‘Telling Me My Stories’ by Kunzang Choden: Memories of Bhutan

Reading ‘Telling Me My Stories’ is like sitting with an old aristocratic lady in the parlour of her ancestral house and listening to stories of her childhood, her household and the golden yesteryears, one after the other. What brings value to these intimate tales are the unique glimpses they provide into a lesser-known and fast-disappearing worldview, for the author hails from a landed Bhutanese family with royal ties, tracing her father’s lineage to the 14th-century Tibetan yogi, Dorji Lingpa.

The backdrop of her stories is the pre-reforms era (before the 1950s), when monarchical and feudal systems were still firmly in place, along with the over-arching influence of Vajrayana Buddhism.

The Prologue begins in the present — the 70-year-old author has taken her place among the temple-circumambulating and sun-chasing elders of her village in Ogyen Choling, with her ancestral house now turned into a museum. Hereon, nostalgia takes over, like memories of listening to All India Radio, or watching her parents share a Leica camera.

It is this changing Bhutan, alongside the oral foundations of a mystical landscape populated by spirits, deities, yetis, healers and yogis, which Choden evokes, making it a delectable primer for those interested in the Bhutanese or Himalayan culture in general.

In her own words, “I write my story as a footnote to the larger history of my country.” For, above all, this is a coming-of-age narrative for Choden and her country, both trying to cope with the transition from the old ways towards the modern.

The author was born in 1952 when Jigme Dorji Wangchuk ascended to the throne. Now considered the father of modern Bhutan, he established the National Assembly and abolished serfdom the very next year, followed by redistribution of larger estates among the landless in 1958. Then, the Dalai Lama fled to India in 1959, as Mao Zedong’s communist forces took over Tibet and were said to be eyeing Bhutan. Amid all this, at the age of nine, with her father’s parting words asking her to study hard and never marry a foreigner, the author joined those initial batches of children from elite Bhutanese families who were made to leave home for a convent-style education in India.

“After more than fifteen days of travel on foot and pony, train and truck”, along with the trauma of being molested by a “kind-looking old man” during a train journey in India, Choden finally arrived at St Joseph’s Convent in Kalimpong.

“I had no language besides my own, Bumthangkha, spoken by a few thousand people in central Bhutan... From the day I became a boarder, the noisy and speaking world became silent for me.” The author lost both her parents a few years thence, and the closing chapters describe the decline in her family’s status and wealth owing to the reforms and the new bureaucracy.

Eventually, Choden did go against one of her father’s wishes; she married a Swiss man — one who considered families like hers to be responsible for maintaining inequality in Bhutan.

— The reviewer teaches at JLNGC, Haripur (Manali)