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Gautama Maharishi
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/15/21


Gautama Maharishi
An Early 19th Century Painting Showing Maharishi Gautama
Personal
Religion: Hinduism
Spouse: Ahalya
Children: Shatananda and others
Parents: Gotama (father)
Honors: One of the Saptarishis (Seven Great Sages Rishi)

Gautama Maharishi (Sanskrit: महर्षिः गौतम Mahariṣiḥ Gautama), also known as Vamadeva Gautama[1] was a Rigvedic sage in Hinduism, who is also mentioned in Jainism and Buddhism. Gautama is prominently mentioned in the Ramayana and is known for cursing his wife Ahalya, after she had an relationship with Indra. Another important story related to Gautama is about the creation of river Godavari, which is also known as Gautami.

History

Vamadeva Gautama was the founder of the Vamadeva family. Most of the hymns in Mandala IV of the Rigveda are attributed to him.[1] He was the son of Gotama.[2]

[W]e Gotamas with hymns extol thee, O Agni, as the guardian Lord of riches,
Decking thee like a horse, the swift prizewinner. May he, enriched with prayer, come soon and early...

Thus to thee, Indra, yoker of Bay Coursers, the Gotamas have brought their prayers to please thee...

O mighty Indra, Gotama's son Nodhas hath fashioned this new prayer to thee Eternal,
Sure leader, yoker of the Tawny Coursers. May he, enriched with prayer, come soon and early...

Prayers have been made by Gotamas, O Indra, addressed to thee, with laud for thy Bay Horses...

Thus Agni Jātavedas, true to Order, hath by the priestly Gotamas been lauded.
May he augment in them splendour and vigour: observant, as he lists, he gathers increase...

O JĀTAVEDAS, keen and swift, we Gotamas with sacred song exalt thee for thy glories' sake.
Thee, as thou art, desiring wealth Gotama worships with his song:
We laud thee for thy glories' sake...

O Gotama, desiring bliss present thy songs composed with care
To Agni of the pointed flames...

They drave the cloud transverse directed hitherward, and poured the fountain forth for thirsting Gotama.
Shining with varied light they come to him with help: they with their might fulfilled the longing of the sage...

The Gotamas making their prayer with singing have pushed the well's lid up to drink the water.
No hymn way ever known like this aforetime which Gotama sang forth for you, O Maruts,
What time upon your golden wheels he saw you, wild boars rushing about with tusks of iron.
To you this freshening draught of Soma rusheth, O Maruts, like the voice of one who prayeth.
It rusheth freely from our hands as these libations wont to flow...

The Gotamas have praised Heaven's radiant Daughter, the leader of the charm of pleasant voices.
Dawn, thou conferrest on us strength with offspring and men, conspicuous with kine and horses...

Ye lifted up the well, O ye Nāsatyas, and set the base on high to open downward.
Streams flowed for folk of Gotama who thirsted, like rain to bring forth thousandfold abundance...

Gotama, Purumīlha, Atri bringing oblations all invoke you for protection.
Like one who goes straight to the point directed, ye Nāsatyas, to mine invocation...

Through words and kinship I destroy the mighty: this power I have from Gotama my father.
Mark thou this speech of ours, O thou Most Youthful, Friend of the House, exceeding wise, Invoker...

The Gotamas have sung their song of praise to thee that thou mayst give,
Indra, for lively energy.
We will declare thy hero deeds, what Dāsa forts thou brakest down,
Attacking them in rapturous joy.
The sages sing those manly deeds which, Indra, Lover of the Song,
Thou wroughtest when the Soma flowed.
Indra, the Gotamas who bring thee praises have grown strong by thee.
Give them renown with hero sons...

A Warrior thou by strength, wisdom, and wondrous deed, in might excellest all that is.
Hither may this our hymn attract thee to our help, the hymn which Gotamas have made...

-- The Rig Veda, translated by Ralph T. H. Griffith

Children

According to Valmiki Ramayan, Gautama's eldest son with Ahalya is Satananda. But according to Adi Parva of Mahabharata, he had two sons named Saradvan and Cirakari. Saradvan was also known as Gautama, hence his children Kripa and Kripi were called Gautama and Gautami respectively. A daughter of Gautama is referred too but her name is never disclosed in the epic.[3] In Sabha Parva, he begets many children upon Aushinara (daughter of Ushinara), amongst whom eldest in Kakshivat. Gautama and Aushinara's marriage takes place at Magadha, the kingdom of Jarasandha.[4] According to Vamana Purana, he had three daughters named Jaya, Jayanti and Aparajita.[5]

Ahalya's curse


Gautama (left) discovers Indra disguised as Gautama fleeing, as Ahalya watches.

The Ramayana describes Ahalya as his wife. Their marriage is recorded in the Uttara Kanda, which is believed as an interpolation to the epic. As per the story Brahma, the creator god, creates a beautiful girl and gifts her as a bride to Gautama and a son named Shatananda is born. The Bala Kanda mentions that Gautama spots Indra, who is still in disguise, and curses him to lose his testicles. Gautama then returns to his ashram and accepts her.

References

1. Jamison, Stephanie; Brereton, Joel P. (2014). The Rigveda - the earliest religious poetry of India. Oxford University Press. p. 556.
2. Jamison and Brereton 2014, p. 563-564.
3. "Puranic encyclopaedia: a dictionary with special reference to the epic and Puranic literature". archive.org. 1975.
4. Mahabharata Sabha Parva Section XXI
5. "Puranic encyclopaedia : a dictionary with special reference to epic and Puranic literature". archive.org. 1975.
• Doniger, Wendy (1999). "Indra and Ahalya, Zeus and Alcmena". Splitting the Difference: Gender and Myth in Ancient Greece and India. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 978-0-226-15641-5.

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Gautama Dharmasutra
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/17/21

I have a larger vision or fantasy of original Indian Buddhism as an ocean with many icebergs, each representing the local textual traditions...of the different parts of the Indian world. Those icebergs are mostly gone...We have the Pali canon...the partial Sanskrit canon...They had a common core but they had many different texts in and around that basic commonality... and... there's no hope of finding them mainly for a simple physical reason, the climate of...India proper is such that organic materials...never last for more than a few hundred years. There are really no really old manuscripts in India proper. You only get the ancient manuscripts from the borderlands of India, in this case Gandhara which has a more moderate climate.

-- One Buddha, 15 Buddhas, 1,000 Buddhas, by Richard Salomon

Gautama Dharmasūtra is a Sanskrit text and likely one of the oldest Hindu Dharmasutras (600-200 BCE), whose manuscripts have survived into the modern age.[1][2][3]

The Gautama Dharmasutra was composed and survives as an independent treatise,[4] unattached to a complete Kalpa-sūtras, but like all Dharmasutras it may have been part of one whose Shrauta- and Grihya-sutras have been lost to history.[1][5] The text belongs to Samaveda schools, and its 26th chapter on penance theory is borrowed almost completely from Samavidhana Brahmana layer of text in the Samaveda.[1][5]

The Samaveda (Sanskrit: सामवेद, sāmaveda, from sāman "song" and veda "knowledge"), is the Veda of melodies and chants. It is an ancient Vedic Sanskrit text, and part of the scriptures of Hinduism. One of the four Vedas, it is a liturgical text which consists of 1,549 verses. All but 75 verses have been taken from the Rigveda. Three recensions of the Samaveda have survived, and variant manuscripts of the Veda have been found in various parts of India.

While its earliest parts are believed to date from as early as the Rigvedic period, the existing compilation dates from the post-Rigvedic Mantra period of Vedic Sanskrit, between c. 1200 and 1000 BCE or "slightly rather later," roughly contemporary with the Atharvaveda and the Yajurveda.

Embedded inside the Samaveda is the widely studied Chandogya Upanishad and Kena Upanishad, considered as primary Upanishads and as influential on the six schools of Hindu philosophy, particularly the Vedanta school. Samaveda has the root of music and dance tradition of this planet.

It is also referred to as Sama Veda....

R. T. H. Griffith says that there are three recensions of the text of the Samaveda Samhita:

• the Kauthuma recension is current in Gujarat, Uttar Pradesh, Odisha, West Bengal and since a few decades in Darbhanga, Bihar,
• the Rāṇāyanīya in the Maharashtra, Karnataka, Gokarna, few parts of Odisha, Andhra Pradesh
• and the Jaiminiya in the Carnatic, Tamil Nadu and Kerala...

Just like Rigveda, the early sections of Samaveda typically begin with Agni and Indra hymns but shift to abstract speculations and philosophy, and their meters too shifts in a descending order. The later sections of the Samaveda, states Witzel, have least deviation from substance of hymns they derive from Rigveda into songs. The purpose of Samaveda was liturgical, and they were the repertoire of the udgātṛ or "singer" priests...

The Samaveda consists of 1,549 unique verses, taken almost entirely from Rigveda, except for 75 verses. The largest number of verse come from Books 9 and 8 of the Rig Veda. Some of the Rigvedic verses are repeated more than once. Including these repetitions, there are a total of 1,875 verses numbered in the Samaveda recension translated by Griffith.

Samaveda samhita is not meant to be read as a text, it is like a musical score sheet that must be heard...

The Kauthuma recension has been published (Samhita, Brahmana, Shrautasutra and ancillary Sutras, mainly by B.R. Sharma), parts of the Jaiminiya tradition remain unpublished. There is an edition of the first part of the Samhita by W. Caland and of the Brahmana by Raghu Vira and Lokesh Chandra, as well as the neglected Upanishad, but only parts of the Shrautasutra. The song books remain unpublished.

A German edition of Samaveda was published in 1848 by Theodor Benfey, and Satyavrata Samashrami published an edited Sanskrit version in 1873. A Russian translation was published by Filipp Fortunatov in 1875. An English translation was published by Ralph Griffith in 1893. A translation in Hindi by Mridul Kirti called "Samveda Ka Hindi Padyanuvad" has also been published recently.

The Samaveda text has not received as much attention as the Rigveda, because outside of the musical novelty and melodic creativity, the substance of all but 75 verses of the text have predominantly been derived from the Rigveda. A study of Rigveda suffices.

-- Samaveda, by Wikipedia

The text is notable that it mentions many older texts and authorities on Dharma, which has led scholars to conclude that there existed a rich genre of Dharmasutras text in ancient India before this text was composed.[6][7]

Authorship and dates

Testimony during a trial

The witness must take an oath before deposing.
Single witness normally does not suffice.
As many as three witnesses are required.
False evidence must face sanctions.

— Gautama Dharmasutras 13.2-13.6 [8][9]

The Dharmasutra is attributed to Gautama, a Brahmin family name, many of whose members founded the various Shakhas (Vedic schools) of Samaveda.[1] The text was likely composed in the Ranayaniya branch of Samaveda tradition, generally corresponding to where modern Maratha people reside (Maharashtra-Gujarat).[1] The text is likely ascribed to revered sage Gautama of a remote era, but authored by members of this Samaveda school as an independent treatise.[10]

Kane estimated that Gautama Dharmasastra dates from approximately 600-400 BCE.[11] However, Olivelle states that this text discusses the progeny of Greeks with the word Yavana, whose arrival and stay in substantial numbers in northwest India is dated after Darius I (~500 BCE). The Yavana are called border people in the Edict of Ashoka (256 BCE), states Olivelle, and given Gautama gives them importance as if they are non-border people, this text is more likely to have been composed after the Ashoka's Edict, that is after mid 3rd century BCE.[12] Olivelle states that the Apastamba Dharmasutra is more likely the oldest extant text in Dharmasutras genre, followed by Gautama Dharmasastra.[2] Robert Lingat, however, states that the mention of Yavana in the text is isolated, and this minor usage could well have referred to Greco-Bactrian kingdoms whose border reached into northwest Indian subcontinent well before the Ashoka era. Lingat maintains that the Gautama Dharmasastra may well pre-date 400 BCE, and he and other scholars consider it to be the oldest extant Dharmasutra.[13][3]

Regardless of the relative chronology, the ancient Gautama Dharmasutra, states Olivelle, shows clear signs of a maturing legal procedure tradition and the parallels between the two texts suggest that significant Dharma literature existed before these texts were composed in 1st millennium BCE.[14][15][7]

The foundational roots of the text may pre-date Buddhism because it reveres the Vedas and uses terms such as Bhikshu for monks, which later became associated with Buddhists, and instead of Yati or Sannyasi terms that became associated with Hindus.[13] There is evidence that some passages, such as those related to castes and mixed marriages, were likely interpolated into this text and altered at the later date.[16]

Organization and content

The text is composed entirely in prose, in contrast to other surviving Dharmasutras which contain some verses as well.[13] The content is organized in the aphoristic sutra style, characteristic of ancient India's sutra period.[17] The text is divided into 28 Adhyayas (chapters),[13] with cumulative total of 973 verses.[18] Among the surviving ancient texts of its genre, the Gautama Dharmasutra has the largest portion (16%) of sutras dedicated to government and judicial procedures, compared to Apastamba's 6%, Baudhayana's 3% and Vasishtha's 9%.[19]

The contents of the Gautama Dharmasutra, states Daniel Ingalls, suggest that private property rights existed in ancient India, that the king had a right to collect taxes and had a duty to protect the citizens of his kingdom as well as settle disputes between them by a due process if and when these disputes emerged.[20]

The topics of this Dharmasūtra are arranged methodically, and resembles the structure of texts found in much later Dharma-related smṛtis (traditional texts).[5]

Gautama Dharmasutras

Chapter / Topics (incomplete) / Translation Comments

1. Sources of Dharma

1.1-4 / Origins and reliable sources of law / [21]

2. Brahmacharya

1.5-1.61 / Student's code of conduct, insignia, rules of study / [22]
2.1-2.51 / General rules, conduct towards teachers, food, graduation / [23]

3. Stages of life

3.1-3.36 / Student, monk, anchorite / [24]
4.1-8.25 / Household, marriage, rituals, gifts, respect for guests, behavior during times of crisis and adversity, interaction between Brahmins and the king, ethics and virtues / [25][26][27]
9.1-9.74 / Graduates / [28]
10.1-10.66 / Four social classes, their occupations, rules of violence during war, tax rates, proper tax spending, property rights / [29][30]

4. Judiciary

11.1-11.32 / The king and his duties, judicial process / [31]
12.1-13.31 / Criminal and civil law categories, contract and debts, theory of punishment, rules of trial, witnesses / [32][26]

5. Personal rituals

14.1-14.46 / Death in a family, cremation, impurities and purification after handling corpses / [33]
15.1-15.29 / Rites of passage for ancestors and the death of loved ones / [34]
16.1-16.49 / Self-study of texts, recitation, annual suspension of Vedic readings / [35]
17.1-17.38 / Food, health, prohibition on killing or harming animals to produce food / [36]
18.1-18.23 / Marriage, remarriage, child custody disputes / [37]

6. Punishment and penances

18.24-21.22 / Seizure of property, excommunication, expulsion, readmission, sins / [38]
22.1-23.34 / Penances for killings animals, adultery, illicit sex, eating meat, different types of penances / [39]

7. Inheritance and conflicts within law

28.1-28.47 / Inheritance rights of sons and daughters on man's property, on woman's property, levirate, estates, partition of property between relatives / [40]
28.48-28.53 / Resolving disputes and doubts within law / [41]

Commentaries

Duties of a graduate

He should not spend the morning, midday or afternoon fruitlessly,
but pursue righteousness, wealth and pleasure,
to the best of his ability,
but among them he should attend chiefly to righteousness.

— Gautama Dharmasutra 9.46-9.47[42]

Maskarin and Haradatta both commented on Gautama Dharmasūtra – the oldest is by Maskarin in 900-1000 CE, before Haradatta (who also commented on Apastamba).[43]

Olivelle states that Haradatta while writing his commentary on Gautama Dharmasutra titled Mitaksara[44] copied freely from Maskarin's commentary.[43] In contrast, Banerji states that Haradatta's commentary is older than Maskarin's.[45] Asahaya may have also written a commentary on the Gautama text, but this manuscript is either lost or yet to be discovered.[45]

Influence

Daniel Ingalls, a professor of Sanskrit at the Harvard University, states that the regulations in the Gautama Dharmasutra were not laws for the entire society, but were regulations and code of conduct that were developed and applied "strictly to one small group of Brahmins".[46] The Gautama text was part of the curriculum of one of the Samaveda schools, and most of the rules, if enforceable, states Ingall, applied to just this group.[46]

It is quite likely, states Patrick Olivelle, that the ideas and concepts in the Gautama Dharmasutra strongly influenced the authors of the Manusmriti.[19][47] Medieval texts, such as Apararka, state that thirty six Dharmasastra authors were influenced by Gautama Dharmasutras.[48]

See also

• Arthashastra
• Manusmriti
• Upanishads
• Vedas

References

1. Robert Lingat 1973, p. 19.
2. Patrick Olivelle 2006, p. 178 with note 28.
3. Daniel H.H. Ingalls 2013, p. 89.
4. Patrick Olivelle 2006, p. 186.
5. Patrick Olivelle 2006, p. 74.
6. Robert Lingat 1973, pp. 19-20.
7. Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr & Jayanth K. Krishnan 2010, p. 38.
8. Robert Lingat 1973, p. 69.
9. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 100-101.
10. Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr & Jayanth K. Krishnan 2010, p. 40.
11. Patrick Olivelle 1999, p. xxxii.
12. Patrick Olivelle 1999, p. xxxiii.
13. Robert Lingat 1973, p. 20.
14. Patrick Olivelle 2005, p. 44.
15. Robert Lingat 1973, pp. 19-22, Quote: The dharma-sutra of Apastamba suggests that a rich literature on dharma already existed. He cites ten authors by name. (...)..
16. Robert Lingat 1973, pp. 19-20, 94.
17. Patrick Olivelle 2006, p. 178.
18. Patrick Olivelle 2005, p. 46.
19. Patrick Olivelle 2006, pp. 186-187.
20. Daniel H.H. Ingalls 2013, p. 91-93.
21. Patrick Olivelle 1999, p. 78.
22. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 78-80.
23. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 80-83.
24. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 83-84.
25. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 84-91.
26. Daniel H.H. Ingalls 2013, pp. 89-90.
27. Kedar Nath Tiwari (1998). Classical Indian Ethical Thought. Motilal Banarsidass. pp. 88–90. ISBN 978-81-208-1607-7.
28. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 91-93.
29. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 94-96.
30. Penna, L. R. (1989). "Written and customary provisions relating to the conduct of hostilities and treatment of victims of armed conflicts in ancient India". International Review of the Red Cross. Cambridge University Press. 29 (271): 333–348. doi:10.1017/s0020860400074519.
31. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 96- 98.
32. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 98-101.
33. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 101-103.
34. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 103-106.
35. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 107-108.
36. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 108-109.
37. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 110-111.
38. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 111-115.
39. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 115-118.
40. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 118-126.
41. Patrick Olivelle 1999, p. 126.
42. Patrick Olivelle 1999, pp. 92-93.
43. Patrick Olivelle 1999, p. 74.
44. Robert Lingat 1973, p. 114.
45. Sures Chandra Banerji (1999). A Brief History of Dharmaśāstra. Abhinav Publications. pp. 72–75. ISBN 978-81-7017-370-0.
46. Daniel H.H. Ingalls 2013, p. 90-91.
47. Patrick Olivelle 2005, pp. 44-45.
48. Timothy Lubin, Donald R. Davis Jr & Jayanth K. Krishnan 2010, p. 51.

Bibliography

• Daniel H.H. Ingalls (2013). Roy W. Perrett (ed.). Theory of Value: Indian Philosophy. Routledge. ISBN 978-1-135-70357-8.
• Timothy Lubin; Donald R. Davis Jr; Jayanth K. Krishnan (2010). Hinduism and Law: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-1-139-49358-1.
• Patrick Olivelle (1999). Dharmasutras: The Law Codes of Ancient India. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-283882-7.
• Patrick Olivelle (2005). Manu's Code of Law. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-517146-4.
• Patrick Olivelle (2006). Between the Empires: Society in India 300 BCE to 400 CE. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-977507-1.
• Robert Lingat (1973). The Classical Law of India. University of California Press. ISBN 978-0-520-01898-3.

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The Ordeal [Purrikeh/Parikyah] in India, Excerpt from Superstition and Force
by Henry Charles Lea
1878

If any One of the Partners by Affinity, at the Time of sharing and dividing their Property, concealed any Part of the Effects, and this Circumstance should afterwards appear, that Part shall then be divided equally among all not the other Partners, and the Man who concealed it. But if any One of the Partners still continues suspicious, he shall undergo the Purrikeh, that is Ordeal for him; whoever is not suspicious of him, he shall perform the Purrikeh....

If a Man brings a regular Suit against another, and that Person absolutely denies the Claim, in that Case, the Plaintiff shall be held to prove his Claim; if the Plaintiff has neither Writing nor Witnesses for his Proof, the Defendant shall perform the Purrikeh (that is) an Ordeal, to satisfy the other.

-- A Code of Gentoo Laws, Or, Ordinations of the Pundits, From a Persian Translation, Made From the Original, Written in the Shanscrit Language, by Nathaniel Brassey Halhed

THE OATH AND ITS ACCESSORIES...

So far, indeed, were the Barbarians from reposing implicit confidence in the integrity of their fellows that their earliest records show how fully they shared in the common desire of mankind to place the oath under the most efficient guarantees that ingenuity could devise. In its most simple form the oath is an invocation of some deity or supernatural power to grant or withhold his favor in accordance with the veracity of the swearer, but at all times men have sought to render this more impressive by interposing material objects dear to the individual, which were understood to be offered as pledges or victims for the divine wrath. Thus, among the Hindus, the ancient Manava Dharma Sastra prescribes the oath as satisfactory evidence in default of evidence, but requires it to be duly reinforced—

“In cases where there is no testimony, and the judge cannot decide upon which side lies the truth, he can determine it fully by administering the oath.

“Oaths were sworn by the seven Maharshis, and by the gods, to make doubtful things manifest, and even Vasishtha sware an oath before the king Sudama, son of Piyavana, when Viswamitra accused him of eating a hundred children.

“Let not the wise man take an oath in vain, even for things of little weight; for he who takes an oath in vain is lost in this world and the next.

“Let the judge swear the Brahman by his truth; the Kshatriya by his horses, his elephants, or his arms; the Vaisya by his cows, his corn, and his gold; the Sudra by all crimes.”

And in the more detailed code of Vishnu there is an exceedingly complicated system of objects to be sworn upon, varying with the amount at stake and the caste of the swearer...

The black Australioid Khonds ... Not only do they constantly employ the ordeals of boiling water and oil and red-hot iron, which they may have borrowed from their Hindu neighbors, but they administer judicial oaths with imprecations that are decidedly of the character of ordeals. Thus an oath is taken on a tiger’s skin with an invocation of destruction from that animal upon the perjured; or upon a lizard’s skin whose scaliness is invited upon him who may forswear himself; or over an ant-hill with an imprecation that he who swears falsely may be reduced to powder....

The hill-tribes of Rajmahal, who represent another of the pre-Aryan Indian races, furnish us with further developments of the same principle, in details bearing a marked analogy to those practised by the most diverse families of mankind. Thus the process by which the guilt of Achan was discovered (Joshua vii. 16-18), and that by which, as we shall see hereafter, Master Anselm proposed to identify the thief of the sacred vessels of Laon, are not unlike the ceremony used when a district is ravaged by tigers or by pestilence, which is regarded as a retribution for sin committed by some inhabitant, whose identification thus becomes all-important for the salvation of the rest. In the process known as Satane a person sits on the ground with a branch of the bale tree planted opposite to him; rice is handed to him to eat in the name of each village of the district, and when the one is named in which the culprit lives, he is expected to throw up the rice. Having thus determined the village, the same plan is adopted with respect to each family in it, and when the family is identified, the individual is discovered in the same manner. Another form, named Cherreen, is not unlike the ordeal of the Bible and key, not as yet obsolete among Christians. A stone is suspended by a string, and the names of the villages, families, and individuals are repeated, when it indicates the guilty by its vibrations. Thieves are also discovered and convicted by these processes, and by another mode known as Gobereen, which is a modification of the hot-water ordeal. A mixture of cow-dung, oil, and water is made to boil briskly in a pot. A ring is thrown in, and each suspected person, after invoking the Supreme Deity, is required to find and bring out the ring with his hand—the belief being that the innocent will not be burned, while the guilty will not be able to put his hand into the pot, as the mixture will rise up to meet it....

It is among the Aryan races that we are to look for the fullest and most enduring evidences of the beliefs which developed into the ordeal, and gave it currency from the rudest stages of nomadic existence to periods of polished and enlightened civilization. In the perfect dualism of Mazdeism, the Yazatas, or angels of the good creation, were always prompt to help the pure and innocent against the machinations of Ahriman and his Daevas, their power to do so depending only upon the righteousness of him who needed assistance. The man unjustly accused, or seeking to obtain or defend his right, could therefore safely trust that any trial to which he might be subjected would be harmless, however much the ordinary course of nature would have to be turned aside in order to save him. Thus Zoroaster could readily explain and maintain the ancestral practices, the common use of which by both the Zend and the Hindu branches of the Aryan family points to their origin at a period anterior to the separation between the kindred tribes. In the fragments of the Avesta, which embody what remains to us of the prehistoric law of the ancient Persians, we find a reference to the ordeal of boiling water, showing it to be an accepted legal process, with a definite penalty affixed for him who failed to exculpate himself in it:—

“Creator! he who knowingly approaches the hot, golden, boiling water, as if speaking truth, but lying to Mithra;

“What is the punishment for it?

“Then answered Ahura-Mazda: Let them strike seven hundred blows with the horse-goad, seven hundred with the craosho-charana!"

The fire ordeal is also seen in the legend which relates how Sudabeh, the favorite wife of Kai Kaoos, became enamored of his son Siawush, and on his rejecting her advances accused him to his father of endeavoring to seduce her. Kai Kaoos sent out a hundred caravans of dromedaries to gather wood, of which two immense piles were built separated by a passage barely admitting a horseman. These were soaked with naphtha and fired in a hundred places, when Siawush mounted on a charger, after an invocation to God, rode through the flames and emerged without even a discoloration of his garments. Sudabeh was sentenced to death, but pardoned on the intercession of Siawush. Another reminiscence of the same ordeal may be traced among the crowd of fantastic legends with which the career of Zoroaster is embroidered. It is related that when an infant he was seized by the magicians, who foresaw their future destruction at his hands, and was thrown upon a huge pile composed of wood, naphtha, and sulphur, which was forthwith kindled; but, through the interposition of Hormazd, “the devouring flame became as water, in the midst of which slumbered the pearl of Zardusht.”

In Pehlvi the judicial ordeal was known as var nirang, and thirty-three doubtful conjunctures are enumerated as requiring its employment. The ordinary form was the pouring of molten metal on the body of the patient, though sometimes the heated substance was applied to the tongue or the feet. Of the former, a celebrated instance, curiously anticipating the story told, as we shall see hereafter, of Bishop Poppo when he converted the Danes, is related as a leading incident in the reformation of the Mazdiasni religion when the Persian monarchy was reconstructed by the Sassanids. Eighty thousand heretics remained obstinate until Sapor I. was so urgent with his Magi to procure their conversion that the Dustoor Adurabad offered to prove the truth of orthodoxy by suffering eighteen pounds of melted copper to be poured over his naked shoulders if the dissenters would agree to yield their convictions in case he escaped unhurt. The bargain was agreed to, and carried out with the happiest results. Not a hair of the Dustoor’s body was singed by the rivulets of fiery metal, and the recusants were gathered into the fold.

Among the Hindu Aryans so thoroughly was the divine interposition expected in the affairs of daily life that, according to the Manava Dharma Sastra, if a witness, within a week after giving testimony, should suffer from sickness, or undergo loss by fire, or the death of a relation, it was held to be a manifestation of the divine wrath, drawn down upon him in punishment for perjured testimony. There was, therefore, no inducement to abandon the resource of the ordeal, of which traces may be found as far back as the Vedic period, in the forms both of fire and red-hot iron. In the Ramayana, when Rama, the incarnate Vishnu, distrusts the purity of his beloved Sita, whom he has rescued from the Rakshasha Ravana, she vindicates herself by mounting a blazing pyre, from which she is rescued unhurt by the fire-god, Agni, himself. Manu declares, in the most absolute fashion—

“Let the judge cause him who is under trial to take fire in his hand, or to plunge in water, or to touch separately the heads of his children and of his wife.

“Whom the flame burneth not, whom the water rejects not from its depths, whom misfortune overtakes not speedily, his oath shall be received as undoubted.

“When the Rishi Vatsa was accused by his young half-brother, who stigmatized him as the son of a Sudra, he swore that it was false, and, passing through fire, proved the truth of his oath; the fire, which attests the guilt and the innocence of all men, harmed not a hair of his head, for he spake the truth.”

And the practical application of the rule is seen in the injunction on both plaintiff and defendant to undergo the ordeal, even in certain civil cases.

In the more developed code of Vishnu we find the ordeal system exceedingly complicated, pervading every branch of jurisprudence and only limited by the amount at stake or the character or caste of the defendant. Yet Hindu antiquity is so remote and there have been so many schools of teachers that the custom apparently did not prevail in all times and places. One of the most ancient books of law is the Dharmasastra of Gautama, who says nothing of ordeals and relies for proof wholly on the evidence of witnesses, adding the very relaxed rule that “No guilt is incurred in giving false evidence in case the life of a man depends thereon.”

This, however, is exceptional, and the ordeal maintained its existence from the most ancient periods to modern times. Under the name of purrikeh, or parikyah, it is prescribed in the native Hindu law in all cases, civil and criminal, which cannot be determined by written or oral evidence, or by oath, and is sometimes incumbent upon the plaintiff and sometimes upon the defendant. In its various forms it bears so marked a resemblance to the judgments of God current in mediæval Europe that the further consideration of its use in India may be more conveniently deferred till we come to discuss its varieties in detail, except to add that in Hindu, as in Christian courts, it has always been a religious as well as a judicial ceremony, conducted in the presence of Brahmans, and with the use of invocations to the higher powers....

THE ORDEAL OF BOILING WATER.

The ordeal of boiling water (æneum, judicium aquæ ferventis, cacabus, caldaria) is the one usually referred to in the most ancient texts of laws. It was a favorite both with the secular and ecclesiastical authorities, and the manner in which the pagan usages of the ancient Aryans were adopted and rendered orthodox by the Church is well illustrated by the commendation bestowed on it by Hincmar, Archbishop of Reims, in the ninth century. It combines, he says, the elements of water and of fire; the one representing the deluge—the judgment inflicted on the wicked of old; the other authorized by the fiery doom of the future—the day of judgment, in both of which we see the righteous escape and the wicked suffer. There were several minor variations in its administration, but none of them departed to any notable extent from the original form as invented in the East. A caldron of water was brought to the boiling-point, and the accused was obliged with his naked hand to find a small stone or ring thrown into it; sometimes the latter portion was omitted, and the hand was simply inserted, in trivial cases to the wrist, in crimes of magnitude to the elbow; the former being termed the single, the latter the triple ordeal; or, again, the stone was employed, suspended by a string, and the severity of the trial was regulated by the length of the line, a palm’s breadth being counted as single, and the distance to the elbow as triple...

As a means of judicial investigation, the Church, in adopting it with the other ordeals, followed the policy of surrounding it with all the solemnity which her most venerated rites could impart, thus imitating, no doubt unconsciously, the customs of the Hindus, who, from the earliest times, have made the ordeal a religious ceremony, to be conducted by Brahmans, with invocations to the divine powers, and to be performed by the patient at sunrise, immediately after the prescribed ablutions, and while yet fasting....

The modern Hindoo variety of this ordeal consists in casting a piece of gold or a metal ring into a vessel of boiling ghee, or sesame oil, of a specified size and depth. Sacrifices are offered to the gods, a mantra, or Vedic prayer, is uttered over the oil, which is heated until it burns a fresh peepul leaf, and if the person on trial can extract the ring between his finger and thumb, without scalding himself, he is pronounced victorious. In 1783 a case is recorded as occurring at Benares, in which a Brahman accused a linen-painter of theft, and as there was no other way of settling the dispute, both parties agreed to abide by the result of the ordeal... So lately as 1867 the Bombay Gazette records a case occurring at Jamnuggur, when a camel-driver named Chakee Soomar, under whose charge a considerable sum of money was lost, was exposed by a local official to the ordeal of boiling oil... it was performed by placing a small silver ball in a brazen vessel eight inches deep, filled with boiling ghee. After various religious ceremonies, the accused plunged in his hand, and sometimes was obliged to repeat the attempt several times before he could bring out the ball. The hand was then wrapped up in tender palm leaves and examined after an interval of three days...

