Print — brokpa-people-of-merak-and-sakteng — BhutanWiki

The Brokpa are a semi-nomadic yak-herding community of eastern Bhutan, concentrated in the high-altitude villages of Merak and Sakteng in Trashigang dzongkhag. The two gewogs together hold around 5,000 to 6,000 inhabitants, almost all of whom describe themselves as Brokpa or, in the older self-designation, mera-saktengpa, "people of Merak and Sakteng". They are linguistically and culturally distinct from the surrounding Tshangla-speaking Sharchops, although the two communities have long traded across the ridges that separate them.^[1]

The name Brokpa derives from the Tibetan term 'brog pa, meaning a pastoralist or yak-herder of the high pastures. Brokpa oral tradition traces the community's arrival in Bhutan to a fourteenth-century migration from the Tshona region of southern Tibet, led by a religious figure remembered as Lam Jarepa and protected by the territorial deity Aum Jomo. The migration is dated by some accounts to around 1347, although these traditions are not corroborated by external sources and should be read as community memory rather than fixed history.^[2]

Until recently the only access to Merak and Sakteng was a two- to three-day walk from the road head at Phongmey, and Bhutanese government policy kept the area closed to foreign visitors. The two gewogs were opened to limited tourism in September 2010, and a feeder road from Phongmey to Merak was completed in the mid-2010s. Both villages now lie within the Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary, established in 2003 and covering some 740 square kilometres.^[3]

Origins and Migration Tradition

Brokpa origin narratives consistently locate the ancestral homeland in the Tshona (or Tsona) area of the southern Tibetan plateau, immediately north of the Bhutan-Arunachal Pradesh border. According to versions recorded by ethnographers in the 1980s and 1990s, a tyrannical local ruler is said to have provoked his subjects to flight, and a religious figure known as Lam Jarepa led them southward across the high passes into what is now eastern Bhutan. Aum Jomo, identified in some accounts as a yul-lha (territorial deity) and in others as a historical female religious figure, is held to have guided and protected the migrants.^[2]

A separate Brokpa population lives in Tawang and West Kameng districts of Arunachal Pradesh in India, where the 1981 Indian census recorded around 1,855 speakers of a closely related dialect. The two populations share oral traditions about Tshona and exchanged livestock and brides until border closures and the 1962 Sino-Indian War cut the older trade routes.^[1]

Language

The Brokpa language, sometimes referred to in the literature as brokpa-kha or mera-sakteng-kha, is a Tibetic language with around 5,000 speakers in Bhutan as of the 2006 estimates used by Ethnologue. It is not part of the East Bodish group that includes Dzongkha, Bumthangkha and Khengkha, but belongs to the Tibetic (or Central Bodish) branch of Sino-Tibetan that descends from Old Tibetan.^[1]

Linguist Nicolas Tournadre (2014) places Brokpa in the Southern Section of Tibetic and notes that it has not undergone several phonological innovations shared by Dzongkha and the other Bhutanese Tibetic varieties, which is one reason it cannot be classed as a dialect of Dzongkha. George van Driem's Languages of the Greater Himalayan Region survey grouped Brokpa with the small Tibetic enclaves of Lakha and Brokkat in central Bhutan, all of them descended from medieval pastoralist migrations from Tibet. The language has two contrasting tones and preserves a number of archaic vocabulary items.^[1]

Brokpa is not used as a medium of school instruction; children attend Bhutanese government schools in Dzongkha and English, with the result that younger speakers are increasingly bilingual. UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger classifies Brokpa as definitely endangered, in line with most of Bhutan's smaller languages.^[4]

Dress

The most visible Brokpa marker is the distinctive felt hat known as the tsipi cham (or tshipee chaapa), worn by both men and women. The hat is made from black yak felt and has five long, twisted tufts projecting outward, said in local explanation to channel rainwater away from the wearer's face and to provide a soft pad when carrying loads on the head. The five tufts are sometimes interpreted in Buddhist terms as representing the five elements, although this gloss is not universal among Brokpa themselves.^[2]

The rest of the traditional dress is also adapted to the cold high-altitude environment. Men wear a sleeveless red wool jacket called tshokhung over a dark inner robe, with leather and felt outer garments in winter. Women wear a similar jacket layered over a long dress, and both sexes wear leather boots with woollen leggings. Sheep wool, yak wool and yak-hide are the main raw materials.^[2]

Pastoral Economy

The Brokpa economy has historically rested on transhumant herding of yaks and sheep at altitudes of 3,000 to 4,500 metres. Herds are moved between summer pastures in the high meadows above the villages and winter pastures at lower elevations within the gewogs and, in earlier periods, across the border into the Tawang region. The principal cash products are yak butter, churpi (hardened cheese), wool, and live animals; in recent decades dried meat and yak-hair tents have also been sold to tourist operators.^[3]

Cultivation is limited by altitude. Buckwheat, barley and a small amount of potato are grown in the immediate vicinity of the villages. Most grain has historically been obtained through barter with Tshangla-speaking villages at lower elevations, in an arrangement that brought Brokpa pastoral products to the lower valleys in exchange for rice, maize and chillies. The opening of the road and the cash economy have weakened but not entirely displaced this older barter system.^[5]

Religion and Ritual

The Brokpa are Vajrayana Buddhists, with strong traditions of attachment to the Drukpa Kagyu and Nyingma schools and a parallel cult of local mountain deities. Aum Jomo, the female deity associated with the migration tradition, is propitiated in annual rituals at Sakteng. Other named territorial deities are tied to specific peaks and passes within the sanctuary. Mask dances and the Ache Lhamo theatre tradition, performed at festivals in Merak and Sakteng, draw on Tibetan and Bhutanese Buddhist repertoires but include local episodes that are not found elsewhere.^[2]

Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary and Tourism

The Sakteng Wildlife Sanctuary covers most of Merak and Sakteng gewogs and part of Lauri gewog in Samdrup Jongkhar dzongkhag, a total of 740.6 square kilometres. The sanctuary protects red panda, Himalayan black bear, snow leopard and a series of habitats from sub-tropical broadleaf forest up to alpine meadow. Brokpa pastoral activities are permitted within the sanctuary under a co-management arrangement with the Department of Forests and Park Services.^[3]

Merak and Sakteng were opened to foreign tourism in September 2010 under a controlled-entry regime, with visitor numbers limited and routed through licensed Bhutanese tour operators. Trekking is the principal form of tourism; homestays in both villages, supported by the Tarayana Foundation and the Royal Government's rural development programme, have provided supplementary income. The contribution of tourism to household incomes remains modest compared with pastoralism.^[6]

Contemporary Pressures

The Brokpa face a combination of pressures common to small high-altitude pastoral communities. Climate change has shifted the timing of pasture availability and increased the frequency of mid-winter rainfall events damaging to yak herds. Out-migration of younger Brokpa to Thimphu and other towns for education and wage employment has reduced the available labour for herding. Road access from Phongmey, completed in stages in the 2010s, has increased contact with the wider economy but also raised concerns within the community about the loss of distinctive practices and dress among younger Brokpa.^[7]

Government and NGO documentation programmes — including work by the Dzongkha Development Commission and academic researchers based in Trashigang and Thimphu — have begun to record Brokpa oral history, ritual texts and pastoral vocabulary, but no comprehensive grammar or dictionary of Brokpa has yet been published.^[4]

Brokpa People of Merak and Sakteng