From Asan to Centre Island

A Field Trip Through Time, Tradition, and Toronto

by Gaurav Shrestha

Attending the colloquium “The Buddhist Newars and Their Neighbours,” 23rd and 24th, May 2025, sponsored by the UofT/McMaster University Yehan Numata Program in Buddhist Studies”at the RCYC Island Club House was an experience shaped by an invitation to introspect and wonder. Hosted by Christoph Emmrich, with Alana, Austin, Ian, and I (Gaurav) as co-hosts, the colloquium was my first opportunity at the University of Toronto to inhabit such a concentrated academic space — intimate, deeply rooted in a dedicated community of scholars and their scholarship, aligned perfectly with the themes I care about: Nepal, the Newars — an indigenous community located in the Kathmandu Valley — and the intersection of youth, religion, and festivals (jātrās) that shape the public sphere. I arrived uncertain of my place in that room, though I left with more questions than answers, which I’m beginning to understand is precisely where a doctoral student should be.   

As someone engaged with ethnography and fascinated by youth cultures, I listened for the undercurrents – moments where conversations didn’t merely describe tradition but pointed to its growth within our academic discipline.  Several presentations resonated not just for their scholarly contributions, but for how they mirrored the kind of work that I too aspire to do. Alana Sá Leitão’s (University of Toronto) research on Christianity among the Newars, usually described as Hindu and/or Buddhist, questioned assumptions of religious homogeneity. Marilena Frisone’s (University College Cork) exploration of food practices and culture in Newar music video’s exemplified by the song “Vām̆̇gu lapte tuyū baji (“Green Leaf, White Beaten Rice”) introduced the Newar song tropes at the intersection of food and memory as circulated through media and music. Todd Lewis (College of the Holy Cross) distributed maps of the old Kathmandu trading community neighbourhood Asan, walked the workshop participants through its narrow streets, and reminded me of how spaces can be seen as both social and sacred.   

Bal Gopal Shrestha’s (Leiden University) video footage of the traditional healer Tuising Maka from Sankhu, a small Newar town in the Kathmandu Valley, stitched together snippets of sessions with clients to open up a wonderful conversation around healing rituals that are an essential aspect of the Newar world.  

 Further, what made the colloquium especially rewarding and – sometimes challenging – was the disciplinary diversity in the room. As an historically and anthropologically oriented doctoral student, I found myself immersed in presentations that foregrounded textual analysis, classical historiography, and visual culture. Art historian Jinah Kim’s (Harvard University) visual unpacking of paintings and manuscripts folios encouraged me to think about ritual iconography and visual(s) in ways I hadn’t before – not just as aesthetic heritage but as narrative tools that convey social knowledge. Initially, I felt somewhat unmoored navigating such different methods, but gradually I found myself connecting the dots: how texts are lived, how images circulate through ritual, and how community members- in my interest; particularly youth might encounter these in layered ways. These cross-disciplinary moments stretched my thinking and helped me recalibrate my research questions with greater sensitivity to textual and visual registers.  

One particularly memorable moment was the participation and presence of Uttam Kumar Makaju, Vice President of the Canadian Newar Guthi, the organization representing the local Newar diaspora. His presence reminded me of how scholarship exists alongside community that the public space is not just discursive, but one that is lived with compassion.  

 One question kept surfacing for me throughout the colloquium – a question that emerges from within my own research concerns: Where are the youth in these narratives? Their subdued presence, or at times total absence, seemed to signal something deeper about how tradition is imagined and reproduced – and by whom. This wasn’t simply an observation, but a recurring prompt. The near invisibility of youth in many of the presentations didn’t strike me as a shortcoming, but as a critical site of inquiry. Why is their role so often peripheral in our academic discourse? What assumptions underlie that marginality? I found myself returning to these questions again and again.  

The colloquium did more than offer stimulating academic content, it generated a kind of intellectual momentum. It gave me the tools and urgency to return to my own questions on youth cultures and jātrās in Kathmandu Valley. I found the interdisciplinary nature of the conversations especially engaging and energizing. The presentations by textualists, for instance, introduced methodological rigor and interpretive precision that I hadn’t previously considered in relation to oral and performative traditions. Crucially, many of these exchanges happened not only during panels but in the quieter moments – over lunch, in walks, or evening chats – where the boundaries between disciplines softened. These moments allowed to reflect more deeply on how tradition is not a fixed inheritance, but something constantly being interpreted, lived, and even contested. It moves. It morphs.   

 One of the more unexpected aspects of the colloquium was the role language played — particularly Newar (Nepal Bhasa). As someone still learning the language, I became acutely aware of the intimacy and distance language can simultaneously produce. Listening to fluent speakers, or encountering texts and terms untranslated, reminded me how language shapes not just access to content, but modes of engagement. It also made me rethink my own methodological choices – not only how I ask questions, but in what language I pose them, and how that frames the answers I receive.  

In that spirit, my research questions have begun to shift. Rather than asking how jātrās sustain ‘cultural continuity,’ I now find it more fruitful to ask: How do jātrās change? Who is driving that change? What does ‘Newarness’ look like today – and who defines it? The act of learning Newar has drawn me closer to questions I couldn’t have recognized before, revealing how language becomes a ‘method in itself’.  

Lastly, the setting of the colloquium – on an island, somewhat removed from the pace of everyday life – also shaped the experience in subtle ways. The isolation created space to slow down, to listen more attentively, and to inhabit the ideas being shared without distraction. That, too, felt like part of the learning. In the end, what the colloquium offered for me is that scholarship is collective and communal, learning as I was reminded, is never a solitary act. Knowledge is not merely produced: it is co-created, re-shaped, and re-imagined in the spaces where we listen, question and choose to care. 

Gaurav Shrestha is a doctoral student at the Department for the Study of Religion. He works on Nepalese religion, processions, and youth.