In almost all ages there has existed the belief that under the divine influence the human frame was able to resist the action of fire. Even the sceptic Pliny seems to share the superstition as to the families of the Hirpi, who at the annual sacrifice made to Apollo, on Mount Soracte, walked without injury over piles of burning coals, in recognition of which, by a perpetual senatus consultum, they were relieved from all public burdens. That fire applied either directly or indirectly should be used in the appeal to God was therefore natural, and the convenience with which it could be employed by means of iron rendered that the most usual form of the ordeal. As employed in Europe, under the name of judicium ferri or juise it was administered in two essentially different forms. The one (vomeres igniti, examen pedale) consisted in laying on the ground at certain distances six, nine, or in some cases twelve, red-hot ploughshares, among which the accused walked barefooted, sometimes blindfolded, when it became an ordeal of pure chance, and sometimes compelled to press each iron with his naked feet. The other and more usual form obliged the patient to carry in his hand for a certain distance, usually nine feet, a piece of red-hot iron, the weight of which was determined by law and varied with the importance of the question at issue or the magnitude of the alleged crime. Thus, among the Anglo-Saxons, in the “simple ordeal” the iron weighed one pound, in the “triple ordeal” three pounds. The latter is prescribed for incendiaries and “morth-slayers” (secret murderers), for false coining, and for plotting against the king’s life; while at a later period, in the collection known as the Laws of Henry I., we find it extended to cases of theft, robbery, arson, and felonies in general. In Sweden, for theft, the form known as trux iarn was employed, in which the accused had to carry the red-hot iron and deposit it in a hole twelve paces from the starting-point; in other cases the ordeal was called scuz iarn, when he carried it nine paces and then cast it from him. These ordeals were held on Wednesday, after fasting on bread and water on Monday and Tuesday; the hand or foot was washed, after which it was allowed to touch nothing till it came in contact with the iron; it was then wrapped up and sealed until Saturday, when it was opened in presence of the accuser and the judges. In Spain, the iron had no definite weight, but was a palm and two fingers in length, with four feet, high enough to enable the criminal to lift it conveniently. The episcopal benediction was necessary to consecrate the iron to its judicial use. A charter of 1082 shows that the Abbey of Fontanelle in Normandy had one of approved sanctity, which, through the ignorance of a monk, was applied to other purposes. The Abbot thereupon asked the Archbishop of Rouen to consecrate another, and before the latter would consent the institution had to prove its right to administer the ordeal. The wrapping up and sealing of the hand was a general custom, derived from the East, and usually after three days it was uncovered and the decision was rendered in accordance with its condition. These proceedings were accompanied by the same solemn observances which have been already described, the iron itself was duly exorcised, and the intervention of God was invoked in the name of all the manifestations of Divine clemency or wrath by the agency of fire—Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, the burning bush of Horeb, the destruction of Sodom, and the day of judgment. Occasionally, when several criminals were examined together, the same piece of heated iron was borne by them successively, giving a manifest advantage to the last one, who had to endure a temperature considerably less than his companions.

In India this was one of the earliest forms of the ordeal, in use even in the Vedic period, as it is referred to in the Khandogya Upanishad of the Sama Veda, where the head of a hatchet is alluded to as the implement employed for the trial—subsequently replaced by a ploughshare. In the seventh century, A. D., Hiouen Thsang reports that the red-hot iron was applied to the tongue of the accused as well as to the palms of his hands and the soles of his feet, his innocence being designated by the amount of resultant injury. This may have been a local custom, for, according to Institutes of Vishnu, closely followed by Yajnavalkya, the patient bathes and performs certain religious ceremonies; then after rubbing his hands with rice bran, seven green asvattha leaves are placed on the extended palms and bound with a thread. A red-hot iron ball or spear-head, weighing about two pounds and three-quarters, is then brought, and the judge adjures it—

“Thou, O fire, dwellest in the interior of all things like a witness. O fire, thou knowest what mortals do not comprehend.

“This man being arraigned in a cause desires to be cleared from guilt. Therefore mayest thou deliver him lawfully from this perplexity.”

The glowing ball is then placed on the hands of the accused, and with it he has to walk across seven concentric circles of cow-dung, each with a radius sixteen fingers’ breadth larger than the preceding, and throw the ball into a ninth circle, where it must burn some grass placed there for the purpose. If this be accomplished without burning the hands, he gains his cause, but the slightest injury convicts him. A minimum limit of a thousand pieces of silver was established at an early period as requisite to justify the administration of this form of ordeal in a suit. But the robust faith in the power of innocence characteristic of the earlier Hindus seems to have diminished, for subsequent recensions of the code and later lawgivers increase the protection afforded to the hand by adding to the asvattha leaves additional strata of dharba grass and barley moistened with curds, the whole bound around with seven turns of raw silk. Ali Ibrahim Khan relates a case which he witnessed at Benares in 1783 in which a man named Sancar, accused of larceny, offered to be tried in this manner.... The ordeal took place in presence of a large assemblage, when, to the surprise of every one, Sancar carried the red-hot ball through the seven circles, threw it duly into the ninth where it burnt the grass, and exhibited his hands uninjured.... Even in 1873, the Bombay Gazette states that this ordeal is still practised in Oodeypur, where a case had shortly before occurred wherein a husbandman had been obliged to prove his innocence by holding a red-hot ploughshare in his hands, duly guarded with peepul leaves, turning his face towards the sun and invoking it: “Thou Sun-God, if I am actually guilty of the crime, punish me; if not, let me escape unscathed from the ordeal!”—and in this instance, also, the accused was uninjured.

A peculiar modification of the hot-iron ordeal is employed by the aboriginal hill-tribes of Rajmahal, in the north of Bengal, when a person believes himself to be suffering from witchcraft. The Satane and the Cherreen are used to find out the witch, and then the decision is confirmed by a person representing the sufferer, who, with certain religious ceremonies, applies his tongue to a red-hot iron nine times, unless sooner burnt. A burn is considered to render the guilt of the accused indubitable, and his only appeal is to have the trial repeated in public, when, if the same result follows, he is bound either to cure the bewitched person or to suffer death if the latter dies....

THE ORDEAL OF FIRE.

The ordeal of fire, administered directly, without the intervention either of water or of iron, is one of the most ancient forms, as is shown by the allusions to it in both the Hindu Vedic writings, the adventure of Siawush, and the passage in the Antigone of Sophocles (pp. 266, 267, 270). In this, its simplest form, it may be considered the origin of the proverbial expression, “J’en mettrois la main au feu,” [Google translate: I put my hand in the fire] as an affirmation of positive belief, showing how thoroughly the whole system engrained itself in the popular mind. In India, as practised in modern times, its form approaches somewhat the ordeal of the burning ploughshares. A trench is dug nine hands in length, two spans in breadth, and one span in depth. This is filled with peepul wood, which is then set on fire, and the accused walks into it with bare feet. A more humane modification is described in the seventh century by Hiouen-Thsang as in use when the accused was too tender to undergo the trial by red-hot iron. He simply cast into the flames certain flower-buds, when, if they opened their leaves, he was acquitted; if they were burnt up, he was condemned....

THE ORDEAL OF COLD WATER...

In India the ordeal of cold water became simply one of endurance. The stream or pond was exorcised with the customary Mantras:—

“Thou O water dwellest in the interior of all things like a witness. O water thou knowest what mortals do not comprehend.

“This man being arraigned in a cause desires to be cleared from guilt. Therefore mayest thou deliver him lawfully from this perplexity.”

The patient stood in water up to his middle, facing the East, caught hold of the thighs of a man “free from friendship or hatred” and dived under, while simultaneously an arrow of reed without a head was shot from a bow, 106 fingers’ breadth in length, and if he could remain under water until the arrow was picked up and brought back, he gained his cause, but if any portion of him could be seen above the surface he was condemned. Yajnavalkya says this form of ordeal was only used on the Sudras, or lowest caste, while the Ayeen Akbery speaks of it as confined to the Vaisyas, or caste of husbandmen and merchants. According to the Institutes of Vishnu, it was not to be administered to the timid or those affected with lung diseases, nor to those who gained their living by the water, such as fishermen or boatmen, nor was it allowed during the winter.

Although, as we have seen, the original cold-water ordeal in India, as described by Manu, was precisely similar to the European form, inasmuch as the guilty were expected to float and the innocent to sink, and although in this shape it prevailed everywhere throughout Europe, and its tenacity of existence rendered it the last to disappear in the progress of civilization, yet it does not make its appearance in any of the earlier codes of the Barbarians. The first allusions to it occur in the ninth century, and it was then so generally regarded as a novelty that documents almost contemporaneous ascribe its invention to the popes of that period...

THE ORDEAL OF THE BALANCE.

We have seen above that a belief existed that persons guilty of sorcery lost their specific gravity, and this superstition naturally led to the use of the balance in the effort to discover and punish the crime of witchcraft, which all experts assure us was the most difficult of all offences on which to obtain evidence. The trial by balance, however, was not a European invention. Like nearly all the other ordeals, it can be traced back to India, where, at least as early as the time of the Institutes of Vishnu, it was in common use. It is described there as reserved for women, children, old men, invalids, the blind, the lame, and the privileged Brahman caste, and not to be undertaken when a wind was blowing. After proper ceremonies the patient was placed in one scale, with an equivalent weight to counterbalance him in the other, and the nicety of the operation is shown by the prescription that the beam must have a groove with water in it, evidently for the purpose of detecting the slightest deflection either way. The accused then descended and the judge addressed the customary adjuration to the balance:—

“Thou, O balance, art called by the same name as holy law (dharma); thou, O balance, knowest what mortals do not comprehend.

“This man, arraigned in a cause, is weighed upon thee. Therefore mayest thou deliver him lawfully from this perplexity.”

Then the accused was replaced in the scale, and if he were found to be lighter than before he was acquitted. If the scale broke, the trial was to be repeated...

THE ORDEAL OF THE CROSS.

The ordeal of the cross (judicium crucis, stare ad crucem) was one of simple endurance and differed from all its congeners, except the duel, in being bilateral. The plaintiff and defendant, after appropriate religious ceremonies and preparation, stood with uplifted arms before a cross, while divine service was performed, victory being adjudged to the one who was able longest to maintain his position. An ancient formula for judgments obtained in this manner in cases of disputed titles to land prescribes the term of forty-two nights for the trial. It doubtless originated in the use of this exercise by the Church both as a punishment and as a penance...

In India a cognate mode is adopted by the people of Ramgur to settle questions of disputed boundaries between villages. When agreement by argument or referees is found impossible, each community chooses a champion, and the two stand with one leg buried in the earth until weariness or the bites of insects cause one of them to yield, when the territory in litigation is adjudged to the village of the victor...

THE CORSNÆD.

The ordeal of consecrated bread or cheese (judicium offæ, panis conjuratio, pabulum probationis, the corsnæd of the Anglo-Saxons) was administered by presenting to the accused a piece of bread (generally of barley) or of cheese, about an ounce in weight,1079 over which prayers and adjurations had been pronounced. After appropriate religious ceremonies, including the communion, the morsel was eaten, the event being determined by the ability of the accused to swallow it...

In India, this ordeal is performed with a kind of rice called sathee, prepared with various incantations. The person on trial eats it, with his face to the East, and then spits upon a peepul leaf. “If the saliva is mixed with blood, or the corners of his mouth swell, or he trembles, he is declared to be a liar.” A slightly different form is described for cases in which several persons are suspected of theft. The consecrated rice is administered to them all, is chewed lightly, and then spit out upon a peepul leaf. If any one ejects it either dry or tinged with blood, he is adjudged guilty.

Based on the same theory is a ceremony performed by the pre-Aryan hill-tribes of Rajmahal, when swearing judges into office preparatory to the trial of a case. In this a pinch of salt is placed upon a tulwar or scimitar, and held over the mouth of the judge, to whom is addressed the adjuration, “If thou decidest contrary to thy judgment and falsely, may this salt be thy death!” The judge repeats the formula, and the salt is washed with water into his mouth...

THE EUCHARIST AS AN ORDEAL.

From ancient times in India there has been in common use an ordeal known as cosha, consisting of water in which an idol has been washed. The priest celebrates solemn rites “to some tremendous deity,” such as Durga or the Adityas, whose image is then bathed in water. Three handfuls of this water are then drunk by the accused, and if within fourteen days he is not visited with some dreadful calamity from the act of the deity or of the king, “he must indubitably be acquitted.”...

THE ORDEAL OF THE LOT.

The appeal to chance, as practised in India, bears several forms, substantially identical in principle. One mode consists in writing the words dherem (consciousness of innocence) and adherem (its opposite) on plates of silver and lead respectively, or on pieces of white and black linen, which are placed in a vessel that has never held water. The person whose cause is at stake inserts his hand and draws forth one of the pieces, when if it happens to be dherem it proves his truth. Another method is to place in a vessel a silver image of Dharma, the genius of justice, and one in iron or clay of Adharma; or else a figure of Dharma is painted on white cloth and another on black cloth, and the two are rolled together in cow-dung and thrown into a jar, when the accused is acquitted or convicted according to his fortune in drawing Dharma....

CONDITIONS OF THE ORDEAL....

In India, the accused was required to undergo the risk of a fine if he desired to force his adversary to the ordeal; but either party could voluntarily undertake it, in which case the other was subject to a mulct if defeated.1214 The character of the defendant, however, had an important bearing upon its employment. If he had already been convicted of a crime or of perjury he was subject to it in all cases, however trifling; if, on the other hand, he was a man of unblemished reputation, he was not to be exposed to it, however important was the385 case.1215 In civil cases, however, it apparently was only employed to supplement deficient evidence.—“Evidence consists of writings, possession, and witnesses. If one of these is wanting, then one of the ordeals is valid.”...

The absence of satisfactory testimony, rendering the case one not to be solved by human means alone is frequently, as in India, alluded to as a necessary element; and indeed we may almost assert that this was so, even when not specifically mentioned, as far as regards the discretion of the tribunal to order an appeal to the judgment of God...

These regulations give to the ordeal decidedly the aspect of punishment, as it was thus inflicted on those whose guilt was so generally credited that they could not find comrades to stand up with them at the altar as partakers in their oath of denial; and this is not the only circumstance which leads us to believe that it was frequently so regarded. This notion is visible in the ancient Indian law, where, as we have seen, certain of the ordeals—those of red-hot iron, poison, and the balance—could not be employed unless the matter at stake were equivalent to the value of a thousand pieces of silver, or involved an offence against the king...

In fact, the ordeal was practically looked upon as a torture by those whose enlightenment led them to regard as a superstition the faith popularly reposed in it. An epistle which is attributed both to Stephen V. and Sylvester II. condemns the whole system on the ground that the canons forbid the extortion of confessions by heated irons and boiling water; and that a credulous belief could not be allowed to sanction that which was not permitted by the fathers....

TORTURE...

In the Institutes of Manu there are very minute directions as to evidence, the testimony preferred being that of witnesses, whose comparative credibility is very carefully discussed, and when such evidence is not attainable, the parties, as we have seen above, are ordered to be sworn or tried by the ordeal. These principles have been transmitted unchanged to the present day.

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Historical Analysis of Land Ownership
by Rajesh Kumar
mkgandhi.org

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The problem of land ownership at present cannot be resolved without understanding the land ownership structure of the past. The past plays an important role in shaping our perceptions and ordering our priorities. Naturally, the solutions we find for the contemporary crisis are affected by our past. Hence, it is important to see how our ancestors understood land ownership.

There is a general consensus among experts that the question of land ownership came into existence in the post-vedic era because during the Rig vedic era, the Aryans were pastorals and cattle was the main index of wealth. Land ownership was not prevalent at that time. In the post-vedic era, due to use of iron implements in agriculture, people started staying in one place. We find reference to land ownership in the post-vedic book Aitareya Brahman in which it is written that when Vishwakarman Bhuvan donated land to the purohits for performing yagna, Prithvi protested. This suggests that it was not possible to donate land without the consent of the community. In other words, land ownership was based on community and there was no concept of individual ownership of land.

According to dharmashastra expert of Mahajanpad period, Gautam, any property that was the means of livelihood, could not be divided, and this, most probably, also included land. With the development of villages inhabited by a wide spectrum of communities and professionals, the question of ownership of land that was not attached to an identifiable property became equally perplexing. The fact that there was common ownership of land can also be verified in Rishi Jaimini’s Mimamsa sutras. Under this arrangement, no king can give away all the land of his kingdom since the earth belongs to all.

During the Maurya era, political philosopher Kautilya was in favour of the king’s control over all agricultural land, but he did not sponsor the notion that the king should be the owner of all the land. Possibly, Manu was the first person to have talked about king’s first right of ownership of the land. But this does not necessarily mean that he is the absolute owner of all the land. According to Manu, the king owns half of all that comes out of mines, because he is lord of the earth and protects it. The concept of king’s ownership over all land was first propounded in the post-Gupta period by Sage Katyayan who said that the king is the owner of all land and therefore, he has right to one fourth of all the products of land. At the same time, he also accepts that one who lives on land, should be the man acknowledged as its owner. A similar sentiment is expressed in Narad Smriti. Contrary to this, the Narsingh Puran clearly says that the land belongs to the king and not to the farmer. One can say that Narsingh Puran is the first text which gives the king the total ownership of land.

According to Narad, if a family has been enjoying the fruits of a land for three generations, then they have the legal rights over it. However, the will of the king can facilitate transfer of the land to another farming household. This implies that the king’s right can infringe upon the individual’s right. Chinese travellers Fahien who came to India during the Gupta period and Hiuen Tsang who came during King Harshvardhan’s rule noted that the land belonged to the king. Writing in the post-Gupta period, Brihaspati noted that during the division of ancestral property, shudra putras (lower caste sons) of upper caste men would not get a share. Besides, the division of grazing land was also an accepted practice. So, division of land and the continuation of accepting it as private property started during the Gupta period [mid-to-late 3rd century CE to 543 CE]. The rules for sale of land were first laid down by Brihaspati. Kautilya talks only about the sale of house and the land attached to it, but he does not talk about sale of land per se. After Brihaspati, it was Katyayan who made rules in this regard. According to him, land which is taxed could be sold to pay the tax. According to Brihaspati, during sale of land one must mention the number of wells, trees, water sources, fields, ripe crops, fruits, ponds, tax houses etc. Here, one may conjecture that Brihaspati was delienating terms of selling an entire village.

According to Gautam and Manu, if a plot of land stays under possession of a person for 10 years or more, then it becomes his property. Yagyavallabh extended this period to 20 years, but none of them talked about land in this context. Vishnu, Narad, Brihaspati and Katyayan increased this period to three generations that is 60 years and also included land under this. With the 11th century Mitakshara law, the time period was increased to a 100 years and in the 13th century under Smriti Chandrika it was increased to 105 years. This makes it clear that the concept of individual ownership of land could not be challenged any further. So, we see that during the beginning of the ancient period, there was community ownership of land; by the end of the ancient period the stress was on the king’s and individual ownership of land, even though it appears that these two rights are in conflict with one another. Due to king’s ownership of land, the king could grant land to temple priests, powerful nobles and employees in return of services rendered to the king. And under the concept of individual ownership of land, the person who received a grant of land from the king could hand it over to farmers on patta. From the above it appears that since the early middle ages, there were more than one claimant for land and each had legal backing for it. A similar situation was prevalent in feudal Europe at that time, though there were some fundamental differences.

During 1200s, when the Muslim sultanates were established in north India, there was a change in the pattern of land ownership. The land under the Sultanate was divided into three parts. The first was ‘khalsa’ land which was directly under the Centre, the second was ‘Ekta’ which was given to the officers in lieu of their salary. The officers were expected to take their salary from the revenue generated from the land and return the remaining to the Centre. The third type of land was donated to scholars and priests. Since land was in plenty, the question of ownership was relatively less intimidating. Khoot, Mukaddam and Choudhary were the intermediate land owning class. Of them the Khoots had the status of zamindars, while Mukaddam and Choudhary were heads of villages and were prosperous farmers. This intermediate land owning class used to collect tax from the farmers and deposit it in the Central treasury. But, during the era of Allauddin Khilji, the powers of the intermediate class were taken away and the State’s employees were given the task of collecting tax directly from the farmers. In the rural society, the land owning farmers and the landless farmers lived side by side, but only the land owning farmer paid the taxes.

During the rule of Sher Shah Suri, the ‘Jabt’ system was introduced and the tax was based on the size of the holding. All cultivable land was measured and each farmer was given a title deed in which the tax to be levied was also mentioned. The direct relation with the state saved the farmer from exploitation by the zamindars and other intermediaries. During the Mughal period, the situation remained unclear, as had been during the Sultanate regime. It is possible that the state and other sections had right over the same plot of land, but there was no concept of total ownership of land. During this period the influence of the zamindars increased and they amassed enormous social clout. Akbar divided the land under him into ‘Khalsa’ and ‘Jagir’. The Mansabdars, whose salaries were derived from the revenue of the land given to them, were known as the Jagirdars. Along with them there was a large class of Zamindars, who, in turn, were divided into three categories. The farmers were of two types – the ‘Khudkashta’ and ‘Pahikashta’. The former were farmers who tilled their own lands and the latter were landless peasants who tilled other people’s land. One may deduce that the settlement pattern during the Mughal period led to the rise of several claimants to the same plot of land.

The question of land ownership once again came to the forefront during the British. It was in Bengal that the British rule first tried to solve this problem. In the beginning, all the land was considered to be that of the ruler and revenue collection was based on contract. The highest bidder of a tract of land was given the right to collect the revenue. After experimenting with several models of revenue collection, the then governor general Cornwallis accepted that the Zamindars had the right of ownership of land and this ownership passed from father to son. This was done so that if a zamindar failed to give the promised revenue on time, his land could be auctioned. When lands of the zamindars were auctioned, it was the traders who usually purchased them. During the British period, industries had declined and for the traders there was no safer investment than land. However, the zamindars lived in the cities and the problem associated with absentee landlordism started cropping up.

The main aim of the absentee zamindars was to extract the maximum amount of revenue from the farmers and little from the tillers. Gradually, the new generation of the zamindars also started living in the cities and their motive too was to extract the maximum amount of revenue from the farmers.

Apart from Bengal, the ownership of land was given directly to the farmers in the rest of the country upon the payment of fixed revenue called malguzari. If they failed, their land had to be mortgaged or sold to pay the dues. In south India, the farmers used to deposit the land revenue directly to the government, while in Punjab and other parts of north India, the Mahal, who represented the farmers, used to collect revenue. Over a period of time, the British increased their demand for land revenue and to ensure that it could be collected, they made land a saleable property. So whenever a zamindar, farmer or Mahal failed to deposit the revenue on the given date, his ownership of the land was auctioned and the land revenue was collected. Prior to the British rule, such auctions of confiscated land was rare. In most of the cases the land on which people could build houses or land that was to be donated for religious purposes were bought and sold. Even during the British period, 40 per cent of the area came under the princely states and the pattern of ownership on this land was based on concepts that varied from the medieval to modern.

After independence, the question of land was discussed in detail at the Constituent Assembly and Parliament. Since India had decided to become a democratic republic, it was decided that a land distribution should be more just and equitable. Egged on by the Centre, the State governments passed the Zamindari abolition act and other similar acts to bring about some regularity in the ownership pattern of land.

After zamindari was abolished, the zamindars were given compensation of their land and it was distributed among those who had been tilling them. In most of the States, the zamindari system was abolished by 1956. But the absence of land records made it difficult to implement laws abolishing zamindari. According to one study, the area under kashtakars (share croppers) had come down from 42 per cent in 1950-51 to around 20-25 per cent in the beginning of the 60s. This did not mean that the share croppers had become owners, rather it meant that the landowners had evicted them. On the other hand, the compensation given to the zamindars was often inadequate and varied from State to State.

There were several hurdles to the abolition of zamindari system. In Uttar Pradesh, the zamindars were allowed to keep land for their personal cultivation, but there was no limit to this holding, as a result of which the absentee landlord could save their land from acquisition. However, some of the bigger landlords did cultivate land on their own and invested in the land, which were included in goals of land development. The land owners also tried to block the implementation of the Act by misusing the path of judicial remedy. However, by 1960, zamindari was abolished in most parts of the country except in some parts of Bihar. While on the one hand, the big landowners were the main losers; on the other hand, the sharecroppers who had been working on the same land for years gained the ownership of the land. According to a rough estimate, due to abolition of zamindari system, two crore sharecroppers got land.

Efforts were made to improve the sharecropping system and there were three main ingredients to it. The time period for registering as sharecropper was kept at six years. Moreover, the land revenue was reduced from one fourth to one sixth of the production. However, to get ownership rights, the sharecropper had to deposit a lump sum land revenue. For example, in Andhra Pradesh it was only after the payment of eight years’ land revene that a farmer could acquire rights over the land he tilled. Despite these Acts, the right of the absentee landowners to start farming and the loosely framed concept of personal cultivable land meant that many sharecroppers were evicted from the land. Since the agreements between the farmers and the landlords were rarely documented, the legality of sharecropper’s claim could not be verified. But even then a large section did benefit from it. To improve the lot of sharecropper, the Operation Barga was launched in Bengal by the Left government in 1978 and by 1990, over 14 lakh Bargadars were registered. The main aim of Operation Barga was to provide security to the sharecropper on the land he tilled. He could no more be evicted on the land owner’s whim and it also ensured that his rights were passed on to his successor. The division ratio between the sharecropper and land owner was kept at 75:25 and if the land owner invested in the seeds and fertiliser, then it was a 50:50 share between the two. Training camps were set up during Operation Barga where officials from more than 10 departments interacted with 30 or more agriculture labourers and sharecroppers to devise strategies on implementing Operation Barga in that area. At first Operation Barga was hugely successful, but later it could not sustain its momentum because the holdings of landowners were no bigger than that of most sharecroppers of the area and because many started cultivating their own lands.

Under the Hadbandi Act, no family could keep cultivable land above a certain limit. In 1946, the Akhil Bharatiya Kisan Sabha had kept 25 acres as the maximum limit of cultivable land a family could keep. However, there was a great delay in framing the rules under this Act and different State governments fixed different limits as a result of which the impact of this act lost its intensity. In a country like India where the average holding of 70 per cent of the farmers was less than 5 acres, the threshold limit of land holding fixed by the State was very high. In Andhra Pradesh it was fixed between 27-132 acres depending on the type of land. In most states the threshold limit was fixed on an individual basis and there was provision to increase it. Even with its limitations, this act was an important milestone in the programme of land reforms. It greatly succeeded in ending the land market and concentration of land.

The landowners often took advantage of the loopholes in the land reform laws. At some places they managed to evict their sharecroppers and to save their land from the Hadbandi Act. Moreover, they started keeping land in fictitious names. It was then that Vinoba Bhave, a close associate of Mahatma Gandhi, started the Bhoodan movement. The movement appealed to the individual landowner to donate land to the landless.

The main thrust of the Bhoodan movement was to address the conscience of the landowner and get him to donate one sixth of his land. The land thus procured was distributed among the landless. By March 1956, the movement started losing momentum after getting more than 40 lakh acres of land. It was found that most of the donated land was either barren or locked in litigation. Efficient distribution, too could not be ensured. By the end of 1955, the Gramdan movement was also launched. Once again the inspiration of this movement was Gandhiji who believed that all land belonged to God. Under Gramdan, all the villagers had joint ownership over the land in the village. This movement started in Orissa. Even though it held a lot of promise, by the 60s the Bhoodan and Gramdan movement lost their momentum. But by these movements an effort was made at land reforms which not only complemented land reform legislations but also encouraged the farmers to enter politics and increased the number of farmer producers’ cooperatives among other things.

So, we find that the pattern of land ownership changed from community ownership in ancient India to individual and then to king’s ruler’s ownership.

In the middle ages the king\sultan and zamindar\farmer had concurrent rights over the same plot of land. In the British era, due to excessive land revenue extracted from farmers, land became a saleable product. In independent India, the laws of land ownership were framed to ensure that each farmer had a minimum amount of land with him, but this target could not be reached. Although, some of the disparities in land ownership were addressed over the years by movements such as Bhoodan and Gramdan, there are still many with large tracts of land and many more who are landless while it remains to see how dexterously the government handles social inequality arising out of uneven distribution of land. An empathetic approach is sought from the big land-owners.

(The writer is an engineer and has published four books on history)
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Land System in India: A Historical Review [Excerpt]
by Rekha Bandyopadhyay
Economic and Political Weekly
Vol. 28, No. 52, pp. A149-A155 (7 pages)
Dec. 25, 1993

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Owing to the cold season I could not observe the condition of the wheat actually growing in the fields, but I learned at the above village that in that locality the wheat crop was considered ordinary when it was at the rate of two bushels from two pecks of seeds, and unusually abundant when the rate reached three bushels. In the neighborhood of Lhasa four or five bushels are obtained from two pecks of seeds, if the weather proves favorable, but three bushels are passed as fair.

This testifies to the primitiveness of the methods of farming obtaining in Tibet. One cannot but be surprised at the ill-kept condition of the fields which, with their ‘rich’ deposits of pebbles, cannot be termed cultivated land in the proper sense of the word. I do not mean to speak ill of the Tibetans, but this curious neglect of cleaning the land is a fact; indeed, it is a universal feature of the country. I once suggested to a native farmer the advisability of removing the pebbles, but the reply was simply that such practices were not endorsed by tradition. Tradition is to the Tibetans a heavenly dictate, and controls all social arrangements. Those residing in more civilised parts of the country, however, entertain somewhat more progressive ideas, and have learned to utilise the products of modern ingenuity from the West. The case is quite different with the mass of the people, who are still laboring under a thousand and one forms of conservatism...

In Tibet, as in other countries, taxes are assessed on cultivated fields, but, as the Tibetans are practically strangers to mathematics, as stated in a preceding chapter, a very curious and primitive method is adopted with regard to the land-measuring which forms the basis of the assessment.

The method consists in setting two yaks, drawing a plough, to work upon a given area, the assessment being made according to the time taken in the tillage. In other words, the different plots of cultivated lands are classified as lands of half a day’s tillage, or a day’s tillage, and so on, as the case may be, and assessed accordingly....

The nation is so credulous in the matter of religion that they indiscriminately believe whatever is told to them by their religious teachers, the lamas. Thus for instance they believe that there are eight kinds of evil spirits which delight in afflicting people and send hail to hurt the crops. Some priests therefore maintain that they must fight against and destroy these evil demons in order to keep them off, and the old school profess that in order to combat these spirits effectually they must know when the demons are preparing the hail. During the winter when there is much snow, these spirits, according to the priests, gather themselves at a certain place, where they make large quantities of hail out of snow. They then store the hail somewhere in heaven, and go to rest, until in the summer when the crops are nearly ripe they throw down the hail from the air. Hence the Tibetans must make sharp weapons to keep off the hail, and consequently, while the spirits are preparing their hail, the Tibetans hold a secret meeting in some ravine where they prepare ‘hail-proof shells,’ which are pieces of mud about the size of a sparrow’s egg. These are made by a priest, who works with a servant or two in some lonely ravine, where by some secret method he makes many shells, chanting words of incantation the while, whereby he lays a spell on each shell he makes. These pellets are afterwards used as missiles when hail falls in the summer, and are supposed to drive it back. None but priests of good family may devote themselves to this work. Every village has at least one priest called Ngak-pa (the chanters of incantations of the old school) and during the winter these Ngak-pas offer prayers, perform charms, or pray for blessings for others. But the Tibetans have a general belief that the Ngak-pas sometimes curse others. I was often told that such and such person had offended a Ngak-pa and was cursed to death.

Having spent the winter in this way, the Ngak-pas during the summer prepare to fight against the devils. Let me remark, in passing, that Tibet has not four seasons, as we have, but the year is divided into summer and winter. The four seasons are indeed mentioned in Tibetan books, but there are in reality only two.

The summer there is from about the 15th of March to the 15th of September and all the rest of the year is winter. As early as March or April the ploughing of the fields and sowing of wheat begins, and then the Ngak-pa proceeds to the Hail-Subduing-Temple, erected on the top of one of the high mountains. This kind of temple is always built on the most elevated place in the whole district, for the reason that the greatest advantage is thus obtained for ascertaining the direction from which the clouds containing hail issue forth. From the time that the ears of the wheat begin to shoot, the priest continues to reside in the temple, though from time to time, it is said, he visits his own house, as he has not very much to do in the earlier part of his service. About June, however, when the wheat has grown larger, the protection of the crop from injury by hail becomes more urgent, so that the priest never leaves the temple, and his time is fully taken up with making offerings and sending up prayers for protection to various deities. The service is gone through three times each day and night, and numberless incantations are pronounced. What is more strange is that the great hail storms generally occur when the larger part of the crops are becoming ripe, and then it is the time for the priest on service to bend his whole energies to the work of preventing the attack of hail.

