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The Ford Foundation and Its Arts and Culture Program in India:

A Short History

Leela Gandhi

(La Trobe University, Melbourne)

THIS study of the Ford Foundation’s arts and culture program in India is an historical

overview, which concerns itself with some of the significant shifts, turns and landmarks

in the Foundation’s thinking about arts and culture in India. In the following pages what I

offer an outsider’s perspective, and one which may well not accord with either the

Foundation’s sense of itself, or with the views of other Ford-watchers within the vast and

complex field of Indian arts and culture. The study itself is divided into four sections.

Section (I) travels, as it were, to America, to chronicle the very early days of the

Foundation with a view to examining the ideological constraints (specifically those

produced by the Cold War) that might have delayed Ford’s immersion in the Indian

cultural field. Section (II) examines the Foundation’s initial contact and negotiation with

India, highlighting its early developmental focus, as also arguing that Ford’s grants, in

this period, to handicrafts, village/small industry, ‘accidentally’ prepared the ground for

the arts/culture program in this country. Section (III) traces the genesis of such a program

through a close study of a 1950s grant to the Southern Language Book Trust. This section

draws attention to the role of a Foundation consultant of these years, Arthur Isenberg, in

drawing the attention of American philanthropy to India’s vanishing cultural heritage.

Section (IV) is devoted to the formal inauguration, in the early 1980s, of the Foundation’s

arts and culture program in India. It also looks at the gradual shift in focus from Ford’s

early enthusiasm for the preservation of India’s national Culture to its concern with the

plurality of cultures populating the margins of the postcolonial Indian nation-state.

Observers and historians of the Ford Foundation (henceforth, FF) tend, by and large,

to agree that the organization was regrettably slow in entering the field of arts and culture

in India. In his 40 Years: A Learning Curve, Eugene Staples attributes this institutional

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neglect of culture in the subcontinent to a third-world specific developmental myopia:

‘The view of those who opposed any concentrated cultural programming in developing

countries was that the Foundation’s limited funds should be spent on problems directly

affecting the poor-----food, population, health and employment. Culture was seen as a

“soft” area’.1 A quick glance at the commentaries of domestic, US, observers, however,

suggests that FF’s late-coming to culture in India was merely symptomatic of a general

and quite geographically-neutral reluctance to privilege arts/culture over other more

pressing areas of human welfare.

Foundation documents tell us that when Henry Ford commissioned the famed Gaither

study committee, in the late-1940s, to report on the proper uses of Foundation resources,

one of his rare instructions to the committee expressed ‘the view that the arts might have

a somewhat lower priority than other subjects’.2 The consequences of this bias are

analyzed, and duly lamented, in Dwight Macdonald’s light-veined The Ford Foundation:

The Men and The Millions. A refreshingly non-partisan account of FF’s early years,

MacDonald’s book diagnoses the Foundation’s initial disinterest in the arts and

humanities, in turn, as the side-effect of an even wider contagion: originating in the

philistinism endemic to post-war America, and then, incubating and gathering strength in

the cold, dry air of social reform circulating through the corridors of most large

philanthropic Foundations. The FF’s early ‘philanthropoidal style’, MacDonald insists,

was of a type: ‘scientific rather than cultural, utilitarian rather than aesthetic’.3

These, and other, negative accounts of FF’s relation to culture are certainly

corroborated by the evidence of grant records. It was only in the 1960s that culture

became a visible feature of the Foundation’s domestic activities. India began to gain

incidental cultural attention, even later, in the late-1970s. However, and without

contradicting the veracity of grant catalogues and budgetary projections, I wish to argue

that the verdict and interpretative framework of writers like Staples and MacDonald is

constrained by a far too simplistic dichotomy between utility and aesthetics, development

and culture, such that one set of terms necessarily excludes the other, and insodoing,

forcibly ‘uncouples’ culture from other forms of social and human existence. Now, in the

context of the present discussion, two consequences could follow from any attempt to

resist such an‘uncoupling’. The first might allow us to argue that, insofar as most ‘life

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practices’ are constitutive of culture, there was always a cultural component to FF

activities in India (and at home) despite fierce protestations to the contrary. The second,

contingent, view, proposes that the history of the Foundation’s inability to, as it were,

think India culturally, was not so much the result of a self-conscious policy decision to

privilege, contra Oscar Wilde, utility over aesthetics, but rather, that it was the accidental

by-product of larger institutional, historical, and political, values and presuppositions.

What, then, were these values and presuppositions? What were the various ideological

lenses which framed Ford’s evolving cultural ‘take’ on India? Where, if not in the

copious grant records and files, can we find the real story of the FF’s culture program in

India? The following section will begin the process of addressing some of these questions

with reference to the early years of the FF, at home, in the wake of the Gaither committee

study report.

(I) Gaither and Later: America, 1949 – 1961

THROUGH all the early interviews I conducted with FF staff and officials, in connection

with this study, I was struck by one peculiarity of the institutional culture which I had

been invited to study. Without exception, every one of the interviewees insisted, in the

name of decentralization, that the Foundation’s imposing New York head office had

never (would never have) really exerted any policy-type control over its Indian tributary.

Confusing information, especially as the cornucopian Archives secreted in the basement

of East 37th Street tell a different story. The dusty files and stomach-churning reels of

antique microfilm lovingly gathered there indicate that the two offices have consistently

been connected by a strong flow of mutual commentary, correspondence, memorandums,

reports, evaluations, reviews etc. And with reference to the particular focus of this study,

the arts/culture-specific policy and ‘thinking’ documents produced by the Head Office

often seem in audible dialogue with the contiguous arts/culture transformations in New

Delhi. In the pages that follow, then, it will be difficult entirely to elude the idea of

meaningful communication and reciprocal influences within, and between, various

branches of the FF. The notion of a common informing culture, however, does not in any

way jeopardize FF claims about the non-monolithic nature of various institutional

policies. It is quite possible, a la T.S. Eliot, to generate individual talent within the

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confines of a/any tradition. Accordingly, the task of the historian is, in context, to search

out the precise outlines of an institutional zeitgeist, and then, with equal energy look for

points of departure, for those ideas which escape, if only to be reabsorbed with

transforming effects, within the whole again.

In this section, the only one of its kind in the present study, my gaze is almost

exclusively upon the U.S. as a setting for the earliest evolution of FF thinking/policy on

arts/culture. I do this for the following reason: although the India program itself began

(and quickly asserted its autonomy) soon after the Foundation was created, FF attitudes in

these early years were overwhelmingly informed by the imperatives and pressures of the

Cold War. Indeed, the Ford presence in India itself was, in so many ways, a direct

consequence of U.S.-Soviet antagonisms. Although US intellectual fashions would, in

times to come, invariably insinuate themselves into the minds and hearts of Indian

intellectuals/professionals (some of whom would then take up jobs as FF program

officers), never again after the thawing of the Cold War would American politics feature

quite so prominently in FF’s international activities/programs.

In summary, my argument in this section runs as follows: the story of the FF’s culture

program in India, I believe, takes shape in the tricky interstices between two features of

the influential Gaither report, mentioned earlier; the one emphasizing a commitment to

‘human welfare’, and the other, far more interesting, to the ‘conditions of world peace’.

Both, let us make no mistake, are, as we will see, products of Cold War reasoning, but

where the former fails to exceed this reasoning, the latter entirely breaks away from the

original model, with attending implications for FF views about the worth of (funding)

culture in India. The early and enthusiastic discourse of ‘human welfare’, which feeds

directly into Ford’s earliest position on the arts and humanities, posits a narrowly

humanistic and neo-imperialist infatuation with the civilizing influence of liberal western

culture in a world allegedly under threat from the barbarism of communism. There is no

ideological space within this perspective for any meaningful articulation of India’s

culture. By contrast, Gaither’s rhetoric of ‘peace’, which drives FF into a zealous

internationalization of its activities, ushers in a new concern for non-western studies,

under the rubric of area studies. Motivated and strategic in its inception, the FF boost to

area studies in America seems on the face of it to have little to do with the realm of

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aesthetics and culture. Nonetheless, and as Francis Sutton maintains in his introduction to

The Men and the Millions, ‘the program escaped its original conception and was captured

by academics who had their own interests to deflect them from dutiful service to the

national interest’ (xvi). As a wide range of critics has argued, what we now know as

postcolonial, multicultural, minority, queer and subaltern studies, all owe their

inheritance to the seeds of cultural relativism accidentally scattered by the first

proponents of area studies. And, as such, it is in this ‘accidental scattering’ that we might

also find the ethical and intellectual basis for FF’s ‘real’ arts and culture program in

India. So, let us begin, then, at the beginning, with the word(s) of Gaither.

Faithful to the instructions of Henry Ford, the Gaither study committee report,

published in October 1950, gave little direct attention to matters of culture and art. It was

only much later, in March 1957, that the Foundation committed itself to a fledgling

Program in Humanities and the Arts, which it set loose in America, on a grand budget of

$1.6 million for exploratory arts funding until the fiscal year 1961, and an annual budget

of $400,000 to cover the whole spectrum of the humanities. Despite its influential and

conspicuous evasiveness about the arts and humanities, however, the Gaither committee

report is, in the strict sense of the term, a profoundly humanistic document. For,

enshrined at the heart of its philanthropic project is a (secular/anthropocentric) cultural

and educational program, concerned with the celebration and cultivation of individual

human capacities. The Foundation’s commitment to ‘human welfare’, which Gaither et al

announce, in high octave, at the very outset of their report, resonates, as it might have

done for a Cicero or a Petrarch, with nothing less than the desire to enable “men” to

‘progress toward the fullest realization of their mental, emotional, and spiritual

capacities’.4

Conventionally, humanism (in all its historical variants) has always seen its ideal of

perfected human nature as embodied in, and expressive of, a certain form of government

or political organization. So, in his Letters on the Aesthetic Education of Man, the

humanist-idealist philosopher Schiller insists that a strong State (emerging, in this case,

from the unification of Germany) alone gives full scope to that which is best in human

nature. In his words: ‘Each individual human being … carries within him, potentially and

prescriptively, an ideal man, the archetype of a human being … This archetype, which is

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to be discerned more or less clearly in every individual, is represented by the State’.5 The

nineteenth-century poet and writer Matthew Arnold, likewise, links the humanist

cultivation of the self to the integrity and sovereignty of colonial Europe. As is well

acknowledged, in each of these instances, humanism also authorizes, in the name of

human development, cultural and material aggression against those peoples seen to lack

the favored/appropriate form of government or political organization.

In 1950, then, and much in the spirit of their considerably more famous humanist

predecessors, Gaither and Co., saw their ideal of human welfare and dignity firmly

embodied in, and reinforced by, the canonical form of western liberal democracy. So too,

in keeping with the political climate of their times, the preservation and dissemination of

this ideal was inextricably linked to their cultural anxieties about, and animosity toward,

the alleged barbarism of communism. Here is a telling passage:

As the tide of communism mounts in Asia and Europe, the position of the United States is crucial. We are striving at great cost to strengthen free peoples everywhere. The needs of such peoples, particularly in underdeveloped areas, are vast and seemingly endless, yet their eventual well-being may prove essential to our own security. To improve their standard of living they must import and use knowledge, guidance and capital. The US appears to be the only country able to provide even a part of the urgently needed assistance (p. 27)

Despite its much-touted internationalism, then, the Gaither report secured for FF the

dubious privilege of installing the US as the canonical and archetypal form of western

liberal democratic culture. And second, as such, it also obliged the Foundation to take on

the additional task of proselytizing the values underpinning this culture. But what does

this long, digressive excursion through the Gaither report have to do with the FF’s early

thinking about culture in India? One thing. There is, arguably, and as we will see below,

no ethical or intellectual space within the agenda described above, for anything even

remotely like a sympathetic view of non-western cultures.

Many of the values underpinning the Gaither report passed seamlessly into a June

1962 ten-year evaluative study, compiled by a committee of trustees and staff organized

under Board Chairman John J. McCloy. The resulting, Directives and Terms of

Reference for the 1960s, with 4 volumes of supporting materials covering the period

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1951-1961, offers fascinating insights into the ideologically founded cultural constraints

of the FF during its early years. A massive compendium of past achievements and future

directions, the Directives document includes some evaluations of the new 1957 Program

in Humanities and Art. Largely apologetic in tenor, for the slow progress of the FF in

such areas, these evaluations are striking principally for their anxious assertion of the

deep cultural and intellectual continuity between the US and the rest of the western

(democratic) world. Everywhere, the prose groans under the cumulative weight of

examples and arguments demonstrating America’s rightful place in the sun of European

‘civility’. Imaginary readers are tirelessly assured that American materialism is finally

giving way to a new aesthetic sensitivity. With the closing of the American land frontier,

it is argued, formerly compulsive citizens, unable to find material outlets for their energy,

are turning inward to the forgotten source of their creative well-springs. Also poised on

the edge of this revolution in artistic introspection are the new class of leisured rich, and

those countless ordinary citizens (without either surplus energy or wealth) whose

apprehension of America’s emergence as a world-power has progressively, if

inexplicably, driven their ‘minds inward’.6

This inner aesthetic space, thus disclosed (and to be cultivated, of course,

humanistically), was, as the writers of the Directives insisted, animated by ‘opera and

ballet’, and the like; a taste created, first, by the thirties and forties ‘influx into the United

States of some of Europe’s most creative artists’, and second (lest Europe forget), by the

‘U.S. involvement in World War II and the presence of millions of young Americans in

Europe’.7 At the end of its first decade of existence, then, FF had clearly started to think

of the arts and humanities both as a significant means of securing the pre-eminent place

of the U.S. within the new Euro-American ‘Atlantic community’; and, concomitantly, as

an important ideological weapon in the Cold War arsenal. Accordingly, financial support

to ‘the arts as an ethic or an aesthetic’ had assumed, as we are told, ‘a new doctrinal

urgency’.8 And, much in the spirit of nineteenth-century ‘civilizers’ like Thomas

Babington Macaulay, FF trustees and staff in, 1962, seemed quite convinced about the

indispensability of the arts and humanities in ‘extending the enlightening and liberalizing

role of Western culture’.9

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A quick glance at activities funded in the name of arts and humanities between 1951-

‘61, then, yields few surprises, revealing an overwhelming emphasis on the indubitably

rich tradition of canonical western music and ballet. Notably, the first humanities-

directed grant of $640,000, made by the Foundation in 1952 under the aegis of the Fund

for Adult Education, went to the Institute for Philosophical Research in San Francisco,

for the purpose of ‘undertaking a dialectical examination of Western humanistic thought

with a view to providing assistance in the clarification of basic philosophical and

educational issues in the modern world’ (The Fund for the Advancement of Education,

Annual Report, 1951-1952, p. 12).10 Dr. Mortimer J. Adler, the driving force behind the

Institute had long been associated, along with then FF associate director, Robert Maynard

Hutchins, with a University of Chicago based academic lobby keen to ‘return education

from its modernist emphasis to a study of classics and philosophy as the reservoir of

fundamental thought’.11 Deeply conservative in his philosophical and cultural

assumptions, Adler was also co-editor, with Hutchins, of a 54 volume Great Books of the

Western World, eventually published by the Encyclopaedia Brittanica in collaboration

with the University of Chicago Press. A subsequent 2-volume index to these tomes, the

Syntopican, was praised by like-minded reviewers for delivering ‘an intellectual machine

that collects the data of thought from all the great books of Western man’.12

If Adler’s Institute for Philosophical Research was given the job of fighting the good

fight on behalf of western man/culture, the work of achieving the same end through a

direct cultural war against communism was deputed to the Congress for Cultural

Freedom (CCF), another one of Ford’s major grantees during these early years.

Dedicated to combating the twinned evils of communism and totalitarianism, the CCF

boasted a membership of some of the leading luminaries of Anglo-American letters:

Arnold Toynbee, Isiah Berlin, Benedetto Croce, John Dewey, Ignazio Silone and John

Kenneth Galbriath (Daed, 99). A favorite child of the FF, the CCF was, however, shown

to be equally dear to the CIA by a New York Times expose in 1966. Notwithstanding

revelations of CIA support, however, Ford remained loyal to the CCF until it dissolved in

the 1970s, funding it under a startling new alias: the International Association for

Cultural Freedom.

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To summarize the discussion so far: it is our contention that FF’s unwillingness to

fund culture in places like India was not merely a function of its utilitarianism or even of

its disinterest in ‘aesthetic’ or ‘humanistic’ values. Rather, its ‘take’ on culture was, we

maintain, shaped by the pressures and possibilities of a range of other (social, political,

ideological) values and presuppositions. So, for instance, during the Cold War, FF found

itself in a situation where, on behalf of America, it had to commit itself to two politically

urgent tasks: first, to confirm the deep and abiding cultural unity among western

democratic nations (the Atlantic partnership), and, second, to assert (especially among the

unconverted) the unchallenged ethical preeminence of western liberal culture. Informed

by such imperatives, thus, it is not surprising that the FF’s Humanities and Arts program,

during these early years, became, in effect, an unapologetic paean to the western cultural

canon. And yet, ironically, were it not for the Cold War, the FF might never have made

its entry into the field of non-western studies. Born out of strategic motivations, this

enterprise, as we will see, paved the way for the cultural relativism which has dominated

FF thinking since the 1970s, and in which we might find the real seeds of its evolving

cultural support for India. Let us, briefly, review some of the main features of this

narrative.

Early in 1951, the FF President Paul Hoffman (so legend has it) deliberated long and

hard in a Californian hotel room with his associate directors in order to devise a radical

new program for the FF. The team took as its starting point some ‘basic assumptions’

enumerated within a memorandum prepared, for the program planners, by Gaither and his

colleagues. The first of these assumptions, destined to produce quite unexpected

consequences, began with the following proposition: ‘the avoidance of total war and the

establishment of the bases for permanent peace is the great task confronting the world’

(In Sutton, Daed 56). This was not, of course, pacifism of the standard type. Rather, it

was based on the growing awareness that the US response to the Soviet Union had,

hitherto, been far too reactive and defensive, thereby exacerbating the peculiar tensions of

the Cold War. A better strategy might eschew the rigid polarities of conflict, and seek,

instead, to confound Soviet antagonists through a shrewd battle for the minds and hearts

of the (as yet) politically endangered peoples of the East. How to do this? Hoffman’s

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solution was the creation of a center for the study of intercultural relations, and his

objectives are explained and amplified in the following recommendation of his proposal:

The concentration of American interest upon the west overlooks the fact that there are millions of people in the east who do not want to be enslaved by Soviet Russia. By constantly talking about the west, we run the risk of alienating these millions. There is no doubt that the traditions of the east and west are different. There is also no doubt that every effort must be made to unite the free world. Although there are institutes for the study of Russia in the United States, and although many students from the East have come to the United States, no university has a center dedicated to understanding the ideas of the Far East and Near East, to discovering the common elements in the eastern and western traditions and to arranging for intellectual exchange between the east and the west.13

We will soon turn to the troubling motivations behind this seemingly eloquent defense

of cross-cultural exchange. For the moment, however, it is important to note that

Hoffman’s push for non-western studies, as early as 1951, forestalled any potential

parochialism in FF activities. By the end of 1951, overseas development (OD) had

become one of the Foundation’s largest programs, and by October 1952, following

Hoffman’s journeys through Asia in August 1951, the FF had a resident representative

operating in India and Pakistan. An International Affairs program (IA) soon committed

itself to ‘increasing public understanding of international issues and augmenting the

effectiveness of American participation in world affairs’;14 and the International Training

and Research initiative (ITR), which would feed into the incipient academic field of Area

Studies, aimed to increase the pool of foreign-area specialists. By 1952 Ford had assumed

financial and administrative responsibility for the Foreign Studies and Research

Fellowship program, funded since its inception in 1948 by the Carnegie Corporation, and

administered by the Social Science Research Council (SSRC). By the end of 1952, a

grant of $1 million provided support for eighty-three Fellows to study in Asia and the

Middle-East, another $100,000 were given to the University of Michigan for its Near

Eastern Studies program, and $250,000 to the American Council of Learned Societies

was utilized for the development of basic Asian languages resources.15 The sums and

projects kept increasing. More fellowships handed out to scholars working in Asia, the

Middle East, Africa and Eastern Europe resulted in a stream of studies dealing with,

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variously, Islamic political theory, Chinese and Russian history and literature,

contemporary religion in Turkey, contemporary Japanese literature and studies in African

politics. $150,000 to MIT helped fund its Center for International Studies; $35,000 went

toward Michigan’s Near Eastern Studies program; Stanford’s Hoover Institute won

$255,000 to help increase the accessibility of its Asia and Middle East holdings; a grant

of $500,000 enabled the American University Field Staff develop ‘field’ training

facilities for potential foreign area specialists before they entered the hallowed portals of

the university system; and ‘millions’ of dollars went into the compilation of an English-

Telegu dictionary-----in a bid to out-manoeuvre the Russians who, allegedly, were filling

Andhra Pradesh with communist propaganda in that language.16 Another substantial grant

to the American Council of Learned Societies assisted in the preparation of dictionaries

and research and training material in twenty-eight ‘Near Eastern’ languages. And, by

1956, FF support had enabled, among others, Boston University to commence an African

Studies program, Harvard and Columbia Universities to fund research into the political

and economic aspects of modern China, and Cornell University to develop Chinese

language training in Formosa for students from the U.S.

