Independent Fellowship Workshop

24-27 August 2005, Sarai-CSDS

August saw the return of the Independent Fellows to Sarai for their final presentations. This year there were almost 50 presentations over a hectic four days of intense and lively discussion. Projects presented were extremely varied, both in terms of areas of research, as also modes of rendition. Topics ranged from a social history of mess houses in 19th Century Bengal, a discussion of children’s relationship to space in Vijayawada railway station, urban water conflicts in Chennai, to a subjective rendering of the experience of space and time in Delhi, Researchers ranged from academics situated within the university system, to professionals situated in work contexts whose research constituted reflections on the spaces they inhabit (such as Kuldeep Kaur’s ethnography of the Labour room, and Faraaz Mehmood’s lively descriptions of work processes in a multi-national bank), to filmmakers, dancers, musicians, song-writers, architects, programmers.

Researchers experimented with a variety of forms – these ranged from semi-fictionalised accounts, first-person narratives, short films which were screened, an audio-essay, a video-cum oral narrative, as well as more formal academic papers. A highlight of the workshop was three performance-presentations. The first by Urmila Bhidikar on the production of feminine and masculine voice in the figure of Bal Gandharva. Sumangala Damodaran presented an analysis of the music of the IPTA through recordings, and Mehmood Farooqui performed two sections from the dastan of Amir Hamza.

The Independent Fellowship programme is designed such that the end of the fellowship process does not signal and end to the conversation between fellows and their material, or between eachother. Many projects were therefore ‘works-in-progress’ and researchers saw the presentations as forums from which to gather fresh questions and provocations, find new directionalities in their work.