[Sarai is an alternative, non-profit organization in Delhi, India. They
describe themselves as "a space for research, practice and conversation
about the contemporary media and urban constellations." Sarai publishes
an annual "Reader" covering many issues relevant to new media art. In a
recent email exchange, Mike Caloud had the chance to interview Sarai's
"Raqs Media Collective" on their unique institution
(http://www.sarai.net).]

+ + +

[Continued from Part 1]

Mike Caloud: Sarai does not seem to indulge strictly in new media. What
meaning and importance do old media forms, especially cinema, have for
you?

Sarai: For us, the term new media is not so much about the novelty of
computers, multimedia and the Internet, as it is about new forms and
strategies of practice. It's about innovative re-combinations between
"Old" and "New" media, between and across print, film, video,
television, radio, computers and the internet.

The cinema in India has always operated on an industrial, and global
scale (Cinema from Mumbai, Chennai or Hyderabad, like Hollywood and the
Hong Kong cinema, is not a local media form; it has always had large
audiences is Africa, Central Asia, Eastern Europe, North America and
Britain). The sheer size and scale of the cinema industry in India does
challenge the possibilities of independent creative practice in all
media forms. That makes it all the more necessary for us to think of
ways in which new media forms can both speak to as well as assert their
autonomy in relation to the cinema.

We are interested in this dialogue between the old and the new media,
not only between cinema and the new media, but also between print, radio
and the new media. We are keen to effect crossovers and transgressions
that displace both old and new hierarchies, which privilege neither
tradition, nor novelty for their own sake, and give rise to a more
layered and agile form of media practice that is more reflective of the
contemporary in our spaces. This means being as invested in the making
of print objects, visual works and soundscapes, as we are in the
creation of web content, and looking for ways in which practices and
objects can straddle off-line and online trajectories.

Mike Caloud: Are there unique Indian qualities to the media projects at
Sarai? Or do you consider yourself part of a more global aesthetic?

Sarai: For us, the idea of a "uniquely Indian quality" is not really
meaningful or expressive of anything at all. India is the name of a
nation state, and "Indian" the term denoting nationality that happens to
be entered in our passports, but it does not really suggest anything
real or concrete in terms of culture to us, nor do the words French, or
Italian or Australian or American, for that matter. Those who use the
term "Indian Culture" usually mean a complex of values, attitudes, and
tendencies that have been processed to mark out a space that is
"uniquely" theirs, and which mirrors an obsession with territoriality.
We are puzzled as to what (in cultural terms) can "uniquely" be the
possession of any sets of people, in exclusivity. Culture is something
that never respects borders and territories. It is infectious, nomadic,
and volatile. We see culture and cultural intervention as an agile
constellation of people, practices, connections, and objects that come
into being when different disciplines, histories and attitudes encounter
each other in a global cultural space. This does not mean that we
subscribe to the view that there are no cultural differences, but that
cultural affinities and differences are not reducible to the mere
notations of current political cartography.

A group of cultural workers (in say, a city like Delhi) trying out new
vocabularies with images, text and data like us may have a lot in
common, in terms of concerns and practices, with their counterparts in
Mexico City or Adelaide or Lagos, and very little in common with
dominant aesthetic forms in their immediate geographical vicinity (or
elsewhere). Location has ceased to be of paramount importance, although
located-ness hasn't. We are strongly located in the city in which we
work, in our "here and now," but we do not define ourselves in terms of
our location, rather we define ourselves in terms of the practices that
we are engaged in.

The internet in fact allows us to build everyday and concrete bridges
and collaborative contexts where the origins (or locations) of the
people collaborating together matter less than the destinations (and the
vectors) that they are going towards, or traveling on.

The work that we do reflects the very specific conditions of a large,
chaotic, industrial, cosmopolitan city which is connected through flows
of information, finance, and industrial processes to the whole world.
While we may hesitate to use the term "Indian" to describe our work, we
are certain that our work speaks to the specific, simultaneously global
and local realities of working and living in a city like Delhi, and of
engaging with the diverse and complex histories of modernity in South
Asia, as reflected in media cultures and practices.

