Activities

Series 1: Decolonization

Series 2: Erasure

Series 2

Erasure (2022–2023)

Chaired by Dr. Stefanie Lotter

In collaboration with Dr. Uma Pradhan (University College London and the Nepal Conversations podcast)

Lecture: Monday, November 27, 2023

Narratives of Ageing, Narratives of Nation-Building: Ralpha and the Legacy of Dissident Poetry in Nepal

Dr. Mallika Shakya

12:00pm UK / 13:00 Germany / 17:30 India / 17:45 Nepal

How do revolutions age alongside humans and nations? Can we read its ageing and memorialising of popular poetry as a project on heritage? This lecture delves into the literary successions embraced by some of the associated poets after the disbanding of Ralpha, a radical collective of poets and musicians that spearheaded poetic and performative protest against the Panchayati dictatorship in the 1960s and 1970s. The subversive body of Ralpha songs continues to resonate in the memories of many Nepalis. A select few of these songs have spontaneously resurfaced and been cited during more recent uprisings in Nepal, particularly those advocating for cultural pluralism and social justice.

While Ralpha songs continue to incite dissent among the new generations of Nepalis today, some of the poets originally associated with the movement have chosen to distance themselves from populist protests, opting instead to poetically pen the aspirations that once fuelled their activism. They now reflect on how those aspirations have been overlooked or intentionally forgotten in contemporary times. I read recent anthologies penned by one of the Ralpha poets, Manjul, to contemplate on the multifaceted and enduring dimensions of dissident poetry’s heritage in Nepal. This lecture situates this body of work within the ongoing anthropological discussions surrounding the epistemologies of writing culture. It seeks to build on the evocative power of poetry to stir conceptual conversations about nationalism, belonging and the passage of time.

Dr. Mallika Shakya is a Senior Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at South Asian University. Her work is interested in the social embedding of industrialization in capital cities and border towns and the poetic imagination of nation and border in South Asia. Her writing has been published in leading academic journals, and her monograph “Death of an Industry: The Cultural Politics of Garment Manufacturing during the Maoist Revolution in Nepal” was published by Cambridge University Press in 2018. Dr. Shakya also serves on the editorial committees of three journals: Dialectical Anthropology, the European Bulletin of Himalayan Research (EBHR) and Society and Culture in South Asia (SCSA).

Lecture: Monday, October 16, 2023

Seduction of the old city of Srinagar: An enquiry into competing narratives of belonging

Dr. Arshi Javaid

11:00 UK/12:00 Germany / 15:30 India / 15:45 Nepal / online

The old city of Srinagar is witnessing massive political and social transformations, influenced by both the state and private sector. The heightened change threatens the fragile architecture, infrastructure, ownership, demographic composition and lived heritage of the city. Like other cities, the old city of Srinagar is not only a spatially bounded geographical cluster but also a cluster of social and political networks of varying intensity.

The city's challenges are manifold, motivated mainly by the top-down political designs and an enforced developmental perspective to remodelling the city. The restructuring led to significant economic and social changes. Some of them are the advent of deregulation, a massive crackdown by the state, and the crisis of social contracts, leaving many social groups on their own. Hence, the phenomenon garners social visibility and produces competing strands of belonging. This talk will lay out the varied narratives of belonging and the specific politics attached to each. I will further interrogate what the differing sets of belonging mean to the city.

Dr. Arshi Javaid is an Einstein Junior Scholar at Humboldt Universität zu Berlin. Her current research project focuses on creating a memory archive of the old city of Srinagar in the Kashmir Valley. Her previous work has looked at experiences of “everydayness” of Kashmiri Muslims and Kashmiri Pandits before 1989, while her PhD examined civic and ethnic dimensions of Kashmiri nationalism. Dr. Javaid’s broader research interests include gender, violence and conflict in South Asia, and conflict and memory.

Lecture: Monday, June 19, 2023

Fabrication and Fragmentation: Nepal’s Memory Palace

Prof. Bryony Whitmarsh

1pm UK (2pm Germany; 5:30pm India; 5:45pm Nepal; 8am Eastern Standard Time - Toronto) / online

Opened to much fanfare after the political transition that ended Nepal’s 239 yr-old Shah monarchy in 2008, the Narayanhiti Palace Museum stands in the centre of Kathmandu, Nepal as a site that is both present and disempowered.  Whilst a desire to protect and preserve are understood as fundamental tenets of heritage practice, I argue that the intention behind those who authorised the museumization of the palace was to rather to fix a particular way of remembering (and forgetting) Nepal’s royal past, a process that involved both fabrication and destruction. As the initial moment of the transition from monarchy to republic recedes further into the past, I explore the processes that consigned the palace to the past. I argue that the creation of narratives of loss aimed to create cohesion through the reimagination of collective memory and explore deliberate acts of destruction and reconstruction that have created the conditions for the palace to become a site of investigation for the Nepali nation and that facilitate the transformation of this heritage site into a tourist attraction. Join me as I explore the material practices that take place behind-the-scenes at the Palace Museum.

