The Himalayan Arc

by Namita Gokhale

  With creeping modernization, a growing cash economy, increased mobility, environmental dislocation and hazards and demographic changes, the religious life of the Himalayan population is bound to change drastically within a lifetime. With that will also change the role and function of sadhus and mystics.

  Hira Lai Tamang’s brother, the shaman, is being asked by UNICEF to help popularize the use of oral rehydration salts by village mothers. When the Rato Macchindranath chariot gets bogged down in monsoon mud, it is a motorized crane that comes to the rescue rather than the willing hands of hundreds of devotees. Shanta Maya Maharjan might soon start taking asthma medication rather than trying to appease the serpent god. And now that the monks at Tengboche are reading by hydropower, will the electric light of modernity replace the inner light promised by the practice of religion?

  MEALS IN THE MOUNTAINS

  Pushpesh Pant

  My earliest memories of meals in the mountains date back to the 1950s and Mukteshwar, where I was born and grew up. It was a small town perched on a ridge at an altitude of 7,500 feet, offering a breathtaking view of the snow-capped peaks of the Himalayas but little else in terms of connectivity. It was surrounded by a mixed forest of oak and rhododendron, along with isolated strands of deodar. Nestling under the shadow of an old Shiva temple were sparsely populated hamlets whose residents toiled year-long on handkerchief-sized terraced fields. Like most villages in the Himalayan region, everyone – rich or poor – consumed what was locally produced. The winters were harsh and the supply of vegetables from the plains all but dried up from November to March, but my mother tried her best to keep us well-nourished with a menu composed of dried and stored vegetables.

  Over the years I have had opportunities to savour different types of Himalayan cuisine, starting from the Pahadi Brahmin fare of my childhood to Newari delicacies, Himachali dishes and Buddhist food. I have found several similarities between these cuisines of the Himalayan region. For example, singal (sweet semolina spirals) used to be a staple during festivals in the Kumaon region. Resembling jumbo jalebis – the spirals were crisp on the outside and fluffy within – these were mildly sweet and redolent of saunf (fennel). Years later, I encountered this long-lost friend in Nepal where it goes by the name of sel roti. In Kumaon, it is made with semolina batter while in Nepal rice flour is used.

  The mountainous regions of eastern Nepal have many things in common with the hill people in the north-eastern states of India. The Magars traditionally consume pork but eschew buffalo while the Gurungs consider pork a taboo but have no inhibition about buffalo meat. The Tamangs, Rais and Limbus have a preference for kinema (fermented soybean), bamboo shoots, buckwheat and thongba (millet beer). Raksi is stronger and many in the cities as well as in villages down their food with this local beer.

  It was Sita Sreshta, a Newar from Kathmandu, who introduced me to the exotic delicacies that are part of the culinary legacy of this artistic community. The ingredients used may be the same as in other mountainous regions but the final product is transformed almost beyond recognition. Unlike women in the Indian villages, those dwelling in the Kathmandu Valley have more time (comparatively!) to experiment in the kitchen. Newar traders enjoy a level of affluence greater than the workers and peasants and can afford to spend more on food. Celebratory festive delicacies are more elaborate. Achaar (pickle) – both vegetable- and meat-based – is widely used as an accompaniment. During a visit to Nepal, I came across kwathi, a soup prepared in the Newari kitchens, a close cousin of the rasa/tathwani in Uttarakhand but made with different beans and lentils. Wo is a variation of the barha. Syen is the familiar fried kaleji (liver). Mye is boiled and fried tongue and I have never understood why it has not become better known.

  Another cuisine I enjoy is that of the Buddhists. Buddhist food, like the religion, has travelled far and wide, from India to Myanmar, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, Tibet, China, Japan and Korea. The essence of the Buddha’s teachings is encapsulated in majjhima patipada – the middle path. If desire, the root cause of all distress and misery, is to be conquered, we must lead perfectly balanced lives, avoiding all excess and ensuring that nothing disturbs the tranquillity of the mind. The body must be properly nourished and kept free from painful diseases that can only distract the mind from sadhana (practice). For the Buddhists, food is an integral part of their sadhana. Like right thought and right livelihood, right food can complement and facilitate right contemplation. When we eat it should be with deep-felt gratitude and reverence for what we are imbibing.

