What is Sikkim History all about?

updated on 22.05.2020

I am not an expert on Sikkim's history, nor am I a prolific historian; my interest in Sikkim's past makes me feel that there are various vacant spaces yet to be filled. When I reviewed different pieces of paper on Sikkim's history, I felt we knew very little about our country. Time has come, and the account of Sikkim's history should be reworked from its primary period, though we know we have inadequate resources.

I am sure that capturing the early days of Sikkim (the era when we found the first settlements on this land) in 2020 isn’t as easy as it seems, but we can make an attempt. As a student of Sikkim history, I feel it is not within our perimeter to come up with the entire scene from the beginning until now at once, but we can create a room for our coming generations to carry forward those works we shall leave for them. 

Today, we hold ourselves accountable to our ancestors (I am not referring to Rishley, Das, Ray, and others; I believe our local people could have come up with more exact and prominent accounts of our past) for failing to record their times of yore, and who knows what future age groups interested in learning about Sikkim will do to us if we fail to record what little we know about our Sikkim.

I am sorry to say that I personally discovered many events of our past that are missing from the pages of Sikkim's history. Just to say that we know little about Sikkim's prime is more of a layman's excuse. If efforts are to be taken, I believe we can make the most of them. Until now, we have looked back at Sikkim’s earliest record, dating back to the 9th century, when Guru Padmasambhava's mysterious flight to Tibet via Sikkim. Well, let’s not make our prime much of a folk tale; we had the evidence of the findings of the Neolithic tools from the state, which says that the earliest men were present in Sikkim before 10,000 BC, and I believe that is much before Guru Padmasambhava's visit. But after that, what happened with those tools is little known. Those tools are the valued assets of the government of Sikkim, and they should be brought back to where they belong. How often do we come across news about such prized digs? But are we really concerned about it?

Another instance is the discovery of a murali maize fossil in Sikkim in the 1950s, which placed Sikkim as the secondary origin of maize; it also took our existence from 5,000 to 10,000 BC. If we only dare to discover our ancestors, we can trace our roots, but is that the big question? To add more to these findings, how do we fit the result of the fossilized algae rock discovered near Namchi into the present scenario? Isn’t the land of Sikkim much older than we had ever assumed?

Let me talk about a few stories that try to defy what we have been following so far. Let's begin with Kabi, a journal that mentions that the blood of a Limbu woman was used for the treaty, while other books mention the blood brotherhood treaty was held between Lepcha, Bhutia, and Limbu; one book on Sikkim history mentions Chanakya's death was successfully planned by the Lepchas, our so-called history says the generation of Khaye Bhumsa was predicted to rule the mountainous region of Sikkim; it is strange that it took 300 years to rule; what happened to those missing years?

How many of us have knowledge of the then-Sikkimese Lepcha population sharing refuge at Antoo Hills in Nepal after the death of their Lepcha Prime Minister during Chogyal’s timeline? We never knew who that Lepcha man was who helped Joshep Dalton Hooker identify the names of the floras he collected in the Himalayan belt of Sikkim. The list seems long. How many of us know about S. Mahinda Thero, a Tibetan Buddhist from Sikkim who is regarded as a nationwide hero in Sri Lanka for spreading Sinhalese literature during the freedom movement on that tiny island.

A mountain featured on the revenue stamps of Sikkim since their first issue has not changed; it is a record! How about the Sikkim Rocketmail Experiment (1935), which made Sikkim the first country to have the world’s first parcel mail dispatch over the river? Most books written about early Sikkim are referred to in H.H. Rishley's "Gazetteer of Sikkim," which is considered the mother of all Sikkim-based books. The book is undoubtedly very neatly written and informative, but can we consider it the final output of our history?

The stamp-sized state of Sikkim had undergone many major transformations from the small Himalayan Kingdom to the 22nd state in the mighty Indian Union. Much like folklore, the history of early Sikkim is divided between facts and uncertainty. Sikkim is mysterious and very rich in legends, yet we have never presented ourselves in scientific ways. We have never tried to collect the exact data from that considerable folklore that has been part of every man's life for ages.

Defining the exact time of events—those of the pottery pieces found around the fields of Daramdin and stories of the Great Flood at Mt. Tendong—could possibly put the state of Sikkim on the world map in a different dimension. The footprints found at Chungthang have developed a sort of controversy over the two scholarly men of bygone centuries. There is disagreement over whether those footprints belong to Guru Rimpoche or Guru Nanak! These are only a few of the legend strings associated with Sikkim.

From my little knowledge, I have tried to classify Sikkim into three parts: the early, middle, and modern periods, just to ease out my research work. The primary phase, or the early days of Sikkim, starts from when this mountainous land was created until the episode of Kabi, where the Blood Brotherhood Treaty is said to have happened. This phase shall look at the folklore and legends associated with Sikkim and try to explain them properly.

To some extent, we can say that Sikkim was reborn in Kabi; we do have certain information in sequence on Sikkim’s political and socio-cultural environment after that. Due to this, I filled up my middle age of Sikkim from the Kabi Brotherhood Treaty towards 1950, when Sikkim agreed to be the Protectorate of India. I believe the seeds of statehood were very well planted in 1950, and the year 1975, when Sikkim merged into the mighty Indian Union, was just a formality. The period from 1950 until now is my modern period of Sikkim's history.

My only institution for remembering the importance of understanding Sikkim is our belief in age-old ethnicity and the words of scholars, but the real truth remains that our future generations need to be explained the mystic forces of time immemorial that build up our Sikkim, from the days of the so-called earliest life of the first men in this land to the three-century-old Namgyal Dynasty and further towards the making of the Sikkim that we li

The history of a place seems incomplete without proper documentation. Let us say we have old photographs related to Sikkim at our houses; can we not share those immemorial treasures? The history of Sikkim is not confined to you and me; it is more ours for our coming generations.