India’s soft power is frequently reduced to consumable icons, yoga mats in Manhattan, Bollywood on streaming platforms, or its cuisine in global capitals. Such accounts miss the point. Indian soft power is not a marketing portfolio but a civilizational inheritance that carries metaphysics, social philosophy, and lived ritual into the public sphere. The question today is not whether India possesses soft power. It is whether it can translate that inheritance into normative influence in a fractured international order.
To understand this, one must begin not in New York or Davos, but in places like Palani in Tamil Nadu, and in diaspora spaces across Southeast Asia where the festival of Thaipusam is observed. It is a Saivite festival dedicated to Murugan, who is also known as Skanda or Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati. In Puranic mythology, the festival commemorates the bestowal of the Vel, the spear given by Parvati to Murugan, enabling him to defeat the asura Surapadman. The myth operates at multiple registers. Psychologically, it is internalised by devotees as the conquest of ignorance and ego. At the cosmological level, it encodes the restoration of order after disorder. But on a theological level, it signifies much more: the fusion of Shiva and Sakti within the form of the deity.
Murugan’s historical trajectory is equally instructive. In early Sangam literature, dating roughly from the early centuries of the Common Era, Murugan appears as a deity associated with the Kurinci landscape, the mountainous ecozone, linked to hunting communities and fertility motifs. Over time, especially under the Pandya and Pallava polities, regional cults were absorbed into an expanding Puranic framework. Murugan became identified with Skanda of the Sanskritic tradition. This was not a simple replacement of one by the other but a layered synthesis that resulted in a composite deity that could speak simultaneously to tribal memory and Tamil devotionalism, while also being true to pan-Indic theology.
Such capacity for synthesis is civilizational and reflective of a long-standing pattern in the subcontinent. The local traditions are not erased but elevated, integrated, and reinterpreted within broader cosmological frames. The same dynamic allowed non-Vedic deities, mother goddesses, and folk cults to be incorporated into a universalistic idiom without obliterating their distinctiveness. In contemporary political vocabulary, one might call this plural integration without pushing homogenization.
The beauty and appeal of Thaipusam are such that it is practised in countries like Malaysia and Singapore, illustrating the enduring nature of the practice. Devotees undertake vows, fast, shave their heads, and in some cases carry kavadis, ornate structures borne on the shoulders, or undergo forms of bodily mortification, including piercing, as acts of penance or thanksgiving. These practices are grounded in the mythology of Murugan’s encounter with Idumban, which provides a ritual template for the kavadi. Yet, the festival in Southeast Asia has also adapted to local regulatory frameworks, urban settings, and even to diaspora politics. Once deeply Tamil, it has now unmistakably become global.
Why does this matter for India’s contemporary foreign policy? Because soft power, when stripped of civilizational depth, becomes ornamental. When anchored in intellectual and ritual traditions, it becomes normative. Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS), increasingly foregrounded in policy discourse, seek to retrieve and systematise epistemic traditions ranging from philosophy and linguistics to medicine, environmental ethics, aesthetics, and jurisprudence. The ambition is not antiquarian revivalism but pursuing indigenous knowledge traditions as legitimate interlocutors in global debates on sustainability, well-being, and social order.
Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s diplomatic style reflects this recalibration. His public engagements frequently draw upon civilizational motifs, whether through references to yoga, the Bhagavad Gita, Buddhist heritage circuits, or temple visits during overseas trips. The successful adoption of International Day of Yoga by the United Nations General Assembly in 2014 exemplifies this strategy. Yoga was not presented as a sectarian practice but as a universal discipline of bodymind integration. Such civilizational sources are acknowledged, integrated, and the appeal is truly cosmopolitan.
The critics decry such an approach as a majoritarian assertion. But to objective observers, this is a manifestation of a long-lost civilizational confidence. The more analytically useful question one must ask is whether cultural ownership can avoid cultural imprisonment. To own one’s civilizational narrative without becoming captive to a narrow reading of it requires intellectual agility. Hindu traditions themselves provide a template. Murugan’s dual marriages, to Devayanai, associated with celestial order, and to Valli, associated with pastoral and transgressive devotion, symbolise the accommodation of orthodoxy and ecstatic bhakti within a single sacred frame. The deity is at once transcendent and immanent, but at the same time, he is austere and accessible.
If contemporary revivalism forgets our layered architecture of faith and belief, there is a greater risk that it will flatten a plural tradition into a paltry slogan. But if it remembers it, honours it, the revival will become renewal. And this distinction is critical. For a civilizational state that seeks to shape global norms, it must demonstrate internal coherence without coercive uniformity.
The geopolitical context heightens the urgency. The post-Cold War unipolar moment has dissolved, with wars in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East only compounded by trade wars, technological decoupling, and information warfare. Normative contestation now unfolds as intensely in digital space as if it were a battlefield.
And in such an environment, rule-taking, merely adapting to standards set elsewhere, constrains strategic autonomy. Rule-shaping, participating in the design of norms, requires intellectual confidence. But rule-making requires proposing frameworks that others can adopt: willingly and cheerfully. And this demands civilizational depth married to institutional capacity.
India’s aspiration to move from “rule-taker to rule-shaper to rule-maker” cannot rest solely on material indicators such as GDP growth or military capability. Those are necessary foundations. But normative leadership emerges when a state can articulate frameworks that resonate beyond its borders. Climate discourse framed through concepts such as “Vasudhaiva Kutumbakam” seeks to ground sustainability in relational ethics. Developmental narratives that emphasise the balance of Panchabhutas rather than extraction draw implicitly on older cosmologies that viewed the human and natural worlds as interlinked rather than adversarial.
Here, the metaphor of the Vel regains relevance. In mythology, it pierces through illusion and restores order. And in statecraft, too, the equivalent is clarity of narrative. A country uncertain of its intellectual heritage hesitates to propose alternatives to prevailing global paradigms. A country that romanticises its past without critical engagement becomes insular. The task is to balance retrieval with reinterpretation.
The disciplined austerities of the kavadi ritual offer an unexpected lesson. They are public acts, but they are rooted in interior transformation. The devotee’s body becomes a site where cosmology and discipline intersect. Likewise, a state’s external projection is credible only when anchored in internal coherence, educational reform, scholarly rigour, and institutional credibility. Indian Knowledge Systems cannot be advanced through rhetoric alone but are contingent on research, peer-reviewed scholarship, and curricular integration that meets global academic standards.
In a world marked by wars of different kinds, from territorial wars to trade wars to cultural wars, the contest is as much about narratives as about territory. India’s civilizational ethos allows absorption without erasure and synthesis without surrender, offering a distinctive template. If that ethos is to be translated into policy with intellectual seriousness and inclusive confidence, Bharat and its culture will evolve into normative power. As a global responsible power, Bharat must also be a normative power, especially the kind that all wish to emulate. And that is the evolution and the journey from rule-taker to rule-shaper to rule-maker. And let’s not confuse it with triumphalism. Instead, treat this as what it is: a civilizational articulation. In an era of turbulence and chaos, Bharat’s way may well be to demonstrate that enduring civilisations do not merely survive chaos but carry within them the power to reorder it.
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Prof Santishree Dhulipudi Pandit is the Vice-Chancellor of JNU.
