Carnival Today

  Indra Bahadur Rai

  Downhill in Darjeeling

  Prajwal Parajuly

  Sikkim: A Home Full of Hotels

  Prajwal Parajuly

  My Journey into Sikkim

  Andrew Duff

  A Tranquil Tenure

  Chetan Raj Shrestha

  The Story of Tanik,the Mythmaker

  Mamang Dai

  My Mother Tampak, Maid of Chongtham

  Binodini

  Embassy

  Janice Pariat

  The Other Side of the Looking Glass

  Jacqueline Zote

  Poetry from India’s North-east

  Introduction: Aruni Kashyap

  On A Moonlit Night, I’ve Seen You Walk: Sameer Tanti

  Jokhini: Nitoo Das

  No One Is Able to Look at Anyone: Lutfa Hanum Selima Begum

  Laughing, Bombing: Uddipana Goswami

  Letter from Pahambir: Desmond L. Kharmawphlang

  Native Land: Robin S. Ngangom

  Your Constitution Has Nothing for Me: Akhu Chingangbam

  The Journey

  Indira Goswami

  Looking to the Future, Spanning 1,000 Years in a Lifetime

  Sanjoy Hazarika

  Burma and the Kipling Mystique

  Andrew Selth

  Moon over Burma

  Tulsi Badrinath

  Pacifist Prisoners and Militaristic Monks

  Salil Tripathi

  A ‘Fierce’ Fear

  Ma Thida

  Bhutan, Nepal and Nagaland

  David Malone

  Notes

  Notes on the Contributors

  Copyright Acknowledgements

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Copyright

  INTRODUCTION

  Namita Gokhale

  The Himalayas are the tallest, and the youngest, mountains in the world. They are bordered on the north-west by the mighty massifs of the Karakoram and Hindu Kush ranges, and spread thereon across Pakistan, India, Nepal, China, Bhutan, and on to the Myanmar Himalayas. Beyond the plateau of Tibet, the northern extrusions of the Himalayas are referred to as Ximalaya Shanmai in Chinese.

  Dramatic geological activity caused the north-moving Indo-Australian plate to collide and be subducted beneath the Asian continent. This thrust and fold led to the formation of the magnificent Himalayan mountain ranges that continue to grow even today. The Indian plate is still driving into the Tibetan plateau, moving steadily at 67 mm a year. The Himalayas are geologically active, they are young and alive and rising by approximately 5 mm a year.

  My perspective in this book is focused on the bend of the Himalayas, the East of South-east, including Nepal, Bhutan, north-east India, and Myanmar. The entire sweep of the mountains has a shared cultural context, encompassing both indigenous and migratory identities, which manifest in worship, food habits, cuisines, musical traditions, and folklore, as well as the hardy mountain wisdom of its denizens. There is also the deeper memory of the animistic traditions of the Bon po religion, of Siberian Shamanism – of the voice of the mountains as it has spoken to generations of Hindu, Buddhist, and other spiritual practitioners.

  In his essay titled ‘A Himalayan Citizen’ Sujeev Shakya observes, ‘It is very difficult to describe what makes one feel as if one belongs to the mountains. Himalayan citizens carry a unique identity. It does not matter which part of the world you belong to when you inherit the hills as your identity.’ Speaking of his journeys across the Himalayas, he continues, ‘In the Darjeeling hills it is said that if you never owned a guitar or played one when you were young, then there was something wrong with you. Music is another factor that binds the Himalayan citizens. The popular Dzongkha songs that I hear in the cabs in Thimphu have different lyrics but seem to have been inspired by popular Nepali numbers. Every momo party has to end with singing…’

  On the momo, that ubiquitous trans-Himalayan dumpling dish that has now encroached the streets of urban India, more later. The intangibles of daily life and the staples of material culture build up to a sense of shared lives and cultural connectivity. The essays, poems, and short stories in this anthology attempt to describe this sense of belonging, not from the point of view of conventional travel writing, but from within the turns and curves of the long and winding roads, and the lowlands and hinterlands of this region. Indeed, the contours of this book are somewhat like the rugged terrain landscapes one might encounter on a long drive through the central and eastern Himalayas. There are breathtaking vistas, steep bends, and unexpected changes in the silhouettes of the mountains as the fog plays hide and seek with the views. Poetry, fiction, and mysticism are juxtaposed with pieces on strategy and diplomacy, espionage and the deep state. Photographs from the last century, folk tales and fables, and even the lineaments of an old-fashioned ghost story all figure in the landscape of this anthology.

