21) Md. Abdul Khaliq, Delhi
Dilli Ke Kabristanhen Aur Shamshanhen Ka Vishleshanatmak Rekheinkan [Hindi]
Death is eternal yet modern in the shape it takes in interacting with community in metropolis. How does the city treat its deceased?
This work through the study of management and ecology of Qabristan and Shamshan aims to explore the life world of those who make their living out of the activities performed in the cremation grounds of city.
The study would bring out how the traditional essence of Life cycle rituals gets reconstructed in modern times. Also an attempt is being made to see if there is any convergence between state and community when it comes to the management of space and bidding farewell to deceased in city.
Thus the study aims at constructing narrative of Death and City as affected by Modernity.

22) Miriam Chandy Menacherry, Mumbai
A Childhood Beyond The Red Light ... ( a scrap book project)
A documentation of the rehabilitation efforts of rescued minor sex workers in Mumbai. Personal narratives that explore their reintegration into society.
Ramya lives in the St Catherine’s home in Andheri ever since she was rescued in a raid on a Mumbai brothel. At 16 years of age, she has created history by depositing to the Child Welfare Committee a testimony of her abuse in the Jamuna Mansion brothel.
Brave as this adolescent is once her moment of fame has flitted past, she faces the real challenge of finding her path to stake a place in society. She has to put behind her the scars inflicted over 4 years – burns caused by scalding water, lesions where an iron rod struck every time she refused a customer. What are the systems in place to help her? I would like to document the rehabilitation process of minor sex workers – their fears, hopes and dilemmas. The child-flesh trade in India is considered the second largest in the world. While raids on brothels have been widely reported in the local newspapers, little is known of what happens to the rescued girls thereafter? Detained indefinitely in police cells and subjected to faulty medical tests in state run hospitals, it is not surprising then that 50% of minor girls return to the brothels.

23) Mohammad Pasha & Seemi Pasha, New Delhi
Gyaspur se Hazrat Nizamuddin tak [Hindi]
This research aims at tracing the evolution of the settlement at Hazrat Nizamuddin Basti, and studying the way the Durgah continues to provide a source of livelihood to a large section of residents of the area. The way the built form has evolved as a result of the influx of people to the Durgah and the consequential commercial activity, the socio-economic forces that have dictated the design of the built form shall also be a part of the research. This is an attempt to understand this urban space, its built form, ecology, culture, economy and history.

24) Nancy Adajania, Mumbai
Digitalisation of Popular Image-Production in Contemporary Urban Indian Contexts
This project will explore the phenomenon of digitalisation of popular image-production in contemporary urban Indian contexts, and the resultant emergence of hybrid or composite forms incorporating conventional as well as digital elements. It will involve the study of three specific social, historical, and expressive trajectories, unfolding in three distinct locations: 1.(street-level photoshops in Bombay; 2.secular digital photoshops in Nathdwara, Rajasthan and 3. Ramoji Studios, the transnational media corporation in Hyderabad). These three trajectories are being reshaped through a negotiation between regional and global tendencies.
At a conceptual level, my project is premised on a need to extend the applications of art history/visual studies in accounting for art-makers who are outside the official gallery-based art-making circuit, and who are not recognised as artisans either, and therefore fall into a ‘definitional void’. These would include such contributors such as computer technicians working in collaboration with photoshop entrepreneurs, and film editors and special effects technicians. Related to this, is the need to recognise the different levels of agency and collaboration in image-making practices today, which go beyond the artist-patron or artist-client relationship and give birth to new image-making patterns in the interstices between formal structures. These patterns go against the singular authority of the artist-as-genius.

25) Naresh Fernandes, Mumbai
Jazz Goes To Bollywood
I used a week last month to head off to Goa to interview a few musicians who played an important role in helping Hindi film music develop harmonically. The most significant of them was Anthony Gonsalves, who gave his name to Amitabh Bachchan’s character in “Amar Akbar Anthony” and who is immortalised in the song from that film which begins, “My name is Anthony Gonsalves…”
The song was music director Pyarelal’s tribute to his violin teacher. But Gonsalves wasn’t just a music instructor. He was an important innovator and, in 1958, composed one of the first raga-based symphonies, which was performed by a 110-piece orchestra in the quadrangle of St. Xavier’s College in Mumbai. The orchestra had an Indian and a Western section, each with its own chorus, which sang in Latin, Konkani and Hindi. Lata Mangeshkar and Manna Dey were among the soloists.
Born in the southern Goa village of Majorda in 1927, Gonsalves’s father was the director of music at the local church and the younger Gonsalves began music lessons at the age of three. After directing church choirs himself for a few years, Gonsalves headed to Mumbai in 1943 to try to put his talents as a violinist to work in the Hindi film industry. The music director Naushad was his first employer. For the first time, Gonsalves was exposed to Hindustani music and, as he put it, he “fell in love forever”.
Gonsalves was an exception among the Goan Catholic musicians in the industry. Most of them thought that Hindi film music was too simplistic for their Western classically oriented and jazz-stuffed ears, and claimed that playing in the studios was a necessary way of making a living. Gonsalves, however, immediately signed up for Hindustani lessons: he studied with Pandit Ram Narayan, Pandit Shyam Sunder and Ustad Inam Ali Khan.
Using the money he earned from arranging music for more than 100 films, Gonsalves eventually put together the Indian Symphony to give voice to his attempts to compose harmonic versions of ragas. He scored pieces for chamber groups (giving his fantasies such titles as “Sonatina Indiana”) as also for the orchestra; his works for the orchestra included “Concerto In Raag Sarang” and “Goenchim Xetam”. Gonsalves quit the industry in the mid-60s to study at Syracuse University in upstate New York.
I also did an interesting interview with Emiliano D’Cruz, who played Latin American music in several Mumbai nightclubs with a group that initially called itself Emiliano and his Gay Caballeros until the leader, whose grasp on English slang was only tenuous because he’d grown up speaking Portuguese, finally realised the implication of the adjective. Like so many Goan musicians, D’Cruz took refuge in the studio when Mumbai’s nightclubs went into decline, playing violin on countless films and attempting unsuccessfully to strike out as a composer in his own right: his Portuguese-trained sensibility didn’t allow him to really get under the skin of Hindi film tunes, he confessed.