Before proceeding any further with this congratulatory narrative, however, we do need

to come to grips with, and to acknowledge honestly, the strategic imperatives behind the

FF’s ITR/Area Studies initiatives. Let us begin with Edward Said’s path-breaking book,

Orientalism, which insists upon the ideological continuities between American ‘area

studies’ and nineteenth-century ‘orientalism’: a Western mode of knowledge about the

non-West directly linked to the interests of Western (imperialist) power over the non-

West. After World War II, Said argues, a new international configuration of forces

(marked by the decline in influence of France and Britain) firmly announced the arrival

of an American imperium: ‘A vast web of forces now links all parts of the former

colonial world to the United States’.17 In this newly organized world, it seemed inevitable

that the area studies scholar, with her claims to regional expertise, would take over

orientalism’s job of producing strategic knowledge ‘in the service of government or

business or both’18 Keenly attentive to the continuation of old racist stereotypes in these

early decades of American area studies, Said conscientiously refuses to gloss over the

unpalatable politics/history of this discipline. In his words:

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Genealogically speaking, modern American Orientalism derives from such things as the army language schools established during and after the war, sudden government and corporate interest in the non-Western world during the postwar period, Cold War competition with the Soviet Union, and a residual missionary attitude toward Orientals who are considered ripe for reform and re-education.19

Thus, what appeared under the guise of pure scholarship was, in point of fact, really a

compromised form of knowledge, much more concerned with issues of public security

and policy than with the cultural worth of its objects of analysis. Dipesh Chakrabary has

recently drawn renewed attention to a Ford advertisement for ITR Fellowships in 1957/8,

which unambiguously asserts the practical/strategic basis for foreign-area specialization;

being ‘part of a broader Ford Foundation program to help meet the need in the United

States for the knowledge and understanding of foreign areas that are required for the

effective discharge of this countries increased international responsibilities’.20 Ford is

also directly named in Said’s list of ideological culprits. The traditional orientalist

outlook, first developed in Europe, was sustained in post-War America, he insists, by,

‘the powerful support of Ford and other Foundations, the various federal programs of

support to universities, the various federal research projects, research projects carried out

by such entities as the Defence Department, the RAND Corporation, and the Hudson

Institute, and the consultative and lobbying efforts of banks, oil companies,

multinationals and the like …’ (p. 295).21 It is worth mentioning, in the context of the

corporate-academic-political networks criticized by Said, that it was FF support in 1948

which enabled the defense think-tank RAND corporation to get started, and that Gaither,

so central to the early shape and form of FF programs, was not only a former consultant

to the National Defence Research Council, but also a former incorporator, general

counsel, and chairman of the RAND Corporation.

While Said’s critique is exemplary in its resistance to the degradation of knowledge, it

leaves little room for (multiple) possibilities of resistance, both internal and external, to

flawed systems of knowledge-production. Accordingly, his insights into the historical

limitations of area studies have often been faulted for their inability to anticipate (or

allow for) the complex evolution of the field beyond, and despite, the Cold War. For a

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more nuanced account we might, briefly, turn to Immanuel Wallerstein’s essay, ‘The

Unintended Consequences of the Cold War on Area Studies’.22

Wallerstein, like many of the academic authorities we have cited so far, gives

credence to Ford’s financial leadership in shaping area-studies. As he writes:

It was the newly established Ford Foundation which was to have the widest, longest impact, beginning in 1952 when it instituted its Foreign Area Fellowship Program, which was administered directly until 1962 and since then via Joint Committees of the SSRC and the American Council of Learned Societies (ACLS). These fellowships paid for doctoral training and field research of a very large number of the most well-known U.S. area specialists. (I myself was an early recipient of one of their Africa grants in 1955-57) (209).

Speaking, as it were, from inside the area-studies machine (and as an FF beneficiary),

Wallerstein takes particular care to point out a long history of resistance to Cold

warmongering by principled scholars working in the field. As early as 1955, he tells us,

Wilfred Cantwell Smith, addressing the American Oriental Society, called for resistance

to those aspects of area studies which were subsuming knowledge to policy rather than

vice versa. There was something seriously ethically flawed, he claimed, about a form of

knowledge-seeking which approached non-western cultures only as passive objects of

(strategic) U.S. information. Although Smith took care to prioritize ‘loyalty’ to one’s own

culture over the heady claims of cultural difference, his lecture introduced the idea of

multiculturalism as a necessary consequence of unmotivated area-studies: ‘A civilization

does not yield its secrets except to a mind that approaches it with humility and love.

Knowledge pursued ad majorem Americae gloriam will, in the realm of oriental, as

indeed in all human studies, fail to be sound knowledge … The overall problem should

perhaps be worded: “The role of university in a multi-cultural world”’.23 By 1963, while

addressing the Center for Middle Eastern Studies at Harvard, the great British orientalist

Sir Hamilton Gibbs (one of the few orientalists for whom Said expresses something

approaching admiration), extended Smith’s tentative protest even further, to pronounce

the area-specialist as an ambassador for cultural diversity.24

A few years later, with the Vietnam War and university protests of 1968-’70, the

tables had, of course, turned considerably, and, many area-studies scholars were

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compelled radically to rethink the philosophical assumptions of their discipline in ways

far too complex to summarize here. Suffice it to say that when the discipline reemerged

in the 1980s, having substantially lost its moorings in the previous decade, it had

metamorphosed into something truly rich and strange. In the end, as Wallerstein writes,

‘more important than the internal debates about area studies was the emergence of a new

form of “area studies” that did not call itself by that name. It was the sudden growth … of

women’s studies on the one hand, and “ethnic” studies on the other (African American

Studies, Hispanic or Latino Studies, Judaic Studies etc.)’.25 No longer interested in the

binaries west/non-west, civilized/savage, which had regulated their discipline through its

descent from nineteenth-century orientalism, these new scholars turned their attention to

a wide range of ‘minor’, ‘marginalized’, ‘dispossessed’ cultures, both without and within

the former west/non-west. The “area” in area studies now marked the site of social,

political, economic and cultural neglect, and the scholar engaged with this site had

assumed the mantle of what Said once described as ‘oppositional’ or engaged criticism.

There is another wonderful twist to this tale: by the 1980s, the concerns raised under

the rubric of the “new” area studies had come into sharp conflict with the cultural the

traditional humanities (evoked, we might remember, early in the Gaither report). The

western liberal canonical tradition was no longer acceptable as an alias for Culture itself;

its former hegemony was seriously being questioned by a cluster of dissenting cultures

(so forcefully derided in Harold Bloom’s monumental, The Western Canon:The Books

and School of the Ages).26 Within years, the humanities had themselves changed

character; absorbing within their framework and curriculum the reforms ushered in by

area studies. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum is apposite and eloquent on the subject

of these “new” humanities. It is worth quoting her in some detail:

It would be catastrophic to become a nation of technically competent people who have lost the ability to think critically, to examine themselves, and to respect the humanity and diversity of others. And yet, unless we support these endeavors, it is in such a nation that we may well live. It is therefore very urgent right now to support curricular efforts aimed at producing citizens who can take charge of their own reasoning, who can see the different and foreign not as a threat to be resisted, but as an invitation to explore and understand, expanding their own minds and their capacity for citizenship.

15

“Soon we shall breathe our last”, wrote Seneca at the end of his treatise on the destructive effects of anger and hatred. “Meanwhile, while we live, while we are among human beings, let us cultivate our humanity.” Across the United States, colleges and universities are working to develop curricula that will meet the challenge contained in those words. Let us support them.27

What then of FF, to return to our main theme? It would be too much to claim that the

Foundation either pioneered or anticipated the radical changes within area studies. But it

is certainly true that were it not for FF support, the field would have taken much longer to

emerge in the first place. So too, it is also true, and creditable, that Ford kept pace with

the reforms within the field, and followed them faithfully at every theoretical turn, and

around every sharp ideological corner. The new FF ‘Crossing Borders’ initiative, for

example, is fully cognizant of the academic critiques against area studies. And, as such, it

reiterates the Foundation’s strong and abiding support for the new and improved face of

the field, ‘at all levels of research and pedagogy, from special research institutes and

graduate programs to basic undergraduate and graduate curricula’28 A quick glance at

post-1980s internal reports on arts/humanities reveals a contiguous shift in FF’s

understanding of culture; now reflecting a concern for ‘minor’ and ‘dissenting’ cultural

forms. Witness, for example, the tone and focus of this 1981 information paper on arts

and culture in the Foundation:

… our on-going arts program in the U.S. has been paying particular attention in recent years to the involvement of minorities and women in the arts and to organizations that give expression to the interests and cultures of minority groups. We have on our current agenda in support of black dance companies, a bilingual Hispanic theatre, an organization that trains young black and Hispanic jazz musicians, and a music theatre that introduces plays by women (38).

Notably, the same paper, cited above, also explicates the long occluded links between

this new understanding of culture, on the one hand, and FF’s involvement with ITR/area

studies, on the other:

An important strand of Foundation support to the arts and humanities that is frequently overlooked came as a consequence of the Foundation’s long-continued effort to build U.S. knowledge and competence on the major

16

areas of the world, and particularly non-western areas … Ford professorships in Chinese painting, Indian literature, African art, Latin American Literature … are dotted across the map of the U.S. (34)

So, to reconnect with the thread of our argument, it was, I submit, FF’s association

with area studies which also opened a window onto the possibilities of (non-western)

Indian culture-----as an end in itself. Notably, discussions of FF’s ITR program initiatives

in the Directives and Terms of Reference for the 1960s, reviewed earlier in this

discussion, are already much more ‘culturally’ sophisticated and nuanced than those

dealing directly with questions of the arts and humanities. Where the latter are still

preoccupied with the bombastic cultural claims of an imagined ‘Atlantic community’, the

former speak, somewhat differently, in the (potentially) self-critical language of non-

western studies. The program evaluation dealing with OD, for instance, insists that the

successful development of new nations substantially depends upon ‘cultural and

intellectual factors’ for the reason that ‘neither men nor nations live by bread alone’.29

And, in the same document, a program submission on the future activities of International

Affairs (IA), acknowledges-----possibly for the first time in FF records-----the importance

of funding cultural development in the non-western world:

The successful development of new nations includes, and in part depends upon, cultural and intellectual factors. New nations seek to “discover” their own cultures, and to achieve greater clarity concerning their national purposes, and to establish new relationships and forms of communication with each other and with the developing world. It is proposed that OD support carefully selected projects designed to further these less tangible but important purposes of developing nations’.30

In order to see what became of this early recommendation, indeed what led up to it, we

will need to change direction and go, in the next section, across the Atlantic, to India.

But, a few more words in conclusion before we close the present discussion. In hitching

its considerable fortune to the wagon of ITR/area studies (initially, for all the wrong

reasons), Ford had clearly picked a winner: a field which would bring with it the winds of

change into the Foundation, and in so doing, blow away, over time, the worst aspects (for

there are good ones too) of the liberal humanism endorsed by Gaither and his followers.

An accident? But then, we are still grateful to Newton for sitting dreamily under the right

tree when the momentous apple fell.

17

(II) Nehru and Ensminger: Passages to India in the 1950s

THE previous section suggested that FF’s unwillingness or inability to support cultural

activities in India directly, was symptomatic of the ideological malaise fashioned by the

Cold War. This section has two aims. First, it will argue that in addition to its

responsiveness to the conditions of US politics, Ford’s initial activities in India were also

circumscribed by the expectations of the postcolonial Indian state. And second, it will

claim that despite FF protestations to the contrary (and the fact that it only announced a

coherent India-specific cultural program in the 1980s) the Foundation was always caught

up within the complex politics of culture in India. Moreover, when observed closely,

many of the Foundation’s early and accidental cultural interventions can be seen to

prefigure the shape of its current cultural initiatives. Thus, as we will see, the FF foray

into handicrafts in the 1950s, albeit in the name of development and livelihood, laid the

basis for many programs of the late-1980s. To continue with our story, then.

In an anomalous and throwaway section of his monumental oral history, entitled, ‘The

Sensitivity of the Ford Foundation Contributing to India’s Art and Cultural Programs’,

Douglas Ensminger (the first FF representative in India), protests that FF’s utilitarianism

and consequent neglect of Indian culture, in the early years, was not of his choosing, but

rather a negative effect produced by the recalcitrance of the New York office, on the one

hand, and by the new Indian government’s myopic disinterest in matters cultural, on the

other. Refusing to admit any inconsistency between development and culture himself,

Ensminger roundly berates the Foundation for its narrow minded approach in India:

I have no difficulty … in accepting the correctness of the Foundation’s initial orientation to help India innovate development programs … But I have difficulty in accepting the persistence of the Foundation’s view that the Foundation should stay out of cultural programs in the overseas programs. On this issue the Foundation has been inconsistent … My point is if cultural programs are important to the U.S. they should be accepted as being of equal importance in India.31

Indian planners and political leaders stand equally condemned for their ‘lack of

concern to the question … of culture’.32 While it is hard to accept Ensminger’s self-

portrayal as a solitary crusader on behalf of Indian culture, he is certainly correct (albeit

18

misguided in his diagnosis of the problem) in pointing to FF’s unwillingness to support

cultural activity overseas. We have examined, in some detail, the reasons for this

reticence in the preceding section. What then of the Nehru administration’s real view of

Indian culture, and efforts, if any, in the sphere of cultural conservation/development?

The question is worth considering, briefly, as it offers a useful context for FF’s own

arrival at the scene of culture in India.

We know about the low priority given to culture by India’s planners from the fact that

the First Five Year Plan made no separate allocation for the culture sector. And, until

1980, when a separate Department of Culture was created with the Ministry of Human

Resource Development, cultural affairs constituted a minor wing of the Department of

Education, with some responsibilities being shared by the Ministry of Information and

Broadcasting. Yet, as B.P. Singh has shown, in his book, India’s Culture: the State, the

Arts and Beyond, given the strongly cultural component of anti-colonial nationalism, the

leaders of postcolonial India invoked the idea of Indian culture, frequently and with great

enthusiasm. Maulana Azad, especially, insisted upon the cultural responsibilities and

obligations of the Indian State: ‘in a democratic regime, the arts can derive their

sustenance only from the people, and the State-----as the organized manifestation of the

people’s will-----must, therefore, must undertake its maintenance and development as one

of its first responsibilities’.33

Although Azad’s passionate advocacy of the arts did not quite translate into State

policy, the Indian government was not entirely negligent in this sphere, continuing

support to those arts and culture institutions which it had inherited from the colonial

government as also launching some initiatives of its own. Part of its colonial legacy, in

this regard, comprised a cluster of significant institutions (orientalist in inspiration)

concerned with the business of heritage and conservation. These included, for example,

the Archaeological Survey of India (ASI), established in 1861 to protect and chronicle

monuments and objects of archaeological, cultural and historical significance. The

National Archives of India, founded in 1891, for the preservation of records, also passed

into the hands of the Nehru administration, as did a range of museums, the National

Library (known as the Imperial Library until 1948), and the All India Radio, launched in

1936, to instruct and delight the radio-possessing Indian masses. In addition, where the

19

British administration had withheld support to literature and the performing arts-----out of

a combination of political fear and aesthetic revulsion-----the postcolonial government

proved relatively energetic, creating a range of important new organizations. The Sangeet

Natak Akademi (1953), provided crucial support for research into the traditions of Indian

dance, drama and music; the Sahitya Akademi (1954) set the stage for new writing in,

and translations across, India’s multiple regional languages and literatures; the Lalit Kala

Akademi (1954), took over the task of fostering and coordinating activities within the

plastic and visual arts. The Sangeet Natak Akademi, in turn, established three further

institutions to develop training programs in the performing arts: the National School of

Drama (1959), which quickly became an important focus point for practical and

academic work within the theatre, the Manipuri College of Dance, and the Kathak

Kendra. Also deserving of mention are the National Book Trust (1957) designed to

publish and disseminate widely, literatures in all Indian languages; the Publication

Division of the Ministry of Information and Broadcasting, responsible, among other

things, for undertaking the publication of the monumental Collected Works of Mahatma

Gandhi; the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (1958), established to foster cultural

cooperation and exchange between India and the rest of the world; and the Films Division

(1948), to blame for that series of worthy but interminable documentaries, so well known

to Indian cine-goers for marking the dreary time before ‘Intermission’, and the welcome

release of Bollywood.34

While this is not, by any means, a bad list of achievements, the Nehru administration’s

cultural efforts were negligible when compared to the energies (budgetary/planning) it

expended on, for example, industrialization, economic growth, mass literacy, the

institution of free compulsory education at all levels etc. The developmental focus of the

new government derived, of course, from the need to repair, first and foremost, the tragic

material effects of colonialism. But equally, its particular edge, as it were, owed much to

Nehru’s unique, indeed legendary, preoccupation with the uncompromising

modernization of India. Ford, then, took its cue from prevailing governmental priorities,

and by January 1952, when the redoubtable Douglas Ensminger was installed as

Representative in a small office at the Ambassador Hotel in Delhi, there was little doubt

about the Foundation’s principal role in India. Drawn, from the outset, into the serious

20

business of nation/state building, FF resources were quickly concentrated upon the areas

of public administration, community and agricultural/rural development, education, law

and legal studies, manpower planning and employment, and other programs of this kind.

Much of this commitment was also inspired by Nehru’s personal influence upon

Ensminger, who, among countless others, quickly succumbed to the charismatic leader’s

charms and attending credo of modernity.

Secreted within the innumerable boxes which comprise Ensminger’s oral history, a

small but significant paper on ‘Relationships with Nehru’, sketches out the contours of

this infatuation. In page after page, Ensminger attests to his special bond with the man

who, in 1951, ‘was India’, detailing, variously, his free access to the prime-ministerial ear

and office, his unique understanding of Nehru’s concerns and motivations, Nehru’s

abiding interest in his own ideas, and his sense of being engaged, as equal, in a

partnership to bring enlightenment to the Indian people.35 Writing (or rather, speaking)

himself into the very fabric of postcolonial Indian history, Ensminger frequently

represents himself, in such terms, as Nehru’s right-hand man, or as a benign deputy

ruler/patriarch. In a section on FF’s interest and involvement with Indian education, for

instance, he describes himself, tellingly, and through an elaborate metaphor, ‘as a parent

standing by an open well seeing one’s son, who had fallen, drown. The rope which was

used to draw water was too short to reach the drowning boy, and the boy was too

occupied with drowning to reach up for help’.36 A fascinating letter of February 23, 1970,

from Alexander Heard to David Bell, reporting on a recent visit to India and Nepal,

confirms (with disapproval) Ensminger’s tendency to megalomania and his idiosyncratic

Nehruvian affectations: ‘… the highly personalized and egocentric style, the Nehru rose

daily in the lapel, the morning ride to the office in the Victoria, et cetera’.37 Historical

gossip aside, these instances allow us to conjecture that Ensminger’s personal efforts to

model himself on Nehru played no small part in shaping his public (developmental)

politics in postcolonial India.

So far then, the picture seems fairly straightforward. Between1951-’52 when Ford

arrived in newly independent India, its services were not required in the cultural sphere---

--already a low priority (though not insignificant) area for government. Ford, we might

conclude, did not intervene within Indian culture, first, because it didn’t know how to,

21

and second, because it wasn’t asked to. But, I wish to argue, differently, that in those

early years of Indian independence, which we are surveying here, it was simply not

possible to participate, as Ford did (and wholeheartedly), in the project of Nehruvian

modernity without being drawn, severely, into the politics of Indian culture. Why? To

answer this question we need a far deeper understanding of the Nehruvian idea of culture

than the one we have been working with so far. And, to this end, we must turn, briefly to

Nehru’s Discovery of India (1946) that strange, almost foreign, perspective on the people

and places comprising the Indian nation.

