Staying Connected #2 | A Mythical City and Sultana's Reality | April 16, 2020

As we spend another week under lockdown, we hope you are safe at home, and finding ways to stay active, engaged and joyful.

We need all kinds of sustenance to keep our spirits up during these difficult times. With the hope to bring you some enriching ideas from the world of arts and culture, the Staying Connected Series by India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) brings you articles, talks, discussions, work of our grantees and other thought provoking resources over the next few weeks.

Today we present an Interactive Fiction penned and devised by Dhruv Jani and an Interactive Multimedia Installation by Afrah Shafiq.

Somewhere by Dhruv Jani is a text driven, first person exploration game, set in a mythical city of storytellers called Kayamgadh in colonial India. This interactive fiction is a collection of stories about the search for a city that does not exist. For the reader/player to be able to navigate these stories, they have to turn into other people. With this shift in identities, each character is a figment of another's imagination, and then becomes a part of an altogether different story.

Three different games from the Somewhere world titled The Indifferent Wonder of an Edible Place, In the Pause Between the Ringing and A Museum of Dubious Splendors are now available online.

Dhruv Jani received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts, under the Arts Practice programme, made possible with support from Technicolor India Private Limited.

Sultana’s Reality by Afrah Shafiq is an animated installation inspired by the Bengali feminist thinker Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain’s 1905 short story titled Sultana's Dream. This interactive project explores the inner lives of the first generation of women to be educated in pre-independent India. Using archival images, digital art and music, the installation brings alive accounts of different women – who were stoned for wearing shoes and carrying umbrellas; who would rather nap than read; who read in secret at night; who read forbidden texts; who read and then challenged the very people who encouraged them to read…and who went on to write books, telling their story in their own words.

Click here to enter Sultana’s Reality.

Afrah Shafiq received a grant from India Foundation for the Arts, under the Archival and Museum Fellowship at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta, with support from Voltas Limited.