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Bal Gopal Shrestha

Bal Gopal Shrestha is a Cultural Anthropologist and a documentary filmmaker based in The Netherlands. He was born in Sankhu, a small town near Kathmandu, and finished his MA (Political Science) from the Tribhuvan University. Shrestha completed a PhD in Anthropology at Leiden University in 2002. He is currently an Affiliated fellow at the International Institute of Asian Studies, (IIAS), Leiden.

He has published widely on Nepalese religious rituals, Hinduism, Buddhism, ethnic nationalism, the Maoist movement, political developments in Nepal, and the Nepalese diaspora, etc. Besides numerous journal articles and book chapters, Shrestha has also authored two monographs: The Sacred Town of Sankhu: The Anthropology of Newar Rituals, Religion and Society in Nepal (Cambridge Scholar Publishing 2012, paperback 2013), and The Newars of Sikkim: Reinventing Language, Culture and Identity in the Diaspora (Vajra Books 2015). He has also written and translated a number of literary and research books in his native Newar language (Nepal Bhasa), including the Folk Stories of Sri Lanka. Some of his poems have also been translated into English.

Dr Shrestha has been a Jan Gonda fellow at the International Institute for Asian Studies, Leiden (2001-02), offered to him by The Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences, Amsterdam. He was also awarded the Frederick Williamson Memorial Fund by the University of Cambridge (2003). Between 2004-06 Shrestha was a research fellow at the Centro Incontri Umani, Ascona, Switzerland. For a while, he taught Politics of South and Southeast Asia at Leiden University (2006–07). In 2009 he joined the School of Anthropology & Museum Ethnography at the University of Oxford, where he has been carrying out research on the Nepalese diaspora in the UK and Belgium.

Together with the late A.W. van den Hoek and Dirk J. Nijland, Bal Gopal Shrestha has made the award-winning ethnographic documentary Sacrifice of Serpents: The Festival of Indrayani, Kathmandu (Leiden, 1997). The documentary received wide public acclaim in Nepal, France, the Netherlands, and the USA. Among other places it was screened at Harvard, Princeton, Cornell and Oxford universities. It was also the recipient of ‘Award of Commendation’ by the American Anthropological Association, Philadelphia.

For his literary contributions to the Newar language, Shrestha has also been honoured with the Thakurlal Manandhar Award (1993) by the Nepal Bhasa Parisad (The Newar Language Literary Council), Kathmandu.