Day 363: Smash and Grab

Many readers assumed this book was banned as soon as it appeared in 1984. Even NDTV’s anchor said so when introducing me in The Big Fight programme. Given the title, which quotes the twelfth Chogyal of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal, the conclusion was not unexpected. It was strengthened when Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim disappeared from view just as its revelations were beginning to attract attention.

A ban would have been clumsy. As it happened, Gurbachan Singh, the last political officer in Gangtok and Sikkim’s de facto overlord, filed a defamation suit against me demanding enormous damages. Normally, defamation has to be proved before the courts take any action. Proving can take months, even years. In my case, the Delhi High Court issued an order at the first hearing, forbidding sale of the book until the case had been settled. A contempt charge was piled on that when Gurbachan Singh produced a cash memo from a shop in some small town which had sold a copy. The matter was resolved only when the eminent jurist, Soli Sorabjee, representing me in a generous act of friendship, persuaded the prosecuting lawyers to accept an out—of—court settlement entailing an apology (Appendix A) but no money. The sales ban was lifted but the publisher claimed he had no copies left to sell. He wasn’t interested in reprinting either.

Neat, you might say. What J.N. (Mani) Dixit, the former head of India’s foreign office who died suddenly in 2005 soon after Manmohan Singh appointed him national security adviser, told me much later made it seem neater still. ‘South Block was very worried about what you might come out with,’ he said one day over lunch in his bungalow in Gurgaon. ‘The defamation suit was a godsend!’ Apparently, Gurbachan Singh’s colleagues in the external affairs ministry and the prime minister’s office, both housed in South Block, had made a point of playing on his wounded vanity. Whether they did or not, the suit was as effective as a ban without laying the government open to the charge of censorship. South Block was even more relieved when the matter was settled out of court. That averted an embarrassing public discussion of actions that were legally and morally questionable.

Dixit was one of the few in the know. Among those to be taken in by official propaganda was Daniel Patrick Moynihan, the American ambassador who cultivated a viceregal presence. His Wikileaks Cable 1973NEWDE04127_b exonerated New Delhi of stirring up trouble or contemplating annexation. ‘Indians will probably prefer to preserve the existing treaty relationship’, he wrote on 10 April 1973, in response to State Department inquiries. Two days later, Moynihan approvingly cited (Cable 1973NEWDE04291_b) the report of ‘an experienced American official now posted in Europe who was vacationing in Sikkim during the current unrest’.

    The official believes that the demonstrations by the Nepalese—Sikkimese majority against the Chogyal’s regime, which favoured the indigenous minority, were spontaneous, appeared to be non—violent, (and) were not induced by the Indian government... India does not plan to incorporate Sikkim within India.

Indian officials who took pride in planning and executing the operation would have split their sides laughing. They can’t be ignored because just as my last book, Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew's Mission India, highlighted the most constructive aspect of Indian diplomacy, 'Smash and Grab' is the only account of the militarism, deceit and betrayal that policymakers are also capable of. Happily, that dark side of India’s Asian strategy has not been repeated. But the reminder may still be necessary.
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There being no conflict between the two positions, a new edition twenty—eight years later should not make me an even worse friend to myself. With Smash and Grab long out of print, people with an interest in Himalayan affairs cannot be denied an honest alternative to the ‘manufactured consent’ of the official version. They must also be saved from a pirated edition that closely resembles the original. Pirated is not perhaps the right word since this clandestine product is also the handiwork of the publisher who formally returned the copyright to me on 16 February 2000. He said he was not interested in another edition (Appendix C). I was all the more surprised suddenly to discover he had surreptitiously flooded the market with a new paperback.

Telling the story again does not mean a u-turn is possible, or even desirable, in history’s one—way street. My Sikkimese friends have made their peace with destiny. On the whole, they have profited from it. Today’s Sikkim is far more vibrant than the sleepy kingdom I knew. Everything is bigger, if not always better. Sikkim’s first economic plan, spanning the seven years from 1954 to 1961 had an outlay of only ₹ 32.4 million. The 2011—'12 plan boasted a ₹ 14,000—million budget. This is in addition to the money New Delhi pours into the state for roads and power plants, special development under the Seven Sisters (as the north—eastern states are called) budget, and for disaster relief. The military invests massively in border defence. Expenditure on this scale is bound to yield results. Rajiv Gandhi’s calculation that only 15 per cent of development funds reach the target also means Sikkim’s 607,688 people are making money hand over fist. They enjoy the additional benefit of subsidised essential commodities like fuel. Those with ‘Sikkim Subject’ cards (meaning they or their ancestors were bona fide residents of the kingdom) pay no income tax.

