Painting

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.

I received the grant during the course of my PhD on the picture story-telling traditions in Bengal and Rajasthan. These are traditions in which itinerant storytellers use scroll paintings to illustrate their storytelling performances. The sterling grant enabled me to order slides of the wonderful scroll paintings, particualrly from the J C French collection  in the V&A and British Museum. They were extremely useful, as these paintings are among four or five surviving examples of a superb, lost tradition.

This award enabled me to do fieldwork in the Varanasi area and to document research material in the Indian Museum Calcutta, and the National Museum in New Delhi. This impacted on my later research, writing and teaching.