When it happens that big masses of clouds are gathering overhead, the Ngak-pa first assumes a solemn and stern aspect, drawing himself up on the brink of the precipice as firm as the rock itself, and then pronounces an enchantment with many flourishes of his rosary much in the same manner as our warrior of old did with his baton. In a wild attempt to drive away the hail clouds, he fights against the mountain, but it often happens that the overwhelming host comes gloomily upon him with thunders roaring and flashes of lightning that seem to shake the ground under him and rend the sky above, and the volleys of big hailstones follow, pouring down thick and fast, like arrows flying in the thick of battle. The priest then, all in a frenzy, dances in fight against the air, displaying a fury quite like a madman in a rage. With charms uttered at the top of his voice he cuts the air right and left, up and down, with his fist clenched and finger pointed. If in spite of all his efforts, the volleys of hail thicken and strike the fields beneath, the priest grows madder in his wrath, quickly snatches handfuls of the bullets aforementioned which he carries about him, and throws them violently against the clouds as if to strike them. If all this avail nothing, he rends his garment to pieces, and throws the rags up in the air, so perfectly mad is he in his attempt to put a stop to the falling hailstones. When, as sometimes happens, the hail goes drifting away and leaves the place unharmed, the priest is puffed up with pride at the victory he has gained, and the people come to congratulate him with a great show of gratitude. But when, unluckily for him, the hail falls so heavily as to do much harm to the crops, his reverence has to be punished with a fine, apportioned to the amount of injury done by the hail, as provided by the law of the land.

To make up for the loss the Ngak-pa thus sustains, he is entitled at other times, when the year passes with little or no hail, to obtain an income under the name of “hail-prevention-tax;” a strange kind of impost, is it not? The “hail-prevention-tax” is levied in kind, rated at about two sho of wheat per tan of land, which is to be paid to the Ngak-pa. In a plentiful year this rate may be increased to two and a half sho. This is, indeed a heavy tax for the farmers in Tibet, for it is an extra, in addition to the regular amount which they have to pay to their Government...

Most priests have some landed property, and some of them breed yaks, horses, sheep and goats in the provinces, though it would be rare for one of the middle-class to have more than some fifty yaks and ten horses. These animals are also employed in ploughing the fields, but no more than ten lots of land may be ploughed by two yaks in a day. The priests can hardly lead a well-to-do life without such property or some private business, for what they are given from their temples and by the believers is not sufficient for them.

Few priests are without some private business or other—indeed, most of them are engaged in trade. Agriculture comes next to trade, and then cattle-breeding. Manufacturers of Buḍḍhist articles, painters of Buḍḍhist pictures, tailors, carpenters, masons, shoemakers and stone-layers are found among the priests; there is hardly any kind of business in Tibet, but some of the priests are engaged in it. There are, besides, many kinds of business in which none but priests engage. The lower class of priests as well as the middle-class engage in trade, but some rich priests have as many as from five hundred to four thousand yaks and from one to six hundred horses. They have from one to six hundred lots of land, each lot being as large as will take two yaks to cultivate in a day...

The Tibetan administration is of an anomalous description—a hybrid partaking of feudalism on the one hand and of the modern system of Local Government on the other.

The relation between Peers and commoners apparently resembles feudalism. The first recipient of the title was granted a certain tract of land in recognition of his service, and there at once sprung up between this lord of the manor, as it were, and the inhabitants of that particular place a relationship akin to that between sovereign and subject. This lord is an absolute master of his people, both in regard to their rights and even their lives.

The lord levies a poll-tax on the inhabitants, and even the poorest are not exempted from this obligation. The levy varies considerably according to the means of the payer, from say one tanka paid by a poor inhabitant to even a hundred paid by a wealthier member of the community. Besides, every freeholder must pay land tax, the land held by him being understood theoretically to belong to the lord. However heavy the burden of the poll-tax may be, each person is obliged to pay it, for if he neglects to do so he is liable to be punished with flogging and the confiscation of his property to boot. The only means of escape from this obligation consists in becoming a monk, and there must be in the Tibetan priesthood a large number of men who have turned priests solely with this object of avoiding the payment of taxes....

However, when it is remembered how heavy are the burdens imposed on the shoulders of the people, it is not strange that they should try to evade them by entering the Order. The condition of even the poorest priest presents a great contrast to that of other poor people, for the priest is at least sure to obtain every month a regular allowance, small as it is, from the Hierarchical Government, while he can expect more or less of extra allowances in the shape of occasional presents from charitable people. But a poor layman cannot expect any help from those quarters, and he has to support his family with his own labor and to pay the poll-tax besides. Very often therefore he is hardly able to drive the wolf of hunger from his door, and in such case his only hope of succor lies in a loan from his landlord, or the lord of the manor wherein he resides. But hope of repayment there is none, and so the poor farmer gets that loan under a strange contract, that is to say, by binding himself to offer his son or daughter as a servant to the creditor when he or she attains a certain age. And so his child when he has reached the age of (say) ten years is surrendered to the creditor, who is entitled to employ him as a servant for fifteen or twenty years, and for a loan which does not generally exceed ten yen. The lives of the children of poor people may therefore be considered as being foreclosed by their parents. Those pitiable children grow up to be practically slaves of the Peers.

The relationship existing between the Peers and the people residing on their estates, therefore, partakes of the nature of feudalism in some essential respects, but it cannot be said that feudalism reigns alone in Tibet to the exclusion of other systems of Government. On the contrary a centralised form of Government prevails more or less at the same time. The Peers, it must be remembered, do not generally reside on their own estates; they reside in Lhasa and leave their estates in charge of their stewards. And they are not unfrequently appointed by the Central Government as Governors of certain districts.

Consequently the Tibetans may be said to be divided into two classes of people, one being subject to the control of the lords of the manors and other to that of the Central Government. Not unfrequently the two overlap, and the same people are obliged to pay poll-tax to their lords and other taxes to the Central Government.

The work of revenue collection is entrusted to two or three Commissioners appointed from among the clerical or lay officials of higher rank, and these, invested with judicial and executive powers, are despatched every year to the provinces to collect revenue, consisting of taxes, imposts and import duties, these being paid either in money or kind...

The classes who are entitled to enter the Government institutions are only four:

1. Ger-pa, Peers; 2. Ngak-pa, the manṭra clan, 3. Bon-bo, the Old Sect clan; 4. Shal-ngo, families of former chieftains...

The fourth class is “Shal-ngo” and is composed of the descendants of ancient families who acquired power in the locality on account of their wealth in either money or land. The Tibetans are in general a highly conservative race, and therefore they succeed in most cases in keeping intact their hereditary property. Their polyandrous custom too must be conducive to that result, preventing as it does the splitting up of family property among brothers. By far the great majority of the Shal-ngo people possess therefore more or less property; and even a poor Shal-ngo commands the same respect from the public as his richer confrère.

Common people are divided into two grades, one called tong-ba and the other tong-du. The former is superior, and includes all those common people who possess some means and have not fallen into an ignoble state of slavery. Tong-du means etymologically “petty people,” and their rank being one grade lower than that of others, the people of this class are engaged in menial service. Still they are not strictly speaking slaves; they should more properly be considered as poor tenant-farmers, for formerly these people used to stand in the relation of tenant-farmers to land-owners, though such relation no longer exists....

Peers are also traders, mostly by proxy, though some of them refrain from making investments and are content to subsist on the income derived from their land....

I shall next briefly describe the finance of the Tibetan Government. It must be remembered, however, that this subject is extremely complicated and hardly admits of accurate explanation even by financial experts, for nobody except the Revenue Officials can form an approximate idea of the revenue and expenditure of the Government. All that I could get from the Minister of Finance was that a considerable margin of difference existed according to the year. This must partly come from the fact that taxes are paid in kind, and as the market is necessarily subject to fluctuation even in such an exclusive place as Tibet, the Government cannot always realise the same amount of money from the sale of grain and other commodities collected by the Revenue authorities. Of course anything like statistical returns are unknown in Tibet, and my task being hampered by such serious drawbacks, I can only give here a short account of how the taxes are collected, how they are paid and by what portion of the people, and how the revenue thus collected is disbursed, and such matters, which lie on the surface so that I could easily observe and investigate them.

The Treasury Department of the Papal Government is called Labrang Chenbo, which means the large Kitchen of the Lama. It is so-called, because various kinds of staples are carried in there as duty from the land under his direct jurisdiction, and from landlords holding under a sort of feudal tenure. As there are no such conveniences as drafts or money orders, these staples have to be transported directly from each district to the central treasury, whatever the distance. But the taxpayer has one solace: he can easily obtain, on his way to the treasury, the service of post-horses, such service on such occasions being compulsory. The articles thus collected consist of barley, wheat, beans, buck-wheat, meal and butter. But from districts in which custom-houses are established various other things, such as coral gems, cotton, woollen and silk goods, raisins and peaches are accepted. Other districts pay animal-skins, and thus the large Kitchen is an ‘omnium gatherum.’ Truly a strange method of collecting taxes!

One peculiarity in Tibet is the use of an abundant variety of weights and measures; there are twenty scales for weighing meal, and thirty-two boxes for measuring grain. Bo-chik is the name given to a box of the average size, and it measures about half a bushel. But tax-collectors use, when necessity arises, measures half as large or half as small as these, so that the largest measure holds three quarters of a bushel, while the smallest holds a quarter. The small ones are generally used to measure the staples from provinces such as the native place of the Dalai Lama, or such as have personal relations to some high officials of the Government. Thus, though a favored district is supposed to pay the same number of bushels as the others, it pays in reality only one-half of what the most unfortunate district has to pay. Nor is the measure used for one district a fixed one; it may change from year to year. Suppose one of the most favored districts has produced a great rascal, or rebel, or has done anything that displeases the Government. The whole people of that district are responsible for it; they are obliged to pay by the largest measure, that is, twice as much as they did in the preceding year. Thus the various kinds of offences make it necessary to have thirty-two varieties of measures and twenty of weight. It is to be noted however that when the Government has to dispose of those stuffs, it never uses the larger measures, though if too small ones are used, it certainly causes complaints on the part of the buyers; hence the middle-sized ones are mostly used. All expenses of Government, such as salaries for priests and officers and wages for mechanics and tradesmen in its service are paid with an average measure...

In each province there are two places where the collection of taxes is made for the Government, one of which is the temple, and the other the Local Government office; for the people are divided into two classes: (1) those who are governed by the temple and (2) those who are governed by the Local Government. They pay their taxes to the Central Government through their respective Governors. In each local district, there is what is called a Zong. This was originally a castle built for warlike purposes, but in time of peace it serves as a Government office, where all the functions of Government are carried on, so taxes are also collected there. The Zong is almost always found standing on the top of a hillock of about three hundred feet and a Zongpon (chief of the castle), generally a layman, lives in it. He is the chief Governor of the district and collects taxes and sends the things or money he has gathered to the Central Government. The Zongpon is not paid by the Central Government directly, but subtracts the equivalent of his pay from the taxes he has collected. The Central Government does not send goods or money to the Local Government except on such few occasions as need special help from the national Treasury. The people under the direct jurisdiction of the Central Government are sometimes made to pay a poll-tax. The people who belong to the nobility and the higher class of priests are of course assessed by their landowners, but there is no definite regulation as to their payment to the Central Government; the people of some districts pay, while others are exempt....

Officers and priests in Tibet can each borrow fifteen hundred dollars from the Government at an interest of five per cent a year and they can lend it again at fifteen per cent, which is the current rate of interest in Tibet, though usurers sometimes charge over thirty per cent. Thus any officer can make at least ten per cent on fifteen hundred dollars without running much risk. If an officer or priest fails to repay the loan the amount is not subtracted from his next year’s loan. Compound interest is unknown in Tibet however long the debtor may prolong his payment; it is forbidden by the law....

The supplementary resources of the Pope’s revenue are subscriptions from the members and laymen, the leases from meadow-lands in his personal possession, and profits acquired by his own trading, which is carried on by his own caravans. The Pope’s caravans must be distinguished from those of the Treasury Department....

The property of the Grand Lama, after his death, is divided in the following way: One-half of the property (in fact a little more than half) has to be divided among his relatives in his native place, and the remaining half is distributed as gifts among the priests of the Great Temples and those of the New Sect. In the case of an ordinary priest, if he leaves property worth five thousand dollars about four thousand is used in gifts to the priests and for the expense of lights, and almost all the remaining thousand is used for his funeral expenses, leaving perhaps three hundred to his disciples. In cases when a priest leaves very little money, his disciples are obliged to borrow money to supply the want of gifts and money for lights in his honor—a custom entirely foreign to the laity.

-- Three Years in Tibet, by Shramana Ekai Kawaguchi

II. Pre-Independence Era

Ancient India

Ancient India depicts a complex set of land relations involving private ownership, royal administration and communal rule of villages. This multiple structure is a complete whole comprising three different layers [Powelson 1988]. Land tenure in one layer or level would be completely different from the other. Hence quite often we find conflicting pictures from authors who stress on only one type of relationship. A brief discussion about three formations will clarify the issue. Private ownership finds justification in the writings of Manu [Burnell 1884]. According to him land belongs to the person who clears it. This refers to the age of abundance and free possession. Later, geographical constraint of demographic factors made good quality land comparatively scarce. At this stage private ownership was acquired through land grants or assignments. Reference to land grants is found in vedic literature where grants to brahmins were revenue free with right of alienation [Majumdar 1977]. During the Maurya period [322-180 BCE] private land transfers were marked by public ceremonies [Kautilya]. By this time private ownership had acquired a stronghold in the social structure. The ruler, though having an overlordship, was unable to abolish private purchase, sale or donation [Nigam 1975]. All these evidences show that private owners possessed the right to alienate land owned by them. But this kind of absolute ownership was exercised by religious grantees only. The case was different with others. These landholders were closely watched by village officers of the king. Their land was liable to confiscation for improper use or partial use. Though land transfer was theoretically possible, the following constraints were present on the right of transfer: (a) Sale was to be made within the same group or sect only, and (b) any proposal of alienation needed to be sanctioned by the elders of the group.

Such a constrained ownership cannot be termed private in the modern sense of the term. The overlordship of these private lands belonged to the king or the supreme ruler. From time immemorial, the ruler (whether indigenous or foreign) was the sole owner of land in India [Blunt 1936]. The homogeneity of products, urban planning and the nature of dwellings of the Harrappan period also show the existence of a centralised authority [Rafique 1973]. The reign of a sovereign continued over the ages. The epic period refers to the supremacy of the ruler and is mentioned in the writings of Megasthenes. From the vedic times India had a stratified social structure. The village evolved as a self sufficient unit of society based on the caste system. It developed its own support system. The complementary relationship between groups of dominant peasant castes on the one hand and artisan and peasant classes on the other, was a special characteristic of Indian rural economy. In essence this oft-quoted system centred round the organisation of production and distribution of the hereditary occupational castes. The non-agricultural castes were compensated by traditionally fixed shares of village produce and in some cases by small plots of land. But these castes always retained some measure of freedom to sell their goods and services for extra income. The payment made by the village was meant to assure them of their minimal subsistence [Dharmakumar 1982].

The village structure was quite organised. Reference to village organisations and councils is found in old inscriptions. Village organisations were very powerful during the Hindu period. All land belonged to the village community. The king exercised minimal influence. At times since the village was inhabited by a particular tribe, village authority was akin to tribal authority. The land distribution was not completely static. Migration and demographic changes brought about alterations in the distribution pattern of the village land. Village organisations became the centre of power after the Gupta period when central authority was comparatively weak and emerged as "nuclear areas of corporate institutions" [Stein 1969].

In the south two types of village organisations predominated: (a) 'Brahmadeya' (a group of villages controlled by a brahmin organisation) and (b) 'Periyandu' an extended locality by organisations of commoners. The decentralisation of authority and emerging role of the village organisations started during the Gupta period. The process started in the south and gradually extended over the sub-continent.

These village organisations were considered as the embryo form of future feudal structure. The king or his intermediary claimed a part of the produce of the land. The revenue was collected from village individuals and deposited in a common pool. Some common expenses of the village were paid out of this pool. The share of the overlord was given by the village committee (as representative of the village people) [Desai 1954]. Thus land as a thing of value was regarded as being part of an aggregate wealth of the community rather than belonging to a single person [Neale 1969]. But the system was not free from exploitation and class differentiation. The contribution to the pool differed among different people. The headman enjoyed some revenue free allotments. The persons controlling the pool and the class favoured by the dominant group paid lower rates of revenue. To compensate, the lower strata of peasants had to pay more. Growth of hierarchical structure and evolution of the position of intermediaries with landed estates were considered as feudalistic features by some [Tod 1984]. But others [Desai 1954] have refuted the notion. According to them those types of societies, though bearing a close resemblance to feudal type, had a striking difference. The intermediaries were the kins of the ruling authority. Nowhere had the military tenure entirely obliterated the original tenure by blood and birthright. This has generated a controversy about Indian feudalism amongst the academics. The Encyclopedia Britanica (CBM: 9: 363) alludes this comparison as follows: "There is considerable controversy among historians as to whether the feudatory pattern (in India) can be accurately described as feudalism. Some argue that, although it was not identical to the classical example of feudalism of western Europe, there are sufficient similarities to allow the use of the term. The counter argument is that the emphasis on the economic contract, essential to the western European feudalism, was absent in India or was at least not clearly stated. But whether the trend indicated feudalisation or not, it created considerable change of land relations, politics and culture and the major characteristics of that change was decentralisation [Powelson 1988].

Medieval India

The medieval period exercised considerable influence in the evolution of intermediaries. The Muslim rulers engaged the military personnel and paid them with a ;lot of land for their services. Over a period of time by a process of commendation these free proprietors lost their independence and therewith their allodial tenure became feudal.

Early jagirs could not be inherited or transferred. But they could be confiscated by the sovereign if the intermediary left his service. In the following centuries, these rules were modified as the intermediaries (jagirdars and zamindars) established local power enabling them to retain their status and pass this on to their sons. When zamindari rights became alienable, the land belonging to the zamindar was divided among his sons on his death. Thus zamindari rights became scattered through inheritance. As a result, two type of landowners emerged.

Each lineage was divided into the more powerful branch which held the fort and other less powerful branch who held lesser village privileges. The former were termed intermediary or secondary zamindars who might collect revenue from their less affluent kinsmen (who were known as the village or primary zamindars). These primary zamindars were sometimes also called pattidars. The intermediary zamindar's rights solely extended to land revenue collection at a superior level or fiscal overlordship of lower landowners. The primary zamindar was the landholder having immediately proprietary dominion over the soil, including a restricted power of mortgage and alienation as well as the right to locate cultivators, control the waste, sink wells and plant groves. They were generally found to be settled as dominant lineages in a number of contiguous villages. The important aspect was not only the territorial extent but also the depth of penetration of the lineage groups over the agricultural community. Their grip was most tenacious where the primary owners were identical with the cultivators [Dharmakumar 1982]. The division of land rights continued further. The small landowners ceded their rights to the large landowners and became their dependents, on condition that they retained the heridatary use of their land. The continuous extension of land made it impossible for the large landowners to collect revenue without the help of others. Thus sub-infeudation evolved creating differentiation of land control rights over land under direct or indirect supervision. The land cultivated directly by the zamindar was termed "Siror Khas" land to distinguish it from land which was allotted to sub-intermediaries for cultivation. From this allotted land zamindar used to take a portion of the produce as his due for overlordship.

The identification of different levels of land rights in India has been long ridden by the confused use of terms. The term zamindar became predominant in the 17th century replacing or altering with a large number of local terms signifying the same or similar land owning right as 'khoti', and 'maqqadam' in Doab Satarabi and 'biswi' in Awath, 'bhomi' in Rajasthan, 'bhant' or 'vanth' in Gujarat. The zamindar in Persian language means keeper or holder of land. The suffix 'dar' implies a degree of control or attachment, but not necessarily ownership. The ownership right originated during the Mughal period when the term implied hereditary claim to a direct share in the produce of land under his possession. The peasant group was called 'muzari,' 'asami' or 'raya.' Application of similar terms to denote different land rights in different regions added to this confusion. The term taluqdar (for example) in northern India meant a big zamindar engaged on behalf of a few smaller zamindars to pay revenue to the government. His rights were hereditary but not transferable. In Bengal the same term was used to denote a person of a lower status than zamindar.

The supreme overlordship of land rested upon the ruler. Variety in land relations originated from the revenue exactions. The land close to the capital was kept under direct control of the ruler. Hence these khas lands had wage tenancy. But land extending to the furthest corner of the kingdom was difficult to control directly and representatives were appointed, thus giving rise to three-tier relationship in land [Irfan Habib 1963].

Revenue rates were also not uniform. Of course varying revenue rates accounted for various types of land (according to inscriptions in earlier days). During Nizamsahi period, land was divided into irrigated and unirrigated types and again both types were subdivided into four groups and revenue was charged giving due importance to these differences. Land revenue accounted for the larger part of the agricultural surplus.

Mughal tax was not proper rent or even land tax as it was a tax on the crop. Though the system reduced expenses of collection and vexation of revenue collecting authorities, it kept the peasants ignorant about the amount they had to pay. To reduce the chance of exploitation of the peasantry, annual assessment was made on the basis of area statistics. Measures were adopted to curb the power of the intermediaries by keeping their possession of land as temporary by transferring them yearly or every two or three years. Also there was a provision of award of promotion or demotion by changing the size of their territory on the basis of their performance. To prevent the intermediary from charging more than the authorised taxes -- a copy of the revenue paper was kept with the permanent local official (kanungo). But the short-term arrangement only enhanced the desire for maximal unauthorised exaction. In its cumulative effort, such pressure not only inhibited extension of cultivation, but also involved the Mughal ruling class in a deepening conflict with the major agrarian classes (the zamindars and the peasantry). By early 1850 there was growing official restiveness that land control was passing steadily into the hands of the non-agricultural classes. The majority of the intermediaries were finding it difficult to afford to maintain the requisite contingents and farmed out their assignment to bankers and speculators from the cities who emerged as rapacious absentee landlords. The board of revenue observed that the nature of transfer was far more complex than could be explained by the crude categorisation of landlords and tenants or of agriculturist or non-agriculturist classes.

Till this time estate was unit of account in the revenue records and brought under one head the lands for which a particular person or group had revenue paying responsibility. Extension of land control rights of the larger intermediaries and the consequent sub-leasing created constant dualism between the proprietary and cultivating rights -- the former yielding rental income and the later agricultural surplus. Thus a distinction was created between the unit of account and unit of cultivation. The transfer of proprietary rights, however, mostly left the cultivating units undisturbed. Hence the village and the peasantry remained passive in the face of agricultural conflict involving change of ownership.

British Period

The British realised that land was the key factor in the process of Indian economic development and they must control land in order to stabilise their rule over the continent. But they found the prevailing land systems quite perplexing. With a multitude of claims upon land by numerous people at various levels of hierarchies, it was difficult to attribute a particular land to a particular person. Nor did the system appear similar to the British system of feudalism although it was termed feudal or semi-feudal.

Their first effort was to fix the legal owner of the land. In 1769, the company divided parganas into 15 lots each and auctioned them with revenue to be paid to the company. Till this time rent had to be negotiated and adjusted to the ability to pay. But the British emphasis in legality and consistency resulted in dispossessing farmers who could not pay fixed amounts of revenue. Again auction sales placed the ownership of land beyond the reach of the poor persons attached to the soil and created a new aristocracy who were originally moneylenders or traders. The new owners squeezed the peasants to pay the speculative land revenue. Famines, land abandonment and decline in revenue made the government understand the failure of the scheme but they attributed the failure to the short period of land settlement. The government expected that lengthening the period of lease would create an incentive to invest and make the landlords innovative. But the extension of period of tenure did not bring the desired change. Land revenue increased four-fold (compared to the level before the assessment). The zamindars were so heavily taxed that they kept themselves busy in shifting the burden to the ryots. The dispossession of zamindars due to non-payment continued.

The British East India Company, super-imposing 18th century western concepts of private property on a very different indigenous land system, assumed that the 'revenue farmers' in fact owned the land, even though they neither worked on it nor invested in it. Ignoring any rights of the actual tillers, the permanent settlement of Bengal in 1793 gave the zamindars the right to fix their terms with the cultivators in return for a fixed land revenue from the zamindars to the state. The latter was payable in cash while the rents to be paid by actual cultivators to the zamindars were not. By this single piece of legislation, actual tillers of the soil became tenants, while a class of revenue farms became de facto owners of the land though they did not cultivate. An exorbitant increase in revenue demand weakened the position of the zamindars. Appointment of active revenue farmers (jagirdars) and collectors (amils) disrupted the patron-client relationship of landlord and tenants which served as insurance against natural calamities. The confiscation of estates by British government for non-payment of revenue added to the disruption of the rural sector. The labour force was set adrift creating labour shortage. Because nobility was getting dispossessed of land therefore capital provided by the nobility for improvement of land was sharply reduced. As a result of all these, by the middle of the 19th century the whole agrarian sector was in a decaying condition. Rural inhabitants dependent on agriculture were emigrating. The villages deteriorated and their revenues declined.

The case of Oudh and northern India was quite different. The taluqdars of Oudh were owners of large estates and had complete control over the resources of these areas. The British policy was to curb the strength of the taluqdars. From 1764 to 1801 the British government gradually tightened the noose on Oudh. They installed British troop in Oudh under the pretext of helping the nawab to keep the taluqdars under control. Payment for these troops was made by handing over half of Oudh to British in 1801 and the other half in 1856. They acquired the adjacent provinces. The British, however, extended the contract of the taluqdars by a period of five years after which the lease was terminated.

British government faced a dilemma in changing the land relations of Oudh and the northern parts. This region had a tradition of communal village proprietorship and the taluqdars still had considerable influence over the area. Hence a system of mahalwari settlement involving mostly the original taluqdars was introduced. But the assessment was quite high. A number of properties went out into arrears. Inexperienced management, depression and frequent occurrence of natural calamities made the situation worse. Distress sales increased during 1839-59 [Metcalf 1979]. To ease the situation and prevent the speculative rise in land prices the government started leasing property in arrears and wanted to restore the original landholder by accepting payment of the arrears through rent. When the owner failed to pay the arrears even after this arrangement, auction sale was the only option left to the government. As a result land relations changed considerably and there was a shift from old landholding class to new commercial class.

Tanjore Committee criticised zamindari and ryotwari forms and suggested the introduction of mahalwari system in Madras. But southern India had a long tradition of ryotwari settlements. Zamindari or mahalwari system was considered unacceptable in this region. The government introduced mahalwari for a short period but soon changed to ryotwari system in Madras. It was considered successful and extended to other regions. The changeover from mahalwari to ryotwari was necessitated to eliminate the village officers. These officers were suspected on concealing the exact amount of village resources and thus usurping part of the revenue. Changeover to ryotwari system, however, did not solve the problem. Even after the change revenue gain was negligible. The company-appointed intermediaries quickly perceived the opportunity for advancing their social and economic interests under the canopy of company protection. Within a short period they established themselves as a complex layer of adept and influential manipulators between the company and the ryots [Stein 1969]. By the middle of the 19th century, the land revenue systems and consequent tenurial structures exhibited a pattern of striking provincial variations. Zamindari system in Bengal, ryotwari and peasant proprietorship in Bombay and Madras, and a hybrid system of mahalwari (where esffective ownership of most land was vested in cultivators but revenue was rendered communally by the village) prevailed in Punjab, north-west provinces and Oudh. It seems ideological distaste for landlordism born of utilitarian philosophy was a major foce behind the development of ryotwari and mahalwari settlements [Stokes 1978].

Substantial land transfers and sub-infeudation occurred as creditors supported by the westernised legal system attempted to secure peasant debtors' land by foreclosing mortgages. It led to the creation of a large agrarian proletariat. The beneficiaries of this change were the moneylenders and traders. They had a parasitical attitude to agriculture. They did not typically dispossess peasant debtors from the land; used the forms of land mortgage as methods of coercion, thus exercising substantial control over agricultural activities and production. They occupied the position of the rich peasants having an established figure in the village, intensifying their wealth and power through more subtle measures of market control. This group appropriated the economic surplus which was the prerequisite for development.

After 1870 constructive efforts were made to improve agrarian conditions. In the estates under the direct control of the government, new crops and new methods of cultivation were introduced. To encourage dissemination of new technologies the government gave monetary assistance to those landowners who had initiative. Thus the commercial process was initiated in several pockets but could not penetrate the traditional sector. As a result dualism evolved in the agrarian sector.

The modernised parts worked on commercial lines with fully developed modern technology and know-how. A new type of commodity production was taking shape here. It was marked by a fundamentally new (as compared to the traditional) structure of the production process, in which modernised labour played an increasingly important role on the basis of expanding intersectoral commodity exchange. The traditional sector with low income and consequent low rural demand for producer goods, extensive arrears in debt and subsistency continued to hold back the revolutionary influence created by the modernised sector. Hence restructuring of the agrarian economy was the essential precondition for accelerated development of the economy. A built-in depressor characterised by exploitation of the peasantry, low capital intensity and traditional methods of production were operating all over the country which resulted in virtual stagnation of the economy as a whole.

After independence, the primary task was to remove the stagnation and provide initiative to the mass of poor cultivators. The need for agrarian reform to change the prevailing structure and build on egalitarian distribution pattern was earnestly felt. From the modest approach of abolition of intermediaries and provision of security of tenure, the programme included numerous issues which reduce disparities and contradictions in social and economic spheres and thus facilitate economic development.

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Part 1 of 2

Tibet's Cold War: The CIA and the Chushi Gangdrug Resistance, 1956-1974
by Carole McGranahan
University of Colorado Boulder
Article in Journal of Cold War Studies
Vol. 8, No. 3, Summer 2006, pp. 102–130
July 2006
© 2006 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology

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-- Chushi Gangdruk [NVDA: National Volunteer Defense Army], by Wikipedia

-- Mustang District, by Wikipedia

-- The CIA's Secret War in Tibet, by Kenneth Conboy and James Morrison

Introduction

Colorado’s mountain roads can be treacherous in the winter, and in December 1961 a bus crashed on an icy road in the middle of the night.1 The crash delayed the bus’s journey, and morning had already broken by the time the bus pulled into its destination, Peterson Airfield in Colorado Springs. The coffee had just begun to brew when airfield workers discovered that they were surrounded by heavily-armed U.S. soldiers. The troops ordered them into two different hangars and then shut and locked the doors. Peeking out the windows of the hangars, the airfield employees saw a bus with blackened windows pull up to a waiting Air Force plane. Fifteen men in green fatigues got out of the bus and onto the plane. After the aircraft took off, an Army officer informed the airfield employees that it was a federal offense to talk about what they had just witnessed. He swore them to the highest secrecy, but it was already too late: The hangars in which the scared civilians had been locked were equipped with telephones, and they had made several calls to local newspapers. The next day the Colorado Springs Gazette Telegraph ran a brief story quoting a student pilot who said that “several Oriental soldiers in combat uniforms” were involved. The short story caught the attention of a New York Times reporter in Washington, DC, who called the Pentagon for more information. His call was returned by Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara, who killed the story not only by uttering the words “top secret national security,” but also by confiding to the reporter that the men were Tibetans.

A Tibetan proverb states that “an unspoken word has freedom, a spoken word has none.” But the freedom of things unspoken is not without limits. Secrets, for example, though supposedly not to be told, derive their value in part by being shared rather than being kept. Sharing secrets—revealing the unspoken—often involves cultural systems of regulation regarding who can be told, who they in turn can tell, what degree of disclosure is allowed, and so on. As a form of control over knowledge, secrecy is recognized in many societies as a means through which power is both gained and maintained.2 Together, Tibet and the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) present the irresistible combination of two twentieth-century icons of forbidden mystery and intrigue—Tibet, Shangri-La, the supposed land of mystical and ancient wisdom; and the CIA, home of covert activities, where even the secrets have secrets.

The Tibetans in Colorado were members of a guerrilla resistance force that fought against the Chinese People’s Liberation Army (PLA) from 1956 through 1974. Begun as a series of independent uprisings against increasingly oppressive Chinese rule, the resistance soon grew into a unified volunteer army, known as the Chushi Gangdrug Army. The Chushi Gangdrug Army fought against the PLA first from within Tibet and later from a military base in Mustang, a small Tibetan kingdom within the borders of Nepal. For much of this time, the resistance was covertly trained and financially supported by the U.S. government, specifically the CIA. Stories of this guerrilla war were secret for many years. Because the operation encompassed multiple governments and the clandestine transfer of men, money, and munitions across international borders, it is perhaps no surprise that information about the resistance, and more specifically about U.S.-Tibetan relations, was suppressed until recently. Secrets of the Tibetan resistance, however, are not always as they appear. They are not only political but also ethnographic, built on cultural systems of meaning and action.

