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Every generation of scholars carries a story of struggle. For those who worked in earlier decades, the story often involves images of travel and waiting: sitting in archives for weeks, writing letters for permission and enduring silence from the clerks who controlled access to files. The act of finding a single document became an achievement in itself. In the world of scarcity, discovery was scholarship.

Now, the dust has given way to data. Archives are digitised, catalogues are searchable and court judgments appear on a computer screen within seconds. Newspapers from the colonial period can be searched by keyword. Originality must now be forged through interpretation and framing, yet conversations are already crowded. The fear is not of finding nothing but of saying nothing new.

And all of that in a digital environment of accelerated timelines and multiplying publication platforms. Junior scholars are urged to publish often to remain visible, and the accessibility of scholarly sources facilitates this ¨C yet we are also reminded regularly that quality alone matters.

If one publishes frequently, the work risks being dismissed as shallow. If one publishes rarely, one risks invisibility. Even high-quality work feels inadequate when others produce in greater numbers. Everyday decisions are shaped by this loop, which has no clear exit.

I write these reflections as a PhD scholar and senior research fellow in India, who has more than 70 publications, ranging from book chapters and research papers to essays on public platforms such as this. This fairly prolific record should inspire pride, yet it brings ambivalence. Many pieces were written in the rush to remain visible, shaped more by urgency than reflection. Only a few, where I allowed the argument to mature, feel deeply meaningful.

So I feel, at the same time, as if I write both too much and too little, producing visibility but without complete satisfaction. And my peers tell similar stories. We publish to survive in a system that constantly demands relevance.

The search for relevance has expanded the very identity of the scholar. It is no longer enough to produce and publish knowledge; one must also perform it: on public platforms, at conferences, on social media. Even a CV has become a performance of visibility. Each published commentary, each conference paper is both scholarship and declaration of presence. This circulation of knowledge has value, but the labour of display is added to the labour of research.

The pressures of abundance also reshape the inner life of the scholar. Scarcity frustrated but provided closure. Abundance removes closure. There is always another source to consult, another article to read or write, another talk to give. The anxiety of incompleteness is endless. Scholars morbidly compare themselves with peers who publish more or appear more visible. Social media amplifies the anxiety, transforming productivity into public spectacle. The body carries the burden, with hours of screen time producing fatigue and restlessness.

While the reality of scholarship has changed for everyone, this emotional landscape is most prevalent among junior scholars, who are under greater pressure to prove themselves. Indeed, some older mentors, who were brought up in the era of academic scarcity, appear blind to the emotional landscape that their supervisees must live in. They may regard digitised collections as making research easier for young scholars than it was in ¡°their day¡±, and their advice fails to fit the reality of abundance, leaving their supervisees feeling unseen and stressed.

Those mentors brought up in academic scarcity will eventually retire, but will those who replace them be any more alive to the contemporary realities faced by their juniors? After all, the effect of the digital revolution on scholarship has far from fully played out. AI is already reshaping research through its ability to find and summarise sources faster than any human can, mapping patterns and connections.

This raises questions about what originality will amount. Most likely, it will shift even further away from discovery and even synthesis of sources towards interpretation of them. In other words, perhaps the scholar¡¯s contribution will lie not in speed and quantity of publication and pronouncement but in depth and due consideration. The qualities that machines cannot replicate, such as care, imagination and ethical judgement, may become the true marks of scholarship.

So there is some hope that relevance need not remain a burden forever. It can be redefined as the ability to create work that endures. To matter may not mean being everywhere but saying something meaningful somewhere, amid a mass of automated superficiality: to write with clarity, to think with care, and to offer meaning that outlasts the noise.

is a and senior research fellow in the Dr. K. R. Narayanan Centre for Dalit and Minorities Studies at Jamia Millia Islamia, New Delhi.