Sakshi Raj Kanchan

My name is Sakshi Kanchan, I have a degree in architecture and due to my inclination toward history, I have pursued heritage design planning and management at the Srishti Institute of Art, Design, and Technology. I got to know about Bidar from Shreyas who facilitated one of the modules in the second semester. As per my understanding, this network's one of the objectives is also to form a collective, exchange information, and share experiences. I would like to use this fill-out to talk about my then-growing relationship with the city of Bidar and its community. Currently, I am not a part of any collaboration placed in the city but am still in contact with many amazing people like Atah Ullah Sahab, Vinay sir, Shreyas, and other many dedicated team members.

I have got a chance to explore Dargah Hazrat Abul Faiz and form an understanding of the heritage and gender-inclusive aspects of the built environment through research based on the complex.

I was looking at how the built structure could create collective social memories that comprise the stratified communities of localities, outsiders, and passersby. It was such a pleasure to get to know many new research methodologies, ways of doing ideation, putting thoughts on paper graphically, getting a chance to talk to actual people who are part of the city for decades and being able to collect many anecdotes from them during the research and new learnings from several discussions over chai. The best part is I could do all this while living in the city for almost a week.

My first engagement with the network was in 2020, as a learner. Khanqah and Dargah culture - Abul Faiz Dargah are a few of the micro contexts that I’m interested to engage with.