Centre for Environmental Research and Education: art from waste pro- duced by school students in Mumbai. See also pages 14-15. INTRODUCTION A recent survey by PricewaterhouseCoopers ventions that ensure they are not ‘commodified’ Pvt Ltd indicates that between 2005 and 2010 in their journey to the marketplace. As revealed the global entertainment and media industry will by some of the grants we have made, the effective see an annual growth rate of 6.6% and a rise in marketing of the arts depends on a very close value from the current US$1.3 trillion to US$1.8 engagement with them. trillion. Interestingly, the survey suggests that the It is clear, however, that the arts also require entertainment and media industry in the Asia- support that balances the market’s insensitivity to Pacific region is expected to have the highest their singularity and their intrinsic relationship to growth rate of any region in the world. This the contexts in which they are created. This con- industry includes forms like filmed entertain- sideration continues to underlie our grant making, ment, television networks, recorded music, inter- which has in recent times gone beyond supporting net advertising, and magazine, book and newspa- individual projects to funding ventures that, vari- per publishing. ously, strengthen infrastructure, create resources Even though a great deal of what is cate- and forge long-term collaborations. gorised as ‘the arts’––live performance and visual While making grants for projects submitted art to take two examples––is not included in this under our various programmes continues to form sector, it is likely that these developments will the bulk of our work, we have also begun to eventually impact the entire universe of the arts. design our own projects and identify those who The growth of the Internet or sectors like televi- might best execute or benefit from them. Two sion and book publishing, for instance, creates such self-managed projects have been underway opportunities for increased dissemination of the in the past year. One, partially supported by the arts. A proliferation of such channels also means Japan Foundation, has facilitated collaborations that there is scope for diversification in the kind between groups in Southeast Asia and India that of work and ideas that are transmitted through have been enriching arts pedagogy in different these media. ways. The second is concerned to track and pub- India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) is alive to lish critical writing––in Bengali, Malayalam, the possibilities that such an expansion holds. Gujarati and Marathi––on the visual arts in the The funding category ‘Special Grants’––which first half of the twentieth century. we introduced last year––is especially focused on Alongside supporting arts practice and schol- projects concerned with strengthening arts infra- arship that is fresh and relevant, we plan increas- structure, business development in arts organisa- ingly to provide for the creation of infrastructure, tions, and issues of livelihood and sustenance. resources and expertise that will go a long way in Our Special Grants recognise that even strengthening the field and consolidating our role though markets for the arts might be expanding, as the country’s leading independent funder of these markets need to be tapped through careful- the arts. ly thought-out projects. While the arts naturally 1 need audiences and buyers, they also need inter- Anmol Vellani Executive Director November 2006 The variety evident even in this small list points to the range of viewpoints and approaches that this programme can accommodate. At one end of this spectrum, we have a media artist like Ashok Sukumaran whose art- works challenge our unquestioning use of tech- nology in a culture of passive consumption, while also extending the field of media art itself. At the other end is the filmmaker Kamal Swaroop, who too is extending our understand- ing of filmmaking by engaging with students of film and related disciplines. In this way he is highlighting issues not just relevant to filmmak- ing (and its forgotten connection with liter- ature, photography and painting), but also to arts education. EXTENDING ARTS PRACTICE In time we intend to organise meetings and seminars on themes relevant to the programme Groundbreaking achievements in the arts ––like interdisciplinarity in the arts or the value often occur unexpectedly. Amrita Sher-Gil’s of artistic innovation. These would have the paintings, Salman Rushdie’s novels or Uday twin functions of alerting us to interesting work Shankar’s vision of modern dance, were not born being done in the arts, while helping to stimu- in a vacuum but neither were they the result of late discussion on approaches to arts practice conscious nurturing on anyone’s part. So while it that we feel ought to have greater currency. is difficult to anticipate radical ideas in the arts, it is entirely possible to encourage the development of a milieu that is