In this article, I contend that our understanding of the Tibetan resistance must include attention to cultural as well as historical and political formations. Our analysis of the Tibetan resistance must not remain just a historical or political project or a story viewed solely through a Cold War lens. Instead, ethnographic detail and explanation, and the nuances of culture and community, must be included if we are to achieve the fullest possible understanding of the transnational and continuing saga that is the Tibetan resistance. An ethnographic approach is useful because the resistance is not one that was crafted solely, or even predominantly, in offices in Washington, DC. Instead, the resistance was forged through conversation, debate, and action among its own members and leaders at least as much as it was organized in dialogue with U.S. officials. Anthropology relies on a similar methodology—participant observation, in which the researcher engages in face-to-face and everyday interaction with research subjects over an extended period of time (often years) within host communities. My exploration of contemporary perspectives on the Tibetan resistance is through a tripartite analysis—one that is historical, political, and anthropological. In addition, my inquiry is not situated solely at the level of the state or government; it is focused instead on the resistance movement itself and the individuals who constituted it.

The article is based on primary and secondary sources generated mainly from within the Tibetan refugee community. Over a five-year period from 1994 to 1999, I collected oral histories of the resistance from leaders of the resistance as well as regular soldiers. In addition, I have examined a number of Tibetan-language books and articles about the resistance published from the late 1950s to the present, many of which contain information and insights not yet appreciated by outside observers.3 Finally, I have consulted the small but growing secondary literature on the resistance in English, including some of the thousands of hits that turn up in an Internet search for the “Tibetan resistance.”
 
The case of Tibet presents a mostly unexplored example of covert Cold War military intervention. By the mid-1950s the Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug army had already defined the PLA as a threat to Tibetan national security, but the intervention of the U.S. government provided external confirmation of the threat that China posed to Tibet. The covert nature of U.S. military assistance to the Tibetans, however, meant that this external validation was not presented to the world. Unlike the Korean War, in which Jennifer Milliken argues that outside intervention constituted “a particularly significant moment in the broader process of (re)constituting the Western security collectivity,”5 Tibetan resistance to the Chinese remained mostly insignificant for much of the Western world. Resolutions on Tibet at the United Nations (UN) were introduced by weak, peripheral states—Ireland and Malaya in 1959, and Malaya and Thailand with the support of El Salvador and Ireland in 1961— albeit often with the encouragement of U.S. diplomats. For the most part, the United States, even while supporting the Tibetan resistance (and exile government), framed the Tibet-China conflict in international forums such as the UN in the language of human rights rather than of state sovereignty. Among the many results of this policy is a degree of ambiguity regarding where the Tibet-China conflicts fits in terms of academic discourse as well as political negotiation. Is this conflict purely an “internal issue” as the People’s Republic of China (PRC) would have it, or is it an international issue, one between two states, as the Tibetan government-in-exile sees it? Given that at the time of the PRC’s incorporation of Tibet, Tibet was de facto an independent state,6 and that multiple states were involved in either actively or involuntarily facilitating the Tibetan resistance, it is important to situate discussions of Tibet within an international framework of analysis.

Anthropology and Cold War Studies

Anthropologists are increasingly turning their attention to studies of the Cold War. From the study of U.S. intelligence and military operations, especially among marginalized groups and countries, to the study of weapons complexes and on to the conceptual and disciplinary apparatuses directing our academic labor as well as everyday life and international affairs around the world, anthropologists are approaching Cold War pasts and post–Cold War presents with an analytical energy reminiscent of disciplinary debates during the Vietnam War.7 In anthropological terms, bringing culture into analyses of political and military history provides important vantage points from which to understand the workings of power, especially in cases of international action and intervention.8 In the merging of ethnography and Cold War studies, culture contributes much more than a variable for explaining anomalous phenomena. 9 Instead, culture provides and pervades backdrops, logics, and structures of all parties and institutions involved. Just as an analysis of the Tibetan resistance requires an understanding of the cultural principles that directed systems of authority and action among the guerrillas, so too does culture have a latent yet orchestral presence in the actions of the U.S. government in Asia and elsewhere. As understood by anthropologists, culture is an all-pervasive and ordered system of meaning that is learned and shared by members of a group. Although all cultures are unique and holistic, appearing habitual or normal to their members, contestation and constraint are also important elements of culture. Everyday life, political violence, economic systems, and the state and nation-building projects that characterize the post- 1945 era are all cultural products, in some respects sharing universal features and in other respects maintaining an autonomy built on culture and notions of difference.

Difference has long been a key element of anthropology, specifically in terms of describing and explaining the “otherness” of cultures outside Euro- American norms.10 John Borneman argues that in the United States, anthropology’s focus on global otherness, rather than solely on different communities within the nation, aligns the discipline (intentionally or not) with the conceptual apparatus of foreign policy.11 Early anthropological concepts used in analyses of American Indian communities, for example, helped shape U.S. policy toward these communities. The policies in turn became a template for state strategies vis-à-vis non-European foreigners.12 In highlighting the political applications of native/other anthropological categories, Borneman argues that “through its institutionalized focus on defining the foreign, anthropology may best be thought of as a form of foreign policy.”13

In the case of the Tibetan resistance, the outline of CIA programs and training drew on prior operations, with modifications made while the Tibet program was under way.14 The modifications were usually made or suggested by CIA officers in the field with the Tibetans, rather than those back in Langley. The Tibet operation both did and did not fit into Cold War models; it lasted significantly longer than most CIA operations and was a project built on a lack of anthropological or intelligence information.15 In both its anomalous and its conforming aspects, the Tibet-CIA connection was an important part of the foreign relations of both countries for two decades.

Recently, anthropologists and international relations scholars have begun a sustained discussion of how the theoretical arguments of each field push the other to further clarity or to revision of long-established disciplinary thought. The most provocative example of this joint enterprise is the edited volume Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger, in which an interdisciplinary team of scholars convincingly show the value of considering culture and the state within the same analytical frame.16 In a foreword to the volume, the anthropologist George Marcus argues forcefully for an ethnographic engagement with the mainstream of international relations, as well as a critique built on the terms of the field itself.17 His proposal is expressly anthropological because, as all beginning anthropology students learn, the goal of ethnography is to combine emic (inside) perspectives with etic (outside) perspectives in our collection and analyses of data. One example of such an ethnographic endeavor is Hugh Gusterson’s study of the Lawrence Livermore nuclear weapons laboratory. Gusterson describes his work as not just providing a constructivist alternative to the mostly positivist nuclear studies, but also as breaking with “the radical separation of the domestic and international levels of analysis that has been a defining feature of dominant thinking in international security studies, especially (neo)realism.”18 Understanding U.S. nuclear weapons projects requires understanding the culture of nuclear weapons laboratories, including the relations of weapons scientists to local institutions, national movements, and international politics.19

The study of CIA involvement in the Tibetan resistance is no different. An assessment of this complicated relationship is predicated on ethnographic understandings of the various groups involved. Rather than looking solely at political costs and strategies, an ethnographic approach begins with an explanation of the cultural factors that drive the operative political calculus within which costs, strategies, and the like are determined. The CIA has been subject to much more rigorous (though not necessarily ethnographic) evaluation than has the Tibetan resistance.20 In this article, therefore, my focus is primarily on the Chushi Gangdrug resistance army as interpreted by three groups—the resistance itself, the Tibetan government-in-exile, and agents of the U.S. government. Although each group presents itself as unified, they actually comprise individuals and factions whose views range from consent to dissent in relation to the group’s center. A closer look at the resistance allows us to see more clearly how the making of the refugee Tibetan community and exile Tibetan state was tied into Cold War politics at global as well as local levels.

The Founding of Chushi Gangdrug

The Tibetan resistance began as a series of independent uprisings in the eastern region of Kham (Khams). In 1949 and 1950, officials of the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) and PLA took over the administration of villages throughout Kham, and eventually in all of Tibet. This “liberation” of the Tibetans was initially tempered by a policy of relative generosity and tolerance in terms of the changes made in the region. However, as sweeping changes were gradually introduced, the situation deteriorated. Local lay and religious leaders were stripped of power, and much that had previously defined normal life in Kham was disturbed. Khampa villagers from all social backgrounds soon began to rise up in protest. These protests were often coordinated by the families and monastic leaders whose authority the Chinese had attempted to undermine. As conditions worsened in the region, people began to head west toward Lhasa, the Tibetan capital.

Khampa Tibetans entering the Lhasa area set up camps on the outskirts of the city. Leaders of the various districts of Kham met and devised plans to sponsor a long-life ceremony for the Dalai Lama and to present him with a golden throne. Along with this public show of support for the Dalai Lama, the leaders decided to unite their formerly separate citizen-soldiers into a unified volunteer army. The independent armies, which had fought under the name bstan srung dang blangs dmag, or “volunteer troops to defend religion and country,” now took the name chu bzhi gangs drug dmag, the “Four Rivers and Six Ranges Army,” in reference to the “four rivers [and] six ranges” of Kham. On 16 June 1958 the united army known as Chushi Gangdrug held its inaugural ceremony in the Lhoka region south of Lhasa.21

The inaugural included a cavalry parade, a ritual procession of a photograph of the Dalai Lama, and the unveiling of the newly-designed Chushi Gangdrug flag. The flag consisted of two deities’ swords with a religious thunderbolt and lotus flowers on the handles set against a background of yellow, the color of Buddhism.22 The army’s headquarters, along with a secretariat and finance department, were established at Triguthang with a total of roughly 5,000 volunteer soldiers. Four of the volunteers were selected as top commanders, five were chosen as liaison officers between the army and the community, five others were to take care of supplies and equipment, eighteen were designated as field commanders, and a captain was appointed for each group of ten soldiers.23 Altogether, thirty-seven units of varying size, grouped by district of origin and assigned names corresponding to letters of the Tibetan alphabet (e.g., ka, kha, ga, nga), were organized.24 The commanders drew up a code of conduct with twenty-seven rules including prohibitions against stealing, rape, entering houses while on a mission, and harming innocent people. The code also stipulated that soldiers were to protect local people from bandits. This last rule was important because the Chinese authorities had been paying bandits, who roamed throughout Tibet, to pose as Chushi Gangdrug soldiers who would terrorize villages, steal, rape women and nuns, and kill innocent people.25 A merit system was also introduced, including, for example, a cash prize of 500 Indian rupees for the capture of a Chinese army officer’s possessions or documents.26

The founding of Chushi Gangdrug served not just to unify disparate groups in their resistance to the Chinese, but also to institutionalize international resistance activities already under way. Following the signing of the “Seventeen-Point Agreement” between China and Tibet on 17 May 1951, several high-ranking Tibetan officials, including Prime Minister Lhukhang and one of the Dalai Lama’s elder brothers, Gyalo Thondup, decided to travel to India to consult with Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. Part of the advice Nehru gave them was to encourage a people’s democratic movement that would be recognized by the world as a legitimate alternative to the Chinese. Lhukhang and Gyalo Thondup conveyed this information to Lord Chamberlain Phala, who in turn encouraged such a development in Lhasa. The Mimang Tsogpa (mi mang tshogs pa), or People’s Party, was soon formed under the leadership of Alo Chhonzed, with sixty-two members representing all three provinces of Tibet.27 The leaders of Mimang Tsogpa protested the Dalai Lama’s 1954 trip to China, urging him not to go, and met him in Kham on his return to Lhasa in 1955. Members of the group also distributed pamphlets and put up posters in Lhasa protesting the Chinese presence and calling on Tibetans to unite against the Chinese. Andrug Gompo Tashi, a Mimang Tsogpa officer who would later lead Chushi Gangdrug, later recalled distributing leaflets that “exhorted all Tibetans to unite and protect their freedom and country in an active and not—what was until now—passive posture.” 28

In 1956, as conditions worsened in Kham, including the bombing of four monastic complexes, Mimang Tsogpa began a series of public protests against the Chinese. They delivered a letter of protest directly to the Chinese authorities calling on Chinese forces to leave Tibet.29 The Chinese authorities demanded that the Tibetan government arrest those responsible. The local officials arrested three of the organizers, one of whom later died in jail. In the meantime, many Tibetans, who were secretly meeting in Lhasa and elsewhere to determine what could be done, all arrived at the same conclusion—that outside help was needed. A group of Khampa Tibetan traders met with Gyalo Thondup to ask him to contact foreign countries for military aid, unaware that the Americans had already approached him regarding the situation in Tibet. 30 In the summer of 1956, the Far East Division of the CIA had decided to support the independent Tibetan resistance in their fight against the Chinese. Gyalo Thondup sent the traders back to Lhasa, where they linked up with Andrug Gompo Tashi and began to organize the resistance army.

Chushi Gangdrug’s military inauguration in 1958 angered the Chinese authorities, who began to pressure the Tibetan government to disband the volunteer army. On several occasions the Tibetan government sent emissaries to Chushi Gangdrug headquarters, some of whom ended up joining the resistance. 31 The volunteer army included battalions from the northeast region of Amdo as well as troops from Central Tibet and even several Nationalist Chinese soldiers, but was composed mostly of troops from the eastern region of Kham. Thus, although the resistance army was a pan-Tibetan unit, it was dominated by Khampa Tibetans, a phenomenon never fully appreciated by outsiders.

The Eagle and the Snow Lion

The United States and Tibet do not have a long history of governmental relations. Contact was first made under President Franklin Roosevelt in 1942, shortly after the United States had entered World War II. The U.S. government wanted to transport supplies over and through Tibet to troops in China. Roosevelt sent two undercover Office of Strategic Services envoys to Lhasa to seek approval.32 The mission was successful, but the next interaction between the two countries did not come until 1947–1948 when a Tibetan trade mission, traveling on Tibetan passports, came to the United States as part of a global mission to strengthen Tibet’s international economic and political relations at a time of growing political pressure from China.

With the Communist takeover in China in 1949, U.S. interest in Tibet grew exponentially. Histories of the Tibetan resistance, therefore, are not just Tibetan histories but a part of the broader history of the Cold War. Tibet had an important role in U.S. Cold War strategy in Asia as both a counter to Communist China and a facilitator of U.S. relations with Pakistan and India. 33 Although many Americans who were politically involved with Tibet at this time developed strong personal support for the Tibetans, Tibet remained for the U.S. government, as it had been for the British, a “pawn on the imperial chessboard.”34 The Tibetans themselves, to use the words of a former CIA officer, were thus “orphans of the Cold War.”35

South Asia was never divorced from Cold War politics.36 The departure of the British from India in 1947 led to the partition of the subcontinent and the emergence of the independent states of India and Pakistan. The two countries were quickly embroiled in a contentious dispute with each other and were also pulled into Cold War battles involving the United States, the Soviet Union, and the PRC. Pakistan was first closely linked with the United States and then later on with China. India took a different route, publicly proclaiming a nonaligned status while secretly courting and being courted by Washington, Moscow, and Beijing. The secretive, constantly changing, and often contradictory allegiances among governments in the 1950s and 1960s resulted in several armed conflicts—the Sino-Indian War of 1962, the Indo- Pakistani War of 1965, the ongoing insurgency in Kashmir, and the Tibetan conflict with China.37

It was China that pulled South Asia into the Cold War, often over border disputes involving Tibet. Tibet’s new status as an occupied country and a site of Cold War conflict was a significant departure from its status in the preceding fifty years. During the first half of the twentieth century, Tibet kept a low international profile.38 Its affiliation with China, based on a religious-political relationship, ended when the Qing Dynasty fell. From 1911 on, Tibet was an independent state, uninvolved in any of the world wars but ideologically and religiously supporting the Allies in World War II. In turn, the British and later the Americans encouraged Tibetan political independence, though only to the point where it would not seriously upset China. Despite ideological and other differences between successive Chinese regimes, each was interested in bringing Tibet within the Chinese political orbit.39 Mao Zedong’s China was no different in that respect.

From the start, Mao announced that his intention was to “liberate” Tibet and restore it to the Chinese motherland.40 He was true to his word—Chinese troops entered eastern Tibet in the spring of 1950 and quickly secured control over all of Tibet by occupying Lhasa in the fall of 1950. After an initial period of attempted cooperation with the Chinese, the situation disintegrated rapidly for the Tibetans. In eastern Tibet, people began a series of independent revolts, which the Chinese brutally suppressed using air strikes and ground warfare. The U.S. government had offered aid to the Tibetan government after China invaded, and the Tibetans asked the United States for military aid in 1955. The CIA established its Tibet program the next year. An initial group of six Tibetans were trained on the island of Saipan and then airdropped into Tibet. In the meantime, the previously independent groups of Tibetans who had been fighting the Chinese were brought into the united resistance movement. CIA training of Tibetan soldiers continued in the United States, first at a secret site in Virginia and then, starting in May 1958, at the equally secret Camp Hale in Leadville, Colorado. Over the next six years, several hundred Tibetans were trained at Camp Hale in a variety of guerrilla war- fare techniques such as paramilitary operations, bomb building, map making, photographic surveillance, radio operation techniques, and intelligence collection.

“The [Tibetans] were the best men I worked with,” says Tony Poe, a retired CIA officer who trained the Tibetan soldiers and later worked in Laos. Poe is believed to be the real-life model for the character of Kurtz in Apocalypse Now.41 He and the other American instructors are remembered fondly by the Tibetans themselves. “They were good people” (mi yag po red) is a common refrain I heard during my research. Despite the mutual admiration of the Tibetans and Americans, a series of misunderstandings marred the relationship. The United States was mainly interested in preventing the spread of Communism rather than providing serious and committed aid to Tibet.42 A second, and more serious, misunderstanding remains unexplored in most discussions of the resistance—namely, the importance of regional allegiances and identities within the Tibetan community.

Tibetan social and political divisions were far more complex than is often realized. The importance of such affiliations was not fully recognized by CIA officers involved in the Tibetan project. This oversight had a dual impact— first, it impaired the U.S. government’s ability to administer and advise the resistance; second, it complicated the internal dynamics and organization of the resistance, affecting relations with the United States and the trajectory of the resistance in general. Three factors help to explain this shortcoming. First, U.S. intelligence analysts had little information about Tibet. What they did know was based on British sources that downplayed the importance of regional variations and focused mainly on Lhasa. Although the British Chinese Consular Service had officials posted in eastern Tibet, the bulk of Britain’s information about Tibet was collected by officers associated with British India and focused on central Tibet. Second, the primary contact between the Americans and the Tibetans was Gyalo Thondup, who was from the northeast region of Amdo and thus not always sympathetic to Khampa systems of authority. Finally, only one CIA officer could speak any Tibetan.43 Communication was otherwise done through Tibetan and Mongolian interpreters, whose knowledge of English ranged from superb to rudimentary.

The CIA officers’ failure to recognize the importance of regional identity for the Tibetans was ironically at odds with the officers’ strong personal admiration of the soldiers they trained. According to resistance veterans, this misunderstanding proved disastrous in several respects. The CIA vetoed soldiers’ suggestions to organize operations around native-place and regional allegiances. On one occasion, a crack unit of guerrillas were sent against their wishes into an area of Tibet in which they did not have local support. They were ambushed by the Chinese, and all but one were killed.44 On a broader level, the administration of the resistance was hindered because of misinterpretations of connections between the different leaders of the resistance, and between the leaders and the soldiers. The CIA’s military-style ranking of the men was based on an achieved status, whereas among the guerrillas themselves achievement and military prowess did not outrank ascribed statuses. For the most part, the leaders were men with long-established social power that was legitimated through the same sort of personal and place connections that existed in Tibet prior to the Chinese invasion. The resistance force, despite being a unified army, retained strong elements of autonomy and allegiance based on native-place networks. The district-based loyalties of soldiers and battalions were at times subordinated to their allegiances to the united resistance, but at other times these loyalties were parallel to or even greater than their commitment to the army. U.S. efforts to organize battalions according to a place-neutral scheme were unsuccessful. Until the end, military resistance operations were primarily organized around native place-based encampments.

Region and the Tibetan Resistance

Prior to 1959, Tibet comprised a series of regions connected through shared cultural traditions, a shared religion, and a variety of political arrangements that linked the provinces with Lhasa. From 1642 through the 1950s, successive Dalai Lamas or their regents ruled Tibet. Under the Dalai Lama, the Tibetan state combined religion and politics in an administration that encompassed ritual and performative aspects of allegiance and extended a high degree of autonomy to certain areas within its sphere of influence.45 Organized hierarchically, the state was maintained in Lhasa and was represented in territories outside Lhasa in various forms. In most, though not all, of central Tibet, aristocratic and monastic leaders from Lhasa governed estates and the laborers attached to them. In other parts of Tibet, such as Kham, an estate system did not exist. Instead, affairs were mostly controlled by hereditary kings, chiefs, and lamas, some of whom belonged to lineages initially appointed by the Fifth Dalai Lama. Among them were leaders antagonistic to the central Tibetan government even when respectful of the Dalai Lama. As such, the structures and dynamics of state-local relations, far from being consistent throughout Tibet, varied widely in different regions as well as over time.

The region of Kham consists of more than thirty districts, referred to as pha yul. Each district is composed of a series of villages and monasteries of varying sizes and sects, often separated by huge mountain ranges and the rivers that cut through them. Systems of governance prior to 1950 varied by district—some were kingdoms, others were chiefdoms, and still others were governed by hereditary lamas.46 A handful of the districts were led by officials directly appointed by Lhasa or by the Chinese authorities in Sichuan. Relations between districts—and between monasteries—were often tense. Feuding was common, and bandits roamed the mountainous terrain. Differences between districts were marked in both secular and sacred ways, through dialect, clothing, and ornamentation, as well as through lamas, sects, and the deities associated with local landscapes. Not all districts or monasteries were assumed equal, and some were nominally or entirely under the stewardship of others. Despite the pronounced differences between regions, outside views of Tibet have tended to focus on Lhasa. To some extent, this has led to extrapolation from central Tibetan sociopolitical configurations to the rest of Tibet without taking due account of regional variations.

The Chushi Gangdrug resistance force was organized in ways that reflected the sociopolitical frameworks of eastern Tibet rather than the aristocratic and monastic hierarchies of central Tibet. On the battlefield, trust, loyalty, and familiarity were crucial. Guerrilla units were based on native-place affiliations, with troops from the same district forming a unit. Leaders of the units were often the same men who had been leaders in their districts—men from elite families or wealthy traders. Although these systems of power and authority were not designed to be as flexible or collaborative as the unified resistance required, they were the system used for military units during the entire period.

The “supreme leader” of the resistance was Andrug Gompo Tashi, a trader from the eastern Tibetan district of Lithang. Although some of the leaders of these native-place battalions had sociopolitical status greater than that of Andrug Gompo Tashi, his status as head of the Chushi Gangdrug resistance was unchallenged. As a result, an inordinate number of men who rose to positions of prominence within the resistance were from Andrug Gompo Tashi’s district of Lithang.

In addition to Andrug Gompo Tashi, Gyalo Thondup was the other major figure of the resistance. Gyalo Thondup was one of several intermediaries between the Tibetan and U.S. governments and was the main liaison between Chushi Gangdrug and the United States. Although other Tibetans had taken part in discussions with U.S. agents in both India and Nepal in the early 1950s regarding Tibetan resistance to the Chinese, Gyalo’s status as brother of the Dalai Lama trumped the connections that any other Tibetan had to offer. In the eyes of the U.S. government, Gyalo was not just an intermediary; he was the chief architect of the Tibetan resistance.47 However, the Chushi Gangdrug soldiers themselves did not always view Gyalo Thondup’s position so favorably. For the soldiers, Gyalo was more of a patron than a leader of the resistance, an intermediary of the highest status, responsible for managing U.S. aid. As the brother of the Dalai Lama and a native of the northeast region of Amdo, Gyalo Thondup was a worldly individual educated in China and a political figure who operated at levels well above those of the average resistance soldier and of their mostly provincial leaders (including Andrug Gompo Tashi). Hence, Gyalo was—and still is—seen as a benefactor of the resistance. In the minds of resistance soldiers, Gyalo was the unofficial and at times renegade official for the Tibetan government-in-exile who coordinated both Tibetan and external support for the resistance.

The status of patron is an esteemed one in Tibetan society. The contributions of a patron are acknowledged and praised, and the patron’s efforts bolster rather than detract from the authority of the group being sponsored. For resistance members, Gyalo Thondup’s contributions to the resistance did not outweigh those of Andrug Gompo Tashi but were assessed differently and were accorded different historical weight within the organization. In contrast, the CIA dealt with Chushi Gangdrug mostly through Gyalo Thondup, rather than taking account of the horizontal divisions within the group’s ranks or the authority of Andrug Gompo Tashi, whose influence continued well after his death in 1964.

In line with these trends in leadership and organization, the resistance saw itself as a mostly autonomous entity. In exile, veterans depict the resistance organization as having been an equal partner to, rather than subordinate of, the U.S. and Tibetan governments. The inability of the Tibetan government’s own army to fight against the PLA, along with the necessarily secret relationship between Chushi Gangdrug and Lhasa, enabled the resistance to enjoy a large measure of autonomy vis-à-vis the Tibetan government that carried over into exile. Indeed, relations between the resistance and the Tibetan government army were never more than lukewarm. Although some army officers joined the resistance, others had disdain for the guerrilla force.48 The Tibetan resistance movement was not a creation of the CIA, of Gyalo Thondup, of the Tibetan government, or even of Andrug Gompo Tashi. Rather, it was a grassroots organization formed in response to Chinese oppression. The managed autonomy that defined the Chushi Gangdrug battalions in Tibet continued into organizational efforts in exile. The many leaders of the group were assisted but not directed by outsiders.

This last point—the guerrillas’ view of the resistance as an autonomous organization—is not to be brushed aside. Time and again, former leaders and soldiers explained to me that the Chushi Gangdrug’s decisions about policy and actions were internal affairs. This was true of activities both inside and outside Tibet. For example, after the escape of the Dalai Lama into exile in March 1959 and almost a full year of battles with the PLA, many Chushi Gangdrug units had to flee to India. Once in India, the soldiers were not allowed to cross the border back into Tibet, and many took jobs building roads in Sikkim. Displeased with this situation and anxious to continue the struggle, they sent messages to Andrug Gompo Tashi and Gyalo Thondup in Kalimpong asking that a meeting be convened. More than 200 leaders and 3,000 soldiers of Chushi Gangdrug subsequently gathered in Gangtok to discuss their options, including the popular suggestion that they return to Tibet to resume fighting. The participants approved three major decisions: first, to appoint two Chushi Gangdrug representatives to each office of the Tibetan government-in-exile; second, to set up military operations in Mustang in neighboring Nepal; and third, to accept aid from the United States rather than Taiwan, which had tried to recruit Tibetans in India to serve in the Taiwanese army. The meeting in Gangtok, and especially the decision to continue sending men to the United States for military training and to establish the Mustang army camp, gave new life to Chushi Gangdrug operations in exile. The meeting instilled in many Tibetans an admiration of and hope in the United States that continues to this day. Although the admiration was mutual for Americans working closely with the Tibetans, sentiment at higher levels regarding Tibet was less personal and more practical—what could the Tibetans do for the United States?

Documents, Wristwatches, Histories

In November 1961, CIA Director Allen Dulles appeared at a meeting of the U.S. National Security Council’s Special Group carrying an unusual item— the bloodstained and bullet-riddled pouch of a Chinese army commander.49 No less graphic than the pouch was what it contained—more than 1,600 classified Chinese documents described as not merely an “intelligence goldmine” but “the best intelligence coup since the Korean War.”50 The pouch and documents were well traveled, having been carried on foot by Tibetan guerrillas out of Tibet through Nepal and into India, where they were whisked away to the United States on transport aircraft. The Tibetan soldiers who captured the documents were part of the Chushi Gangdrug volunteer army’s Mustang force.

The Tibetans did not enjoy uniform support in Washington.51 In the early 1960s, with the transition from the Eisenhower to the Kennedy administration, senior officials debated whether the covert operation in Tibet should be continued.52 Allen Dulles’ dramatic introduction of the blood-stained bag literally “shot through with explanation” could not have been better timed.53 The documents in the pouch were of priceless value to the U.S. government. At the time, little intelligence information existed about the PRC. China presented itself as a perfectly functioning state, one that was militarily secure, with a population that was flourishing. The documents revealed just the opposite: that the Great Leap Forward had failed catastrophically and had led to widespread famine in China, and that serious internal problems had arisen in the military and the party.54 The importance of these documents to the CIA was unparalleled, and the scholarly community responded in kind when the materials were released several years later.55 Nowhere, however, was it revealed how the U.S. government had obtained the documents. Although President John F. Kennedy approved the continuation of the Tibetan project, the story of the men who captured the documents remained a secret.

The Tibetan government was also interested in the documents, though for a different reason. After leaving Lhasa, the only evidence the Tibetan government could obtain of the atrocities committed by Chinese troops was the oral testimony of Tibetan refugees. These testimonies were valuable but not as valuable as hard documentary evidence. The materials captured by the guerrillas contained crucial and tragic confirmation of the magnitude of violence in Tibet. The documents showed that in Lhasa alone more than 87,000 Tibetans had been killed by the Chinese military from March 1959 through September 1960. This evidence of Chinese atrocities was invaluable for the Tibetan government when it presented its case in the diplomatic language of international law. For the Tibetan government-in-exile, as for the CIA, the substance of the documents was what mattered rather than tales of how and by whom they had been obtained. The Dalai Lama’s autobiography, published in 1990, indicates that the documents were “captured by Tibetan freedom fighters during the 1960s.”56

Considering the importance accorded to the documents by the U.S. and Tibetan governments, one might expect that the former guerrillas would highlight this event in their narrations of resistance history. But as I soon found, this is not the case at all. They neither begin nor end their accounts with any mention of the documents, and they often did not refer to them at all. Why is it that this particular achievement so valued by the U.S. and Tibetan governments, is not remotely as memorable for the former soldiers?

Following the 1959 Tibetan exodus into South Asia, the resistance operated out of Mustang, the ethnic Tibetan kingdom that jutted up from the borders of northern Nepal into Tibet. In Mustang, the men established camps from which they could periodically sneak across the border into Tibet, raiding army camps, dynamiting roads, stealing animals, and collecting information and transmitting it by radio to the United States. One of their goals was to ambush PLA convoys, kill the soldiers, and confiscate all their weapons, supplies, and materials. On one especially successful raid they captured a large pouch stuffed with documents. The documents were all in Chinese, a language that none of the Tibetans could read. A veteran named Lobsang Jampa was one of the few who did mention the documents to me. He recalled:

There was a man called Gen Rara. He was very popular among us. He led an attack on the Chinese and secured some very important documents from a Chinese official. This proved very useful to us. . . . We sent those documents on. But I don’t know what they were about.57

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Part 2 of 2

Other veterans who referred to the documents were similarly nonplussed. In Pokhara, Wangyal Lama explained, “our soldiers attacked Chinese trucks and seized some documents of the Chinese government. After that the Americans increased our pay scale. Nobody knew what the contents of those documents were. At that time, questions weren’t asked. If you asked too many questions, others would be suspicious of you.”58 Baba Yeshi, the general who was in charge of operations in Mustang, said that

a group of thirty Tibetans on horse traveled into Tibet. . . . Nine days later the group returned with uniforms, hats, diaries, Chinese government documents, and a lot of ammunition. . . . All that was captured resulted from the ambush of two Chinese convoys in western Tibet. [I] sent the diaries and government documents to Darjeeling. . . . [Later] four CIA officials congratulated me on overcoming such difficult initial conditions and praised me for our success in attacking the Chinese. As a reward the CIA gave me an Omega chronograph.59

Apparently, the Americans did not realize that the Tibetans had discriminating tastes in timepieces. Khampas had dominated the transnational Tibetan trade industry, and many of the resistance soldiers were former traders who possessed a sophisticated knowledge of the market value (and not just the use value) of international commodities. On this topic, Lobsang Jampa adds that at an earlier time “we were also given Omega wrist watches by the American instructors. They also gave us one trunk full of other watches. These watches were of cheap quality, and some of our soldiers did not want them.”60 What the soldiers did want was the restoration of Tibet to the rule of the Dalai Lama and the opportunity to return to their homes—that is, for life to return to “normal.” Captured documents of unknown importance were but a small victory and, at that particular moment, difficult to regard as a concrete step toward their goal. The marginality of the Tibetans to broader U.S. Cold War goals vis-à-vis China and beyond was the result of a larger set of discourses, institutions, and experiences. Yet, as Anna Tsing has shown in the case of the Meratus in Indonesia, people often engage and challenge their marginality.61 One way that Tibetan soldiers dealt with this marginality was by denying it. They placed the resistance, unlike the Omega watches, squarely within the realm of the valuable. Many of them were convinced that they would defeat China diplomatically if not militarily and return to Tibet well within their lifetimes.

The Mustang Generation: Tibetan Resistance Operations in South Asia

Hope for Tibet was cultivated in action. As long as the Mustang army was actively engaged in strikes against China, the soldiers felt they were contributing to the collective project of regaining Tibet. Mustang’s geographic location made it a politically strategic, albeit geographically difficult, base for resistance operations in Tibet. Following the Gangtok resistance meeting, the men who were chosen as leaders were sent for training in the United States, and other recruits received training in India before heading to Mustang. In Mustang itself, CIA-trained graduates provided instruction to other soldiers. U.S. assistance to the Tibetans in Mustang began during the first year of operations, at a time when the guerrillas were in dire straits. Two airdrops of supplies (arms, ammunition, food, etc.) were made in 1962 and another in 1965. Through 1969, the CIA provided financial assistance to the Tibetan resistance movement via the intelligence headquarters in Delhi. Even after the CIA’s role ended, however, the Mustang-based operations continued for another five years.

