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The Himalayan Arc

Page 3

by Namita Gokhale


  So, for example, as a Kashmiri Tibetan Muslim who moved to Kalimpong and then moved to Kathmandu and had been living in just rented apartments, it became important to state where you belonged to. For a Tashi or a Nima, who could be from Tibet, Ladakh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttaranchal, Sikkim, Bhutan, Arunachal or Darjeeling, it became important to tell people which part of the world he or she belonged to. You could have family in each of these places, but it became important to say which country you were domiciled in. While Europe, fractured after the World Wars, came to terms with free movement of people and interchange of identity, the Himalayas suddenly curtailed movement and continued to ask the difficult question – where do you belong?

  There is a lot of connection between the Himalayan nations that are now forgotten or just remain in the pages of some book written by a traveller or an anthropologist, beyond the interest of the common folks. The members of the royal families of Bhutan, Ladakh, Mustang, Sikkim and Tibet were closely related. With the integration of Ladakh into Jammu and Kashmir and Mustang into Nepal, the annexation of Tibet by China and Sikkim by India, the real relationship of the Himalayan states has never been re-established. It is difficult to understand in today’s context that the silver coins of Tibet used to be minted in Kathmandu Valley. After Francis Younghusband created a base in Kalimpong and a new route to enter Tibet through Sikkim, the Tibetan trade moved from eastern Nepal to Sikkim and Kalimpong. But the Newah community, which is one of the key inhabitants of the Kathmandu Valley, and to which I belong, was the only one given access to trade with Tibet.

  Sikkim continues to avoid tourists from Nepal while pitching for tourists to come all the way from Gujarat and Karnataka. The exodus of Nepalis from Bhutan complicated the relationship between the two Himalayan nations. While a Bangladeshi can enter Bhutan without a visa, a Nepali cannot. While Nepal grants free visas to SAARC nations including Bhutan, the same is not reciprocated. Bhutan potatoes enter the Nepal market through an Indian trader in Siliguri, similar to how Indian tea enters Pakistan via Dubai. The inner-line permits of Sikkim or other north-east states have not worked in the interest of integrating the Himalayan economies.

  Is the idea of a Himalayan citizen a nostalgic concept that helps one live in one’s past or an opportunity to rethink as the globe shrinks but the discourse on identity surges? I would love to see a European Union-type arrangement in East South Asia where one can drive freely from one town to another, irrespective of the nation it is in. I would like the food and music of one Himalayan region to move freely to another, like a little Lo Phing stall that sells Tibetan delicacies in the food stalls of a mall in Kathmandu jostling space with Kolkata phuchkas and Bombay sandwiches. Energy generated through hydropower from any of the Himalayan states should be able to power other Himalayan regions. Tourists should be able to cross through the Kanchenjunga region into Nepal from Sikkim or vice versa, with adequate security checks. The relationship between Bhutan and Nepal needs to get back to normal. Politics cannot separate Himalayan nations when people yearn for free movement. There has to be more discourse and exchange. In the days of nation states, national identities are important, but that should not kill the identity of a Himalayan citizen.

  THE MAKING OF THE GORKHA EMPIRE

  The transition of a tiny hill state to a mighty kingdom

  Amish Raj Mulmi

  ‘When an old man dies, his words die with him… What you who are gathered here will hear from me, pass on to your children, and they to ours; and this kingdom will endure.’ – Prithvi Narayan Shah, Dibya Upadesh1

  In 1742, a tiny hill state in central Nepal began to dream, courtesy of its young ruler’s ambitions. Seven decades later, the hill state would give its name to an empire spanning nearly 200,000 sq. km, from the Teesta River in the east to the Yamuna in the west, an empire running parallel to the highest mountain peaks and encompassing some of the most fertile lands in the subcontinent. And what an empire it was, gobbling up tiny hill principalities and larger kingdoms in a military juggernaut that overpowered several peoples and cultures, until it came to an absolute halt in 1816, wedged in on three sides by an even more impressive colonist, and on the north by the same Himalayas that protected its borders.

