HIMALAYA is a biannual, peer-reviewed, open-access journal published by the University of Edinburgh on behalf of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS), formerly known as the Nepal Studies Association (1972-2000).
Expanding Horizons, Deepening Engagement
This editorial reflects on a period of institutional growth and editorial transition at HIMALAYA, the journal of the Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. Amid recent regional upheavals—including the May 2025 escalation between India and Pakistan—the journal reaffirms its commitment to rigorous, inclusive scholarship on the Himalayan region. Strategic developments such as the adoption of the Open Journal Systems (OJS) platform, a publishing partnership with the University of Edinburgh, and expanded print access through IngramSpark have significantly increased the journal’s global reach and accessibility. The editorial welcomes new team members who mark a generational and geographic expansion of HIMALAYA's editorial vision. These include Associate Editor Dr. Shubham Sapkota (University of Colorado Boulder); Reviews Editor Dr. Zezhou Yang (Asia Research Institute, NUS); and in-region Assistant Editors Heidamteu Zeme (IIT Delhi), Gulal Salil (independent artist), and Yatin Batra (University of Delhi). Fatma Matar, a master's student in visual anthropology at UiT The Arctic University of Norway, has also recently joined the team as Assistant Editor. This issue features contributions on ritual performance, visual repatriation, agricultural imaginaries, linguistic justice, and archival critique, exemplifying the journal’s evolving commitment to multimodal, interdisciplinary, and regionally grounded scholarship.
Copyright (c) 2025 Michael Timothy Heneise https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
A Borderland’s Soul: Through the India–China Border and the Hidden Histories of Kalimpong
Copyright (c) 2025 Tanka Subba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Nepal and surrounding regions in India are known for resplendent masked performances. Often ritual in nature, they serve as tools for spiritual belonging, community cohesion, ties of kinship, and artistic expression. Research on Nepal’s culture and performance traditions has been smaller compared to neighboring South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Nepal’s performance traditions are complex, with centuries of history, culture, and religious beliefs attached to them. In Nepal, many of these traditional performances are called Pyakhan or stories/parables. They are deserving of in-depth study, much like their other South Asian counterparts. This paper takes a deep dive into masked dance forms of Nepal, especially the making and use of masks in Bhairab Nach, and Navadurga performance.
Copyright (c) 2025 Deepsikha Chatterjee https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This article explores the complexities of colonial photography, archival ownership, and visual repatriation within the context of Arunachal Pradesh, India, focusing on historic Nyishi photographs from the Pitt Rivers Museum. By reconnecting the families of Nyishi interpreters Bath Heli and Kop Temi with photographs taken by colonial administrators Ursula Graham Bower and Charles Robert Stonor, the study examines the power dynamics embedded in the archival process. Using an autoethnographic approach, the research situates visual repatriation as a medium for restoring Nyishi cultural memory and examining tribal identity. The findings reveal how photographs, once decontextualized in the colonial archive, carry distinct meanings when reintegrated into their communities— challenging colonial narratives locked within museum spaces and enabling cultural resurgence.
Copyright (c) 2025 Menia Taba https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
There are many ways to define Ladakh: geographically (as an area between the Himalayas and the Karakoram), historically (as a kingdom from the 10th century until the Dogra conquest in 1834), or linguistically (as a region sharing a common language—a Tibetan dialect). However, most of these definitions have been put forward by foreigners or officials. Do the inhabitants of these areas feel that they belong to the same community? The author's answer is “no.” He concludes that Shi’as in Kargil and Buddhists in Leh consider themselves to constitute separate communities. The survey draws on sociology, ethnology, and some history, extending back to 1931.
