Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  Gould’s mission arrived at a hugely sensitive time as the search for the new Dalai Lama got underway. The period following the thirteenth Dalai Lama’s death in 1933 had been predictably traumatic. The most powerful minister at the time was Thubten Kunphel, known as Kunphela, a strong man who had entered the Dalai Lama’s service as a servant and risen through force of personality to lead the most effective military unit in Tibet. He was regarded as sympathetic to the Kuomintang. His enemies, particularly Lungshar, one of four tsipon, state treasury ministers, and who was Tsarong’s rival in the 1920s, used the Dalai Lama’s sudden death to build a coalition against him. Kunphela’s power base melted away and he was imprisoned. His fall provoked rebellion in the eastern Tibetan province of Kham from his allies, the powerful and wealthy Pandatsang family. These rebels, small in number, also fought China’s communists as they struggled through the grinding horror of the Long March, their flight from Kuomintang forces deep into the interior of China and the eastern marches of Tibet. Kunphela and the Pandatsang would soon start an opposition movement in exile: the Tibet Improvement Party.

  Lungshar didn’t enjoy his ascendancy for long. Like Kunphela he was a moderniser. It was Lungshar who had accompanied the four young Tibetan aristocrats to Rugby school and understood that Tibet must change. Yet his attempt to increase state revenues at the cost of Lhasa’s aristocracy and monastic establishment left him vulnerable and he was accused of communist leanings, something Laden La had warned about following their trip to Europe. The ultra-conservative leader of the cabinet – or kashag – Trimon Shap-pe outmanoeuvred Lungshar, who was arrested and suffered the archaic torture of having his eyes put out. No one alive had performed this punishment and it was botched. Soon afterwards Trimon Shap-pe himself resigned from public service, giving up his role in selecting the new Dalai Lama. This process was as usual a fraught enterprise, with divinations vulnerable to political influence. The head of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, lying in state, was seen to turn to the north-west. Reting Rinpoche, the regent, saw a vision in a sacred lake of two letters: ‘A’ and ‘K’, suggesting Amdo and the monastery of Kumbum, far to the north-west of Lhasa in modern Qinghai, at the time under the control of the Kuomintang warlord Ma Bufang. Hugh Richardson reported suspicions in Lhasa that such visions were conveniently helpful for Reting, a deeply controversial figure in this crucial moment of Tibetan history. Tibet’s monastic elite was still vulnerable to sectarian conflict, between the dominant Geluk institutions and those of the Nyingma school. Reting, although Geluk, was seen as too sympathetic to the Nyingma side, which had found protection under China’s rule. Reting may have been indicating that a Dalai Lama from the periphery was needed to challenge the great monasteries of the centre.

  In theory, the Panchen Lama also had to be involved in the search for the little boy, but negotiations for the Panchen Lama’s return from exile had stalled and he remained under China’s control in eastern Kham, on the periphery of the Tibetan cultural world. Kewtsang Rinpoche, the lama from Sera monastery who led the search for the fourteenth Dalai Lama, went to the monastery at Jyekundu, where the Panchen Lama was living, to seek his opinion. The Panchen Lama offered three names, including that of a ‘fearless’ young boy in the village of Taktser, not far from Kumbum. A year later, at the start of December 1937, the Panchen Lama died unexpectedly. At first, the Chinese tried to use the return of the Panchen Lama’s corpse as a bargaining chip in much the same way as they had with the living version. Then the situation changed. As Hugh Richardson put it: ‘Chinese interest in a dead [Panchen] Lama soon gave way to the more promising prospect of a live Dalai Lama.’ That same year, Kewtsang became convinced that the fearless boy from Taktser, called Lhamo Thondup, was indeed the next Dalai Lama.

  For a while Kewtsang was forced to remain silent. Taktser and the nearby monastery at Kumbum were still under the control of the Muslim warlord Ma Bufang. It had been Ma Bufang who had smashed the Tibetan army in the early 1930s, just before the death of the thirteenth Dalai Lama, and annexed portions of Amdo to Qinghai, including Kumbum. Ma Bufang was on the rise and, like his father Ma Qi before him, had a ferocious reputation, especially among Tibetans. He had conducted a campaign of ethnic cleansing against the Ngoloks, a Tibetan tribe that resisted his rule, sacking and looting monasteries along the way. Though strongly Islamic, Ma Bufang, now governor of the Chinese province of Qinghai, was a dedicated Chinese nationalist and virulently anti-communist. Should the boy’s identity be announced while under Ma Bufang’s control, there was the grave risk he might arrive in Lhasa with a large Chinese military escort.

