by Andrew Duff
For the ruling family of Sikkim, and for the political officers in Gangtok, life in Sikkim in 1942 was, as Fosco Maraini put it, ‘something of a fairy tale’.
It was this ‘fairy tale’ kingdom to which Thondup returned from Dehradun in 1942. But underneath the surface it soon became clear that Tashi had been deeply affected by his eldest son’s death. This small, thin, delicate man, who had coped so admirably with becoming Chogyal unexpectedly in 1914 when he was only 21 years old, now retreated into himself, finding comfort only in meditation and painting. By the time Maraini dined with him in the late 1940s he was ‘small, thin and elderly, as delicate as a little bird and as noble as a coat of arms, draped magnificently in his brown silk Tibetan robe’. The Italian watched the Chogyal ‘bend over his plate, peer through his spectacles, and follow – with notable ability, it cannot be denied – some peas which tried to escape the point of his fork’.
In this ‘exquisite, microscopic struggle’ lay the seeds of a sad, gradual withdrawal from public life in the last two decades of Tashi’s life, during which he spent much of his time painting visions of Khangchendzonga, the mountain worshipped by the people of Sikkim.
Almost immediately on his return, therefore, Thondup took over the reins of power in Sikkim. He had matured quickly in Dehradun and now felt ready to act as head of the State Council, the unelected body that ran the affairs of the country. In 1943, when the Scottish missionary-run girls’ school in Gangtok was renamed the Paljor Namgyal Girls’ School (known as the PNG), it was Thondup who gave the address. ‘I happened to make my speech quite well,’ the 23-year-old prince wrote to his friend Rustomji. ‘No boasting and long words – and did not stutter more than twice.’
In 1945, a new British Political Officer, Arthur Hopkinson, arrived in Gangtok to replace Basil Gould. He could not help but think of the parallels between Thondup and his own King George VI. Both men had reacted with great maturity when thrust into a role they had never expected. It seemed uncanny, too, that both men were able to suppress their stammers when in front of a microphone. But it was Thondup’s open and generous manner that Hopkinson admired more than anything, as he recorded in a letter home:
The charming Maharajkumar,* in his purple Chuba, spent most of the evening playing bridge with the old folk in the bridge room – not because he didn’t want to romp, but to get the bridge going and help the old people too. He is so nice, he reminds several people of our King. In a way in looks. Young & pleasant, clean and keen looking, with a charming smile. Young-minded and youthful, but intensely keen on his work. Tactful, doesn’t rub up the old state servants. A slight stammer. Very intelligent face, & good features. Charming manners, & v considerate. Well groomed, always nicely dressed, and not ostentatious.13
All these qualities, Hopkinson felt, would assist the young prince as he tried to modernise Sikkim, something that Hopkinson noticed Thondup seemed painfully aware he needed to do. But what impressed Hopkinson most was that he seemed willing to roll his sleeves up and do something about it personally. In early 1946 he expressed his pleasure at seeing Thondup and his cousin Jigme, the heir in Bhutan, spend ‘two whole days sweating in Tata’s scrap-yard scrounging all the scrap iron required for road shovels etc, personally. Not many Indian “Maharaj Kumars” elsewhere would get down to it with personal sweat like that.’
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Apart from Paljor’s tragic death, the war had not greatly affected Sikkim. Its end, however, brought with it the prospect of great change.
The Second World War had merely postponed the inevitable British retreat from Empire. In late 1945 the new prime minister in London, Clement Attlee, confirmed via the King’s Speech that the UK government planned ‘the early realisation of full self-government in India’.14 The words were carefully chosen. How it would happen was by no means clear. Less than half of India was directly administered by the British government; the rest of the country consisted of a patchwork of independent kingdoms, known collectively as the Princely States. These states – around 600 of them – played a vital part in Britain’s imperial rule in India, but their status was a legal minefield. While each was nominally sovereign, each also accepted the principle that the British Raj rule over them was ‘paramount’. In return the British provided public services on their behalf and collected taxes. It was an arrangement that generally worked well for the Princes and for the British, but everyone knew that, since no two agreements with Princely States were alike, the transition to ‘full self-government’ in these semi-autonomous areas would be far from simple. Thus, while India’s leading politicians – Mahatma Gandhi, Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohammed Ali Jinnah – led discussions with the British about what a successor Indian government might look like, the rulers of the Princely States looked very carefully at their own arrangements in preparation for the inevitable negotiations to come.
