Tasveer Ghar Fellowships: FAQs
Who is eligible to apply? What would a fellow be expected to do?
What does the Tasveer Ghar fellowship provide? What the fellowship will not support?
What should your proposal contain? How to send the proposal?
Who is eligible to apply?
This fellowship is ideally meant for individuals or groups who already have access to a unique collection of popular art material that needs to be archived, digitized, or restored, but may not have the resources or expertise on how to go about doing these tasks. We are also open to proposals that seek to start a new collection or document/photograph something that is available in a public space and needs urgent attention. Currently we offer this fellowship to individuals or groups based in India only. In exceptional cases, we may consider projects from outside India, but the subject of research/documentation would have to be Indian and the artwork needs to be sent to New Delhi, India. Also, the grant money can only to be issued for a bank account in India. There is no bar of age or educational qualification, as long as you are capable of conducting the entire research/ documentation on your own, and can possibly provide a context to your work in the form of a text report or essay in English or Hindi.
What would a fellow be expected to do?
You are free to carry on your research/documentation in any manner that suits your subject. However, after the approval of your proposal and the granting of the fellowship, Tasveer Ghar may present some advice or guidelines on how you could go about conducting your fellowship. The period of six months available for the fellowship work includes the making/organizing of your arts collection, writing a report/essay about it, and interacting with our editors and web-designer to finalize the virtual gallery based on your work on the website.
You could either send the artworks to us (at your cost) for digitization, or digitize it yourself using the guidelines suggested by us. The collected material sent to us would be returned to you after digitization/scanning at our cost. Currently, Tasveer Ghar does not provide the facility for the physical storage of the specimens. Tasveer Ghar will also not provide the facility to “restore” the artworks. You shall be responsible for acquiring any copyright permission (and related documents) if required for the artwork.
What does the Tasveer Ghar fellowship provide?
Although you can send us a detailed estimate of what your documentation would cost, Tasveer Ghar can provide a maximum of Rs.75,000 (Indian Rupees seventy five thousand) to each fellow. This amount includes all costs such as research, travel, acquiring of artwork, sending of the material to Tasveer Ghar, writing of the essay, fees to be paid to any third party, and so on. In case you wish to do the digitization/scanning of images yourself, no extra funds would be available for that. The fellowship amount would be paid to you in three instalments: (1) at the time of the signing of agreement: 40%, (2) mid-way: 30%, and (3) after the announcement of the virtual gallery based on your final submitted material: 30%. Taxes as levied by the government of India would be applicable to the fellowship payment. You must have a PAN number and a bank account in India in order to receive the fellowship payment.
What the fellowship will not support?
We would not support any infrastructural costs such as setting up of an office, buying of equipment, daily meals, or per diem costs, etc. The fellowship will also not support the making of new artworks by an artist. Tasveer Ghar is not in a position to purchase the art work from the collector. In exceptional cases, if a fellow requires a larger sum of money to buy a unique collection of art, Tasveer Ghar would have the right to own that material.
We are currently NOT looking for the strictly traditional art forms such as folk arts, classical arts, or art with archaeological importance, unless any of these reflect the change or transformation brought about by modernity, urbanization, the interventions of mass-mediated technologies, and so on. In fact, your objective of the research need not be strictly the documentation or collection of a certain art form. It could even involve contextualizing certain trends of popular aesthetics, such as “politics or economics of popular art”, or “aesthetics of election campaign” and so on. However, Tasveer Ghar will not support a highly subjective/creative presentation or interpretation of popular culture devoid of any empirical analysis.
What should your proposal contain?
Although we encourage you to write your proposal in any manner that enables you to clearly state your objectives, some of the following should be provided:
You may also provide the following with the proposal:
How to send the proposal?
You would need to send your proposal in Microsoft Word format by email to tasveerghar@gmail.com. If you need to send more than one attachments that are over 2 MB in size, you may send them in separate emails, clearly giving a brief title of your proposal in the subject line. You may also provide a list of all the attachments, in the body of the email. If you need to send a specimen in hard copy, please ask us for the mailing address. After we receive your proposal, you may be given a reference number which you must quote in all correspondence related to your proposal.
If the above FAQs do not provide your satisfactory answers, you may write to us. You may also send us a brief description of your research topic for our advice before sending the full proposal.
Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Archive of South Asian Popular Visual Culture