Copyright (c) 2025 Patrick Kaplanian https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Ladakh’s climatic conditions have preserved some of the most impressive monuments in the Himalaya. These temples trace the spread of Buddhism in the Western Himalaya and the development of artistic and architectural styles. However, they are increasingly under threat due to the introduction of modern construction materials and methods, as well as the intensification of climate change induced events. In 1999, Achi Association was formed to conserve temples belonging to the Drikung Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, one of the oldest orders in Ladakh, and one under which many of the earliest temples in the region were built. In 2010, the establishment of Achi Association India (AAI) expanded this to any Buddhist heritage in precarity throughout Ladakh, regardless of sect. With a quarter of a century of experience in the region, the two organizations collectively produced an impressive fountain of documents that chart and record all aspects of conservation work done across nine sites that date from the late 13th century to the 19th century. In this paper I scaffold an interdisciplinary approach to access these archives, which range from architectural surveys to community engagement reports, accentuating that conservation is a dialectic between stakeholders, where decisions made by conservators — shaped by their training and available technology — are interpreted by other stakeholders, namely locals and the clergy, through their own epistemic frameworks. Mapping the entirety of conservation and restoration, this paper covers multiple aspects of the process, including documentation, community engagement, technical procedures, and the ritual ramifications of decisions.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sushan Bhattarai https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Nepal’s Dalits in Transition by David N. Geller and Krishna P. Adhikari
Copyright (c) 2025 Ina Zharkevich https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Conducting fieldwork among middle-class families in Bhaktapur, Nepal in 2018-2019, I found that local parents are concerned with teaching their children the notion of ‘moral measure’. At the same time, a strategy of avoidance, rather than open negotiation, is preferred to maintain harmony and preserve kinship networks. Focusing on the case study of Dor Bahadur and his children Sita and Vishnu around a contested birthday celebration, in these visual works in gouache, acrylics, and oil colors, I explore and analyze the role that parent-child interactions play in the making of moral selves among middle-class people in Nepal. Through layers of colors, I convey the sense of the conflictual processes that the protagonists of this story experience, and the concomitant ‘opacity of minds’ established between their existential perspectives.
Copyright (c) 2025 Paola Tiné https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This essay attempts to foreground the question of native agency in the making of the photographic archive of Charles Alfred Bell, British Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. It seeks to approach a new hermeneutics of British imperial archive-making vis-á-vis Tibet by assessing not only how native agency variously informed the sacerdotal, epistemic and technical content of most of Bell’s photographic archive, but also how such agency was central to its very process of visual production. By examining the roles of Rabden Lepcha, Sonam Wangyal or Palhese and Kartick Chandra Pyne, apropos their contribution to Bell’s visual archive, the essay shows how British imperial knowledge-construction on Tibet deployed native agency, thereafter relegating them (mostly) to archival silence. In the process, the essay demonstrates how these silences were not merely accidental, but fundamental to the process of knowledge-production on Tibet.
Copyright (c) 2025 Parjanya Sen https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Michael T. Heneise, Jeevan R. Sharma https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This contribution is an edited version of a wide-ranging conversation between linguistic anthropologist and past co-editor of HIMALAYA, Mark Turin, and Lava Deo Awasthi, the first Chairperson of Nepal’s Language Commission. In the course of the interview, Turin and Awasthi discuss the Commission’s role and establishment, Awasthi’s appointment to the position of Chairperson, his intellectual training and administrative preparation for the task, and the strategic goals and objectives that he brought to the portfolio. The conversation then moves on to a critical reflection of the challenges and achievements of Awasthi’s term as Chairperson, concluding with his vision for mother tongue instruction and linguistic justice in Nepal.
Copyright (c) 2025 Mark Turin, Lava Deo Awasthi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Upland Agriculture, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation
In the last two decades, different governments in India have made a concerted effort to address the plight of the marginal farmer who owns (or has access to) some private or communal land across the uplands in the northeast of the country. Various governmental schemes and subsidies have been initiated to ensure that other ways of earning a livelihood mitigate falling returns from agriculture and the increasing need for cash among farmers. Upland farmers have evoked both hope and despair from governments that look to transform subsistence-style agricultural practices into revenue-earning endeavours. They have been the source of much political posturing, as the regional political elite, scientists, and industry have taken up their cause. The same farmers have also been subjected to intense policy pressure, persuading them to think differently and pull themselves out of poverty. There is, therefore, an increasing demand for them to prepare for radical changes in their livelihoods and way of thinking. In this article, I draw from fieldwork conducted in Arunachal Pradesh, Assam, and Mizoram to examine how new discourses of entrepreneurship and innovation have become essential to understanding social and economic transformations in the uplands of Northeast India.
