Academic Activities
Kathmandu University students learning about integrating research methods, design, and art studio courses
Kathmandu University first-year students from the Master of Fine Arts programme visited the South Asia Institute, Kathmandu Branch Office, on 22 April 2026. The visit was part of an interdisciplinary project integrating research methods, design, and art studio courses. During the visit, the students explored the institute’s library and learned about the ongoing projects and research initiatives in Nepal. As part of their project work, the students are preparing to organize an exhibition related to Bungadhyo. In this context, Monalisa Maharjan also conducted a session on the “People and Places: associated with the Bungadhyo Chariot Procession”.
Inking an Identity: The Stories Behind Tharu Tattoo Motifs
Ways of Seeing: Revising Colonial Perceptions of the Himalaya
by Amish Raj Mulmi
In his colonial conceit, British India’s governor-general Lord Curzon defined the Himalaya as ‘the most formidable natural frontier in the world’, allowing imperialism to imagine the world’s highest – and the youngest – mountain range as a barrier between South Asia and the rest of the continent. As colonial explorers 'discovered' the Himalaya for the rest of the world and practised an orientalism that persists to the modern day, nation-states in the Himalaya continue to borrow from such frameworks despite the challenges of climate change and governance today.
In this talk, writer Amish Raj Mulmi laid out a case against such colonial ways of seeing the Himalaya, and argued the Himalaya has always been a mobile and interconnected space where people, cultures, and gods have intermingled through history, borrowing from archaeology, religion and the histories of trade and migration.
The talk was organised by The South Asia Institute, Kathmandu Branch Office, at Alliance Française, Pulchowk, Lalitpur.
Tibetan Archives From Mustang
Reconstructing the Lives of "People without History"
by Prof. Dr. Charles Ramble
Communist propaganda publications from the 1960s contain photographs of celebrating Tibetans standing around bonfires of burning legal and administrative documents. While such documents may have been symbols of social and economic oppression, they were also a window onto the daily lives and hardships of ordinary villagers, windows that were effectively closed for ever by these acts of immolation. More recently, the immense value of such documents for our understanding of the social history of Tibetan-speaking communities has been demonstrated by the discovery of archival collections in Himalayan areas adjacent to the Tibet Autonomous Region of China, and in particular Nepal’s Mustang district. These collections, which are the property of temples, private households or village communities, include a wide variety of documents such as wills, contracts, legal cases and even entire law codes. The difficulties of finding and deciphering such documents, which date mainly from the nineteenth century, are abundantly recompensed by the fascinating picture they offer of the lives of “people without history”.
Prof. Dr. Charles Ramble is directeur d'études in the History and Philology Section of the École Pratique des Hautes Études, PSL University, Paris, and director of the Tibetan Studies research team of the Centre for Research on East Asian Civilisations (CRCAO).