Dara Shikoh Fellowship

06/04/2018

Director Anish Gawande was discussing the Dara Shikoh Fellowship with the India Culture Lab Leadership Fellows in Mumbai! An alum of the Lab, Anish spoke of the need for mentorship in art spaces and how such mentorship can be facilitated.

03/31/2018

Our panel, "Imagining Kashmir: Finding the Country Without A Post Office," will begin in two hours. You can view the live stream on the Soch: Columbia Pakistan Symposium page!

03/25/2018

On March 31, the Dara Shikoh Fellowship will host a panel at Soch: Columbia Pakistan Symposium on "Imagining Kashmir: Finding The Country Without a Post Office."

Kashmir has remained a central component of how, following the Partition of the South Asian subcontinent, both India and Pakistan have imagined themselves. On television debates in Delhi and Islamabad, over trade meetings in Karachi and Mumbai, the future of Kashmiris has been discussed and argued for more than seven decades.

Yet, there is a staggering inability to transcend the political to think about freedom in cultural, religious, or social terms. At Soch, Nyla Ali Khan, Beena Sarwar, and Saiba Varma will explore intersectionality and nationalism in Kashmir from a feminist lens to understand how we can better understand what Agha Shahid Ali called "The Country Without a Post Office."

02/09/2018

2016 Dara Shikoh Fellow Priyanka D’Souza will be exhibiting at the India Art Fair this weekend! Do go see her work - and drop in a word of encouragement.

01/31/2018

We are collaborating with the South Asian Millennials Conference to host a panel on “Places Of Partition” with three stellar academics at Columbia University.

On the agenda: how to uncover hidden identities lost in the mainstream Partition narrative, how to emphasise the role of gender and sexual minorities, and how to deal with longing and belonging - 70 years on.

For more information, visit www.samcofficial.com.

01/11/2018

: Here’s a photo of our workshops at Natrang Jammu in August! Exploring gender and masculinity through Augusto Boal’s “theatre of the oppressed,” we worked with incredible young theatre artists to break down stereotypes in the region.

01/05/2018

The Dara Shikoh Fellowship is curating a panel at the Harvard College US-India Initiative in New Delhi this weekend!

Focusing on voices from the margins, the panel will feature the first female Kashmiri Sahitya Akademi winner Naseem Shafaie, transgender rights activist Aijaz Ahmed, and acclaimed painter and visual artist Veer Munshi in conversation with the Fellowship’s Director, Anish Gawande.

The Harvard India Initiative 2015, co-sponsored by SAI, hopes to foster targetted dialogue and academic critique on India's future

11/01/2017

The deadline for submitting applications to the Dara Shikoh Fellowship has been extended to 28 February, 2018!

The month-long Fellowship will take place in August 2018, with a theme of "Reframing Ladakh" that will focus on creating transnational links that situate the region in a larger Central Asian context.

The Dara Shikoh Fellowship aims to bring together individuals across varied disciplines and backgrounds in a fifteen day immersive experience which allows them to interact with local students, artists, craftsmen, writers, and theatre practitioners.

09/29/2017

Our event with Yale’s Supriya Gandhi starts in TWO HOURS! As you make your way up to Knox Hall, here’s a 1905 painting of Dara Shikoh that finds its home at the Victoria Memorial Hall in Kolkata. Talk about legacy!

09/23/2017

We now have four organisations on board to support our event on Dara Shikoh with Supriya Gandhi at Columbia University in the City of New York! Join us this coming Friday at 5 PM at 208 Knox Hall to discuss the life and legacy of the Mughal prince.

RSVP: https://www.facebook.com/events/2010085449275211/?ref=br_rs

09/13/2017

This painting by Raqib Shaw, who was born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir, is titled "Death, Beauty and Justice V." Part of a larger series of fantastical works that explore human emotion, this work is part of the The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York's Art Archives. Here's how they describe it:

"Born in Calcutta and raised in Kashmir, Shaw now lives and works in London. Joining the traditions and techniques of his native Asia with cosmopolitan and eclectic sources of imagery that he mines in the museums of London, his pictures present a collision of nature and fantasy, violence and eroticism, that exposes the otherwise hidden side of hedonism."

09/12/2017

The Hanle Monastery, which was built in the 17th century, sits atop the Hanle Valley in Ladakh. Constructed under the patronage of Sengge Namgyal, the monastery was an influential component of the Drupka lineage that existed alongside the Gelug school in the region. The Valley itself has a unique culture, with influences from both Tibet and Mongolia because of repeated relations of trade and war.

Photo: Sayannath