Books

BELLS OF SHANGRI-LA: Scholars, Spies, Invaders in Tibet by Parimal Bhattacharya. Speaking Tiger, Delhi, 2019.

‘The river Penam-nyang-chu flowed below the hill, and in the distance rose the snow-capped peaks of the northern Himalaya. In between, across a wide valley, lay Tashi Lhunpo. The sun was setting in the Indian horizon in an unforgettable display of translucence. It set on fire the golden domes, chortens, spires, palaces and memorials of the monastery town. It was so novel yet so intimate.’

This vision of Tashi Lhunpo in Tibet had been described by George Bogle in 1774 and had haunted Sarat Chandra Das till he came across it a hundred years later. The same vision seeps into the dreams of the author, another hundred years later, as he traces a part of the Bengali pundit’s path in the highlands of the Sikkim-West Bengal border.

The Great Game began in the early 19th century when Britain strove to protect its hegemony and its all-important trade routes from the march of an expanding Tsarist Russia, that had its covetous eyes on the Jewel in the Crown. Bold explorers and spies from both sides, risking imprisonment and death, sought to map the large blank spaces in Central Asia and bring them under their country’s influence.

The Viceroy’s ban on British officers venturing there led to an ingenious solution of using trained natives to do the surveying. Trained in subterfuge, the ‘pundits’, as they were known, disguised themselves as traders, pilgrims and holy men and went about their mission in the most inhospitable terrains. Contrary to notions of many such pundits being trained, in actuality, only twenty such pundits were sent across for they required men of exceptional skills.

Parimal Bhattacharya in his book touches admirably on the lives of two such pundits, the Bengali Sarat Chandra Das and the Sikkimese Kinthup, bringing them from the margins to the centre. Posted as a lecturer in Darjeeling in the 1990s, his earlier book No Path in Darjeeling is Straight, is an evocative meditation on the hill town. He brilliantly captures the course of the ‘Queen of the hills’ from its ramshackle tin houses in its early days to its aftermath of a violent political agitation and peppers his story with informed anecdotes mingled with his poignant reflections. During the course of his stay he forays into every part of the town and touches upon the tales of the people who live there. The story of the inhabitants becomes the story of the town.

‘Now, as I held the blue felt-bound typescript in my hand in that bookshop in Shimla, Kinthup’s tale returned to me, and the memory of that cloying smell, the fog of lost time slipped in through a crack in the door.’

Bells of Shangri-La has him continuing in the same vein. It finds him foraging through Nima Tashi’s kabari shop in Darjeeling below the Mahakal market to stumble upon a mouldy copy of Kinthup’s report on his exploration of the Yarlung Tsangpo River in Tibet. Coming across another account of Kinthup’s travel in an antiquarian bookshop in Shimla, the story of Kinthup piques his interest and, as one thing leads to another, he discovers the travels of Sarat Chandra Das.

Kinthup is a tragic figure utterly forgotten in his country of birth, Sikkim, and his place of residence, Darjeeling. His life is a trajectory of loss but for one singular moment of brilliance. Migrating for a better life to Darjeeling, this illiterate Lepcha man is trained in the Bhutia Boarding School and sent on a mission to ascertain the course of the Tsangpo River, a mystery tantalizing geographers. What is supposed to be a 6-month expedition turns out to be 4-year ordeal where he faces inexpressible hardship. The author leads us through Kinthup’s ordeal and the tragedy that awaits him.

It is another thirty years before we find Kinthup’s story vindicated when Eric Bailey and Henry Morshead, on their expedition, find the route as described by him word for word. Their report would go on to be used in the drawing of the McMahon line, the boundary between India and Tibet. Sarat Chandra Das is another, breaking the stereotype of the effeminate Bengali babu and turning himself into spy-cum Buddhist scholar. Trained as an English educated civil engineer, and appointed Head Master of the Bhutia Boarding School, he is sent to survey, observe and report on the diversity of Tibetan society; his reports would pave the way for an easy and bloody victory during the Younghusband mission of 1903-04.

The author weaves a fine a story of the life and times of Sarat Chandra Das, which occupies a good part of the book. Amidst the persistent fog of Darjeeling, perhaps the author finds in Sarat Chandra Das a kindred spirit. Nudged on by his colleague Professor Norbu, he seeks out Lhasa Villa and to close the cycle, goes out of his way to track Sarat Chandra’s descendants in Calcutta.

The book is part biography, part travelogue and part memoir. He intersperses the travels of the pundits, fictionalizing them along the way and making them characters one can empathize with. One applauds with the bystanders when Bailey hugs the old Kinthup; desires the lovely Rimpoche as Sarat sees her bare ivory arm coming out of the folds of the silk; and relives the horror when Sarat, in a fit of delirium, runs into a hall full of hanging carcasses.

