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Our Story
Hi, we are the TEAM behind Katharchive
Submissions
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Hi, we are the TEAM behind Katharchive
Katharchive began as our project for Incubate Nepal 2026, a virtual mentorship program that gave our team the space, guidance, and community to turn an idea about memory and history into something real. As part of the 2026 cohort, we built Katharchive under the mentorship of Sushan Bhattarai, with Akrishta Dahal as our peer mentor, two guides whose knowledge of Nepali history and patient feedback shaped this platform at every stage.
Growing up, most of us heard bits of history that never showed up anywhere official. A story from a grandparent, a ritual at a local temple no one could explain, a name for a place that used to mean something. We started asking why so much of that never gets written down, and what happens to it once the people who remember it are gone.
Our mentor's lectures changed how we saw Nepali history. We talked about the eras of monarchy and democracy, about the parts of our history that got rewritten by outside influence, about where a lot of what we call "Nepali identity" actually comes from. It made us realize history isn't one fixed thing. It depends a lot on who got to tell it.
Katharchive: a place where anyone can record heritage that's personal to them. Oral histories, local temples and monasteries, artifacts, rituals, the kind of history that only ever lived in a few people's memory. Before building, we looked closely at platforms like the Rubin Museum, DANAM, and Ladakh's archaeology work, took what we thought worked, and tried to build something that felt more accessible for regular people, not just institutions.
We're not trying to hand people a finished archive. We're hoping people use this to take their own history seriously, the version they grew up with, not the version someone else decided was official. If even a few families or communities record something here that would've otherwise disappeared, that's the whole point of this for us.
This is just the start for us. We want Katharchive to grow into something people actually trust as a source on Nepali history, and that means a lot of work ahead. We're planning to add blogs, so contributors can write about and give context to the histories already on the platform. We also want to build an expert mode alongside our general mode, something with more detailed, in-depth information for professionals and researchers who want to use Katharchive for their own scholarly work.
