So Close to Heaven (18 page)

T
HE
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.

Sikkim also sat astride the most accessible gateway to and from Tibet, an old trade route from Lhasa to Darjeeling through the pass called Natu La. This and other high but navigable trails might one day be used by India’s enemies. Bhutan’s mountain passes were more distant and difficult to traverse, and therefore of less concern to imperial Britain and later India. Bhutan was also larger geographically, and peopled by a martial race of strapping men and women who had proved their battle skills time and again over the centuries. They gave Bhutan a don’t-tread-on-us quality that the Sikkimese did not enjoy, and especially not the Lepchas,
the country’s third major ethnic group, the gentlest of Himalayan people.

To the Indian establishment, allowing Sikkim to remain free and vulnerable when the British left India in 1947 was tantamount to exposing a Himalayan Achilles’ heel. China was not yet the direct threat it would later become after its army had overrun the Tibetans and turned its attention to the Indian border, but Sikkim did have close ties with Tibet through culture and marriage. The Chogyal Palden Namgyal studied there as a monk and married a gorgeous Tibetan princess, Sangey Deki, who died in 1957, a few years before Hope Cooke entered his royal life. The Sikkimese long nurtured claims on Tibetan territory, and those might someday prove troublesome, Indians thought. Almost from the day independent India was born, many Sikkimese believe, Delhi plotted the kingdom’s downfall, with little regard for a 1950 treaty of accommodation.

Indian ministers and administrators gave outsiders the impression that they were already in control well before delivering the fatal blow. They argued that they were simply picking up the reins (or, as one Indian official preferred, a leash) on Sikkim dropped by the departing British. In early 1960, John Kenneth Galbraith, then ambassador to India, recorded in his diary a brief visit to Gangtok and his meeting there with Bleshwar Prasad, “the Dewan Sahib, who is the effective head of the government and an Indian.” He added the observation that all the top administrators in Sikkim seemed to be Indians. The
dewan
, by then an Indian-appointed adviser to the chogyal who introduced himself to Galbraith as prime minister of Sikkim, apparently had a reputation for tactlessness, the ambassador noted. It was a trait that flowered then and flowers still in Indians sent abroad to do their nation’s work in the neighborhood.

Sikkimese could later make much of Galbraith’s adopting Delhi’s language in calling the aging ruler he met in Gangtok a “maharaja.” Chogyal Tashi Namgyal, the king he met, was a frail man of sixty-eight and an artist more interested in his paints than his government files. His heir, who would marry Cooke, Galbraith called the “maharajkumar.” As often in politically status-conscious India, the choice of title carries significant implications. “Maharaja,” in Delhi-speak, was applied to heads of protectorate territories and incorporated princely states. It was a rank subordinate to that of a king, as “chogyal” was defined in Sikkimese. Indians, who argued accurately that the British also called Sikkim’s king
“maharaja,” inevitably got out of sorts when the Sikkimese or foreigners addressed the chogyal as “Your Majesty,” which was deemed more than he deserved. “Your Highness” would have been more than enough for India, which had abolished hereditary kingships.

Galbraith’s Indian escorts must also have shared their considerable anxiety about Tibet with the ambassador, who at one point while visiting a Bengali plantation was apparently told that he was closer to Tibetan territory than he probably was. He noticed the numerous contingents of Indian forces in Sikkim, “located here, presumably, to discourage the Chinese.” The level of paranoia in Delhi about the Sikkim corridor from Tibet soared after the 1962 Chinese attacks on India in the Ladakh area on the western flank and near the Burmese border in the east. These incursions, met disastrously by an ill-equipped Indian force, were mounted not long after Beijing had finally consolidated its occupation of Tibet in 1959. India’s Himalayan line of security had never been so threatened.

And then, in 1963, along came the marriage of the heir to Sikkim’s throne to an American, who, given the lively imaginations of Indian policymakers, might as well have been an agent of the Central Intelligence Agency. That same year, to the consternation of Delhi, Hope Cooke’s new father-in-law, Sir Tashi Namgyal, the artist-chogyal whom Ambassador Galbraith had met, died and his son inherited the throne. It took more than a decade of treachery, dirty tricks, and the blatant cultivation of Nepali-Sikkimese to accomplish the task of decapitating Sikkim and dethroning its hereditary ruler, but Indira Gandhi finally succeeded in the 1970s. By then she had also drawn into her cause a few high-ranking Tibetan-Bhutia Sikkimese, most notably a schemer named Kazi Lhendup Dorji, to give the destabilization plot a less obviously ethnic coloration.
Kazi
is a Sikkimese title of inherent nobility, possibly with Central Asian or Kashmiri antecedents; in Kashmir a
qazi
was traditionally a learned expert on law, usually born into a substantial family. Until relatively recently, a Sikkimese kazi was more apt to serve the royal government than to enter opposition politics, but Kazi Lhendup Dorji was not cut from the old mold. Even less reticent about breaking fealty to the king was his ambitious European-born wife, the Kazini Elisa Maria. Thus three women played prominent parts in the dramatic undoing of Sikkim: the kazini; her innocent archenemy, Hope Cooke; and Indira Gandhi.

As prime minister of India, Indira Gandhi had none of the scruples or statesmanship of her father, Jawaharlal Nehru, who had given Sikkim assurances that its autonomy, if not independence, would not be disturbed. He died in 1964 and his immediate successor, Lai Bahadur Shastri, soon followed him to the funeral pyre, leaving the field to Nehru’s ambitious but perennially insecure daughter. By 1975, a brief but violent invasion, the forced abdication of the chogyal, and an act of Parliament in New Delhi had made Sikkim an Indian state. By the time free Sikkim had plunged into its last two turbulent years of life, the American-born queen, Hope Cooke, and her influential friends from the United States were going or gone, my Sikkimese gentleman insisted, so nobody outside seemed to care.