Land of the Dawn-lit Mountains Read online

  Praise for Land of the Dawn-Lit Mountains

  ‘A fabulously thrilling journey through a beguiling land’

  Joanna Lumley

  ‘A tale of delight and exuberance – and one I’d thoroughly recommend. Bolingbroke-Kent proves a great travelling companion – compassionate, spirited and with a sharp eye for human oddity’

  Benedict Allen, author of Edge of Blue Heaven and Into the Abyss

  ‘With tremendous verve and determination Antonia plunges through an extraordinary world. Thank heavens she survived to tell this vivid and thoughtful tale’

  Ted Simon, author of Jupiter’s Travels

  ‘A transformative journey that gripped me from the very first page’

  Alastair Humphreys, author of The Boy Who Biked the World and Microadventures

  ‘A beautifully-written, exciting and revealing book that harks back to a golden age of travel writing’

  Lois Pryce, author of Revolutionary Ride

  For Marley

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  PART ONE: THE WILD EAST

  1. The Forgotten Land

  2. All I Need Is a Hero

  3. Tea and Unicorns

  4. Where’s John?

  5. Into the Wild

  6. Opium Country

  7. Monsoon Come Early

  8. Tribal Gathering

  9. Secrets of the Tsangpo

  10. Last of the Igu

  PART TWO: TOUCHING TIBET

  11. Searching for Shangri-La

  12. The King

  13. The Heart of the Lotus

  14. The Cheerful Mountain

  15. Goodbye to Pemako

  PART THREE: UP AND OVER

  16. Easter in the Hidden Land

  17. A Risky Business

  18. The Sela Pass

  19. Sister Act

  20. Yak to the Plains

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgements

  About Antonia Bolingbroke-Kent

  Glossary

  List of Tribes in Arunachal Pradesh

  Endnotes

  Select Bibliography

  Index

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  During the course of my journey I encountered and spent time with people from numerous different tribal groups, among them Idu Mishmi, Khampa, Monpa, Adi and many more. When I am writing about someone from a distinct tribal group I always refer to them as Idu, Adi or Monpa etc., as opposed to simply ‘Indian’. When talking about tribal people in general I occasionally use the term ‘tribals’, which is a term commonly used in India, both by tribal and non-tribal peoples. When I am writing about people from the states of Assam, Bihar or Bengal, I refer to them as Assamese, Bihari or Bengali. In cases where I write about non-tribal Indians in a generic manner I simply refer to them as Indian, or ‘mainland Indian’ – a common term used by the tribal people of Arunachal Pradesh to describe non-tribal people from outside the state. In a very few instances, names have been changed to protect people’s identities.

  PROLOGUE

  The priest chivvied us into the dark, humid interior, muttering mantras and incantations as he went.

  ‘You are so lucky!’ said Manash. ‘This is the least crowded I’ve ever seen it. Normally you have to queue for hours.’

  But it was hard to contemplate a bigger crowd. Age-blackened walls sealed us into Kamakhya’s crush of devotees, the mass of humanity shuffling and chanting as it moved through the tunnel towards the subterranean inner sanctum, the air thick with incense, sweat and expectation. Priests rocked and chanted next to bronze platters piled with notes, streaking our foreheads with vermilion as we passed. Crimson deities loomed out of the shadows, their stony features lit by the flickering of dozens of little butter lamps. Hemmed in by rock and flesh, I pressed on through the guttering gloom, hands raised in supplication, lips mouthing mantras I didn’t understand, senses charged with an unseen energy.

  In a small cave at the heart of the temple lay the holy of holies, Sati’s yoni, or vagina, a slab of black granite carved with a ten-inch fissure kept constantly moist by a spring in the rocks above. Here the crush and heat and fervour reached a crescendo as people pushed towards the holy pudenda. Call it the goddess, imagination or claustrophobia, but the cramped, ancient chamber seemed to pulse with the power of something beyond my understanding, as if we’d stepped into the womb of the divine mother herself.

