Darjeeling (12 page)

Lepcha
is the name given by the Nepalese from
lep
(speech) and
cha
(unintelligible). This is somewhat paradoxical as the Lepcha language is unusually rich in the vocabulary of the natural world, with not only terms for every plant, leaf, moss, and mushroom of the forest, but also distinctive names for the stages of a plant’s ripeness. No wonder they often prefer to call themselves Rongpas (ravine dwellers).

While today Lepchas live in Sikkim, eastern Nepal, southwestern Bhutan, and Tibet, most reside in West Bengal. Of the approximately 150,000 of them, more than 90 percent live in the Darjeeling hills.
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Though well versed in the ways and rhythms of the forests around Darjeeling—or perhaps because of it—the Lepchas were not interested in becoming laborers for the British in establishing a new sanitarium. Progress stuttered along. Lloyd must have felt that to turn this isolated mountain ridgeline, lacking communication with the rest of India and surrounded by unhelpful locals, into a hill station on par with Shimla or Ooty was a near impossible task. Indeed, by the summer of 1839, the powers in Calcutta were so unhappy with Lloyd’s sluggish progress that they curtly dismissed him.
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Lloyd returned to his military unit and in early 1840 sailed for China to participate in the First Opium War.
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But Lloyd’s story in India—and Darjeeling—was far from over. He rose to the rank of lieutenant general, and by the time sepoys on the plains launched their rebellion in 1857, he was almost seventy, gout-ridden, and long-past retirement age.
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He hesitated on disarming the sepoys in his brigade as those to the south were mutinying. While he had his luncheon aboard a steamer on the Ganges, three regiments in the Bengal Native Infantry—over two thousand men—fled with arms and ammunition and joined up with other rebels. Lloyd’s response in sending out troops in pursuit was equally hesitant and bungled. At last 343 Europeans, 70 Sikhs, and a few gentlemen volunteers went out after them.
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The white-uniformed men were ambushed by rebels in brilliant moonlight as they passed through a mango grove. It was a complete debacle—or turning point in the rebellion, depending on one’s viewpoint. Relieved of his command for “culpable neglect,”
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Lloyd retired to
Darjeeling, where he died an uncelebrated figure a few years later. His widow had to arrange the memorial plaque that read “discoverer of Darjeeling.”
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The development of Darjeeling into a famous hill station—and home of the world’s finest tea—is attributed almost solely to another East India Company man who arrived just weeks after Lloyd’s unceremonious sacking.

In June 1839, a Scottish civil servant in the Indian Medical Service, Dr. Archibald Campbell, was transferred from Kathmandu to Darjeeling to take up the newly created superintendent post.
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The Scot devoted himself with workaholic energy to building the new station. With planning by Lieutenant Robert Napier of the Royal Engineers (later commander in chief in India, eventually Field Marshal Lord Napier, and ultimately one of Britain’s most celebrated soldiers), the settlement quickly began to take shape across the flanks and spurs of Darjeeling’s Y-shaped ridge.

Although discouraged by Sikkim’s unwillingness to supply laborers, within a dozen years Campbell had gotten built a good stretch of road through the tough terrain, at least seventy European houses, a sanatorium for troops, a hotel, a bazaar, and a jail, and he introduced a justice system and abolished forced labor.
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At the end of 1839, just a handful of Europeans resided in town. Until a rail link was established in the 1880s, the journey from Calcutta to Darjeeling took months by bullock cart to the base of the hills, and then by horse, foot, and
dooly
, a litter slung between long poles and carried by four bearers. The hazardous, uncomfortable trip was made only by the desperate or the determined.

Yet the population of the area jumped from less than a hundred people when Campbell arrived to ten thousand in a decade and to twenty-two thousand by 1869.
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Most were Gorkhas from across the border in
Nepal. A special commissioner from the East India Company who visited Darjeeling to check on its progress in the early 1850s stated in his report, “It is necessary to observe that whatever has been done here has been done by Dr Campbell alone.”
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(The Nepalese workers would surely have disagreed.)

