Heidelberg Research Architecture The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art
The Project
Priya Paul, the current Chairperson of Appejay Park Hotels, has been an ardent collector of Indian contemporary as well as popular art. Her collection of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters is one of the finest archives of such ephemera in India. In cooperation between Tasveer Ghar: A Digital Network of South Asian Popular Visual Culture, and the Cluster „Asia and Europe“ the material was digitized. Over 4.200 images together with their metadata were uploaded to the HeidICON image database, where they were further annotated by local and international experts. Between 2012 and 2014 the collection metadata was migrated to VRA core 4 XML and added to Tamboti (now discontinued).
The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Art contains illustrations from the late 19th and early 20th century. A large part of the collection are commercial labels that were glued onto parcels of textiles imported from Britain or made in India. Sometimes they reflect an interesting blend of east and west: Asian subjects illustrated in western styles and vice versa for Indian or European markets.
Digital Output
The Priya Paul Collection of Popular Arts contains over 4.200 images of Indian popular culture from the late 19th and early 20th century. A large part of the collection consists of old posters, calendars, postcards, commercial advertisements, textile labels and cinema posters. This is one of the finest archives of such ephemera in India. Priya Paul has opened her collection for digitization to the Cluster "Asia and Europe in a Global Context". In cooperation with the digital network "Tasveer Ghar – A House of Pictures", the Heidelberg Research Architecture (HRA) uploaded the digitized material into the heidICON image database. The project decided to provide the images of this collection to an interested public and invited a group of selected international researchers to add their information and research comments. Coordinated by the HRA, a group of research students systematically further enriched the image collection in a series of about 15 metadata edit-a-thons.
Besides the challenges of archiving the Priya Paul collection, an innovative use of these images was the commissioning of a dozen essays by international scholars of disciplines such as religious studies, film studies, history or anthropology by the Trehan India Initiative, University of Michigan. These essays were published by Tasveer Ghar and the FID4SA, the Specialised Information Service for South Asian Studies hosted at Heidelberg University Library.
