Hope Cooke (born June 24, 1940) was the Gyalmo (Tibetan: རྒྱལ་མོ་, Wylie: rgyal mo) (Queen Consort) of the 12th Chogyal (King) of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal.[1] Their wedding took place in March 1963. She was termed Her Highness The Crown Princess of Sikkim and became the Gyalmo of Sikkim at Palden Thondup Namgyal's coronation in 1965.[2] She is the first American-born Queen Consort.[3]
Palden Thondup Namgyal eventually was the last king of Sikkim as a protectorate state under India. By 1973, both the country and their marriage were crumbling; soon Sikkim was merged into India. Five months after the takeover of Sikkim had begun, Cooke returned to the United States with her two children and stepdaughter to enroll them in schools in New York City. Cooke and her husband divorced in 1980; Namgyal died of cancer in 1982.[4]
According to BBC report Hope Cooke's tenure as queen of Sikkim was marked by controversy, notably surrounding allegations of being an agent of the CIA. Speculation suggested she advocated for American interests and opposed Sikkim's integration with India.[6]
Early life and family
Cooke was born in San Francisco to John J. Cooke, a flight instructor, and Hope Noyes, an amateur pilot. She was raised in the Episcopal Church.[7] Her mother, Hope Noyes, died in January 1942 at age 25 when the plane she was flying solo crashed.[8][9]
After her mother's death, Cooke and her half-sister, Harriet Townsend, moved to a New York City apartment across the hall from their maternal grandparents, Helen (Humpstone) and Winchester Noyes, the president of J.H. Winchester & Co., an international shipping brokerage firm. They were raised by a succession of governesses.[8] Her grandfather died when she was 12 and her grandmother died three years later. Cooke became the ward of her aunt and uncle, Mary Paul (Noyes) and Selden Chapin, a former US Ambassador to Iran and Peru. She studied at the Chapin School in New York and attended the Madeira School for three years before finishing high school in Iran.[10]
Marriage to the Crown Prince of Sikkim
The King and Queen of Sikkim (1966)
In 1959, Cooke was a freshman majoring in Asian Studies at Sarah Lawrence College and sharing an apartment with actress Jane Alexander. She went on a summer trip to India and met Palden Thondup Namgyal, Crown Prince of Sikkim, in the lounge[11] of the Windamere Hotel in Darjeeling, India. He was a 36 year-old recent widower with two sons and a daughter. They were drawn to each other by the similar isolation of their childhoods. Two years later, in 1961, their engagement was announced, but the wedding was put off for more than a year because astrologers in both Sikkim and India warned that 1962 was an inauspicious year for marriages.[1]
On March 20, 1963, Cooke married Namgyal in a Buddhist monastery in a ceremony performed by fourteen lamas. Wedding guests included members of Indian royalty, Indian and Sikkimese generals, and the US Ambassador to India, John Kenneth Galbraith.[1] Cooke renounced her United States citizenship as required by Sikkim's laws and also as a demonstration to the people of Sikkim that she was not an "American arm" in the Himalayas.[12] She was dropped from the Social Register but the marriage was reported in National Geographic magazine. The New Yorker followed the royal couple on one of their yearly trips to the United States.[1] Although her husband was Buddhist, Cooke did not officially convert from Christianity to Buddhism though she had practiced Buddhism from an early age (Henry Kissinger once remarked "she has become more Buddhist than the population").[13][14][7] Namgyal was crowned monarch of Sikkim on April4, 1965. However, their marriage faced strains, and both had affairs: he with a married Belgian woman, and she with an American friend.[1][8]
King and Queen of Sikkim and their daughter watch birthday celebrations, Gangtok, Sikkim
At the same time, Sikkim was under strain due to annexation pressures from India. Crowds marched on the palace against the monarchy.[15] Cooke's husband was deposed on April10, 1975 and confined to his palace under house arrest.[16] The couple soon separated. Cooke returned to Manhattan, where she raised her children, Palden and Hope Leezum.[17] In May 1975, Representative James W. Symington (D-MO) and Senator Mike Mansfield (D-MT) sponsored private bills to restore her citizenship;[18] however, after the bill passed the Senate, several members of the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Immigration objected, and the bill had to be amended to grant her only U.S. permanent resident status before it could gain their support and pass Congress.[12][19][20] President Gerald Ford signed the bill into law on June16, 1976.[21][22] By 1981 she still had not been able to regain U.S. citizenship.[23] The royal couple divorced in 1980, and Namgyal died of cancer in 1982 in New York City.[24][25][26][27][28]
Later life
With child support from Namgyal and an inheritance from her grandparents, Cooke rented an apartment in the Yorkville area of New York City. This time around, she felt "profoundly displaced" in the city and started going on walking tours and then creating her own.[29] She studied Dutch journals, old church sermons, and newspaper articles to acquaint herself with the city and lectured on the social history of New York. She wrote a weekly column, "Undiscovered Manhattan", for the Daily News. Her books include an award-winning memoir of her life in Sikkim, Time Change: An Autobiography (1981), an off-the-beaten-path guide to New York, Seeing New York,[30] developed from her walking tours, and, with Jacques d'Amboise, she published Teaching the Magic of Dance.[10]
Cooke remarried in 1983 to Mike Wallace, a Pulitzer Prize–winning historian and Distinguished Professor of History at John Jay College of Criminal Justice.[10][31] They later divorced. Hope Cooke's son, Prince Palden, a New York banker and financial advisor, married Kesang Deki Tashi and has a son and three daughters. Cooke's daughter, Princess Hope, graduated from Milton Academy and Georgetown University, and married (and later divorced) Thomas Gwyn Reich, Jr., a US Foreign Service officer; she later remarried, to Yep Wangyal Tobden.[citation needed]
Cooke lived in London for a few years before returning to the United States, where she now lives in Brooklyn and currently works as a writer, historian, and lecturer.[10] She was a consultant for PBS's New York: A Documentary Film (1999–2001).[32] Cooke is a regular contributor to book reviews and magazines and also lectures widely.[citation needed]
Controversies
Cooke faced controversy during her tenure as queen due to allegations of being an agent of the CIA, purportedly promoting American interests and opposing Sikkim's merger with India. Her American background fueled suspicions of CIA influence in Sikkim's affairs.[33][34]
Publications
Time Change: An American Women's Extraordinary Story, New York: Simon & Schuster (1981); ISBN0-671-41225-6.[35]
Palden Thondup Namgyal was the 12th and last Chogyal (king) of the Kingdom of Sikkim.