The guerrillas referred to the Mustang force as the “Lo Army,” which was divided into battalions of approximately 100 men each.62 Each battalion conducted military exercises and received weaponry and warfare training. The battalions rotated in and out of Tibet, traveling at night and sleeping in the forest or in boulder fields during the day. Their activities in Tibet were a combination of guerrilla maneuvers and intelligence-gathering. They carried out raids in the summertime, when the mountain passes were still covered with snow but the danger of frostbite was less. Resistance life was not romantic and was plagued by the uncertainties of external support, by internal squabbles, and by changing relations with the local Mustang population. The resistance benefited not only from the support of the King of Mustang, but also from the silent consent of the Nepali government.

Nepali officials, including King Birendra himself, visited Mustang for discussions with resistance leaders, and Nepali intelligence officers were stationed in Mustang throughout the years of operations. Just as the government of Nepal was aware of the Tibetan presence in Mustang, so too was the government of India cognizant of Tibetan resistance activities originating in South Asia. The difference was that India not only knew about the revitalized Chushi Gangdrug activities but was also, along with the United States, a direct participant in them.

In addition to the Mustang guerrilla force, the Chushi Gangdrug pursued a number of other efforts from exile. The CIA continued to parachute groups of Colorado-trained soldiers into Tibet for operations throughout the country.63 Tibetan guerrilla units also entered Tibet on foot from India for intelligence- gathering missions. Unlike in Nepal, however, the Tibetan units in India were not independent of local militias or government. Instead, they were incorporated into them. Tibetans were trained by the Indian Central Intelligence Bureau (CIB) and, after training, would either stay with the CIB or go on to a leadership post in a new Tibetan force in the Indian military. On 14 November 1962, in the midst of a Sino-Indian border war, the Special Frontier Force (SFF), an all-Tibetan force popularly known as “Establishment 22,” was formed.64

The Mustang Tibetans regarded the SFF as the Chushi Gangdrug branch in India. In addition to Establishment 22, the Indian Ministry of Home Affairs set up an Indo-Tibetan Border Police Force (ITBF) under its auspices in October 1962. Both forces were stationed in border areas. As understood by the Tibetans, the ITBF included Tibetans in its ranks, whereas Establishment 22 was specifically created “to restore independence to Tibet.”65 Based in Dehra Dun, the SFF was initially trained by both U.S. and Indian officers but was led by four Tibetan commanders—Ratu Ngawang, Gyatso Dhondup, Jampa Kalden, and Jampa Wangdu. Both Ratu and Gyatso were from Lithang, Andrug Gompo Tashi’s district; Jampa Kalden was from Chamdo; and Jampa Wangdu was from Lhasa.66 The Americans pulled out of Establishment 22 after U.S. relations with India soured in the 1970s, and the Soviet State Security Committee (KGB) moved in. The trainers and equipment changed from American to Soviet.67 In 1971 the Tibetan force was used in India’s war with East Pakistan (now Bangladesh). Fifty-six Tibetan SFF soldiers were killed in battle, and 580 Tibetan soldiers were decorated with medals for bravery by the Indian government.68

Although the withdrawal of American support did not stop activities in India, it did eventually stymie efforts in Nepal. Several years after U.S. funding was cut off, the Nepali government ended its policy of turning a blind eye to covert operations against the PRC from within its borders. Pressured by the Chinese authorities, the government of Nepal tried to force the guerrillas to shut things down, publicly calling them “bandits” and claiming not to have known that guerrillas were there in the first place. Not until 1974, however, did the Tibetan soldiers finally decide to call it quits. Even then, they did so only in deference to the pleas of the strongest unifying force in the Tibetan exile community, the Dalai Lama. The Dalai Lama’s brother-in-law carried a taped message from the Dalai Lama to the soldiers in Mustang by hand. The Tibetan spiritual leader urged the soldiers to surrender, saying that it would not be good for them to fight with the Nepalese army. Having received orders from the Dalai Lama himself, the guerrillas finally ended their operations and turned over their weapons to Nepali officials.

The resistance operation ended in drama and tragedy: splits within the organization, six-year-long jail terms in Nepal for a number of the leaders, the resettlement of many soldiers in lowland refugee camps, preferential treatment for those who cooperated with the Nepali government, and the daring attempt by one resistance leader and his men to escape to India, only to be ambushed and killed by the Nepali army. The dissolution of the Mustang force in 1974 left the Tibetan soldiers in grim circumstances. Many could not speak Nepali and had no money or obvious means of livelihood. Upon release from prison, most of them were resettled in refugee camps run by the Nepali government and the International Committee of the Red Cross. As a result of political splits within the resistance force, some of the veterans’ camps were dissociated from the Tibetan government-in-exile.

Nonetheless, even when the Mustang operation was terminated and the soldiers were scattered about, Chushi Gangdrug continued to operate. The head office in Darjeeling, and later Delhi and Dharamsala, maintained a political and social (and at times antagonistic) presence in the refugee community. In Nepal, Mustang veterans formed an organization called “Lo-thik” to address issues of social and economic welfare. Members of the group were from all regions of Tibet, and the Lo-thik provided (and still provides) a pension to veterans based on their years of service. Pension funds are generated through different Chushi Gangdrug business ventures in Nepal and India. No pension funds are given to the veterans by either the Tibetan government-in-exile or the U.S. government.

The end of the Mustang operations marked the close of a specific chapter in the history of the Tibetan resistance. The resistance continues in the form of Chushi Gangdrug, a social and political organization with a military past, and as a component of the Indian Army. Yet, the dissolution of the Mustang army signaled the end of an autonomous Tibetan military force. Although the U.S. government regarded the Mustang operation as primarily an intelligence- gathering force, the Tibetans themselves viewed their activities as part of a military battle, not just the gathering of information. For many of the veterans, the loss of U.S. support and the order from the Dalai Lama to leave Mustang made them pessimistic about what the future might hold. Nonetheless, the support provided by the United States and the close bonds between Tibetan trainees and CIA instructors sustained the former guerrillas’ belief that the West in general, and the United States in particular, might provide help to Tibet in the future. Many observers in the West, however, focused not so much on the plight of the Tibetan soldiers as on their connection to the CIA.

Secrets Told and Untold

The story of the “Colorado Tibetans” that opened this article is an example of how the story of the resistance as a government secret dominates the literature on the CIA-Tibet connection. As words not quite “unspoken,” but spoken only to a select few, secrets have the freedom and the license to travel, circulating not just as acknowledged silences but also as truths to be pursued and revealed. Thus, although many Tibetans feel obliged not to divulge resistance secrets, outsiders are not bound by the same constraints.69 In the late 1960s and early 1970s, despite the best efforts of the U.S. and Tibetan governments to keep things under wraps, bits and pieces of what was going on began to slip out. A series of investigative and speculative articles appeared, some romanticizing the resistance and others criticizing the CIA, the Tibetan government, or both.70 Currently, the literature in both English and Tibetan on the resistance is growing, albeit along somewhat different tracks and in both cases giving away some secrets while still keeping others.71

Admittedly, guerrilla resistance and government intelligence work are, by their very nature, secretive enterprises. In this case, the history is doubly secret because of the international political climate at the time—the height of the Cold War—and because independence remains an elusive goal for the Tibetan resistance and exile community. Only recently did the U.S. government begin releasing information about its involvement with the Tibetan resistance. In Asia, even less official information is available. The Nepalese government publicly denied any knowledge, not to mention approval, of the Tibetans’ use of Nepalese territory for resistance operations. Privately, however, the King of Nepal had told the U.S. government as far back as 1950 that he was willing to aid the Tibetans.72 In India today, the public knows little about its government’s cooperation with the United States in aiding the Tibet resistance.

Indeed, not until April 1978, when rumors began to circulate that the Ganges, the most sacred river in India, had been polluted by the government, was there even the slightest public hint of India’s role vis-à-vis Tibet.73 The Indian government caused a stir when it acknowledged that the rumors might be true. It turned out that India and the United States had conducted a series of secret operations against China in 1965, including the installation of plutonium- 239 devices to monitor Chinese missile launches and nuclear explosions on the high reaches of the Himalayan peak of Nanda Devi. Later, when intelligence teams went to retrieve the sensors, a 33-pound pack containing two to three pounds of plutonium could not be found. Intelligence officials assumed—rightly, as it turned out—that the monitors had been swept away by an avalanche and had perhaps ended up in the Ganges River, which runs past Nanda Devi.

Other secrets are only beginning to come to light, such as the revelation that the Tibetan resistance provided key intelligence information to the U.S. government, including information about PLA military capacity, internal dissent in China during the Great Leap Forward, and information about the first Chinese nuclear tests at Lop Nor in northern Tibet.74 Secrets between governments persist and are a key part of the history of the resistance, yet what for India, Pakistan, Nepal, and the United States was an official secret, was for the Tibetans much more. For the Tibetan community, the story of the resistance is not just one of clandestine politics or government secrets; rather, it consists of multiple stories—personal tales of serving the nation and the Dalai Lama, accounts of the armed struggle for their country, and continuing debates over facets of communal identity in the exile community.

The resistance was ultimately unsuccessful in regaining Tibet, but that does not diminish its historical importance for the resistance movement. Many Chushi Gangdrug veterans consider the resistance a key part of recent Tibetan history and view their own combat experiences as defining moments in their lives. For veterans, the resistance was important in defending Tibet against the Chinese and in defending and protecting the Dalai Lama in his escape from Tibet. Although one might expect that the story of the popular armed struggle for Tibet would be at the center of national narratives of modern Tibet, it is not. Histories of the Tibetan resistance have not yet secured a place within state-sanctioned national history in exile. One of the reasons that stories of the Tibetan resistance are not a part of official Tibetan history is the Tibetan cultural practice that I call “historical arrest.”75

Set against the backdrop of forty-four years of exile, Chushi Gangdrug now stands for more than a guerrilla resistance army. Since 1974, Chushi Gangdrug has had a social and political, not just military, presence in the Tibetan community. Cutting across all of these organizational facets, however, is the predominantly Khampa nature of the organization. Although Tibetans from other regions participated in the resistance, Khampas still dominate the leadership posts and the membership, and Chushi Gangdrug is widely perceived as a Khampa organization. As such, the resistance does not easily fit into standard narratives of Tibetan struggles against China, which have been primarily celebrated as diplomatic or non-violent. The one exception is the holiday on 10 March commemorating a popular revolt in Lhasa in 1959. By contrast, there is no community-wide holiday in exile that commemorates the Chushi Gangdrug resistance. As with sectarian and other alternative histories of Tibet, the regional inflections of resistance histories are discouraged in favor of homogenized, and at times sanitized, histories of Tibet. The experiences of Tibetan soldiers, and resistance history in general, remain “subjugated knowledges” in the Foucaultian sense, having been “arrested” in favor of other ways of telling the story.76 The factors that determine what counts as history are themselves historical and political products rather than fixed cultural practices. Amid the social and political chaos of Tibetan geographic dislocation, the possibilities for telling resistance history are generated in and by local, national, and global forces at work both during and after the Cold War.

Conclusion: Ethnography and Cold War Studies

How should we tell Chushi Gangdrug history as part of Cold War history? More fundamentally, should we tell Tibetan resistance history as part of Cold War history? My work with Tibetan veterans suggests that they see their struggle as one of Tibetans against the Chinese, rather than a broader international effort against Communism. They do, however, regard their struggle as a joint one in which Tibetans worked with individuals from other countries, supported by foreign governments—the U.S. and Indian governments, among others. Although my field notes and interviews include numerous comments to the effect that “the Americans didn’t really want to help Tibet, they just wanted to bring down Communism,” overall I find that resistance veterans, regardless of their current political orientation, are supportive of the Dalai Lama (though not invariably of the Tibetan government-in-exile), grateful to the CIA for the help it provided, and proud of the resistance’s part in the quest for Tibetan independence. Tibetan views of the guerrilla movement are, in this sense, a part of Cold War history—that is, Tibetans were not just acted on; they were actors in Cold War struggles. Although in understanding the Tibetan resistance we must take account of cultural-historical aspects unrelated to Communism and global responses to it, we also need to pay attention to the constraints imposed by the Cold War on Tibetan actions and opportunities. Tibetan understandings of the military-political struggle of 1956–1974 need to be incorporated into our broader study of the United States and the Cold War in Asia.77

In fitting Tibet into broader macro-histories of the Cold War, I stress here the magnitude of understanding the resistance on its own terms before trying to understand it in relation to the United States. The cultural, historical, and political context of the resistance is undoubtedly linked at points to the United States, but resistance existed before the U.S. government got involved and exists beyond its connections to the United States. The connection to the United States, though important in its own right, should not obscure other, equally vital aspects of the resistance, such as the specifically Tibetan brand of organization and administration and the sociopolitical location of the resistance in the Tibetan exile community. We must, therefore, pursue both local and global levels of inquiry—local in the United States, India, and China, as well as in Tibet, and global in terms of the broader Cold War context.

In the Tibet-China conflict, securities and insecurities are intimately bound together. The PRC is fixed as an objective and external threat, but the social and cultural meanings associated with this threat are culturally subjective understandings of the conflict. As understood by the Tibetan guerrillas, for example, the threat was much more immediate and localized than the global spread of Communism, which was the main threat perceived by the U.S. government. Each bundle of insecurities reflects back on cultural imperatives and identities, often but not always put into operation through state institutions and technologies. In regard to the Tibetan resistance, the processes through which the resistance took place and was categorized were not inevitable or only internal. Rather, these processes were contingent on hegemonic geohistoric structures and typologies and remain so today.78 The local complexities of cross-cultural Cold War politics, argues anthropologist Joseph Masco, are to be found in “investigations of how people experience insecurities across a broader sphere of relationships.”79 In closing, I follow his advice in suggesting a different sort of Cold War intervention, one that will consider histories such as that of the Tibetan Chushi Gangdrug resistance not just at the level of the state but also at the ground level, looking at actors and institutions such as resistance battalions and CIA training teams. As research continues on this topic, we may begin to unravel not just the secrets of U.S.-Tibet relations but also the cultural logics behind them. Only through such collaborative scholarship will a full picture of the Tibetan resistance in all its endeavors, relations, and perspectives be possible.

Acknowledgments

The initial version of this article was prepared for “The Cold War and Its Legacy in Tibet: Great-Power Politics and Regional Security” conference at Harvard University. My thanks to Mark Kramer and all at the Cold War Studies Project at Harvard University for organizing the conference, and to the participants and audience for their useful feedback. Thank you also to anonymous journal reviewers for comments and suggestions, as well as to John Collins, Eugene Mei, Ann Stoler, Lucien Taylor, and audiences in Berkeley, Boulder, Chapel Hill, Chicago, and Park City for constructive and critical engagement with earlier versions of the paper. Research support was provided by the American Institute of Indian Studies, the Social Science Research Council, and the Rackham Graduate School at the University of Michigan. Finally, thanks are owed to the many Tibetan veterans and retired U.S. intelligence officers who took the time to discuss their stories with me.

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Notes:

1. David Wise, The Politics of Lying: Government Deception, Secrecy, and Power (New York: Random House, 1973), pp. 239–262, 557–559.

2. Georg Simmel, “The Secret and the Secret Society,” in Kurt H. Wolff, ed. and trans., The Sociology of Georg Simmel (New York: The Free Press, 1950), pp. 307–376;Michael Taussig, Defacements: Public Secrets and the Labor of the Historical Negative (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1999); and Stanton K. Tefft, ed., Secrecy: A Cross-Cultural Perspective (New York: Human Sciences Press, 1980).

3. Examples include Tsongkha Lhamo Tsering, Tsan rgol gyal skyob, Deb bzhi pa, Glo smon thang du bstan srung dang blangs dmag sgar chags tshul dang Bod nang gray dmar la phar rgol ‘thab ‘dzings ji byas dngos rjien lo rgyus deb phreng gnyis pa bzhugs [Resistance, Volume IV: An Account of the Establishment of the Tibetan National Volunteer Defense Force in Mustang and Operations against the Communist Chinese inside Tibet, Part II] (Dharamsala: Amnye Machen Institute, 2003); Tsongkha Lhamo Tsering, Tsan rgol rgyal skyob, Deb Gsum pa, Glo smon thang du bstan srung dang blangs dmag sgar chags tshul dang Bod nang rgya dmar la phar rgol ‘thab ‘dzings ji byas dngos rjien lo rgyus deb phreng dang po bzhugs [Resistance, Volume III: An Account of the Establishment of the Tibetan National Volunteer Defense Force in Mustang and Operations against the Communist Chinese inside Tibet, Part I] (Dharamsala: Amnye Machen Institute, 2002); Tsongkha Lhamo Tsering, Bstan rgol rgyal skyob, Deb gnyis pa, Bod nang du drag po’i ‘thab rstod byas skor, 1957 nas 1962 bar [Resistance, Volume II: The Secret Operations into Tibet (1957–1962)], Tashi Tsering, ed. (Dharamsala, India: Amnye Machen Institute, 1998); Tsongkha Lhamo Tsering, Bstan rgol rgyal skyob, Deb tang po, Sku’i gcen po llha sras rgya lo don grub mchog gi thog ma’i mdsad phyogs dang gus gnyis dbar chab srid ‘brel ba byung stang skor [Resistance, Volume I: The Early Political Activities of Gyalo Thondup, Older Brother of H. H. the Dalai Lama, and the Beginnings of My Political Involvement, 1945–1959], Tashi Tsering, ed. (Dharamsala, India: Amnye Machen Institute, 1992); Phuntsok Tashi Taklha (Stag llha phun tshogs bkra shis), Mi tshe’i byung ba brjod pa, 3 vols. (Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1995); and Phupa Tsering Tobgye (Phu pa Tse ring sTobs rgyas), Gangs can bstan srung dang blangs dmag: sMar khams sgang gi rgyal srung dmag ‘thab lo rgyus [The Tibetan Volunteer Army to Defend Buddhism: The History of Markham’s Battles to Defend Tibet] (Dharamsala, India: Narthang Press, 1998).

4. Gompo Tashi Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges: A True Account of Khampa Resistance to Chinese in Tibet (Dharamsala, India: Information and Publicity Office, 1973); Dawa Norbu, “The 1959 Tibetan Rebellion: An Interpretation,” China Quarterly, Vol. 77 (1979), pp. 74–93; Jamyang Norbu, Horseman in the Snow: The Story of Aten, an Old Khampa Warrior (Dharamsala, India: Information Office, Central Tibetan Secretariat, 1979); Jamyang Norbu, “The Tibetan Resistance Movement and the Role of the C.I.A.,” in Robert Barnett and Shirin Akiner, eds., Resistance and Reform in Tibet (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1994), pp. 186–196; Kunga Samten Dewatshang, Flight at the Cuckoo’s Behest: The Life and Times of a Tibetan Freedom Fighter (As Told to His Son Dorjee Wangdi Dewatshang) (New Delhi: Paljor Publications, 1997); Brief Introduction of Chushi Gangdrug Defend Tibet Volunteer Force and Welfare Society of Central Dhokham Chushi Gangdrug of Tibet (Delhi:Welfare Society of Central Dhokham Chushi Gangdrug, 1998); Roger E. McCarthy, Tears of the Lotus: Accounts of Tibetan Resistance to the Chinese Invasion, 1950–1962 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Co, 1997); John Kenneth Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War: America and the Tibetan Struggle for Survival (New York: Public Affairs, 1999); Kenneth Conboy and JamesMorrison, The CIA’s SecretWar in Tibet (Lawrence, KS: University Press of Kansas, 2002); andMikel Dunham, Buddha’s Warriors: The Story of the CIA-Backed Tibetan Freedom Fighters, the Chinese Communist Invasion, and the Ultimate Fall of Tibet (New York: Penguin, 2004).

5. Jennifer Milliken, “Intervention and Identity: Reconstructing the West in Korea,” in Jutta Weldes et al., eds., Cultures of Insecurity: States, Communities, and the Production of Danger (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), p. 91.

6. Melvyn Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet, 1913–1951: The Demise of the Lamaist State (Berkeley: University of California, 1989).

7. Examples include Joseph Masco, The Nuclear Borderlands: The Manhattan Project in Post-Cold War New Mexico (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); David H. Price, Threatening Anthropology: McCarthyism and the FBI’s Surveillance of Activist Anthropologists (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004); Laura Nader, “The Phantom Factor: Impact of the Cold War on Anthropology,” in Noam Chomsky et al., The Cold War and the University: Toward an Intellectual History of the Postwar Years (New York: The New Press, 1997), pp. 107–146; Eric Wakin, Anthropology Goes to War: Professional Ethics and Counterinsurgency in Thailand (Madison: University of Wisconsin, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, 1992); and Hugh Gusterson, Nuclear Rites: A Weapons Laboratory at the End of the Cold War (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1996).

8. On this point, see Pamela Ballinger, “The Politics of the Past: Redefining Insecurity along the ‘World’s Most Open Border,’” in Weldes et al., eds., Cultures of Insecurity, pp. 63–90.

9. “Introduction: Constructing Insecurity,” in Weldes et al., eds., Cultures of Insecurity, pp. 1–33.

10. On the concepts of difference and otherness in anthropology, see Johannes Fabian, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983).

11. John Borneman, “American Anthropology as Foreign Policy,” American Anthropologist, Vol. 97, No. 4 (1995), pp. 663–672.

12. Ibid., p. 667.

13. Ibid., p. 665. See also the articles in Talal Asad, ed., Anthropology and the Colonial Encounter (London: Ithaca Press, 1973); Dell Hymes, ed., Reinventing Anthropology (New York: Pantheon Press, 1972); and George Stocking, ed., Colonial Situations: Essays in the Contextualization of Ethnographic Knowledge (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1991).

14. On failed attempts to teach nation-building to the Tibetans, see Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War.

15. On other special operations in Asia, see Richard J. Aldrich et al., eds., The Clandestine Cold War in Asia, 1945–65: Western Intelligence, Propaganda, and Special Operations (London: Frank Cass, 2000).

16. Weldes et al., eds., Cultures of Insecurity.

17. George Marcus, “Foreword,” in Weldes et al, eds., Cultures of Insecurity, pp. vii-xix.

18. Gusterson, Nuclear Rites, p. 223.

19. Ibid.

20. Wise, The Politics of Lying; Victor Marchetti and John Marks, The CIA and the Cult of Intelligence (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1974); Chris Mullin, “Tibetan Conspiracy,” Far Eastern Economic Review, No. 32 (5 September 1975), pp. 30–34; and Christopher Robbins, Air America: The True Story of the CIA’s Mercenary Fliers in Covert Operations from Pre-war China to Present Day Nicaragua (London: Corgi Books, 1979).

21. Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges.

22. Ibid.

23. Ibid.

24. Brief Introduction, p. 3; and Tachen, interview, Kathmandu, 23 April 1998.

25. Lobsang Jampa, interview, Kathmandu, November 1997. See also Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges; and Thubten Khentsun (Thub bstan mKhas bstun), dKa’a sdug ‘og gi byung pa brjod pa [A Tale of Sorrow and Hardship] (Dharamsala, India: Sherig Pharkhang, 1998), p. 36. Lobsang Jampa also states that the Chinese would put Khampa clothing on dead Chinese soldiers and take photographs for propaganda purposes.

26. Lobsang Jampa, interview, Kathmandu, November 1997; and Tachen, interview, Kathmandu, November 1997. According to several resistance veterans, these rewards were hypothetical only.

27. Gyato Kelsang, interview, New York City, 12 April 2000. See also Alo Chhonzed, Bod kyi gnas lugs bden ‘dzin sgo phye ba’i lde mig zhes bya ba a lo chos mdzad kyi gdams, spyi lo 1920 nas 1982 bar [The Key That opens the Door of Truth to the Tibetan Situation: Materials on Modern Tibetan History] (Canberra: self-published, 1983); and Tsering Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows: A History of Modern Tibet since 1947 (London: Pimlico, 1999), pp. 144–147.

28. Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges, p. 40.

29. Gyato Kelsang, interview; Lobsang Jampa, interview; and Ratu Ngawang, interview, Delhi, 5 December 1997. See also Andrugtsang, Four Rivers, Six Ranges.

30. Gyalo Thondup, interview, Kalimpong, June 1999. See also Tsering, Bstan rgol rgyal skyob, pp. 25–31.

31. Paljor Jigme Namling (rNam gling dPal ‘byor ‘Jig med), Mi tshe’i lo rgyus dang ‘bril yod sna tshogs [My Life History and Other Stories] (Dharamsala, India: Library of Tibetan Works and Archives, 1998). See also Khentsun, dKa’a sdug ‘og gi byung pa brjod pa.

32. The early history of U.S.-Tibet relations remains murky. Journalist Tom Laird contends that in the 1940s U.S. nuclear weapons intelligence operations in Asia involved Tibet, a factor that might help explain why such secrecy shrouds U.S.-Tibetan affairs. See Thomas Laird, Into Tibet: The CIA’s First Atomic Spy and His Secret Expedition to Lhasa (New York: Grove Press, 2002).

33. S. Mahmud Ali, Cold War in the High Himalayas: The USA, China, and South Asia in the 1950s (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1999); and Albert Siegfried Willner, “The Eisenhower Administration and Tibet, 1953–1961: Influence and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy” Ph.D. diss., University of Virginia, 1995.

34. Premen Addy, Tibet on the Imperial Chessboard (New Delhi: Academic Publishers, 1984).

35. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War.

36. Robert J. McMahon, The Cold War on the Periphery: The United States, India, and Pakistan (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994).

37. Ali, Cold War in the High Himalaya, provides the most comprehensive view of the Cold War in South Asia with relation to Tibet.

38. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet; TseponW. D. Shakabpa, Tibet: A Political History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1967); and Tsepon W. D. Shakabpa, Bod kyi srid don rgyal rabs [Political History of Tibet], 2 vols. (Kalimpong, India: Shakabpa House, n.d.).

39. Dawa Norbu, China’s Tibet Policy (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2001).

40. Shakya, The Dragon in the Land of Snows; Norbu, China’s Tibet Policy; and Warren S. Smith, Tibetan Nation: A History of Tibetan Nationalism and Sino-Tibetan Relations (Boulder: Westview Press, 1996).

41. Tony Poe, interview, San Francisco, 17 December 1999.

42. For example, Baba Yeshi, the chief leader in Mustang through the early 1970s, states: “In the beginning, I thought that the Americans were helping us, really helping us, to regain our country and our freedom. But, later, after many things, seeing what they gave, what they asked for, I realized they were only looking for their own benefit.” Baba Yeshi, interview by Thomas Laird, Kathmandu, December 1993.

43. This was Bruce Walker, who, posing as a member of the U.S. Air Force, studied Tibetan at the University of Washington in Seattle. His classmates included two now prominent Tibetologists— E. Gene Smith and Melvyn Goldstein. Bruce Walker, interview, San Francisco, 7 January 2000.

44. This story has been told to me several times. A written version is available in Tsering, Bstan rgol rgyal skyob, deb gnyis pa.

45. Goldstein, A History of Modern Tibet; and Geoffrey Samuel, Civilized Shamans: Buddhism in Tibetan Societies (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1993).

46. For a brief review of Khampa social, religious, and political organization by district, see Samuel, Civilized Shamans, pp. 64–86. On the political status of Kham in the early twentieth century, see Carole McGranahan, “Empire and the Status of Tibet: British, Chinese, and Tibetan Negotiations, 1913–1934,” in Alex McKay, ed., The History of Tibet, Vol. 3: The Tibetan Encounter with Modernity (Richmond, UK: Curzon Press, 2003), pp. 267–295.

47. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War.

48. Namling, Mi tshe’i lo rgyus dang ‘bril yod sna tshogs; and Sonam Tashi, Bod dmag gcig gi mi tshe [Life of a Tibetan Army Soldier] (Dharamsala, India: Sherig Pharkang, 1997).

49. The “5412 Special Group” was a secret group focusing on covert activities under National Security Council Directive 5412. Its members were the national security adviser; the deputy secretaries of state and defense; and one staff member, an assistant to CIA Director Allen Dulles. Unlike the NSC itself, the Special Group “was usually able to decide and coordinate the government’s covert programs on the spot without its members having to check with their principals.” Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War, p. 351 n. 46.

50. Ibid., p. 249; and McCarthy, Tears of the Lotus, p. 236.

51. Tibet was, of course, linked to China in U.S. policymaking. On U.S. policy toward China during the Cold War, albeit without reference to Tibet, see the collected essays in Robert S. Ross and Jiang Changbin, eds., Re-examining the Cold War: U.S.-China Diplomacy, 1954–1973 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Asia Center, 2001).

52. One of the most vocal opponents of the Tibet operation was John Kenneth Galbraith, the ambassador to India under President John F. Kennedy. For a discussion of Tibetan policy under Dwight Eisenhower, see Willner, “The Eisenhower Administration and Tibet.”

53.Walter Benjamin, “The Story-Teller,” in Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. by Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), p. 89.

54. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War, pp. 249–250; and McCarthy, Tears of the Lotus, pp. 231–236.

55. The documents were released to the Library of Congress in 1963 and were published as J. Chester Cheng, ed., The Politics of the Chinese Red Army: A Translation of the Bulletin of Activities of the People’s Liberation Army (Stanford, CA: Hoover Institution Press, 1966).

56. Tenzin Gyatso the 14th Dalai Lama, Freedom in Exile: The Autobiography of the Dalai Lama (New York: Harper Collins, 1990), p. 148.

57. Lobsang Jampa, interview.

58. Wangyal Lama, interview, Pokhara, Nepal, April 1998.

59. Robert Ragis Smith, “A History of Baba Yeshe’s Role in the Tibetan Resistance,” B.A. thesis, Johns Hopkins University, 1998. I thank General Baba Yeshi, his son Lobsang Palden, and his daughter-inlaw Dolma for sharing this manuscript with me. As it is a direct translation of Baba Yeshi’s own autobiography, I have changed the pronouns from “he” to “I.”

60. Lobsang Jampa, interview.

61. Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, In the Realm of the Diamond Queen (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993).

62. Tibetans commonly refer to Mustang as “Lo,” after the name of the kingdom’s capital, Lo Monthang.

63. See Tsering, Bstan rgol rgyal skyob.

64. The most detailed history of the Special Frontier Force is found in Conboy and Morrison, The CIA’s Secret War in Tibet.

65. Ratu Ngawang, interview, Delhi, 5 December 1997.

66. Jampa Kalden, interview, Dharamsala, 22 June 1999.

67. Ibid.

68. Brief Introduction, p. 21.

69. Georg Simmel, “The Stranger,” in Wolff, ed. and trans., The Sociology of Georg Simmel, pp. 402– 408.

70. George Patterson, A Fool at Forty (Waco, TX:Word Books, 1970); George Patterson, “Ambush on the Roof of the World,” Reader’s Digest, March 1968, pp. 59–64; Adrian Cowell, “I Saw the Secret Shooting War with China,” Argosy, Vol. 364, No. 5 (1967), pp. 29–33, 96–97; and Michel Peissel, The Secret War in Tibet (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1972).

71. Jeff Long, “Going After Wangdu: The Search for a Tibetan Guerrilla Leads to Colorado’s Secret CIA Camp,” in Michael Tobias, ed., Mountain People (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 1986), pp. 112–118; Hugh Deane, “History Repeats Itself: The Cold War in Tibet,” CovertAction, Vol. 29, No. 2 (1987), pp. 48–50; Fred Lane, “The Warrior Tribes of Kham,” Asiaweek, 2 March 1994, p. 17; William M. Leary, “Secret Mission to Tibet,” Air and Space, Vol. 12, No. 1 (December 1997/January 1998), pp. 62–71; Melinda Liu, “When Heaven Shed Blood,” Newsweek, 19 April 1999, p. 27; John B. Roberts III, “The Dalai Lama’s Great Escape,” George, October 1997, pp. 130– 133; John B. Roberts III, “The Secret War over Tibet,” The American Spectator, December 1997, pp. 31–35, 85; and Paul Salopek, “How the CIA Helped Tibet Fight Their Chinese Invaders,” The Chicago Tribune, 25 January 1997, p. 4. On the Tibetan side, see the film The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet, directed by Ritu Sarin and Tenzin Soman (White Crane Productions, 1999).

72. “Mis. Dev. Relating to Tibet,” Cable No. 683, from New Delhi to Department of State, 30 March 1950, in U.S. National Archives.

73. See Ali, Cold War in the High Himalaya, pp. 1–3.

74. Knaus, Orphans of the Cold War; and Liu, “When Heaven Shed Blood.”

75. Carole McGranahan, “Truth, Fear, and Lies: Exile Politics and Arrested Histories of the Tibetan Resistance,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 20, No. 4 (November 2005), pp. 570–600.

