SiHP Faculty Seminar 01 | History of Agriculture Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 10 October 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Shamik Mishra
Series: History of Agriculture
Title: Reconstruction of the Agricultural Landscape from Historical Sources: A Case of XIX-century Nepal
Abstract: The work aims to reconstruct the agricultural landscape of XIX-century Nepal from available historical sources. The presentation will: (a) provide rationale for the undertaking, (b) give an overview of the existing methodologies of reconstruction as well as justify the method used in this work, and, (c) discuss values and limitations of the different categories of sources used.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 02 | Historical Economy Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 17 October 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Nischal Regmi
Series: Historical Economy
Title: Overview of Price Data Pre-2020 BS
Abstract: This seminar will present an overview of the market price data of early XX-century Nepal with focus on selected years. The discussion will centre around key themes, including (a) modern equivalence of the measurement systems used, (b) the prevalent currencies and their interconversion, and, (c) inferring and triangulating prices based on varied sources. Moreover, the presentation will highlight noticeable patterns in the market price that provide an informed direction for further research.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 03 | Philosophy of Technology Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 31 October 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Shailesh Pandey
Series: Philosophy of Technology
Title: Rethinking the Divide Between Nature and Technology
Abstract: Challenging the anthropocentric monopoly on ‘design,’ this seminar looks at efforts that position biological artifacts as cognitive technologies. By synthesizing extended phenotype theory with morphological computation, such works interrogate the precarious boundary between instinct and artifice, questioning whether the definition of technology rests upon the maker’s intent or the object’s own recursive functional output.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 04 | Visuals and History Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 7 November 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Bandana Gyawali
Series: Visuals and History
Title: Photographs of Swayambhunath c. 1888-1892
Abstract: This seminar will present three photographs of Swayambhunath with the aim of discussing 1) visuals and history-source, 2) visuals and fragments and 3) visuals and narratives. The conversation will focus on the kinds of historical awareness embodied in visuals.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 05 | History in Fragments Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 14 November 2025 (Friday)
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 14 November 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Yogesh Raj
Series: History in Fragments
Title: The Nepali vyavahara compendium ascribed to Ne, c. XIV century
Abstract: Our understanding of legal practices in Southasia are generally shaped by two sets of beliefs: First, the Classical Sanskrit legal codes (smrtis and vyavahara texts) give these practices normative and structural coherence, and comprehending (translating and analysing) these texts ought to be considered as more useful than a mere antiquarian or linguistic exercise. Second, any variation in actual legal procedures, processes or outcomes found ethnographically could be explained as admixtures of various conventions, local innovation, deviation from the norms or historical accidents. There is a long scholarly tradition of examining both classical Sanskrit texts and field findings. Yet, vyavahara texts written in other non-Sanskrit languages of the medieval period have not received sufficient attention they deserve for scrutinising either set of the beliefs mentioned above. This seminar will see a preliminary discussion on methodological challenges in approaching one such fourteenth-century Newari text.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 07 | Historical Economy Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 28 November 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Nischal Regmi
Series: Historical Economy
Title: Further Observations from Price Data Pre-2020 BS
Abstract: The seminar outlines the systematic compilation of historical market price data across selected periods. A preliminary assessment reveals broad regularities alongside inconsistencies in coverage, classification, and reporting. The discussion highlights indicative patterns and discontinuities that inform methodological reflection and help shape the next phase of the research.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 08 | Philosophy of Technology Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 5 December 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Shailesh Pandey
Series: Philosophy of Technology
Title: How the Body Understands the World
Abstract: This seminar examines works that displace the Cartesian “I think” with “I can,” where the body is taken as the essential medium for world-inhabitation. We trace how habit and tool-use transform external objects into sensory extensions, blurring the boundary between subject and environment. Ultimately, perception is framed as an active, embodied grip upon a world of shifting significance.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 09 | Medieval Urbanisation | Abha Singh
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur (Virtual)
Date: 12 December 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Abha Singh
Title: Medieval Urbanisation
Abstract: The establishment of the Delhi Sultanate brought dramatic changes in the cityscapes – with new markers and skylines – the mosques and tombs of the new rulers. The centralised state, high level of monetisation, liberation of the artisanal classes, new technologies, sufi movement, etc. all left deep imprints on the pattern of growth of towns in the medieval period. The Mughals further expanded the cities and a sort of symbiotic relationship seems to have existed between the towns and the country, though scholars have argued their parasitic nature as well. Historians have also contested whether the Mughal cities were ‘camp cities’ or architectural representations of a ‘patrimonial-bureaucratic’ empire.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 10 | Visuals and History Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 19 December 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Bandana Gyawali
Series: Visuals and History
Title: Fragments, narratives and metaphors
Abstract: We read section three from Roberto Bolano’s novelette Antwerp (2002) titled Green, Red and White Checks to explore the breaking of narratives or the assembling of non-narratives. Apart from attempting to understand the reader’s response to Bolano’s experimental writing, the seminar will borrow from literature to discuss possible ways of history-telling including the role of fragments and metaphors.
