“There are plenty of jobs, but the graduates don’t want to take them because they think the job is low for them,” a teenage boy told me. “They want to achieve greatness at a single step. They want to go to office carrying briefcases and laptops. They see people carrying iPhones and they want to carry them, too.”
In 2000 there was one newspaper in Bhutan—the government-run Kuensel. Today there are 11, though nearly all are struggling to survive on low ad revenue. More than 84,000 Bhutanese are on Facebook and 5,000 on Twitter. Lively blogs command thousands of followers. And GNH is jokingly said to stand for Gross National Haranguing or Gross National Harassment.
Democracy has helped the Bhutanese find their voices. As a result, some have conceived an admiration—perhaps reverse idealism—for the United States, which they perceive as culturally more upfront and politically more transparent. This is especially true of those who have lived in the States. “What I liked about people there is they don’t have a double standard,” said Chimi Wangmo, the feminist who directs the anti–domestic violence group RENEW, which stands for Respect, Educate, Nurture, and Empower Women.
As Wangmo knows well, domestic violence has been shrouded in silence. Bhutan’s 2010 Multiple Indicator Survey found that 68.4 percent of women ages 15 to 49 “believed that a man was justified in hitting or beating his wife if the woman was not respecting the ‘family norms’ such as going out without telling a husband, neglecting a child, burning the food or refusing to have sex with him.” When she began lobbying lawmakers for a bill banning domestic violence, Wangmo was met with incredulity. Opponents insisted that there couldn’t be domestic violence in Bhutan, because “Bhutan is a GNH nation.” She countered their tautologies with facts, inviting legislators to RENEW’s headquarters to view photographs and videos of battered women. (In February 2013, the National Council passed the Domestic Violence Prevention Bill.)
“Bhutan must come out of self-denial: It is not a Shangri-la,” said Wangmo. “No matter how much we flaunt GNH, no matter how much we picture ourselves as a happiness country, the hard reality remains that we are among the most backward, poorest countries in the world. GNH is a beautiful concept. But we could do better than this—not just talking about GNH, but living it. It’s basically fundamental human rights, which the Western countries have done much, much better than us.”
With Gross National Happiness, Bhutan has turned the metrics of the material into the metrics of the spirit. At the moment, however, the country is poised between centuries-long traditions and an understandable rush toward the security and comforts that the affluent West takes for granted. Will these ambitions subvert the poetic possibilities of GNH?
While preparing for my trip, I had read a number of blogs from Bhutan. One in particular struck me as smart and eloquent, authored by someone who deeply understood this cultural turning point. Land of the Thunder Dragon is written by Yeshey Dorji, a government bureaucrat turned entrepreneur turned nature photographer.
I met Dorji on the street in front of my hotel in Thimphu. Tall and bespectacled, dressed in jeans and a black quilted Patagonia jacket, he was gracious, impatient, cantankerous, and funny as hell. Everyone seemed to know and respect him. Wherever we went in Thimphu, people greeted him with a smile or came up to talk politics or gossip, and I thought of him as the unofficial mayor.
Dorji is highly attuned to the poignancy of impending loss. “We have jumped from one very strange period to another very strange period,” he explained. “Today, people have all the time in the world to talk to you. It’s not productive, but it’s the human side of life. Soon, development will change all that. Bhutanese people will be abrupt, fast-moving. They will no longer be Bhutanese.”
Yet he also believes that Bhutan could learn from the American example. “Times have changed. We have to change ourselves. But we aren’t willing to do that. I am convinced the Bhutanese mentality needs a makeover—total. We keep complaining about how fast your life is in New York. But without the development of that culture, you wouldn’t be where you are.” What he admires about American culture is its energy, innovation, drive, curiosity, cosmopolitanism, ambition—qualities, in fact, that are conspicuous in Dorji himself and have enabled him to be a shrewd observer/participant in his homeland.
Like many people I met here, Dorji feels caught between two ideals: the past perfect and the future perfect—that is, the Bhutan that was serenely remote and the Bhutan that somehow will negotiate modernity. “Development changes the way people move, talk, think, the way they look at value. If you keep the same old habits, then you can’t change the Bhutanese,” he said. “But the moment you change the Bhutanese, you’ve probably lost GNH.”
