Day one | Day two | Day three

Day one

IT IS dark, raining, five hours from our journey's beginning or end, and the gatekeeper of Arunachal Pradesh doesn't like my permit. Or visa, perhaps that should be, Arunachal being as difficult to enter as almost any country. The seven-day “protected area permit” now being sniffed at by a torch-lit figure in khaki took me almost a year to get, including lobbying in several state and central government departments. Among a long list of conditions, it says I will “not be allowed to discuss the controversial issues which would affect the relations between China and India.”

I have not yet broken this rule. The border-guard is more concerned that the permit, though signed and counter-signed, has not been rubber-stamped. With the assurance of a man trained to look for stamp-marks, not to read English, he says I may not pass. I puff out my cheeks. He shakes his head. I mobilise my travel companion, a close female friend of Arunachal's chief minister's son, who is eagerly awaiting her arrival.

A few minutes later we are rolling on, quitting the plains of Assam and starting a climb that continues, almost unbroken, to the Tibetan plateau at 15,000 feet (4,500 metres).

Foreign journalists find it especially difficult to enter Arunachal. Precious few have managed it in recent years. But non-Arunachali Indians, or “aliens” as they are known locally, also struggle. They require an “inner-line permit”, named after the boundary imposed by India's former British rulers to divide oil-rich, tea-growing Assam from the rugged North-East Frontier Tracts, as Arunachal Pradesh—literally, land of the dawn-lit mountains—was then known. Previously ruled from Assam, it was made a state in 1987. This was part of an effort to cement India's hold on an area seized by China during a brief, bloody border war in 1962, and still claimed by it. Chinese hawks refer to most of Arunachal as “South Tibet”, which drives Indians apoplectic.

But India's efforts to normalise its far north-east have been lacklustre. Arunachal, a vast area, though home to less than 1.5m people, has few roads and most are dreadful. The rutted way to Bumla, a frontier-post popular with Indian tourists, requires an off-road vehicle; from Bumla, a smooth two-lane Chinese highway can be seen stretching away into Tibet. The inner-line permit, typically issued to migrant workers for six months, provided they have a local sponsor, has also kept the region isolated. Yet there is a benefit to this.

It has spared Arunachal the swarms of settlers from West Bengal and Bihar that have swamped other parts of the north-east. Thus insulated, to the relief of most Arunachalis, the state has kept many fragile traditions alive. Despite in-roads made by Hindu and Christian missionaries, many of its 26 main tribes are mostly animist: worshipping the sun and moon, a practise known as “Donyi-Polo”. In western Tawang district, most sorely coveted by China, hundreds of Buddhist nuns and monks study in seminaries blissfully untouched by the ravages of the Cultural Revolution that destroyed Tibet's monasteries. Members of the local Monpa tribe, of Tibetan origin, practise river-burial, whereby corpses are chopped into 108 pieces and thrown into a foaming torrent to ensure the deceased is reincarnated in human form.

After a brief stop in Bomdila, a mostly-Monpa town halfway to Tawang, we start early the next day. At 1,000 feet the morning sun picks out scattered rhododendron flowers, crimson specks in a variegated green swath of juniper, oak and pine. The road winds around itself, climbing precipitously towards the Sela pass, the entrance to the long Tawang valley. It is pot-holed, crumbling and made treacherous by mud and ice, certainly nothing to boast of. Yet its creator, the state-run Border Roads Organisation (BRO), is enormously proud of its shoddy work.

Every mile or two, it advertises itself in way-side slogans, offering advice to drivers and trumpeting its feats. Some are rousing: “Your BRO!” Others are poetic: “Danger creeps where safety sleeps.” One or two are saucy: “Be gentle on my curves”. My favourite owes more to its location than content. It reads, “Life is a journey, don't end it here,” and is daubed on a bridge, at the foot of the Tawang valley, that is popular for river-burials.

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Day two

AS A boy, Lama Leta watched a party of khaki-suited British surveyors tramp through his village on their way to map the border with Tibet. “That's what we thought they were doing anyway,” says the 91-year-old Monpa peasant (pictured below). “We knew nothing about the British.”

