The History of Bhutan Read online

  RANDOM HOUSE INDIA

  Published by Random House India in 2013

  Copyright © Karma Phuntsho 2013

  Random House Publishers India Private Limited

  Windsor IT Park, 7th Floor, Tower-B

  A-1, Sector-125, Noida-201301, UP

  Random House Group Limited

  20 Vauxhall Bridge Road

  London SW1V 2SA

  United Kingdom

  This eBook is copyright material and must not be copied, reproduced, transferred, distributed, leased, licensed or publicly performed or used in any way except as specifically permitted in writing by the publishers, as allowed under the terms and conditions under which it was purchased or as strictly permitted by applicable copyright law. Any unauthorised distribution or use of this text may be a direct infringement of the author’s and publisher’s rights and those responsible may be liable in law accordingly.

  EPUB ISBN 9788184004113

  There is no guru dearer than one’s father and no divinity higher than one’s mother.

  ~ The Buddha in Kemendra’s Bodhisattvādānakalpalatā (chap. 92, v. 4)

  To my parents

  Contents

  Preface

  THE COUNTRY AND ITS NAMES

  Mon

  Lhomonkhazhi—the Mon of four approaches

  Menjong—the medicinal country

  Country bestrewn with Tsanden

  Drukyul—the Land of the Thunder Dragon

  Bhutan—a British legacy

  THE LAND AND ITS PEOPLE

  The Subtropical Lowlands

  The Temperate Midlands

  The Alpine Highlands

  The People

  MANY TONGUES

  Central Bodish group

  Dzongkha

  Chocha Ngacha/Tsamangpikha

  Jyokha of Merak and Sakteng

  Jyokha of Dur

  Lakha language

  Bökay or Tibetan

  East Bodish group

  Bumthangkha

  Khengkha

  Kurtöp

  Ngenkha

  Chalibikha

  Dzalakha

  Dakpakha

  Monkha/Olekha

  Other Bodic languages

  Tshangla

  Lhopikha

  Gongdukpikha

  Lepcha

  Limbu, Rai, Tamang, Sherpa, etc.

  Kurux

  Indo-European languages

  Nepali

  Hindi

  English

  HISTORY AND PREHISTORY

  In the presence of the past

  The Prehistoric Period

  EARLY HISTORIC PERIOD: EARLY DIFFUSION OF BUDDHISM

  Songtsen Gampo and the two temples

  Padmasambhava and the two kings

  The refugees

  EARLY HISTORIC PERIOD: LATER DIFFUSION OF BUDDHISM

  The dung lineages

  The Ura dung

  The Ngang dung

  Dung/dung reng

  The religious lines

  Bön religion

  The Lhapa Kagyu school

  The Drukpa Kagyu school

  The Nyingma school

  Tertöns in rough chronological order

  Pema Lingpa and other local Bhutanese tertöns

  Lhomon Kathogpa

  Chagzampa tradition

  Nenyingpa

  Barawa of Kagyu school

  Sakyapa

  Shingtapa of Gelug school

  Kamtshang of Kagyu school

  Drigung of Kagyu school

  Other prominent religious visitors

  Indian visitors

  A sketch of society and polity

  THE MEDIEVAL PERIOD: THE UNIFICATION OF THE DRAGON COUNTRY

  The historical conditions

  Zhabdrung’s dispute in Tibet

  Zhabdrung arrives in Bhutan

  The Portuguese guests

  Zhabdrung’s first dzong and the second Tibetan invasion

  The Palace of Great Bliss and the third Tibetan invasion

  The Dalai Lama’s rule and Zhabdrung’s victory

  Gaden Phodrang’s second defeat and Zhabdrung’s celebrations

  Zhabdrung’s retreat and expansion of the state

  ZHABDRUNG’S LEGACY AND THE EARLY MONK RULERS

  Zhabdrung’s legacy of a religious state

  Sustaining Zhabdrung’s legacy

  The pressing question of succession

  The beginning of internal strife

  The alternate line of succession

  Overture to Ladakh and disclosure of the ‘open secret’

