Table of Contents
Lessons from International Practice — Adapting global frameworks without sacrificing institutional autonomy, academic integrity, or contextual relevance.
Introduction
In 1990, Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye introduced the concept of ‘soft power’—a nation’s capacity to attract and persuade rather than coerce, operating through the appeal of its culture, values, and policies rather than military or economic compulsion (Nye, 2004).
India, with its civilisational depth, linguistic diversity, and cultural plurality, holds one of the world’s most extensive reserves of potential soft power. In the Brand Finance Global Soft Power Index 2026, India ranks 32nd among 193 nations assessed, with a score of 48.0, behind several countries with markedly smaller cultural footprints (Brand Finance, 2026).
By triangulating linguistic asset mapping, institutional audit, and cross-national comparison, this article offers a granular account of where India’s cultural diplomacy underperforms—and what it would take, specifically, to close that distance. The article argues that India’s linguistic heritage and literary traditions are not peripheral academic concerns confined to university corridors, but instruments of national engagement that merit deliberate, better-resourced cultivation by policymakers, universities, and cultural institutions alike.
Language as a Strategic Asset
Language is among the most fundamental media of influence. India’s relationship with English illustrates one of the more striking inversions in postcolonial history: a language introduced as an instrument of administration and subjugation has, across generations of writers, scientists, and educators, been remade into a vehicle of global participation and assertion.
Approximately 129 million Indians reported English as a second or third language in the 2011 Census, making it the country’s most widely used link language after Hindi (Census of India, 2011).
1,369
rationalised mother tongues, grouped into 121 languages, of which 22 hold Scheduled status under the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution (Census of India, 2011).
Sanskrit continues to underpin legal, scientific, and philosophical vocabulary well beyond India’s borders; the ghazal tradition and Urdu poetry retain devoted international followings; and government-backed AI translation initiatives are now extending the global reach of Hindi and other Indian languages through digital platforms—demonstrating that linguistic diversity, properly supported, functions as a soft power multiplier rather than an administrative complication.
India’s Literary Heritage on the World Stage
“If language is the medium, literature is the message.”
Indian literature—spanning the Vedas and the Mahabharata, the Nobel-laureate poetry of Rabindranath Tagore, and the Booker Prize-winning prose of contemporary writers—has shaped how the world understands India, and how India understands itself. Works by Amitav Ghosh, Vikram Seth, Kiran Desai, and Jhumpa Lahiri have achieved international critical acclaim and carried India’s stories and philosophies into universities and homes across the world (Mukherjee, 2000).
Geetanjali Shree’s Ret Samadhi, translated by Daisy Rockwell as Tomb of Sand, became the first Hindi novel to win the International Booker Prize in 2022. Three years later, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp, translated from Kannada by Deepa Bhasthi, won the same prize in 2025—the first work translated from Kannada, spoken by an estimated 50–65 million people, to do so (The Booker Prizes, 2025).
The Indian diaspora—estimated at 35.4 million people across more than 200 countries, the largest national diaspora in the world (Ministry of External Affairs, 2024)—functions as a living extension of this literary and cultural diplomacy.
Cultural Diplomacy Architecture: An Audit
The Indian Council for Cultural Relations (ICCR), established in 1950 under Maulana Abul Kalam Azad, remains the principal vehicle of India’s cultural diplomacy abroad (Indian Council for Cultural Relations, n.d.). Its FY 2025–26 budgetary allocation rose to approximately ₹351 crore (roughly US $42 million)—an increase on previous years, though parliamentary committees have noted this remains modest relative to India’s ambitions and to the funding enjoyed by comparator institutions (Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs, 2025).
International Day of Yoga—established following Prime Minister Modi’s 2014 UN address and now observed in more than 190 countries each 21 June—has become one of India’s most visible, low-cost diplomatic instruments (United Nations, n.d.). The BHASHINI initiative, a government-backed AI translation mission offering real-time text and speech translation across more than twenty Indian languages, has extended India’s multilingual capacity into the digital domain, with deployments ranging from the 2025 Maha Kumbh mela to national e-governance platforms (Digital India Bhashini Division, 2025).
Comparative Models: Lessons and Cautions
China’s Confucius Institutes expanded rapidly after 2004, reaching roughly 550 institutes across more than 160 countries by 2019, backed by substantial state funding and a long-term strategic vision (Gill & Huang, 2006; Melbourne Asia Review, 2022). The network has since contracted sharply in North America, Europe, and Australia amid concerns over political influence on host campuses—falling from around 100 US university Confucius Institutes in 2019 to fewer than five by 2023 (U.S. Government Accountability Office, 2023).
The British Council, the Alliance Française, and the Goethe-Institut offer comparatively durable models of institutionalised cultural diplomacy (Fundaón Princesa de Asturias, n.d.). Yet even these are under fiscal pressure: British Council funding from the UK government fell by roughly £12 million between 2023 and 2024, with Goethe-Institut funding falling by a comparable margin over the same period (British Council, 2024).
