"Incredible India" - yoga, spices, Bollywood. These are not mere slogans employed by the tourism industry: Orientalist images of India persist in many other ways as well.

The Masala Modernities field trip to Delhi, which took place from February 20 to March 17, 2018, gave more than twenty students from various departments of the University of Potsdam the opportunity to challenge, revise and fine-tune these handed-down images and stereotypes. In a semester-long preparatory seminar, participants engaged with historical, cultural and political aspects of India's capital city. In the process, they defined and specified their own individual research projects which they pursued during the four-weeks stay in Delhi. Project themes ranged from Indian stand-up comedy to gender issues, from analyses of Delhi's street art scene to the pressure politics of impaired people in India, from children's picture books to the status of the holy Ganga river as a legal 'person', from the reading of various museum spaces to the construction of counterfactual histories of (post)colonial Delhi.