During the 1950s and 1960s, the industrial city of Ahmedabad, in Western India, was a centre for innovative ideas and futuristic sounds. Its National Institute of Design, established in 1961, was founded during a period of investment in media, design and technology in India which saw a number of new institutions and initiatives springing up, often housed in striking modernist buildings. One of the NID’s more unusual features was an electronic music studio, housing a brand new Moog modular synthesizer. Under the direction of New York composer and pianist David Tudor, who set up the studio in 1969, students and staff at the NID experimented with this unfamiliar instrument, creating India’s first electronic compositions.

The Moog came to Ahmedabad via the New York connections forged by musician Gita Sarabhai, who had studied with John Cage in the US and in return taught him about Indian music. Sarabhai came from a prominent local family with roots in Ahmedabad’s textile industry and a keen interest in the arts. Through the Sarabhais, during the 1950s and 1960s Ahmedabad hosted “everyone from Trisha Brown, Robert Rauschenberg, Louis Khan, Le Corbusier, Buckminster Fuller…” says Paul Purgas. “It’s like this visionary modernist crucible in India, and for such a small city there’s an immense amount of vision and ambition there within this postwar window. The NID emerges as India’s Bauhaus, during that period.”

Purgas, a UK musician of Indian heritage, recently visited Ahmedabad on the trail of the NID’s Moog, and discovered a collection of tapes from the studio, made between 1969–73. His journey to find out more about the composers who made them is the subject of the new BBC Radio 3 documentary Electronic India. We talked about modernism in India, the afterlives of instruments and the connection between the NID, electronic music and the Indian space programme.

Frances Morgan: Something that immediately strikes me is the question of why the NID would buy a Moog in the first place. David Tudor wasn’t greatly interested in synthesizers at that time, and the easier way to do it would have been to go for a classical electronic studio set-up based around tape and sound generators, things that are easier and cheaper to get hold of or mend when they go wrong.

Paul Purgas: This seems like one of the contradictions of the story, in that the Moog itself seems to be in a stark contradiction to how we know Tudor envisaged sound and his practice. The Moog was clearly the centrepiece of the studio, and it seemed that there was a desire to have a real jewel in the crown, rather than what would have been the more prudent route of trying to construct an electronic music studio from various parts. It was more just like there was a one-shot opportunity, I think, in this window of time in which there was an evolving relationship between Tudor, Rauschenberg, Cage, EAT [Experiments in Art and Technology] and Ahmedabad, and there was a lot of money at the time, comparatively, with the support from the Ford Foundation – so the NID was an autonomous educational institute being backed by US dollars. So perhaps choosing the wiser, more frugal path didn’t necessarily need to be adhered to. But simultaneously the Moog was possibly the straw that broke the camel’s back, in terms of the Ford Foundation. It was seen as such an opulent acquisition at a moment where the NID and the Ford Foundation were in quite a precarious discussion about their support, and the Moog became symbolic of the extravagance of the Institute’s approach.

The Moog arrives in Ahmedabad in autumn 1969. And that was a moment in which the relationship between India and America was starting to shift – in the NID you can see it with the trepidation around funding, but in the bigger geopolitical picture you can see it two years later, when Nixon chooses to side with Pakistan in the India-Pakistan war. By that point, relations between India and America are pretty much at rock bottom.

So previously to that relations had been good?

There were various projects, politically and artistically, that had been looking to build exchange, and that could equally be perceived as mutual as well as the consideration that American and European modernism could be deployed as methods of colonising the East. It was a very dreamy moment for India, specifically those first 20 years post-1947, post-Independence – there was a lot of hope and ambition and desire to modernise the country. There was an influx of Western ideas – I presume a lot of it good-willed, and a lot of it opportunistic.

This is one of the few examples I can think of, maybe the only example, of an electronic music studio at that time being part of a design institute, rather than a music department or broadcasting company.