Bryony Whitmarsh is a Professor of Heritage and Museum Studies within the Department of Archaeology at the University of Southampton and joined the Higher Education sector following a career in museums, bringing with her a wide range of experience including curation, learning, museum outreach and interpretation. As Co-Chair of the University of Portsmouth’s Heritage Hub, she played a key role in building sustainable partnerships and enabling community heritage work. Currently working as Associate Dean International for the Faculty of Arts and Humanities my teaching focused on the historiography of architecture and interior design (with a particular emphasis on a global history of architecture), material culture and museology. Her PhD at the School of Oriental and African Studies (University of London) offers an account of the creation of a heritage site, based on ethnographic fieldwork at the Narayanhiti Palace Museum in Kathmandu, Nepal.

Lecture: Monday, May 8, 2023

Let’s Make a List: How to Get Things Done with Words in Newar Religious Practice

Dr. Christoph Emmrich

1pm UK (2pm Germany; 5:30pm India; 5:45pm Nepal; 8am Eastern Standard Time - Toronto) / online

Rites are made, among other things, of things. Rites among the Newar Buddhists and Hindus of the Kathmandu Valley are big and hence require all kinds of things—and lots of them. It is hence not surprising that only few people are able to keep track of what is needed for which particular rite and for when it is needed—particularly when the date is close and there is still so much to do. For that, Newars, just as people elsewhere, use lists. Rites, hence, are not only made out of things, they are made from lists. What do these lists look like? What do they cover? How are they drawn? How are they used? How do they contribute to making the rite happen? And how do they help us understand better how texts, images, speech, human interaction, and the understanding of what rites are meant to accomplish work together? This lecture will provide a close reading of some of these lists, both textual and visual, share observations on their use in the exchanges between the main actors working towards making ritual happen, such as the family priest, the organizer, or her collaborators, and the vendor, and will attempt to provide insights into crucial creative activities in the run-up to the eagerly anticipated ritual event.

Christoph Emmrich is a Newarologist, Burmologist, Jainologist, and Associate Professor of Buddhist Studies at the University of Toronto, where he has been teaching Newar, Burmese, Pali, Buddhist, and Jain Studies since 2006. When he does not teach, he divides his time between Lalitpur among the Newars, Mawlamyine and Mandalay among the Mons and Burmese, and Pondicherry among the Tamil Jains, conducting research on rites and ritual literature, shop-keeping, and list-making, as well as poetry, textual practice, and temple management.

His latest monograph Writing Rites for Newar Girls. Marriage, Mimesis, and Memory in the Kathmandu Valley is forthcoming with Brill. His publications include “’I Don't Want a Wife without Ear Cuffs’”: Jewels, Gender, and the Market among the Newars of Nepal." Buddhist Jewels, edited by Vanessa R. Sasson, pp. 112-153. Honolulu: University of Hawai’i Press, 2021; “What Theravāda Does. Thoughts on a Term from the Perspective of Post-Colonial Nepal,” in Theravāda Buddhist Modernities. Theravāda Buddhist Civilizations, edited by Juliane Schober and Steven Collins (London: Routledge, 2017), and “Vessantara Opts Out: Newar Versions of the Tale of the Generous Prince,” in Readings of the Vessantara Jātaka, edited by Steven Collins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2017).

Lecture: Monday, March 27, 2023

The politics of erasure: Language, place and ideology in Nepal

Dr. Prem Phyak

12:00 GMT (13:00 CET; 16:30 IST; 16:45 NPT; 19:00 Hong Kong) / online

Language plays a critical role in the construction of the identities of place and people. Taking language as a political construct, this talk builds on the notion of ‘erasure’ (Irvine & Gal, 2000) to examine how state policies have erased multilingualism and promoted homogeneity supporting unequal power relations among languages. Dr. Phyak discusses the historicity of the erasure by analyzing the state policies and their role in shaping the place and public imaginations about the values of indigenous languages. He discusses textual, anecdotal, ethnographic, and linguistic landscape data from school and the public spheres to unpack ideological meanings of the erasure at different times, spaces, and scales. 

