The Confluence Collective

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The Confluence Collective

A space, founded by researchers and artists, facilitating interdisciplinary dialogues and critical engagement in the Easter Himalaya

15/04/2026

Have old photographs?
Get them digitised with The Confluence Collective.
As we expand our digital photo archive to Sikkim, we invite you to share your albums and help preserve memories for the future.
Old family albums are more than just collections of photographs they are living records of memory, identity, and heritage. Each image carries stories that connect generations and reflect the cultural fabric of its time.
But these fragile archives are at risk. Photographs fade, edges wear away, and details disappear taking irreplaceable memories with them.

How to contribute https://www.theconfluencecollective.com/contribute

07/04/2026

Have old photographs? Get them digitised with The Confluence Collective.
As we expand our digital photo archive to Sikkim, we invite you to share your albums and help preserve memories for the future.
Old family albums are more than just collections of photographs they are living records of memory, identity, and heritage. Each image carries stories that connect generations and reflect the cultural fabric of its time.
But these fragile archives are at risk. Photographs fade, edges wear away, and details disappear taking irreplaceable memories with them.

How to contribute https://www.theconfluencecollective.com/contribute

19/03/2026

बाउको धुरी छैन (Father Has No Roof Over His Head) - A Look Back

04/03/2026

Poem - Appa and Photography by Lungmying Lepcha
In our latest blog post, Lungmying Lepcha – A Daughter Understanding Her Father Through Photography, we reflect on memory, inheritance, and the quiet language of images.
It begins with self-doubt questioning the urge to make photographs. Slowly, it becomes a realisation: perhaps this impulse is inherited. Not as perfected skill, but as instinct as a way of holding on to life, to family, to fleeting moments.

Read the full piece.
https://www.theconfluencecollective.com/post/appa-and-photography

Call for Submissions
The Confluence Collective is now accepting blog submissions. We invite original works that explore personal experiences, as well as social, political, and cultural realities connected to the Sikkim–Darjeeling Himalayas. Our blog seeks to bring together diverse voices and perspectives to build a shared narrative of this region.
To submit your work, please email us at [email protected].

26/02/2026

Just 2 days left to experience something truly unforgettable.
After an incredible 5 days, the journey continues and this is your final chance to be part of it.

बाउको धुरी छैन
Father Has No Roof Over His Head
Step into powerful stories of recognition, loss, and return where forgotten lives from early high-altitude Himalayan exploration are finally brought back into view.
For the first time in Kalimpong, rare historic expedition photographs are presented alongside deeply personal histories recovered through archives and family memory. Images once unnamed and kept far away now return to the very land they came from speaking directly to it.

This is more than an exhibition.
It is remembrance. It is reclamation. It is homecoming.

Industrial Park, Kalimpong
21–27 February 2026
Don’t miss these final two days. Come witness history being given back its names.

24/02/2026

Born as Karma Palden in Lhasa, Tibet, in 1894, he was orphaned at the age of twelve after the death of his parents. He was subsequently raised by missionaries in Darjeeling, where he adopted the name Karma Paul and received his education. This early exposure to multiple cultures and languages profoundly shaped his future path. By his late twenties, he was fluent in English, Tibetan, Nepali, Bengali, and several Himalayan dialects.
Before joining mountaineering expeditions, he worked in Calcutta and later served as a schoolmaster in Darjeeling. In 1922, at the age of twenty-eight, he was recruited as an interpreter for his first British expedition to Mount Everest. His linguistic ability and deep cultural knowledge made him invaluable to the expedition teams, and over the next sixteen years he accompanied five more expeditions.
By the 1940s, Karma Paul was known not only as a respected “sirdar” but also as a businessman in Darjeeling. Demonstrating remarkable adaptability, he trained himself as a skilled automobile mechanic and established a taxi service in the hill town. At the same time, he developed a keen interest in horse racing and owned several racing ponies. In the 1950s, he reportedly made a modest fortune through the sport.
Karma Paul’s life reflects an extraordinary journey from an orphaned child in Lhasa to a respected interpreter, expedition member, and successful entrepreneur in Darjeeling bridging cultures during a formative era of Himalayan mountaineering.

