Document Actions
December 2002
Newsletter- December 2002
Contents:
I. @rt.net.uk/now
II. Workshop @ Sarai: Writers Unblock - Fiction Writing
& The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law
III. Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary
IV.Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
V. Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, the Sarai Hindi Reader
VI. New @ Sarai Interface
I. @rt.net.uk/now
An Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Programme, presenting facets of
contemporary Internet Based Art Practice in Britain
Curated by Honor Harger (curator, webcasting, Tate Modern, London)
and Pauline van Mourek Broekman (editor, Mute - A Journal of New
Media Arts, London)
Organised by the British Council in collaboration with Sarai: The New
Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
December 2 - 5, 2002
Exhibition at the British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi.
December 4
Presentation and interaction with Sarai
December 5
Net Art Now
Presentation by the Curators at the British Council, followed by a
public conversation, moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai.
About the Exhibition
@rt.net.uk/now is an exhibition that brings to the fore key issues in
critical internet-based art practice. Issues of borders and
borderlessness, mapping and territories, the relationships between
'old' and 'new' media, access and control, critical reflections on the
experiences of the 'thinning' of time and the thickening of the data
cloud around us.
Internet based art is often mistakenly regarded as art 'showcased' on
the internet. This programme seeks to challenge this notion by
offering instead a foregrounding of the intrinsic properties of the
net as the material of a new form of art practice. This is a
sensibility that is conceptual, interactive, time based and that often
plays with the difficulties of access, unstable connectivity and
crashing software - features that are so much part of everyday online
experience.
Pauline Van Moerik Broekman and Honor Harger deliberately eschew the
'flashy' and spectacular effect-laden world of mainstream web content
to curate a series of online experiences that are designed to be
thoughtful, and at times, sharply political in the way in which they
treat the questions of online and offline territoriality and the
'fragmented public sphere' of the internet.
The works presented by them represent the critical cutting edge of
online art practice and include projects by leading contemporary
British net artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Tim Knowles,
Richard Wright, Andy Deck, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. The exhibition
will chart an eclectic mini-journey through new media projects from
the past few years, culminating in some of the absolute latest and
most contemporary examples in this context, based on the premise that
the quasi-historical purview will give an opportunity to look at some
of the questions that may have lingered in context.
About the Curators
Honor Harger is a new media artist who is currently working as an
education and online projects officer of the new Tate Modern Gallery.
Honor has been working on developing new techniques of audio streaming
for quite some time as a part of a group called Radio Qualia.
Van Mourik Broekman is co-publisher and editor of the London based
technoculture magazine Mute, which she co-founded with Simon
Worthington as 'the Art and Technology Newspaper' in late 1994. As
well as editing Mute, she writes regularly on art, media and
technology for journals and books. The editors, especially Pauline van
Mourik Broekmann, have created a very active and dynamic network of
contributors, artists, writers and critics who represent the best in
the British avant garde new media scene. Mute Magazine has been
presenting public forums on new media culture at the Tate Modern.
Honor and Pauline will be travelling to Kolkata and Bangalore Indian
cities to make presentations and conduct workshops as a forerunner to
the exhibition between December 6 and 15, 2002.
II. Workshops at Sarai
1. December 11-12, 2002
11 am -5 pm, Sarai Interface Zone
Writers Unblock
with Meaghan Delahunt
What is the work of a writer? How do ideas for fiction crystallize and
grow into short stories... and novels? What is the daily regimen, and
what are the exercises and observational practices that an aspiring
writer needs to work out? How to make the "writer's block" into a
piece of living textual sculpture?
Meaghan Delahunt, Asialink Fellow and writer-in-residence at Sarai,
will conduct a workshop on writing fiction through a series of
imaginative and fun excercises that grapple with these questions. She
will also share aspects of her own creative process, as it was
deployed in the writing of her first novel 'In the Blue House', and
offer advice and insight into working with agents, publishing houses
and other practical aspects of the writer's trade. To pre-register
email dak at sarai.net or call 3960040.
'In the Blue House' won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best
Book category in SE Asia and South Pacific, and the Saltire Society
Award in Scotland.
2. December 20-21, 2002
10 am -5 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS
The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law
In the context of the global economy Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) has emerged as one of the important modes of ensuring that
cultural and economic flows occur within a given set of rules and
regulations. This necessitates the disciplining of the activities of
those who operate beyond the boundaries of the regulated formal
economy. Thus IPR unfolds itself in the lives of people on a day to
day basis, determining what economic activities they may or may not
engage in. These boundaries are also backed by an omnipotent threat
of coercive violence through the use of the police force as agents
enforcing IPR.
At the conceptual level there have been a number of challenges posed
to the philosophical and the material basis of IPR. These range from
the open source movement in software to the open revolution in
content, music and publishing. This broad movement can be called
the movement of the creative commons.
What clearly inspires the open revolution is a dissatisfaction with
the philosophical premises of IPR (romantic authorship, incentive
theory, monopoly rights etc.) as well as a recognition that, given
the distribution of inequality implicit in the global economy, there
is a need to articulate a praxis that allows for more democratic
modes of participation within the global economy.
Legal scholars, lawyers, researchers, media practitioners and law
students from across the country will discuss these and other issues
at this workshop. We will also screen The Code - Story of Linux, a
film that brings many of these issues to the forefront and Arjun
Raina, actor and playwright, will perform A Terrible Beauty is Born,
his play on work, distance and Call Centres.
III. Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary
All screenings are at the Seminar Room, Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -110054.
1. Friday, December 13, 2002, 4:30 pm
Mat / The Vote
Directed by Pankaj Rishi Kumar, (2002), 80 minutes
Mat/ The Vote is a filmic deconstruction of the electoral process in
India. It closely examines the interests and issues that guide the
performance of different players - political parties, candidates,
party workers and voters - in a competition for power.
The film follows Imtiaz Khan, BJP candidate, in the Uttar Pradesh
assembly elections held in February, 2002, and Hemraj Saathi, a BJP
worker. The overall election process in Siyana, UP, forms the matrix
of the film. The crucial subjects here are the voters, divided and
categorized according to caste and community.
The production of Mat/ The Vote has been motivated by a need to bring
the vital issues in Indian democracy to the fore, by revealing in a
comprehensive and articulate manner, the failure of our society to
meet even the most basic challenges of such a social and political
system.
2.Friday, December 20, 2002, 4:30 pm
The Code - Story of Linux
Directed by Hannu Puttonen, (2001), 59 minutes
The Code presents the first decade of Linux from 1991 to 2001. The
film tries to tell one of the key stories of the digital age, a
symbolic saga of capitalism during the last fin de siecle of the
second millenium and during the early steps of the third one. It
features Linux Torvalds and many of his closest allies in the
development process of Linux, along with Richard Stallman.
