Dolma Choden Roder – “Bhutanese culture is more relational than individualistic”

The anthropologist, publisher and editor spoke about new writing from Bhutan and how the country’s independent past is allowing it to look at anthropology without being burdened by the discipline’s colonial baggage

Tell us about Riyang Books, the family-run publishing house that you work with. What did the publishing landscape in Bhutan look like when it was founded in 2012?

My mother, Kunzang Choden, is one of the earliest Bhutanese authors to write books in English. She used to publish in Thailand earlier. It was a good experience but it was very hard to get the books to Thimphu. We had to literally bring the books home in a suitcase. It is, of course, very nice to have a global audience but she wanted to make sure that the books were available to Bhutanese readers. Then she switched to an Indian publisher. She thought that this change would make it easier. But things continued to be incredibly difficult.

To this date, people want to put her novel The Circle of Karma (2005) on their reading lists but it is almost impossible to get copies in Bhutan. The distribution network is terribly complicated even though it has improved a lot. With this sort of experience, my mother was not sure if she wanted to continue to publish outside. She felt that her books were intended mainly for the Bhutanese market. It is quite easy to get a publishing license in Bhutan. In fact, a lot of people self publish. That’s how the idea of Riyang Books came into the picture.

We had a really hard time finding a publisher for our book Ogyen Choling: A Manor in Central Bhutan, which is about my mother’s ancestral home in Bumthang. The origins of this place can be traced back to the 14th century. It is an important site of Bhutanese cultural heritage. It was, historically speaking, an important religious, economic and political centre. The book itself is a weird mix of history, memory, scholarship, articles, personal reflections, and architectural diagrams that map out the whole complex. That was one of our first books. It was hard to explain what it was all about to someone outside, so we published it ourselves.

What does the word “Riyang” mean? How did you end up with this name?

It’s a beautiful name, isn’t it? It was suggested by Karma Phuntsho, an accomplished Bhutanese scholar, who is a close friend of my mother’s. He is a former monk, who completed his Buddhist monastic education in South India, and got a Western doctorate at Oxford after that. With his profound understanding of Bhutanese culture and Buddhism, he came up with a name that is so meaningful, and just perfect. “Riyang” means voices or sounds or melodies from the mountains. We are a publishing house that wants to go beyond publishing what my mother and I write. We want to support creative work that is anchored in our country and our culture. In fact, there is an additional layer of meaning. “Ri” and “yang” also denote a coming together of the masculine and feminine energies. Manjushri and Yangchenma are both Buddhist deities associated with the flowering of wisdom.

Speaking of books by other Bhutanese writers, you published a lovely collection of poetry titled ...Folded Into a Paper Boat back in 2015. You edited it along with Kunzang Choki and Sonam Deki. What gave you the confidence to publish poetry, which many publishers are reluctant to invest in because they worry about the lack of readership?

I am not a poet but I love poetry. The idea of working on this book came from realizing that a lot of Bhutanese people do enjoy reading, writing, sharing and performing poetry. It seemed that an anthology was long overdue even though we were not quite sure if we had the expertise to put it together. We hosted an evening of poetry readings in 2012. The engagement and enthusiasm among the audience was quite encouraging. We asked people if they would send in their poems. We put out a call for entries on social media. It took three years before the anthology was eventually published. A lot of credit for making this happen goes to Kunzang Choki and Sonam Deki, our guest editors. The book has benefited from their wide reading, their discerning ear for poetry, and their knowledge of the craft.

What were your selection criteria? What were the recurring themes in the submissions?

(laughs) We were looking for good poems. A good poem was one that all three of us agreed was a good poem. A lot of people sent us poems about love, and poems about their mothers. Of course, we could not include all of them. We read all the poems on our own first, and then as a team of editors. It was not easy at all! We discussed each submission before we selected the final set of poems that made the cut. The anthology has poems touching on various subjects and emotions. It has poems about love, history, legends, families, rain, flowers, stray dogs, and so many other aspects of Bhutanese life. Many of the poets were gracious enough to welcome the feedback that we gave them and sent in revised work.

I look back at the whole project with a fair amount of satisfaction. It gave a platform to writers from diverse backgrounds. We had poems by college students, retired professionals, teachers, filmmakers, doctors and engineers. They dipped into their life experiences, and created some beautiful work. They wrote happy, sad, funny, honest and powerful poems.

Do you plan to publish more anthologies in the near future?

We are in the middle of putting together a collection of short stories by Bhutanese writers. This time, it’s a different process. Instead of using an open call for entries to invite submissions, we are working closely with a group of writers that I am already familiar with. We have been writing stories, and reading each other’s work. I am proud of what we have so far. It will give people a really good picture of what Bhutan is like; what it is all about.

Riyang Books had a significant presence at the recent Drukyul’s Literature and Arts Festival in Thimphu. Many of the books on display were targeted at children, and had subjects and characters set in Bhutan. How did you venture into children’s books?