DAVID FARLEY
Ashes to Ashes
FROM AFAR
“YOU PEOPLE COME to Varanasi from the West because you’re so unprepared for death,” said the 85-year-old who opened the door. His voice was bullish and loud. “But what you’re all missing is this: You need to be a see-er.” Now he was screaming. “A see-er! You understand me?”
I wasn’t sure I did. I had come to Varanasi, a city of some 1.5 million people in northeastern India, on a mission: to engage with death (a strange quest I’ll explain shortly). So there I was at a place called Moksha Bhavan, a gated housing compound about a 10-minute auto-rickshaw ride from the Ganges River that could best be compared to a convalescent hospital. Except no one there was necessarily sick or needing care. The place was more like a waiting room for death, for the people who come to Varanasi to die. According to Hindu belief, succumbing in this holy city gives people more good karma to achieve moksha, or liberation.
Seatia Nararyna, as the man who screamed at me was called, had been there for 22 years. “Your eyes are covered, and the only way to uncover them is to really know yourself. Meditate. Think about yourself. And do this until you find ananda,” he said. When I asked what ananda was, he leaned forward and looked deep into my eyes. I felt myself starting to shake.
“Bliss!” he screamed. “You need to do this until you have found bliss! Now go back to the ghats, think about yourself and death, and dedicate your life to ananda.” With that, he slammed the door in my face. So I went back to the ghats, the multipurpose stone riverbank steps that give access to the Ganges at various points.
Varanasi, it turns out, is a great place to die. People—alive and dead—have been gravitating to the city for millennia. The living come as pilgrims and tourists, visiting the plethora of temples that hug the riverbank; the dead arrive to have their bodies burned to ashes on a pile of banyan or sandalwood at one of two cremation grounds—Manikarnika ghat and Harishchandra ghat—and then scattered in the Ganges. To be cremated in Varanasi is to achieve moksha—a reprieve from the cycle of life and death: You don’t have to endure rebirth in the world, you don’t collect 200 rupees, you go directly to nirvana.
Which, given that I’m still alive, wasn’t exactly why I was there.
When a good friend was killed in a car accident in high school, I felt profoundly unprepared. For the first time in my life, I found myself asking why such things happen. I didn’t have any answers. What really disturbed me was the way many friends of the family reacted—by quickly and quietly drifting away. I decided that no matter how difficult it might be, I wouldn’t turn away from the face of grief and death.
A few years later, I volunteered at a hospice in Los Angeles. As a “friendly visitor,” I’d turn up at the homes of the dying and chat about whatever they wanted to discuss. Often they would tell me how much they appreciated my presence, and that many of their friends, out of discomfort with pain and death, had already disappeared from their lives. Making these visits for about six months was a deep plunge into the way Western culture deals—or doesn’t deal—with death.
The first person I visited after going through the three-week training program, a 67-year-old accountant, took his last breath as I sat beside him holding his hand. Being around the dying, and talking to them, helped demystify d
eath for me. At least enough so that the questions of existence and mortality didn’t haunt me as they had before.
That is, until about a couple years ago. I was going through the toughest time of my life. The end of a marriage, an unexpected rift with my parents, and the loss of a few friendships left me feeling like I was stuck in a deep pit, one that I could not, for the life of me, claw my way out of. At one particularly low point, during the holidays (isn’t it always during the holidays?), I felt defeated. I was ready to give up.
To paraphrase a passage from David Foster Wallace’s Infinite Jest, I was standing on the ledge of a burning building, and jumping seemed a lot more attractive than facing the fire. Fortunately, at the last moment, and for reasons I’m still not sure of, I stepped away from that metaphorical ledge. In the days that followed, Varanasi kept popping up: there it was in a magazine; there it was on TV; there it was on someone’s Facebook profile. The city, I realized, was a place defined by life and death, where loss is viewed in a completely different way. If I was going to walk through the fire, I needed to go to Varanasi, where darkness is nothing to fear. And I’d be showing up with a lot of darkness.
