Soft power,culture and modernity: Responses to Bollywood films in Thailand and the Philippines

India's soft power

The US diplomat, Joseph Nye, continues to argue that there are cultural great powers, as much as there are military and economic powers (Nye, 2004, 2008, 2011). Nye has noted how the cultural influence or what he calls the ‘soft power’, of countries like India exceeds and complements their military and financial leverage (or ‘hard power’). Outstanding artists, scientists and sportspeople are all contributors to the creation of a favourable impression amongst other national populations, as are authoritative media outlets, world-class universities and credible democratic standards. When these achievements can be communicated effectively at the international level, the aggregation of soft power becomes persuasive in nature (Nye, 2005). By fostering the external perception of a country as a benign influence, soft power can create a receptive environment for international initiatives. For Nye, in the day-to-day discussions that sustain the international order, national media brands such as the BBC play a vital role in establishing and projecting soft power and enabling consensus. By the same measure, Hollywood cinema is portrayed as having been an effective ambassador for the American way of life but also credited for the spread of formal democracy during the 20th century. In this reading, the global presence of American film and television (TV) helped to promote a consensus-based approach to international relations and a conducive environment for growth and development around the world. Arguing therefore for a much more positive reading of ‘cultural imperialism’ than is commonly found in the discipline of International Communications, Nye attempts to circumvent the ‘intrusion of foreign ideas’ thesis by suggesting that transnational communication is almost always preferable to the other available instruments of foreign policy (see Boyd-Barrett, 2014; Tomlinson, 1991).

Nonetheless, as dependency theorists in communications have long argued, the cultural domain is far from being a level playing field (Cardoso and Faletto, 1971). While soft power may allow smaller, post-imperial powers like the UK to ‘punch above their weight’, critical mass is always a significant factor in cultural domain. That is, British influence stems from the benefits of historical hegemony and the attendant consequences of a larger ‘media civilisation’ that it shares with the United States and the Commonwealth (see Athique, 2016). On the purely national level, larger countries in terms of population, such as China and India, possess a greater natural capacity for projecting their cultures at a global scale (Straubhaar, 2010). A larger population creates economies of scale for cultural production, and it also tends to create a greater demographic and commercial presence in other regions. In seeking to develop these assets for political purposes, both India and China, formerly strident critics of ‘cultural imperialism’, have become ardent investors in the notion (and practice) of ‘soft power’ (Bamzai, 2006). For his part, Joseph Nye has explicitly identified India's Bollywood films as a clear example of ‘soft power’ in the global field (Diwakar, 2006; Nye, 2005). In exactly the same way that Hollywood cinema was perceived as an American ambassador, Bollywood films have been increasingly seen as postmodern renditions of India's cultural prestige. Long-serving diplomat, Minister of State and novelist Shashi Tharoor (2008) describes the popularity of Bollywood films around the world as a concrete indication of India's capacity to project a ‘good story’ that the world wants to hear.

Over the past decade, the adoption of soft power rhetoric has been endorsed explicitly by successive governments, with India's previous Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, observing in 2011 that ‘India's soft power is an increasingly important element of our expanding global footprint… The richness of India's classical traditions and the colour and vibrancy of contemporary Indian culture are making waves around the world’. India's current Prime Minister, Narendra Modi, has also embraced cultural diplomacy via popular and classical culture, including his signature sponsorship of ‘World Yoga Day’ in 2015 (Tandon, 2016). Narendra Modi has also invested a great deal of his public image in his patronage of digital technologies and in a close alliance with the moguls of Silicon Valley. Thus, the newly established image of India as a dynamic, modernizing, capitalist society has also been shaped in important ways by India's success in the global information technology (IT) economy. During two spells in government at the centre, India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party facilitated the rapid expansion and liberalisation of India's wider media economy, for which Bollywood is a flag carrier, creating new international opportunities for capital and the alliances that go with them (Athique, Parthasarathi and Srinivas, 2018a, 2018b). Since 2008, the potential spending power of India's middle classes as an ‘emerging market’ for listless global capital and India's rising defence expenditure have also backed up investments in soft power with some hard economic power, the effective combination of which Joseph Nye (2008) is fond of calling ‘smart power’. In this setting, the achievements of India's cultural diplomacy, both popular and classical, become inseparable from the gains made in India's ‘new economy’ sectors.