Published a year before Indian independence, Nehru’s Discovery consistently

represents Indian ‘culture’ as an idea emerging out of a conflict (unto death) between two

aspects of the Indian past: the first ‘usable’, and the second, ‘disposable’. What is the

content of these two aspects? For Nehru, the usable past consists of all those aesthetic or

cultural products (let’s call them ‘heritage’) which need to be excised from their ‘value

context’ and brought into alignment with the needs of the present, viz; modernity,

national unity, development, progress. In sharp contrast, the disposable past comprises

the way of life, or system of values, which, although surrounding, enabling and

signifying ‘heritage’, is no longer consonant with the mood and imperatives of the

present. It is embodied, furthermore, at the scene of the village and in the figure of the

peasant. Nehru’s bias against this aspect of the past (and by implication against the

culture of the rural masses) is consistently betrayed in the language of Discovery, which

rails, in varying registers, against the ‘monster meetings’ which greet him in Indian

villages, and against the ‘illiterate peasant’, ‘with his limited outlook’, whom he

identifies as ‘the supreme problem of India’.38 Elsewhere in the text, reporting on his

impressions of village India, he categorically announces his desire to delegate

rural/traditional culture to the waste-bin of history: ‘… I approached her [India] almost as

an alien critic full of dislike for the present as well as for many relics of the past that I

saw … I was eager and anxious to change her outlook and appearance and give her the

garb of modernity … There was a great deal that had to be scrapped, that must be

scrapped’.39 To enter into alliance with Nehruvian modernity, then, necessarily brought

with it a corresponding obligation to ‘scrap’ the disposable Indian past; to reshape, in

other words, the very fabric of Indian culture.

22

There is another twist to this tale. For, the ‘village’, portrayed so negatively by Nehru

was also a major source of ideological and ethical conflict between him and Gandhi, who,

contrary to his younger colleague, posited rural India as the very embodiment of that

which was best and most valuable in Indian culture. As he writes in one of his numerous

commentaries on village industries, ‘I would say that if the village perishes, India will

perish too. It will be no more India. Her own mission in the world will get lost … we

have to concentrate on the village being self-sufficient, manufacturing mainly for use’.40

While Gandhi is known for his passionate espousal of the social and economic betterment

of rural India, little attention is given to the fact that he also saw in the reinvigorated

village a site for a genuine and meaningful aestheticisation of Indian life itself.

Constantly warning his audiences that ‘the decay of [village industries] spells too the

decay of art’ (ibid. 37), Gandhi makes the following prophesy: ‘ When our villages are

truly developed there will be no dearth in them of men with a high degree of skill and

artistic talent. There will be village poets, village artists, village architects, linguists and

research workers’ (ibid. 19).

Thus, if the village, in post-independent India, emerged as the locus of (in some ways)

the major ideological conflict between Gandhi and Nehru, Ford was inadvertently drawn

into the eye of this storm (and its attending cultural politics) in 1952, when Nehru invited

Ensminger to consider FF support for the development of small/village industries. This

invitation, I believe, inaugurates FFs cultural enmeshment with India and deserves some

attention.

One day in 1952, or so Ensminger tells us, when he walked into the prime-ministerial

office (in his customary manner) to discuss with Nehru the state and shape of FFs

involvement with a rural community-development program, the leader surprised him with

an invitation to prepare a report on the modernization of small and village industries.

Nehru’s impulses, as ever, were practical and development oriented. Holding up his

elegant hands to Ensminger, ‘in a very thoughtful and reflective mood’, he spoke the

following words: ‘“While we must do everything we can to apply the findings of science

and develop modern industries with good management, we must keep in mind there are

millions of idle hands in India … we must do everything we can to provide employment

opportunities to put the idle hands to work”’.41 Let us pursue the subsequent chain of

23

events before submitting them to analysis. Following Nehru’s request, Ensminger

assembled (under the aegis of the FF) a team of experts which reported, in due course, to

the Planning Commission with a list of threefold recommendations: first, to set up four

regional small industries service and extension institutes, second, to establish a small

industries corporation and, third, to establish a small industries board which would bring

together leadership from the various states. Notably, while foregrounding strategies for

the modernization of some small industries, the team’s recommendations (fully accepted

and endorsed by the Planning Commission) did nothing to attack, or compromise the

position of, the traditional industries and handicrafts. Nowhere did they suggest, for

instance, that the government discontinue its support for the handloom, khadi and

handicraft industries. Following on from this report, a few years later, in 1957, FF

assembled another team-----this time to report directly on the reinvigoration (as opposed

to modernization) of the handloom/handicraft industries.

While there were many consequences which followed from these initiatives (we will

revisit some them in greater detail, in a moment), perhaps the most significant outcome of

FFs entry into the field the field of small/village industries was that it suddenly brought

the hitherto Nehruvian Foundation directly into conflict with Indian Gandhians. Once

again, Ensminger’s oral history is revealing, describing in one segment, and with barely

disguised distaste, the apparently uncouth demeanor of an anonymous Gandhian who

burst into his office without an appointment to pronounce, sans encouragement, great

doom on FF’s small industries investigations: ‘Almost immediately in our conversation

the Gandhian follower of traditional industries made clear that he saw no gains, or no

opportunity, for the Foundation to make a contribution to India’s thinking with respect to

small industries’.42 On another occasion, more ‘followers of Gandhi’ confronted

Ensminger to criticize FFs support to a government sponsored program of community

(rural) development. Rightly believing that the project of village self-sufficiency would

be better served by non-government bodies, these protesters found an unsympathetic

audience in Ensminger, whose objections are predictable: ‘This philosophy of a

cooperative underpinning village self-sufficiency was in direct opposition to a philosophy

of the cooperative playing a dynamic role for development and the cooperative

functioning as a business organization under capable management and with an orientation

24

to meeting developmental needs for agriculture’.43. This particular conflict between

Gandhism and the FF/Ensminger is of historic interest if we recall that by the late 1970s

FF had, of course, shifted its support, almost exclusively, to NGOs; and that, furthermore,

its arts/culture program, when it finally emerged, was principally (with a few notable

exceptions) addressed to non-government agencies, bodies, institutions.

In the 1950s, however, to resume the thread of this narrative, Ensminger wanted to

have his Nehruvian cake and pretend to eat a rustic Gandhian one too. Reflecting, thus,

on ‘Gandhian Philosophy’ in his oral history, he distinguishes between two species of

Gandhian, the first ‘traditionalist’, and the second ‘authentic’. While the former, he

argues, are retrogressive, the latter comprise those quiet visionaries who see no real

inconsistency between the Mahatma’s philosophy, on the one hand, and the

developmental obligations of the modern Indian nation-state, on the other. In his words,

‘this … group, which looked upon Gandhi as being a dynamic individual, was quite ready

to think through the application of the Gandhian philosophy and the Gandhian teachings

to independent India, therefore giving it a developmental orientation’.44 Ensminger finds

a shining example of this type of mythical Gandhian in the Rajkumari Amrit Kaur who,

apparently, once assured him that Gandhi’s program of family and village self-

sufficiency was always intended to be a provisional strategy (to be abandoned with

independence), designed to ‘frustrate the British policy of taking raw resources from

India to Britain’.45 On another occasion, at Gandhigram, Ensminger was apparently

clasped to the breast of a sentimental Gandhian and praised for keeping FF thinking close

to the teachings of Gandhi himself: ‘He pointed to his pad of paper and he said, “During

the day, I have recorded every statement you have made, and as I listened to you … I said

to myself over and over again, Gandhi may just as well have been here saying the very

things you said”’ (ibid., p. 14).

Ensminger’s disingenuous self-representations notwithstanding, the FF (and its

officials) were deeply suspicious of, if not antagonistic toward, Gandhi, in these early

years. In his, rather more brief, oral history, Willard Hertz (an official on the program

staff of the Pakistan office), for instance, categorically condemns Gandhi as a

‘reactionary’ who appealed to the most backward-looking elements within traditional

Indian society: ‘Gandhi was a very reactionary man in many ways and one reason why he

25

was so successful as a political leader was that he was operating in a society which

responded favorably to his reactionary appeals’.46 Enlisting FF as a positive,

counteractive force against Gandhism, Hertz is quick to repudiate any suggestion that the

Foundation was starting to bend Gandhi-ward in, and through, its small industries

initiatives: ‘ … if someone told you we were building on the Gandhian tradition, I think

that’s very deceptive. I think in a fundamental way we were definitely not; in a very

fundamental way we were deliberately turning our backs on the Gandhian tradition in the

countryside because we thought that was a dead end’ (p. 23). Rather, Hertz claims, the FF

looked upon the ‘village’ and the rural countryside through a distinctly Nehruvian

looking-glass, perceiving therein a culture and way of life seriously in need of

unceremonious ‘scrapping’, such that one could ‘go into villages, tear them down and

build them all over again, new houses, streets and street lights …reorganizing … socially

and economically and in every other way’ (pp. 24-25).

Now, to the business of commentary. How, as we have been claiming, did FF’s move

into the area of handicrafts and small/village industries, inadvertently, prepare the

groundwork for what would emerge, over time, as its arts/culture program in India?

Essentially, by plunging the Foundation into the heart of the Nehru-Gandhi contretemps

over the status and significance of the ‘village’ in independent India, it provided crucial

(if contestable) exposure to the Gandhian view of the village/peasant as true repositories

of Indian culture and, thus, as objects of interest rather than antagonism; of preservation

rather than ‘scrapping’. In this view we can find, of course, the seeds of what would

emerge as the conservation and preservation programs of the late-1970s and early 1980s.

But, more so, this is also the outlook which has provided inspiration to FFs dynamic

folklore program, inaugurated in the late 1980s and active up until the time of the present

study. We will turn to this program, in greater detail, later in the discussion. For now it is

sufficient to acknowledge its intellectual origins in the confused and confusing

handicrafts/village industries grants disbursed, with much arrogance and some foresight,

during the Foundation’s infancy in the subcontinent.

It is worth casting a quick eye over two small grants made under the rubric of the

handicrafts/small industries program, the better to see how FFs accidental immersion in

village industries constantly threw up new ways of bypassing the inexorable logic of

26

development, and revealed, in flashes, the proper scope and the direction of an/any arts

and culture program in India. In 1956, then, Ford sanctioned a grant to purchase from the

Museum of Modern Art in New York, for distribution in India, some 1000 copies of

books and 6 prints of films arising from an earlier exhibition, organized by the MOMA,

on Indian handloom textiles and craft ornaments. The tone of the grant itself is somewhat

condescending, purporting to bring the principles of good design back to small industry

service institutes and handicraft organizations in India. Ironically, however, the books

themselves and other relevant material, carefully preserved in the MOMA archives,

champion not only the inimitable craft of Indian artisans, but more importantly, the way

of life, the continuous culture, sustaining the diverse and ancient traditions of Indian

design. Among the essays which accompany the book arising from the exhibit, John

Irwin, for instance, insists that ‘In India, the decorative arts reflect something

fundamental in the traditional way of life’ (23).47 And, writing in similar vein on, ‘Indian

Fabrics in Indian life’, Pupul Jayakar, reiterates the inextricability of traditional craft and

culture: ‘For in India, textiles have rarely been concerned with fashion or individual

separateness and uniqueness; rather, garments have always been only one part of a

complex ritual of life, one aspect of a … milieu in which man is born, grows to stature,

and dies’ (15). It is impossible, then, as these writers suggest, and contra Nehru,

surgically to excise Indian craft/art forms (the usable past) from their ‘value context’ (the

disposable past), without doing irreparable damage to the traditions themselves. Such too

are the conclusions reached by the International Study Team on Handicraft Industry,

mentioned earlier, and brought to India by Ford grant in 1957. Headed by a

Mr.Martinuzzi, vice-president of the New York department store Macy’s, the team’s

report includes practical suggestions about marketing and design. In addition, it urges

government consistently to protect the artisan’s world ‘from the shock of arbitrary

transformation’,48 elsewhere voicing the recognizably Gandhian plea to ‘Keep folkcraft

pure. Re-establish old standards, that have been lost. Regenerate creative talent in the

villages. This will necessitate the cooperation of ethnologists, art historians, and village

teachers with a feeling for the true cultural past’.49

The discussion so far has, of course, been based on a partisan reading of the conflicts

which shaped postcolonial India, and, as is implicit, on a preference for Gandhian

27

eccentricity over Nehruvian pragmatism. One could, I imagine, tell this story very

differently. And yet, there is an unmistakable way in which the evidence of these early

years (the grants, the reports, the discussions, the memoirs) suggests that Ford only came

to think culture in India-----sometimes negatively-----when it was forced to look askance

from the often inspirational edifice of Nehru’s modern India toward the concealed face of

that other, non-modern, India, once adopted by Gandhi, and soon relegated to the margins

of the postcolonial nation-state. Modernity itself, needless to say, constantly throws up its

own fascinating cultural and artistic forms (Bollywood represents but one expression of

urban culture/s in India). So too, there are, as we know only too well in contemporary

India, great dangers in submitting, unthinkingly, to forms of cultural

romanticism/nostalgia. Nor is the village, by any means, the only authentic site of/for

Indian culture. But, as Ford came to recognize over the years, it is not possible, ethically,

philosophically, politically, to construct a sanitized Indian culture out of the ruins of the

village. One has, as Dr Freud might once have said, to live with all aspects of the past in

order to live without them. Such is certainly the wisdom which came to Ford in the

course of its career in India. We can see this, at a glance, in the changing shape of its

subsequent handicraft/village-industry centered grants.

FF grants to handicrafts/village industries have, over the years, retained the central

livelihood focus which provided the occasion, we might remember, for the Foundation’s

entry into the field. So, for example, a 1986 grant to support a Workshop of Handicraft

Producer Groups in Bihar, remains loyal to the FF’s initial developmental agenda, in its

overwhelming concern ‘to enhance socio-economic conditions of women who are

producers of hand-crafted items’.50 A similar set of priorities are clearly explicated in a

1990 grant to the Self-Employed Women’s Association, which directly links the

Foundation’s interest in craft producer groups to its ‘interventions in other employment

sectors’. The aim here, as elsewhere, is ‘to enhance the returns women get from their

labor, their control over the production process and their access to the resulting income.

The premise is that only when these conditions are met can employment become

empowering for women’.51 If pragmatic in texture, however, the notion of development

underscoring these (and related) grants, has already undergone a sea-change. For a start,

and with few exceptions, the FFs craft-based activity is now almost entirely mediated

28

through non-government bodies, or through local networks which substantially bypass

the national mainstream. Second, and most significantly, the rhetoric of development is

no longer judgmental, readily foregrounding the value of the life-worlds or cultural

content within/behind craft activity. A 1993 grant to support handicrafts and livelihood

for the Tibetan Community, is quite comfortable with the fact that ‘Handicrafts are both a

manifestation of cultural identity and one of the chief sources of income for the Tibetan

community’.52 Another grant to facilitate the participation of four Indian craft specialists

in the World Crafts Council Meeting in 1986, is especially forthcoming on the need for

India to evolve, out of handicraft/village industries, ‘a holistic approach more in tune

with their own indigenous cultures and philosophies’.53 This privileging of the cultural

content of craft-worlds is most clearly enunciated in a 1988 grant to the Madras Craft

Foundation (MCF). In this case, and possibly for the first time in FF records, the

boundaries between craft and folklore are almost entirely blurred, such that craft activity

is seen as the precious repository of indigenous/folk knowledge-traditions. Defending

support for a project to combine a ‘folk art development program’ with a ‘cultural

education program’, the Request for Grant Action (RGA) fully endorses MCF’s desire to

illustrate, through a series of permanent exhibits and installations, ‘the cultural context of

the folk art’, so as to, ‘expose urban children … to their own traditional mythology and

folklore through participatory programs’.54 Notably, where the grants of the 1950s

represented the ‘artisan’ and her industry as the naive and passive recipients of

governmental and Foundation expertise-----as the inhabitants of fundamentally ‘ignorant’

worlds-----the artisan-figure at the center of these new grants appears as the subject of

knowledge; a teacher whose cultural instructions might offer the urban-dweller some

strategies for living, in this case, with modernity. This reversal is most clearly announced

in a 1985 grant, which extends enthusiastic support to traditional theatre crafts for the

reason that these crafts, uniquely, enable the traditional performer to ‘create an

atmosphere whereby the audience views the actors as gods and demons, thus facilitating

communion with the divine …’.55

Much has changed. However, before we conclude this section, it is crucial to make

note of the fact that it took at least another three decades for FF to reach the conclusions,

and to develop the intellectual outlook, reflected in the grants discussed above. So far, we

29

can only claim that the handicraft initiatives of the 1950s, however misguided in their

inception, were not wasted in the history of the Foundation’s cultural work in India. They

bore good fruit, albeit slowly.

(III) The Southern Languages Book Trust and Beyond

THIS change of section (dear Reader) does not yet mean a change of decade. We are still

situated, chronologically, in the 1950s, in order to look at another grant which gained a

lot of Foundation attention at the time, and which is often regarded, by observers of the

FF, as the Foundation’s first cultural initiative in India. This was a grant of 1955 to the

Southern Languages Book Trust (SLBT), which Ensminger, with characteristic modesty,

rates, ‘as a major and significant contribution in the field of culture in India.’(B. 12, p.

4).56 And much like that early grant which funded a team to report on small/village

industries in India, the SLBT grant was also, as we will see, of foundational importance

to FFs arts/culture program in India.

According to the 1955 FF Annual Report, the establishment of the Southern

Languages Book Trust, with a grant of $400,000, was meant to promote, within India, the

publication and distribution of good books in large quantities and at low cost. In

rendering generous support to the SLBT, FF claimed to be making up for the absence of a

sound publishing industry in India. The small size of the Indian book buying public,

combined with the absence of capital to make larger printings, had, arguably, stunted the

growth of publishing enterprise in India. After independence, India stood in urgent need

of some benefactor who could take the necessary financial risk and commit themselves to

publishing, distributing and promoting high quality books to a mass audience. And Ford,

in response, stepped in to take up the challenge. The SLBT, headed by a board of seven

trustees who were the Vice-Chancellors of South India’s seven major universities, was

expected to publish up to twenty books a year in each of the four major South Indian

languages. The annual list of books would be eclectic, ranging from the ‘works of both

Western and Oriental authors and … include both classic and contemporary works in

history, philosophy, fiction, poetry, belles letters, drama, the arts, the natural and social

sciences, religion and travel; children’s books, how-to-do-it books and reference

books’.57 The truth? Partly. But first a look at the happenings behind the scenes.

30

Early in the 1950s, an associate director at FF called Milton Katz began to receive, by

way of the Honolulu-based Watumull Foundation, letters from a former YMCA organizer

called Marie Buck who had made a sort of home in Madras, where she ran a medical

program for the industrialist Mr. Anantharamakrishna. In her spare time, Ms. Buck had

developed a deep concern for the lamentable book situation in India: good and cheap

books in the ‘vernaculars’ were few and far between, and worse still, the ‘Communists’

were flooding the southern Indian market with cheap propagandist paperbacks through an

ingenious distribution system. Haunting university campuses at the end of term, they

would distribute (for free) suitcases full of readable printed propaganda to naïve but

mercenary students returning home for the vacations. Once home in their small towns or

villages, these students, in turn, would (apparently) get on their bicycles, distribute books

throughout their region and, of course, pocket the proceeds.58 In the absence of an

effective form of US counter propaganda (the USIA were, apparently, not able to match

the distributional genius of the communists), the troubled Ms Buck felt convinced that the

time was ripe for the Foundation to intervene.

