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Fellowships 04-05

This section conatins material from the 04-05 cycle of fellowships

Sumangala Damodaran: Protest Through Music: This project begins a process of documentation and analysis of protest music as embodied in the tradition of the IPTA in Hindi and Bengali. In addition, the research  also attempts a preliminary analysis of the structure of the music.
Nitoo Das: Hypertextual Poetry: This project studies the extremely popular MSN Poetry Communities to investigate changing concepts of poetry according to recent models of hypertextuality. Can anonymous poetry, or rather, poetry written under interesting screen names or "nicks", change the way poetry is traditionally understood (as a lyric/subjective medium)?
Madhavi Desai: Women's Spatial Narratives in Ahemadabad: This project attempts to trace women's mobility patterns with respect to their neighbourhood and the city, within their social network and outside it; to analyse women's connection to urban institutions and services such as banks, post office, etc.; to understand women's activities and sites of leisure such as hotels, restaurants, parks and multiplexes and to look into women's notions of what a city is in terms of their image and descriptions.
Archana Jha: Nautanki Shahar Mein: This project explores the conditions of production and popularity of the nautanki form in the colonial and post colonial period in Kanpur.
Sunil Kumar: Aa Maa Tujhe Dil Ne Pukara; Jagaran Tales in Delhi: This project  looks at the Jagaran phenomenon in Delhi, especially the Jagaran parties, singers, writers and musicians. The proposal attempts to understand the ways in which these "public" occasions constitute and gather their publics, and how public resources are gathered and deployed.
Kaiwan Mehta: The Politics of Mapping and Representation of Urban Communities: <div>Communities, essentially housing communities are defined on various cultural frameworks that range from migration patterns, employment status, community structures, etc. Very often they create cultural zones, which are not generated through historical or social sequences, but are enforced to create preferred cultures. How does one understand the living space and community space within these living complexes? How does one holistically document these housing communities? Architects' classical tools of the plan and map have limitations. This project by a Mumbai based architect is an attempt to find a mode of representation that documents the living space and the relationships that it accommodates, the community and the politics that it generates, the form and the memories and aspirations it provokes.</div>
Leela Rani Narzary, Nidhi Bal Singh, Sabir Haque: The Eastern Yamuna River Bed: Ecological Imbalance and Future Implications: The research studies the new developments that are being planned in the Eastern Yamuna river bed and documents the displacement of people living along its banks who are pushed to the fringes in the name of development. The study seeks to critique the notion of development which always meant concrete construction and nullifying the concept of National Capital Territory: pulling, as opposed to diverting, more resources into Delhi. The study will be based on the eastern banks of Yamuna, starting from ITO to ISBT.
Prashant Pandey: Documenting the Contemporary History of the Making of the Hindi Film Song: The merging of sound recording with computer technology to create a sample- and sound file-based approach to production has resulted in an enormous increase in the number of songs recorded. This project attempts to unpackage emerging practices, mediated by technological innovation, in the contemporary film industry. It explores changes in artistic practice and production.
Meera Pillai: Foodcourts and Footbridges: Conceptualising Space in Vijaywada Railway Station: The study explores how a popular public space, the Vijayawada Railway Station (the largest railway junction on the South Central Railways section in India), is used and perceived by different stakeholders, including street children, rickshaw pullers, railway officials, porters, vendors, and middle-class passengers. The study compares uses and perceptions of this space by street children, middle-class users, and those whose presence at the Railway Station is legitimised by authority. It examines the relevance of different stakeholders in the geography of this space, and asks how this important public utility space in the city reflects and contributes to diversity.
Rochelle Pinto: Manuel in The City: A Semi-Fictionalised Illustrated Book on the Arrival and Absorption of Goan Migrants to Mumbai: This is an attempt to produce a semi-fictionalised illustrated book on the arrival and absorption of predominantly working-class Goans into the growing city of Bombay in the 19th century. It draws on the variety of criminalised representations of these groups available in police reports, government correspondence between Bombay and Goa, and the disparaging writings of the Goan elite. In contrast to these, it also explores the wide range of print generated by the newly solvent migrants, which is more evocative of their encounter with the city, and the ways in which they inhabited and transformed its geography.
