The Annual Kathmandu Conference on Nepal and the Himalaya – Kathmandu, Nepal
‘Poetry comes nearer to vital truth than history.’ (Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nature (1836)). Engineer Saab!/ For the earthquake of the heart / Poets and artists are what you need! (Bimal Nibha, 2012) In their widely-cited analysis of post-disaster politics, Pelling and Dill (2010) identify three discursive moments in a typical aftermath. The first moment focuses …
The Nepali Poetry of the 2015 Earthquakes and their Aftermath Read More »
Wayne Johnston is engaged in explorations of what it means to return, the role of specific sites in the experience of memory, and the ways in which past and present experience can inform each other. These explorations lead him on a personal journey of return to Kathmandu for the first time since 2007. The results …
There is no authentic data on Nepalese migration to Canada, but a significant number of people started to immigrate to Canada as permanent residence in early 1990s. The young Nepalese immigrants living in the Greater Toronto Area (GTA), learned civic education and civic behaviours during their high school, i.e. Grade 9 to Grade 12. Although …
Starting in 2008, Bhutanese-Nepali refugee resettlement began to the United States, with approximately 60,000 individuals having moved to American cities since that time. The question of how to maintain Nepali and/or Bhutanese identity is at the forefront of dialogue by the majority of Bhutanese-Nepali refugee families, whose identities are complex, counterintuitive, and based in part …
Nepal’s first university—Tribhuvan University (TU)—was established only in 1959, although there was a serious effort to set up a university a decade earlier, in 1949, during the reign of the last Rana Prime Minister Mohan Shamsher. The earlier effort did not realize a university: it was aborted after an exercise of a year or so, …
Power Play: An Intricate Story of the Founding of Nepal’s First University Read More »
The Japan-Nepal Society Collection, now owned by the Institute for Advanced Studies on Asia, the University of Tokyo, includes hundreds of books, periodicals and brochures obtained in Nepal between 1960 and 1965 by Mr. Tatsu Kambara, who was then affiliated with Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs. This sub-collection includes various brochures, both in Nepali and …
The Dibya Upadesh, purported to be Prithvi Narayan Shah’s final instructions to his successors before his death in 1775 CE, is perhaps the most popular, enduring, and contested political treatise in modern Nepali history. Even though the story behind the re/discovery of Dibya Upadesh remains disputed in some circles, it will be fair to say …
Dibya Upadesh and the Making of a Nationalist Gospel Read More »
This thesis consists in the historical and critical analysis of the process of construction of Nepalese contemporary art and its different styles over the last centuries. Departing from the hypothesis that it must be understood around the performative parameters of its traditional culture, where the piece of art is valued primarily as a guide to …
Contemporary Art of Nepal, Picturing a Nation, Performing an Identity Read More »
In India Aadhaar Card- a 12 point digital number (biometric identification system) has become subject to controversy and partially welcomed and criticism from general public. A normal public poll suggests very significant percentage supporting the scheme of running government in order to justify a reasonable restriction in name of larger country security, law and order …
In November 2014, three Public Interest Litigation (PIL) petitions attacking the ‘Gadhimai Mela’ (a five-yearly mass animal sacrifice offered at Gadhimai temple in Bariyarpur, province n. 2) were filed at the Nepal Supreme Court. In a 52-page verdict published in August 2016 that dealt with all three petitions together, the Supreme Court went beyond the …
Deviation or Devotion? A Supreme Court Verdict on Animal Sacrifice in Nepal Read More »