Himalaya

by Ed Douglas

  The most important reform Chandra agreed with the British was the right to import goods from third countries without paying duty taxes to the Raj. Up to this point, the Nepal economy had run a surplus, selling rice to India. Now, thanks to this deal, there was a flood of cheap imports, particularly from Japan, where rapid industrialisation was undercutting the cost of British goods. (After the war, this duty-free privilege encouraged widespread smuggling back across the border into India, with a wink from politicians and sometimes their active involvement.) This new trade deal prompted a consumer boom that quickly soaked up the savings of ex-servicemen. Domestic textile production collapsed. Chandra of course charged duty of his own on this glut of imports, further enriching the Rana dynasty, which now enjoyed a moment of flamboyant excess. The politician Pashupati Rana, born in 1941 and a great-grandson of Chandra, recalled the extravagant fashions his mother’s generation wore:

  block-printed Dhaka layered with fine muslin, velvet embroidered with heavy pure gold thread interspersed with pearls, exquisitely worked saris with beautiful borders, diamonds and jewelled tiaras.

  It was a life of boggling luxury. Pashupati recalled hundreds of servants at his father’s home: ‘as a child I had four maid-servants and a wet-nurse to look after me indoors and four men-servants to attend to me out of doors.’

  As a revenue collector, a position the Ranas auctioned off to the highest bidder, Krishna Prasad Koirala had been acutely aware of his position in a society of such dire inequality. The story of precisely why he was forced into exile is a famous one, recounted by his son and political heir B P Koirala:

  It was winter and [a] large number of his men, very poor and in rags, were migrating to India in search of employment. He asked one of them for his clothes and himself fished the rags out of the man’s bag. And he had them sent to the Prime Minister with a covering letter saying that this was the usual clothing that ‘your subject wears in winter and compare this with what you are wearing. I hope it will not be interpreted as disrespect on my part to have sent these dirty rags to Your Highness.’

  Chandra was already suspicious of Krishna Prasad; bringing rebellious Bengalis to the safety of Nepal to teach in a school for ordinary people was verging on sedition itself. This package of rags was the last straw. The Koirala clan fled arrest into the arms of India’s independence movement, planting seeds that would bear fruit after the war.

  When Chandra died in 1929, his brother Bhim Shamsher had taken over, who survived just long enough to demand the British do something about the growing bands of anti-Rana Nepalis living in India. After him came Juddha Shamsher, the last of the seventeen sons of Dhir, Jang Bahadur’s youngest brother, to rule as maharaja. Juddha was far more autocratic, a competent and energetic military man who performed well in the devastating earthquake that shook Kathmandu almost to pieces in 1934. Politics however baffled him. There was a constant drip of corrosive anti-Rana stories in Indian newspapers and gossip in Kathmandu’s bazaars that king Tribhuvan would soon take back power. Even the army became dissatisfied. In 1936, an activist called Shukra Raj Shastri organised public meetings, which quickly landed him in jail. Shastri was part of a renaissance in Newari culture, the first stirrings of a political consciousness among Nepal’s ethnic minorities. An opposition party took shape, called the Praja Parishad or People’s Council, and when it called for an uprising the Rana regime arrested scores of activists and executed four of them, including Shastri, who was still in jail following his earlier conviction. The freedom movement had its first martyrs.

  By then the world was at war again. Juddha showed the same commitment to the British as Chandra had but many Ranas were dismayed as German forces swept across Western Europe. British India’s once impressive façade was also crumbling. In August 1942, Indian National Congress party activists cut the telegraph wires linking Nepal with the outside world, tore up railway tracks and burned police stations and post offices, cutting the British off from their ally in Kathmandu. It took weeks for the Indian authorities to restore links with the city, providing a moment of clarity for Juddha’s government. The slow response showed Nepal exactly where it stood in the eyes of the British, despite the country’s loyal sacrifice. (Of 282 Victoria Crosses awarded during the Second World War, thirteen went to Gurkha regiments.) Wanting more from the relationship, Juddha requested British help in building factories that would compete on favourable terms with those in India. The British preferred a plan to fund hydroelectric plants to raise Nepali living standards.

