Write for us
We often have a topic in mind but not yet the right scholar to write on it. If you’re keen to write for The Long Memory but don’t have a clear proposal in place, below are some historical themes that we are hoping someone will write for us. Please do reach out to submissions@thelongmemory.in for more, with proof of your past work, and a pitch on why you’re the ideal candidate for the chosen piece.
Why the Dutch failed in India: In the seventeenth century the Dutch East India Company was the richest commercial enterprise on earth yet it never gained lasting ground in India the way the Portuguese, French, or British did. Was this a deliberate strategic choice because they prioritized the Spice Islands over Indian textiles, or a failure forced by circumstance? This piece will examine Dutch commercial priorities, military overextension, rivalry with the English and Mughal authorities, and shifting trade economics that together pushed them out of the subcontinent.
Who were the Ajivikas?: The Ajivikas held fate(niyati) as the supreme force governing existence, a doctrine they carried into the shifting religious landscape of the 6th century BCE Gangetic plains alongside Buddhists, Jains, and Vaidik schools. They were heavily patronized by Mauryan rulers and immortalized by the architectural splendour of the Barabar and Dashrath caves, rivaling their contemporaries in influence. This piece traces their rise and distinct philosophy of determinism along with their perpetual decline into obscurity.
The many lives of Usha temple: In the small town of Bayana in Rajasthan stands a building that has worn many identities and resists settling into just one. Known today as the Usha Mandir, the temple was raised under the Gurjara-Pratiharas in the tenth century, dedicated to the dawn-goddess Usha whose name it still carries. After the Ghurid conquest, it was transformed into a mosque. Centuries on, local rulers reconsecrated the site as a temple once more restoring it to its original character. This essay reads the monument as a layered record of north India’s contested history, told through the stone recounting how monuments served as a symbol for political and religious dominance.
The Rise and Fall of Burhanpur: Burhanpur owed its fortunes to geography as it was perched on the Tapti River at the threshold of the Deccan. The city became the Mughal empire’s essential gateway for every southward campaign from the time of Akbar up to Aurangzeb’s long Deccan wars. Imperial patronage transformed the city accordingly, leaving behind palaces, mosques, and water systems that still testify to its medieval grandeur. Yet the city’s fortunes were tied entirely to Mughal ambition in the south. As that power waned and the Marathas rose to dominate the region, Burhanpur lost its strategic purpose and slid into obscurity. This essay traces how a city built for the empire was abandoned with it.
Identity and Representation of Muslims in the Literature of Tulsidas: This essay will examine how Muslims, their faith, and their practices are represented across Tulsidas’s writing ranging from the Ramcharitmanas to the Kavitavali and Dohavali. Tulsidas is often described as a poet of syncretism, with his use of the phrase “Garib Nawaz” sometimes cited as evidence of Sufi sympathy. This essay tests that reading against the text itself, examining his references to mlecchas and yavanas alongside his devotional vocabulary. The essay aims to distinguish what Tulsidas actually wrote from later interpretation, and to situate his outlook within the religious and political context of sixteenth-century Mughal India.
Kapilendra Deva: The King Caught Between Two Empires: Kapilendra Deva rose to the Gajapati throne in a fifteenth-century Odisha hemmed in by two formidable neighbours: the Hindu power of Vijayanagara to the south and the Bahmani Sultanate to the west. Rather than buckle under this pressure, he turned it into the making of his fame, pushing his armies as far as the Kaveri and holding the Bahmanis at bay. This essay traces how a kingdom positioned between two empires built its own moment of dominance, and asks what Kapilendra’s reign reveals about the shifting balance of power in fifteenth-century India.
Bayana: The Capital That Never Was: Bayana is a small town in eastern Rajasthan with a long history. Its story goes back to the Gupta period, marked by an old pillar that names the local ruler Vishnuvardhana, a feudatory of the Guptas. Over time, Bayana grew into a strong military garrison, well placed to guard the approach to Delhi and Agra. It even held the promise of becoming an imperial capital, a promise that scarcity of water may have cut short. For centuries, it remained a contested frontier between expanding Muslim power and the Rajput kingdom of Mewar, and was ruled for a time by its own line of Muslim governors who shifted allegiance as power changed hands. This essay will explore Bayana’s rise as a strategic stronghold and its slow decline as nearby Agra rose to take its place.
Does Noida have a history?: Noida was planned in 1976 and raised from farmland into a grid of sectors and expressways, it wears the look of a true post-colonial city with no significant past. This essay asks whether that is true. Beneath the present city lies an older floodplain of the Yamuna and Hindon, a country of villages, groves, and shrines whose names survive, half-buried, in the sectors that replaced them. This essay will trace Noida’s historicity if any, peeling back that blank slate to ask what is lost when a city is built as if its land had no memory.
The Satnamis who defied Aurangzeb: In 1672, a community of low-caste artisans and peasants from Narnaul dared to challenge the might of the Mughal Empire. The Satnamis who followed a sect built on radical egalitarianism, rejecting caste distinction, were pushed to rebellion by Aurangzeb’s crushing tax burden and systematic religious persecution. This essay traces who the Satnamis were, how their austere, reformist faith set them apart and how imperial provocation ignited their uprising ultimately leading to their temporary annihilation.
James Prinsep: The Man who made the ancient speak: James Prinsep arrived in India as a minor mint official and at the end of his career he achieved distinction as the man who had unlocked two thousand years of forgotten Indian history. In the decade he spent bending over coins, inscriptions, and crumbling pillars, he deciphered Brahmi script and handed ancient India back to itself. He was a painter, architect, assay master, meteorologist, epigraphist and what not. This zealous passion resulted in physical exhaustion and the harsh climate of India aided in breaking his health ultimately leading to his untimely death. This essay traces the life of a man who adopted a country as his own, burned through it with terrifying brightness, and died at thirty nine, leaving Indology to mourn what the remaining decades might have yielded.
Ravidas and the making of his griefless city: Ravidas was a bhakti saint in the 14th century who imagined a city where sorrow would not exist. He called it Begumpura, the land of no grief and in doing so, stepped outside the entire grammar of Bhakti thought. This essay asks whether Begumpura was a spiritual metaphor dressed in the familiar cloth of devotion, or a radical political vision that the Bhakti idiom was simply the only safe language to speak in, especially for a low-caste leather worker living under Sultanate rulers with little patience for dissent. It traces the social roots of his movement, how it held together under hostile skies, and what his dream of an equal city tells us about his vision and thought.
Kumarajiva: The Kashmir-Trained Monk Who Translated Buddhism for China: Born around 350 CE to a Kuchean princess and a Kashmiri royal preceptor, Kumarajiva embodied the civilisational bridge between India and China. Educated in Kashmir, Yarkand, and Kashgar, his fame reached eastern China by 379 CE, where he spent his remaining life rendering hundreds of Sanskrit texts (including the Prajnaparamita and Lotus Sutra) into Chinese, serving as imperial preceptor. His story illuminates Kashmir’s forgotten primacy in transmitting Buddhism eastward: between the fourth and sixth centuries, Kashmiri scholar-monks travelling to China outnumbered those from all other Indian regions combined. This article recovers that neglected chapter of Greater India through the life of one man who, more than any other, carried India’s mind into China.