  Breathless, bewildered and trampled on, I knelt before the sacred slit, obeying the attendant priest as he motioned for me to touch the pool of water, smash a coconut on the rock, donate some rupees and throw a handful of marigolds. Please, goddess, look after me on the journey ahead, I repeated, as he thumbed my head with more vermilion, gave me a scrap of red cotton and hustled me out of the way. A minute later we were blinking in the daylight and greedily gulping at the air, daubed red and garlanded with marigolds.

  As we left the temple compound I grabbed a passing baby goat for a cuddle. It looked at me with cold, capricious eyes and proceeded to munch on my marigolds. Sacred vaginas, holy goats and a lucky absence of crowds – the omens were good. This was fortunate, for I was about to depart on a journey that had fired my dreams and fears for the past two years. Given the remoteness of where I was going, and the events of the past year, I needed all the divine luck I could get.

  PART ONE

  THE WILD EAST

  1

  THE FORGOTTEN LAND

  Curled beneath the eastern ramparts of the Himalayas broods a wild land of unnamed peaks and unexplored forests: the Indian state of Arunachal Pradesh. The largest and least populous of the Seven Sisters – the septet of states that make up India’s turbulent, tribal Northeast – it lies folded between the Tibetan plateau, the steaming jungles of Burma, the mountains of Bhutan and the flood-prone plains of the Brahmaputra Valley. Remote, mountainous and forbidding, here shamans still fly through the night, hidden valleys conceal portals to other worlds, yetis leave footprints in the snow, spirits and demons abound, and the gods are appeased by the blood of sacrificed beasts. More tribes live here, and more languages are spoken, than anywhere else in South Asia. A goldmine of flora and fauna, its unparalleled altitudinal range provides sanctuary to a fabulous array of exotic and alarming creatures. Snow leopards prowl along frozen ridges. Royal Bengal tigers pad through the jungle. Burmese rock pythons slither through the loam.

  Yet Arunachal Pradesh remains almost unheard of outside India and little known by those within it. Cordoned off from the outside world from 1873 until the end of the 1990s, today the harshness of its terrain, a sensitive political situation and the need for expensive and restrictive permits still make it a little-visited region.

  Much of this isolation is down to simple geography. This violent landscape was formed around fifty million years ago when the Eurasian and Indian landmasses collided in an almighty tectonic smash, the old continents welding into a naturally forbidding architecture of plunging ravines and densely packed peaks, all rent and skewed and tumbling, the very earth itself fighting for space. In the seam between the former continents rose a great river, the Tsangpo, coursing along the suture of the Indian and Eurasian plates. Landlocked, topographically impractical and soon covered by thick forests, this was not a corner of the planet designed for human habitation.

  Who came here first, and where they came from, nobody really knows, but what is certain is that by the time the East India Company annexed the region – then known as Assam – from the Burmese at the Treaty of Yandabo in 1826, this isolated Indo-Tibetan border area was home to numerous tribes of singularly fearsome repute. Major John Butler, a British Political Officer who travelled everywhere with two glass w
indows to fit into the bamboo walls of the huts he stayed in, described it as a ‘wild, uncivilized foreign land’ occupied by lawless savages with a nasty proclivity for opium. In 1837 J. M’Cosh, a surgeon stationed in Calcutta, wrote of its ‘straggling hordes of barbarians’. Another colonial wag noted how these ‘rude and barbarous people’ were ‘very averse to strangers’ and notably fond of removing the heads of unwanted interlopers. The warlike Ahom, Tai invaders who’d ruled Assam for 600 years, had wisely left these headhunting hill dwellers alone and, unless provoked, the British did too.

  In 1873, after half a century of intermittent raids on their lucrative interests in Assam, the British introduced the Inner Line Permit. Designed to prohibit movement between the Brahmaputra Valley and the surrounding mountains, it was essentially a peace deal with the tribal populations of the hills, a clever way of saying: ‘You stop interfering with our tea, oil and elephant trades and we won’t meddle in your affairs.’ By now Assamese tea was big business and, with so much at stake, the British did not want their profits dented by troublesome tribesmen. From then on – the odd skirmish and light butchery aside – the ‘savages’ kept to the hills, the British to tending their tea on the plains.

