Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia

KALZANG BHUTIA, University of Southern California, Los Angeles, California, was approved funding in April 2023 to aid research on “Returning the Temple: Recovering and Repatriating Sikkimese Buddhism from Colonial Structures.” This research engages with the provenance histories of cultural belongings collected by Orientalist scholar of the Himalayas and British colonial officer L.A. Waddell in the 1890s in Sikkim, Darjeeling, and Tibet. These cultural belongings serve as a launching point for thinking about all of the cultural belongings and knowledge removed from the Sikkim Himalayas during the period of British colonialism, and as a way to talk about movements towards the reclamation and promotion of Indigenous knowledge. This grant provided material support to carry out research in the United Kingdom where the grantee was able to examine cultural belongings acquired by Waddell and his surviving archival materials, and also visit other archives in the United Kingdom holding cultural belongings and knowledge from Sikkim, including at the University of Glasgow, Kew Gardens, Oxford University, and Cambridge University. This study was also able to learn more about repatriation and rematriation initiatives in the United States, Aotearoa New Zealand, and Nepal by traveling to significant museums and archives and meeting with scholars, activists, and knowledge holders.