Lost and Found

Ahmedabad, India; 1969. Jinraj Joshipura, all of 19 years, got wind of an unusual music workshop through flyers he’d seen in the city; an experimental American composer/musician named David Tudor was in town, and he’d brought with him some tape machines and this weird, gigantic, futuristic analogue synthesiser called the Moog. 

The workshop, to be held at a design school in the city, was structured to teach students how to use the synthesiser and compose music on it. It was done and forgotten in a flash—a fun little experiment over three months which, thanks to the socio-political headwinds of the time, didn’t amount to much. Fifty years later, Paul Purgas, a British musician and sound artist of Indian origin, discovered recordings from this period (1969 to 1972), marking a brand-new chapter in the history of electronic music in India. 

At the time, all Joshipura knew about Tudor was that he was “associated with the Institute of Experiments in Art & Technology (E.A.T.)”, a New York-based art-tech institute founded in 1966, had worked with famous musicians like John Cage, and was coming to teach electronic music to the design school in question—the National Institute of Design (NID), set up as a progressive design college in 1961 in Ahmedabad, Gujarat. 

“I took my bicycle, took my flyer, and said, ‘I’m interested in this!’” he said over a Zoom call from Ahmedabad, where he is stationed for the next few years. In 1969, he was an architecture student at a nearby college, the Centre for Environmental Planning and Technology (CEPT, known today as CEPT University), and had no previous background or training in music. 

At the workshop, he met Tudor and Gita Sarabhai (later Gita Mayer), a musicologist and musician involved in the institute's setting up, and they decided to interview him on the spot to gauge his interest and understanding of music. “They wanted to know my enthusiasm for it rather than my background. Because it [the Moog] was so new, nobody had the background. Everybody was fresh,” he said. Soon enough, he was accepted into the three-month workshop, for which he needed permission from his college authorities. He was joined by S. C. Sharma, Atul Desai, I. S. Mathur and Sarabhai herself—all faculty or staff members at NID.  

It's remarkable now to think of the Moog, this state-of-the-art new technology, landing up in a young India—with its own prevailing musical traditions and styles—and finding a place of purpose as a vehicle for avant-garde electronica experiments. The Moog itself was an electronic synthesiser developed in the early 1960s by engineer and inventor Robert Moog, and was considered a game-changer in electronic music. It allowed precise control over pitch, tone, and timbre through a modular system of oscillators, filters, and envelope generators, which musicians could patch together to create complex sounds. 

Armed with this exciting new instrument, and with the iconoclastic Tudor as their mentor, the artists were allowed to experiment freely—to paint at whim on an empty canvas—pushing the boundaries of music in unexpected ways during this brief window. They were playing with structure and arrangement, with melody and rhythm, with fusion, with sound itself. 

Within three years though, before anything tangible could materialise from these thrilling adventures, the Moog had been locked up thanks to a complex web of geopolitics, cultural clashes, and shifting foreign and national policies (and just the diminishing novelty of the Moog itself). A fledgling scene that never was, ended well before its time.

Joshipura, now in his seventies, is the last surviving member of the group. The material he and the other composers produced on the Moog 50 years ago had been all but forgotten, until Purgas stumbled upon the tapes at the NID archives in 2017. He decided to restore and digitise the recordings for modern audiences in the form of the record The NID Tapes, Electronic Music from India 1969-1972, which was released in October last year. Today, these compositions are celebrated as a significant historical record, marking a new chapter in the history of electronic music in both India and globally.

However, it clashed somewhat with Tudor’s musical philosophy. Alexander Keefe’s article notes that “Tudor himself despised the Moog system and all that it represented”, calling it a “control fetish” that Tudor questioned. You Nakai, an academic who has researched Tudor’s life, writes in Subcontinental Synthesis: “His complaint was mostly against the inflexibility caused by standardisation, which resulted in predictability—a loss of fortuity. As he explained in September 1984: ‘I hated the way those machines were so predictable; and it’s very difficult to make them sound, you know, different than they’re supposed to.’ ” That Tudor, despite his misgivings, agreed to work with the Moog in Ahmedabad underscores further the unorthodox nature of this project.

As per my research and conversations, David Tudor landed up in India with the Moog in late October 1969. He stayed at the Villa de Madame Manorama Sarabhai, designed by Swiss-French architect and urban planner Le Corbusier, a pioneer of modern architecture. Tudor and the widowed Manorama, sister-in-law to the Sarabhai siblings, had struck up a friendship over the years. He was there for three months. 

