by Ed Douglas
Among Nepalis, there was scepticism and disquiet at the prospect of tourism. Ritual pollution from contact with foreigners made interaction awkward at first for those from higher castes and many in Nepal’s elite couldn’t understand why foreigners would want to come anyway. What was so special about a few old temples? With his patron King Tribhuvan undergoing treatment in Switzerland, Boris sought permission from the crown prince Mahendra to bring in as many rich Americans as he could fit in a Dakota aircraft to stay at his new hotel. Mahendra indulged him but couldn’t see much in the idea until he watched the Americans vacuuming up every trinket on offer in the hotel’s gift shop. When Tribhuvan died in March 1955, Mahendra told Boris he wanted him to organise his coronation the following year. This became a shop front for Nepal, both as a tourism destination and a development aid project. Hundreds of foreign dignitaries were invited and scores of western reporters. The journalist Lowell Thomas was among them, arriving in a convoy of jeeps along Kathmandu’s first road to the outside world. His enormous cameras were set up in front of the royal dais and Thomas could be heard shouting instructions – ‘Hold it, king!’ – to Mahendra during the ceremony.
Another of the foreign reporters was the Eurasian novelist Han Suyin, born Rosalie Matilde Kuanghu Chou in the Chinese province of Henan; her novel A Many-Splendoured Thing had appeared as a Hollywood blockbuster the year before. Han Suyin captured fragments of Kathmandu’s coming-out party and the boozy world of Boris Lissanevitch in her barely fictionalised story The Mountain is Young. (‘They do say that there is a thing called mountain exhilaration,’ she wrote, ‘that when in the high places a strange elation seizes one; akin to ecstasy or madness.’) It was in Kathmandu that she met her third husband, an Indian army colonel called Vincent Ratnaswamy, providing the novel’s love story. Han Suyin had studied in Brussels before the war and was a friend of the Belgian cartoonist Hergé, who in 1956 was casting around for a new location for his fictional reporter Tintin’s next adventure. Their friendship may have been an influence on his choice of the Himalaya, although Hergé had used Tibet as a setting for Tintin as early as the 1940s. The new story appeared under the title Tintin in Tibet, which had tested well with the publisher’s sales force, but it takes place as much in Nepal as Tibet and features drawings of Kathmandu’s temples that are both charming and accurate. The story also features a yeti, the mythical abominable snowman, then at the height of its fame. The self-styled cryptozoologist Bernard Heuvelmans was Hergé’s ‘expert’ advisor on this creature, and he talked too with the French mountaineer Maurice Herzog, who claimed to have seen the creature’s footprints.
But the deeper inspiration for Tintin in Tibet was the psychological torment Hergé was experiencing as he wrote the story, torn between two women, searching for an exotic dream-world of innocence and hope. That would be the version of the Himalaya the new King Mahendra would peddle as he ruthlessly put Boris Lissanevitch out of business and invested himself in the tourism business, even as he crushed Nepal’s first attempt at democracy.
19
Songs from a Dark Cell
A few weeks after Saddam Hussein’s regime fell to American-led coalition forces, I interviewed a Tibetan prisoner of conscience called Ngawang Sangdrol. At the time she was still only twenty-five but had spent almost half her life behind bars. She was the best known of a small group of nuns imprisoned for protesting against China’s continuing occupation of Tibet, so I knew a little about the beatings and torture she had suffered at the hands of her guards. What I hadn’t been prepared for was her size. Sangdrol was barely five feet tall and slight: too slight. I could see the bones of her shoulders under her thin cardigan. What a man armed with an iron bar could do to her didn’t take much imagination. As she answered my questions in her soft voice, Sangdrol unconsciously massaged her head; migraines were a long-term consequence of the sustained violence she suffered, along with damaged kidneys and a malfunctioning digestive tract. It seemed a miracle she had survived. Only when I asked her why she thought she had been singled out for particularly harsh treatment did I get a glimpse of her resolve. Her eyes hardened and she gave a wry half-smile: ‘Maybe they didn’t like me.’
