By Aashish Mishra
Kathmandu, Sept. 30: From Dya Dhwakha, the only surviving medieval gate of Kirtipur, to Tadha Bahi, whose sanctum in Lalitpur houses one of the largest cast Buddha statues in the country, and Shambhunath Mandir, the largest religious monument of Kalikot, a project has been steadily documenting Nepal’s heritages since 2018. Through photographic, iconographic and epigraphic studies carried out both from desk and field visits, this project, led by the Heidelberg Centre for Transcultural Studies (HCTS) at the Heidelberg University, has been building a database of Nepal’s monuments for the last three years.

Aptly titled ‘The Nepal Heritage Documentation Project (NHDP)’, this scheme is the brainchild of media anthropologist Professor Dr. Christiane Brosius and Indologist Professor Dr. Axel Michaels. Faculty members at HCTS, both have an immense love for Nepal and its rich history, which is why it caused them great pain to see so many heritage sites destroyed by the 2015 earthquake. And from that pain, they saw the need for documentation to ensure heritage preservation.

“Physical structures are not eternal. They fall victim to time. That is why we need to document them, their history and their architecture, among others, so that a record remains, even if they don’t,” Dr. Rajan Khatiwoda told The Rising Nepal.
Chief scientific documentation coordinator for NHDP, Dr. Khatiwoda added, “These records can then help rebuild and restore these structures when required.”

For the documentation, the team has gone the digital route, archiving everything on the freely accessible website Digital Archive of Nepalese Arts and Architecture (DANAM). The reason for doing this, as Khatiwoda revealed, is because digital records are easy to preserve.
“Physical documents are prone to theft or decay, digital ones aren’t.” Khatiwoda explained, “They are also easy to backup.”

For backup, the Project uploads all data, which include but are not limited to structured information about the monuments like their location, history, architectural structure of religious and social significance, historical and recent photographs, maps, plans and drawings and transcriptions of inscriptions, on Heidelberg University’s institutional repository heiDATA and its multimedia platform heidICON.

Carrying out the documentation is NHDP’s team of 26, working both from Germany and in Nepal to obtain comprehensive information of the monuments of Kathmandu Valley and the surrounding cities of Banepa, Panauti, Pharping and Nuwakot as well as the comparatively distant Dolakha which are historically and culturally associated with the Valley’s culture. They also record sites in western Nepal, namely Dailekh, Jumla, Dadeldhura and Mustang, and have also worked in Solukhumbu in eastern Nepal.

“We want our database to be a national database. That is why we want to cover as much of the nation as possible,” Dr. Khatiwoda informed.
But how does a project go about the monumental task of documenting nearly every monument the eye sees? Through fieldwork, Khatiwoda said. Lots and lots of fieldwork; done by a dedicated team of anthropologists, historians, linguists, socio-cultural scholars, architects and photographers.
“We call it the in-situ team which goes to the study site and collects data,” Khatiwoda shared.

This team is informally divided into three pillars – the first to study history, epigraphy and iconography, the second for photography and the third to document architecture.
Bharat Maharjan, a scholar of Nepal Bhasa and Newa culture, is a member of the first pillar and he explained that the in-situ team first numbered and coded the monuments, then collected information about them through inscriptions, icons, imagery and by talking to people.

As this is done, senior heritage photographer Yogesh Budathoki photographs the heritage, its components and surroundings and the architects document every single aspect of the monument structure down to the millimetre. All this recorded information is then verified and edited and uploaded on DANAM in both Nepali and English for both national and international audiences.
“It takes around 10 days to fully document a site, depending on the size of the site and volume of information available,” Maharjan said.

The full NHDP team is composed of Brosius, Michaels, Khatiwoda, transcultural scholar Radha Malkar, Buddhism expert Dr. Manik Bajracharya, architect Professor Dr. Niels Gutschow, archaeologist Dr. David Andolfatto, semantic technology scholar Dr. Ashish Karmacharya, computer science student Lily Djami and Nepali arts researcher Dikshya Karki in Germany and Maharjan, Budathoki, heritage architecture specialist Anil Basukala, engineer and draftsman Bijay Basukala, architecture student Bibek Basukala, art historian and anthropologist Dr. Monalisa Maharjan, historian Ravi Shakya, full-stack developers Ashish Gautam and Bishwo Bijaya Shah, research assistant Pabitra Bajracharya, intern Pankaj Nakarmi, restoration expert Thomas Schrom, Newa Studies scholar Rajendra Shakya and team support Jagat Lama in Nepal.

“We not only document the tangible monuments but also record the present and past intangible rituals associated with them,” Bharat Maharjan added.
But conducting such in-depth documentation needs funding, which the Project receives from the Arcadia Fund. The UK-based charity organisation, which provides grants to preserve endangered culture and nature across the world, has provided NHDP financial support worth € 2.5 million to be used over its project period.

Similarly, the Project also collaborates with other institutions for knowledge and resources.
“At the heart of our work is our relationship with the Saraf Foundation for Himalayan Traditions and Culture,” Khatiwoda said, adding, “We also have very important partnerships with the Department of Archaeology and the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation (UNESCO). We also approach and are approached by individuals and organisations who want to share their documents and information to aid our work.”
But one of the most important partnerships NHDP maintains is with the Kathmandu Valley Preservation Trust (KVPT) with whom they also share an office space in Pimbahal, Lalitpur. “Our objectives align with each other and the KVPT help us greatly in our activities,” Dr. Khatiwoda added.

Through these endeavours, NHDP seeks to document every single heritage of Kathmandu Valley and as many heritages as possible of other areas. Putting that in numerical terms, the Project aims to document over 2,000 monuments, 2,500 inscriptions and 8,000 objects along with the intangible traditions related to them before it ends in 2026.
“Ambitious, yes. But not impossible,” assured Khatiwoda, informing that the Project had documented 750 heritages and were collecting information on new ones almost every day. “A majority of our Nepali team members are locals of Kathmandu who live in the area they study. So, COVID-19 and travel restrictions have also not affected our work much.”

“By the end of this project, we hope to have established a ‘heritage knowledge bank’ to serve researchers and conservationists,” Maharjan said. “It is also an heirloom to pass down to our future generations so that they may know what our culture was like and restore it,” he hoped.
Maharjan also stressed that NHDP’s archives could support the repatriation of stolen artefacts by proving their Nepali provenance.

In Dr. Khatiwoda’s words, “Our culture is what keeps our civilisation alive and our monuments are what our culture stands on. We want to document these monuments before they are destroyed and by doing so, want to keep alive the hope that they may be rebuilt in the future.”
He added, “We want to create an inventory because Nepal’s culture and history deserve it.”