A view of the Menchuka valley, with the Yar Gyaphu
river dividing mid-stream into what looks very much like a map of India... of
course, with the northeast missing!!
by Ajai Shukla
Business Standard, 31st Mar 12
My first glimpse of Shangri-La blows away the
fatigue. After eight gruelling hours of bumping along the mountain road from
Along (itself a full day’s drive from the Assam plains), the Bolero rounds a
corner and the thickly-forested gorge opens into a wide valley. Here is
Menchuka, the remote, mystical valley through which meanders the medicinal Yar
Gyap Chu river. (In Tibetan, men is “medicinal”, chu is “water”, and ka is
“alongside”.) It is a crystal-clear day, rare on the rainy, 17,000 ft-high
Himalayan watershed which is the McMahon Line, the disputed border between India
and Tibet in Arunachal Pradesh. Steep mountain walls enclose the valley on
either side with snow-clad ramparts.
Such is the geography of Arunachal Pradesh, our
north-eastern version of the Land of the Five Rivers. Five major rivers flow
from the eastern Himalayas to the Brahmaputra in Assam, their valleys separated
by 16,000 ft-high ridges. These are not rivulets but mighty torrents — the
Lohit, Dibang, Siang, Subansiri and Kameng — which meet to form the Brahmaputra,
the soul of Assam. A mere handful of roads connects these river valleys to one
another. For the most part, the only way to travel from one valley to the next
is to drive down the valley for a day or more to Assam, then drive along the
Brahmaputra on National Highway 52, and then do the long drive upriver to one’s
destination in the other valley. This downriver-upriver layout sometimes
requires a three-day road journey to a destination that is just 70 km away on
the map.
Near the river, at the entrance to Menchuka, a
town of 10,000 people, is a spot marked by a sea of Buddhist prayer flags. This
commemorates what used to be the rock seal of Guru Rimpoche, which marked
Menchuka as one of the “hidden valleys” of Tibetan lore. According to legend,
the 8th-century Guru Padmasambhava — since he carried Buddhism from India to
Tibet and founded the Nyingma sect, Tibetans regard Guru Rimpoche as second only
to the Buddha himself — guarded against the inevitable moral degeneration of his
followers by secreting a number of hidden sanctuaries, each a remote, beautiful,
unpopulated paradise, to which the faithful could migrate when life became
unbearable.
Guru Rimpoche hid the keys to these
sanctuaries. It required an exceptional person, known as a terton,
endowed with high moral qualities, to decode the location of a hidden valley
through a set of clues called a terma. In Guru Rimpoche’s great plan, the
terton would then guide his followers to one of these Shangri-Las which
would be marked by a sign, such as a rock shaped in a certain way or stamped
with a seal. Legend has it that Sikkim was the first of these hidden treasures
to which paradise-seekers migrated in the 14th century. That initial foothold
was followed by full-scale Tibetan colonisation in the 17th century and the
establishment of a dynasty by the Choegyals, who ruled Sikkim until India
annexed it in 1974.
In the early 18th century, a terton from
Kongpo, the rugged yet beautiful area around the Tsangpo bend in Tibet, led his
paradise-seeking followers away from the depredations of the invading Mongols
into what is today Menchuka. Paradise, however, was short-lived. By the 19th
century, Menchuka became a lucrative addition to the Gachak estate in Kongpo and
its wealth of agricultural produce, livestock and medicinal plants was heavily
taxed. Even after India’s independence, the local Buddhist Memba people
continued to pay tribute to the masters in Tibet. That relationship ended with
the arrival of India, when a platoon of 2nd Assam Rifles marched into Menchuka
in 1948.
* * * * *
The Indians brought in strange ideas, recounts
70-year-old Pema Phelye, including the abolition of slavery, a tradition by
which Tagin tribesmen from Subansiri were purchased by Membas for domestic and
agricultural work. A cadre of competent and sensitive administrators from the
pioneering Indian Frontier Administrative Service ended slavery and the rule of
the local Tibetan chieftains, one of whom was Deb Pema. But what made India
unquestionably welcome in Menchuka was an end to the punishing tax payments to
the overlords in Kongpo.
Menchuka today, like Tawang, and the
neighbouring valley of Manigong, remains a Buddhist enclave in an area that was
historically home to the tribal Lhobas, or “savages”, as the Tibetans saw them.
The people of the Brahmaputra valley saw these remote hill tribes the same way;
the Assamese called them Abors or “uncontrolled”. These masters of the forest
are today the Adi tribe, as cultured and sophisticated as any people in the
country, who have long played a dominant role in the politics of Arunachal
Pradesh.
The old links with Tibet made Menchuka a key
Chinese objective in the 1962 war, along with Tawang and Walong. A handful of
Indian defenders from the 2 Madras and 2/8 Gorkha Rifles were ordered to
withdraw in the face of a Chinese advance and join a larger force at Taliha in
the neighbouring Subansiri valley. Harried by fast-moving patrols from the
People’s Liberation Army, most of them perished in the retreat. An entire Gurkha
platoon (36 soldiers), led by four officers, disappeared without trace in the
thickly forested mountains while attempting a suicidal cross-country move to
Taliha. Locals still recount tales about the month that they spent under PLA
occupation, after Beijing’s unilateral ceasefire of November 21, 1962. Chinese
soldiers did everything they could to win local loyalty, but the Membas, with
memories of the Tibet revolt of 1959 fresh in their minds, saw through the
opportunism in their overtures.
Today, the Chinese would face an immeasurably
more difficult task if they attacked Menchuka. It is strongly defended by the
army’s Red Devils. The army presence can hardly be missed, whether in the form
of heavy vehicles growling along the roads, a very visible army encampment,
military signposts everywhere (sample: “After a hard day’s work and sweat we,
the Red Devils, love to have Chinese for supper”), or the AN-32 transport
aircraft that roar in and out of the airfield in the middle of Menchuka town,
bringing in the supplies that keep the army going. On their way back to Assam,
the AN-32s give lifts to locals who need to move out in a hurry.
The actual border with China is at the Lola
Pass, some 45 km from Menchuka. The Line of Actual Control (as the border is
called) is not disputed here, as it is in other sectors like Longju. But Tibetan
civilians have been apprehended in Indian territory while gathering the
medicinal plants that this valley has always been famous for. Locals tell us
that the Indo-Tibetan Border Police (ITBP), which physically guards the border,
arrested a large group of Tibetans some six years ago when they intruded into
India.
Intrigued, I go to the sub-division
headquarters, where I meet Additional Deputy Commissioner Gepak Poyum, an Adi
from Along. A small-framed man in a tiny office, with a photograph of Subhas
Chandra Bose hanging on the wall, Poyum is kept warm by a wood-burning bukhari
that crackles comfortingly. With not a file on his desk, he is happy to chat
with a visitor from Delhi. Yes, the Tibetans did come, and were kept by ITBP for
about a month, he tells us. They must have been collecting yartsa gunbu,
the magical plant that grows in high mountain pastures, transforming into a
caterpillar in winter and a fungus in summer. China loves yartsa gunbu, I
learn; it is reputedly a potent aphrodisiac. It is sent to Tibet for the
equivalent of Rs 80,000 per kg; the street value in Menchuka of 1 kg of
yartsa gunbu is Rs 30,000.
What happened to the Tibetans, I ask? Poyum
tells me that release orders came from New Delhi because they had strayed across
by accident. In early 2007, they were repatriated across Lola. Clearly things on
the ground between India and China are not as bad as many imagine!
* * * * *
Menchuka’s long tradition of medicinal herbs,
which formed a sizeable component of the tax payments to Kongpo, is now being
commercialised. Pasang Sona, the MLA from Menchuka, has leased a large tract of
land to Pronaali Agro-Tech, a company run by former tea planter Giri Sodhi.
Perched on a hillside with a spectacular view of Menchuka, Sodhi has converted
this into a plantation for Taxus bacata, an evergreen conifer long known
as the yew. The toxic component of Taxus Bacata, known as taxol, is a
powerful chemotherapeutic drug for treating breast and cervical cancer.
Sodhi has tied up with German pharmaceutical
company Fresenius Kabi Oncology (it acquired Dabur Pharma some years ago) which
will process Menchuka’s Taxus bacata in its laboratories in Sahibabad and
Kalyani into anti-cancer medicines. Fresenius Kabi currently imports Taxus
bacata from Europe and South America; it hopes to cut costs to one third by
sourcing it from Menchuka.
For Sodhi, this is a high-stakes, high-risk
game, with a strong element of adventure. He says, “My expenditure on 70
hectares of Taxus bacata, over 20 years, on field development, planting,
irrigation and labour will work out to about Rs 25 crore. And my income flow
will only begin after six or seven years. But Fresenius Kabi is supporting this
strongly.” He adds: “This is hard work, 20 hours’ driving time from Assam in a
very remote area. But it is very enjoyable, and I take satisfaction in being
able to cut treatment costs for cancer patients in the future.”
The Arunachal Government is watching and
waiting. Poyum says, “We are watching to see how this works. If it is a success,
other locals will also start growing. And definitely, we will support [it]
because the tradition in Menchuka of growing medicinal herbs stopped due to
medicines coming from Kolkata and Mumbai.” We look out at Menchuka from Sodhi’s
fields, where lovely Memba women tend to the plants. The Yar Gyap Chu flows
placidly, an island in midstream shaped exactly like India. An army patrol
climbs the hill slowly, familiarising itself with the area they are tasked to
defend.
A few years ago, when the road to Menchuka was
being completed, the Border Roads Organisation was blasting Guru Rimpoche’s rock
seal which was in the way. But nobody from Menchuka protested. In traditional
Tibetan Buddhist belief, paradise had already been desecrated when armed forces
entered it and a war was fought there in 1962. Menchuka has moved on from its
legendary past.
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