  Tibetans believe that it is essential to make a lifelong commitment to a healthy dietary regime. All physical disorders result from impaired digestion and faulty distribution of nutrients to different vital organs. The Tibetan medicine system maintains that most diseases can be cured by eating right.

  The Buddhist culinary philosophy is rooted in the teachings of Ayurveda – the ancient Indian science of life. As in Ayurveda, Buddhism distinguishes between foods of light (satvik) and foods of darkness (tamasik). Light foods are essential, pure and easy to digest. Dark foods put a strain on the system and are toxic and intoxicating.

  It is not just Ayurveda, though, that has provided the base for Buddhist thinking on food; indigenous traditions and dietary practices from the different lands it travelled to have mediated and spurred on its evolution. The inheritance of Buddhist food is truly pan-Asian and pan-Himalayan.

  The wonderful range that Buddhist repast offers is, to say the least, exhilarating. The Buddha never asked his followers to renounce what was natural and did not interfere with the practice of the middle path. A slight adjustment to one’s lifestyle was often enough to ‘centre’ oneself and regain the lost balance. It is amazing what joy can be experienced while ‘restricting’ one’s diet to Buddhist menus – even a purely vegetarian one. The colours and textures are seldom interfered with and the cooking styles can vary. The subtle aromatics of Indian cuisine, the chromatic creativity of the Thai and the rustic ruggedness of the basic Tibetan diet offer a dazzling range to choose from. From piping hot nourishing soups and crunchy cool exotic salads to lamay, tempura, momos, pickles and relishes to accompany rice or noodles, myriad curries and desserts, the Buddhist culinary repertoire is rich and resplendent. Modern research has validated many of the traditional beliefs about Buddhist food. In Tibetan cuisine the traditional repast comprises a bowl of roasted barley and butter tea.

  An edition of Mountain Echoes, an annual literature festival, took me to Bhutan and provided me a rare opportunity to savour hill food very different from ours. Ema datshi chillies ‘n’ cheese is the national dish, but there is much else to tempt you if you aren’t addicted to the breakfast buffet in the hotel. Buckwheat noodles and pancakes paired with local wild greens and sundried meat are foods that haven’t changed for generations. There were friends who discovered what they described as excellent ‘thin-crust pizza joints’ and ‘yak meat hamburger outlets’ too.

  Regrettably, aspirational foods – fast and fashionable, mostly junk – have made steady inroads into the Himalayas. From Ladakh to Bhutan through Himachal and Uttarakhand, not to forget Nepal, meals in the mountains have lost their flavour. Even if the dishes bear old names – momo or thukpa, sekua or bhuta – the ingredients and recipes have ‘evolved’ to suit ‘contemporary’ tastes and health concerns. There are a few septuagenarians around who can recollect foraged foods like shishuna (stinging Himalayan nettles), linguda (curved ferns), jarg (wild spinach) and taruda (a variety of yam growing between two hard rocks) or chewn (edible wild mushrooms) that until two generations ago came to the rescue of the abjectly poor. People have switched from coarse cereals like madua to wheat, and refined oil and vanaspati have annihilated gai ghew (ghee made with cow’s milk).

  Nature has been ruthlessly ravaged and biodiversity destroyed while chasing the mirage of development. Communities in villages even at high altitudes are no longer bound together by shared values, dreams and struggles. It’s not surprising that festive f
easts and ritual foods have died unlamented deaths. Patrician deluxe hotels and a few plebian eateries continue to serve ‘ethnic’ thalis or some little-known ‘lost’ dishes but the magic is missing. This is not the stuff that memories are made of.

