Bhutan's culture: a way of life written into law

Who the Bhutanese are by language and descent

Britannica names three main groups. The Ngalop, or Bhutia, descended from Tibetans who came south from about the 9th century, live mainly in the north, centre and west and dominate political life; Britannica puts them at about half the population. The Sharchop of the east, related to the peoples of neighbouring Assam and Arunachal Pradesh, are believed to be the earliest inhabitants. The Lhotshampa, of Nepali descent, live in the south; Britannica puts them at roughly a third, and Wikipedia's article on Bhutan, noting that no reliable figures exist, describes the Sharchop as slightly larger than the Ngalop.

The national language is Dzongkha, "the language of the fortress", declared national in 1971. It is native to eight western districts, including Thimphu, Paro, Punakha and Ha, and is the lingua franca in the districts to the south and east. In 2013 it had 171,080 native speakers and about 640,000 speakers in all. It is written in a form of the Tibetan script and is partly intelligible with spoken Tibetan, and the liturgical language Chöke, the classical Tibetan of the monasteries, was the language of schooling until the early 1960s. Schools now teach in English and teach Dzongkha as a subject.

Ethnologue counts 24 languages spoken in Bhutan, all Tibeto-Burman except Nepali. Wikipedia's article on Bhutan gives the following shares without a year for most of them, and warns that they do not add up to 100% because no reliable census of language exists.

What the dress and etiquette code requires

Driglam Namzha translates roughly as "the rules for disciplined behaviour". It prescribes what to wear, how to eat and speak, and how to bow before officials and the clergy, and it also covers art and architecture. It was introduced under the sixth Five-Year Plan of 1987 to 1992 as part of the "One Nation, One People" policy, and Wikipedia's article on Bhutanese culture dates its imposition on all citizens to 1990.

For men the garment is the gho, a knee-length robe tied at the waist with a cloth belt, the kera, and folded so that it forms a pocket over the stomach. Women wear the kira, a large rectangular cloth wrapped into an ankle-length dress and fastened at the shoulders with two brooches, the koma, over a long-sleeved blouse, the wonju, and under a short jacket, the toego. Everyday cloth is cotton or wool in checks and stripes; silk is for festivals.

Rank is shown by the scarf. On a visit to a dzong or before an official, a man wears a kabney from the left shoulder to the opposite hip: white for a commoner, and a different colour for local officials, ministers and the king. Women wear a narrower embroidered rachu over the left shoulder. The red scarf, the Bura Maap, with the title of Dasho, is conferred by the throne for service to the country.

The rule has been narrowed since the 1990s. Wikipedia's article on Bhutan records that national dress is now required in Buddhist buildings, government offices, schools, official functions and public ceremonies, and of government employees at work. The code was one of the grievances behind the southern protests of 1990, described with both sides' accounts in the history article: people of Nepali descent objected to being made to wear the clothing of the northern majority, and Nepali was dropped from the school curriculum the same year.

How Buddhism organises the year

Britannica gives about three-quarters of the population as Buddhist and nearly a quarter as Hindu, mostly in the Nepali-speaking south, with a tiny Christian minority; Wikipedia's article on Bhutanese culture gives 75% Buddhist, about 23% Hindu and 0.2% Muslim. The sources differ on the status of the faith. Wikipedia describes Vajrayana Buddhism as the state religion; Britannica says that it was formerly the state religion and that the 2008 constitution describes it as the country's "spiritual heritage". Proselytising is illegal.

Two traditions coexist. The Drukpa Kagyu, the school of the founder Ngawang Namgyal, is state-supported and followed by most Bhutanese. The older Nyingma, present in Bhutan and Tibet since about the 8th century, keeps a separate identity, though Britannica describes relations between the two as historically close. At the head of the monastic order is the Je Khenpo, the chief abbot. The Central Monk Body of about 600 monks spends the summer in Thimphu and the winter at Punakha Dzong, where the founder's body has been kept under vigil since the late 17th century.

Boys enter monasteries at six to nine years old and learn Chöke, Dzongkha and English. A common length for a monk's silent retreat is three years, three months, three weeks and three days. Britannica characterises Bhutanese Buddhism less by its monasteries than by the ideal of the lama who has reached perfection through meditation yet stays inconspicuous in daily life. Religion is visible outside the monasteries too: prayer flags on the hillsides, a small white flag on a house roof to show its owner has made offerings to the local deity, and a shrine in a corner of most homes.