  This laissez-faire attitude came to an end in 1910 when the Chinese invaded Tibet, deposed the Dalai Lama and looked set to march into eastern Assam too. Russian imperialist ambitions in the East were bad enough but now, with the Chinese jabbing at their unprotected Achilles heel, the British quickly set to mapping and monitoring these neglected frontier zones. Surveying parties led by colonels with bristling moustaches and perfectly pomaded hair marched north from the plains, their trains of bandy-legged porters buckling under the weight of hampers, tents and gramophones. As the British explorer and botanist Frank Kingdon-Ward later wrote, these parties were instructed to not only ‘explore and survey as much of the country as possible’, but also find the ‘Pemako Falls’ and settle ‘the question of the Tsangpo and Brahmaputra rivers’. Whether the two great rivers of Tibet and Northeast India were one and the same, and if they hid a colossal waterfall in their unexplored inner gorges, was one of the greatest geographical mysteries of the nineteenth century. The British were determined to find the answer before the Russians or Chinese.

  Not wanting to dilly-dally, in 1914 Sir Henry McMahon, the foreign secretary of the British-run government of India, boldly inked a new Indo-Tibetan border along the ridge of the eastern Himalayas. Until then, British colonial interests officially extended only to the edges of the Brahmaputra Valley, but now we were laying claim to the ungovernable mountainous tracts beyond. Stretching 550 miles from Bhutan to Burma, the ‘McMahon Line’ was rejected by the Chinese delegation at that year’s Simla Conference, who walked out after maintaining that Tibet and a significant chunk of Assam belonged to them. Sidelined by the confusion of the Great War and its aftermath, the issue reappeared in 1943 when the Chinese produced a map reiterating their claim to these territories. Despite the British responding with a renewed bout of mapping and exploration of the disputed frontier, the matter still wasn’t resolved by the time India lurched to Independence in 1947.

  At this point, Jawaharlal Nehru, India’s first prime minister, had more pressing issues to consider than his fledgling country’s remote, tribal Northeast. Rather than complicate matters, he opted to keep Britain’s Inner Line Permit system in place – a system that remains to this day. As a man who claimed to have a ‘strong attachment to the tribal people’ of his country, he was, perhaps, partly driven by a desire to preserve the unique cultures of the North East Frontier Agency, as Arunachal Pradesh was then known. But it could also have been a case of taking the most expedient path – a path that was muddied when India’s accommodation of Tibet’s fugitive Dalai Lama in 1959 contributed to the Sino-Indian War of 1962. In October of that year, Mao Zedong’s People’s Liberation Army launched a surprise assault across the McMahon Line, temporarily occupying parts of the region and advancing as far south as Tezpur in Assam. Fortunately, a month later, they announced a ceasefire and withdrew.

  Since then the two nations have eyeballed each other over the parapet of the Himalayas, missing few opportunities for border braggadocio, spying and diplomatic spats. China has never accepted the McMahon Line and continues to lay claim to the region, referring to it as South Tibet and including it on official government maps – a slur which India takes very seriously indeed. As I write this in May 2016 the Indian government is drafting a new law that could lead to not only a hefty jail sentence but also a fine up to $15 million (no, that’s not a typo) for any careless cartographers who publish an inaccurate map showing disputed territory, such as Arunachal Pradesh, Kashmir and Ladakh’s Aksai Chin, as lying outside its borders. The Indian customs declaration form, which all visitors to the country must fill out on entry, puts ‘maps and literature where Indian external boundaries have been shown incorrectly’ above ‘narcotic drugs and psychotropic substances’ in their list of prohibited items. It must be the only country in the world where a badly drawn map is deemed more dangerous than a stash of class As.

