Cultural diplomacy: India does it differently

Abstract

This article reviews the singularities of Indian doctrine and practice of cultural diplomacy, beginning with the observation that this term and the notions of ‘soft power’ and ‘public diplomacy’ commonly associated with cultural diplomacy elsewhere do not have much purchase in India, where the spirit and letter of ‘international cultural relations’ are the preferred currency. The essay explores the historical grounding for this preference, as well as the attitudes and practice that flow from it. Another singularity is the role and importance of the Indian diaspora: overseas populations of Indian origin have been both a significant segment of the target audience for international cultural relations – as if a certain idea of India had to be projected abroad to a part of itself – and a significant ‘co-producer’ in projecting that image. A third is the emergence of a new avatar of the diasporic Indian, now identified with capitalist entrepreneurship.

Keywords:

• Cultural diplomacy
• soft power
• public diplomacy
• Indian diaspora
• ‘the global Indian’

Notes

1. In his capacity as Scientific Coordinator and Team Leader of the European Union ‘Preparatory Action’ research project on ‘Culture in EU External Relations’.

2. Yet we must also recognize the deep-seated Indian concern with securing a ‘correct’ image of India abroad, in other words as a society that is truly contemporary, which is forging an original synthesis between cultural tradition and modernity.

3. I have explored elsewhere how cultural policy, both as a term of common parlance and an object of scholarly research is extremely underdeveloped in India (see Isar forthcoming).

4. It is significant that at the same time as the ICCR, Azad’s ministry also established the key building blocks of the new Republic’s educational infrastructure and a set of apex bodies for the dispensation of government patronage of the arts and culture sector, namely the ‘Akademies’: the Sahitya Akademi (literature); the Sangeet Natak Akademi (music and dance) and the Lalit Kala Akademi (visual arts). Then as now, most of the government’s culture budget is spent on these entities (after the more than 40 per cent that is allocated to heritage preservation via the Archaeological Survey of India).

5. The internationalist openness was embodied in the composition of the Council itself in the early years. In 1961–62, for example, the Council still included, in addition to eminent Indian cultural figures, international luminaries such as Clement Attlee, W. Norman Brown, D.H. von Glassenopp, Ali Hekmat, Taha Hussain, Louis Renou, D.T. Suzuki, Arnold Toynbee and Giuseppe Tucci. Later on, however, this worldwide membership ceases.

6. While India is increasingly an international aid giver aid for cultural projects has not been part of the government’s soft power arsenal, except in the case of the Cambodian World Heritage site of Angkor Wat. Since the 1980s, working through the Archaeological Survey of India, the government body responsible for the nation’s monuments, India has disbursed significant amounts for the conservation and restoration of various structures at Angkor Wat, approaching the task ‘through a lens of cultural affinity (Winter 2007, 133).

7. Surprisingly for an organization whose purpose is external relations, much of the ICCR’s activity is devoted to such performances, in its New Delhi headquarters as well as in its Regional Offices.

8. However, as Mark points out, the same Committee also noted that ‘whatever recognition’ Indian contemporary art had achieved was due more to the efforts of private galleries ‘or otherwise’ than through the efforts of the Council.

9. Other kinds of image-building were pursued by this Prime Minister. For example, her government helped finance David Attenborough’s film Gandhi, which rendered the then official Indian version of relations between the majority Hindu and the minority Muslim communities of British India and of the political developments within and between the two that led to the Partition of the sub-continent in 1947.