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Monk on a
mission
Sudeshna
Sarkar meets a 93-year-old German soldier who’s out to save a
200-year-old monastery from human depredation
It’s a long
journey from Hitler’s Germany to Nepal and Karl Henrik Wagner would
have been an incredible figure if he had done nothing more than
complete the odyssey. What makes the 93-year-old former German
soldier all the more remarkable is that at this age he has started a
new battle - to save a 200-year-old monastery from human
depredation.
The extraordinary story goes back to the 1940s when
Adolf Hitler was planning to invade Norway and Wagner, then in his
30s, was recruited into the army against his wishes. He did not want
to fight and his heart was on the side of the Norwegians. So from
occupied Norway, he decided to move on, skiing across the border
into neutral Sweden where he lived as a struggling refugee for
nearly 10 years. It was a hard life, even after the war ended, and
the most difficult thing was to keep his nationality a
secret.
Wagner, with his remarkable memory for dates and details,
remembers how he used to fend off queries: “Sometimes, a Swede would
come up to me and ask, ‘Are you Swedish?’ with a sickly smile on his
face. ‘No,’ I would bark. ‘Where were you born?’ he would ask, even
more annoyingly. ‘I am a fish!’… ‘But you must belong to some
nation? You’re German, aren’t you?’ ‘No! I have a Swedish passport
and the rest is none of your business’.” The highlight of his stay
in Sweden was meeting a Swedish girl, Ingrid, falling in love and
getting married. The couple became members of the Theosophic
Society, got introduced to other religions in the world and became
deeply interested in Buddhism. Wagner wanted to know more about this
religion that taught to conquer anger and the couple decided to
travel to Nepal and India, the country in which the Buddha was born
and where he preached his religion of non-violence.
The journey
to the East in 1953, 10 years after he had deserted the army and
eight years after the war had ended, was long and arduous. The
Wagners didn’t have money to fly and so went by land and water. From
Stockholm, they travelled with Arab pilgrims to Basra in Iraq, where
they boarded a steamer to Mumbai. It took 12 days and in Muscat the
little that remained of their money was stolen. Arriving penniless
through the Gateway of India, they were welcomed by the Sarnath
Mahabodi Society and Wagner began contemplating becoming a monk.
The desire became reality in 1954 when the Wagners finally
reached Nepal from Sarnath. It was just two years that Nepal had got
rid of the despotic regime of the hereditary Rana prime ministers
and opened up to outsiders. However, there were no roads connecting
Nepal with India and people generally flew in from Patna in the
newly operational Dakotas. The Wagners were taken under the wing of
a Nepalese monk, Amritananda, whom they had met in India, and given
initiation, probably becoming the first Western couple to become
Buddhists. In June 1955 Ingrid became a Buddhist nun, taking the
name Amita Nisatta - literally meaning “infinite”. Five months
later, Wagner followed suit and Amritananda rechristened him Sugata
- “he who goes the happy way”. And that is the name he has been
using since then.
“On the day of my ordination,” Sugata recalls,
“I talked about the subject that was closest to my heart: my shame
for my own white skin. I spoke about the evils of imperialism under
the British - how all the art from Delhi had been robbed by the
English and was languishing in the Victoria and Albert Museum in
London. Yes, I had the fire of anger in me. I was ashamed to belong
to this race of people who had looked down on this so-called
primitive culture, and had robbed Asia for centuries.”
However,
life was not all meditation. Sugata was fascinated by the new,
exotic life and culture around him. As he remembers those days: “The
wells were crowded with women washing their saris and oiling their
bodies. Although there was no road into the city, there were a few
cars in Kathmandu. I was mostly running around with my cameras,
fascinated with all the life around me… the people, the art and the
culture…
“You think life is difficult today! Then it was almost
impossible. We had electricity, but it was not regular, and we were
forbidden to have anything stronger than 15-watt bulbs. There was no
water on Swayambhu; it had to be carried up by water-bearers every
day. I had to go the Indian Embassy to register a letter to Europe:
to send post could take one day; to find post could take another.”
