Take West Bengal. Over the last 10 days, violence of the bottom-of-the-barrel-scraping kind has been rampant in various parts of the state before next month’s panchayat polls. And yet, Bengal more or less remains cocooned to the outside world in its ‘bhadralok’ genteelness, marked by things like ‘culture,’ a litany of great dead men, and ‘laidbackness’ – a secretly amenable quality, despite its depiction as a vice elsewhere.
Bengal’s soft power of literary, cinematic, artistic, cultural hauteness acts as the visible tip of an iceberg that continues to melt rapidly into a permanent mix of societal anarchic chaos and political fisticuff-cussedness. Magically, it has remained the ‘cultural capital,’ the proverbial Potemkin Village hiding unsavoury things behind a respectable window front, a Planet Bengal keeping its distance from the UPs and Bihars whose violence and skullduggery it has resembled, even exceeded, well before the advent of mobile or Mamata.
India’s soft power is still forming in the oven, arguably lagging behind its rising hard power quotient. Part of the reason for this is that India’s self-fashioning has, overwhelmingly, been in front of a mirror, not behind a window. Its image as a ‘mysterious’ ‘spiritual’ Otheristan has been fashioned over not just the last 75-odd years, but the last few centuries. Shaking off that Tintin ‘Maharajah of Gaipajama-Ramacharma the Fakir’ dual image has neither been easy, nor really earnest. And it has always been a self-image created in opposition to the ‘materialistic’ ‘spiritually defunct’ West. But making a portrait isn’t about ‘not drawing anyone else’s face’.
What is confounding is that much of these cliches have been propagated, perpetuated and celebrated by India itself. They have been twee, not cool, not gaining much leverage beyond sub-groups like hippies and IT nerds abroad. We’re still thrilled each time a person in Moscow sings, ‘Mera joota hai Japani…’
India is a conservative, liberal country. And yet, to depict an Indian Muslim, we still resort to showing a man wearing a skullcap. The fact that the secular Hindu – they form the majority of this religious majority – increasingly sounds like an oxymoron to our own ears is strange, considering ‘Ram Ram’ is a greeting, not automatically a majoritarian lamentation in the form of a cri de guerre. Yoga, sitar, gurus, RRR and quoting Gandhi-Tagore are all very fine, but they form, at best, the side dishes of a much more mainstream, dynamic, confident-in-being-themselves menu. Today’s mainstream films and streaming shows like Gully Boy, Criminal Justice, Decoupled, Pataal Lok and Dahaad are probably more representative of not India, but what India wishes itself to be: contemporary, materialistic (dumping its ‘soul-sucking’ connotations), fun, order-seeking, chaos-rejecting, liberal…. Even illiberal sections of India, still, make a case for them to be seen as liberal. Soft power is built not by showcasing cuisines and folksy traditions, but by showing how a people wants to come across as. Seeing mainstream American movies will give you the impression that that’s how Americans and America are. Britain, too, still punches well above its weight culturally because of the people depicted in movies/shows with Brit actors and/or characters. Reality needn’t match – in fact, shouldn’t match – in toto.
Soft power is different from optics. As political scientist Joseph Nye wrote in his influential 1990 book, Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power, ‘the best propaganda is not propaganda’. India must seek out to seduce, not dole out PIB handouts or tourism board brochures to update its face. We all know how the PRC, super-achiever in all other aspects, is faring on the PR front.
On the other hand, the US, also the hard superpower, captivates the world through its self-imagings. Making the world forgive, forget, downplay, tut-tut, ignore all the bad things Americans and America have been and may still be up to, by subliminally charming the world with romcoms, action movies, superhero films, comedy shows….
After all, the real purpose of soft power is to make everyone be fond of a people, country or state through its depictions of culture, values and self-worth. Fond enough for the ‘outside’ world to overlook its vices and weaknesses, and be able to see it like it sees itself – no warts at all.