SiHP Faculty Seminar 11 | History in Fragments Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 26 December 2025 (Friday)
Presented by: Yogesh Raj
Series: History in Fragments
Title: The Nepali vyavahara compendium ascribed to Ne, c. XIV century
Abstract: In the second part of the series History in Fragments, Yogesh Raj added a 16th-century Newari manuscript on the vyavahara composition ascribed to Ne muni to his source corpus and continued to discuss the problems of reconstruction and interpretation. He argued that thee manuscript ‘copies’ tend to be expositions when separated by centuries and intended for different set of readers or various groups of language speakers. The chronological layers pose philological challenges and also raise inter-related historical questions. For instance, how does one comprehend a difficult passage when (a) it does not correspond to standard Sanskrit dharma- and smritisastras; (b) the knowledge about the evolution of its language is at best sketchy; and (c) the practice it implied appear to be strictly local and witnessed neither by contemporary texts nor by today’s conventions.
SiHP Faculty | History in Fragments Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 13 February 2026 (Friday)
Presented by: Yogesh Raj
Series: History in Fragments
Title: The Nepali vyavahara compendium ascribed to Ne – III
Abstract: Further attempts to transliterate and translate the vyavahara text reveal three more methodological problems: a. available Classical Newari glossaries/dictionaries sometimes do not list the meanings of terms implied in the present text; b. different copyists interpolate various meanings from identical sentences owing perhaps to their changed contexts and language usage; and c. manuscripts often do not indicate breaks in subject matter and the shifts in the topic are subtle. All three issues pose challenges to interpretation. I also argue that changes in meanings in all three copies under consideration might trigger historiographical enquiry into continuity/change in legal system through the 14th-17th centuries Nepal Valley, it is not in all likelihood a very productive line of enquiry. Instead, this examination may help understand the question about the nature of jurisprudence systems in Nepal, which appears to be intrinsic and not yet resolved currently.
SiHP Faculty Seminar | The Goddess with Thirty-Seven Animal Faces: Her Role, Iconography, and Unique View of Animals | Prof. Tsunehiko Sugiki
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur (Virtual)
Date: 10 April 2026 (Friday)
Presented by: Prof. Tsunehiko Sugiki (Hiroshima University)
Title: The Goddess with Thirty-Seven Animal Faces: Her Role, Iconography, and Unique View of Animals
Abstract: A Buddhist goddess with unique form is drawn at the lower left corner of a cloth painting created in 1467 CE in Nepal. She is Sūkarāsyā (“boar-faced lady”), possessing faces of thirty-seven animals including boar. The painting depicts several deities, representing the meditation sequence as presented in the Mahāsaṃvaravidhi, composed by Newar Ratnasena on the basis of the 12th-century Ḍākārṇava, a Tantra belonging to the Budhist Saṃvara tradition. In that meditation sequence, Sūkarāsyā is visualized to remove obstacle demons from the ritual space. Furthermore, Sūkarāsyā is the enlightened one, and her thirty-seven animal faces are manifestations of her enlightened mind, representing the nondual reality. For those who recognize the world from her perspective, all are non-dual, and in the sense that non-duality is their nature, animals in the world are Buddhas, speaking dharma in the languages of their respective species, such as woofing and meowing.
