Reimagining India’s Cultural Tapestry: In Conversation with Neville Tuli

Neville Tuli addressing the media at the launch of the online archive tuliresearchcentre.org

There’s something almost poetic about the way Neville Tuli speaks about India’s visual heritage – with reverence, urgency, and a visionary’s gleam that has fuelled his nine-year odyssey to create what might be the most ambitious digital archive of Indian cultural knowledge systems ever attempted.

As the Tuli Research Centre for India Studies (T.R.I.S.) officially unveiled its groundbreaking website tuliresearchcentre.org on April 30, 2025, at a packed press conference at the India Habitat Centre, I caught up with the man whose obsession with preserving India’s cinematic and visual treasures has culminated in this digital magnum opus – a platform housing over 100,000 meticulously catalogued artifacts spanning film, photography, architecture, and fine arts.

An artist’s art and associated information are neatly listed and accessible freely

There are four value systems in society – economic, religious, cultural, and ecological, and the weakest among them is the cultural value system, said Tuli at the press conference, taking the audience through a presentation of Phase 1 of the website and its ambitious expansions planned.

“I spent so much time in the art world, to respect the value of the art object,” said Tuli. “If the art object is respected, the artists and all those around that will be respected. Cinema is the only cultural discipline which has taken along the box-office, the artist, the celebrity, everyone along with it. That is why cinema has the love of the people because it took on every facet of society’s expectations. All other cultural disciplines shy away from this and as a result, the family of cultural disciplines never worked together. Dance, music, poetry, philosophy, fine arts, literature – they don’t like supporting and cross-subsidising each other.”

The mission to connect the dots and build a repository that offers scholars, students and the general public an intertwined massive database of our cultural heritage drove Tuli towards shaping this website, and make it available for free access to all.

Every artist’s archival objects are categorised under Introduction, Research Centre, Body of Work, Integrated Timeline, Economics of Cinema, e.g., Amitabh Bachchan (in the picture)

What began as a passion project in 2016 has evolved into something far more revolutionary: a transdisciplinary gateway that seeks to rebalance how we perceive knowledge itself, challenging the primacy of text by elevating visual and audio elements to equal scholarly importance. Each piece of information in tuliresearchcentre.org is thus accompanied by a visual object, and if required, audio and video objects as well.

In our wide-ranging conversation, Tuli revealed the philosophy driving this monumental undertaking, the unexpected challenges of integrating diverse knowledge systems, and why he believes cinema holds special power as an educational resource in understanding India’s cultural narratives. As the conversation progressed, what emerged was a fascinating glimpse into how this digital repository might transform our relationship with India’s creative and intellectual legacies. Excerpts from the interview:

Research Categories For India Studies

Antara: The new Tuli Research Centre website represents a significant shift from traditional academic research platforms by prioritizing visual storytelling. What inspired this approach? How do you envision it changing the way people engage with India Studies?

Neville Tuli: Visual storytelling is not really prioritized but the visual as source of knowledge is being privileged with tuliresearchcentre.org, to create a much more just power balance with the text as a source of knowledge. Soon the audio as knowledge is to be accelerated to create the more meaningful trinity of knowledge, thus bringing back the aesthetic joy of learning along with the intellectual rigor, while highlighting the essential multiple perspectives of any search for truth beyond the facts.

Keeping alive the nature and energy of diversity embedded in all Indian creative traditions is also nurtured this way, so setting the rhythm for the evolving India Studies conceptual and engagement framework.

Antara: Your press release mentions cinema as a “key educational resource.” Could you elaborate on how film archives specifically contribute to our understanding of India’s cultural narratives, and what unique insights they offer that other mediums might not?

Neville Tuli: Cinema already fulfils its role as entertainment, an art form, the source of much glamour, celebrity, fashion, and the like, but now it is important that she fulfils deeper her responsibility for serving learning and education requirements. Any and every subject, from history to anthropology, economics to political science, has the voice of cinema within it, the key is to create the systematic archives and then myriad moments will emerge, to be collated and restructured, serving or countering arguments made through other disciplines. The joy and emotional connects which this will allow, will help bring back some of the energy and dedication lacking in the classrooms.

All the art forms generated to publicize a film are ideally placed to facilitate this process on many levels. The essential ability to fuse so many cultural disciplines under the umbrella of cinema further highlights the critical diversity of knowledge to be shared much more easily, hence further facilitating the deeper inter-disciplinarity nature of India Studies.

Listings of artworks with full details of auctions

Antara: With your three decades of experience in archival preservation, what would you identify as the most pressing challenges facing cinema and cultural archiving in India today?

Neville Tuli: Living in the moment, lacking an understanding, let alone a respect for history leads to a society blundering through life as it does not learn or grasp how mostly everything has been experienced before and each generation must learn from such and add their relatively minor new experiences and insights without having to recreate the wheel every time. A sense of superficial innovation pushed by economic systems further adds to this wasteful civilization building priority, as it is required to keep the financial moment feeling stable.

Further, you cannot just privilege preservation and the glories of history, which is simply documenting with passion and objectivity the work of all humanity and other living souls, including nature. It is a selfless activity, rarely receiving gratitude, with no financial incentives, and totally taken for granted by society, so you imagine how can such acts get privileged in our society today. The key is thus to bring the brilliance and importance of history to the fore with many Trojan Horses and indirectly make all citizens realise how intertwined is the past-present-future continuum, that each contemporary moment cannot function or know itself without millions of other moments experienced and lived by others. Loving cinema and having a meaningful cinematic culture are two very different paradigms. The latter cannot exist without history living in every corner of the day and speaking to all of us in simple and complex creative ways.