When Sikkim had been admitted to the Indian ‘Chamber of Princes’ in 1935 it had been expressly recognised that Sikkim was a ‘special case’. The reason noted was that, unlike any other Princely State, Sikkim was ‘bounded on three sides by foreign territory and only on one side by British India’.15 But there were other reasons that Sikkim could be considered an exception. Religiously and culturally, Sikkim was very different from the other Princely States. Across the subcontinent the Princely rulers were mostly Hindu or Muslim. Sikkim, like neighbouring Bhutan, was a Buddhist state with strong religious ties to the theocracy of Tibet and its spiritual leader, the Dalai Lama.
Most importantly of all, the historical process by which Sikkim had become part of British India had – astonishingly – left the British presence with no formal footing for being in Sikkim at all.
Sikkim had only ever been a means to an end for the British. The country had first come to the attention of the British while they were looking for allies around the fringes of Nepal during the Anglo-Gurkha war of 1814–16. They had discovered the tiny Kingdom of Sikkim, nestling conveniently between Nepal and Bhutan. The Sikkimese, who had suffered harassing raids from the Gurkhas for most of the previous century, had readily assisted the British in the hope of regaining lost territory. When the Gurkhas were defeated in 1816, the British and the Sikkimese signed the mutually convenient Titalia Treaty in 1817: the Namgyals regained the land they wanted, while the British gained political influence through asserting that they would arbitrate in the case of further disputes with the Gurkhas, which they found cause to do a number of times.
In 1835, the British had secured a permanent presence in the region by persuading the Chogyal at the time, Thondup’s great-grandfather, to sign over a small ridge of Sikkimese land, Darjeeling, nominally as a sanatorium or ‘hill station’. The initial deal was undoubtedly underhand (the renegade British Officer had deliberately ignored the Chogyal’s request for land in exchange), but by the time the Chogyal and his advisers realised they had been misled it was too late. They lodged a formal complaint to Calcutta, who accepted in 1846 that Darjeeling had been ‘acquired in a very questionable and unsatisfactory manner’, but by then the town was already a thriving hub of commercial activity in the hills. For the British, it was the start of a concerted effort to open up trade through the land trading route that they had discovered lay alongside Sikkim: the Chumbi Valley.
Although his great-grandfather had been granted an annual payment in recompense, the ‘Darjeeling Grant’ remained a bone of contention for Thondup’s ancestors and their advisers. Matters soon came to a head. The Namgyals had always relied on strong dewans, chosen from the Sikkimese nobility, to complement their own role as defenders of the Buddhist faith in Sikkim. In 1849, the so-called ‘Pagla’ (‘Mad’) Dewan kidnapped two British travellers (one of them the renowned botanist Joseph Hooker) near the Tibetan border. The kidnap caused a major panic in Darjeeling. Although the two were released within a few weeks, the British immediately sought to avenge the insult. Lord Dalhousie, the Governor-General in Calcutta, felt that his government had been put in ‘a very humiliating position’ with re
gards to ‘the hill savage’. Military retaliation, however, was quickly ruled out on account of the mountainous terrain. Instead the British had settled for the banishment of the Pagla Dewan and the cessation of the annual payment to the Namgyals for Darjeeling.
For a decade, there was an uneasy peace. But in 1860 the Pagla Dewan returned, harassing the British once more. This time the British did not hold back. A force of 1,800 troops marched into Sikkim and enforced a punitive treaty in 1861, the Treaty of Tumlong, by which the British won trading rights through Sikkim. They now focused on opening up Tibet to trade. A succession of moustachioed trade commissioners made their way up to windswept 14,000-foot passes between Sikkim and the Tibetan Chumbi Valley to try and open the way for British manufactured goods. Time and again they were rebuffed: the influential Tibetan monasteries (who largely controlled trade in and out of Tibet) jealously guarded the secrecy and privacy of Tibet and did not want the British in their country. The Namgyals in Sikkim found themselves caught in the middle between the British pushing to open the Chumbi Valley, and the Tibetans seeking to keep it closed.
