This editorial reflects on the conditions of political violence, moral exhaustion, and uneven rupture that have marked 2025 globally and in the Himalayan region. Taking recent unrest in Nepal as an analytic point of departure, it considers how moments of breakdown expose exhausted forms of authority and reopen questions of legitimacy, responsibility, and agency. Situating the journal’s work against the normalisation of political fatalism, the editorial reaffirms HIMALAYA’s commitment to historically grounded, ethically attentive scholarship. It introduces the contributions to Volume 44, Issue 2 as engagements with ritual, ecology, art, migration, and care that together insist on complexity, situated knowledge, and the continued possibility of critical thought in unsettled times.

Himalayan Buddhist regions such as Sikkim preserve vibrant traditions of thangka painting, where sacred imagery, ritual practice, and precise iconometric systems converge. Yet, compared to other Himalayan artistic centers, Sikkim’s thangka traditions have received limited scholarly attention. Drawing on 2024 ethnographic fieldwork and guided by theoretical approaches from Gell’s notion of art as agency, Malinowski’s emphasis on embodied practice, and Sharf’s view of Buddhist images as enlivened through consecration, this paper analyses how iconometry (thig tshad), ritual discipline, and lineage-based apprenticeships structure artistic creation. It also shows how these sacred arts persist even as tourism and new markets influence how they are made. In the end, the study highlights thangka painting in Sikkim as a vibrant living tradition, where skill, devotion, and ritual vitality remain central.

The kichkini is a young, beautiful, female ghost featured in Nepalese legends, instantly recognizable by her back-turned feet. She is believed to travel through the night in search of men to seduce, and those who encounter her may fall ill or even die. This article explores the kichkini narrative through four in-depth interviews with Nepali nationals—three based in the UK (n=3) and one in Nepal (n=1)—supported by published stories, online blogs, and YouTube video clips. Ghost stories are found throughout the world, and many features of the kichkini legend are transcultural. For example, “hitchhiking ghosts” and “back-footed beings” appear in other folklore traditions. At the same time, ghost stories may also act as “cultural objects,” reflecting specific cultural ideas and concerns. In the Nepali context, ghosts arise due to “bad deaths” or incorrect death rituals. They can be malign, and shamans are tasked with protecting the living from these entities. Kichkini may represent the perceived threat posed by female sexuality to patrilineal structures and be used to justify restrictions on women and even violence against them. As the social climate of Nepal shifts under the influence of modernity and the drive for development, the position of women is changing, and the kichkini story appears to be evolving to reflect this. There is little research-based literature on the kichkini, and analyzing such legends could provide deeper understanding of death, gender, female sexuality, and social change in Nepal.

Nepal and surrounding regions in India are known for resplendent masked performances. Often ritual in nature, they serve as tools for spiritual belonging, community cohesion, ties of kinship, and artistic expression. Research on Nepal’s culture and performance traditions has been smaller compared to neighboring South Asian countries such as India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka. Nepal’s performance traditions are complex, with centuries of history, culture, and religious beliefs attached to them. In Nepal, many of these traditional performances are called Pyakhan or stories/parables. They are deserving of in-depth study, much like their other South Asian counterparts. This paper takes a deep dive into masked dance forms of Nepal, especially the making and use of masks in Bhairab Nach, and Navadurga performance.

This essay attempts to foreground the question of native agency in the making of the photographic archive of Charles Alfred Bell, British Political Officer for Sikkim, Bhutan and Tibet. It seeks to approach a new hermeneutics of British imperial archive-making vis-á-vis Tibet by assessing not only how native agency variously informed the sacerdotal, epistemic and technical content of most of Bell’s photographic archive, but also how such agency was central to its very process of visual production. By examining the roles of Rabden Lepcha, Sonam Wangyal or Palhese and Kartick Chandra Pyne, apropos their contribution to Bell’s visual archive, the essay shows how British imperial knowledge-construction on Tibet deployed native agency, thereafter relegating them (mostly) to archival silence. In the process, the essay demonstrates how these silences were not merely accidental, but fundamental to the process of knowledge-production on Tibet.

There are many ways to define Ladakh: geographically (as an area between the Himalayas and the Karakoram), historically (as a kingdom from the 10th century until the Dogra conquest in 1834), or linguistically (as a region sharing a common language—a Tibetan dialect). However, most of these definitions have been put forward by foreigners or officials. Do the inhabitants of these areas feel that they belong to the same community? The author's answer is “no.” He concludes that Shi’as in Kargil and Buddhists in Leh consider themselves to constitute separate communities. The survey draws on sociology, ethnology, and some history, extending back to 1931.

Ladakh’s climatic conditions have preserved some of the most impressive monuments in the Himalaya. These temples trace the spread of Buddhism in the Western Himalaya and the development of artistic and architectural styles. However, they are increasingly under threat due to the introduction of modern construction materials and methods, as well as the intensification of climate change induced events. In 1999, Achi Association was formed to conserve temples belonging to the Drikung Kagyu sect of Tibetan Buddhism, one of the oldest orders in Ladakh, and one under which many of the earliest temples in the region were built. In 2010, the establishment of Achi Association India (AAI) expanded this to any Buddhist heritage in precarity throughout Ladakh, regardless of sect. With a quarter of a century of experience in the region, the two organizations collectively produced an impressive fountain of documents that chart and record all aspects of conservation work done across nine sites that date from the late 13th century to the 19th century. In this paper I scaffold an interdisciplinary approach to access these archives, which range from architectural surveys to community engagement reports, accentuating that conservation is a dialectic between stakeholders, where decisions made by conservators — shaped by their training and available technology — are interpreted by other stakeholders, namely locals and the clergy, through their own epistemic frameworks. Mapping the entirety of conservation and restoration, this paper covers multiple aspects of the process, including documentation, community engagement, technical procedures, and the ritual ramifications of decisions.