Project Co-ordinators:

Christiane Brosius
Christiane is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. With a background in Art History and Art Education (photography, printmaking and drawing), she began to be interested in the contexts of art production, dissemination and consumption during her studies. Christiane has worked and published about the cultural historian Aby Warburg (Hamburg, Germany) who developed the 'Mnemosyne Image Atlas', a model to collect, archive and display images from all kinds of genres, techniques and cultures in the context of their field of production - an incomplete project that serves as an orientation model for 'Tasveer Ghar'. For her book Empowering Visions (London: Anthem Press 2005), Brosius explored the iconography, rhetoric and production context of video propaganda of the Hindu Right (especially late 1980s to 1990s). For further details, see www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/ethno/ Her other research interests are “ritual agency,” urban anthropology, diaspora studies and commercial Hindi film. She is currently writing another book about the cosmopolitanism of the emergent Indian economy, with case studies about Indian Cinema, urban architecture and town-planning, Heritage Tourism and Spiritualism, and Lifestyle specialists and magazines.

Manishita Dass
Manishita Dass is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA), where she holds a joint appointment in the departments of Screen Arts & Cultures and Asian Languages & Cultures, and teaches courses in South Asian cinema, world cinema, film history/theory, and postcolonial theory. Her research interests include early cinema in India and its intersection with other forms of popular culture; the impact of left radicalism on the film cultures of Bombay and Calcutta in the 1940s-1960s; the question of realism in Indian cinema; the cinematic city; and the visual and literary worlds of Bengali modernity. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Nation, and Modernity in India, which traces how the space of cinema was imagined in films and in public discourse, in relation to the trope of modernity and the emerging category of the nation, in early-to-mid-twentieth century India.

Sumathi Ramaswamy
Sumathi was Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and as of July 2007, is Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. Her interest in visual culture began in the 1990s when she wrote about the visualizing of the Tamil language as goddess, queen and mother in her book Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (University of California Press, 1997). She also analyzed popular visual representations of Hindi as a demoness in her study of the demonization of the language by Tamil nationalists in an essay entitled "Battling the Demoness in Tamil India." In Crispin Bates, ed. Beyond Representations: Colonial and Post-Colonial Constructions of Indian Identity.  Delhi: Oxford University Press (2006), pp. 123-150. She is the editor of Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Sage, 2003), and she is finishing a book entitled The Goddess and the Nation: Picturing Mother India that is part of a larger project on cartographic visualizations of Indian territory.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Shuddhabrata is a media practitioner, filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media Collective, and one of the initiators of Sarai, the New Media Initiative at the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, New Delhi, India. His recent work involves textual explorations of aesthetics, surveillance and cyberculture. He is currently working on a series of new media and digital culture projects at the Sarai Media Lab.

Yousuf Saeed (Project Director)
Yousuf is an independent filmmaker and researcher based in Delhi. He started his career in educational television (with the Times of India) in 1990, co-directing the science series Turning Point for Doordarshan, and moved on to make documentaries on a variety of subjects. Some of his prominent films include Inside Ladakh, Basant, A Life in Science: Yashpal, and the Train to Heaven which have been shown at numerous film festivals, academic venues and on TV channels. Besides films and television, Yousuf also worked for Encyclopedia Britannica (India) as the Arts Editor. He has been a Sarai Fellow (2004), and an Asia Fellow (2005). His most recent work is a feature length film Khayal Darpan about the state of classical music in Pakistan. His interest in the popular devotional art of Indian Muslims and his extensive collection of such art work brings him to the Tasveer Ghar. More details...