Project Co-ordinators:

Christiane Brosius
Christiane holds the new Professorship of Visual and Media Anthropology at the Cluster of Excellence "Asia and Europe in a Global Context" (www.asia-europe.uni-heidelberg.de) at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. With a background in Art History and Art Education, she started to be interested in contexts of art production, dissemination and consumption. For her MA-thesis, Christiane researched and published on the German cultural historian Aby Warburg who developed the 'Mnemosyne Image Atlas', which had an impact on Tasveer Ghar's focus on popular culture and image itineraries. For her book Empowering Visions. A Study on Videos and the Politics of Cultural Nationalism in India (London: Anthem Press 2005), Brosius explored the iconography, rhetoric and production context of video propaganda of the Hindu Right (especially late 1980s to 1990s). Her other research interests are "ritual agency," urban anthropology, diaspora studies and commercial Hindi film. Her latest book has just been published and is entitled India's Middle Class. New Forms of Urban Leisure, Consumption and Prosperity (Routledge, New Delhi, 2010). It carries ethnographic case studies about urban architecture and town-planning, heritage tourism and spiritualism, and lifestyle specialists and magazines. Currently, Christiane is working on the globalised imaginary of Valentine's Day and the visualisation of romantic love. See her recent essay on Tasveerghar: The Rhythm of Romantic Love". More on the chair of visual and media anthropology and Christiane's CV....

Manishita Dass
Manishita Dass is an Assistant Professor at the University of Michigan (Ann Arbor, USA), where she holds a joint appointment in the departments of Screen Arts & Cultures and Asian Languages & Cultures, and teaches courses in South Asian cinema, world cinema, film history/theory, and postcolonial theory. Her research interests include early cinema in India and its intersection with other forms of popular culture; the impact of left radicalism on the film cultures of Bombay and Calcutta in the 1940s-1960s; the question of realism in Indian cinema; the cinematic city; and the visual and literary worlds of Bengali modernity. She is currently working on a book manuscript, titled Outside the Lettered City: Cinema, Nation, and Modernity in India, which traces how the space of cinema was imagined in films and in public discourse, in relation to the trope of modernity and the emerging category of the nation, in early-to-mid-twentieth century India.

Sumathi Ramaswamy
Sumathi was Professor of History at the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, and as of July 2007, is Professor of History at Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, USA. 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. Her most recent monograph is titled The Goddess and the Nation: Mapping Mother India (Duke University Press, 2010).  She is the editor of Beyond Appearances: Visual Practices and Ideologies in Modern India (Sage, 2003) and Barefoot Across the Nation: Maqbool Fida Husain and the Idea of India (Routledge, to be released September 2010).

Yousuf Saeed (Project Director)
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), the Asia Fellow (2005-06) and the Margaret Beveridge Senior Research Fellow (at J.B.Media Resource Centre, Jamia Millia, New Delhi, 2009). 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. He also looks after the overall design and update of the Tasveer Ghar website. More details...

Suboor Bakht (Manager, Research and Archiving)
With a background in Biochemistry and Post Graduation in Marekting Management, Suboor has a 10 years experience in the corporate world with specialisation in Quality Assurance, Training and Intellectual Property Rights. He has worked with companies like GE, Laing O'Rourke and the Times of India. Despite his hectic schedule Suboor continued to learn and spend time on his interest areas: arts, antiques and interior decoration. He collects material of historical importance and participates in activities pertaining to preservation of heritage, art and culture.