For the first three weeks, Joshipura explained, the participants had to attend group sessions during the day to study the Moog. Once they’d got an understanding of the technique, the mechanics of the Moog, and the analogue detailing it required, they worked one-on-one with Tudor to craft their compositions. 

Purgas felt Tudor was the perfect fit for this programme. “He was a free thinker; I don’t think he had an imposed idea of what experimental sonic synthesis should be.” According to him, this enabled the composers to find their voice, to develop their musical strategies. So while Gita Sarabhai had a more structured approach towards composition, someone like Joshipura could run free with his experimental ideas. He created a futuristic, sci-fi journey through space in his composition Space Liner 2001, inspired by 2001: A Space Odyssey and old James Bond films. Through his piece, he aimed to capture how he imagined music in space. 

Purgas talked about a composition by Atul Desai that was used at the Osaka Expo in Japan in 1970—a “world’s fair” or “world expo”, a large-scale global exhibition held to highlight nations’ achievements—based on a multimedia idea of sound. “It’s a sound collage, bringing together traditional Indian instruments and electronic music. It was an international presentation of Indian culture at that moment, and there was an interest in positioning electronic music within that sound,” he said. Another piece he told me about was Gita Sarabhai recording the tones of a chromatic scale, “an attempt to think through mapping Indian ragas on to the control system for the Moog”. 

While others worked during the day, Joshipura, as a CEPT student, could only use the studio at NID from 7 to 11 pm. “I was learning something new and slept maybe four hours a night for three months,” he said. Tudor, he noted, was kind and accommodating, staying till 11 pm, listening and guiding. “Whenever I needed help, he’d be in the next studio working on his own composition,” he said.

With no formal music training and uninterested in recreating Western or Indian styles, Joshipura centred his vision on sonic synthesis. He developed ideas like decoding animal languages or using synthesis for submarine communication. He wrote to Tudor, who helped him secure a J. D. Rockefeller grant for biofeedback research in California. However, his father withheld permission, urging him to finish his architecture course first. Life moved on, and it became a missed opportunity, but Joshipura built a successful multidisciplinary career. Grateful to Purgas for reviving this chapter of his life, he said that he was now taking AI classes. His next goal is to teach synthesisers to create music autonomously using modern tech and data science

Recounting the end of Tudor’s three-month residency, Joshipura said that the group, in early 1970, hosted Soundscape, an audio-visual exhibition presenting ‘Incidental Music’. This was the piece Tudor himself worked on at the studio, for which he incorporated the work done by the other five composers. “He was working on his own composition,” said Joshipura. “Everybody’s music was there. And if you listen to the master tape, you will not be able to distinguish my work from anybody else’s because he synthesised the compositions in his own way.” 

It was a free gig—no entry charge—a way to attract crowds, with food and drinks arranged. According to Dr Shilpa Das, Principal Faculty, Interdisciplinary Design Studies at NID and author of 50 Years of the National Institute of Design: 1961-2011, 2,000 to 2,500 people showed up. There was an interactive element to the space, where crowds would walk in and make ‘incidental’ music with their steps; perhaps a quick glimpse of the future in a postcolonial India. 

IN 1961, THE National Institute of Design (NID) was set up following the findings of the India Report, which the renowned American designers Charles and Ray Eames produced in 1958. The Indian government commissioned the report, with Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru and cultural activist Pupul Jayakar—who had met Charles Eames earlier—playing a pivotal role.

Gautam and Gira Sarabhai, the founders of the institute, were two of the eight children of Ambalal and Saraladevi Sarabhai. The Sarabhai family, wealthy, influential, and progressive, had close ties with Mahatma Gandhi during India’s independence movement. Ambalal, the family patriarch, supported Gandhi when he arrived in India from South Africa. The Sarabhai siblings became prominent figures in science, technology, art, and politics. Among them was Vikram Sarabhai, regarded as the father of India’s space programme.

Dr Shilpa Das, who contributed an essay to Subcontinental Synthesis on the Sarabhais’ role in founding NID and establishing its recording studio, explained in a Zoom interview that Gautam and Gira emphasised a non-prescriptive, workshop-based education. Their approach focused on “learning to know and learning to do”. “The Sarabhais always wanted to acquire the latest in technology; they wanted to know all about state-of-the-art audio-visual equipment,” said Das. “And the NID’s earliest projects were mega projects and exhibitions, where the soundscapes played an important role. So you needed good equipment.” 

