Kalzang Dorjee Bhutia is a Non-Resident Senior Fellow in the Centre of Excellence for Himalayan Studies at Shiv Nadar University, India. He is a researcher, educator, and activist who has worked across the fields of Buddhist philosophy and history; relationships between humans and more-than-humans in the environments of the Himalayas, and especially his home state of Sikkim, focusing on ritual, land, water, air, foodways, and climate change; Indigenous studies; and decolonial knowledge repair and reclamation.
His project at IGVI will focus on relationships between humans, non-human animals, and more-than-human forces in Sikkim’s landscape, and how these relationships are responding to the different impacts of climate change.
Dr. Bhutia completed a PhD in Buddhist Studies at the University of Delhi and his research has been supported by the American Council of Learned Societies, the Robert H. N. Ho Foundation, the Wenner-Gren Foundation, and others. He was recently a research associate for the project Hidden Stories: New Approaches to Local and Global History of the Book at the University of Toronto and Princeton University. For more information on the project see:
His most recent publications include the co-authored book On the Significance of Religion in Climate Change (Routledge 2025), and “Rituals to Make the Rain Fall on Time and Mend the Concrete
Caves: Propitiating the Land as Repair and Care in Sikkim,”
Yin-Cheng Journal of Contemporary Buddhism 1.2 (2024)
For more information about Dr. Bhutia’s research, see:
and: