GANJU LAMA’S LIFE: LEARNING TO WRITE FOR CHILDREN

I never imagined I would be writing for children.

The idea emerged almost casually. My friend Lekha Rai, the proprietor of Café The Twins, a book café in Salbari, Siliguri, was in the process of starting a publishing house, later named Foothills Publishing, and was sounding out ideas. I was drawn to it not only because of the gap in children’s literature, but also because it was an independent venture led by a woman, rooted in the region. Somewhere in that conversation, I found myself saying that there was an acute shortage of children’s literature grounded in our own geography. Stories children here could recognise as their own. Biographies for children. Local heroes. Lives they would not encounter elsewhere.

A group of friends of the Café, friends in life as well, came together to think this through. Lists were made. Names discussed. And very quickly, Ganju Lama emerged as the inaugural choice. Ganju Lama was a boy from Sikkim who went on to fight in the Second World War, earning the Victoria Cross and the Military Medal for his role in the Burma campaign, as well as Sikkim’s own Pema Dorji Medal. The timing seemed right. His birth centenary fell in 2024.

There was enough material available. And, perhaps most importantly for me, there was access. His son, Pema Leyda, was my former colleague at The Telegraph.

Writing about a war hero is never straightforward, especially when the audience is young. What do you do with war? Do you soften it, sanitise it, or avoid it altogether? Or do you risk normalising violence by narrating it too simply?

I thought about this for a long time. And then it struck me that in Sikkim, Ganju Lama is already a presence, somewhat, in children’s lives. There is Ganju Lama Road. Ganju Lama Gate. His name is known, but the person behind it remains vague.

More importantly, his story is not only a story of war. Yes, he was a soldier. Yes, his courage on the battlefield was extraordinary. But that is not where his story ends. He returned from war and became an advocate for peace. His bravery extended far beyond the battlefields. His qualities of restraint, moral clarity and compassion are as relevant today as they were then, perhaps more so. I felt children deserved a fuller picture of the hero.

Pema Leyda and his mother, Pema Chuki, gave me long, generous interviews. Chuki Madam opened her home to me, showing me artefacts that carried the weight of memory. These included medals, photographs and books that had travelled with the family across time. They were not just objects, but fragments of a life lived across extraordinary historical moments.

Ganju Lama’s sons have built a well-curated museum in Sangmu, the village where the VC Saab, as Ganju Lama is known in Sikkim, was born. The museum proved invaluable to my research. Its display panels carefully chronicle Ganju Lama’s life and service, alongside his uniforms, personal objects, souvenirs, citations, a transistor and medals, each offering a tactile sense of the man behind the history. I also drew on newspaper reports and online resources, including the websites of the Gurkha Museum and the Victoria Cross and George Cross Association. John Percival’s For Valour proved particularly helpful in piecing together the military record.

I consider myself very fortunate to have Pankaj Thapa as the illustrator for the book. He has done a stellar job with the illustrations, rendered in black-and-white sketches full of movement and drama. In fact, the images informed my writing in important ways, as I went back and rewrote sections to better align with what his drawings conveyed. His sketches feel universal, even as they retain a strong sense of local ethos.

Very early in the writing process, I realised something else. Ganju Lama’s life is not a story for very young children. At least, I am not equipped to tell it in that register. It is complicated. It demands nuance. For that reason, the book is intended for readers aged 10 and above, or for anyone, really, with a reading level of 10 plus.

Take something as basic as his name. How and why did Gyamtso Shangderpa become Ganju Lama? This is not a neat anecdote about a misheard name. It is entangled with colonial bureaucracy, military systems, the martial race theory, Gurkha identity, and the ways in which individuals from the margins were recorded, renamed and remembered. These systems also shaped who was considered fit for military service, and who was excluded from it. To reduce that complexity would be to distort it.

What also makes Ganju Lama’s story particularly compelling is that he was a Bhutia, not really a “Gurkha”. Under colonial military policy, only certain Nepali communities, designated as “martial races”, were recruited into the Gurkha regiments. Ganju Lama’s entry into the force, and his eventual recognition for exceptional valour, disrupts that rigid framework. He remains the only Bhutia to have been awarded the Victoria Cross, a fact that adds another layer of complexity to how courage, identity and recognition operated within the colonial military system.

What surprised me was how much thought the writing demanded. I wanted to break things down for young readers, but I also did not want to oversimplify or dumb anything down. Children are intelligent. They are competent readers. I was determined not to produce a “kiddish” book.

I thought about how I speak to my own children. I have never used babyspeak with them, not when they were younger, not now. I speak to them as thinking individuals. That became my guiding principle. I chose a language that is conversational, but never patronising.

Yes, the book may feel dense in places. But that density is intentional. It is an invitation to young readers to work a little harder, to pause, to ask questions. That, after all, is what reading is meant to do. You encounter something unfamiliar. You grapple with it. You grow into it.

If this book challenges children, even slightly, then it has done its job.

The good news is that this is only the beginning. Ganju Lama is the first book in a planned biography series, with more lives to follow—written by various authors, possibly including me. If the series succeeds, it will not only fill a gap in children’s publishing but also help young readers discover that the histories worth knowing are often closer to home than they realise.