Means of support
Programs
One
Fellowships
Multi-year fellowships are offered to practitioners and scholars whose work bears on the trust's areas of concern. A fellowship is intended to free the recipient from the immediate pressures of livelihood for a sustained period — long enough that a body of teaching, performance, painting, or written work may take its proper shape. Selection is by invitation and by considered application; numbers are deliberately few.
Two
Direct Grants
Smaller, single-purpose grants are made to individuals and to small institutions for clearly defined needs: the conservation of a manuscript, the recording of a senior musician's repertoire, the apprenticeship of a student to a senior practitioner, the publication of a regional study. The trust prefers requests that are modest in scale, specific in purpose, and likely to outlast the funding.
Three
Archival Partnerships
The trust enters into long-term partnerships with libraries, museums, and private collections that hold material relevant to the traditions of northern India and Bengal. These partnerships typically involve cataloguing, conservation advice, scholarly access, and, where the holding institution wishes, digitisation. The trust does not seek to acquire holdings; its preference is that material remain with the institutions and families that have cared for it.
Enquiries concerning any of the above are welcomed, in the first instance by letter.