The Power of Image-Text-Audio Trinity in Understanding Indian Culture
Today our objective is to nurture and sensitize visual literacy to fuse image-text to create a deeper holistic source of knowledge at the highest level
The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies is a pioneering initiative dedicated to redefining the understanding of Indian culture and history through a unique blend of image, text, and audio. In an exclusive conversation with Deccan Chronicle, Neville Tuli, the founder, shares his vision for the centre and its potential impact on global understanding.
What inspired you to create the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies, and what vision do you have for its impact on the global understanding of Indian culture?
The Centre has been visualized and planned since 1994, creating various structural forms along the way, and so has emerged from a personal journey of three decades of writing, exploration, research, archiving, entrepreneurship, and cultural-institution-building work across India’s visual and cultural history spanning the fine arts, cinema, photography, architecture, the popular arts,the economics of culture and animal-welfare.
I had realized that a very small amount of original creative objects, with full historical and aesthetic context were accessible to students, educators, and researchers worldwide within a coherent vision for India. This has led to a very partial and incomplete understanding of India, hence distorted, both from its scale of diversity and coherence of depth.
After various successes and failures, The Tuli Research Centre for India Studies was founded to re-examine how India is experienced, understood, and studied not solely through texts but through the layered interplay of images, audio, and material institution-building culture and experience.
Today our objective is to nurture and sensitize visual literacy to fuse image-text to create a deeper holistic source of knowledge at the highest level, while being freely accessible to all, so inviting domestic and global audiences to explore India’s complexity through a sensory-rich, non-linear model of learning that places visual sensitivity, intellectual curiosity and joyous self-discovery at its core.
Can you walk us through the development process of the research centre's platform, and what makes its “image-text-audio” trinity unique?
Imagine today, with over 25,000+ learning and educational institutions in the world, and there is NOT even one three-year undergraduate course for Modern and Contemporary India Studies. So where are the experts? Is no deep knowledge required for understanding, let alone governing India?
Hence creating a model for this framework and curricula, while building and collating all the content required, and then to make such freely available to all, irrespective of background, while keeping alive ones financial independence, hence distance from patronage and bureaucracy of any form which compromises the intellectual integrity of the journey, has been one’s clear dedication for decades.
This has naturally been a most difficult task. Resolving these macro issues are intertwined with the micro ideas related to fusing the use of image-text-audio, as naturally knowledge becomes most impactful when encountered through multiple senses and directions. By integrating the three you also begin to change the power balance towards creating knowledge, hence breaking though many preconceptions, allow people to start from clean new pages, so moving beyond the conventional hierarchies of information. A film still, a handwritten note, or a voice recording can be as intellectually stimulating as a formal essay if contextualized in a rigorous intellectual structure. This trinity fosters an organic dialogue between media, with the image-text jugalbandi the most important shift in the process and so changing the degree of fluidity and system in interdisciplinarity.
How do you see the Tuli Research Centre contributing to the field of India Studies, and what gaps in knowledge or understanding do you hope to address?
India Studies has historically been shaped by a focus on the ancient, classical and medieval time periods, rarely privileging the image as a critical source of knowledge relative to text, the nature of its interdisciplinarity has been highly rigid and superficial, the role of daily cultural institution-building experience instructuring curricula without compromising content has also been minimal, no formal 3-year undergraduate India Studies program has ever been implemented in any educational institute across the world ; all these issues had and have to be tackled along with giving free access to such learning opportunities while pursuing the highest levels of intellectual rigor and bringing a daily joy to the process of learning, teaching or self-discovery.
The Tuli Research Centre via the merger of the online visual-textual knowledge-base online and its offline Archives and Library will try to address this by offering an integrative framework across sixteen Research Categories which defines the base for a modern and contemporary India Studies.
The Centre also engages with the economics of art, offering insights into India’s modern and contemporary art markets through curated data sets, auction histories, and artist-centric economic indicators. This allows scholars to examine the intersections of culture and capital in new ways. Ultimately, the Centre’s contribution lies in its reconfiguration of access: making scholarship not only more democratic but also more interdisciplinary, visual, and intuitive.
What role do you see the research centre playing in shaping the next generation of scholars, researchers, and thought leaders in India Studies?
We see the Centre as a space that nurtures independent,critical inquiry processes and helps to strengthen all the wonderful learning and educational institutions in the world that continue the noble profession of education.
At our heart is the thought that every answer only leads to a deeper question, it is an ancient philosophical idea, as much in Upanishadic thought as in any logical framework with a different spirituality.
Great civilizations and noble individuals are built upon fearlessness of the mind, deep compassion in the heart and an evolving selflessness which emerges from confidence, faith and even deep selfishness towards one’s journey. However, it is an unrelenting love for knowledge, all its forms, and the humility that such love must nurture, while bringing joy to all your suffering. From nurturing such an ecology and atmosphere great scholars, researchers and thought leaders emerge inevitably.
How will the centre’s vast knowledge repository and search engine be curated and updated to ensure accuracy and relevance?
For thirty years I have planned and written the histories and ideations of India so many times, across so many subjects, only to never complete them, given the nature of the process, the various obligations around me of also tackling the building of cultural institutions and the creation of wealth. One has now tired me, the other has virtually rejected me, so all my manic energy has gone into my first love and wish – of creating the many paths towards grasping, loving and understanding the nature of India through her arts, social sciences and humanities, and in the process hopefully transforming the nature of idealism and its livingness in young minds wishing to dream the good dream.
What are your plans for collaborations or partnerships with other institutions, and how do you see the Tuli Research Centre evolving in the next few years?
The v1.0 launches on 30thApril 2025 with sharing the Search & Filter system and a Masterlist Calendar until 1st January 2026 (v3.0) when we begin formal collaborations with educational institutions in supporting and strengthening their programmes for India Studies and related subjects such as Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Art & Aesthetics and the like. From v1.1 (30th June) we began to increase the number of Masterlists and by v2.0 we introduced the customization for the visitor / student so that their study is more systematic and geared towards a clear points framework and self-discovery framework with our growing faculty.
The key is to bring back the confidence and joy in all students that you now have freely available the finest knowledge-base on modern and contemporary India, you need not bow or ask no favour from anyone, it is your right, it is a gift long overdue from one corner of humanity to other parts. Please focus and build upon your sense of yourself and its relationship with one of the most beautiful, wise and meaningful civilizations that inhabits our cosmos.