Project Co-ordinators:

Christiane Brosius
Christiane is Assistant Professor at the Department of Social Anthropology, South Asia Institute of the University of Heidelberg in Germany. With a background in Art History and Art Education (photography, printmaking and drawing), she began to be interested in the contexts of art
production, dissemination and consumption during her studies. Christiane has worked and published about the cultural historian Aby Warburg (Hamburg, Germany) who developed the 'Mnemosyne Image Atlas', a model to collect, archive and display images from all kinds of genres, techniques and cultures in the context of their field of production - an incomplete project that serves as an orientation model for 'Tasveer Ghar'. For her book Empowering Visions (London: Anthem Press 2005), Brosius explored the iconography, rhetoric and production context of video propaganda of the Hindu Right (especially late 1980s to 1990s). For further details, see www.sai.uni-heidelberg.de/ethno/ Her other research interests are “ritual agency,” urban anthropology, diaspora studies and commercial Hindi film. She is currently writing another book about the cosmopolitanism of the emergent Indian economy, with case studies about Indian Cinema, urban architecture and town-planning, Heritage Tourism and Spiritualism, and Lifestyle specialists and magazines.

Sumathi Ramaswamy
Sumathi is Professor of History and Director, Center for South Asian Studies at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, U.S.A. Her interest in visual culture began in the 1990s when she wrote about the visualizing of the Tamil language as goddess, queen and mother in her book Passions of the Tongue: Language Devotion in Tamil India (University of California Press, 1997). She also analyzed popular visual representations of Hindi as a demoness in her study of the demonization of the language by Tamil nationalists in an essay entitled "Battling the Demoness in Tamil India." In Crispin Bates, ed. Beyond Representations: Colonial and Post-Colonial Constructions of Indian Identity.  Delhi: Oxford University Press (2006), pp. 123-150. She is the editor of Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Sage, 2003), and she is finishing a book entitled The Goddess and the Nation: Picturing Mother India that is part of a larger project on cartographic visualizations of Indian territory.

Shuddhabrata Sengupta
Shuddhabrata is a media practitioner, filmmaker and writer with the Raqs Media Collective, and one of the initiators of Sarai, the New Media Initiative at CSDS. His recent work involves textual explorations of aesthetics, surveillance and cyberculture. He is currently working on a series of new media and digital culture projects at the Sarai Media Lab.

Project Director:
Yousuf Saeed
Yousuf is an independent filmmaker and researcher based in Delhi. He started his career in educational television (with the Times of India) in 1990, co-directing the science series Turning Point for Doordarshan, and moved on to make documentaries on a variety of subjects. Some of his prominent films include Inside Ladakh, Basant, A Life in Science: Yashpal, and the Train to Heaven which have been shown at numerous film festivals, academic venues and on TV channels. Besides films and television, Yousuf also worked for Encyclopedia Britannica (India) as the Arts Editor. He has been a Sarai Fellow (2004), and an Asia Fellow (2005). His most recent work is a feature length film Khayal Darpan about the state of classical music in Pakistan. His interest in the popular devotional art of Indian Muslims and his extensive collection of such art work brings him to the Tasveer Ghar. More details...