Cultural diplomacy in a mediated world

As the distinction between cultural and economic goods has become increasingly blurred in the media intensive global economy, the value of projecting an attractive brand in international affairs has been taken up with enthusiasm by the India Brand Equity Foundation, which is administered jointly by the Indian Ministry of Commerce and the Confederation of Indian Industry (see Kaur, 2012; Pigman and Deos, 2008; Thussu, 2013). Soft power initiatives nonetheless require a receptive audience to go with the good story. In that sense, soft power is always an intrinsically comparative measure, with the rising hard power of China appearing to make commentators in some Asian and Western countries receptive to a new glossy narrative for India in the new millennium. As such, the reconfiguration of Brand India has operated in parallel with the emergence of a new geopolitics of information (see Aouragh and Chakravarrty, 2016). The courting of India by the West is also implicated in the return of the Great Game, that is, the jockeying for influence in the ‘border zones’ between the major powers (see Brobst, 2005). In the present geopolitical climate, India is once more strategically significant to imperial fault lines in the Middle East and South China Sea. This geopolitical reality, as much as India's own ‘great power’ aspirations and its economic renaissance, provided the broader context for India's triumphant Bollywood-themed soft power routine at Davos in 2006. For good or for ill, the widespread adoption of the logic of marketing nations and cultures like movie franchises has seen the parallel projects of rebranding the Indian cinema and rebranding India itself become intertwined (Dinnie, 2016).

Notwithstanding its diplomatic novelty, the contemporary reach of the Bollywood brand is built upon a century of Indian film production and transnational circulation. Similarly, the newly fashionable status of the soft power concept in India tends to obscure the continuity of cultural diplomacy over the longer term. The rich civilisational heritage of the subcontinent has been consciously and consistently articulated as a foreign policy instrument since independence in 1947. In comparison with most other postcolonial nations, India has been particularly active in promoting its arts and culture on the world stage, although the shift in emphasis from classical to popular culture has only occurred during the past 20 years. Certainly, as Kate Sullivan (2014) has noted, the correlation of cultural assets along with the moral standing of Gandhian ideals has long been central to the projection of India's ‘moral superiority’ on the world stage. The establishment of this putative superiority over a more powerful and technically advanced occupier was an important rhetorical strategy in the struggle for independence. It served to inculcate a world view that subsequently characterised India's foreign policy and international orientation for the remainder of the century. From a realist perspective in International Relations, it could of course be argued that this emphasis on moral and cultural standing in the first-half century after independence was reflective of a continuing weakness in the military and economic domains. In reality, the matter is more complex, as India primarily sought to fashion a narrative synthesis between a Western-inspired model of development and a political and cultural identity that was consciously Asian.

In terms of the latter, it is important that India's first Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru aspired to assume a natural leadership role in Asia, an idealistic vision that was shattered by the 1962 border war with the Peoples Republic of China. The hard realities of the Cold War determined that the other Asian states cast further afield for political support and the conduct of foreign policy matters remained oriented towards the Western powers during the remainder of the 20th century. As India subsequently moved closer to the Soviet Union during the 1970s, India's diplomatic arm nonetheless remained consistent in mobilising India's cultural assets in forums such as the United Nations and the Non-Aligned Movement (NAM). It was the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, India's failed relationships with its immediate neighbours and the rapid economic growth of the Pacific Rim that eventually prompted India to develop a more active policy of engagement with Southeast Asia (Harshe and Seethi, 2009). A ‘Look East’ policy intended to indicate a new emphasis on India-Association of South East Asian Nations (ASEAN) ties was inaugurated in 1993 (Naidu, 2004). Over the past 20 years, India has incrementally upgraded its relationship with the ASEAN grouping as well as concluding bilateral arrangements with several of its member states (Thomas, 2009). By contrast, the simultaneous embrace of the soft power doctrine, every bit as much as the moral superiority paradigm that preceded it, has continued to demonstrate a marked focus towards impressing the West. What really differentiates the two epochs of cultural diplomacy is a shift from classical heritage to showcasing India's achievements in commercial media, IT and the ‘globalised’ economic relationship that it has developed with Indian communities abroad since 1991.

The proximity of Asian civilisations

Notwithstanding the shift to ‘soft power’, the ‘new economy’ and the ‘global Indian’, the rhetorical impetus of India's cultural diplomacy remains somewhat familiar. That is, establishing a connection between India's classical culture and its current development trajectory. Perhaps the most compelling rendition of this meta-narrative is Daya Thussu's (2013) book Communicating Soft Power: Buddha to Bollywood. In this account, the putative connection between the historical spread of Buddhism across Asia and Mahatma Gandhi's status as the most successful proponent of soft power in modern times provides an historical trajectory explicating India's contemporary achievements in media and communications. What sets Thussu's account apart from India's official iterations of soft power, however, is his conclusion that the rise of India and China provides an opportunity to reinvigorate inter-Asian co-operation in the 21st century. This contemporary articulation of the Nehruvian vision of the 1950s reminds us of the unfinished business of India's turn from West to East. In the early years of independence, the combination of India's historically constituted cultural capital and its role in leading the struggle against colonialism led India's politicians to assume that Southeast Asia would naturally look to India as a mentor. As such, the core assumptions of India's cultural diplomacy in regard to South East Asia have tended to rest upon the formative influence of Indian cultures in the region during what was, for Europeans, the Middle Ages.

