Abstract

In India, cultural policy is not an academic discipline or congeries of disciplines. This is surprising, for the country’s 1.25 billion inhabitants enjoy a flourishing and variegated cultural life. Their government(s) – the federal or ‘central’ government as well as those of the Indian Union’s 29 States and 7 Union Territories – ostensibly subsidise the arts and heritage. Identity politics has always existed in India and has become increasingly vehement today, but the tensions play out in connection with religion, caste and class rather than ethnicity. Yet there is little scholarly exploration of these issues; analytical speculation of the sort long practiced in Western Europe (and increasingly nowadays in other regions, notably East and Southeast Asia), is practically non-existent. Nor has cultural policy in India become a favoured terrain of foreign researchers, as it has in East Asia.