Smash and Grab

About the Book

AN INTIMATE AND GRIPPING ACCOUNT OF THE LAST DAYS OF THE HIMALAYAN KINGDOM OF SIKKIM THAT BECAME INDIA'S TWENTY-SECOND STATE.

This book made history. It wasn't banned, not quite, when it first appeared in 1984, but its disappearance was cleverly managed so that few got to read the only authentic account of how a protected kingdom became India's twenty-second state. As the Hon. David Astor, editor of The Observer in London, wrote, Sunanda K. Datta-Ray was 'alone in witnessing and communicating the essential story'. He had to surmount many obstacles and incur severe disapproval to do so. Nearly thirty years later, in 2013, a revised edition was published with a long introduction by the author, and now all these years later, the book still reads like an exciting thriller. Rich with dances and durbars, lamaist rituals, intrigue and espionage, it brings vividly to life the dramatis personae of this Himalayan drama-Sikkim's sad last king, Chogyal Palden Thondup Namgyal, and his vivacious American queen, Hope Cooke; bumbling Kazi Lendhup Dorji and his scheming Kazini, whose nationality and even name were shrouded in mystery, and who played into the hands of more powerful strategists.

Citing documents that have not been seen by any other writer, the book analyses law and politics with masterly skill to recreate the Sikkim saga against the backdrop of a twentieth-century Great Game involving India and China. Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim didn't just make history. It is history.

About the Author

Sunanda K. Datta-Ray is one of India's foremost experts on the Himalayan states. A chance visit to Gangtok in 1960 first sparked a lifelong interest that has allowed him to cultivate a deep knowledge of the history, customs and politics of Himalayan societies. Datta-Ray's fifty-five years in journalism spanned England, India, the US and Singapore. Educated in Calcutta and at the Victoria University of Manchester, where he read Economics, he abandoned Chartered Accountancy to start his career as a reporter with a small-town weekly in the north of England when he was twenty. He was elected Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 2001- 02, and appointed Senior Research Fellow at Singapore's Institute of South-East Asian Studies. Before taking up a teaching assignment at Singapore's Nanyang Technological University, he was Editorial Consultant to the Straits Times group of publications in Singapore, Editor-in-Residence at the East-West Center, Honolulu, Editor of The Statesman (Kolkata and Delhi) and on the Board of Directors of United News of India. For many years, he was the South Asia correspondent of The Observer, London, a regular columnist in the International Herald Tribune and an essayist in Time magazine.

He also wrote for Le Monde Diplomatique and The Canberra Times. His columns now appear in The Telegraph, Business Standard, Asian Age, Deccan Chronicle and Free Press Journal.