FROM HIMALAYA TO MALAYA

Dato Mohamed Mirza Taiyab is one of the quickest thinkers I have known. While on his first Tourism Malaysia promotion in Nepal, as the Director in charge of Promotions and Marketing, he was already tinkering with what Nepal Tourism Board might adopt for its advertising jingle. He told me that The Carpenters' song "Top of the World" would greatly resonate with international tourists alluring them to visit the tallest mountains in the world; would we be able to secure the copyright to it?

Later as the Director General of Malaysian Tourism Board he brought many innovative marketing strategies to offer Malaysia to the world as "Truly Asia". It was he who pointed out to me the connection between our Himalaya and his Malaya. People had travelled from North India to Malaya before Christ and brought to it the Hindu religion and its ruling dynasties. One of the first kings of Kedah, a Malay province known in ancient times as Langkasura, was a progeny of Alexander the Great who married a princess of North-western India and settled down in Malaya. He named his new territory "Malaya" a derivative of Himalaya if this theory is to be believed. Rajah and Sultan were titles imported from India.

The Malay link to the Himalaya does not end here of course. It was during the Second World War that the Gurkha soldiers fought on the side of Britain to expel the Japanese invaders. Later still the Gurkha soldiers fought the Communists during the Malayan Emergency. Four new regiments were formed here, Gurkha Engineers, Signals, Transport and Military Police. After 1957 A.D. in recognition of their contribution Independent Malaysia would bestow onto them citizenship and conscription in the Malaysian Armed Forces, especially in the Royal Ranger Regiment. In 1955 my father General Kiran Shumsher as Commander-in-Chief of the Nepalese Army went on an official visit to Malaya at the invitation of Commander-in-Chief, Far Eastern Command of the British Army and inspected the Gurkha regiments stationed there. I have found an old newspaper cutting of my father inspecting Gurkha children in a school.

I have been involved in our country's commercial ties with Malaysia. Representing Malaysia Airlines in Nepal as its General Sales Agent I have had the honour and pleasure of welcoming a great number of Malaysian tourists since 1999. In close collaboration with the Malaysian Tourism Board I initiated the promotion of Malaysia as an attractive and viable tourist destination for Nepalese pockets. Nepalese tourists reveled in the manifold attractions of Kuala Lumpur, a modern cosmopolitan city; in the many theme parks such as those in Genting Highlands and the pristine beaches of Langkawi. I single handedly started a burgeoning outbound travel industry that a decade later caters to ever larger numbers of Nepalese tourists flocking to foreign shores from Egypt to Turkey, Mauritius to Dubai and from Thailand to China.

Furthermore Malaysia today has become the proverbial El Dorado for young Nepalese men and women in search of job opportunity the host country generously obliges them with. There are over 600,000 Nepalese workers there sending back remittance to the mother country in precious foreign exchange that helps our banks run. We are more welcome there than many other workers from neighbouring countries as history is on our side. The Gurkhas have lost their lives guarding Malaya. Malaysians are now paying the debt it owes to the people from the Himalaya.

I am with my family in Kota Kinabalu, Sabah, Malaysia

A BLAST FROM THE PAST - THE PROCLAMATION

General Kiran reading the historic proclamation



MY FLIGHT OF FANCY

The dream I have of flying like a bird was fulfilled in a way when I took off to the air recently as I para-sailed in Penang. The reassuring harness strapped to my body the speedboat took off with a great speed and noise and hurtled me into the air, feet dangling and all, for a sensation I wanted to experience since my childhood. As I soared higher and higher, I watched the Penang beachfront receding into the distance and the horizon widening to unveil a jewel of an island.

Flying was a novelty to most of us back then when I was a child, for both adults and children. Few aircrafts landed at Kathmandu and those pilots who flew them were legendary. Whenever I came across these pilots, pointed out to me in whispered awe by my minders, I used to look up to them both literally and metaphorically. I remember a Sikh pilot and another Anglo-Indian pilot frequently flying the Nepal skies. I cannot remember their names. However the real Indiana Jones of the time was a Polish pilot; more of him later.

