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, a revised edition with the author’s long new introduction 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 her 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 background of a twentieth-century Great Game involving India and China. Smash and Grab: Annexation of Sikkim didn’t only 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 the interest that has taken him back to the hills again and again ever since and explains his deep knowledge of the history, customs and politics of Himalayan societies. Datta-Ray’s 55 years in journalism span 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 on a small town weekly in the north of England when he was twenty. He was elected Visiting Fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, 2001-2002, 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 (Calcutta 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 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. In 1990 he was awarded the Freedom of Information Award in New Delhi. His other books include Looking East to Look West: Lee Kuan Yew’s Mission India which won the Vodafone Crossword Award for non-fiction in 2009, Bihar Shows the Way, and Waiting for America: India and the US in the New Millennium.