Archival research is often a lonely pursuit. One afternoon while going through portraits of the kings of India to figure out if any king is shown wearing the bracelet I was researching for my Unit 1 essay, one particular portrait caught the eye of a professor from Cambridge. It led to a five-minute conversation about the history of South India, none of which I knew! Nodding throughout, I felt elated, about having learnt something new, and guilty, for not knowing about it already.
This is one of my best memories of researching in an archive, and I look forward to more such encounters.
