The US Ambassador’s Fund For Cultural Preservation — A Curious Trail

Eric Garcetti had to wait two years before his appointment as Ambassador to India was confirmed by his Senate in March 2023.

Indians didn’t mind the delay because he declared in 2021 that he intended to engage directly with our civil society and human rights groups.

For Indians, this was a red rag to a bull, because Garcetti’s statement was interpreted as a formal declaration that the American government would interfere in our domestic affairs.

Dismaying visions of toolkits, sub-nationalism, and regime changes, rose.

Oddly, some Americans weren’t too keen on Garcetti, who is also a close associate of President Joe Biden, being sent to India either, because they felt he would end up jeopardizing an important relationship.

There was also a question of competence. One of his former staffers told CNN that “He is unfit to become an ambassador or really to hold public office anywhere in this country or this world”.

But India’s foreign minister, Dr S Jaishankar, waved these concerns away with his trademark mischievous grin, and said: “Aane do. Prem se samjhayenge”, meaning, “Let him come. We’ll explain things to him lovingly”.

Now that Garcetti is finally in India, he has been travelling the country to get a feel of his new posting, and tweeting about his tours like an excited teenager. And it is in one of these tweets that Swarajya stumbled upon an interesting story.

Garcetti’s tweet read: “The US Ambassadors Fund for Cultural Preservation (AFCP) has invested $2 million in documenting, conserving & restoring 21 historic sites & cultural treasures in India. Today I toured the #PaigahTombs in #Hyderabad, my first visit to an AFCP project site. Have a look!”

A visit to the AFCP website reveals a curious slant in the selection of these 21 sites.

In north India, the sites are all Mughal, located in Haryana, Punjab and Delhi. These include the Nur Mahal in Jalandhar, which was built in 1620 CE for Nur Jahan, wife of the Mughal emperor Jahangir. The AFCP has not selected a single site in Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, or the hill states.

In western India, the AFCP website says that a grant from them aided the “Revival of Medhi Talao ensemble at UNESCO World Heritage site at Champaner- Pavagadh, Gujarat”, in partnership with the Heritage Trust, Vadodara.

It further states: “The AFCP grant helped in the documentation and preservation of this important Hindu pilgrimage site in western India.”

Great work, but there is only one problem. The listed work done is the documentation of the Jami Masjid and the Saat Kaman at Champaner – the great fort citadel built by Mahmud Begada of the Gujarat Sultanate around Pavagadh hill in the 15th century!

The other restoration work funded by the AFCP in western India is the Young Men's Christian Association’s student branch at Lamington Road, Mumbai. This is, per the website, “a neo-classical and neo-Palladian building built in 1910”.

It gets even better as we travel east. The AFCP proudly showcases its expenditure in Arunachal Pradesh: “Documentation of traditional culture and lifestyle of indigenous people of Arunachal Pradesh for Sustainable Development…through films, a website, and a coffee table book”.

This work was done in partnership with a Kolkata-based NGO called Contact Base.

The other AFCP activity was the release of a Bangla Qawwali CD in 2015, as part of a project to document Bengali folk music traditions, by Helen LaFave, US Consul General in Kolkata. The local partner was Contact Base again.

And finally, we come to the south, where Garcetti tweeted from.

The AFCP webpage says that it funded a project to preserve and digitize palm leaf manuscripts dating back to the 16th century, and rare books from the 18th century onwards which are “used by theological and secular scholars from India and abroad”.

The local project partner was the United Theological College, an ecumenical seminary based in Bengaluru.

Strangely, though, the part of the work highlighted on the webpage is the preservation of “Rare books belonging to American Arcot Mission of the Reformed Church of America”.

The list is impressively secular: step wells inside the Qutub Shahi tombs complex, idgahs, mausoleums, and more tombs, including the two tombs of Taramati and Premamati — ‘believed to have been singers and dancers in the court of Abdullah Qutb Shah, the seventh ruler of the kingdom of Golconda’.

Now, it is entirely the American embassy’s prerogative on which projects it chooses to fund, or whom it partners with.

More importantly, nobody in India really cares what America spends its money on, or even whether they spend anything on the restoration of our historical sites or not, but the pattern of the AFCP’s spending does offer us an interesting insight into the institutional bias inherent in official American decision making.

So, following Dr Jaishankar’s tack, here’s some loving advice to Garcetti as he gets to know India, and prepares to implement his 2021 pledge of engaging with Indian civil society and human rights groups: the new Indian is less argumentative and more watchful.

We silently scrutinize everything, and respond only after we have our ducks in a row.

So, it would be a grave diplomatic mistake to misinterpret our reticence for acceptance, of how you conduct yourself, while you represent your country here.