Areas of Concern

The trust supports the cataloguing, conservation, and study of classical and vernacular manuscripts across South Asia. Many such works survive in private collections, temple and dargah libraries, and the storerooms of small institutions, often uncatalogued and unread.

The work begins with description: who wrote it, in what hand, on what paper, for whom. Partnerships with established archives allow for digitisation and, where appropriate, scholarly editions. The aim is not to remove these works from where they belong, but to ensure they are known.

The classical traditions depend on transmission from one practitioner to the next. The recording is not the music; the teacher is.

Fellowships and stipends support senior musicians willing to teach and the students who commit the years required to learn. A separate programme funds the documentation of repertoire and oral history while those who carry it are still with us.

The painted and crafted traditions of South Asia were trades, taught hand to hand, dependent on materials and methods that are, in many particulars, no longer well understood. Pigments, papers, brushes, the discipline of the apprentice's hand: once ordinary knowledge.

The trust funds research into materials and methods, supports working artists and craftspeople trained in these idioms, and partners with collections on questions of attribution, conservation, and display.

Falconry, shikar in its older and disciplined sense, the keeping of hawks and hounds, the seasonal protocols of the hunt and the court — once ordinary skills, taught early, refined over a lifetime, bound to a particular relationship with land and animal. They are now rare.

The trust documents these practices as they survive, supports the few who still hold the working knowledge, and funds writing that places them within the longer cultural and ecological history of the region.