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. The political theorist Partha Chatterjee argued many years ago that anti-colonialist nationalists in India produced their own domain of sovereignty within colonial society well before beginning their political struggle with the imperial power. The strength of subsequent Indian nationalism, Gandhi's in particular, was largely based on this process, while also drawing freely on western political and cultural ideas. Through the 1950s and into the 1960s, the government of India founded institutions that provided the 'dominant paradigms for the "arts and culture" field as a whole'. Deontological issues such as access and participation, or choosing between democratization and democracy in the cultural realm, are rarely evoked in the grumblings of the Indian intelligentsia.