They began setting up the sound studio in 1964, and by ’68, it was functional, with modern equipment sourced from around the world. This included a Berlant 7-inch spool tape recorder, a Shure microphone, Ahuja speakers, a Thorens turntable, AKG microphones, Ampex ¼-inch magnetic tape recorders, and Tannoy speakers “to start a basic studio”, as Das outlined in her essay. The Ampex recorders, she wrote, had only been used at All India Radio previously, while cartridges for the turntables, manufactured in the US, had also been acquired with great difficulty. 

NID was primarily a design and art school, but music remained part of the fabric of the institute. Purgas told me how Gita Sarabhai (who was part of the workshop), sister to Gautam and Gira, had amassed an extensive record collection, spanning innovative Western and Indian music, that was housed at NID. These records, per anecdotal stories he accumulated, would often be played at lunchtime on the PA systems on campus. 

Gita Sarabhai, a musicologist, collector, and musician–one of the first female pakhawaj (an Indian drum) players in India–was vital to the musical direction the institute took. As detailed in writer and researcher Rahila Haque’s essay in Subcontinental Synthesis, Gita had concerns—and curiosities—about the impending influx of Western musical forms and how that might affect Indian classical traditions. In the mid-’40s, she decided to go to the US to study Western music. You Nakai explained it succinctly in his essay in the book: “It was a peculiar idea that resembled the principle of vaccination: she was to deliberately expose herself to the source of influence to become immune to it—or, at least that was the plan.” 

While in the US, Gita befriended composer John Cage, who had developed an interest in Eastern philosophies. The two ended up exchanging notes and training in their respective musical vocations over the next six months. Despite their vastly differing backgrounds, they found common ground in their shared distaste for tonal harmony. Thus, the first seeds of this experiment were planted. 

In the years to come, Cage visited Ahmedabad, though it is unclear if he went to NID. Further, many distinguished international artists, designers, scientists, and thinkers of note visited NID for short periods as part of the institute’s ambitious pedagogical programmes—these included globally respected figures such as Louis Kahn, Henri Cartier-Bresson, Maxwell Fry and Steve Paxton. Another on the list of dignitaries was Billy Klüver, founder of Experiments in Arts (E.A.T.)—which encouraged collaborations between artists and engineers—who ended up playing a role in the establishment of the programme that got the Moog to India.

“Gita Sarabhai’s story is instrumental,” said Purgas. “She had these links going back to the New York musical avant-garde in the forties, but also through projects like the Indian pavilion for the Montreal Expo in 1967. Inevitably, her links became the connection through which Tudor came to Ahmedabad.” 

With Ahmedabad’s All India Radio studio unavailable for commercial work, artists turned to NID’s studio, making it a vibrant hub for recordings. Das wrote that key figures like sound engineer S. C. Sharma (one of the composers on the tape) and faculty member Akhil Succena joined in the late sixties and early seventies, facilitating creative experimentation. In Das’ essay, Succena noted that the Moog synthesiser, central to the studio, “lent itself to improvisation” and became more an “expression” than traditional music, inspiring artists to recreate sounds like birdsong and rain.  

The studio galvanised the city, providing local and national artists a nearby recording space, reducing the need to travel to Bombay. Dhun Karkaria, the late artist, was another one who spent time playing around with the Moog at NID. “After a point, it got unruly and so we had to regulate the time that students like Dhun could come and play on it,” wrote Das in her essay, quoting Succena. These artists spent the next three years walking in and out of the studio, tinkering with the synthesiser and spawning many of the recordings on the record as well as other work. 

IN 1972, THIS golden period came to an abrupt end. The Moog was locked up. “It was just lying in a garden toolbox shed at the back in NID,” said Joshipura. After a tug-of-war with the Indian government, the Sarabhais also resigned from their positions at NID in this period. 

To understand this rapid turn of events, we must get a sense of the cultural and socio-political dynamics at play. Das explained that the Ford Foundation was funding NID for the first nine years since its inception. She said, “They gave a grant of US$ 200,000 to buy machinery and equipment. Later, they gave another grant of US$ 250,000 for foreign consultants to visit.” Each year, the institute received US$ 120,000 in funding from the Foundation. This helped NID staff to go overseas for training; it also helped them establish the library, the Knowledge Management Centre, which housed rare books from across the world. 