‘The sky was partly clouded and there was rain and sunshine. The raindrops glittered in the sun and fell silently, like flaming flowers, into the ravines.’

The author’s own excursions into the Singali-La trek and Bailey’s trail in Sikkim and Arunachal is a delightful read. Describing places and people in his nuanced style, he connects them with the stories of Joseph Dalton Hooker, the famed English botanist; Alexandra David-Neel, the first European woman to enter Lhasa; and Alexander Csoma de Koros, the European Tibetologist. Each an important chapter in the unfurling of a mystery called Tibet.

The book ends on a brooding note with an account of the Chinese invasion of 1962, and of the young soldiers of the Sikh Light Infantry freezing to death in the icy altitudes of Poshing La with nothing on them but cotton clothes and canvas shoes.

‘The yak bell in Sangay Dorjee’s cottage didn’t ring anymore, the clapper was missing. But perhaps it continued to jingle in his memories. Only I couldn’t hear it.’

Tashi Chophel

Poet and bureaucrat based in Gangtok

 

THE KIPLING FILE by Sudhir Kakar. Penguin Random House, Delhi, 2018.

THE Raj syndrome appears to be an unending affair which is, whether one likes it or not, affirmation of an imperialist culture whose legacy has still not been spent. The protagonists of this saga, both heroes and villains, have been discussed in various accounts of our colonial history. However, enough attention has not been paid to the lives of those who supported the ideological structure of the Empire. Rudyard Kipling stands out as an important figure who assiduously built up the case for the Empire providing it with an ideological and moral justification.

The phrase ‘The White Man’s Burden’ that was initially used to extol U.S. imperialism became a metaphor for the justification of the entire colonial enterprise worldwide, especially the British imperialism in Africa and India. The seeds for imperialist attitude were perhaps sown in Kipling’s mind when he was growing up in India in the 1880s in Lahore. This was also the time when the British residing in India, Kipling included, treated India as their rightful colony and Indians as second class, uncouth, untrustworthy subjects.

There are numerous biographies of Kipling besides his own autobiographical writings such as Something of Myself that have given us a picture of the man in much detail. Yet it needed Sudhir Kakar, author and a trained psychoanalyst, with exceptional insight into human psyche, to probe the inner world of Kipling to fill in the gaps and show us the complete man, warts and all. The Kipling File is a well researched, elegant and highly readable fictional account of the young writer’s life in colonial India. We know more about his fears, his pains, his opinions, his secretive nature, his contradictions, his likes and dislikes. It also tells about the life at that time, how Anglo-Indians (British residing in India) lived, interacted, socialized and ruled.

Born in Mumbai, India, in 1865, Kipling was a prolific writer whose novels, short stories, children’s tales and poems became household words and have fed the imagination of generations of readers.

The novel revolves around the friendship between Kipling and Kay Robinson, who was one of his editors at the Lahore-based daily called the Civil and Military Gazette, which served the community of Anglo-Indians in the Punjab in the 1880s. Kipling was a fledgling reporter for the Gazette. The narrative voice is significant as the novel is told from the perspective of Robinson who is both closely involved with Kipling and also tries to proffer an objective assessment of his subject. Robinson thought very highly of Kipling’s literary gifts, both in prose and verse and believed that he was wasting his time in India when he had the promise to blossom in the journalistic and literary circles in London.

Robinson calls his recollections, ‘The Kipling File’, drafts of Kipling’s letters and some of his early writings he had preserved. Robinson’s estimate of Kipling (who is referred to by his nickname Ruddy) was quite justified as from being a mere journalist he went on to become the bard of the British empire. He was a gifted literary colossus who went on to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. Yet the critics disparaged Kipling’s early Indian stories which they said reeked of military barracks, horse stables and bar-rooms. His literary pursuits were dismissed as fanciful and foolish by his previous boss. But Robinson encourages the young Ruddy, allowing him greater creative freedom at the Gazette. He featured his short stories on the front and second pages of the daily, which soon became very popular with readers. Many of the stories were later published in books, contributing to Kipling’s literary renown. Kipling’s journalism was not wasted either since it made a major contribution to the text of the Raj working within and extending existing representations.

Robinson recounts the events taking place when Kipling was aged 16 to 23. While in India he spent most of that time in Lahore, in what Robinson calls the ‘Family Square’ – a reference to Kipling, his parents and younger sister, Trix. Now mostly a forgotten figure Trix nevertheless remains the focus of attention for Robinson who is smitten by her. Kipling was resentful of Robinson’s attention to his sister which leads to Robinson’s strained friendship with him who was also his best friend in India. Robinson wanted to marry Trix, of whom Kipling was fiercely protective. It infuriated him that Robinson was 13 years older than his sister, who was 18 when the editor first became infatuated with her.

