Bhutanese and Tibetans, once linked by monastic orders and trading caravans, are today divided by geopolitics into two antagonistic spheres. After Beijing began to suppress Tibetan nationalism and dilute Tibet’s ethnic composition and its Tantric Buddhist culture following the 1959 rebellion against Communist Chinese rule, and after China’s attacks on India in 1962, Bhutan had little option but to cast its lot with New Delhi, whose army regards these hills as part of its own frontier. To do otherwise would have put Bhutanese independence in jeopardy. Thus, open borders and overland journeys to the great Tibetan temples at Lhasa, Ralung, or elsewhere are only memories among elderly Bhutanese and those Tibetan exiles who fled here before the borders closed.
“In olden days, many Bhutanese people used to go to Tibet for higher education,” Rinpoche Mynar Trilku told me. The rinpoche, who was born in Tibet but fled the year the Dalai Lama went into exile, is now the curator of Bhutan’s National Museum. “Many of the most learned Bhutanese monks we have here, who are called as gyshye—which means professor or doctor of divinity—took all their degrees and studies in Tibet.” Because of the tradition of sending monks to Tibetan monastic institutions, the Bhutanese clergy never established major centers of learning or religious publication in their own country. That is not to say that Bhutanese monasteries did not produce great scholars or commentators, the rinpoche hastened to add. It’s only that the pinnacle of Tibet was so high, its lights so bright, and its influence so wide that all others stood in its shadow.
Still, the dzong named Drukyel—“Victory of the Druk People”—is a reminder that life next door to Tibet had its downs as well as its better moments. Historical records say that the fortress was built by Ngawang Namgyal, the seventeenth-century unifier of Bhutan, to celebrate the 1644 defeat of a Tibetan army apparently bent on taking Paro, about fifteen miles away, one of more than half a dozen Tibetan attacks over several decades. About the same time that Drukyel Dzong was being constructed, another large fortress was going up in Paro, the Rinpung Dzong. This solid, square fortress-monastery, though periodically ravaged by fire over the years, remains the capital of Paro district and the site of one of Bhutan’s best-known religious-folk festivals of music and dance, the Paro Tshechu, held each spring. The fortress, which most people call Paro Dzong, has all the local history. The dzong’s old watch-tower, Ta Dzong, several miles up the hill above the fortress, houses the National Museum.
I was in one of the museum’s upper galleries, sneaking another look at Bhutan’s brief but wildly eccentric postal history—stamps in honor of Walt Disney, mushrooms, and a classic Rolls-Royce—when Rinpoche Mynar Trilku came along to answer some of my questions about more serious exhibits of thangkas, images, and objects used in worship. Some of the items displayed are so sacred that all visitors to the museum must circumambulate the galleries in a clockwise direction, as if all the rooms were temples. The rinpoche, who was wearing a giant plastic wristwatch with a bright orange face, is a genial monk with a ready smile who radiates enthusiasm when he talks about his collection. His lively discourse brings the chilly and dimly lit galleries to life and gives them meaning. Though a scholar of renown, he revels in the thought that in Bhutan the past is not confined to artifacts and academics but is still alive and all around us.
“I think that in many of the European countries a museum is where you go to see something of the past—unless it is a modern art museum,” he said. “Normally you try to learn there what people have forgotten. But here this is a living museum. On auspicious days, we have lots of local visitors. They are corning to the museum not really to see the collection. They come here to take the blessings from the images. As a result you see that in two galleries we always burn the butter lamp and bring the waters, and put incense and everything, which sometimes may be against the conservation rules. International conservation rules don’t allow that because of the precious thangkas.”
Bhutan resists demands from grant-giving foreigners that its museum be sanitized. The rinpoche has taken his persuasive case for keeping this a living museum to the doors of international art experts raised on more orthodox galleries, places where people would not feel at home as they do here padding around with prayer beads, mumbling mantras. He scents victory.
“Recently when I have attended some of the conservation meetings, they note it may not be really bad to do what we do. They are now saying: Suppose an image in a monastery for three-four hundred years has been exposed to that kind of heat with the butter lamps, that kind of smoke. If you take it out and keep it in a museum without this environment surrounding it, the decay of that piece may be worse.”
