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.
Bandhavgarh Before the Tigers: The Forgotten Capital of Baghelkhand: This essay will trace Bandhavgarh’s life as a political and spiritual capital long before its rebranding as a tiger reserve. It was earlier a fortiifed seat of power inhabited since at least the Vakataka era (c. 300 CE) and later held by the Kalachuris, whose rule left behind its most striking legacy: a colossal 10th-century rock-cut Vishnu reclining on Shesha, alongside a full set of Dashavatara carvings that mark the site as a serious center of Vaishnava devotion, named “Bandhavdheesh” for Lakshmana himself. The site was subsequently inherited by Baghels who carried its prestige into the Mughal period through court ties with Akbar. The essay will also explore Bandhavgarh’s bhakti-era significance, as the birthplace of Dharamdas, Kabir’s disciple and founder of the Kabirpanth. Finally, it will examine the 1617 shift of the capital to Rewa — why it happened, and how the abandoned fort was slowly reclaimed by forest, setting up its unlikely second life as a national park.
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.
When a Manipur King Chose Braj: Raja Kulachandra of Manipur and the Sacred Politics of a Final Abode: Raja Kulachandra Dhaja Singh is remembered chiefly as Manipur’s deposed monarch during the Anglo-Manipur War of 1891. This article instead examines his final years at Radhakund in Braj-Vrindavan, where he settled after colonial confinement and died in 1934. It argues that choosing this sacred landscape was more than a devotional retreat. For a ruler shaped by Manipur’s Gaudiya Vaishnava court culture, Radhakund offered a new geography of belonging through which exile could be transformed into spiritual homecoming. Using Manipuri chronicles, British records and local memory, the article will also ask how freely this destination was chosen under colonial restrictions. Kulachandra’s final abode reveals a quieter political afterlife in which a king deprived of territory preserved dignity and cultural continuity through sacred space.
The Paik System and the Military Machine of the Ahoms: This essay will examine the paik system as the backbone of the 17th-century Ahom military. It will trace how the system fused labour, revenue, and military service into a single administrative unit, with paiks organized into gots of four and granted land in exchange for rotating state duty. It will also look at the command structure, examining the role of officials like the Bar Barua and Bar Phukan, who combined revenue, justice, and command over thousands of paiks. This piece would enquire what made this land-labour-war fusion so distinctive against other contemporary military systems.
The Raja Who Rediscovered Khajuraho: Pratap Singh of Chhatarpur and the Preservation of a Lost Legacy: This essay will trace the life and reign of Raja Pratap Singh (r. 1816–1854), the second Raja of the Chhatarpur princely state, focusing on his unlikely role in Khajuraho’s afterlife. Between 1843 and 1847, he carried out excavations and renovations of the Khajuraho temples, making him the first local ruler to take interest in the site. It will also examine the Pratapeshwar Temple, which he built as a memorial to himself, a monument that stands as both tribute and legacy, marking his own place within Khajuraho’s long architectural history. The essay will explore what it meant for a minor princely ruler to step forward as custodian of an already-ancient sacred landscape.
Forgotten and Found: How the Guptas Became India’s “Golden Age”: This essay traces how the Gupta dynasty, erased from memory after its decline, was reconstructed through colonial-era epigraphy and then reframed as a nationalist symbol. It follows James Prinsep’s 1837 decipherment of Brahmi, which allowed the “completely forgotten” Imperial Guptas to be identified from coins and inscriptions sent to him from across India. It examines how colonial historians like Vincent Smith cast the Gupta period as a golden age within a narrative of Indian history as cycles of greatness and decline, one that conveniently justified British rule as restoring lost unity. It then turns to how nationalist historians later amplified this “golden age” framing as a reaction against imperialist historiography, even as later scholars question how far that glow reached beyond the elite. This essay will be a story less about the Guptas themselves than about how a distant dynasty became a mirror for two very different political projects.