Dr. Prem Phyak is an assistant professor at the Chinese University of Hong Kong. His research interests include language policy, language ideology, social justice, and decolonial theories. He has published numerous papers in different international journals. 

Lecture: Monday, February 13, 2023

Reclaiming Nepal’s Heritage

Roshan Mishra

13:00 GMT (14:00 CET; 18:30 IST; 18:45 NPT) / online

This presentation highlights how the Nepal Heritage Recovery Campaign began, what it has done so far to reclaim Nepal’s cultural properties, and why it is important to the community. The talk will go over the campaign's successes, challenges, and a few examples of cases we have dealt with over the last two years.

Roshan Mishra is the Director of Taragaon Museum and a Kathmandu-based visual artist. He oversees the Nepal Architecture Archive (NAA), which is run by the Saraf Foundation for Himalayan Traditions and Culture, a Taragaon Museum patron organisation. Roshan is also the founder of Global Nepali Museum, Nepalian Art, and an initiator of the Mishra Museum, as well as a visiting faculty member at the Kathmandu University, Art and Design. Roshan is now actively involved in the Nepal Heritage Repatriation campaign (NHRC) to bring back Nepali lost and stolen heritage.

Lecture: Thursday, Nov. 3, 2022

Flowers of love in Western Tamang song traditions

Prof. Kathryn March

13:00 GMT (14:00 CET; 18:30 IST; 18:45 NPT) / SOAS University of London, Room BG01/ and online

Tamang are prodigious composers and performers of song, in both their eastern and western traditions. These traditions have been responding to new contexts of Nepali nationalism and Radio Nepal, the ethnic revitalization movements of the 1990s, and globalization and wage out migration with great creativity and vigor. This presentation looks particularly at the Western Tamang dancing and ripost songs known as Mhendomaya (‘Flowers of love’) to explore both continuity and change in this vibrant song tradition. Examples come from fieldwork in village, national, and international contexts, and from time frames ranging from 1975 to the present.

Kathryn March is Professor Emerita at Cornell University’s Department of Anthropology. Her research foci include gender and social change in Himalayan Asia, the political and economic pressures on local ethnic communities, and the study of ritual, religion, and song as both reflective of individual experience and larger cultural and aesthetic frameworks.

Series 1

Decolonization (2021–2022)

Chaired by Prof. Sasanka Perera

Placemaking and Methods of Urban Research in South Asia

Prof. Nihal Perera

Thursday, February 29, 2024

9:15 am–11:00 am

Sociology Classroom ES 005, South Asian University, New Delhi (on-site)

Space is central to society. Per mainstream discourse, social space is largely produced by the state and by capital. Nihal Perera’s work takes issue with this preconception and addresses the colossal gap left by the leaders in the field of social production of space, including Henri Lefebvre and David Harvey. As his People’s Spaces (Routledge 2016) demonstrates, the adaptation, interpretation, transformation, and creation of spaces are also carried out by ordinary people. He will demonstrate how subjects reconcile the difference between the intended goals of imposed/provided spaces and ordinary people’s own expectations of these, creating spaces for their daily activities and cultural practices. At the other end, the spaces ordinary people produce make the state and capital negotiate their needs.

Adopting an inside-out perspective, empathic to the subjects, Professor Perera will argue that the vast terrain of ordinary actors and spaces which are currently marginalized must be reflected in academic debates and policy decisions and that the local thinking processes that constitute these spaces need to be acknowledged, enabled, and critiqued. For this, he will demonstrate that we need to adopt intellectual approaches grounded in local communities, paying attention to local norms and interpretations.

All photos of Nihal Perera’s lectures were taken by Aruna Jayasena, PhD candidate, Department of Sociology at South Asian University.

Reading Urban Space as a Contested Text: Towards a ‘Decolonized’ Approach to Place-making

Prof. Nihal Perera

Wednesday, February 28, 2024

2:30 pm–4:30 pm

Sociology Classroom ES 005, South Asian University, New Delhi (on-site)

Most countries in the world, including India and Sri Lanka, were European colonies where complexities of coloniality were imposed on the local inhabitants. Their contemporary urban systems did not evolve from their hinterlands but were created, as cities like Bombay, Colombo, Dhaka, Karachi, and Madras, were established as parts of larger imperial urban systems. In addition to building modern cities, urban systems, and spaces, the colonial powers imposed and helped the subjects internalize these as their own, causing epistemic subjugation. Hence the question: What are postcolonial developments?

