Ongoing Projects
- Oral History Project: The project in particular focuses on the digitization and preservation of oral histories of merchant communities of the Eastern Himalayas, with particular emphasis on narratives shared by long-distance traders such as the Lhasa Newar. These traders played a crucial role in shaping trans-Himalayan trade networks, cultural exchange, and socio-economic relations between Tibet, Nepal, and the Eastern Himalayan regions. The digitization effort centers on an interview conducted with Yogbir Shakya of Kalimpong, a descendant of a Lhasa Newar trader family. His oral testimony offers valuable first-hand insights into family histories of trade, migration, commercial practices, and everyday life connected to the Lhasa–Kalimpong trade corridor. The interview captures personal memories, inherited narratives, and reflections on the decline of traditional trade routes following political and economic transformations in the region. Interview with Yogbir Shakya: https://soundcloud.com/darjeeling-history-club/sets
- Digitization and Digital Preservation Project: This initiative is a dedicated digitization and digital preservation project centered on the rich and multifaceted history of the Darjeeling region and its surrounding areas in the eastern Himalayas. The core focus involves systematically scanning, photographing, cataloging, and making digitally accessible a wide array of historical materials. These include rare colonial-era newspapers and periodicals (such as issues of The Darjeeling Times and Planters Gazette), books, gazetteers, travelogues, and administrative records, photographs, postcards, family albums, and personal memorabilia, manuscripts, letters, maps, sketches, and other ephemera, artifacts, objects, and material culture items that tell the story of the region’s pasts. The overarching goal is to significantly expand the digital footprint of Darjeeling’s history, thereby making these invaluable resources freely or widely available online to researchers and the general public. Democratizing access to knowledge that was previously limited to physical archives, private collections, or institutional holdings, this effort seeks to bridge the physical and digital worlds, preserving the region’s storied legacy for current and future generations while ensuring that Darjeeling’s history, often overshadowed in broader narratives of colonial India or Himalayan studies, gains the visibility and enduring presence it deserves in the digital age. (https://archive.org/details/@darjeeling_history_club)