Copyright (c) 2025 Sanjay Barbora https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Copyright (c) 2024 Carole McGranahan, Sienna R. Craig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Examining the ‘feminization of agriculture’ in a mixed-farming system in Sindhuli District, Nepal
This paper aims to explore the feminization of agriculture amidst the agrarian transition from cereal to citrus crops in Sindhuli district. Multiple ethnographic field studies in citrus-producing areas have been used to present the conceptual debate and empirical findings on the feminization of agriculture in a mixed-farming system. The paper highlights changing labor arrangements for household labor, exchange labor, and wage labor in agriculture and presents the nature of the agricultural work conducted by men and women. The paper argues that cash crop farming has resulted in a gendered hierarchy in agriculture, with men primarily occupied with skill-based work in high-value citrus crops, while women’s engagement is mainly limited to subsistence farming and menial agricultural tasks. However, some women directly benefit at the household level because of their involvement in citrus production. The study shows that gender-based inequalities in labor use have the power to reinforce and intensify the existing gender roles that render women subordinate. However, women choose their work based on its importance for household food security. The paper portrays four categories of feminization, namely feminization of labor vis-à-vis managerial feminization, feminization of labor categories such as household, exchange, and wage labor, and feminization of particular crop/livestock and subsistence/commercial farming. The study concludes that feminization varies based on the degree of crop marketability.
Copyright (c) 2024 Hritika Rana https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
What do high Himalayan villages feel like as they shift in form and character through patterns of outmigration and the effects of climate change? How do people wrestle with enduring connections to place, through the pain and uncertainty that accompanies social and ecological change? What does it mean to steward a landscape and attend to sacred geography as well as history through these transitions? These questions are explored in this flash ethnography, set in the village of Samdzong, upper Mustang, Nepal.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sienna R Craig https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The Promises and Perils of Highland Infrastructure
In recent years, state-led infrastructure creation in the name of progress and development has occurred across the Himalayan region. It has increased the presence of the state in places formerly regarded as relatively isolated. Despite being aspirational, infrastructure creation projects have uprooted people from their lands, deprived them of their livelihoods, and transformed their identities. This paper focuses on Pakyong Airport in the state of Sikkim, which has provoked huge protests in recent times. Through the study of this mega-infrastructure project, the paper addresses everyday processes associated with rampant change, transformation, and the formation of social memory forged through resistance and struggle in the form of counterpublics. Considering different processes, the paper assesses how Himalayan infrastructure development has a varied impact on the people and politics of the region.
Copyright (c) 2024 Archana Pathak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of Ek Tha Gaon directed by Srishti Lakhera
Copyright (c) 2024 Vidushi Dobhal Naithani https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Review of A Mountain Oasis: Daily Life in a Village in the Yasin Valley, Pakistan by Susan York
Copyright (c) 2024 Fizza Batool https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Vitality and Sustainability of Traditional Music
Dāphā bhajan is a participatory genre of Hindu–Buddhist devotional music, sung by groups of farmers and other Newar singers in the Kathmandu Valley, Nepal. It is deeply integrated with local neighbourhood communities, but owing to recent disasters (the 2015 earthquake, the 2020–2022 Covid-19 pandemic) and ongoing cultural changes, its sustainability is in doubt. In 2022–2023 the authors conducted a survey of selected groups to investigate the performers’ perspectives. In this preliminary report we find that dāphā groups showed resilience in recovering from the recent disasters, the main effect of which was to exacerbate ongoing systemic problems. Chief among these is the difficulty of recruiting and training new members, to which some groups are responding with innovative solutions. But a range of other interconnected issues also emerged. We conclude that although many groups exhibit continuing vitality and an integrated relationship with the local communities in which they are embedded, their dependence on traditional models may be unsustainable without a degree of change.
