As a historian, writer, educator, and stall owner in Guwahati, I am supposed to be obsessed with dates, events, chronology, theories, and practicals to become a qualified professor through a gate called the National Eligibility Test. All of this syllabus of victory, battles, policy, and amendments is what can be said is 5% of light, which is the evidence, but I have become obsessed with what is there in the dark, consisting of 95%.

Scholars like Dr Michio Kaku, a renowned physics theorist and string theorist, suggest that the universe is 95% of dark matter and dark energy, and only 5% light is what we see, like the stars, galaxies, humans, etc. The theorist further explains how humans are the nature of the dark debris and the cosmic creation, and in this article, I explore the dark matter and dark energy of my soul and society in general. Another figure, Rupert Sheldrake, a biologist whose work on morphic resonance sits outside mainstream science, suggests that materialist science cannot fully explain what is there in the dark. It is like the universe is protecting itself from being explored.

Before we go further, let’s recall how the word dark has been used in the Indian context, especially after the British. The word ‘Dark’ is a colonizer’s sword. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the word ‘Dark’ comes from Old English. Before 1150 CE, it was used as an adjective, but by the 1300s it became a noun. The British were so curious to categorise everything into boxes, apparently, until the English people did not paint, we as humans never knew maps, but how far is true? The word dark is used for many things, but ever since it became a noun, it is something “unknown, uncivilised, or dangerous” to the colonisers. The same word used by the British to describe the continent, customs, rituals, genders, folklore, oral tradition, and others into darkness. Back in the 19th century, Africa was known as a dark continent, a place with no history, ignoring thousands of years of oral history and human existence. The scholars of the Renaissance used the term “Dark Ages” to dismiss the Middle Ages as a time of intellectual blackout, ignoring the massive shifts of science and culture of the East and the Global South. The word dark has been used and is still in practice to racially derail a person. The same word has been used for the queer communities, for women who challenged norms were termed as dark and later burnt alive in groups by calling them witches. The word ‘dark’ has been used by the English to divide us, demean us, and question everything that they have not found a word to describe it with. But when we flip the script, in oral traditions among many indigenous ethnic communities, darkness is a cosmic womb, dark is where you and I go to heal when we face shame, guilt, anger, frustration, and rest. In India, especially in the Hindu religion of Assam and Bengal, our deities are dark like Kali, Kamakhya, Durga, Chamunda, Kaal Bhairav, Krishna, Mahadev, and others, who are the protectors, nurturers, creators, and destroyers. The linga was even older than the concept of Hinduism and the birth of paper; people existed, they sculpted, they communicated, bred, killed, and so on! I have also realised I am 95% dark matter and energy, for example – I am a historian, writer, social activist, a stall owner, a son, a daughter, a mother, a father, a brother, a dancer, a sister, a friend, a healer, a mystic activist, nonbinary, and the list keeps on growing. But the state, academics, and now even society see only the 5% of me that is visible to them: a man, a stall owner, a degree holder, my age, my gender, my outward appearance. Everything else is dark, mysterious, dangerous, uncivilised, and unknown. 

Who am I? The Superposition.