  Ma Bufang knew Kewtsang had met with several candidates in his province and knew that if the infant Dalai Lama was declared in his jurisdiction, it would boost his leverage with central government in Beijing and increase his power locally. So he kept three-year-old Lhamo Thondup and his family close at hand. At first, Lhasa temporised, keeping their selection hazy as they negotiated with the Chinese for the terms of the new Dalai Lama’s arrival in Lhasa. Luckily the Kuomintang government was now at war with Japan, a situation of far greater consequence than any problem in Tibet could be. When the Tibetans sent a high-level delegation to fetch the boy from Qinghai there was a deal to be done. Tibet was forced to pay Ma Bufang four hundred thousand Chinese silver dollars as compensation, money the Indian government helped source.

  In July 1939, two years after his discovery and now four years old, Lhamo Thondup and his retinue, together with a small escort of Ma Bufang’s troops, left Kumbum monastery for southern Tibet. As they crossed the border of Ma Bufang’s territory, all vagueness over the identity of the Dalai Lama was abandoned: officials announced that Lhamo Thondup was and always had been the one true candidate. At Lhasa, Reting Rinpoche ordained the boy a monk, giving him the new name Tenzin Gyatso, fourteenth Dalai Lama, embodiment of Chenrezig, bodhisattva of compassion, known to Tibetans as Kundun: ‘presence’. By then the world was at war. Tibetans and all the peoples of the Himalaya stood on the brink of profound and sometimes violent change that would threaten their identity even as it brought the modern world crashing in.

  18

  Summit Fever

  Sunrise on the Kalindi glacier, high in the mountains of Garhwal: six men prepare to leave camp, shouldering rucksacks as the white summits flare into light above valleys still sunk in blue shadow. Yesterday they prepared a trail of steps, kicked into soft snow, and after last night’s frost these are now firm, like a staircase, crusty with ice whose crystals dazzle with refracted light as the men plod north-east. Above them is the Kalindi khal, a snowy pass almost six thousand metres above sea level linking the sacred Gangotri region behind them with the Arwa valley that cuts east towards the village of Ghastoli, a day’s walk north of the pilgrim town of Badrinath. At the crest of the pass, the group pauses. In front of them is a new horizon of spectacular mountains, including, to the north-east, the sentinel summit of Kamet, looking down on the forgotten world of the Guge kingdom and the bone-dry expanse of western Tibet. It is 15 August 1947.

  There can have been few better places to welcome India’s independence day, in this throne room of the mountain gods, at least until monsoon clouds rolled up the valley and snow started falling. The night before, as the clock ticked toward midnight and these men took shelter from the bitter cold inside their tents, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had delivered his ‘tryst with destiny’ speech in the central hall of the Indian parliament.

  It is a fateful moment for us in India, for all Asia and for the world. A new star rises, the star of freedom in the east, a new hope comes into being, a vision long cherished materialises.

  That vision held immense implications for the people of the Himalaya.

  One of the six standing on the Kalindi pass that independence morning would meet Nehru six years later in his own tryst with destiny. Tenzing Norgay was now thirty-three years of age, recently a widower with two young daughters, Pem Pem and Nima, living back in Darjeeling. He carr
ied their pictures with him in a frame. Tenzing had marked time through the war as an orderly for the Indian army in Chitral, far to the north-west. Now he was back working for a climbing expedition as a ‘Sherpa’ (the ethnic identity of Sherpa had by the 1940s become confused with the job description of a high-altitude porter). This trip would prove pivotal in his long journey to the summit of Everest with Edmund Hillary six years later. The expedition leader, not present on the pass that day, was the Swiss mountain guide André Roch. Among the most successful Himalayan climbers before the war, he had climbed in the Karakoram with Günter and Hettie Dyhrenfurth. Now, after the war, Roch was returning to the Himalaya at the age of forty to start again. A glaciologist, on rest days he would spend his afternoons painting landscapes. Among his team was René Dittert, a good-natured, self-effacing Genevois and an integral member of the Androsace Club, which included many of the best Swiss mountaineers. These two would both be part of the first Swiss attempt on Everest five years later, when Tenzing and Raymond Lambert came close to the top. Roch had just made Tenzing sirdar, leader of the expedition’s small team of Sherpas, after the man he first selected was injured. The other Sherpas seemed indifferent to reaching summits, but not Tenzing. There was, as one of the climbers put it, ‘a gleam of determination in Tenzing’s eyes’. André Roch judged him ‘our best man’. It was Tenzing who had led the way on the first ascent of a seven thousand-metre peak called Kedarnath, with highly trained and fit Swiss guides in his wake.