This means that our work does in fact reflect the popular print,
narrative, visual or cinematic histories of urban spaces in this part of
the world. These are very specific histories, and the addition of the
word "Indian" detracts from their concreteness and specificity. These
histories emerged out of the global encounters that people in South
Asian urban spaces had with the world throughout history and
particularly from the nineteenth century onwards. These included
interactions of those engaged in forging a new public culture in cities
like Calcutta, Delhi, Bombay, Lahore, and Pune with lithographers in
Hamburg, writers in London, typesetters in Zurich, photographic pioneers
in Paris, engineers in Boston, miniature painters in Tabriz and
Florence, weavers in Sumatra, storytellers in Zanzibar and ceramic
artists in Beijing and Kyoto. The fabric of contemporaneity in South
Asia is a result of an array of cross-cultural encounters like these,
and it would be unrealistic to see what is happening today (say in the
digital domain) as disconnected from this history.

It is because we are strongly located in a city like Delhi that we also
know that we are part of, and contribute to, a global domain of
aesthetic and cultural practice.

Mike Caloud: English dominates computer culture, and is also a large
part of Indian life. Do you think the languages of India will be cast
aside, in favor of English, within India's computer culture? Is an
exclusive use of English a possible future for Indian computer culture?

Sarai: (answered by Ravikant, ravikant@sarai.net) The proposal embedded
in the query is not entirely new. A suggestion to this effect was made
in the colonial period as well. The marginal success of that legacy can
still be traced in the post-colonial army pedagogical practices. The
instructors use Roman English to conduct their classes held in Hindi.
So, we are talking about a change in the script only, not language per
se. There are quite a few mailing lists running in Hindi today that use
roman to communicate in Hindi. I deploy the same method in writing my
mails to people who have become comfortable with reading/writing theirs
in Hindi. I also believe that Hindi speakers should take up English in a
big way, if they really wish to help the cause of Hindi.

Your question however, suggests a radical language shift, which is
different from the above case, which is actually a contingent, strategic
measure, a stopgap arrangement waiting to be abandoned as soon as
computers become Hindi-literate. The suggestion is based on an erroneous
assumption that English is a very common language in India. Contrary to
the conclusion we might reach based on the proliferation of English-
medium schools, even in small towns and villages, the fact is that Hindi-
medium students would outnumber those reading in English even in a
metropolitan city like Delhi. Also note that the newspaper with the
highest circulation in the country is a Hindi one (Dainika Bhaskar) to
be followed by the Malayalam Manorama. So I do not see a future
exclusively with English as either bright or immediate or preferable.

It is not a question of cultural identity only that makes people prefer
their own languages to others. It is also a question of comfort, the
sense of feeling at home in their own languages. It is also a faith in
the individual geniuses of languages: you must have heard this oft-made
comment among bi-lingual speakers, for example: "it can't be said as
beautifully in Hindi" (or Urdu or English), depending on what is being
referred to. A whole tehzib (manner) cannot be translated
instantaneously. And every translation, while enabling portability also
entails loss.

The idea of exclusive dependence on one language or the other is
unacceptable. People in India are natural at practicing bi- or multi-
lingualism and they have had to add English to their list of linguistic
skills. This is indeed happening. In fact with the computer and the
internet there is a chance that certain languages that lost out in the
print-race of 18th-19th-20th centuries may now skip the whole
intermediary stage and jump straight from the oral to the digital. So,
English (because you can't do without it) in the company of
local/regional languages would constitute a healthy public domain in
India.

Mike Caloud: What are some of the new and future projects coming out of
Sarai, including media projects, social activism, and community
outreach? Where do you want to see your organization go?

