IEA

Fellowship from May toJune 2011

Research project : Search For the Patronage System for the Performing Arts

"Performing arts in particular and arts in general have grown primarily with the support generated by various kinds of patronages in India and also in other countries like China and Japan. Europe too is no exception in this. Classical musicals were supported by courts of small princely states like Rampur or Gwalior or Patiyala etc. Temples too patronised performing arts like music and dance, particularly of the devdasis of Andra Pradesh. Parthan ,the tribal musician and genealogist of the Gond community or Charan, musician and the genealogist of the Rajputs of Rajasthan and Gujraat were amply supported through the social custom prevalent in these societies which allowed them to earn livelihood. All these systems of patronages gradually broke down without giving rise to any alternative patronage system. I propose to study these systems to propose some new system for the independent democratic Indian society."

Biographical elements:

Poet, novelist and essayist in Hindi, Udayan Vajpeyi was born in Bhopal, Madhya Pradesh, in 1960. A doctor by training, he now teaches physiology at Gandhi Medical College in Bhôpal.

Founder in 1994 of the avant-garde literary journal Samas, Udayan Vajpeyi has worked on several documentary films and written dialogues of Adhyaya Char, a feature film of Kumar Shahani.

Besides two volumes of poetry - among which Adrishya Jivan, invisible life - he wrote Abhed Akash "The Sky indivisible ", conversations with filmmaker Mani Kaul, a collection of short stories and a collection of essays. Translated into several Indian languages and foreign languages Udayan Vajpeyi himself translated into Hindi texts by Octavio Paz, Jorge Luis Borges, Joseph Brodsky, Philip Anton Chekhov and Jaccotet.

Invisible Life (translated by Franck Andre Jamme and the author, publisher Cheyne, 2000, revised and enlarged edition, ed. Chafe, 2007) is his only book available in French.

"I am a poet , short-story writer and a essayist. Apart from writing poetry as such, I am extremely interested in searching and creating forms of poetry in different genres of arts. In other words, I go on trying to find various ways of writing poetry. This desire takes me to many art forms including films, theatre etc. I recently wrote a play based on the great play of Sanskrit by Bhavbhooti called Uttarramcharitam. It was directed by one of the finer theatre directors of our times, K N Panikkar. I had three teachers (gurus).One was a writer, Nirmal Varma, one was a painter, J. Swaminathan and one is a film maker, Mani Kaul. My act of writing is the work of my gratefulness to my teachers. For last few decades I got interested in the history of Indian civilization and this brought me to investigate the strategies involved in creating the images of Indian civilization by the colonial masters of past. I worked with the well known historian of eighteenth and nineteenth century of India, called Dharampal. "