Vol. 45 N.º 1 (2026)

This issue of HIMALAYA asks whose work is visible and who is treated as a burden, a question the editorial finds sharpened by the year's youth protests in India, Bangladesh and Nepal and pursues across a century of Himalayan labour. Ambika Rai and Bibhusha Rai report on the Bāuko Dhurī Chhaina (Father Has No Roof Over His Head) exhibition in Kalimpong, which returned photographs of the porters, cooks, interpreters and sardars of the early Everest expeditions from the Royal Geographical Society's archives to the region where those men were recruited. Prince Tomar follows road building in Ladakh through the hands that cut and maintain the border roads, proposing "eventfulness" as a way of reading routines that are at once mundane and acts of border-making, with two field poems as part of the method. Geoff Childs, Sienna R. Craig and colleagues work through three decades of Nepali census data from Tsum-Nubri, Manang, Mustang and Dolpo to ask what population churn does to a valley's ethnic and linguistic make-up when its young people leave and others arrive; Anna Szymoszyn, drawing on nearly twenty years of ethnography "from the inside," traces the transcultural identities of youth from Mustang and Dolpo educated far from home. Two contributions stand apart: Seyiechonu Kera's photo essay documents the women's pottery tradition of Khuzama village among the Angami Nagas, learned from one of its last practitioners, and Tenzin Nyima Bhutia and Pawan Rai read Kalimpong's Mary Mother of God Church, so like a monastery that Buddhist visitors circumambulate it, as contact zone and sacred space. Five book reviews close the issue, among them Prayash Gupta's review of Michael Hutt's translation of Buddhisagar's Karnali Blues, with responses from translator and author, alongside reviews of Radhika Gupta's Freedom in Captivity, The Routledge International Handbook of Himalayan Environments, Development and Wellbeing, Seika Sato's Women in 'New Nepal' and Mahesh Sharma's The Realm of Faith.

The cover reproduces Tenzin Nyima Bhutia's photograph of a mural by the late Michael Shen in Mary Mother of God Church, Kalimpong: Mary seated on a lotus, with St Peter's Basilica and the Kalimpong church below her.