[Reader-list] Thursday 6 December -- General Audience Highlights

[Vivek Narayanan]

Hi all,

Things hot up a little as the workshop races to its conclusion. 
Highlights for a general audience tomorrow (Thursday 6 December) might 
early in the day and include the last part of artist Inder Salim's 
performance piece, a solo "forum theatre" show by Pritham Chakravarty, a 
feature length video presentation by Debkamal Ganguly, and the second of 
our special panels (the first special panel, yesterday, was truly 
fascinating), featuring ex-fellows Zainab Bawa, Parismita Singh, Madhavi 
Tangella and Prasad Shetty. Read on for details! And scroll to for 
detailed abstracts of the entire day's lineup.


*Highlights for a General Audience -- Thursday December 6, 2007*
(LTG Auditorium, Mandi House)

1. 6.15 – 6.45
(In Upstairs Gallery Space)
Performance Art: “This Evening Too: From Lal Ded to Abdul Ahad Zargar”
by Inder Salim: Space limited to 25 persons only—first come, first serve.

Inder Salim (indersalim @gmail.com), an Independent Fellow this year, is 
a performance artist based in Delhi. He blogs his work at: 
http://indersalim.livejournal.com/


2. 7.15pm – 8pm
Chennai Sabha Drama: An Actor’s Story:
Solo performance by Pritham Chakravarty (running time: 30 mins)

For her 2007 Independent Fellowship project, Pritham Chakravarty 
researched and revisited the lingering artifacts of a scene that she 
herself had been a part of as a child actress: Chennai’s “sabha drama”, 
a semi-amateur subscription theatre scene. Her solo show performance is 
not autobiographical, but is based on a composite reconstruction of 
interviews with actors and others—it draws on Chakravarty’s usual and 
intensive method of designing one-person scripts based on a series of 
interviews, inhabiting the persona of the interviewed.

Pritham K. Chakravarty (prithu7 @hotmail.com) has been a political 
theatre performer and theatre activist based in Chennai for 20 years; 
but her acting debut first came on the Sabha drama stage itself, at the 
age of six.


3. 4.30 – 6.00 Work In “Progress”: Feature-length video by Debkamal Ganguly
(87 minutes)

Following the trail of a 1932 journey by one key Bengali novelist, 
Bibhutibhushan, the video tries to explore varied ways of interaction of 
'urban-subject' with 'non-urban' forest and plateau-like spaces, close 
to the western border of West Bengal. Selecting Bangla texts as early as 
1872 to as late as 2007, the video tries to articulate the changing 
trajectory of space-emotion, from mythical to self-conscious to sublime 
to existentialist and finally the virtual and hyper-real. The video 
acknowledges the random and arbitrary as an aesthetic function and 
recycles whatever comes along its way.

Debkamal Ganguly (deb99kamal @yahoo.com)’s work as a scriptwriter, film 
and sound editor (including with director Vipin Vijay) has earned him 
some national and international recognition. He pursues this current 
project as a 2007 Sarai-CSDS Associate Fellow.


4. 2.15 –4.15
Special Panel: Where Does Research Go?
Featuring: Zainab Bawa, Parismita Singh, Madhavi Tangella and Prasad 
Shetty.
Discussant: Vivek Narayanan.

If research really did proceed as it plans to do, time after time, in 
the bright, overdeterminate clarity of good proposals, asking direct 
questions and receiving exact answers, this would not be saying very 
much for the richness or depth of our lives, our social and built 
structures and knotted networks! Instead, we wander, we diverge, we 
rethink, we scratch out, we revisit: the strength of research is not in 
the attempt to control the world’s material but in questions leading to 
new questions, that is, in the ability to stay alert while the ground 
unexpectedly shifts under us. In this panel, we ask four previous 
Independent Fellows to look back on their fellowship research, 
considering the ways they have been led to unexpected conclusions, new 
projects, critiques of what they were doing in the first instance, and 
revisitings of the original site of research to find it changed. How 
does research evolve, and what kinds of other projects does it lead to?

Prasad Shetty (askshetty @rediffmail.com) is an architect and urban 
planner. He is a founding member of CRIT (Collective Research 
Initiatives Trust), Mumbai.

Parismita Singh (parismitasingh @yahoo.com) is finishing her first 
graphic novel, due in 2008.

Zainab Bawa (zainabbawa @yahoo.com) talks her walks through a world of 
words on her infrequently updated blog www.xanga.com/citybytes.

Madhavi Tangella (manzilechar @yahoo.com) is currently a film student at 
SRFTI.

