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Report
Activist Listeners
2009
Overview
Raqs Media Collective reaches well beyond the confines of the art world to appeal to communities both on and off line. \"Raqs\" translates into \"dance\" in Farsi, Arabic, and Urdu. But founding members Jeebesh Bagchi, Monica Narula, and Shuddhabrata Sengupta once jokingly stated, however, that raqs stands for \"rarely asked questions.\" The nine years of Sarai have seen an enormous change in all these areas. The Sarai fellowships have produced a tide of contemporary practice and practitioners. Forms that had no chance of developing a sustained body of practice in India, such as the graphic novel, sound art, software art, and performance, now have stable bodies of work around them, partly thanks to Sarai fellowships. We kick-started the revolution in the opening up of Indian languages to cyberspace through early interventions in free and open source software for Indian languages. Now there is a burgeoning new public sphere on the internet in Hindi and other languages that is directly attributable to [Sarai]'s efforts in the field. The robust challenges to censorship and self-censorship and the tyranny of intellectual property that have emerged in the last few years in India can be traced back to an extent to the work that began at the Sarai Program. Our preliminary investigations into surveillance, into the vibrant cultures of piracy and into the interface between politics, political economy, and information are beginning to yield a lively public debate on these issues. And a large number of questions that are now commonplace factors of public discourse - from the state of the urban environment to issues of eviction and displacement as a result of urban \"redevelopment\" to the rights of queer people in India - were in many ways first \"aired\" within the hospitable safety of the Sarai cafe, and on electronic discussion lists hosted by the Sarai website. NIELS VAN TOMME: Although internationally very active, you are still based in Delhi and often make work that directly relates to that city. Nevertheless, you refrain from labeling yourself as \"Indian.\" Can you explain why you prefer to identify yourself as being \"from Delhi\" instead?
