For most Bhutanese, life in the hidden Himalayan valleys that form the landlocked kingdom in the shadow of the earth’s highest peaks is still simple and tranquil, if strenuous. Bhutanese Buddhists, inheritors of a phantasmagorical literature, see all around them the elaborate artistic representations of their gods, often in temples set in a natural environment of primeval beauty. To minimize disruption of this way of life, development under two enlightened kings has been very cautious since it began in the 1960s.
Alone among the generally overcrowded nations of the South Asian subcontinent, the Bhutanese enjoy an important quality of life that cannot be overvalued or underestimated: privacy. Though families may be large, virtually everyone has a home and therefore a sanctuary. The Bhutanese are accustomed to solitude; many ride or walk alone for long hours, perhaps days, from high-altitude villages to market towns or schools and back again. But for an isolated people, they are unexpectedly cosmopolitan. A district administrator assigned to one of the remotest outposts ventured that maybe this had something to do with living on mountains, “where we can be far-seeing and maybe learn to take a broader look at life.”
Samuel Davis thought that the Bhutanese were an intellectual match for any other nationality in the region. He wrote that they might need only secular teachers “to equal, if not surpass, their Indian neighbors, over whom they possess an advantage in an exemption from the restraint of caste, that insuperable bar to social improvements and national dignity.” Furthermore, as Rigzin Dorji said, the people of Bhutan are spared the soul-destroying need to beg for anything: for food, for space, for shelter, for a moment of attention. They are never forced, as are the street people of Dhaka, Calcutta, or Bombay, to eat, sleep, wash, defecate, make love, and raise children in the crowded gutters of urban life. Their world smells of woodsmoke and pine needles, and resonates with birdsong and the splashing of waterfalls.
Into this setting creep the ugly tensions, deep and destructive, that threaten to wound and disfigure this extraordinary nation. As the outside world closes in, despite the Buddhist kingdom’s best efforts to keep its distance from the corrupting influences and sins of others, challenges multiply. An open border with India and air links to Bangkok, Dhaka, Kathmandu, Delhi, and Calcutta not only have brought to Bhutan’s doorstep high-stakes smuggling, including the illegal trade in temple treasures, gold, and endangered animal pelts, but also have exposed the Bhutanese to AIDS and other new diseases. A slowly expanding private tourism industry and soaring property values are creating a wealthy urban (by Bhutanese standards) middle class in the capital, Thimphu, where life grows more distant day by day from its medieval village roots. A few panhandlers and street children have moved in. Burglary is a new urban phenomenon; the lone hair dryer from Thimphu’s first beauty shop was among the first objects to go. These crimes shock and could overwhelm a traditional system of justice experienced for the most part in resolving family quarrels.
What is lost? An atmosphere of trust. In late 1992, in Thimphu, a woman who owns a jewelry shop went out on an errand and left me alone with her entire stock, some of it extremely valuable antique corals and turquoise pieces. When I finally chose some earrings, and she hadn’t yet returned, I left the money in the charge of an old lama who had dropped in for tea. He nodded and with a toothless smile indicated he approved of my choice. It never occurred to me that he might pocket the cash and leave. And it obviously didn’t worry the shopkeeper that she had left me alone with her inventory in unlocked cases. A year or two later, I heard from one of the sophisticates who lunch at the Swiss Bakery that young hooligans had begun disguising themselves as monks in order to steal from trusting merchants like my jewelry seller as well as from temples. And what about the tourists? I asked, thinking of those well-heeled visitors who pried statues off their pedestals in the struggling stately homes of Rajasthan and packed them away as if they were souvenir ashtrays from a chain hotel. No trouble with them yet, most Bhutanese say. Once trust is broken and the magic is gone, however, everyone takes a piece of what’s left.
There are other troubling changes, larger in scale than the criminal behavior of a few and more immediately dangerous to the integrity of the Bhutanese state. In southern Bhutan, along the unfenced border with India, available land and free education and health care continue to draw illegal immigrants, different in religion and ethnicity from the people of the central valleys and alien to the Buddhist culture that has defined national life for more than a thousand years. Immigrant Hindus of Nepali ancestry are part of a huge Nepali world outside Bhutan’s borders. In the early 1990s, there were at least thirty million Nepalis in overpopulated (and environmentally devastated) Nepal and in India’s Himalayan foothills, and fewer than three-quarters of a million Bhutanese citizens—Buddhist and Hindu together—in Bhutan. Only the small Indian state of Sikkim, where Nepali people long ago outnumbered the former kingdom’s Tibetan and tribal stock, separates Bhutan from Nepal’s teeming eastern border.