Shai Heredia: Excavating Indian Experimental Film: <div>This a research project that aims to identify and understand the neglected history of Indian experimental film. Experimental film here refers to filmmaking that explicitly sets out to develop innovative techniques for combining sight and sound, light and word. </div>
Kiran Jonnalagadda: An Investigation of how Form Affects Discussion and Community in Online Discussion Spaces: <div>With the advent of social software for the Web (prominently in the form of weblogs and social networking services), we see the Web change from from an information publication space to an interactive communication space. This results in the overlap of what were previously distinct research areas: how the medium affects the message, and how user interface affects usability in computer software. This project intends to study this overlap, of how user interface shapes the communities that form in online communication spaces.</div> There are currently no items in this folder.
Vasudha Joshi: History and Storytelling about Kolkata and Howrah: This project straddles history and storytelling about Kolkata and Howrah and includes a number of other histories of Kolkata through personal narratives. In the course of working on this project the researcher is interested in working on forms that strive to integrate narrative and database, and experiment with how interactivity might work in new ways.
Pankaj Rishi Kumar: Ponytails-Rings-Punches: Female Boxers in India: Boxing has traditionally been associated as a masculine activity, identified with the male physique and psychology. Blood, bruises, cuts and concussion, are considered to be "natural" for men, but absolutely at odds with the essence of femininity. Boxing is deeply gendered, embodying and exemplifying "a definite form of masculinity: plebeian, heterosexual and heroic". Thus, when female boxers display unconventional signifiers like aggression, power and hyper-performity, there i s a lack of grammar to understand the ways in which self is expereinced and understood. This project explores the lifeworlds of female boxers through interviews, culminating in a short film.
Lakshmi Kutty: High-Rise Hygiene: Narrativising Mumbai's New Urban Culture: <div>This project attempts to explore the different narratives of hygiene and sanitation that inhabit Mumbai city spaces today, that emphasise the need for uncluttered, unperilous modes of communication and interaction, entertainment and leisure, finance and vocation, to name a few. The city space, presently and in its vision for the future,- is being plotted in terms of eliminating its polluting excesses. These new models seem to make earlier patterns and ways of inhabiting and consuming the city seem awkward and passé. The project will investigate the exclusionary mechanisms of scrutiny that animate the dominant discourse on hygiene, and will look at how these nuanced tools of power and control are getting articulated in certain print and visual media of the city.</div>
Faraaz Mehmood: Changing Banking Practices in Udaipur: The project attempts a compartmentalised study of six papers dealing with the profit making practices of a multi-national bank as a sales machine. The researcher is interested in thinking through the ways in which the entry of a mutli-national bank into a small town transforms financial practices by introducing new modes of work practice, consumption and saving.
Anannya Mehtta: The Viewership of Non Commercial and Independent Film in Delhi: This study hopes to understand film viewing as a site of meaning, fun and sharing in Delhi. By meaning, the study hopes to convey the now virtual truism that film viewership has come to mean more than just the act of viewing. The cinematic pervades every sphere of our lives the social, the political, the emotional and certainly the economic. What is the motivation behind the mechanics of viewing, behind the habit of regular visits to Sarai, the India Habitat Centre, the Max Mueller Bhavan, the French Cultural Centre, etc? How do audiences understand, interpret and experience films?How do we unravel the ubiquitous presence of the filmic in our lives?
Nagarik Mancha: Workers, Factory Closures and Urban Space: This study primarily aims at closely inspecting this synergistic relation between closing down of factories and urban space. It will also study the extent of rehabilitation or self-employment and trace its impact on the surrounding urban infrastructure like markets, schools, tea shops and trading points; observe and analyse the effect of closure on the non-worker section of this urban space; attempt to estimate the social cost of this loss of skill.
Hilal Bhat: The Shrine as Anodyne in Kashmir: The project explores the changing environs of shrines in conflict-devastated Kashmir, where thousands of devotees take refuge in the absence of modern alternatives for dealing with the stress. In the wake of chaos and mayhem in Kashmir, a shrine remains the sole place where the victims of violence have a chance of getting rejuvenated.
Prayas Abhinav: Publicity, Promises and Public Space in Ahemadabad: This project explores the practices of public communication, commercial as well as personal, in Ahmedabad and thereby documents the broken links between the "promises and commitments" made by these practices and their delivery.
Urmila Bhidhikar: The Female Impersonator Bal Gandharva: This project investigates the relationship between the production-consumption of the North Indian musical genre of thumri (and other allied forms) through gramophone records and the fashioning of the songs of the female characters in Marathi Sangeet Natak tradition, with special emphasis on the female impersonator actor Bal Gandharva.
