Sometime around 1616 AD, Ngawang Namgyel, or Zhabdrung Rinpoche as he came to be later known, felt increasingly edged out by the political intrigue around his temporal and spiritual authority at the Ralung monastery in Tibet and decided to head south. Striking anchor in western Bhutan, he founded the Chagri Dorjeden Monastery at the northern end of the Thimphu valley, some 15-odd kilometres from the capital of today. Over the course of the next 35 years of his life, and 54 more years of what is possibly the longest-kept secret about someone’s demise, Zhabdrung Rinpoche became the great unifier of Bhutan, giving the country its modern-day contours. For the next two and a half centuries, the so-called “ecclesiocratic period” (1651-1907), clans waxed and waned until the House of Wangchuck reunified the kingdom.
From unification to reunification, Vajrayana Buddhism became both a leitmotif of power and an article of faith welding the populace. The impact of this continuum has been singular. It engendered a stability that allowed Bhutan to remain cloistered for the better part of the twentieth century and adopt metrics such as gross national happiness, eschew the global hunger for unbridled ‘development’ in favour of holistic growth, and even embark on a guided transition to democracy. This rich inheritance, however, also had a downside to it. It left Bhutan with a cornucopia of oral traditions but precious little by way of what would qualify as literary work. Text was sacralised; it became something to be revered. Buddhism was the proper subject of traditional scholarship; literature beyond the pale.
As the Land of Druk slowly opened itself to the world from the latter half of the last century, the modern project of reclaiming text from religion began. This process, of the secularisation of text in Bhutan, has had to take the long road of spiritual exegesis, country compendiums, academic treatises, touristy guides, folk tale collections, and the odd traveller’s impressions to finally yield a nascent literary landscape.
It takes a trailblazerCaught in the everyday reality of household life, 15-year-old Tsomo is suddenly called upon to travel when her mother dies. She makes her first journey to a faraway village to light the ritual butter lamps in her mother's memory. Beginning here, her travels take her to distant places, across Bhutan and into India. As she faces the world, a woman alone, Tsomo embarks on what becomes a life journey, in which she begins to find herself and to grow as a person and a woman.
For all its steeped-in-the-milieu flavour, the plot line of The Circle of Karma is admittedly spartan. What it masks, though, is the extraordinary. The 2005 book, published by Zubaan/Penguin, is Bhutan’s first novel by a woman author. Kunzang Choden did her hard yards for 11 years — Folktales of Bhutan in 1994, followed by the 22-story Bhutanese Tales of the Yeti and Dawa: The Story of a Stray Dog in Bhutan , a novella — before the breakthrough book. And yet a decade down the line, Choden might be the grande dame of writing but the ground beneath her feat hasn’t shifted much. A book she proposed on architectural mapping found no takers, prompting her to set up her own publishing house, Riyang Books, in 2012. It afforded her the luxury of publishing a poetry collection of hers, ‘Folded in a paper coat’, this February. “People are beginning to value the culture of reading,” she says.
It takes a little impatienceChoden’s trailblazing act has spawned newer word warriors, including Pema Auden, who became Bhutan’s youngest author at 12 with Coming Home in 2008 and, even as she studies mathematics in the U.S., released her second book, Lomba , this June. More in the Choden mould, however, is Chador Wangmo, who started Miza Books in 2012, again to publish her thickening personal output. Named after her daughter, ‘Miza’ also stands for the ‘fire tin’, a hearth around which children in the villages gather to hear elders narrate folk tales that go Dangphu dingphu (‘Once upon a time…’) A schoolteacher for years, Wangmo’s writing impulse was fuelled by the growing realisation that not only was Bhutan never a reading society but the introduction of television in 1999 on the 25th anniversary of then king Jigme Singye Wangchuck’s coronation threatened to efface even folk and oral traditions. She trained in writing folk tales and stories for children under the government-funded Bhutan Children’s Book Initiative project. The “impatient writer” now has 11 books under her belt, branching off from children’s fare to pen her first novel, La Ama , in 2015, and the just-released Kyetse, a window into the eastern Bhutanese culture of Trashigang and Samdrup Jongkhar. “Someone had to do it,” she says.
Monu Tamang’s problems were much more elementary — it was about getting started. Diary entries he wrote for his then girlfriend while a final-year physiotherapy undergraduate student in Raichur, Karnataka, formed the kernel of a book draft he finally finished in 2014. By February next year, the editing was done and the book print-ready, but it went into cold storage for lack of a publisher. As the college romance gathered dust, Tamang decided to take to social media and crowdsource money. He approached active Facebook users in Bhutan with a stakeholder proposition: invest money in the book and sell copies at 50 per cent profit. Thirty people signed up with varying amounts. Chronicle of a Love Foretold (with apologies to Marquez), published by DSB Books and printed at the Kuensel press, released on December 19, 2015. “Writers have to do everything here,” he says.
It takes a villageTamang’s lament only illustrates the challenge of pushing the frontiers in a country with a population of just over 7,50,000 and a literacy rate of under 60 per cent. As writer, editor and publisher of her recent books, Wangmo has had to travel to Delhi and — closer to home — Siliguri in Bengal to get the binding and embossing finesse Thimphu printing presses lack. There’s also the question of numbers. Siksha Bhattarai, whose father B.P. Bhattarai opened DSB Books, Thimphu’s first bookstore, says the countrywide market is still partial towards guide books and children’s books, and built around bulk school purchases at the annual book fairs at Mongar in the east and Punakha, the former capital, in the west. Choden’s Dawa needed the state’s helping hand (the story is now part of the official school curriculum) to get the volumes. Auden’s second book has launched with an initial print order of 500. Tamang’s reader-as-stakeholder outreach notched up 2,000 copies in sales. Wangmo’s La Ama , a semi-autobiographical exploration of the mother-daughter relationship, sold 3,000 copies — a bestseller of bestsellers in the Thimphu setting. “Bhutan read like never before,” she gushes.
As this year’s Mountain Echoes — the seventh edition of what has become Thimphu’s annual date with literature and the arts — also commemorated 400 years of the arrival of the founder of modern Bhutan, the overwhelming sense is that a tabula rasa is being filled bit by bit, where dissemination is the starting point of mounting the fledgling literary culture on a surer footing. For the first time, the number of Bhutanese writers outnumbered Indians — 31 to 26. Footfalls rose from 4,500 in 2014 to 7,500 last year and are estimated to have touched 9,000 this year. Eight hundred students were in attendance, some travelling over 500 kilometres to listen to authors — local and global — and their stories.
As sessions unfolded at the Royal University of Bhutan auditorium, the lit fest epicentre, a student wrapped in the national dress, gho, emerged from a panel discussion on teenage love and went down the steps to the adjoining makeshift bookstall. He scanned the racks as people moved in a file from stall entry to exit, and furtively bought a copy of Meenakshi Madhavan Reddy’s Split before being spirited away by friends. Perhaps he is another Monu Tamang by night, penning his own Chronicle of a Love Foretold for his beloved. Perhaps he’ll ask for Marquez upfront at the payment counter next year.
abdus.salam@thehindu.co.in
