How this digital-first platform is transforming cultural education and bridging archives, art, and emotion

Culture isn’t static—it lives, breathes, and evolves with us. And in a hyper-digital world, where information is fleeting and often superficial, the quiet power of deep cultural understanding feels more important than ever. There’s a growing need to slow down and truly understand the roots of who we are and where we’re headed. 

While the answers are out there, waiting to be discovered, we must first look back, delve deep, and examine the layered textures of our past. And in a country as culturally abundant and historically rich as India, the need for accessible, thoughtful, and interdisciplinary knowledge platforms has never been more urgent. 

Enter the TULI Research Centre for India Studies (T.R.I.S.)—a bold and imaginative new initiative that redefines how we study, engage with, and internalise India’s cultural identity. Founded by Neville Tuli, T.R.I.S. is a digital-first platform that invites students, educators, scholars, creatives, and everyday seekers to explore India in all its layered complexity. From rare art records to cinematic history, architectural legacies to philosophical thought, the platform offers an unprecedented way to engage with knowledge—visually, emotionally, and intellectually.

T.R.I.S. stands as both archive and invitation: to reflect, question, and rediscover India through a more immersive, human lens. With over three decades of work in cultural preservation and scholarship, Tuli, through T.R.I.S., strives to not only document the past but also reimagine how we learn from it. In conversation with Bazaar India, Tuli shares what inspired the creation of T.R.I.S. and integrating emotional and spiritual dimensions into research.

Harper’s Bazaar: What inspired the creation of T.R.I.S., and how does it differ from traditional academic approaches to Indian cultural studies?

Neville Tuli: T.R.I.S. is the culmination of nearly thirty years of writing, study, travel, research, curation, institution-building, and re-imagining India across many levels, subjects and experiences by one mind and life, thus bringing a unique sensibility and coherence to a vast idea. While the scale of obsession and dedication to creating a new conceptual framework, archive, and system to study and grasp India and India Studies anew is difficult to express, hopefully, tuliresearchcentre.org will do justice to the intention. The first version of the platform is open to the public, and newer versions are set to follow.

 

HB: In an era saturated with digital content, how does T.R.I.S. ensure intellectual depth and scholarly rigour while remaining accessible to a broader audience?

NT: The platform privileges the visual-textual equality within a deeply integrated historical context and knowledge base, unlike any other site in the world. It is a vast flow of fusing theory-practice within a unique approach to inter-disciplinarity, emanating from one human mind and his experiences structured across myriad conceptual frameworks, all cohering perfectly to serve India studies. We have resisted the speed and surface-level consumption characteristic of today’s digital environment. Instead, it has been built upon the slow, deliberate labour of structuring thousands of archival objects with aesthetic and intellectual care, context, and conceptual clarity. By designing a powerful search-and-filter engine from the ground up, rooted in a minimalist Excel-based framework, it prioritises meaningful discovery over sole reliance on algorithmic logic, allowing both specialists and first-time learners to explore at their own pace and depth.

HB: How do the various research categories function together to present a more holistic understanding of India’s cultural and historical identity?

NT: The 16 research categories are not silos but points of entry into a deeply interconnected civilisational matrix. They represent Mr Tuli’s journey of exploring and grasping the nature of India and conceptualising the first framework for a three-year undergraduate course on India Studies. The fusion of the visual-text-audio as sources of knowledge, along with the embrace of the arts-humanities-social sciences, along with the theory-practice-memory and the aesthetic-ethical-spiritual frameworks, adds various degrees of depth and insight to the nature of inter-disciplinarity. This allows the diversity and depth of India to blossom and reveal itself anew in many ways. 

HB: With unrestricted access to auction records and visual archives, what potential does T.R.I.S. unlock for young researchers, artists, and educators both in India and globally?

NT: The platform’s open and fully contextualised access to auction records provides an unprecedented resource for understanding the Indian modern and contemporary art market. For the arts and academic fraternities, the government agencies, the banking and corporate sectors, insurance agencies, and investors, this data offers clarity on credible pricing data, provenance, and various historical and artistic trajectories over time. For investors and market researchers, it forms a robust foundation to analyse value movements, artist performance, comparison across time with all different asset bases, and broader economic patterns within the cultural sector. By situating financial data within a wider visual and historical context, T.R.I.S. enables more informed, ethical, and transparent engagement with the Indian art market, making it not just a commercial resource but an educational one. 

 

HB: You’ve spoken about integrating emotional and spiritual dimensions into research. How does T.R.I.S. embody this vision, especially in a digital environment?

NT: As you can gauge from the 16 research categories which define the conceptual framework for India Studies, at least three of the categories—The Changing Smile of Childhood and its Second Coming, The Religious-Spiritual-Poetic-Philosophical Frameworks, and The Animal-Human-Nature-Continuum—will allow the intellectual-aesthetic-emotional-spiritual nature of knowledge to be privileged in many new ways. The fact that T.R.I.S. is collaborating with the Vanraja Sanctuary and Hospice for canine and feline children will also allow a deeply new attitude towards integrating the knowledge of living souls across species into a cultural, intellectual and aesthetic framework.

All images: Tuli Research Centre for India Studies. 

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