Doctoral researcher.
Prince Tomar is a doctoral researcher at the Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University. He works with borderland communities along the Indian Himalaya, with a particular focus on the dynamics of road development — tracing the subtle interplay between infrastructure, territorialisation, and the region’s intricate dance of history, geopolitics, and terrain.
Beyond the academic work, he writes poems and is interested in the porous border between ethnography and literary studies. His current project studies the spatial-temporal dimensions of change in the Indian Himalaya as the pace of road development quickens.
I keep an open notebook here: photographs from the field, dispatches and small experiments with AI, and an epilogue of things being read, thought about, and listened to.
A study of strategic roadwork along India’s borders with China and Pakistan. What is behind the asphalt’s arrival, the place of the mountains, and the arrival of tourism in a land long defined by its remoteness?
Read further → Open the field atlas
Twin-towns Raxaul and Birgunj, a comma between two republics. A borderless borderland held tight with the fabric of a web of centuries of culture, connections, faith, and now the economy.
Read further →Grouped sets of photographs from the field, each circling a quiet theme.
HIMALAYA · Forthcoming
ethnomarginalia.com
A small open sandbox: prompts, models, and quiet provocations at the seam between ethnography and machine reading. Not conclusions — exposures.
Turn academic reviewer feedback into a structured, gamified roadmap for revision. This tracker analyses reviewer comments, organises them by theme and importance, and turns them into a prioritised revision plan. Generates daily tasks with XP rewards — progress bars track your way through major and minor revisions. No accounts, no data collection, everything saves locally.
Feeling the weight of academic life? Plotting revenge against reviewers? Shakespeare might help. Drop your mood and the Bard offers a verse — uplifting, or perhaps just the bare truth. Requires a Google account.
A comparison of writings on pictures from my fieldwork between what I see and what an LLM sees. Memory vs what is digitally captured.
If games are about fast-paced collection of achievements and scores, then this is an anti-game. Through an interactive 3 minutes, it shares a learning that came from my work in Ladakh: One is never on the mountains, but in them. For our dreams of travel takes us to such places in search of a familiar difference, that stays hidden somewhere in us, while we look for it elsewhere. Until we let the place and the mind alter each other and realize that what we are looking for is in those exact moments of awaiting.
Enjoy this game of collecting moments, not by doing something but by waiting, and letting the mountains do their thing.
A loose, updated ledger — books on the desk, audio from the field, ideas circling the mind.
