Introduction

For the last almost eight years [2000-08], Sarai, as part of its commitment towards the enrichment of the public life of intellectual activity in India, has consistently supported independent research projects and inter-disciplinary practice initiatives all over the country. These projects, undertaken by a diverse body of researchers and practitioners in English and Hindi, constitute a growing body of work that has emerged under the aegis of the Sarai-CSDS programme of fellowships for independent researchers and practitioners. Till date, this has translated into more than three hundred foundational grants to independent research and practice projects located in more than twenty cities across India. These projects are best seen, not as a set of finished undertakings, but as an array of working questions…

The programme’s innovation consists in putting in place a public architecture for the production, circulation and exchange of knowledge through a combination of physical and virtual encounters hosted by Sarai. The public architecture of knowledge generated by the fellowship programme invites and invokes a discursive and creative community into being, provides it with tools and platforms for the public articulation of its knowledge through electronic discussion lists, publication and public events, and creates a publicly accessible repository – a commons of discourse and creative resources – by generating an open archive (the opposite of an
enclosed site that prevent s access to knowledge, either through intellectual property safeguards, or disciplinary barriers, or both) that indexes and renders the result s of the research activities and creative processes enabled by the programme…

Production

This book and the Sarai-CSDS Fellowship Programme have both been realised with the support of the Ford Foundation.