  Tenzing found working for the Swiss a warmer experience than he had the pre-war British expeditions to Everest. After their ascent of Kedarnath, there had been a party. One of the expedition recalled how that evening,

  when we all came down to base camp, and we all sat down, he sat down with us and drank a glass of wine. This was something unheard of. Shipton and Tilman wouldn’t have thought it odd but I can think of plenty of English climbers who would have done.

  That expedition member was Trevor Braham, not Swiss but British, born in Calcutta in 1922. It was Braham that Tenzing and a team of five Sherpas was accompanying to the Kalindi pass that independence morning, where three turned back to camp, leaving Braham and two of the Sherpas to continue downhill towards Badrinath.

  Braham had accepted a general invitation from the Swiss to the Himalayan Club for one of their number to join the Gangotri expedition: a gesture of goodwill. In the 1920s and 1930s the club had been first port of call for anyone exploring the mountains. Now, hollowed out by the war, it had stalled. Chaos and austerity in Europe had slowed the stream of climbers to a trickle. Braham, educated at St Joseph’s in Darjeeling, where his parents escaped the hot summer months in Calcutta, had only been climbing for a short while and only in Sikkim; his nine-week trip to Garhwal in the company of leading European alpinists was a test and an education.

  That day, 15 August 1947, Braham was returning home ahead of the main group, wanting to visit the Bhyundar valley, Frank Smythe’s valley of flowers. Sixty years later he could still recall the scent of freshly cut pine filling the air as he rattled down the trail to Badrinath, new wooden homes going up as men returned from military service. When he reached the temple, two days’ walking from the Kalindi pass, bunting for India’s independence day was still up and the mood was still buoyant. Yet on the train to Delhi, the horror of Partition was evident. He shared a compartment with a Sikh,

  such a quiet man; we talked a lot. Then we stopped at a station. He got out and was transformed into some kind of fierce warrior. He shouted: ‘Kill them! I’ve seen what they’ve done to our people.’

  At Delhi there were corpses laid out on the platform and the police tried to confiscate Braham’s ice axe.

  Much of the violence was focussed on the Punjab, but it spilled over into the Himalaya. On their return to the small town of Joshimath, the Swiss were put on an army truck back to Delhi for their safety, leaving the Sherpas to fend for themselves. After a fortnight spent hanging around, Tenzing and his crew got a lift to Dehra Dun, where civil order was unravelling. One young Sikh recalled how the town’s Muslim enclave was torched and the next day watching the bodies of fifteen Muslim girls being loaded onto a truck. Tenzing had a good friend in Dehra Dun, Jack Gibson, headmaster of the Doon School, who had hired him for a climbing holiday just after the war. Gibson had established a small refugee camp within the school grounds for Muslims escaping the chaos, and the Sherpas stayed in this oasis of peace until Gibson could find them transport home.

  Not all foreigners were as lucky as the Swiss. Theos Bernard was an American traveller and yoga celebrity who grew up in Tombstone, Arizona in a family obsessed with eastern religions: his uncle was Pierre Bernard, ‘Oom the Magnificent’, who was an early American proponent of yoga and a spiritual snake-oil merchant. Like Oom, Theos was a relentless self-promoter. Before the war he had travelled in Tibet, upsetting monks with his intrusive photography. Back home he appeared on the cover of Family Circle magazine dressed in tailor-made monk’s robes next to a Hollywood starlet and wrote about his experiences in his travel memoir Penthouse of the Gods. He had spent the war studying for a doctorate on Hatha yoga and after the war travelled to Spiti on the hunt for lost manuscripts. Caught with Muslim porters on his way to Kye monastery during the violence of partition, Theos Bernard and his third wife Helen were murdered, their bodies presumed thrown in the Spiti river.

