Archival and Museum Fellowships

This initiative was closed in 2018.

From 2013 to 2018, IFA ran the Archival and Museum Fellowships initiative. During this period, our work between the years 2015 and 2018 was supported by the Tata Trusts and the INLAKS Shivdasani Foundation supported one fellowship in 2016. The aim of these fellowships was to energise archives and museums as platforms for dialogue and discourse. It provided practitioners the opportunity to generate new, critical and creative approaches to public engagement with materials in the museum and archival collections. These fellowships enabled the creation of multiple narratives and histories, based on resources that would be difficult to access otherwise.

During these five years, 35 fellowships were made across fourteen archives and museums.

The institutions that IFA collaborated with are: The Munshi Aziz Bhatt Museum of Central Asian and Kargil Trade Artifacts in Kargil; Asia Art Archive (AAA) in New Delhi; The National Museum in New Delhi; Centre for Studies in Social Sciences Calcutta (CSSSC); Kerala Museum, Kochi; The Archives and Research Centre for Ethnomusicology of the American Institute of Indian Studies (ARCE) in Gurgaon; Indira Gandhi Rashtriya Manav Sangrahalaya in Bhopal; Assam State Museum in Guwahati; Centre for Community Knowledge, Ambedkar University, Delhi; Visvesvaraya Industrial and Technological Museum (VITM), Bangalore; Deccan College, Pune; Goa Chitra, Goa; Saptak Archives, Ahmedabad; and Kalakriti Archives in Hyderabad.

With the initiative having completed five years, as is the practice at IFA with each of our programmes, it was felt necessary to review the initiative and reimagine its future trajectory. A conference titled Old Routes/New Journeys was organised in New Delhi in March 2018, in collaboration with Goethe-Institut / Max Mueller Bhavan, New Delhi; and supported by Tata Trusts, Titan Company Limited and Ambedkar University, Delhi. This conference brought most of the IFA fellows and host institutions together to share the outcomes with the public and experts in the field. This was followed by a programme review by a panel of experts from the field comprising Rustom Bharucha, Joyoti Roy, Naman Ahuja, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta. With the help of their recommendations, the current Archives and Museums programme was been formulated.