“Welcome to the center of the universe, my friend. You’re standing at the beginning and end of all life, the epicenter of creation, the spot of ultimate transformation, the passageway through which souls achieve moksha.” The man delivering this spiel, his face barely peeking out of a brown scarf that was wrapped over his head, had accosted me the second my foot landed on this supposedly most holy ground, Manikarnika ghat. And he wasn’t just making this up as he went along. On my flight from New York, as I was reading a scholarly book on Varanasi, one line particularly struck me: “Just as India is the navel of the world, and Varanasi is the navel of India, so Manikarnika ghat is the navel of Varanasi.” I was standing in what was, for the 1 billion Hindus on the planet, the core of all creation.
The guy who had become my impromptu tour guide was one of the doms, the people who work at the cremation grounds. They’re among the untouchable caste, the lowest of the low, and are more or less condemned, as were their ancestors, to exercise this profession all their lives.
“Look around,” he added, fanning his arm at what could have been a postapocalyptic landscape, a panorama dotted with bonfires, stacks of wood the size of a small house, the odd leaning temple spire in the distance, and a riverside sprinkled with bathers ritually immersing themselves in polluted Ganges River water. Impossible to ignore were the groups of a half-dozen men jogging lightly and carrying shroud-wrapped dead bodies on bamboo litters above their heads. They chanted, “Rama nama satya hai!” (Only the name of God is truth) and were headed right toward where we were standing, the main cremation ground in Varanasi.
“This spot, this ghat,” said the dom, “was not made by human hands. It was made by Lord Shiva 3,500 years ago.”
I followed him as he scurried up the ghat’s muddy, irregular steps, past sleeping canines and garbage-grazing bovines that seemed unfazed by all the activity. Inside a portico overlooking the ghat, a flame, no bigger than what you’d see in an average fireplace, flickered. “This is the sacred fire,” he said, adding that it has been burning constantly for 3,500 years and had been lit, naturally, by Lord Shiva. “This is the flame with which all bodies are ignited,” he said. “This is the flame that sends people to moksha.”
Traditionally, that flame is controlled by the Dom Raja, the lord of the dead. He rules over the doms and is one of the richest people in town (despite his low caste). If you want to use the flame to cremate a loved one, you have to negotiate with him. As with royalty, the position is hereditary. When the Dom Raja dies, his title is handed down to the eldest son. But when the Dom Raja Kailash Choudhary passed away in 1985, something interesting happened: there was a power struggle in the family, and eventually his five sons decided to split the Dom Raja duties.
There’s more to Varanasi than just death. Though nothing as compelling. Also called Benares, Kashi, City of Light, and Forest of Bliss, this city on the Ganges is not, despite the implied tranquillity of some of its nicknames, a peaceful haven. It’s a cacophony of auto-rickshaw horns and buzzing motorbikes, a maelstrom of swirls of dust and more dust. The smell of exhaust fumes, chai, and curry, plus the occasional waft of incense, intermingle to create the olfactory imprint of this ancient city, said to be one of the oldest continually inhabited spots on the planet. Just up from the riverbank is a warren of narrow, twisting, dank, excrement-dolloped lanes where every second storefront seems to be a yoga or meditation school. To the first-time visitor, the walkways go on forever.
This is not the India of techie call-center employees and upwardly mobile professionals. Varanasi exists far removed from that India. One finds few trappings of globalization and almost no cosmopolitan culture here. There are no kitschy souvenir shops in Varanasi. No racks of postcards. No stands selling My Uncle Went to Varanasi for Enlightenment and All I Got Was This Lousy Good Karma T-Shirt T-shirts. Mumbai might have its Bollywood stars and Delhi its politicians, but Varanasi has its crumbling riverside palaces and temples, the dead, and the Dom Raja.