The Foundation withdrew support in 1970 following shifting global dynamics during the Cold War, and NID began to rely on the Government of India for greater support. Per Keefe’s article, the Sarabhais established the position of Executive Director in October 1970, appointing Vice-Admiral B. S. Soman to act as a liaison between the government and the institute. Keefe describes Soman as a “man with a passion for callisthenics and little taste for art and design”. The institute was “largely illegible to Indian government types”, which led the government to mistrust the Sarabhais and how they ran the show unchecked. 

This period coincided with the arrival of Tudor—Moog in tow—at Ahmedabad. Pressure was building on NID. “He [Soman] couldn’t understand how the creative process works or how a creative institution can work,” said Das. There was, per Das, “friction” between the Sarabhais and Soman. When the Sarabhais relieved him of his post, Soman went to the press. 

Das told me that criticism was levelled against the government for “spending large sums of money on these kinds of ‘white elephants’ [referring to the Moog]”. Keefe, in his piece, pointed out that the government too was uncomfortable with the experimental pedagogical vision of NID and felt that the Sarabhais were running it as a private enterprise. There were accusations levelled against the Sarabhais of being “extravagant” and the link between their acquisitions and design education was questioned. 

The Moog, which was an extremely expensive purchase, was caught in the crossfire and came to be symbolic of this supposed indulgence–the ‘white elephant’. The government set up two committees to investigate the Sarabhais’ running of NID. While they were not found to be personally culpable, Keefe mentions that the committees did find the institute to be “lacking in purpose.”  Following this, said Das, “the Sarabhais took moral responsibility and resigned”. 

Even as these culture wars played out internally, the tense geopolitical global dynamics of the time were—as we’ll learn—another factor contributing to the termination of this cross-cultural venture.

WHILE THE EXPERIMENTS themselves are a landmark discovery—a capsule of an inventive period of musical expression—the undercurrent of soft diplomacy and global power playing out in the backdrop had a major impact on the legacy of these experiments. Purgas examines this in detail, both in his essay in the book and during our conversation. He said, “After the British left India in 1947, there was a lot of anxiety in the West about what was going to step into that place. I think Nehru quite rightly tried to keep India neutral within those conversations. But during the height of the Cold War, with so much political paranoia operating, there was a desire to get some clarity about India’s trajectory, especially from the Americans. I think they were desperate to suppress the development of socialism within developing nations.”  

Purgas told me that from the mid-’50s onwards, American foreign policy tried to aggressively push experimental culture and the arts in developing nations like India. The US, as part of its cultural diplomacy in developing nations, also used jazz as a tool to reach out to those audiences. As detailed in historian Penny Von Eschen’s Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War: “Indeed, by the mid-1950s, jazz was widely celebrated in the establishment and middlebrow circles alike as a pivotal cultural weapon of the Cold War—in newspapers and magazines ranging from The New York Times and Newsweek to the Reader’s Digest and Variety.” She further wrote in the book: “Although Ellington suffered from health problems throughout the tour, missing half of the performances in New Delhi and the entire Hyderabad-Bangalore-Madras portion because of illness, for the State Department there was no question that he was an ‘enormous success in India’.”

This approach was adopted, Purgas said, “to align these developing cultures towards a sympathy for Western values, including capitalism and consumerism”. He added, “Incorporated organisations like the Ford Foundation, MoMA, and the J. D. Rockefeller Fund became embroiled in this relationship between political agendas and arts and culture. So it was a double-edged sword operating in India because a lot of this foreign investment is enabling this very experimental culture to develop, but it’s built on a very fragile foundation.”

In his essay in Subcontinental Synthesis, titled ‘Subcontinental Synthesis: Dreams & Lost Futures’, Purgas wrote that the US felt that India was “drifting towards Soviet influence” by the late sixties. Thus, organisations like the Ford Foundation began to gradually withdraw from India, “driven by shifts in governmental policy that de-prioritised cultural investment programmes”.

Complicating matters further was the 1971 war between India and Pakistan as well as the apprehensions of a young nation torn between clinging to its rich traditional history and embracing the virtues of the modern world. The Foundation decided to invest in other projects in India instead of Western arts.

Amid the country’s struggle to balance tradition and modernity, dwindling cultural investments impacted NID’s experimental ventures, an institution already strained by its own identity crisis. The Moog, its novelty having long since diminished, became one such casualty, fading into obscurity and gathering dust for years. 

