2018-2019

Nilina Deb Lal


Grant Period: One year

For working with the cultural history archive at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) which contains a wide variety of visual materials across genres from 19th and 20th century Bengal that includes books, journals, popular paintings, prints, posters, hoardings, advertisements, and commercial art productions.The archive has also recently acquired the digitised records of the Calcutta Improvement Trust (CIT) which records the urban and municipal history of 20th century Calcutta. This fellowship supports research that will focus specifically on the legacy of the Calcutta Improvement Trust, studying the growth of the city of Kolkata in the years preceding the formation of the Trust, as well as the alterations in the years that came after. The outcomes will be an exhibition, seminar, publication and other neighbourhood engagements in different parts of the city. The Fellow’s deliverables to IFA with the Final Report will be images of the exhibition, process images, audio recordings and texts, if any.

Diksha Dhar


Grant Period: One year

For working with the cultural history archive at the Centre for Studies in Social Sciences, Calcutta (CSSSC) which contains a wide variety of visual materials across genres from 19th and 20th century Bengal that includes books, journals, popular paintings, prints, posters, hoardings, advertisements, and commercial art productions. This fellowship supports research that will explore the relationship between the city of Kolkata and its citizens, and the many different registers through which the city is experienced. The project will locate Kolkata as a site of both colonial encounter and colonial modernity, and investigate the many mechanisms through which an ‘authentic’ experience of the city is constructed, distributed and negotiated in the everyday. The outcomes will include an exhibition, and other public events around the archive. The Fellow’s deliverables to IFA with the Final Report will be process images, audio recordings, texts and a publication, if any.

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