by Andrew Duff
For the Indians in particular, any idea that Tibet acted as some sort of buffer between the main body of India and China disappeared once and for all. The impact on foreign-policy thinking was immediate. The idealistic impulse behind the ‘Hindi-Chini-Bhai-Bhai’ slogan was mocked by a belligerent press as ‘Hindi-Chini-Bye-Bye’. There was now no question that Sikkim, Bhutan and Nepal directly touched the Chinese communist empire. And it was Sikkim, with its historic links with Tibet and its active trading passes between Gangtok and Lhasa, that the Indians feared was the weakest point on the new border. Almost immediately, Indian troops started to pour into the tiny Himalayan state, taking over an area in the lower reaches of Gangtok and manning the pass into the Chumbi Valley.
Thondup watched the rapid influx of Indian troops with mixed feelings. As an honorary Lt-Colonel in the Indian Army, he knew the set-up well and found the officer class convivial company. He was also well aware that under the terms of the 1950 treaty – which gave India the responsibility for Sikkim’s external affairs – there was precious little he could do about it; his country was vulnerable without Indian support. But there was no escaping the fact that the troops’ presence changed the atmosphere in Gangtok. Between 1939 and 1959 the town had retained the ‘fairy tale’ feel that Fosco Maraini had commented on when he’d travelled through in the 1940s.
The arrival of the Indian Army base changed that irrevocably.
One person who could not help but notice the influx was Martha Hamilton, a tall, spirited, single 28-year-old Scottish missionary teacher who had just taken over as headmistress of the Paljor Namgyal Girls’ School in Gangtok. Martha had first come to India in 1955 to fulfil a promise to her grandfather, Lord Maclay (a shipping magnate and key member of Lloyd George’s cabinet in the First World War). Maclay had lost two sons in the war, one of whom (Eben) had sent a letter to his father days before his death, saying he wanted to be a medical missionary in India. Martha promised her grandfather she would follow in Eben’s footsteps. With no medical training, she instead found an educational posting with the Church of Scotland in 1955, and persuaded the church to limit her posting to two years rather than the normal 30-year commitment. On a short visit to Sikkim in 1957, near the end of her posting, she had met both Tashi (‘a dear old man, dressed in a beautiful silk brocade’) and Rustomji (‘the real ruler of Sikkim, a Parsee and a delightful person’). She had fallen in love with the place immediately. When the opportunity to return to Sikkim at the head of the school arose in 1959, she jumped at the chance.
The school, set up in 1942 in memory of Thondup’s elder brother, stood directly over the burgeoning army base. Hamilton, a self-assured woman with an incisive sense of humour who had come to the region to fulfil a pledge to her grandfather, would remain in Gangtok for the next six years. As a European and the school’s headmistress she had an unusually high level of access to the Palace. Each week she wrote a letter home to her parents, providing a remarkable perspective on events. In September, she observed:
The army below the school has been increased in size and we have an endless sound of bagpipes as the General of the Eastern Command is here and the troops are practising for his guard of honour. ‘The Skye Boat Song’ is being murdered daily till we nearly sent a note of protest. He leaves tomorrow and I hope they now will stop.
On Boxing Day 1959, Hamilton was given an unusual opportunity (‘the Christmas party probably helped’ she admitted in her letter) to venture up to the Nathu La pass, leading into Tibet. Escorted by Indian soldiers, she gazed across the Chubi Valley to the holy mountain Chomolhari, ‘a great white cone perfect against the blue sky’. But looking down from the windswept border on the heights of the Nathu La she sensed she was being watched: ‘The Chinese checkpoint is quite far down the other side of the pass and not a soldier or anyone else could be seen though no doubt our arrival was noted by their binoculars.’
Hamilton was well aware that, with the Chinese occupation of Tibet completed in 1959, Sikkim’s border had once more taken on an international dimension. By the time she came to Sikkim she had already spent two years in Kalimpong, the Indian hill town just to the south of Sikkim, where the Tibetan rebels had plotted and schemed. She had become accustomed to the Western journalists tripping over each other to dramatise the events of the Dalai Lama’s escape, concluding, probably correctly, that ‘most of the news reports were made up in the local hotel’.
