So Close to Heaven (19 page)

That is not strictly true. Voices were raised in the United States and at the United Nations against this burst of Indian manifest destiny. Feelings in Delhi were bruised by American admonitions. Prominent among the critics of the annexation was Claiborne Pell, the Rhode Island Democrat who was already something of an
éminence grise
among foreign-policy experts in the United States Senate. Outrage was not sustained, however. In 1973, American troops were returning from a debacle in South Vietnam—Hanoi’s regulars would overrun Saigon two years later—and there was no enthusiasm for rattling sabers over odd little Sikkim and its medieval crown.

Cooke, who left Sikkim and the chogyal in 1973, never to return, is remembered vividly in the region, though not for her spirited foray into Tibetan Buddhism and Sikkimese wifehood. Indian officials reached a sneering and unfair conclusion that the American interloper lusted after a crown, and decamped when she saw that she would lose it. In truth, her reasons for leaving Sikkim were far more personal, as her self-absorbed autobiography illustrates. In other Himalayan nations, especially in Bhutan, Cooke is recalled and occasionally still castigated among the elite for an article she wrote for the June 1966
Bulletin of Tibetology
, of which she was also an editor. The Bulletin was published by the Institute of Tibetology in Gangtok, established in the late 1950s as Tibet was slipping under total Chinese repression. As gyalmo of Sikkim after 1963, Cooke had become an active partner with her royal husband in bolstering the identity of the little kingdom. Apart from supporting research into the religion and culture of the Tibetan peoples, the royal couple also promoted native Sikkimese crops and crafts, introduced more effective
protection of an unusual natural environment, and fostered appearances of Sikkimeseness in architecture, decoration, entertainment, and public life.

This alone would have been observed with suspicion in some quarters in New Delhi, since Sikkimese nationalism could only enhance an affinity for things Tibetan. But Cooke did not stop there. She turned her considerable American energies and creativity from bolstering Sikkimese craftsmanship and restoring the bungalow-palace in Gangtok to reexamining history. Her now infamous article in the
Bulletin of Tibetology
reopened the acidic issue of Darjeeling, a former outpost of Sikkim that had been effectively annexed by India’s British colonial administration in the nineteenth century. Following Britain’s lead, India assumed control over Darjeeling and other hill areas at independence, despite Sikkimese protests. The issue of Darjeeling could only reopen wounds among the Sikkimese at a dangerously tricky moment. In her article, the gyalmo argued that the Sikkimese crown had probably intended to grant only “usage” rights in the Darjeeling area to the British, who wanted to build a sanitarium away from the pestilential plains of Bengal. Britain abused that grant, the gyalmo’s argument concluded. The corollary was obvious: the Indians were perpetuating a violation. Cooke later acknowledged ruefully that she had “stirred up a hornet’s nest.”

The Indian press, too often willing to promote the government line whatever the facts, flew into a prompted rage. Himalayan statesmen were appalled and fearful, a Bhutanese told me two decades after the publication appeared. Cooke was also sobered by the reaction. “I was remorseful, scared,” she wrote in her memoir of those years. Many Sikkimese, Bhutanese, and sympathetic Indians look back on that one well-intentioned if reckless act as the gyalmo’s most dangerous mistake. To the bureaucrats and policy planners of India, this unpredictable American woman, whose very presence in the region had focused an unwelcome spotlight on Sikkim, now seemed to be fanning her husband’s already defiantly nationalistic tendencies.

The tale of Sikkimese victimization and helplessness that the gentleman told me in his formal parlor in Gangtok, so at variance with India’s official version of events, was familiar. Indeed, it was fresh in my mind, because a day or two earlier I had found, prominently displayed in a Gangtok bookshop, a copy of a book difficult to obtain in India,
Smash and Grab: The Annexation of Sikkim.
This riveting blend of chronology
and personal observation was written a decade after the collapse of independent Sikkim by the distinguished Calcutta journalist Sunanda K. Datta-Ray, who had reported on the kingdom for more than a decade and was, in the end, a friend of the last chogyal.
Smash and Grab
, a lot of it read by candlelight in my room at the old Nor-khill Hotel during an electrical blackout, brought alive the miserable story of a king doomed by treachery and finally cancer, yet trailed to the end of his days by graceless Indian intelligence agents. Still, the book hadn’t quite prepared me for the raw bitterness that welled up in the dark parlor of the aristocratic family whose son I was hearing out. Before I left, the gentleman walked around the room pointing out family portraits, some in ornate frames. The pictures also spoke poignantly of a lost world, but in those frames the past was safe and everyone smiled.