76. Foucault describes “subjugated knowledges” in two ways: first, as “historical contents that have been buried and disguised in a functionalist coherence or formal systematization”; and second, as “a whole set of knowledges that have been disqualified as inadequate to their task or insufficiently elaborated.” Michel Foucault, “Two Lectures,” in Colin Gordon, ed., Power/Knowledge (New York: Pantheon, 1980), pp. 34, 38.

77. CaroleMcGranahan, “Empire Out of Bounds: Tibet in the Era of Decolonization,” in Ann Stoler, Carole McGranahan, and Peter Perdue, eds., Imperial Formations and Their Discontents (Santa Fe: School of American Research Press, forthcoming).

78. On geohistoric categories in the international realm, see Fernando Coronil, “Beyond Occidentalism: Towards Post-Imperial Geohistoric Categories,” Cultural Anthropology, Vol. 11, No. 1 (1996), pp. 51–87.

79. Joseph Masco, “States of Insecurity: Plutonium and Post–Cold War Anxiety in New Mexico, 1992–96,” in Weldes et al., eds., Cultures of Insecurity, p. 226.

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The Shadow Circus: The CIA in Tibet
directed by Ritu Sarin and Tenzin Soman
White Crane Productions
1999

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Chapter 1. The Young Lamas Home School, Excerpt from Tibetan Tapestry
by Sarita [Cherry] Armstrong
2020

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The move to a bigger property at Dalhousie also allowed for some modest expansion of the school, requiring more volunteers and a gearing up of the administration. Cherry Armstrong, an eighteen-year-old whose mother was active in the Buddhist Society in London, arrived towards the end of the school's first summer in the hills.

Her role was a loosely defined mix of administrative and secretarial, particularly helping with the correspondence generated by the Tibetan Friendship Group and Freda's scheme for pen friends for young Tibetan refugees.

The western friend would include a small monetary gift, usually in the form of money orders ... In return the Tibetan pen friend would send a little photograph or a prayer written in Tibetan ... My job initially was to keep this scheme working and it was often a life-saver for individuals with no financial aid. It was a system that needed no overheads -- once the connection was established the money went directly to the person for whom it was intended and usually continued for years.

Freda was good at delegating, and at multitasking. Every morning she 'held court' with a pile of papers (the morning post) on her lap. Tibetan matters were handed over to Trungpa Tulku who acted as her interpreter and scribe (as well as doing his own religious and language studies). Indian matters were handed to the Indian administrator of the school, Attar Singh; English letters were handed to me, while Freda herself would be simultaneously writing her own more important letters. During this time there would be frequent Tibetan or Indian visitors asking for help or for Freda to use her influence on their behalf and everyone was attended to with care and foresight. Sitting beside her whilst all this was going on I could see that her method of coping was to give her undivided attention to the specific matter in hand; a kind of purposeful concentration to the exclusion of all other matters. When one matter was dealt with, the next had her exclusive attention .... She had an immense capacity for work.19

Cherry learnt to type, often with an old typewriter balanced on her lap or on her bed. It was rudimentary but it worked. Alongside the daily grind, Freda was also adept at maintaining connections with those of influence. When a couple of months after the move to Dalhousie Anita Morris headed home to England, she carried a package for Christmas Humphreys, the judge and doyen of the Buddhist Society in London, and for the renowned violinist Yehudi Menuhin.

Among those who came to visit was the Beat poet Allen Ginsberg, who turned up 'with an equally scruffy-looking mate, looking like a couple of beggars' -- as Cherry recalls. 'Freda invited him to our communal supper. I can't say I was impressed.'20

Cherry Armstrong's unpublished account of the year she spent at the Young Lamas' Home School has the freshness and excitement of a youthful odyssey but one laced with a shrewd eye for how the operation held together as well as affection for the lamas and her fellow volunteers. She described Freda as a 'grey-haired English lady in a dark red sari, looking very much like a lama herself, who greeted her on arrival with a bear-hug and a resounding kiss. 'She talked of England with some nostalgia in spite of the fact that she had completely adopted the Indian way of life, the Buddhist religion, and the oriental way of conducting affairs.' The main room at Kailash, large and shabby, 'could have been the sitting room of an old English farmhouse if it were not for the red-robed figures padding silently over the worn carpet.' She had a room with views over the mountains, heated by a stove, 'a squat black metal cylinder standing with its three legs in a pan of water to prevent the floorboards burning', with a lid into which wood and fir cones were fed.21

In the evening the lamas were doing a special puja, or religious chanting ceremony, to which we were all invited. The lamas were already assembled in the shrine room as we seated ourselves cross-legged at the back of the room. As they began chanting the sound which filled the room was completely alien to my ears and at first seemed quite cacophonous. Yet there was a fascination about it and I soon learnt to notice the rhythms and variations in tone. Half way through the ceremony the chanting faded away. Tin mugs were distributed and a monk brought Tibetan tea in a kettle with a yellow marigold stuck into the spout. I had been warned about Tibetan tea made with butter and salt as well as milk, but no one had warned me that unless I hid my mug somewhere out of reach it would be refilled again and again in spite of desperately shaking my head, nor that my pleadings of 'No more, thank you,' would be taken as mere politeness so long as my mug stood unguarded within easy reach of the spout of the kettle.

Cherry was also drawn into the teaching at the school -- one of perhaps half-a-dozen young westerners of different nationalities, only a few of whom had a serious interest in Buddhism. She found the atmosphere at the school to be relaxed and convivial. 'It was a place of laughter and joking.'

The yearly rhythm of the school adapted to changing circumstances. The Home School operated in Dalhousie from April to November. During those summer months, as Cherry recalls, the tulkus could learn English, French or German as well as Hindi, general knowledge and simple mathematics, while still keeping mainly to the rules of monastic discipline. One of the aims of the school was to avoid a social rift between the bulk of the Tibetan refugees who were getting educated in Indian schools and the young lamas, the elite of Tibetan society, whose religious vocation required them to be educated separately. The plan was that each winter the pupils would return to their gurus and concentrate on their religious studies.

In the first winter in Dalhousie, that plan was disrupted by a month-long border war between India and China, which ended with the victorious Chinese declaring a ceasefire on 20th November 1962. China crossed into what India held to be its territory both on the western part of the border, in Aksai Chin a remote area of eastern Ladakh, and in the east in what was then known in India as the North East Frontier Agency where many Tibetans had initially sought refuge. The school wasn't in any immediate peril but there was a real sense of alarm. 'Every evening we sat silently attentive round the tiny transistor radio as it crackled and spluttered out the latest reports of fighting and death,' Armstrong wrote. 'Every evening the news became worse. For this reason many of the tulkus' gurus who were living in the frontier area very near to the fighting had begged Freda not to send the tulkus back to them as was customary for the winter months. Freda had of course agreed and in a manner typical of her ways she decided to turn this into something positive for everyone.'22 She decided to move the entire school for the winter months to a Buddhist centre in Delhi, the Ladakh Buddhist Vihar, in one of the older and more central districts of the city close to the Yamuna river.

And she arranged two coaches to transport both young lamas and volunteers. On the way, the entire school visited the Dalai Lama at Dharamsala -- where Freda, Cherry and the lamas had their photo taken with the most revered figure within the Tibetan diaspora -- and meandered through Punjab on the way to the Indian capital. From there, several of the group went by train on a pilgrimage to the Buddhist sites in north India -- as Freda sometimes remarked, the Tibetan refugees were helping to bring Buddhism back to its original home, to the land where the Buddha achieved enlightenment.

The impact of the border fighting followed the school to Delhi. Hundreds of Tibetans displaced by the fighting, and so uprooted for a second time, appeared at the gates of the Buddhist centre. Cherry Armstrong looked on from her balcony as a yellow-robed senior lama strode over to the entrance: 'the gates were flung open and the people poured through, eager but unhurried'.

Many filled the unoccupied dormitories, others crowded into tiny rooms and some made homes under the stairs, while others claimed a little patch of veranda for their belongings. Those at the back of the crowd for whom there was no room sat down with their loads on the river bank. During the next few days more and yet more arrived until they totalled over a thousand. Huge marquees usually reserved for festivals were erected to house them. Even more camped in the open around Delhi -- on islands in the middle of roundabouts, in parks, and on the roadside verge.

Their tattered clothes hung on them, thick and heavy in the Delhi heat, yet their grimy faces were cheerful. Lama Lobsang organised those inside the vihara into groups of a dozen or so, and it was not long before food aid and parcels of clothes arrived. I would never have believed that human beings in such desperate straits could have distributed these windfalls with such calm orderliness. I never saw any ill-feeling or someone trying to take more than their share ... The women and girls were shy about wearing short cotton frocks and indeed all their quiet dignity was lost in the new attire. They had lost everything to do with their homeland and now they had to change even the way they looked.23

For Freda, it must have reminded her of Misamari: the destitution, the shortage of medicine, and the desperately ill -- there were many suffering from TB among the new arrivals -- who sought her out for help in getting treatment.

Alongside this new emergency, Freda continued to pursue another hugely ambitious project. 'My two lama "sons" are coming to England in March ... wonderful young lamas,' Freda told Olive Chandler -- an indication of the strong emotional as well as spiritual bonds forged with these tulkus.24 Along with John [E. Stapleton] Driver, a scholar of Tibet who had spent several years in Kalimpong, she managed to secure a Spalding scholarship to allow Trungpa to study at Oxford University. Akong was to accompany him.

They were, in Cherry Armstrong's words, Freda's 'golden boys'. She recognised in Trungpa, in particular, an exceptional spiritual presence and an ability to communicate and to inspire those with whom he came into contact. Both had formal roles at the school -- Trungpa as codirector (he described himself as the school's spiritual advisor) while Akong made sure that the place ran with tolerable efficiency. Anita Morris, who taught English both at Green Park and at Dalhousie, had mixed opinions of the two. 'Akong was very much taking care of the younger ones -- a lot of them were a lot younger. So if they had any pains or any problems, they would go to Akong,' she recalls. 'He'd be going down maybe to a doctor at Dalhousie if necessary or just for ordinary shopping and taking care of things. Whereas Trungpa just did his own thing, his bits of painting and that sort of stuff.'25 A Tibetan lama who knew both well at Dalhousie comments that Trungpa always wanted attention and prominence, while Akong was solid and reliable. Trungpa was already developing a reputation as something of a wild child. Although it was a well-kept secret, he apparently fathered a child with a Tibetan nun who came to Dalhousie to visit him. They took a mattress up on the roof of the school -- said Trungpa's English wife in her memoirs -- and spent the night there. That was not at all typical of the school, but not entirely untypical ofTrungpa.26 He was an enormously important figure in the spread of Tibetan Buddhism in North America and Europe and one of the first to teach westerners in English, but he had lifelong issues about sexual promiscuity and the use of drink and drugs.

At Ladakh Buddhist Vihar, Cherry remembers Trungpa and Akong sitting in their room studying maps of the London Underground and out-of-date bus timetables in preparation for their journey. They travelled by boat. On the day they were due to dock outside London, the pupils at the Home School -- by now back in Dalhousie -- held a prayer ceremony on an open patch of woodland on the hillside adjoining Kailash. 'They lit a fire of juniper branches and the smoke rose in a blue spire into the branches of the trees and on up into the cloudless sky. We sat on brightly patterned Tibetan rugs spread over the stony ant-infested ground and the lamas began their chanting. It was a happy, picnic-like affair around the scented bonfire, with kettles of hot buttery Tibetan tea.'27 At Tilbury, Cherry's parents were on hand to welcome the two Tibetans -- as were Anita Morris and other well-wishers -- and to provide them with an initial berth at the family home in High Wycombe. Once installed at Oxford, Trungpa and Akong were joined by an old friend and another alumnus of the Home School, Chime Rinpoche. They shared a small flat in St Margaret's Road, on the same street as Freda's old college, and Akong took work as a hospital orderly to help support the household. All three became powerful beacons of Tibetan Buddhism in the west.

Alongside this noticeable success, Freda faced some acute disappointments. She made enemies as well as friends, and sometimes these rivalries became vicious. Lois Lang-Sims commented, without saying what prompted the observation, that Freda's enemies 'were not only numerous but of an almost incredible malevolence'.28 That intense animosity seems to have been behind the most wounding public assault on Freda and her integrity. The stiletto was wielded by D.F. [Dosabhai Framji] Karaka, an Oxford contemporary of the Bedis. He was a writer and journalist of some distinction, though by the early 1960s he was the editor of a not-so-distinguished Bombay-based tabloidstyle weekly, the Current. This was awash with brash, sensationalist stories, reflecting Karaka's fiercely polemical style, his crusading anticommunism and his impatience with Nehru, India's prime minister, for his supposed lack of zeal in standing up for the national interest. The weekly paper bore the slogan 'God Save the Motherland' on its front page.

In September 1963, Freda's photograph graced the front-page of the Current, accompanying a story which also took up much of the following page. It was a hatchet job. Under his own byline, Karaka asserted that 'an Englishwoman, married to an Indian, is attempting to express a great deal of anxiety to help the Buddhist cause as a screen for her Communist activities'. He insisted that 'Mrs Freda Bedi ... will always, in my opinion, be a Communist first, irrespective of her outwardly embraced Buddhism.' This was an absurd accusation. Freda's days as a communist sympathiser had come to a close almost twenty years earlier. Her husband had abandoned communism a decade previously. But the accusation of being a concealed communist was deeply wounding especially when the Tibetan refugees regarded communist China as their arch enemy -- the occupiers of their homeland and destroyers of their culture, faith and tradition -- and when India had recently been at war with China.

'Freda has dabbled with Communism ever since my student days in Oxford,' Karaka reported. 'She was, in fact, at Oxford at the same time as myself. Later, she married Bedi, a well known Indian Communist. They both came out to India and plunged themselves into the Communist movement.'29The article resorted to innuendo, suggesting that 'the alleged indoctrination of Sheikh Abdulla [sic] was largely to be traced to his very close association with Freda Bedi'. It suggested that some former associates of the Bedis in Kashmir had 'mysteriously disappeared'. Freda was alleged to have been caught up in controversy about Buddhist property and funds before turning, 'with the active encouragement of Shri J. Nehru, the Prime Minister', to the running of the Young Lamas' Home School. The article suggested that Freda was getting money from the Indian government, and using government headed paper to appeal for funds from supporters in America and elsewhere. Karaka suggested that the Tibetan Friendship Group was a 'Communist stunt' and he alleged that 'noted Communists, with the usual "blessings" of Mr. Nehru, are using the excuse of helping Tibetan refugees and Buddhist monks for furthering the cause of Communism in strategic border areas.'

Aside from the venomous smears, the only evidence of inappropriate conduct that the article pointed to was her use of official notepaper to appeal for funds for her school and other Tibetan relief operations. It cited a letter of complaint, sent by an unnamed Buddhist organisation which clearly was antagonistic to Freda, stating that she had been using the headed paper of the Central Social Welfare Board which bore the Government of India's logo. A civil servant's response was also quoted: 'Mrs Bedi is not authorised to use Government of India stationery for correspondence in connection with the affairs of the "Young Lama's Home" or the "Tibetan Friendship Group". This has now been pointed out to Mrs. Bedi.'

Even if Freda has been using government headed paper to help raise money -- which those who worked with her say is perfectly possible -- it was hardly a major misdemeanour. But detractors were able to use this blemish to damage her reputation. She was, it seems, distraught at this vicious personal attack and took advice about whether to take legal action. She was advised, probably wisely, to do nothing, as any riposte would simply give further life to accusations so insubstantial that they would quickly fade away. 'The accusation was that Freda was a communist in nun's clothing -- not that Freda was a nun at that time,' recalls Cherry Armstrong. 'I remember her being particularly distressed and "beyond belief' when she believed she had identified the culprit. Freda was totally dumbfounded about it.'

Freda was convinced that another western convert to Buddhism, Sangharakshita (earlier Dennis Lingwood), was either behind the slur or was abetting it.30 They had much in common -- including a deep antipathy to each other. Lingwood encountered Theosophy and Buddhism as a teenager in England and was ordained before he was twenty by the Burmese monk U Titthila, who later helped Freda towards Buddhism. During the war, he served in the armed forces in South and South-east Asia and from 1950 spent about fourteen years based in Kalimpong in north-east India, where he was influenced by several leading Tibetan Buddhist teachers. In the small world of Indian Buddhism, the two English converts rubbed shoulders. More than sixty years later, Sangharakshita -- who established a Buddhist community in England -- recalls coming across Freda, then new to Buddhism, living at the Ashoka Vihar Buddhist centre outside Delhi. 'She was tall, thin, and intense and wore Indian dress. She had a very pale complexion, with light fair hair and very pale blue eyes. In other words, she looked very English! I also noticed, especially later on, that she was very much the Memsaheb ... During the time that I knew Freda she knew hardly anything about Buddhism, having never studied it seriously .... She had however developed what I called her "patter" about the Dalai Lama, compassion, and the poor dear little Tulkus. So far as I could see, Freda had no spiritual awareness or Enlightenment. She may, of course, have developed these later.'31 His view of the Young Lamas' Home School is also somewhat jaundiced -- 'some of [the tulkus] developed rather expensive tastes, such as for Rolex watches.'

Sangharakshita's recollection is that he and Freda 'got on quite well, even though I did not take her "Buddhism" very seriously' as they were both English and (in his view) of working-class origin. He was not impressed by her husband: 'he struck me as a bit of a humbug ... I was told (not by Freda) that he was then living with one of his cousins.' In his memoirs, he recycled one of the allegations that featured in Current, that an 'Englishwoman married to a well-known Indian communist' was trying to 'wrest' control of Ashoka Vihar outside Delhi from the Cambodian monk who had founded it.32 Decades later, he continues to recount this and other of the items on the Current charge sheet, describing Freda as 'a rather ruthless operator' while in Kashmir. He recalls the furore over the Current article, but says that he had no reason to believe that Freda was using the Lamas' School for a political purpose. Freda never tackled him over her suspicions, but he does not deny a tangential involvement. 'It is possible,' he concedes, 'that certain reservations about the Young Lamas' Home School eventually reached the ears of Current.'

The incident was a reflection of the intense rivalries within the Tibetan movement and its supporters. 'Strong personalities do seem to draw opposition by their very nature,' Cherry Armstrong comments, 'and there is a lot of personal politics amongst the Tibetan groups -- not all light and loveliness as one might like to think.'33

--14: The Young Lamas' Home School, Excerpt from The Lives of Freda: The Political, Spiritual and Personal Journeys of Freda Bedi, by Andrew Whitehead

Map


Kailash

"Did you have a good journey?" asked the Tibetan lama in deep red robes and rubber beach shoes.

"Yes" -- I hesitated as I wondered whether the night-long train ride across the Indian plains in the packed third-class carriage was 'good'. Interesting and exciting, but not good. "Quite good," I conceded.

The lama chuckled; he knew what I meant. We were sitting in a large, shabby room which might have been in an old English farmhouse if it were not for the red-robed figures padding over the worn carpet. The room was dim except for a brilliant shaft of sunlight that streamed through the window, showing up every speck of dust in the air. If I could have squinted through the inward-slanting sunbeam, I would have seen a range of the Himalayas topped with snow, dazzling against the deep blue sky.

Opposite me sat the grey-haired English lady who had greeted me on the hill path with a bear-hug and a resounding kiss. She spoke of England with some nostalgia, although she had adopted the Indian way of life, the Buddhist religion, and the oriental manner of conducting affairs. While we talked, I attempted to eat some rice and lentils placed before me by a thin, sadly smiling Indian cook.

Even in this outlandish place high in the mountains there were several Europeans and Americans who hurried to the room, eager to meet the newcomer from some civilised place on the other side of the world. First there was an elderly French lady called Suzanne, then Johnny, with his straggly beard and lank hair, who had travelled to India from America, taking several years over it as he considered all sensible travellers should. Jonathan had made his way overland from England, rebelling against his public school upbringing, although it remained an obvious part of his nature. Another Englishman, Frank, small and dark-haired sat quietly in the background, watching with bright attentive eyes. Maretta, also from America, seated herself cross-legged in an armchair, grinning at me like a Cheshire cat, her green eyes looking extra large behind black-rimmed glasses.

When I had done my best with the rice and lentils, they led me to another house where the volunteer helpers lived. My upstairs room was sizeable with wide windows overlooking beautiful snowy mountain peaks, now turning to gold in the setting sun. In the centre of the room stood the bed -- a wooden frame with tapes woven across it. I had been told to bring my sleeping bag. There was a cupboard, a chair and a table with a vase of wildflowers that Maretta had placed there. Next to the bed stood a medieval-looking stove -- a squat black metal cylinder standing with its three legs in a pan of water to prevent the floorboards burning. In the top was an aperture with a lid, into which wood and fir-cones could be thrown. The chimney rose to the height of my head then careered drunkenly across the room and out of the wall. Jonathan took the lid off the stove, cupped his hands, and blew vigorously into it. I was feeling cold and shivery in the unaccustomed surroundings, so he produced an aspirin "to stop old ladies from dying and being reborn." As he went out of the door he remarked, "We've been told to treat you like a sister," and gave me a wink.

I lay down in my sleeping bag with my duffle coat over the top and reflected on how quickly everything had happened! I had left school without the exam results to get me into a university, and after weeks of drearily looking through newspapers trying to find a job, a friend of my mother remarked, "I could arrange for you to work in India with the Tibetan refugees. You could go tomorrow if you liked. You wouldn't get much pay and conditions are not great, I hear, but it would be interesting work. I know an English lady who has a school for Tibetan lamas at Dalhousie in the foothills of the Himalayas. She always needs teachers and secretaries."

A few letters were exchanged, and my job confirmed. Then the news came that China had made aggressive incursions over the Indian border near to the school, and it looked as though it could break into full scale war. The Chinese had already built roads up to the frontier unnoticed by the Indians in this wild, unpopulated area! My parents fretted, but Freda Bedi who ran the school, asked if I could come immediately before they transferred to Delhi for the winter months.

The plane was three hours late in reaching Delhi but a Scottish volunteer from the school called Duncan, was still waiting for me. Three hours is not a long time to wait in India. We sped into New Delhi on the airport bus, passing the ubiquitous cows, the women carrying pots and bundles on their heads, the turbaned Sikhs. I had tried to imagine what India would be like, and with a superficial glance from the bus it did not seem extraordinary. I suppose I had expected the lean cows wandering across the road, the erratic driving with horns blowing, the poverty, the dust and dirt. But -- men riding bicycles in their pyjamas? There was a man with a briefcase and rolled umbrella defecating by the side of the road! Another was being given a shave on the dusty pavement: I giggled at him as I stared out of the window. The attendant caught my eye, and nudging his friend, laughed back at me. Then the bus moved on.

Early in the morning the overnight train from Delhi reached its terminus at Pathankot. I had started the journey with half a buttock lodged on a few inches of wooden seat and the worrying prospect of spending the night like that. The head of the soldier next to me kept falling onto my shoulder as he nodded off. Was it on purpose? I couldn't be sure, but was too polite to do more than edge away, whilst giving him a surreptitious poke with my elbow. The train was full of soldiers going to the north Indian front to fight the Chinese. They looked hopelessly inadequate. Halfway through the night an officer came onto the train, ordered all the soldiers to climb onto the roof racks so I could lie out on the bench seat, which I did regardless of feeling like a slaughtered lamb on an altar.

At Pathankot Duncan emerged from the other end of the carriage where he had spent the night on the floor in his sleeping bag. "This will be a treat. I've been looking forward to this," he said, as he steered me toward the First Class Station Restaurant where we ate a slap-up English breakfast with bacon and eggs, toast and marmalade, washed down with a proper pot of tea. Soon it was time for the bus to leave for Dalhousie, so with our luggage on its roof we started the journey over the last part of the plains and up into the mountains. Owing to the narrowness of the road, they allowed traffic to travel into the mountains only between certain hours, so before beginning the climb we stopped for an hour in a tiny village. I was feeling exhausted after the journey so stayed in the bus and stared out of the window. Duncan was asleep on a vacated bench at the back.

While the sun beat down, a sweet-seller, enormously fat, sat amongst his pyramids of sweets while the flies crawled over them. Did he ever sell any, I wondered? The sweetseller's head slumped onto his broad chest and he slumbered. A gaunt old woman with a ring in her nose was silting on a rope bed. She waved a hand and shouted raucously to a man on the other side of the roadway. Curry was mulling in a cauldron over a charcoal fire nearby. A cow nuzzled at the ground where someone had dropped a bit of flour. The bus conductor, a young Sikh in khaki uniform, the end of his turban hanging rakishly over one shoulder, was laughing with some passengers. The driver turned away from the group to urinate into the ditch.

At last a bus arrived from the opposite direction and the drivers chatted over a cup of tea together. Finally, we set off at a terrific pace towards the mountains. Each hairpin bend took us higher and revealed a more magnificent view. The driver delighted in driving at the edge of the road, and for me it was thrilling to look down over the precipice to the valley hundreds of feet below. Great landslips had left the red earth bare like a sore gash in the mountainside; boulders clung to the slope and a rush of stones showed where a river would pour down in a torrent during the rainy seasons. As the route became steeper and twistier, the air turned colder until I was huddled in my duffle coat, though Duncan remained unperturbed in his short-sleeved cotton shirt.

When we got out of the bus at Dalhousie, I could scarcely walk a few yards with my bags without gasping for oxygen like a fish out of water. We were 8000 feet above sea level but I felt rather foolish when I thought of mountaineers who make expeditions to places twice this height. After we had been walking for what seemed to be miles up a road that would have put me on my hands and knees if it had been any steeper; we turned off along a little track which threaded its way between enormous fir trees. At last Duncan pointed out my destination -- a large rambling old house built on an outcrop of rock on the hillside. This house was named Kailash, reminding all who lived there of the sacred Himalayan mountain. Just then, I saw coming towards us through the wood three maroon-robed Tibetan lamas and a grey-haired English lady dressed in a dark red sari, looking very much like a lama herself. This was Freda Bedi, who organised the school and who had greeted me so warmly.

The first evening I arrived, the lamas were doing a special puja; a religious chanting ceremony with drums and bells, to which we were all invited. The lamas were already assembled in the shrine room as we seated ourselves cross-legged at the back. As they began chanting, the sound which filled the room was completely alien to my ears and at first seemed quite cacophonous. Yet there was a fascination about it and I soon learnt to notice the rhythms and variations in tone. Halfway through the ceremony the chanting faded away. Tin mugs were distributed, and a monk brought tea in a kettle with a yellow marigold stuck into the spout. I had been warned about Tibetan tea made with butter and salt as well as milk, but no one had advised me that unless I hid my mug somewhere out of reach, it would be refilled again and again despite shaking my head, nor that my pleadings of "No more, thank you," would be taken as mere politeness, so long as my mug stood unguarded within reach of the spout of the kettle.

All the students at the lamas' School had the title of tulku. [1] [Tulku is the title given to a recognised reincarnated teacher. Lama means 'teacher' so all tulkus are lamas. Rinpoche, meaning 'Precious One', is used amongst western Buddhists for tulkus and lamas, but at the time of writing (1964) it was used primarily as a form of address rather than as part of a name. Any lack of this term in my writing should not be taken as lack of respect.] These were special children whom their countrymen believed had reached, through a series of innumerable rebirths (as they consider all beings to be reborn many times) a state of enlightenment, when they could be free from the round of birth, decay and death that all beings undergo. But of their own free will, they have decided to be reborn in order to help other beings along the spiritual path. Such beings are known as bodhisattvas. When a tulku dies, those who knew him well in his previous life, seek out his reincarnation and take him back to the monastery where he is brought up to this special role in life.

Tibetan society centred on the monastic system. Lamas and tulkus were regarded by the lay people as their spiritual teachers and often as their secular leaders too, the spiritual and worldly being far less clearly defined than in other cultures. The monasteries relied on the communities for their food and livelihood; the people by their own nature relied on the lamas for their spiritual needs and happiness. Amongst the Tibetan people one sees tremendous love and admiration for the Dalai Lama and tulkus and for the entire community of monks. It is this centralising force that unites the refugees and gives them an underlying purpose in life.

In India the younger generation of Tibetan children were receiving a western form of education in schools set up by the Indian government, but the tulkus were unable to attend and keep up their intensive religious studies at the same time. Freda realised that unless the tulkus of school age (some as young as eight or ten years old) received some modern learning, they would become an antiquated group within the current Tibetan society.

So she established the Young Lamas Home School to give a series of courses lasting from April to November, to teach them English and Hindi, French or German, plus some general knowledge and simple mathematics, whilst still keeping to the rules of monastic discipline. Thus they could adapt to the new requirements of Tibetan society, and some of them could be of great value in universities in the west. They would spend each winter with their guru (their mentor) to catch up with their demanding spiritual studies and meditation.

Most of the volunteer teachers had an understanding of the people they were teaching and of their requirements, which Freda considered more important than standard western qualifications.


Duncan's English Lesson

I was brought up in a Quaker household, though a very liberal one, and my mother's interests ranged over the years through Spiritualism and Theosophy to Buddhism. My upbringing left me with an underlying scepticism towards any priesthood. Yet here I was, thrust into the midst of it. But unlike Christian priests who claim to be intermediaries between their congregation and their God, the tulkus made no claims of their own talents or special standing, and seemed shy of appearing different from other people.

They had all been through incredible hardship on their escape from Tibet and witnessed terrible actions. Now they needed to adjust to an environment most of them never even knew existed! Yet, they maintained the gentle humility of one who accepts equally their own strengths and weaknesses. They retained a natural understanding and compassion towards others.

When told the story of Jesus Christ and shown a crucifix, they considered it desperately sad that the man had such a disastrous kharma [2] [Kharma is a basic Buddhist belief that everything that happens to you in this life is the result of past thoughts and actions, often carried over from previous lives. Whatever you do (or even think) in this life creates the kharma of the future. Tibetans not only believe in a personal kharma, but also in the collective kharma of a country, and indeed of a world.] They could not grasp why anyone would worship a man dying in such torment. Equally, the tulkus must have questioned the bad kharma they experienced in this life, when they were purported to be enlightened beings, whose kharma should have been all light and loveliness! But they all seemed to be taking it on the chin!

Coming from England, what struck me most was their cheerfulness and kindness despite all the hardships and anguish they had experienced. Because of their inherent belief in kharma, they had not developed the inevitable chip on the shoulder or bitterness that someone of a different culture would have. They were as full of fun as any young people, playing practical jokes on each other, laughing uproariously, or occasionally even giggling in the middle of a recital of the scriptures. Their sense of fun might have seemed childish (well, most of them were still children) if it were not coloured by their sensitivity.

The first lama I got to know was Lhaka Tulku, whose soft features displayed an inner beauty of spirit. One day, looking rather shy, he took us volunteers to the shack in the woods where he would live through the winter with sixteen other monks. Instead of Tibetan tea he had tactfully prepared English tea, very sweet and milky, which we drank in the garden sitting amongst giant orange marigolds, like so many golden suns against the deep blue sky. As we sat sipping the tea out of scalding glasses held in handkerchiefs, there was not a sound to be heard. The Tibetan enchantment had begun.

"Now please may I take you to the Gyume College?" asked Lhaka Tulku. ''They are having a special initiation ceremony. Mummy is already there." All the tulkus at the school called Freda 'Mummy'. She wanted me to do the same, but I found it hard as I had my own 'Mummy' at home. She also wanted me to take meditation with Trungpa Tulku, [3] [Chogyam Trungpa Tulku's style of 'crazy wisdom' became popular in America where he established the Shambala Buddhist Centres and published several books. A flamboyant lifestyle contributed to an early death in 1987, but his Buddhist centres live on. The importance of his initial 'jump start' to the American people, filling a spiritual vacuum in a way they could accept, should not be underestimated.] who spoke such good English, but I declined. I already felt like a sponge absorbing everything; to meditate as well would have been more than I could cope with. It seemed ungrateful to turn down such a wonderful opportunity, as she told me there were a number of Westerners that the tulkus refused to teach because they perceived their psyches to be such that it could do them more harm than good. Anyway, if I were to have practised meditation, I would have preferred a different teacher.

We followed the sound of deep-toned chanting, down a steep path towards a large white tent. A camp of tents housed the remaining few of the thousands who had once belonged to the Gyume and Gyuto [4] [The monks and lamas of this unique Tibetan tradition now have their own place at Dharamsala, thanks to the Dalai Lama's use of money from his Nobel Peace Prize. https:/www.gelukfoundation.org/gyuto-monastery/] Tantric Colleges of Lhasa, with practices and traditions going back thousands of years and properly understood by only a few. We were greatly honoured to attend the ceremony and only permitted because of our close association with the tulkus.

The monks had made a special mandala of finely powdered coloured stones and chippings. Its intricate geometric design was a symbolic representation to help the intuitive mind appreciate the whole state of being in which we live, the manifold, the condition of our existence; then showing the way back, or indeed the way on, to a state of reintegration with 'the Absolute'. They had been creating it as part of an initiation to a higher stage of meditation for some monks, accompanied by several days of chanting. Afterwards, they would destroy the exquisite mandala, which had taken many weeks to construct, to instil in them the realisation of the insubstantiality of human existence.

