I'm making progress. I ended up going through grid.import.js to see what jqGridImport was doing. My thought is you feed in a json string which was generated from jqGridExport and then it should just work. Well my “ReferenceError: Can't find variable “grid” ” error was due to the json string not having a grid root ” {“grid”: ” after going through the functions. I ended up using the “json” variable ( json = $.jgrid.parse(jsonstr); ) from the JsonConvert var/function and changed my import command be “$($t).jqGrid( json );” instead of “$($t).jqGrid( gprm );”