It was sometime during this period that I dropped a bombshell sending the household into a tizzy: I would become an airline pilot when I grew up! The consternation this unexpected announcement generated caught my mother in a pang of anxiety as she slapped me and started sobbing. Flying for a living was a subject one did not broach ever after. But flying I did for the very first time in a Douglas DC-3 of Royal Nepal Airlines when I accompanied my father to Patna en route to a train journey bound for Varanasi and Lucknow back in 1962. The Dakotas were noisy and shaky and I remember father and son puking at the Patna airport washroom after a particularly violent flight.

DC-3 Aircraft at Kathmandu's Gauchar Airfield

Starting from 1950 the first commercial aircrafts to land at Kathmandu's "Gauchar", cattle grazing field, were the Dakotas of Himalayan Aviation, an airline company started by Nepal's political exiles Subarna Shumsher and Mahavir Shumsher based in Calcutta with 3 DC-3s acquired from the Burma Front. Both the Ranas would finance to the hilt many burgeoning but penniless political parties hell bent on ousting the Rana regime but I digress. It took Captain Stanislaw Bujakowski, a gutsy Polish WWII veteran of the Royal Air Force and accompanying good karma to fly passengers from Calcutta into the mountains up north and land in Kathmandu Valley. The couple Bujakowski - Halina and Stanislaw - were intrepid adventurers who embarked in 1934 on a transcontinental journey from Warsaw to Shanghai on a BSA G34-14 motorbike for "their honeymoon"!  Following Hitler's invasion of Poland Stanislaw joined the RAF in England and fought for the British. After the war he joined Himalayan Aviation and flew frequently to Nepal.


The Bujakowskis and their BSA motorbike

After 1951 for the first time supplies were flown into Nepal instead of transported on the backs of porters over the interminable mountain passes. Himalayan Aviation was merged into Indian Airlines in 1953 while the Nepalese aviation industry would grow independently with the formation of Royal Nepal Airlines in 1958.


Halina Bujakowska's book on her journey with her husband Stanislaw from Warsaw to Shanghai in a motorbike

My dream to fly has been fulfilled in more ways than one since my childhood. I have brought in international charter flights to Nepal filled with tourists, represented numerous airlines such as Malaysia Airlines and Aeroflot and assisted China Southern Airlines to fly to Nepal. I was not destined be a pilot; that is all.



Transavia Airlines' maiden flight to Nepal, September 1998







HOTEL ROYAL AND THE UNVEILING OF SHANGRI-LA

The story of the first hotel of repute in Nepal starts with King Tribhuvan opening up the country after his return from a short exile in India. The year was 1951 A.D. Just a few years earlier King Tribhuvan was the first monarch in several generations to be granted permission to leave the country on a private visit since the Rana family started ruling Nepal. In 1944 Maharajah Juddha Shumsher the prime minister made arrangements for the king to leave for Calcutta on health grounds and my father Kiran Shumsher, Juddha's son then Major General was deputed to look after the royal visit.

Boris Lissanevitch was the purveyor of European style wining and dining to the metropolis that was Calcutta. The name of Boris's famed establishment was "Club 300", the name derived from his limiting its membership to 300 of Calcutta's elite while women too were allowed in bucking the Colonial trend. It became hugely successful. Soon it became as legendary as the bar in the movie "Casablanca" the Humphrey Bogart character presided over. I can vividly imagine the affable Boris telling tall tales of his flight from Odessa to Paris after the Bolshevik takeover, his successful stint with ballet master Serge Diaghilev's "Le Ballet Russes" and his later jaunts in pre-revolutionary Shanghai. He told stories of how he danced all the way to Calcutta with his dancing partner and first wife Kira before parting ways. King Tribhuvan, hitherto unexposed to life on the fast lane, must have been enraptured by the Calcutta glitterati and the charming Boris.