  If geography is destiny, the fragile tectonic balance predicated a day in the life of Sushma Joshi. To quote: ‘A latticework of heavy pillars of wood and bricks, the debris of a temple that had collapsed behind me, had pinned me down. It took me a while to register that this was real. This just happened. This wasn’t fiction. This was the real deal…’

  ‘I’m not a good practitioner of dharma,’ she continues, ‘my practice tends to be patchy, at best.’

  But at this instance of gravest danger, I fell back upon the Tara mantra, almost by instinct. This is how I’d gotten to it: on a visit to Chokyi Nyima Rinpoche, I had requested his support to do a Tara puja. Rinpoche had said to me: ‘Why do you want to do the Tara puja? That is very complicated.’ When I insisted, he said: ‘Here, I will teach you the Tara mantra instead, and you can do it at home. After you’ve practised for a while, come back and we can discuss the puja.’ Then he gave me the mantra, the same one I started to repeat in my head, over and over, as I lay buried under the debris in Patan Durbar Square. There’s something about a mantra that automatically calms the mind, gives solace and dispels fear.

  The 7.8 magnitude earthquake of 2015 left a trail of devastation across Nepal. As the Indian subcontinental plate grinds into the Asian continental plate, the seismically active spread of the Himalayas continues to be a high-risk zone, with the thrusting mountains venting their stress, releasing their latent strain in the deep interiors of the earth.

  Meanwhile, Amish Raj Mulmi looks at the political formation of Nepal, how the tiny hill state of Gorkha became a mighty Himalayan empire, ‘in an unimaginably short period of time – seven decades, to be precise. Within this period, the Gorkhas had overrun the Newars of the Valley, the Sens of Palpa, the Chogyal of Sikkim and the Chand kings of Kumaon’ thanks to its young ruler Prithvi Narayan Shah
and the bravery of the Gorkha army, one whose Indian unit is still lauded for its fearlessness.

  Back to modern-day Kathmandu. ‘It’s obvious that Kathmandu is a nest of spies,’ writes Thomas Bell, going on to elaborate the various kinds: North Korean, South Korean, Japanese, Chinese, and Indian intelligence and Pakistan ISI, that operate in a Molotov-cocktail-like dynamic, often under the surveillance of Nepali intelligence, the government, and sometimes the odd citizen.

  Pushpesh Pant’s essay on meals in the mountains fondly speaks of the similarities between the Kumaoni meals of his childhood and those of the Newari and Nepali communities. It brings out the local flavours and similarities of festivals and customs in the Himalayan region wherein food forms such a vital link.

  The abiding faith that that saw Sushma Joshi through her ordeal is contiguous across the region. In their essay ‘Dharma Through a Changing Landscape’ Kanak Mani Dixit and Sudhindra Sharma lead us on a tour of religious belief and practices ranging from extreme asceticism to philosophical erudition to unquestioning ritual, as ‘religion is inseparable from daily life in the Himalaya’.

  ‘Like the important nerve centres of the body which contain latent energy, the Himalayan mountains are vital geographical energy centres of the globe,’ says Chokyi Nyima, head of the Ka- Nying Shedrup Ling Monastery in Baudha, outside Kathmandu.

