Distributed Research Network
A distributed research network design has been integral to the Sarai programme since its inception in 2000. Inspired by the fluid network architecture of the early internet before the emergence of media platforms, our distributed research design targeted an emerging community of independent scholars, researchers, practitioners, and activists by fostering interdisciplinary contexts for critical practice and thought. In the early years of Sarai, we encountered familiar disciplinary silos within universities that constrained opportunities for a critical public culture. Sarai envisioned a collaborative, vibrant public space where research, media arts practice, and creative work could converge. Each grant raised by Sarai included support for fellowships and residencies. Additionally, it featured an archival component; in this distributed research design, grantees deposited their materials in the Sarai archive for future generations to access. In the initial years, fellows shared their research diaries via mailing lists, while more recently, blog posts have emerged as platforms for fellows. Grantees have contributed to the Sarai Reader series, an open-access publication. Artists and practitioners have produced exhibitions and performances. The distributed research grants encompass Independent Fellowships, Student Stipendships, City as Studio fellows, FLOSS fellowships, Residencies, Social and Digital Media Fellowships, and Capture All Fellows. This distributed research model has supported over 400 individuals, yielding critical outputs that include books, articles, graphic novels, art installations, performances, and software programmes. From the beginning, Sarai has endorsed work in both English and Hindi, and the distributed research archive reflects this diversity.
Independent Fellowships
From 2000 – 2008, Sarai supported independent research projects and interdisciplinary practice initiatives all over India. Undertaken by a diverse body of researchers and practitioners in English and Hindi, Sarai gave more than three hundred foundational grants to independent research and practice projects in more than twenty cities across India. The fellowships emerged from a public call and were competitively awarded. Apart from a final presentation, each fellowship holder shared research diaries in a public mailing list. These projects were seen not as finished undertakings but as an array of working questions still evolving, pushing the boundaries of disciplines, and shaping the forms and methods of diverse creative practices. The Sarai Independent Fellowship Programme’s innovation consisted of putting in place a public architecture for producing, circulating and exchanging knowledge through a combination of physical and virtual encounters hosted by Sarai. It provided the emergent community with tools and platforms for publicly articulating its knowledge through electronic discussion lists, publications and public events. The Independent Fellowship Programme and its allied activities responded to the crises of creativity within institutional settings, the isolation of researchers and practitioners, and the lack of support for a discursive community. Most crucially, the fellowship programme privileged bridging the distances between intellectual activity and research, creative practices and a wider public.
Student Stipendships
The Student Stipendship Programme provided students with financial support and academic resources for conducting research, presenting their work, and engaging with the broader scholarly community. Sarai annually supported approximately 20 young research scholars through a short-term studentship to facilitate research on urban life in South Asia. Stipendiaries were selected from all regions of the country, including both metropolitan areas and small towns, covering a diverse array of traditional and emerging academic disciplines, such as literature, history, geography, urban planning, and media and film studies. The student stipends originated from the City One Conference organised by Sarai/CSDS in January 2003. The Programme established a network of young researchers focused on urban issues, promoted research on various themes, particularly emerging topics, fostered an experimental environment for research methodologies, and offered academic support through readings and lectures. It encouraged the public presentation of work via email-based discussion forums, fostering a culture of peer review among young researchers by inviting them to comment on their colleagues' postings and drafts. The programme concluded in 2008.
FLOSS Fellowships
Parallel to its successful programme of bilingual Independent Fellowships, Sarai also ran a programme of Free Software Fellowships till the year 2010. Sarai gave fellowship to no less `than 30 people over several years. Sarai was able to launch the first desktop ever in Hindi, which was a . Kde version. It released open Sarai fonts in the public domain and designed a successful Bolnagri keymap. Sarai supported localisation endeavours in Kannada, Telugu, Oriya, Urdu, and Kashmiri and held workshops in Bangalore, Srinagar, and Bhubaneshwar, apart from those held annually in Delhi.
Residencies
During 2001-08, Sarai hosted several residencies at Sarai. Residents were mainly new media artists from South Asia, Australia, Europe and the US.
City as Studio
The City as Studio project was organised during 2010-2013 to create contexts for high-intensity inter-disciplinary processes at different locations in Delhi and the Sarai space in CSDS. Sometimes, these process(es) were rendered as an exhibition, at other times as a gathering, as a library, as a temporary archive or as an occasion for performances, conversations and debates. At other times, it took the form of a workshop, a temporary atelier, a media studio, a publication, or an online platform. The core was a practice fellowship that brought together artists, media practitioners, intellectuals, writers and activists.
Capture All Fellowships
In 2021, Sarai, in collaboration with Liquid Architecture (Melbourne) and supported by the Australia Council for the Arts, initiated a collaborative project titled ‘Capture All: A Sonic Investigation’ to assist six artists, scholars, and writers based in India and Australia through a series of creative and critical workshops, intensives, and dialogues. The project aimed to explore the sonic dimension during a period of accelerating platform capitalism. It was contextualised and grounded in Sarai’s pioneering work on critical issues related to media and information, urbanism, infrastructure, media archaeology, data and law, the commons, and the public domain in South Asia, as well as in Liquid Architecture’s research project ‘Machine Listening, a curriculum’, which serves as a critical platform for writing, interviews, music, and artworks that examine both the dystopian and utopian impacts of algorithmic, machinic, networked, and technologized listening on our social and political lives.
Social and Digital Media Fellowships
The Social Media and Digital Media Fellowships explored the remarkable transformation signalled by social media in the contemporary era. Such contemporary changes were situated in a complex history mapping the social basis and circuits of older and more recent media, including film and sound media, the emergence of audio and video cassettes in the 1980s, and the development of a powerful scrambling and interlacing of media technologies, formats and publics across different platforms and devices with the proliferation of digital forms in the 1990s.This research initiative supported several short-term research projects, which took inspiration from the pioneering Sarai Independent Fellowship programme that initiated and supported a host of individual researchers working on contemporary culture. Like the Sarai Independent Fellowship programme, the social media and digital media fellowship project mobilised collaborative research models in which selected researchers interacted with Sarai’s in-house research group and a larger community. They deposited their materials in the Sarai archive for public access and use.