reading/thinking
on the subtleties of doing archival work
Dearest Gentle Reader,
For most of June and July, I have engaged myself in archival documents. Archival materials contain vignettes of history. These documents open us up to the world that was contained in paper trails, buried in one corner of an archival institution.
Reading
Archives often bear the most intimate imprints of history. Sometimes, it is a letter written on parched paper tucked away in a police file. And other times, it is Ghalib’s poetry scratched on the walls of a jail cell. Or it might be a report on a hallucinating Satyagrahi who deluded himself of meeting national leaders just as he counted days in prison.
Or a letter—a deeply personal one—that finds itself in a private file, written by a wife who awaits her husband’s return from jail cells. Or even worse, scribbled footnotes of bureaucratic files that decide the fate of thousands. Each vignette tells you something about history—not just what happened, but also what caused it, and what that event meant for history itself.
The last two months were marked by a certain sense of joy, when I found something interesting about the times I was reading about; anxiety, and a deep sense of frustration, when I realised that it was not all that easy to do archival work—to dig up materials that might only exist in your imagination.
On a good day, I would sit with friends in the library and tell them the stories from the texts I just discovered in archives—about how some ordinary people faced the British Empire. On a bad day, I would juggle between looking for new avenues for research and new ways to make sense of what I already have in the archives. And, even newer ways of coming to terms with—and telling yourself—that this should be enough. You can tell a good story with this information. There is sufficient data for you to build your argument. And other such excuses.
But finally, that is done now. I have convinced myself enough that I have sufficient data to start working on my PhD chapters. Having done what seemed almost undoable in three months, I now look to working on chapters. I feel confident, at least until another roadblock hits me. No matter how prepared you are with your data, your interpretations, it is never easy.
There are things you do not have so much control over. Family, for instance, is one. This last month has been anxiety-inducing to say the least. Family situation back home often kept me from reading and thinking so much. Perhaps, things that are too personal to write for this audience, at least for now. But let’s just call this a family situation. There were times I felt helpless. There were also other times I came to terms with feeling helpless. Between sitting and reading in archives, attending calls, and then getting back to reading and thinking, it takes a toll on you. Things have improved a bit on this front now and are likely to continue, so I hope.
In between all this, I fell off in the bathroom and got stitches on my hand. The witnesses, my friends, can attest to the severity. Just a few stitches on the right arm. It took ten days for it to heal, and fifteen for the stitches to come off my arm. Now, almost a month after the incident, just a mark remains.
Thinking
I got a few articles published in the last two months. This is always refreshing. I wrote this journal article with a colleague, Luke Munn, on how AI codifies cultures for the New Media and Society. The abstract reads as follows:
How is the cultural made computational? CLIP models are a recent artificial intelligence (AI) innovation which train on massive amounts of Internet data in order to align language and image, deploying this ‘grasp’ of cultural concepts to understand prompts, classify images and carry out tasks. To critically investigate this cultural codification, we explore MetaCLIP, a recent variation developed by Meta. We analyse the model’s metadata, a single file of 500,000 terms that aims to achieve a ‘balanced distribution’ or sufficiently broad understanding of concepts. We show how this model assembles histories, languages, ideologies and media artefacts into a kind of cultural knowledge. We argue this codification fuses the ancient technique of the list with a more recent technique of latent space. We conclude by framing these technologies as cultural machines that exert power in defining and operationalising a particular understanding of ‘culture’ invisibly and at scale.
In writing this paper, I learnt a lot myself about how AI interprets cultural data to understand culture. And in the process, I also learn what CLIP models do in how AI interprets data.
Read the full article here if you find this intriguing.
Earlier, I had written this journal article for the Australian Journal of International Affairs, titled: “The United States is a Messianic State”, where I argue that between 1991 and 2020, the US foreign policy rhetoric is shaped by the self-image of the United States as a global messiah.
In an invited essay for the Australian Outlook, I reflect further on my formulation:
Between 1991 and 2021, America had emerged as a messianic state—a nation-state that assumes a global responsibility to save other societies from an impending threat. These states constitute three interrelated features: first, they assume their relative superiority as opposed to others; second, they sustain an altruistic vision for the world; and third, they tend to use the rhetoric of benevolence to justify their actions. For a time, for European colonial powers, it was the “white man’s burden” to uplift societies from the savagery and barbarism of native societies. At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union, as leader of the communist bloc, similarly used state-led propaganda to propagate global Marxist-Leninist proletarian revolution. Building on the rhetoric that capitalist state systems were exploitative, the Soviet Union pushed forth Communist International as a form of classless and stateless society. And for the United States, it was the democratic decline and the subsequent rise of autocratic governments worldwide.
