So Close to Heaven Read Free Page B

unintentionally copy the stances and demeanors of a century of kings. Bhutanese women in the countryside, round-faced and hearty, display a Chaucerian mirth and sensibility; only their newly Westernized town cousins affect a demure or languid look.
    For many years before and after Bogle and Davis, the Bhutanese, guided by a policy of wariness and aided by geography, shut out the world almost entirely. In the latter part of the twentieth century, as other once-closed Himalayan realms—Nepal, Ladakh, Sikkim, and Tibet—were opening to tourism, Bhutan held back, fearful of scarring its unspoiled terrain and turning its spontaneous, pervasive religiosity into a Buddhist performance for camcorders. When tourists finally began to arrive, limits were placed on their numbers.
    But the Bhutanese are discovering that tourism may not be their most pressing problem. Some disturbing changes that threaten this unique Himalayan culture are springing from within the Bhutanese themselves as they proceed, through trial and error, toward integration into the wider world. What Bhutan is going through now should be of interest to all of us who worry about how an overcrowded planet increasingly headed toward a crisis of physical survival in the next century, especially in South Asia, will cope with the primal screams of small, endangered human cultures that get in the way of the scramble for farmland and living space.
    But even among these threatened communities, the Bhutanese stand apart. Many of Asia’s endangered societies are tribal—food-gatherers or pastoral nomads whose development stopped at a basic level of subsistence—and they attract the sympathy and support of anthropologists and good-hearted laypeople, particularly in Europe, who form paternalistic committees and organize demonstrations to look after their interests. The Bhutanese—proud, capable, lonely survivors of a developed ancient civilization of scholastic brilliance and considerable social achievement—are far removed in time and lifestyle from tribalism, by any definition. No charitable crusaders panting to save the world’s naïfs reach out to them; in any case, they would disdain that kind of help. The few foreigners allowed to live in the Dragon Kingdom, ostensibly to help develop it, soon learn that the Bhutanese always do things their own way and in their own time. Down to the lowest farmer, they need to beconvinced that something new being dangled before them is something they need and want. Then there’s no stopping them.
    In an electronic age, and at a time when people can move from place to place with relative ease, defying almost any nation’s efforts to close its borders, the world beyond Bhutan intrudes with or without the catalyst of tourists or other visiting foreigners. The Bhutanese king’s periodic orders banning satellite dishes become gestures sadly close to commanding the sea to hold back, because television receivers
are
permitted, and they connect to video players, bringing tales of casual violence to people barely out of an age of mythology. The five young men accused of killing the lama of Chimme Lhakhang and his two novices apparently told the police that they identified with the high-living gangsters they saw in cheap video films flooding the country from India, Hong Kong, and Bangkok. Or at least that’s the way the police wanted the story to be told. “The motive for the murder was not village vendetta, revenge, or reprisal, but purely greed,” the police told
Kuensel.
“Such cold-blooded murders are normally unheard of in this country.”
    If murder is still rare, theft from religious monuments is not, and this may sooner or later lead to the locking away of more temple treasures. Because icons and chortens, or shrines, are known to contain objects of value—if not pure silver and gold, certainly semiprecious stones—they are increasingly the targets of thieves no longer fearful of divine retribution for tampering with holy