Currently Pondering

Research Questions and Direction

I decided to become an architectural historian at fourteen. The conviction has only deepened. I am drawn to contradictions: sacred and secular, rooted and unmoored, rigorous and intuitive. I believe a city can be scripture, that memory has architecture, and that the most productive thinking happens precisely where existing frameworks stop working.

I approach this field from a dual insider-outsider position. As a Sindhi-Hindu historian working on living ritual space, I bring proximity to my material without collapsing into it. My background is a starting point, not a byline: it sharpens my ability to expand discourse beyond reductive readings of the Indian subcontinent, and to foreground the multiple temporalities and practices embedded in sacred space that a purely external gaze tends to flatten.

My research examines sacred urbanism and diasporic spatial memory, asking how architecture mediates devotion, identity, and collective memory under conditions of urban transformation, displacement, and historical rupture. I approach sacred spaces as contested archives, where ritual practice, colonial histories, institutional frameworks, and diasporic longing intersect and often collide.

At the core of this inquiry is a sustained reworking of genius loci — the spirit of place. The framework proposed by Norberg-Schulz provides a foundation, but it proves insufficient when tested against Indian ritual spaces, diasporic communities, or sites scarred by political erasure. This is precisely where my research intervenes. Rather than treating genius loci as stable or bounded, I examine how it fractures, mutates, and survives across contexts of erasure, migration, and loss. This has led me to develop several original frameworks. Fractal genius loci accounts for the recursive patterns through which sacred meaning reproduces itself across scales — visible in Varanasi, for instance, in the way the cosmic geography of the city replicates itself down to the level of the individual shrine and ritual gesture. Migratory genius loci traces how the spirit of place travels and reconstitutes itself through diaspora, persisting in practice, object, and myth when the originating geography is lost or inaccessible. Paper sovereignty examines how legal, cartographic, and documentary instruments construct or destroy sacred space as a category of property and authority — how a map or a court order can unmake what centuries of ritual have made. The R/A/L Diagnostic Framework — mapping the relationships between Ritual, Architecture, and Loss across a given site or community — offers a structured comparative method for reading sacred urbanism in states of flux, tracking what survives erasure, what mutates, and what disappears entirely.

Methodologically, I work at the intersection of architectural history, material religion, and comparative place theory. I draw on architectural analysis, visual and material archives, urban ethnography, and speculative research formats to trace how sacred meaning is produced and inhabited over time. My empirical base includes fieldwork across fifty sacred sites in Varanasi conducted in 2024 — sites under simultaneous pressure from infrastructural redevelopment, heritage institutionalization, and tourism — and a digital corpus of Instagram posts documenting religious graffiti and its circulation, which tracks how sacred spatial identity is produced and contested through digital mediation. I am currently completing a PhD by publication structured around this body of work, with a portfolio of peer-reviewed research examining sacred urbanism, institutional memory, and the limits of architectural frameworks when tested against living ritual space. This work has been presented and tested at the Association for Art History annual conference at the University of Cambridge, ENSA Paris-Malaquais, and the Werner Oechslin Library Foundation colloquium in Mendrisio.

My research is comparative and transregional. Varanasi functions as a critical site for examining sacred urbanism as a living, evolving condition rather than a static religious category. Renaissance Florence offers a comparative lens on patronage, devotion, and the institutionalization of sacred space. Diasporic Sindhi Hindu and Arab contexts extend this inquiry beyond fixed geographies, tracing how sacred identity is negotiated when homelands are lost, fragmented, or politically inaccessible.

A concept that runs through all of these cases is what I call the documentation paradox: the condition in which the act of institutionalizing or archiving sacred space simultaneously distorts or destroys what it claims to preserve — converting living practice into monument, contested territory into settled heritage, community authority into administrative category. It is from this paradox that my central research questions follow:

How must frameworks like genius loci be reconstructed — not merely extended — to account for ritual, affective, and diasporic relationships to space that existing architectural history cannot hold?

What forms of architectural memory persist beyond material survival, and through what practices are they maintained?

How can historical research account for the documentation paradox without reproducing its logic?

What responsibilities do institutions hold when engaging sacred spaces whose living communities are structurally illegible to the heritage frameworks claiming to represent them?

These questions share a common stake: to reframe sacred urbanism as a site of productive tension rather than a preservation problem, and to build historically grounded frameworks that can inform institutional practice without reducing sacred space to either monument or spectacle.

I approach curation as a research method rather than a primary objective. Exhibitions, when they appear in my work, are often speculative or non-material, functioning as tools for testing historical arguments rather than platforms for artistic display. In practice, this means developing curatorial concepts from historical argument outward — centering what I call the operative object: texts, inscriptions, and spatial practices that have historically constituted sacred space, political authority, or social order, rather than merely represented them. The curatorial question then becomes not what to display, but what an object does — and what institutional conditions allow or prevent that doing from being legible.