Mid-20th-century Nepal saw sweeping sociopolitical changes associated with the decline of the Rana dynasty and the ascendancy of the Shah rulers and the Panchayat government. The relatively few Nepalis educated abroad during this period were recruited into government service to execute the emerging modernist visions for national development. With one foot in academia and the other in government service, the ‘bureaucrat-scholar’ became an important figure in realising ambitious technocratic projects such as land reform, district reorganisation and national planning. In this interview-essay, the human geographer Upendra Man Malla (1932–2019) offers a first-person perspective of a period of profound political and personal transformation. Malla recounts his journey to becoming a geographer (part one) and his experiences of applying his knowledge of Nepal’s people and places to governance from the 1950s to the end of the Panchayat (part two). He also provides insight into the early years of anthropology and fieldwork in Nepal through a detailed account of the three months he worked as Christoph von Fürer-Haimendorf’s assistant during his preliminary research among the Sherpas in 1953. His life story is contextualised and comments are provided on the historical processes and persons that shaped the trajectories of Malla’s and Nepal’s interwoven transformations, converging memory, narrative and history.

Historically, travelogues have taken a variety of forms, depending on the media available. The ultra-fast contemporary development of digital tools has revolutionised this exercise on three levels: the ease of taking and storing images and video, the planetary expansion of their potential reach and the possible immediacy of this dissemination. Combined, they have become a common feature of contemporary ‘connected’ tourism, a major producer and consumer of images. In the case of the recent development of domestic tourism within a growing urban Nepalese middle class, particularly on Himalayan trekking trails, the production and online dissemination of a video account of one’s ‘adventure’ seem to have already imposed themselves as structuring components of the practice, from the choice of itinerary to the realisation and narration of the trek itself, as witnessed by the explosion in the number of videos posted by young Nepalese people recounting their experience. Field observations and interviews (Mardi Himal trek, Langtang) were combined with analysis of YouTube videos posted by Nepalese trekkers to understand their practices and motivations. Some recurring patterns emerge from these vlogs, such as the exaltation of groups of young people at their joyful, amicable undertakings, and the appeal of the environment and mountain landscapes, which often contributes to a sort of national pride.

Are the Tamangs convinced that they are the heroes of their original mythical tales or eternal victims of an unfortunate religious and national history? How can we uncover their answers and their own analyses in the oral treasures of their epic traditions? This semiotic reading questions the Tamangs’ subjectivities and elements of conviction and/or controversy about their own history, as revealed in certain heroic gestures by lamas, singer of tales, shamans and ordinary people.Many of the answers to these existential and institutional questions take a heroic form in certain recitatives sung by the Tamang singer of tales, the tamba: ideas about cosmology and the end of time, unanswered riddles about the origins of heaven and earth, visible and invisible living beings, and tales of controversial alliances between men, gods and demons. But we find other heroic forms in the dramatised evocations of the origins of society, declaimed and performed by lamas based on ancient rnyingmapa religious corpora in which ancestors are the heroes of a story about kings and queens of heaven who lost their throne because of incestuous crimes. As a counterpoint to these stories, the dramas sung by the shamans during their long trance sessions combine epic and religious arguments, placing them at the heart of their incessant battles, both against the hero of the lamas, Guru Rinpoche, and against the demons, the enemies of mankind. Finally, some of the ideas put forward by ordinary people through their stories and secret language support this collective memory woven at the heart of religious and national analogies and antinomies, evoking a backdrop of institutional and political battles.

While the perspectives of sovereign nation-states have tended to dominate how the Tibeto-Himalayan region has been shaped, viewed and lived in the last century, we argue for adoption of multidisciplinary perspectives that focus on flows and interactions rather than the limited frames of state-centred exchanges. Collating empirically grounded studies from different parts of the Himalayas, this special issue highlights the cross-border networks, negotiated identities and politics of place that are directly and indirectly enabled by state practices and are enacted in the lives of the people in the region. This issue offers a critical understanding of the tangled role of cultural, material, political and economic factors that have informed historical and contemporary processes in the Himalayas. In this introductory paper, we highlight the Himalayas as a productive site of contestation before identifying some of the connections and ruptures that mark it. A useful way to understand the region and its peoples is through the foregrounding of networks, identities and place-making that mark its lived realities.