Three years ago—before our lexicon included words that we had never heard before, before children used words like ‘pandemic’, ‘Covid’, ‘Delta’ or ‘Omicron—I had arrived breathless at Nathu La. At 14,150 feet, this border outpost on the Roof of the World is where two countries face each other, eyeball-to-eyeball. You inch along a road carved out of the mountain to face a rusty barbed wire that marks the LAC. Beyond, covered in indigo hues sprawls the Tibetan plateau. I gasp for air.
Comes another sledgehammer blow—sucking the very breath of life out of me. I am in a place that was once hemmed in by three bigger neighbours, where the ruling elite erred in handing over the tilling of their traditional agricultural land to outsiders. Oftener than not, the outsiders end up with the land (and political power) while the original owners are left holding the song or the story.
To say Sikkim is small is obvious. It’s a tiny sliver of land, no more than 70 miles by 40 miles where the last King of Sikkim fell hopelessly in love with a teenager. Hope Cooke was 17 years his junior. With international media splashing pictures of their wedding, evoking images of a Shangri La to attract the very attention that some fault for the chain of events that followed.
In the 19th century, a Resident was posted in Gangtok, and remained no more than a ‘Whisper behind the Throne, but never for an instant the Throne itself.’ To the Raj, the place was a launchpad to gain an edge in the Great Game. Schooled in Bishop Cotton, Shimla, Thondup joined the ICS school in Dehradun, then running from a tented colony, but nonetheless ‘renowned as the training ground for bureaucrats’.
It taught its charges the fundamentals of administration with an eye on the day when the Empire would go home. ’Twas here that the young man picked up his love for all things western. Destiny and Sikkim’s sensitive geopolitical position dealt him an almost unplayable hand.
Summertime saw the Chogyal back in his Palace, to be with his two beautiful sisters, Coocoola and Kula.
‘Who would have suspected,’ wrote the Italian author Fosco Maraini as he saw Kula ski on the slopes below where I stand, ‘there was so much strength and determination in her pearl porcelain body?’
Again the lovelorn Austrian Heinrich Harrer says: ‘The Tibetan words to fall in love is sem schor wa and means to lose one’s soul... in case of Coocoola, both were accurate.’
As I drive back to Gangtok, past the rhododendron reserves (with 30 species, a favourite of the 18th-century naturalist Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker) I am lost in daydreams of a man who failed to get others on board to understand that small could have been beautiful and in April 1975, Sikkim became the then 22nd constituent of India.
When he passed away on a cold winter’s day of February, the Chogyal’s body was carried in a mighty procession to the royal burial ground six miles further up towards the Tibetan border. As the smoke billowed on and on from the pyre, it freeze-framed a moment in time—a legacy had ended.
A whole new page of a new age had begun.
Ganesh Saili
sailiganesh@gmail.com
Author, photographer, illustrator whose works have been translated into two-dozen languages