That’s right! Lately, there have been a lot of children’s books because that’s an area that my mother is very passionate about. People often want to publish children’s books because they are cheaper and they sell easier but she feels strongly that this is not how it should be done. She wants to have really nice children’s books with beautiful illustrations that are well printed, and with stories that Bhutanese children would be excited to read.

While studying in the United States, did you also get some training in publishing?

No, I was in a graduate programme at Arizona State University in Tempe. I pursued a PhD in Socio-Cultural Anthropology. As part of our education, they did give us a lot of professional training in academic writing but not really in publishing outside academia.

The world of academic publishing in the US is highly competitive, even cut-throat, and so focused on securing tenure. Coming from Bhutan, how did you cope with that?

I am not a good anthropologist, if you go by the number of research publications as a yardstick. I am not very good at getting them out one after another. Honestly, my main interest lies in teaching, and I have contributed a few chapters to books on subjects like youth aspirations in higher education, and the changing nature of marriage as an institution.

How did you get interested in researching material culture, gender and education?

My mother’s family has a museum in Ogyen Choling, so material culture was always an area of interest. I wanted to learn how we could do a better job because they ask for my advice at times. As a graduate student, I ended up working mostly with archaeological collections in Arizona. I felt important because I had the keys to a building with six floors of boxes of shards. It was uninteresting for people who were not into research themselves. In fact, the interest in material culture is what led me to graduate school in the first place.

Education became an area of interest because I felt that it is one of those experiences that most Bhutanese people are engaged in because of how significantly it shapes their lives. Changes in the education system often go unexamined because it is seen largely as a benign presence. Education has led to huge cultural shifts in Bhutan. My mother belongs to the first generation that went to school. My grandparents didn’t go to school at all, and my mother went all the way to India. She studied at schools in both Darjeeling and Kurseong.

I have been teaching at the Royal Thimphu College for about 11-12 years. The interest in gender is inevitable if you are a woman in academia. It is one of those cross-cutting themes. Also, for my PhD dissertation, I studied the experience of women in higher education.

That was my entry point but gender shapes educational experiences even at the school level. There is new research on how haircuts are enforced for boys in Bhutanese schools, and also on how individuals who do not conform to the gender binary or to heterosexuality are bullied.

Anthropology as a discipline has its origins in colonialism, with experts being sent out to study native populations and help colonial masters use that knowledge to oppress. Given this history, how do you try to do anthropological work in non-extractive ways?

That’s an interesting question! Bhutan wasn’t actively colonized though we had complex relationships with the British in India. We were still not incorporated into the British empire or studied and categorized in the way that other populations were. We escaped that. Anthropology is a relatively young discipline in Bhutan, and that makes it possible for us to make it what we want it to be. My college, which is a private college, has the only anthropology department in the country. Our department has faculty members who have trained in Australia, the US, Europe and India. Since we are a young department, we can kind of pull from wherever and whatever we find interesting, compelling and useful. We like to emulate best practices but also reflect on our own educational experiences and what we found missing. It is exciting to be involved in shaping what anthropology looks like in Bhutan.

We have a hard time getting students. Anthropology is one of the least popular subjects. But once students are in, they love talking about tradition and culture, globalization and change, all of which is very much part of the experience of Bhutanese people. Our students also take up a final year research project that is fascinating. Some students are really ambitious and they want to do a big theoretical project but some just want to document a festival in their village. It gets them thinking about knowledge production and meaning making.

Every year, the college has a symposium where the three best projects are presented. This year, the best projects were around medicine, disciplinary practices in school, and folklore.

A lot of writing on Bhutan comes from explorers and diplomats. Do you thinking that anthropology has a special role in training Bhutanese people to write about Bhutan?

I think so. Even if they do not end up becoming anthropologists, even if they end up running a company or working in one, I hope they carry with them the empathetic stance that anthropology teaches. It may not be an intellectual skill but it is a skill for how to live.

In the West, critical thinking is a large part of training in anthropology. In the Bhutanese context, what kind of space is available for critical thinking in a monarchy?

We have a constitutional monarchy, so I think there is space for critical thinking. Respect is very important in our culture. Some of the traditional structures that may not be respected outside of Bhutan are taken very seriously in our country. At the same time, there is quite a lot of room for innovation. We are trying out things that are different from the rest of the world; perhaps it’s not recognized as much because of the pace or the volume. Again, the kind of critical thinking that we do in Bhutan may not be seen as critical enough because it is not the loud, opinionated, argumentative kind that as one sees in Western academia.

Would you say that one loses out on training in compassion when there is an excessive focus in learning how to critique? With Buddhism as the state religion, and the concept of Gross National Happiness, compassion is highly valued in Bhutan, isn’t it?

Yes, definitely! When we have debates in Bhutan, we don’t think only about the issues and the arguments; we also think about the other people who are involved. Maybe this isn’t how debates run in the West. You see, we are a small country with a close-knit population. Our culture is certainly more relational than individualistic. To be able to think about your community, and your responsibility to each other, is also a form of intelligence that needs to be valued just as much as what we call critical thinking.

Chintan Girish Modi is a freelance writer, journalist and book reviewer.