Tashi Namgyal was the ruling Chogyal (King) of Sikkim from 1914 to 1963. He was the son of Thutob Namgyal. He was the first independent king of Sikkim.
Namgyal, a Tibetan deity, has been a personal name in several countries; see :
The Chogyal were the monarchs of the former Kingdom of Sikkim, which belonged to the Namgyal dynasty. The Chogyal was the absolute monarch of Sikkim from 1642 to 1973, and the constitutional monarch from 1973 to 1975, when the monarchy was abolished and the Sikkimese people voted in a referendum to make Sikkim the 22nd state of India.
The history of Sikkim begins with the indigenous Lepcha's contact with early Tibetan settlers. Historically, Sikkim was a sovereign Monarchical State in the eastern Himalayas. Later a protectorate of India followed by a merger with India and official recognition as a state of India. Lepchas were the main inhabitants as well as the Rulers of the land up to 1641. Lepchas are generally considered to be the first people, Indigenous to Sikkim also includes Darjeeling.
Sikkim is a 1971 Indian documentary about the nation of Sikkim, directed by Satyajit Ray. The documentary was commissioned by the Chogyal (King) of Sikkim at a time when he felt the sovereignty of Sikkim was under threat from both China and India. Ray's documentary is about the sovereignty of Sikkim. The film was banned by the government of India, when Sikkim merged with India in 1975. The ban was finally lifted in September 2010. In November 2010 the director of the Kolkata film festival stated that upon screening the documentary for the first time, he received an injunction from the court of Sikkim again banning the film.
Tashi Namgyal Academy (TNA) is a public school in the Himalayan state of Sikkim in India. It was founded in 1926 by the late Sir Tashi Namgyal, KCSI, KCIE, the 11th consecrated Ruler of Sikkim. It is an autonomous English-medium, co-educational and residential-cum-day school.
Chogyal Wangchuk Tenzing Namgyal is the second son of Palden Thondup Namgyal, the last sovereign king of Sikkim. Educated at Harrow, he is also the present heir of the Namgyal dynasty and pretender to the throne of Sikkim.
Selden Chapin was a career foreign service officer and United States diplomat.
Frederic Lincoln Chapin was a United States diplomat. He was the ambassador to Ethiopia and Guatemala.
Wangchuk or Wangchuck is a given name and surname. Notable people with the name include:
Windamere Hotel, built as 'Ada Villa' in 1841 and then turned into a boarding house for tea planters and other Raj types, on contract, in the late 1880s. In 1939, it became 'Windamere Hotel', a colonial hotel situated on Observatory Hill, in Darjeeling, India.
A referendum on abolishing the monarchy was held in the Kingdom of Sikkim on 14 April 1975. Official results stated the proposal was approved by 97.55% of voters with a turnout of about 63%, and resulted in the country becoming an Indian state.
Bhim Bahadur Gurung was the third Chief Minister of Sikkim. He held office from 11 May until 24 May 1984, the shortest term in the history of Sikkim.
Alice S. Kandell is an American child psychologist, author, photographer and art collector interested in Himalayan culture. She worked extensively in the Indian state of Sikkim as a photographer, capturing approximately 15,000 color slides, as well as black-and-white photographs, between 1965 and 1979.
Gomchen Pema Chewang Tamang was a Tibetan Buddhist scholar, teacher and a renounced practitioner.
Bipen Behari Lal was an Indian civil servant who served as the first governor of the state of Sikkim after its merger with India. Prior to the merger, he served as the Chief Executive of the Kingdom of Sikkim.
Jahan Bagcha Teesta Rangeet is a song that serves as the de facto state song for Sikkim, India.
Sikkim: Requiem for a Himalayan Kingdom is a nonfiction book by Andrew Duff.
↑ "Palden Thondup Namgyal, Deposed Sikkim King, Dies". The New York Times. January 30, 1982. Retrieved February 22, 2015. The deposed King of Sikkim, Palden Thondup Namgyal, who had been undergoing treatment for cancer in New York, died last night from complications following an operation at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center. He was 58 years old. A family spokesman said his body was to be flown home to Sikkim for the funeral. ...
↑ Gerald R. Ford Administration White House Press Releases(PDF). Washington D. C.: Federal Government of the United States. 1976. Retrieved September 27, 2022– via Gerald R. Ford Presidential Museum. The President has signed S. 1699 - Relief of Mrs. Hope Namgyal. This bill grants perm nent [sic] resident status to the American-born wife of the deposed Crown Prince of Sikkim
↑ "Index of the "Bulletin of Tibetology"". Namgyal Institute of Tibetology. April 5, 2017. Archived from the original on April 28, 2016. Retrieved April 5, 2017. Bulletin of Tibetology 1966 No.2- "The Sikkimese theory of land holding and the Darjeeling grant" by Hope Namgyal and Bulletin of Tibetology 1969 No.1- "Obituary: Princess Pema Choki" by Hope Namgyal
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