Editorial
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1It is with great pleasure that we publish the 60th issue of the EBHR, the first for 2023.
2This issue features a special section about the ‘Nepalese lowlands’, the Tarai, a region that has received increased attention from researchers since the mid-2000s, chiefly as a consequence of growing federalism demands on the part of some of its inhabitants. The media and researchers alike have often focused on strictly political issues pertaining to identity, belonging or representation of the long under-represented Madheshi population at national level. The three articles in this special section adopt a different lens to explore the influence of national and international policies and in particular that of development plans on agrarian practices and on access to land and water in the Tarai. Olivia Aubriot and Tristan Bruslé address the question of the transformation of the Nepalese plain in a review article that shows how both local actors with stakes in the development of agriculture and the state have managed to transform the region from a peripheral area to a central one, at least in terms of food production. Irrigation infrastructures in this part of Nepal, where the land is capable of producing high yields, are particularly necessary if the country is to become less dependent on imports. However, as Romain Valadaud and Marie-Amélie Candau both demonstrate, controlling access to water also leads to discordance between local and national policies, giving way to differentiated access to state resources and creating more inequalities. The region, Nepal’s most densely populated one, now faces a gradual shift from rurality to expanding forms of urbanity driven by remittances, generating growing tensions over land. The third and final article by Jérôme Picard in the special section examines the benefits and limitations of geomatics in studying land-cover changes, based on a study in the Tarai.
3The varia section of this issue contains two research articles. In the first, Nilamber Chhetri delves into the delicate problem of social classification in India, which was inherited from the colonial period. The Haati case he presents is fascinating as questions of justice mingle with questions of formal recognition and of geography. The second article, by S Shiriin Barakzai, discusses the question of the identification of a temple that is described in sketches and notes written in Sanskrit, which are housed in the Hodgson Collection at the Musée Guimet in Paris. The article provides a description of the sketches and a translation of the notes and identifies the temple as currently being under Bhutanese management and known as Dongag Choling.
4Since our transition to online publishing as a Diamond Open Access journal, we have been preparing a cumulative index that will cover the formative years of the EBHR up to issue 53 (2019). This index will cover the full extent of the print collection and will be made available as a hard copy to previous subscribers by the end of 2023. We hope it will prove particularly useful as a tool for searching the content of the journal in libraries that house the entire collection of the journal. We are also particularly delighted to announce that in the years to come all past print issues of the EBHR will be digitised and will be available as searchable archives on the Persée platform. We will keep you informed of the progress of this long-term endeavour.
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Tristan Bruslé, Stéphane Gros et Philippe Ramirez, « Editorial », European Bulletin of Himalayan Research [En ligne], 60 | 2023, mis en ligne le 12 juillet 2023, consulté le 16 octobre 2024. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/ebhr/1632 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/ebhr.1632
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