hospitable to such ideas. This is the intention behind our Extending GRANTS Arts Practice programme. It was launched in July 2005 to support the innovative, the untried and Kamal Swaroop, Mumbai the fresh in the practice of the arts. At the same Rs 2,27,500 over three months time, we do not want to make a fetish of the new: Towards identifying partner institutions, artists may be searching for another direction for developing course books and film study cap- their art even if they are not seeking to produce sules, and fixing a time schedule for a series of self-professedly experimental work. In a culture workshops to be conducted for students of film, that is not generally encouraging of the explorato- design and creative writing. The eventual work- ry and the open-ended, our primary aim is to give shops will lead to the creation of a story-board artists the confidence to try out new ideas and look on the life of the pioneering filmmaker, for fresh ways in which to express themselves. Dadasaheb Phalke. By bringing together stu- The four grants we have made so far all dents of these various disciplines, the workshops involve a kind of creative re-ordering of the will explore ‘the industrial mode of production’ prevalent terms of practice in different fields. in cinema––something which Phalke exempli- Equally the artists we have supported wish to fied and which the current specialisation in the connect their practice with specific cultural his- arts no longer allows for. tories or with aspects of contemporary society. Bodhaditya Bandopadhyay, Kolkata 3 From Kamal Swaroop’s manuscript, The Life and Times of Dadasaheb Phalke. See also pages 5 and 20-24. Bodhaditya Bandopadhyay, Kolkata Rs 5,00,000 over eighteen months For the making of a non-fiction film based on the Bengali text Hutom Pyanchar Naksa. The film will use the text––which documents the excesses, decadence and cultural richness of nineteenth- century Bengali bhadralok––as an entry point to explore the silences in the narratives of colonialism and modernity. Envisaged as a dialogue between the past and the present, the film will involve extensive documentation and interpretation of public life in contemporary Kolkata and of various subaltern art forms, revisiting places and practices mentioned in the text. Taran Khan, Aligarh, Uttar Pradesh Rs 4,00,000 over two years For a writer and a filmmaker to make a docu- mentary film on the significance of Sufism in the lives of mofussil communities in the Awadh region of Uttar Pradesh. The grandfather and grand- daughter pair will begin by looking at the chang- ing perceptions of Sufism within their own family and then branch out to explore the intersection of religious belief, cultural practice and social mores in the Awadh region. Ashok Sukumaran, Mumbai Rs 5,03,000 over two years ‘Phalke believed that the For the creation of a series of public installa- image is not invented but tions based on proto-typical electronic arrange- is already pre-existent in ments. The intention behind these pieces is to draw attention to the pervasively ‘wired’ nature of the minds of the audi- our environment. At the same time, by working ence. So in order to with simple, almost everyday arrangements and locate the image you have exhibiting outcomes in public places, the project will also critique ‘hi-tech’ media art that operates to either find the audi- exclusively in galleries or laboratory-like spaces. ence or create them. In Documentation of the installations will be made available through an online archive. the end, no matter what, the audience is the author and the producer them- 4 selves, not individually but collectively.’ Filmmaker Kamal Swaroop on Dadasaheb Phalke. NEW PERFORMANCE Rarely are the performing arts in India daring GRANTS in form and content, ready to portray multilingual realities, prepared to undertake genre-defying exper- Jhuma Basak, Bangalore iments or willing to extend beyond middle class sen- sibilities and preoccupations. The compulsions of Rs 5,36,700 over five months state patronage, the market fixation of corporate For the further development of a new perform- sponsorship and the constitution of the festival cir- ance form called Versedance. Three short pieces of cuit collude in keeping performance within strict dance-theatre, based on poems by Rainer Maria disciplinary and monolingual boundaries. Rilke, Amrita Pritam Singh and Jibonananda Das, It was in this context that IFA’s New will be created and performed in Kolkata. The edu- Performance programme was introduced during the cational possibilities of Versedance will also be year. It provides artists with opportunities to explore explored with students at two universities in the city. new modes of making and presenting performance, to reach beyond their own specialisation to create Adishakti Laboratory for Theatre Art new performance styles or forms, or to generate con- Research, Pondicherry tent that introduces spectators to new perspectives Rs 6,40,000 over six months and realities.