1The Association for Nepal and Himalayan Studies (ANHS) conference – HSC6 or the 6th Himalayan Studies Conference – was held at the University of Toronto on 13–16 October 2022. The ANHS is an academic organisation based in the United States that traces its history half a century back to 1971 when the Nepal Studies Association (NSA) was founded after a meeting of Nepal-focused scholars at the Association for Asian Studies. Supported by a Ford Foundation grant in 1972, the NSA continued to function through the years and in 1999 adopted the name ANHS to reflect wider Himalayan interests. In addition, the original NSA journal Himalayan Research Bulletin (HRB) was renamed HIMALAYA, its current name. HSC6 was the sixth in-person conference and the first one to be held in Canada, after the ones in 2011, 2013, 2014, 2016 and 2017 which were all held in the United States.

2Over time, the ANHS has also considerably broadened its areas of interest in the Himalayas, and HSC6 included papers on Bhutan and Kashmir, a welcome move since these are both areas that I myself work on and also areas that are typically not well represented in Himalayan scholarship and conferences. At HSC6, the adopted format was a hybrid one with 115 registrations in person and 95 online. Although getting to grips with the technology was not without fairly significant challenges during the sessions and not all in-person registrants were able to make it because of visa issues, there was certainly an international spirit at the conference and an almost equal number of participants were from South Asia and the Himalayas as were from Europe and North America. I would have liked to see more Nepali women scholars as well. On two of the four days of the conference, there were six parallel sessions at any time that were rather loosely thematically organised, so while there was a wealth of arguments to consider, no amount of skilful navigation would have made any attendee satisfied that they had listened to most of the papers they might have been interested in. Nonetheless, we rushed from one session to the other, going back and forth between large halls in gorgeous curving old buildings with stained-glass windows to the modern classrooms in the recently built ones, talking and thinking as we crossed the colourful carpet of autumn leaves on the campus at this time of year.

3On the first day of the conference, 13 October, the opening ceremony in the late afternoon was preceded by a visit to the Tibetan artwork section at the Royal Ontario Museum for those who had preregistered, and was followed by a keynote lecture delivered by Mona Bhan of Syracuse University, who spoke about climate contestations in Kashmir, especially focusing on how Ladakh is imagined as largely peaceful and pro-India. Her polysemic title ‘weathering the occupation’ was apt and expanded into a consideration of the role of the weather in constituting everyday subjectivities and how weather reporting, including in areas not under Indian administration, has been used after 2019 to ‘showcase India's imperial stamina’. Bhan has worked on Ladakh for many years and in fact her paper on Kashmiri women's narratives of dispossession in the aftermath of the floods of 2014 in the region was part of the first-ever collection of Kashmiri women scholars writing on 'women and Kashmir' that I co-edited as a special issue in the journal Economic & Political Weekly in India (published in December 2018), and which later grew into the volume ‘Can you hear Kashmiri women speak?’ (Kali for Women Press 2020).

4The sessions on the second day of the conference, 14 October, reflected a plethora of interests as the small sample here indicates – linguistic rights and educational practices and policies in Nepal; the artistic legacy of John C Huntington (1937– 2021); impact of international migration on Sherpa communities and Nepali students in Canada; Nepali diaspora and housing politics in the United States; intersecting influence of colonialism and Covid-19 on nomadic tribes of Jammu and Kashmir; impact of market exposure on pastoral nomadic communities in Ladakh; mother goddess worship in the Garhwal Himalayas; controversies over sacred and impure blood in Nepali religious and legal discourses; religious revival in Indo-Chinese borderlands; a Newar online dictionary project; digital libraries in the Himalayas and the politics of knowledge production; generational perspectives of the exiled Tibetan community and Bhutanese refugees; sacred geography and the spiritual practices in highland settlements in Nepal; assessments of tourism in relation to climate change and Covid-19 in Mustang. The sessions clearly suggested an engagement with the many ongoing upheavals in the Himalayan region, especially the impact of economic or ecological changes as they cascade into everyday life and community practices.

