By Nikhil Stewart
Hello, my name is Nikhil Stewart! I am a senior at the University of Hawaiʻi (UH) Mānoa pursuing a double bachelor’s degree in religious traditions and political science, with a certificate in Sanskrit. Originally, I hail from Long Beach, California—a place known for good music, great people, and bodacious skate parks. I’m quite typically Californian: I grew up surfing, skating, and sailing in the summers at the Leeway Sailing Center, where I later worked my first job as a coach. Beyond that, I play guitar and sitar with my band, ‘Blue Tuesday’ (our latest single, “Lock and Key,” is available on streaming platforms, if you’re interested!).
Within my Religious Traditions degree, I focus on South Asian thought traditions—Buddhism, Sāṃkhya, Nyāya, and related schools of philosophy—as well as Buddhist lived practice. I’m incredibly grateful that my home university specializes in Indigenous methodologies, Indian thought and Sanskrit, as it has given me the rare opportunity to study ancient texts that not only connect with my own ancestry—I’m half Bengali—but also offer a profound porthole to view the human mind and condition, across space and time.
In Political Science, I’ve been primarily focused on geopolitics, history of political thought, and political ecology. In the Summer of 2023, I worked for the United States Senate conducting policy research concerned with Animal Rights, Transportation & Infrastructure, Environmental Policy, and I put together a document which analysed how President Biden’s Fiscal Responsibility Act of 2023 affected New Jersey Constituents.
Additionally a scholarly hobby of mine is linguistics, having studied Spanish, Bengali, Sanskrit, and cursory amounts of Korean. My undergraduate thesis is a piece in theoretical linguistics, synthesizing Jakob von Uexküll’s biosemiotics theory with linguistic structuralism (e.g., Sapir, Whorf), positing language as a “meta-biological sense organ.” All of this experience culminates and informs the project I am engaged in this summer.
My research this summer, thanks in large part to the Tyler Foundation and the UH Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program, will be an Indigenous modernities study questioning the role that social media plays for Tibetan Buddhist practice and identities in and around the Kathmandu Valley. I will be conducting ethnographic interviews of Buddhist Lamas (monks), lay practitioners and related community members to better understand this relationship.
Colleague Rachel See and I, summitting Kyanjin Ri (4773m / 15655 ft), May 2024.
The impetus for this project first arose on a trip to Nepal before I attended an American Institute of Indian Studies (AIIS) Bengali language program in Kolkata, India, last June. I visited Kathmandu, with a colleague Rachel See who is a Tibetan Buddhist Scholar. While there, I noticed robed Lamas walking through monasteries and scrolling on Facebook, watching reels on Instagram, and chants on YouTube. The sight was surreal, if not baffling. I had taken multiple courses focusing on Tibetan Buddhism, yet they all somehow failed to mention the importance of WhatsApp groups and Facebook posts in cultivating the Dharma…
After a week in Kathmandu, we ventured 200 kilometers north and hiked for a total of eight days into the Himalayan mountains eventually arriving at Langtang Valley. There I saw Tamang villagers who were semi-nomadic yak herders for the past eight hundred years dancing to global TikTok trends. They were sharing a similar ‘memefied,’ referential humor, similar to my friends back home.
Trekking guide, Sudip Adhikari, Rachel See and I driving to Langtang Valley.
This was the moment I heard the penny hit the floor and the clock tick. I knew something profound and strange was happening in this global moment. I informally asked some villagers and lamas what their experience with social media was. As it turns out, this phenomena accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many people received phones for schooling and other life necessities in the most remote areas. One lama I talked to informed me there were Buddhist Facebook and WhatsApp groups where the diaspora could communicate and organize internationally.
Tamang Villagers in Langtang Valley scrolling on social media.
Shortly after this visit, I began to do some research to see who else may have written about this. There were a few articles, a book Immigrant Ambassadors (2009) by Dr. Julia Meredeth Hess. Hess asserted that because the Tibetan Nation is not a nation-‘state’ the unique qualities associated with the Tibetan Diaspora, ‘Tibetanness’ is important in order to maintain legitimate appeals to organizations such as the United Nations. Thus it becomes geo-politically important to understand how the Tibetan Diaspora is rapidly changing.
A conversation between myself and a thangka art Shop owner in Kathmandu, who uses Facebook to advertise Buddhist Art
This summer I plan to go back to the Kathmandu Valley and neighboring Tibetan communities to conduct formal ethnographic research. The goal of the study is to use Indigenous and decolonial methods, positioning research subjects (Tibetan lamas, lay practitioners, and associated community members) as primary sources while taking capacious effort to care for and respect their ways of knowing and being. The goal of this study is to understand the specific ways in which social media serves to homogenize aspects of culture, while simultaneously allowing for niche groups to consolidate regardless of geographic location.Along with this project, I am also looking forward to the intensive Intermediate Sanskrit course I will be taking at Rangjung Yeshe Institute (RYI). This past year, Rachel See and I set up an official study abroad program between the University of Hawaiʻi and RYI, as a pleasant result, I will be taking these courses alongside other friends and colleagues. Additionally, I opted to stay with a Nepali host family and I am eager to engage in deep cross-cultural learning so that my own ways of knowing and being can change for the better!
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