Vivek Narayanan (vivek @sarai.net) co-coordinates the Independent 
Fellowship programme for Sarai and writes, mostly poetry and some 
fiction. He is Consulting Editor for the web-based literary journal, 
Almost Island and an Associate Editor for the Boston-based international 
poetry annual, Fulcrum. His first book of poems appeared last year.


*Complete Abstracts for the Day*

Thurs 6 December
Venue: LTG Auditorium, Mandi House

10.00 am – 11.30
Medicine and Modernity
Chair: Awadhendra Sharan

Gyaltsen Lama
Shamans in Gangtok: A Graphic Novel

A four part graphic novel exploring the lives of four different shamans 
in Gangtok, Sikkim. 20 pages of each part with black and white 
illustrations. Each part is approached with different illustration and 
narrative styles.

Gyaltsen Lama (gyaltsenlama @gmail.com) received his bachelor of fine 
arts degree in 2000 from the Sir JJ School of Art, Mumbai. He is 
currently the fine arts teacher at the Tashi Namgyal Academy, Gangtok. 
Photographs, interview transcripts, pages from the novel and videos for 
this project are uploaded at: http://www.etattoo7.com/sarai/home.html

M.S. Harilal
Adopting Modernisation and Negotiating Modernisation: Placing Modern and 
Traditional Ayurvedic Sectors in the Context of Transformation

The study endeavors to analyze responses of the larger transformation of 
a traditional medical system, namely Ayurveda, to a more affirmative 
institutional system and a well developed market. The modern forms of 
Ayurveda seem to be pulled by both pharmaceutical companies and modern 
practitioners in a direction that flaunts cultural authenticity and 
tradition as well as scientific efficacy and standardization for its 
products. It analyses how the stakeholders in this bifurcation - 
traditional and modern ayurvedic manufacturing, perceive and deal with 
modernization, which is two fold, both in form and content. The two 
specific questions that the study intends to explore, based on selected 
case analysis and necessary ethnographic works, are: one, How do we 
explain the recent gains made by many firms operating in the 'modern' 
sector? Two, what are the ways in which the traditional-informal sector 
has coped with the processes of transformation? To the gist, we are 
addressing the question of agential relation in the transformation and 
want to contrast and compare how the two sections deal with the 
challenge of globalization or negotiate to find their space in the 
global era. Three rationales may be given for this study: one, the 
traditional knowledge systems are increasingly become relevant, two, 
there is a universal concern to addressing community ownership of 
traditional knowledge and third, it will help us understand the struggle 
and revival of similarly placed traditional industries.

M.S. Harilal (harilalms @gmail.com) is, at present, a doctoral scholar 
in Economics at the Centre for Development Studies, Thiruvananthapuram. 
His current areas of interests are the modernization of Indian systems 
of medicine, the medicinal plants sector, IPR and traditional knowledge.


Burton Cleetus
Urbanisation, Western Medicine and Modernity: The Rockefeller Foundation 
in Travancore

One of the most important interventions made by the “progressive” state 
of Travancore which later became part of the state of Kerala, was in the 
field of health care. The reorganization of the public health department 
with the aid of the Rockefeller Foundation of the United States was 
aimed at drafting a coherent health care policy for the state, primarily 
to cater to the needs of the emerging population in the urban centres. 
The study seeks to argue that the process of reconstituting the health 
care policy by the princely state in the early twentieth century was a 
political project of governance aimed at socio-cultural framing. A 
comparison between activities of the Rockefeller foundation in 
addressing the spread of malaria and plague in the early twentieth 
century with the attempts made by the state of Kerala in tackling 
similar contagious diseases in recent times would enable to one 
understand the shifts in the frames of references of the nature of 
interventions of western medicine over the last century.

Burton Cleetus (burtoncleetus @yahoo.co.uk) is a PhD scholar from the 
Center for Historical Studies, JNU. He did his post graduation and M 
Phil from JNU. His research on the institutionalization of indigenous 
medicine in Kerala is an attempt to explore as to how esoteric cultural 
practices and localized healing techniques were refashioned, revitalized 
and consequently institutionalized into the broad framework of Ayurveda.

11.00 – 11.30
(In Upstairs Gallery Space)
Short film on ragging—Listen, Little Man-- by Madhavi Tangella; see also 
discussion with Shivam Vij on Friday’s programme below.

Madhavi Tangella (manzilechar @yahoo.com) worked on Sagar Cinema, a 
“poor man’s multiplex” for her Sarai Independent Fellowship. She is 
currently a film student at SRFTI, Kolkata.

