“You are the symbols of India’s soft power. You are the unofficial ambassadors, the cultural ambassadors,” Indian President Pranab Mukherjee told expatriates in Windhoek, Namibia, last week.
The Southwest African nation has barely 300 expatriates, a miniscule part of a 30 million diaspora spread globally that is being rallied as never before. Mukherjee, on a maiden visit by an Indian head of state, chose this motley group of businessmen and professionals to propose “a new relationship” with the entire continent of Africa.
He hailed M.K. Gandhi as the “greatest Indian abroad”. Baptised in South Africa’s movement against colonialism, apartheid and exploitation, Gandhi had, on his return home, led “a non-violent struggle against the world’s mightiest empire”.
India’s “soft power” yields hard currency. Indians send more money home than any other group of migrants. A World Bank report estimates that India received US$70.4 billion (RM289.7 billion) in remittances in 2014. That’s ahead of China, which got US$64.2 billion, and more than all the remittances received by the Philippines, Mexico and Pakistan combined.
However, expatriates are only one of the many forms of India’s “soft power” that is being assiduously pushed to mutual advantage. A fast-growing Indian economy, with more money to spare for aid and investment abroad, has proved encouraging.
Cinema, especially Bollywood, comes next. As much as the difficult-to-assess export earnings, what matters is a mix of nostalgia and brand loyalty that has sustained the sector for generations and is growing. A big draw among the South Asian diasporas, it has become commercially rewarding as well, enough for the marquee Hollywood names to set up shops in India and make it global.
I watched Raj Kapoor’s Awaara (1955), dubbed Chavargo in Hungarian, more than four decades ago in one of Budapest’s niche theatres. It drew a full-house. Returning to it this year, I found the craze for Bollywood had grown stronger.
The generation that admired Raj Kapoor is fading, but other Kapoors and the Khans are immensely popular. The Indian Embassy’s cultural centre in Budapest, appropriately named after Amrita Sher-Gill, last century’s celebrated Indo-Hungarian painter, is packed whenever it screens Bollywood movies.
It is amazing but Indian TV serials are popular in distant West Africa. “Everything comes to a halt in our homes at 7.30pm when they start,” says Richard J.A. Boateng, a film actor-director from Ghana. So smitten is he by Bollywood that he has produced, directed and done the lead part in the first Ghana-India co-production. Titled Mr India, it is slated for release in Accra next month.
You will find India’s “godmen” wherever you go. They travel, give sermons, promote vegan culture and organic food, deliver medicinal cures and much else.
Perhaps the most unwitting and unsung carriers of Indian soft power are the Romani or Roma. Called gypsies in the English-speaking world, the traditionally nomadic ethnic group who live mostly in Europe and the Americas had migrated centuries ago from the northern regions of the Indian subcontinent.
Although centuries have passed and they are hundreds of kilometres from the land of their ancestors, they are conscious of their roots even as they struggle to integrate in societies where they are victims of discrimination. Contemporary India nurtures these ties, albeit in a limited way, by helping to run schools in parts of Europe and hosting world Roma conferences.
In an apparent blowback, the Romas are finding connections with Dalits, the socio-economically oppressed Indians, who are waging their own struggle in India. Their icon is Babasaheb Ambedkar who wrote India’s Constitution in the last century. Viewed from the human rights prism, Ambedkar’s ideas have found echoes among the Roma, 500,000 of whom live in Hungary alone. In April, Indian envoy Rahul Chhabra gifted books to the Roma-run Ambedkar Institute in Sajokaza, a small city on Hungary’s border with Slovakia and to the University of West Hungary, Sopron, on the border with Austria, deep in the heart of Central Europe.
Indian soft power draws deeply from the past and the present, bolstered by deep cultural ties forged by visitors from and to India. Few other societies can boast of this.
They are now fostered by the Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), the cultural arm of the External Affairs Ministry that runs 36 centres across the globe, like the one in Budapest and Netaji Subhas Chandra Bose Centre in Kuala Lumpur.
The newest arrow in India’s cultural armoury is yoga. It is being vigorously promoted by the present government that has dispatched more than 200 yoga teachers to many cities across the world for the Second International Yoga Day on Tuesday.
The emphasis is on lifestyle, health, restraint, fulfilment and wellbeing — and not so much on exercise and the religious aspects, since many mistake it to be a “Hindu” pursuit and may have reservations.
Last weekend, Indian missions in Dublin, Paris, Beijing and other cities conducted yoga performances that were joined by thousands.
In Hungary, the International Yoga Day was part of the larger Ganges-Danube Festival. Nine of its cities used their historic sites as backdrops for the yoga event. One of the venues was the central prison in Budapest. This nation of 10 million boasts 60 yoga centres.
Symbolically bringing the Ganga and the Danube closer, the festival witnessed fashion shows, art exhibitions, puppeteers, Indian classical dances, a food festival and, of course, Bollywood films.
Perhaps, the “most diverse” International Yoga Day observances were held at the United Nations headquarters where the ancient holistic science of India was celebrated by a microcosm of the world’s nationalities, religions and cultures — blending its practice and yogic meals with digital interactivity, glamour, and an examination of its relevance to the global body’s mission.
Mahendra Ved is NST’s New Delhi correspondent. He is president of the Commonwealth Journalists Association (2016-2018) and a consultant with ‘Power Politics’ monthly magazine