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Muthatha Ramanathan: Tracing Spatial Technology in the Rural Development Landscape of South India: This study critically examines the increasing use of a new suite of technologies, remote sensing (RS) and geographic information systems (GIS), for planning in the natural resource management (NRM)-based rural development sector in India. The key question is: how is this emerging paradigm altering the nature and content of NRM-based rural development in India? The study borrows from an interdisciplinary theoretical framework that draws from Science and Technology Studies (STS) and Critical Development Geography (CDG) to research an NGO's use of these technologies to facilitate development in a cluster of villages in Raichur, Karnataka.
Anurag: Laghu Patrika Andolan: Abhivyakti ke Naye Aayam: <div>This work addresses the world of expansive world of Hindi 'little magazines' - its history, its sociology, politics but most importantly, its economics.</div>
Moyukh Chatterjee and Swara Bhaskar: Of Riots and Ruins: The area of study of this project is a conglomeration of colonies inhabited by Muslims, Hindus and Dalits, located in Vatva, an industrial (previously agrarian) area on the outskirts of Ahmedabad. It was a site of violence during the 2002 carnage and is now informed by post-violence "compromised" peace. The project attempts to map on this spatial-geographic entity the processes by which contesting discourses of ethnicity, communal identity and multiple explanations for communalisation of "everyday" life are (re) produced.
Sudeshna Chatterjee: Children's Friendship with Space: This study proposes place friendship as a valid form of affective place relationship in childhood that is different from the more widely studied construct of place attachment. By studying children's place friendship it attempts to empirically investigate the meaning of child friendly places for children in cities.
Uddipan Dutta: The Growth of Print Nationalism and Assamese Identity in Two Early Assamese Magazines: This study is an attempt to deconstruct the complex dynamic of the forging of linguistic nationalism thorugh print culture in two early magazines of Assam, Arunoloi and Jonnaki, in the colonial context of the province.
Dev Kamal Ganguly: The Culture of Crime Pulp Fiction in Bengal: <div>The intention of the project is to look closely at those crime thrillers in Bangla which do not have the same recognition as Satyajit Ray's 'Feluda' or Sharadindu Bandyapadhyay's 'Byomkesh' series. The books no longer exist in significant proportions, but they have left a series of questions relevant for cultural study: what made them successful in their good old days; how were the images of the crime, chase, violence etc., portrayed in those books related to the urban phenomena of the big city.</div>
Vijendar Singh Chauhan: Dilli ke City-scape mein Dik wa Kaal: This multimedia work records sound and image and suppplements them with texts and personal prose. It attempts to capture different shades and textures the city inhabits in different time zones and across seasons. The cityscapes selected include Rajpath, AIIMS Crossing, Chandni Chowk, Moolchand flyover, Connaught Place and the Old Yamuna Bridge.
Veena Naregal: Informal Economies and Distribution Practices: Studying Bollywood: <div>Despite the evident cinephilia of Indian audiences and an estimated current turnover of Rs. 5000 crore, the Hindi film industry continues to largely rely on off-the-books speculative capital and parallel money markets for its finance and distribution arrangements. This study initiates the necessary task of gathering data and practices in the distribution and exhibition sector. It focuses on representative segments of two major distribution territories: 1) Bombay: comprising of Maharashtra, North Karnataka and Gujarat; 2) Delhi and UP. </div>
Madhavi Tangella: Sagar Cinema - An Illegal 'Poor Man's Multiplex' in a Malad Slum: Malad (a suburb of Mumbai on the Western Express Highway) is home to a large community of migrant Telugu labourers. They live and cook in large groups and rent cheap housing. They rarely have any access to television. Instead, they regularly visit Sagar Cinema, which screens a Telugu film every day at 10.30 pm. Sagar Cinema is an illegal theatre in a slum area of Malad. It has four rooms; two rooms are equipped with video projectors, and the other two screen films on TV sets. Instead of the gimmicks and astronomical fee of a regular multiplex, Sagar Cinema sells tickets at a flat price of Rs. 10, but it mirrors a complex cinematic multiplicity; thus, it might be called a poor man's multiplex. Sagar offers a curious mix of Telugu and Hindi mainstream action-packed thrillers and soft poronography. At the cinema, migrants can hear a language they understand, see their hero fighting the big bad world and winning and, lastly, experience a sense of nostalgia about "home" as generated through images in the big screen. The study wishes to explore the interface of the above two themes of cinema and migration within the mapping of a city space.
