Lepchas were short, with dark, coppery skin and Mongolian features. They went barefoot and mostly bareheaded (their hats, when they had them, were made of leaves and plaited slips of bamboo), and wore long, red-and-white-striped robes of untreated wool or cotton cloth, which wrapped around the body, pinned at the shoulder, and tied at the waist. Over their shoulders the men slung wooden sheaths that held a two-foot-long knife and a pouch of arrows for hunting birds. “They are constantly armed with a long, heavy, straight knife,” which, Hooker wrote, “serves equally for plough, toothpick, table-knife, hatchet, hammer, and sword.”11 (To these tasks another early commentator added “hoe, spade, and nail parer.”)12 Hooker also noted the bamboo bow and quiver of arrows they carried along with a pouch holding aconite to poison their tips.13
Keen hunters and highly skilled trackers and herbalists, the Lepcha collected roots, leaves, and herbs from the forest, foraged for wild honey and fungi, and trapped fish in the streams. They grew oranges and tapioca, farmed cardamom under large trees on the steep slopes, and planted terraces of rice. Bamboo was key. Not only did the Lepcha utilize twenty-two different varieties of it that grew in the area,14 but they believed God created bamboo along with their people.15
They called their land Mayel Lyang, Abode of the Gods. While, gradually over the centuries, the Lepcha largely adopted Buddhism, they never fully forwent some of their culture’s more primitive spiritual elements. Early Lepchas observed a religion called Bon that worshipped nature in its physical forms—trees, forests, rivers, lakes, mountains—with God omnipresent in them. “Though the first man and woman were created out of pure snow from Kingtsoomzaongboo Chyue (Mt. Kanchenjunga), each clan, after the downfall of man, had its own lake and mountain,” wrote Dennis Lepcha, a member and adviser to the Indigenous Lepcha Tribal Association. “Hence, after death, a Lepcha soul will rest in the lap of his ancestors who are residing in their respective clan’s mountain and lake.”16 According to another Lepcha author, they “chant their hymns and prayers in the tune of birds, in the sound of winds, water-falls, rivers, etc.”17 Call it an ecotheology or ecosophy.
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.18
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.19 Lloyd returned to his military unit and in early 1840 sailed for China to participate in the First Opium War.20
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.21 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.22 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,”23 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.”*
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.24 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.25
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 1869.26 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.”27 (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.28 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.”29