Through the keen insights of his narrator, Kakar deftly captures the panorama of life in 19th century India, especially in the countryside of which he gave very vivid descriptions. At one point, for example, Robinson lyrically observes that dusk is decided not by the clock but ‘when the last puff of the day-wind brought from the unseen villages the scent of damp woodsmoke, hot cakes, dripping undergrowth and rotting pinecones.’

Robinson and Kipling were both nature lovers and loners. But whereas Robinson thought of himself as a ‘tough romantic’, he believed Kipling to be a ‘tender cynic’. Late in his life Robinson recalls: ‘I could not know then that once we left India and I found my calling and retreat in the English countryside, the ‘romantic’ in my soul would bloom, whereas Ruddy’s move, away from the Family Square in Lahore and into literary fame in England, would dry up the wellspring of his tenderness, leaving weeds of cynicism and bitterness to grow rank and wild.’

In Kakar’s narrative Kipling emerges as a man of compelling contradictions – a mercurial genius with immense talent who was at the same time engaged in fighting his inner demons. Kipling had a dark side that included a foul temper and more than a hint of sadism, which were elements of many of his stories. In the offices of the Gazette, Robinson witnessed Kipling throwing paperweights when lower-ranked staff entered his office without knocking. Robinson finds him full of eccentricities and ‘the worst-tailored Englishman’ he had ever encountered. He was unsympathetic towards native Indians, contemptuous towards Hindus and Hinduism but was found frequenting native Hindu prostitutes, while being fascinated by Muslims. The book confirms the then prevalent British opinion that Hindus didn’t have the ability, strength of character, moral convictions and education to rule themselves. Critics who considered Kipling’s view of life to be incompatible with the principles of civility were repelled by the bullying self-righteousness and racial vanity of his imperialism.

Robinson recounts that as Kipling frequented the brothels of Lahore he favoured poor, illiterate Hindu village girls, mostly child widows who were a burden on their families as they could not remarry due to religious sanctions. ‘God knows, I was far from a chaste monk’, Robinson writes, ‘before marriage, during the hot months, I had had a couple of discreet liaisons in Lahore with attractive Eurasian girls. But to deliberately seek out, as Ruddy did, the lowest of native prostitutes in the most squalid of settings for the satisfaction of his sexual needs was beyond my comprehension... I could never understand how what disgusted him during the day could hold such an irresistible attraction at night.’ It may be recalled that the rank and file of the British Army which made up a sizable European population in India were the customers of native prostitutes (euphemistically called the ‘comfort women’) which revealed the underside of the Raj providing it a dubious ingredient of stability. India, the voluptuous ‘other’, became almost a racial fetish prompting the colonial authority to act out its fantasies of possession and invest its libidinal economy. Nonetheless it threatened the colonial self-perception as a civilizing agency, and aroused anxieties over the possible loss of its prestige.

Rudyard Kipling wrote in the heyday of the British Empire. His literary precursors were the Victorian novelists who functioned as apologists for empire and their fictions reflected imperialist assumptions and aspirations, including most crucially an Anglocentric worldview. Predicated on this view was a tendency to regard British culture as most supreme. Kipling assumes this basically uncontested empire. He was writing not just from the dominating· viewpoint of a white man in a colonial possession, but from the perspective of a massive colonial system whose economy, functioning, and history had acquired the status of a virtual fact of nature. Kipling reproduces and complicates these imperial ideological structures while at the same time one can sense his ambivalence about India, his inability to decide emphatically either for the cause of empire or for his ‘beloved’ India. This was probably because of his primary identification with the land of his childhood, yet his narratives betray the ambivalence of his position as colonizer. He had an idyllic childhood in India nurtured by Indian ayahs which instilled emotive and effeminate tendencies in him while his schooling in England gave him a cold western outlook.

The English schooling system instilled the flamboyant cult of manliness in its students which was to be reflected in the men who ruled India and elsewhere. Kipling is also typically portrayed as a rigid pillar of Victorian sensibility, and critics argue that the bulk of his work promotes belief in the infallibility of the British Empire which, even at a time when imperial rule was being resisted by colonized peoples and, due to military setbacks such as the Indian Rebellion and First Boer War, was beginning to show the strain of maintaining authority over the colonies. Kipling’s work is understandably silent on representations that elide the challenge to the British worldview. In the times of Brexit with the radical right reasserting itself, admirers of Kipling may not be really deferring to his literary virtuosity but to his textual affirmations. Kakar’s novel offers a balanced perspective on the man while it unravels the complexities of colonial enterprise – its rise and propensity for decline.

Satish C. Aikant

former Professor and Head, Department of English, H.N.B. Garhwal University; former Fellow, IIAS, Shimla