Monpas struggle to revive their long-lost tradition

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Monpas struggle to revive their long-lost tradition

Lhakpa Quendren Trongsa—Sixty-seven-year-old Nakari from Jangbi, Trongsa, is the last person in the Mon community to wear the ancestral pagay, a symbol of Monpa culture that faded in the 1960s in favour of the gho and kira. Nakari remembers wearing a secondhand gho for the first time at age 10, after his mother, a single parent, traded 10 dre (1.5 kg) of white amaranthus at Langthel. “Traders from Bumthang used to bring washed, stitched used cl…