"India is still the best place to learn something about the whys and wherefores of sculpture."  Isamu Noguchi

Isamu Noguchi first visited India from September 14, 1949 to January 3, 1950 on his Bollingen Foundation grant to study the manner in which sculpture played a role in the everyday life of pre-modern societies. He traveled to, among other places, Bombay, Ahmedabad, Madras, Pondicherry, the ashrams of Sri Aurabindo and Raman Mahershee, Bangalore, Calcutta and Benares. While in New Delhi he sculpted a portrait head of Prime Minister Nehru. Noguchi was especially taken with the astronomical observatory of Maharajah Jai Singh II in Jaipur, which became a source of sculptural forms that he used in future garden projects . Also critical to his experience of art that went beyond the isolated object was the temple of Ellora carved out of natural rock, a work of which, he wrote, "there is no vaster concept of sculpture." Noguchi continued to travel in India through the next two decades, stopping there regularly en route between Japan and America. He employed Indian themes and images in many of his later sculptures.