Copyright (c) 2024 Nutandhar Sharma, Richard Widdess https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Tibetan pastoralists often say that many know how to graze animals (ཟོག་ལུག་འཚོ་བ), but few know how to nurture them (ཟོག་ལུག་སྐྱོང་བ). Skyong (སྐྱོང) means nurturing or attending to something or someone with tenderness. While conducting fieldwork research among Tibetan pastoralists in eastern Tibet, I learned that animals were dying from eating discarded plastic khata (ceremonial scarves) and prayer flags. Even those who nurture animals through winter, when grass was scarce and snowstorms were constant, were not sure what to do to prevent this. This ethnographic experience inspired me to make a documentary film and to experiment with flash ethnography on this topic of the sacred status of khata in relation to its poisonous contemporary materiality. This flash ethnography takes creative license, allowing khata to speak.
Copyright (c) 2024 Huatse Gyal https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Landscape Aesthetics of Remoteness in the Indian Himalayas
This paper examines the pictorial practices of landscape painting in colonial British art and the textual practice of colonial travel writing to examine the landscape aesthetics of remoteness in the Indian Himalayas. It argues that neither the ‘picturesque’ nor the ‘sublime’ genre of colonial landscape paintings can describe the representation of the marginalised geographies of the Indian Himalayas and the colonial impetus to engineer them. By offering a paradigm of the landscape aesthetics of remoteness, this paper demonstrates how remoteness is aesthetically reproduced in the colonial visual imagination, which informs the mapping, engineering and transformation of the Himalayan landscape. It examines the landscape aesthetics in the travelogue and its accompanying illustrations of aquatints in the works of James B. Fraser (1820a, b) and of the lithographs and accompanying text in the work of Thomas Daniell (c.1800) for the North-Western Himalayan region in India. The paper situates these representations of colonial landscape paintings in a broader study of ‘landscape and power’ (Mitchell 1994). It analyses the pictorial and textual practices through the dialectic of the ‘interior’ and the ‘frontier’ that produces the landscape aesthetic of remoteness and provides a new paradigm for studying landscapes and their representation.
Copyright (c) 2025 Bhoomika Joshi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This essay explores works by contemporary artist Sonam Dolma Brauen through two lenses: as the result of ongoing and changing functions of an object, and as part of a broader dialogue about indexical imagery in contemporary art. Sonam Dolma’s family escaped from Tibet to India when she was young, carrying few possessions on their difficult journey through the Himalayas. One of these items, a small metal tsa tsa mold used in Tibetan Buddhist rituals, would later become an instrument of creation in Sonam Dolma’s art practice. Comprised of multiple plaster casts made from the original object, the artworks mark the former presence of the object—they are indexical. I examine two works, My Father’s Death (2010) and Red Carpet (2011), exploring this indexical nature and asking, how might new functions emerge from old forms?
Copyright (c) 2024 Sarah Magnatta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
The culture of migration is so deeply ingrained in the Nepal highlands, that individuals from marginalized households in the western provinces view migration to India as “a rite of passage to adulthood”. The western Himalayan region, due to its close proximity, attracts a significant number of Nepalese migrants during the non-agricultural season, where they engage in informal work opportunities and return to Nepal in the agricultural season. This type of migration is described in existing studies as ãune-jãne, or coming and going, which signifies the temporary and circular nature of the movement. However, over time, migrants have adopted a different approach, with a greater emphasis on choosing temporary migration to Gulf countries while also spending significant time in the western Himalayas, leading to semi-permanent migration as compared to earlier, temporary migration. This semi-permanent migration serves as the central focus of this essay. This photo essay displays the Nepalese migrants who have migrated to the remote regions of Uttarakhand, a state in the western Himalayas of India, and who have been residing in the Garhwal region of Uttarakhand for the past few years. It aims to provide a closer peek into the realm of the everyday practices of these migrant workers, focusing on how they build their living space on agricultural fields, which they refer to as “Dyarā”; cultivate the abandoned fallow lands; and are involved in vegetable cultivation. Further, it also tries to show how their children perceive the space and adapt to it.