11.45 – 12.45
Two Views of the Changing Industrial Landscape
(short documentary films & discussion)
Chair: Jeebesh Bagchi

Ranu Ghosh
The Story of a Laid-off Worker’s Resistance to Eviction in Kolkata

I have been following the transformation of a productive, half a century 
old Jay Engineering Works into Kolkata’s South City Project, “Eastern 
India's largest mixed use real estate development”. Jay Engineering, 
commonly called Usha Factory, started operations manufacturing 
electrical consumer durables in the 1950s. The labour force of this 
reasonably large manufacturing unit was mostly comprised of migrants 
from Bihar and UP, and refugees from East Pakistan. The Works was closed 
down, made defunct and the land was handed over to the real estate 
consortium of five major real estate “magnates” in 2003. The factory 
buildings were demolished and the construction of the South City 
Projects comprising three 35-storey and one 28-storey tower, a shopping 
mall, school, multiplex, club etc, started from February 2004, which 
included the illegal filling up of one of south Calcutta's largest 
natural water bodies. The workers of Jay were forced into retirement 
with little or no compensation and sent into limbo, except for Shambhu 
Prasad Singh. Shambhu has refused to opt for the meagre handouts and has 
instead taken his case to court. Against all odds, and withstanding the 
sustained pressure of the builders, he continues to live in his original 
quarters, surrounded and dwarfed on all sides by the construction in 
progress of South City. This brave stand taken by an individual is an 
example of how such “development” can be challenged.

Since the latter half of 2004 I have been documenting in video and still 
formats, the stages of development at the construction site as the work 
progressed and the displaced labour force, and out of that, Shambhu 
Prasad evolved as an outstanding example of the protest against this 
“development”. I began to follow his everyday life, his improvised 
strategies of survival in the face of difficult circumstances and his 
innate zeal to fight for his rights. He has transformed from a character 
in my film into that of a collaborator, adding a unique dimension to the 
project.

Ranu Ghosh (ghosh.ranu @gmail.com)has worked as a freelance camera 
person and director in the Indian industry for the past eight years.

T. Venkat and Meghna Sukumar
Building the Indian Dream: Living and Working Conditions of Migrant 
Workers on Chennai's IT Corridor

Cities in this country have been promoting huge infrastructural projects 
in their attempt to redefine themselves to the age of globalisation. The 
6 lane express way, christened the IT corridor, along with the luxurious 
industrial, commercial and residential complexes are part of Chennai 
city’s attempt to create a global image. Thus to the people of the city 
it is an image, a dream and an opportunity for change and 
transformation. To the migrant construction workers it is undeniably an 
opportunity with enormous economic prospects, but in what ways does it 
transform their lives? What hope does it hold out for them? What image 
does it create in them? What is their stake in it?

Presented through a short documentary film, our research delves into the 
aspirations of the workers, and their imageries of the creature they are 
building. It enquires into the change and transformation that this grand 
project has brought to their lives.

T. Venkata Naga Narasimhan, alias Venkat (venkatt2k @gmail.com), is a 
post graduate in sociology from the University of Madras. He joined as 
research assistant to Dr. Karen Coelho (an earlier Sarai Independent 
Fellow and asst professor at Madras Institute of Development Studies) on 
a project titled “Neighbourhood Associations as Urban Collective Actors: 
a comparative study of Bangalore and Chennai” in the year 2006-07.


1pm – 2pm
Tracking Literatures
Chair: Ravikant

Rajiv Ranjan Giri
Saraswati ki Sarvajanik Duniya, 1900-1920 (The Popular World of the 
Journal Saraswati, 1900-1920)

Rajiv Ranjan Giri has published extensively on the history of Hindi. He 
co-edits a Hindi journal called Samved. He can be reached at: 
rajeevgirijnu @rediffmail.com .

Gopal Ji Pradhan
Hindi mein Uttar Purv (The North-east in Hindi Literature)

Gopal Ji Pradhan is a writer and activist. He teaches Hindi at Assam 
University, Silchar and can be reached at: gopaljeepradhan @rediffmail.com .

2.15 –4.15
Special Panel: Where Does Research Go?
Featuring: Zainab Bawa, Parismita Singh, Madhavi Tangella and Prasad 
Shetty.
Discussant: Vivek Narayanan.

4.30 – 6.00 Work In “Progress”: Feature-length video by Debkamal Ganguly
(87 minutes)

6.15 – 6.45
(In Upstairs Gallery Space)
Performance Art: “This Evening Too: From Lal Ded to Abdul Ahad Zargar”
by Inder Salim: Space limited to 25 persons only—first come, first serve.

7.15pm – 8pm
Chennai Sabha Drama: An Actor’s Story:
Solo performance by Pritham Chakravarty (running time: 30 mins)