  The Chinese issue has shaped this region since 1962 and is the prism through which the Indian government and people view this far-flung frontier state. But Chinese expansionism isn’t the only conflict that has riven this far-off corner of the world in recent decades. Since Independence, guerrilla armies and liberation fronts have sprung up all over the Northeast, each of them fighting for autonomy from an India that feels geographically, culturally and religiously separate. Caught in the cross-currents of communism, the Vietnam War, the Cold War and the chaos of East Pakistan and Bangladesh, this Hydra-headed struggle for independence has been further agitated by frequent outside interference. The US backed Naga rebels between the 1950s and 1970s, with CIA agents operating in the area being easily mistaken for missionaries, and Pakistan and China have consistently funded and trained various groups. It’s been a long and bitter battle that few outsiders have heard of, yet one that has claimed the lives of an estimated 200,000 Naga – killed with eye-watering savagery by soldiers of the Indian Army. Today the violence is a fraction of what it was in the 1950s, ’60s and ’70s, but numerous guerrilla factions still exist and the dream of independence from India still fuels numerous rebel groups throughout the Seven Sisters.

  All this has meant that this disputed frontier territory – which was named Arunachal Pradesh, ‘the land of the dawn-lit mountains’, in 1987 – has remained uniquely isolated, a hidden land that time and the outside world forgot.

  *

  Fate, once again, had dealt me a lucky card. In October 2013, on the very day I emailed the manuscript of my previous book, A Short Ride in the Jungle, to my publisher, I received a call from the BBC. A few days later I landed in post-Diwali Delhi, a city choked with fog and filth, to spend a week finding stories and characters for a documentary on Azadpur Mandi, one of the world’s biggest fruit and vegetable markets. Traipsing through rotting vegetable matter discussing the inner workings of the Indian carrot trade wasn’t the most glamorous TV job I’ve done. But it did mean I met Abhra.

  An ebullient Bengali with a ready laugh, Abhra is behind many of the documentaries about India you see on Western TV screens. Fixer extraordinaire, he’s the man the BBC, Channel 4, Discovery and National Geographic go to if they want to film on the subcontinent. He arranges filming permits, hires local crews, deals with the muddling world of Indian bureaucracy, arranges transport and sniffs out locations, stories, ideas and characters from Manali to Mumbai. He smuggled Simon Reeve across the border to Burma to meet insurgents in his Tropic of Cancer series; took Gordon Ramsay to meet a Naga chief in Great Escapes; helped Michael Palin up the Himalayas and arranged for the Human Planet team to meet mahouts and their elephants in the jungles of Arunachal Pradesh. Blessed with the rare ability to find anything and get on with anyone, be they politicians or rubbish pickers, Abhra could charm the pants off Putin. His nickname isn’t Abhra-cadabra for nothing.

  Abhra
also happens to be one of the few outsiders to have travelled extensively in the Seven Sisters. Until then, I’d been only vaguely aware of these anomalous states, bolted onto the eastern shoulder of India like a hasty afterthought. But over lengthy gin-fuelled dinners in the same Delhi restaurant, eyes twinkling behind thick black-rimmed spectacles, he fired my imagination with tales of unmapped wilderness, shamans with magical powers, sacred valleys, matrilineal tribes, yeti sightings and bizarre rumours of human sacrifice. Even more intriguing was that these little-known states, connected to the rest of the subcontinent by a twenty-mile strip between Bangladesh and Nepal, contained disputed frontier territory and were a hotbed of insurgent groups, wildlife poaching and cross-border drug trafficking. I had to go.

  I returned to England with lungs full of Delhi smog and a brain buzzing with intrigue. But ideas, like dough, need time to rise, ferment and take form. The Northeast was too large, too disparate, to tackle as one haphazard journey: I needed a focus. For several months I let the idea roll about my mind, prodding it, kneading it, stirring it with sprinklings of research. And the more I did so, the more Arunachal rose to the fore. The most inaccessible, culturally diverse and little known of the Seven Sisters, here was a place hidden in the shadows and wrinkles at the edge of the map; a far-off land that spoke of magic and mystery, gods and monsters and the glorious wild. With the exception of the late Mark Shand, whose 2002 book, River Dog, told of his journey down the Brahmaputra, almost nothing has been written about Arunachal since the 1940s. And even Shand, who travelled through just a small eastern section of the state, only scratched the surface. I am not of the curmudgeonly caste that moans about there being nothing left to explore; exploration is a state of mind. But in a world that has largely been mapped, clicked, blogged about, uploaded and tramped across, it seemed unbelievable that such a place still exists. Arunachal it was.