From the rinpoche’s viewpoint, a visit to this museum may be educational but should never be merely an intellectual exercise. The intricate and colorful torma offerings, the amulets, the robes, the vessels of copper, the stuffed wild animals, the images of bodhisattvas, all objects (except maybe the stamps and the antique armory), speak of the daily intermingling of life and belief. “Here all can see what kind of offerings we make, how the images are placed, what are the venerations,” the rinpoche said. “And all of this is real—no reproductions.”
The first time I came to Paro, late on a spring afternoon, fresh from the mania of Kathmandu, I stumbled into another kind of unexpected encounter with the continuity and authenticity of Bhutanese life. The occasion was an archery contest on a field near the sixteenth-century Druk Choeding temple. Archery, Bhutan’s national sport, is also a ritual with roots in a warrior past. The archers, whose powerful bows shoot arrows to targets nearly four hundred feet away with a speed that makes following the line of flight almost impossible, celebrate each score with a brief slow-motion dance accompanied by incantations and howls drawn up from a timeless past. The effect is electrifying and chilling in its other-worldliness. So much so that it took a few extra minutes to notice that some of the archers were using hi-tech American-made Hoyt bows. The bows, and argyle knee socks from New York or London to wear with a gentleman’s gho, are among the country’s most highly prized imports.
The trip from Paro to Thimphu, everyone’s jumping-off point and provisioning place for a road tour of Bhutan, takes less than two hours. But the short journey is a primer for what is to come. As the Paro Valley narrows, the eye catches small temples or monasteries identified by a wide red band painted high on the outer whitewashed walls. There are farmers at work in their fields near farmhouses not only decorated in the distinctive colors that enliven window frames but also adorned with folk paintings on the walls. Folk artists have a pretty standard repertory of themes: real and mythological animals, some of them characters in fables, and phalluses. It is not unusual to see a large erect penis or, better, two, one painted on each side of the door, gently adorned by the artists’ rendition of floating ribbons and sometimes flowers. Wooden phallus shapes accompanied by daggers dangle from the eaves of homes; an erect clay phallus may protrude over a doorway, draped in a silken thaka, a gauzy white scarf. These serve not as fertility symbols, as I was once told erroneously by a guide reluctant in his modernity to discuss superstitious throwbacks, but as guardians and protectors of the home.
Long before Chhuzom, the road begins to snake through a gorge, clinging to hillsides or teetering along the edges of cliffs. It will get much, much worse, but not until after Thimphu, when fear and nausea begin to compete ferociously for attention in the consciousness of many a tourist. It doesn’t help that most four-wheel-drive vehicles in Bhutan run on diesel fuel and reconditioned engines. Straining on steep gradients, the motor pours clouds of acrid black smoke through ventilator ducts into passengers’ faces and clothes. One begins to appreciate Aum Rinzi’s revulsion for the age of motor travel.
Racketing cars and trucks are quickly coming to symbolize what Bhutan gave up in tranquillity when highway construction began not so long ago. It may seem strange to us, but in many developing countries there is a real debate about the cultural destruction caused by roadbuilding, which often speeds up unwanted
urbanization as farm folk flock to town. On the other hand, there are advantages. People who would surely have died of disease or injury can be brought to hospitals if they are reasonably near a roadhead. Mobile medical teams bearing vaccines and antibiotics can reach isolated hamlets in a shorter time. Families living at subsistence level can improve their lives by raising crops to bring to market and sell for cash to buy small luxuries or different foods to diversify and improve their diets. In Bhutan, whole hillsides are being turned into orchards because harvests can be loaded on the bus or jeep for quick transport to Thimphu or Phuntsholing. A bumper fruit or vegetable harvest might mean new clothes for the children, a radio, or a gas-cylinder stove.