In Gangtok she saw a quite different side of the situation: the urgent refugee problem. It was quite clear to Hamilton that Princess Coocoola, Thondup’s sister, had taken control of the issue. The strong historic ties between Sikkim and Tibet meant that there were family members who were affected by events. Coocoola in particular, married to a Tibetan nobleman, felt a personal responsibility to help the large numbers of refugees who were now piling into the state.
Hamilton noticed something else about Coocoola: following the death of her brother’s first wife, she had now taken on the role of being Thondup’s partner at official functions. Coocoola and her sister Kula had been determined that palace life should not suffer; between them they had ensured that Sikkim’s social life had continued. Rock and roll had reached Sikkim, and Martha Hamilton’s ability to dance – and teach others how to dance – to the new music meant she quickly became a part of this social set, invited to parties at both the palace and the Residency, the home of the Indian political officer. She noticed at one such party in the Residency Library that it was Thondup (‘a terrible flirt’) who was the centre of attention for many giggling young girls in Sikkim: ‘As soon as HH* entered all the young girls seized huge philosophic tomes from the shelves and studiously looked at them.’
Meanwhile Coocoola worked night and day on behalf of the refugees from a small office in the palace.† Martha Hamilton brought the scale of the project to life in one of her letters home:
We went with the Kumari‡ down to the Refugee Camp for which we collected money from our concert. It was very interesting – also pathetic. There is just no room to put them so they are all on the floor with what belongings they managed to bring out with them. Incredible number of children considering they had to cross passes of 12,000 and 14,000 feet and they had practically no clothing on arrival. It is supposed to be a transit camp but so many of them are sick when they come from the plains where conditions are pretty grim that it is about impossible to move them all on. The really sick are put into hospital and the less desperate lie and shake with malaria on the floor. They are delighted to be in Sikkim and there are those of course who prefer to be a little sick rather than go off to build some road in the north of Sikkim. Two days later the Kumari came again and took some of the girls down and distributed the sweaters they had made. I hope my photos will come out well, for some of the children were marvellous, with their new sweaters being positively heaved over their poor ears as they were a bit small.
*
Nehru and his Indian government were also faced with the question of what to do with the Tibetan exiles, and how to react to the new de facto position of Chinese control in Tibet.
After his flight in 1959, the Dalai Lama had little choice but to make the argument for full Tibetan independence. The Indian leader, however, continued to believe that a compromise based on Tibetan autonomy could be possible. When the two men met in the hill station of Mussoorie in April 1959, their aims were already diverging. By June 1959 the young Tibetan had decided to take things into his own hands, with a speech seeking a return to the position before the disputed 17-Point Agreement of 1951, when Tibet had enjoyed and exercised ‘all rights of sovereignty whether internal or external’.7
The British prevaricated even more than the Indians. The Foreign Office, if ‘forced to declare itself’, one mandarin said, ‘would have to go along with Nehru’s position’; but ‘on balance it would be far better if the Asians took the lead’, said another.
In October 1959, the Tibetans finally persuaded Ireland and Malaya to sponsor a UN debate on the Chi
nese aggression in Tibet. Still the British refused to commit to a position. The British representative at the debate was told ‘to make clear their abhorrence of the Tibetan situation’ but (with strange logic) ‘to avoid as far as possible influencing other votes’.8 In the final vote, Britain abstained. It was enough to make Hugh Richardson, the man who had served as the last British resident in Tibet under Sir Basil Gould, ‘profoundly ashamed’ that his own government had ‘sold the Tibetans down the river’.
The one country that the Tibetans did find willing to help, at least behind the scenes, was the USA. Although they had also been taken by surprise by events, the Americans encouraged the rebellion taking place in Kham, and reinforced the CIA-backed efforts to stimulate the resistance in Tibet; one group within the government called it a ‘windfall for the US’, offering opportunities to strike a blow for freedom.9 The American charge d’affaires in Delhi, Winthrop G. Brown, was told to make sure the Dalai Lama was aware of American support and to tell him that ‘the US remained “strongly” opposed to Communist China’s admission to the UN’ (which would have consolidated the communists’ control over China).* The American media also took up the Tibetan cause – a picture of the Dalai Lama with the headline ‘THE ESCAPE THAT ROCKED THE REDS’ filled Time magazine’s front cover for 20 April 1959.
