The story of Sikkim’s last king and
queen reads like a fairy tale gone wrong
1
August 2015 The Spectator
Glamour, romance and a
deposed monarch are vividly evoked in Andrew Duff’s nostalgic
history of the beleaguered Himalayan former kingdom
Sikkim was a Himalayan
kingdom a third of the size of Wales squeezed between China, India,
Nepal and Bhutan. I was there once in April, when the sky was
cornflower blue. When Britain withdrew from India the last
‘Chogyal’, or king, battled for his country’s independence, but Mrs
Ghandi won the war, and Sikkim is an Indian state now. It’s a sad
story, as Andrew Duff’s subtitle suggests, but one representative
of 20th-century geopolitics.
This dense book — Duff’s
first — places Chogyal Thondup Namgyal at the centre of the story
and focuses exclusively on the period from the 1950s to the 1970s.
Sikkim’s strategic position is crucial, particularly as the Cold
War hots up, and spies from Peking, Delhi and Washington sidle on
and off the pages. Everyone gets particularly worked up about Tibet
(Sikkim, unlike most of the other princely states, was and is
Buddhist, and had strong ties with the Lhasa theocracy). The
Chogyal’s sister Coocoola, an important figure, was passionate
about the Tibetan cause and rode the trade route over to Gyantse
with a rifle over her shoulder and a revolver in her
pocket.
There is, too, a touch of
Grace Kelly glamour, as in the lounge of the Windermere Hotel in
Darjeeling Thondup met a 20-year-old American beauty called Hope
Cooke. They married in 1963, ‘in the shadow of the Sino-Indian
conflict’. A scarlet-robed lama officiated, and the Maharaja of
Jaipur brought his own champagne. Cooke embraced her new country,
but noted astutely: ‘I can just see them using me as a wedge to
help destroy his [Thondup’s] rule.’ And they did. The tide turned
against her almost everywhere, as tides always do.
Newsweek called her ‘a Himalayan Marie-Antoinette’, and
Henry Kissinger (who pops up frequently) wrote, with characteristic
sensitivity: ‘She has become more Buddhist than the
population.’
Duff has undertaken diligent research in diplomatic archives across
the world and it is hard to imagine there is much information about
this small place in those decades that has escaped his attention.
Just as he finished his first draft, Wikileaks released 500 secret
cables revealing fresh information about US involvement in Sikkim.
As Duff writes: ‘The patchwork of alliances and enmities
surrounding and within Sikkim had the characteristics of a
fiendishly complex multi-player game of chess.’ China did not
recognise Sikkim as part of India until 2005.
I would have liked more
background information on the topography and customs of thin-aired
Sikkim, and in particular on the various ethnic groups (they barely
get a mention). Duff mentions ‘Sikkim’s separate identity’, but one
never gets a clear sense of what it is. Equally, while I admire the
author’s refusal to indulge in speculation, he remarks often that
the relationship between Cooke and Thondup was ‘never simple’, yet
these pages offer the reader little insight on how.
As is often the case with
nationalist causes, Sikkim wanted to be free of India but was
heavily reliant on the aid flowing from Delhi. Inevitably, Mrs
Gandhi got her way and annexed the kingdom in 1975. Duff is
sympathetic to Thondup and instinctively on his side, but he makes
it clear that the man was not an adept politician. Emotion ruled
the day — when his minders in Calcutta refused to let him fly the
Sikkim flag on his car, he let the vehicle proceed without him and
walked with an assistant holding the flag.
In short, he was not up to
his job. One wonders who would have been, with almost every
superpower on the case. ‘Everyone agrees,’ writes Duff, ‘that
Sikkim’s sensitive geopolitical position dealt Thondup an almost
unplayable hand.’ At least the state enjoys relative peace now,
living off hydroelectricity and tourism — unlike Tibet. But one has
ample evidence that Beijing will not rest until cultural
annihilation on the plateau is complete.
As a result of a
referendum, the monarchy was abolished in 1975, and the marriage
crumbled under the strain of events. Cooke left the modest palace
in Sikkim’s capital, Gangtok, and returned to America with her two
children. Thondup died in 1982, and Cooke lives on in New York,
though she refused to meet Duff. He quotes judiciously from her
autobiography Time Change.
This a
wonderful story, expertly told, and, given the Everest of books on
India, Duff was
clever to spot it. What a film it would make!