Intrigued by his correspondence with Ms Buck, Katz approached James Laughlin of

the Ford-funded Intercultural Publications, asking him, further to appropriate

consultations with Douglas Ensminger, to explore the possibility of an FF intervention

into the Indian publishing scene, or lack thereof. A word about Laughlin: approached in

the early ‘50s by the FF to set up a program of cross-cultural literary exchange, as part of

the Foundation’s growing efforts in ITR, Laughlin (who claims to have learnt his

questionable internationalism at the feet of Ezra Pound) set up a magazine called

Perspectives USA to export, with FF blessings, representative aspects of US culture

abroad. Often under fire, as Dwight Macdonald writes, for antagonizing ‘literary circles

abroad by competing at cut rates with their own struggling magazines’(87), Perspectives

and Intercultural Publications constitute an important face of FF’s ITR/area studies

interests. And as such, Laughlin’s involvement in the SLBT/Books for India project

directly links FF’s area studies initiatives to its arts and culture program in India. At this

stage in the FFs history, however, the limitations of its ITR thinking spilled over,

invariably, into its perspective on Indian culture. So it is not surprising that the early

conversations, letters, debates which accompany institutional preparations for the FF

31

Books for India program should betray the relative immaturity and sadly motivated

nature of the FFs stance on India/Indian culture during this period. And I put them on

view here if only to give some measure of the great distance that Ford has traveled since.

In their initial exchanges over the proposed Books for India project, Laughlin and

Ensminger were never able to reach a satisfactory consensus on the subject under review.

Where Ensminger, to his credit, was wary of Intercultural’s narrow anti-communist

imperatives, his own suggestion that the Foundation launch its program through the

Bharitiya Vidya Bhavan (BVB) brought him under suspicion of harboring secret

sympathies for Indian cultural nationalism. Those on Laughlin’s side included one

Wallace Stegner, an influential novelist on the FF trust-list, who vetoed the BVB on

account of its proposed ‘History and Culture of the Indian People’ series, which, he

claimed, carried the unpleasant odor of third world culturalism and patriotism. For

Stegner it was crucial that Ford maintain its credentials as the luminous and civilizing

agent of westernization in India. In his words, ‘I should think the aim of a foundation

such as Ford … might be to encourage the outward-turning of a nation like India, and

help it make contact with the West, rather than to endow its inward-turning and its

patriotic embracing of its ancient glories. Granted that any culture ought to know itself

before it turns outward toward another; but that self-knowing seems to me hardly the

concern of the foundation.’59 In another memo railing, at large, against Indian “Great

Books”, he defends the production and dissemination of only those books ‘which admit

the incontrovertible, accept the partial westernization of Indian thought’.60

Meanwhile, over October and November 1952, or so the records tell us, as James

Laughlin and his co-director at Intercultural, Richard Weil, traveled through the pre-

winter landscapes of the India and Pakistan, they became increasingly persuaded that ‘the

Communist book distribution effort is effective and a serious menace to the stability of

the subcontinent’.61 Contrary to their ally Stegner, however, they returned home

confident that the communist menace in India would not be countered so well through

incontrovertible westernization, as much as it might through the deliberate fostering of

cultural nationalism. In their words: ‘Such a program, it was agreed, should not only

translate Western books but also intensify the revitalization (after the long British

suppression of Indian culture) of traditional indigenous values-----a potential spiritual and

32

intellectual force which may well prove an even stronger barrier to the acceptance of

Communism by Hindus and Moslems than imported Western ideals’.62 Where Stegner’s

prose and attitudes are evocative, as we might recall from the first section, of Gaither et

als values, Laughlin and Intercultural recall the language of a-still-to-be-reformed area-

studies. Both, however, are ultimately concerned with the task of combating communism.

Ensminger, meanwhile, wants book production in India out of a Nehruvian interest in

literacy, but is ill-equipped to think about the cultural consequences of such a move. And

out of this ideological/theoretical goulash, the Southern Languages Book Trust was born;

in the end, a harmless entity whose list included a chaos of titles ranging, at a glance,

from Three hours with Animals, Electricity in Everyday Life, In the Life of Nehru, You

and Your Radio. Hardly stuff to vanquish communism by, or even to bring on a burst of

patriotism among Indian readers. Accordingly, the official launch of the SLBT late in

1955 was greeted with little suspicion. Most newspapers waxed eloquent about the

virtues of reading, and somewhat more fulsomely, the Indian Express suggested that ‘one

be grateful to the Ford Foundation for offering both financial and professional aid’ to the

Indian world of letters.63 And should one?

With hindsight we can see how the SLBT project paved the way for FF interest in

cross-translation between Indian languages. For, an important feature of the SLBT lay in

its efforts to translate literatures across the four major languages of Southern India. Over

time, this enterprise grew to greater maturity, pointing FF in the direction of what would

become a complex program of linguistic research, teacher training, the production of

materials aimed to foster bilingualism in the Indian languages, and the effective use of

English. In 1957, a sixteen year grant of $1,015,386 to the Government of India’s English

Language Teaching Institute helped enormously with a project to train teachers and to

develop appropriate materials for instruction, in order to prepare a greater number of high

school students for the English-based university system in India. A later 6 year grant of

$590,000 to the Central Institute of English and Foreign Languages at Hyderabad, made a

further contribution to the development of English language teaching, while also creating

opportunities for increased international communication. Other significant grants in this

field include a ten year grant of $659,000, beginning April 1970, to the premier Central

Institute of Indian Languages at Mysore, to reinvigorate the regional languages through

33

cross-translation; a four year grant of $400,000 to the Municipal Corporation of Greater

Bombay to assist language schools attempting to communicate instruction across at least

ten language groups arising from the cities immigrant populations. A more recent 1993

grant allowed Mozhi to produce a standardized Tamil dictionary with the aim of

countering political and regionalist attempts to ‘purify’ the language by exploring and

liberating its usage into contemporary and everyday life.

But what about FF’s role in the development of Indian literary culture? If regrettably

marginal, relative to its other achievements, FF has certainly made some interesting

efforts in this field in the wake of the SLBT project. In 1969, for example, a small grant

to the National Book Trust enabled Bhabani Bhattacharya to complete his fascinating

little book, Gandhi the Writer; and in 1985, with a sensitive (but not sustained)

apprehension of the need for holistic humanities development in this country, Ford

supported the Literary Criterion Center in its efforts to organize scholarly interactions

between creative writers in regional languages and scholars in the humanities, with a

view to broadening the intellectual horizons of both. By 1986, a breakthrough grant to

Granthali, extended much needed support to ‘socially significant’ literature in India,

specifically the work of Dalit writers in Maharashtra. In the same year, the Vatsal

Foundation was given support for its work in the field of Hindi literature, and its efforts

to develop the craft of new entrants at the scene of Hindi letters. In recent years,

something of FFs commitment to language/literature development is exemplified in its

support to the admirable publishing venture Katha. Originating as a non-profit society

based in Delhi, under the leadership of writer Geetha Dharmarajan, Katha has been hard

at work since 1989 to develop translation as a serious and professional activity in India,

and one which privileges the status of the ‘story’ as a means of cross-cultural exchange

and communication. Unlike the Sahitya Akademi, the government’s central agency for

language and literary development, which focuses mainly on translations from the

regional languages into Hindi, Katha is possibly unique, in India, for its large-scale

efforts to promote high quality literary translations among and between the various

regional languages. At the heart of its concerns is the desire to foster multicultural

tolerance in a country increasingly beset by divisions of culture and religion, to say the

least. Katha’s FF supported ‘Kanchi’ and ‘Shishya’ initiatives are a case in point. Named

34

after that great place of learning, famous in around the second-century A.D. for attracting

students and scholars from all over the country collectively to translate texts as part of

their education, the ‘Kanchi’ program aims to bring translation into the very heart of the

literature and humanities academy. To this end it has produced primary texts for

departments eager to teach Indian literature in translation, conducted highly popular

teaching translation workshops for teachers in schools and colleges, helped device

specific courses for students in translation studies, and conducted culture-link workshops

to augment connections between India’s diverse regions, cultures and people through the

means of fiction in translation. The ‘Shishya’ program continues these initiatives through

a more direct pedagogic engagement with schools. Continually encouraging the

imagination of younger students through the play of languages and stories, the workshops

organized under the auspices of this program are helping to train a new generation of

students in the habits of cultural pluralism.

These successful new grants, and FFs very immersion in language development and its

small efforts toward literary development, then, can each be traced back (in a way) to its

support, albeit wrong-headed at the time, to the SLBT. But to understand and appreciate

the real (if entirely accidental) link between the SLBT and FF’s art/culture program in

India, we need to pursue a small, hidden, sub-narrative, or rather, the relatively unknown

Indian career of a man called Arthur Isenberg.

Sometime in 1955, when FF was in the process of launching its somewhat ham-fisted

investigations into Indian book production, Isenberg was appointed as a consultant to the

SLBT for a period of some seven and a half years. His brief, in the first instance, was to

survey the publishing scene in South India, and the results of his investigations are

available in/as the text of his Sital Primlani Memorial Lecture of 1969, on ‘The

Publishing Scene in India – Achievements, Problems, Prospects’.64 There are, really, few

practical insights in the lecture; nowhere does the text dazzle the reader with the

confident technical and cultural authority of other, coeval, FF commentators. Instead, the

tone is quietly optimistic, charting positive innovations in the publishing sector, praising

Indian publishers for their growing professionalism, and enthusiastic about the new trend

of using khaddar and other beautiful Indian handlooms for book-binding. The lecture

ends with disarming humility and civility:

35

From everything that I have seen, heard and learned in the last fifteen years in this hospitable land, I say-----not with the conventional politeness of a guest-----but out of a profound conviction that, inspired by such examples as that of the late Shri Sital Primlani, the eminent book-man whose memory we are honoring today, the Indian publishing industry will rise to the occasion and will nobly meet the many challenges posed by your great country’s expanding needs’ (15)

If I might permit myself some rhetorical excess here, I would like to suggest that in

Arthur Isenberg, FF finally sent to India a man capable of perceiving the best that India

had to offer, both to itself and to the world. Through all the records of the 1950s and early

1960s which we have been studying, his voice stands out for the fact of its freedom from

the blinkered and motivated prose of cold warmongering, as also from the quasi-

Nehruvian license, so readily embraced by Ensminger, to approach India and its people

simply as the passive objects of modernization and development. Notably, Isenberg is, in

many ways, the architect of the arts/culture program, and it is to this aspect of his career

that we must now devote our attention.

In January 1964, acting in an entirely personal capacity, Isenberg prepared an informal

report entitled, The Case for American Support of Selected Cultural Projects in India. By

the time he came to write this piece he had been living in India for nearly a decade, over

the course of which he found himself, ‘profoundly impressed by the achievements of

Indian culture’.65 Struck, however, by the disparity between the munificence of American

non-governmental support to ‘India’s economic, technological, scientific, medical and

educational development,’ on the one hand, and the near-total absence of ‘such aid to

India’s arts and humanities,’ on the other, he resolved to record his fears in a report on

the state of culture in India. The resulting 61 page study, canvassing support for a variety

of cultural fields in India, was duly dispatched to a wide range of US philanthropic

organizations, in the hope that one or more of them would, ‘decide to take the necessary

action to help translate into reality a program in support of cultural activities in India,

either along the lines set forth in these pages or along some other fruitful lines’.66

More important than the specific recommendations made by this study, Isenberg’s

argument chronicles a significant shift in attitude to the dialectic of development versus

culture framing US views of India at the time. What has shifted? Writing some nearly

36

two decades after Indian independence, Isenberg articulates a deep anxiety about the

inexorable logic of development that was driving India with such apparently incalculable

speed toward the unknown future that the outline of its monumental (cultural) past had

begun to dim and fade away. There are, needless to say, several problems with this sort of

perception. For a start, it too insistently temporalizes the fields of development and

culture: projecting the former into the future, while relegating the latter, far too

exclusively, to the past. Invariably, such a view restricts, as we will see, arts/culture

policy to the activities of preservation and conservation alone. Moreover, it postulates,

albeit inadvertently, a potentially conservative view of culture itself. And yet, in one way,

Isenberg offers us a paradigmatic response to modernity. Indeed, as theorists and writers

like Walter Benjamin and, more recently, Tom Nairn, have argued, modernity itself is a

peculiarly Janus-faced creature, cherishing most the things that it destroys; looking ahead

greedily to its ambitions for the future while, simultaneously, looking back with wistful

longing at the past it has rejected. Thus, and to cite Nairn out of context, it encourages

peoples and societies to:

… propel themselves forward to a certain sort of goal (industrialization, prosperity, equality with other peoples etc.) by a certain sort of regression-----looking inwards, drawing far more deeply upon their indigenous resources, resurrecting past folk-heroes and myths about themselves and so on …’67

Isenberg’s report worries, in these terms, about the paradoxes of modernity, especially

in its urgent petition that foreign aid agencies mitigate their developmental programs with

an undertaking to ‘slow down … erosion of the country’s cultural heritage’ (10).

Isenberg’s understanding of ‘heritage’ itself, however, is fairly compound here,

including both those important repositories of India’s classical past such as temples,

monuments, art treasures, archaeological sites, manuscript collections, and its ‘folk

culture’ or all those ‘tribal proverbs, aphorisms, charms, mantrams … dialects in danger

of corruption from near-by urban centers …’ (39). From the perspective of the present,

the specific programs and activities discussed in this report may seem somewhat dated.

What is significant, however, is the way in which it attaches the idea of cultural

programming in India to an improved ethics of philanthropy, claiming that an

37

attentiveness to Indian culture would necessarily usher in an era of humility, reforming

from within the egotism which oftentimes shadows the passage and practice of

altruism(s). The citation from S. Krishnan which concludes this report is salutary in this

regard, suggesting that cultural support implies admiration for the cultures being

supported, thereby, if only for a brief moment, making it possible for grant-giver and

grant recipient to face each other as equals: ‘When you build me a dam, you give me

something I don’t have and I am grateful. But when you help me catch in sight and sound

the mortal beauty of a great dancer’s art, you respect what I have been able to create and I

warm toward you’ (p. 61). And, as though implementing this idea directly, Isenberg

begins his own study with the following aphorism: ‘I do not say that it is America’s duty

to assist India in the cultural sphere. I do say that it is America’s privilege to do so’ (i).

Given Isenberg’s long association with Ford, we can only assume that it headed the

list of organizations to whom he forwarded The Case for American Support. Some four

years passed, however, before the Foundation finally prepared a short Discussion Paper

called, Possible Ford Foundation Support of Cultural Projects in India (1968). The tone

of this document is still wary, and quick to justify ‘possible’ FF interest in cultural

activity, first, with reference to the fact that the Third, Fourth and Fifth Five Year Plans

marked a substantial increase in government spending on culture and, second, through

various arguments about the utility of cultural development for tourism, and also for the

purposes of national integration. Defensive about FFs cultural reticence in the past, the

paper invokes the good example of the Southern Languages Book Trust, of course, and

also, and quite justifiably, of Foundation support to the National Institute of Design

(NID) in 1959. Arising out of the small industries initiatives of the early 1950s, the NID

was originally conceived a research institution which would endeavor to prevent the

deterioration of handicraft design, while developing new designs and symbols to aid

India and Indians in their efforts (through stamps, official buildings, coins, uniforms etc)

at symbolic self-representation. Looking ahead from these early ventures though, the

paper under review concludes with a resolve to maintain a startlingly ‘hands-off’ or

decentralized approach to (possible) culture programming in India: ‘The Foundation’s

role in the implementation of any program in culture and the arts would be limited to the

granting of financial support for approved projects … Any ultimate program would

38

depend for its success on the active interest, cooperation and guidance of those Indians

who have already achieved significant results in their areas of interest’.68 Humility or

caution. A bit, as we will see, of both.

Within a year this time, the tentative suggestions of the 1968 discussion paper on

culture had already borne fruit, and a relatively minor grant of $50,000 was released, in

1969, for support of cultural projects in India. The RGA (Request for Grant Action) for

this venture draws quite heavily upon Isenberg’s 1964 paper, especially in its determined

benefaction of those values and practices which constitute ‘the best of the Asian past’.69

Positing Asia as the mythic ground from which two of the greatest world civilizations

have sprung (India, China), the authors of this particular RGA firmly locate the well-

springs of Asian creativity within ‘tradition’, claiming, by way of example, that the

unique vigor of Japanese society lies in the fact that ‘the Japanese were able to preserve

many of their traditional values despite the destructive early impact of the West on

Japanese culture’.70 Some breast-beating follows at the thought that the FF might have

been a diabolical agent of westernization in Asia. But, we are assured, all is not lost for,

‘as all of us become somewhat wiser, or more sophisticated, or more skeptical-----one

may choose the adjective-----about the process of development, we become increasingly

dubious about concentrating on purely economic indicators’.71 In fulfilling the logic of

this sudden ideological volte face, the document also rails against those Asian leaders

who, concerning themselves too narrowly with modernization, ‘often ignored, and on

occasion attacked the fabulous Asian past’.72 By contrast, great praise is reserved for

those other Asian leaders like Sukarno, Sihanouk and Gandhi who ‘demonstrate an

effective appeal to the ways of the past and their present political uses’ (p. 6; Notably FF

funded the National Book Trust for Bhabhani Bhattacharya’s book Gandhi the Writer in

1969, the same year that the present grant was authorized). The rest of the RGA

announces support principally for projects aimed at preserving India’s cultural heritage,

reserving a small portion for contemporary cultural endeavors. Some funds are also

allocated to employ Arthur Isenberg, officially, as a cultural consultant to the FF for one

and a half years, for help in working out the strategies of grant- making to small but

significant cultural programs.

39

As a direct result of this consultancy Isenberg produced yet another report in 1970,

Trends and Needs in Indian Culture in the 1970s. Really an official version of his 1964

paper, this study does not add much in tone or content to the papers and documents which

we have been surveying. But, and with characteristic sensitivity, in his proposal for Ford

interventions into the now privileged field of conservation/preservation, Isenberg warns

US cultural anthropologists and academics to approach India without succumbing to the

pitfalls of ‘scholarly imperialism’; viz; the temptation to render India, once again, into the

object of study rather than the subject of its own knowledge systems. To this end he

advices FF to ensure, at the very least, that all photographs or documents or other objects

produced by Foundation-funded scholars in India be made immediately available to, and

for, Indian scholars and academic institutions.73

While some aspects of the (positive) shift in FFs thinking toward India and Indian

culture can be attributed to the benign personal influence of Arthur Isenberg, there is a

great deal in the discourse surrounding the documents under review which, surely, also

bespeaks the impact, within the US, of the revolutionary events and ideas associated

with1968. Several commentators have drawn attention to the fact that, during this period,

the anti-Vietnam-war movement, notable for its mobilization of a range of minority

groups, quickly combined energies with the preceding and overlapping Civil Rights

Movement and what came to known as Black Cultural Nationalism. The emerging

sympathies for politics of (subjugated) identity and culture within the US academy, for

instance, also found utterance in and as sympathies for recent wars of national liberation

outside the US, in countries of Indochina and Southern Africa. And very soon, as Aijaz

Ahmad writes (somewhat unsympathetically), ‘the general valorization of [cultural]

nationalism as such’ was soon identified with ‘the aura of particular leaders-----Naseer …

Nkrumah, Sukarno, Nyerere, Kenyatta and others-----who had led the movements of anti-

colonial consolidation’.74

Ironically, though, by the time that FF had caught something of the political taste for

third-world cultural nationalisms characteristic of late-1960s America, it had also come

into conflict with an Indian government reluctant, if not hostile, to foreign interference in

India’s cultural affairs. Many of the internal documents that we have been considering

hint at this unexpected strain (after a long honeymoon period) in relations with

40

government. The 1969 RGA for Foundation support to cultural projects in India, for

instance, defensively mentions a public controversy in which FF (unfairly) found itself

implicated:

Negotiations between the Government and the Foundation for agreement on grant approval procedures turned out to be more time-consuming than originally anticipated … Being a pilot venture, the Foundation’s proposals raised new questions of policy for the Government of India, and these were magnified as a result of events which, in themselves, did not involve either the Foundation or its cultural program but which, nevertheless, charged with political considerations the entire area of foreign cultural activities in India. (One example was the closure of five USIS reading rooms.) Against this background, it probably speaks well for both the significance of the project and the standing of the Foundation that the Government of India formally approved the project of May 13, 1970.75

Isenberg’s 1970 report confirms, albeit cryptically, the prevailing Indian

Government’s unfavorable view of foreign support to Indian culture. Noting the sudden

upsurge in governmental sensitivity, he advices that ‘foreign organizations wishing to be

supportive must be patient of delays, tactful and sure of their own bona fides. Above all

they must realize that the proper role of a foreign organization in the cultural life of

another nation must be marginal and carefully defined, avoiding even the appearance of

any desire to make the cultural life of India over in their own national image.’76

FF records are very vague on the details of the precise events which resulted in this

governmental coolness about the Foundation’s projected cultural initiative. However,

personal interviews and conversations with relevant sources point to a cloud of suspicion

over Ford in the late-1960s following Congressional hearings in 1966 which disclosed

covert CIA support for a variety of US international activities and organizations such as

the Asia Foundation, which had to close operations in India as a result. We might also

recall from Section (I), it was in 1966 that the New York Times exposed strong CIA

support for the Ford sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom. Add to all this the

concerted effort, within India, by Dawn and other CPI, CPM and CPML publications to

show up the FF as a CIA front-----charges which would occasionally lead to questions in

the Lok Sabha which the Government, in turn, would have to deal with, sometimes by

imposing a government clearance on one or other form of Foundation grant-making.