The Himalaya overflows with stories of courage and resilience but few compare with that of Ngawang Sangdrol. She was born in Lhasa in 1977 with the lay name Rigchog, the name her guards would use to strip her of her spiritual identity. Her family was poor but close, and dedicated to the cause of freedom and to Tibetan Buddhism as an expression of their culture. Her father, Namgyal Tashi, had fought in the Lhasa Uprising of March 1959, when Tibetans rose up against China’s occupation amid fears about the safety of the fourteenth Dalai Lama, who fled into exile. Through the early 1960s and 1970s, years of collectivisation and the disaster of the Cultural Revolution, he had been in and out of prison and detention camps. Namgyal Tashi would tell Sangdrol and her brothers and sisters about Tibet before communism changed everything. Her mother, Jampa Choezom, described how during the Cultural Revolution their father would be carried home unconscious from political ‘struggle’ sessions, known in Tibet as thamzing, in which party cadres publicly humiliated and beat those deemed politically untrustworthy. He suffered more persecution when he refused to sign a letter expressing support for China’s policies in Tibet. Sangdrol admired these stories of resistance and shared her parents’ strength of feeling for their identity as Tibetans.
At the age of twelve, Sangdrol joined the Garu nunnery just north of Lhasa. The nunnery’s foundation myth tells how Guru Rinpoche, founder of the Nyingma tradition, saw its location as propitious but couldn’t decide if it should become a monastery or a nunnery. He then had a vision of three female spirits, khandroma in Tibetan, dakini in Sanskrit, dancing in front of him. He went with the nunnery. Guru Rinpoche, known also by his Sanskrit name Padmasambhava, had as his consorts two dakini, Mandarava and Yeshe Tsogyel, both teachers in their own right, both adepts in tantric Buddhism. Yeshe Tsogyel in particular remains a popular figure in Tibetan mythology and there are many sites across the Himalaya associated with her name. She’s unusual to have had biographies dedicated to her, Tibetan Buddhism being as capable of misogyny as other religions; women are routinely characterised as intellectually incapable of fully grasping the dharma. An exception was the bridge-builder Tangtong Gyalpo, whose partner, in life as well as in dharma practice, was a woman called Choekyi Dronma: she was recognised by Tangtong as a female tulku, or reincarnate lama, one of the few female reincarnate lineages, and the most important: the Samding Dorje Phagmo. (The East India Company’s man George Bogle would, three centuries after her death, meet Choekyi Dronma’s reincarnation.) Yeshe Tsogyel was no sidekick either. In a reversal of the usual scenario she took consorts for herself, an inspirational exception, which is why she has such currency today among progressive feminist Buddhists. In one story, Yeshe Tsogyel and her followers find Guru Rinpoche meditating in the caves at Taktsang in the upper Paro valley of Bhutan. (She has carried him there earlier in the guise of a tigress.) Yeshe Tsogyel prostrates herself and he calls her heruka, meaning here an adept who has fully realised the true nature of existence. Guru Rinpoche tells her:
Oh yogini who has accomplished the secret mantra, the human body is the basis for attaining enlightenment. Male or female, inferior body – it makes no difference. If possessed of the aspiration to enlightenment, a female body is actually superior.