Campbell—he was called both Archibald and Arthur—came from the blustery island of Islay, known for its smoky, peat-fired whisky. He studied medicine at the University of Glasgow and then the University of Edinburgh before joining the East India Company as an assistant surgeon in 1827. A year later, he was posted to a horse artillery unit in Meerut, northeast of Delhi. Five years on he took up an appointment as surgeon to the mission in Kathmandu, where he served under B. H. Hodgson.
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Well-known for his deep love of the Himalayas, Hodgson wrote extensively on its flora and fauna, religion, and languages. Under him, Campbell’s interest in the region grew, and like his mentor, he penned a number of scholarly articles on topics that ranged from the Lepcha to taming elephants in Assam. “He was a warm friend, of a remarkably generous and affectionate disposition,” an obituary of Campbell later read; “he was liberal in his views of all matters, and averse to disputation, though tenacious of his opinions.”
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Two years after arriving in Darjeeling, Campbell married a women fifteen years his junior
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and fathered twelve children.
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Along with the supervising tasks of his position—essentially managing the fiscal, criminal, and civil administration of the district—the energetic Scot also controlled the station funds, acted as postmaster, and was the marriage registrar.
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He started a papermaking factory that lasted for a couple of years
³³
and introduced various new crops, including cinchona for producing quinine to treat malaria. (Cinchona is Darjeeling’s second most important crop today.)

And with undreamed-of consequences, Campbell was also the first to grow tea in Darjeeling.

In 1841, just two years after arriving, Campbell planted tea in the garden of his residence, known as Beachwood, with stock that came from the nurseries in the western Himalayan foothills. The trees came to bear in the second half of that decade, and the Company inspector reported in 1853 that both Chinese and Assam varieties were doing well in Campbell’s garden. Civil Surgeon Dr. J. R. Withecombe and Major James Arden
Crommelin, a Calcutta-born member of the Royal Bengal Engineers, also had extensive plantings near Darjeeling town. Campbell stated in a report dated April 28, 1853 that some two thousand tea plants, ranging from twelve years old to seedlings of a few months, were growing at two thousand to seven thousand feet in elevation.
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He requested that none other than Robert Fortune, once again back in China for the Company, personally come to Darjeeling and give his opinion on the “suitableness of the climate and soil of the Hills for the cultivation and manufacture of Tea.”
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With governmental backing, Campbell established tea nurseries in Darjeeling and in Kurseong. While both types of leaf varieties were planted,
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Chinese ones that had largely failed to flourish down in the jungle conditions of Assam were wildly, even unexpectedly, successful. Plants from stock Fortune had smuggled out of China thrived in Darjeeling’s misty, high-elevation climate.

The Company began to propagate plants for individuals and small companies opening up land and clearing plots for tea gardens. Nepalese laborers stripped the Himalayan foothills of their virgin forest by cutting away and burning the underbrush, and severing the lateral roots of large trees so that they toppled over under their own weight. Rocks and roots were removed, the land hoed smooth and, in places, terraced, and saplings transplanted in straight, even lines along the contours of the hills. The first commercial gardens were planted out in 1852 at Tukvar by Captain Masson, Steinthal (“Stone Valley” in German) by a German missionary named Joachim Stölke, and Aloobari. More gardens quickly followed: Makaibari, Pandam, Ging, Ambootia, Takdah, Phubsering. The first factory opened on Makaibari on 1859.

Darjeeling was growing—but remained an enclave within the rajah of Sikkim’s domain. It was only a matter of time for the British to be intimately drawn into the kingdom’s internal affairs and conflicts, and to want to expand out of isolation.

The situation came to a head during Joseph Hooker’s plant-hunting visit in the late 1840s. Attracted to the region’s lavish and diverse flora—four thousand species of flowering plants and three hundred varieties of ferns grow in and around the forests of Darjeeling alone
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—Hooker spent three years in the Darjeeling hills, Sikkim, and Nepal identifying and collecting. “In short, there is no quarter of the globe so rich in plants,”
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he wrote in the preface of
The Flora of British India
, his magnum opus
coming out of the trip. The seven-volume work, published between 1875 and 1897, totaling nearly six thousand pages and including some sixteen thousand species, contributed greatly to public knowledge of the region’s rich floral biotope. But Hooker’s travelogue of the journey,
Himalayan Journals: Notes of a Naturalist
(1854), dedicated to his close friend Charles Darwin, was an immense popular success. The book informed, inspired, and excited a public with its high-peaked Central Asian descriptions and adventures.

