Postcard from Bhutan

Bhutan is one of the more difficult places to reach; like North Korea, either you go on a highly structured package tour or you are a guest of the government. If you manage to surmount these hurdles, you are pretty free to do what you want, although certain areas of the country require special permission. But the country does have a strong sense of being cut off, ‘out of time’, a peaceful islet in a world of chaos. Yet in some ways it isn’t. Last December, the king led his troops in the field against insurgents along the southern border; not against his government, but rebels against the Indian and Bangla Deshi governments hiding in the difficult terrain. This was deemed to be a major victory and the Bhutanese are very proud of it, but it has led to a greater sense of insecurity. The Chinese, of course, are making noises about how parts of Bhutan are really parts of Tibet, which of course they have an inalienable right to govern. India exercises control over Bhutan’s foreign affairs and indeed the country is very much within the Indian cultural sphere. Tiny shops, ‘general shop cum bar’, burst with all the sprawling light industry of the subcontinent, girls in leather trousers seductively urge Pepsi on passing herders.

This is curious, for the Bhutanese are rather formal; they like order, people to be properly dressed, pieces of paper to be signed and stamped, introductions to be made. Coming from rambunctious, noisy Thailand, this can either strike you as cold or calm. Personally, it appeals to my Germanic side; often I like things to work, trains to run on time, telephones to ring. I can imagine, though, after a while here, you might be afflicted with a desire for a bit more chaos and exuberance, a tinge of Italy. But actually, the strongest sense you get is of a former British colony, although it wasn’t. The Anglo-Bhutanese society meets at No. 1, Whitehall, which probably tells you something. English is widespread and prestigious, and many small things, such as the red pillar boxes, give you an endearing sense of post-colonialism. The Bhutanese love pets, especially cats, and they wander round the houses, sitting between family members around the stove, and the English find this very endearing. Some of this may be fossilised borrowings from India; India is the source of much new Anglicisation. Nonetheless, in the countryside there are many elements of English fantasy, wooden houses and log fires, an intense blue sky, the ever-spreading pine forests, clear lakes and rivers, horses, dogs and nearly tame birds.

Indeed, something no television documentary or glossy picture-book can quite prepare you for is the landscape. Along every road there are sweeping vistas, conifers to the edge of the mountains always on the horizon, gleaming with snow. When not preparing to snow, the sunshine is brilliant, and a startling feature of driving the high roads are the sharp transitions between dry Mediterranean scrub and Nordic scenes of fir-trees and snow, complete with icicles and frozen streams. Bhutanese houses, probably not accidentally, resemble Swiss alpine houses, often three stories and framed in elaborately carved and painted wood. Streams are crossed by quavering suspension bridges straight from an Indiana Jones movie. Every administrative centre is dominated by a dzong, a huge Tibetan fortress, usually built on a hill-top, where the chief abbot and the secular governor conspire to administer the province. The dzongs were once oppressive places, extracting taxes in butter and cheese and keeping the villages in poverty; Kafka’s ‘Castle’ comes to mind. Smaller settlements have a temple, often ringed with squawking crows and scrappy dogs waiting for the food from ceremonies to be placed outside. Inside, two lines of monks ring bells and rattle skull-drums as they chant the sutras.

Something else hard to capture is the intermingling of past and present. No building looks very old, since everything is constantly refurbished and the style has remained the same over centuries. The place where I am based, Jakar, in the centre of the country, was founded in the seventh century by a lama from India, invited by a local chief, ill because he was unable to combat prevalent local demons. The lama was able to subdue the demons, and founded a monastery considered to be one of the oldest and most sacred in Bhutan, and where the royal family are now buried. Obviously the lama was not entirely successful, because, as the person who was telling me this concluded, ‘there are still many demons around here’. Many temples are closed to outsiders, but by a chance I was allowed to see the inner room, the goemkham, of a very ancient temple, east of Bumthang. On the walls were very archaic-looking paintings of the Buddhist hell, skeletons menacing the living, and shields from a battle fought in the 1300s hanging above two elephant tusks. The main altar of the temple is flanked by polychrome wooden statues of famous lamas, said to have been carved a thousand years ago. In Europe, only Norway has anything like this, raw wooden doors from churches in the Viking era.

Although telecommunications are surprisingly good, given the difficult topography, most households still practise subsistence farming, growing potatoes and buckwheat, milking the cows and threshing the grain with oxen. Many scenes seem to be straight out of the Luttrell Psalter, especially the spinning and weaving of cloth, if a Buddhist version of fourteenth century England with yaks can be imagined. It is quite possible to see someone break off bullock-ploughing to answer the phone.

The education system here has left its students with astoundingly good English, but the national objective is to convert to Dzongkha, the national language, related to Tibetan, and with an appropriately elaborate script. Essentially religious in origin, many people find it difficult to write and it certainly requires considerable adaptation to the world of Google. A while ago, Microsoft announced they would be developing a Windows Dzongkha interface, although I have seen no evidence of this. Nonetheless, every dzong has a unit dedicated to the translation of official documents.

