Charles Bell and 13th Dalai Lama shared lasting friendship

HIMALAYAN GUARDIAN  MAY 18, 2011

Charles Bell and 13^th Dalai Lama shared lasting friendship

Sir Charles Alfred Bell K.C.I.E. (1870 – 1945), born in Calcutta, was a British-Indian tibetologist. He was educated at Winchester College. After joining the Indian Civil Service, he was appointed Political Officer in Sikkim in 1908. He soon became very influential in Sikkimese and Bhutanese politics, and in 1910 he met the 13th Dalai Lama, who was forced into temporary exile by the Chinese.

He got to know the Dalai Lama quite well during this time, and he was later to write his biography (Portrait of the Dalai Lama, published in 1946). At various times he was the British Political Officer for Bhutan, Sikkim and Tibet.

After travelling through Tibet and visiting Lhasa in 1920, he retired to Oxford, where he wrote his series of books on the history, culture and religion of Tibet. Some of his photographs that he took while in Tibet can be found in the Pitt Rivers Museum in Oxford. Some of these can be found in a recently published book Tibet: Caught in Time (containing photographs by Charles Bell and John Claude White; Reading: Garnet, 1997).

His English-Tibetan colloquial dictionary was first published together with a grammar of colloquial Tibetan as Manual of Colloquial Tibetan in 1905. Charles Alfred Bell died in Canada in 1945.

Sir Charles Bell was a career diplomat in the service of the British Raj, the personification of the grandeur of an empire that spanned the world. The Great Thirteenth Dalai Lama of Tibet was the spiritual and temporal leader of a remote and isolated theocracy in the heart of the Himalayas. Sir Charles represented the power and limitless potential of the new century. The Dalai Lama was the literal embodiment of an ancient lineage, an incarnation of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, the ruler of one of the most inaccessible and forbidding places on earth. That the two men should find so much in common and develop a bond of deep and lasting friendship is a wonder that does credit to them both. Sir Charles' biography of the Dalai Lama, Portrait of a Dalai Lama: The Life and Times of the Great Thirteenth is the story of that friendship.

Sir Charles Bell gives us a unique insight into the personality of the man behind the ritual and pageantry of his high office. He shows us a man of profound intelligence and sensitivity, a man of wit and humour, a man quick to anger, a man of compassion. This man, who ruled with absolute authority and was revered as a living god, gave Sir Charles Bell his friendship; and, through his eyes, we see a man of warmth and charm, who loved his dogs and his garden.