Few Bhutanese—not even Aum Rinzi, who is closer to her extended family by car than she has ever been—would want to roll back the highways. In fact, everyone wants a road. The king and the planning chief spend a lot of time explaining why every hamlet cannot have one in a country where the cost per mile to build roads is astronomical. Once, the king ran out of patience during an audience when the hundredth request for a road was made by a rural villager, someone traveling with him told me. “His Majesty just suddenly lost his shirt, and cried out, ‘Okay, break for lunch!” ’ he said. “He cooled off during the meal, but after eating, the people came right back and asked for the same thing.”
The unregulated explosion of private vehicles on Bhutan’s narrow, twisting roads is undeniably subtracting from the joy and adding to the hazards of travel in a country where the airstrip at Paro is one of only a few flat surfaces. Bhutanese guides are especially proud of a stretch of the east-west highway called the Yadi bends, a dizzying series of hairpin turns that zigzag down a mountainside of airy, long-needled conifers about twenty miles from Mongar on the road to Tashigang in eastern Bhutan. Because the filmy trees and unusual topography make it possible to see the whole collection of Yadi bends from the top of the slope, they are a major tourist attraction. Locals say they made the Guinness Book of Records. That begs the question of why all of Bhutan was not entered in the competition.
I hadn’t given the downside of roads much thought until I met Aum Rinzi at her farmstead near Mendegong, only a few hours’ drive from Thimphu at the top of a rocky dirt track not really meant for cars. Although her family had a home in Thimphu, she said she was happiest in the country, where her heart and head overflowed with memories. Her lively mind ranged over past and present, sifting and analyzing and balancing the limits of the feudal society into which she was born against the excesses of the life she saw evolving around her. She was not judgmental, but she was very wise. Her life was a reminder that in this extraordinary country there are people whose experiences span eras, not just generations.
Aum Rinzi had lived through epochal change. But she had always chosen to hold on to that which she saw no reason to discard in haste. She had enjoyed a privileged life, and owned the substantial house and farmland she shared with her late husband’s second wife. She slept on a simple pallet bed and worshipped at the small temple she had built adjoining her home; it was probably her largest extravagance, and she showed it off with great pride. As we stood there by her family altar, a bird flew in from the garden and began to flap around in panic, banging into walls and unfamiliar panes of glass. When I opened a narrow window on the temple’s outer porch and helped the bird escape, Aum Rinzi turned to me with a smile somewhere between amused and beatific and said, “You will gain merit for that.”
Aum Rinzi—aum means grandmother—speaks thoughtfully but not without passion at what has been lost as well as gained by three decades of rapid development. As a young woman not yet out of her teens, she became a companion and lady-in-waiting to a Bhutanese queen and later the wife of a government minister.
But privilege in Bhutan was a relative thing in the days of Aum Rinzi’s youth. That was a time of greater equality among Bhutanese, says King Jigme Singye Wangchuck. “I remember my father saying when I was a small boy that in the old days—although there was a lot of hardship and suffering that we faced due to the policy of complete isolation—one of the main reasons Bhutanese were united, were happy, were contented, although we were poor, was because all of us were equally poor,” he said. “I think that is very true.”
Aum Rinzi’s reminiscences of travel are full of happy times on the road, when no one was in a hurry, there were no noxious cars and buses, and everyone, farmer or lord, moved from home to home or temple to temple or palace to palace at a human pace, sharing the foot tracks and horse trails that wound through the mountains and valleys. “First of all, in those days it was inconceivable that people would go back and forth as much as they do now,” Aum Rinzi said, as her granddaughter, Doma Tshering, a foreign service officer educated at Macalester College, did the translating. “Just to travel around one’s home meant a journey on horseback. So for the most part, people tended to remain around the house, tending to the work. Of course, we didn’t have vehicles of any kind. We didn’t even think of that in those days. We had no reason to go out much. We used to have a lot of land, so we were pretty much self-sufficient. We didn’t have to buy any commodities. We didn’t even have to buy butter for the butter tea and lamps, because we kept cows. To a certain extent it is the same now for me in Mendegong. We grow all our own vegetables and rice. So in that way, life hasn’t changed so much for many of us.
