Bhutan’s Bizarre “Night Hunting” Is A Dark Custom

Rural version of urban dating leads to uncontrolled bastardy.

In many Eastern areas of Bhutan; “Night Hunting” is a dating or courtship tradition. We can safely say it is a rural version of urban dating.

For these hard-working classes of Bhutan, where the whole of the day time is passed on taking care of farmlands, a time-consuming date is more of a luxury. Thus couples meet in the darkness of night.

During the day, the couple would just meet to have a quick chat about night-time, where they often talk about how the girl would facilitate the boy’s entry into her house.

Let’s find more about the Bomena, the Night Hunting tradition in Bhutan.

The Word Bomena And The Misconceptions

Bomena is a traditional culture of night-time romance and courtship. The night hunting part that it is often translated to is not Night Hunting which is weird because the word doesn’t mean anything close to that.

The best rendering of the original word Bomena could be or should be Prowling for girls — the word is probably translated in Night Hunting because of the nature of how and what takes place during it.

Tradition Of Young Men Roaming The Streets In Search Of A Partner

Young men in Eastern parts of Bhutan would sneak out of their homes at night in search of girls to spend a night with.

This prowling is either solo or in the form of groups. Solo prowling is often fixed, and an individual often knows where he has to go, more like a fixed date.

However, men who don’t have a girl opt for different ways to sneak into a girl’s place by climbing up the walls and through the window.

There is a girl in everyone’s mind they want to go and spend the night with, so what begins as a group disperses gradually as men among them find their partners.

Traditional Buildings Make It Easier To Sneak In

Village and outback areas of Bhutan traditionally have two-story buildings, which in some way make things a little harder for these night-time lovers.

However, the wooden windows with easy-to-open wooden latches make things much easier. Some other things like the wooden doors, which are and uniform architectural design of the Bhutanese house, are often of help.

The age-old traditional doors and windows are often easy to undo. Why? Because, over time, people have devised many tools and techniques to undo them with ease.

But infiltrating the girl’s house is one thing the main part is what comes next, where a boy can easily be rejected by a girl he is perusing — especially for the first timers where a lot of persuasions is needed in order to convince the girl for a night.

Night Hunting Can Go Wrong In Many Ways

The practice is kind of dramatic: the nature of practice and the setting contributes, as it takes place when it is pitch dark outside.

The traditional way families sleep in these parts of Bhutan is all sleep in one large room, often a part of a kitchen.

This makes things worse for the prowlers who are planning to sneak into a girl’s house.

The prowler must know very well where the girl sleeps in order to find the right bed; otherwise, things tend to get messy really quickly.

Every home in these small towns and villages is full of stories about where things went wrong.

Some stories are where prowlers who got into the wrong bed, like the girl’s grandma or another elderly woman in the house; these kinds of incidents often provide a good laugh for everyone.

However, in some other stories, things haven’t been so gentle.

There are many ways prowling can go wrong: in some cases, the intruder’s wrong-footing might wake up the whole of the family.

This is where the intruder is either thrown out of the same window where he came from or chased away with splashes of hot water.

Furthermore, it depends on the parents; if they are strict, they would often chase the guy and even threaten him in many ways.

While on the other hand, the more liberal ones are often fine with it, especially if they know the intruder is the same guy they are going to marry their daughter to.

Boys Are Threatened With Wed-Lock

Boys involved in Night Hunting try to complete the task at hand and make a quick exit, especially if he knows the girl’s parents are home; if they are not, then it is an entirely different story.

Boys do make a quick exit because of another tradition or custom that requires the boy to marry the girl if he is found in the morning by the girl’s parents.

This is why both the boy and the girl make sure things are done quickly and long before the sun comes out again.

In every small village or town, there are many couples that are in existence just because of Night Hunting or, as Bhutanese call it, Bomena.

Bomena Is A Dying Culture And Tradition

The culture of Bomena is slowly fading away from the societies around Bhutan, and one of the most obvious reasons for that is the locks are far more upgraded — locks for windows and doors.

Jokes aside, the main change has come from modern education.

The new generation of Bhutanese is well literate and knows much about the western culture of dating, which is deemed a much more civilized way of approaching a girl or a boy.

These young Bhutanese are no longer keen on continuing the practice of Bomena, Night Hunting.

Another reason to avoid the practice of Bomena is that most young Bhutanese believe Bomena is tantamount to sexual harassment and it is something that leads to rape.

Therefore many laws have been devised to discourage the practice of Bomena; one of the legal ways to control Bomena is the new paternity law that has been devised.

Law states that the man involved in enforced sex and pregnancy will pay 20% of his income every month until the child is of 18 years.

Another problem or the downside with the culture of Bomena is rampant bastardy.

The country has seen exponential growth in children who are born because of the practice of Bomena, and this is not good for a society that heavily relies on the family system.

Final Words:

Bomena might have been acceptable for the people who were living long before us, but in this day and age, this kind of practice is nothing less than sexual harassment.

Another problem is we live in a world where things have changed a lot more than in our past.

Who knows, in the earlier times, the exact practice of night hunting was something else, and the one we see today is just a modified version of it? Well, no one.

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