  Across the Himalayas, the mountains themselves are a sort of religion. As we learn in Tshering Tashi’s fascinating narration ‘Gangkar Punsum: The World’s Highest Unclimbed Mountain’, Bhutan has the distinction of being one of the few countries in the world that enforces a total ban on mountaineering, imposed by the country’s National Assembly during its 65th session in 1987. The ban was initiated by the people of the high country of Laya and Lunana after they found mountaineers traversing the sacred mountains, violating the holy summits. ‘Since we believe the mountains to be the abodes of deities who protect us and worship them as living beings, mountaineering is considered sacrilegious. The mountain people urged their representative who accordingly took up the matter in the country’s highest legislative body to stop the profanity.’

  Journalist John Elliott’s reminiscences of interviewing the fourth king of Bhutan, His Majesty Jigme Singye Wangchuck, more than three decades ago, forefronts the transformational ideas and policies of this visionary monarch. This was perhaps the first public formulation of the idea of ‘Gross National Happiness’, which later became a foundational aspect of Bhutan’s development agenda.

  Poet and diplomat Abhay K.’s poems evoke the texture of the landscape and material culture of Nepal and Bhutan.

  Listening in to Sanjoy Hazarika, we get a sense of the stretch of the far eastern Himalayas from Sikkim eastward.

  …in the east the range becomes a geopolitical jigsaw, crossing national frontiers with impunity... It is Asia in miniature, a place where the brown and yellow races meet. The range is astounding. Taking a south–north transect, for example, you encounter the Assamese and Bengali migrants in Assam, Tibeto-Burmans in the Himalayan mid-hills and the Khampa of the high plateau. Going west to east, the spectrum is even more diverse; from the people of Tibetan stock – the Bhutia and Lepcha of Sikkim and the Ngalong Dzongkha-speaking people next door in Bhutan – the population takes on Tibeto-Burman hues with the Sarchop of eastern Bhutan, who have affinity with the tribes of neighbouring Arunachal. Eastward, the communities become progressively less ‘Tibetan’ and more ‘Burman’. … Straddling the ages and the mountains, the people of this winding trail form an anthropological bridge to South-east Asia, where the roots of many still lie.

  The clash and comingling of communities forms a theme that spreads over the anthology, much as it does over the great Himalayan arc itself. Prajwal Parajuly’s piece on Darjeeling’s underlying ethnic tensions that rise to the surface as Gorkha demands for statehood is a recurring concern. In another essay, he explores tourism in his home state Sikkim: ‘Sikkim became a part of India in 1975. Apart from the occasional nostalgia for pre-1975 days, the Sikkimese, by and large, have made peace with the merger, thanks in no small part to the union government pouring enormous amounts of cash into the state…’

  Indra Bahadur Rai’s There’s a Carnival Today, translated by Manjushree Thapa, is a panoramic view of post-Independence Darjeeling, foreshadowing issues of identity which still shape politics and attitudes in the region. Manjushree Thapa’s introduction provides a context and perspective on this most beloved and significant of Nepali writers.

  Sikkim has also its share of political drama adeptly captured through the lens of Andrew Duff who introduces us to the remarkable tale of Thondup Namgyal, the last king of Sikkim, and his American wife, Hope Cooke.

  The state again forms a backdrop to a short story. Chetan Raj Shrestha explores the life of a retired Indian bureaucrat reminiscing fondly about his days in Sikkim.

  Pramod Kumar K.G., archivist and museumologist, presents a series of period photographs from the colonial ‘People of India’ collection. In his introduction, he writes, ‘Despite the politics behind the images, these photographs are often the only surviving evidence of people from, and places in, the more remote corners of India and her immediate neighbours, cutting across the Himalayan arc.’

  Catherine Anderson is an inveterate, peripatetic soul, well-versed with the Himalayas. Her intimate account of life among the Tibetan refugee community in Dharamshala, of adjusting to and finding solace in an alien land despite a failing marriage, is a thought-provoking meditation on the idea of ‘home’ and nationality.

