[Reader-list] Friday 7 December -- General Audience Highlights

[Vivek Narayanan]

Hi all,

Highlights for a general audience tomorrow (Friday 7 December) include
the premiere of Pankaj Rishi Kumar's feature-length documentary on
women boxers, presentations by Nancy Adajania and Debkamal Ganguly on
their current projects, Madhavi Tangella and Shivam Vij on ragging
(Madhavi's short documentary, partly inspired by Shivam Vij's seminal
Independent Fellowship project) and of course the final open-ended
discussion, which in the past has always been very vigorous. Read on
for details! And scroll to for detailed abstracts of the entire day's
lineup.


*Highlights for a General Audience -- Friday December 7, 2007*
(LTG Auditorium, Mandi House)

7.00 – 8.30 Punches Ponytails Ringtones: Women Boxers in India
A film by Pankaj Rishi Kumar (82 mins)
Introduced by Shuddhabrata Sengupta

"This is a journey into the science of boxing as practiced by 2 Indian
women. From Dec'04 to May'07, I shot with them as they tried to
understand their bodies, their undying love for the sport and their
constant struggle to realize their dreams. The film unfolds their
story."

Pankaj Rishi Kumar (kumartalkies at yahoo.com) has been making making
documentary films for the last 11 years.  His best known films include
Kumar Talkies.  He showed the first rushes from his Independent
Fellowship project on women boxers at the 2005 workshop.

11.00 – 12.15
(In Upstairs Gallery Space)
Side Effects: Collaborations and Conversations Between Independent Fellows.

A documentary  film on ragging—Listen, Little Man (28 mins)-- by
Madhavi Tangella; discussion and commentary by Shivam Vij, who studied
ragging for his Sarai-CSDS Fellowship.

Introduced and moderated by Iram Ghufran

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.

Shivam Vij (mail @shivamvij.com) is a journalist, blogger, and runs
the website stopragging.org .  His research on the nature of ragging
in hostels for the Independent Fellowship in 2005 led him to being
appointed as a consultant to the R.K. Raghavan committee set up by the
Supreme Court to recommend measures to curb ragging.  His journalistic
interests include caste, social mobility, internet censorship, and
online communities.


1.45 pm – 3.45 pm
Special Presentation: The SARAI-CSDS Associate Fellowships
Chair: Monica Narula
[Monica Narula (monica @sarai.net) is a media practitioner with a
background in filmmaking and English Literature. She is one the
co-initiators of Sarai and one of the editors of the Sarai Reader
series. She is part of the Raqs Media Collective. She coordinates the
media practice projects at Sarai.]

Nancy Adajania: A New Journal for the Arts: Prototype Issue, 2007

Although there have been exciting recent developments in the world of
Indian art, there is a strong sense that much of it has been happening
in the dark, without enough open discussion made widely available to
the public. Hoskote and Adajania argue that in order for art to have
significance and value beyond a point, it needs to be made in the
context of lively discussion and critical debate. Modern India has had
a rich history of such critical initiatives, but in the current
context there are very few platforms for such engagement; those that
do exist confine themselves largely to reporting on events, or more
often, to sales figures and scandals, focusing on the life of the
studio, the solitary creator, and of economic institutions such as the
gallery and the auction house. Both senior art critics in their own
right, Hoskote and Adajania propose to make a journal that focuses on
actually mobilising and creating a new context for the production of
art.

Rather than being a public relations exercise for art in India, the
journal would be a colloquium across disciplines, regions, traditions
and intellectual lineages. It would include, among other forms of
writing, analytical essays, tactical accounts, select reviews, and
polemical texts. The journal would be interested in developing a
perspective of what the proposal calls "a nuanced critical
regionalism", which would reject both the "neo-tribalism" of an
inward-looking isolationism, as well as an uncritical globalism that
lacks anchorage in a specific cultural context.  Last but not least,
the journal would seek and institute collaborative ventures between
artists and public-sphere or civil-society activists.

Nancy Adajania (nancyadajania71 at yahoo.co.uk) is a well-known cultural
theorist, art critic and independent curator.  She is developing this
project for the Associate Fellowship with Ranjit Hoskote.


Debkamal Ganguly: An Imaginative Text Based on Contemporary Travel
Through the "Forests" Described in Bibhuthibhushan's Memoirs

[note showing of complete video by Debkamal Ganguly at 4.30 on
previous day, Thursday December 6.  On the 7th, Ganguly will show
excerpts from the video, discuss its making and answer questions.]