Tangible signs of American support came in the form of the CIA’s continued links with the exiled Tibetan freedom fighters. When Gompo Tashi, a senior figure within the Tibetan Resistance movement Chushi Gangdrok, arrived in Darjeeling as Tibet fell, he was greeted at the Agency’s safehouse by CIA officer Robert McCarthy with two bottles of Scotch and two cartons of Marlboros. In Camp Hale, Colorado, meanwhile, gnarled CIA agents continued to train young Tibetans to fight a guerrilla war. There, the Tibetans took a particular liking to the latest Hollywood Westerns: Viva Zapata!, Walk East on Beacon, Rogers’ Rangers and Merrill’s Marauders among others. Cheyenne, starring Clint Walker, was a particular favourite; some of the Tibetan trainees even started to imitate Walker’s swagger through the post-Civil War Wild West in preparation for their reinsertion to their homeland.
But the practicalities of the situation in Tibet meant that airdrops were becoming less and less feasible. In May 1960, the shooting down of a US U2 spy plane over Soviet Russia led to the suspension of all flights over communist countries. A new plan was needed – one that would give the thousands of Tibetans living in and around Sikkim a more permanent base from which to strike a blow in aid of recovering their homeland. The Americans – with Indian support – would soon choose a base on the Nepal–Tibet border to fulfil that purpose: the Mustang Valley.
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While the Americans had been planning support for clandestine operations into Tibet, Thondup had been faced with a more local issue: the rise of a new political movement in Sikkim – and the emergence of a new leader, Kazi Lhendup Dorji.
Frustrated by the byzantine electoral system, a group of politicans formed a new party in September 1959 – the Sikkim National Congress – out of the ashes of the two parties that had contested the previous system in the 1950s. Soon this new party was being led by Dorji, a diminutive local landowner who came from an old Sikkimese Lepcha family, the Khangsarpas.
The Khangsarpas and the Namgyals had not seen eye to eye for many years. The Lepchas were considered the indigineous people of Sikkim; they had been in Sikkim before the Namgyals and their Bhutia kinsmen arrived in the country from Tibet. Although there had been some natural tensions, the Namgyals had reduced these by assimilating the Lepchas into the hierarchy of the kingdom they had established.
In the 1890s, however, Claude White (the first British Political Officer) encouraged widescale Nepali immigration; the Namgyals objected, fearing dilution of their Buddhist heritage by the incomers. Since Dorji’s Lepcha uncles were more welcoming of the Nepali labour (and more tolerant of their Hindu beliefs), the British had rewarded them with land and favours, while constraining the Namgyals’ power for the first two decades of the twentieth century.
By 1918, the British were seeking to develop links with Tibet, and the Namgyals became more useful again. Now Tashi Namgyal was given his full powers back by the British. There was an immediate impact on the Khangsarpas, who the Namgyals had not allowed to retain the same status to which they had become accustomed. For Dorji – who would become known simply as ‘the Kazi’ – the impact had been personal. Trained as a Buddhist monk as a young man, he had become head of the prestigious monastery at Rumtek. But when Thondup Namgyal came of age, Dorji was set aside. It was something that he would resent for the rest of his life.
Dorji, therefore, held very different views from Thondup Namgyal as to the future of the country. His family’s strong connection with the Nepali immigrants in south-west Sikkim (in Chakung, where his family’s estates were) led him to champion their cause. He was convinced that a fairer voting system, which did not discriminate against Sikkim’s Nepali population, was essential and he was entirely willing to work with the new Sikkimese Nepali political class to achieve this.* Dorji was also one of those certain that the future of Sikkim lay in closer ties with India.
During the late 1940s and early 1950s, Dorji was just another of the young politicians trying in vain to navigate the convoluted power structures in Sikkim. But in 1957, Dorji, like Thondup, met a woman in Delhi who entirely changed his political career.
