How it was made

An experiment

LAKEER is an experiment in what can be made with AI tools in spare time: the songs, the words, the research and the pictures were all made with AI, directed by one person who is not a historian. It has been made with care, but it hasn't been checked by historians or by speakers of every language on it, and it will contain mistakes. Treat it as a way in, not as a reference work, and follow the links to the real sources.

The songs

LAKEER is a concept album in a prologue and twenty-five songs. The music was generated with Suno, an AI music tool, from lyrics and style prompts written for each song. Takes were used as Suno made them; ENFIELD's was reworked in Suno's own editor. Where Suno couldn't do something (switch tempo halfway through a song, drop the band out for a verse, play water bowls), the song was rewritten until it could, or the idea was let go.

That rule has costs you can hear. The accents drift: Suno's voices tend towards an American sound and resist being told otherwise. Some takes were kept because they were good enough rather than perfect.

The words

The lyrics, the research and the text on this site were written by Tariq Fernandes working with Claude, an AI model made by Anthropic. The history in the songs is drawn from published sources, which are linked from the words themselves: look for the small magnifying glass. Where the evidence is contested, the page says so in the pencilled notes beside the lyric, and where a number can't be known, the song doesn't give one.

Invented people

This isn't a family history. The album follows two roads that many families took to Britain, one from Punjab and one from Goa by way of East Africa, and the people who speak along them are invented. The narrators, and many of the scenes, are composites, built from what people of that time and place went through. Every song page says which. They include the settler woman on the canal (ABADKAR), the family from Jalandhar (RADCLIFFE), the woman in the fog (RECOVERY), the letter-writer of 1971 (EKATTUR), the clerk in Kampala (IN ABSENTIA), the daughter with the suitcase (NINETY DAYS) and the girl at the daytimer (DAYTIMER). The last song says so too.

Named historical people are real, and the facts about them come from published sources. Some songs give them a voice (Ashoka, Duleep Singh, Dara Shukoh and Aurangzeb speak in the first person): those words are invented, and the notes say so. Where the songs repeat a tradition or a story rather than a documented fact, the lyric usually says "they say" or "the story goes", and the notes say so again.

The languages

The songs carry lines in more than a dozen languages and scripts. Not all of them have been checked by a native speaker. If you find a mistake, please say so on the Glossary page, and it will be corrected with thanks.

The pictures

The illustrations on this site were made with AI image generation, each in the manner of an art tradition that fits its song: an azulejo tile panel for the Portuguese, a Company painting for the East India Company, a linocut for 1947. They follow strict rules:

• They are illustrations, never evidence. None shows a real document, map or photograph.
• None shows a real person, a holy figure or scripture.
• None contains lettering, and none shows violence.
• Each one is labelled on the page as an AI illustration and names the tradition it imitates.
• Each one was checked against these rules before it went up.

The real things (the edicts, the paintings, the registers, the treaties, the photographs) are held by museums, libraries and archives. This site doesn't copy them. It links to them, under "See the real thing" in every chapter.

The other graphics on the site, such as the stamp, are drawn in code.

Links and corrections

The links to sources were written with AI. They are checked automatically from time to time, and some may have moved since. They haven't all been opened and read by a person, so a link may occasionally point somewhere less useful than it should. If a link is wrong or a fact is mistaken, please get in touch.