Syamukapu: The Lhasa Newars of Kalimpong and Kathmandu

SAGAR CHETTRI

People often think the history of trade across the Himalayas is only about big empires, military expeditions, and government treaties. However, the real story of this rough mountain border was driven by brave trading families who connected different worlds through sheer hard work, determination, and courage.

This is exactly what I felt after recently finishing Deb Shova Kansakar Hilker’s amazing and deeply moving 2005 book, Syamukapu: The Lhasa Newars of Kalimpong and Kathmandu, published by Vajra Publications in Thamel, Kathmandu, Nepal. This book tells the true story of her own family across a massive period of 122 years, starting from the year 1882 all the way to 2004. The story moves across beautiful places like the historic city of Kathmandu in Nepal, the cold mountain hills of Darjeeling, the busy trading town of Kalimpong, the wild and freezing flatlands of Phari, and the mysterious capital city Lhasa in Tibet. At its heart, the book shows how a special group of people from Nepal called the Newar merchants managed to build a massive business world despite facing terrifying political changes, dangerous mountain paths, and deep cultural barriers. Most importantly, the book shines a bright light on how the beautiful hill town of Kalimpong became the most critical meeting point, acting as a living bridge that connected the three worlds of India, Nepal, and Tibet during a time when the world was changing forever.

To understand how this beautiful story happens, we first have to look at who the Newar people actually are. The Newars were the very first people to live in the Kathmandu Valley of Nepal. Over hundreds of years, they built an incredibly advanced city life filled with gorgeous brick and wood temples, deep artistic traditions, and an amazing talent for buying and selling goods. Nepal has always been a country with many different kinds of people living in it, but they can generally be split into two main groups. One group is the Gorkhas, who generally speak the Nepali language. The Newars belong to a different group who speak their own special language, and they are known for being exceptionally peaceful, cheerful, highly emotional, and completely against physical fighting and admired running businesses of all sorts. Because of this natural love for business, Newar craftsmen like goldsmiths, silversmiths, and coppersmiths had a total monopoly on the ancient trade paths that went straight from Kathmandu over the freezing northern Himalayan mountains into Tibet.

Everything changed for these traders in the year 1904 when a British officer named Colonel Francis Younghusband opened a new mountain path called the Jelep La pass, which gave British India a direct entry point into Tibet through the little kingdom of Sikkim. This new path was much easier and safer than the incredibly old, rocky footpaths in northern Nepal. Because of this, the Newar traders decided to stop using the old routes and moved their operations to this new area. They chose the newly opened path that was very close to a small hill station called Kalimpong. This shift completely transformed Kalimpong from a simple village into the beating heart of trans-Himalayan commerce, where goods and ideas flowed constantly between India, Nepal, and Tibet.

Kalimpong was the perfect place to become the center of this tri-national relationship because of its location and climate. It sits at an altitude of 1250 meters above sea level, which means it enjoys a lovely, mild, and sunny climate all year round. This was incredibly important for the Newar merchants from Kathmandu, who found the nearby hill town of Darjeeling to be far too cold, foggy, and wet. Kalimpong had a fascinating history; it used to be the headquarters of the Bhutanese government and was part of Bhutan until 1865. Because of this, the Bhutanese royal family even built a beautiful home there called the Bhutan House. After a war between the British and Bhutan, Kalimpong was joined with Darjeeling, and by 1916 it became an official sub-division and now a separate District.

This small town grew into a magnificent melting pot where many different cultures lived together in peace. Rich Tibetan noble families bought properties there so they could send their children to the excellent British missionary schools to learn English. There were also many Chinese families who made Kalimpong their home, even starting their own Chinese school. You could walk through the streets and see British officers living in beautiful English villas, smart Marwari business families who had come from Rajasthan or other parts of India to run big wholesale shops, and hardworking Newar metal smiths setting up busy workshops. While Darjeeling was known for its massive tea plantations and its beloved steam-powered Toy Train [established by the British between 1879-81] that climbed the steep hills from Siliguri, Kalimpong was a place of pure action and business. It was a frontier town where fortunes were made on the backs of endless mule caravans carrying valuable goods over the high mountain passes of Nathu La and Jelep La.

