There are a good number of ships represented in ancient Indian art, which are valuable evidence, capable of throwing light on ancient Indian shipping and shipbuilding technology. Some of these representations were referred to by scholars here and there, but no complete and systematic study of these ships was carried out.

I would like to thank the Trustees for their timely and generous awards. The first award allowed me to conduct research among the Warli tribe in Maharashtra and to write up the results of this research for my MA dissertation at the National Museum Institute in Delhi. After my MA and spurred on by my work on the Warlis I moved to Cambridge (UK) in 1994 to do an M Phil in Social Anthropology.The M Phil was funded by a Cambridge ODASS award. I subsequently took a PhD on matweaving in South India at the University of Cambridge and now teach at the University of Manchester.