Rule-takers to rule-shapers to rule-makers

Rule-taking, merely adapting to standards set elsewhere, constrains strategic autonomy. Rule-shaping, participating in the design of norms, requires intellectual confidence.

- SANTISHREE DHULIPUDI PANDIT

India’s soft power is frequently reduced to consumable icons, yoga mats in Manhattan, Bollywood on streaming platforms, or its cuisine in global capitals. Such accounts miss the point.

Indian soft power is not a marketing portfolio but a civilizational inheritance that carries metaphysics, social philosophy, and lived ritual into the public sphere. The question today is not whether India possesses soft power. It is whether it can translate that inheritance into normative influence in a fractured international order.

To understand this, one must begin not in New York or Davos, but in places like Palani in Tamil Nadu, and in diaspora spaces across Southeast Asia where the festival of Thaipusam is observed. It is a Saivite festival dedicated to Murugan, who is also known as Skanda or Kartikeya, the son of Shiva and Parvati. In Puranic mythology, the festival commemorates the bestowal of the Vel, the spear given by Parvati to Murugan, enabling him to defeat the asura Surapadman. The myth operates at multiple registers. Psychologically, it is internalised by devotees as the conquest of ignorance and ego. At the cosmological level, it encodes the restoration of order after disorder. But on a theological level, it signifies much more: the fusion of Shiva and Sakti within the form of the deity.