IV. Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
On November 14 -16, 2002, Sarai hosted the South Asian Tactical Media
Lab (TML), one of a chain of such events, that are taking place in
different parts of the world (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cluj, New York,
Delhi and Sydney) as a run-up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes Conference
(N5M4) in Amsterdam in 2003.
Over the three days free software enthusiasts, programmers, graphic
designers, filmmakers, artists, activists, members of NGOs,
telecommunications experts, students and media practitioners from
Mumbai, Dehradun, Kolkata, Dacca, Kathmandu, Tehran & Delhi shared
ideas, experiences, problems and grievances, explored varied uses of
tactical media, discussed strategies, designed posters and websites,
disbanded opinions and formed new ones through panel discussions,
presentations, installations, workshops and a film screening.
The TML started with a very well attended public conversation between
Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and David Barsamian, founder and
director of Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly
radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado. David Barsamiyan is well
known in Delhi through the publications of his interviews with Noam
Chomsky, Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmed.
This was followed by discussions and presentations on different
approaches to Tactical Media. Discussions on subsequest days focussed
on language and localization issues in Free Software, freedom and
programming culture, ICT and its ability to look beyond the
development paradigm and on the need for collaboration of new media
networks in Asia.
A print and web designing workshop conducted by Pradeep Saha, Managing
Editor, Down to Earth, and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, Sarai Media Lab,
formed part of the TML and audio-visual and web installations were
playing in the Sarai Interface Zone on all three days.
The event lent itself naturally to the crystallization of a loose
coalition of tactical media enthusiasts in the Asian region. The
participants from Iran, Bangladesh, Nepal and various parts of India,
spoke of the need to carry the energies that they had discovered
through their meetings into the future. Plans were made to set up a
Tactical Media Asia discussion list hosted by Sarai, and everyone was
in agreement on initiating a cluster of collaborative processes, like
a free software desktop in the Urdu language as a concrete instance of
collaboration between people at Sarai and the LinuxIran group.
For more details click on http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm
V. Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, The Sarai Hindi Reader
Sarai launched the first Hindi Reader Deewan-e-Sarai 01: Media
Vimarsh://Hindi Janpad (Media Discourses:// Hindi Public Domain) on
Saturday November 30. Prof. VB Singh, Director, CSDS, welcomed the
guests and speakers while Prof. DL Sheth moderated the presentations.
Ravikant, co-editor, Deewan 01, gave a brief introduction to the
series that is designed to cover a whole range of issues from the
history and practice of technology (Electricity, Railways, Computer,
Internet) to city, films, legal debates around copyright, surveillance
and information politics, history of labour and historiography.
Sanjay Sharma, co-editor, Deewan 01, presented an overview of the volume.
This was followed by readings from Deewan 01. Ruchika read a poem,
'Internet par Shaadi', and 'Aag ka Copyright', Ravikant read out his
translation of Bapsi Sidhwa's 'Television Satyagraha ke woh Din', an
essay on the day in the 1970s when the Indian film, Pakeeza, was
broadcast on Amritsar TV and how Lahore went berserk. David Lelyweld
who was a witness to the Pakeeza screening shared his memories of the
day in private conversations later. Sanjay Sharma then read out
extracts from his rather funny memoir on the BBC Hindi service.
After the readings invited speakers commented on the book. Much of the
interactions revolved around the use of language by Hindi writers and
publishers. Historian Sudheer Chandra praised the prose and supported
the Deewan's practice of going against the dominant notions of
shabd-maitri, whereby people do not allow so-called Hindi words to
mingle with so-called Urdu ones, but he also pointed out a couple of
factual inaccuracies.
Sanjeev Kumar, lecturer of Hindi at Delhi University, liked the name
Deewan but was critical of the Deewan's assumptions about the Hindi
Public, especially its literary publics, and pointed out the
overwhemingly secular mood of high Hindi literature. He sought to
nuance the notion of tadbhavaization, or corruption, by appealing for
the acceptance of tadbhavised or apbhramshised Urdu as well. He also
talked of the inherent lack in training that allows most writers the
competence to play around with words derived from Sanskrit rather than
with Perso-Arabic derivations.
By referring to current trends in the Hindi print media he pointed out
the disappearance of not only the nuqta but other diacritical marks
like the chandrabindu,and the halant, in an effort of simplifying
Hindi typography and moulding it for computer screens.
Aditya Nigam, Fellow, CSDS, distinguished these two kinds of
disappearance and celebrated the kind of language Deewan seems to have
inaugurated. He also praised the hard work put in by the Translation
Unit at Sarai.
Language debates brought forth passionate interventions from the floor
and Rana Behl, Delhi University, Yogendra Yadav, CSDS, and Vijay
Pratap, Lokayan, presented their own insights as language
practitioners. This interactive 'lokarpan' went down well with the
gathering and we are sure to hear more on this for some time.
VI. New @ Sarai Interface
The Sarai Digital Interface, available on the terminals in the Sarai
Interface Zone, is an in-depth presentation of Sarai's activities and
concerns that also contains areas of interactivity. The Interface is
designed to let the visitor to Sarai have a hands-on feel of the kind
of work we do, the issues that we are interested in and to allow for
an interaction with Sarai projects in various stages of development.
It contains a digital gallery and also acts as a public platform for
the sharing of ideas, knowledge and creativity, a digital bulletin
board for posting messages about public concerns as well as an
evolving resource that is built and sustained by the community that
grows around Sarai. The Interface can be used as a space to register
subjective experiences of living in urban spaces.
The recent additions to the digital gallery in the Interface are:
Cold Glory at Ground Zero
Photographs by Monica Narula
Exactly a year after September 11, 2001, New York city, under a clear
sky. A nervous flutter of US flags at every block are signs of
remembrance, and foreboding. And talk of war brings alive a cold glory
in early autumn. Monica Narula follows the flag and its strange
appearances, on pavements, walls, alleyways, and the outer perimeter
of Ground Zero.
Graffiti and Signage in the City
Photo-essays by Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan.
2 HTML photoessays documenting the pictorial modes of visual
representation through graffiti and signage ranging from the
religious, the superstitious and the occult to everyday announcements
in the city of Delhi.
VII. Sarai/CSDS Independent Fellowship (December 2002-May 2003)
We are happy to announce the list of Sarai/CSDS Short Term
Independent Fellowships for the year 2002-03.
We received more than one hundred and fifty proposals in English and
Hindi from all over India, in response to the call for proposals that
went out in September 2002. We were delighted by the number of high
quality proposals that came in response to our advertisement. Sixty
seven proposals were shortlisted and thirty six proposals were finally
selected for support.
Given the large number of good proposals and our desire to encourage
younger scholars and practitioners we have decided to maximize the
awardees by distributing the total grant outlay amongst a larger
number of candidates. This has resulted in the awarding of some
partial grants, which we hope will encourage an interesting and
diverse body of research and practice.
We congratulate all the awardees and thank all those who responded so
enthusiastically to the call for proposals.