Kira and Boris

 Soon after King Tribhuvan assumed power in 1951 it was his old acquaintance Boris of Club 300 fame the king would invite to open a hotel in Nepal. Boris Lissanevitch landed in Kathmandu in November 1953 with his newly-wed wife the Danish beauty Inger, 20 years his junior, and with their two small boys, Mischa and Alex. Nicholas my classmate in junior school was born in Nepal. Boris was handed over one wing of the large palace then known as Bahadur Bhawan, the residence of the eldest son of Maharajah Juddha, to open a hotel. He named it Hotel Royal in salient gratitude to royal patronage. It was never known as Royal Hotel as it might denote ownership of the Royal family, part of the calibrations a democratic post-Rana Nepal required.

Boris and Inger

The palace that Boris was given for opening a hotel had its own turbulent past. The palace known as "Char Burja" with four minarets on the roof following Mughal-era architectural tradition was built in 1889 by Maharajah Bir Shumsher Rana, prime minister of Nepal from 1885 to 1901. It was one of several opulent palaces Bir built to transform the landscape of Kathmandu Valley from ethnic Newari to European neo-classical. Tallo (or lower) Narayan Hiti, Lal Durbar, Seto Durbar and Phora Durbar were also built during his period. "Char Burja" was given to his son General Rudra Shumsher where he and his family resided until 1934 A.D. Rudra was the eldest son of the second wife of Bir Shumsher elevated to the rank of Maharani after he came to power and the sons were enlisted in the roll of succession as approved by the Privy Council.

Politics intervened cruelly to give new ownership to the building that was "Char Burja". On 18th of March 1934 A.D. Maharajah Juddha, succumbing to pressure from the restless "A" class Rana "nomenclatura", banished from the prime ministerial roll Commander-in-Chief Rudra Shumsher, second in line after the prime minister, and all other sons of Bir and Bhim Shumsher considered to have been born from their second wives and thus deemed unfit for the roll of succession. Their Kathmandu properties were confiscated by the state and they were exiled to albeit luxurious life of country squires but far away for the power center of Kathmandu. Rudra Shumsher was exiled to Palpa as the Bada Hakim or Governor of the province. Maharajah Juddha took over the palace and gave it to his eldest son Bahadur Shumsher.

"Char Burja", the former Hotel Royal houses the
National Election Commission today.

The palace forlornly houses the National Election Commission today. Despite its recent whitewash it looks lifeless. Boris the bon vivant is missing, his tourists are missing, his royal guests do not visit anymore and his mother-in-law's antique shop does not bring in the curiosity hunters. Grey bureaucrats wander about aimlessly waiting for the next dubious election. Hotel Royal saw its halcyon days in the fifties and early sixties until newer hotels such as Soaltee and Annapurna opened to steal its thunder. But Boris and his Hotel Royal will always be remembered as the first among equals.

Boris in the background supervising a State Banquet

GODAVARI SCHOOL REVISITED

"Live for God, Lead for Nepal" was the mantra imparted to us by our Jesuit priests at St. Xavier's Godavari School, my alma mater. Life was simple and straight forward then as illustrated by the sound tagline for an English Medium School opened in 1951 A.D. by a special permission Fr. Marshall Moran, S.J. charmed out of the last Rana Prime Minister of Nepal, Maharajah Mohun Shumsher. Godavari is a pristine locality in the south east corner of the Kathmandu Valley, resting on the lap of the Phulchowki Mountain in the Mahabharat range, at over 9,200 ft. the tallest peak surrounding the valley. The Rana rulers of Nepal had built there for themselves summer palaces to escape the stifling heat of the city during the months of May and June. A road was cleared for horses and carriages and electrical lines stretched.



