Documenting Elite Desi Lives
Archiving the Aesthetic of Privilege
While workers walked home barefoot, sourdough rose.
While the state outsourced grief to religion, the elite soul outsourced empathy to Instagram.
The Caste Archive is a digital humanities and public history experiment that archives the everyday aesthetics of elite upper-caste life during the COVID-19 crisis. Through screenshots, essays, memes, and artefacts, it maps how privilege turned crisis into content, and how the “aesthetic of care” became a moral performance of distance.
This is not an archive of suffering; it is an archive of comfort. A museum of moral minimalism. A collection of yoga mats, banana breads, ring lights, and guilt washed down with kombucha.
Think of it as a digital x-ray of Savarna virtue-signaling—where aesthetic stillness hides systemic violence. systemic
Critical Insights
Research Initiatives
Cultural Artifacts
Where we catalogue the everyday relics of caste — from Sanskritized sensibilities to influencer spirituality. Think of it as anthropology with a side of shade.
Essays
Long-form provocations that unlearn what Savarna scholarship footnotes. Because some histories deserve better than Savarna nostalgia disguised as theory.
Digital Preservation
Because caste doesn’t vanish when you clear your browser history. We archive the inconvenient: deleted posts, censored rage, and pixelated memory.
Public Engagement
Bringing caste critique out of the seminar room and into the scroll — one awkward WhatsApp forward at a time.