Dancing Ambassadors: Postcolonial India and the Birth of a Global Cultural Project

Soon after independence in 1947, the early postcolonial Indian state embarked on a concerted campaign to project ‘Indian’ culture across the globe. Officials saw culture as the site on which to counteract the nation’s shortcomings in material and might. The government began to project a ‘national culture’ abroad—making civilizational claims that asserted ancient achievement, present decolonization, and a future of resurrected greatness.

This paper – exploring how dancers were deployed as cultural ambassadors in countries across the world – will offer a new history of the Indian state’s transnational ambitions and entanglements. Over the 1950s and 1960s, the Indian state aided in, and benefited from, select dancers becoming globe-trotting, state-sponsored cultural ambassadors, projecting a vision of the young nation’s art as ancient, sophisticated, and spiritual (implicitly Hindu), rebirthed after an age of colonial cultural death. Performing abroad at venues ranging from concert halls to embassies, for heads of state and lay public alike, classical dancers came to be hailed within India and abroad as the republic’s ambassadors.

Beginning by locating the origins of this mode of cultural diplomacy through the global performances of Uday Shankar and his ‘Hindu Ballet’ during the colonial period, the paper then interrogates the ways in which the Nehru government made dancers the centerpiece of early postcolonial cultural diplomacy. It opens a window onto the state’s anxieties about defining a ‘national culture’, the wide discretionary power wielded by bureaucrats, disputes between the state and artists, and the responses to these international ventures from political opposition to civil society reactions. Apart from shedding light on a key part of postcolonial India’s cultural outreach, the paper also demonstrates how cultural diplomacy, assumed to be the preserve of powerful nations, could be deployed even by countries in the Global South.