The British didn't know much about them. After fixing India's north-eastern frontier in 1914, in an agreement with Tibet, autonomous then, they largely ignored the region. Tibetan officials continued to levy taxes in Tawang, a traditional Tibetan satellite and the birth-place of the sixth Dalai Lama in 1682. Mr Leta, who lives on the edge of Tawang's main town in an encampment for poor Tibetan refugees—his late wife's community—remembers those officials too.

Descending from the Tibetan plateau with their fur-clad retinue, the Tibetans used to winter comfortably in Tawang. Then when spring came, they moved from village to village, collecting a share of the new harvest and transporting it on the shoulders of local peasants back to Tibet. They gave nothing in return, except access to the Tibetan salt trade, and considered the Monpas an inferior lot. “But they were our rulers,” says Mr Leta. “Nobody questioned them.”

In 1951, shortly after India established an administrative outpost in Tawang, China occupied Tibet. That brought the two giant nations face-to-face, separated by a border that China's new communist government, which claimed most of Arunachal, did not recognise. In 1959 the current Dalai Lama fled to Tawang, first taking refuge in its great 17th-century monastery, one of the biggest outside Lhasa. Three years later the Chinese army came too. After weeks of high tension on the border, Chinese soldiers scattered India's shivering, poorly-trained troops and seized much of Arunachal as well as, in the western Himalayas, a big chunk of Kashmir.

In Tawang's hillside villages, where white stone houses flutter with colourful prayer-flags, the Chinese troops are remembered rather fondly for having leant a hand in the fields. “They were little men but they were always ready to help. We had no problem with them,” says Mem Namsey, a sinewy 83-year-old bent over a staff. A few weeks later, the Chinese withdrew. “We weren't sorry to see the back of them either,” Mr Namsey chuckles.

With subsequently no access to Tibet, and little economic development from India, Tawang's people were isolated. But if this stirred resentment against India, an entity few had much idea of, it was quickly doused by outrage over the crimes of the Cultural Revolution in Tibet. The destruction of its monasteries spread a loathing of China that endures. Some educated Monpas even maintain that the Chinese army's good behaviour in Tawang was part of some nefarious communist plot. “They behaved well in Tibet, too, before they destroyed the monasteries and molested the monks and nuns,” says Thupten Gendun, a former monk who acted as a translator for the current Dalai Lama when he visited Tawang last year. “They would have done the same here.”

Sino-Indian relations, broadly speaking, are much improved. Yet there has been a pronounced chill lately, provoked partly by China re-emphasising its claim to Tawang. As a result, last year China sought to block a $60m loan from the Asian Development Bank for projects in Arunachal. It also objected furiously to the Dalai Lama's recent visit. Whipped up by scare-mongering media, some Indian commentators said that, sooner or later, fresh conflict was inevitable. But few educated people in Tawang (nearly half its 45,000 people are illiterate) expect this. “India is too strong now,” says Mr Gendun. Though he, like many others, suspects that China could repeat its 1962 triumph if it tried.

After nearly half a century of peace, most Monpas seem relaxed about living in the dragon's shadow. Banners welcoming the Dalai Lama, who has visited Tawang five times since 1959, are still on display in its main bazaar. But so, these days, are stacks of cheap Chinese goods—shoes, toys, crockery and clothing. A gang of youths lounging there, sporting feathered hairdos and drain-pipe jeans, said the threat of Chinese aggression was the least of their concerns. They cited two others: unemployment and a fear that the current trickle of alien settlers in Tawang would one day become a flood.

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Day three

JUST before dawn, the rain that thunders down for most of my stay in Tawang, battering the hotel's tin roof and rattling its windows, abruptly stops. Stepping onto a balcony that overlooks the great golden-roofed monastery outside the town, I see a glint of snowy peaks all around. It's time I took a walk.

