Small Study and Research Grant (UK)

The Visiting Fellowship gave me the opportunity to visit the museums and archives in the UK, including the Victoria and Albert Museum. The award also enabled me to gain more professional expertise and to enrich my knowledge of museology. I prepared a monograph about my experience in the UK and presented research papers to history fora on the Indian objects in the Coromandel- English trade.

To obtain photographs of Pahari ragamala miniature paintings in the collections of the V&A Museum

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 grant was to facilitate research for my MA dissertation, and was a great help. It supported my travel to Leh and Alchi as well as enabling me to photo document the monasteries of Alchi.