  A YOUNG MONARCH’S DREAM for his country’s national happiness

  John Elliott

  As I walked into the darkened room of the imposing Tashichho Dzong in the Bhutanese capital of Thimphu, I couldn’t immediately see the person I had come to meet. After a few moments I spotted him, standing quietly in the shadows by a tall window, dressed in the traditional purple, gold and green coat with a yellow scarf. ‘Ah, there you are!’ I exclaimed, thinking later that this was not how one should greet royalty – in Delhi when I’d met Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, we’d been instructed to bow (or curtsey), not to shake hands and never repeat what she says. No one had briefed me on how to approach Bhutan’s young King Jigme Singye Wangchuck, but he didn’t seem to mind when we sat down and he asked about my visit.

  As we started talking, I quickly realized how concerned and anxious this shy but dignified thirty-two-year-old king was about ways to develop this remote and diplomatically sensitive Himalayan kingdom sandwiched between India and China. How to open it up, but not so fast that it would disrupt such a sheltered and secluded people, and how to maintain Bhutan’s traditions and peaceful Buddhist culture, were the main questions.

  It was 1987 and, in an almost paternalistic way, he was agonizingly aware of the enormous challenges of his inheritance – and that his decisions could make or break his tiny nation and its people. He felt that Bhutan needed protection from possibly uncontrollable and avaricious outside influences at a time of great international economic change, and he was acutely aware that some other countries had got it wrong and had found their culture swamped – notably Nepal, though he did not mention the country by name.

  He was particularly concerned about his people’s happiness. ‘We are convinced that we must aim for contentment and happiness,’ His Majesty told me at the start of the interview. ‘Whether we take five or ten years to raise [the] per capita income and increase prosperity is not going to guarantee that happiness – a lot of things go into it, including political stability and social harmony, and the Bhutanese way of life, as well as economic development.’

  He referred to gross national happiness (GNH), a concept now known internationally but then just an idea in his mind. I learned much later that this was the first time he had talked at length about this with any reporter and, when I returned to Bhutan in 2011, I realized that my subsequent report in the Financial Times on 2 May 1987 was regarded in the country as a significant piece of historical record.

  I was FT’s South Asia correspondent based in New Delhi at the time. To the best of my knowledge, no FT reporter had previously written much about Bhutan, and certainly none had interviewed the king, nor indeed had more than one or two journalists from other foreign newspapers. It was difficult even to visit the country, certainly as a journalist, though tourism was opening up to organized groups.

  I managed to obtain an invitation when I followed the advice of another foreign correspondent who had been helping Bhutan set up its first newspaper, the Kuensel. ‘Just meet Lynopo Dawa Tsering, the veteran foreign minister, at an international conference, and say you want to write about development, and you should be okay,’ he had told me. I followed the advice in November 1986 at a meeting of the then new SAARC (South Asian Association for Regional Cooperation) regional grouping in Bangalore, and obtained my invitation. Five months later, I flew from Calcutta with my family in one of the small and hot Dornier aircraft then operated by Bhutan’s Drukair. It was a dramatic flight through the mountains to the tiny international airport at Paro, and on by car through winding green valleys to Thimphu, the capital.

  There we stayed in the modest Bhutan Hotel (now the Ministry of Information). After a couple of days meeting various top ministers and officials, it was time for my interview with the king in the Tashichho Dzong, as the government offices are known. Built in the traditional Bhutanese style, they have massive fortress-like white walls reaching up to lines of carved wooden windows and an overhanging roof.

  My interview was all on the record and there were no prior rules, though part of the deal was that I would not question the king on his personal life. Known as the country’s Fourth King, shortened colloquially to K4, he had come to the throne in 1972 with absolute powers over the nation. Some twenty years later, he would pave the way for parliamentary elections and abdicate in favour of his son, King Jigme Khesar Namgyel Wangchuck, but in 1987 the future of Bhutan lay in his hands.

  ‘We have seen many countries which have done economically very well, but none which has a modern society and [has] kept a strong tradition and culture. We have seen examples of cultures being eroded with extreme modernization,’ he told me.

  ‘We want to continue both as a modern trading nation with the best modern technology, but we would like to blend that with our system and culture. I think we can do it. We have to do it if we are to have GNH and a quality of life that is good for Bhutanese people. We can do it because we have a small population, endowed with great mineral and other national resources, and we have water resources – the cleanest rivers in the world.’