The awardees (in alphabetical order) are -
1) Abhay Dube (Hindi)
'Naya' Shahar/Nayi Sexuality ('New' City/ New Sexuality)
To focus on sexual assertitions in city/towns in the face of moral and
organisational opposition. Print publications, video parlours and
their subscribers as well as love spots in the city will form the
basis of the study. It will also interrogate sex as commodity and how
it has acquired a middle class respectability, and critique, in the
form of court cases, organisational oppositions, etc.
2) A.R.Basu
Mediation of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry
in Colonial Bengali Periodicals
To look at how psychiatry and categories such as insanity were
deployed in Bengali periodicals, both popular and scientific, in the
late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
3) Arvind Narrain, C.S. Balachandran and Vinay Chandran
Outing Bangalore : Intesections of Geographies, Law and Sexualites
To embrace an ethnography of what it is to be homosexual in urban
space, reflect on online homosexual spaces, construct everyday
psycho-geographies of being gay and also look at the legal regimes and
repressions that mark out the everyday experience of homosexuals in
city spaces, specifically Bangalore.
4) Avinash Kumar (Hindi)
Des-Pardes ka Dvand aur Dilli (The Dilemma of the Insider/Outsider and
Delhi)
To explore the writerly dilemma of belonging and alienation in a city
of migrants, a city where the Hindi/Urdu dichotomy has greatly
affected the writer. An entire range of poetry and fiction will be
looked at along with interviews conducted with all surviving writers
to explore how their work reflects the everyday contradiction of
living in a city they do not love.
5) Ayisha Abraham
Deteriorating Memories: Blurring Fact and Fiction in Home Movies in
India:
Research, combined with work towards a media art project based on 8mm
Home Movies in Bangalore.
This project combines old and new media in very interesting ways. She
has been collecting and researching the little known area of the
domestic usage of 8mm, super 8 mm and 16 mm celluloid film, and has
found remarkable collections, including those made by middle class
housewives, a post office worker and other people who worked with
these film formats as a hobby.
She intends to work further with these materials, recycling them in a
digital format and presenting them for an installation, or a series of
installations, in spaces that are not mainstream art venues. She also
intends to research and experiment with appropriate technological and
aesthetic forms towards the public rendition of this material.
6) Bharti Chaturvedi
The City of Bins : Narratives from the informal waste recycling sector
in Delhi
To work with personal narratives of people who work in the waste
recycling sector in Delhi. This will work towards a wall newspaper
with, and for, the waste recycling workers.
7) Bharti Kher
Love -an absence of assignable cause: Research towards the realization
of a media based art project
To interrogate the delicate politics of status, gender and caste that
lie at the heart of the three-line matrimonial ad. She will be
researching into the appropriate digital interface with which to
realize this project which will ultimately take the form of a video
and sound installation.
8) Frederick Noronha
GNU/Linux in India: Research and Reportage on the Free Software/Open
Source Movement in India.
Continuing last year's efforts at networking all the Linux Users
Groups (LUGs) and other campaign groups across South Asia, Noronha
also hopes to focus the research on Indic Computing and complete a
book on FLOSS.
9) Gayatri Chatterjee
Researching the Mehboob Papers
To research a previously unexplored body of archival material,
preserved in fourteen steel cupboards at the Mehboob studios in
Mumbai. This will help to throw light on the story of the early years
of Hindi cinema including foreign distribution, government decisions
and policies regarding foreign quota, ways of amassing finance from
various official and unofficial sources and the various situations
filmmakers in India faced in the decades after independence. The
papers will also allow for the
tracing of the history of a great studio.
10) Hari Roka
The Condition of Nepali Migrants in Delhi
To work out a detailed ethnography of Nepali migrant workers in Delhi.
It seeks to examine their everyday lives, their social networks and
cultural practices in the city, the kind of films they see, their
forms of political involvement (especially against the context of the
insurgency in Nepal) and the way they see Delhi and other people in Delhi.
11) Khadeeja Arif and Ambareen Al Qadar
Lives of Women in Zakir Nagar, Delhi.
To interrogate issues of clothing, gestures, habitation,
entertainment, physical movement and the very texture of the daily
lived experiences of the women as something that is intrinsically
linked to the peculiar formation of Zakir Nagar, Okhla, Delhi.”
12) Kundan Kaushav
Upanyason Ka Shahar: The World of Hindi Popular Fictions, its Economy
& its Images.
To examine the world of pulp literature in Hindi, especially centred
around Meerut and Delhi, as sites of production. It wants to look at
the network which is created around the production and distribution of
the 'pulp novel' - small printing set ups and stalls on footpaths and
railway stations, as well as examine the world views of both readers
and writers through interviews, and collections of fan material.
13) Kurnal Rawat and Vishal Rawlley
Typocity: Documentation and Interpretation of the Typographic forms in
Public Signage in Mumbai
To do a documentation and analysis of interesting and rare instances
of typography throughout the city of Bombay from the point of view of
graphic design, production techniques and social significance
including painted film posters, hand painted restaurant menu boards,
hand crafted shop signs and calligraphic taxi number plates.
14) Manju Singh (Hindi)
Pregnancy Wards se kahaniya (Narratives from Pregnancy Wards in Delhi)
To collect and illustrate narratives of pregnant women, their visitors
and the workers in public and private hospitals in Delhi.
15) Meenu Gaur
Camp People : The Refugees From Kashmir in Delhi
To look at the way in which Kashmiri refugees have become part of the
rhetorical arsenal of the Hindu right, even as their very real human
needs and deprivations are completely neglected, and the violence that
they have suffered is not addressed in any real sense. This project
will be a documentation of the everyday lives, struggles and
experiences of these refugees through recorded testimonies and
photographs. It will also be an interrogation of the ambivalent and
multiple meanings that the word 'home' conjures in the context of camp
life, and the memories that the refugees have of the 'home' that they
have left behind.
16) Nandini Chandra
The Child's Experience of the City in Hindi Cinema
To interrogate the narrative of the child in the city in Hindi Cinema,
which is used as narrative justification for much that goes on in the
course of a film. Interviews with famous child artists of the fifties
and sixties, especially Daisy Irani and Master Raju, will help explore
the performative trope of 'cuteness' that was mastered by them, and
how they saw their own status as glorified child workers within the
ambience of a bourgeoise cuteness that they had to affect. An
interesting list of 33 films will form the basis of this study.
17) Narender Thakur
Chowk : Study of the Daily Labour Market (Labour Chowk) in Delhi
To document the world of the daily wage worker who sells, or attempts,
to sell his labour in three sites of daily labour markets in North,
East and South Delhi. A questionnaire, which encompasses a range of
areas from communication networks within daily wage workers, to
expenditure decisions, links with the village and many other specific
inquiries, has been devised for detailed interviews.