Other Sikkimese told me similar stories of a people deceived and a country stolen. They pointed to silent, lingering signs of protest: the continuing use of the old Sikkimese coat of arms on the buildings of what is now an Indian state, the pilgrimages to the memorial chorten of the last chogyal, where foreigners cannot go. Not all the disaffected are Buddhists, and not all the complainants want to see a return of the monarchy. Over the years since the debacle of 1973–75, the criticisms of Indian rule have polarized around concerns that too many people have been pouring in from the overpopulated Gangetic plain and Nepal, both densely populated and strained in resources. Marwaris, Kashmiris, and other high-intensity Indian merchants (present in smaller numbers even a century ago) had muscled out local businesses, people told me. Aid was spawning corruption of unprecedented proportions. In many quarters there was the half-assertion, half-question: Why, when everyone had been so much poorer before the annexation, did the quality of life seem better? Those days are remembered as a bucolic time when Gangtok’s few streets weren’t choked with jeeps and concrete monstrosities did not spring up at every turn to mar the soul-healing, spirit-lifting mountain views.

One morning on the way to Rumtek monastery—a roller-coaster trip from one side of the Ranipool River valley to the heights on the opposite bank—I stopped to pick up a well-dressed woman walking to work in some haste. She had missed a local jitney and was anxiously trying to flag down another ride as she struggled along in shoes not made for trekking. She wore a sari, and the red dot of a
bindi
on her forehead
indicated she was a Hindu. “Nepali,” said the taxi driver with the certainty of taxi drivers everywhere as we slowed to give her a lift. She was a minor civil servant, she said in the course of a conversation in which she lamented the overbuilding of Gangtok and the hills around it as Indian development money for building projects and a few small agriculture-based industries poured in to keep the restive Sikkimese reasonably happy. By 1990, India, which had used the Nepali majority in Sikkim to overthrow a Buddhist monarchy, had to worry that millions of Nepalis concentrated across the Indian north and east wanted their own nation. They call it Gorkhaland. In the hill towns of West Bengal—Kalimpong, Kurseong, and most of all Darjeeling—a strong Nepali separatist movement, armed and unarmed, had created havoc and economic disruption in the 1980s. Among other effects, this sent a warning to the Bhutanese, who decided to take a now controversial census to see how much Nepali migration they had absorbed.

The Gorkhaland movement for land and a national identity defined by the Nepali language took its name from the legend of the brave Gorkhas, soldiers from the lowlands of Nepal known for their ruthlessness, utter obedience to a cause or commander, and exceptional, legendary fighting skills. Gorkhas—they prefer that spelling to Gurkhas—were the people who produced the warrior-king Prithvi Narayan Shah, who united Nepal in the eighteenth century. They served the British well in several wars and now provide troops for the Indian army and paramilitary police. A dimestore novelist, Subhas Ghising, took up the Gorkhaland standard in Darjeeling. In Sikkim, a leading politician, Nar Bahadur Bhandari, leading another Nepali-nationalist party that eschewed the Gorkha label, responded with demands that Nepali-Sikkimese get special treatment—a quota of Indian parliament seats, for example—to keep them from being swept up in a Gorkha tide. The Gorkha movement naturally had an appeal in Sikkim among newer arrivals from Nepal and Indian hills and northern plains. Bhandari was beginning to drift toward quasi-separatism (while bogged down in lawsuits on charges of corruption). As chief minister of Sikkim before his personal and political troubles brought him down, he was regularly accused of autocratic behavior; tourists were told he chose which way the satellite dish was pointed (it made cable television possible in the isolated town) and everyone in Gangtok had to watch his programs.

How ironic, I thought, if some kind of autonomy should be restored
to Sikkim at the insistence of a politician like Bhandari and his Nepali-Sikkimese followers, who were largely responsible for the overthrow of the stubbornly nationalist Buddhist king. From the early days of Sikkim’s final crisis, Nepali-Sikkimese were having second thoughts about what a monster they had unleashed. The personal Sikkimese valet of B. S. Das, the Indian sent to Gangtok effectively to engineer the signing of Sikkim’s death warrant, asked his master anxiously if this meant he would have to become an Indian. “I hope not,” Das remembered him saying. To be Sikkimese then meant being a Buddhist Bhutia or a Lepcha who spoke a Tibetan dialect, and not the Nepali language, which is closer to the Hindi of North India. Das did not think total absorption of Sikkim by India was inevitable when he left in 1974, after gaining an agreement on an associate status for Sikkim. But things rapidly fell apart after his departure, and New Delhi moved swiftly and ruthlessly.

