Vaibhav Srivastava

Vaibhav is a doctoral candidate researching agrarian history in nineteenth-century colonial North West India.

 He reads, writes, and thinks to overcome the despair, drudgery, and dilapidation resulting from being thrown into this grotesque, unequal world, neither of our choosing nor our making, of competition, individualism, and meritocracy. More than research objects, more than disciplinary fidelity, more than political commitments, Vaibhav approaches intellectual pursuit as a matter of cultivating an ethos and orientation that attune him to grapple with and make sense of the imperceptible and structural forces that organise everyday life under capitalism. He is drawn to issues, themes, practices, and objects that refuse and elide easy systematisation and explanation—problems that, in their complexity and difficulty, challenge our moral and political imagination. He wishes to arrive at a method that ties, in a non-deterministic manner, the intimate and impersonal, the psychic and the global, and the aesthetic and the rational, to generate imaginative insights about some of the pressing issues of our times, including but not limited to technology, fascism, climate change, urban governance, care, love, and sex. Not only does he find a great thrill in being disciplinarily disobedient, but he also sees great analytical value, even virtue, in it. His intellectual concerns extend beyond academic writing to fiction and film, where he attends to the ways aesthetic form renders visible the contradictions, violences, and longings that structure modern life. When not engaged in intellectual matters, he can be found in the kitchen trying new recipes for friends and family, learning the names of wild plants and grasses through ChatGPT during evening walks, reading poetry, doom-scrolling short-form content, or watching films.

Reach Vaibhav at - vs374@snu.edu.in