5The sessions relating to colonial legacies and lived realities in Himalayan borderlands, convened by Galen Murton, were of special interest to me. They included my presentation on the 1910 treaty between Bhutan and Britain, where I analysed the role of friendship diplomacy in creating political relationalities in the Himalayan borderlands and how this continues to be significant. Dibyesh Anand traced the history of how Tibet was erased over time in China–India border disputes and how Tawang became a flashpoint. Swati Chawla described the racialised discourse of the colonial British state that was influential in creating the idea of India's ‘Mongolian Fringe’. Swargajyoti Gohain’s presentation focused on the coinciding monastery circuits in western Arunachal Pradesh and the new tourist circuits in the Indian Himalaya, pointing out the role of the Indian state in promoting monastic tourism in Himalayan borderlands. Papers by Arjun Sharma and Galen Murton were concerned with the legacies of colonial frontier-making in border community villages and the creation of territories through roads and towns across Himalayan frontiers. Nadine Plachta’s presentation also referred to the geographies of securitisation across Himalayan borderlands. Another set of papers of interest to me were those relating to twenty-first century Bhutan in a session convened by Ariana Maki and including presentations by younger Bhutanese scholars, such as Deki Peldon who comparatively assessed the political transitions in Nepal and Bhutan, and Sonam Nyenda who chronicled change over time with the case study of Sumthrang Monastery in central Bhutan. The panel on film, fiction and photography in places like Kumaon and Kathmandu was one that I would have liked to attend but clashed with two simultaneous roundtables, one on envisioning a just and global climate change science for the Himalaya and another on pedagogy and practices for Nepal and Himalayan Studies. The latter roundtable on pedagogy confronted the difficult but urgent question of how to create and sustain an engagement with Himalayan Studies in the United States. Within North America, interest in Asia is focused on China, Japan, Korea and, within South Asia, on India. Even when Himalayan studies are highlighted, the engagement is really with Tibet and, at a stretch, Nepal. This is indeed vexing for scholars who work on the wider Himalayas and want a broader emphasis for political, cultural and ecological reasons. Carole McGranahan suggested that a possible way forward would be greater involvement of Himalayan studies teaching at the undergraduate level.

6The second keynote lecture was held towards the end of the second day and just before a meeting to discuss a Canadian Himalaya Initiative. The lecture was presented by Karine Gagné on the topic ‘Taming India’s northernmost border: ecologies of violence, care, and resistance in the Himalayas’. Gagné’s book-length ethnographic account of lives and experiences of Tibetan Buddhists of Ladakh in relation to their geographical, social and historical realities and narratives was published in 2019. She proposed an ‘ethics of care’ approach to perceive the way in which these Ladakhis relate to their land, animals and even the glacier. Gagné was previously the recipient of the James Fisher Prize for first books on the Himalayan region. At HSC6 in Toronto, the names of this year's James Fisher Prize award announcements were made at the ANHS general meeting at the close of the third day on 15 October. Sara Smith’s book ‘Intimate geopolitics: love, territory, and the future on India's northern threshold’ was awarded the prize, and Swargajyoti Gohain’s book ‘Imagined geographies in the Indo-Tibetan borderlands’ received a merit mention. These announcements and other personal acknowledgements of individuals who have contributed over long periods of time to the running of the organisation, were pleasant breaks at the general meeting which otherwise focused on prosaic matters relating to the running of the organisation, expanding membership and finding ways of establishing and maintaining local connexions in the Himalayan region that are now made less easy by various post-Covid constraints.

7The third day of the conference, 15 October, again consisted of a mass of parallel sessions that can be sampled from this range: considering spatial temporalities and infrastructures in the Indian Himalaya, and especially water crises and water infrastructures; pastoral displacements as a result of changing rules, climates or economies; educational initiatives in Uttarakhand; politics of labour and the role of migrant workers in the Himalayas, as well as migrant workers from the region in the Middle East; indigenous knowledge and science in Nepal; young people's blood donation practices in Shimla; Tharu activism in western Nepal; local news media and democracy in a Nepali border town; responses to the pandemic in Nepal; construction of sherpa identity; neoliberal practices in the Himalayan mountaineering industry. In addition, there were various roundtables, such as on Himalayan art, youth deliberation on post-federalism and political culture in Nepal, and decolonising Himalayan studies. My own paper on the postcolonial Himalayas argued for recognising the complex indigeneities and what I call ‘discourses of competing victimhoods’ in the Kashmir conflict, a critical perspective appreciated by scholars from the region and beyond who were in attendance.

8On the last day of the conference, 16 October there were relatively fewer panels since the conference ended not long after noon with the long-awaited and delicious momos for lunch. In addition to the sustained focus on Himalayan infrastructures, religion and rituals, the presentations covered various themes including climate injustice and disasters, Himalayan masculinities, Himalayan histories and Himalayan literature and poetry. As can be surmised from this report, the ANHS HSC6 conference was a gathering of scholars and students from across a variety of disciplines; the geographer or political scientist may not feel out of place at such a gathering and, on the contrary, may end up having useful exchanges with sociologists and anthropologists. As a multi-disciplinary academic, I enjoyed the event and it was certainly a pleasure to have many interesting conversations with so many people, ranging from the American and Indian scholars of the Himalayas I have presented alongside before, to emerging Tibetan scholars in Canada who introduced me to the large Tibetan diaspora community and its leaders in Toronto. It was also brilliant to be at a conference that went beyond the standard veneration of the established white males and allocated the two keynote lectures to women scholars who are not yet full professors.

9Whether we are peoples from the Himalayan region or scholars and creatives working on the region, or an overlap of both (as in my case), it is vital that we create spaces and conversations for our knowledges to reflect the interlinked realities that are simultaneously political/social/economic/ecological/cultural. This will, in turn, assist in addressing the multiple intersecting challenges and vulnerabilities faced by those for whom, and with whom, we create knowledge. Such an endeavour is at once difficult and urgent. Academic disciplines are changing to acknowledge this, and ANHS HSC6 was a positive move in this direction.