Associates

As a Doctoral Candidate in Anthropology at Stanford University, Nikhil Anand is researching the social life of water in Mumbai, as it is made to flow from rainfed lakes, through public bodies and into the Arabian Sea. Over the last few years he has also researched Mumbai's transportation infrastructure projects, activist subjectivity at the World Social Forum (WSF), and the politics of India's National Biodiversity Planning Process (NBSAP).

Nikhil Anand has a Masters in Environmental Studies from Yale University and a BA in Biology from Reed College.

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Himanshu Burte is an architect based in Goa, India, and is deeply involved with architectural practice, research and writing. He is a graduate of Sir J.J. College of Architecture, Mumbai. His work so far straddles the worlds of architectural practice, independent writing and research, and initiatives towards building a cross-disciplinary discourse about architecture and urban space.

His own research, writing and teaching have continually attempted to construct a humane critique of current architectural and planning practices and their larger societal implications. He has an established and continuing interest in the intersections of culture, urban management, politics, and design in the construction of the public sphere. Another special interest is the design of spaces for the arts, particularly, theatre.

Himanshu Burte has been invited to speak and present papers at many conferences in India and abroad. His essays have appeared in a number of anthologies. He was a co-founder of the Architecture Forum of the Mohile Parikh Centre for the Visual Arts (MPCVA) at the National Centre for the Performing Arts (NCPA), Mumbai, and was involved in running it from 1996-2001.

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Pankaj Joshi is a conservation architect in private practice with projects in Greater Mumbai, Maharashtra and Gujarat. He received his Diploma in Architecture from the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai and his Masters in Architectural Conservation from University of York, the UK. At present, he is the Executive Director of UDRI, Mumbai.

Pankaj Joshi serves on the Mumbai Heritage Conservation Committee, and is also a visiting professor at the Academy of Architecture and Rizvi College of Architecture, Mumbai and consultant to the Heritage Conservation Society of the Mumbai Metropolitan Region Development Authority (MMRDA).

He is the joint convener of the Mumbai Study Group, an interdisciplinary forum, at the Academy of Architecture, Mumbai and a member of SAVE forum, an environment action group in North Mumbai.

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Sameera Khan is a a journalist, writer and researcher. A former assistant editor at The Times of India in Mumbai (1995-2000), she has spent a considerable amount of her working life reporting and writing for the mainstream media in India as well as the foreign press on subjects as diverse as public health, medicine, environment, business, gender, development, local history and culture.

For a brief while (1994-95), she also worked as a researcher and writer at the United Nations in New York. A founder member of the Network of Women in Media, India, Sameera Khan has lectured in journalism at the Xavier Institute of Communications, Mumbai, and also assisted in setting up the first part-time journalism training program for Muslim women in Mumbai. An executive member of the Bombay Local History Society, she currently freelances for print and radio. She is in the process of researching and writing a book on the old Muslim mohallas (neighbourhoods) of Mumbai. Her essay "Moharrum in the Mohalla" is featured in the Penguin anthology, 'Bombay, meri jaan - Writings on Mumbai' (2003).

As a PUKAR research associate, she has been associated with the PUKAR Neighbourhood project as part of which she initiated the Khotachiwadi Cookbook: an ethnographic encounter with community and cuisine. More recently since 2003, she has been actively involved with the PUKAR Gender & Space project, funded by IDPAD, and is currently co-writing a book based on the project with research associates Shilpa Phadke and Shilpa Ranade.

She has a BA in History and Anthropology from St. Xavier's College (University of Bombay), a diploma in Social Communications Media from Sophia Polytechnic, Mumbai, and an MS in Journalism from Columbia University , New York.

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A Master’s candidate in City Planning at Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Aditya is researching low income housing in Mumbai. He was a core member of the team that launched the PUKAR Youth Fellowship program in 2005. He has been central to the implementation and evolution of the program, its engagement with young people and collaborations with other organizations.

Aditya has a Master’s degree in Modern Indian History from Jawaharlal Nehru University and a Bachelor’s from Hindu College, University of Delhi.

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Deepak Pawar is a lecturer of Political Science and a language activist. He and his colleagues are involved in 'Marathikaaran', that is Politics and Economics of Marathi language, culture and people. He writes columns for newspapers and magazines. Presently he is pursuing his PhD on 'Post-Globalization Politics of Language in Maharashtra'.

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Shilpa Phadke conceptualized and led the Gender & Space Project at PUKAR from September 2003 to September 2006. She is currently writing a book based on the Gender and Space project along with Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade to be published by Penguin, India. She has been educated at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai, SNDT University and the University of Cambridge, UK.