Sarai generally focusses on urban spaces and the processes of
urbanisation.  However, a very crucial emerging question in
contemporary India is, how are "rural" and forest spaces being
transformed in the current context, and what is the relationship of
this process to the development of cities?  One could look at the
question only in terms of contemporary transformations, but another
approach would also situate it historically, in relation to accounts
of what these non-urban areas used to look like. The project looks
precisely at this question, in the context of Eastern India.  Debkamal
Ganguly is interested in how the idea of "nature" has developed and
has been changed by visitors from the city, over several decades,
including himself. He seeks to understand "how an otherwise
'underdeveloped' marginalized geographical/cultural space in the
immediate west of the Gangetic plains has been entangled in
multilayered relationship with the urban consciousness and artistic
creativity of Kolkata."


4.00 – 5.30 pm
Towards a  Future for Independent Research: Interactive Open Discussion

All participants.


*Complete Abstracts for the Day*

Fri Dec 7
Venue: LTG Auditorium, Mandi House

10.00 – 11.00
Proofreading: Identity and Publishing
Chair: Mahmood Farooqui

Vijay Kumar Pandey
Meerut ka Prakasan Udyog (The Publishing Industry in Meerut)

The publication industry of Meerut is almost 200 years old. During
this period the industry has evolved with time and flourished. The
present turnover of the industry is nearly Rs. 200 crore per annum and
provides employment to approximately one lakh people.

The study aims at identifying the factors contributing to the rapid
growth and evolution of this industry in Meerut during past 200 years
as well as the problems and challenges before it. It will also look
into how the industry has changed with time.

Vijay Kumar Pandey (vijaykharsh @yahoo.co.in) has been a journalist
for the last five years.  He is currently with Amar Ujala.


Yoginder Sikand & Naseemur Rahman
Islamic Publishing Houses in Delhi

This research project focuses on the Muslim publishing industry in
Delhi. It examines various aspects of this industry, including content
of publications and linkages between authors, publishers and consumers
of the literature produced by these publishing houses. It also looks
at how the Muslim publishing industry is responding to the various
challenges that Muslims in India today see themselves faced with.

Naseem ur Rahman (majidee @yahoo.com) is a Ph.D. student at the Jamia
Millia Islamia and is presently working with the Markazi Maktaba
Islami, a leading Muslim publishing house in Delhi; and Yoginder
Sikand, Professor at the Centre for Jawaharlal Nehru Studies, Jamia
Millia Islamia, New Delhi.

11.00 – 12.15
(In Upstairs Gallery Space)
Side Effects: Collaborations and Conversations Between Independent Fellows.

A documentary  film on ragging—Listen, Little Man (28 mins)-- by
Madhavi Tangella; discussion and commentary by Shivam Vij, who studied
ragging for his Sarai-CSDS Fellowship.

Introduced and moderated by Iram Ghufran

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.

Shivam Vij (mail @shivamvij.com) is a journalist, blogger, and runs
the website stopragging.org .  His research on the nature of ragging
in hostels for the Independent Fellowship in 2005 led him to being
appointed as a consultant to the R.K. Raghavan committee set up by the
Supreme Court to recommend measures to curb ragging.  His journalistic
interests include caste, social mobility, internet censorship, and
online communities.

11.15 – 12.15
Maps for Lost Cities
Chair: Shuddhabrata Sengupta

Surojit Sen
The Displacement of Prostitutes: A Tale of Two Cities in Two Centuries

This paper focuses on a satirical text Bodmaes Jobdo (Wicked Punished)
by Prankrishna  Dutta in 1869 on the aftermath of 1868 The Contagious
Diseases Act XIV. Which the British enforced in April 1869 in order to
control flesh trade and prevent the brothel-going soldiers from
contracting venereal diseases. The Act made it mandatory for the
prostitutes to register their names and undergo medical examination
and treatment ( if necessary ). While the police used the legislation
as a ploy to harass the prostitutes, their clients also felt axed by
the Act. Things came to such a pass that some prostitutes brought the
matter to the attention Viceroy Lord Mayo and his wife through a
letter (19 July, 1869 ) most  probably written by someone on their
behalf. The chaotic situation forced a section of prostitutes to leave
the Sonagachi  red light area of Calcutta for Chandannagar town, then
under French rule, and throng the brothel that had existed there since
the 1770s.

