Point of View: Soft Power Matters, Perhaps More Than Ever
[Left] Borobudur in Java, Indonesia (Source: Wikimedia)
India can represent the cohabitation, not a clash, of civilizations, notes historian William Dalrymple in The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World. “The Wonder That Was India,” to borrow A. L. Basham’s famous title, becomes “The Wonder That Was the Indosphere” in Dalrymple’s latest book.
Lately, whether the trigger was terrorist attacks or trade wars or something else, there’s been a great deal of turmoil. And uncertainty. In the subcontinent, hard power rapidly gained the upper hand, leading to a tense clash between India and Pakistan. We can only be thankful that the armed conflict didn’t turn into a full-blown war. Meanwhile, because of tariffs and other factors, the U.S., which was long seen as indispensable for global stability, though several nations resented it, is viewed with dismay by the rest of the world and many of its own citizens.
In the East and West, we are living through a challenging, confusing period, as if the rules have suddenly changed and we can’t differentiate between friends and enemies or frenemies. Ethnoreligious nationalism and authoritarianism imply a more lawless, us-versus-them world. Trust is low, and fear is high. Ultranationalism is in, globalization out. It’s a topsy-turvy world, and any talk of soft power may sound triumphalist, making people nervous.
Still, at a time when the superpowers U.S. and China are locked in a struggle for dominance, causing wide distrust, could there be an opening for India? Sounds improbable, given its own crisis with Pakistan. It’s not just China and the U.S. that engage in brinkmanship. But a more hopeful future is possible if India can get its act together. That could be the lesson of William Dalrymple’s engrossing new book, which shows a way forward by shining a light on the distant past.
Soft power, a concept popularized by Harvard political scientist Joseph Nye (who died recently), is achieved through persuasion and diplomacy, not coercion or military power. What matters is economic and cultural influence, as well as intellectual heft, all of which India wielded for a millennium and a half, from around 250 BCE to 1200 CE. The “country” that did that was really a civilization.
Today’s India, having overtaken Britain, is expected to overtake both Germany and Japan within the next decade to become the world’s third biggest economic superpower. As Dalrymple points out in The Golden Road: How Ancient India Transformed the World (Bloomsbury Publishing), besides being more unified and centralized than ever before, India has quadrupled the size of its economy in a generation.
What can the remote past teach us? Plenty, Dalrymple believes. And he’s optimistic about India’s ability to exercise soft power. Dalrymple’s connection to India is scholarly rather than ancestral, making his prognosis more credible. He’s an honorary Indian, given his long residence in the subcontinent, but we could also call him an Indophile, except that it doesn’t do justice to his stature as a lauded, award-winning author with a vast following. Indologist sounds better.
No matter how we see India’s prospects on the world stage, what’s less debatable is the appeal of Dalrymple’s book. It is unfailingly readable. “The Wonder That Was India,” to borrow the historian A. L. Basham’s famous title, becomes “The Wonder That Was the Indosphere” in Dalrymple’s rich narration. The Indosphere, it’s true, was largely an Asian sphere. Nevertheless, India’s influence was wide-ranging, Dalrymple says, covering religion, art, music, dance, textiles, technology, astronomy, mathematics, medicine, mythology, language, and literature.
The Golden Road that facilitated this transfer was no road. It was confined to the seas, where the ships traveling from and to coastal India took advantage of the monsoon winds to propel their passage. The Sinosphere then was much smaller than the Indosphere, and the legendary Silk Road—now touted as part of China’s Belt and Road initiative—did not exist.
Ashoka, of course, stands out when we think of Buddhism, whose impact has been so profound that, even now, China has more practicing Buddhists than any other region. India’s scientific ideas might have had a more lasting impact than spiritual matters, with the fifth-century mathematician Aryabhata being one example. Only the Hellenic sphere came close. A thousand years before Copernicus and Galileo, as Dalrymple says, Aryabhata, who debunked the notion that it was the sky that rotated, figured out that the earth rotated on its axis. Although he was wrong in thinking the sun revolved around the earth, Indian astronomers back then were able to calculate the length of a year with astonishing accuracy (to seven decimal points).
Asian scholars flocked to Nalanda, the Oxbridge or Harvard-MIT of its era. This great center of learning in eastern India was probably the world’s first residential university, attracting more than 10,000 students from abroad. Its nine-story library, with a rich collection of sutra manuscripts, was as renowned as the one in Alexandria, which was destroyed in a fire.
When it comes to universal languages, we think only English comes close to being one. There is, however, another remarkable, intricate language—the language of mathematics we get from Indo-Arabic numerals—that has been embraced by the entire world. This contribution is most strikingly exemplified by sunya, the Buddhist concept of void or emptiness. Treating sunya as another numeral, Brahmagupta was the first sage to understand the mathematical significance of zero, which he described as what you get when you subtract a number from itself.
Borobudur in Java, Indonesia, graced by 72 bell-shaped stupas, is home to the world’s largest Buddhist complex, while Angkor Wat, the sprawling Hindu temple complex in Cambodia, with its quincunx of towers, is so huge that it can be seen from outer space. They represent the zenith of Indic influence in Asia.
The biggest wonder of the Indosphere is that there were no forcible conversions or notable conquests and occupation. Much of the soft-power transfer happened organically, painlessly. Which is why some unsavory aspects of Indian society didn’t make inroads.
“The caste hierarchy, for example, never crystallized in the region in the way it did in India, and ideas of ritual impurity and elaborate bans on eating with members of different castes completely failed to take root,” according to Dalrymple. The region he’s referring to is Southeast Asia, which also rejected vegetarianism and where women continued to enjoy a high status in society.
At the same time, in a region where Hindu and Buddhist influences mixed easily, no cultural transfer from India made a deeper mark than the timeless stories of the Mahabharata and Ramayana.
While India’s clout today is considerable, its many weaknesses can’t be denied. So, is a second Indospehere—which will no doubt be very different—possible as we head into the second quarter of this century? It’s an open question. But Dalrymple has correctly identified India’s strengths, which include an ability to absorb outside influences and reshape them in useful ways.
“History shows that India has always been at its most creative and influential when it is at its most connected, plural, hybrid, open and receptive to new ideas from its neighbors, when it represents the cohabitation, not a clash, of civilizations,” he notes.
Murali Kamma is the managing editor of Khabar. Email: letters@khabar.com
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