There are some Nepali Hindus in the south, but the core Bhutanese are entirely Buddhist, something often difficult to engage with in a world of pick ’n mix religion. Monasteries and temples are scattered through the landscape and every significant road junction is marked by a chorten or stupa, usually surrounded by hundreds of multi-coloured prayer flags flapping on tall poles. Every house of any size has an altar room, where prayers are offered and where monks come to perform ceremonies to mark life cycle events or deal with crises. This pervasiveness also helped me understand the nature of conversion; if you work with people all day long for whom a religion is at the centre of their lives, you start thinking of your unbelief as out of place, wondering if there ought be a prayer-flag outside Guest Road, or a water-driven prayer wheel in the garden. This is not the urge to somehow convert spiritually, but rather a sense that adopting these things is part of being culturally whole. No doubt these fantasies will fly away once in the tasteless stew of global Britain, but for now…

As in Nepal, Buddhism is intermingled with shamanism, and when people have serious problems, either health or increasingly, commercial, they command a performance. Apart from entering trances, shamans here are prone to spectacular circus-like tricks, such as swallowing boiling water and being apparently strangled with a scarf. However, they are now opposed by the radical Buddhists, who consider them competitors, and the hierarchy has recently moved against the more popular shamans. Radical Buddhism is something we don’t hear much about, but it is clear that contact with the wider world has made many leaders aware that some of the practices they previously tolerated are less than orthodox. Compared with Islam, it is pretty harmless, improved prayer-wheels for increased prayer production, encouragement not to mistreat people and animals and to reduce the meat in our diets.

Anthropologists often like to read about Tibetan polyandry, wives with several husbands, but I suppose in some way I never quite believed in it. But it is very much a reality here, especially with the Tibetan herders. As one women explained, it is very practical, since one husband can be sent off with the yaks, the other with the sheep…Even without multiple husbands, this is definitely a place with strong women, who are often the heads of villages and run the herding operations.

In case all this seems unrealistically optimistic, Bhutanese food is definitely not one of the world’s great cuisines. Rice and buckwheat pancakes are the staples, and vegetables consist almost entirely of fresh chilis, with every meal accompanied by bowls of watery lentils. Eggs and potatoes are to vary the diet of foreigners, but the Bhutanese seem content to eat the same thing three times a day forever. Occasionally they stick in a flake of yak meat or some fatty pork, but the tastes are overwhelmed by the pepper.

Bhutan must have some of the most advanced environmental policies in the world; the aim of the government is to protect two-thirds of the forest cover and one-third of the country is now national park. This results from a confluence of Buddhism and the accidents of geography; Bhutan is so isolated, the escarpments so steep, that serious exploitation remains too costly for the predators. There are intriguing consequences of this combination of Buddhism and environmentalism, one of which is that livestock owners are increasingly unwilling to kill their own animals. For a country where the citizens like to eat meat, and where most households depend on livestock, this is something of a paradox. In the capital, Thimphu, home of the severely orthodox, they resolve this by importing all their meat from India, where appalling people who engage in butchery. In the countryside this is more difficult and so it is arranged that animals meet with ‘accidents’ at regular intervals. If a community decides there is a shortage of meat, the bovine mafia gets to work and an unfortunate occurrence follows. We came across a girl drying yak meat (while keeping off the crows with a miniature bow and arrow) who told us that animal had died when some mustard oil they were rubbing on its skin somehow got into the animal’s lungs. O well, nothing to do but share out the meat.

Another consequence is that wildlife, far from being on the retreat, is exceedingly abundant, and indeed is on the increase. This creates more problems, as people are unwilling to hunt animals, yet keep tasty treats, such as sheep, a sort of snack for the tigers and bears on the prowl. Coming from middle-class environmentalism, which has you thinking these animals are picturesque but headed for extinction as a consequence of our relentless greed, it is quite a mental leap to seeing them as problems. There’s a scene in Apocalypse Now where the soldiers go into the forest to find some mangoes and encounter a tiger; the disbelief on their faces registers the disconnect between the Disney image of wildlife and the reality. So, no, I haven’t personally had a one-on-one with a tiger, but they are around; one of the people we have been talking to had a horse eaten just last week. Added to this is the language of respect which complicates discussions. The tiger is referred to with the same set of honorifics as the King, whereas the bear is referred to as ‘uncle’. His Excellency the tiger ate our sheep…

A particular charm of Bhutan is the way it heedlessly subverts all the grimmest symbols of modernity and globalisation. Even the control tower at the airport is barely visible among the carved and painted beams, tigers and dragons dancing across it. Mountaineers would like to get access to Bhutan’s peaks and turn them into the same tired highways that scar Nepal. But they are forbidden, for the deities who live up there may be disturbed. Indeed, the high mountain lakes are the homes of spirits who will take revenge on those who make noise close to them.

Can it last? The government introduced television several years ago and the evening schedules are now dominated by Hindi soaps. Go into a small café in the early evening and it is full of upturned faces, mesmerised by whatever appears on the little screen. Even beyond the television network, DVD players show dreary Nepali music videos to yak herders in country bars. Traditional clothes are being replaced by trainers and all the familiar and tedious logos. Roads are pushing through to all but the most isolated villages. Wise monks place their retreats on the most inaccessible mountains.