Events and activities
Alongside the photo exhibition, the programme will include a series of talks, workshops, and interactive activities designed to deepen engagement with the exhibition’s themes. These sessions create spaces for reflection, dialogue, and shared learning around the histories, labour, and lived experiences connected to the Himalayas. Significantly, the exhibition is being held in a place from which many of the historic Himalayan expeditions of the 1920s were organised and carried out, lending particular resonance to the conversations and activities that unfold here. Through collective participation, the programme brings together researchers, community members, families, and visitors to foreground local perspectives and foster meaningful, intergenerational exchange.
Making Butter Tea & Tsampa
with family members of the 1920s Everest expeditions
21st-Feb, 2025 / 12pm
Industrial Park, Kalimpong
As part of the exhibition, visitors are invited to join a shared, hands-on activity focused on making butter tea and tsampa staple foods that sustained early high-altitude porters in the Himalayas. Family members of Chheten Wangdi (1921 expedition) and Ang Tshering Sherpa (1924 expedition) will take part in this session, connecting Everest histories of the 1920s with lived family memory today.
Looking at the photo archives and documents at the Royal Geographical Society - WILEY DIGITAL ARCHIVES, we see clear evidence that expedition food was organised along unequal lines. Letters were exchanged discussing in detail the best food and personal preferences of European climbers tinned meat, biscuits, sugar, chocolate, alcohol, and other imported supplies. These records show careful planning for the climbers’ comfort and nutrition. In contrast, simple tsampa was often the only food listed for local porters, revealing a stark difference in how bodies and labour were valued. This contrast forms an important context for the activity.
For generations, butter tea and tsampa nourished porters, guides, and workers in harsh mountain conditions. These foods were not only practical but part of everyday life, shaping routines of work, rest, and care at high altitude. Prepared collectively and grounded in local knowledge, they formed an essential link between labour, landscape, and belief.
By comparison, many Western climbers relied on imported expedition foods carefully selected and transported from abroad. Their supplies reflected a temporary and extractive relationship to the mountains, often framed around ideas of endurance and achievement. Meanwhile, local porters sustained themselves through familiar foods embedded in cultural continuity and respect for mountains understood as living beings.
This gathering creates space for shared preparation, tasting, and storytelling. By bringing these food histories into the present, the activity invites reflection on labour, value, and memory highlighting the unequal yet deeply intertwined histories of Himalayan expeditions, and grounding the exhibition’s themes in embodied and communal practice.
The sacred dimensions of Khangchendzonga -
Pema Wangchuk Dorjee
22nd Feb, 2025 / 04-05pm
Industrial Park, Kalimpong
Khangchendzonga: Sacred Summit, a work that has been deeply influential in shaping contemporary understandings of Khangchendzonga not merely as a geographical landmark, but as a living, sacred presence. The talk will explore the sacred dimensions of the mountain—how Khangchendzonga is worshipped, revered as a guardian, and embedded within local cosmologies and belief systems.
These perspectives resonate strongly with our ongoing research into early Everest and other Himalayan expeditions undertaken during the British and European imperial period. While such expeditions were often framed through narratives of conquest and discovery, this talk foregrounds parallel understandings in which mountains were perceived as sentient, sacred beings by local communities.
By offering a vital counterpoint to imperial narratives of exploration, the talk invites us to reconsider ideas of reverence, guardianship, and lived relationships with the Himalayas.
Migration & Labour in the Eastern Himalayas
Ambika Rai
24th Feb, 2025 / 04-05pm
Industrial Park, Kalimpong
The talk traces both historical and contemporary trajectories of labour migration in the Eastern Himalayas, with particular attention to the movement of workers between Nepal and the Darjeeling Hills. It highlights how patterns of labour mobility, shaped by colonial wage employment, have profoundly influenced the region’s socio-economic history.
By examining the factors that drove migration across different periods, the discussion foregrounds the lived experiences of labourers engaged in plantation work, porterage, and other forms of wage employment. In doing so, it brings to light the often-overlooked contributions of these workers to the development and transformation of the Himalayan region.
Myriad Ways of Looking:
Exploring Local Mountaineering Labour through Photographs, Objects, and Stories
Bibhusha Rai
25-26th Feb, 2025 / 11am-01pm
Industrial Park, Kalimpong
This interactive workshop invites school students, college students, and the public to explore the lives of local porters, guides, interpreters, and animals involved in early Himalayan mountaineering expeditions. Starting with a ‘Guided Walkthrough’ of the exhibition ‘बाउको धुरी छैन / Father Has No Roof Over His Head’, participants engage with photographs, objects, and personal stories. Followed by a ‘Storytelling Session’, where they select an image,object, and caption, sharing their perspectives through writing, drawing or both. The workshop concludes with a ‘Postcard-Writing Activity’, where one can write to historical figures, mountain workers, animals, the Yeti or the mountains. All your responses will be compiled into ‘The Myriad Ways We See Our Mountain Labour Zine’, celebrating diverse perspectives and creative engagements with the exhibition.
Bibhusha Rai is a writer and researcher from Darjeeling. She holds a BA and MA in English Literature from the University of Delhi. She served as the Research and Editorial Support for the Sikkim Project, and was a Research Fellow in the Confluence Collective and India Foundation for the Arts project ‘Darjeeling Himalayas: Stories from Within’, collaborating with photographer Ruchi Dyeksang. Her essays and poems have appeared in- Zubaan, The Little Journal of Northeast India, Wingword Poetry Prize, The Alipore Post, and others. Her interests encompass identity, food, and women’s stories.
