The architecture of consent: the Ford Foundation, ‘brain irrigation’, and the making of India’s neoliberal transition

India’s transition from a statist, inward-oriented economy to one integrated with global markets is often explained by macroeconomic crisis and the failure of ‘license raj’. We argue that while crisis was the trigger, the form and resilience of India’s liberalisation were shaped by a decades-long project of elite knowledge network formation and preparation. Foregrounding the role of the Ford Foundation, we conceptualise its influence as building the institutional capacity for ‘brain irrigation’—a Gramscian process of hegemonic network construction, ideational transfer and elite cultivation that naturalised liberal economic thought as ‘common sense’. Through major grants (1952-1992), Ford, alongside Bretton Woods partners, supported the development of a cadre of Indian economists at institutions (including Delhi School of Economics, numerous Indian IIMs). This elite network, with figures like Patel, Ahluwalia, Bhagwati, and Singh, played pivotal roles in key episodes: 1966 devaluation, pro-business shifts in the 1980s, and 1991 reforms. Crucially, they also helped promote the move to liberalisation by moderating India’s stance on the New International Economic Order (NIEO). Using original archival records, we demonstrate how Ford’s long-term elite network investment did not cause liberalisation but provided the critical knowledge infrastructure that made a domestically-owned, sustainable market turn possible.