This 200 year old settlement was demolished by some promoters bent on
using the land as real estate. The prostitutes living there couldn't
resist the onslaught; nor did any organization come to their rescue. I
view the event from the standpoint of  'rights' and relate it to the
recently proposed amendment to the existing ITPA Act  ( 1987 ). Which
tends to treat prostitution as criminal offence even as it has not
been declared illegal. Without making any provision for their
rehabilitation or alternative livelihood, this official move I argue,
is going to take away the little space that the 'fallen' women have
and marginalize them further.

Surojit Sen (surojit369 @yahoo.co.in) does research for documentary
films, writes book reviews, short prose pieces on literature and
scripts for telefilms (in Bengali).  He renders editorial service and
is now working on his first Bengali novel named City Edition.


Mohit K. Ray
Heritage Ponds of Kolkata: A Contemporary History

Kolkata is a city of ponds. Job Charnok, the first well-known British
merchant, set up his office by the side of a pond called Lal Dighi,
which still exists to remind of this city's colonial past. There are
many ponds like this with rich historical linkages. Many streets and
places of Kolkata are named after ponds. Even after the onslaught of
the real estate sector, the city has more than 3500 ponds.  The
significance of these urban waterbodies as water resources is being
appreciated now as never before. These ponds form a part of the
cultural history of the city. Once, it was the place where community
people met during bathing; Bengali literature has so many narratives
about the ghats of these ponds. The fields by the side of some ponds
provide space to hold fairs. However, there is still no proper
documentation of such an important city heritage. This study will add
to the urban cultural history where the city ponds are not mere past
heroes, but active agents of a thriving present.

Mohit Ray (mrsg @vsnl.com), the principal researcher, is an
environmental professional who has a PhD in Chemical Engineering and
works for environmental rights.


12.30 – 1.30
Rethinking the Social
Chair: Vivek Narayanan

Santana Issar and Aditi Saraf
Rethinking Animal Activism in an Urban Context

Human-animal relationships have been historically constituted in
complex and intimate ways along the economic, the affective, the
cultural and ritual, and the metaphoric. As these relationships have
receded into an irretrievable past, it has been suggested that animals
have been reconfigured in the urban imagination; as household pets, as
objects of wonder in zoos and circuses, and as (Kentucky or not) fried
chicken.

Our question is - does this driving of a wedge between human lives and
those of animals inform dominant notions of 'animal welfare'?

We study the relationship between the theory of the human-animal
interaction in a post-industrial urban context, and the practices of
animal rescue and welfare, in order to understand how, and to what
extent, each is shaped by the other. All this in the particular
context of our very own urban jungle – Delhi.

Both Santana Issar (santanaissar @gmail.com) and Aditi Saraf (aditisrf
@gmail.com) are graduates of St Stephen's College. Santana is a
filmmaker, Aditi works as a research associate at the National
Knowledge Commission.

Arnab Chatterjee
Beyond Private and Public: New Perspectives on Personal and
Personalist Social Work

In the first part of my presentation ( in the final version of the
paper too) I  shall dwell on the importance of the public/private
divide in modern social theory and ask, is the public/private divide
the main unresolved dilemma that haunts the sign of our own times ?
How does the personal interrupt and contaminate the above binary and
wherefrom our engagement could temporarily begin? An impersonal public
sphere, threatened by the deceptive nature of the personal, was
founded to ground political modernity and was extended to  cover such
remote questions of personal charity which –some like Hegel sought to
replace by state related public assistance or welfare. This
normalizing restraint was energized even at the level of speech, but
through the instance of personal attacks, the repressed narrative of
the personal seemed to recur at the cost of our unease—a political
pornography of sorts.  An excavation informed us--behind the masked
ordeal of innocent impersonality, there lurks the obscene narratives
of manipulation, lying, backstabbing, blackmailing, fraud, betrayal,
malice by which persons govern each other.

Now,  all proposed resolutions, located within the impasse,  have they
worked? I discuss the Gandhian attempt and discuss the dictatorial
desire. The failure to integrate the public and the private until it
vanishes in  the terrorized unity of the person/al --  inaugurates—in
a sense-- and urges us to recover the suppressed history of the
personal and subsequently a theory of the personal with its roots in
the German version of personalism.

