The Trust

The KQS Heritage Trust is a private foundation, established to support the classical literature, arts, and living traditions of Bengal, the Hindi belt, Jammu & Kashmir, and Punjab. Its mandate is conservatorial rather than curatorial: the trust does not seek to interpret these traditions for new audiences so much as to ensure that those who have carried them, and those who would learn them, are not left without the means to do so.

The trust was founded on the conviction that a great body of inherited knowledge — written, performed, painted, and practised — stands at present within reach of being held, and that the work of holding it is itself a form of scholarship. Its instruments are deliberately modest: fellowships of meaningful duration, direct grants of clearly defined purpose, and long partnerships with the archives, families, and institutions in whose keeping this material has rested.

The trust operates without publicity. It maintains no permanent collection, builds no museum, and seeks no recognition beyond that of being useful to the practitioners and scholars whose work it exists to support.