Cultural Development, ‘Helping Hands’ and the Internationalization of Postcolonial Indian Theatre

Abstract

This paper focuses on the role of the Ford and Rockefeller Foundations in India’s cultural development in the latter half of the twentieth century. It delineates how American foundations used India as a ‘guinea pig’ for developing a global model of cultural development between the 1960s and 90s that was subsequently replicated by Scandinavian developmental agencies, German Stiftungen, and the EU. By demonstrating how Ford and Rockefeller established a presence in the Indian cultural sector, consolidated its position and subsequently fundamentally altered its cultural landscape, the paper complicates dominant understandings of the history of theatre in the ‘Global South’ and the development of Performance Studies as an academic discipline.