Basil Gould, Younghusband, Dalai Lama and Dharamsala

Earlier in the month, a news item in this paper mentioned the sale of the collection and archive of British diplomat Sir Basil Gould. Under colonial rule, some of Gould’s postings had been in what were termed ‘challenging areas’: Kabul, Kurrum, Malakand, Waziristan and then in Baluchistan, where in 1935 his wife passed away. Subsequently, he was based in Sikkim. In 1940, as the British representative, he attended the enthronement of His Holiness, the 14th Dalai Lama.

From India, Gould had taken the young and talented artist, Kanwal Krishna, who created a set of 40 watercolours of the ceremony. These included paintings of the dignitaries present and became an authentic record of the event. The heart of the collection was Kanwal Krishna’s oil painting of the four-year-old Dalai Lama seated on his throne on February 22, 1940. As Gould was to note of Kanwal: “Arriving in Lhasa ahead of me, he found a ready welcome and soon established himself as a sort of official artist for the occasion of the installation.” These paintings, along with several other artefacts of the ‘Gould Collection’, were placed under the hammer by the London auction house Bonhams and fetched just under a million pounds.

Some years back, it was from one of his descendants that I first learnt of Basil Gould. On the lady’s recommendation, one sent for Gould’s autobiography, ‘The Jewel in the Lotus’, which had been published posthumously. Attending the ceremonies at Lhasa, Gould had noted of the young Dalai Lama: “…a main impression produced was the extraordinary interest of the child in the proceedings, his presence, and his infallible skill in doing the right thing to the right person at the right time. He was perhaps the only person in the many hundreds who never fidgeted and whose attention never wavered.”

It was on a day in mid-spring that we were having this conversation. In the same place, on a summer day in 1903, another episode, and one that held tragedy and bloodshed for Tibet, had unfolded. This was the infamous ‘Younghusband Expedition’, the British invasion of Tibet in 1903-04. And here lies a sequence of seemingly unconnected dots.

At the end of the Anglo-Sikh wars of the mid-19th century, Kangra had been taken over by the British and the territory between the Sutlej and Ravi rivers, except Jaswan valley, was constituted into an administrative division. Initially, Kangra fort was to be the capital of the district but this plan was abandoned as there was insufficient land for the civil station. This was when Dharamsala was chosen as the district capital in March 1855.

John Younghusband (later, Major-General), father of Sir Francis Younghusband, who led the infamous invasion, came to serve as an aide-de-camp to Sir Charles Napier, when Sind was annexed to the British empire in 1843. In 1856, a newly married John Younghusband arrived in Dharamsala as the Captain of Police and was, in all likelihood, the first police officer there. A few years later, John was stationed at Murree (now in Pakistan), where his to-be famous son, Francis, was born.

Francis joined the army and was posted at Indore when he received a letter from the Viceroy, Lord Curzon, summoning him to Shimla. Younghusband was a lifelong admirer of Curzon and went to the extent of saying that his father and the Viceroy were the two men who had most influenced his life. At Annandale on May 20, 1903, they gave the final touches to a plan of bringing Tibet into the British sphere of influence. In a letter to his father, Younghusband exulted: “This is really magnificent business that I have dropped in for.”

Younghusband’s expedition, which left India in December 1903 under the military command of Brigadier-General Macdonald, was termed a ‘Diplomatic Mission’ but can only be classified as an unprovoked invasion. Curzon’s ‘Diplomatic Mission’ slaughtered close to 700 Tibetans at Chumi Shengo near Guru, and took a quarter of a million rupees as indemnity. They also occupied the Chumbi valley for three years and stationed a trade mission at Gyantse.

Impacted by this ‘expedition’, in later years, Younghusband became deeply spiritual and this included an association, if brief, with Swami Paramahansa Yogananda.

In 1912-13, it was Basil Gould who was stationed as the British Trade Agent at Gyantse. Younghusband’s father had been Dharamsala’s police chief, and the town is now the residence of His Holiness, the Dalai Lama.

— The writer is a Shimla-based author

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