I’ve officially entered the stage of my senior fall in which I can’t stop monologuing about my senior thesis, and I’m not even sorry about it. 

My senior thesis work really began my junior year — for which I am now, knee deep in my thesis, especially grateful — thanks to the tutorial system in History & Literature, affectionately known as Hist-Lit. I’m a strong proponent of the interdisciplinary program: among its winning attributes are producing alumni like Conan O’Brien (with whom I also share the Mather House affiliation) and Pete Buttigieg, and the sheer flexibility and latitude of the department. For anyone who finds academic betrothal too gross a commitment, this is the ideal academic path — in my view, one of the richest and most rigorous training in the humanities at Harvard.

The department breaks up junior year into two parts: during the first semester, we design our own syllabus. My fellow tutee and I designed a syllabus, focused on colonial and post-colonial South Asian history, titled “South Asia: Religion, Law, Literature.” In the class, we spent the semester reading a 1488-page novel called A Suitable Boy, a book on post-Independence India that quickly rose to the top of my book rankings. I remember spending weeks lugging arond that book, inviting many curious questions. I loved the attention.

This course ended up being the perfect intellectual scaffolding for my work on my Junior Essay the following semester, during which I lingered in 1960s Pakistan, an era that I find fascinating due to its paradoxical perception as a ‘progressive’ epoch in the nation’s history — despite it being a decade of martial rule under a dictator.

Given my historical interests, my History & Literature tutor Vikrant helped me find my primary source — a 1960s Pakistani Anglophone women’s periodical called Mirror of the month, edited by a woman called Zaib-un-nissa Hamidullah, widely regarded as the first Pakistani journalist. The magazine itself, woefully neglected by scholars perhaps due to its frivolous veneer, is a crucial archive of early Pakistani history, one that engaged in vital debates and negotiations surrounding new models of fashion, love, marriage and motherhood. I enjoyed reading and writing about this magazine so much that I felt compelled to find other magazines like it.

The Harvard College Research Program (HCRP) supported my travel to Washington, D.C. and Lahore and Islamabad in Pakistan. In DC, I visited the Library of Congress, which has extensive archives of Pakistani periodicals — acquired under the Public Law 480 Program, under which the U.S. government used local currencies obtained from selling surplus food in developing countries to purchase and translate foreign books and publications. While in D.C., I actually had the opportunity to meet Hamidullah’s grandson — with whom I’d shared excerpts of my junior essay — and learn more about his grandmother.

Later, I visited Lahore and Islamabad, where I visited several archives. It wasn’t always easy: the English-language periodicals weren’t catalogued, in many of these sites, but I was with friends, and also had the support of my History & Literature advisors back home in Cambridge. I came back feeling energized and ready to begin sifting through the hundreds of photos I’d amassed between DC, Lahore, and Islamabad.

There is still quite a long way to go for my senior thesis. I’m in the murky in-between of my first and second chapters, of what I hope will be a three-chapter thesis, and I am often fraught with moments of dejection and uncertainty about the research I am doing. In fact, even writing this blog feels a little premature.

But I’m currently feeling a great amount of momentum as the semester draws to a close: I plan on returning home to Indiana, camping at my favorite local (and Muslim-owned!) coffee shops, and ploughing through what remains of this sprawling project, a source of tremendous fulfillment in this final year at Harvard.