She is a PhD candidate at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences, Mumbai working on issues of contemporary urban middle-class sexuality. She has taught undergraduate sociology and anthropology at St. Xavier's College, Mumbai. As a pedagogue, she has designed and coordinated several discussion groups, a lecture series and workshops. She has published both academically in journals such as the Economic and Political Weekly and the Indian Journal of Gender Studies, has chapters in books published by Sage, OUP and Zubaan (forthcoming) and popularly in newspapers and magazines. Her areas of concern include gender and the politics of space, the middle classes, sexuality and the body, feminist politics among young women and reproductive subjectivities.

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Shilpa Ranade is a practicing architect and researcher. She trained in architecture from CEPT, Ahmedabad and has done her M.A. in cultural studies from the University of Arizona, Tucson. She is a founding partner of the design collaborative DCOOP where her portfolio includes interior, architecture and urban design projects.

Shilpa Ranade’s areas of research interest are architectural history, design theory, 20th century Indian history, feminist theory and cultural anthropology; her M.A. thesis titled “The Motherland & Other Mothers: Constructing womanhood in the Hindu nation” examined the intersections of gender and Hindu nationalism.

She has been associate editor, of the South Asian volume in the series ‘World Architecture 1900-2000: A Critical Mosaic’ and has also published articles in various architectural magazines. She is currently writing a book based on the Gender and Space project with Shilpa Phadke and Sameera Khan.

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Vyjayanthi Rao is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at The New School. She is also a research associate of Partners for Urban Knowledge, Action, and Research (PUKAR) and has served as its Co-Director from 2002-2005.Her broader research interests lie in the intersections of planning, design, artistic practice and social transformation.

She has studied contexts of development and modernization in rural South Asia, particularly questions of trauma, memory and historicity and is preparing a book manuscript based on her dissertation, Ruins and Recollections.

More recently, she has been studying urban change in relation to the economy, technology, infrastructure, and built form of post-industrial Mumbai and has a number of publications on the topic. Vyjayanthi Rao has also worked extensively with Mumbai based artist, Sudarshan Shetty and curated a dialogue between Shetty and Xu Bing, the New York based Chinese Artist at the New School in 2006. She lives and works in New York but travels frequently to Mumbai.

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Abhay Sardesai is the Editor of Art India – the premier Indian art magazine focusing on contemporary art. He is also a Visiting lecturer in Aesthetics at the Department of English, University of Mumbai. Apart from writing on Art and Literature in various journals, he has written fiction and poetry. Abhay Sardesai translates from Marathi, Konkani and Gujarati into English and has been involved in several translation projects.

 He has been a lecturer of English at an undergraduate college in Mumbai from 1995 - 2002.

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Rahul Srivastava is based in Goa where he writes and does research on urban issues. He has studied anthropology at Mumbai, Delhi and Cambridge (UK). He has written on cities, tribal histories and popular culture and also writes fiction for young readers. He has worked extensively with urban heritage movements.

 As the Co-Director of PUKAR, Mumbai, he conceived the Neighbourhood Project which worked with students and civic groups to produce intimate portraits of the city based on local histories, family narratives and biographies.

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Paromita Vohra is a filmmaker and writer. Her films as director include Morality TV and the Loving Jehad: A Thrilling Tale, Q2P (German Star of India award for Best Documentary at the Bollywood and Beyond Film Festival in Stuttgart and the Grand Jury Prize for best documentary at Indian Film Festival Los Angeles 2007); Cosmopolis: Two Tales of A City (award at the Indo-British Digital Film Festival) and UnLimited Girls (Women’s News Award, Seoul; Aaina Film Festival Award) among others.

She has written the feature films Khamosh Pani (Best Screenplay, Kara Film Festival; Best Film, Locarno Film Festival), Sunday ke Sunday (in production), Kumari Shobha (in development), and Khamoshi: The Musical (co-writer); the documentaries If You Pause: In A Museum of Craft, Stuntmen of Bollywood, A Few Things I Know About Her (Silver Conch, Mumbai International Film Festival, National Award for Best Film), and Skin Deep; and TV shows including Videocon Flashback and Bollywood Inc.

She has taught scriptwriting since 2000 at Sophia Polytechnic Bombay besides taking regular scriptwriting workshops at various places including Oberlin College, Ohio, FTII, Pune, Open Space, Pune, S.N.School of Fine Arts, Hyderabad, School of Convergence, New Delhi, the Design Centre IIT, PUKAR and Majlis all in Mumbai.

She has worked extensively with young people using both radio, video and writing as means of exploring narrative and creativity in workshops that culminated in completed projects.

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