The main story of the book focuses on the life of Bhajuratna Kansakar, which reads like an incredible, inspiring adventure of a man rising from total poverty to unbelievable wealth through pure hard work. Bhajuratna was born in Dec 1882 in a neighborhood called Kel Tole, located in the ancient heart of Kathmandu right next to the beautiful Janbahal temple complex. His family belonged to the Kansakar caste, which means their traditional family job was to melt metal and make heavy, high-rimmed semi-bronze plates called Kaan demas that Newar families used for eating their daily meals. Because Bhajuratna's father did not own his own workshop, the family was not well off and had a difficult time trying to make ends meet. One night, the young boy overheard his parents worrying about how they would feed the children the next morning. Showing an unbelievable amount of love and bravery, the little four-year-old boy went to his grand-uncle’s metal workshop the very next morning to ask for work. He was given the job of blowing the flames of the furnace using a heavy tool called a bellow, earning a few tiny paisa coins each day that he proudly handed over to his mother.

As he grew a little older, Bhajuratna found another unique way to earn money for his family. During Newar festivals, it was a custom for families to perform a sacred dance called the kumba pyakhan. Sons of rich families who wished to avoid taking part personally would hire poor boys to take their place in exchange for money. Bhajuratna took up this difficult dancing work for wealthy families and spent twelve years earning money this way  for his family.

Because his parents had no money, Bhajuratna and his older brother Kulratna never had the chance to go to a real school. In the year 1898, when Bhajuratna was about sixteen years old, the two brothers decided they had to leave Nepal to find real work. They set off on foot toward the Indian hill town of Darjeeling. This was a long and grueling five-day journey that most fortune seekers had to take, walking over steep mountain trails from Thankot to Bhimphedi, crossing small rivers, and traveling down to the Indian border town of Raxaul, where they could finally catch a steam train to Siliguri. Once they arrived in Darjeeling, the brothers spent five years doing odd jobs and running errands for a relative who owned a successful metal workshop. They saved every single paisa they could and returned to Kathmandu in 1903, where their parents quickly arranged for them to get married.

Newar weddings were incredibly elaborate, expensive, and took at least four days of complicated rituals to finish. To save money, poor families would often marry all their sons of marriageable age on the exact same day. Even with this saving, the massive wedding costs pushed the family deep into debt once again. Realizing he had to clear his father's debts, Bhajuratna left his young wife behind in Kathmandu and headed straight back to the Indian hills to start trading. He quickly realized that buying and selling goods was the fastest way to make money. He was so determined that he even traveled all the way to the massive city of Bombay to buy high-quality textiles, and within a few years, he managed to expand his business to thirteen cloth shops back in Kathmandu.

Just when life was starting to look bright, tragedy struck Bhajuratna twice in the exact same year. In 1918, a terrible fire broke out in the crowded streets of Kel Tole in Kathmandu. Even though all the neighbors rushed to help, the fire completely destroyed four of Bhajuratna's main shops, turning his expensive goods and property into ash and leaving him with massive loans he could not pay back. Only a short time later, his beloved first wife, Gyan Maya Tamrakar, caught a severe fever while fasting during the holy Buddhist month of Gunla and passed away, leaving him completely alone with four tiny children named Gyan Prabha, Laxmi Prabha, Laxmi Hera, and a baby boy named Maniharsha Jyoti. Bhajuratna had to delay his plans to leave the city, and around 1919 he married his second wife, Gyan Maya Tuladhar. Two years later, leaving his new wife with the children and a tiny four-month-old baby named Gyan Jyoti, he headed back to Darjeeling to start all over again.

