How Do I Bring You Home? Seeking Ancestral Relations in a Colonial Photo Archive

Abstract How Do I Bring You Home? is an expression of the author's intellectual and affective vulnerabilities that emerged while engaging with a colonial photo archive, the L. A. Waddell Collection (ca. 1890). Currently housed at the Royal Anthropological Institute, London, the collection has sixty photographs of thirty men and women categorized as “types of Natives” of Nepal, Tibet, and Sikkim. This ongoing work is a self-conscious attempt at seeking different ways of experiencing colonial archives informed by the author's Khambu Rai ontology. The centrality of the mundum, the Rai cosmology, guides the poetics here. It includes an imagined visual and oral reconstruction. The visual is a bricolage of sorts—a juxtaposition of photographs from different archives, individual and institutional, and from the author's own family albums. The oral is in the form of conversations—reflective of their internal dilemmas and oscillations.