“Evokingly and sharply the arrows whistle across the gully from out the bamboo grove,” Nicholas Roerich wrote in the opening lines of a chapter on Sikkim in his travelogue Altai-Himalaya . “The Sikkimese remember their favourite ancient pastimes. One says: ‘The arrow is better than a bullet.
It sings as it strikes, while the bullet screeches as it flies outward.’” Roerich, a Russian painter, writer and philosopher, travelled to the Kingdom of Sikkim in early 1924, some months after his arrival in India with his wife Helena and sons Yuri and Svetoslav. It was the family’s first visit to the country, but their deep knowledge of Hindu texts and Buddhist doctrines bred a sense of familiarity.
India is where they would eventually settle down. The Kingdom of Sikkim was ruled by Chogyal Tashi Namgyal at the time. Nestled in snow-covered Himalayas, and largely isolated from the world, it was pristine and unspoilt.
A delighted Roerich would write glowingly about its flora and fauna, about visiting its ancient monasteries and meeting its knowledgeable lamas. He fell in love with it. “Deep ravines and grotesque hills rear up to the cloud-line, into which melts the smoke of villages and monasteries,” he said.
“Upon the heights gleam banners, suburgans or stupas. The ascending mountain passes curve with sharp turns. Eagles vie in their flight with the colourful kites flown by the villagers.
In the bamboo-stalks and amid the fern the sleek body of a tiger or a leopard a.