Sarai Independent Fellowship workshop 2006

This 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 debate
and discussion.

Projects presented were extremely varied, both in terms of areas of
research, as also modes of rendition. Projects ranged from an
examination of the ways in which mobile phones inflect women’s
experiences of space in college, water ecologies in Mumbai, an
ethnography of Theyyam from a practitioner’s perspective, a search
for forms of narrating informal sector construction work, a
biographical narrative of the first teacher in a small town in Madhya
Pradesh, to explorations of sexuality and space, an examination of
the content of braille magazines, women’s magazine’s in urdu, trading
communities in Kutch, an exploration of the modes through which
musicians learn Western classical music and the construction of
“originality”.

Researchers ranged from academics situated within the university, to
professionals situated in work contexts whose research constituted
reflections on the spaces they inhabit (such as Rahul Pandita’s
graphic novel on life in 24 hour news, and Indu Verma’s lively
descriptions of the world of Hindi soap-operas), to filmmakers,
musicians, graphic designers, television professionals, journalists,
architects, programmers, social workers, actors.

Researchers experimented with a variety of forms – these ranged from
semi-fictionalised narrative accounts, first-person narratives, short
films, an audio-essay, a video-cum oral narrative, formal academic
papers, graphic novels and comic books.

Like last year, this year too saw research rendered as performance-
presentations in the evening. Averee Chaurey presented “The Song of
the Baul’, a spoken word and song performance of written as a first-
person narrative.

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.