In Tibetan, the name for a female spirit, khandro, means something like space-dancer; there’s a playful or joyful quality in the term: a fully realised mind with the psychological space to express itself. There was little of this in Sangdrol’s experience. At Garu she discovered that her father’s suffering wasn’t exceptional; many of the older women could tell similar stories. In August 1990, when Sangdrol was still only thirteen, she went on her first demonstration with twelve other nuns, shouting slogans – ‘Long live the Dalai Lama!’ – at the Sho Dun festival held each summer in the Norbulingka park on the edge of Lhasa to mark the end
of a traditional period of retreat for Geluk monks. There was a heavy security presence. Tibet was still tense after a sequence of major public demonstrations against Chinese rule in the late 1980s that had frequently ended in violence and the deaths of scores of protestors. Martial law had only ended three months earlier. Almost immediately, police, uniformed and plainclothes, dragged the nuns away and put them in a truck. They were taken to the Public Security Bureau’s Gutsa detention centre east of the city, interrogated and beaten. Neither Sangdrol’s age nor her small size made any difference. She recalled being thrown around the room like a doll. The authorities wanted confessions and names of other protestors but the nuns refused, which earned them more abuse. There was never enough food and it was common at Gutsa for prisoners to be forced to give blood as payment for their rations. Sangdrol told me how when it rained she would stick her cup out of her cell window to collect water but was so small she could barely reach.
Her mother Jampa Choezom found out where she was being held and was allowed a visit. Sangdrol forced herself not to cry; her mother was too upset to speak and didn’t want to in front of the guards. When she was released after nine months Sangdrol discovered her father and one of her brothers, Tenzin Sherab, had been imprisoned following a demonstration at Samye monastery; her mother was dead, aged fifty-two, from a heart attack. As a former political prisoner, Sangdrol was banned from returning to her nunnery so she lived at home with her brothers and sisters, watched by police, and kept away from her friends in case she incriminated them by association. She said prayers for her mother but all the time thought of those still in prison and of returning to political action. In June 1992, less than two years after her first demonstration and imprisonment, she joined other Garu nuns and monks from Ganden monastery in a peaceful demonstration of support for the Dalai Lama and Tibetan freedom in the Barkhor, the circular thoroughfare and pilgrimage route that surrounds the Jokhang, the temple that stands at – and for – the heart of Lhasa and by extension Tibet. It had hardly begun before Sangdrol and the others were dragged away. She was sentenced to three years in prison ‘for incitement to subversive and separatist activities’. Still only fifteen years old, Sangdrol was one of the youngest political prisoners in the world.
This time she was incarcerated at Drapchi, the prison complex that took its name from an old Tibetan army regiment whose barracks once occupied the site. The People’s Liberation Army had taken it over to house prisoners following the Lhasa Uprising in 1959. As a form of political quarantine, two new units, or rukhag, were opened to house the surge in dissidents being incarcerated following this new wave of unrest. Men, often monks, were put in Rukhag 5; her father was being held here. The women went in Rukhag 3. Although the men always outnumbered the women, the authorities were forced to expand Rukhag 3 to cope as nuns continued to protest. Life in Rukhag 3 was brutally hard. Sangdrol was put to work in the prison’s carpet factory and given a daily quota. If she didn’t meet it, she was beaten or had her rations withheld. Yet even in this atmosphere, protest continued. One of the prisoners smuggled in a tape recorder and fourteen nuns collaborated in writing and recording songs about their lives in prison and their resistance to the occupation. Each of them gave their names and dedicated a song or poem to friends and supporters who had not forgotten them in jail, telling of the beatings they had suffered and their commitment to Tibetan independence. The recordings were smuggled out of Drapchi and released abroad as an album. In October 1993, little more than a year after her original three-year sentence, Sangdrol was given another six years for her role in ‘spreading counter-revolutionary propaganda’.
The head of Rukhag 3 was a Tibetan in her forties called Pema Butri, a woman who after work would go to a chapel nearby to say her prayers. She called the nuns dumo, she-devil, and if they didn’t pay sufficient respect, she made them suffer. Pema Butri singled out Ngawang Sangdrol as a ringleader for her small acts of defiance. In March 1996, Sangdrol was sitting outside her cell block. It was snowing. Pema Butri arrived with a small group of guards and seeing Sangdrol sitting there told her to stand. Sangdrol refused. A guard dragged her upright and the others began beating her. Sangdrol broke free and began shouting political slogans. Chaos reigned for a moment until armed police arrived and demanded to know who had started it. Pema Butri pointed out Sangdrol but the nearest policeman thought she meant another woman, Pema Phuntsog, and kicked her in the stomach. Not her, Pema Butri shouted, that one, Sangdrol. Although Phuntsog had done nothing wrong, both women were dragged off to solitary confinement, what the Tibetan prisoners referred to as a ‘dark cell’ with no window or light. Phuntsog was put in the next cell but one to Sangdrol’s: the one in between was left empty.