It’s boom time in this little corner of the Himalayas. Many development projects that the Chogyal mooted but New Delhi shot down then are in full swing now. But it's progress without the stabilising ballast that tradition provides. Land prices have shot up. Peasants who made a killing selling their holdings are setting new records in ostentatious consumerism. A young farmer who traded in his field for the most flamboyant motorbike also hired a driver to support the prestige of affluence. Easy come, easy go. Some become bankrupt. Others are reduced to nervous wrecks. One feckless youth now tills the land his fathers owned. A gift racket to launder black money followed the excise scam that created many millionaires. The innocent Sikkimese did not think of exploiting the absence of any excise duty in the Chogyal’s time. But the shrewd Indian businessmen who flooded Gangtok after the annexation were quick to grasp they could make a killing from duty—free goods. All they needed was an address in Sikkim, a front man and a dummy company. Soon, greed overcame prudence. Factories elsewhere in India began rolling out manufactures stamped ‘Made in Sikkim’. The exchequer is believed to have lost ₹ 3,500 million on account of evaded tobacco duty alone.

Old distinctions of birth and rank as well as traditional cultural supports are dissolving in this upsurge of new wealth. Christian evangelists have never had it so good. Construction is booming. Travel restrictions that kept foreigners out have been relaxed. Indian Airlines’ ancient Dakotas no longer monopolise the air route to Bagdogra. Helicopters ferry passengers to the Burtuk helipad in Sikkim. A ropeway whirls visitors above Gangtok. An aerotropolis is coming up at Pakyong. Trekking tours compete with orchid and rhododendron displays, exhibitions, talks and seminars. The once moribund Namgyal Institute of Tibetology hums with activity. Even the agitation against hydroelectricity projects (no fewer than twenty-nine in north Sikkim alone) speaks of social dynamism. The one dump of a hostelry of the 1960s long ago gave way to a galaxy of hotels, spas and resorts.

Gangtok has become a throbbing business and tourist centre with packed cafés, a busy walkway and one of India’s few casinos. The Chogyal’s youngest son and daughter by Gyalmo Hope have made a major contribution to the modernist image. Prince Palden, a successful investment banker in New York, has married into the Sikkimese aristocracy and built a magnificent mansion in Gangtok that he visits regularly. Princess Hope Leezum and her husband, a Sikkimese nobleman in the police force, live in Gangtok where she runs a thriving tourist business. Few look back with nostalgia. But no one can afford to ignore the interlinked historical processes that converted a kingdom under India’s protection into the twenty—second state of the Indian republic. The disappearance of the old Sikkim was not the end of the Himalayan story. It was the beginning.

~~Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim -by- Sunanda K. Datta-Ray

Day 139: Book Excerpt: So Close To Heaven

The gentleman was angry. The son of a former royal official, he had stored up nearly two decades of bitterness against the West. Now he had the unexpected opportunity to vent it. It was late on a winter afternoon in the Sikkimese capital, Gangtok, when we met; I had invited myself to his house, which was set in a quiet and secluded garden somewhere on the edge of town. A local merchant had guided me there, saying that this distinguished family had a store of firsthand accounts of the final years of Sikkim’s last king, the Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, and the shattering of Sikkimese independence. The chogyal, who died of cancer in near-obscurity in New York in 1982, is one of modern Asia’s most tragic historical figures, the more so because his sorrowful story is barely remembered.

Even B. S. Das, the Indian official sent from New Delhi effectively to depose him in the 1970s, remembered the chogyal with respect and something approximating affection. “A lone and forgotten man who lost his kingdom, his wife and everything he stood for, stuck to his Palace, his People, his Sikkim till he breathed his last,” Das wrote eloquently in The Sikkim Saga, an account of his ghoulish mission to this vulnerable Himalayan kingdom. “Unbending in his misfortunes, he dreamt of some one, some day appreciating the righteousness of his cause and placing him in history as a true nationalist who fought single-handed against all odds for what he believed in.”