41

In part, increased governmental antagonism toward Ford between 1966 – 1978 was

also colored by the specific anxieties and pressures of the Indira Gandhi years: an era

marked, on the one hand, by increased dissidence and separatism within India, and on the

other, by a corresponding centralization, authoritarianism, and mode of suspicion within

Government itself. From 1966, when Mrs.Gandhi was sworn in as India’s third prime-

minister up until 1975, when she imposed her draconian Emergency on the nation, the

Indian state was buffeted, variously, by armed insurgency in Mizoram, the epochal siege

of Naxalbari in West Bengal, the creation of a separate Punjab State, a severe drought

(1966-’67) which increased Indian reliance on U.S. grain, a troubling improvement in

US-China relations in 1972-----preceded by the cementing of Pakistan-China ties,

encouraged, of course, by the US-----and a dramatic split within Congress itself. And,

even as the State reacted with growing paranoia, enacting in 1971 the Maintenance of

Internal Security Act which provided for preventative detention without trial, and then

suspending democratic governance altogether between 1975-1977, there was little room

to welcome, without suspicion, the activities in India of a large US foundation such as

Ford; already tarnished in these years through its unfortunate association with the CIA. In

this charged milieu, perceived FF interference in India culture would have been a

particularly sensitive topic, especially, and if Ensminger is to believed, the Foundation

was bent on endorsing a cultural program designed to bypass the regulative structures of

an already volatile government, by making ‘grants direct to the cultural institutions and

not to the Government of India.’77

Between 1968 – 1978, then, with the exception of some grants toward infrastructural

support (equipment costs, air-conditioning etc) to Indian cultural institutions, FF’s

enthusiastic conversion to the greater glory of Indian cultural nationalism remained a

somewhat dormant fantasy. There is only one grant of note in 1972, providing

architectural and technical consulting services to the National Centre for Performing Arts

(NCPA), and something of the discrepancy between FFs cultural aspirations, on the one

hand, and freedom for implementation, on the other, is revealed in the accompanying

RGA. While the grant is only modest, arranging for 2 US architects to advice NCPA on

the design of their then forthcoming permanent center for performance, it is ushered in

with rhetorical fanfare as proof of the FFs resolve to preserve and strengthen India’s

42

cultural identity, and as an outcome of growing knowledge ‘that cultural strength is a

necessary concomitant of economic and political strength.’78 And with the exception of

another similar grant in 1973, supporting the Triveni Kala Sangam with the construction

of its extension buildings, FFs cultural activities went underground during this period,

only to reemerge in 1978 with a grant proffering $345,000 for the Preservation and

Interpretation of India’s Cultural Heritage: a project represented as being integral ‘part of

the Foundation’s overall development strategy in the country.’ 79To the history and

consequences of this grant, we will turn in the following section.

(IV) The Ford Foundation’s Culture Program in India

IN comparison with all the documents which we have reviewed so far, the 1978 grant for

the preservation and interpretation of India’s cultural heritage has more administrative

than discursive significance for FFs cultural profile in India. For while it simply reiterates

(on the ideas-side) Ford’s new commitment to the project of national culture (and its

location in the nation’s vanishing past), it also brings into being something like the

formal shape of a culture program, with qualified staff to administer it. ‘Largely missing

from the Foundation’s program’, the accompanying RGA concedes, ‘has been a

systematic, continuing approach to the preservation of India’s cultural traditions’. 80 By

way of reparation, then, this grant announces the New Delhi office’s appointment of

V.C.Joshi, an eminent archivist formerly based at the Nehru Memorial Library, for the

purpose of implementing a threefold objective: first, to oversee the training in advanced

methodologies of members of associations concerned with the conservation of

monuments, remains, buildings and artifacts; second, to facilitate research on the sources

(written, visual and oral) of the traditional performing arts, and, third, to encourage

activities which relate to the preservation of pre-modern (meaning non-British and for the

most part, non-official) manuscripts. In addition, the grant makes a small provision for

the creative activities of individual artists and scholars: a project to be managed by Tom

Kessinger, then program advisor in education and social science.

In the extraordinarily creative period which followed, Ford launched itself (with what

remains an enduring commitment) into the three projects/fields mentioned above,

variously funding, in 1984, through grants of $70,000 each, conservation studies in the

43

cities of Jaipur and Ahmedabad, among others. Archaeological research was supported

by grants to the Deccan College Postgraduate and Research Institute ($160,000), the

Benares Hindu University ($146,000 in 1990), the Maharaja Savajirao University of

Baroda ($185,000 in 1991). In addition much support was rendered for colloquiums and

exchange programs in the field.

A source interviewed in connection with this study explained Ford’s apparently

indirect engagement through educational institutions and programs, in the fields of

archaeology and conservation, as an effect of continuing Government restrictions which,

for long, disallowed funding for excavations, while imposing stringent restrictions and

screening processes for foreign consultants to archaeological projects. By and large, my

source insisted, Ford was required to confine its activities to the development of

equipment and technologies. This partly accounts for FFs greater visibility and influence

(within preservation/conservation) on the microfilming, through advanced techniques, of

manuscript collections in India. And, valuable work was accomplished in this regard

through substantial backing to, among others, the Prajna Patshala Mandal ($60,000 in

1979) for the preparation of a comprehensive index of authoritative Sanskrit works in

scriptural and semi-scriptural texts; the Government of Rajasthan ($59,729 in 1979) for

microfilming select manuscripts; the Government of Orrisa ($29,000 in 1979) for

installing microfilming systems at the Orissa Sate Museum; the Vrindaban Research

Institute ($10,000 in 1980) for a survey and microfilming of manuscript collections in

temples and private houses; the University of Mysore ($64,000 in 1980) for microfilming

manuscripts in various repositories in Karnataka.

Such was the success of FFs ‘heritage’ program that by 1982, Foundation annual

reports finally began to feature the India office’s achievements in cultural preservation

and conservation in the main section on Education and Culture, where, formerly, all

India-specific reports were automatically classified under Overseas Development, or

another such category. Yet, if the 1982 Annual Report glowingly (and somewhat

patronizingly) endorses FF efforts ‘to preserve, revitalize, and make more accessible to

the people of the developing world their own rich cultural heritage’,81 the winds of

change blowing through the US academy in the late-1970s were already preparing to

unsettle Ford’s decade long romance with “high” national culture in India. Where, in the

44

1960s, third-world nations had been idealized, in Aijaz Ahmad’s words, ‘as the site,

simultaneously, of alterity and authenticity’, the ‘stagnation, increasing dependence,

dictatorial brutality, religious millenarianism, and general fracturings of polity and

society’, experienced by so many postcolonial nations through the 1970s, ushered into the

US academy a new disenchantment with cultural nationalism.82 And with the rise,

concurrently, of theories of postmodernism and post-structuralism with their aversion for

all grand totalizing narratives, especially those of class and nation, the third world nation

soon became seriously infra dig.

Something of this change of heart is captured within a series of position papers

produced by Ford in 1976 to consider future directions for the Foundation prior to the

retirement of McGeorge Bundy as president. Of special note in this Future Programming

Planning Project, as it is called, is a lengthy transcribed conversation between the

eminent anthropologist Clifford Geertz, and the economist Albert Hirshman. I quote at

some length here from Geertz:

In the 50s and 60s we all misinterpreted new state nationalism. We thought it was rather like European nationalism-----concerned with self-definition, with nation building, with finding a common culture. When I look back now on what actually happened, it seems rather more an effort to legitimize a new elite. That’s what it has turned out to be. The original anti-colonial revolution looks now less like a thirst for democracy, or even a search for identity, and more like a reaction to the simple problem of being ruled by people whose interests were elsewhere and who were different culturally. The old elite was discredited. It was not culturally inwardly connected with the life around it; and the new elite which claimed to be so connected, was legitimized in such terms. There is some internal contradiction involved in such an effort. When you legitimize a new elite in essentially cultural terms, rather than in terms of some ideology, such as Marxism or traditionalism, you sooner or later get to something of a crisis as the new elite gets more separated, culturally, from the people that it is ruling.83

And so, in a single conversation, the entire effort of anti-colonial nationalisms in Asia

and Africa is dismissed as inadequate to the noble expectations of the American liberal

imagination. Yet, despite the irritating pietism of Geertz’s verdict, the change of heart

45

which it represents proved beneficial, as we will see, for FFs changing attitudes to Indian

culture.

The effects of the drastic new recoil from cultural nationalisms, described above, only

found expression in FFs arts/culture program a few years later, in 1983, with the

endorsement of a supplementary grant to culture in India (henceforth, 1983 supplement).

It is worth examining the content of this initiative in some detail. Elaborating upon the

rudimentary findings of a 1982 Culture Strategy Paper, the 1983 supplement begins, if

subtly, the work of disengagement from the fabric of Indian cultural nationalism in two

ways: first, through a new valorization of the pluralism and diversity of Indian cultures,

arguably belied by the monolithic edifice of Indian nationalism, and second, by moving

away from the notion of a reified /monumentalized past-----germinal to (cultural)

nationalist projects-----toward a tentative but dynamic privileging of contemporary

creativities. How are these ideas articulated and structured? In two further ways: one,

working with what is now, admittedly, a discredited anthropological model, the RGA to

this grant reveals India to be a hybrid of, on the one hand, ‘great traditions’ of ecumenical

pluralism, and on the other, of the many unacknowledged ‘little traditions’ which

comprise ‘folk’ or ‘peoples’ cultures. Two, in a concerted effort to dismantle the rigid

‘past-ness’ of Indian culture, the RGA proposes a long overdue shift from the idea of

‘heritage’ to that of ‘performance’; substituting the cultural work of ‘preservation’ with

something like ‘revitalization’. To cite from the source under consideration: ‘While the

original DAP [the 1978 grant to culture] sought to encourage activities that would

preserve the best in the past to ensure the future has access to it, the supplement proposes

activities to explore how cultural traditions interact with the present in the evolving of

new creative expressions and how these might be made accessible to the public.’84

The implementation of the above, namely, support to India’s folk-culture, to its

traditions of ecumenical pluralism, and to its performance culture, constitutes the rest of

the story that I have to tell about FF achievements over the last 2 decades (and the scope

of its future activities). For the remainder of this section, then, let us study, one at a time,

the main projects introduced by the 1983 supplement, beginning with the folklore

initiative. But first a little more by way of intellectual background.

46

In the late 1970s and early 80s, even as the US academy was noisily proclaiming its

new found wisdom about the perils of third-world cultural nationalism, a small group of

South Asian historians who called themselves the Subaltern Studies Collective were

engaged in an effort to disclose non-nationalist forms of anti-colonial insurgency in India.

Wary of the structural and ideological continuities between the colonial and nationalist

elite, their aim was to create a space within historiography for the plural and

heterogeneous cultures of the people (peasant, subaltern). The basic methodological

principles followed by this group were announced in Ranajit Guha’s book, Elementary

Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India. First published in 1983-----incidentally

the year of the grant supplement under consideration-----Guha’s book argued that the

mainstream nationalist bias of modern Indian history needed to be countered through an

opposing effort ‘to summon folklore, oral as well as written, to the historians aid.’85

While fully cognizant of the limits of folklore-----for example, its decorative

appropriation by the elite intelligentsia-----Guha, nonetheless, publicized the need for

greater, more rigorous, research in the field. For Guha and his collaborators, folklore or

peasant culture was valuable, first, for its role in liberating the idea of ‘politics’ or

‘protest’ itself from its historic association with nationalism. Such culture, the Subaltern

Studies historians argued, made it possible to imagine the needs, aspirations and

complaints of all those who, for reason of religion, caste, class, gender etc, are/were not

accommodated within the neutralizing space of the post/colonial nation. Second, the

Subaltern Studies project, turned away from the modernizing and developmental (let’s

call it enlightenment) logic of post/colonial nationalism to give new legitimacy to the

(often) ‘non-modern’ knowledge systems of the ‘people’: knowledge systems which, we

might recall, Gandhi had once located in the Indian ‘village’.

A mood was certainly in the air and, whether by accident of design, in 1984 Ford

commissioned the great poet, translator and folklorist A.K.Ramanujan to write a fresh

report on the state of the arts in India with a view to possible FF action in the field. More

a working document than a polished piece, the Ramanujan report covers a vast area of

arts/culture activities. It is, however, rendered coherent through its preoccupation with

certain common and recurring themes which connect very closely to the concerns and

spirit of the 1983 supplement.

47

Throughout his study Ramanujan exhibits great impatience with the conservation

drives which characterized FF culture programming in the late-70s. In his words: ‘I found

a rage all over India for recording, classifying, archiving, doing it almost as if in a panic

fear that it would all be lost if every scrap is not held down and preserved and pickled.

Understandably. But indiscriminate recording is endless and would later involve endless

labor in sifting and making sense’.86 Ramanujan’s preference, by contrast, is for those

schemes which are able to divert their gaze from the past so as to establish connections

with the living cultures of the people of India. Two ongoing FF projects which he singles

out for praise, in this regard, are the Ninasam project at Heggodu, and the work done by

Granthali in Maharashtra (mentioned in an earlier section). In Heggodu ( a little Malnad

village in Karnataka) he finds an FF supported theatre school training local actors, and

assisting tribals in nearby villages to stage their own plays. Equally striking are the

efforts of Granthali to reconnect literary culture with the ‘common’ writer and the

‘common’ reader, both.

It is while extolling, through these two projects, the virtues of living peoples cultures

that Ramanujan endorses the idea and worth of folklore as an appropriate new model for

thinking culture in India. If sketchily, this report points to a sort of three-fold path for

folklore-centred grant making in India, which would proceed, first, by constituting

networks and consortia of scholars/practitioners either within the field or even well-

disposed toward it; second, by promoting the practice of regional ethnographies which

might focus, say, on an important city in a region, such as Tanjore, or on occluded inter-

regional links between, for example, Tamil Nadu and South East Asia; third, a folklore

initiative would maintain a strong pedagogic component, continuously training new and

interested scholars through summer schools, and through fellowships/internships to

deepen technical knowledge of relevant methodologies etc. All these proposals are, of

course, tentative, and mixed in with a host of other suggestions. Nevertheless, the

Ramanujan report gives a certain authority to the notion of supporting folk-based

cultures, and as such, is an important ingredient in the cooking of FFs folklore initiative

which, in turn, is properly launched only in 1986.

But before we turn to the implementation of this program we need to knit another

important thread into our intellectual history. So far we have been arguing that the recoil

48

from cultural nationalism, and from the assimilative politics of the postcolonial nation-

state, ubiquitous on both sides of the Atlantic during the late-1970s and early 80s,

generated a mood which proved very hospitable to folklore studies and practices. Indian

folklore studies itself, however, has a much earlier genesis. A response to the search for

regional identities in the 1960s, this discipline developed through the work of early

regional languages scholars, attaching itself to linguistics in the 1970s, before drawing

productively upon the evolution of ethnography within the reformed anthropology

departments of the 1980s.

If the 1980s, then, were a radical growth period for folklore studies-----

methodologically speaking, and, as we have seen, on account of a certain favorable

intellectual milieu-----the discipline, with its concern for non-nationalist forms of cultural

heterogeneity, was, surely, also strengthened and inspired by the burst of decentralized

NGO activity during this decade. For, in India, as elsewhere, the critique of mainstream

nationalism originated outside the academy, gaining inspiration from the legacy of grass-

roots activism left in place by M. K. Gandhi and nurtured, although in a very different

idiom, within the rich traditions of Indian Marxism. If muted for many years these

eclectic traditions sprang to new life during the totalitarianism of the Indira Gandhi years,

gathering force under the leadership of Jayaprakash Narayan. The social awareness

campaigns of this period brought Left and Right together on many fronts, resulting in

what can only be described as an unprecedented explosion of voluntarism and NGO

activity through the decade of the 80s. By the 1990s, of course, Government itself had

had begun to let go, as Ashoke Chaterjee writes, ‘through contracting NGOs for the

implementation of official anti-poverty programs.’87 But during the 80s it was as though

politics had changed character (or found its ‘true’ character), through a renewed

attentiveness to all those groups and people otherwise marginal to the centers of power

and bureaucracy.

So, in about 1986 when FF embraced folklore as a means of fostering ‘diversity and

pluralism in the field of arts and culture by supporting broad-based and inclusive

participation of disadvantaged communities in the developmental processes of India’, it

was, of course, responding sensitively to the temper of its times: a temper much improved

since the blinkered 1950s, where we began this story. Let us not, however, forget the

49

positive effects of the past. For, in reclaiming through folklore the cultural worth of non-

modern and non-urban wisdoms, this new-improved FF was only building upon

processes set in motion by, for example, the handicrafts initiatives of the Nehru-

Ensminger years. Throughout the 1983 Supplement, which we have been reviewing

above, the idea of folk-culture remains firmly attached to craft-activities and to the tasks,

variously, of supporting ‘the understanding and display of the achievements and

conditions of cottage industry in the arts’, or assisting ‘the emergence of a cooperative of

artists and artisans to sustain their craft, control their markets better, and provide their

younger generation an apprentice in their parents work.’88 The tone is more respectful,

but the structures are not dissimilar to those governing FFs early small industries grants.

So too, let us not forget, folklore studies first emerged out of those very regional

languages institutes and departments carefully tended by Ford, as we have seen,

following the successful launch of the Southern Languages Book Trust..

Now, to return to the main plot: One of the first grants with which FF launched its

folklore program in 1986, took a refreshingly integrated view of culture and cultural

activity in its support of the study and documentation of folklore in ancient temples and

monuments along the Mahanadi river in Orissa.89 Originating in the forests of Madhya

Pradesh , and flowing down to the plains of Orissa, the Mahanadi, literally ‘great river’,

has carried both royal dynasties and tribal populations from one region to another. Like

all other great rivers in India it has a practical significance for the economy and

agriculture of the region, as also a deep cultural significance as the link for a cross-

section of myths, symbols, legends which animate the different terrains and ethnic groups

along its changing banks.

Directly invoking the influence of the 1984 Ramanujan report, the grant under

consideration brought 3 types of folk-culture related activities together. First, it

committed itself to the sort of regional ethnography endorsed so strongly by Ramanujan.

Second, it also implemented Ramanujan’s proposal for folk studies consortia by drawing

into the same project the co-operative efforts of three grantee-institutions-----the Institute

of Applied Language Sciences (IALS) to document the folklore of selected villages,

Utkal University to study ancient temples built from the seventh-century through the

fourteenth-century near the Mahanadi (downstream from Narsingpur town), and

50

Sambalpur University to consider the temples and monuments within 15km from the

Mahanadi (upstream from Narsingpur town). Third, and finally, this grant honored the

pedagogic emphasis of the Ramanujan report by making it an explicit aim of the project

to train young scholars in the skills of systematic data collection, and of working within a

comprehensive theoretical framework. Thus, recent Ph.D’s formed the bulk of the staff,

working as project assistants under more experienced supervisors.

Many grants followed from here, building further upon the innovative structure and

approach demonstrated in the Mahanadi river project. In an effort to help develop the

disciplinary and scholarly superstructure of modern folklore studies in India, significant

grants were distributed across many regional universities: Telegu University in

Hyderabad received $140,000 in 1988 to support training in modern folklore studies

among postgraduates in Andhra Pradesh; in 1995 the University of Calicut and the

Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College Trust won $100,000 and $65,000 each to strengthen

research, documentation and dissemination activities in the field; and in the same year

grants-in-aid of documentation, research, archiving, networking and community outreach

in Indian folklore were distributed, among others, to St Xaviers College, Tezpur

University and North-Eastern Hill State University; the last two grants marking FFs first

efforts to include the North East within its cultural program. Another significant grantee

of these years is the Jodhpur-based Rupayan Sansthan which I visited in early February

2001, in connection with this study. The story of its evolution is worth recording in

greater detail.

