A Story of Love and Jealousy
Primarily a dance to entertain, the Pholay Molay Cham — the Dance of Noblemen and Charming Ladies — is based on Indian myth, portraying the love and jealousy that exist between couples no matter their social standing. All human beings, from king to beggar, guru to disciple, must contend with the power of emotion. The dance shows that love can bring genuine happiness to the heart, but that it can just as easily give rise to jealousy among couples, friends, and neighbours — and that once the mind is tainted by jealousy, one loses the ability to see good in others, deepening the delusion of the senses further still.
Two noblemen play the characters of King Norzang and his father; two women play their queens. One of the queens is a young and beautiful lady named Yidthrokma, daughter of the Driza spirit. According to the story, a hunter's son encountered this charming lady while hunting in a dense forest, and offered her to his king as a mark of respect.
The Story: A King's Downfall and Redemption
Yidthrokma and King Norzang fell in love with each other the moment they met. The King already had five hundred queens, yet lost control over his own desire and attachment, taking the young lady as his newest queen and devoting all his time to her — much to the fury of the queens who had come before her.
One day, Hari, the court priest, predicted the coming of war, describing a dream in which enemies would soon invade the kingdom. On the strength of this prophecy, the King's father sent his son off to war with an army, to pre-emptively strike before the enemy could properly prepare. But the priest's prediction was false — a ploy born of jealousy, engineered by the other queens, who had persuaded the court priest to invent the prophecy specifically to lure the King away and leave Yidthrokma unprotected. As a token of remembrance before he left, King Norzang gave her his ring and his white turban.
Norzang returned from the war victorious — but suspecting, wrongly, that Yidthrokma had been unfaithful in his absence, he cut off her nose in a fit of jealous rage. A physician later helped her recover from the disfigurement. The lengthy dance demonstrates the passions bound up with love — attachment, infighting, jealousy — and their inevitably disastrous consequences, urging that negative motivations be abandoned in favour of cultivating faithfulness to one another, both within the home and across the wider community.
Origins and Costume
The origins and introduction of the Pholay Molay Cham to Bhutan are unknown. It may have been performed for more than a century, possibly developed by a Bhutanese artist adapting an oral story rooted in Indian myth into dance form. The costumes worn for the performance closely resemble ordinary Bhutanese formal dress worn for special occasions, presenting the central couple as royal and from a wealthy, noble family — a deliberately understated visual choice, given the outsized emotional drama the story itself contains.
Where to See the Pholay Molay Cham
The dance appears at festivals across Bhutan, including as part of both the Thimphu Tshechu and Jambay Lhakhang Drup programmes. The Kelcham, the brief farewell dance commemorating King Norzang's own departure to battle, is always performed in the middle of this longer sequence.