The fact that it’s a design school is both a blessing and a curse. At that time, design is booming in India, so it creates the infrastructural space for the Moog to be acquisitioned, but I think, longer term, design demanded on some level that the Moog be applied, would have a use. Initially it was mostly aligned with the animation department. It seemed like in India’s grand narrative there was a desire to explore television. It’s interesting to think about India’s approach to television – they weren’t really interested in entertainment, so there’s this idea that it could be a means of education, to expand literacy, to communicate ideas about family planning… there was a grand plan that was being discussed with NASA around the late 1960s of the launch of an Indo-American satellite that would enable television to travel across the whole of India. Animation and electronic sound were seen potentially as tools to create content for this television network.

But a lot of students would get to use the Moog after hours for their own more free-spirited experiments. So it has this beautiful night and day narrative around it – often students would be working on things that felt more applied or vocational by day, but by night they would be hanging out in the studio.

Were any of the tapes from the studio broadcast on the radio at the time?

There’s one tape that actually contains a broadcast with interviews of several of the composers who were using the studio – it’s from All India Radio, in Ahmedabad, and it’s the only document that communicates their voices, their perspectives. So discovering that was a real gem, because it was an archive piece of material that somehow gave the whole thing a voice.

What can you tell me about the composers on the tapes that you found?

IS Mathur and SC Sharma were both faculty – technicians overseeing the school. Atul Desai was at NID and also connected to All India Radio. Gita Sarabhai had a whole other story linked to studying with John Cage and being instrumental in bringing an avant garde music library to NID itself. As far as I know, Jinraj Joshipura was one of the few students that actually appears on the tapes. A good number of the recordings took place while Tudor was there, and I think many under his oversight.

Was there anybody as well as David Tudor supervising or teaching, or working as a studio tech?

I think SC Sharma would have been the person in that position, because Sharma’s the producer of the very last tape, towards the end of 1972. That was the most sophisticated – that was the tape that had about 120 edits in it, and when I took it out of the box it basically came apart, so I had to reconstruct this entire tape. It’s the one that felt most like a composition.

Do you know much about him? You mention in the documentary that he was a poet.

I think he studied film and then came to NID as faculty. He oversaw the operations of the studio, and he was also writing Hindi poetry as a sideline. So it’s quite beautiful that he has this music, sound, technical and poetic thing converging. But it was incredibly difficult to find even small details about individuals connected to the studio, as a lot of people connected to it have passed away, or memories have faded and records haven’t been kept. Discovering about the composers themselves was very much about finding these little fragments of knowledge from conversations.

Gita Sarabhai came from a classical Indian musical background – she played the pakhavaj and was a highly trained musician. Is that something you can hear in her electronic music?

There are two tapes from Gita, one of which feels like an improvisation on the Moog. The other is a tape in which she’s transferred a chromatic scale into square wave and sine wave tones. That tape’s very interesting because it’s the most obvious attempt to, let’s say, explicitly map musicality onto the Moog itself. It didn’t have a keyboard – the system that was brought over had a ribbon strip [controller]. So I think Gita’s second tape is the initiation of trying to impose a clearer musical structure onto the instrument itself.

A lot of the tapes have kind of sound manipulations of Indian rhythms. The students or composers using the studio were bringing those reference points to the table because they weren’t knowledgeable about Western music, they’d been brought up on Indian music, so that would be their way of interfacing with the Moog. But there’s this other thing that becomes apparent, which is that it’s not just about musical traditions, it’s about the environment itself. A lot of the composers were coming from this rural village background, so it’s interesting to see that a lot of the tapes are reconstructions of birds, for example – this idea of trying to re-imagine their environment through this instrument. And that to me feels very Indian somehow.

I wonder if that might have come from David Tudor’s influence as well.

Of course, that seems incredibly apparent, this relationship between electronic sound and the environment. I’m sure at that time Tudor was actively recording sounds in India or looking to create electronic simulations of those sounds. So those conversations were clearly, I imagine, being exchanged with the students. There’s this idea of India in many ways being a perfect mirror for Tudor, because there’s a meeting of order and harmony and chaos converging at any one time. So I’m sure India would have made sense as a perfect home for his ideas.

