Aruna Kharod

National Endowment for the Arts (NEA)-funded state folklife programs in the United States of America historically aim to "[identify]...arts that are at risk for being forgotten" and "fortify those at-risk art forms" (Malloy and Murphy, 2017, p. 11). Far from being forgotten, Bharatanatyam-classicized Indian dance-is an artistic genre upheld by strong cultural infrastructure and a large body of practitioners, the majority of whom are Hindu Indian Americans (e.g., O'Shea, 2003; Soneji, 2010; Putcha, 2019). The tension between Bharatanatyam's status as classicized, infrastructurally-supported dance form and the NEA's priority to support and sustain artistic practices that belong to minority groups and may be "atrisk" inspires a nuanced examination of the ideologies, institutions, and individuals involved in regularly funding Bharatanatyam folklife apprenticeships across the US. I argue against the notion of uncritically safeguarding minority cultural forms, expanding on Grant and Chhuon's (2016) idea of artistic infrastructure. In this article, I analyze NEA's and UNESCO's intersecting ideologies on folklife and heritage promotion, Bharatanatyam's US-based history and artistic infrastructure as a genre belonging to a racial minority group, and autoethnographic reflections as a former Bharatanatyam apprentice and ethnomusicologist. Through this threepronged approach, I seek to unveil multilayered and nuanced analyses that grantmaking organizations and individuals must exercise in order to enact their social justice-oriented commitments to equitably supporting artistic genresespecially those belonging to minority groups.