Between the 6th and 12th centuries, Buddhist, Shiva-Buddhist and Hindu culture spread across the Southeast Asian region from India, coming into contact with the earlier transmission of Buddhist teachings to China and Northeast Asia some 500 years earlier. The Sri Vijaya empire in Sumatra and the Majaphahit empire in Java and Bali have left us with the most visible reminders of this legacy, but Hindu and Buddhist monarchies were firmly established for a millennium across the region, both on the littoral and as far afield as the Visayas. It is equally significant that the adoption of Islam in the Southeast Asian archipelago stemmed from its Indian adherents rather than its origins in Arabia (although India's contributions to Islam have been downplayed since partition, both by a Hindu-majority India and by the increasing dominance and orthodoxy of Wahhabi doctrines exported from the Gulf States). Indian-inspired traditions of royalty have survived into the modern era in the various Kingdoms and Sultanates of Southeast Asia and the ritualistic and linguistic legacies of Indian influence can also still be seen and heard across Southeast Asia. At the same time, in each and every case, Hindu and Islamic practices were adopted selectively alongside more localised traditions and beliefs, contributing to strong indigenous cultures. This cultural synthesis famously prompted the Bengali intellectual Rabindranath Tagore to comment on visiting Java in 1927 that: ‘I see India everywhere, but I do not recognize it’ (Devare, 2016).

This large scale exchange across the longue duree directs us to Fernand Braudel's model of ‘civilisations’. Braudel proposes that civilisations accrete the creative achievements of their members over the longer sweep of history, fostering a certain way of thinking as much as a certain way of speaking. This, in turn, inculcates a self-awareness that guarantees their reproduction. Civilisations operate across scales of time and space; they are bigger than cultures and societies and more enduring than state structures. Braudel also proposed that the physical geography of the world determines both the barriers and bridges between civilisations, whereby:

Civilizations continually borrow from their neighbours, even if they ‘reinterpret’ or assimilate what they have adopted. At first sight, indeed, every civilization looks rather like a railway goods yard, constantly receiving and dispatching miscellaneous deliveries. Yet, a civilzation may stubbornly reject a particular import from outside…Every time, the refusal is the culmination of a long period of hesitation and experiment (1995: 29).

Mediation is evidently central to this proposition, denoting both the boundaries of geo-linguistic regions and providing the primary means of exchange between civilisations. In exploring the cross-cultural reception of foreign media content (specifically TV) in the contemporary period, Joseph Straubhaar (1991) has developed the concept of ‘cultural proximity’. Straubhaar offers a relativistic approach to the cultural preferences of audiences, suggesting that: ‘countries and cultures…prefer their own local or national productions’ due to various factors, including the local appeal of celebrities, locally specific humour, locally relevant issues, culturally specific styles and ‘the appeal of similar looking ethnic faces’ (2007: 91). Straubhaar observes that ‘if countries, did not produce certain genres of TV, then audiences tend to prefer those kind of programmes from nearby or similar cultures and languages’ (2007: 91). The notion of ‘nearby’ cultures thereby adds an important dimension to cultural geography because, although it identifies cultures as distinctive formations, it also suggests that the differences between them are incremental rather than absolute. Straubhaar (1991) thereby implies a scale of affinity between cultures. Proximity creates a form of radial gravity structuring cultural compatibility relative to each region. ‘Native’ culture comes first, followed by neighbouring (or ‘familiar’) cultures. More distant formations become marked as exotic and are only likely to exert an appeal in instances where their singularity infers novelty (as in the worldwide craze for martial arts films in the late 1970s). This concentric notion of proximity is accompanied by Straubhaar's further observation that cultural compatibility is stratified from cosmopolitan elites down to the more localised taste cultures of the lower classes.