We went into a large tent attached to a house, the only place big enough to hold the whole gathering, and breathed in the incense-laden air. I watched for a while with conjectural interest, regarding with some misgiving this 'high church ritual' and unaware at the time of the true significance of the ceremony. Then, it was as if the intense atmosphere created by the ceremonial chanting, the booming of the trumpets, bonging of drums, tinkling of hand drums combining intricate hand movements with the sacred dorje, penetrated my aura of scepticism. A feeling of peaceful yet exultant joy swept through me. No longer an isolated being viewing a strange scene, I was bubbling over with joyful compassion that reached out to everyone and everything. It felt as though each person was giving off an electric current mingling in the surrounding air.

Later we were shown into a dark rather dingy room of the house, where the monks presented us with the traditional white Tibetan scarves of greeting. We sat quietly and grinned at each other over the obligatory tea and biscuits, unable to speak a word of each other's language, but radiating happiness without the least awkwardness. What a privilege it was just to sit with these people who spread about them such an infectious happiness. I later learnt of the idea of dharshan where one can receive a blessing simply by being in someone's presence. That was how I felt.

Outside again in the brilliant sunshine, as we walked back up the hill the others were chattering excitedly. But their words did not take shape in my mind. I was not a separate person who listened or heard or even thought. I was only a moving part of the incredibly blue sky, the trees and plants with their bright green leaves, and the sparkling white road. Had they put some soma in the tea? [5] [Soma is a hallucinatory plant mentioned in the ancient Vedic texts.]

A prayer to Brāhmanaspati for protection from wicked men
1 The godless man whoever plots against us, Brāhmanaspati,
Thou shalt give up as prey to me the worshipper who pour the juice.
2 If, Soma, any spiteful man hath aimed at us whose thoughts are kind,
Smite with thy bolt upon his face: he, crushed to pieces, vanisheth.
3 Soma, whoever troubleth us, be he a stranger or a kin,
Deprive him of the strength he hath: slay him thyself like mighty Dyaus!

-- The Hymns of the Atharvaveda, translated by Ralph T.H. Griffith

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Chapter 2. The Journey to Delhi, Excerpt from Tibetan Tapestry
by Sarita [Cherry] Armstrong
2020

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Chapter 2. The Journey to Delhi

For a long time we had been hearing of the encroachment of the Chinese troops into northern India, one line of attack in the east, another in the west dangerously near Dalhousie. Every evening we sat silently attentive around the transistor radio as it crackled and spluttered out the latest reports of fighting and death. Every evening the news became worse. For this reason many of the tulkus' gurus (spiritual teachers) who were living in the frontier areas very near to the fighting, had asked Freda not to send the tulkus back to them as was customary for the winter months. Freda agreed and in a manner typical of her, turned the situation into something positive for everyone. The entire school would move to Delhi for the season. Moreover, the journey to get there would become a 'visual educational tour' of the Punjab for the tulkus.

The school hired a bus to take the 25 tulkus accompanied by the men volunteers, and a minibus for Freda, the women volunteers and the Indian staff. Refugee rations -- sacks of rice, lentils and potatoes -- would be prepared for evening meals each night by Suju-of-the-sad-smile, Freda's Indian cook. A dormitory and one or two small rooms could be hired very cheaply at any of the local rest houses along the way.

On the day we were to leave, a burly man in a leather jacket, crash helmet and sunglasses, the rest of his face covered with a bushy black beard, arrived on the doorstep. At that moment Johnny appeared and yelled, "George! I never thought you'd make it!" But he had made it, riding his motorbike across Europe, Turkey and the Persian Desert. Now here he was sitting down to breakfast with us. He ate as though he had not seen food this side of Istanbul.

"I'm so glad I got here in time," he said between mouthfuls. "I see you're all planning to leave. The coaches were at the bottom of the hill as I came up. This tour sounds marvellous. Freda won't mind if I tag along, will she? Of course I'll pay my way. Say, is there any more of that porridge?"

So that is how our two buses came to have a motor-bike escort. Despite initial appearances, George was gentle as a lamb and had a heart of gold. All the tulkus loved him, the little ones especially coming to take his hand when we were walking anywhere, and a ride on the motorbike became the ultimate thrill for them. He enlivened our company too, with unending tales of his adventures and jokes about his mishaps along the way.

Everything, including bedrolls, sacks of rice and cooking pots, was piled onto the roof of the buses. Swarms of Tibetans from the refugee camps added to the crowds that came to bid farewell to the tulkus and to receive their final blessing. At last we started the long winding journey down through the mountains with George and Johnny on the motorbike looking like a police escort, sometimes behind, sometimes in front, often out of sight if we passed through a village, for they could never resist the temptation of stopping for tea and fried pakoras. [6] [Little chunks of spicy vegetable fried in batter; a standard Indian street food.]

I felt glad that we were going downhill, for the engine of our bus coughed and spluttered at the slightest acceleration.

"It is because of the high altitude, Memsahib," the driver explained to Freda. "Soon she will be quite better. Immediately we are on the plains she will be going very well." The other bus was not doing so well either and it was not long before it pulled to the side of the road and stopped. A row of shaved heads popped out of the windows and arms waved excitedly. The driver, a white-haired Sikh in the usual khaki costume of a bus driver, came over to us smiling apologetically. He hardly needed to explain, for the flat tyre at the back was obvious.

Luckily he had a spare wheel and it was a good opportunity for us to get out and have a look around while the wheel was changed. The air was much warmer already, although we were still in the hills. Everything was quiet, save a cricket chirping continually in the dry shrubs. Waves of terraces were cultivated on the hillside and a little way below us an Indian was driving two sheep and a goat along a narrow path. The goat stopped whenever possible to take a swift bite at any thorny branch as it passed.

"Mummy! Mummy, we are going now!" called little Tulku Pema Tenzing, the youngest at the school, who was hardly more than ten years old. As the bus moved off we noticed that Trungpa Tulku's seat was empty and presumed he must have decided to travel in the other bus. When we reached the barrier at the end of the one-way section of the road, where I had had to wait in the bus on the way up a few days before, Freda hurried round to the other vehicle.

"Is Trungpa Tulku with you? Is he there?" she called, but he was nowhere to be found. In fact, no-one remembered seeing him after we had stopped to change the wheel.

"I'll go back and see if I can find him," said George. He turned his bike around and roared back up the hill while we went to the Rest House to get a cool drink. The Rest House was a relic from the British Raj days, kept by an elderly Sikh who spoke perfect English. He remembered with nostalgia the Dalhousie that had been a popular hill station for the British. Oh yes, they had done a good trade then, but now very few people came to Dalhousie and certainly no British people. He regretted to inform us that as so few people came this way now, the cost of the fizzy orange we were drinking had gone up considerably.

After sitting around for about an hour we at last caught the sound of the motorbike's engine and round the corner speeded George with Trungpa Tulku riding pillion. He was grinning gleefully over George's shoulder, his long red robes billowing behind him. Between delighted giggles he told us how he had gone to sit in the shade of a tree and when he came back, there was no sign of anyone.

"Oh dear!" I exclaimed. "You must have been worried."

''No,'' he replied grinning, "I knew someone would come back, so I waited. And I could have a great opportunity to ride on the motorbike!" I suspected that the prospect of a bike ride had been the main reason for his disappearance.

We took the road to Dharamsala and after a short time stopped again for lunch. It looked as though someone had sent a message on ahead of us, for all the villagers were out in the street cooking spicy titbits for us to eat. Curry and rice was handed round on banana leaves, hot pakoras on pieces of paper that seemed to have been torn from a child's old exercise book, and thick, creamy buffalo yogurt in the little disposable earthenware bowls in which it had been set. Wonderful!

We passed through the beautiful Kangra Valley in the foothills of the mountains where the countryside sloped gently, the land looked fertile and the people happy. Newly cut grass was lying in the fields and large deciduous trees gave shade, making a pleasant change from the pines of the high hills and the brown treeless plains. Women with shiny brass pots on their heads waved and smiled as we passed. Freda told us she was planning to buy a small place here where she could spend her final days in retreat.

Early evening, and with much hooting and shouting the buses negotiated the crowded bazaar of Dharamsala. There was always a large encampment of Tibetans here, for the Dalai Lama lived in a bungalow on the top of the hill and the stream of pilgrims was unceasing. Swashbuckling Tibetan men in knee-high leather boots, broad-brimmed hats and thick, though often worn and torn traditional knee-length coats stood in groups gossiping. Old men with their prayer-wheels of silver and polished wood wandered up and down, absorbed in their introspections. For them prayer was not a supplication to God for this or that to happen, for wealth or health, but a state of intense yearning for purity or completeness. The Buddha is no Almighty God who fulfils mankind's wishes (at His whim) but an example of what each being can become. Gautama Buddha himself said, "Buddhas do but point the way."

Many of the Tibetans here would be camping out under the stars and under the frost, for we were still a good 6000 feet above sea level and it was the month of November. Others would huddle together in makeshift tents. We heard that the only hotel was full, so returned to the lower bazaar and (rather incongruously for the tulkus) found rooms at the Soldiers' Rest House.

***

"Prepare to meet thy God!" Jonathan said sternly as we climbed the steep track that led to the residence of His Holiness the Dalai Lama. A visit to the Dalai Lama was of exceptional importance to the tulkus. Freda also wanted to have the permission and blessing of His Holiness to take the elite of the Tibetan incarnate lamas on this rather unusual trip around the Punjab. Undoubtedly she felt a great responsibility for them. All morning the tulkus had been rather quiet, but otherwise they did not seem disturbed at the prospect of meeting the incarnation of the Lord Chenrisi, the God of Compassion and Mercy, their spiritual and temporal Lord. But Jonathan's teasing was lost on me for I believed neither in a heavenly god nor one incarnated in a human body.


From left, behind H.H. the Dalai Lama: George, Duncan, Tulkus, Freda, Attar Singh, me, Jonathan, Tulkus. 1962.

After a meticulous examination of passports and identity certificates by Indian guards, and the frisking of the tulkus to see if any were a Chinese in disguise, intending to assassinate the Dalai Lama with a knife concealed in his voluminous robes, we passed the armed guards and entered the grounds of the modest bungalow where the Dalai Lama lived. Later we understood there had been an attack on the Dalai Lama by a Chinese man dressed as a lama, and we were the first people allowed into his presence since then. Our visit was only by special concession because we were all either Europeans or tulkus, several of whom the Dalai Lama knew personally, also Freda was an ex-Indian Government official.

I felt nervous as I clutched my white muslin Tibetan scarf of greeting that I would present to the Dalai Lama. Thank goodness I would not have to do three prostrations, as all the tulkus automatically performed. He stood at the door to welcome us and my turn to present my scarf came almost before I realised it. I placed it across his hands; he seemed shorter than I and looked up at me smiling, his eyes twinkling behind his glasses. I bowed slightly, and he placed the scarf hack around my neck as a blessing. Then we all sat down on the thickly carpeted floor. The high throne on which the Dalai Lama usually sat had been covered with a yellow cloth, for today he would sit with us on a cushion on the floor, as an equal with the other tulkus, who sat with bowed heads hardly daring to raise their eyes.

The Dalai Lama asked about the school: who was the best in each class? The tulkus showed him their exercise books and presented an album of photographs taken at Kailash. If he spoke to any tulku individually they would blush and stammer a shy reply. Yet the Dalai Lama was as charming as anyone could be, and perhaps felt rather sad that everyone was so in awe of him. After a long talk to the tulkus, he asked if any of us volunteers would like to ask him questions. Most of these were of a political nature, and he thought carefully before answering each one. He spoke through an interpreter although he appeared to understand English quite well and often corrected the interpreter if he felt he had failed to convey the exact meaning.

His sincerity and openness shone in his countenance. It seemed as if his emotions were written on his face as they passed through his mind: love, sorrow, laughter and query followed fleetingly like sunshine and cloud across a meadow. He talked to us Westerners of the necessity for each person to practise religion rather than simply to study it. He spoke of the Tibetans left behind in Tibet, of the famines there and the dreadful hardships his people were undergoing, while overwhelming sadness filled his face. He also considered the good that could grow out of their present unfortunate situation. He realised that many nations would now access the Tibetan knowledge which had been totally closed off in the past. He saw the trauma of their exodus from Tibet to be a kharmic result of this closure to outsiders, and he looked to the benefits that would develop from the expansion of the culture.

We visited the two tutors of the Dalai Lama, and the school for Tibetan children run by the elder sister of the Dalai Lama, Mrs. Tsering Dolma, a motherly woman with a child in each arm and a dozen of them clinging to her skirts. The conditions at that time were terribly hard and almost all the children must have been suffering from worms and dysentery. Thirty-seven would die during that winter. We were not shown into the dormitories where the little ones were sleeping seven sideways on a single bed, but we did see the tray of lumpy rice, welcome food rations from the Indian Government, being distributed with incredible orderliness by the hungry children themselves. Later they gave us a brave and moving demonstration of Tibetan dancing in their national dress.

We left as dusk was falling and took a small path down the hillside to another set of bungalows where the older children lived. They had eaten their supper and were standing on the veranda singing with all their might the songs of Tibet. I have never heard children singing so lustily, filling the whole valley with their voices. It seemed so sad and so moving: these little children bravely facing the world, standing up straight, sticking out their chests and letting the entire world know how they loved their homeland and their precious "Kundun" (a familiar name of the Dalai Lama used only by Tibetans).

***

Next day we moved on again in the two buses followed by George and Johnny on the motorbike. We crossed stony dry river beds, forded a small river, passing through many little Indian villages with boys selling bananas, trinkets, or wreaths of flowers for the local Hindu temple. Cyclists were hooted out of the way amidst a clamour of boys running beside the bus. The smell of the villages and the oppressive airlessness of the plains when we stopped soon became no longer worthy of comment. It was a strange part of the country between the foothills and plains: a stony, uninviting country. Large antimalaria slogans were whitewashed on any suitable piece of rock-face in large English letters that few Indians of the region would have been able to understand.


In one dry and dusty village a beautiful Indian lady and her husband greeted us in the street and invited us to lunch with them. As we stepped through the door in the high wall that surrounded their house and courtyard, it was as though we stepped backwards in time. The seclusion from the outside world was complete, for the high wall shut us away from the bazaar and the sound of raised voices outside. It enclosed a lush garden with the sound of tinkling water from a fountain making one more aware of the dryness beyond the wall. It reminded me of the story of how Prince Siddhartha, later to become the Buddha, grew up in sheer luxury, shielded from any unpleasant sight. Gardeners even picked the fading flowers before he would see the dead petals. Then one day he went outside in disguise and discovered how life really was. He found disease, people begging, a funeral procession, and naturally, this was a turning point in his life. He left his luxurious home and family and meditated until he understood the reality of life and formed the doctrine we know as Buddhism.

But for now we could enjoy the secluded serenity behind the walls that separated us from the actual world outside. They placed cane chairs under shady trees. A servant in uniform brought glasses of fresh lime juice on a silver tray and handed round plates with a choice of spicy titbits. These were friends of Freda from many years before who had heard she would pass through their village. We would discover as time went on that there were many such people glad of the opportunity to repay Freda for some previous gift, or to show appreciation for what she was doing for the Tibetans.

Continuing on our way, we arrived at a large open green space with vast ruins beyond. This was a fort built by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BC and must have been the furthest outpost of his empire. They had built it on a peninsular surrounded on three sides by a sweeping curve of the wide river Beas, which flowed hundreds of feet below at the bottom of the steep valley. When his soldiers baulked at proceeding further east, they turned back along river Indus. Not long after, Alexander died of a fever but many of his soldiers settled in these outlandish parts and brought some of their culture, including their music and their love of sculpture. Hundreds of years later they were the first to sculpture images of the Buddha, and very beautiful they were too, for they amalgamated their Grecian love of beauty of the body with an eastern fluidity of form.

We spent our nights on the journey at a variety of cheap lodgings. Usually it was a village Rest House formed around a courtyard whose central feature was a fountain for washing, though rarely did any water come out of it. There would be a stone fireplace where sadly-smiling Suju and his Tibetan helper would kindle a fire and cook our cauldron of refugee ration rice, lentils and vegetables.

Maretta's initial task on arrival each evening was to set up a little shrine with her figure of the Buddha. Until I became accustomed to this routine, I watched in amazement. Maretta and I were very different in outlook, which was unfortunate as we were living closely together for some time. Our differences were discernible in our perspective on Buddhism. Maretta knew the name of every deity and each motif and brought to it a Christian-style of faith. I was interested in the fundamental spirit of the religion, and in the Buddhist attitude to life.

One village was renowned for a holy flame that had been burning since time immemoriaL After dinner, Maretta and I slipped away to explore. We walked through a small bazaar where gaudy pictures and toys, beads, bangles and beachshoes jostled each other on market stalls. The shops in Indian bazaars stay open until the shopkeeper falls asleep behind his counter. No six o'clock closing here! A young boy saw a cow nuzzling an open tin of biscuits· at his father's stall and ran shouting to frighten it away. A tune from one of the latest Bollywood films blasted out, making a suitable soundtrack to the sights. The air was filled with that unique smell of all Indian villages, a mixture of biri8 [Biris are Indian cigarettes, each made of a single tobacco leaf rolled up and tied with cotton. They need continual puffing to keep them going, while the tar and nicotine drip visibly from the end.] smoke, curry and cow pats.

Groups of men with hand-woven shawls draped over their shoulders were gathered around little charcoal braziers to warm themselves, now that the blazing sun had set and left a chill in the air. The soft light from the glowing coals emphasised the ridges and folds of their wraps and silhouetted the angular, animated faces of the gossiping men.

We climbed on up a steep cobbled street, hurrying in the dark places between the lights of the shops, until the road forked. As we hesitated, a barefoot man in a traditional dhoti and long shawl appeared out of the shadows.

"You want to see very fine temple of Hindu god?" He asked in broken English.

"Oh yes," we replied in unison, "Which way is it?"

"Come," was the terse reply.

We followed his bare cracked heels as they climbed the steps ahead of us, until we arrived at a large whitewashed archway, the entrance to the temple. Monkeys inhabited the place, squawking and chasing each other over the roofs. They stopped and glared at us, their eyes glinting in the light. They appeared like evil spirits and not to be ignored!

As custom required, we slipped off our shoes at the door and bathed our feet in a pool of water. As we padded across the cold slippery marble of the sanctuary, we glimpsed exquisite inlays and carvings on the walls. We entered the inner shrine and paid our respects to the god Shiva. His image regarded us with painted eyes that implied, "Do not come with scepticism in your hearts or you will encounter strange powers here of which you know not!"

Our guide pointed to a fissure in the floor where a blue flame spurted directly out of the rock. He explained that the fire had been burning since time immemorial. Watching for our reaction, the man slowly lowered his hand to the flame and held it there. He bent close as he murmured, "Look, it is cold flame, eternal flame, it does not burn you. Please try." Cautiously at first we dashed our fingers through and then kept them in for longer. It was cool, as he had said. We were suitably amazed. He bowed reverently before the miraculous flame, backed away a few paces, then turned swiftly and beckoned us to follow. He had done his duty and led us to the entrance, dodging between the screaming monkeys that stretched out grasping hands as we passed. We found our shoes with some difficulty and mustered enough coins to satisfy our guide.

It was hard to find our way back in the dark. Strange figures lurked in doorways. "We shall be safe," said Maretta, as she pulled her little Buddha image from beneath her blouse, "Buddha will show the way." I wished I had brought my torch, though I knew the road was downhill until we came to the Rest House.

In the morning the whole school made its official visit to the temple. In broad daylight there seemed scant mystery about the blue flame. George had a physical explanation for it, and Frank a geological one. The tulkus, naturally unafraid, couldn't wait in their eagerness to plunge their hands into it.

Some of India's modern achievements, such as the great hydro-electric dam at Bakra Namgyal, were also on the itinerary. We sat on the steps overlooking the enormous construction site and ate a picnic lunch of chappatis doled out of a bucket and boiled potatoes mixed with chillies from another bucket, washed down with fizzy orangeade. For the tulkus it must have been quite an experience to see such a vast engineering project and the gigantic pieces of machinery cranking away. Some of them were quite dismayed and perhaps associated it with their first experience of mechanisation: the building projects that the Chinese had undertaken in Tibet during their occupation.

Since time immemorial the Tibetans - like many so called 'primitive' cultures - had never plundered the sacred earth for gold and minerals, and so this wealth lay untouched for those with fewer scruples. The Chinese were well aware of the mineral wealth lying beneath the soil of Tibet and it was said to be one of the prime reasons for their invasion of the Tibetan plateau.

Chandigarh, the new capital of the Punjab designed by the notable French architect Le Corbusier was another overnight stop. I don't know what the tulkus thought about it, but to me it seemed drab: 1950s-style concrete box houses where their way of life in an urban environment. It just didn't work.

Soon we were on the Great Trunk Road heading straight for Delhi, with the horns blowing continually to warn the buffalo carts and cyclists of our approach. Just at the point where the new bypass travelled alongside the broad River Jumna, stood a most unusual oriental building. It formed the shape of an E, the centre part being a temple with a double pagoda-style roof. The rest of the building comprised compact rooms and dormitories, the ground floor surrounded by a veranda, the upper storey by a balcony. The gateway made a circle that framed the temple building. This was the Ladakh Buddha Vihara9 [Now on Tripadvisor!], built by monks from Ladakh, combining a temple with living accommodation. We gasped with surprise and anticipation when the buses drove straight up to the building and stopped at the gate. So this beautiful place was to be our home for the rest of the winter!


Map of Cherry's North Indian Journeys

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Hara Prasad Shastri [Hara Prasad Bhattacharya]
by Wikipedia
Accessed: 4/27/21

The manuscript of Ramacarita was discovered by MM. Pandit Haraprasad Sastri in 1897. It contained not only the complete text, but also a commentary of the first Canto and 85 verses of the second. The portion of the manuscript containing the commentary of the remaining verses was missing.

MM. Sastri printed the text and the commentary from this single manuscript in the Memoirs of the Asiatic Society of Bengal, Vol. Ill, No. 1. The scope of his work may be described in his own words: “The commentary, as may be expected, gives fuller account of the reign of Rampala (sic) than the text. The other portion of the text is difficult to explain, and I have not attempted to make a commentary of my own. But I have tried, in my introduction, to glean all the historical information possible by the help of the commentary and the inscriptions of the Pala dynasty, and other sources of information available to me In the introduction I have attempted to write a connected history of the Palas of Bengal from their election as kings in about 770 A.D. to the end of Madanpala’s (sic) reign” (pp. 1-2).

Ever since its publication the Ramacarita has been regarded as the most important literary document concerning the history of the Pala rule in Bengal. It has formed a subject of critical discussion by notable scholars, and many of its passages have been interpreted in different ways. Scholars have, however, experienced great difficulty in dealing with the text on account of the absence of any translation either of the commented or of the uncommented portion. The difficulty was rendered all the greater by certain readings and interpretations of MM. Sastri which proved to be erroneous on a closer examination of the manuscript. A new and critical edition of the text, with a running commentary and an English translation of the whole of it, was, therefore, a great desideratum....

The technique of composition is equally unique. Each verse of the poem has two meanings, one applicable to the story of the Ramayana, and the other to the history of the Pala kings...

The necessity of keeping to this double meaning obliged the author to use obscure words and unfamiliar expressions, and in particular to present personal and proper names in abbreviated and occasionally very twisted forms. Although the poem, as a literary composition, showed, therefore, technical skill of a high order, it was not likely to be fully intelligible to one not well acquainted with the history of the times. Fortunately this difficulty was realised before it was too late, and some one wrote a commentary for the elucidation of the subject-matter of the poem and thereby earned the gratitude of the posterity. This person, whose name is yet unknown, probably lived shortly after the author, and in any case must have flourished not long after, at a time when the events of the reign of Ramapala were still fresh in the minds of the people. This commentator appears to have quoted a lexicon in support of the two meanings of the word nana in verse 33 of Chapter II, which occurs in the lexicography (Vaijayanti) of Yadavaprakasa who is generally regarded to have flourished towards the end of the twelfth century A.D. MM. Sastri’s view that the commentary was probably written by the author himself while unnatural in itself, is positively disproved by the reference to different readings of the text in the commentary of verse 22 of Chapter I, for no author would possibly vouch for two different readings of his own text. Moreover, the commentator has often explained a word in more ways than one...

So far as the commented portion is concerned, we may be tolerably certain that the text has been handed down to us in its original form. The same thing cannot be said of the remaining part. As a matter of fact MM. Sastri observed that “the scribe seems to have omitted many verses after” verse 5 of Canto IV (p. 51, fn. I).1 [These figures within brackets, after reference to MM. Sastri’s view, refer to the pages of his edition of Ramacarita.] Fortunately the text itself supplies us a means of checking the extent of the loss, though this was overlooked by MM. Sastri. At the end of the text we have the words “Arya— 220” clearly written, but this has been omitted in the text printed by MM. Sastri. These words were certainly intended to convey that the text consisted of 220 verses, all in arya metre. The Ms. contains only 215 verses in arya, and so only five verses have been left out, probably due to the carelessness of the scribe.

The author of the poem, Sandhyakaranandi, has given a short account of himself in the concluding portion of the text called Kaviprasasti. He was an inhabitant of the village called Brihadvatu2 [MM. Sastri evidently took this word as an adjective and not a proper name...

The concluding verse of Canto IV shows that the poem was actually composed, at least finished, during the reign of Madanapala, the son of Ramapala and third in succession from him.1 [MM. Sastri calls Madanapala the fourth king from Ramapala. This is misleading, for only two kings — Kumarapala and Gopala — intervened between the two.]

Sandhyakaranandi was a Karana (Kayastha) by caste.2 [MM. Sastri calls Sandhyakaranandi a Brahmana, but in verse 3 of the Kaviprasasti, Prajapatinandi, the father of Sandhyakara, is described as the ‘foremost among the Karanas.’ The Karanas generally denote a Kayastha. According to MM. Sastri the family derived its cognomen from the residential village called Nanda, and is “still well-known.” He, however, cites no evidence.]...

But whatever view we might take of the attitude of the author towards Mahipala, there is absolutely no justification for the following statement made by MM. Sastri:

“Mahipala by his impolitic acts incurred the displeasure of his subjects ..... The Kaivartas were smarting under oppression of the king. Bhima, the son of Rudoka, taking advantage of the popular discontent, led his Kaivarta subjects to rebellion.” (p. 13)

There is not a word in RC to show that Mahipala incurred the displeasure of his subjects by his impolitic acts or that there was a general popular discontent against him. It is an amazing invention to say that “the Kaivartas were smarting under oppression of the king," for the RC does not contain a single word which can even remotely lead to such a belief. It is a travesty of facts to hold that Bhima led his Kaivarta subjects (?) to rebellion. The rebellion was led by a number of feudal vassals and there is no evidence to show that they belonged solely, or even primarily, to the Kaivarta caste. There is again nothing to show that Bhima had anything to do with the rebellion, far less that he led it. Such an assumption seems to be absurd in view of the fact that he was the third king in succession after Divya who occupied the throne of Varendra after the rebellion. There is again nothing in RC to show that during the reign of Mahipala the Kaivartas formed a distinct political entity under Divya or Bhima, so that they might be regarded as the subjects of the latter.

This tissue of misstatements, unsupported by anything in the text of RC, is responsible for a general belief that Mahipala was an oppressive king, and has even led sober historians to misjudge his character and misconstrue the events of his reign. A popular myth has been sedulously built up to the effect that there was a general rising of people which cost Mahipala his life and throne, that it was merely a popular reaction against the oppression and wickedness of the king, and that, far from being rebellious in character, it was an assertion of the people’s right to dethrone a bad and unpopular king and elect a popular chief in his place. In other words, in fighting and killing Mahipala the people of Varendra were inspired by the noblest motive of saving the country from his tyranny and anarchy. Some even proceeded so far as to say that this act was followed by a general election of Divya as the king of Varendra, and a great historian has compared the whole episode with that which led to the election of Gopala, the founder of the Pala dynasty, to the throne of Bengal.1 [ A movement has been set on foot by a section of the Kaivarta or Mahisya community in Bengal to perpetuate the memory of Divya, on the basis of the view-points noted above. They refuse to regard him as a rebel and hold him up as a great hero called to the throne by the people of Varendra to save it from the oppressions of Mahipala. An annual ceremony — Divya-smriti-utsava -- is organized by them and the speeches, made on these occasions by eminent historians like Sir Jadunath Sarkar, Rai Bahadur Rama Prasad Chanda, and Dr. Upendranath Ghoshal [1886-1969; President of The Asiatic Society of Bengal 1963-1964; Author of: Studies in Indian history and culture (1957); A History of Hindu Political Theories: From the Earliest Times to the End of the First Quarter of the Seventeenth Century A.D. (1927); A History of Indian Public Life (1966); Ancient Indian culture in Afghanistan (1928); Contributions to the history of the Hindu revenue system (1929); The agrarian syste in ancient India (1930)] who presided over the function seek to support the popular views. On the other hand attempts have been made to show that these popular views are not supported by the statements in Ramacarita (cf. Bharatavarsa, 1342, pp. 18 ff.).]

This is not the proper place or occasion to criticise these views at length, or to refer to many other important conclusions which have been drawn from MM. Sastri’s sketch of the life and character of Mahipala. But in view of the deep-rooted prejudices and errors which are still current in spite of the exposition of the unwarranted character of MM. Sastri’s interpretation, it is necessary to draw attention to what is really stated in RC about the great rebellion and the part played by Divya. The author of RC did not regard the rising in any other light than a dire calamity which enveloped the kingdom in darkness (I. 22). He describes it as anika dharma-viplava or the unholy or unfortunate civil revolution (1. 24), bhavasya apadam or the calamity of the world, and damaram which the commentator explains as upaplava or disturbance (I. 27). Further, the latter describes it as merely a rebellion of feudal vassals (ananta-samanta-cakra), and not a word is said about its popular character. There is even no indication that the rebels belonged to Varendra or that the encounter between Mahipala and the rebels took place within that province. Such revolts were not uncommon in different parts of the Pala kingdom in those days. Similar revolts placed in power the Kamboja chiefs in Varendra and Radha, and the family of Sudraka in Gaya district. 1 [For a detailed discussion of this point and a view of Divya’s rebellion in its true perspective cf. Dr. R C. Majumdar’s article ‘The Revolt of Divvoka against Mahipala II and other revolts in Bengal’ in Dacca University Studies Vol. I, No. 2, pp. 125 ff.]

There is not a word in RC to the effect that Divya2 [The name is written variously in RC as Divya (1. 38), Divvoka (1. 38-39 commentary), and Divoka (I. 31 commentary).] was the leader of a popular rebellion, far less that he was elected as king by the people. As a matter of fact his name is not associated in any way even with the fight between Mahipala and his rebellious chiefs (milit-ananta-samanta-cakra) referred to in Verse I. 31. The RC only tells us that “Ramapala’s beautiful fatherland (Varendri) was occupied by his enemy named Divya, an (officer) sharing royal fortune, who rose to a high position, (but) who took to fraudulent practice as a vow” (I. 38). The account given in RC is not incompatible with the view that Mahipala met with a disastrous defeat in an encounter with some rebellious vassals in or outside Varendra, and Divya took advantage of it to seize the throne for himself. That the author of RC did not entertain any favourable view of the character and policy of Divya is clear from the two adjectives applied to him, viz., dasyu and upadhivrati. The commentator says ‘dasyuna satruna tadbhavapannatvat.’ It is obvious that the commentator means that the term dasyu refers to the enemy (Divya) as he had assumed the character of a dasyu (enemy). As to the other expression upadhivrati, the commentator first explains vrata as ‘something which is undertaken as an imperative duty,’ and then adds ‘chadmani vrati.’ In other words, Divya performed an act on the plea that it was an imperative duty, but this was a merely false pretension. In any case the two words in the text ‘dasyu’ and ‘upadhi’ cannot be taken by any stretch of imagination to imply any good or noble trait in his character...

MM. Sastri wrote (p. 13) that Bhima ‘built a Damara, a suburban city close to the capital of the Pala empire’. The only foundation for this misstatement is the expression wrongly read by him as damaram-upapuram etc’ in the commentary to v. I. 27. The expression, as correctly read, viz ‘damaram-upaplavam,’ shows that there is no reference to any city, far less to any capital city founded by Bhima, as Mr. R. D. Banerji imagined.1 [Op. cit., p. 291.]...

