Sarai (www.sarai.net), a programme of the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), Delhi initiated in 2000, encompasses an inter-disciplinary research programme, a platform for critical reflection, a screening space, a convivial context for online and offline conversations and a media lab.

Sarai (the space and the programme) takes its name from the ‘caravan-sarais’ for which medieval Delhi was well known. These were places where travelers could find shelter, sustenance, and companionship; places to rest in the middle of a journey.

The Sarai initiative interprets this sense of the word ‘‘sarai’’ to mean a very public space, where different intellectual, creative, and activist energies can intersect in an open and dynamic manner.

Our effort at Sarai in these past five years, since we began is to create an ongoing context for intellectual and critical engagement with the contemporary urban moment in South Asia. This necessarily includes an investment in thinking about, researching and actively practising e-Culture.

e-Culture has been seen as the “integration of information and communication technologies into the primary processes of production, presentation, preservation and (re) utilisation of cultural expression”. (From ICT to e-Culture: Advisory Report on the Digitalisation of Culture and the Implications for Cultural Policy, Netherlands Council for Culture, The Hague, August 2004)

Since, the middle of the 19th century the cities of South Asia set up social laboratories for Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Here, we mean ICT to be the technological means, which facilitate information exchange and dispersal - a domain much wider than a mere clubbing together of computers and other digital media. New mechanical printing technologies, photography, cinema, and the parallel histories of telegraphy and the radio, and later, television - all of these ‘technocultures’ created new forms of communication.

Consequently, urban spaces in India have for long been spaces of high information density.

At Sarai, other than an investment in researching and reflecting on informal and improvisational e-Culture, we are also deeply investing in FLOSS (Free/Libre and Open Source Software) initiatives. Sarai has an active and ongoing FLOSS research programme that is interested above all in localisation, pedagogy and crticial social usage of FLOSS products and processes. (http://www.sarai.net/freesoftware/freesoftware.net)

When we founded Sarai, the challenge before us was to cohere a philosophy where research and media practice could flow into each other. We were interested in the way in which we could see the urban space we were located in, begin to reveal itself to us as a dense communicative network. As a matrix (as crowded as the streets of the old quarters of our city) within which, new and old technologies and practices of communication, ranging from print to photography to film and the Internet were able to constantly renew a dynamic media ecology.

This imperative to understand contested meanings and transmission within the spaces opened out by e-Culture has taken several inter-related forms. It has first of all, taken the shape of an intensive research project called ‘Publics and Practices in the History of the Present’ (PPHP) which studies how different media spaces, networks and markets (cinema, cable, telephony, assembled computers and informal software markets) mark and shape the urban fabric. (http://www.sarai.net/citylives/citylives. htm and www.sarai.net/mediacity/mediacity/htm)


Further, since 2001, it supported more than a hundred independent research and practice projects proposed by artists, media practitioners, researchers and academia from all over India. These have included support for India’s first published graphic novel, an audio-novella about growing up in depressed industrial suburbs, a cluster of new media art projects, oral histories of popular music, reflections on the public life of cities besieged by violence and research into the histories of free software, radio, early cinema, popular music, photography, printmaking. (http://www.sarai.net/community/fellow.htm)