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Polyandry — the practice of a woman taking two or more husbands simultaneously — was, until recent decades, a recognised social institution among certain highland communities of northern and central Bhutan. The form practised was almost exclusively fraternal polyandry, also called adelphic polyandry, in which the co-husbands are brothers who share a single wife and maintain a single household. The arrangement was most prevalent among yak-herding communities in remote high-altitude areas, particularly the Layap of Gasa District in northwestern Bhutan and the Brokpa of Merak and Sakteng in Trashigang District. In 1914, polyandry was reportedly described as the prevailing domestic custom in certain highland areas of Bhutan. Today the practice is rare, though not entirely absent in the most remote communities.

Practical Rationale

Fraternal polyandry in the Bhutanese highlands arose from a specific constellation of ecological and economic pressures rather than from ideological preference. The relevant factors included:

Land scarcity and indivisibility: In highland environments where arable and grazing land is extremely limited and fragmented into small parcels, dividing a family's holdings equally among multiple male heirs would render each portion too small to sustain a household. Fraternal polyandry kept the family estate intact across a generation.
Labour continuity: With one husband away on long seasonal migrations with the yak herds at high pastures, the presence of the other husband or husbands in the home village ensured that domestic agriculture and household management were maintained without interruption.
Economic solidarity: Brothers who might otherwise compete for limited resources were instead bound together into a single productive unit, sharing income from yak products, barter trade, and (in later years) cash employment.

The eldest brother typically assumed the primary household authority, though all brothers were understood as equal partners in the marriage. Children called all the brothers "father," and paternity was not formally attributed to any individual husband.

Social Context

Within Bhutanese highland society, fraternal polyandry was not a mark of low status but an accepted family strategy. It coexisted with monogamy and polygyny in the same communities, with the form of marriage selected according to family circumstances and resources. The custom was reinforced by the matrilineal inheritance practices common in parts of Bhutan — see matrilineal inheritance — which gave women considerable household authority and reduced the social vulnerability of women in polyandrous arrangements. A woman in a polyandrous union retained access to the family's property and social network regardless of which brother was physically present.

Related practices were also found among Tibetan and other Himalayan communities across a broad geographic arc extending from Ladakh through Nepal to eastern Tibet, suggesting that fraternal polyandry was a regional adaptation to similar ecological pressures rather than a cultural peculiarity of Bhutan alone.

Decline

Fraternal polyandry has declined sharply since the 1990s and is today rare even in the communities where it was formerly most common. Several factors have driven this change:

Legalisation of cordyceps collection (2003): The opening of cordyceps (yartsa gunbu) collection to all highland residents introduced cash incomes to communities that had previously operated largely on barter. Households could now generate significant individual income independently, reducing the economic imperative for fraternal co-habitation.
Tourism and homestays: The growth of highland tourism created additional income streams for individual families, further loosening the economic logic of polyandrous arrangements.
Education and cultural exposure: Expanded access to schooling, media, and contact with lowland Bhutanese society exposed younger highland people to monogamous marriage norms and created social incentives to conform to them.
Legal framework: The Marriage Act and subsequent legislation formalised monogamous marriage as the legal norm, making polyandrous arrangements legally ambiguous even if not explicitly prohibited.

Daily Bhutan reporting on the Layap community found that even among older residents, polyandrous marriages have largely given way to monogamous unions, and younger Layap women typically seek single-husband marriages. The practice nonetheless remains a documented part of Bhutanese social history that distinguishes highland communities from lowland Bhutanese and from most of South Asia.

Polyandry in Bhutan

Practical Rationale

Social Context

Decline

References