“The annual increase of the population of Nepal may be as much as the total population of Bhutan,” King Jigme Singye Wangchuck told me in late 1992. “Their population increase per year is about five hundred thousand—half a million—people, and there is chronic unemployment. In Nepal they have destroyed and denuded all their forests, there is no land to be given to the landless people, and all the arable land can no longer be farmed because of environmental and ecological problems. Where the water table has gone down, tremendous erosion is taking place. India today has about ten million Nepalese, and these ten million Nepalese have all come from Nepal. In Bhutan, the attractions were free education, free health, and easier availability of free land, and all this [immigrant influx] was done with the full support and cooperation of our southern Bhutanese people.”
Faced with this threat to an already endangered Himalayan Buddhist culture, the kingdom’s dominant Drukpa people and others in the Buddhist mainstream reacted initially in panic, setting the stage by 1990 for a rebellion among southerners who said that they were being culturally repressed and illegally evicted even when they were citizens. Their accounts were sometimes true, sometimes exaggerated. Undoubtedly there were outbursts of excessive zeal among the Drukpa administrators; that cannot be denied. A requirement that national dress be worn by all Bhutanese was enforced so rigorously that a Japanese scholar in Western clothes was roughed up trying to convince law enforcement officers that he wasn’t Bhutanese at all.
National dress in Bhutan is defined as a kimono-like gho for men and boys and a somewhat different ankle-length robe called a kira for girls and women. Worn correctly and with knee-length socks and decent shoes, the gho, often in dark plaids or stripes (even pinstripes), is an elegant garment. Unfortunately, a lot of young Bhutanese, who are hit-or-miss about how they fold and fasten the ample robe and iconoclastic in their choice of what to wear with it (running shoes, athletic socks, and sweatpants are favorite accessories), make the national costume look unkempt if not ridiculous.
The gho has a bathrobe-like wide collar and buttonless front panels, one crossing over the other from left to right when the robe is put on. A gho is ankle-length in construction, but it is worn at knee level, hoisted up and secured by a woven belt, with the excess fabric bloused out at the top. At the back, the robe is folded from the waist down into two inverted vertical pleats that meet at the center, making the garment hug the body at the hips while having a roomy look at the top. In front, the pouch formed in the diagonal opening above the waist provides a generous pocket for carrying all kinds of useful items: a handkerchief, a traditional wood-and-silver bowl for drinking tea or homemade alcoholic brews, an appointment book, money, the shopping, or a supply of betel chews.
Under a gho, a Bhutanese man wears a white shirt with overlong sleeves, which are folded up over the outside of the robe at the wrists to form wide cuffs. Adding the kabne, a scarf that identifies one’s rank, to this already taxing ensemble is a more complicated operation than one would guess, since the long piec
e of material has to be thrown over the shoulder and folded over itself at chest height before also being thrown over the left arm. The proportions of folded and free-flowing cloth have to be exact, so that the kabne falls with the correct drape and length.
The kira, for women, is slightly simpler. Basically a rectangular length of woven cloth (or more likely several pieces sewn together) about two and a half yards long and one and a half yards wide, it wraps around the body over a shawl-collared blouse, the onju, and is fastened at the shoulders with silver hooks—or sometimes safety pins and, lately, Velcro. A silver or cloth belt secures the kira at the waist. A short unbuttoned jacket, the toego, completes the outfit. The cloth chosen for a kira, traditionally handwoven in horizontal stripes (unfairly, since stripes for men are vertical), now varies in color and design with the whims of Bhutanese fashion.
