An Introduction We are delighted to announce the foundation of Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture. Tasveer Ghar is a trans-national virtual “home” for collecting, digitizing, and documenting various materials produced by South Asia’s exciting popular visual sphere including posters, calendar art, pilgrimage maps and paraphernalia, cinema hoardings, advertisements, and other forms of street and bazaar art. Some of the key fields of exploration within the network are:
We also hope that such a digital data-base, which we envisage as an open access, democratic space, will also serve as a hub around which to promote dialogue and debate on matters pertaining to South Asian popular visual culture. We hope that Tasveer Ghar, we anticipate, will help promote inter-disciplinary scholarly exchange across the globe between academics, artists, and others on South Asian popular visual culture. Tasveer Ghar is supported by a generous three-year gift from Adarsh and Ranvir Trehan of the Trehan Foundation to the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA. With these start-up funds we have planned several exciting events over the course of the next three years. These activities are currently limited to Indian popular visual culture, but as and when we raise more funds, we hope to expand our reach to cover the other countries of the South Asian subcontinent. Tasveer Ghar is located in three institutional nodes:
The principals at these institutions will be Sumathi Ramaswamy, Christiane Brosius, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta respectively. We are also very pleased to announce that Yousuf Saeed will be the Project Director based in New Delhi. More details… We invite you—as friend, colleague, and partner—to join this initiative in whatever capacity that you are comfortable with. Kindly see our call for proposals… Chris, Sumathi, Shuddha, and Yousuf |