In 1888, the Tibetans occupied a small part of Sikkim, just across the 14,000-foot Jelep La pass on the Sikkim–Tibet frontier, to try and halt what they saw as steady encroachment by the British in the region. By now Darjeeling, not more than 30 miles from the pass, had become the centre of an extremely valuable British Indian tea industry. The British therefore decided they could not countenance such Tibetan insolence and sent a force trudging up to fight a minor war. The Tibetans were routed in what one British officer called ‘a unique and rather tiresome hill war’.*
The British were now determined to consolidate their gains. Rather than negotiate with the Tibetans, they signed a convention with the Chinese government, who claimed a vague overlordship of the Tibetans. The Anglo-Chinese Convention was very significant for Sikkim. In it, the two governments effectively agreed to recognise each other’s rights in, respectively, Sikkim and Tibet.† Clause Two specifically recognised the British government’s ‘protectorate over the Sikkim State’ and acknowledged that the British had ‘direct and exclusive control over the internal administration and foreign relations of that state’. Although nothing had been signed directly between Sikkim and the British, there was now an international treaty stating that Sikkim was a British protectorate.
The convention marked a turning point in the British relationship with Sikkim. They sent a political officer to establish a Residency in Gangtok and temporarily banished the Chogyal (who had absconded to Tibet during the conflict) to live in British India. By the time the Chogyal returned in 1895, the British had set up a new administration packed with nobles to act as a counterbalance to the Namgyals.
By now the British had convinced themselves that there was another more strategic reason for establishing relations with Tibet. In the western Himalayas, the shady battle with the Russians for control of Afghanistan known as the ‘Great Game’ had reached something of a stalemate. But the bogey of Russian expansionism remained. Lord Curzon, appointed as Viceroy in 1899, was worried by rumours that the Russians had begun to forge relations with the Tibetan leadership in Lhasa. In response he mounted the extraordinary Younghusband Expedition, which bludgeoned its way to Lhasa, via Sikkim, in 1904.* The mission found little evidence of the supposed Russian threat, but they did manage to enforce a treaty, this time directly with the Tibetan leadership (with the Chinese as a signatory), which secured limited British influence in Lhasa.
Gangtok now became the main base for British attempts to influence Tibet and create it into a ‘buffer state’ to exclude Russian, and later Chinese, influence. Sikkim’s importance in this respect was further emphasised after the Dalai Lama, escaping a final bid to subdue Tibet by the collapsing Chinese Empire, fled into the British political officer’s arms in Gangtok in 1911. For nearly two years the Dalai Lama lived in Darjeeling, where the British carefully cultivated him; by the time he returned, he had become convinced of the value of British influence in Tibet – as a counterbalance to the Chinese.
Nearly a quarter of a century had now passed since Britain had established the Residency in Gangtok. During that period the political officers had carefully brought the Namgyal family under their control. The eldest Namgyal son and heir, who had refused to return from Tibet, had been deftly sidelined by simply changing the succession; his younger brother, Sidkeong, had been educated at the best British Indian boarding school, sent for a year at Oxford in 1906 and taken on an extraordinary round-the-world tour to expand his horizons. The family were honoured at the Imperial Durbar of 1911 and officially given a 15-gun salute. In 1914, there had been a slight hiccup to the plans when Sidkeong had died after only ten months on the throne, but his replacement, Tashi, had proved equally malleable. In 1918, the British had restored full powers to him; in 1935, he had become an official member of the Indian Chamber of Princes.
During the 1920s and 1930s, no one had thought it necessary to consider the oddities of the nebulous relationship between Sikkim and the British Indian government. The British, who, as one post-independence diplomat would later put it, were ‘past masters at manipulation without definition’, were certainly not concerned.
But with the British announcement in 1945 that they were going to leave, Thondup realised that some sort of ‘definition’ was urgently needed.
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In early 1946, the British sent a Cabinet Mission to Delhi to decide on the future of India after independence. Thondup immediately realised that Sikkim’s membership of the Chamber of Princes might be used to argue that Sikkim should be lumped in with every other Indian Princely State. For Thondup that was anathema: Sikkim was an independent Buddhist state and, despite the administrative and political connection with the British, had little if any cultural connection with India itself. His own family were Tibetan, and Sikkim’s historical links were clearly to the north, with Tibet, rather than with India.
