X Factor with a twist helps Bhutan fall in love with its culture

THE musician plucked his dragon-headed lute, launching a nervous young woman into a high-pitched, ululating song broadcast live across the remote Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan.

The judges were unsparing. She was out of synch with the music, one said. The other consulted historical scriptures and discovered she had got the lyrics wrong.

Bhutan Star is not just another low-budget knock-off of the X-Factor juggernaut. This wildly popular show, which forces contestants to sing the nation’s fading traditional songs, is Bhutan’s most promising weapon in its fight to save its culture from being overrun by globalisation.

Conservative grandparents, Buddhist monks, rebellious teens and almost everyone else with a TV gathers every Saturday and Sunday to watch contestants belt out classical Buddhist compositions. Jaded youngsters have started humming folk tunes in the street.

Nestled in the high peaks between India and China, the “Land of the Thunder Dragon” long maintained an insular existence, with traditions nearly frozen in amber and no paved roads, phones or postal service until the 1960s.

Then, in 1999, came TV, the internet and what education minister Thakur Powdyel calls “the onslaught of global culture”. The changes to this slow-paced nation of 700,000 were lightning fast.

Nidup Dorji, a popular 37-year-old writer, actor, composer and singer, wondered whether the Bhutanese were ready to embrace their culture afresh but with a modern twist.

He appropriated the format of American Idol, which he had seen on satellite television. He then used Bhutan’s pop genre known as rigsar to lure children into watching the folk music called boedra and the more complex zhungdra – classical, religious songs composed by Buddhist lamas and reminiscent of Chinese opera.

Each week, the contestants perform one rigsar song with a modern band on one side of the stage and one song of either boedra or zhungdra with a traditional band on the other playing the dramnyen lute. The series has the production quality of a junior high talent show and is broadcast on local public access television.

The judges, while far more polite than those on Idol, are brutal by the genteel standards of a country that measures its development by the homegrown calculation of Gross National Happiness.

Though there are no weekly ratings, the show receives 70,000 to 80,000 text votes at five ngultrum (6p) a vote every week, Dorji said. It has sold thousands of cassettes and DVDs, and been praised by the prime minister in parliament for restoring Bhutan’s dying musical heritage.

“It’s the only entertainment we have in Bhutan,” said 16-year-old Gyelwa Kuenzom. “We are learning from it the traditional songs, it’s really enjoyable.”

Nearly all 900 monks in Tsheten Dorji’s monastery watch the show. “Wisdom is given by the words of some songs,” the 29-year-old monk said.

Yet Dorji constantly struggles with the delicate balance of bringing his audience back to its cultural roots while keeping it entertained.

While crimson-robed monks sat beside parents in traditional dress at a recent Bhutan Star concert, at least half the crowd wore western clothes as they listened to a cover version of Cee-Lo’s US pop hit Forget You, playing from the speakers before the show.