The world has heard much about India’s extraordinary transformation in recent years, and even of its claims to a share of “world leadership.“ Some of that is hyperbole, but in one respect, India’s strength may be understated.
What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, military strength, or economic development? By all of these measures, India has made extraordinary strides. It is on course to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2034, it has the world’s fourth-largest army and nuclear weapons, and it is already the world’s fifth-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and continues to climb, though too many of its people remain destitute.
All of these indicators are commonly used to judge a country’s global status. However, something much less tangible, but a good deal more valuable in the twenty-first century, may be more important than any of them: India’s “soft power.”
Take Afghanistan, for instance – a major security concern for India, as it is for the world. But India’s greatest asset there doesn’t come out of a military mission: it doesn't have one. It comes from one simple fact: don’t try to telephone an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. That’s when the Indian TV soap opera “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” , dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss it.
"Saas" is the most popular television show in Afghan history, with a 90% audience penetration. It’s considered directly responsible for a spike in the sale of generator sets and even for absences from religious functions which clash with its broadcast times. “ Saas” has so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are often literally hidden behind the veil, it’s an Indian TV show that has come to dominate (and sometimes to justify) public discussion of family issues.
That’s soft power, and its particular strength is that it has nothing to do with government propaganda. The movies of Bollywood, which is bringing its glitzy entertainment far beyond the Indian diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom , offer another example. A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film – she doesn’t understand the Hindi dialogue and can’t read the French subtitles, but she can still catch the spirit of the films and understand the story, and people like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. An Indian diplomat in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly displayed portraits as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.
Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, now striding across the world’s runways. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises Indian culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.
When a bhangra beat is infused into a Western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when “Monsoon Wedding” wows the critics and “Lagaan” claims an Oscar nomination; when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, India’s soft power is enhanced.
Likewise, when Americans speak of the IITs, India’s technology institutes, with the same reverence they accord to MIT, and the “Indianness” of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excel
Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/india-s-bollywood-power?a_la=english&a_d=9ca6350146f86f
The world has heard much about India’s extraordinary transformation in recent years, and even of its claims to a share of “world leadership.“ Some of that is hyperbole, but in one respect, India’s strength may be understated.
What makes a country a world leader? Is it population, military strength, or economic development? By all of these measures, India has made extraordinary strides. It is on course to overtake China as the world’s most populous country by 2034, it has the world’s fourth-largest army and nuclear weapons, and it is already the world’s fifth-largest economy in terms of purchasing power parity and continues to climb, though too many of its people remain destitute.
All of these indicators are commonly used to judge a country’s global status. However, something much less tangible, but a good deal more valuable in the twenty-first century, may be more important than any of them: India’s “soft power.”
Take Afghanistan, for instance – a major security concern for India, as it is for the world. But India’s greatest asset there doesn’t come out of a military mission: it doesn't have one. It comes from one simple fact: don’t try to telephone an Afghan at 8:30 in the evening. That’s when the Indian TV soap opera “Kyunki Saas Bhi Kabhi Bahu Thi” , dubbed into Dari, is telecast on Tolo TV, and no one wishes to miss it.
"Saas" is the most popular television show in Afghan history, with a 90% audience penetration. It’s considered directly responsible for a spike in the sale of generator sets and even for absences from religious functions which clash with its broadcast times. “ Saas” has so thoroughly captured the public imagination in Afghanistan that, in this deeply conservative Islamic country where family problems are often literally hidden behind the veil, it’s an Indian TV show that has come to dominate (and sometimes to justify) public discussion of family issues.
That’s soft power, and its particular strength is that it has nothing to do with government propaganda. The movies of Bollywood, which is bringing its glitzy entertainment far beyond the Indian diaspora in the United States and the United Kingdom , offer another example. A Senegalese friend told me of his illiterate mother who takes a bus to Dakar every month to watch a Bollywood film – she doesn’t understand the Hindi dialogue and can’t read the French subtitles, but she can still catch the spirit of the films and understand the story, and people like her look at India with stars in their eyes as a result. An Indian diplomat in Damascus a few years ago told me that the only publicly displayed portraits as big as those of then-President Hafez al-Assad were of the Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan.
Indian art, classical music and dance have the same effect. So does the work of Indian fashion designers, now striding across the world’s runways. Indian cuisine, spreading around the world, raises Indian culture higher in people's reckoning; the way to foreigners’ hearts is through their palates. In England today, Indian curry houses employ more people than the iron and steel, coal and shipbuilding industries combined.
When a bhangra beat is infused into a Western pop record or an Indian choreographer invents a fusion of kathak and ballet; when Indian women sweep the Miss World and Miss Universe contests, or when “Monsoon Wedding” wows the critics and “Lagaan” claims an Oscar nomination; when Indian writers win the Booker or Pulitzer Prizes, India’s soft power is enhanced.
Likewise, when Americans speak of the IITs, India’s technology institutes, with the same reverence they accord to MIT, and the “Indianness” of engineers and software developers is taken as synonymous with mathematical and scientific excel
Source: https://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/india-s-bollywood-power?a_la=english&a_d=9ca6350146f86f