Beyond Americanisation: the Ford Foundation and the making of educational governance in early postcolonial India

This paper examines the Ford Foundation’s role in shaping educational governance in early postcolonial India, focusing on secondary education reforms between 1952 and 1962. Drawing on archival materials from the Ford Foundation records, it argues that the Foundation’s significance lay less in directing policy than in assembling the infrastructural conditions that made reform governable: new advisory bodies, professional routines, comparative study practices, and channels linking Indian officials and educators to transnational circuits of expertise. Working as a quasi-state partner to the Indian Ministry of Education, the Foundation helped convene regional and national reform forums, organised international study teams, supported headmaster and inspector training camps, expanded teacher-training extension centres, and backed the creation of the All-India Secondary Education Council as a hub for coordination and assessment reform. At the same time, the paper highlights the limitations of the Foundation’s influence. Its projects unfolded within India’s planning-oriented, non-aligned framework, where shifting bureaucratic priorities and institutional frictions limited their scope and coherence. Rather than a straightforward story of Americanisation, the case shows secondary education as a politicised arena where postcolonial nation-building and Cold War infrastructures of expertise became entangled through uneven, negotiated processes of governance-making.