Sometime in 1959, Komal Kothari a young musicologist working with the Rajasthan

Music & Theatre Academy encountered a Manganiyar musician for the first time. The

man was walking down a neglected Jodhpur road, carrying a kamachia on his back. Eager

to hear the sound of the instrument, Kothari invited the musician, Antar Khan

Manganiyar, back to his office and found, to his delight, that his expert kamachiya

playing was accompanied by a wonderful repertoire of songs. So began a lifelong interest

in the musical castes and traditions of Rajasthan, and with it, the genesis of Rupayan

Sansthan, established in 1960, with the aim of promoting a deeper understanding of

Rajasthani culture. Dissatisfied, for many years, by the inadequate histories-from-above

which marked both colonial and nationalist accounts of the region, Kothari found in the

51

musical worlds of the Manganiyars and Langas the possibility of an alternative

perspective. Where ‘official’ accounts insist upon the strictly feudal structure of art

patronage in Rajasthan (and other regions), the sub-narratives of musical castes revealed

that the abolition of the jagirdari system after Independence adversely effected and

displaced only those musical castes commonly patronized by Rajput jagirdars and other

Rajput families of high status. Meanwhile, with reduced competition, professional

musicians receiving patronage from the wider base of the common people finally came

into their own, carrying in their songs the burden of an hitherto unacknowledged history.

To the process of recording and understanding this history, Rupayan Sansthan devoted

its best efforts, finding, en route, the freedom of complaint and protest enshrined within

folk (musical) culture, the signs and symptoms of life-worlds inflected with a startlingly

relaxed view of social and sexual normativity and, most significantly, evidence of an

inspirational blend of Hinduism and Islam among folk artists. The Manganiyars, for

instance, adopted Islam in the 16th and 17th centuries, but continue to sing in praise of

Hindu Gods. Performing, with equal conviction for Muslim and Hindu patrons, they

maintain Islamic customs while preserving much of the garb and symbolic forms of

Hindu culture.

Komal Kothari rightly believes that he would have continued his work with or without

FF assistance, but he generously argues that, more than Foundation funds, he has an

abiding gratitude for an early visit from Ford official, V.C. Joshi, who, in conversation,

urged him further out of the world of music into a deeper concern with its attending and

sustaining folk culture. A FF grant in 1982 enabled him to record some 6000 hours of

music, consolidating and supplementing an archive which provides fodder for

conferences and workshops all over the world; a resource for local and international

scholars and students; and a means of giving greater world-wide exposure to local

musicians. The favorable winds of the 1980s folklore initiative bought further benefit in a

grant which allowed Rupayan to begin work on the organization of their archive, to

conduct further research and documentation of those Rajasthani musical traditions

integral to community life, and to commence an audio recording series which would

package and disseminate Rajasthani music through the mass media.

52

A direct beneficiary, then, of FFs folklore program, and now widely acknowledged as

an eminent folklorist, Kothari tends to regard the term ‘folklore’ as convenient shorthand

for all marginal cultures, specifically those marked by traditions of orality, and so,

excluded from all ‘respectable’ script-privileging knowledge systems. Looking back at

his life-work, through Rupayan, and in deep collaboration with the eminent Rajasthani

writer Vijay Den Detha, Kothari feels increasingly uncomfortable with the

anthropological grid of folklore studies. He is interested now in the secret working of

what he calls the ‘ethno-mind’, i.e. with the ways in which a given society derives

generational knowledge without any structural format, mainly through practice and

experience. All too often this experiential knowledge has produced wiser, more tolerant

cultures. It is this knowledge that Kothari is keen to pursue; to learn, for example, the

clue to those secret adjustments whereby the Manganiyars peaceably forged their

composite identities, living and singing the world as Hindus and Muslims, both.

Now to the main narrative: in 1996, to consolidate its grant-making activities in the

field, the New Delhi office conducted a review of its folklore program, steered by a 3

member team of international experts. While endorsing the achievements of the program,

the review team recommended an even greater expansion of FF activity in the area in

three directions. First, it suggested that Ford move beyond ethnographies of marginal

(Hindu) communities to increased research and documentation on, for example, Christian

and Muslim groups as also those groups organized along the axes of gender rather than

religion/caste alone. Second, Ford was advised to give greater attention to the need for

technological improvements in documentation and archiving process, including greater

use of multimedia technologies. Finally, and third, it was suggested that greater value be

given to making effective use of folklore as a resource in public programming such as

festivals, concerts, workshops, museum demonstrations, as well as in social and

development communications. In addition, during the review process a number of Indian

folklorists and heads of regional folklore centers pointed to the urgent need for the

creation of a national body to provide assistance to, and coordination between, certain

common activities within folklore. And to this end, the review team suggested that FF,

with its experience in institutional development, was ideally placed to venture the

establishment of a national body for Indian folklore.

53

In response to these suggestions, FF invited leading Indian folklorists, on the basis of

regional and institutional representation for a meeting in November 1996, which resulted

in the formation of a national steering group to work toward the organizational and

programmatic structure of the proposed body. After several further meetings and

questionnaires, the National Folklore Support Centre (NFSC) was registered as a public

charitable trust on October 21st 1997, and by May 14th 1998, FF had formally approved a

supporting grant of $485,000. Indian folklore studies had moved center-stage, and Ford

deserves much credit for expert stage management.

In the few years since its inception, the fledgling NFSC has more than fulfilled its

promise, fully consolidating Ford’s folklore initiative, as also expanding the disciplinary

parameters of folklore studies, to include dialogue with the adjacent fields of

multicultural, postcolonial and urban studies, as also policy research in cultural issues. In

exploring many of these links the NFSC is taking the lead in liberating folklore from its

hitherto rural setting, and insodoing, helping to develop both the practical and theoretical

aspects of the discipline. Informed in all its activities by this multi-disciplinary approach,

and an attending respect for indigenous knowledge systems and for cultural diversity,

NFSC works though publications, public programming and projects concerning technical

training and networking. It has already launched a quarterly newsletter and an ongoing

book series, and preparations are well in place for its annual scholarly journal. Its efforts

in public programming are sensitively geared toward the difficult task of audience

cultivation for folk arts and performance. At work on a database of folk artists,

institutions involved in related work, scholars, performers and potential audiences, the

Centre has begun the process of organizing a series of workshops, lectures and

performances to reinforce and clarify the informing values of folk aesthetics and culture.

In addition, it has been developing a bibliography of manuscripts, research papers,

articles, palm leaf manuscripts, scholarly work in the regional languages, a collection of

oral epics, riddles, proverbs and a calendar of folk festivals in India. Furthermore, and

avoiding the errors of several archival and conservation centers, the NFSC is fully aware

of the imperatives of dissemination: its regular workshops and seminars connect disparate

workers in the field and also serve to communicate information to public audiences. To

date its workshops have covered the varied traditions of Thanjavur, Kalamkari,

54

Madhubani, Warli, Pattachitra and Kishangarh paintings. Further programs will focus on

folk performance culture.

NFSCs pioneering work in the collection and dissemination of materials arising from

FFs folk initiative has been complemented, in recent years, by the activities of grantee

Surabhi Foundation for Research and Cultural Exchange (Force). Surabhi started in 1991

as a television series on traditional culture, quickly becoming a nation-wide phenomenon.

An outcrop of this original program, Surabhi Force has a primary objective of providing

informative tools for the investigation of historical and social issues and relationships

between various traditional cultures and contemporary India. With FF support it has

begun work on the documentation of what it calls the ‘folk wisdom’ of India through the

means of a 13 part series; disseminating such information on an unprecedented scale

within India. Focusing on the local practices, crafts and craftspeople, the series aims to

introduce its audience, of some 70 million viewers a week, to a breathtaking range of

wisdom traditions, such as, water harvesting in Rajasthan, Rabari construction techniques

in Gujarat, iron-ore extraction methods among the Agarias and Baigas of Madhya

Pradesh, not to mention various forms of local self-government, and systems of

traditional medicine apart from the better known yunani, ayurvedic and siddha.

The work done through this Surabhi series is to be supplemented through another

forthcoming environmental series, Bhoomi, which will expose viewers to traditional

means of living non-exploitatively with and among our limited natural resources. The

organization’s dynamic team, under the leadership of television personality Siddharta

Kak, is currently at work to set up a digital archive that will form the core of a National

Media Resource Centre on Indian culture. Aiming to weave information together in a

number of thematic presentations providing ‘walkways’ or multiple access sites, this

virtual living museum should have tremendous educational and informative value for

students, laypeople and India-watchers, alike.

If, then, as we have seen, FF directly and enthusiastically implemented the

commitment to folklore announced in the 1983 supplement, it was equally energetic in

the execution of support to the performing arts, mentioned, as we might recall, in the

same grant document. By 1984, we see the Foundation placing a high premium on the

performing arts in a grant-in-aid of the 1985 US Festival of India, modeled on previous

55

such festivals in Britain and France. Approving a program to subsidize the international

exposure, as it were, of classical dance and music, theatre, folk performance, and film

festivals, the RGA concedes that these arts constitute an integral part of Indian ‘cultural

heritage’ and, as such, are of primary importance to the Delhi office’s long term program

interests.

In the early 1980s, when FF began to enter the arena of performing arts funding, its

thinking on the subject was, however, still caught between the conflicting messages of

the 1978 grant to culture, and its 1983 supplement: the former emphasizing ‘heritage’ and

a conservationist or archeological view of culture, the latter appealing for greater

‘revitalization’, or, for activities to ‘explore how cultural traditions interact with the

present in the evolving of new creative expressions and how these might be made

accessible to the public.’

Inevitably, in these early years, the Foundation erred on the side of ‘heritage’ and

‘preservation’ in its negotiation of India’s classical performance traditions. The rationale

for intervention into classical dance or music, thus, was typically shaped by the following

historical analysis: the classical performing traditions, grant documents reiterated,

underwent a radical transformation and consequent ‘deterioration’ during the hey-days of

Indian nationalism in the 1930s. Eager to bring a cultural component to the political

struggle for independence from British rule, Indian nationalists, it was argued, drew upon

the indigenous performing arts for symbolic opposition to the colonial civilizing mission.

And, even as new secular institutions, and the commercial patronage of the urban middle

classes, offered traditional performers alternative venues and forums for self-expression,

they drastically severed the inspirational links between the traditional performer and the

highly codified context of the temple or the court. The democratization and secularization

of classical traditions may well have facilitated the highly creative transformation of the

ritual functionary into the individual artist, but at a great cost. Dance and music,

especially, succumbed to the demand for popularization, gradually losing touch with the

enthralling discipline and esotericism of former times. Worse still, as performers

migrated to urban locales and adapted to (pernicious) modern living styles, the old system

of instruction requiring long years of intimate exchange between guru and shishya, began

to collapse. In the absence of patient and committed students, ageing gurus were

56

prevented from passing on invaluable skills and secrets to the next generation. No longer

could it be expected that new performers would become authoritative representatives of

their respective artistic lineages.

While FF made relatively few grants of note to classical dance, its initial intervention

into the tradition of classical music was, thus, certainly marked by preservation panic, or

the desire to prevent the imminent disappearance of the traditional knowledge systems

underscoring the arts. A very early grant of 1981 to the American Institute of Indian

Studies sets the agenda with generous support for the establishment of an Archive and

Research Center in Ethnomusicology. Attributing this initiative to the Foundation’s 1978

undertaking to initiate ‘a systematic program for preservation of historic cultural

materials in India’, the RGA voices the urgency of recording and documenting vanishing

musical traditions in India. Announcing the Foundation’s intention to wrap up its

conservation efforts in the fields of archaeology and manuscript conservation, this grant

is significant for its espousal of the traditional performing arts as a new and meaningful

category of ‘heritage’.90

The mood of many subsequent grants in the field is consonant with this shift in

priorities. A major grant of $150,000 in 1989 to the Sangeet Research Academy, for

instance, enabled the collection and collation of information from ageing representatives

of various sub-traditions of music, for the purpose of developing rationalized training

systems for each vocal style. The recipient of this grant, the Sangeet Research Academy

has, indeed, and thanks to FF assistance, gone a long way to provide an institutional

home for the traditional gharana culture. Master vocalists have lived on its campus in

South Calcutta, training students strictly in accordance with the established traditions of

their respective schools; promising young musicians have been supported through timely

scholarships; and general classes for beginners have helped in the identification of

suitable candidates for advanced training and residential scholarships. Another grant of

this oeuvre supported Samparadaya, from 1984 onward, to work toward the

documentation and dissemination of Carnatic and other traditional forms of South Indian

music. Founded in 1981, this organization has played a significant role in offsetting the

deleterious effects of market-forces by providing an interactive forum for neglected

composers and styles of Carnatic music. With FF assistance it has been able to establish a

57

cornucopian audio archive, complemented by a reference library of books, periodicals,

copies of rare manuscripts, photographs and dossiers on musicians. Ongoing support has

permitted the organization to grow into a significant center for the preservation and

dissemination of threatened traditions of South Indian music.

Also deserving of mention here, is an earlier 1984 grant to the Sriram Bharatiya Kala

Kendra to support documentation and research on the musical tradition of women light

classical singers in India. Notable for its interest in ‘subjugated’ traditions of North

Indian classical music, namely, the ‘light’ traditions of Thumri, Dadra, Ghazal, Tappa

etc., this grant also enabled crucial research into the predominantly female monopoly of

such forms. Neglected in the post-independence enthusiasm for ‘classical’ culture,

several of these forms fell into neglect, and with them, many of their exponents too were

forced underground along with their teachers and accompanists. The premises of old

music establishments were eventually taken over by the flesh-trade, and former singers

and dancers driven into prostitution. The FF grant under consideration, conducted under

principle investigator Rita Ganguly, herself a noted Thumri singer, aimed to document

not only the languishing art of Hindustani light classical music, but with it, to explore the

tenuous life-worlds of its practitioners. In an adventurous twist to standard research

procedures, Smt Ganguli visited several red light areas in the country in search of singers,

disguised as a male customer. Her narrative report is delightfully matter of fact about this

process. As she writes: ‘It is needless to mention that I had to visit these area under the

garb of male attire and make-up. It is evident that such visits were not free from risks.

The identity got disclosed, because of the little mistakes of a male member of my troup in

Majaffarpur and Bhopal. It was a hard job to come out of the clutches of the bad elements

of the underground world.’91

If single-minded, as we have seen, in its preservation efforts with regard to classical

music, by 1986 or so, FF had begun to develop (or reflect) a more relaxed attitude toward

the traditional performing arts. Still reverential and anxious about the corrupting

influence of the very urbanization and modernization it had once condoned, the

Foundation gradually started to look out for institutions which could explore creative

aspects of the encounter between traditional and contemporary worlds/expression. A

notable grant to the Nalanda Dance Center in 1993, to support pedagogical development

58

in Indian classical dance, reveals this subtle shift in attitude. Focusing this time on flaws

in traditional systems of instruction this grant document laments the fact that ‘Gurus lack

a scientific grasp of kinetics or vocal physiology, with the result that music and dance

apprentices suffer frequent physical set-backs that prevent them from attaining their full

potential.’92 Inaugurating a new concern for pedagogical advancement in the classical

performing arts, the grant pledges support to progressive teaching academies, such as the

Nalanda Dance Research Centre, which are willing and able to conduct innovative

research into the technical and theoretical possibilities of various dance styles. Another

grant of this nature goes to the Academy of Indian Music and Arts in 1993 for the

purpose of contemporizing Carnatic music education. Also, we might include in this

category FFs extensive support to the remarkable Society for the Promotion of Indian

Classical Music and Culture Among Youth (Spic-Macay). The brain-child of former

engineer-mathematician Kiran Seth, this organization has done yeoman’s service in

popularizing Indian classical performing arts among students and young people. By

bringing practitioners face to face with uninformed young audiences, through lecture-

demonstrations, Spic-Macay has directly linked tradition to contemporaneity,

democratizing (and abbreviating) the basic structure of the Guru-Shishya interface. A

whole generation of young people now have an access to the multiple facets of Indian

culture; and practitioners, no less, have greater understanding of the new milieu in which

they find themselves.

Another grant of note, reflecting FFs late-80s effort to bridge the gap between past and

present creative expression(s), went in 1987 to the Samvaad Foundation, to assist in its

efforts toward the documentation of North Indian Classical music. Founded in 1975

under the guidance of noted musicologist Vamanrao Deshpande, Samvaad launched itself

directly into a program of public conferences and chamber concerts of North Indian

classical music, exposing urban audiences for the first time to some of the greatest

exponents of the tradition, such as, Madhup Mudgal, Ashwini Bhide Deshpande, Veena

Sahasrabuddhe and Prabhakar Karekar, to name a few. But this was only a taste of the

contribution that Samvaad would make, in coming years, to the music world. Based in a

small apartment in Bombay, under the leadership of Satyasheel Deshpande (the son of

Vamanrao Deshpande, and erstwhile disciple of maestro Kumar Gandharva), Samvaad

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has become a treasure trove of rare classical bandishes and recordings. Its 2000 plus

hours of recordings now provides a unique archival resource for students, scholars and

music lovers. But, far from serving the function of a library alone, the organization’s

principle strength, and contingent success, lies in its creative approach to the very culture

and spirit of the tradition that it serves with such dedication. Deshpande and his

colleagues approach their work with the recognition that contemporary musicians have to

function creatively in a world where the former pedagogic and performance structures of

North Indian classical music are no longer available. Where once the gharana (school)

system functioned as a secret society, forbidding students to listen to other musicians,

especially representatives of other gharanas, it is no longer viable to function-----or

indeed, to secure-----such conditions of splendid isolation. So too, classical music was

once a mauhik parampara, namely a tradition whose values could only be transmitted in

totality through the gurukul system which required a student to live in close proximity to

her teacher over many years. This system, also, is no longer in existence. What, then, can

a musical aspirant do without the sustaining conventions of her art? How, in other words,

is it possible for an aspiring musician to perfect her craft in the contemporary world?

These are the real questions which have informed Samvaad activities over the last two

decades or so.

In response, Samvaad has begun the business of reparation in two ways: first, by

recording rare and representative renditions from the various gharanas, and, second, by

recording, as well, taalim sessions where living gurus highlight various aspects of a style

such as compositions, alaap, raga delineation and other tonal modulations and structures.

The process of recording itself is a highly imaginative process, conducted in an open-

house milieu, without time restrictions, based on impromptu sittings among musicians, so

that they can communicate the best aspects of their craft freely, and at their leisure. While

these recordings are, thus, a unique pedagogic resource for the many young musicians

who gather at Samvaad’s hospitable quarters, Deshpande is not content to simply recreate

or simulate the lost traditions of the past. All too aware of the limitations of the often

claustrophobic purism of the gharana system, the limited repertoire of each isolated

gharana, and, of the crippling and jealous hold of so many gurus over their disciples,

Deshpande seeks to introduce a greater ease and eclecticism among new practitioners.

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The Samvaad archive, accordingly, is designed to enable students to cross-reference,

compare, and enter into dialogue with various ‘compositions’ across gharanas, so as to

develop a dynamic hybridity within their own contemporary musical styles. All the

volunteer scholars and practitioners whom I encountered during my visit to Samvaad

early in 2001, were engaged in this exciting labor of musical transgression while

imbibing, with rigor and discipline, the craft and wealth of so many fading conventions.

Not content merely to encourage the blending of disparate gharana styles, however,

Desphpande is quick to insist upon the symbiotic relationship between folk and classical

music too, thereby discrediting any rigid separation if ‘high’ and ‘low’, ‘classical’ or

‘folk’ culture, as also between classical and film music (which he rates very highly). The

recipient of an FF endowment in 1994, this organization is among the most innovative of

Foundation grantees. And, if enabled, in so many ways, by FF patronage, Despande’s

combination of irreverence and impeccable scholarship, of documentation and

improvisation, must, doubtless, have helped Ford to blur the boundaries between some of

its own program categories and classifications.

