The Himalaya

After three weeks of Hindu temples and Islamic domes and Portuguese churches in the south, the trip went to the opposite corner of the country: the eastern Himalaya, where India runs out into the mountains. Darjeeling and Gangtok are a different India entirely: Buddhist, Tibetan-facing, built on tea and altitude, and, in Sikkim’s case, a kingdom that only joined the country in 1975.

It belongs in a musing about the Deccan precisely because it is the exception that sharpens the rule. The course asked, at every southern stop, what happens to a place when centuries pile up on the same stones. Up here, the layers are thin and recent, and that turns out to be its own kind of history of place.

In practice it came at the very end: the last week of October 2019, after the coursework was done. Three days in Darjeeling, then the long road north and east, dropping to the Teesta and climbing back up into Sikkim, and three more in Gangtok. None of it was assigned, and by the count of the photographs it is the part that took hold hardest: Gangtok alone left more frames than Mumbai, or than any single stop on the course.

Darjeeling sits at about 2,000 metres on a steep spur of the eastern Himalaya, and almost everything about it is a 19th-century invention. It was a near-empty ridge the British leased from the kingdom of Sikkim in the 1830s and turned into a hill station, a cool-air retreat and sanatorium, eventually the summer capital of Bengal, reached by the absurd Darjeeling Himalayan Railway, the two-foot-gauge “toy train” that loops and switchbacks up the mountain (opened 1881, now a UNESCO World Heritage Site).

And then there is the tea. The British planted the slopes with Chinese tea stock from the 1850s, and the thin cold air and the soil produced something that does not grow anywhere else: Darjeeling tea, the muscatel “champagne of teas,” now a protected geographical name, one of the first that India registered.^[1] The terraced gardens fall away thousands of feet below the town; the whole economy, and most of the labour history, is the plantation. This is a history of place too, just a young and extractive one: not an ancient temple worn by use, but a colonial landscape remade in a single century into a brand.

Gangtok, at the end of that road, is the capital of Sikkim, and Sikkim is the part of this whole trip with the strangest relationship to the word “India.” For more than three centuries it was an independent Buddhist kingdom, ruled by the Namgyal dynasty (the Chogyals) from 1642, with its own monarchy, its own Tibetan Vajrayana Buddhism, its own borders with Tibet, Nepal, and Bhutan. It became a protected state after India’s independence, and then, in 1975, a referendum abolished the monarchy and merged Sikkim into India as its 22nd state.^[2]

What you see in Gangtok is the Buddhist world, not the Hindu-Islamic one of the south: the gompas(monasteries), the prayer flags strung along every ridge, the prayer wheels, the white chortens. The most important is Rumtek, rebuilt in the 1960s by the 16th Karmapa after he fled the Chinese occupation of Tibet, making this corner of India one of the principal seats, in exile, of an entire Tibetan Buddhist lineage. The architecture speaks a different grammar from anything in the Deccan: where the Hindu temple is a cosmic mountain and the Mughal tomb a paradise garden, the chorten is the universe stacked as five elements: a square earth, a round dome of water, a spire of fire, a parasol of air, and the jewel of space at the very top.^[3]

The Deccan taught the course one lesson: that a place is a palimpsest, centuries of use and worship and looting and restoration piled on the same stones, and that purity is a myth. The Himalaya teaches the inverse, and it is just as much a history of place. Here the defining layers are young. Darjeeling’s whole landscape is barely a century and a half old, a colonial plantation invention. Sikkim’s membership in “India” is younger than the people who govern it. Where the south asks who owns the deep past of a place, the north-east asks the sharper version: when did this place become India at all, and who decided?

The south was about how old a place is. The Himalaya is about how new a country can be.

There was no assigned reading for the Himalaya, the way there was none for the Jain colossus at Sravanabelgola. The syllabus was built for the precolonial Deccan, and the eastern mountains were never in it. They arrived as pure encounter, which is maybe the only honest way to meet a place you have no framework for. I came down from the cold with no theory to file it under and a single durable impression: that “India” is not one thing but a recent agreement among very different worlds, and that the agreement is younger, and more contingent, than it looks from the ancient stone of the south.