  Neither party could do much to protect Nepal from Indian inflation. The collapse of the Indian rupee during the war cut the value of Gurkha pensions, a significant benefit to the Nepali economy, by a third. In Indian hill stations like Darjeeling, the spiralling cost of living ate into the savings of those least able to cope, including Tenzing Norgay, who recalled relying on his second wife Ang Lhamu working as an ayah, or nanny, to keep their heads above water: ‘there seemed to be no ups – only downs.’ He bought a couple of horses to carry tourists, mostly visiting American troops, up Tiger Hill for its spectacular view of Kangchenjunga. As Nepali soldiers flooded home, bringing with them millions of Indian rupees, there was a currency crisis: Nepal simply didn’t have enough coins in circulation to exchange all that Indian paper money. The government in Delhi wasn’t prepared to sell silver on acceptable terms so a Nepali diplomat in London toured the capital’s silver dealers and bought a million ounces on the open market, enough to stabilise the currency.

  Ordinary Nepalis were resilient and resourceful but growing numbers wanted change: their children had no schools and their ageing parents no health care. The Nepali state, meaning the Rana family, didn’t have the technical capacity or sufficient political will to develop the country. Juddha Shamsher, a father of twenty sons and twenty daughters, feared he was nearing his end and retired in late 1945 to go on pilgrimage. His replacement was Padma Shamsher Rana, the son of Juddha’s elder brother Bhir, a low-key pragmatist who clashed with the sons of Juddha and Chandra, particularly Chandra’s outspoken eldest son Mohan. This political vulnerability hampered Padma’s sensible programme of reform: more schools, more electricity and more roads, including a start on an east–west highway. Yet development had to materialise promptly to save the Rana dynasty and the winds of history were already against them. Nepal needed heavy equipment to build roads but Britain, exhausted and almost bankrupt from war, was slow to deliver it. Padma showed real acumen in looking elsewhere. If the British were broke and quitting India, then the Rana dynasty needed to make new and preferably rich friends. Japan had provided Nepal with a taste of consumerism before the war but now lay in ruins. America was clearly the new power. And so Padma instructed Nepali leaders attending the Allies’ victory parade in London in June 1946 to continue on to Washington for talks with Harry Truman. Nepal, with an eye on American development aid, invited the United States to establish diplomatic relations.

  On the day the American mission arrived in the spring of 1947 a Gandhi-style satyagraha, or peaceful demonstration, began nationwide, organised by a new political party called the Nepali National Congress. This had coalesced from Nepali communities based in the Indian cities of Benares and Calcutta, with the tacit approval of the king. Tribhuvan, who had a history of heart disease, had used his health as an excuse to visit Calcutta, where he held talks with opposition leaders. By the time the Americans arrived, B P Koirala was already under arrest for helping to organise a strike at a jute mill in Biratnagar to demand fairer wages, and was now being force-marched back to Kathmandu. There he was jailed, attracting sympathy and support from the Indian independence movement’s most famous leaders, including Gandhi, who wrote to Padma demanding his release.

  Again, Padma showed himself an adroit politician. Anxious not to encourage an equivalent movement within Nepal, he promised a new constitution and invited Indian constitutional lawyers to help write it. He announced an independent judiciary, the introduction of female education and municipal elec
tions. Although autocratic, the Ranas could present themselves as conservative Hindu champions of the pahadis, the dominant Brahmin–Chhetri caste of the middle hills. This was enough to persuade Nehru that there need not be a coup in Nepal to bring change, at least under Padma’s leadership. And on the day India became independent, Padma ordered the release of B P Koirala, who immediately went back to India and exile.