By the time Dorji met Elisa-Maria Langford-Rae she was, like him, already in her fifties. She had also been through two marriages. Born into an ordinary family in Edinburgh, Scotland, she was a woman with an infinite capacity for reinvention. After a period in Belgium, she had emigrated to Burma with her first husband, an Anglo-Burmese man, Frank Langford-Rae, in the 1920s, where, she would later claim, she had been a close acquaintance of Eric Blair, who found fame as George Orwell. When that marriage collapsed, she had a short marriage to Dr Khan, a Muslim, but by the early 1950s she was single again and in the Indian capital.
In Delhi, Langford-Rae became a teacher, first as a private tutor to the son of an important Nepali prince, and then teaching French at a school run by Christian brothers. Tall and statuesque and with a strong sense of social justice, she soon built up a reputation for moving in diplomatic and political circles, preferring the company of the socialists to that of the ruling Congress Party. No one doubted her intelligence, although few were able to pin down the exact details of her past. It was while in Delhi that she began to actively encourage a sense of mystery about her background – a mystery that would attend her for the rest of her life. To some, she claimed her uncle was a Field-Marshal Mannerheim, the founder of modern Finland; to others, that she had connections with Belgian royalty. Very few knew that before arriving in Burma she had been Ethel Maud Shirran, daughter of a Colour sergeant in the Black Watch.10
It was through a party held by a Nepali political contact that the mercurial Elisa-Maria met Kazi Lhendup Dorji. Soon, an unlikely late-life romance developed. By late 1957, Langford-Rae had arrived in Kalimpong. With remarkable haste, Dorji moved his then wife out of his house in Kalimpong, and Langford-Rae moved in. (She would later claim the family of Dorji’s first wife made an attempt on her life to avenge this insult.)
With marriage to the Kazi, Langford-Rae entered a new phase of her remarkable life. Soon she had adopted the title of Kazini of Chakung. The more she learnt about the situation in Sikkim, the more she recognised a new cause that she could associate herself with: her husband’s struggle to move Sikkim away from what she saw as its colonial hangover (a feudal mini-state run by a king from a minority community with strong links to the Tibetans) towards becoming a functioning state with closer links with India.
The newly styled Kazini fitted in perfectly to the exotic community in Kalimpong, with its assortment of spies, adventurers, socialites and other weird and wonderful characters described in the previous chapter. It was a place where, in the words of one UK newspaper, ‘innocence is a guise, not a virtue’. Chinese Premier
Zhou Enlai believed the town to be ‘full of spies and reactionary elements’.11 Nehru had been forced to admit in 1959 that the town was indeed ‘a nest of spies’ and contained more intelligence agents than any other profession.
By 1959, when the Kazi started his new political party, the Sikkim National Congress, the Kazini was already well established in Kalimpong, where she was known for her witty, amusing articles (often satirising Sikkim’s unique situation), written on a typewriter in the back room of the house, in support of her husband’s political aims.
All she needed now was a female counterpart upon whom she could focus her venom.
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After meeting Thondup in 1959, Hope Cooke returned to America and her studies at Sarah Lawrence College in New York, determined to find out more about Sikkim. That year she took a paper in ‘Cultural Frontiers of China’; the following summer of 1960 she strongly considered an immediate return to Darjeeling to find Thondup again, but instead went to see her uncle Selden and aunt Mary, now posted to Lima, Peru. But all the time it was ‘the Prince’ and Sikkim that were on her mind:
There was somewhere inside me the conviction that I would return to Darjeeling and that I would know instinctively when the time was right to do so. I cannot explain why I was so sure of this nor what I expected. It was just there – a deep, unflinching feeling of which I was constantly aware. I was equally aware of the Prince’s existence, certainly, but I did not hear from him. Nor did I write to him; it didn’t seem the thing to do.12
Finally, in the summer of 1961, she flew to India and booked back into the Windamere Hotel. She had no idea how long she was going to spend in Darjeeling – but she was now determined ‘to find out . . . whether I was egging on fate or whether fate was dogging me’. She recalled later:
