Sunanda K Datta-Ray: The lost kingdom of Sikkim

Vijianagram's relic is as forlorn as the Chogyal's palace in Gangtok on the cover of my book Smash and Grab

Indar Pasricha would have murdered me. It was bad enough plonking a copy of Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim, the book that has had as turbulent a passage as Sikkim itself, on the priceless piano in his smart picture gallery in London's Connaught Street. I cringed when a fashionable grey-haired woman placed a glass of red wine she'd just taken from Indar's butler on the piano's gleaming marquetry surface only to pick up the book. She put her glass down right next to a notice sternly warning people not to use the surface like a table.

It was an early 19th-century piano. There are only three of them in the whole wide world, Indar says. What probably counts far more is that it belonged to a European royal family that found refuge in Switzerland. Hastily, I placed a paper napkin under the glass before it became a casus belli in those rooms packed for the opening night of Tim Scott Bolton's exhibition of oils and watercolours that recalled Mark Twain's famous eulogy, "If there is one place on the face of the earth where all the dreams of living men have found a home from the very earliest days when man began the dream of existence, it is India!"

There was the expected Taj Mahal and an unexpected Amritsar cook house, an unfamiliar view of Delhi's Rajpath and an all-too-recognisable Lodi Gardens, all shrouded in mist and mystery like Turner on the Thames. But Bolton's India isn't locked into the straitjacket of political frontiers. I counted several scenes of Nepal and Bhutan. And to my delighted surprise, above the hallowed piano hung a vision of prayer flags, chortens, red-robed monks and a glimpse of white monastic walls reaching up to upturned eaves against an ethereal background of snow, cloud and rock. It was unmistakably the lost kingdom of Sikkim. That's why I braved Indar's wrath and, as I told the artist, offered my book in tribute to his art.

Not that I immediately recognised the Sanga Choelling ("island of esoteric teaching") monastery seven kilometres from Pemayangtse ("the sublime perfect lotus"), Sikkim's premier monastery which I do know. Like a painting of Darjeeling's Bhutia Bustee, Sanga Choelling evocatively captured the essence of Himalayan life. It was the biggest (36" x 48") painting in the show. At £6,000, it was the most expensive. At the risk of being accused of artistic lese-majeste, I felt it would have made an ideal illustration for the glossy new Tranquebar-Westland edition of Smash and Grab which Deep, my son, had just brought from Mumbai.

The original book was manoeuvred into obscurity 29 years ago. The virtually indistinguishable paperback edition you bought in Darjeeling, Kalimpong and Gangtok all these years was a cunning work of piracy. The mix of bureaucratic conceit, political insecurity and clandestine censorship that made this possible is described in detail in my long introduction to the new edition. Bolton had no inkling of those tumultuous happenings. He had visited Sikkim as a tourist long after it was all over. But Indar knew. His exhibitions are a celebration as much of the Indo-British encounter as of royalty. Witness the Paikpara portraits in his basement.

It was entirely appropriate, therefore, that we should stumble upon a small tablet lost in the grass on our way back from the elegantly jolly opening nights he specialises in, as I wrote in this column four years ago. I didn't want to walk but Deep insisted on cutting through Hyde Park. I am glad I agreed because, otherwise, I would have missed what a guide book calls one of London's "lost fountains."

The metal plaque that tops the little slab of concrete reads: "A Fountain given by His Highness the Hon Maharajah Meerza Vijiaram Gajapati Raj Manea Sooltan Bahadoor of Vijianagram. KCSI stood on this site from 1867 until 1964." The questions popped up. What did the fountain look like? Was it demolished in 1964 or relocated somewhere else? Why? Above all, who was this forgotten potentate who squandered his state's revenues building fountains for foreigners who obviously cared nothing for him?

He wasn't the only one. Apparently, fountains were a welcome gift after London's 1854 cholera epidemic. The books say "Cowasji Jehangir Readymoney gave one to Regent's Park in 1869." The Princess of Teck inaugurated it. Perhaps the Readymoney creation still stands. I must look for it. But Vijianagram's relic is as forlorn as the Chogyal's palace in Gangtok on the cover of my book.