SiHP Faculty | History in Fragments Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 22 May 2026 (Friday)
Presented by: Yogesh Raj
Series: History in Fragments – 4
Abstract: This presentation focuses on three problems, besides the usual ones about linguistic history, in comprehending the Ne-muni vyavahara fragment under study. The first set of issues is related to finding the structural divisions because the text does not always follow modern conventions of marking shifts in the topics, sections, subsections etc. The diffuse textual elements often mislead one to understand the context in which the meanings of a particular word or phrase are to be interpreted. The second set is about a few archaic and unfamiliar economic practices, such as keeping a child, or an image of a deity as a collateral, that obstructs our view of the import of even plain phrases. Without historicising the economic ideas and practices themselves, our attempts to write economic history may not lead us very far. A set of closely related terms pose challenges because the semantic distance among them has evolved. To illustrate, stri, misa, yilim and bhari, all seem to indicate different states of women, yet how distinct their uses in the text can only be implied. Similarly, the standard glossaries and dictionaries on Classical Newari generally provide identical gloss ‘interest (on an amount)’ for kalantra, java, vaya, and vyaja, all occuring on a folio or two. While they may indicate ways of increasing the value of an asset or capital, it is difficult to discern the exact distiction among them.
SiHP Faculty | History in Fragments Series
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 19 June 2026 (Friday)
Presented by: Yogesh Raj
Series: History in Fragments – 4
Abstract: In this presentation, I discuss two fairly common dilemmas for historians examining lawbooks of the previous centuries.
The first difficulty is to decide the extent to which these specimen reflect prescriptive/descriptive nature of the real behaviours. The books might have codified the norms or ideals perhaps of the dominant groups only. Even within this limited scope, however, the question then becomes the degree these norms or ideals of the elites dovetail their own social reality. The problem thus persists. Some knowledge about actual proceedings of legal cases in details would have been helpful in understanding how the codes were applied in reality. The case records from subsequent period could be useful, if one could suppose that the said lawbooks were still held, say, as governing texts. In the absence of the actual case records, much ’empirical’ exercise of reconstruction may simply be historian’s fictions.
Closely related to this is the second dilemma, which is about the representative quality of the lawbooks. Did a smriti manuscript, for instance, found in the Sonigah, aka Kathmandu Valley, exemplify legal practices in the Valley with known political and social fragmentations, or the legal thoughts and transactions are circumscribed within such individual fragments?Information on intended audience or users of these books is generally missing. But it is difficult to see how one’s tasks become easier even when such data are available. If the colophon in a particular manuscript specimen says that the text was presented by its scribe to the government minister, for example, can it be inferred that the text was of practical use to the official, and not simply of his antiquarian interests, public display of patronage, or side hobby?
I also argue for a few strategies to overcome these dilemmas in the seminar.
SiHP Faculty Seminar | The Life of a Caitya: Construction, Maintenance, and Patronage of the Cilaṃco Caitya in Kirtipur | Dr. Liwen Liu
Venue: SiHP Seminar Hall, Patan Dhoka, Lalitpur
Date: 14 August 2026 (Friday)
Presented by: Dr. Liwen Liu
Title: The Life of a Caitya: Construction, Maintenance, and Patronage of the Cilaṃco Caitya in Kirtipur
Abstract: Who built and repaired caityas in late Malla Nepal, and how were these monuments sustained over time? Drawing on inscriptional evidence, this talk examines the construction, restoration, and ritual life of the Cilaṃco Caitya in Kirtipur, with particular attention to the social backgrounds of its donors and the role of guthis in sustaining religious institutions. By tracing both the physical transformations and social networks that shaped the caitya’s history, this study sheds light on the religious and social life of Newar Buddhist communities, revealing the enduring significance of caityas within the urban landscape of late Malla Nepal.