On the road to Rumtek, our hitchhiker gestured to this or that substantial concrete house that she swore had been constructed with the inevitable creaming off of development assistance. She sailed with some enthusiasm into a general condemnation of India and the destruction that had ensued since Sikkim was pried open to the people of the plains. The harshness surprised me, since she had no doubt been the beneficiary of a Nepali-led state government. About then, we passed a construction crew at the side of the narrow road. The faces were hard to identify and the saronglike garments some of the laborers wore were intriguing, so I interrupted to ask where those people had come from. “Maybe they are Nagas, or are coming from somewhere in Nepal,” she said. “So many people are brought here to work on lowly jobs, too many people. A lot of Nepalis. None of these people belong here.” But aren’t you Nepali? I asked. “Nepali!” she replied with a hard look and a stage laugh. “No, no. I am Sikkimese. The Nepalis are foreigners.” The late chogyal might have smiled sadly at the sound of history falling on itself.

“T
HIS
OFFICE
is belong to Sikkim,” a cheerful young person at the Sikkim Tourism headquarters told me, explaining why she could not provide information on taxi fares direct from various Bengali gateways to Gangtok, the only routes in for foreigners since an ambitious helicopter service from Bagdogra, in West Bengal, was grounded for safety soon after a very scary opening. “Taxi are in West Bengal, so I can’t tell.” But
she could tell me that because of the “trouble” in Kashmir—then approaching a fully developed war for independence—New Delhi was planning to open more of Sikkim to tourists, especially trekkers and those who wanted to visit mountain monasteries. For years, Indian security constraints had kept large areas of the country off-limits to foreigners. By the early 1990s, the numbers of tourists (many of them trekkers) began to rise significantly; Gangtok had as many as two hundred small hotels or guesthouses.

An outsider coming to Sikkim for the first time years after its incorporation into India has a tough time making independent judgments about the changes that have taken place. To me it all seemed a very un-Indian place, with a few exceptions, from the moment my taxi from Bagdogra reached the Sikkimese border at Rangpo. An archway welcomed visitors to Sikkim as if it were a foreign country. We were obliged to stop and register with local authorities; the Indians require special passes for foreigners traveling to Sikkim. While I waited for the inevitable paperwork to take so inexplicably but routinely long to complete, I had coffee and a snack in a cheerful lodge where flowering shrubs and trees added color to the green hillside beyond the windows. The spacious tourist center, which also had about eight guest rooms, was built in the largely concocted Sikkimese style, with elements of Tibet in the slope of its outer walls, tall windows wider at the bottom than the top, and an ornamented central tower. The rooftops of the lodge, the tower, and a freestanding shelter over the entrance were neither flat, as they might have been in Tibet or Ladakh, nor pitched, as in Bhutan, but somewhere in between, giving the green metal panels a pagodalike slope that blended nicely with the hills. The countryside all around was luxuriously overgrown and seemed devoid of people.

The paperwork over, we were back on the road and on the way to Gangtok, a route that at first follows the valley of the jade-green Teesta River before it veers away toward its origins in the hills. The Teesta, flowing down to the plains over and around white sandbanks and through rocky rapids, has always been an important symbol of Sikkim—though it hasn’t been very useful as a waterway for transport; it is not deep enough for long enough stretches for boats. Its valley is serenely beautiful, neither wild nor overcultivated. As we passed through villages en route to Gangtok, I savored what made Sikkim so instantly different from the Indian state of Himachal or many stretches of the Himalayan
foothills in Uttar Pradesh, where hillsides grow yearly more barren of vegetation and every roadside stop is a full-time bazaar broadcasting the ubiquitous warbling whine of Hindi cinema soundtracks. On the road to Gangtok we passed through hamlets that seemed all but deserted. In one, a woman stepped out on her roadside porch and stretched, face to the sun, to yawn and scratch about her person. Buddhist prayer beads dangled from one hand. There was so much silence. In the valleys we followed into the hills, there were occasional farming hamlets, clusters of whitewashed one-story buildings with tin or thatch or wood-shake roofs.