  The Gorkha Empire’s transition from a humble hill principality to a Himalayan empire took place 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. In Kings and Political Leaders of the Gorkhali Empire (1768–1814), Nepali historian Mahesh Chandra Regmi writes that at the time of Prithvi Narayan Shah’s death in 1775, ‘the Gorkhali Kingdom comprised the whole of the eastern Tarai, central inner-Tarai (Sindhuli, Udayapur, Chisapani, and Makwanpur), Kathmandu Valley, the eastern hill region up to the Tista [sic] river … and the western hill areas of Nuwakot and Dhading … The principality of Jajarkot … had signed a treaty accepting [the] Gorkha’s suzerainty in January 1769, a few months after the conquest of Kathmandu.’2

  The Baise and Chaubise hill principalities in Nepal had been acquired by the empire by 1789. But the Gorkhalis, under Rana Bahadur Shah, the grandson of Prithvi Narayan, had their sights on the lands beyond the Mahakali (or the Sharda) River. Kumaon was occupied by early 1790, and Garhwal became a vassal state after a year-long siege.3 Its expansion into the north was halted by a war with Tibet and China until both sides sued for peace in 1792. Its 1804 annexation of Garhwal, despite their earlier alliance, and the question of where the new borders lay, eventually brought the empire into war with the East India Company. The subsequent Sugauli treaty of 1816 resulted in a loss of nearly a third of Gorkha territory and created the modern Nepali state’s political boundaries.

  So how did Gorkha, a tiny hill state less than 250 sq. km in the mid-eighteenth century, audaciously rise to become an empire nearly 100 times its size?

  The easy, and reductive, answer would be one all Nepalis have grown up with: it was the vision and foresight of Prithvi Narayan Shah, coupled with the bravery of the Gorkha soldiers, that ‘unified’ Nepal. Nepali history then becomes a linear narrative, wherein all cultures that existed prior to the Gorkha Empire are considered militarily weaker (such as the Newar states of Kathmandu Valley), or are relegated to the footnotes of history (the Baise and the Chaubise kingdoms). How else could a tiny Gorkha overpower these kingdoms?

  This history of Nepal as we’ve been taught ignores the nature of Gorkhali rule in the new territories they had conquered. It reduces a mammoth campaign of expansion to a story of valour in the face of adversity (Balabhadra Kunwar’s story of resisting a fierce English onslaught on the Nepali fort at Nalapani in Dehradun comes to mind), or of territorial hunger by a malicious ‘enemy’ (the East India Company). Handed down to us royally approved, it ignores the complexities of empire-building and its impact on the various peoples and their cultures. This does little justice to the Gorkhas’ political and military acumen and to the pre-existing cultures that the Khas-Arya Gorkha Empire eventually subsumed within itself. Lastly, the whitewashed version ignores the undercurrents of the many divisions that currently plague Nepal and find their roots in this story of imperial proportions.

  ‘This country is like a gourd between two rocks.’ – Prithvi Narayan Shah, Dibya Upadesh 4

  Prithvi Narayan Shah’s most famous dictum, the allegory of Nepal being sandwiched between China and India, is as ubiquitous as his calendar-art images in the country. Yet, this simple statement captured the most important geopolitical reality for a Himalayan state with gargantuan ambitions.

  The historical background against which Prithvi Narayan Shah became the ruler of Gorkha was one of flux. In the Indian subcontinent, the East India Company had begun to flex its muscles, and the British had begun manipulating political events in Awadh. In the sixteenth century, Mukund Sen of Makwanpur had divided his kingdom between his four sons, one grandson, and a nephew, and the resulting states further fragmented. The lon
gstanding feud between Lamjung and Gorkha continued, as did those between the three warring factions of the Newar Mallas in Kathmandu Valley.

  Popular history suggests that Prithvi Narayan Shah stood upon Chandragiri Hill’s summit and surveyed the Kathmandu Valley, expressing a desire to conquer it. There may have been other kings before him with similar thoughts, but unlike the others, Prithvi Narayan Shah made it his mission, and to do that, he needed to change the way Gorkhas thought.