Out of the Moog compositions you heard, which was the one that stood out the most?

The SC Sharma tape Dance Music, from 1972, immediately spoke to me in terms of its proficiency, but also how musically far ahead of its time it felt. Given the isolation and the context of India, it felt like it had echoes of krautrock, it had echoes of when I’d first listened to bleep techno on Sähkö, from decades later. So it felt like it was a sonic achievement for India for that time. The other tape that stuck with me was the two-reel tape by Jinraj Joshipura. He was only 19 at the time he was at NID – he was a student. His composition has this kind of beautiful naivety in the title: it’s titled Space Liner 2001. So when I opened up the tape, I was like, it’s obviously a Kubrick reference, what’s going on here? And the ‘Space Liner’ having this sense of an interstellar cruise vessel, you know? The thing that struck me was that it wasn’t environmental, it wasn’t a kind of freeform improvisation, it was an explicit attempt to use music as a method to imagine the future. And that was the thing I hadn’t been prepared to discover – this techno-imaginary output of the studio. It was obviously very nascent and it only manifests across this composition. But to me – I’ve grown up with Detroit techno and various histories of electronic music that imagine new futures, so to find that in India felt like – it was emotional.

What makes it sound futuristic?

It’s very much about imagining a subjective soundscape of what it might be like to be in the future, and be sat on a spacecraft that’s cruising through deep space. That’s obviously a recurring motif across different futurist identities. But within the composition there’s an attempt to communicate ideas of vastness while being inside a vessel as well, while imagining… stars, you know, classic evocations of the space experience. I guess the composition is within limited means and there’s a certain minimalism in its approach. But I feel massively in awe of its ambition.

Within the bigger story of the Sarabhais, Gita Sarabhai is instrumental in bringing the studio together and building those relationships with the New York avant garde, and then her brother Vikram Sarabhai is simultaneously setting up the Indian space programme. And all of this is permeating around the city of Ahmedabad itself, which already has this profound modernist vision, and the studio itself is kind of locking together electronic music and the vision around that, and something as far-reaching as the space programme – which we know is bound up in various different modernisms with the evolution of electronic music itself. So these things are converging, and it’s quite beautiful to see a tape that’s another extrapolation of that, that’s almost manifesting out of this meeting of worlds.

Ahmedabad is such an important context for this story. Do you think electronic music could have happened elsewhere in India at this time?

I think the most obvious comparator would be 300 miles away from Ahmedabad, in Mumbai, with that being the home of the film industry. So that could have potentially formed the conditions for something like this happening. A bit later there emerges electronics within Bollywood soundtracks, and obviously as we get to the early 80s we’ve got Charanjit Singh, 10 Ragas To A Disco Beat, but the commercial demands of Bollywood always rule. But I wouldn’t be surprised if something emerges of something happening in Mumbai in the 60s and 70s. The other context that I’m curious about in India is more of a science based laboratory context, in which people working with test equipment and oscillators may have been using them, albeit unwittingly, in a sonic context.

One thing I’ve really enjoyed about this whole journey is that this equipment in India seems to have initiated a real sense of play. So it wouldn’t surprise me if there was a technical institute or a more scientific based research centre, in this window of possibility in the 50s, 60s and 70s, that was using electronic sound, but once again in this after-hours style – people using the equipment to have these more open explorations of sound and what the equipment could do.

So where is the NID’s Moog now?

The Moog was sold around the 80s to a former student at the NID, who has sadly passed away, so it’s now in the care of his family. One of the things I did find out about it was that it ended up in this sanctuary for cats and dogs and birds somewhere out near the airport! So obviously the arc of this object had gone through various hands and it had been on a pretty epic journey.

There’s still a hope that at some point it might resurface. It’s point zero, as far as I know, for electronic music in India, and so to me that makes it an important musical-historical object. It would be great if it could preserved for people in the future: as India’s narrative of electronic music grows, which I’m sure it will do – it’s expanding at the moment – there’ll be a generation looking back to its own history.

Electronic India airs on BBC Radio 3 on 17 May at 6:45pm