With Asian grace, the gentleman in Gangtok I met that afternoon showed his annoyance at my intrusion for only a moment before offering me a chair and ordering his servant to bring cakes and tea. But sixteen years after Sikkim was absorbed by India, he could barely disguise his contempt for the journalists he said had ascended to the mountain kingdom in 1963 with baggage full of adjectives to coo over the fairytale wedding of Hope Cooke, but hadn’t stuck around long enough to notice that there would be no happy ending to the Sikkimese story. Journalists found plenty to say about the New Yorker who fell in love with a monkish Himalayan prince thrust into line for the throne by the death of an elder brother. They couldn’t stop writing about the young American who was elevated to gyalmo, or queen, of Sikkim, not long after. But they were strangely absent a decade later when the kingdom collapsed and died. Where were you then? the gentleman wanted to know. By clinging to an exotic fantasy and averting its eyes and cameras in Sikkim’s darkest days, he said, the democratic world had acquiesced in India’s cynical destruction of his homeland, the second-to-last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom. “No one heard us cry,” he said. “Or no one listened.”

“The Shangri-la concept was dangerous for us,” Cooke wrote in her autobiography, Time Change. “At every interview I’d given over the years, I’d tried again and again to drive the point home that however small and semiexotic we might be, we were real, we existed. If people didn’t credit us with reality, we would perish very soon, the victim of very real power politics.” And perish Sikkim did. No longer an independent kingdom with barely 200,000 people, Sikkim is now an Indian state with at least twice that number of inhabitants in a mountainous land of less than eight thousand square miles—somewhere between the land size of Puerto Rico and Canada’s Prince Edward Island.

The Sikkimese gentleman and I reached an accommodation. I would not name him in any publication if he would talk awhile. And he did, sadly, now and then looking out the window toward the neat lawn and the trees that enclosed a small, slightly formal garden on a hillside terrace. In the days of the Raj, such gardens were often inspired if not created by compulsive British weekend horticulturalists determined to make the Himalayan hill stations take on the cultivated look of rural England. Gardens, along with amateur theatricals, tearooms, lending libraries, and stone churches with trellised gates, were weapons against homesickness. Gangtok, being the seat of an independent kingdom, escaped day-to-day administration by British civil servants and thus had no large expatriate colonial community. A resident political officer worked directly through the king. His functions were to oversee the affairs of the royal government while protecting British interests (a precedent India built on) as well as to set the general social tone and see that the appropriate flowers got planted.

John Claude White, the first political officer to take up residence in Gangtok in the late nineteenth century, when there were no roads or towns of any size, wrote in his journals about his efforts to build an appropriate house “in the midst of a primeval forest” not far from (but on a hill higher than) the royal palace. “By levelling the uneven ground and throwing it out in front, I managed to get sufficient space for the house, with lawn and flower beds around it,” he recalled proudly in Sikkim and Bhutan, his record of his colonial service. “The garden was a great joy and an everlasting source of amusement and employment both to my wife and to myself,” he wrote. “It was a lovely garden, the lawns always a beautiful green in winter, and perfectly smooth, with masses of flowers, the magnificent forest trees left standing about in clumps with feathery bamboo and groups of tree ferns adding a charm of their own. In early spring the lawns were fringed with daffodils, primroses, polyanthus, daisies, pansies—almost every spring flower you can name, flowering in a profusion seldom seen in England. By the end of April, the roses were in full bloom, a perfectly exquisite sight, excelling anything I have ever seen even in England. The house and all the outbuildings were covered with them.”

A century later, these gardens that the British carved into hillsides remain a recognizable colonial legacy from the high valleys and mountainsides of Pakistan to the remotest resorts of Assam. There is always a lawn, usually rectangular and rimmed with flowering borders and bushes, sometimes planted in pots that give the whole affair portability as seasons change. On the lawn (regularly swept by servants) are chairs, tables, and sometimes large umbrellas set out for taking tea or enjoying meals in the open air. The most appealing characteristic of the climate in the Himalayan foothills is that while the nights may be harsh, the sun at midday and into the afternoon always seems to be warm and soothing, monsoon seasons excepted.

