A wide-ranging conversation on archives, cinema, and cultural consciousness, where interviewer Vinta Nanda engages Neville Tuli in reflecting on memory, pedagogy, visual culture, and the urgent need to rethink how India understands itself.

In this in-depth conversation, cultural theorist and archivist Neville Tuli speaks to filmmaker and writer Vinta Nanda about Self Discovery | Rediscovering India, a long-term cultural and educational initiative by the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies. The dialogue explores cinema as a civilizational archive, the politics of knowledge creation, the role of visual culture in education, and why slowing down, archiving, and deep inquiry are essential to understanding contemporary India beyond spectacle and algorithms.

For over three decades, Neville Tuli has worked at the intersection of art, cinema, history, and cultural memory—building archives, institutions, and frameworks that insist on seeing India through its creative expressions rather than its clichés. As the founder and guiding force behind the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies (TRIS), Tuli has consistently argued for culture as a serious, research-led way of understanding the nation—one that values context, continuity, and critical inquiry over immediacy and spectacle.
The Self Discovery | Rediscovering India initiative reflects this long-term vision. Conceived not as a festival in the conventional sense but as a sustained cultural and educational programme, it brings together exhibitions, film screenings, panel discussions, masterclasses, conversations, and curriculum-building exercises. Spread across several weeks, the initiative invites audiences to reflect on India’s artistic, cinematic, political, and philosophical histories—while also engaging with contemporary voices and practices.

In this conversation with me, Neville Tuli speaks about the thinking behind Self Discovery | Rediscovering India, the role of archives and dialogue in shaping cultural consciousness, and why slowing down—looking closely, and thinking deeply—has become an urgent act in our present moment.

VN: The Self-Discovery | Rediscovering India Festival is not structured like a conventional cultural event but as an interlinked system of exhibitions, screenings, panels, and curricula-building. Are you attempting to create an alternative knowledge framework for understanding India—one that operates outside dominant market narratives and institutional gatekeeping?

NT: Yes, but these “physical experiences” are mostly created to facilitate the creation of meaningful content, and increase its awareness, for our vast India Studies work which is slowly but surely unfolding on tuliresearchcentre.org.
Also, at a certain stage of institutional development (or lack of it) it is more systematic and refined when your internal Archival & Research work is made public, as it is evolving daily, given it is part of the larger never-ending objective of changing the “knowledge-engagement” ecosystem surrounding whatever be your area of focus.

After thirty years of creating such knowledgebases, it becomes viable, given the carefully thought out inter-linkages, otherwise creating and sustaining alternative systems of learning and education this way are not easy, they can only complement something deeper and wider.

Today, as probably throughout time, the core nature of learning and education needs significant change. From the manner of bringing back joy and excitement within the learning processes to the rebalancing of the visual-textual-audio as sources of knowledge to the transforming of the mediocre inter-disciplinary frameworks which are totally inadequate in grasping the scale, diversity, depth and energy of contemporary India, to the interlinking of the cultural with the ecological and animal welfare aspects of daily life, these and many other changes are critical for a more meaningful learning and teaching framework, let alone for a conceptual framework for India Studies.

Just imagine the complacency… that after nearly 80 years of independence we do not have even one Undergraduate 3-year degree for Contemporary India Studies, in any University, anywhere in the world.

To change this specific situation has also been a chief concern of mine for many decades, and today we are finally in a position to help facilitate and support the best Universities world over with vast visual-textual-audio knowledgebases.

 

1. Listening to Lives – Vinta Nanda in conversation with Sathya Saran
2. Shadows, Memory, Light, Legacy - a powerful exchange of memory and meaning documented by Hemant Chaturvedi, and interviewed by Vinta Nanda 
3. Creation Begins Where Opinion Ends - Having an opinion about art and making art are poles apart, writes Vinta Nanda

 

Archives, Memory, and the Question of Resistance

VN: Through the festival, your archives foreground publicity art, cinema ephemera, and visual culture often dismissed as “secondary” to films or fine art. In an age of algorithm-driven memory and cultural amnesia, do you see archiving as an act of resistance against erasure—and if so, resistance to what exactly?

NT: Not really, and yet of course all existence for an uncompromising inner spirit is always a daily struggle and resistance.

Today, whatever humanity considered certain has been broken down, virtually everything. No institution or ideas remain where the human keeps faith with that system, except maybe in the integrity of one’s inner voice and its pursuit of being true to itself, but that too could be delusionary.

As a result, more than ever, dealing with uncertainty anew with calm is a pivotal need of the age. This implies that each answer only reveals a deeper question, which means sustaining the process for answer-question-answer-question… is the only key issue to focus upon, i.e. the process and its joy. Ancient wisdom on one level.

Thus, the freedom of the mind and soul must be pivotal; no thought process must override this ecosystem of questioning with love and respect. Yet such an ecosystem demands huge sacrifices and efforts to be built, especially by the intelligentsia and creative communities, where freedom from patronage and dependency is as critical as standing up against the stifling of innovation and research.

To excel we need our memories unfettered, concentration to be undistracted most of the time, and the ability to sustain building processes over decades. Thus, it is not about resistance but understanding and sustaining a path, or destiny, for the truly logical mind, while disregarding the fancies of the day. Again, this is not to disrespect the powerful fancies of the day, but to recognize the more eternal aspirations of our consciousness and daily realities of such engagement.

What was “secondary” fifty years ago, is “primary” today to facilitate renewed pedagogic processes with joy. Studying the photograph of a scene of the film is as critical as seeing the film, but more importantly because that film is not going to be seen easily, and so much of the film is buried in that photograph, new rediscovering processes reignite the layers of creativity to create a new yet continuing educational processes. The key is about access and inspiring the moment.