Mahmood U.R. Farooqi: Tale Tellers: Dastangoyee, The Culture of Storytelling in Urdu: This study seeks to explore dastans, oral fictional narratives of epical length that flourished in Urdu between the 18th and 20th centuries. While they drew on an older tradition in Arabic and Persian, the Urdu storytellers turned what were often one or two volumes of longish stories into adventures of mammoth proportions.
S.M. Irfan: Awaazien FM Radio Ki: <div>The proposal attempts to look at the role of FM in the life of Delhi and its satellite areas. The two aspects of this world are, (a) the world of the radio jockey, and (b) the effect on the listeners, but the proposal concerns itself with the former aspect. The attempt will be to analyse the "content" produced by these jockeys. </div>
Bodhisattav Kar and Subhalakshmi Roy: Messing with The Bhadralok: Towards a Social History of Mess-Houses in Calcutta: This  project wishes to appreciate the role of the mess-houses as lived sites of the constitution, exercise and contestation of the distance between the metropolis and the mofussil. From extensive interviews and dispersed written accounts, the research would try to recover the fast vanishing histories of the everyday negotiations of identity.
S. Anant: The Culture of Business: The Informal Sector and Finance in Vijawada: This project  looks at the phenomenon of globalisation as it manifests itself at the local level and in day-to-day economic practices. The primary objective of the study is to demonstrate the manner in which the culture of business at the local level is impacted by the phenomenon of globalisation.
Karen Coelho: Tapping In: Urban Water Conflicts as Citizenship Claims in Chennai: This project explores collective, contentious and transgressive practices of urban citizenship as articulated in claims to water in the city of Chennai. It uses multi-media techniques to interrogate the narratives of order purveyed by the reforming state, from the vantage point of its margins.
Syed Bismillah Geelani: The Kashmiri Encounter in Delhi: The study explores how far the Kashmiris, Hindus and Muslims, living in Delhi have preserved memories of "Kashmiriyat" and asks if it binds them together in any way. It also explores how the armed movement in Kashmir affects the life of these two communities living in exile in Delhi. It documents the real life experiences of these two communities, their encounters with each other, with Indians and with the Indian state.
Syed Khalid Jamal: The Work Culture in Fast Food Chains: In preliminary research for Sarai's Student Stipendship programme, the researchers looked at working conditions and considered the relationship of employees of fast food chains with their work place, documenting their desires and frustrations mapped their life histories through a process of active listening and participation. During this research, certain fascinating tropes of the fast food profession, such as "smiling" and "mobility", were articulated. This project attempts to push and explore these strands further
Kuldeep Kaur: The Hospital Labour Room as a Space for Unheard Voices: The words uttered in and around the labour room are of an order diffirent from the utterances encountered in everyday life. The expressions captured in the labour room are the real micro-picture of a society's overall attitude towards mothers and children. This study, conducted by a practicing nurse and freelance journalist, attempts to collect narratives from this space.
Jasmeen Patheja: Blank Noise: Building Testimonies in Public Space: Blank Noise makes its entry through street harassment / "eve teasing"--- an offence granted normalcy by its sheer daily recurrence. Blank Noise was initiated in 2003. The project in its first phase began with a series of workshops that explored the public and private identities of nine young urban Indian women. This collective participatory experience evolved into Blank Noise. Both perpetrator and victim were addressed in the final installation that included video, sound and photographs. In Phase 2, Blank Noise seeks to intervene in the public space by addressing and confronting the public.
Himanshu Ranjan: The Development of Allahabad and its Intervention as a Cultural Centre of the Hindi-Urdu Belt: Allahabad emerged as a prominent cultural centre of modern esteem in the 20th century, out of a very complicated and controversial background of the so-called 19th-century renaissance (particularly that of Hindi-Urdu belt), engrossed with rivivalist trends and a typical communal divide where Hindi and Urdu were identified with the Hindu and the Muslim religious communities respectively. Ironically, the two languages belong to the same socio-historic demography of the same belt. linguistic, literary, cultural and socio-political movements, debates and discourses that constitute Allahabad as an important cultural centre of the Hindi-Urdu belt.
test: This section conatins material from the 04-05 cycle of fellowships

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Fellowships 04-05