  Consider this extract from Regmi’s Kings and Political Leaders:

  [T]he Gorkhali rulers devised the principle of allegiance to the ‘dhungo’, which literally means a stone, but used metaphorically to denote the state. The concept of dhungo implied that the Gorkhali state was a permanent entity that transcended the person of the ruler. In other words, allegiance to the state superseded personal loyalty to the ruler.5

  To modern readers, it may appear unusual that a principle we take as a given today – allegiance to a state and not a monarch – would be the cornerstone of the Gorkhali expansion. But for a hill state in the eighteenth century, the metaphor of the dhungo was a radical approach to state–subject relations. Regmi explains:

  The traditional principle of allegiance was based on kinship or personal loyalty to the ruler, which pre-Gorkhali states in the Himalayan region had used at the risk of frequently releasing fissiparous forces. These states were, consequently, subject to fragmentation because of such factors as the division of the succession rights among the king’s sons and relatives by the king himself, or else disputed succession.6

  The fragmentation of Kathmandu Valley into three kingdoms, the Baise and Chaubise kingdoms of mid-west and far-west Nepal, and the Bara and Athara Thakurai principalities of the Garhwal region, makes sense when understood as states created via infighting over personal loyalties. This is what made the Gorkhali campaigns so uniquely robust and revolutionary – a political ideal that allowed a people to pledge their allegiance to the modern abstraction of an amorphous, unchanging state.

  But ideas by themselves do not an empire make. The generals, the officers, the soldiers – the cogs of the war machine – needed material impetus to participate in long military expeditions. As historian Ludwig Stiller explains in The Rise of the House of Gorkha, the empire’s second foundation rested on this carrot:

  Land was the currency of the conquest, the means by which the rulers of the House of Gorkha paid for the victories that extended their rule from the Teesta to the Sutlej… The peasant had inevitably to surrender half of his crop in taxes, regardless of the government that actually ruled the land. What the Gorkhali conquest gave to the government in Kathmandu was the right to appropriate that revenue or to assign it either to the army, to an official of the state, or to a citizen in reward for services he had rendered to the state.7

  Land tenure systems across the hill states were based on a few pre-existing principles: all land was ‘understood’ to be the state’s property; freehold ownership of land was the only means of increasing prestige and social standing; and land, as the primary source of wealth, could not be left idle. Add to this the primary systems by which the state awarded land holdings – the jagir grant, by which rulers granted noblemen a tract of land the latter could farm or lease out for as long as they were in service; and the age-old birta grant, which was similar to the jagir except that it was interminable without royal orders, and at times entailed a mortgage in lieu of funds borrowed from the individual. And while the jagir grant was not transferable and the lands returned to the state at the end of the nobleman’s term, the birta grant ‘alone was a form of private property which usually could be subdivided, inherited, sold, mortgaged or bequeathed’.8

  While the birta was often awarded to high-ranking Brahmins and politically influential groups, such as members of the royal family and the nobility, to retain their loyalty or as a mark of their services to the state, jagir grants were awarded to ‘civil or military employees and government functionaries’. Rarely did the empire pay its civil servants in cash. Land compensated the costs of the campaign, while appeasing ‘the land-hunger of an army that was composed, for the most part, of peasants’.9

  As the Gorkha Empire expanded, land grants became crucial to its survival. Its noblemen, generals and soldiers all received grants in varying degrees, with new lands, usually in the fertile Terai, regularly being assigned to them as the military increased in size. Jagirs by their nature were dependent on whether the nobleman continued to serve the court (or the king), which was decided through an annual review system called pajani. Further, Prithvi Narayan Shah’s dictum in his Dibya Upadesh ensured that soldiers from the lowest rung onwards were to be awarded land: ‘An important point is that the soldiers required for the king should be given their house and land and that they farm it, so that they can support themselves by both means.’10

  These economic motivations and the changed political relationship between a subject and the state both kept the bhardars (courtiers) and the military in favour of expansion. Once the war machine began to roll, there was little to stop it. Indeed, such was the pace of expansion and the resulting riches for the bhardars and the military leadership that even the loss of nearly 64,000 sq. km of land after 1816 barely weakened the Gorkha kingdom and its polity; all it did was bring the expansion to a halt.