  MULTIPLE INCARNATIONS AND THE RISE OF LAY RULERS

  The Shaman of Wang and the rise of the first lay ruler

  The proliferation of incarnations and the fall of Bearded Desi

  Two incarnate brothers and the last Tibetan invasion

  Mipham Wangpo’s escape and the continuation of Bönbji rule

  The glorious days of Sherab Wangchuk

  THE RISE OF SOUTHWARD RELATIONS AND INTERNAL STRIFE

  Zhidar and Bhutan’s affairs with Cooch Behar

  The opportunistic EIC

  Bogle and the first British Mission to Bhutan

  The reign of Jigme Sengay and more white men

  Factional fighting and the imbroglio of incarnations

  The clash of incarnations and the first pressure from the east

  Bhutan’s stake in British expansion

  Death, destruction and reappearance

  CIVIL WARS AND FRONTIER TROUBLES

  First clash with the British in the east

  The fear of the unknown and the Pemberton mission

  Chakpa Sangay’s rebellion and an unaccomplished mission

  Two capitals, two rulers and oaths of reconciliation

  The loss of the luminaries and re-ignition of strife

  The fate of Jigme Norbu and the fall of Chakpa Sangay

  The incessant conflicts

  The rise of Jigme Namgyal

  THE DUAR WAR AND THE BLACK REGENT

  Continued frontier outrages

  The humiliation of Ashley Eden

  The Duar War

  Resumption of civil war

  THE EMERGENCE OF UGYEN WANGCHUK AND END OF CIVIL WAR

  The Rise of Ugyen Wangchuk

  Bhutan’s last internal strife and the battle of Changlingmethang

  Ugyen Wangchuk as king-maker and mediator

  The final years of a religious republic

  EARLY MODERN PERIOD: THE INTRODUCTION OF MONARCHY

  The sociopolitical setting

  The King is crowned

  King Ugyen Wangchuk’s deeds and devotion

  The reign of Jigme Wangchuk

  The weight of the golden yoke

  Securing the sovereignty

  THE MODERN PERIOD: THE DRAGON’S NEW JOURNEY

  Decentralization, democracy and dasho aspirants

  Security, sovereignty and the dragon’s wrath

  Socioeconomic development and cultural transformations

  The dragon’s tryst with happiness

  Bibliography

  Notes

  Index

  Acknowledgements

  A Note on the Author

  Preface

  WHEN ZHABDRUNG NGAWANG NAMGYAL, the founder of Bhutan, passed away in 1651, his death was concealed through the hoax of a retreat. Meals were served on time, musical instruments were played regularly, orders issued on wooden boards and someone pretending to be him even received gifts and gave blessings from behind a curtain. The Bhutanese public were given the impression that he was in meditation but his Tibetan enemies were not easily convinced. The 5th Dalai Lama suspected that Zhabdrung suffered an inauspicious death after being struck by a fatal illness, which was caused by the Dalai Lama’s own occult powers. In contrast, the Mughal governor of Bengal was told that Bhutan’s ruler was an ascetic, some 120 years old, living on a vegetarian diet of bananas and milk. Understandably, the mystery of his ‘retreat’ gave rise to interesting and also conflicting speculations. It certainly also helped an emerging Bhutan sustain its newfound sovereignty as a unified state.

  Such an enigmatic scenario is not merely a phenomenon of the distant past. Perceptions of Bhutan even in recent years were imbued with a similar sense of mystery and contrasting views. While many saw Bhutan as a happy country of exceptional natural beauty and cultural exuberance, some held views of Bhutan in less favourable terms as an autocratic third-world state. These perceptions often veered to extremes, with one group romanticizing Bhutan as a modern Shangrila while the other portrayed Bhutan as a genocidal state. Like the mystery concerning the founder’s death in the seventeenth century, the intrigue entailed by these biased perceptions in some ways also helped Bhutan underline its security and sovereignty. Similarly, just as the medieval government promoted the ‘retreat’ hoax, the modern Bhutanese government endeavoured to convince both its citizens and the outside world of Bhutan’s special position as a happy land with a rich blend of culture and nature.

