Three human heads emerge from vibrant hues of molten lava and are arranged to form another head. Three heads, with one ear, four eyes, and three noses, feature black, brown and beige complexions. This uncanny assemblage is bound together by a single blue turban. One of the men plays a trumpet, another a baritone saxophone, and the third a nāgasvaram , the double-reed aerophone of South India. Above the turban, an all-caps text proclaims: “A Festival of Indo•Euro•Afro•American Music.”
This is an advertisement for a week-long 1980 event in Bombay, India, called the Jazz Yatra, which promises to feature both “jazz and Indian classical” music with “live performances by the greatest musicians in the world!”
The artwork for this poster was made by a Polish artist for an Indian jazz festival that featured a plurality of American performers. In this image, we find a portrait of what I call the Jazz Yatra’s jazz intercommunalism: the utopian vision of “Indo-Euro-Afro-American music”.
Over the course of its 25-year history, Jazz Yatra became the longest-running jazz festival in the world outside of the United States and Europe. Yātra means “pilgrimage” in Sanskrit. Between 1978 and 2003, this Indian festival established itself as a major musical pilgrimage site of the late twentieth century. Despite Jazz Yatra’s significance in the global history of music and international relations during the late Cold War and its aftermath, the festival has not received the attention that it deserves.
Three worlds to one
The greatest intellectual legacy of the Cold War in the West is what historian Carl E Pletsch calls the “three worlds scheme”, comprising the First World, the Second World, and the Third World. Pletsch argues that this tripartite division is a repackaged product of the deeper divisions of traditional vs. modern and ideological vs. free.
In the West’s conception of the three worlds scheme, the First World is both modern and free, the Second World is modern but ideological, and the Third World is both traditional and ideological.
1978 Jazz Yatra festival pamphlet cover. Image courtesy Niranjan Jhaveri Jazz Collection, Archives and Research Center for Ethnomusicology Culture was a coveted weapon in the Cold War. The capitalist First World and the communist Second World both sought to influence the Third World’s ideological development through their cultural exports and influence campaigns. India, as a founding member and leading voice in the Non-Aligned Movement, was a pivotal battleground in the cultural Cold War. The Soviet Union’s close relations with post-Independence India enabled it to achieve influence through a wide range of arts, with a particular focus on theatre and film.
In the 1980s, the CIA believed that the United States was losing the cultural Cold War in India, due to the Soviet Union’s ground-level connections with broad segments of Indian society. Jazz, as an American-born art form, was the United States’ cultural Cold War weapon of choice, and India was no exception. The Jazz Ambassadors programme sent American jazz musicians across the globe on the U.S. State Department’s dime to win hearts and minds during the Cold War.
Jazz proved to be such an effective weapon that other governments – including those in the Eastern Bloc – began to send their own jazz groups abroad after the start of the United States Jazz Ambassadors programme.
Cold War funding for culture was so abundant that Jazz Yatra organisers reported the following in the festival’s inaugural 1978 brochure: “Jazz Yatra 78 has the unique distinction of being the only jazz festival in the world where the organisers have not had to pay even one Rupee (or Dollar, Pound, D. Mark or Yen) to the performing and participating foreign artistes.” All expenses were paid by foreign governments and their affiliated cultural organisations eager to deploy jazz diplomacy in India.
The 1980 Jazz Yatra went on to feature multiple groups whose trips to India were funded by the governments of the United States and the Soviet Union. The festival also included performances by bands from Poland, Hungary, Bulgaria, Germany, France, Sweden, Finland, Australia, Brazil and Japan.
While global geopolitics made the Jazz Yatra materially possible, the festival organisers challenged India’s place in the three worlds scheme. In the 1992 festival brochure, they wrote that “Many people around the world marvel at and wonder how, for 15 years, a developing so-called ‘Third-World’ country like India continues to stage a major international jazz festival.”
Jazz Yatra also made it a tradition to inaugurate every festival with an Indian jazz artist. By rejecting the framing of India as a Third-World country and insisting on the participation of Indian musicians, the organisers resisted India’s subordinate position as a passive recipient of First- and Second-World cultural exports. They also used the Jazz Yatra’s success as evidence that India was not the traditional and ideologi…
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