Dancing ambassadors: The Indian republic’s global cultural project

Abstract Beginning in the 1950s, emerging from the British empire’s shadow, the Indian government helped dancers become globe-trotting, state-sponsored cultural ambassadors, projecting a vision of the young nation’s art as ancient, sophisticated, and spiritual. Asserting a ‘national culture’ (understood by the formerly colonized as essential to decolonization) involved its reconstitution, despite claims to civilizational continuity. This article reveals how dance became the natural candidate for global cultural projection, the ways in which the state allied with artists in this endeavour, and the conflicts this engendered between them. It offers insights into the state’s anxieties about the nation’s image globally, debates within civil society and between politicians about Indian culture, and the logic underlying how Indian dance was presented differently across the world. The global projection of culture and its reception abroad was part of the contested process of defining it at home. National culture took shape as it travelled the world.