Hooker was a grandee in the heroic age of scientific exploration. After completing his medical studies in Glasgow, the twenty-two-year-old Scot joined Captain James Clark Ross’s four-year-long expedition to Antarctica, which set off in 1839—the last of the epic voyages of exploration done under sail—as assistant surgeon and botanist on the
Erebus
. He had the opportunity not only to observe and collect at the southern pole, but at all the main areas of the southern hemisphere, from Tierra del Fuego to Tasmania and the Cape. Back in Britain, as Hooker began assembling his great work on the region’s flora (published between 1844 and 1859 in six large quarto volumes), the urge to collect in rich, unexplored regions returned. When offered a chance to go to the Himalayas, he took it and traveled with official accreditation and a government grant.

Hooker, with tiny spectacles crowned by wild, worried brows, and with heavy side whiskers and a beard encircling his otherwise clean-shaven face, arrived in Darjeeling famous and also well connected. His father was director of Kew Gardens. (Hooker
fils
would succeed him at the august institution.) The young Joseph was a confidant, collaborator, and early reader of Darwin.
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On the ship traveling out to India, Hooker became friends with the new governor-general, Lord Dalhousie.

For Hooker’s first expedition into Sikkim, Superintendent Campbell himself obtained permission. On Hooker’s second one, in 1849, which would take him through Sikkim to the frontier of Tibet, Campbell, unable to resist the opportunity to fulfill a decades’-old dream to see the mysterious and forbidden kingdom, joined his esteemed visitor.

That autumn the men, against protests of Sikkimese guards, crossed into Tibet. Once back in Sikkim territory, the two Scotchmen were
immediately placed under arrest. According to a contemporary newspaper account, Campbell was beaten, tightly bound with bamboo cords, and tortured. Officials interrogated Campbell and tried to force him to sign various documents promising that the British wouldn’t exert their influence in Sikkim. Campbell refused. The men were then escorted to the Sikkimese capital, Tumlong. While Hooker remained free to collect along the way, guards restrained Campbell, who, exhausted after some days of walking, had his hands bound to the tail of a mule was and pulled the final distance.
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The men remained locked up in Tumlong well into December. Eventually released, they arrived back in Darjeeling on Christmas Eve, six weeks after being seized.

Repercussions were swift. A punitive British force crossed into Sikkim and camped for a couple of weeks. The soldiers didn’t fire a shot; they simply made their presence known. That was enough. The British stopped paying the rajah’s annual allowance for Darjeeling and, more significantly, annexed the lower part of Sikkim, called the Terai. The name translates to “moist land,” referring to its marshy grasslands and boggy forest. While Hooker called it “that low malarious belt which skirts the base of the Himalaya”
⁴⁰
and a “fatal”
⁴¹
district, the 640-square-mile tract of land was the most fertile part of Sikkim’s largely mountainous dominion.

For the Sikkimese, this turned their kingdom—bordered to the east and west by enemies and enclosed on the north by impenetrable Himalayan peaks—into a landlocked mountain hinterland cut off from all access to the plains below. They now had to pass through British territory to reach them.

But for the British, the move connected Darjeeling to the adjacent lands of British-controlled India.

Some Indian historians see Campbell’s journey as a calculated attempt to provoke the Sikkimese leaders, with whom his relations had soured, thus handing the British justification to grab land. It also made irrelevant any lingering doubts surrounding the original deed to Darjeeling that Lloyd had coaxed from the rajah of Sikkim or the circumstances in which it was obtained.
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If the wording actually meant the British had the right to more than merely reside on the tract, or even if the deed, as some suspected, had actually been written by the Sikkimese ruler himself (and not Lloyd), it was now immaterial.
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Darjeeling was not yet done expanding. Following their loss in the Anglo-Bhutan War (1863–65), Bhutan was forced to cede the Kalimpong tract,
along with a section of foothill plains called the Dooars, to the Company in return for an annual payment. These were added to the district of Darjeeling, which then had its final—and present—shape, some 1,234 square miles.
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