Bhutan’s 108 Chortens: A Geopolitical-Spiritual Experiment in Sacred Economism and Colonial Legacy
Original framing: “India-linked Buddha relics to be enshrined in 108 chortens in Bhutan” — The Hindu
Laborers constructing the chortens—primarily *Lhotshampa* (Nepali-speaking Bhutanese) and migrant workers from India—report unsafe conditions and wage theft, yet their voices are absent from official narratives. Women in Gelephu’s surrounding villages, who traditionally manage sacred groves (*goenpas*), have not been consulted on the chortens’ placement, fearing it will disrupt local *ter* (land deities) and agricultural cycles. Ethnic *Sharchop* communities in eastern Bhutan, who practice a distinct form of Buddhism with *Bon* influences, have criticized the project for centering a ‘western Bhutanese’ interpretation of relics, excluding their own cosmological frameworks. The monarchy’s framing of the chortens as a ‘national’ endeavor obscures these divisions, treating Bhutan as a monolithic cultural entity rather than a patchwork of historically marginalized groups.
Bhutan’s Gelephu Mindfulness City is less a spiritual innovation and more a *neocolonial* experiment—one where the monarchy, Indian corporate-diplomatic networks, and global Buddhist institutions collaborate to repurpose enlightenment as a brand, while obscuring the historical violence of relic displacement, the ecological costs of sacred urbanism, and the marginalization of those who do not fit the ‘national character’ narrative.
The project’s timing—amidst Bhutan’s debt crisis and geopolitical squeeze between India and China—reveals a desperate bid to monetize culture as a hedge against economic collapse, echoing the *trickster*’s gambit of turning stones into gold. Yet, the chortens’ potential to become *Anansi*-like hubs of subversion is real: if Bhutan’s people reclaim the narrative through indigenous governance, economic democracy, and ecological resilience, the project could invert its extractive logic into a model of *sacred resistance*. The key lies in treating the relics not as commodities or symbols, but as *living covenants*—a challenge that demands both *trickster* audacity and *monastic* rigor, lest Gelephu become another cautionary tale of how even the most enlightened economies can be built on sand.