Because many, though not all, southern Nepali-Bhutanese are Hindus with cultural links to fellow Nepalis all along the Himalayan foothills, most normally dress differently from the northerners of the high mountain valleys. If the Drukpas only grumble about wearing what is, after all, their traditional costume, the southerners, called officially Lhotsampas, see the enforcement of a national dress code based on a northern costume as a glaring violation of their civil rights and cultural customs. Southern Bhutanese favor either Western clothes or the Nepali jodhpurs, tunic and multicolored topi (a kind of lopsided fez) for men or the sari for women, garments that set them apart from the northerners in their ghos and kiras. Efforts by some liberal local officials to ease the dress-code rules or mitigate their enforcement came late, but were real. On a hot, flat plain in the Samchi district, across the border from the Indian tea gardens of Cooch Behar, I saw farmers in Western-style trousers working their fields and a watchman at a Druk fruit-processing plant dressed in a “half gho,” a kiltlike garment, with a sport shirt and Nepali topi. But by then, the damage had been done, and clothes had become a major civil rights issue.
At the same time that this ethnically based dress code was being imposed on the southern Bhutanese and other pressures were being applied to them to prove their legitimacy if not loyalty, some well-known politicians in Thimphu apparently took the opportunity to grab Nepali-Bhutanese property. Soon, government officials were forced, unarmed, into the theater of a shadowy guerrilla war notable even in violent South Asia for its senseless atrocities. In the village of Chiengmari, near Samchi, a Lepcha—whose people took no side in the Bhutanese dispute—was beheaded one afternoon and thrown, dismembered, by the side of the hamlet’s one road to serve as a ritual sacrifice or a warning. Local people suspected the former, and told dark tales of Nepali blood rites. People of all ethnic groups lived in terror.
Yet the day after I heard this story, I watched in acute embarrassment as a local administrator, visiting an even smaller and more vulnerable border hamlet near Sibsoo, set out to humiliate (for the benefit of his audience) a headmaster who refused to live in the free house he had been given on the grounds of an isolated school repeatedly attacked by militants. The man had fled with his family to the security of a nearby village. Moral support was what he needed, but the government official, retelling the story in front of the hapless, crestfallen headmaster, suddenly turned on him and began to cluck—“Cawk! Cawk! Cawk! Cawk!”—like an enormous chicken. The painfully insecure headmaster had just served us all cookies and tea at a castoff table in his abandoned house, trying his best to show he was still in charge of the burned-out, stripped-down school. Across a vacant field, a few brave teachers huddled in the still-standing classrooms with groups of little children, most of them Bhutanese Nepalis so poor they had to be given their tiny regulation ghos and kiras by the government.
As all of these problems boil over at once, Bhutan’s loyal friends fear not only for this imperiled society but also for the loss the world will incur if Durk Yul, the Kingdom of the Thunder Dragon, slides toward disintegration or extinction.
What to keep? What to give up? And how much time to make the choice? On such questions, there is no consensus in Bhutan. There is only a vague fear, spreading like an inkblot, that an era has ended and no one knows what the next age will bring. The future, unlike the past, holds no hope of fantasy, no expectation of miraculous intervention by deities in times of trouble. No magic dances or Tantric rituals can chase away the new demons that stalk the Bhutanese hills.
Trapped between India and China, two giant nations wary of each other; under relentless regional demographic pressures; and confused by their own uncertainties about how to deal with the secular outside world and its alien cultures, the Bhutanese are not optimistic. They have seen Ladakh, Tibet, and Sikkim vanish as independent Himalayan Buddhist realms, to be absorbed and altered by India or China. They derive only bleak hope from the knowledge that the Tibetan Buddhism that shaped their nation has found a new following in the West. Westerners take only what is relevant to them, usually the practice of meditation and aspects of traditional medicine. Himalayan Buddhism is much more than that; in Bhutan it is a rich stew of theology spiced by legend, superstition, astrological interpretation, and the worship of natural phenomena. Bhutanese Buddhism is Bhutanese Buddhism only in Bhutan.
At a time when the protection of minority rights and the spread of democracy have become high priorities worldwide, the Buddhists of Bhutan, followers of an arcane theology, are at a possibly fatal disadvantage. Nepali-Bhutanese rebels have set up shop in Kathmandu to spread the word that the panicked Drukpas—the Dragon People—are oppressors led by an evil king. In Thimphu, King Jigme Singye Wangchuck says ruefully that he knows how hard it is to defend monarchy at this point in history. One of his ministers was more direct: “If we were spotted owls, the world would care about us,” he said. “Can’t you see we are an endangered species, too?”
