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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
62
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