Central to the process of Indian nation-building in the mid-twentieth century was the framing of cultural policies aimed at producing an aesthetic sensibility representative of a distinctly national identity which is ‘modern’ yet ‘Indian’. Existing studies on the Union government’s cultural policies of this period focus on the new upper-caste, upper-class cultural leadership and their role in displacing hereditary communities of artists from their profession. The article seeks to establish that selective inclusion of certain art forms by the cultural bureaucracy in educational institutions was a deliberate attempt to ensure that young Indian nationals were endowed with certain forms of cultural literacy that could be identified as Indian. In this context, this article examines the emergence of government-sponsored cultural arts competitions in the 1950s, known as the yuvajanotsavam (youth festival), in the southern Indian state of Kerala, and argues that they played a major role in producing a ‘modern’ aesthetic sensibility that the government legitimized in the name of nation-region building. The present article reflects on this ‘modern’ national aesthetic by drawing upon archival material related to the youth festival and existing scholarly discussions and debates on post-colonial cultural politics in Kerala in relation to arts education, nation-region building, gender, caste and sexuality, embedded in the colonialist and nationalist projects.
Rajashree R. (Mon,) studied this question.