Somewhere in your home, there is a cupboard nobody dares to clear out: handwritten letters from ancestors, a sari too precious to wear, a recipe book stained by decades of cooking. Is it merely clutter, or is it history? Who preserved those letters, and why? Does anyone still cook from that recipe book? What will happen to the objects in that cupboard? And what happens when these seemingly ordinary objects find their way into a classroom discussion?

For Professor Tana Trivedi, a faculty member at the Amrut Mody School of Management, archives are windows into stories: some forgotten, some hidden, some in plain sight, and others that continue to shape the present. A conversation between Leenaben Sarabhai and Mahatma Gandhi about establishing a Montessori school in Ahmedabad, a hand-spun khadi sari, the writing desk of an erstwhile Diwan, or a photograph that captures a particular moment in time - each is an archival object that holds a story, offering insights into the past and context for understanding the present.

With a PhD in contemporary Indo-Fijian poetry, Professor Trivedi has long been interested in the history and identity formation of Indians in Fiji. Closer to home, however, she has also been investigating Indian history through the lens of vernacular Gujarati narratives from the 1920s and 1930s. Having grown up in Ahmedabad, she was familiar with both Gujarati and English, a linguistic advantage that encouraged her to turn her attention to regional histories. “Why should I not look at what is closer to home?” she recalls asking herself.

This curiosity led her to undertake a project with the Pattani Archives in Bhavnagar. In 2020, Professor Trivedi and a small team trained themselves in the handling, preservation, and digitisation of archival materials. She soon recognised that working with archives demanded a different set of skills and methodological approaches from those she had acquired through her training in literary studies. Today, she serves as the Academic Advisor for the Pattani Archives, an ongoing initiative dedicated to archiving, digitising, and preserving the family records of the erstwhile Diwan of Bhavnagar State. She also works closely with the Ahmedabad Textile Industry's Research Association (ATIRA) to identify, catalogue, preserve, and digitise archival materials relating to Ahmedabad's textile history.

Her engagement with archives has also shaped her understanding of the importance of interdisciplinary learning in university classrooms. For Professor Trivedi, historical inquiry need not remain confined to textbooks or disciplinary boundaries. In her course on the History of Indian Business, for instance, she brings actual coins into the classroom while discussing the history of coinage. A numismatist herself, she draws upon her personal collection of old and rare coins, inviting students to handle and examine these historical objects. Students learn how to study the coins, use digital tools such as Google Lens to investigate their features, and construct historical accounts of their origins, circulation, and value. By combining direct engagement with historical artefacts and digital inquiry, the exercise encourages students to approach history as a process of investigation rather than a collection of established facts.

She extends this approach to the use of artificial intelligence in historical interpretation. Students are asked to read and interpret an archival document independently before comparing their observations with a response generated by an AI language model. This comparison encourages them to question what the model recognises, what historical or cultural contexts it overlooks, and why archival sources demand careful, critical reading. Rather than treating AI as an authoritative source of knowledge, students learn to evaluate its interpretations against historical evidence and their own understanding.

Over two decades of teaching, Professor Trivedi has come to recognise that studying poetry, researching the archives of a princely state, and teaching business history in a management school are complementary rather than contradictory pursuits. Each offers a different way of examining how individuals, institutions, and communities construct, preserve, and communicate their histories. Her academic journey reflects a conviction that meaningful scholarship often emerges at the intersections of disciplines.

This interdisciplinary perspective is accompanied by an awareness of the need for scholars who can work fluently across languages, particularly in Gujarat. Regional and vernacular archives often remain underexplored not because they lack historical significance, but because relatively few researchers are equipped to navigate comfortably between regional languages and English. This linguistic divide can limit access to valuable historical material and create gaps in the production and dissemination of knowledge. For Professor Trivedi, strengthening bilingual scholarship is therefore essential to making regional histories more visible and accessible.

Looking ahead, she hopes to help communities and institutions build, preserve, and digitise their own archives while encouraging younger generations to engage critically with historical materials. The task, she believes, is not simply to save old papers or preserve objects from the past. It is to make them accessible, ask new questions of them, and consider how they might challenge, complicate, or transform the stories we tell about history.

Perhaps, then, that cupboard at home is not merely a collection of things we have been reluctant to discard. It is an archive waiting to be understood.