VN: The phrase Rediscovering India carries significant ideological weight today. Through the festival, whose India is being rediscovered—the popular, the forgotten or the marginal? And how do you guard against nostalgia slipping into a softer form of cultural conservatism?

NT: All collective journey’s aiming at carrying all strata of humanity and living souls must carry all facets of human and much non-human thought and aspiration. Of course, practicality demands many will offload and travel elsewhere. However, the critical point is how the freedom of the individual and the empathy required within that position is always privileged when nurturing and sustaining that change. Further, if the creation of knowledge is to be helpful for all living souls not just humans, then the nature of compassion and its custodial duties never allows a complacency or lull, as the birds, dogs, cats, cows, trees, grass, rivers, ponds, gardens have unending care once you walk beside, they are all like four year old children who will never grow up.
Further, in my life I have always noticed since childhood that the moment success or establishment comes close and seeks to befriend or absorb me, I lash out, even self-destruct to keep my distance and the counter voice strengthens automatically. Also remember, I have for more than twenty years been creating “Rediscovering” or “Rebuilding” or “Revisualizing India” projects, it was the main reason to return home in 1993-4.

Additionally, a holistic vision for India rooted upon its creative energies forces you into a scale and diversity of thought over decades. It is not really your choice depending on today or day after. Further, no conservatism is possible when you are always embracing the more vulnerable and beaten down than you can ever be, for it renews and puts on guard any concept of marginalization or victimhood or popularity, from both perspectives.

Cinema as a Civilizational Text

VN: Across the festival—from Mughal-e-Azam and Sholay to the works of Mahesh Bhatt, Saeed Mirza, Dipankar Banerjee, Khwaja Ahmad Abbas, and extensive cinematography histories by Hemant Chaturvedi—cinema is treated as a civilizational document. What does Indian cinema reveal about us that politics, economics, or textbooks consistently fail to capture?

NT: The 1st Core Research Category for our India Studies framework is to grasp the nature and reach of “Cinema as a Critical Educational Resource”, so that whatever subject we may study, the voice of cinema and its aesthetic vocabulary is privileged in that learning framework.

The learning that cinema delivers, especially for India, is that it has cut through all barriers, differences, and creates ideas, songs, music, mindsets and interests at all levels of intellect and sensibility. Now you can see this as a huge problem if you wish, given that discernment, excellence, the brilliance of thought is always an elitist preoccupation for a period, and then slowly, sometimes very slowly, it percolates to all sectors of society. Or you can see it as a vast opportunity to start relearning again, new tabula rasa’s, holding everything, implying nothing, hopefully while creating a more egalitarian and joyous system. Cinema provides that possibility more than any other subject, especially when asking questions in non-cinematic zones and mindsets.

I naturally see it as a great opportunity, and nurture this love and joy towards rebuilding the frameworks for learning, such as privileging the visual over the textual as a source of knowledge so that the power balance in the jugalbandi is more fair and equal.

VN: Several conversations within the festival foreground the idea of the “social responsibility of the creative mind.” At a time when artists are increasingly polarized, what responsibility do you believe cultural practitioners truly owe society—and where should that responsibility end?

NT: There is never any responsibility to society, it is always first and foremost to your creative spirit and its demands. Thereafter if the spirit has the seeds of a universal consciousness, which it must and does, society may and will benefit, but it should be a by-product of that journey.

Remember, creativity is beholden to a deeper and wider consciousness, that journey of being true to being an artist or poet or philosopher or writer or filmmaker will compel the individual to search deeper for relevance and meaning, especially as time dwindles and death looms, and befriending that exit is as critical as laughing at the earlier abundance of energy.

Social responsibility is thus deepest when the core of one’s destined work meets the needs of the times, be they human, non-human or beyond. It is no different from a meaningful loving relationship where you must first be true to yourself before you can even imagine being true to another, let alone to togetherness, which demands a selflessness, patience, acceptance and deep compassion and empathy, which ironically only selfishness running riot and tiring and realizing the meaning of daily life comes to fully respect and become years later.

At the same time, the hijacking of learning by politics has distorted this understanding of social responsibility of the creative mind deeply, but that thought can be for another time.

Institutions, Inheritance, and the Long View

VN: The scale and depth of the festival reflects decades of collecting, thinking, and institution-building. Are you building a sustainable, inheritable institution for the future of India studies, and if yes, why is there a need to do so?

NT: I have lost so much, luckily built much more, and mostly for others to gain, but perceptions are so grounded in success that the true builder, karmayogi must be blind to those perceptions, the joy of the journey must become the sole driving force, even if a thousand failures emerge, especially in the realm of knowledge and creativity.

Materialism has a much lower threshold for failure, and correctly so. However, today when there is enough wealth but minor power-backed instincts to genuinely redistribute that wealth gracefully, the nature of institution building needs deep reassessment regarding success and failure. Once upon a time I longed for institutions to live long and grow deep over time, today I recognize the equal need to trigger and catalyse change, and that requires a different risk-taking spirit and institution-building model.

Today I see how easy it is for the system, not necessarily people alone, to create false perceptions, because of the nature of the platform, their interaction in co-existence, and hence the ecosystem that has been polluted and distorted.

For someone who chose to keep relatively silent for nearly 14 years, while before that constantly speaking for 14 years, the nature of communication and dissemination of ideas is a deep dilemma, as with all of us, to be or not to be, to act or not to act, to speak or not, between the how and whys, we are rarely any advanced than 5,000 years ago, hence it is easy to still respect ancient wisdom as much as any contemporary meme.

The institutional framework for Contemporary India Studies must imbibe ‘fully’ the spirit of India’s energy which you wish to privilege. It is the intangibility of that energy which is the true education for the visitor seeking wisdom.  

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