Paper short abstract:

This paper sets out to map elements in ‘cultural exchange’ between India and Germany during the last 60 years with the objective of examining the flows of ideas, frameworks, initiatives, and people between two nation states, to explore cultural diplomacy as a site of challenge and negotiation

Paper long abstract:

The present project traces the contours of a relationship between two new nation states that began afresh as a diplomatic one in the early 1950s, sharpened particularly since India opened itself to the world through the path of economic liberalization in the early 1990s. Historically, this interaction saw significant changes with the division of Germany (and a separate axis in India's ties with the Federal Republic of Germany and the former German Democratic Republic). In the Indian context, the shift in cultural policy after the 1990s has meant a clear self-representation as a globalizing society on the world stage, signaling a self fashioning along state determined images of a cohesive and yet cosmopolitan cultural identity. The agents are different forms of visual culture open to public memory. In the German context, this becomes an avenue for a renewed engagement with this globalizing/globalised entity. What we see is a result finely shaped by self-projections of state cultural policy from both ends in a global context.

The aim of this study is to examine this flow of ideas and initiatives, the sharing of individual agents, and the often selective self projection on either side, in order to trace the travelling of ideas across political economies of culture. The central questions that direct this inquiry will be whether the imbalances in intercultural exchange and the transcultural flows of ideas have shifted, what global phenomena have made these shifts possible, and in what ways we can speak of the political economies of cultural policy.