  The people Padma most needed to convince of the need for reform, but couldn’t, were his own extended family. His cousin Mohan saw in Padma’s constitutional reform an end to Rana dominance. One or other of them would have to go and Padma blinked first, resigning his position in early 1948, soon after Nepal’s new constitution was promulgated. On taking power, Mohan didn’t revoke it, but it remained largely inoperative. Instead, he cracked down on freedom of speech and assembly, and banned the Nepali National Congress, earning the contempt of ordinary Nepalis who had liked their taste of freedom. Banning the Nepali Congress also proved a tactical disaster in his dealings with Nehru, who played on Mohan’s fear of how India might respond in order to screw concessions out of Nepal’s government: on trade and the use of Nepali troops now serving in the Indian army. And when that was accomplished, Nehru offered his support to a skilfully managed coup that levered the Ranas out of power.

  Tribhuvan’s position, meanwhile, had become increasingly difficult. The focus for opposition hopes, the king remained under the Rana family’s tight control. Early one morning in November 1950, he left the palace with most of his family for a hunting trip, his sons at the wheel of their motorcade. As it passed the Indian embassy, they simply turned through the open gates, which were locked behind them. Tribhuvan’s young grandson Gyanendra had been left behind to reassure the Ranas nothing was afoot, so Mohan had the child declared king and allowed Tribhuvan to fly into exile in India. The British were prepared to continue their support for Mohan, partly because the Nepali Congress were hostile to Gurkha recruitment, but it was Nehru and not Britain who was now calling the shots. He could turn armed Nepali insurgents on and off at will and used the threat of insurrection to build pressure against Mohan, who finally capitulated in early 1951. Tribhuvan returned at the head of a new government that Nehru had carefully calibrated to include some of the old regime alongside his allies in the Nepali Congress. A century after Jang Bahadur murdered his way to power, the nation seemed poised on the slipway of democracy.

  *

  What Mohan hadn’t done as he tried in vain to turn back the tide of reform was to return Nepal to its former isolation. Apart from British diplomats, few Europeans had visited Nepal in the first half of the twentieth century, fewer than visited the supposedly exclusive Tibet. Family members living abroad brought back news of India’s burgeoning independence movement, but otherwise ordinary Nepalis continued their lives as they had for centuries. A few journalists were allowed in. Penelope Chetwode wrote an article titled The Sequestered Kingdom for National Geographic in 1935. Chetwode, still only twenty-five and recently married to the poet John Betjeman, was the only daughter of Field Marshal Lord Chetwode and not someone likely to challenge Nepal’s unusually static status quo. Likewise Edward Alexander Powell, an American adventure-travel journalist who applied for a visa on a whim in 1927 while staying in Calcutta and got lucky. His book was The Last Home of Mystery: Adventures in Nepal. Like Chetwode he portrayed the Ranas as ‘distinctly progressive’, while overlooking the fact that attempts at modernisation were for the benefit of Nepal’s rulers, not its people.

  The European most capable of burrowing under the surface of Nepal at this time was the Italian scholar Giuseppe Tucci, who spent four months in the Kathmandu valley in the summer of 1929, the first Italian to do so since the missionaries of the eighteenth century. There was no greater European scholar of the Himalaya before the war. Few adventurers travelled as far or wide, but this brilliant, cynical and ambitious opportunist never hesitated to apply political expediency if it took him closer to his academic goals: the past was his kingdom, not the present, and the Ranas would have nothing to fear from Tucci. He was born in 1894, the son of a tax officer in the provincial backwater of Macerata, whose most famous son was the Jesuit missionary Matteo Ricci. At the age of seventeen Tucci published his first paper, on Latin inscriptions in the countryside around his hometown, in a prestigious German archaeological journal and barely stopped writing for the rest of his life. At university in Rome he came under the influence of the fascist philosopher Giovanni Gentile and by extension Gentile’s patron Mussolini, and developed a lasting passion for Chinese philosophy, in particular Taoism and the semi-mythical teacher Laozi. His interest in Buddhism, he once told an Indian journalist, was born in an earlier life. The joke neatly sidestepped a paradox: no European scholar before Tucci came as close to unravelling the myriad complexities of Tibetan Buddhism, but Tucci took for himself only its core philosophy: the use of detachment as a protection, a transparent bubble, against the mediocre or tiresome. For a while, fascism held the same appeal. Tucci was, in the early 1920s, friendly with the fascist intellectual Julius Evola, author of Revolt against the Modern World: they met at the Italian branch of the Theosophical Society. Long after the war and in his early sixties, Tucci could still write that, ‘In Tibet man had not yet disintegrated: he still sank his roots fully into the collective subconscious, which knows no difference between past and present.’ He was, like so many Westerners in the Himalaya, a ‘seeker’.

