This article examines animation education at the two Indian government design schools, the National Institute of Design (NID) and Industrial Design Centre (IDC), looking beyond the transfer of skills to the negotiation of social and professional identity. The accounts of faculty, students and graduates express symbolic values of local relevance and cultural continuity rooted in a tradition of ‘purposeful design’ as a tool for post-independence national development. Moreover such testimony not only reveals fraught discourses of national, regional, class, and gender identity, but also creative independence and entrepreneurship. By placing design instruction in a context of communities of practice, the author argues that this reflects an overt politicised effort on the part of educators and students to respond to the current industrial conditions of Indian animation, rejecting market-driven labour standardization in favour of ideologically-based professional networks of their own devising.