Popular authors like Neale Donald Walsch and Joe Dispenza, who work with the idea of “Quantum Mysticism” rather than academic physics, suggest we are all everything at once until the observer’s effect. Basically, the one observing gives me the meaning of who I am and brings me into the 5% light of the state with laws, morals, good or bad, light or dark. Let’s decode this. What happens when we spin a coin on a table? As it spins, it is both Heads and Tails; it has the potential to become anything, or just stay grounded and not fall flat on any side. Now I put my hand on it, tell me what it is? Similarly, the state sees my clothes, my sex, the NET exam, it collapses my possibility to become all at once, so it applies the observer effects and collapses me into a box. It forces the beautifully spinning wheel of my life to be just one thing. Is my definition limited to only the 5% light? I would still choose my 95% dark matter and energy. If we try to reimagine history, what if back in 1861, when Phulaguri dhawa happened because of miscommunication of taxes on opium and areca nut (tamul paan)? Imagine that there was no miscommunication about taxes on these items. Do you think that then Phulaguri would have happened? It leaves us with a superposition of both yes and no. But in reality, the reality collapses there because for years, what the people of Assam had in abundance was now feared to be taxed, and because the collapse of identities happened like 5% light, taxes, areca, opium, villagers, farmers – the 95% started functioning in its own way, killing of Lieutenant G. B. Singer, mass reprisals in which dozens of Assamese farmers were killed, and what is widely regarded as Assam’s first peasant uprising. To the British, tamul paan was just a taxable item – the 5%, but for the people in Phulaguri, tamul paan was hospitality, culture, daily consumption, and anything in superposition – 95% dark matter. The miscommunication was not just about money, but the ‘observer’s effect’, where the British failed to see the 95% dark matter, eventually leading to a massacre.

The Violence of the Spotlight: The Census.

Before the British got the ledger and a pen, identity in India was quite fluid. A person could be anything they want, a healer, a trade person, a man, a woman, both, neither, or others. Then came the age of record-keeping, as I say, the beginning of erasure happening. In the year 1871-72, the British finally came up with a measure called ‘census’ which collapsed the sub-continent into one gender, one caste, one religion, one ideology, basically into an ‘observer’s effect.’ We can understand this with a very recent landmark in Indian society. The earlier Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Act, 2019 was a hope for those spinning wheels by upholding self-identification, so different identities of transgender people coexist, not fully, but in superposition. The new Transgender Persons (Protection of Rights) Amendment Act, 2026 collapses all the superpositioning to one singular thing, basically telling you that only a few of them exist, and others are essentially the dark matter. The 1871 census, the ACT, and NET exam are just the 5% of the light that is visible, which actually flickers out; the 95% darkness remains. Similarly, when traditional historians look at the record, the signs, the letter, the paperwork, and events, they usually use the observer’s effect with the help of the 5% of what is known about the civilisation, river, mummies, oceans, stars and others, yet the 95% which the whole of human existence and surprises is tucked away into the dark because only there it can be safe.

Darkness in You, Me, and the Multiverse.

While I was reading a paper on three generations in biology, which explains how you and I were first inside the womb of our grandmother. Basically, when my mother was in my grandmother’s womb, the fetus of my mother started forming, which would in the future create me when my father meets my mother. Until my father met my mother, there was a 95% chance that I could have had a different father. But as my mother and father got married, the observer effect, I am their baby because of the 5% light, which is the birth certificate – otherwise, I guess my grandmother is equally my parent. We humans, are designed for greater things and have created multiple galaxies of truth with our bias, or the 5% light; the 95% stays hidden still. As a historian, I remember Ranajit Guha, who suggests that the state has no interest in the politics of the people. It functions with the 5% of light of acts, legislature, morals, etc., while the 95% of the ethnic people, gendered, coloured people, women, queers, non queers already in motion, creating a vastness in the already existing vast multiverse. What happens when we believe in the 5% light? We collapse the system and place it in a computerised version, where only something exists because it was forced to be recorded, and others were shunned to the darkness.

You, Me, and Them.

We are the dark energy, energy of care, love, protection for each other, our loved ones. We are the dark matter because we do anything to keep that one thing constant. Humanity alone cannot break the ice; it can, but it would take eons. But if a group does the same thing, it becomes easy. As the dark energy is constantly in the care of creation. Our gender, clothes, ornaments, values, books, and other nouns written are the 5% of light. The 95% waits, watch, and consume not to destroy but to create a future of happiness, consolidation, communication, and community. You, I, the law, men, women, deer, lions, queers, nonqueers, nonexistents, glassmakers, the ants, the grass, the ocean, water, air, micro-organisms, viruses, and all and nothing exist all at the same place. We are the darkness, as the light is not enough!