18) Naresh Goswami (Hindi)
Yamuna Paar ke Saptahik Bazaar: Paridhi par jeevan
(The Weekly Markets of Trans-Yamuna: Life in the margins)
To take a close look at the weekly haats (markets) that are held in
different parts of the Trans-Yamuna area of Delhi on a particular day
of the week. The network that is involved in the creation and
dismantling of these markets will be explored through a mix of text,
sound, image and video by interacting with vendors, buyers and all
those who involved.
19) Naunidhi Kaur
Examination of everyday life in localities in Mumbai that were hit by
the 1992-93 riots
To explore how people in these locations view solidarity as well as
tensions of everyday existence in the family and neighbourhood
contexts, the cycles of festivals and ceremonies in public spaces and
the routines, stratagems and factional battles deployed in mass politics.”
20) Navaneetha and Shefali
The Space Between: Women's Hostels as Urban Spaces
This study of women's hostels in Hyderabad wants to see the city
through the eyes of young women, students and professionals who live
in hostels, and also see how they reclaim the hostel as a common
space.
21) Naveen Chander (Hindi)
Suniyojit Visthapan - Aniyojit Punarvas: Kaamgaron ka shahari mukam ke
liye jaddyojahad
(Planned Displacement - Unplanned Rehabilitation : Struggles of
Working People for Habitation in Delhi)
Continuation of last year's research project interrogating the
displacements and proposed rehabilitation of Metro workers in Delhi.
The project interrogates issues of public space, urbanisation, the
process of modernisation as effected by the Delhi Metro Project and
the dynamics of labour behaviour.
22) Navin Thomas
Street Musicians in Mumbai
To document the lives and music of itinerant street musicians in
Mumbai, and focus at the way in which they respond to the music
generated by the Hindi film industry. This will involve creating a
photographic profile of the spaces in which they perform together with
visual and audio portraits of them through still photos and sound
recordings.
23) Prabhas Ranjan (with Sadan Jha)
Sheher Ke Nishan II
This proposal is for the renewal of Sheher Ke Nishan. This time, it
aims to concentrate on the 'production' of signs, through interviews
with sign painters, sticker designers, and also to observe the economy
of the circulation of signs. It will also be a continuation of the
process of observing found signs, now concentrating on sites like
trains and public toilets.
24) Rahaab Allana
Of Urban Localities & Bazaar(s) Photography
To investigate the practice, form and experience of photography
within Delhi Bazaars. This will help to build a serious body of work
examples of Bazaar Photography including interviews with
practitioners.
25) Raheema B & Namita
Shivaji Nagar Signs
To develop a series of strategies for public interventions in
Bangalore as a response to the communalization and parceling out of
public space, using storytelling, street installations, bioscopes,
sound recordings, graffiti, stickers and photography.
26) Rajaram Bhadu (Hindi)
Jaipur ki Kacchi Bastiyon ka Sanskritik Adhayan (A Cultural Study of
Slums in Jaipur)
To study the process of cultural transition in mixed communities of
Jaipur slums through memories and identities. It wants to go beyond
established parameters, by looking at cultural changes and lifestyles
of predominantly dalit bastis.
27) Rajivan S.A
Subsequent Hearing: A project using sounds from the urban landscape
The Project aims to record a set of sound events from the city space
and recompose these events through interplay between the sound
recording and subsequent hearing. The idea is to make the subsequent
hearing of the recording into a fictional space that allows an
indirect, and layered experience. This will thus create a soundscape
of a city by recording sound events through different media to give a
sense of a dispersed spatial dynamic.
28) Ravi Aggarwal and Anita Soni
Jan Dedenge, Ghar Nahin: Photographic documentation of the movement
against eviction by communities in the Bhatti Mines area of Delhi
To focus on the Oudh and Kumhar communities settled in the Asola
Bhatti Mines region of south-east Delhi, which is slated to become the
Asola Sanctuary and Reserve Forest. The body of photographic materials
will form an archive, and will be presented in court as evidence that
the communities are not encroachers who must be evicted for
environmental reasons in the course of a Public Interest Litigation.
29) Rumman Hameed
Old Delhi - An Exploration of Connected Spaces
To map the unique forms of communication and interaction that occur in
old Delhi between the vertical levels of the different floors and of
built forms, and the horizontal levels, between gallis and across
mohallas.
30) Sayantoni Datta
Amorphous - Kaleidoscope Images: Discovering lesbian sexualities in
the media in India
To look at the representation of women in popular culture, films,
tele-films, soaps and internet spaces through a Lesbian sensibility,
in order to claim a representative and interpretative agency for young
lesbians in India.
31) Shahid Datawalla
Photographic Documentation of Cinema Halls and Cinema Going
Subcultures in Delhi
To build a collection of photographic records and interpretations of
the exterior and interior ambiences of cinema halls in Delhi including
those that are closed, abandoned or transformed into markets or
offices.
32) Sharmila Rege
Speaking From the Margins and Across Cultures: Documenting and
translating the narratives of Dalit and Black Women
To translate key documents and texts of the Black Feminist movement in
the United States into Marathi, and to translate key Marathi texts of
Dalit Feminism into English.
33) Sougata Bhattacharya
A History of the Aurora Film Corporation, Calcutta (1908 - 2002)
To write a detailed history of one of the longest surviving film
distribution, exhibition and production equipment hiring companies in
the Bengali film industry, to detail the industrial and business
history of the company, especially its decision to diversify into
distribution, and not be caught in the trap of the star system. It
will examine the company's correspondence, its production, its major
films and all other associated activities in order to draw out what
is, without doubt, a major episode in the history of cinema in
Calcutta.
34) Souvik Mukherjee and Riddhi Shankar Ray
Reading Books with Joysticks: Computer games and the history of
reading
To examine the sub-culture around gaming and the playing of various
kinds of first person computer games as a variant of reading and
writing.
35) Subhajit Chatterjee
Romancing the Post Colonial City: Problematic of the desire to 'Settle
Down'’ in urban Bengal
To explore cinematic representations of public spaces in the city as
the sites of romantic encounters in popular Bengali cinema and
investigate the relationship with similar real-life encounters.
36) Vishwajyoti Ghosh
Once Upon a Time...' - Migration, Memories & Personal Mappings
A mixed media Graphic Novel in black & white combining family memoirs
and history about the resettlement of post partition refugees from
East Pakistan in CR Park in Delhi.
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That's all this month. We hope to see you at the screenings and the
workshops.
Cheers,
Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Socities
www.sarai.net
Contents:
I. @rt.net.uk/now
II. Workshop @ Sarai: Writers Unblock - Fiction Writing
& The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law
III. Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary
IV.Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
V. Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, the Sarai Hindi Reader
VI. New @ Sarai Interface
I. @rt.net.uk/now
An Exhibition, Lecture and Workshop Programme, presenting facets of
contemporary Internet Based Art Practice in Britain
Curated by Honor Harger (curator, webcasting, Tate Modern, London)
and Pauline van Mourek Broekman (editor, Mute - A Journal of New
Media Arts, London)
Organised by the British Council in collaboration with Sarai: The New
Media Initiative, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies.