Still, besides gawking at the cremation grounds, one of the main things visitors to Varanasi do is stroll the 3-mile waterfront, which is lined with 84 ghats. Here, between the river and the mishmash of dilapidated palaces, one will be accosted every seven seconds by teenagers selling hash or wanting to take you out in a rowboat—“Boat? Boat, sir?”—and men befriending you so you’ll pay a visit to their silk shops. Near the river, holy men meditate and children play cricket with tattered, taped-up balls. In the river, locals bathe and women wash bedsheets.
Each ghat has its own distinct personality and function. Gaya ghat, for example, near the northern end, is a place where pilgrims board boats to sail down the river, making stops at ghats that contain important temples. Dashashvamedha ghat, the “main ghat,” is the busiest, with holy men, or sadhus, planted under mushroomlike wooden umbrellas, some beckoning tourists over to receive a bit of wisdom, maybe in exchange for a few rupees. At the opposite end from Gaya ghat is Assi ghat, which has become a backpackers’ ghetto, chock-a-block with Western-friendly vegetarian restaurants and cheap hotels. In stark contrast, the other side of the wide river is a gloomy nothingness of brown dirt and haze.
Around the cremation ghats, Manikarnika and Harishchandra, the activity is relentless. For the denizens of Varanasi, it’s all very commonplace. But as a newcomer I was paralyzed with morbid curiosity, my attention inexorably drawn to the transformation of bodies from flesh to ash in a theater of death played out 24/7 for all to watch. More than 30,000 bodies are burned annually here. Harishchandra ghat even has an audience platform, allowing onlookers, along with family members, to get a better view of the flaming spectacle. It may seem like a serious taboo for Westerners with eyes blanketed from death, but this sort of experience is exactly why we travel—to witness the “unreal,” to take in the extraordinary ordinariness of a way of life we could never have imagined.
The day after my haphazard introduction to Manikarnika ghat, I returned for a deeper exposure to its rituals and protocols. Flames from the pyres punctuated the smoky landscape. The doms quietly went about their business, poking at the fires with bamboo sticks. Human ashes rained down on my head and shoulders as I watched a body being laid upon a stack of wood. The corpse was wrapped in a gold shroud, which I was later told indicated that the deceased was an elderly man who had died a good death. Red flecked with yellow is for high-caste women who die before their husbands, and white is for most men. Five men from the deceased’s family stood around the pyre. (Women aren’t typically allowed here, for fear widows will throw themselves on the blaze.) One man, the chief mourner (according to tradition, the dead man’s eldest son), held a thick sheaf of straw on which he balanced an ember from the sacred fire. The men circled the pyre five times, one circumnavigation for each element: fire, water, earth, air, and ether. They walked counterclockwise, because, as one dom said,
“in death everything is reversed.” The chief mourner placed the hay and the smoldering ember upon shavings of sandalwood that had been sprinkled atop the body. Thus ignited, the body began to burn. The rituals, while no doubt profoundly spiritual, were performed in such a routine manner that it put me at ease.
Around the cremation grounds, I talked to several doms about their jobs. They seemed largely unaffected by living and working in the constant presence of death. “It’s just a job,” said Gautam Choudhary, 22, when I asked about his work. Loulou Choudhary (all doms share the same last name, even if they’re not related), 31, who has been doing the job since he was 16, wandered over a few minutes later and echoed Gautam’s sentiments. “It’s not a matter of like or dislike,” he said of his job. “This is what I do. This is what my ancestors have done”—he’s a seventh-generation dom—“and it’s what my children will do. After all,” he added, “we’re untouchables.”
A body can take anywhere from 2 to 12 hours to burn. “It depends on one’s karma,” another dom told me. “The better the karma earned in life, the faster you burn.” He then told me about the five types of people who can’t be cremated: pregnant women, children, sadhus, lepers, and people who died from a cobra bite. These people get a rock tied to their bodies and are dropped into the Ganges.
About an hour after the elderly man’s corpse had been lit, the chief mourner approached the pyre, carrying a bamboo pole. He raised the 4-foot stick over his head and then thwacked the corpse’s skull. It split open. This, Loulou Choudhary told me, is the moment when the soul is officially freed from the body and travels to the afterlife. Calmly, the mourner walked away. He showed little emotion.
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