An exhaustive library of information and visuals to document the journey of each artist. In the picture is the Gieve Patel Library

Antara: The website is launching in phases with ambitious goals for 2025. What were some of the unexpected obstacles you encountered while developing this digital platform, and how did your team overcome them?

Neville Tuli: One major challenge was integrating heterogeneous sources of knowledge and data therein, with say, film publicity material, photographs, song synopsis booklets, architectural monuments, fine arts into a single, searchable system without diluting their individuality. We overcame this through a patient, interdisciplinary design process, building customized metadata schemas and crafting interfaces that adapt to multiple modes of knowledge consumption. Formatting the Excel sheet templates to absorb all possibilities and then filling in these simple yet complex frameworks consistently is a meticulous time consuming task.

The Sharmila Tagore Library

Antara: Your platform is described as “a pioneering digital platform offering open, precision access” to a vast integrated database. Could you share insights into the technology infrastructure powering this website? How scalable is it for future growth as your archives continue to expand?

Neville Tuli: The foundation of this platform is not built on complex technology, but on decades of meticulous human effort thousands of structured Excel templates developed through sustained intellectual labour, memory, and curatorial vision of one mind, hence cohesion is inherent. This disciplined groundwork allows for remarkable precision and coherence across the archive.

While the backend does incorporate a modular, API-oriented framework with cloud-based storage and metadata tagging to support scale and flexibility, the real engine of the platform is the integrity of its content architecture hand-built, rigorously classified, and designed to evolve without compromising its conceptual clarity. Technically React.js is for the front end, Node.js for the back-end, with MongoDB and Neo4j for data layering.

With approx. 120,000 partially documented objects and 70,000 basic level Masterlists at present we are barely mapping 300,000 relationships, we expect to cover over 10 million by 15^th August 2025.

The timeline helps the visitor view the artist’s journey

Antara: In an era of rapid AI advancement and synthetic content generation, how critical do you believe institutions like yours are in curating and verifying authentic cultural materials? What safeguards have you implemented to maintain the integrity and provenance of your digital archives?

Neville Tuli: Institutions like Tuli Research Centre for India Studies will become essential bulwarks against the blurring and distorting of authenticity. In an age where anyone can claim anything without any proof or written documents, our archives and systems where we enforce rigorous cross-checking, with provenance checks, maintaining primary source documentation and audit trails for every digital object will genuinely provide confidence to the public on the nature of knowledge and the discernment inherent.

AI is used selectively to assist, but never to substitute, human scholarly judgment. Each artifact is indexed with verifiable metadata linked to its documentation history, ensuring traceability and trust, which Excel precisely verifies very easily, though manually.

Listings of rare books on art with full details

Antara:  Your approach emphasizes transdisciplinary knowledge development. How does connecting cinema with other cultural elements like architecture, transport history, and fine arts create a more comprehensive understanding of India’s heritage?

Neville Tuli: India is a deeply diverse civilization with myriad inter-relationships lost, forgotten or neglected. The essence and influence of this diversity is similarly lost on the public if these links are not highlighted or clarified. Remember an incomplete or inadequate sharing of the degree of diversity is a destruction of the diversity, so at times even relatively flimsy links or connections are required if only to restore, revive or let die the relationships. Complexity demands itself to be seen as it is, but naturally simply, the nature of that communication and dissemination is pivotal. Categorising thus becomes a complex process.

A film showcase also includes a film trailer

Antara: The digital archive will eventually contain over 100,000 visual and textual objects. Could you share some of the rare or particularly significant cinema-related artifacts that researchers and film enthusiasts might discover on the platform?

Neville Tuli: We start with 100,000+ objects & documents in May and by end September should have integrated 250,000+ objects & documents. There are untold treasures from the Silent Era of Indian Cinema to the Hollywood Silent Era, with a  great focus on that world of Comedy and Horror where Fatty Arbuckle, Charlie Chaplin, Mack Sennett, Buster Keaton, Marx Brothers, to the Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Godzilla, King Kong, Creature from the Black Lagoon to every facet of history, especially the great German directors in the USA such as Lang, Murnau, Pabst, Lubitsch, von Stronheim, von Sternberg, to the mesmeric worlds of the Indian trinities of Dev-Raj-Dilip to Ray-Ghatak-Sen to SRK-Aamir-Salman, it is a unlimited feast of art works for all film lovers.

The 16 Research Categories for India Studies

The 16 Research Categories for India Studies

1. Cinema as a Critical Educational Resource
2. Modern and Contemporary Indian Fine Arts
3. Photography in India
4. The Printed Image, Popular Arts, and Crafts
5. India’s Architectural Heritage as Inspiration
6. Economics of Art & Cultural Industry
7. Automobile, Transport and Travel Heritage
8. Uncertainty – Magic | Horror | Sci-Fi | Gambling
9. Social Responsibility of the Creative Mind
10. The Changing Smile of Childhood & Its Second Coming
11. The Sensual Discipline within Creativity
12. The History & Historiography of Scholarship in the Arts, Humanities,
    and Social Sciences
13. Seeking Justice and Political Integrity
14. India and her Relationship with the World
15. The Religious-Spiritual-Poetic-Philosophical Framework
16. The Animal-Human-Nature Continuum

More Must Read in Silhouette Interviews

‘His First Release in Bombay was ‘Anand’, Not ‘Saat Hindustani” — SMM Ausaja, Author of THE BACHCHANS

‘Films Must be Restored Like a Work of Art’: In Conversation with Shivendra Singh Dungarpur

‘Soumitra Became Ray’s Voice’ – Interview with Catherine Berge, Director of ‘Gaach’

‘The Entire Village was Participating in the Filmmaking’: Masterclass with Shyam Benegal