The couple returned to Norway, which Sugata had adopted as his new
home, but he returned to Nepal in 1960 on a fascinating mission: to
take photographs of an esoteric Tibetan rite, the Devil
Dance.
New changes were taking place north of Nepal. China had
annexed Tibet and the Nepal-Tibet border was closed, ringing the
death knell for the centuries-old salt trade route from Tibet to
India in the south. The restriction hit hard the northernmost
districts in Nepal, like Mustang, once part of the ancient Tibetan
kingdom where entire villages followed the salt caravanserai for
their livelihood. Tibetans living in northern Nepal for generations
began a mass exodus.
Every winter in Tukche, a tiny village in
Mustang, people danced the Devil Dance to bring peace in the world.
It was an elaborate ritual, complete with masks and mysticism.
Sugata has a graphic description of a rite earlier kept hidden from
foreign eyes:
“The evening before the masks were hung on the
gompa walls. They were taken out of their huge trunks where they had
been kept under lock and key for the whole year. It was an important
ritual. The masks were believed to have special powers and if
someone ‘unworthy’ put one on, they would overpower him with their
magic. There were masks of monkeys with crowns on their heads,
symbolising our yearning for pride and material belongings. There
were masks of angels spreading goodness called Gandavas and masks of
devils with horns spreading evil, impressive with dark
fear.
“From the first light people started arriving. They dressed
in their traditional costume, bright, with gold thread glistening in
the sun. The courtyard was full; people clambered on every roof and
terrace. The dance began with the arrival of the Guru Rimpoche,
protected and at the same time revered, under an umbrella. With the
dances the whole place came alive. The dancing itself is difficult
to describe because neither its purpose nor its form has any
parallel in the West. Some dances were peaceful and fluid; others
violent and so fast the dancers were unable to slow down or control
their bodies. Some dances were highly ceremonial and stately; others
again depicted the wrathful protection of specific deities. In all,
the fundamental action was to destroy all obstacles to the purpose
of life…” However, though he took hundreds of black and white
photographs of the sacred dance with the three Leicas he carried
around his neck, to his crushing disappointment, Sugata was told by
the lamas not to use them for commercial purpose. So he took them
back all the way to Norway, where they were stashed away with other
unused objects for nearly five decades.
During his trip to
Tukche, Sugata had travelled further north, to a place called
Chhairo, where he found an old gompa (Tibetan monastery) with an old
lama in residence. Though built around 1800, the Chhairo monastery
was still impressive, containing an image of the Buddha sitting in
the lotus position with his fingers touching the earth and about 15
beautifully carved wooden and brass Buddhas and Bodhisattvas. The
four walls were adorned by paintings unspoilt by any Nepalese
influence. Though the dance and the monastery remained etched in
Sugata’s memory, when he returned to Nepal in 2001 to celebrate his
90th birthday, a rude shock awaited him. The last monks and nuns and
left in the 70s, rainwater had ruined the paintings and the
monastery had been looted.
But when he returned to Kathmandu, an
unexpected encounter lightened his heavy heart. A 61-year-old
Buddhist monk Shashi Dhoj Tulachan, was waiting to meet him. The
tonsured, venerable lama was a stripling when Sugata had visited
Tukche in 1960 and remembered the white monk asking his father, a
thanka artist, about his art. What made the coincidence all the more
remarkable was that Tulachan, a thanka artist himself, was part of a
local initiative, the Kali Gandaki Foundation Trust, to raise money
and save the Chhairo gompa. Sugata had a brain wave: he would sell
the photographs he had taken of the Devil Dance and hand over the
proceeds to the trust. And that is how, nearly 50 years after they
were taken, Sugata’s photographs have returned to Nepal, along with
his autobiography, Bird of Passage, co-authored by New Delhi-based
activist Rachel Kellett, who through the California-based Cultural
Restoration Tourism Project will raise the lion’s share of the
required funds. The objective is to make the dead gompa come alive
again. Tulachan is ready to take up residence there and teach his
art to Tukche youngsters while the monastery can serve as a retreat
for visitors.soldier’s David. The journey back to Chhairo has helped
lay that angst and anger and restore Sugata’s inner self as
well.
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