Cultural contact between Hindustani music and Europe after India’s independence did not travel on a frictionless highway. It moved through irregular letters, unexpected postponements, circuitous bureaucratic hoops, frustrating bargaining, and unbending opinions about how Indian arts should be staged and described. The correspondence between the European polymath Alain Daniélou (1907–1994) and the Dhrupad maestro Nasir Aminuddin Dagar (1923–2000) conserved at the Fondazione Giorgio Cini, Venice, is a compact record of that unglamorous understructure. Read as an archive, these letters show how ‘cultural exchange’ was built on small, procedural acts that negotiated who appeared on stage, where, and on what terms. They complicate celebratory narratives such as the ‘universality of music’, and, just as usefully, they resist neat counternarratives too. What emerges constantly is the tedious but constitutive work that went into the making of international tours for Hindustani musicians in the post-independence era.