  However, until recently, most people outside the Indian subcontinent have not even heard of Bhutan. Due to its small size, insignificant economy and the lack of reliable information about it, Bhutan largely remained an obscure country. Consequently, Bhutanese travelling abroad would have to often endure delays at immigration check points and embassies, as immigration officers struggled to locate the country. This changed in the last couple of decades as the travel culture rapidly increased in other parts of the world, and Bhutan,
with its high-value tourism policy, has now become an exotic and much-desired travel destination. As a result, the number of tourists who visited Bhutan shot up from 6,392 in 2001 to 1,05,414 in 2012 and included a large number of Indian visitors who travelled by land.

  Yet, detailed and objective information on Bhutan is still sparse. Apart from a handful of books by foreign scholars and local Bhutanese writers, most publications are colourful pictorial books or sentimental travelogues by visitors to the country. Most of these sources present a nostalgic account of Bhutan with a heavy dose of Orientalist romanticism and often betray the authors’ own subjective susceptibility more than they report the actual situation in Bhutan. In addition to this, the government has actively engaged in a calculated effort of packaging and branding the country as a whole in order to appeal to the external expectation and sensibility. The recent efforts of the government to promote Gross National Happiness as a new economic and development paradigm in forums such as the UN has further complicated people’s imagination of Bhutan both at home and abroad. Increasingly, more and more people now describe Bhutan as a happy country, despite the fact that a large percentage of the Bhutanese live in depressing poverty and many Bhutanese youth would willingly grasp the opportunity to work in an American kitchen or European warehouse if given the chance. Moreover, none of the existing sources on Bhutan also adequately discuss the seriousness of the sociocultural transformations, which is fundamentally changing the worldview, cultural ethos and social fabric of Bhutanese society today.

  In contrast to popular writings, most of which ‘shangrilize’ Bhutan, the academic accounts of Bhutan generally provide readers a fairly sober account. Although they are fewer, these writings give readers information about Bhutan in some depth and detail. Yet, many academics approach Bhutan with a prior knowledge of Tibet and often show a naïve tendency to Tibetanize Bhutan. A very good example for demonstrating this is the application of the la suffix, which is added after first names in conversations to address people in the honorific form in Tibet. Although the la suffix may be added at the end of a phrase or sentence (see Chapter 3), its addition after names is not usual practice in Bhutan and, in some parts of the country, it is even considered pejorative to address poeple with a la suffix attached to their names. Many acclaimed scholars on Bhutan, unaware of such cultural and linguistic nuances, confidently use the la suffix after a name in imitation of the Tibetan practice.

  Such nonchalant Tibetanization of Bhutan can be also found in numerous other cases—even in writings of scholars on the Himalayas and Bhutan. A well-known example is the following introduction to Bhutan by two doyens of Tibetan Studies, Hugh Richardson and David Snellgrove; it is cited by two pioneering historians on Bhutan, Michael Aris and Yoshiro Imaeda, in their introduction of Bhutan.

  Thus, of the whole enormous area which was once the spirited domain of Tibetan culture and religion, stretching from Ladakh in the west to the borders of Szechuan and Yunnan in the east, from the Himalayas in the south to the Mongolian steppes and the vast wastes of northern Tibet, now only Bhutan seems to survive as the one resolute and self-contained representative of a fast disappearing civilisation.1

  While it cannot be denied that Bhutan is closely linked to Tibet in its religious culture and is now often called the last bastion of the Tibetan Buddhist civilization, the general cultural affinity between Bhutan and Tibet outside of the religious influence is far more tenuous than most experts on Tibet would have us believe. Thus, against the general tendency of Tibetologists to treat Bhutan as an extension of Tibet, we must distinguish one from the other, at least to the extent Japan is distinct from China or Nepal is from India. It will become clear from the following discussion of history that for nearly half a millennium Bhutan and Tibet had separate political and sociocultural existences, which have led to stark differences even in the religious cultures. Such differences have only become further entrenched and distinct after Bhutan’s northward link to Tibet was severed in 1959, following the occupation of Tibet by China.