It has been noted above that Ramapala and his elder brother Surapala were both in prison when Mahipala was defeated by the rebellious chiefs. What became of them after this catastrophe is not expressly stated. MM. Sastri’s statement that “they were rescued by their friends” (p. 18), presumably even before the revolution, is not borne out by RC. It is clear, however, that somehow or other they managed to escape and leave Varendra. Although there is no subsequent reference to Surapala in RC it is clear from v. 14 of the Manhali copper-plate of Madanapala that Surapala ascended the throne after the death of Mahipala II. Of the events of his reign we know nothing. But the silence of RC about Surapala’s later history certainly does not justify, in any way, the assumption made by Mr. R. D. Banerji that he was murdered by Ramapala. 1 [Op. cit, p. 280.]...

The author of Sabdapradipa, whose father served Ramapala, was himself the court-physician of a king Bhimapala, ruler of Padi. MM. Sastri identifies him with the Kaivarta king Bhima (RC Introd. p. 15). This does not seem probable. It is more likely that Bhimapala either belonged to the family of Pala rulers in S. Bengal whose existence has been revealed by the Sundarban copper-plate grant, dated 1196 A.D. (I. H. Q., Vol. X, p. 321) or is to be identified with Bhimayasas, king of Pithi, one of the chiefs who helped Ramapala. In that case Padi may be regarded as a mistake for Pithi.]...

[MM. Sastri identifies Bala-Balabhi with Bagdi (p. 14), but there is no evidence in support of it.]...

Soma of Paduvanva not identified.2 [Paduvanva may be the origin of the name Pabna as MM. Sastri suggests (p. 14), but there is no evidence in support of it, except the similarity of the two names.]...

MM. Sastri seems to have misunderstood the passage describing the conclusion of the war. Thus he writes: “Hari at last found himself powerless, was captured, and led to the place of execution. Bhima, too, seems to have been put to the sword” (p. 14). Far from being executed, Hari was ‘established in a position of great influence’ by Ramapala after the battle was over (III. 32). Evidence of further cordial relations between Ramapala and Hari is furnished by verses III. 39-40 which tell us that Ramapala and Hari met together and shone for a long time in each other’s close embrace in the palace” at Ramavati. Probably the same cordiality existed also between Hari and Madanapala (IV. 37, 40).

The subsequent treatment to Hari justifies the inference made above, that Hari was won over by Ramapala or his son Vittapala by offer of money, and this defection finally shattered the resistance offered by Bhima’s partisans.

The scattered references to Hari leave no doubt that he became a distinguished person of great importance and was held in great love and esteem by the Pala kings.

After the final collapse of the forces of Bhima, Ramapala took possession of his immense riches, and “occupied after a long time the dearest land of Varendri” (III. I). He restored peace and order in Varendra (III. 27) and founded a new city there called Ramavati. The poet gives a glowing account of Varendra, which was also his own fatherland, in twenty-seven verses (III. 2-28), and refers to Ramavati in the next twelve verses (III. 29-40). MM. Sastri took all these verses to refer to Ramavati and hence remarked that Ramapala founded a city named Ramavati at the confluence of the Ganges and the Ivaratoya. As a matter of fact it was Varendra and not Ramavati which is referred to by the author as situated between these two rivers. MM. Sastri’s interpretation has misled many scholars to look for the city of Ramavati at the confluence of the Ganges and the Karatoya for which there is no warrant in the text itself. Ramavati is most likely to be identified with Ramauti, mentioned in Ain-i-Akbari as a fiscal unit (circle) in the Sarkar of Lakhnauti...

In addition to what is stated in v. 24 other political persons and events are referred to in course of the description of Varendra, by way of veiled allusions; but it is now impossible to understand their full import in the absence of a contemporary commentary. Thus mention is made of several potentates in verses 2-4 viz., Srihetvisvara, Candesvara, Ksemesvara, and Skanda, but we do not know who they were and in what connection they are referred to. MM. Sastri's contention that the advice of the first three of these kings was followed by Ramapala in selecting the site of the city of Ramavati is a pure guess, and obviously incorrect, as the verses in question have nothing to do with that city....

Kamarupa was conquered by an allied king to whom Ramapala showed great honour (II. 47). MM. Sastri’s view that Mayana was the name of this conqueror (p. 15) is due to his error in reading the compound word “mahimanam = apa na=nrpo” as “mahimana-mayana- nrpa.” It is impossible to ascertain the names of, or say anything definite about, the various kings referred to in the above verses...

The verse referring to the reign of Gopala (IV. 12), for example, seems to contain some dark hints about his premature and unnatural death, but we are unable to solve the mystery. Very great prominence is, again, given to an allied king Candra, who is described in five verses (IV. 16-20) and was one of the most reliable friends of the king. This king Candra is probably to be identified with the son of Suvarpadeva and grandson of Mahana, ruler of Anga.1 [Cf. I. H. Q„ Vol. V, pp. 35 ff. The view originally propounded by MM. II. P. Sastri (p. 16), and subsequently followed by Mr. R. D. Banerji and others, that this king Candra was the Gahadavala ruler of Kanauj is untenable, as according to the scheme of chronology, now generally adopted, Madanapala ascended the throne after the latter’s death....

A pitched battle on the Kalindi river is alluded to in v. IV. 27. 1 [It is difficult to accept the conclusion drawn by MM. H. P. Sastri from this verse that the Bengal army fought a battle against the enemies of Kanauj on the banks of the Yamuna”. (p. 16).]

-- The Ramacaritam of Sandhyakaranandin

Highlights:

Hara Prasad Shastri (Bengali: হরপ্রসাদ শাস্ত্রী) (6 December 1853 – 17 November 1931), also known as Hara Prasad Bhattacharya, was an Indian academic, Sanskrit scholar, archivist and historian of Bengali literature. He is most known for discovering the Charyapada, the earliest known examples of Bengali literature.

The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism from the tantric tradition in Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

It was written between the 8th and 12th centuries in an Abahatta that was the ancestor of the Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Odia, Magahi, Maithili, and many other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, and it is said to be the oldest collection of verses written in those languages. Charyapadas written in the script resembles the most closest form of Assamese language used today. A palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada was rediscovered in the early 20th century by Haraprasad Shastri at the Nepal Royal Court Library. The Charyapada was also preserved in the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

As songs of realization, the Charyapada were intended to be sung. These songs of realisation were spontaneously composed verses that expressed a practitioner's experience of the enlightened state.

Shastri studied at the village school initially and then at Sanskrit College and Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata)...

Shastri passed entrance (school-leaving) examination in 1871, First Arts, the undergraduate degree, in 1873, received a BA in 1876 and Honours in Sanskrit in 1877. Later, he was conferred the title of Shastri when he received a MA degree...He then joined Hare School as a teacher in 1878....

Hara Prasad Shastri held numerous positions. He became a professor at the Sanskrit College in 1883. At the same time, he worked as an Assistant Translator with the Bengal government. Between 1886 and 1894, besides teaching at the Sanskrit College, he was the Librarian of the Bengal Library. In 1895 he headed the Sanskrit department at Presidency College.

During the winter 1898-99 he assisted Dr. Cecil Bendall during research in Nepal, collecting informations from the private Durbar Library of the Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, and the total registration of manuscripts was later published as A Catalogue of Palm-Leaf and selected Paper Manuscripts belonging to the Durbar Library, Nepal (Calcutta 1905) with historical introduction by Cecil Bendall (including description of Gopal Raj Vamshavali).

In 1894–1895 he was in Nepal and Northern India collecting oriental manuscripts for British Museum. During the winter 1898–1899 he returned to Nepal and together with pandit Hara Prasad Shastri and his assistant pandit Binodavihari Bhattacharya from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the team registered and collected information from palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library belonging to Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher J. B. Rana, and here he found the famous historical document Gopal Raj Vamshavali, describing Nepal's history from around 1000 to 1600.

-- Cecil Bendall, by Wikipedia

The Gopal Raj Vamshavali (IAST: Gopālarājavaṃśāvalī, Devanagari: गोपालराजवंशावली) is a 14th-century hand-written manuscript of Nepal which is primarily a genealogical record of Nepalese monarchs.

One of the most important and popular chronicles in Nepalese history is by this name. This vamshavali was previously called Bendall Vaṃśāvalī, as Prof. Cecil Bendall found the manuscript "in the cold weather of 1898–99 in Kathmandu's Durbar Library" or the Bir Library...

The original copy of Gopal Raj Vamshavali is now stored at National Archives, Kathmandu in an "unsatisfactory" state, in contrast to an "excellent" condition, when Prof. Cecil Bendall found it at the turn of the 19th century.

-- Gopal Raj Vamshavali, by Wikipedia

He became Principal of Sanskrit College in 1900, leaving in 1908 to join the government's Bureau of Information.

Also, from 1921–1924, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit at Dhaka University.

Shastri held different positions within the Asiatic Society, and was its President for two years. He was also President of Vangiya Sahitya Parishad for twelve years ...

Bangiya Sahitya Parishad is a literary society in Maniktala of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Established during the time of the British Raj, its goal is to promote Bengali literature, both by translating works in other languages to Bengali and promoting the production of original Bengali literature...

1894 saw the first officers, with Romesh Chunder Dutt as the first president...

Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE (Bengali: রমেশচন্দ্র দত্ত; 13 August 1848 – 30 November 1909) was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, writer and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata.

-- Romesh Chunder Dutt, by Wikipedia

and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London...

He was first introduced to research by Rajendralal Mitra, a noted Indologist, and translated the Buddhist Puranas which Mitra included in the book The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal. Shastri was also Mitra's assistant at the Asiatic Society, and became Director of Operations in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts after Mitra's death.

Shastri was instrumental in preparing the Catalogue of the Asiatic Society's approximately ten thousand manuscripts with the assistance of a few others...

Shastri gradually became interested in collecting old Bengali manuscripts and ended up visiting Nepal several times, where, in 1907, he discovered the Charyageeti or Charyapada manuscripts. His painstaking research on the manuscript led to the establishment of Charyapada as the earliest known evidence of Bengali language. Shastri wrote about this finding in a 1916 paper titled "হাজার বছরের পুরোনো বাংলা ভাষায় রচিত বৌদ্ধ গান ও দোঁহা” (Hajar bochhorer purono Bangla bhasay rochito Bouddho gan o doha) meaning "Buddhist songs and verses written in Bengali a thousand years ago"...

He also discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of Skanda Purana in a Kathmandu library in Nepal, written in Gupta script.

The Skanda Purana (IAST: Skanda Purāṇa) is the largest Mahāpurāṇa, a genre of eighteen Hindu religious texts. The text contains over 81,000 verses, and is of Kaumara literature... The text has been an important historical record and influence on the Hindu traditions related to the war-god Skanda.

The earliest text titled Skanda Purana likely existed by the 8th century CE, but the Skanda Purana that has survived into the modern era exists in many versions. It is considered as a living text, which has been widely edited, over many centuries, creating numerous variants....

This Mahāpurāṇa, like others, is attributed to the sage Vyasa.

-- Skanda Purana, by Wikipedia

-- Hara Prasad Shastri, by Wikipedia

For Gujarati writer, see Hariprasad Shastri.


Hara Prasad Shastri
Born: 6 December 1853, Khulna, Bengal Presidency
Died: 17 November 1931 (aged 77)
Occupation: Academic, orientalist

Hara Prasad Shastri (Bengali: হরপ্রসাদ শাস্ত্রী) (6 December 1853 – 17 November 1931), also known as Hara Prasad Bhattacharya, was an Indian academic, Sanskrit scholar, archivist and historian of Bengali literature. He is most known for discovering the Charyapada, the earliest known examples of Bengali literature.[1]

The Charyapada is a collection of mystical poems, songs of realization in the Vajrayana tradition of Buddhism from the tantric tradition in Assam, Bengal, Bihar and Odisha.

It was written between the 8th and 12th centuries in an Abahatta that was the ancestor of the Assamese, Bengali, Bhojpuri, Odia, Magahi, Maithili, and many other Eastern Indo-Aryan languages, and it is said to be the oldest collection of verses written in those languages. Charyapadas written in the script resembles the most closest form of Assamese language used today. A palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada was rediscovered in the early 20th century by Haraprasad Shastri at the Nepal Royal Court Library. The Charyapada was also preserved in the Tibetan Buddhist canon.

As songs of realization, the Charyapada were intended to be sung. These songs of realisation were spontaneously composed verses that expressed a practitioner's experience of the enlightened state...

The rediscovery of the Charyapada is credited to Haraprasad Shastri, a 19th-century Sanskrit scholar and historian of Bengali literature who, during his third visit to Nepal in 1907, chanced upon 50 verses at the Royal library of the Nepalese kings. Written on trimmed palm leaves of 12.8×0.9 inches in a language often referred to as sāndhyabhāṣa or twilight language, a semantic predecessor of modern Bengali, the collection came to be called Charyapada and also Charyagiti by some. At that time, Shastri was a librarian of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, and was engaged in a self-assigned mission to trace and track ancient Bengali manuscripts. His first and second trips to Nepal in 1897 and 1898 met with some success, as he was able to collect a number of folkloric tales written in Pali and Sanskrit. However, after he rediscovered the treasure manuscripts in 1907, he published this collections in a single volume in 1916. According to some historians, there may very likely have been at least 51 original verses which were lost due to absence of proper preservation.[10] Based on the original Tibetan translation, the book was originally called Charyagitikosh and had 100 verses. The scrolls discovered by Shastri contained selected verses.

The original palm-leaf manuscript of the Charyapada, or Caryācaryāviniścaya, spanning 47 padas (verses) along with a Sanskrit commentary, was edited by Shastri and published from Bangiya Sahitya Parishad as a part of his Hajar Bacharer Purano Bangala Bhasay Bauddhagan O Doha (Buddhist Songs and Couplets) in 1916 under the name of Charyacharyavinishchayah. This manuscript is presently preserved at the National Archives of Nepal. Prabodhchandra Bagchi later published a manuscript of a Tibetan translation containing 50 verses.

The Tibetan translation provided additional information, including that the Sanskrit commentary in the manuscript, known as Charyagiti-koshavrtti, was written by Munidatta. It also mentions that the original text was translated by Shilachari and its commentary by Munidatta was translated by Chandrakirti or Kirtichandra.

-- Charyapada, by Wikipedia

Early life

Hara Prasad Shastri was born in Kumira village in Khulna, Bengal (now in Bangladesh)[1] to a family that hailed from Naihati in North 24 Parganas of the present day West Bengal. The family name was Bhattacharya, a common Bengali surname.

Shastri studied at the village school initially and then at Sanskrit College and Presidency College in Calcutta (now Kolkata). While in Calcutta, he stayed with the noted Bengali scholar and social reformer, Ishwar Chandra Vidyasagar, who was a friend of Shastri's older brother Nandakumar Nyayachunchu.[1][2]

Shastri passed entrance (school-leaving) examination in 1871, First Arts, the undergraduate degree, in 1873, received a BA in 1876 and Honours in Sanskrit in 1877. Later, he was conferred the title of Shastri when he received a MA degree. The Shastri title was conferred on those who secured a first class (highest grade) and he was the only student in his batch (class) to do so. He then joined Hare School as a teacher in 1878.[1][2]

Professional career

Hara Prasad Shastri held numerous positions. He became a professor at the Sanskrit College in 1883. At the same time, he worked as an Assistant Translator with the Bengal government. Between 1886 and 1894, besides teaching at the Sanskrit College, he was the Librarian of the Bengal Library. In 1895 he headed the Sanskrit department at Presidency College.[1][2]

During the winter 1898-99 he assisted Dr. Cecil Bendall during research in Nepal, collecting informations from the private Durbar Library of the Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher Jung Bahadur Rana, and the total registration of manuscripts was later published as A Catalogue of Palm-Leaf and selected Paper Manuscripts belonging to the Durbar Library, Nepal (Calcutta 1905) with historical introduction by Cecil Bendall (including description of Gopal Raj Vamshavali).[3]

Cecil Bendall (1 July 1856 – 14 March 1906) was an English scholar, a professor of Sanskrit at University College London and later at the University of Cambridge.

Bendall was educated at the City of London School and at the University of Cambridge, achieving first-class honours in the Classical Tripos in 1879 and the Indian Languages Tripos in 1881. He was elected to a fellowship at Gonville and Caius College.

From 1882 to 1893 he worked at the British Museum in the department of Oriental Manuscripts (now part of the British Library).

In 1894–1895 he was in Nepal and Northern India collecting oriental manuscripts for British Museum. During the winter 1898–1899 he returned to Nepal and together with pandit Hara Prasad Shastri and his assistant pandit Binodavihari Bhattacharya from the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, the team registered and collected information from palm-leaf manuscripts in the Durbar Library belonging to Rana Prime Minister Bir Shumsher J. B. Rana, and here he found the famous historical document Gopal Raj Vamshavali, describing Nepal's history from around 1000 to 1600.

He was Professor of Sanskrit at University College London from 1895 to 1902, and at Cambridge from 1903 until his death.

He was a contributor to the Dictionary of National Biography.

He died in Liverpool in 1906 and is buried at the Parish of the Ascension Burial Ground in Cambridge.

-- Cecil Bendall, by Wikipedia

The Gopal Raj Vamshavali (IAST: Gopālarājavaṃśāvalī, Devanagari: गोपालराजवंशावली) is a 14th-century hand-written manuscript of Nepal which is primarily a genealogical record of Nepalese monarchs.

One of the most important and popular chronicles in Nepalese history is by this name. This vamshavali was previously called Bendall Vaṃśāvalī, as Prof. Cecil Bendall found the manuscript "in the cold weather of 1898–99 in Kathmandu's Durbar Library" or the Bir Library. This was later, and popularly, called the Gopālarājavaṃśāvalī by scholars as Baburam Achayra and Yogi Naraharinath to name a few, as a hand-written catalog list of the library termed the manuscript Gopālavaṃśādi prācīna rājavaṃśāvalī (गोपालवंशादि प्राचीन राजवंशावली), meaning ancient royal vamshavali starting with Gopala dynasty. Pant, however, questions if this could be called a vamshavali proper, as the chronicler never mentions it thus.

The original copy of Gopal Raj Vamshavali is now stored at National Archives, Kathmandu in an "unsatisfactory" state, in contrast to an "excellent" condition, when Prof. Cecil Bendall found it at the turn of the 19th century.

Summary

With the advent of Kali Yuga in the primordial kingdom of Yudhisthira, Śrī Bhṛṅgāreśvara Bhaṭṭāraka emerged. There, ṛṣi (saint) Gautama came and established Gautameśvara and other deities.

Gopālas (cow-herds) came to the valley and in the Gopāla-vaṃśa, eight kings ruled for 505 years 3 months.

Thereafter, Mahiṣapāla (buffalo-herd) kings ruled up to 3 generations for 161 years 2 months. The Kiratas conquered the valley and ruled up to 32 generations for 1958 years 2 months.

Thereafter the Solar Line ruled Vimalanagarī (Vaisali?) and Nepal by defeating the Kirata kings. To name some important contributions, Śrī Supuṣpadeva enforced the varṇa system and constructed temple of Śrī Paśupati Bhaṭṭāraka. He built a town dedicated to the Lord, enforced all laws and ruled with justice. Similarly, Śrī Bhāskaradeva observed penance at Paśupati, by merit of which he conquered Kāñcinagara Maṇḍala up to southern sea. Likewise, King Śrī Haridattavarmā constructed Lord Viṣṇu Bhaṭṭāraka temple in all four śikhara-pradeśa (hillocks). Śrī Viśvadeva consecrated a caitya Bhaṭṭāraka in Sinaguṃ vihāra (Svayambhū) and set up stone water-conduit. He also installed a big trident at northern side of Śrī Paśupati. Śrī Mānadeva unknowingly killed his father and observed penance at Guṃ vihāra and consecrated a caitya and Śrī Māneśvarīdevī temple. He regulated land measurements and rent, and started the tradition of celebrating Holi. Śrī Gaṇadeva offered treasury to Śrī Paśupati Bhaṭṭāraka to cause rainfall and propitiated Mahānāga after three years of drought. Gopālas vanquished the Solar Line and ruled for three generations.

Again, the Licchavis ruled. Śrī Aṃśuvarmā founded Rājavihāra, and started system of grammar and other branches of learning. They were from a different scion. Thereafter, the Solar dynasty ruled over Nepal again. Śrī Narendradeva initiated the festival of Śrī Lokeśvara of Bungamati and Śrī Bālārjunadeva offered his crown to Buṅga Lokeśvara Bhaṭṭāraka. Śrī Mānadeva constructed market-place; Śrī Guṇakāma deva constructed rest house and performed koti-homa (crore homas); Śrī Lakṣmīkāma deva sponsored ceremonies to bring peace in the nation (200 NS). In the same line, Śrī Bhāskaradeva sold paternal crown and destroyed the image of Śrī Māneśvarī Bhaṭṭāraka, for which he suffered a great deal. In the same line, Śrī Śivadeva completed the (re-)construction of temple of Śrī Paśupati Bhaṭṭāraka and temple of the Eastern mountain (Changu), four-storeyed royal palace with five courtyards, canals at Balkhu river, water-conduits, wells and tanks. He brought silver and gold coins in use.

With Śrī Arimalladeva's reign, a great famine and epidemic spread. A great earthquake in NS 375 (1255 AD) brought a "lot of suffering" to propitiate which annual lakṣahoma and fortnightly pakṣaśrāddha were performed. The Khaśas under Jayatāri (Jitārimalla) entered the valley for the first time from west in NS 408 (1288 AD) and were massacred in large number; next they set the villages on fire. The Tirhutiyās entered the valley in NS 411 (1291 AD). Sultān Shams Ud-dīn raided the kingdom and reduced the whole Nepal valley in ashes, including breaking of the Śrī Paśupatināṭh icon to three pieces.

Śrī Jayasthitirājamalla, brought by Śrī Devaladevī, became King upon marriage with Rājalladevī. By the grace of Svayambhū, he made several reforms. Next is described the installment of four Nārāyaṇas in all four directions.

Following this, there is a detailed description of the events from 177 NS (1057 AD), which Malla (1985) [5] categorizes as Vaṃśāvalī2 from folio 31. With full details of astrological dates (pañcāṅgas), this part describes the stories of birth, deaths and marriages of different kings.

In addition, it also covers events of political conflicts, religious contributions, construction works and disaster relief.

-- Gopal Raj Vamshavali, by Wikipedia

He became Principal of Sanskrit College in 1900, leaving in 1908[4] to join the government's Bureau of Information.

-- The Three Bureaus of Information, Excerpt from "Influential Centres of Disaffection": Indian Students in Edwardian London and the Empire that Shaped Them, by William H. Cowell

Also, from 1921–1924, he was Professor and Head of the Department of Bengali and Sanskrit at Dhaka University.[1][2]

Shastri held different positions within the Asiatic Society, and was its President for two years. He was also President of Vangiya Sahitya Parishad for twelve years ...

Bangiya Sahitya Parishad is a literary society in Maniktala of Kolkata, West Bengal, India. Established during the time of the British Raj, its goal is to promote Bengali literature, both by translating works in other languages to Bengali and promoting the production of original Bengali literature.

The organisation was founded by L. Leotard and Kshetrapal Chakraborty in 1893. Then it was known as The Bengal Academy of Literature. On 29 April 1894, the name of the society itself was changed to Bangiya Sahitya Parishad. 1894 saw the first officers, with Romesh Chunder Dutt as the first president...

Romesh Chunder Dutt CIE (Bengali: রমেশচন্দ্র দত্ত; 13 August 1848 – 30 November 1909) was an Indian civil servant, economic historian, writer and translator of Ramayana and Mahabharata, a great national leader before Gandhian era and contemporary of Dadabhai Naoroji and Justice Ranade.

-- Romesh Chunder Dutt, by Wikipedia

and Rabindranath Tagore and Navinchandra Sen as vice presidents.

-- Bangiya Sahitya Parishad, by Wikipedia

and was an honorary member of the Royal Asiatic Society in London.[1][2]

Works

Shastri's first research article was "Bharat mahila", published in the periodical Bangadarshan when he was a student.

Cover page of Bangadarshan

Bangadarshan was a Bengali literary magazine, founded by Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay in 1872,

Bankim Chandra Chattapadhyay

Bankim Chandra Chatterjee or Bankim Chandra Chattopadhyay, CBE CIE (27 June 1838[1]–8 April 1894) was an Indian novelist, poet and journalist. He was the composer of Vande Mataram, originally in Sanskrit, personifying India as a mother goddess and inspiring activists during the Indian Independence Movement.

Vande Mataram (IAST: Vande Mātaram, also pronounced Bande Mataram; transl. Mother, I bow to thee) is a poem written in Sanskrit by Bankim Chandra Chatterjee in 1870s, which he included in his 1882 Bengali novel Anandamath. The poem was first sung by Rabindranath Tagore in the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress. The first two verses of the song were adopted as the National Song of India in October 1937 by the Congress Working Committee prior to the end of colonial rule in August 1947.

An ode to the Motherland, it was written in Bengali script in the novel Anandmath. The title 'Vande Mataram' means "I bow to thee, Mother" or "I bow to thee, Mother". The "mother goddess" in later verses of the song has been interpreted as the motherland of the people –– Banga Mata (Mother Bengal) and Bharat Mata (Mother India), though the text does not mention this explicitly.

It played a vital role in the Indian independence movement, first sung in a political context by Rabindranath Tagore at the 1896 session of the Indian National Congress. It became a popular marching song for political activism and Indian freedom movement in 1905. Spiritual Indian nationalist and philosopher Sri Aurobindo referred it as "National Anthem of Bengal". The song and the novel containing it was banned by the colonial government, but workers and the general public defied the ban (with many being imprisoned repeatedly for singing it in public); with the ban being overturned by the Indian government after the country gained independence from colonial rule in 1947.

-- Vande Mataram, by Wikipedia

Chattopadhyay wrote fourteen novels and many serious, serio-comic, satirical, scientific and critical treatises in Bengali. He is known as Sahitya Samrat (Emperor of Literature) in Bengali.

-- Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, by Wikipedia

and resuscitated in 1901 under the editorship of Rabindranath Tagore. The magazine had a defining influence on the emergence of a Bengali identity and the genesis of nationalism in Bengal.

Many of Bankim's novels were serialized in this magazine, which also carried work by writers such as the Sanskrit scholar Haraprasad Shastri, the literary critic Akshay Chandra Sarkar, and other intellectuals. It carried many articles on the Puranas, the Vedas and the Vedanta, reflecting a reaction within Bengali intellectual community (the bhadralok culture) to "negotiate with the set of ideas coming in the name of modernity by incorporating and appropriating the masses."[2]

Bankim articulated his objectives in creating the magazine as one of: "...making it the medium of communication and sympathy between the educated and the uneducated classes... the English language for good or evil has become our vernacular; and this tends daily to widen the gulf between the higher and lower ranks of Bengali society. Thus I think that we ought to disanglicise ourselves so as to speak to the masses in the language which they may understand."[3] Haraprasad Shastri also echoed this spirit: "What is the purpose of Bangadarshan? Knowledge has to be filtered down.".[4]

But the magazine was far more than a mere dispenser of intellectual knowledge. It was the intoxicating mix of stories that readers waited with bated breath, particularly for the next serialization of a novel by Bankim. Besides the readership among Bengali intelligentsia, the magazine was also widely read among the Bengali-literate women.

The first novel to be serialized here was the stunning Vishabriksha ("poison tree") on 1873. It was followed by Indira in the same year and Yugalanguriya in 1874. Indeed, nearly all of Bankim's subsequent novels were published in this magazine.

In 1876, after Radharani and Chandrashekhar had come out, the magazine faced a hiatus. After a short period though, Bankim's brother Sanjibchandra Chattopadhyay resuscitated the magazine, and Bankim remained a major contributor. His novels Rajani, Krishnakanter will and the Rajput novel Rajasimha were featured between 1877 and 1881. Particularly notable is the publication of Anandamath (1882), the story of a revolt by a group of ascetic warriors; though the battle is against the Muslim forces, the British power lurks in the background. This novel also contains the song Bande Mataram.

The impact of the magazine in 19th-century Bengal can be gauged from Rabindranath Tagore's recollections of reading it as a boy - he was only eleven when Bangadarshan was launched. "It was bad enough to have to wait till the next monthly number was out, but to be kept waiting further till my elders had done with it was simply intolerable."[3] Prof Santanu Banerjee observed: "There is hardly any magazine apart from Bangadarshan in the world to claim the glory of publishing two National Song of two separate country".[5]

In the late 1880s, the magazine was eventually no longer in publication.

-- Bangadarshan, by Wikipedia

Later, Shastri became a regular contributor to the periodical, which was then edited by the noted Bengali author Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay, authoring around thirty articles on different topics, as well as novel reviews. He was first introduced to research by Rajendralal Mitra, a noted Indologist, and translated the Buddhist Puranas which Mitra included in the book The Sanskrit Buddhist Literature of Nepal. Shastri was also Mitra's assistant at the Asiatic Society, and became Director of Operations in Search of Sanskrit Manuscripts after Mitra's death.[1][5]

Shastri was instrumental in preparing the Catalogue of the Asiatic Society's approximately ten thousand manuscripts with the assistance of a few others.[1] The long introduction to the Catalogue contains invaluable information on the history of Sanskrit literature.

Shastri gradually became interested in collecting old Bengali manuscripts and ended up visiting Nepal several times, where, in 1907, he discovered the Charyageeti or Charyapada manuscripts.[1] His painstaking research on the manuscript led to the establishment of Charyapada as the earliest known evidence of Bengali language.[1] Shastri wrote about this finding in a 1916 paper titled "হাজার বছরের পুরোনো বাংলা ভাষায় রচিত বৌদ্ধ গান ও দোঁহা” (Hajar bochhorer purono Bangla bhasay rochito Bouddho gan o doha) meaning "Buddhist songs and verses written in Bengali a thousand years ago".[2][6]

Shastri was the collector and publisher of many other old works, author of many research articles, a noted historiographer, and recipient of a number of awards and titles.[1]

Some of his notable works were: Balmikir jai, Meghdoot byakshya, Beneyer Meye (The Merchant's Daughter, a novel), Kancanmala (novel), Sachitra Ramayan, Prachin Banglar Gourab, and Bouddha dharma.[2]

His English works include: Magadhan Literature, Sanskrit Culture in Modern India, and Discovery of Living Buddhism in Bengal.[2]

He also discovered an old palm-leaf manuscript of Skanda Purana in a Kathmandu library in Nepal, written in Gupta script.

The Skanda Purana (IAST: Skanda Purāṇa) is the largest Mahāpurāṇa, a genre of eighteen Hindu religious texts. The text contains over 81,000 verses, and is of Kaumara literature, titled after Skanda, a son of Shiva and Parvati, who is also known as Murugan. While the text is named after Skanda, he does not feature either more or less prominently in this text than in other Shiva-related Puranas. The text has been an important historical record and influence on the Hindu traditions related to the war-god Skanda.

The earliest text titled Skanda Purana likely existed by the 8th century CE, but the Skanda Purana that has survived into the modern era exists in many versions. It is considered as a living text, which has been widely edited, over many centuries, creating numerous variants. The common elements in the variant editions encyclopedically cover cosmogony, mythology, genealogy, dharma, festivals, gemology, temples, geography, discussion of virtues and evil, of theology and of the nature and qualities of Shiva as the Absolute and the source of true knowledge.

The editions of Skandapurana text also provide an encyclopedic travel handbook with meticulous Tirtha Mahatmya (pilgrimage tourist guides), containing geographical locations of pilgrimage centers in India, Nepal and Tibet, with related legends, parables, hymns and stories.

This Mahāpurāṇa, like others, is attributed to the sage Vyasa.

-- Skanda Purana, by Wikipedia

References

1. Chowdhury, Satyajit (2012). "Shastri, Haraprasad". In Islam, Sirajul; Jamal, Ahmed A. (eds.). Banglapedia: National Encyclopedia of Bangladesh (Second ed.). Asiatic Society of Bangladesh.
2. edited by Subodhchandra Sengupta. (1998). Subodh Chandra Sengupta and Anjali Bose (eds.) (ed.). Sansad Bangali Charitabhidhan. Vol. I (4th ed.). Sahitya Samsad. pp. 612–613. ISBN 81-85626-65-0. (in Bengali)
3. Durbar Library (Nepal); Shastri, Hara Prasad; Bendall, Cecil; Bengal (India) (1905). A catalogue of palm-leaf & selected paper mss. belonging to the Durbar library, Nepal. Calcutta: Printed at the Baptist mission Press. pp. Historical Introduction, p. 1. OCLC 894231596.
4. Official website of Sanskrit College Archived 27 August 2013 at the Wayback Machine, Principals of Sanskrit College
5. Bhatacharyya, Ritwik. "Time-citations: Haraprasad Shastri and the 'Glorious Times'". Cerebration. Retrieved 12 April 2008.
6. S. D. (1987). "Charyapada (Bengali)". Encyclopaedia of Indian Literature. Vol. 1. Sahitya Akademi. pp. 646–. ISBN 81-260-1803-8.

External links

• H P Shastri at the Encyclopedia of Science Fiction
• Sanskrit College new website. Viewed in August 2020.