December 2 - 5, 2002
Exhibition at the British Council, Kasturba Gandhi Marg, New Delhi.
December 4
Presentation and interaction with Sarai
December 5
Net Art Now
Presentation by the Curators at the British Council, followed by a
public conversation, moderated by Shuddhabrata Sengupta, Sarai.
About the Exhibition
@rt.net.uk/now is an exhibition that brings to the fore key issues in
critical internet-based art practice. Issues of borders and
borderlessness, mapping and territories, the relationships between
'old' and 'new' media, access and control, critical reflections on the
experiences of the 'thinning' of time and the thickening of the data
cloud around us.
Internet based art is often mistakenly regarded as art 'showcased' on
the internet. This programme seeks to challenge this notion by
offering instead a foregrounding of the intrinsic properties of the
net as the material of a new form of art practice. This is a
sensibility that is conceptual, interactive, time based and that often
plays with the difficulties of access, unstable connectivity and
crashing software - features that are so much part of everyday online
experience.
Pauline Van Moerik Broekman and Honor Harger deliberately eschew the
'flashy' and spectacular effect-laden world of mainstream web content
to curate a series of online experiences that are designed to be
thoughtful, and at times, sharply political in the way in which they
treat the questions of online and offline territoriality and the
'fragmented public sphere' of the internet.
The works presented by them represent the critical cutting edge of
online art practice and include projects by leading contemporary
British net artists such as Heath Bunting, Rachel Baker, Tim Knowles,
Richard Wright, Andy Deck, Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie. The exhibition
will chart an eclectic mini-journey through new media projects from
the past few years, culminating in some of the absolute latest and
most contemporary examples in this context, based on the premise that
the quasi-historical purview will give an opportunity to look at some
of the questions that may have lingered in context.
About the Curators
Honor Harger is a new media artist who is currently working as an
education and online projects officer of the new Tate Modern Gallery.
Honor has been working on developing new techniques of audio streaming
for quite some time as a part of a group called Radio Qualia.
Van Mourik Broekman is co-publisher and editor of the London based
technoculture magazine Mute, which she co-founded with Simon
Worthington as 'the Art and Technology Newspaper' in late 1994. As
well as editing Mute, she writes regularly on art, media and
technology for journals and books. The editors, especially Pauline van
Mourik Broekmann, have created a very active and dynamic network of
contributors, artists, writers and critics who represent the best in
the British avant garde new media scene. Mute Magazine has been
presenting public forums on new media culture at the Tate Modern.
Honor and Pauline will be travelling to Kolkata and Bangalore Indian
cities to make presentations and conduct workshops as a forerunner to
the exhibition between December 6 and 15, 2002.
II. Workshops at Sarai
1. December 11-12, 2002
11 am -5 pm, Sarai Interface Zone
Writers Unblock
with Meaghan Delahunt
What is the work of a writer? How do ideas for fiction crystallize and
grow into short stories... and novels? What is the daily regimen, and
what are the exercises and observational practices that an aspiring
writer needs to work out? How to make the "writer's block" into a
piece of living textual sculpture?
Meaghan Delahunt, Asialink Fellow and writer-in-residence at Sarai,
will conduct a workshop on writing fiction through a series of
imaginative and fun excercises that grapple with these questions. She
will also share aspects of her own creative process, as it was
deployed in the writing of her first novel 'In the Blue House', and
offer advice and insight into working with agents, publishing houses
and other practical aspects of the writer's trade. To pre-register
email dak at sarai.net or call 3960040.
'In the Blue House' won the Commonwealth Writers Prize, in the Best
Book category in SE Asia and South Pacific, and the Saltire Society
Award in Scotland.
2. December 20-21, 2002
10 am -5 pm, Seminar Room, CSDS
The Daily Life of Intellectual Property Law
In the context of the global economy Intellectual Property Rights
(IPR) has emerged as one of the important modes of ensuring that
cultural and economic flows occur within a given set of rules and
regulations. This necessitates the disciplining of the activities of
those who operate beyond the boundaries of the regulated formal
economy. Thus IPR unfolds itself in the lives of people on a day to
day basis, determining what economic activities they may or may not
engage in. These boundaries are also backed by an omnipotent threat
of coercive violence through the use of the police force as agents
enforcing IPR.
At the conceptual level there have been a number of challenges posed
to the philosophical and the material basis of IPR. These range from
the open source movement in software to the open revolution in
content, music and publishing. This broad movement can be called
the movement of the creative commons.
What clearly inspires the open revolution is a dissatisfaction with
the philosophical premises of IPR (romantic authorship, incentive
theory, monopoly rights etc.) as well as a recognition that, given
the distribution of inequality implicit in the global economy, there
is a need to articulate a praxis that allows for more democratic
modes of participation within the global economy.
Legal scholars, lawyers, researchers, media practitioners and law
students from across the country will discuss these and other issues
at this workshop. We will also screen The Code - Story of Linux, a
film that brings many of these issues to the forefront and Arjun
Raina, actor and playwright, will perform A Terrible Beauty is Born,
his play on work, distance and Call Centres.
III. Films @ Sarai: Focus on the Documentary
All screenings are at the Seminar Room, Centre for the Study of
Developing Societies, 29 Rajpur Road, Delhi -110054.
1. Friday, December 13, 2002, 4:30 pm
Mat / The Vote
Directed by Pankaj Rishi Kumar, (2002), 80 minutes
Mat/ The Vote is a filmic deconstruction of the electoral process in
India. It closely examines the interests and issues that guide the
performance of different players - political parties, candidates,
party workers and voters - in a competition for power.
The film follows Imtiaz Khan, BJP candidate, in the Uttar Pradesh
assembly elections held in February, 2002, and Hemraj Saathi, a BJP
worker. The overall election process in Siyana, UP, forms the matrix
of the film. The crucial subjects here are the voters, divided and
categorized according to caste and community.
The production of Mat/ The Vote has been motivated by a need to bring
the vital issues in Indian democracy to the fore, by revealing in a
comprehensive and articulate manner, the failure of our society to
meet even the most basic challenges of such a social and political
system.
2.Friday, December 20, 2002, 4:30 pm
The Code - Story of Linux
Directed by Hannu Puttonen, (2001), 59 minutes
The Code presents the first decade of Linux from 1991 to 2001. The
film tries to tell one of the key stories of the digital age, a
symbolic saga of capitalism during the last fin de siecle of the
second millenium and during the early steps of the third one. It
features Linux Torvalds and many of his closest allies in the
development process of Linux, along with Richard Stallman.