When he arrived in Darjeeling, his relatives saw that he was now an independent shopkeeper and felt it would be shameful to give him low-wage manual labor in their workshops. They gave him a brilliant piece of advice: they suggested he go to the rising town of Kalimpong to set up his own retail shop, because that was where all the Tibetan merchants were coming to buy goods. Bhajuratna took their advice immediately. He walked down the steep hills from Darjeeling to Kalimpong with his incredibly loyal Tamang servant named Thulecha, who carried a large bamboo basket called a doko tightly strapped to his forehead. The basket was packed with heavy bronze, brass, and copper pots to sell. When they arrived, Bhajuratna stayed with the Shakya family who came from Patan Kathmandu and were already established businessmen and known as Lhasa traders. Bhajuratna rented a tiny shop below the 10th Mile from a Marwari family for the small sum of fifteen rupees a month. This tiny space served as both his shop during the day and his home at night, located right on the path leading down to the famous Hath Bazar market that met every Wednesday and Saturday.

His business grew so fast that poor Thulecha had to constantly run back and forth to Darjeeling to bring more goods to fill the shelves. Realizing this was a waste of time, his relative in Ghoom suggested that Bhajuratna bring his own skilled metal workers directly from Kathmandu to Kalimpong so he could manufacture his own goods locally. Around the year 1922, his older brother Kulratna traveled from Nepal to Kalimpong, bringing along Bhajuratna's young son Maniharsha Jyoti and four master metal workers. Bhajuratna had taught himself to read and write as an adult, and because he knew how painful it was to be uneducated, he immediately enrolled the young boys into the local Scottish missionary school for boys, which was called SUMI. He set up a long wooden workshop building at the 10th Mile called the jyasachhen [workshop in Newari], where his workers began hand-crafting beautiful copper cauldrons, brass bowls, and special multi-tiered steamers used for making delicious dumplings called momos. Business boomed, and a few years later, another batch of workers arrived from Kathmandu, accompanied by Bhajuratna’s wife and his now four-year-old son, Gyan Jyoti, whom he had not seen since the boy was a tiny baby.

It was during this highly successful period that the legendary name "Syamukapu" was born in an entirely accidental way. One of his master metal workers named Tushin unfortunately died of the terrible disease cholera, leaving behind a young wife and three small sons with absolutely no way to buy food. Bhajuratna, who always had a deeply kind heart, asked the widow how he could help her. She told him that her father back in Nepal was a sweet maker and that she knew how to make traditional candies. Bhajuratna immediately came up with a brilliant plan; he told her to start making a simple white sugar candy ball called chiriboka or yelachingra at the back of his shop. In those days, there were almost no manufactured sweets available in the hills, and these little sugar candies became an unbelievable success among the local Nepali and Tibetan people.

The Tibetan mule drivers, known as thebas, became completely obsessed with these white candies, buying them in massive sacks that weighed forty kilos each. Every single Tibetan trader who came down from the mountains refused to leave Kalimpong without buying these sweets. Because the Tibetans did not speak the Newar language and could not pronounce Bhajuratna's name, they began asking around the town for directions to the little shop near the two large trees owned by the kind man who always wore a traditional white cap. In the Tibetan language, "Syamukapu" means literally "white cap". As the weeks and months rolled by, this simple description turned into a massive, highly respected brand name across the entire Himalayan region, and the entire family became proudly known to everyone as the Syamukapu family.

Bhajuratna’s next big business breakthrough happened because he was always open to smart ideas. One day, a visiting relative named Triratna Man Tuladhar sat in the shop and watched dozens of Tibetan mule drivers buying sacks of candy. He quietly pointed out to Bhajuratna that instead of paying expensive Newar middleman companies to transport his metal goods all the way to Tibet, he should make a direct deal with these mule drivers, since their animals were walking back to Tibet completely empty anyway. Bhajuratna realized this was a fantastic idea. He used a clever mix of friendly persuasion and a small threat to stop selling them their favorite candies to get the mule drivers to agree to carry his commercial loads to the border village of Phari at a much cheaper rate than the standard market price. These Tibetan mule drivers were incredibly tough, deeply honest, and knew every single dangerous turn and narrow path through the treacherous mountain passes. Soon, other wealthy Newar merchants noticed that Bhajuratna was shipping goods safely and cheaply, and they began begging him to manage their logistics too. Bhajuratna agreed to act as their middleman without taking any personal commission, asking only that the wholesalers offer lower prices to his fellow traders. This incredible honesty made him the most influential and trusted business leader in all of Kalimpong.

