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 social scenarios if it hadn't occurred. This also led me to texts on the 'internal' narrative of how essential qualities of 'Indianness' in terms of social behaviour, civilisation and psyche had been reformulated by the colonial encounter, which I then explored in the field through a few different modes of observation including museum studies, brief studies of public domains and working with 1 actor to adapt a short story by Satyajit Ray into a play.

I then used a behaviour design model to frame this understanding of India as a 'character' responding to different foreign invasions across history. This then became a basis to re-approach the existing speculations of non-colonial political scenarios and extrapolate what a more authentically 'Indian' process of modernisation might have looked like.