  In late 1925 Tucci and his Sanskrit professor Carlo Formichi arrived in India at the invitation of Rabindranath Tagore, India’s first and so far only winner of the Nobel Prize for literature, who had been touring the world seeking support for his experimental Visva-Bharati college in the sleepy Bengali town of Shantiniketan, dedicated to outdoor learning and Indian nationalism. Formichi had been Tagore’s interpreter when he visited Italy earlier that year and had written to Mussolini begging financial support for an Italian teacher to accompany Tagore home for a return visit. Il Duce hadn’t given India much political thought until that point, but looking to counter negative publicity about a fascist Italy in the rest of Europe, he saw an opening. He ordered an extravagant library of Italian literature be sent to Visva-Bharati and paid the fare for a teacher: Giuseppe Tucci. When Tagore returned to Italy a year later, the poet was bamboozled by Mussolini’s blunt charm, telling Formichi: ‘There is such a massive vigour in that head that it reminds one of Michael Angelo’s chisel.’ Flattered by his warm reception, he told an Italian newspaper: ‘Let me dream that from the fire-bath the immortal soul of Italy will come out clothed in quenchless light.’ Tagore’s more liberal European friends were aghast, and once out of Italy the poet soon backtracked. There would be no more generous gifts from Mussolini, although the dictator later welcomed a semi-admiring Gandhi to Rome.

  The months in between Tagore’s visits to Italy were a delicious interlude for Tucci, reading and studying in the warm seclusion of Shantiniketan, walking with Formichi in the gardens of Tagore’s college. Formichi was full of admiration for the younger man.

  In addition to Sanskrit and the literary dialects of India, he knows Chinese, Tibetan, and has delved into the study of Iranian and the languages of Central Asia.

  He was, Formichi said, the ‘future prince of Oriental scholarship’, and he regarded him as a son. Tucci, when he was famous, would keep a cool distance from Formichi, describing himself as an ‘autodidact’ who as a young scholar had felt stifled in Italy’s dreary academic scene. Sharing credit was never easy for him. Never much of a photographer, he relied on his companions for making a visual record, including his second wife Giulia Nuvolini, whom he took to India in 1925. Her photos were rarely credited. Such ingratitude was typical of Tucci, according to his student Pio Filippani-Ronconi, himself a fascist of the Gentile school. Filippani saw Tucci as by turns charming and cruel, a man who could swiftly calculate the use of another person.

  That charm was nowhere better applied than in his dealings with British colonial officials
in the Himalaya. His first trek there had been with Tagore in the hills beyond Darjeeling, but he soon focussed his interest on western Tibet and the second diffusion of Buddhism that had taken place there between the tenth and eleventh centuries. He earned his keep teaching in Dacca, Calcutta and Benares, and made research trips to Ladakh and Zanskar, learning the system of permissions he would need for more extensive explorations in Tibet. Returning to Italy in 1931 as professor of Chinese in the Oriental Institute of Naples, he organised two long expeditions to western Tibet of immense ambition that took him to those places he had identified as crucial to his studies of the second diffusion: the monasteries of Tabo, in the Spiti valley, and nearby Nako, built in a similar style, as well as Tholing, across the modern border in the west Tibet region of Ngari, and the nearby citadel of Tsaparang. In western Tibet in particular, he felt as though a vast spiritual enterprise had crumbled away almost to dust and squalor and showed no compunction in removing whatever he could from the crumbling monuments he found, including an entire wall painting.