“But nowadays, wherever you go, people are always in a rush,” she said. “They hop in their car, and off they go. They hop out, and it’s over. In the old days, you started off with people loading luggage on horses. Then the children were loaded. Finally we all rode off. As we went, we looked for a nice field whenever we wanted to stop. Wherever we chose, the servants would start a fire and we would break for tea. Then we would move along again, gradually. In the evenings, when we got to a nice rest spot, someone would put up tents for the night. The servants and the women would start singing songs and dancing, and we would all sit there and enjoy the evening.”
One serendipitous evening in Bumthang, I was invited to such an entertainment, and was able to glimpse the world Aum Rinzi described. The dzongda, Pem Dorji, had summoned all his district officials to a conference, and the day ended around a huge bonfire built against the chill of a dark mountain night. Huge vats of food were prepared: curried stews, dumplings, red rice, and salads. Beer flowed. All the while, young people danced story-dances, some mischievous or even a little wicked in theme. Not infrequently, the tale was of men being outwitted by women—or at least that’s what they told me. We all sat in a semicircle around the fire and watched. The atmosphere was warm and convivial, sometimes uproarious, but never too loud to disturb the little children dozing at the edges of the gathering. Aum Rinzi was right: there is nothing to equal this spontaneous celebration among generous people.
In 1934, when Aum Rinzi was barely twenty, she made the journey of a lifetime, to Calcutta, as part of the entourage of King Jigme Wangchuck and his queen, Ashi Phumtsho Choegron. King Jigme, the grandfather of the present ruler and the second hereditary monarch of Bhutan—he reigned from 1926 until 1952—had been invited as the official guest of the British colonial government in India. It is fascinating to hear Aum Rinzi talk about that trip, and then read a description of the same visit written by Margaret Williamson, the wife of Frederick Williamson, the British political agent for Bhutan and the official responsible for arranging the visit.
“This was the first trip I made anywhere,” Aum Rinzi said, preparing a betel chew from ingredients she kept in a plastic container. “We all went to see the foreigner, the Lord Sahib. From Bumthang, where we were staying, we went to the Indian border by horse. There someone had sent us automobiles to take us to a train for Calcutta. I was astounded. We were all afraid to step into the cars. We had about twelve people in His Majesty’s entourage, and there were five more with the Royal Grandmother, who also had her cook and servants.” Aum Rinzi calls the former queen “Royal Grandmother” because that is her present title in the Bhutanese c
ourt.
“I was very shocked when I first got to Calcutta,” Aum Rinzi went on, her eyes twinkling as she paused to spit betel juice into something she had stashed in the fold of her kira. “It was as if I were in a dream. I could never imagine that such things existed, that so many people could be there. Calcutta was very clean and orderly. Wherever we went there were all foreigners. Even the shopkeepers were British. We didn’t go out very much. It was all too overwhelming. We stayed twenty-five days in Calcutta, and then went to Nepal, where we were for a very long time.”
Mrs. Williamson, who recorded her memories of the same event in a 1987 book, Memoirs of a Political Officer’s Wife in Tibet, Sikkim and Bhutan, could not have known of the Bhutanese apprehensions when she and her husband, whom she called Derrick, set out to receive the royal visitors. With their extraordinary innate aplomb, the Bhutanese hid their fears.
“Derrick and I went down to Jalpaiguri, where the narrow gauge joins the main railway line, to meet the train bringing the royal party from Hashimara,” Mrs. Williamson wrote. “And what a spendid sight they were when they arrived! Their Highnesses wore colorful Bhutanese costume, as did the more than 200 retainers who accompanied them, each of whom was armed with a bow and arrow and had a shield slung over his shoulder.”
Mrs. Williamson recalls wondering whether the Bhutanese would be nonplussed by the “hooting, speeding traffic, by the milling crowds kept in constant motion by the remorseless drives that activate the modern commercial world, by the sheer profusion of buildings, among the great administrative, business, religious and public edifices.” To her delight, the royal visitors “took it all in their stride.” As for the armed retainers, they decided to set up an archery competition on the Maidan, Calcutta’s Central Park, and had to be dissuaded by their hosts, who feared certain disaster if Bhutanese arrows started flying from warriors’ bows. “Graciously, they took down their targets and withdrew,” Mrs. Williamson wrote.
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