IV. Tactical Media Lab @ Sarai
On November 14 -16, 2002, Sarai hosted the South Asian Tactical Media
Lab (TML), one of a chain of such events, that are taking place in
different parts of the world (Amsterdam, Barcelona, Cluj, New York,
Delhi and Sydney) as a run-up to the fourth Next 5 Minutes Conference
(N5M4) in Amsterdam in 2003.
Over the three days free software enthusiasts, programmers, graphic
designers, filmmakers, artists, activists, members of NGOs,
telecommunications experts, students and media practitioners from
Mumbai, Dehradun, Kolkata, Dacca, Kathmandu, Tehran & Delhi shared
ideas, experiences, problems and grievances, explored varied uses of
tactical media, discussed strategies, designed posters and websites,
disbanded opinions and formed new ones through panel discussions,
presentations, installations, workshops and a film screening.
The TML started with a very well attended public conversation between
Shuddhabrata Sengupta from Sarai and David Barsamian, founder and
director of Alternative Radio, an independent, award-winning, weekly
radio program produced in Boulder, Colorado. David Barsamiyan is well
known in Delhi through the publications of his interviews with Noam
Chomsky, Edward Said and Eqbal Ahmed.
This was followed by discussions and presentations on different
approaches to Tactical Media. Discussions on subsequest days focussed
on language and localization issues in Free Software, freedom and
programming culture, ICT and its ability to look beyond the
development paradigm and on the need for collaboration of new media
networks in Asia.
A print and web designing workshop conducted by Pradeep Saha, Managing
Editor, Down to Earth, and Mrityunjoy Chatterjee, Sarai Media Lab,
formed part of the TML and audio-visual and web installations were
playing in the Sarai Interface Zone on all three days.
The event lent itself naturally to the crystallization of a loose
coalition of tactical media enthusiasts in the Asian region. The
participants from Iran, Bangladesh, Nepal and various parts of India,
spoke of the need to carry the energies that they had discovered
through their meetings into the future. Plans were made to set up a
Tactical Media Asia discussion list hosted by Sarai, and everyone was
in agreement on initiating a cluster of collaborative processes, like
a free software desktop in the Urdu language as a concrete instance of
collaboration between people at Sarai and the LinuxIran group.
For more details click on http://www.sarai.net/community/announce.htm
V. Launch of Deewan-e-Sarai, The Sarai Hindi Reader
Sarai launched the first Hindi Reader Deewan-e-Sarai 01: Media
Vimarsh://Hindi Janpad (Media Discourses:// Hindi Public Domain) on
Saturday November 30. Prof. VB Singh, Director, CSDS, welcomed the
guests and speakers while Prof. DL Sheth moderated the presentations.
Ravikant, co-editor, Deewan 01, gave a brief introduction to the
series that is designed to cover a whole range of issues from the
history and practice of technology (Electricity, Railways, Computer,
Internet) to city, films, legal debates around copyright, surveillance
and information politics, history of labour and historiography.
Sanjay Sharma, co-editor, Deewan 01, presented an overview of the volume.
This was followed by readings from Deewan 01. Ruchika read a poem,
'Internet par Shaadi', and 'Aag ka Copyright', Ravikant read out his
translation of Bapsi Sidhwa's 'Television Satyagraha ke woh Din', an
essay on the day in the 1970s when the Indian film, Pakeeza, was
broadcast on Amritsar TV and how Lahore went berserk. David Lelyweld
who was a witness to the Pakeeza screening shared his memories of the
day in private conversations later. Sanjay Sharma then read out
extracts from his rather funny memoir on the BBC Hindi service.
After the readings invited speakers commented on the book. Much of the
interactions revolved around the use of language by Hindi writers and
publishers. Historian Sudheer Chandra praised the prose and supported
the Deewan's practice of going against the dominant notions of
shabd-maitri, whereby people do not allow so-called Hindi words to
mingle with so-called Urdu ones, but he also pointed out a couple of
factual inaccuracies.
Sanjeev Kumar, lecturer of Hindi at Delhi University, liked the name
Deewan but was critical of the Deewan's assumptions about the Hindi
Public, especially its literary publics, and pointed out the
overwhemingly secular mood of high Hindi literature. He sought to
nuance the notion of tadbhavaization, or corruption, by appealing for
the acceptance of tadbhavised or apbhramshised Urdu as well. He also
talked of the inherent lack in training that allows most writers the
competence to play around with words derived from Sanskrit rather than
with Perso-Arabic derivations.
By referring to current trends in the Hindi print media he pointed out
the disappearance of not only the nuqta but other diacritical marks
like the chandrabindu,and the halant, in an effort of simplifying
Hindi typography and moulding it for computer screens.
Aditya Nigam, Fellow, CSDS, distinguished these two kinds of
disappearance and celebrated the kind of language Deewan seems to have
inaugurated. He also praised the hard work put in by the Translation
Unit at Sarai.
Language debates brought forth passionate interventions from the floor
and Rana Behl, Delhi University, Yogendra Yadav, CSDS, and Vijay
Pratap, Lokayan, presented their own insights as language
practitioners. This interactive 'lokarpan' went down well with the
gathering and we are sure to hear more on this for some time.
VI. New @ Sarai Interface
The Sarai Digital Interface, available on the terminals in the Sarai
Interface Zone, is an in-depth presentation of Sarai's activities and
concerns that also contains areas of interactivity. The Interface is
designed to let the visitor to Sarai have a hands-on feel of the kind
of work we do, the issues that we are interested in and to allow for
an interaction with Sarai projects in various stages of development.
It contains a digital gallery and also acts as a public platform for
the sharing of ideas, knowledge and creativity, a digital bulletin
board for posting messages about public concerns as well as an
evolving resource that is built and sustained by the community that
grows around Sarai. The Interface can be used as a space to register
subjective experiences of living in urban spaces.
The recent additions to the digital gallery in the Interface are:
Cold Glory at Ground Zero
Photographs by Monica Narula
Exactly a year after September 11, 2001, New York city, under a clear
sky. A nervous flutter of US flags at every block are signs of
remembrance, and foreboding. And talk of war brings alive a cold glory
in early autumn. Monica Narula follows the flag and its strange
appearances, on pavements, walls, alleyways, and the outer perimeter
of Ground Zero.
Graffiti and Signage in the City
Photo-essays by Sadan Jha and Prabhas Ranjan.
2 HTML photoessays documenting the pictorial modes of visual
representation through graffiti and signage ranging from the
religious, the superstitious and the occult to everyday announcements
in the city of Delhi.
VII. Sarai/CSDS Independent Fellowship (December 2002-May 2003)
We are happy to announce the list of Sarai/CSDS Short Term
Independent Fellowships for the year 2002-03.
We received more than one hundred and fifty proposals in English and
Hindi from all over India, in response to the call for proposals that
went out in September 2002. We were delighted by the number of high
quality proposals that came in response to our advertisement. Sixty
seven proposals were shortlisted and thirty six proposals were finally
selected for support.