“The rich and splendorous culture of the Great Wheel of Buddhism, which once flourished in Sikkim, Tibet, Ladakh, Lahaul, and Spiti, is well on the path to extinction,” Jigmi Thinley, a Bhutanese government official, told a 1993 conference of scholars at London University’s School of Oriental and African Studies. “Today, Bhutan, the last bastion of this cultural heritage, is in a state of siege.”
Chapter 2
THE DRUK GYALPO
THE PRECIOUS RULER of the Dragon People waits for visitors in his silk-lined lair at the top of a very steep flight of monastic ladder-steps in Tashichodzong, the fortress in Thimphu that houses the royal Bhutanese government and the head abbot of the Buddhist clergy, the je khenpo. Actually, there are several flights of punishing wooden steps from the austere stone gateway of the dzong to the upper reaches of the offices of the king, which are in a tower at the opposite corner of the long courtyard from the je khenpo’s temple and, until recently, the hall set aside for meetings twice a year of the National Assembly, the Tshogdu. Even before being bedazzled by the splendor of the high-ceilinged royal audience hall and its gilded throne, the intruding outsider is rendered breathless from the exertion of getting there.
As courtiers part the curtains that cover the door to the large but dimly lit chamber, the king is standing just inside, ready with a brief, disarming smile. He leads his guest past brilliant thangkas, paintings on brocaded scrolls, and other richly colored hangings garnishing the saffron-colored walls whose remaining spaces are ornamented with religious symbols embossed in gold leaf. Benches and pillows covered with the skins of snow leopards define the corner where His Majesty settles himself for interviews and audiences. The scene is photographed often and pictured just about every week in Kuensel: the king with the Indian ambassador, the king with the resident representative of the United Nations Development Program, or, more recently (in the time of ethnic conflict), the king with leaders of Amnesty International, the king with a delegation from the International Committee of the Red Cross. Asked about the pelts of the endangered cats on which we sit, His Majesty disowns them, saying they were put there before his time, before Bhutan pledged to the world community to protect its animals and pla
nts. “I had nothing to do with that,” he answers quickly, with only a faint trace of impatience at being sidetracked by the upholstery. He has more urgent issues to discuss.
In appearance, the king exemplifies the arresting good looks and natural grace of many of the northern Bhutanese: black hair above a slightly tawny face with the high cheekbones and dark, almond-shaped eyes of the Tibeto-Burman people. Strong and well proportioned like most Bhutanese, the king is resplendent in a gho of handwoven silk in deep blue and gold stripes, the gold patterned lightly in red by adding an extra weft to the weave, a hallmark of the most highly treasured Bhutanese textiles. Over his left shoulder is draped a kabne of saffron-colored raw silk. Every Bhutanese man is required to possess a kabne in a color or design appropriate to his rank, whether exalted or lowly, and to wear it in dzongs and other government buildings. The saffron-gold shade is worn by only two men: the monarch and the je khenpo. His Majesty wears black knee socks and Western dress shoes instead of the traditional knee-high boots made of animal skin or felt, now seen mostly on ceremonial occasions. There is a winter chill in the audience hall, only slightly mitigated by the hot tea and fresh savory pastries. The king has a slight cold, and a bit of untraditional plaid flannel shirt escapes from beneath the collar of his gho as he reaches for a handkerchief now and then during a conversation on a dismal afternoon. He has a solemn, even superserious, demeanor and voices his thoughts in precise language, using his expressive eyes but almost no facial or hand gestures as he speaks—or as he listens with apparent interest to his guests. It is the common experience of those of us who have met him that at the end of your interview he begins his, asking very direct questions about international politics and soliciting opinions on Bhutanese affairs. His head is full of facts about Bhutanese development—he says he spends a lot of his time reading files—and he pleads his case for international understanding tirelessly and with a repertoire of well-rehearsed arguments, as delegations of foreigners who have heard about the trouble in the south come and go. Saving the last Himalayan Buddhist kingdom has become his full-time job.
So Close to Heaven Page 3