Copyright (c) 2024 Garima Bhandari, Anindya Jayanta Mishra https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Traveling is a complicated endeavor. For some, it is as simple as picking up one’s passport and heading to the nearest airport. For others, it is a harrowing experience, one marked by uncertainty. For tourists, traveling represents a temporary detachment from the mundanes of everyday life. For many migrants, it is an incredibly significant decision that can define their very futures. Drawing from a personal encounter at the airport, this flash ethnographic piece hopes to be able to illustrate the dichotomy of traveling i.e. the ease, and pleasure for some, and the uncertainty of refusal for others.
Copyright (c) 2024 Tenzing Wangdak https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
In interviews with leading emergency medicine doctors and developers of a national system of pre-hospital care in Nepal, they allude to the significance of treating trauma patients during “the golden hour”. This flash ethnography highlights the intersubjective meaning making of an outsider ethnographer, whose familiarity with the metaphor comes from photography, and doctors, who use the phrase in its emergency medicine application to describe the brief window of opportunity to intervene after a traumatic injury.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jan Brunson https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This is an ethnographic snapshot of an encounter with a Gaddi shepherd in the hills of Himachal Pradesh. The Gaddis are a semi-nomadic pastoral people who live across the Himalayan belt of Northern India. In this piece, I recount how this lone shepherd, with just a slight gesture and in unspoken words, shows me how a journey can be lived unbounded by time
Copyright (c) 2024 Ishani Dasgupta https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
An anthropologist describes a journey to visit a friend’s mother in Nepal. As she crosses over mountains and valleys with her friends from the village, she considers the meanings of maiti, the maternal home, and what it means to see a mother’s face.
Copyright (c) 2024 Aidan Seale-Feldman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
What does change look, sound, and feel like? After Nepal’s 2015 earthquakes, everything is remade in tin. Walking through this newly reflective landscape, we see how things are transformed in both material and political terms, as post-disaster reconstruction proceeds in tandem with the process of post-conflict federal restructuring. This short piece of flash ethnography takes us beyond the immediate destruction and trauma into the sensory world of the post-earthquake ‘tin state’, offering a view into how people experience the long-term shifts in sensibility that both environmental and social change provoke.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sara Shneiderman https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
This story describes a snapshot of a Tibetan nomadic woman who later became a construction worker after moving to a settlement town. It highlights some of the challenges her family faces as they move away from herding life and embrace a new way of life.
Copyright (c) 2024 Sanggay Tashi https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0
Rain as a Singular Object with Multiple Ontologies among the Gurung in the Nhāson Valley
Rain, a droplet of water that comes from the sky, appears as a singular object with multiple ontologies among Gurung, an indigenous people of Nepal dwelling in the mountain region. This paper offers an ethnographic analysis of the relationships between society and the environment through the names of rains among the Gurung based on the nine months of fieldwork between 2012 and 2018. In the article, Gurung’s nomenclature for rains strongly raises the question of universal and quantitative scaling to nature and natural phenomena, particularly a water droplet from the sky. For the Gurung, names for rain, which are grounded on land and expressed autochthonously, have cultural meanings that play an important role in comprehending the indigenous notion of the environment. However, global climate change is not only affecting the precipitation pattern in the Himalayan region but also uprooting the nomenclature of rain that is rooted in ancestral thick and insightful observation of the environment.
Copyright (c) 2024 Jiban Mani Poudel https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0