Given the large number of good proposals and our desire to encourage
younger scholars and practitioners we have decided to maximize the
awardees by distributing the total grant outlay amongst a larger
number of candidates. This has resulted in the awarding of some
partial grants, which we hope will encourage an interesting and
diverse body of research and practice.
We congratulate all the awardees and thank all those who responded so
enthusiastically to the call for proposals.
The awardees (in alphabetical order) are -
1) Abhay Dube (Hindi)
'Naya' Shahar/Nayi Sexuality ('New' City/ New Sexuality)
To focus on sexual assertitions in city/towns in the face of moral and
organisational opposition. Print publications, video parlours and
their subscribers as well as love spots in the city will form the
basis of the study. It will also interrogate sex as commodity and how
it has acquired a middle class respectability, and critique, in the
form of court cases, organisational oppositions, etc.
2) A.R.Basu
Mediation of a Marginal Science in a Colonial City: Reading Psychiatry
in Colonial Bengali Periodicals
To look at how psychiatry and categories such as insanity were
deployed in Bengali periodicals, both popular and scientific, in the
late nineteenth and the early twentieth centuries.
3) Arvind Narrain, C.S. Balachandran and Vinay Chandran
Outing Bangalore : Intesections of Geographies, Law and Sexualites
To embrace an ethnography of what it is to be homosexual in urban
space, reflect on online homosexual spaces, construct everyday
psycho-geographies of being gay and also look at the legal regimes and
repressions that mark out the everyday experience of homosexuals in
city spaces, specifically Bangalore.
4) Avinash Kumar (Hindi)
Des-Pardes ka Dvand aur Dilli (The Dilemma of the Insider/Outsider and
Delhi)
To explore the writerly dilemma of belonging and alienation in a city
of migrants, a city where the Hindi/Urdu dichotomy has greatly
affected the writer. An entire range of poetry and fiction will be
looked at along with interviews conducted with all surviving writers
to explore how their work reflects the everyday contradiction of
living in a city they do not love.
5) Ayisha Abraham
Deteriorating Memories: Blurring Fact and Fiction in Home Movies in
India:
Research, combined with work towards a media art project based on 8mm
Home Movies in Bangalore.
This project combines old and new media in very interesting ways. She
has been collecting and researching the little known area of the
domestic usage of 8mm, super 8 mm and 16 mm celluloid film, and has
found remarkable collections, including those made by middle class
housewives, a post office worker and other people who worked with
these film formats as a hobby.
She intends to work further with these materials, recycling them in a
digital format and presenting them for an installation, or a series of
installations, in spaces that are not mainstream art venues. She also
intends to research and experiment with appropriate technological and
aesthetic forms towards the public rendition of this material.
6) Bharti Chaturvedi
The City of Bins : Narratives from the informal waste recycling sector
in Delhi
To work with personal narratives of people who work in the waste
recycling sector in Delhi. This will work towards a wall newspaper
with, and for, the waste recycling workers.
7) Bharti Kher
Love -an absence of assignable cause: Research towards the realization
of a media based art project
To interrogate the delicate politics of status, gender and caste that
lie at the heart of the three-line matrimonial ad. She will be
researching into the appropriate digital interface with which to
realize this project which will ultimately take the form of a video
and sound installation.
8) Frederick Noronha
GNU/Linux in India: Research and Reportage on the Free Software/Open
Source Movement in India.
Continuing last year's efforts at networking all the Linux Users
Groups (LUGs) and other campaign groups across South Asia, Noronha
also hopes to focus the research on Indic Computing and complete a
book on FLOSS.
9) Gayatri Chatterjee
Researching the Mehboob Papers
To research a previously unexplored body of archival material,
preserved in fourteen steel cupboards at the Mehboob studios in
Mumbai. This will help to throw light on the story of the early years
of Hindi cinema including foreign distribution, government decisions
and policies regarding foreign quota, ways of amassing finance from
various official and unofficial sources and the various situations
filmmakers in India faced in the decades after independence. The
papers will also allow for the
tracing of the history of a great studio.
10) Hari Roka
The Condition of Nepali Migrants in Delhi
To work out a detailed ethnography of Nepali migrant workers in Delhi.
It seeks to examine their everyday lives, their social networks and
cultural practices in the city, the kind of films they see, their
forms of political involvement (especially against the context of the
insurgency in Nepal) and the way they see Delhi and other people in Delhi.
11) Khadeeja Arif and Ambareen Al Qadar
Lives of Women in Zakir Nagar, Delhi.
To interrogate issues of clothing, gestures, habitation,
entertainment, physical movement and the very texture of the daily
lived experiences of the women as something that is intrinsically
linked to the peculiar formation of Zakir Nagar, Okhla, Delhi.”
12) Kundan Kaushav
Upanyason Ka Shahar: The World of Hindi Popular Fictions, its Economy
& its Images.
To examine the world of pulp literature in Hindi, especially centred
around Meerut and Delhi, as sites of production. It wants to look at
the network which is created around the production and distribution of
the 'pulp novel' - small printing set ups and stalls on footpaths and
railway stations, as well as examine the world views of both readers
and writers through interviews, and collections of fan material.
13) Kurnal Rawat and Vishal Rawlley
Typocity: Documentation and Interpretation of the Typographic forms in
Public Signage in Mumbai
To do a documentation and analysis of interesting and rare instances
of typography throughout the city of Bombay from the point of view of
graphic design, production techniques and social significance
including painted film posters, hand painted restaurant menu boards,
hand crafted shop signs and calligraphic taxi number plates.
14) Manju Singh (Hindi)
Pregnancy Wards se kahaniya (Narratives from Pregnancy Wards in Delhi)
To collect and illustrate narratives of pregnant women, their visitors
and the workers in public and private hospitals in Delhi.
15) Meenu Gaur
Camp People : The Refugees From Kashmir in Delhi
To look at the way in which Kashmiri refugees have become part of the
rhetorical arsenal of the Hindu right, even as their very real human
needs and deprivations are completely neglected, and the violence that
they have suffered is not addressed in any real sense. This project
will be a documentation of the everyday lives, struggles and
experiences of these refugees through recorded testimonies and
photographs. It will also be an interrogation of the ambivalent and
multiple meanings that the word 'home' conjures in the context of camp
life, and the memories that the refugees have of the 'home' that they
have left behind.
16) Nandini Chandra
The Child's Experience of the City in Hindi Cinema
To interrogate the narrative of the child in the city in Hindi Cinema,
which is used as narrative justification for much that goes on in the
course of a film. Interviews with famous child artists of the fifties
and sixties, especially Daisy Irani and Master Raju, will help explore
the performative trope of 'cuteness' that was mastered by them, and
how they saw their own status as glorified child workers within the
ambience of a bourgeoise cuteness that they had to affect. An
interesting list of 33 films will form the basis of this study.
