For research leading to a travelogue on the songs performed during Muharram in various districts of West Bengal. The Muharram songs will be viewed as a part of a performative tradition that interprets and internalises the history of the Shia community. The recorded interviews and the songs will be documented as an audio-visual archive.
For the development and staging of a performance by and for children in Bengali based on a story by Upendra Kishore Roychowdhury. The children will visualise the story and develop the script for the performance through constant improvisations and experiments with the patua community in West Bengal.
For research into indigenous children’s literature in the nineteenth century Bengal that burgeoned in opposition to the British education system and reclaimed displaced popular culture to establish an important swadeshi tradition. The research will culminate in an encyclopaedia and a website on indigenous children’s literature in the nineteenth century Bengal.
For the publication of a two-volume encyclopaedia and creation of an Internet archive of Bengali Theatre from 1795 to 2008. The encyclopaedia will include entries on theatre personalities, plays and production houses. A CD accompanying each volume will contain photographs, reviews and other material on plays and production companies.
For research into and documentation of post-Partition Bengali newspapers, primarily Ananda Bazar Patrika (1966-1977), towards examining the formation of the cultural identity of the Bengali middle class. The project will lead to an archive of documents and a reader in Bengali.
For research into the linked histories of the radio, the gramophone and Bengali music in the early twentieth century towards an archive of printed materials, a monograph, and a reader collating and annotating articles from Betar Jagat (1930-1950)––a journal published by Calcutta Radio Station. The project will examine, source and collate print and audio-visual records pertaining to the early history of both media in order to map the evolution of Bengali music of the period.
For the creation of a series of short video-poems, animation sequences of digital paintings, still photographs, collages, and site specific live-action video responding to the changing visual environment of Kolkata and the increasing presence of mass-produced images across the city. The series will be played on the closed-circuit television monitors of the Metro Railway in Kolkata.
For the production and post-production of two films that will complete the Sikkim trilogy inaugurated with the IFA-supported The Listener’s Tale. Emerging out of the research and production of the first film, these subsequent films will move closer to places and people in an attempt to capture the everyday, which underlies the grand design of Tibetan Buddhism in Sikkim.
For building of an archive of photographs of urban middle-class women of Bengal from the 1880s to the 1970s. The project will critically and thematically archive and read the economy of photographic practices including modes of representation and resistances connected with the lives of urban middle-class Hindu/ Brahmo women in Bengal.
For research into and documentation of the history of cartoons in West Bengal and Bangladesh towards a book in Bengali. The research will examine the relationship between public life and cartoons while paying particular attention to individual cartoonists whose work has contributed significantly to the development of the form.
