Feature Story

"…a Shadow of those Wonderful Tales."

It used to take Ngawang Phuntso three days to walk from the end of the road to his family's village in rural Bhutan. That was before improvements were made to the roads in 2002. Now it only takes two days. Ngawang is a university student in this small Buddhist kingdom nestled in the Himalaya Mountains. He has an interest in his country’s culture and folklore and serves as a research intern with the Centre for Bhutan Studies.

"Walking three days continuously, climbing high mountains and crossing dangerous rivers, wasn’t fun,” Ngawang recalled, “but love for your parents, dear ones and sweet home took you there anyway. We still had the charm of the village once I got there, and those, I think, were the wonderful times of my life."

Ngawang fondly looks back on the days when the entire family – grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers, sisters, and cousins – all stayed together as one big family under the same roof. "“During the day, the elder members of the household would go out in the field to work," he said. "Small children would stay with old grandparents while a few accompanied parents in the field."

"Evenings were usually the interesting part of our life," Ngawang continued. "The elder members would narrate different stories. With great fascination and concentration, we would listen to the storyteller, whose stories would flow non-stop. This process would go on until all the children were asleep. In the morning, all the children tried to recollect the stories that they had heard."

When the children of the village gathered together to play, they would share the stories they heard from the elders during the nighttime story sessions. "Often, in those days, the number of stories one could remember was a source of pride for boys and girls," Ngawang said.

With the passage of time and the necessity of going off to boarding school, however, a gap developed between Bhutan’s grandparents in the villages and the lifestyle of the country’s younger generation. “Although we hated to stay away from our homes, we had no choice for the fear of bears, swollen rivers and constant landslides on our way," Ngawang said. "Soon, the gap between our grandparents in the village and us greatly widened. We no more had time for folktales and as we read more stories from the texts, we forgot what we had heard initially."

Today, the extended family concept in Bhutan is more the exception than the rule, and those nights of endless storytelling are a distant memory. "We no more live in a big family and no more like to listen to folktales. Slowly our interest declined and without our grandparents we have forgotten what we have heard before," Ngawang said.

Dorji Penjore, researcher at the Centre for Bhutan Studies, agreed; "Walls of rural Bhutanese houses may have once echoed and re-echoed with folktales narrations, but frequency of the narrations today has become even fainter and lesser."

Many in Bhutan, however, see that the nation’s folklore has a role in revitalizing the kingdom’s traditional mores and values and want to see the folklore tradition revive.

HRH Princess Sonam Choden Wangchuck recognized the seriousness of the situation when she said, "Inevitably the crucial role that the oral tradition has played in transmitting knowledge is likely to decline. There is an apparent danger that the folktales and fables whose deep significance and origins we do not yet fully understand could disappear."

She continued, "The oral tradition is a powerful living medium of communication between one generation and the next. It ensures the survival of undocumented knowledge. In the villages of Bhutan>, folktales are still told and people, mostly children, learn from this living tradition. The art of listening to folktales and retelling them has, in my opinion, been an important tool for the development of native eloquence and articulateness which we find in abundance among ordinary Bhutanese. It also enables people to find moral, philosophical, religious, mythical and romantic meaning to stories."

Bhutanese folklorist Kunzang Choden also expressed hope that the value and transmission of Bhutanese folktales would revive. "Storytelling in the communities in the near future will be usurped by other new forms of media, print, audio and visual," she said, "but I am hopeful Bhutanese will soon realize the importance of their own stories and their value to their own lives and storytelling in the traditional way will be given importance."

Ngawang also wondered whether modern modes of communication are an adequate substitute for the common folktales that have been around for generations. He said, "With the introduction of BBS radio station, people even in the remote areas switched their entertainment to radios. Now it is not surprising to know that almost every household in the village owns a radio. Radio programs entertain them, and nowadays, everywhere, children grow up without listening to a single folktale. But can it substitute a place once occupied by folktales?"

"It is clear that, other than storytelling, people in the rural areas had no forms of entertainment in the past," Ngawang continued. "It was a great pastime for the fun-loving children and tired adults. These are only painful memories now.   I am fortunate to have observed this change in our rural communities, but it is unfortunate that these stories are dying out. Today we have but a shadow of those wonderful tales."