  Inaccurate projections by foreign writers, however, are not the only factors that influenced perceptions of Bhutan. If the accounts of Bhutan by outsiders smack of the Orientalist romanticization, naïve Tibetanization or other traces of pro- or anti-Bhutan sentiments, many local Bhutanese have appropriated and internalized these external perceptions and projections. Thus, we find many Bhutanese painting the same rosy picture of Bhutan, which an enchanted Western visitor may paint, and promoting it with a patriotic zest as if it were an official dogma although they are fully aware of the problems and challenges that beset the country. They regurgitate the same sentimental and hyperbolic descriptions of Bhutan produced by a nostalgic visitor. This was also true to some extent with the traditional Bhutanese authors writing in classical Tibetan or Dzongkha. They wrote under a strong Tibetan influence and reproduced the perceptions which the Tibetan religious visitors through the ages had of Bhutan. Their discourses on Bhutan are set in the Tibetan cosmological and religious context and embedded in the Tibetan literary culture despite their best efforts to extricate Bhutan from the Tibetan cultural and political domain. These tendencies of internalizing external perceptions are nonetheless tolerable when compared to awry opinions such as Ashley Eden’s claim that Bhutan had no tradition or history or the mistaken view still held among some quarters that Bhutan is a political vassal of India. Such viewpoints are too parochial to be considered even worthy of any rebuttal.

  Against these tendencies and misconceptions, a new voice of independent Bhutanese writers who draw on Bhutan’s rich cultural heritage and history, is now rising. Many Bhutanese today write in English for a global audience and bring the local Bhutanese stories, wisdom and cultures directly to their readers around the world without an intermediary. Not only do they present the original Bhutanese voice but they also help develop the much needed self-representation in scholarly discourses on Bhutan. Through them, Bhutan is beginning to emerge on the international intellectual arena with its own voice.

  Like a shy bride gradually removing her veil, Bhutan is today shedding its historical obscurity and isolation and beginning to attract a lot of attention, especially through its policy of Gross National Happiness. It is my hope that this book will aid this emergence of Bhutan by giving some substance to the growing popularity. The book aims to tell the story of Bhutan’s past in an unbiased narration and analysis and is the first ever attempt to cover the entire history of Bhutan in detail in English, combining both traditional perspectives and modern historiographical analyses.

  While every effort is made to steer away from the undue influence of external perceptions or internal prejudices, I make no claim of cultural or political neutrality. Ideas and opinions arise from sociocultural contexts, and the narratives and analyses in this book are also results of my own exposure to traditional Bhutanese cultural upbringing and education as well as modern Western academic training. Although I am intimately aware of both the blessings of Bhutan and the challenges it is facing, this book is intended neither as praise for Bhutan’s successes nor as a critique of its failures. My main concern here is to present an objective story (or a plausible one when evidences are lacking) by weaving the facts or available data together into a readable narrative as no such complete history of Bhutan exists so far.

  This book is a byproduct of the project entitled ‘The Historical Study and Documentation of the Padma Gling pa Tradition in Bhutan’, funded by the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council at Cambridge University. Through this project and other digitization projects funded by the Endangered Archives Programme of the British Library, I have carried out an extensive digitization of the textual corpus associated with the Pema Lingpa tradition in order to both preserve Bhutan’s textual heritage and to compile a historical account of Pema Lingpa’s tradition, which is the only religious tradition of local Bhutanese origin. It was in the course of my collection of notes for the history of Pema Lingpa’s tradition that I was tempted to undertake a comprehensive study of Bhutan’s history; this book is an outcome of such curiosity and intellectual diversion.

  From a Buddhist perspective, the foremost project of human existence is self-development and edification. In order to improve the world, a country or community, one must start by improving oneself, something that can be effectively pursued only by first understanding oneself. We are products of a complex historical process and history tells us who we are and why we are who we are. It reveals the roots of our perceptions, prejudices, outlooks and parochialisms and helps us improve ourselves by learning from past mistakes and emulating past achievements. Our past explains our present and informs and guides our future; it is my modest hope that The History of Bhutan will help readers better understand the Bhutanese character and contribute towards a process of social edification by fostering the Bhutanese tradition of self-reflection and mindfulness, especially as it pursues its goal of Gross National Happiness.