Finally, does the category personal, through the sieve of personalist
social work, solve the public/private problem posed in the beginning,
or compound the problem further?  How, despite the personalist
indeterminacy and irreducibility of the person, a personalist ethics
could be found will be addressed in this section; I'll spend  a
considerable five minutes on the above and end by reflecting on my
most recent work not covered in SARAI postings.

Arnab Chatterjee (apnawritings @yahoo.co.in) is Doctoral Fellow at the
department of Philosophy, Jadavpur University, Kolkata and  on the
visiting faculty of Ethics and Human Values at the  Bengal Institute
of Technology, Kolkata.

1.45 pm – 3.45 pm
Special Presentation: The SARAI-CSDS Associate Fellowships
Chair: Monica Narula
[Monica Narula (monica @sarai.net) is a media practitioner with a
background in filmmaking and English Literature. She is one the
co-initiators of Sarai and one of the editors of the Sarai Reader
series. She is part of the Raqs Media Collective. She coordinates the
media practice projects at Sarai.]

Nancy Adajania: A New Journal for the Arts: Prototype Issue, 2007

Although there have been exciting recent developments in the world of
Indian art, there is a strong sense that much of it has been happening
in the dark, without enough open discussion made widely available to
the public. Hoskote and Adajania argue that in order for art to have
significance and value beyond a point, it needs to be made in the
context of lively discussion and critical debate. Modern India has had
a rich history of such critical initiatives, but in the current
context there are very few platforms for such engagement; those that
do exist confine themselves largely to reporting on events, or more
often, to sales figures and scandals, focusing on the life of the
studio, the solitary creator, and of economic institutions such as the
gallery and the auction house. Both senior art critics in their own
right, Hoskote and Adajania propose to make a journal that focuses on
actually mobilising and creating a new context for the production of
art.

Rather than being a public relations exercise for art in India, the
journal would be a colloquium across disciplines, regions, traditions
and intellectual lineages. It would include, among other forms of
writing, analytical essays, tactical accounts, select reviews, and
polemical texts. The journal would be interested in developing a
perspective of what the proposal calls "a nuanced critical
regionalism", which would reject both the "neo-tribalism" of an
inward-looking isolationism, as well as an uncritical globalism that
lacks anchorage in a specific cultural context.  Last but not least,
the journal would seek and institute collaborative ventures between
artists and public-sphere or civil-society activists.

Nancy Adajania (nancyadajania71 at yahoo.co.uk) is a well-known cultural
theorist, art critic and independent curator.  She is developing this
project for the Associate Fellowship with Ranjit Hoskote.


Debkamal Ganguly: An Imaginative Text Based on Contemporary Travel
Through the "Forests" Described in Bibhuthibhushan's Memoirs

[note showing of complete video by Debkamal Ganguly at 4.30 on
previous day, Thursday December 6.  On the 7th, Ganguly will show
excerpts from the video, discuss its making and answer questions.]

Sarai generally focusses on urban spaces and the processes of
urbanisation.  However, a very crucial emerging question in
contemporary India is, how are "rural" and forest spaces being
transformed in the current context, and what is the relationship of
this process to the development of cities?  One could look at the
question only in terms of contemporary transformations, but another
approach would also situate it historically, in relation to accounts
of what these non-urban areas used to look like. The project looks
precisely at this question, in the context of Eastern India.  Debkamal
Ganguly is interested in how the idea of "nature" has developed and
has been changed by visitors from the city, over several decades,
including himself. He seeks to understand "how an otherwise
'underdeveloped' marginalized geographical/cultural space in the
immediate west of the Gangetic plains has been entangled in
multilayered relationship with the urban consciousness and artistic
creativity of Kolkata."


4.00 – 5.30 pm
Towards a  Future for Independent Research: Interactive Open Discussion

All participants.

7.00 – 8.30 Punches Ponytails Ringtones: Women Boxers in India
A film by Pankaj Rishi Kumar (82 mins)
Introduced by Shuddhabrata Sengupta

"This is a journey into the science of boxing as practiced by 2 Indian
women. From Dec'04 to May'07, I shot with them as they tried to
understand their bodies, their undying love for the sport and their
constant struggle to realize their dreams. The film unfolds their
story."

Pankaj Rishi Kumar (kumartalkies at yahoo.com) has been making making
documentary films for the last 11 years.  His best known films include
Kumar Talkies.  He showed the first rushes from his Independent
Fellowship project on women boxers at the 2005 workshop.