With the disintegration of the Soviet Union in 1991, the United States became the sole superpower with the power to wage wars and stop them anywhere in the world. Subsequently, scholars began articulating America as “the last hope on earth,” “the leader of the free world,” and “an empire of liberty.” These articulations suggested that America played a unique role in the world and that it is an exception. Although the roots of exceptionalism go back to the founding moment (for instance, Thomas Jefferson remarked upon America as an “Empire of Liberty”), American exceptionalism began to animate political discourse more clearly after the end of the Cold War.
Equipped now with the notions of exceptionalism, American leadership began envisioning “democracy promotion” as their altruistic vision for the world. Francis Fukuyama had, by then, in 1989, declared “The End of History” with “the universalisation of liberal democracy as the final form of human Government.” Fukuyama’s thesis—and the subsequent formulations of democratic peace—enabled US foreign policy practitioners to adopt democracy promotion worldwide.
Between 1991 and 2021, various American administrations meticulously adopted the discursive practices of benevolence. Every US administration since President George H. W. Bush in the 1990s spoke of how “with the help of America, all [countries] are on the road to peace,” and how “the impoverished, the oppressed, the weak have looked to the United States to be strong, to be capable and to care.” And “perhaps more than anything else,” how “they have depended on the [United States] to lead.”
Let me illustrate this with an example. In the wake of the Global War on Terror (GWOT), which began in the aftermath of the 11 September terror attacks, President George W. Bush said: “Our mission is clear, to disarm Iraq of weapons of mass destruction, to end Saddam Hussein’s support for terrorism, and to free the Iraqi people.” Subsequently, the administration’s National Security Strategy document declared that Afghans and Iraqis have “replaced tyrannies with democracies.” In most instances of American intervention, the narrative of benevolence animated the public discourse.
The notion of American exceptionalism and its vision for making the world safe for democracy, now equipped with the rhetoric of benevolence that informed its interventions practice—as saving societies from their decline—in the name of democracy promotion.
Click on this link to read the full essay.
And finally, I got myself published in the World Politics Review, a political science and IR website read by thousands of dedicated readers on geopolitics. The title of my reflective essay is as follows: “To Lead the Global South, India Must Get Its Own House in Order”.
India has long aspired to be a mouthpiece for the Global South, but those aspirations have grown since Prime Minister Narendra Modi took office in 2014. In recent years especially, India has hosted and convened multiple high-level global summits, proclaimed and defended its strategic autonomy and spoken the language of democratic values and global solidarity. And in doing so, India has sought to position itself as a bridge between Western societies and the developing world—one that is postcolonial, powerful and poised to lead.
But despite Modi’s rhetoric of Vishwa Mitra, or friend of the world, and Vishwa Guru, or teacher of the world, India has struggled to match its foreign policy ambition with achievements. Even as Modi seeks to portray India as the leader of the Global South, its domestic conditions—including socio-economic inequality, religious intolerance, curbs on free speech and democratic decline—suggest it actually lacks the capacity to lead. Instead, India’s foreign policy today increasingly resembles that of what economist Lant Pritchett has called a “flailing state”—the head makes plans, but the limbs don’t follow them.
The article is paywalled, and therefore, if you would like to read this essay, just comment below and share your email. I will share it with you.
And finally, I also read Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, which won the International Booker Prize for 2025. This collection of short stories contains heartwarming stories of Muslim women navigating and challenging the patriarchal and religious norms shaping their everyday lives.
Take, for instance, the heartwarming narration of Shaista’s life, a Muslim woman married to Iftikhar Bhai, who loves Shaista unconditionally and wants to build her a Mahal as beautiful as the Taj Mahal. Soon, Shaista dies while birthing yet another child for Iftikhar Bhai, just as she had birthed several earlier. Thereafter, Iftikhar marries again to another young woman, and the circle would continue–reproduce and die in the process, perhaps. In Iftikhar’s declarations of love for Shaista, which sustained until her death, Mushtaq shows us what love meant and how fleeting it turns out to be.
Click on this link to read the full review of Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp.
This is all I did in the last two months. August is likely to be busier than July. I will be travelling back home for a bit. I will also go around the countryside for a bit. I haven’t taken a train journey since coming back from Brisbane. So, doing that, I think, will be fun.
For now, dear reader, I let this newsletter slip through my grip and pass on to you. I hope you enjoy reading this one. Feel free to comment below on how your life has been these two months.
Hi Adarsh, it was an interesting read, especially the excerpts. Please share the link to your article on WPR with me. Thanks a ton!