To support this massive, growing trade network, Bhajuratna began opening permanent business branches along the route. In the year 1930, he opened a permanent house called a kothi in the high-altitude Tibetan village of Phari, sending his first wife’s brother to run it as the chief manager. Phari was a brutally cold, barren place that remained frozen almost the entire year. The old traders used to say that if a person could survive the harsh weather of Phari, their body was tough enough to make it all the way to Lhasa. Having a permanent base there was a massive relief for the Newar merchants because they could now send letters via fast post-runners and know exactly when their valuable goods had arrived safely or if they had been lost to mountain bandits. He followed this by opening a large corporate office in the major city of Calcutta in 1937 to handle the clearing of imported goods from the sea port, and finally opened a flagship business house in the Tibetan capital of Lhasa in 1939.

The book beautifully weaves these incredible personal business successes together with major historical disasters that shook the entire region, such as the terrifying  Earthquake of Jan 1934. It was a gorgeous, sunny winter afternoon in Kathmandu, and most families were sitting outside on their rooftops, brick terraces, or temple steps to enjoy the warm sunshine. At exactly two o'clock in the afternoon, the ground began to roll and sway like the waves of the sea, and massive brick buildings began to collapse into the streets with a deafening roar. It was a massive earthquake that measured 8.4 on the Richter scale, with its center along the border of Nepal and Bihar. The destruction was absolute; it left over seventeen thousand people dead, thousands wounded, and destroyed more than two hundred thousand homes and historic temples. As soon as the news of the disaster reached the hills of Kalimpong—where the shaking ground was strong enough to knock down the tall stone steeple of the local Scottish missionary church—Bhajuratna dropped everything and rushed back to Kathmandu. He was deeply relieved to find that his elder son Maniharsha Jyoti was completely safe and that his old ancestral house in Kel Tole was miraculously still standing.

As Bhajuratna grew older and his trading empire expanded across multiple countries, the heavy daily work of running the business fell onto the shoulders of his two brilliant sons. His elder son, Maniharsha Jyoti, had spent his teenage years living in Calcutta to get a modern education and chose to manage the busy Calcutta port office. This meant that when the manager of the distant Lhasa office in Tibet needed to be replaced in the year 1942, Bhajuratna had to ask his second son, Gyan Jyoti, to step up. Moved by deep love for his parents, Gyan Jyoti agreed to go.

After a deeply emotional religious prayer ceremony called a bhinapuja to wish him safety, a young Gyan Jyoti set off for Tibet on Dec 06, 1942. The journey was a massive shock to him. He left behind the gorgeous, lush green hills of Kalimpong, which were always filled with bright wild flowers, blooming hedges, and beautiful trees, and found himself riding a mule across the stark, empty, and completely dry Tibetan plateau. The endless view of grey dirt and freezing rocks was so lonely and intense that it frequently made him want to cry from deep sadness. He often told his children in later years that one afternoon, after riding for days through the wilderness, he saw a single, lonely green leaf hanging onto a naked tree branch, and the mere sight of that little bit of green life was enough to lift his heavy spirits and keep him cheerful for the rest of the week. Gyan Jyoti spent two highly successful years running the Lhasa house, trading in incredibly valuable items like aromatic musk, fluffy yak tails, raw wool, fine Indian brocades from the holy city of Benaras, and luxury Swiss Rolex watches.