By the late 1990s, scholars of ‘postcolonial urbanism’ demonstrated that space is both multivalent and contested. Nihal Perera (2016) demonstrates how the intended subjects negotiate imposed/provided spaces, creating room for their own everyday activities and cultural practices. To view these, we need to adopt intellectual approaches grounded in the places of the production of space, paying attention to local norms and interpretations. Professor Perera will demonstate how subjects reconcile the differences between the intended goals of imposed/provided spaces and ordinary people’s own understandings and expectations of these, thus creating spaces more friendly to their own activities.

Ethics and Positionality: Social Science Research on Sensitive Topics

Dr. Emiline Smith

Friday, March 31, 2023

9:00 AM 11:00 AM

Sociology Classroom 001, ES Building, South Asian University (on-site)

To contribute to the Heritage as Placemaking’s ongoing series on decolonization, HaP post-doctoral researcher Dr. Emiline Smith (Scottish Centre for Crime and Justice Research, University of Glasgow) gave a presentation at South Asian University that uses a criminological perspective to reflect on ethics, decolonization, and reflexivity when conducting social science research on sensitive topics. She advocates for an ethics of empathy as a framework for knowledge creation, use, and reproduction. The full abstract of the talk can be found in the accompanying poster.

August 15, 2022

Regenerating Buddhist Heritage through Community Action: A Case Study of Taxila

Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar

12:00 GMT (13:00 CET; 17:30 IST; 17:45 NPT) / online

The official discourse on national heritage in Pakistan deploys the Buddhist archeological history of ancient Pakistan, weaved out of a selective appropriation of ancient history, as the binding elements of a national heritage. Built on the epistemology of colonial Anglophone archeology, this discourse works through a centralized bureaucracy and stringent patrimony laws and regulates the physical engagement of living communities with their material past. The Eurocentric global discourse on heritage, led by UNESCO, furthermore privileges professional archeological perspectives over any other claims to heritage and ascribes universal positive value to the Buddhist heritage of Pakistan.

Instead, taking the Buddhist archeological sites of Taxila on the World Heritage List as a case study in dissonant heritage management, Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar’s lecture will highlight the gaps between the epistemology and ethics of Anglophone archeology with the material definition of heritage as sites, places, or monuments on the one hand, and the variety of beliefs, experiences, and rationales underlying non-professional engagement with the material past, such as illegal digging and counterfeiting of Gandhara antiquity on the other. Drawn from the oral history and archival records, he will also explore the process of public reclamation of the pre-Islamic history of Taxila, a site surrounded by a Muslim population but anchored in the Buddhist cultural past, as an integral part of local heritage, articulated through the adoption of the ancient name ‘Taxila’ for the newly emerging town in the 1960s and the reenactment of the ancient history of Taxila by local citizens through public exhibitions and popular festivals. He also explores how the rural, community-led initiative of Gandhara Resource Center Pakistan (GRCP) at Taxila serves as a conduit in the process of reclamation of Buddhist heritage by supporting a range of activities for remembering, commemorating, and communicating the Buddhist cultural heritage of Taxila.

Dr. Nadeem Omar Tarar is a historical anthologist, an author, and a public speaker. He holds the Gandhara Chair in Cultural Studies at the University of Wah, Pakistan. He has also worked at the National College of Arts, Lahore, and at the School of Oriental and African Studies, (SOAS), London. He serves as the International Council on Museums (ICOM) Pakistan's Board member for 2021-2024 and the Vice President, Council of Social Sciences (COSS) Pakistan. He is the founder member of Gandhara Resource Center Pakistan (GRCP), a dedicated institution in Taxila to create community awareness and engagement with heritage through documentation, publication, exhibitions, and cultural events. Dr. Tarar holds an MSc. Anthropology from Quaid Azam University, Islamabad, and MA in Critical Theory and Cultural Studies from University of Nottingham, UK. He holds a Ph.D. in Art History and Theory, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, and Post-Doctoral Fellowship, Aga Khan Program for Islamic Architecture, MIT.

August 8, 2022

Asian Social Science and Decolonial-Pluralist Sociology: Lessons for South Asia

Dr. Siri Gamage

12:00pm CET (11:00am GMT, 3:30pm IST, 3:45pm NPT, 8:00pm AEST Australia) / online

As early as the 1970s, Syed Hussein Alatas argued that Asian social science is characterised by uncritical imitation of Western social science knowledge, theories and methods, to the extent that he articulated the concept of the Captive Mind. His view was that there is a 'demonstration effect' resulting from the wholesale provision of teaching and research materials by Western social scientists. Asian social scientists who obtain their training from Western higher education institutions tend to reproduce what they learn without adapting such knowledge and tools to their own context. He emphasized the need to selectively assimilate ideas from Western social science (European and American). More importantly, he argued for an autonomous Asian Social Science tradition plus an Asian sociology. In recent decades, other social scientists like Connell, Mignolo and Walsh, Bhambra, Julian Go and Sujata Patel have explained the need for postcolonial, decolonial or pluralist sociology using arguments based on southern theory and de-colonial thought. Others speak about constructing indigenous or autonomous sociology. In this talk, Dr. Siri Gamage will introduce arguments of these social scientists with a view to draw lessons for South Asian social science/sociology.