There was a metal grill in the ceiling of Sangdrol’s cell, through which a male prisoner, convicted of criminal offences, could look down on her. Some of the light from his cell filtered into hers. If she stretched out her arms, she could touch both its walls. When she rolled out her mattress, it more or less filled the floor. In one corner was a hole in the floor where she could defecate. The smell was so bad that guards were loath to step through the door. Sometimes, as she slept, a rat would come up through the hole and one winter’s night it crawled up the sleeve of her prison uniform, looking for the warmth in her armpit. There was no heating, even in the depths of the Tibetan winter. At night the water in her tap froze. Sangdrol suffered constant back pains from sleeping on a thin mattress on a cold floor; sometimes the guards would shout at her in the night to check she was still alive.
Sangdrol spent her days praying, looking through a gap in the cell door’s hatch at a shadow in the corridor outside. If the dark edges of the shadow flickered, she knew a prison guard was approaching. If she were caught praying, she would be beaten. Under her prison uniform she wore a thin red sweater and Sangdrol unpicked a thread from its hem to make a mala, a rosary. She used this to count off her prayers for the Dalai Lama, for saints like Tsongkhapa, guiding inspiration for the Geluk tradition, for liberation from the psychological torment she suffered. She regretted she had been banned from her nunnery so young; she hadn’t had time to study Buddhism properly. The older nuns seemed to her stronger, less angry. Each evening, as long as the guards weren’t around, she and Pema would call to each other, keep each other going. Eventually the other women in Rukhag 3 went on hunger strike in protest at their treatment and after six months the pair were released. When they were finally able to speak freely, Sangdrol asked Phuntsog why she had admitted to shouting slogans when she hadn’t. Phuntsog smiled. ‘To support you.’ Sangdrol was taken back to court and sentenced to a further eight years, on top of the nine she was already serving. She’d just turned nineteen.
The beating that almost killed Ngawang Sangdrol happened in the spring of 1998. On 1 May, Labour Day in China, prison officials arranged a ceremonial parade for the raising of the Chinese flag. Two criminal inmates began shouting for Tibetan independence and political prisoners joined in. There was pandemonium. Armed police grabbed prisoners and dragged them away. When order was finally restored, the authorities announced another Labour Day parade for 4 May, but this time long-standing political prisoners like Sangdrol would not be allowed to attend. Despite this, inmates still shouted support for the Dalai Lama. Sangdrol and the other nuns were watching through the windows of their block and smashed the glass, so their shouts of support could be heard. Monks prevented from attending now rushed the gate of the prison courtyard and armed police opened fire, hitting one of them. After half an hour, Pema Butri arrived in the nun’s block with more armed police and dragged Sangdrol outside, where they beat her with batons so badly that she quickly lost consciousness. A nun who saw it described how blood ran from her head like water. Pema Butri then stepped forward and hit her with her belt buckle, something Red Guards did habitually during the Cultural Revolution, as though Pema Butri were quoting from a familiar script. Sangdrol woke up at this blow and Pema Butri shouted at her: ‘I thought you had died, but you stil
l didn’t die.’ Sangdrol didn’t die, but in the violent aftermath of this demonstration five other nuns did. Prison authorities claimed they had committed suicide although witnesses who saw the bodies claimed they had been beaten beyond recognition. Sangdrol was given a further extension of her sentence for her role in the 1998 demonstration but increasing attention from international human rights organisations prompted the authorities to reduce her sentence and she was released in October 2002, just in time to be reunited with her father before his death. She is now an American citizen and a human rights campaigner.