My sister and I were at a bookstore the other day, casually chatting about how our partners will probably never fully understand our obsession with books, or how we randomly sprinkle historical facts or literary criticism into everyday conversation. According to them (and maybe us too, on bad days), our brains are never at rest. This constant hum of thought contributes to mental health woes we can’t seem to shake off. It’s gotten to the point where even explaining our thought patterns to a therapist feels impossible, forget explaining it to the world.

I mean, how does one describe a mind that has this random childhood memory of a Krishna life story where after stealing the butter, Yashoda asks baby Krishna to open his mouth, and in his mouth she sees the whole universe including our solar system. That scene from an animated series has stayed with me. Not that I am comparing my knowledge to the vastness of this universe, but because, like that vision, the landscape of my mind feels chaotic and incomprehensible. Especially to others. Often even to me.

Take, for instance, the time my partner’s friends were discussing property rates in the blessed National Capital Region, India (heavy sarcasm). I had no clue about the topic and no real interest either. Yet somehow, I blurted out, ‘Did you know gaj as a unit of land measurement originated in Mughal times under Akbar? Abul Fazl records it in the Ain-i Akbari.’ Why? No idea. I never memorised this for any exam. I don’t know when or where it nestled itself in my brain, but there it was, cooing like a pigeon. And like all pigeons nesting in our balconies, relentless and unyielding, better learn to coexist with these facts.

With the same group of friends, we went to Jaipur to see the Hawa Mahal. By now, I had an inkling of how absurd I must seem to them, this historian tagging along with a group of engineers. They’re lovely people who’ve grown to also love me despite my strange fascinations, but I can sense the bemusement. While they admired the palace’s architecture, I stood there contemplating the gendered aspects of its design, the way it was meant to reveal just enough for palace women to witness the empire’s spectacles from behind the jharokhas, while concealing them entirely from the world. Voices erased, names forgotten, stories reduced to footnotes, if that. The crowd was a bit much for me, so I sat at a café across the street, sipping something overpriced and touristy, smiling for pictures while my brain spiraled into thoughts on heritage tourism and sustainability.

So imagine my delight when I read the first chapter of Sathnam Sanghera’s Empireworld, the very book I picked up on that bookstore trip mentioned at the start of this essay. Dealing with the online (and in-person) backlash he received for his first book critiquing the British empire, Sanghera—who, shaped by the mentality of being a child of immigrants, had never really learnt how to ‘take a break’—decided to go on a beach holiday with his partner to Barbados, Caribbean.

Surprise, surprise! He couldn’t stop thinking about how Barbados was once a ‘leading sugar colony and the jewel in the crown of England’s western empire’ (Sanghera 2024, 20). Unable to shake off the habit of ‘tracing the historical in the contemporary’ (23), his ‘enthusiasm,’ I believe, must have been ‘contagious’ as his partner agreed to visit former slave plantations with him on their so-called relaxing trip. (A very familiar vibe, if you ask me.)

Naturally, I’m going to list the plantations, for future reference, as I too am a historian and old habits die hard - cite, refer and ‘conquer.’ They were:

• Drax Hall Plantation

• St Nicholas Abbey

• Sunbury Plantation House

If you haven’t caught on yet, yes, I used the words ‘enthusiasm,’ ‘contagious,’ and ‘conquer’ with a tinge of irony, mirroring Sanghera’s observation that ‘the British weren’t solely responsible for the wiping out of the native people of the Caribbean: it had been European settlers in general who decimated indigenous Taino populations across the region through “overwork, malnutrition and epidemic disease.”’ In fact, as Jonathan Kennedy notes, ‘when Europeans started settling in the Caribbean, it was only a matter of time before the viruses and bacteria that had evolved in the Old World in the wake of the Neolithic Revolution made the jump across the Atlantic.’ The indigenous population ‘had never before been exposed to these pathogens and so hadn’t developed resistance’ (22).

But just as I was enjoying my reading revelry, I was brought face to face with a question I have often avoided: have I become accustomed to reading and analysing accounts of inhumane violence with a kind of professional distance? Have I stopped being affected by it? Sanghera wonders the same:

Reading about the violence had me wondering, not for the first time, how historians themselves cope with analysing such accounts on a sometimes daily basis. The trauma of other professionals encountering such material is widely acknowledged: studies have found that lawyers, journalists, psychotherapists and mental health professionals dealing with violent crime suffer from ‘secondary’ or ‘vicarious’ trauma. But what about historians? (26)

He goes on to ask whether the real danger now is that we are ‘actually becoming inured to the violence rather than being unmoored by it.’

This took me straight back to my recent ‘leisurely’ attempt to watch Chhaava, the Hindi-language historical action film about Sambhaji Maharaj, second ruler of the Maratha empire, played by Vicky Kaushal. Adapted from Shivaji Sawant’s Marathi novel Chhava, the film is directed by Laxman Utekar and produced by Dinesh Vijan under Maddock Films. It also features Akshaye Khanna as the arch-enemy, Mughal emperor Aurangzeb. The film is loud, visually intense and its violent scenes are exaggerated for cinematic effect. There was one attack sequence so overwhelming it triggered near-claustrophobia in me. I remember comparing it to that famous Jon Snow war scene from Game of Thrones—yes, my thought spirals work like that. And yet, reflecting on it now, I am struck by how I kept joking afterward about how much I loved Khanna’s portrayal of Aurangzeb. I kept saying we should petition to cast him as Aurangzeb in all movies, propagandist or otherwise. But here’s the thing: have I become numb to the representation of violence itself? Is that my historian’s coping mechanism?

And more fundamentally, will I ever again be able to enjoy a film? A holiday? Even a book like Empireworld, which I picked up, with some naive pride, to ‘take a break’ from my usual microhistories by reading something that looked like a sweeping macrohistory of colonialism?

Probably not.

Bliss, after all, belongs to the ignorant. Historians? All we get are contexts and sleepless nights.