The Historical Context of India’s Soft Power

As an ancient civilization, India has influenced cultures both east and west of it for millennia, and in turn, over the centuries, India has assimilated ideas from foreign cultures, most notably Islamic and European. Jewish populations have lived on the west coast of southern India since Roman times: Christians claim that St. Thomas visited India soon after Christ was crucified and is buried there. There are more Muslims in India than in Pakistan—the first modern-state built on the basis of religion. Home to one of the world’s oldest surviving civilizations and religions—Hinduism—and of Buddhism, its biggest ideological export, India’s spiritual, artistic, and cultural impact makes its soft power global. Indian ideas have traveled across the globe—from the peaceful spread of Buddhism across Asia to the Gandhian message of nonviolence in the twentieth century—enriching and exchanging other cultures but also absorbing and assimilating. At the heart of these exchanges was a quest for knowledge and coexistence, as exemplified by Nalanda University in eastern India, a Buddhist monastic center of learning from about AD 427 to AD 1200. It attracted students and scholars from all over India and beyond—from Greece and Persia in the West to Tibet, Korea, and China in the east, until the twelfth century, when the Turks who ruled northern India destroyed it as promoting idol-worship.