Rana Prime Minister's residence re-christened Xavier House by the Jesuits 

Starting this school was one of the epochal steps Nepal took to open itself to the outside world: hitherto Nepalese students going to school in India could now get proper education in the English medium in the Kathmandu valley itself. Fr. Moran, S.J. having started a similar Jesuit school in Patna in India, had the wherewithal to convert the Rana buildings and its expansive grounds into a school of high quality. Necessary permissions were granted in 1951 A.D. through the office of General Mrigendra Shumsher, the Director of Public Education, who was very influential as he was the son of Commander-in-Chief Baber Shumsher J. B. Rana. Promptly Fr. Moran chartered a plane and brought from Patna one Land Rover, two tons of supplies and Fr. Frank Murphy and Fr. Ed Saxton in tow. Soon the Rana Regime would end and Nepal would enter a new era of experimentation with democracy.

Godavari School Class VIII, 1968

In 1965, when I was first admitted to Godavari School in Class V, there were still buildings extant named after their Rana patrons - there was "Keshar Mahal", a bungalow separated from the main school manor house by a long, dark and cold walk in the wintry night as the building was our dormitory in Class VII. "Nara Mahal" was where some of the fathers lived and where Fr. Bertrand Saubolle experimented with his roses. The main building was the abode of the Rana Prime Minister and this is where we had our dormitory in Class V. I don't recall the original name but it had been re-christened "Xavier House". The decorative water fountain in the driveway had been turned into a swimming pool. Fr. Eugene Watrin, S.J. who was our principal then, would take his morning and evening swimming exercises and I remember with three strokes of his powerful arms he would swim across the pond and repeat the same innumerable times to keep fit.

"Keshar Mahal" was our dormitory in Class VII

Godavari is one of the important holy places in Kathmandu Valley with the local deity feted annually and which culminates every twelve years in a great month-long mela. The local spring is said to have a direct link with the River Godavari of South India as a sage swept by the River Godavari was found floating in the spring at Godavari in Kathmandu Valley. True or false history has forgotten. It can be safely said that the rulers of Nepal had their summer abodes there even earlier but the first confirmation from a reliable source comes from Daniel Wright, the surgeon at the British Residency in Kathmandu of the 1870's, who wrote that Maharajah Jung Bahadur Rana and his brothers had built numerous country houses there for summer retreat and hunting. Wright also mentions that cardamom was profitably grown there.

The main building which can be described as a manor house that we found back in 1965 was definitely built by Maharajah Chandra Shumsher on earlier foundations. He also built a few lodges scattering around the manor house for his entourage including his sons. "Keshar Mahal" was one of them named after his son. Whosoever became the maharajah took possession of these premises much like the other famous retreat at Gokarna; so it changed hands from one family to another. During the time of Maharajah Juddha, he further enlarged the buildings and built new lodges including one for his eldest grandson General Nara Shumsher, the building known to us as "Nara Mahal".


"Nara Mahal" is today Godavari Ashram,
a chapel adjoins the original building.

A quarter of a mile away was "Bahadur Bhawan" named eponymously after the eldest son of Maharajah Juddha but very few people know that my father General Kiran Shumsher was the owner of this building which was handed over to Fr. Moran. The building further underwent several incarnations. Originally a residence of the lay school masters, the building was handed over by the Jesuits for some time to Dr. Edgar Miller and his wife Dr. Elizabeth Miller to run a clinic before the Shanta Bhawan Missionary Hospital was completed. Later during the early seventies the building went to the forest department after the Jesuits built new buildings to house the school masters and today the building is the Head Office of the neighbouring Botanical Gardens.


"Bahadur Bhawan" which belonged to my father General Kiran
is today the Head Office of the Botanical Gardens

These were the original buildings the school used during the first years of its opening. While the main building, Keshar Mahal, Bahadur Bhawan and the "dhobi" laundry shed next to it were offered to the Jesuits, "Nara Mahal" was actually purchased by them in 1952 A.D.

The last Rana ruler Maharajah Mohun Shumsher was wise to bestow Godavari's Rana era buildings and its expansive grounds to the Jesuits to run a school. He was leaving behind a generous legacy as an antidote to the new political order that would predictably start trashing the 104 years of Rana rule.