26) Nilanjan Bhattacharya, Kolkata
Community Ecological Mapping
The eastward expansion of the city is causing the fast transformation of the semi rural and rural landscape into highly urban settlements in the eastern fringe of Calcutta. Kalikapur, a densely populated locality inhabited mostly by the people from poorer economic strata, a unique ecosystem with very rich mosaic of original vegetation, with groves of indigenous trees and bushes, swamps with reeds, and number of water bodies, has strangely survived the onslaught and now remains as a refuge threatened by the fast approaching urban expansion. A considerable number of Kalikapur residents have significant dependence on the local wilderness for their dietary supplements, fuel and fodder. They, and particularly their children, are quite knowledgeable about these available, ‘free’ resources, in the locality and also in adjacent urban settlements. The proposed research is aimed to study such unique practice of resource use, sharing, and indigenous knowledge, in a framework of urban-semi-urban ecosystem. An outline ecological mapping along with the ethnographic history of Kalikapur region is being planned. The project also plans to document the process of urban transformation.
A small group comprises of knowledgeable kids from Kalikapur, and kids from the adjacent urban locality, who have operational computer knowledge, would be formed. Kalikapur kids will work as field guides and the urban ones will take charge of the documentation (paper, photographs, computer storage) mainly. A participatory bio-resource documentation, and exchange of knowledge and skill between these two groups would be actively initiated.

27) Nirmal Kanti Saha, Kolkata
Economy of Meaning and Meaning of Economy: A re-invoation of Calcutta based Journal Annya Artha
A Bengali journal that emerged out of the radical Marxist tradition during the early seventies in the metropolis of Calcutta is the nodal point in this project. Re-construction of urban consciousness in the face of large-scale infiltration (after the liberation of Bangladesh), economic unrest, and political bankruptcy on the part of both left and right, has been reflected in the articles published. Started by a group of young (left) intellectuals with a serious commitment towards the understanding of social economy leads gradually to an understanding of the (im)possibility of a discussion on economy without a serious re-thinking of social and political theories .
The project aims to analyse the socio-economic-political agents responsible in re-structuring urban consciousness through the lens of this journal. A face-to-face interview to map the contours and terrain of a growing urban radicalism has also been planned with the editorial members and contributors in the journal, most of them, now in their late fifties or early sixties, most of them intellectuals of repute in the national as well as the international arena. Also we have a plan to preserve all the issues of this journal in an electronic format.

28) Poonam Bir Kasturi, Bangalore
Eco-Source

29) Preeti Sampat, New Delhi
In Search of the 'Uncommon' Woman
Front-page cartoons in most national newspapers, generally in little boxes to the left, depict (as opposed to represent) women in a plainly patriarchal manner. The women are depicted (if at all) by these undoubtedly male cartoonists as either ‘homely’ furniture in the background or a little more tantalizingly with some ‘parts’ popping out of their clothing just as their tongues occasionally do. With predictable regularity, any real comment is made by a man. I’ve admired the ‘common man’ for a long time for his ability to speak volumes through his silence, until I realized with all the enormity of the betrayal, that the common woman’s silence is in fact, deafening!
I want to interrogate this wholly unnecessary disrespectful depiction of women and examine its wider cultural meanings and implications. I intend to interview the cartoonists of four national dailies: The Hindustan Times, The Indian Express, The Times of India and The Hindu. I will also undertake archival research of cartoons, articles and other relevant materials. This critical examination will then culminate into an article or two sent for publication to national dailies or popular magazines and a final essay for Sarai.

30) Promod Nair, Bangalore
Freedom of Expression and the Limits of the Law of Contempt