  The Gorkhali campaign was built on two conditions: the dhungo at the centre of the Gorkhali universe, and the land the dhungo conquered, which could be owned by the bhardars. That singular motivation was adequate to push the Gorkhalis, and the thousands of men and women in their territory, to the battlefront, creating an empire that would test the strongest military power in the world at the time.

  OPERATION MUSTANG

  Thomas Bell

  I had dinner with some friends, mostly foreigners, who had taken an intense and detailed interest in Nepali affairs for many years. They worked on politics and human rights for international organizations and NGOs. We were sitting around on the floor with glasses of wine and bowls of olives, and humus and pistachio nuts and sticks of cucumber. There was almost certainly some esoteric music playing, which would have passed me by. Someone mentioned a secret intelligence operation codenamed ‘Mustang’. The others all had, but I’d never heard of it.

  While I’d been away a detailed article appeared in a Nepali language magazine called Nepal, which captured the attention of all the foreign missions.

  Going to Mustang

  Foreign friends have gotten lost in Mustang

  There is a meeting in Mustang

  the article began. ‘Such conversations used to take place among the spies at the National Investigation Department (NID), the primary secret espionage department of the government of Nepal. But the word Mustang virtually hanging off their lips was not the name of the mountainous district in Nepal. It was in fact a covert operation which ran for more than four years before the peace agreement in 2006. ‘Foreigners would come in vehicles with black windows to the supplies department and would meet secretly with the chief then leave,’ it quoted an NID officer as claiming. ‘The construction of the new building inside the department and all other requirements of the operation were met by the British Government.’

  The Maoists were the target. MI6 were said to have used three safe houses (the article gave their addresses). They supplied 35 motorcycles, 36 sets of night vision binoculars, 35 desk top computers, 35 stills cameras and 35 cassette players as well as a varying number of cars, television sets, video cameras, lap tops, mobile phones, faxes, fridges, air conditioners and items of furniture. A radio mast was installed on top of Pulchowki hill, on the Valley rim, and another on top of a newly constructed building in the NID headquarters, creating a secure network for the 35 special radio sets. The article was less specific about the bugs and other listening equipment the British supplied. (Apparently they insisted that the Nepali government pay for the 35 pistols required from its own funds.) A handful of British civilian and military officers attached to t
he embassy, as well as a varying cast of visitors, trained the NID officers and ran the Kathmandu end of the operation.1

  The fact that by 2004 the king was planning a coup d’état created a problem for Operation Mustang, because the British government would obviously have to condemn it. So an environmental NGO named, with a glimmer of public schoolboy wit, the High Altitude Research Centre (HARC) was established to provide extra cover. Every signature on HARC’s registration document was provided by an NID officer.2

  ‘There’s a certain black comedy,’ one of the guests at the dinner remarked, ‘in the fact that the Brits got ripped off by a dodgy NGO.’ Because the reason all of this is known is that someone, or some people within the NID leaked it all, claiming that the British equipment – the cars and motorcycles and the air conditioning units – had been stolen and sold off by the spies they ran. The Indians apparently bought up the bugging and intercept gear. The disgruntled officers produced a 24-page document detailing these frauds, which they circulated to all the political parties, including the Maoists, to the parliamentary public accounts committee, to two tabloid weekly newspapers, and to Nepal magazine.3

  When I heard these things described at that dinner party several thoughts ran through my mind in an almost instantaneous succession. I’d known the spies and military types at the British embassy during the war. I liked some of them. (One of them offered to recommend me for a career in his office.) We socialized, and talked about what we thought was going on in Nepal. But because I’d known what my friends were I took the things they told me seriously, but not always literally. I suspected they sometimes flattered me (a freelance journalist in his mid-twenties) with scraps of information that seemed exciting; so I received them with interest, but I didn’t put them in the newspaper – except once. The day after the coup in 2005, I was told that British military aid to Nepal was being suspended. That information now appeared in a different light.

 

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