17) Narender Thakur
Chowk : Study of the Daily Labour Market (Labour Chowk) in Delhi
To document the world of the daily wage worker who sells, or attempts,
to sell his labour in three sites of daily labour markets in North,
East and South Delhi. A questionnaire, which encompasses a range of
areas from communication networks within daily wage workers, to
expenditure decisions, links with the village and many other specific
inquiries, has been devised for detailed interviews.
18) Naresh Goswami (Hindi)
Yamuna Paar ke Saptahik Bazaar: Paridhi par jeevan
(The Weekly Markets of Trans-Yamuna: Life in the margins)
To take a close look at the weekly haats (markets) that are held in
different parts of the Trans-Yamuna area of Delhi on a particular day
of the week. The network that is involved in the creation and
dismantling of these markets will be explored through a mix of text,
sound, image and video by interacting with vendors, buyers and all
those who involved.
19) Naunidhi Kaur
Examination of everyday life in localities in Mumbai that were hit by
the 1992-93 riots
To explore how people in these locations view solidarity as well as
tensions of everyday existence in the family and neighbourhood
contexts, the cycles of festivals and ceremonies in public spaces and
the routines, stratagems and factional battles deployed in mass politics.”
20) Navaneetha and Shefali
The Space Between: Women's Hostels as Urban Spaces
This study of women's hostels in Hyderabad wants to see the city
through the eyes of young women, students and professionals who live
in hostels, and also see how they reclaim the hostel as a common
space.
21) Naveen Chander (Hindi)
Suniyojit Visthapan - Aniyojit Punarvas: Kaamgaron ka shahari mukam ke
liye jaddyojahad
(Planned Displacement - Unplanned Rehabilitation : Struggles of
Working People for Habitation in Delhi)
Continuation of last year's research project interrogating the
displacements and proposed rehabilitation of Metro workers in Delhi.
The project interrogates issues of public space, urbanisation, the
process of modernisation as effected by the Delhi Metro Project and
the dynamics of labour behaviour.
22) Navin Thomas
Street Musicians in Mumbai
To document the lives and music of itinerant street musicians in
Mumbai, and focus at the way in which they respond to the music
generated by the Hindi film industry. This will involve creating a
photographic profile of the spaces in which they perform together with
visual and audio portraits of them through still photos and sound
recordings.
23) Prabhas Ranjan (with Sadan Jha)
Sheher Ke Nishan II
This proposal is for the renewal of Sheher Ke Nishan. This time, it
aims to concentrate on the 'production' of signs, through interviews
with sign painters, sticker designers, and also to observe the economy
of the circulation of signs. It will also be a continuation of the
process of observing found signs, now concentrating on sites like
trains and public toilets.
24) Rahaab Allana
Of Urban Localities & Bazaar(s) Photography
To investigate the practice, form and experience of photography
within Delhi Bazaars. This will help to build a serious body of work
examples of Bazaar Photography including interviews with
practitioners.
25) Raheema B & Namita
Shivaji Nagar Signs
To develop a series of strategies for public interventions in
Bangalore as a response to the communalization and parceling out of
public space, using storytelling, street installations, bioscopes,
sound recordings, graffiti, stickers and photography.
26) Rajaram Bhadu (Hindi)
Jaipur ki Kacchi Bastiyon ka Sanskritik Adhayan (A Cultural Study of
Slums in Jaipur)
To study the process of cultural transition in mixed communities of
Jaipur slums through memories and identities. It wants to go beyond
established parameters, by looking at cultural changes and lifestyles
of predominantly dalit bastis.
27) Rajivan S.A
Subsequent Hearing: A project using sounds from the urban landscape
The Project aims to record a set of sound events from the city space
and recompose these events through interplay between the sound
recording and subsequent hearing. The idea is to make the subsequent
hearing of the recording into a fictional space that allows an
indirect, and layered experience. This will thus create a soundscape
of a city by recording sound events through different media to give a
sense of a dispersed spatial dynamic.
28) Ravi Aggarwal and Anita Soni
Jan Dedenge, Ghar Nahin: Photographic documentation of the movement
against eviction by communities in the Bhatti Mines area of Delhi
To focus on the Oudh and Kumhar communities settled in the Asola
Bhatti Mines region of south-east Delhi, which is slated to become the
Asola Sanctuary and Reserve Forest. The body of photographic materials
will form an archive, and will be presented in court as evidence that
the communities are not encroachers who must be evicted for
environmental reasons in the course of a Public Interest Litigation.
29) Rumman Hameed
Old Delhi - An Exploration of Connected Spaces
To map the unique forms of communication and interaction that occur in
old Delhi between the vertical levels of the different floors and of
built forms, and the horizontal levels, between gallis and across
mohallas.
30) Sayantoni Datta
Amorphous - Kaleidoscope Images: Discovering lesbian sexualities in
the media in India
To look at the representation of women in popular culture, films,
tele-films, soaps and internet spaces through a Lesbian sensibility,
in order to claim a representative and interpretative agency for young
lesbians in India.
31) Shahid Datawalla
Photographic Documentation of Cinema Halls and Cinema Going
Subcultures in Delhi
To build a collection of photographic records and interpretations of
the exterior and interior ambiences of cinema halls in Delhi including
those that are closed, abandoned or transformed into markets or
offices.
32) Sharmila Rege
Speaking From the Margins and Across Cultures: Documenting and
translating the narratives of Dalit and Black Women
To translate key documents and texts of the Black Feminist movement in
the United States into Marathi, and to translate key Marathi texts of
Dalit Feminism into English.
33) Sougata Bhattacharya
A History of the Aurora Film Corporation, Calcutta (1908 - 2002)
To write a detailed history of one of the longest surviving film
distribution, exhibition and production equipment hiring companies in
the Bengali film industry, to detail the industrial and business
history of the company, especially its decision to diversify into
distribution, and not be caught in the trap of the star system. It
will examine the company's correspondence, its production, its major
films and all other associated activities in order to draw out what
is, without doubt, a major episode in the history of cinema in
Calcutta.
34) Souvik Mukherjee and Riddhi Shankar Ray
Reading Books with Joysticks: Computer games and the history of
reading
To examine the sub-culture around gaming and the playing of various
kinds of first person computer games as a variant of reading and
writing.
35) Subhajit Chatterjee
Romancing the Post Colonial City: Problematic of the desire to 'Settle
Down'’ in urban Bengal
To explore cinematic representations of public spaces in the city as
the sites of romantic encounters in popular Bengali cinema and
investigate the relationship with similar real-life encounters.
36) Vishwajyoti Ghosh
Once Upon a Time...' - Migration, Memories & Personal Mappings
A mixed media Graphic Novel in black & white combining family memoirs
and history about the resettlement of post partition refugees from
East Pakistan in CR Park in Delhi.
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That's all this month. We hope to see you at the screenings and the
workshops.
Cheers,
Ranita
The Sarai Programme
Centre for the Study of Developing Socities
www.sarai.net