Research Papers & Publications

Not long ago, one of us typed a simple prompt into ChatGPT's image generation tool: visualise a traditional mosque in Kerala. What came back was striking, not for its accuracy, but for its failure. The image showed a tile laid structure reminiscent of a Hindu temple, topped with a cross alongside a crescent, populated by figures in white caps and green checked lungis that looked more like a costume designer's approximation of Muslim identity than anything drawn from lived reality. There was no arched entrance, no jali work, no minar, none of the distinctive Malabar mosque architecture that any person from Kozhikode or Malappuram would instantly recognise. The algorithm had produced something confident, visually coherent, and profoundly wrong.Read more

Every morning, millions of people across the world read a newspaper, in print, on screen, or through a feed, and discard it by evening. The news of today becomes the waste of tomorrow. Yet within those pages, quietly and without ceremony, history is being written. Not the history of kings and constitutions, but the history of communities: their anxieties, their celebrations, their arguments, their silences. The newspaper is perhaps the most democratic historical document ever produced, and one of the least protected.Read more

In the closing decades of the nineteenth century, William Logan, a Scottish civil servant in the employ of the British colonial administration, sat down to write the history of Malabar. The result, published in 1887, was a monumental two-volume work that remains, to this day, one of the most cited references on the region's geography, administration, social structure, and political history. Generations of historians, lawyers, administrators, and researchers have drawn on it. It is indispensable. It is also, in a profound and largely unacknowledged sense, someone else's story told by someone else entirely.Read more

There is a particular kind of silence that falls over a community when an elder dies. It is not the silence of grief alone, though grief is there, full and heavy. It is the silence of everything that person carried and never wrote down: the name of the well that dried up in the year of the great drought, the route the spice traders took before the road was built, the words of the song sung at weddings in a village that no longer exists, the account of what actually happened on the night the colonial soldiers came. When an elder dies without a recorder present, without a patient interviewer, without even a grandchild who thought to ask, a portion of history dies with them. Quietly, without announcement, without an entry in any archive. Just gone.Read more