  The first time the king had referred to GNH in the presence of foreign journalists was in Bombay in 1979, though he is reported to have talked about it in Bhutan in 1972. In 1979, he was on his way back from a Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) conference in Havana, Cuba, when an Indian journalist asked him at Bombay airport about Bhutan being a poor country. Bhutan had just voted differently from India at the conference over the admission of Cambodia’s Khmer Rouge, so maybe that provoked the somewhat abrasive question. The king replied that instead of just focusing on GNP (gross national product), it might be more useful to measure GNH.

  The next recorded time he spoke about it, equally briefly, was to a New York Times correspondent, Michael Kaufman, whose main report appeared on 29 April 1980. ‘There is a gross national product but there is also gross national happiness,’ said the king. He wanted to improve the standard of living while not endangering other standards of contentment.

  Mine was a long interview, lasting far more than an hour. Twice in my notebook, which I still have, I made margin notes saying that it seemed time to bow out politely and let the king get on with other things. Both times, however, he continued talking around the basic theme, adding to my impression that he was exploring a way forward as he spoke.

  ‘The priority is not so much development as creating [a] very efficient, very strong, very clean dynamic government – that is the most important factor now,’ he said. ‘For the past twenty-five years we gave priority to development work – now we have to be very cautious because if we chart our course carefully, we can get economic prosperity and political stability and social harmony.’

  Bhutan needed a smaller government – there were 13,889 civil servants and he was thinking of reducing the number by a minimum of 2,000 that year and more later. Retrench people who are not productive, he said, but with bonuses for relocation. That was ‘a very painful job and also sensitive’.

  He was ‘clamping down very hard on corruption’ and wanted to make the Civil Service Commission ‘very strong, moral and ethical’. Corruption had started when development began in 1961. ‘The level compared with developing countries elsewhere is not serious, but is serious for our standards. It was rare before development, but now it is right from the government to the (local) government level. It has to be curbed immediately.’

  The biggest problem had been lack of both education and skill training, so the gap between the pace of development work and available manpower had been widening. ‘Biting off more than one can chew,’ commented the king. ‘We were compromising on quality.’

  In formulating the country’s sixth (the latest) economic plan ‘we stress culture more – it was always there, but in the last twenty-si
x years of development work, we never took any serious step on it because we felt no need to take any initiative’. Development over those years had affected the Bhutanese way of life. ‘We took it for granted that no special attention was needed.’

  A new problem in the last fourteen years had been that ‘our own people started stealing gold tankas and ransacking and selling in Darjeeling and Nepal’. That was ‘unthinkable ten to fourteen years ago’ because it was sacrilegious. Numerous monasteries had been ransacked and antiques stolen from village homes. Villagers had also started selling their valuables and handicrafts to such an extent that some of the best religious items had been lost. The king also talked about tourism and how people were complaining about tourists climbing sacred mountains, and that some monasteries were being closed.

  On foreign investment he said: ‘If we unilaterally opened up, a lot of (money from) tax shelters would be misused and [we] would not use our national resources.’ So Bhutan was deciding on each case individually. That was, he said, ‘nothing to do with keeping foreign influence out, but making sure it will be used well and be repaid.’

  ‘Generally, it is not so much outside influence we worry about, but every Bhutanese individual has to be very productive, confident, patriotic and nationalistic. We have opened up in a big way for twenty-six years. We don’t want a policy of isolation… For the future, our prosperity and well-being will be to produce goods and trade. So we can’t afford isolation, and we need to trade in South Asia and beyond.’

  This was before the king began to change the political system, introducing a form of parliamentary democracy and reducing the power of the monarchy, but he envisaged change. In the 1950s, people had not wanted a national assembly – till then, people had just said ‘Yes’ to what government officials said. The king’s ‘role has been changing in the last twenty years,’ he stated. ‘We are looking for the right system – we have no hang-ups or restrictions. We have, today, in the palms of our hands, the chance to mould any system which will help us face challenges. We are searching for the best sort of system – the main thing is that the system must work.’