Lhop Erotic

The Lhop are one of the few peoples in Bhutan whose roots in the country appear to go deeper than those of the Buddhist majority. There are only a few thousand of them. They live in a small group of hill villages in Samtse District in the southwest, close to the Indian border, and they have kept a firm sense of themselves as a people apart. Their name comes from the Dzongkha word for south, a label given to them by people further north. Their Nepali-speaking neighbors call them Doya. Three things hold the group together: their language, a long habit of marrying within the community, and a religious life built around the spirits of places and ancestors rather than around monasteries. Their language, Lhokpu, belongs to the Sino-Tibetan family but does not fit neatly beside its neighbors. It is not a Tibetic language like Dzongkha, and linguists still argue over exactly where it belongs in the family. Those looking for its relatives have looked across the border, and Toto, spoken by a small community in West Bengal, is the one most often suggested. Many Lhop also speak Nepali, the common language of the villages around them, and children learn Dzongkha and English at school. Religion here is practical and local. People make offerings to the gods of the forest, the hills and the household, and to their own dead, and ritual specialists lead the more serious ceremonies. Buddhist and Hindu elements have come in through neighbors, but they sit on top of the older practice rather than replacing it.

For a long time the Lhop married only within the group. That is a big part of why they have stayed distinct in a district where other communities have mixed together. Farming used to depend on shifting cultivation, with maize and millet grown in cleared patches on forested slopes. Two things changed that. Bhutan restricted slash-and-burn farming, and roads, schools and clinics reached the area in recent decades. Together they moved households toward permanent fields and cash crops such as cardamom. The traditional dress is the pakhi, a single length of cloth wrapped around the body and fastened at the shoulder. Development programs now treat the Lhop as one of Bhutan's vulnerable communities, and the pressures on them are familiar ones. Young people leave for school and work, more of them marry outside the group, and a small language has to compete with Dzongkha, Nepali and English. The villages are still clearly Lhop, but the next generation will decide how much of that lasts.