23/02/2026

Ang Tsering’s daughters remember 1960 as “one of the hardest years for our family.” That year brought losses that unfolded across mountains and distances, beyond anyone’s control.
His mother had remained in Thame, Nepal while her sons worked in Darjeeling. For years, her only connection to Ang Tsering was the clothes and small gifts he sent. His daughters recall how she would hold the garments close, breathing in their scent and whispering blessings: “My son, Ang Tsering, sent these.” Love endured through absence.
After an Everest expedition, Ang Tsering set out on foot to bring her to Darjeeling. The journey was harsh long days of walking, hunger so severe he survived by chewing ice. But when he reached Thame, his mother had just died. He met her not at home, but at her grave.
At the same time in Darjeeling, tragedy was unfolding. His wife, Passang, was gravely ill. Their children were managing the household when their youngest sister fell from a second-storey building and suffered a severe head injury. They kept this from their dying mother. Soon after, Passang passed away. The children performed her funeral rites alone, unable to reach their father and unwilling to burden him further.
Meanwhile, Ang Tsering, having spent his savings on his mother’s rites, joined another expedition to earn money. Only two months later did he learn of his wife’s death. When he finally returned home, the family realised the cruel timing: his wife had died on Friday, his mother on Sunday just days apart.
Ang Tsering never remarried.

22/02/2026

In 1933, members of the Everest Expedition Team arrived not only with ropes, oxygen apparatus, and imperial ambition but with six sets of boxing gloves. At Tengkye Dzong, Tibet Boustead staged “lessons” in the so-called art of boxing for local porters. A sport unfamiliar to them was imposed as entertainment, discipline, and spectacle. Teaching the porters to fight for amusement reduced them to performers in a colonial theatre, their labour extending beyond hauling loads up the mountain to staging endurance for European eyes.
To confront this moment honestly is to reject any sentimental reading of it as harmless cross-cultural exchange. Even leisure operated as an instrument of hierarchy. The mountain was not the only terrain being claimed; bodies were also made into sites of control. The gloves, the spectatorship, the laughter each rehearsed imperial authority in miniature.
The photo from the Wiley Archive at does not document innocent recreation. It records porters sweating, striking, and exhausting themselves under the watchful gaze of expedition members who remained spectators. It shows bodies turned into performance. It shows empire practicing itself.

Come witness these stories as Day 2 begins not as tales of adventure, but as records of imbalance, endurance, and empire laid bare.

21/02/2026

We were deeply honoured to open this exhibition alongside members of the families of Chheten Wangdi, who joined the 1921 expedition, and Ang Tshering Sherpa of the 1924 expedition. To welcome their descendants here, within our own community, felt profoundly meaningful. Their presence bridged a century of history, connecting the early Everest journeys with the living memories that continue within families today.

More than one hundred years after those expeditions set out, these stories were shared not as distant history, but as personal memory passed across generations, across tables, and across time. Descendants gathered not only to remember, but to reconnect. What began as exploration on the mountain has become part of our shared local story, carried through migration, labour, family life, and enduring community bonds.

This exhibition is not simply about mountaineering. It is about our trans-Himalayan people about the labour that made exploration possible, the strength of culture carried across borders, and the resilience that shaped both the journeys and the lives that followed. It reflects how these histories are woven into our community today, and how photographs take on deeper meaning when seen alongside oral histories and lived experience.

Here, where cultures meet and families have built new roots, these images feel close to home. They are not just archival records; they are part of family memory, community identity, and an ongoing conversation about who we are and where we come from.

We warmly invite you to visit, to spend time with these stories, and to share in this living connection between past and present.

20/02/2026

You are warmly invited to the opening of our exhibition
“बाउको धुरी छैन” (Father Has No Roof Over His Head)” happening Tomorrow

21st February
11:00 AM
Industrial Park, Kalimpong

Please join us as we gather to remember, honour, and witness the untold stories of our mountain people the skilled porters, guides, and interpreters who carried European expeditions to the top of the world.

The opening will be followed by a Tsampa & Butter Tea ceremony, shared in community.

We look forward to welcoming

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Atisha Road
Kalimpong
734301

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https://www.theconfluencecollective.com/supportus

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