Sarai: At the moment, Sarai is very busy. People at Sarai are working on
a number of different areas and projects. We are gearing up to produce
(at the end of February [2002], to coincide with our first anniversary)
the second Sarai Reader–The Cities of Everyday Life–which will contain
original writing, image-text essays, and discussions on city spaces and
urban culture. There are plans to publish a Sarai Reader in Hindi in the
summer.

Today, Sarai includes under its ambit a media lab which is a focus of
creative and experimental work in various media (video, audio, print,
internet), a programme for the development of Hindi language resources
in cyberspace, a free software development programme, a public access
space (the Interface Zone) which is a platform for the exhibition of new
media projects - and an active Outreach Programme (The Cyber Mohalla
Project - or - Cyber Neighbourhood Project) which works in a working-
class squatter settlement in central Delhi to create resources of
digital creativity for young people.

Additionally, two inter-disciplinary research & practice projects–
Mapping the City, and Publics & Practices in the History of the Present–
act as catalysts for a variety of intellectual and creative
interventions at Sarai.

Sarai places a great deal of emphasis on developing new and critical
interdisciplinary theoretical work. The research agenda of Sarai is
organized towards two complementary themes–understanding the place of
the media in urban public practice and consciousness, and reflections on
the city as constituted through representations and technologies. The
research on media is directed towards understanding the rhythms and
routines of daily life in the city as mediated through words, images,
and sounds. Our particular concern is with the possibilities involved in
people's relationship to the media, the domain of "needs," "desires,"
work and leisure, creativity and communication practices that the media
world opens up.

The analysis of urban life attends to the varied dimensions of everyday
life. These range from planning and housing to geographies of the city,
mediated through work, leisure, transport, and communication.
Technological forms that underwrite contemporary urban experience as
well as the social practices through which the city is imagined and
acted upon will be addressed in our research.

The Cyber Mohalla project at Sarai continues to be active, and a Cyber
Mohalla Diaries will be published in February, which will render the
work of the project and the way in which the young people who are
engaged with the project look at the city, and use tools of digital
creativity to reflect on their lives.

We (the Raqs Media Collective, at the Sarai Media Lab) are also working
on a number of new media projects which examine questions related to
claims and contests around issues of space and access in the urban
environment, and explore the idea of a "digital commons." We hope to
realize at least three to four major new media projects around these
themes this year on a variety of platforms, on the Internet, as
installations, and in the form of publications.

We will also be working on a hypertext project on surveillance titled
the Global Village Health Manual Version 2, which takes off from where
an earlier work, Global Village Health Manual Version 1, left off in
terms of its examination of how our bodies inscribe and are inscribed
upon in cyberspace.

The Sarai calendar is full each month with screenings, talks, workshops,
seminars, and exhibitions. We have had seminars and workshops with
students on cyberculture, with artists on digital art and new media
technologies, seminars on cinema and the city, a number of curated film
screenings (including Iranian Cinema, Hong Kong Action Films, Science
Fiction and the Urban Imaginary), and exhibitions of new media art works
arising out of collaborative artists residency programmes.

This year began with a photographic hypertextual work–"The Street is My
Country"–by a photographer from Dhaka, Bangladesh, Syeda Farhana Zaman,
who looked at the marginalization of migrants in the city. Recently, we
have undertaken our first experiments with streaming audio–members of
the Sarai community participated in an internet radio programme for four
days in February to coincide with the World Social Forum at Porto
Alegre.

We are organizing a conference on Information and Politics in March
[2002], which will include discussions and presentations by activists,
artists, and researchers on surveillance, censorship, free speech, cyber
laws, and the right to information campaign in India. Apart from these,
this year will see more international collaboration events at Sarai, and
a renewed focus on free software culture related projects.

As part of its public initiative, Sarai is interested in media cultures
that lie in the shadow of technological and social elites. We are
interested in speaking to critical voices that produce and live the new
media, which may exist in the street, the software factory, the worlds
of the local videowalla, the neighbourhood Public Call Office/cyber
caf