  The impact of independence was felt in every Himalayan nation, not just India. On 15 August, as Trevor Braham was saying goodbye to Tenzing Norgay on the Kalindi pass, a Nepali political leader, among the most admired the country has seen, was being freed from a Kathmandu jail, a shrewd attempt to quell spiralling public discontent against the Rana dynasty. Bishweshwar Prasad Koirala, known simply as B P, had been born in Benares in India in 1914. His father was a bahun, a hill Brahmin called Krishna Prasad, who had migrated from his home east of Kathmandu to the then small village of Biratnagar near the Indian border. He prospered, both as a businessman and a government tax collector; he had two wives who between them had five surviving sons and four daughters, the makings of a political dynasty. Three of the sons would be prime ministers of Nepal. Krishna Prasad Koirala had seen the poverty around him and began to take action, opening a school at his own expense, but even these mild attempts at social reform earned him the displeasure of the Rana regime and he fled to Benares. The Ranas confiscated his properties and the extended family and retinue was plunged into poverty. Krishna Prasad joined the Indian National Congress, on the basis that nothing in Nepal would change until the Ranas lost their protective ally, the British Raj. One of B P’s earliest memories was seeing his father receiving garlands in the early 1920s from his Nepali political supporters in Benares. When Gandhi called for a campaign of civil disobedience in 1929, B P responded by standing up at his school desk and saying: ‘I leave my school.’ Three years later he was arrested on suspicion of helping ‘terrorists’ conspiring against British authority and imprisoned for the first time in his young life. It would not be the last.

  Krishna Prasad had gone into exile during the First World War, when Chandra Shamsher, the close ally of Curzon, was Nepal’s prime minister. Uncharacteristically for the sprawling Rana family, Chandra was an austere man, teetotal and monogamous and not prone to smiling. (It was said that when he did, it boded ill for those he smiled at.) He gave substantial assistance to the British war effort, sending some fifty-five thousand recruits for the Indian army’s Gurkha regiments and releasing eighteen thousand troops from the Nepal army for garrison duties in India. Taking into account Nepali subjects in other Indian military or policing roles, the country’s contribution had been around a hundred thousand men, with ten thousand fatalities, from a total population of five million.

  In June 1915, during the disastrous invasion of Gallipoli in modern-day Turkey by Allied troops, Himalayan explorer Charlie Bruce had been reunited with his old battalion, the 1/5th Gurkhas, and an old friend from his climbing days, Subardar Major Harkabir Thapa. (In the sum
mer of 1899, Harkabir had bewildered local people on the Isle of Skye with his speed in the mountains, running barefoot to the summit of Glamaig, and doing it again when they didn’t believe his time.) It was Bruce’s task to show his old comrades their route of advance for a planned attack on the heights of Achi Baba, overlooking the Gallipoli peninsula. Bruce knew this was asking ‘the impossible with quite inadequate means’. It was, he recalled, ‘a practical certainty that I was saying goodbye to my best friends’. Seven officers and 129 men lost their lives on the day of the attack. Harkabir Thapa was wounded but survived.

  This level of sacrifice couldn’t help but galvanise Nepali society. Before the war, recruitment into the Gurkha regiments stood at around a thousand men a year. After it tens of thousands of Nepali soldiers who had seen the world outside returned home, or else preferred Nepali communities inside British India, where work was easier to find and political debate was giving way to direct action. The new king Tribhuvan was not content to be a mere figurehead for the Ranas. Having ascended to the throne in 1911 aged eight, as he grew to adulthood in the 1920s he began exploring routes back to power. Even some younger members of the Rana family saw the need for change, a group that became far more engaged when Chandra tried to limit the immense cost of this sprawling family by classifying them into three streams: ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’. Those in the ‘C’ bracket were cut loose from the Rana payroll to agitate on the periphery. Many of them had studied in India and could see how Nepal was being left further and further behind.

  Chandra’s loyalty to the Raj did have its rewards. Before the war the British had begun to regard Nepal more as a princely state than a fully independent nation. In 1923, the Raj had formally recognised Nepali independence. The British also doubled Chandra’s subsidy, money he used to resume Nepal’s token development programme, building suspension bridges and beginning work on a road and ropeway that linked Birgunj on the Indian border to the Kathmandu valley 130 kilometres to the north. He outlawed the practice of sati, widows immolating themselves on the funeral pyres of their husbands, and attempted to deal with the far more widespread curse of slavery: more than sixty thousand slaves were freed thanks to this initiative. Yet these were really only expediencies in the face of pressure from outside Nepal. Chandra’s main interest was maintaining his family’s grip on power, even at the expense of ordinary Nepalis, supposedly telling George V that the British were in trouble in India because they had made the mistake of educating ordinary Indians.