Starting with the question What if the British Raj hadn't happened? I first tried to broadly understand the narrative of India's history leading up to and through the Raj, which introduced me to a few existing speculations on alternate political and economic scenarios of what might have happened if the Raj hadn't occurred. This also led me to texts on the internal narrative of how 'Indianness' had been reformulated by the colonial encounter in terms of social behaviour, civilisation and psyche, which I then explored in the field through a few different ethnographic studies including museum studies, observations of public domains and working with an actor to adapt a Bengali short story into a play.

With this understanding of India in an essential, time-less sense beyond the post-colonial time-bound sense, I then returned to the research intention and tried to frame India as a 'character' experiencing the events of history by identifying the 'healthy' and 'unhealthy' pattern in India's responses to foreign invaders at different points of history. Finally, this became the basis to re-approach the existing speculations of non-colonial political scenarios and extrapolate what a healthier, more authentic Indian process of modernisation might have looked like in social and cultural terms.