Preet Mohan Singh Malik’s Sikkim: A History of Intrigue and Alliance opens not with Sikkim’s kings or its people, but with the author himself: a young diplomat arriving in Gangtok in 1967, driving up the winding roads from Siliguri in a low-slung sports roadster he had brought from Singapore.
The anecdote is colourful, but it also sets the tone for what is to come. This is not Sikkim’s history told from the inside. It is Sikkim viewed through the eyes of an outsider, a representative of the Indian state, and above all, a strategist measuring the Himalayas against the great game of powers.
That vantage point dominates the book. Despite its title, the “history of Sikkim” often fades into the background, replaced instead by long discussions on British policy in Tibet, Indian hesitations after independence, and China’s steady advance. Malik’s recurring argument is clear: had Britain and India taken Chinese aggression seriously in the early 20th century, Tibet might have remained independent, providing the very buffer state India so badly needs today.
The most compelling chapters are those dealing with the Chumbi Valley. Malik underlines how this sliver of land, wedged between Sikkim and Bhutan, commands the Siliguri Corridor — the “chicken neck” that links India’s northeast to the rest of the country. Both the British Raj and later New Delhi had moments when they could have secured this valley, fortifying India’s eastern flank. But they failed to act. The result, as Malik notes, is a strategic dagger pointed at India’s most vulnerable passage. These are not abstract arguments. They are history lessons with direct bearing on India’s security today.
Malik also highlights a larger irony. Even after China’s collapse in 1911, when its forces withdrew and Tibet functioned with fierce independence, Britain continued to recognize China as Tibet’s suzerain. This fiction, preserved in treaties like the 1904 Lhasa Convention, weakened Tibet’s international standing and left the Himalayas exposed. India inherited that posture after 1947, and when Mao’s China occupied Tibet in 1950, the cost of earlier hesitation became painfully clear.
The conclusion of the book distils Malik’s central claim: “The British never looked on Sikkim as a strategic asset that was important to the security of India. For them, Sikkim was a logistical asset serving Britain’s commercial interest in Tibet. If Sikkim had been looked at in terms of its tactical significance, the importance of the Chumbi Valley would have sunk in.” Malik’s frustration with these lost opportunities is palpable — and he is persuasive in showing how the shadows of those mistakes still loom over India’s Himalayan frontier.
Where the book disappoints most is in its treatment of Sikkim itself. For a kingdom with such a fascinating history, the narrative offers surprisingly little on the internal dynamics that shaped its destiny. The court politics between the Bhutia and Lepcha aristocracy, the Gorkha aggression along Sikkim’s western frontiers, and the fault lines these created within the monarchy receive only passing mention.
Even more striking is the scant attention given to the figure of Hope Cooke, the American socialite who became Queen of Sikkim and whose presence in Gangtok added both glamour and controversy to the Namgyal court. These episodes could have brought alive the drama, fragility, and contradictions of Sikkim in its final decades as a monarchy. Perhaps Malik, as a diplomat stationed in Gangtok, did not have access to the inner circle of the king. But these omissions make the book feel distant from the lived experiences and personalities that animated Sikkim’s history.
Had Malik woven these stories into his account, the book might have captured both the high politics of geopolitics and the intimate politics of Sikkim itself. Without them, it reads as though Sikkim were only a pawn on a larger chessboard, rather than a small but complex kingdom navigating its fate.
In the end, Sikkim: A History of Intrigue and Alliance is not quite what its title suggests. It is less a history of Sikkim and more a study in Himalayan geopolitics — an account by a diplomat who never stopped seeing the mountains through the lens of strategy. Readers interested in foreign policy and security will find much to ponder here, especially in the lessons of the Chumbi Valley. But for those looking for Sikkim’s own story, this book may feel like that sports car winding up the Teesta valley roads: sleek, polished, but somewhat out of place.
Books like this remind us how those in power often shape narratives, while the voices of smaller states and ordinary people are pushed to the margins. That’s why independent journalism matters — to tell the stories that get overlooked.
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