Areas of Concern

The trust supports the cataloguing, conservation, and study of manuscripts in Sanskrit, Persian, Kashmiri, and Bengali, alongside the regional scripts and vernaculars of the Hindi belt and Punjab. Many such works survive in private collections, temple and dargah libraries, and the storerooms of small institutions, often uncatalogued and unread.

Our work begins with description: who wrote it, in what hand, on what paper, for whom. From there, 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 and accessible to those who would study them.

The classical traditions of the hills — the dhrupad and khayal repertoires of the northern plains and hills, the regional gharanas, the devotional and seasonal forms tied to particular valleys — depend on transmission from one practitioner to the next. The recording is not the music; the teacher is.

Through fellowships and stipends, the trust supports senior musicians who are 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 these regions — the Pahari, Mughal, Rajput, Kashmiri, and Bengal schools of painting most widely among them, alongside mural, miniature, woodcarving, metalwork, and textile — share a common ground: they 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: these were once ordinary knowledge.

The trust funds research into materials and methods, supports a small number of 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 hill court — these were once ordinary skills, taught early, refined over a lifetime, and bound to a particular relationship with land and animal. They are now rare.

The trust does not romanticise these practices, nor does it advocate for their unrestricted return. It documents them 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.