Civilisational memory, made public

Project Bhaskar is a cultural and research initiative that brings India's civilisational memory into contact with contemporary technology and public experience. Our work begins with place, and few places carry as many centuries of layered identity as Ajmer.

For an upcoming exhibition opening in July, we are mapping the historical landscape of the Ajmer region - its archives, collections, oral traditions, and personal records. This is not an institutional survey. It is a search for the full picture: official and unofficial, documented and remembered, celebrated and overlooked.

Ajmer has been a seat of Sufi scholarship, a centre of Mughal administration, a British civil station, a princely-era crossroads, and a market town woven through by trade, pilgrimage, and schooling. All of that history lives somewhere - in government vaults, family trunks, temple registers, and the recollections of people whose grandparents were present for events that never made it into textbooks.

We are asking you to help us find it.

Current research scope

What we are currently mapping

Our research spans the full range of sources that constitute regional memory - from formal institutional records to informal personal collections.

• Historical archives and institutional records

• Old photographs, maps, and newspapers

• Oral histories and family archives

• Personal collections and lesser-known sources

• Documents related to education, administration, culture, and public life in the Ajmer region

How you can contribute

We are not asking you to hand anything over. We are asking you to point us in the right direction — or to share what you know.

Guidance towards collections or custodians: If you know of a collection, institution, family, or individual who holds relevant material — introduce us.

Access to archival materials for research: Physical documents, photographs, maps, letters, registers — anything that illuminates Ajmer's history.

Permission to document or catalogue: Where appropriate, we would like to photograph, record, or catalogue materials for the exhibition and for ongoing research.

Every city has two histories — the one written down, and the one kept alive in the places where documents do not reach. We are looking for both.