Beyond their incredible success in making money, the Syamukapu family played a truly historic and brave role as the ultimate protectors of the Buddhist faith during a dark time of intense political oppression in Nepal. Nepal was ruled by the autocratic Rana prime ministers, who strictly banned the public preaching or revival of Theravada Buddhism. In the year 1926 and again in 1944, the harsh rulers forcefully arrested and expelled prominent Buddhist monks from the country, forcing them into a painful exile. Bhajuratna believed deeply in the teachings of the Buddha and refused to stand by and watch the holy men suffer. In 1944, before the monks were forced to leave the valley, Bhajuratna sent his brave daughter Gyan Shova down to the mountain checkpoint of Thankot. As the exiled monks slowly walked past the guards into the cold unknown, she stepped forward and quietly handed each monk a thick envelope filled with money from her father, telling them to travel straight to Kalimpong if they ever needed a safe place to live.

Kalimpong quickly became the ultimate sanctuary for these peaceful religious refugees. Bhajuratna welcomed them with open arms, providing them with free housing, warm clothes, and a daily donation of food called bhojan-daan for as long as they wished to stay. To ensure that the monks had a permanent, dignified place where they could live, study, and pray together under a single roof, the Newar and Tibetan traders tried to collect donations, but the money was far too small. Bhajuratna then stepped forward and paid a massive sum of sixteen thousand rupees out of his own pocket to buy a large, beautiful colonial English estate at the 9th Mile in the year 1947. This estate was beautifully renamed the Dharmodaya Vihar. At first, some conservative Newar families criticized the choice, arguing that it was deeply weird and inappropriate to turn the former home of a British gentleman into a sacred Buddhist temple.

However, the Dharmodaya Vihar quickly grew into a world-famous center for Buddhist peace and learning. International monks came to live there, designing gorgeous flower gardens and installing a stunning marble Buddha statue that had been gifted by the Buddhist people of Burma. It was from this very sanctuary in Kalimpong that a special five-member global delegation led by a famous monk named Narad Bhikkhu met in 1948 to plan their next move. They traveled from Kalimpong to Kathmandu to meet directly with the Rana Prime Minister, successfully convincing him to cancel the cruel exile laws and allow all the Buddhist monks to return home to Nepal in peace. For his incredible lifetime of kindness, Bhajuratna was given a special letter of honor by the government and was later chosen by the international Buddhist community to carry sacred holy relics and an authentic Bodhi tree sapling on top of a grandly decorated elephant through the streets of Kathmandu, while thousands of emotional citizens cheered and showered them with fresh flower petals.

The magical golden era of trans-Himalayan trade through Kalimpong came to a sudden, painful, and permanent end because of massive international wars. The Chinese army invaded Tibet in 1959, which deeply disrupted the old caravan routes, and in the year 1962, a bitter war broke out directly between India and China. Because Kalimpong was located right next to the sensitive border, the Indian government became deeply suspicious of the local Chinese families, forcing many to pack up and leave for Calcutta or Hong Kong. The massive wool warehouses were permanently closed, the borders were tightly sealed, and the musical jingling sound of the mule caravans over the mountain passes disappeared forever. Realizing that the world they had built was gone, the Lhasa Newars sold their properties and left Kalimpong for good, moving back to live permanently in the Kathmandu Valley.

Deb Shova Kansakar Hilker’s beautiful biography of her father and grandfather serves as a magnificent historical treasure, ensuring that the memory of this incredible trading world is never forgotten. By sharing the personal struggles, tragic fires, grand marriages, and deep religious faith of the Syamukapu family, the book provides a vivid and easy-to-understand record of how a small group of peaceful traders turned the sunny hill town of Kalimpong into a historical bridge that united the hearts, economies, and souls of India, Nepal, and Tibet. A must-have addition to any library, the book is currently available on Amazon.in, and it would be great if bookstores in Sikkim could also stock it for readers who prefer to flip through the pages before making a purchase.

(Email: sagachettri@gmail.com)