What happens at a tshechu

A tshechu, literally "tenth day", is the annual festival held in each district on the tenth day of a lunar month, the month varying from place to place. Its centre is a fixed sequence of masked dances, cham, performed in the dzong courtyard over two to four days. Monks dance some unmasked, such as the Black Hat dance; laymen perform the masked roles. Several of the dances are traced to Ngawang Namgyal himself and have been passed down since the mid-17th century, and the tradition began as a monastic practice before its first full public celebration, at Tashichho Dzong in Thimphu in 1690.

Before dawn on the final day a huge appliqué thangka, the thongdrel, is unrolled across the courtyard; seeing it is held to free the viewer from sin, and it is rolled up again before the sun strikes it. Because a festival cannot run without its dancers, registered dancers who refuse to perform can be fined. One dance, the Mask dance of the drums from Drametse, was inscribed on UNESCO's intangible heritage list in 2008, Bhutan's only element there.

How families pass down land and names

Bhutan departs from much of South Asia in the household. Wikipedia's article on Bhutanese culture describes inheritance as matrilineal: daughters inherit the house, the groom traditionally moves into the bride's family home, there is no dowry, and women keep their own names at birth and at marriage. Some communities give the eldest daughter the largest share of land on the expectation that she will care for her parents, though younger families increasingly divide land evenly. Britannica describes the Ngalop family system as patriarchal at root, with estates divided equally between sons and daughters, and both accounts agree that women and men choose their partners and may initiate divorce. Britannica's account of society adds that women and men have an essentially equal legal status, that inheritance law favours women, and that most households are managed by women. Polygyny and polyandry are both socially accepted, and a marriage can be registered once a couple have lived together for six months.

The house itself differs by region. Britannica describes the typical Ngalop house as two storeys of timber and stone with thick walls of pounded mud against the cold, livestock on the ground floor and the family above, and a small Buddhist shrine in a corner. The Sharchop build in stone and wood, often on stilts on the slopes, and have practised shifting cultivation, burning a plot clear and moving on when the soil tires. In the warmer south, Nepali-speaking households build in bamboo and thatch, and caste shapes marriage and other social ties.

Names carry no surname, outside the royal line. A child receives two names, often chosen by the local lama, and the names usually give no clue to sex. Because the stock of names is small, people are told apart by place: a woman called Chong Kinley from Chozom village is known outside the Paro valley as "Paro Kinley".

What Bhutanese cooking is built on

The staples are red rice, which grows at altitude and has a nutty taste, buckwheat and increasingly maize. The dish Britannica and Wikipedia both describe as national is ema datshi, chillies cooked in cheese; kewa datshi adds potatoes, and both are eaten with red or basmati rice. In the hills the diet adds pork, yak, dried beef, chicken and lamb, and almost all milk from yaks and cows is turned into butter and cheese. Butter tea, black tea and ara, a locally brewed rice wine, are the common drinks.

Southern households cook differently: Hindus of Nepali descent do not eat beef and some eat no meat, and their rice and curry dishes are those of Nepal and India. A guest offered food says meshu meshu and covers the mouth with the hands, then accepts at the second or third offer.

Which sports and arts Bhutan keeps up

Archery is the national sport. Two targets stand more than 100 metres apart and teams shoot from one end to the other, two arrows each per round, while opponents stand near the target and mock the archer. Khuru, darts with a 10-centimetre nail thrown at a target 10 to 20 metres away, is played as widely, and digor resembles the shot put. Football has a large following too: in 2002 Bhutan beat Montserrat 4 to 0 in Thimphu in a match staged on the day of the World Cup final.

Visual art follows Buddhism. Britannica lists the mandala, painted on temple walls or on scroll paintings called thangka, images of Padmasambhava, and the eight auspicious symbols as common subjects, and records metalwork in bronze and silver for statues, temple doors, bells and trumpets. Architecture uses rammed earth, stone and carved wood, and traditionally no nails. Music runs from monastic chant and long horns to the folk genres zhungdra and boedra and, since the early 1990s, rigsar, played on traditional instruments and electronic keyboards. The film Travellers and Magicians (2003) by the lama Khyentse Norbu was shot in Dzongkha in northern Bhutan.

When schools and television arrived

Until the early 1960s the only schools were religious. Britannica records that education took about a fifth of government spending in the early 2010s and that adult literacy was still only about two-thirds in that decade, with slightly more than half of women able to read and write, while girls outnumbered boys in primary and secondary schools. Sherubtse Degree College was founded at Kanglung in the east in 1983, affiliated with the University of Delhi.

Broadcasting came late and by permission. Radio began in 1973 with thirty minutes on Sundays. Television was allowed in 1999. The internet arrived in 1999 in Britannica's account and in 2000 in Wikipedia's. In 2010 Bhutan banned the sale of tobacco, and in 2021 it reversed the ban to stop cross-border smuggling during the pandemic.