Dr. Siri Gamage’s research addresses a number of crucial intersections within the social sciences, including the idea of academic dependence, Eurocentrism, autonomous social science for global south/Asia, and decolonial/postcolonial sociology. He has worked as Senior Lecturer at the University of New England (Australia) and has most recently engaged in collaborative research in the School of Social Sciences and Psychology at Western Sydney University, Australia. 

July 4, 2022

Space as localized histories, intergenerational marginalization, and resistance

Sheelasha Rajbhandari & Hit Man Gurung

12:00 GMT (13:00 CET; 17:30 IST; 17:45 NPT) / online

Chaired by Christiane Brosius

Within the Kathmandu Triennale, a central position is occupied by artists working within multiple aesthetic and cosmological perspectives and meanings, manifesting the multiplicities that construct our kaleidoscopic global reality. Theirs are practices that often have been systematically excluded from the realm of art and designated by a colonial ethnographic gaze as craft, folklore, or at best, "traditional" art, even if these practices are constantly evolving and embodying the traces of their contextual transformation and of this often- disobedient instability. In light of this, it is equally important to question what is categorized as heritage and who gets to decide what is worth preserving. It is difficult and complex to situate vernacular practices that have deep, localized histories and speak simultaneously of intergenerational marginalization and resistance. These ideas also percolated into the conceptualizations of the Pavilion of Nepal at the 59th Venice Biennale, where the intention was to reevaluate the very framework by which the Himalayan region gets fetishized by western, as well as nationalist, lenses. In contradiction to a mythical utopia envisioned in such ill-conceived visions is the reality of an intricately distinct and interconnected peoples who have repeatedly experienced displacement, loss, and the insurmountable task of reconstituting their lives.

Sheelasha Rajbhandari and Hit Man Gurung are founding members of ArTree Nepal and co-curators of the Kathmandu Triennale 2077 and the Pavilion of Nepal at the 59th Venice Biennale (2022)
Rajbhandari’s longitudinal curatorial research efforts are rooted in valuing quotidian and plural narratives by weaving folktales, oral histories, and rituals as juxtaposition to conventional historiography. Her art reclaims and recovers the somato-cosmic omnipresence of femininity through an intentional hodgepodge of memories, myths, and realities that intersperse and intersect time and space. Gurung’s various media of works are concerned with some of the most pressing socio-political, socio-economic and socio-cultural landscape of Nepal. In parallel, his art also speaks to the strong impact of global capitalism, the dramatic economic boom in the Middle East and Southeast Asia and their unprecedented investment in infrastructure development, leading to a high demand of cheap laborers; and consequently, stitching the various patterns of mass migrations seen in Nepal.

June 27, 2022

Liberators and encroachers: Banaras and the shifting meanings of heritage in new India

Dr. Vera Lazzaretti

12:00 GMT (13:00 CET; 17:30 IST; 17:45 NPT) / online

Dr. Vera Lazzaretti is researcher at the Centre for Research in Anthropology (CRIA) and ISCTE – University Institute of Lisbon, working on interreligious relationships and the politics of heritage and security in urban South Asia. Vera studied Philosophy and Cultural Anthropology and holds a Ph.D. in Indian and Tibetan Studies from the University of Turin. She previously worked at the University of Milan, the University of Oslo and the South Asia Institute in Heidelberg. Vera’s main field site is urban north India, and her research interests include the anthropology of space and place; religion and politics; heritage; security; interreligious violence; religious offense; pilgrimage; religious nationalism; and ethnography.

December 13, 2021

Thinking through nuances in decolonizing heritage

Dr. Neel Kamal Chapagain

12:00 GMT (13:00 CET; 17:30 IST; 17:45 NPT) / online

The idea of heritage can be argued both as a colonizing project and a product of colonization. Therefore, decolonizing heritage may mean a utopian aim as well as a process. At best, it is a wishful condition and a necessary process to refine the heritage idea in order to make it relevant to people. This talk will dwell on some observations on 'making of heritage' and 'doing heritage' to discuss the nuances of decolonizing heritage.

Dr. Neel Kamal Chapagain is Associate Professor and Director at Centre for Heritage Management, Ahmedabad University.