There is an obvious objective: Gyangong Ani Gompa, a convent built into the hillside around 400 metres above the monastery, which I have previously caught only sodden glimpses of through the clouds. It was founded, my guide-book tells me, in the late 17th century and run by a sister of the monastery's founder, a Tibetan lama called Mera Lam Lodre Gyamtso. Around 50 nuns live there, on rations winched up from the monastery over a deep river gorge.

I set out, limbs rejoicing after so many hours car-bound, and descend into this ravine. Following a muddy track, in which a few diminutive nun-sized shoe-prints have survived the rain, I cross a foaming torrent, then clamber up the other side. This presents a lovely scene: a grassy plateau spotted with dark juniper bushes and scattered nomad tents. Three yellow-billed blue magpies throw themselves into the air with startled chortles, fluttering their absurdly long tail feathers. Unperturbed, some yaks and goats quietly graze, while a brutish dog goes berserk, tugging dementedly at a rope in an effort to get free and kill me.

An elderly nomad, wrapped in a cow's hide, appears and points, laughing, to the nunnery high above us. I respond with a complicated mime, which means for God's sake keep your dog tied up. Unsure whether I have been understood, I put in a brisk spurt to the nunnery.

The clouds have reconvened by now, and it is raining hard. But even without any sort of view, the convent seems a nice spot to be a nun. It is smaller than I'd imagined, a huddle of neat, white-walled buildings arranged around a tall prayer-hall, which an unsmiling young woman, with the obligatory red robe and crew cut, leads me to. I leave my boots dripping at the door and step inside, anticipating the smooth pine floor and pleasant buttery scent of oil-lamps. Golden idols of the Buddha, festooned with white votive scarves, gradually materialise, as my eyes grow used to the gloom.

It is a relaxing place, at once accessible and imposing. Butter-scented, a happy vision of a secluded, contemplative life comes to me. It would be wonderful, if also challengingly boring. Yet it is no wonder that Tibetan Buddhism has travelled well, soothing the raw nerves and spiritual cravings of so many in Europe and America. In fact, these seekers will soon be able to come here, to this haven, in droves—along a new road, now under construction, that will link the convent to Tawang for the first time in its 300-year history.

For all their aura of timelessness, Tawang's Buddhist clergy are feeling the force for change. In his monastic office, lushly red-carpeted and with portraits of India's founding fathers on the walls, the abbot of Tawang monastery, Guru Tulku Rinpoche discusses this frankly. Local families no longer routinely submit their second sons to the monasteries, making recruitment of monks a concern. Tawang monastery's population fell from around 600 in 1959 to an all-time low of 200. Partly in response, the clergy introduced secular education to the novices' training, and better food. There are now 480 monks at the monastery, and with over 70 novices inducted last year, from Tawang and nearby Bhutan, its future looks reasonably secure.

Interrupting our discussion, the abbot is called upon to induct half a dozen more, the first new batch of this year. Mostly skinny children under the age of ten, the inductees are ushered in to prostrate themselves before the abbot, while he scribbles down their new monastic names. He then drapes a sacred red thread over the boys' shorn heads, ceremoniously cuts a few more bristly hairs from them, and gives the younger and more frightened-looking boys a reassuring pat on the cheek. About a third of inductees quit before completing their long studies, the abbot says, either because they cannot keep up, or to pursue their secular education.

“But I am a little worried,” says the 39-year-old abbot, who is considered to be a reincarnation—or living Buddha—of one of his enlightened predecessors. On completing their training, young monks, typically in their early 20s, used to confine themselves in their monasteries or to lofty hermitages to practise meditation. “But these days they want to pursue their education or to see the world, to see what is happening in other countries” he says.

With China's Tibetan Buddhists considered to be under the cosh, denied access to their spiritual head, those in India feel a special burden to preserve the religion's traditions. But being relatively few in number—a big majority of India's 8m Buddhists are recent converts from Hinduism to other Buddhist strains—they may struggle. “Now is a very difficult time for our philosophy,” the abbot admits. “We must protect and keep this Buddhist culture and religion.”

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