Samvaad’s complex relationship with the sphere of ‘the traditional’ is paralleled,

albeit in an entirely different idiom, by the work of Veenapani Chawla’s Pondicherry-

based theatre group Adishakti. Supported in 1987 by an individual FF grant to develop a

methodology for the voice training of the performer, and more substantially by a 1998

grant to consolidate the activities of Adishakti, Chawla has been creatively engaged in the

task of evolving, through the theatre, a new aesthetics of pluralism, which would bridge

the gap between traditional performers and contemporary performance, regional theatre

practitioners and urban/metropolitan architects, between the needs of the contemporary

actors body and the resources of traditional medicine. Adishakti’s relationship with

traditional form is especially instructive in the context of the present discussion. For, far

from treating such forms as hermetically sealed, or only as the object of preservation and

restoration, the group believes that past disciplines need to be deliberately displaced from

their own context in order to throw up a range of new elements within them, not formerly

known or apprehended. In other words, Chawla et al regard such disciplines as

constitutively incomplete, and attribute, in part, some of their fading appeal, within their

own spectator-communities , not so much to the corruption (through urbanization etc) of

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audience taste, but rather, to the historical attrition or paralysis of the forms themselves.

Within this understanding, the contemporary performer is privileged as a critic whose

task it is to reinterpret and, as it were, fill in the blanks within specific traditional forms.

So, in its encounter with the traditional artist, the group has endeavored, of course, to

clarify its own formal and imaginative directions, but also, and equally, to stimulate the

artist to discover old forms anew. The encounter, thus, is premised upon a powerful

recognition of mutual worth and capability.

Some examples: by way of its initial exchanges with the Kalaripayattu guru

Shankaranarayana Menon of the SNGS Vallahatta Kalari at Chavakkad, Adishakti has

been equipped to adapt the vocabulary of the traditional martial arts into its own

performance practices. But this exchange has also helped the guru himself to discover the

unique relation of breath to body dynamics in the form. While the guru was always

unconsciously aware of this relation, Adishakti’s investigations helped him to articulate

and systematize this occluded self-knowledge, contributing enormously to the

performance quality of Kalaripayattu. Similar results ensued from a dialogue with

Koodiyattam performer Usha Nangiar, in 1997. Once again, while enormously beneficial

to Adishakti in up-scaling its skill-base, the process helped Usha to draw Koodiyattam

training exercises-----such as the use of breath to generate emotion-----into the space and

scope of her formal performance itself. Other innovations followed. For example,

drawing on Adishakti’s use of an unwritten text during performance, Usha was able to

reinterpret the ‘vichinta’ or ‘thoughtful mood’ emphasized in Koodiyattam Attaprakaram

to mean the process of active inner thought throughout performance. An outstation

member of the group now, Usha’s performances are already much more accessible and

‘fresh’ for community audiences.

Recently, Adishakti began a new interaction with Kodiyattam musician and mizahavu

(a traditional drum) player, Hariharan, which resulted in its recent production, Ganapathi,

notable for its use of music as text in performance. To continue its exploration of

mizhavu and traditional percussion the group embarked on a networking meeting to the

Tiruvaarur temple (some 6 hours drive from Pondicherry) which houses a unique 1000

year old five-faced mizhavu (called panchamukhamvadhyam) the only one of its kind in

existence, and an instrument intimately linked to the ritual performance aesthetic of

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temple dancers. Guiding the group was Tillagammma, a 76 year old former devadasi

(temple performer) whose maternal line had long been linked with the Tiruvaarur temple.

FF program officer Sharada Ramanathan and I, joined this meeting, traveling with

Adishakti under the unforgiving glare of the mid-May sun in Southern India. Over two

days, the group established and participated in a dialogue between the temple mizhavu

player, a traditional instrument maker from Palaghat, and a metal-caster from Trichur.

The consequent exchange of skills and information(s) in the narrow temple corridors

resulted in a concrete plan to construct, together with all the parties involved in the

preparatory dialogue, a similar mizhavu at the Adishakti premises: a process which will

not only ‘revive’ the art of this nearly-vanished instrument, but also, in reconstruction

seek to highlight and further investigate its forgotten potential. Meanwhile, in the wings,

and throughout the trip, a cross-transfer of knowledges was being negotiated and enacted

between Tillagamma and Adishakti’s young Ottan Tullal performer, Suresh, and new

Mohini Attam recruit, Nimmi. In coming months, Tillagamma will travel the road from

Tiruvaarur to Pondicherry, reversing Adishakti’s mid-may pilgrimage, to spend a month

transmitting and rediscovering her skills in the company of her youthful new

collaborators.

Like Samvaad, Adishakti is one of those many special FF grantees whose originality

and rigor have helped to unsettle the standard classifications which cannot but regulate

art policy. However, to continue with discussion, it is worth noting that FFs willingness,

from the outset, to support Adishakti’s troubling of the boundaries between, for example,

tradition and ‘the contemporary’, heritage and innovation, was characteristic of its

approach, consistently, to theatre development. For, if FFs intervention into the classical

performing arts was shaped, significantly, by the heritage focus of the late-1970s,

evolving gradually in the direction of innovation, its understanding of traditional theatre

forms grew directly out of the powerful folk initiative of the 1980s: always open to

experimentation, and responsive to the idea of a living people’s culture. As early as 1982

(before the folk-idea had been formally articulated in the 1983 supplement), the New

Delhi office had quietly initiated a program of folk performing arts. The first of these

grants went to the Indian National Theatre (INT) in Bombay, in support of its efforts to

revive and research local theatrical traditions (and attending musical and dance forms) in

63

Gujarat and Maharashtra. And where the INT effortlessly combined the tasks of

documentation with projects bringing folk and urban actors together on the urban stage,

two other grantees of this period, The Madhya Pradesh Kala Parishad in Bhopal and the

Mahatma Gandhi Memorial College in Udipi, did similar work into, and with, folk

performance forms in Kerala, Karmataka and Madhya Pradesh. In both cases, the

business of recording vanishing forms was underscored by an emphasis on interaction

between past and present worlds, on the grounds that ‘contemporary Indian directors seek

inspiration in theme and style from traditional and folk theatre and … encouraging

contemporary creativity is among the objectives of Foundation activity in the cultural

field.’93 So commendable were the efforts of Ford in theatre development, that former

program officer Anmol Vellani claims they inspired the Sangeet Natak Akademi to

announce in 1984 a parallel ‘annual program to assist young directors to develop stage

productions using stylistic conventions drawn from folk drama.’94

Ford’s early apprehension of theatre as a unique forum ‘of and for the people’ is

revealed also in subsequent efforts toward the promotion and development of a range of

rural theatre activities. Its support in 1983 to the Ninasam Janaspandana (so highly

praised, we might recall, in the Ramanujan report), is a case in point. The co-ordinator of

a unique rural and theatre project, Ninasam supported some 50 theatre and film groups in

rural Karnataka, giving them opportunities for interaction, self-expression and workshops

on modern technical aspects of stage and film crafts. The Dalit Rangbhoomi, funded in

1984, similarly provided a mobile theatre to serve rural areas of Maharashtra, and the

Theatre Living Laboratory ($50,000 in 1988) in Khardah, comprising a group of

disenchanted and unemployed youth from impoverished lower middle-class families,

worked under the leadership of Probhir Guha, to nurture the growth of a people’s theatre

movement in rural areas of Eastern India.

If unmistakably ‘worthy’ in intent, the very freedom with which Ford entered into

engagement with local theatre worlds, mixing urban and rural forms, new and old styles,

very rapidly produced an accompanying interest in the craft or formal aspects of

theatrical performance. A landmark grant of 1984 to the Kalidasa Akademi supported

research into the wisdom of the Natyashastra, the classical text on Indian performing arts,

and a year later the Upchar Trust in Calcutta had received funding for its wing the Natya

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Shodha Sansthan, to sponsor and promote research into the theatre, as also build up a

service network for theatre all over India. Padatik, funded in 1987, was enabled to

conduct a symposium dealing with the theoretical, methodological and practical aspects

of the relationship between the martial arts and performance, and in 1994 the Pune-based

Theatre Academy, likewise, was supported in its efforts toward the development of

regional theatre groups and script evolution among younger playwrights. And, as

observers of FF are well aware, all of these efforts in the theatre-field found their

apotheosis in the Theatre Laboratory Project, inaugurated in 1992.

Constraints of space will only allow me to provide a brief outline of this enterprise

which has already attracted a great deal of journalistic and scholarly interest. It is also the

subject of a recent doctoral dissertation submitted to the University of Hawaii.95 In the

main, very much a product of the counter-nationalist mood of the 1980s (reinforced

within the Foundation through its folklore initiative), the Theatre Laboratory Project

(TLP) drew upon the performing arts-----specifically theatre-----to protest against the

incurably centrifugal tendencies of the postcolonial Indian state. Squarely blaming the

growth of regional chauvinism in India on the ‘failure of Indian statecraft to give due

political recognition to the legitimate aspirations of distinct cultural groups’, this project

aimed to resist attempts at cultural homogenization by encouraging, initially, some 12

competitively-selected, Indian theatre ‘laboratories’ to develop an ‘active relationship

with their own milieu.’96 Wedded to the promotion of cultural difference through artistic

expression, the TLP also kept its gaze firmly on the need for continuous experimentation

which would challenge dominant theatre practices.

Accordingly, the scheme was announced in December 1990, and a panel of six theatre

experts was brought together to screen more than 80 applications and recommend grant

awards. After a prolonged review process, which included site visits by the advisory

panel, the 12 groups selected for awards fully reflected, as Vidhu Singh writes, ‘India’s

pluralistic identity as a nation’, bringing together, ‘different regions and languages with

diverse cultural, economic and political concerns.’97 Who were these groups? Very

briefly, they included Neelam Mansingh Chowdhury’s Punjab-based The Company

which sought to help traditional theatrical Naqqals or impersonators to simultaneously

draw upon the lost essence of their craft, as also forge new connections with modern

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sensibilities and production concepts. Another beneficiary was the Forum for Theatre

Laboratory Theatres of Manipur, an umbrella organization committed to opening

Manipuri drama to new theatre concepts, and to helping young playwrights to evolve

plays responsive to the regional and artistic aspirations of the affiliated groups. The

Koothu-p-pattarai Trust, organized under the leadership of N. Muthuswamy (often named

as the first modern playwright in Tamil), was supported in its efforts to evolve, with

reference to Tamil Nadu’s folk drama form therukoothu, a physical theatre consonant

with the groups contemporary interest in non-narrative dramaturgy. The Calcutta based

group Nandikar was selected for its work with local children’s theatre; Natyayogam,

under the leadership of playwright K. Reghu for its innovative exercises with village

performers and audiences in rural Kerala, and the Jammu-based Natrang for its

experimental ‘theatre-of images’, seeking to communicate visually with audiences

divided either by language or socio-cultural background. Bansi Kaul’s Rang Vidhushak

attracted attention, likewise, for its exploration, within Madhya Pradesh, of the role and

possibilities of the ‘Vidhushak’ figure: a flexible, multi-dimensional clown character

ubiquitous in all Indian village theatre. Root Trichur made the list for its pledge to save

Kerala theatre from commercialism through an effort to bring new vigor and continuity to

regional theatre activity; the Karnataka group Spandana, under B. Jayashree, was selected

for similar aspirations to develop new productions based on folk forms. Two other groups

in the scheme were Probhir Guha’s Living Theatre Laboratory (mentioned earlier),

chosen for its work in creating a ‘theatre of living feelings’ which sought to communicate

the raw experience of social inequity, and, last but by no means least, Kerala’s Ankanam,

lead by actor-director K.C.Manavendranath was nominated for its plan to bring about a

confrontation of contemporary theatre and Kerala’s dance-drama and martial art forms.

It is not possible to assess the success or failure of the TLP given the scope of this

report. But, the many reviews conducted by FF itself into the scheme and the groups

involved paint a mixed picture. Some groups were clearly seen to have ‘worked’ better

than others, and only some of those which did ‘work’ were expected to have a sustainable

future. Some critics lamented the fact that the TLP was too much of a laboratory project

with not enough emphasis on the giving out of results/performances to a wider audience.

More enthusiastic commentators, however, argued that while the TLP did little to mediate

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the gap between audience and performers, it was unique in its insistence upon networking

meetings between grantees, leading to a profound and regular exchange of ideas and

practices across the multiple regions incorporated within the project. In mid-February

2001, in the course of a ‘site visit’ to FF grantees in Bombay, I conducted some

interviews in connection with the Foundations theatre support schemes, specifically, the

Theatre Laboratory Project. An eminent theatre critic-----henceforth SG-----offered some

significant insights. While observing that the FF has consistently had its finger on the

proverbial pulse of theatre development in India, SG expressed anxieties about the

Foundation’s relative (and apparent) disinterest in the urgent task of theatre

dissemination. Many of the TLP groups, s/he felt, worked too exclusively in a ‘hot-

house’ environment, rarely connecting the indispensable business of research and

experimentation with the obligations of performance. Leaving aside the question of

bringing their work to audiences in other regional centers, some groups, especially, were

unable to establish regular and meaningful contact even with audiences within their

immediate communities. Acknowledging the vital need for intensive preparatory work----

-a luxury often supported by the FF-----SG convincingly argued that, in the end, theatre

derives its unique energy from living audiences. And in the absence of adequate infra-

structures for dissemination and performance, TLP groups (and other FF grantees) ran the

risk of museumification: valuable as ephemeral repositories of ‘pure’ rather than

‘applied’ theatre; academic rather than practical or ‘vital in their focus. Some of the

problem, SG suggested, accrued from what she regarded as FFs nostalgia about a pure

and uncorrupted folk culture. An attitude all too often articulated as a snobbish disinterest

in urban and commercial theatres-----now, often more profoundly audience-based than its

folk counterparts. If debatable, SG’s arguments certainly serve to remind us that the site

of the urban-popular is, in many ways, the contemporary correlative of the rural-folk, and

the forms which it produces and sustains, Bollywood not least of all, are deserving of

more serious attention. In this regard, it is worth noting that a recent NFSC newsletter

broke with disciplinary orthodoxy to examine the city as a vibrant locale of and for folk

culture.

In the main, however, SG’s concern about the lack of FF support for dissemination

and performance-venue development was volubly echoed by Sanjana Kapoor of Prithvi

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Theatre. This premier institution has established itself over the last 22 years as one of the

countries most renowned and respected theatre venues, hosting regular national and

international theatre festivals, subsidizing theatre rentals, organizing children’s

workshops, monthly original play-reading sessions, music and dance festivals, and

publishing, recently, a bi-monthly newsletter. It has successfully crafted a genuine theatre

milieu consisting of numerous semi-professional groups as also of an enthusiastic and

supportive audience. Only recently the recipient of FF funding with a grant-in-aid of its

15th Festival, an occasion for new performances, networking and collaboration,

workshops, seminars and lecture-demonstrations, Prithvi aspires to work more

aggressively towards improving quality of production and widening of its audience base.

In conversation, Sanjana Kapoor was preoccupied with the need for theatre groups and

practitioners to connect and transmit their skills to ever widening circles. To this end,

Prithvi has recently expressed interest in developing a Theatre Centre for Riaz: a

workshop space where national and international professionals active in their respective

fields would communicate skills in acting technique, scene study, movement, voice,

speech, dance, make-up, costume and set-design to other theatre workers, thereby

creating a dynamic atmosphere of exchange and cross-fertilization as also contributing to

the quality of theatre production in the country. Another proposal envisages Indian

participation in the Project Phakama, an international arts education exchange program

involving an interface between theatre practitioners and young people. Pioneered in

South Africa and Britain, the project has already supported cross-cultural exchange

between people from the Black, Asian, Cape Colored, Afrikaans and English community.

By drawing India into the loop, as it were, Prithvi hopes to implement a similar program

of multi-cultural training with theatre workers constituting its pedagogic core. Finally, in

its efforts to expand the reach of theatre Prithvi works most energetically toward the task

of audience cultivation, always increasing venues for more and more performance-

audience contact. All too aware of the dearth of viable venues in this country, Sanjana

Kapoor would like to see the regeneration of urban theatre-going in India, allowing

various regional groups (many of them FF grantees) to have ready and regular access to

trained audiences and to imaginative performance spaces. Arguably, FFs theatre

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programs would benefit enormously from touring grants to grantee groups, the conscious

development of performance spaces, and systematic audience cultivation.

For all its limitations, however, the Theatre Laboratory Project of the early 1990s

clearly marked a historical watershed in Ford’s arts programming, demonstrating a

startling new confidence and knowledge of the field. Moreover, possibly for the first time

in the history of FFs arts and culture program, a new premium was placed on the value of

artistic excellence/creativity-----not as an end in itself, but as something which could be

justified on its own terms. Where most other FF grants have supported the arts under the

alibi, variously, of development, preservation or even the reparative restoration of

threatened folk-values, the TLP was fairly (and appropriately) unembarrassed in its

espousal, ultimately, of the urgent need for good and imaginative work in the theatre.

And, it is a measure of the new priority given to arts by the FF in the 1990s, that the

Foundation initiated in 1991 an exploration into the possibility of professionalizing arts

funding in India. A concept paper prepared for this end justified the need for such an

initiative through an enthusiastic 5-fold valorization of the arts as, variously, a repository

of culture, a means of refining and humanizing existence, a source of cultural identity and

shared values, an arena and testing ground for individual and social innovation, a means

of improving the quality of life and the values by which people live and, finally, as a

means to apprehending the history of civilizations.98 Following a long process of

planning and development, the India Foundation for the Arts (IFA) was registered as a

public charitable trust in 1993 and given $1 million in general support, $1 million in

endowment support and an extra $250,000 to establish a theatre development fund. Based

in Bangalore, under the executive direction of Anmol Vellani (also the moving agent

behind the TLP), the IFA has supported an impressive range of activities under its arts

research and documentation program (strengthening of archival resources, materials

toward exhibitions, films and arts teaching methodologies) as also under its arts

collaboration program, stimulating dialogue between urban and tribal visual artists,

actors, dancers. A key collaborative partner to the FF (much like the NFSC), the IFA

extends much needed support toward the institutional development of current Indian

theatre, continuing the good work begun under the TLP. It has also been exploring, in

recent years, the imperatives of systematic arts education in the country, helping, among

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others, the School of Drama in Goa, the Rewachand Bhojani Academy (RBA), Pune and

Pragati Shikshan (PSS), Phaltan, to add an arts component to the curricula and strengthen

teaching capabilities through the arts. A recent initiative offers assistance to the Indian

Institute of Management, Bangalore (IIMB) for its elective course, Tracking Creative

Boundaries, which introduces management students to the processes of the arts with a

view to enhancing their appreciation of cultural diversity, as also of alternative sources

and forms of creativity.99

And so, here we are, at the fin de millennium, having traveled through 50 years with

the Ford Foundation, through all its incarnations: from modernization to preservation,

from urbanization to the village, from cultural nationalism (by proxy) to folk-culture,

from handicraft to folklore, from cold warmongering to the politics of the margin, from

heritage to innovation, even from utility to art. End of story? Almost, but for one small

forgotten footnote, kept to the last as it might carry us lightly into the imperatives of

future programming. We might recall that the 1983 supplement, cited so often in this

discussion, pledged support to India’s ‘high’ culture of ecumenical pluralism in a bid to

diversify the monolith of Indian nationalism. What has Ford done toward this end? As

early as 1969, the Foundation assisted the Islam and Modern Age Society to supply a

forum for the exchange of ideas among Islamic scholars seeking to negotiate the distance

between traditional beliefs and contemporary conditions. To this end the Society began a

process of journal publication devoted to canvassing the problems of Indian Muslims,

and to organizing conferences for Islamic scholars from India, Asia, Africa, Europe and

the United States. Some two decades later FF also devoted considerable attention to the

preservation of crucial forms and practices within Hinduism, supporting the Rastriya

Sanskrit Sansthan in 1984 to preserve the oral intellectual tradition of traditional pandits

while making the same accessible to modern scholarship. In 1985, the Theosophical

Society was funded for 4 colloquia on philosophical/religious themes; 1986 witnessed a

grant to compile a Who’s Who of Living Pandits in India; 1986 an interactive training

program for modern philosophers and traditional scholars of Indian philosophy; 1987 an

exciting initiative, conducted by the Institute of Historical Studies, Calcutta, to conduct a

survey and compile a catalogue of the archives of eighteenth and nineteenth-century

Christian missionary records lying scattered in and around Calcutta, and in 1991 the

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Prajna Pathshala Mandal was enabled to conduct a seminar reviewing the methodology of

the Dharmakosha, an encyclopedic compilation of all Sanskrit texts on dharma, with a

view to making it more accessible to contemporary social sciences and philosophers. And

last but not least, from about 1981, FF has offered exemplary assistance toward the

preservation of Tibetan culture and Buddhism, supporting, among others, the Library of

Tibetan Works and Archives to continue the cataloguing and conservation of its rare

holdings of Tibetan books, manuscripts, xylographs, icons and art objects; the Tibetan

Institute of Performing Arts to enable the documentation and transmission of Tibetan

dance, music, theatre and opera through the rigorous training of instructors, and the

Foundation for Universal Responsibility of His Holiness the Dalai Lama for a campus

outreach program to include young people in discussions of major challenges confronting

India today. A short but impressive list, and I invoke it here only to remind Ford of its

support for religious pluralism in a country and region now beset by the worst kinds of

fanaticisms and fundamentalisms. For, quite apart from the necessary advocacy of Indian

secularism it is also possible to pronounce, with authority, India’s historical capacity to

live creatively with religious difference. Ford has already left a meaningful mark in this

area, but even as we suffer times shattered by, first, the monstrous demolition of the

Babri Masjid in Ayodhya and second, the monstrous gunning down of the Bamiyan

Buddhas in Afganistan, there is much more left to do. As an institution long devoted to

exploring and promoting the sheer (and harmonious) variety of Indian cultures, Ford is

well placed to put more of its knowledge on view: showing to greater effect, and to more

people, the ecelecticism and religious cross-fertilization of India’s classical, folk and

artistic cultures.

