The Secret Memories of the Dalai Lama’s Brother

Several kilometres off the Siliguri Corridor, or as it is more popularly known, the ‘Chicken’s Neck’—that narrow strip of land wedged between Bangladesh, Bhutan and Nepal which connects the Northeast of India to the rest of the country—is a long-forgotten frontier town in the foothills of the Himalayas. Kalimpong was once a flourishing trade centre between Tibet and India, an important part of the route that stretched from Lhasa to Kalimpong, and from there on to Calcutta and the rest of the world. But during the period of unrest in Tibet in the 1950s, the Indo-Chinese war of 1962, and for a few years thereafter, this tiny town became a nerve centre of suspicious activities. There were Tibetan resistance fighters itching for a fight. There were CIA agents, people who had connections with the UK’s MI6, a famed Japanese spy who for many years posed as a Mongolian monk, a Greek-Danish anthropologist who was expelled from India on suspicion of being a spy—all of them warily tracked by the Indian intelligence apparatus. Mao Tse-Tung, and later Jawaharlal Nehru, were said to have been especially cautious of this area, remarking on quite a few occasions that it was a den of spies.

During this period of the 1950s, to the dread of both India and China, appeared the suspicious figure of the Dalai Lama’s elder brother, Gyalo Thondup. After the Dalai Lama, Thondup is perhaps modern Tibet’s most important figure. Forever travelling, from Washington and New Delhi to Taiwan and Hong Kong, courting powerful foreign leaders, he networked with spies, organised Tibetan resistance fighters, became a go-between for governments, and was involved with the CIA.

The 86-year-old Thondup now permanently resides in Kalimpong, retired from all aspects of his previous occupation, managing a humble living from an arcane trade: he runs a noodle factory. He is viewed with suspicion, quite unfairly, even by fellow exiled Tibetans. The fact that he had links with various governments, was closely connected with Chiang Kai-Shek, married a Chinese woman, organised the ill-fated CIA support of the Tibetan resistance movement and later became Deng Xiaoping’s contact person with the Tibetan government-in-exile has all contributed to this reputation.

Thondup has now published his memoir. Titled The Noodle Maker of Kalimpong, it runs through important episodes in the life of modern Tibet, and its relationships with key countries from the perspective of one of its key players. The co-author of this book, Anne F Thurston, seems to suggest early on—first in the introduction and later in the afterword—that Thondup is on occasions an unreliable narrator. In the book, he accuses many people, both prominent Tibetans and members of other states, of several things, even when, as Thurston writes, he has little evidence. She refers to Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, writing that there could be several alternative views of the same episode. ‘Gyalo Thondup’s viewpoint nonetheless prevails even when I would not personally have drawn the same conclusions,’ Thurston writes in the introduction. ‘This, thus, is not Rashomon. It is not an attempt to tell the same story from different points of view… It is the story of Gyalo Thondup’s own life as he experienced it and wants to have it told.’

Thondup was, from a young age, groomed to help his brother in statecraft. Of the five male siblings who lived to adulthood, he was the only one who did not become a monk. He was sent to China by Tibet’s then regent, Reting Rinpoche, and his father, Choekyong Tsering, for a modern education so he could better serve his brother when the time came. Later, he moved to Taiwan after the Kuomintang retreated to the island nation, under the direct guardianship of Chiang Kai-Shek. He became fluent not just in Tibetan, but also Chinese and English, which would help him in his connections with several countries.

The book shifts from one continent to another, as Thondup is wooed by governments and secret agencies. He argues and bargains for Tibet and makes covert deals, although he is invariably let down. One important aspect of the book is the CIA’s support of the Tibetan resistance movement, which began in the late 1950s and continued through much of the 1960s. Thondup played the central role of organising support and selecting Tibetans who would be trained. But when US President Richard Nixon and his Secretary of State Henry Kissinger got close to Beijing, all support was abruptly stopped and Tibetans were yet again left in the lurch.

It is surprising that this book hasn’t gotten much traction in India thus far. There is a fair amount of detail on how India approached the Tibet issue, and how the Indian intelligence machinery works. During the 1950s and 1960s especially, Thondup met Nehru and several high-ranking officials at RAW many times. The Indian Government was one of the first governments to warn Lhasa of the impending crisis when Communists were taking over China, and made promises of help. Yet, later, Nehru reneged on his promise to grant political asylum to the Dalai Lama when he visited India in 1956. ‘As I accompanied my brother to the Sikkim border to say our good-byes, I had no doubt that he was returning to a horrible fate. I was convinced that I would never see him again,’ he writes. ‘Eventually I would come to consider Nehru a great leader. But at that time, I felt outrageously betrayed.’ Even when the asylum was eventually granted in 1959, the Dalai Lama and Thondup were prohibited from conducting any political activities or making any public statements. New Delhi wanted the Dalai Lama to take up residence in Shillong, although it later decided on Dharamsala, because the Government believed these areas would be too remote for anyone, especially the media, to have access to the leader. Everything changed after the 1962 war. India set up a special task force of Tibetan fighters called the Special Frontier Force within the Indian armed forces, for combat with the Chinese. The Tibetan resistance fighters, when they set up base in Nepal’s Mustang region, did not just work with the CIA; Thondup reveals that India was also a part of this endeavour. The results of the Mustang operation—the monitoring of Chinese telephones and broadcasts along with periodic ambushes of Chinese transport vehicles—were shared with the CIA and RAW. In 1988, a new opportunity for a settlement between Beijing and the Dalai Lama arose. China wanted to reopen dialogue with the Dalai Lama’s representatives, even asking him to choose the venue and date for such a meeting. But when RAW learnt of it, it tried talking Thondup out of it. Later, Thondup writes, ‘Indian officials’ forced the representative of the Dalai Lama in New Delhi, Tashi Wangdu, to make a public announcement asking the Chinese to meet the Dalai Lama’s representatives in Geneva on 15 January 1989. ‘I knew immediately that this was an unacceptable breach of protocol…The Indians had deliberately sabotaged our negotiations. And the Tibetans had destroyed the best opportunity we had had since 1959.’

There is also a juicy incident around efforts of RAW trying to destabilise the Bhutanese monarchy. The agency was apparently trying to manipulate a Tibetan woman who was the Bhutan king’s concubine into interfering with the Himalayan country’s political succession. When it failed, the blame was then pinned partly on Thondup. Later, Thondup writes, India plotted against the Sikkimese monarchy and took over the tiny kingdom. ‘India had stepped in where the British left off,’ he writes, ‘instigating all sorts of complicated political intrigues and plots to overthrow one ruler or another.’

Apart from the publication of this book, Thondup has retreated from public life. He rarely even steps out into his town’s marketplace. The only time locals seem to take notice of his presence is when the Dalai Lama stops by to call on his elder brother. To Thondup, this memoir is not just an attempt to tell the story of Tibet from his perspective, but also serves as a form of remembrance. He wakes up every morning in Kalimpong before dawn, and as he waits for the sun to rise, he writes, his soul is filled with the agony of the past and the image of young able-bodied Tibetans who died in the Tibetan resistance movement. ‘But there are reasons to hope,’ he writes, ‘…The Tibetan government in exile now has a democratically elected, young, intelligent, well-educated prime minister. I hope that he and his colleagues can bring a new approach to our old problems.

booksDalai LamaGyalo Thondup & Anne F ThurstonThe Noodle Maker of KalimpongThe Untold Story of My Struggle for Tibet