Priya Paul, a well known Indian entrepreneur and the current Chairperson of Apeejay Park Hotels, has been an ardent collector of Indian art, contemporary as well as popular/archival art. Her collection of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters, painstakingly accumulated over several decades, is one of the finest archives of such ephemera in India. Tasveer Ghar was commissioned to digitize and archive this important collection in 2008. Each image needed careful handling, cleaning, scanning, digital photography, classification, and creation of detailed metadata. It took more than 3 months to physically handle and scan the images into raw digital data. Part of the work was funded by the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context“ at Heidelberg University. The formatting and digital restoration of all files as well as the metadata creation is still ongoing. It is estimated that when we are all done, we will have the digital versions of over 5000 images in the archive covering a broad range of subjects including Indian nationalism, Hindu mythology, Islamic iconography, commercial advertisements, popular cinema, and portraits. This digital image archive will soon be available on Tasveer Ghar’s website for all to see and benefit from. Specified thematic image-clusters would also be used by specialists/scholars to write visual essays. We also present here a short video interview of Priya Paul about her art collection (recorded in October 2008).

2. New Grant from the German Research Foundation (DFG)

Eid Mubarak, a greeting card for Eid festival, published at Lahore, early 1940s (from Priya Paul collection)

Tasveer Ghar has received a generous grant of three years of funding from the German Research Foundation. This grant emerges from Tasveer Ghar’s collaboration with Heidelberg University’s new Cluster of  Excellence, “Asia and Europe in a Global Context. Shifting Asymmetries in Cultural Flows” (see http://www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de/Plone). This grant will enable Tasveer Ghar to launch a new initiative on Eurasian Muslim Popular Visual Culture, as well as strengthen our capacity to work across and beyond the South Asian region from Delhi, and develop institutional ties with the Cluster members at the Karl Jaspers Centre, Heidelberg, as well as international partners. Our collaboration with Heidelberg University’s Cluster of Excellence will lead us to track (a) the flows of images and concepts between Europe and Asia, and within Asia; and (b) further ongoing collaboration with European and Asian institutions/scholars/ students/practitioners. The moving and still images collected and tagged in this process will be fed into already-existing image archives of both Tasveer Ghar and the Karl Jaspers Centre.

3. New Virtual Galleries of the Tasveer Ghar Fellows of 2008: Tasveer Ghar awarded fellowships to 4 scholars on the theme: “Kaleidoscopic Sites and Sights: The Printed Visual Culture/s of Religious Pluralism”. The work of these fellows is coming to an end and will soon be available in the form of virtual galleries on the following topics: (a) Religious Iconography in the Public Sphere - Painted and Tile Gods Adorning the Streets. (by Shirley Abraham and Amit Madhesiya) (b) Outside the Imambara: The Lives of Pilgrimage Souvenirs (by Subah Dayal and Suzanne Schulz) (c) Exploring Ravidas, Understanding a Meeting Point of Faiths and Resistance (by Daljit Ami) (d) Challenging Dominance: The Visual Repertoire of the Bonallu Festival and Subaltern shrines in Hyderabad (by Joe Christopher and Alice Sampson) Kindly visit our website for more exciting material scheduled to be featured here soon.

A pavement wall with tiles of gods, Mumbai, 2008 (Shirley Abraham)

As announced earlier, we look forward to your participation in the building of our popular arts archive by contributing interesting images.

Thanks

Christiane Brosius, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Manishita Dass, Yousuf Saeed