Soumhya Venkatesan

Soumhya Venkatesan

Small Study and Research Grant (India)
1995
Anthropology Craft Contemporary Tamil Nadu

To study the mat and silk weaving traditions of Pattamadai village and Kanchipuram town in Tamil Nadu

Lecturer in Social Anthropology, the University of Manchester, UK

I would like to thank the Trustees for their timely and generous awards. In the year following my Cambridge M Phil I returned to India  and was given a second grant to conduct ethnographic research among weaving communities. This work formed  a pre-PhD pilot study and I returned to Cambridge in 1996 to commence work on my PhD entitled  "Crafting discourse: mat weaving in Pattamadai, South India". I was awarded the PhD in 2002.