  Poetic impressions ranging from Assamese poets Nitoo Das, Uddipana Goswami and Lutfa Hanum Selima Begum as modernist, female voices to Sameer Tanti from the tea tribe, along with Robin Ngangom, Akhu Chingangbam and Desmond Kharmawphlang, give us an inkling of the diverse expanse poetry occupies across the region. Aruni Kashyap’s excellent introduction sets these poems in context, reminding us that ‘No cluster of poems can be said to be representative of a region with literary cultures as diverse as India’s north-east’ and questioning the idea of the ‘North-east poem’. ‘After all, why should poets from the North-east write only the kind of poems expected of them?’

  The great Indian writer Indira Goswami was an important political interlocutor in her troubled state Assam. Her evocative short story ‘The Journey’, translated by M. Asaddudin and her, is poetic, despite the serious themes of poverty and the struggle for independence. Two people travelling across Assam are stranded with an impoverished family, and observe how life and the insurgency in the state has taken its toll on them.

  Mamang Dai talks about the now-defunct small weaving centres, and how they offered the first step towards economic independence to women, through the story of a single mother and her son.

  Janice Pariat’s ‘Embassy’ walks the reader through Shillong’s streets while addressing political conflict with the gentlest of touches, in a story ostensibly about heartbreak. While describing popular landmarks such as Jacob’s Ladder, Ward’s Lake, Bosco Hill, it also shows a Shillong whose people ‘drenched their grief in alcohol, and stashed their dreams behind the familiar, flimsy darkness that smelt faintly dank and sour, the odour of defeat’.

  L. Somi Roy’s translation of his mother Maharaj Kumari Binodini Devi’s memoir provides an insider’s view of life in the erstwhile royal house of Manipur at a time of transition: ‘We grew up in a large and exceptional family. It was a household where the traditional and modern elements of Anglo-Manipur came together. We were never taken out without chandan marks on our faces, but the clothes we were dressed in were those of English children: shoes, socks and woollen clothes imported from England.’

  Jacqueline Zote’s retelling of Mizo folk tales talks of the female lasis – women of the skies, the khuawangs and phungpuinus who populate the unseen realms around us, and are often able to make the ruthless necessary choices that women on earth cannot. Under the tales of fantasy and magic are subversive messages that only some, like Pari in the story, c
an catch on to.

  The easternmost Himalayas continue into Myanmar. The British seized Yangon and lower Burma in 1852, after the second Anglo–Burmese war of 1852, and the last Mughal emperor, Bahadur Shah Zafar, was exiled there after the first Indian War of Independence in 1857.

  The essays in this anthology look at the region through different perspectives. Andrew Selth’s thoughtful and provocative essay ‘Burma and the Kipling Mystique’ probes the psychology and process of the colonized imagination. To quote:

  In the minds of many Westerners, Burma (now known as Myanmar) is still firmly attached to the bard of the British Empire, Rudyard Kipling… Kipling wrote a number of poems and stories that featured Burma, but he only visited the then province of India for three days, and part of that time was spent at sea. In fact, he later wrote that his sojourn in Rangoon was ‘countable by hours’. Despite the claims of several writers, he never sailed on the Irrawaddy River, nor did he ever visit Mandalay.

  Yet ‘…the poem irrevocably altered public perceptions of Burma, and, by extension, Western notions of the “Far East”’. No surprise then, that Boris Johnson recently chose to recite ‘Mandalay’ at the country’s most sacred temple, even as he was stopped mid-sentence by the British ambassador. Then we have Salil Tripathi moving to more recent times, telling us of, among others, the writer Ma Thida and her long incarceration in the notorious Insein prison. The narrative moves on to a searing first-person account by Ma Thida herself, of the psychology and psychosis of ‘Myanmar’s deep and rotten societal wound that breeds intolerance, a desire for revenge and the diversion of punishment from the powerful guilty to the powerless innocent’.

  A short story by Tulsi Badrinath is set in World War II, where Major Bhawander of the British Indian army is captured by the Japanese and plots a daring escape. But what lies in store for him outside?

  Following ex-diplomat David Malone across Nepal, Bhutan, and Nagaland, we discern the shifts in mood and political atmosphere along his travels and glean insights into culture, development, and the life and work of his fellow-Canadian Jesuit William Mackey.