“This retrenchment among established competitors presents India with a genuine strategic opening.”
Educational Institutions and Academic Collaboration
Universities and humanities departments are primary generators of the intellectual capital that underpins soft power. The National Education Policy 2020 took a meaningful step by emphasising mother-tongue instruction and interdisciplinary learning (Ministry of Education, 2020).
IIT Madras established India’s first overseas campus in Zanzibar, Tanzania, in 2023; IIT Delhi followed with a campus in Abu Dhabi in 2024; and a third, developed with Nigeria, is expected to admit students in 2026 (Business Today, 2025). The revived Nalanda University, inaugurated in 2024, now enrols students from more than twenty countries on ICCR and ASEAN scholarships—a deliberate, symbolically resonant attempt to rebuild India’s historical role as a regional hub of learning (Nalanda University, 2024).
Humanities and language departments have been largely absent from this wave, which has concentrated on engineering, business, and finance.
Conclusion & Recommendations
The central argument of this article is straightforward: the question is not whether India has soft power—it manifestly does—but whether India will apply to its cultural and linguistic assets the same strategic discipline it routinely brings to defence procurement, trade policy, or economic planning.
Substantially expand ICCR’s budget and cultural-centre network on a sustained, structural basis.
The increase should be ongoing rather than a one-off allocation, bringing ICCR’s reach closer to comparator institutions such as the British Council or Alliance Française, with a specific mandate to invest in literature, linguistics, and translation.
Extend the current wave of academic internationalisation to the humanities and social sciences.
This should include dedicated funding for joint and dual-degree programmes in Indian Studies, Translation Studies, and Cultural Diplomacy with partner universities overseas, mirroring the model already established for engineering and business at IIT campuses abroad.
Integrate government-backed digital infrastructure such as BHASHINI more closely with university-based digital humanities research.
Public investment in language technology should simultaneously strengthen the scholarly archiving, translation, and global dissemination of India’s classical and contemporary literary heritage.
Establish or substantially expand endowed chairs and visiting fellowships in Indian Studies at leading universities abroad.
This is a comparatively low-cost instrument that several other nations have used effectively to sustain long-term scholarly and policy attention to their cultural assets.
India’s literary and linguistic heritage—capacious enough to encompass the Vedas, the ghazal, and a 2025 International Booker Prize for a Kannada short-story collection—is one of the country’s most distinctive and currently underused instruments of global engagement.
In an information environment where attention and credibility are themselves forms of power, treating that heritage as a deliberate, adequately resourced element of national strategy is not an aspiration. It is an imperative.
References
- Brand Finance. (2026). Global Soft Power Index 2026: Executive summary.
- British Council. (2024). Investment in UK soft power falls as competition for global influence increases.
- Business Today. (2025, March 18). IIT overseas campus expansion: India’s academic ambitions go global.
- Census of India. (2011). Language atlas: India, 2011. Office of the Registrar General & Census Commissioner, India.
- Department-Related Parliamentary Standing Committee on External Affairs. (2025). Demands for grants (2025–26): Fifth report. Lok Sabha Secretariat.
- Digital India Bhashini Division. (2025). BHASHINI: National Language Translation Mission. MeitY, Government of India.
- Fundaón Princesa de Asturias. (n.d.). Alliance Française, Società Dante Alighieri, British Council, Goethe-Institut, Instituto Cervantes and Instituto Camões.
- Gill, B., & Huang, Y. (2006). Sources and limits of Chinese soft power. Survival, 48(2), 17–36.
- Indian Council for Cultural Relations. (n.d.). About ICCR. Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India.
- Melbourne Asia Review. (2022). The fall of Confucius Institutes and Confucius Classrooms?
- Ministry of Education, Government of India. (2020). National Education Policy 2020.
- Ministry of External Affairs, Government of India. (2024). Population of overseas Indians.
- Mukherjee, M. (2000). The perishable empire: Essays on Indian writing in English. Oxford University Press.
- Nalanda University. (2024). International community.
- Nye, J. S. (2004). Soft power: The means to success in world politics. PublicAffairs.
- The Booker Prizes. (2025). Heart Lamp by Banu Mushtaq, translated by Deepa Bhasthi, wins the International Booker Prize 2025.
- U.S. Government Accountability Office. (2023). China: With nearly all U.S. Confucius Institutes closed, some schools sought alternative language support (GAO-24-105981).
- United Nations. (n.d.). International Day of Yoga.
About the Author
Harshita Sharma
Assistant Professor, Department of English — Vikrant University, Gwalior, Madhya Pradesh
Her research interests span literature, linguistics, and cultural studies, with a particular focus on the intersection of language, identity, and national development. She has contributed to academic discourse on Indian Writing in English, postcolonial linguistics, and the cultural dimensions of education policy. She holds a postgraduate qualification in English Literature and is actively engaged in interdisciplinary research connecting language, culture, and strategic studies.