Thondup therefore wrote to Lord Pethick-Lawrence, the 70-year-old head of the mission, asking that:
no decision directly affecting Sikkim will be taken without due consideration of the position of Sikkim as a border state and without giving the Sikkim representative an opportunity of setting forth the peculiarities of the case before the Right Honorable the Cabinet ministers and seeking their advice.
He also politely requested a meeting with Pethick-Lawrence to discuss these matters. But for the commission, sweating under the Delhi heat as they tried to reconcile opposing factions in India, the Himalayan Kingdom of Sikkim was hardly a priority. The request was equally politely rebuffed.
Unperturbed, Thondup lobbied hard that summer, joining forces with his cousin Jigme in Bhutan, who faced a similar problem. In the Residency, British Political Officer Arthur Hopkinson looked on benevolently as ‘the Sikkim heir-apparent charged off to Delhi’ on a regular basis. Hopkinson felt that there would be consequences if Sikkim’s status was not clarified, but knew he was no longer in a position to help. ‘President Nehru,’ he wrote in his diary that summer, ‘if he is not careful, will have the Chinese Empire within three hundred miles of Calcutta . . . the Sikkim and Bhutan people are very worried, and I am not in a position to give them any comfort.’
Thondup was determined to ensure that Sikkim’s separate identity was respected. He therefore turned his efforts to Nehru and the Indian Constituent Assembly that had been given the responsibility for shaping the future of India in 1946. As a Kashmiri, Nehru had some sympathy with the position of both Sikkim and Bhutan as Himalayan states. In early 1947 he therefore pushed through a resolution agreeing that Sikkim and Bhutan were ‘not Indian States’ and acknowledging that, since they constituted a ‘special problem’, their future should be negotiated separately.
For Thondup, still only 23, this felt like a major victory – all his hard work had paid off. Not only was it now in writing that Sikkim was different from the rest of the Princely States, but also Sikkim was to be classified alongside Bhutan
. Unlike Sikkim, Bhutan had signed a specific ‘treaty of perpetual friendship and peace’ with the British Indian government and was thus in a stronger position to assert its international identity (legally speaking) than Sikkim. If the two countries were treated as broadly similar, that could only help his cause.
In June 1947, faced with a deteriorating situation in India, the British decided to bring forward the date for the transfer of power from Britain to India. Originally planned for 1948, the Viceroy, Lord Mountbatten, decided that Britain needed to quit India by the end of August – within three months.
Across India the impact was immediate. Until that point the focus of negotiations had been on the main body of India and the question of partition or otherwise. Suddenly the unresolved question of the future of the Princely States became pressing. For Mountbatten the issue became something of a personal priority, a chance to demonstrate the Crown’s ability to fulfil its promises in the face of intense criticism over their handling of the problems between India’s core communities. He decided that, at the very least, he would deliver what he called ‘a full basket of apples’16 (i.e. a solution that dealt with every one of the 600-plus Princely States) by 15 August, the date now set for Independence.
During July 1947, Delhi therefore became a feverish and colourful place, as hundreds of Indian princes were ferried back and forth to open (and sometimes closed) meetings. Thondup again travelled to Delhi to state his case, and again won a reiteration from officials in the External Department that Sikkim’s position was ‘different from that of any other ruler’.17
But Sikkim was not the only outlier. Four other states made their desire for independence clear, the most important being Kashmir and Hyderabad, both huge states with proud histories. As Mountbatten began to realise that he might end up with something considerably less than the ‘full basket of apples’ he had promised, he looked for short-term solutions. When it came to Sikkim and Bhutan, he told Hopkinson to inform them that it would be in their best interests to accept a continuation of existing arrangements: Hopkinson should stay in Gangtok after 15 August; he would be merely ‘changing masters’. This, Hopkinson was advised, would be the best guarantee of continued recognition of Sikkim’s ‘special position’. Hopkinson passed the message on but remarked in a private letter that he felt sympathy for Sikkim, which he thought was being ‘deserted’ by the British.