It is worthy of note that in 1998 the FFs New York-based Education, Media, Arts and

Culture (EMAC) program enthusiastically committed itself to a new initiative called

‘Religion and Culture: Meeting the Challenge of Pluralism’. Where, previously, FF has

tended to regard religion principally as a means to approach questions of community

mobilization, civic participation and women’s rights/health, this new initiative recognizes

religions as discrete systems of thought, in and of themselves. And, as such, it is

committed to foregrounding the role of religions in the promotion of pluralism, through,

for example, programs of multi-religious cooperation.100 While FF is yet to make an

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explicit commitment of this nature in India, a recent grant to the Viveka Foundation is

clearly a step in the right direction. Established in 1999 as a charitable organization,

Viveka is emerging a center dedicated to exploring the cultural, spiritual and

philosophical underpinnings of development in the current context of globalization. More

groups, scholars, philosophers and religious thinkers need to drawn into this process in a

systematic manner.

Late in February 2001 I traveled to Dharamsala with program officer Sharada

Ramanathan for an audience with His Holiness the Dalai Lama, indubitably one of the

greatest living spiritual leaders and pluralists of our time. There in the delicious chill of

the mountains looming over the Kangra valley, we spoke to His Holiness the Dalai Lama

at the Tibetan Institute of Performing Arts, during a day long festival of Tibetan opera.

Reproduced below is the edited text of this conversation, surely the best way in which to

conclude the present study.

His Holiness The Dalai Lama in Conversation with Sharada Ramanathan and Leela Gandhi, Dharamsala, 26 February 2001

SR/LG: Your Holiness we would like to speak to you about the role of spirituality and culture in world

harmony. We are especially interested in the role of Tibetan culture in this regard, in a world best by inner

and outer violence.

DL: I don’t know. Perhaps I think that the Tibetan culture has 2 categories. One category of Tibetan culture

is certain customs and traditions especially created by the social system, by society, and also by the

environment. While these customs have had unique characteristics, now (you see) society is changing, even

Tibetans themselves are changing. So they are an important part of Tibetan culture but there is no use to

preserve them. But there is another aspect which I feel is related with the basic human way of life – human

attitudes towards oneself, towards other fellow human beings, towards animals, towards environment. I

think that is Tibetan culture, and at that level much influenced by Buddhism, Buddha-dharma. So it is, at

that level, more thoughtful, more respectful, more compassionate, non-violent. Of course to sing or to

dance or do other forms of music or art is are also very unique to the Tibetans, but go further, further than

that to the deeper inner values. Here I think Tibetans have something which may be shared with other

people. My feeling (I mean in my own experience) is that we can all borrow some Buddhist techniques in

order to promote human value. This is my feeling. That we can do with all religions. We can also do this

from many Hindu traditions. Take the idea of ahimsa-----not just philosophy; it is very relevant in our daily

life.

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Sometimes I come across some people who believe in human values and human moral ethics. But they

also believe that without religion you can’t be a nice person, a good person. I think there are two attitudes:

either that in order to be a good human being you must be a religious person, or if you are not a religious

person, a non-believer, than these morals have nothing to do with you. But I believe it is not necessary to be

a religious believer to be such a good, a warm hearted person. That can be done. I try where I go to always

promote human value. And some methods (because of my own experiences) some Buddhist methods and

techniques may increase human values without making you a religious believer. Or another case – without

becoming Buddhist remain a Christian, a Muslim or Hindu or Jew or some other religious follower.

Without changing your religion simply borrow some methods from other religions. So among the Christian

community-----I have many friends, many monks and nuns-----they don’t fear that I will try and convert

them (laughter). They feel very comfortable. So that can be done.

In the modern education system [especially] I think something can be done. In modern education he

main objective is ‘good life’. Good life means material facility, not touching the inner spirit. So the focus is

how to develop materially. So now we, humanity, is passing through some experience where despite

material comfort we are not necessarily happy people. Still we have some other needs, which have to be

fulfilled.

On one occasion, when Indira Gandhi was there I wrote a letter to her concerning education – the

education system in these Himalayan regions. We found that the local people had very very low rates of

crime. And crimes rates increased with people becoming more clever, more cunning. Then I wrote a letter

about how to find an education method that would suit the masses-----in India, and for the Buddhist

community in the Himalayan regions. Now, you see … according to the Indian constitution religion cannot

be taught. But then they can’t make the distinction that somebody can be spiritual without being religious.

But I am not talking about religion, not talking about Buddhism, not talking about Hinduism, just how to be

a happy person, how to be a happy family.

Now we consider the practice of compassion as something good for others, not necessarily beneficial to

oneself. But anger we consider as harming of others in order to protect oneself. This is our impression. But

if we analyze, if we think, properly, carefully, as soon as compassion develops we immediately get benefit.

But to others-----not sure. Now for example if you see someone and feel a sense of compassion

immediately you get feeling of closeness to that person, and also you get feeling of inner strength-----that

you [can extend] your help. But the other person sometimes they get suspicious. Why you are so caring to

me? I can manage myself (laughter). Some old lady we are trying to help (helpless laughter) they think they

can manage better than that. So they feel a little uncomfortable, isn’t it, sometimes? So, therefore, feeling

of compassion is for oneself, not necessarily beneficial to others. On the other hand, anger-----you think

you are trying to harm others. But actually as soon as anger comes it hits your peace of mind and hits your

peaceful sleep. Anger hits the happiness of your family. That will not harm your enemy. Actually it goes at

you. For weeks and months you are demoralized, unhappy. So then usually you become lonely and that is

your enemies wish: you become physically weak, mentally weak. Then that person can become lonely,

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very easily die (or become) mad. That is the greatest wish of your enemy (much laughter). So these are not

necessarily religious studies, just analyzing. Now in modern medical science people are showing serious

interest in the emotional … side. So in the education field, one of the most important ways [is to learn] to

care for one’s health by analyzing emotion. That is the way-----to teach how to be a happy person, how to

be a happy family, to be a happy society, and create a peaceful world. Peace must build from [the basis of

the] individual. War won’t get world peace. [You know] there are military forces they call peaceful forces--

--- for a peace-loving nation. So all forces are peace-loving forces (peals of laughter).

SR/LG: How do we bring back these values that you are talking about which are based, not necessarily on

religion, but on inner spirituality? How can institutions work together towards this end? Can institutions

intervene at a level where people are actually killing each other?

HHDL: It is doubtful that inner values, spiritual values can be promoted just by organizations. It has to

come from the community as a whole … I [also] think the answer is in education. My suggestion is that

you bring together people who have the same concerns-----individuals-----and talk more. Then eventually

organize some workshops, bringing [young] students from the universities. Talks, and then articles, more

articles, for circulation. And in that way it will raise the interest in the public. Of course there are many

NGOs concerned about these things. But then (maybe it’s wrong) my impression is many groups of people,

many organizations, think concern about the unhappy situation of many societies, [however] it seems to me

they try and tackle these problems on a physical level. Not tackle at an emotional [or] motivational level.

The physical level might [look] like it’s putting people in some better shape but negative things are still

there … that is why [I say] education is of utmost importance … for long term [change] … And not just

through school … but through television, through radio, through newspaper and some seminars.

SR/LG: Your Holiness could we ask you to indulge in some prophesy, and tell us what the future will be?

HHDL: If you know a good prophet [ I ] would like to ask about the future of Tibet (laughter) … But, my

feeling is that the future means another few centuries or maybe few 1000 years. And I feel quite certain if

we today, our generation, if we wake up our minds and use human intelligence, human wisdom, properly, I

think that at least by the next few centuries we’ll be more happy. After few thousand, who knows?

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Notes 1 Eugene Staples, Forty Years, A Learning Curve: The Ford Foundation’s Programs in India, 1952-1992 (The Ford Foundation, New Delhi 1992), p. 38 2 Francis X. Sutton, ‘The Ford Foundation: The Early Years’, Daedalus, Winter 1987, p. 46 3 Dwight MacDonald, The Ford Foundation: The Men and the Millions (1955; Transaction Publishers: New Brunswick and Oxford, 1989), p. 164 4 Report of the Study for the Ford Foundation on Policy and Program (The Ford Foundation: Detroit, Michigan, 1949) 5 Fredric Schiller, On the Aesthetic Education of Man in a Series of Letters, eds and trans. Elizabeth M. Wilkinson and L. A. Willoughby (Clarendon press: Oxford, 1966), p. 17 6 ‘The Arts’, in Ford Foundation Directives for the 1960s: Supporting Materials; Program Proposals for the 1960s, Vols I & II, Ford Foundation Archives, p. 6 7 Ibid 8 Ibid., p. 5 9 Directives and Terms of Reference for the 1960s, Ford Foundation Archives, June 1962 10 The Fund for the Advancement of Education, Annual Report, 1951-1952, p. 12 11 William Greenleaf, The Ford Foundation: The Formative Years (Unpublished Manuscript), Chapter V, p. 10 12 Chicago News, September 11, 1951 13 Trustee Docket, January 1951, p. 7, Ford Foundation Archives; cited in Sutton, ‘The Ford Foundation’, op. cit., pp. 57-58 14 Robert A. McCaughey, International Studies and Academic Enterprise: A Chapter in the Enclosure of American Learning (Columbia University Press: New York, 1984), p. 154 15 Ibid, p. 153 16See Ibid., p. 164 17 Edward Said, Orientalism: Western Concepts of the Orient (1978; Penguin: Harmondsworth, 1991), p. 285 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., p. 291 20 Cited in Dipesh Chakrabarty, ‘Talking Across Differences: Notes Towards a Dialogue Between Area-Studies and Diasporic Studies, unpublished paper, p. 4 21Ford is again implicated, indirectly, in the following passage in Orientalism, in which Said writes with particular bitterness about the economic nexus behind area studies: ‘There is of course a Middle East studies establishment, a pool of interests, “old boy” or “expert” networks linking corporate business, the Foundations, the oil companies, the missions, the military, the foreign service, the intelligence community together with the academic world. There are grants and other rewards, there are organizations, there are hierarchies, centers, faculties, departments, all devoted to legitimizing and maintaining the authority of a handful of basic, basically unchanging ideas about Islam, the Orient, and the Arabs’ (p. 302) 22 Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘The Unintended Consequences of the Cold War’, in The Cold War and the University, ed. Noam Chomsky (New Press: New York, pp. 196-97) 23 Cited in ibid, pp. 212-213 24 See ibid. pp. 214-215 25 Ibid., p. 222 26 See Harold Bloom, The Books and School of the Ages (Papermac: London, 1995) 27 Martha Nussbaum, Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard University press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1998). Pp. 300-301 28 Crossing Borders: Revitalizing Area Studies (Ford Foundation, 1999), xi 29 ‘Overseas Development’, in Ford Foundation Directives for the 1960s: Supporting Materials; Program Proposals for the 1960s, Vols I & II, Ford Foundation Archives, p. 5 30 ‘International Affairs’ Ford Foundation Directives for the 1960s: Supporting Materials; Program Proposals for the 1960s, Vols. I & II, Ford Foundation Archives, p. 11

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31 Douglas Ensminger, ‘The Sensitivity of the Ford Foundation Contributing to India’s Art and Culture Programs’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, 1971, B. 12, p. 1 32 Ibid. pp. 2-3 33 Cited in B.P. Singh, India’s Culture: the State, the Arts and Beyond (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 1998), pp. 53-54 34 For a comprehensive and lucid account of these institutions and traditions see Kapila Malik Vatsyayana, Some Aspects of Cultural Policies in India (Unesco: Paris, 1972), and ‘Culture the Crafting of Institutions’, in Hiranmaya Karlekar, Independent India: The First Fifty Years, Indian Council for Cultural Relations (Oxford University Press: Oxford, 19980, pp. 486-503 35 See Douglas Ensminger, ‘Relationships with Nehru’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, A. 8 36 Douglas Ensminger, ‘The Ford Foundation’s Interest and Involvement with Indian Education’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, B. 23, p. 88 37 Letter from Alexander Heard to David Bell, February 23, 1970, FF Archives, David Bell Files, Box 12 and 177. 38 Jawaharlal Nehru, The Discovery of India (The Signet Press: Calcutta, 1946), pp. 43, 46, 39, 306 39 Ibid., pp. 30-31 40 M. K. Gandhi, Village Industries (Navjivan Publishing House: Ahmedabad, 1960), p. 7 41 Douglas Ensminger, ‘Why did the Ford Foundation Assist with India’s Handicrafts and Handloom Industry’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, B. 5, pp. 1-2 42 ‘The Ford Foundation’s Contribution in the Field of India’s Village and Small Industry’, in ibid., B. 2, p. 4 43 Ensminger, ‘Need for Understanding the Gandhian Philosophy and Different Interpretations Expounded by Gandhain [sic] Followers’, in ibid., A. 13, p. 5 44 Ibi.d., p. 2 45 Ibid., p. 14 46 Willard Hertz, Oral History Project, May 8, 1973 and April 8, 1974, p. 21 47 Department of Circulating Exhibition Records, Long Version, The Museum of Modern Arts Archives, NY: Records of the Department of Circulating Exhibitions, 11.1/83 (2). 48 Grant # 05800055, International Study Team on Handicraft Industry, Report of Madame Alix Gres’ on her Mission to India, p. 11 49 Ibid.,Report on India’s Handicrafts by Peter Kaufman, p. 7 50 Grant # 08850787, Mahila Vikas Sangh, Survey and Workshop of Handicraft Producer Groups in Bihar, RGA, p. 2 51 Grant # 900934, Self-Employed Women’s Association, To Strengthen and Enhance Production in a Women’s Craft Producers Organisation, 1990, RGA, p. 4 52 Grant # 0950438, Handicrafts and Livelihood for the Tibetan Community, 1993, RGA, p. 2 53 Grant # 08750103, Support for the Participation of Four Crafts Specialists in the World Crafts Council Meeting in New Delhi, Narrative Report, p. 2 54 Grant # 08850787, The Madras Craft Foundation, Folk Arts Documentation, Development and Education Programs in Tamil Nadu, RGA, p. 4 55 Grant # 08400205, Srinivas Malliah Memorial Theatre Crafts Trust, Support for the Preservation of Traditional Theatre Crafts, 1985, RGA, p. 3 56 Douglas Ensminger, ‘The Sensitivity of the Ford Foundation Contributing to India’s Art and Culture Programs’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, 1971, B. 12, p. 4 57 The Ford Foundation Annual Report, 1955, p.98 58 This information is drawn from James Laughlin, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, May 22 and 23, pp. 25-26 59 See Grant # 05500205, The Southern Languages Book Trust, 1955, Correspondence 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid. 62 Ibid. 63 Indian Express, October 8, 1955 64 Arthur Isenberg, ‘The Publishing Scene in India – Achievements, Problems, Prospects’, Sital Primlani Memorial Lecture, Ford Foundation Archives, IR6 (69 –561) # 001503

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65 Arthur Isenberg, The Case for American Support of Selected Cultural Projects in India: Report on an Informal Inquiry (1964), p. 3 66 Ibid., ii 67 Tom Nairn, The Break-Up pf Britain: Crisis and Neo-Nationalism (New Left Books: London, 1977), p. 348 68 Possible Ford Foundation Support Of Cultural Projects In India, Discussion Paper, November 1968, Ford Foundation Archives, 69 – 561 # 006928 69 Grant # 06990561, Ford Foundation Support for Cultural Projects In India, 1969, RGA, p. 1 70 Ibid., p. 7 71 Ibid., p. 6 72 Ibid. 73 See Arthur Isenberg, Trends and Needs in Indian Culture in the 1970s (The Ford Foundation, New Delhi, April, 1970) 74 Aijaz Ahmad, In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (Oxford University Press; Oxford, 1997), p. 41. Cf. also, pp. 60-61, 41-42 75 Ford Foundation Support for Cultural Projects In India, 1969, RGA, p. 2 76 Arthur Isenberg, Trends and Needs in Indian Culture in the 1970s, pp. 37-38 77 Douglas Ensminger, ‘The Sensitivity of the Ford Foundation Contributing to India’s Art and Cultural Programs’, Ford Foundation Oral History Project, June 21, 1972, B. 12, p, 10 78 Grant #07200224, The National Centre for Performing Arts, 1972, RGA, p. 4 79 Grant #07400649, Support for activities in the preservation and interpretation of India’s cultural heritage, 1978. 80 Ibid., RGA, p. 7 81 Ford Foundation Annual Report, 1982, p. 34 82 Ahmad, In Theory, op. cit., p. 33 83 Conversation with Messrs. Geertz and Hirschman, in ‘The Hungry, Crowded, Competitive World’, The Ford Foundation Board of Trustees/Future Program Planning Project, 1976, vol. 1, p. 1 84 Grant Supplement # 07890782, Support for Activities in the Preservation and Interpretation of India’s Cultural Heritage, 1983, RGA, p. 7 85 Ranajit Guha, Elementary Aspects of Peasant Insurgency in Colonial India (Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1983), p. 14 86 A. K. Ramanujan, Report to the Ford Foundation, Ford Foundation Archives, File # 012446, 1984, p. 11 87 Ashoke Chatterjee, ‘NGOs: An Alternative Democracy’, in Hiranmay Karlekar ed. Independent India: The First Fifty Years (Oxford University Press: Delhi, 1998), p. 285 88 Grant Supplement #07890782, 1983, p. 10 89 See Grant # 08500793, Support for a Study of Ancient Temples and Monuments Along the Mahanadi River in Eastern Orissa, 1986 and Grant # 08500794, Support for a Study of Ancient Temples Along the Mahanadi River in Western Orissa, 1986 90 See Grant # 08200905, Support for the Establishment of an Archive and Research Centre in Ethnomusicology by the American Institute of Indian Studies, 1981 91 Grant # 080450247, Support for Documentation and Research on the Musical Traditions of Women Light Classical Singers in India, 1984, Grantee Narrative Report, 1992, p. 7 92 Grant # 8800114 Supp # : 1, Support for Pedagogical Development in Indian Classical Dance, 1993, RGA, p. 5 93 See Grant # 8201012, Support for the Development of Programs in Creative Writing and Folk Performing Arts, 1983, RGA, p. 15 94 Anmol Vellani, ‘Individual Theatre Awards Program’, Culture Review, p. 2 95 Vidhu Singh, Toward a Theatre of the Common People: New Interactions Between Classical, Folk and Modern Theatre in Koothu-P-Pattarai, Rang Vidhushak and Ankanam, Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation submitted to the University of Hawaii, December 2000 96 See Request No: DCP-2534, Indian Theatre Laboratories, 1992, RGA, pp. 3, 4 97 Toward a Theatre of the Common People, p. 41 98 ‘The Indian Foundation for the Arts Project’ Concept Paper, pp. 1-2 99 See India Foundation for the Arts, Annual Report 1997-98, p. 13

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100 See Program Officer Memo, Religion and Culture: Meeting the Challenge of Pluralism, EMAC, November 1998