In June 2023, Diljit Dosanjh, the personable megastar of Punjabi music and cinema, was spotted at a restaurant in Canada with one Taylor Swift. To everyone who has even vaguely followed Dosanjh’s career, especially his social media histrionics, this came as a pleasant, life-affirming surprise. For long, a distant, yet outspoken fan of international artists, Dosanjh, after he became the first sardar to perform at Coachella, was now dining with one of the biggest popstars in the world. The nature of their dalliance is inconsequential to the broader trajectory of his work. A pop music icon of a regional though well-travelled industry, Dosanjh has begun in his own unguarded amicable way, to rub shoulders with the biggest and the best. The tabloid-like fallout of this sequence of events aside, his rise to global fame represents an entire nation’s growing cultural footprint. Because on the global chessboard of ‘soft-power’, India sits on the cusp of prominence like it has never experienced before. Any move going forward, is likely to be a step up.
In 2023, director S.S. Rajamouli’s sensorial odyssey, RRR, often described by the west as ‘maximalist poetry’, took Indian cinema around the globe. That ‘Naatu Naatu’ was nominated and eventually brought home an Oscar trophy, is probably the least of the film’s achievements. For it sent people dancing in the aisles at screenings, and penetrated pop-culture chatter to the point that it might have manifested its own little cult. In an era where palettes are experimenting far beyond the limitations of language and race, RRR became a cultural avalanche; the kind of artefact that is discussed over nerdy podcasts, exchanged as meme and dissected a hundred times over because it evokes that kind of curiosity and passion. It helped, to an extent to also witness Kartiki Gonsalves’ The Elephant Whisperers and Shaunak Sen’s All that Breathes join Rajamouli and crew on the Academy floor.
Music, cinema and other arts are precarious metrics. Especially when viewed through the prism of western adulation. Which is why artistic commerce must also be supported by the markers of something more tangible. The toolbox that will define art and culture’s future - technology. From Sundar Pichai to Satya Nadella, the tech industry’s most fascinating chapter - where it battles questions about security, politics and the growth of AI (artificial intelligence) - is being led by Indian minds. It represents more than just the demographic advantage that India’s engineering farms have come to represent. Though the coveted degree itself might be declining in popularity, it has given the world leaders who are fronting humanity’s next wave of innovation. The days of bundling Indians into stereotypes like call-centre executives, taxi drivers or coding mechanics, sound a thing of the past.
Cinema and music travel faster on the map, but lifestyle exports like Yoga, our spiritual etiquette and Vedic ideas have also helped India carve an image of sobriety that stands out in a world that has historically embraced excess. Our politeness doesn’t, however, just wear dull shades of grey. It also wills itself to the exuberance of the ‘Big Fat Indian Wedding’, a celebration of love and family that has also become an obsession the world over. Soft power after all isn’t just the translation of moral lectures, or the distribution of an artefact. But it can also be the thing that inspires in neighbours' curiosity, maybe even envy.
In Mindy Kaling’s Never Have I Ever, an Indian family feels at home in a foreign country, managing to even rewrite a typical American, coming-of-age narrative. Amazon Prime’s Citadel marks Priyanka Chopra Jonas’s ascendance to a place of relevance from where Marvel and Disney look like accessible, market-consolidating bets. Awards and critical acclaim might just be – rightly so- the last thing on her mind. Alia Bhatt (Heart of Stone), Ali Fazal (Kandahar), Adarsh Gourav (Extrapolations), look destined to go places as well. That said, not all of our cultural expansion should be measured on a scale tethered to western preoccupations. Much like Korean cinema, and the K-pop boom, success globally, might depend on what we do natively.
Rather than ape western storytelling, we must place our bets on our own sense of aesthetic and language. RRR’s success confirms the adage that the most global stories, are local in design. Rather than chase the moody existentialism of the west, it’s important to stick to the narrative framework we have known and nurtured. We can obviously learn from foreign industries where artists, regardless of streams, collaborate liberally. Barbenheimer, for example, has recently offered evidence of the benefits of mutually feeding a cultural moment.
To add to that, our diversity, the sheer variety of voices we represent, need not be diminished by the scale of our vision. A great, seminal piece of art after all, can come from anywhere. Time is also ripe to build venerable institutions, and preserve them with blood, sweat and dignity. Institutions that reasonably reward and revaluate art. Institutions that support artists and creative endeavours. To the point where we decolonize the very idea of creation and consumption. It sounds improbable, but so did RRR’s global lap of discovery, Dosanjh’s performance at Coachella, and other feats that Indians have, in recent years, pulled off in front of global audiences. It takes a village, and in quarter-of-a-century’s time till 2047, we’ll likely to have more than just the one.
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