Cozy, understated gardens also survive around old British-era hotels, in Murree, Shimla, Darjeeling, and the balmier hill stations of South India. These homey patches of grass and flowers are not the magnificent formal constructions of the Moguls, with their terraces and watercourses, or the more austere French garden landscapes of Dalat, the premier colonial sanitarium-resort in Vietnam. But no people so rhapsodized over their flowering plants as the British. Claude White went on for pages in his memoirs cataloguing all his flowers, season by season, and boasting of the size of their blooms. A stock flowering in front of his study window, he recorded methodically, was four feet six inches high and three feet six inches in diameter, and a Lilium auratum “grew to eight feet, with 29 blossoms on a single stalk.”

Gangtok was so undeveloped in the 1880s that the Whites had to import dairy cattle for milk, sheep for meat, a baker, carpenters and furniture builders, a blacksmith, and a silversmith. But they built a house to match their status, even wallpapering the interior with an imported touch of home. Fine Sikkimese houses, like that of the gentleman talking over tea, caught the ambience of an English manse, with dark, heavy furniture and draperies in rooms designed to resist the sun along with the sounds, smells, and often even views of Asia. Roses in the dooryard bloomed. Beyond them hedgerows grew. It was a self-contained world.

When the life of independent Sikkim was snuffed out, the courtly gentleman was saying, it had been a small country on the way to controlled growth in tune with its size and heritage, much like Bhutan. But there were crucial differences. In Sikkim a Buddhist monarch and Tibetan or Bhutia people closely related to the Bhutanese ruled a population more than half Nepali by ancestry. Nepalis were largely Hindu, spoke a very different language, and were eager and mobile workers in a variety of occupations. They took quickly to new terrain, where they settled and expanded their families. In Sikkim, as later in Bhutan, they could be readily exploited as disaffected fifth-columnists.

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Day 30

This is a study of ritual within a community variously referred to as Bhutia, Lhopo or Denjongpa in the agricultural village of Tingchim in North Sikkim. It is intended as a contribution to the anthropology of Himalayan Buddhist communities and to the discussion concerning the relation between Buddhism and shamanism. This study explores the rituals and working relations of Buddhist lamas and shamans within the wider context of village life, taking into consideration the sacred history of the land as well as its more recent political and economic transformation.

Shamanic rituals held by various specialists among Tibetan Buddhist communities such as the Sherpas and the Ladakhis usually have either disappeared under the influence of forms of Buddhism that did not support such worldly practices or have been absorbed into the hierarchy of the Buddhist monasteries. The pawo (dpa’ bo) and the nejum (rnal ’byor ma), the male and female shamans of the Sikkimese Lhopo, have remained independent of the Buddhist establishment and, for the most part, were neither suppressed nor greatly influenced by the lamas. In Tingchim, they perform their rituals side by side with non-celibate village lamas, usually independently but on some rare occasions, jointly.
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Buddhism, which firmly established itself in Sikkim in the seventeenth century, initially absorbed the cult of ancestral gods and local deities which eventually became central to the performance of rituals currently held by both village lamas and shamans. I argue that this shared conceptual view of reality, well rooted in the sacred topography and history of the land, is at the base of their amiable coexistence. So strong is this shared worldview, which links the body, the territory, society and the supernatural, that village lamas and shamans in Tingchim have at times together ignored reformist Buddhist ideas that have permeated into the village in recent decades, the most significant being the question of propitiatory animal sacrifice. Thus, contrary to how the lama-shaman relation has generally been presented in the literature, the situation in Tingchim suggests that viewing it as a dichotomy may be misleading. In her discussion about the relationalism of shamanism versus the individualism of Buddhism among the Sherpas, Ortner (1995) has indeed demonstrated that a simple dual analysis may hide at least as much as it reveals. Although the Buddhist project and its production of a non-relational self does exist and has been analysed by Adams in the context of Tibetan society (1992), instead of focusing on this binary opposition and the details of this process, or how Buddhist thought is pushing the shamans out of business, I chose to explore how and why the relational worldview refuses to die despite an obvious decline in Lhopo shamanistic practice per se.

