2. Projects

I’ve made a number of things over the years. Some of them were called archives. Some were tools. Some began as collaborations, others as questions. Many are still online. A few have disappeared. All of them, in one way or another, have shaped how I think about knowledge, about form, about what it means to hold something together.

Bichitra was the first large project I worked on. A digital variorum of Rabindranath Tagore’s works, it brought together manuscripts, printed editions, editorial judgments, and machine-readable metadata. Most of the conceptual work was already solid. The difficulties were infrastructural: teaching markup to thirty project workers in a week, figuring out how to collate a five-act play against a single-act edition, working out how Bengali behaves when encoded, line by line. Bichitra didn’t fall apart. It remains one of the few projects I’ve been part of that feels, even now, finished.

Recalling Jewish Calcutta was not like that. It was fragile from the start and, perhaps, more intimate. Built with members of the city’s dwindling Jewish community, it held photographs, oral histories, recipes, and family trees. For a few years, the site travelled widely: Time, the BBC, CNN, and elsewhere. Then it vanished. There was a malware attack in 2017, and we recovered. Another came in 2019, and we could not. The files are safe. The infrastructure is not. The project taught me that fragility is not always symbolic.

I joined Letters of 1916 after those two. Like Bichitra, it was an editorial project—structured, annotated, and carefully managed. But the audience was different. Bichitra was built for scholars, for close readers of text and context. Letters was built for the public. People I would never meet transcribed wartime correspondence from home, on browsers I would never test. My work focused on infrastructure: transcription systems, interfaces, data flows. The editorial labour was distributed, sometimes uneven, but always active. It was the first time I saw scholarship unfold across hundreds of hands—not behind the scenes, but in plain sight.

Battle of Mount Street Bridge was public history, but of a different kind. Built inside a game engine, it reconstructed a single day of the Easter Rising—through physics, ballistics, line of sight. We consulted with military historians to test weapon accuracy, worked with mathematicians and geographers on spatial modelling, and brought in external 3D artists to build the environment. I contributed to the conceptual frame: what we were trying to show, and what we were willing to simulate. The goal wasn’t immersion. It was argument. A way of using realism not to collapse complexity, but to stage it.

Humanities at Scale was about teaching. Not in the classroom, but at the level of infrastructure. The project set out to create digital humanities training materials; not just slides or syllabi, but a full platform, written from scratch. Everything had to be built: the content, the delivery system, the workflows for multilingual collaboration. The audience wasn’t students. It was teachers. People who were already doing the work but needed a framework to teach with. The project was part of DARIAH-EU and brought together digital humanities experts from across its working groups. It was collaborative in a different register. It was slow, discursive, distributed. In many ways, Humanities at Scale was a response to the crisis of the humanities, not a defence, but a collective proposal. Looking back, I’m not sure I ever believed in distance learning. At the time, I was committed to the work, but uncertain about the form. The effort to build, to make something teachable and shared, still matters.

anvay is a web-based topic modelling tool for Bengali texts. It began as a pedagogical experiment: how do we design digital tools for people who aren’t already experts? I wanted to avoid a structure that assumes a particular model of pedagogy: modular, carefully scaffolded, designed for measurable outcomes. My own teaching is different. I prefer meandering lectures, the kind that respond to students in real time. That kind of unfolding, that shared uncertainty, often doesn’t fit into predefined modules. anvay was built with that openness in mind. It is not a script; it is a platform. The interface is exploratory. The documentation is interactive. You choose how deeply to engage, how much complexity to invite, how to read what the model returns. I am not offering a method. I am inviting you to discover what that method might be.

It isn’t finished. Like everything else I have built, it is in motion. Humanities at Scale asked what kind of materials we need; anvay tries to ask what kind of materials allow room for thinking.

If anvay is a project about to reach a stage of completion, The Indian Fountain Pen Project is just beginning. I’ve always been drawn to fountain pens: their weight, their mechanism, the way they leave a trace. In a world of Instagram reels and generative text, they feel like relics. Yet, this is a project about tactility, slowness, and the quiet satisfaction of everyday objects. It will eventually become an archive. It already includes a database of Indian manufacturers from 1935 to the present. There are plans for interviews with traders, collectors, and shopkeepers. And there will be a series of reflections, some written by me, some invited, on writing, memory, craftsmanship, and care.

If anvay was built for others—for a community of readers, students, and researchers—then this project is for me. It is an indulgence. But like everything else I have made, it is also a way of asking how we hold on to what matters.

Unfinished Work

Not every project finds its form.

In 2014, I, and a few others, began work on a network for digital humanities from the region where I am from. It was called South Asia Digital Humanities. The idea was to bring together scholars, archivists, and technologists across the region. It didn’t hold. I was in the right place, just not at the right time. In retrospect, it was an early formation: an ancestor to what would later become DHAI and later, DHARTI.

In 2016, I built a prototype for a mobile app to explore historical letters. I spoke about it in conferences. There was interest in it, but I never released it. Somewhere along the way, I lost interest. That happens to me often. I write half-papers. I sketch bits of code. Once the idea has been tested, once the challenge is met, I tend to turn away.

My CV of failures is long. In 2017, I returned to India with a freshly minted Ph.D., some work in the European cultural heritage sector, and with the expectation that I would seamlessly transition into this system. Over the next three years, I tried to partner with cultural heritage institutions in India. I needed this for my work; dare I say, some of these institutions needed me. I followed leads, wrote proposals, made plans. Nothing came of it. It broke a part of me that I don't think I have managed to fix. I have applied and have been rejected by grant bodies five times. Some of that was structural. Some of it, I’m sure, is on me. These aren’t complaints. These are the scars I bear. I don’t want to hide them from you. This is what it means to be an academic. And, I am fortunate than most