According to Dr Shilpa Das, the Moog was purchased by Dhun Karkaria, the former NID student. “What we know,” she said, “is that he acquired the Moog, probably through an auction or some kind of a formal process, in the eighties. I interviewed him for my book in 2011, and he showed me the Moog. Except for one key, it was in mint condition. He was immensely proud of it; it occupied pride of place in his studio.”  

Joshipura recalled hearing that someone bought it for 10,000 rupees (US$ 120 today) and it was lying somewhere in Ahmedabad. He’s even open to restoring the Moog. “It’s an antique museum piece,” he said. “It’s the evidence of my life.”

RANA GHOSE—CANADIAN-Indian economist and filmmaker (among other things)—worked closely with the late Charanjit Singh, a musician who had been working in Bollywood in the seventies and eighties. Singh had a penchant for new technology and playing around with sound. In 1982, he acquired the recently released Roland TB 303 bass synth and the TR 808 drum machine. The 808, especially, was revolutionary, paving the way for countless musical innovations in the years since, and became synonymous with hip-hop culture. 

Using these machines, Singh released his landmark record Synthesizing: Ten Ragas to a Disco Beat. It was met with a lukewarm response at the time. In the late 2000s, however, Western audiences discovered the album and lauded it. Many commentators claimed that Singh accidentally created what later became known as acid-house music. For instance, journalist Louis Pattison deemed him an “acid house pioneer” in a story for The Guardian. Ghose, however, believes they were mistaken and maintained that the album is unique in its sound. 

Similar in a way to these NID recordings, Singh’s album has been widely considered to be a significant contribution made by India to the development and history of electronic music in the world. Ghose drew a parallel between the NID Tapes and Charanjit Singh’s work. He said, “Both went beyond established music norms, and a free-spirited exploration was the underpinning of both works.” 

However, he has certain misgivings about the patronage model in art, wherein artistic experiments are funded through philanthropy and donations by wealthy benefactors who may have their own motives behind the generosity rather than organic market demand, believing it to lack sustainability and economic viability. Singh had a cultural context for his subversive art, given that he had spent years working in Bollywood and his album used as its base Indian ragas, and it was supported by a label that released his record. The NID recordings, though, were entirely dependent on socio-political dynamics and patronage.

 “The point of it was just this kind of bizarre elitist fantasy. Is that unfair to say? This crazy gear [such as the Moog] lands up in Ahmedabad at this forward-looking institution. These things tend to happen in these weird, elitist siloes which are relegated to an aspiration, but also an ill-thought-out aspiration, if the goal was to use this technology for an interesting purpose. Historically, of course, it’s fascinating,” said Ghose. He offered a counterpoint to his thought, stating that maybe the point of having it at an art school made sense. To further emphasise that, I would add: if not in the field of education and art, where else does such an outsize experiment find a home? 

TODAY IN INDIA, there’s a thriving electronic music scene, both in the club circuit as well as the more obscure, off-beat electronic explorations that the Moog recordings foretold. Hundreds of local independent artists across dozens of cities and performance venues comprise this movement. Large-scale musical festivals, such as Sunburn or Magnetic Fields, attract some of the biggest names in the world, who come down to play to passionate audiences. 

While the “what if” of NID’s experiments lingers, it is equally fascinating to trace today’s Indian electronic scene back to these origins within the global evolution of electronica. In the BBC documentary Electronic India, Purgas discussed the recordings with composer and producer Sandunes (Sanaya Ardeshir), who lamented the “lost opportunity” and expressed sadness that nothing came of them at the time. She added that while electronic music was often seen through a Western lens, discoveries like this revealed a far richer, more diverse history than previously imagined.

“We understand,” said Purgas, “that there are these pockets of experimental activities happening across time. Whether it is NID or the broader experiments on the edges of Bollywood like Charanjit Singh’s, we realise there’s a map but there are a lot of gaps in between. There’s a whole new wave of artists and producers coming out of India—whether improvised experimental music or club material like house or techno. These scenes are developing now, with festivals dedicated to modular synthesis. Something like the NID Tapes becomes a useful anchor for thinking through a history of experimental sound and music.” 

The NID recordings, thus, serve as a precursor, a spiritual ancestor of sorts, to the many radiant electronica movements that exist in India today. They’re a chronicle of multiple histories at once—of electronic music, of nation-building in a postcolonial India, of soft diplomacy, of the American avant-garde. This was a moment lost to the sands of time, now brought back to life.