Tingchim villagers’ worldview revealed itself best during the performance of curing rituals where the working relations of village lamas and shamans could be witnessed along with the infl uence knowledgeable outside lamas and Rinpoches have had on their practice. Not only do these moments of crisis reveal villagers’ ritual preferences, the necessity to save people’s lives provides the ritual specialists with the license to join hands and perform rituals that would, under normal circumstances, be considered unacceptable by orthodox Buddhist lamas. These rituals in turn best illustrate to what extent the ancestral gods and the local deities are thought to link people’s actions to the land, the body, the household, the lineage, the village and the state. I argue that this relational or shamanic worldview is so fundamental to the Sikkimese way of thinking that it underpins the lama-shaman duality. A number of historical, political and economic developments have contributed to the endurance of the shamanic worldview in Tingchim, which now seems to be maintained by the central importance attributed to household rituals as opposed to those held at the Buddhist monastery. Community membership entails mandatory participation in a number of domestic rituals, the performance of which indirectly sustains the amiable co-existence of shamanism and Buddhism at the village level. This study thus asks why village lamas seem uninterested in eradicating, or at least controlling, the shamans’ practices in the way that Tibetan Buddhist lamas generally advocate. And why villagers’ relational or shamanic view of the universe seems to endure despite a decline in shamanic practices? In the process of seeking answers to these questions, I have tried to gain some understanding of people’s ordering of their own world, its basic premises and the articulation of its various realms.
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Sikkim was an independent Himalayan Buddhist kingdom, founded in 1642 by Tibetan Nyingma (rNying ma) lamas and ruled by the Namgyal dynasty, a monarchy of Tibetan origin. It became a protectorate of the British Government in 1890 and was integrated into the Union of India in May 1975, simultaneously putting an end to the rule of the Chogyals. Sikkim is a small mountainous state squeezed between Nepal, Bhutan, West Bengal and Tibet. There is not a single stretch of flat land and altitudes vary from a few hundred metres above sea level to the world’s third highest peak, Mount Kangchendzönga at 8,585 metres. Agriculture is the basis of Sikkim’s economy and is the world’s main producer of large cardamom. The ethnic composition of Sikkim’s half million inhabitants is extremely varied considering that Sikkim is a tiny state of about 70 by 110 kilometres and that twenty percent of its territory lies under perpetual snow. The Anthropological Survey of India has documented twenty-five different communities that can be grouped in three main categories: (1) Bhutias (Lhopos) and Lepchas, the original inhabitants of Sikkim who now represent less than 20% of Sikkim’s total population; (2) people of Nepalese origin, mainly Limbus and Rais, who started migrating to Sikkim in large numbers from the 1870s and who now represent more than 75% of the population; and (3) people from the plains of India, mainly Marwaris, Biharis and Bengalis who are a small although rapidly growing minority of merchants and service castes.

Tibetan settlers came to Sikkim from the neighbouring valleys of Chumbi and Ha and regions beyond these southern valleys such as Kham Minyak from the thirteenth century onwards and established the kingdom in 1642. Their descendants call themselves Lhopo (lho pa—‘people from the south’) but are generally known as Bhutia, Sikkimese or even Denjongpas, the people of Denjong or Demojong (’Brasmo ljongs—‘the fruitful valley’, often translated as the ‘valley of rice’). Since the term ‘Bhutia’ can also refer to any Buddhist highlander living in the Himalayas, and ‘Sikkimese’ may be confusing considering that the Lhopos are now a minority in the state, I will refer to them as Lhopo, which is the term they themselves prefer.

Tingchim is an agricultural village of 54 corporate Lhopo households. Its 265 Lhopo villagers are organised in ten exogamous patrilineages that have little purpose beyond regulating marriages. The majority are descendants of migrants from the adjacent valleys of Chumbi (Tibet) and Ha (Bhutan) who came to Sikkim between 200 and 400 years ago. The village is located in Sikkim’s North District, some 53 kilometres north-west of the state capital of Gangtok along the highway that leads to the high valleys of Lachen and Lachung. It lies on the eastern bank of the river Teesta at an altitude of 1,300 metres and is part of a group of a dozen Lhopo and Lepcha villages centred around the Kagyud (bKa’ brgyud) monastery of Phodong and the Nyingma monasteries of Labrang and Phensang. Tingchim faces the Lepcha reservation of Dzongu, located on the opposite bank of the river Teesta where Geoffrey Gorer carried out fieldwork in Lingthem in 1937 (Gorer 1938).

~~Lamas, Shamans and Ancestors -by- Anna Balikci