Soft power in South East Asia: Popular responses to Indian media

On the face of it, Braudel's longue duree, Straubhaar's model of proximity and the assumptions of influence that underpin India's adoption of the doctrine of soft power all appear to present a strong case for favourable reception of Indian popular culture in the ASEAN states. The commercial geography is also suggestive: trade links established during the colonial period, diplomatic links formed in the Cold War heyday of the NAM and intensified geopolitical engagement since the turn of the century are all antecedents for contemporary Inter-Asian dynamics (Sinha and Mohta, 2007). Nonetheless, the proposition of soft power carries with it an implicit claim of ‘media effects’ that remains controversial in media and communications research and which needs empirical substantiation. While the spread of India's media exports can be determined to some extent upon the basis of market data, the attendant claims that seek to link positive perceptions of India with its media exports necessitate a more subjective investigation. In turn, subjective data of this kind infers a qualitative approach capable of drawing out both the embedded perspectives of India amongst foreign populations and the perceptions formed, confirmed or challenged by exposure to Indian media content. The adoption of such qualitative approaches in Media and Cultural Studies, however, has tended to reject the proposition of media effects to the extent that ‘ethnographic’ approaches focus on commentary regarding existing viewing habits, which frequently omits an analysis of the actual reception of media content. Consequently, the various incongruities between doctrinal assumptions and methodological practices present a number of obstacles to assessing cross-cultural media reception. In the particular context of mediated exchanges between India and Southeast Asia, a set of complex historical, geographic and sociological preconditions also need to inform any useful analysis.

It was with these conceptual disjunctures and methodological challenges very much in mind that I undertook a programme of qualitative reception studies in South East Asia during 2015. Despite being limited in funding and scope, and thus primarily indicative in its ambitions, this project sought to achieve two objectives: first, to resituate the discussion of India's soft power within the context of Inter-Asian relations and, second, to obtain first-hand responses to India media from a sample of local populations. Recognizing that the reception for Indian media exports is determined by local conditions and subject to the inter-cultural specifics of each case, a sample of study locations was chosen across the region. These were Metro Manila in the Philippines, Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia and Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai districts in Northern Thailand. The range of study sites therefore covered both the ‘mainland’ and archipelago of South East Asia and included countries with a varied history of cultural and commercial exchange with India. Rural districts were chosen (somewhat arbitrarily) in Thailand to offset the metropolitan bias of the other two sites. There were four components to the larger study design:

(1) to establish the ‘prevailing’ representation of India in the mainstream media of each country, major online news publications were tracked over a 12-month period and analysed for the topic and treatment of India related news.

It is the latter exercise that forms the basis of this article. Here, there were important differences between the framing of the case studies in Thailand and the Philippines, where prior exposure to Indian media was relatively low, and Malaysia, where a larger and more visible Indian population interacts with the localised politics of multiculturalism. The function of film consumption as an external agent for creating impressions of India was more readily apparent in the other two sites and, given its theoretical interest, this article focusses down further on the data from Thailand and the Philippines. The reception studies in Thailand and the Philippines included 60 participants in each country recruited by partner investigators based at local universities. Participants were organised into three cohorts: (1) youths 18–25 (in formal education) (2) youths 18–25 (outside formal education) and adults 25–45 (from various professions). These were then organised into ‘focus groups’ of 8–12 members. There was a gender balance in each focus group, with the important exception of the ‘outside formal education’ groups in Chiang Rai that were female only. All of the reception studies took the form of a pre-screening questionnaire that asked respondents to describe their existing exposure to Indian media content as well as their general mix of media content and habits. They were also asked to describe their existing knowledge of India, their expectations of Indian content and their assumptions regarding its compatibility with local audiences. They then watched a commercial Indian film, which was followed by a structured discussion of approximately 2 hours that was subsequently recorded and transcribed.

The questionnaires and focus groups used an identical script but were conducted in a locally suitable language in each case. That is, all of the groups in Thailand were conducted in Thai, whereas the formally educated and adult groups in the Philippines were comfortable proceeding in English. The ‘outside education’ focus groups were conducted in Tagalog. The settings were also ‘in situ’ within the community in question. The subsequent transcriptions were translated to English where necessary, coded and then analysed for indicative responses. Given the focus groups followed a reception study design, the choice of stimulus was critical to the responses obtained. While researching the local distribution infrastructure for Indian films, a selection of locally available films was purchased for use in the screenings. In Thailand and the Philippines, all of the available material was subtitled and Hindi language in the original. Thai-subtitled films were obtained from Bangkok-based retail outlets, as they were not directly available in stores in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai. In Manila, Indian films could only be obtained via Indian community stores or the Internet, with the exception of Aamir Khan's Three Idiots which was available in regular playback media outlets (with Tagalog subtitles). The films used in the reception studies were as follows: Dil Chahta Hai (2001), Three Idiots (2009), Don (2006) in the Philippines and Devdas (2002), Ready (2011) and Ek Tha Tiger (2012) in Thailand. Two of the films used in Thailand included scenes shot in that country, whereas Don (screened in Manila) includes sequences shot in Kuala Lumpur. The material collected from short answer questionnaires and focus groups was qualitative in nature and is considered here through an interpretative framework. As such, drawing upon a pool of 120 respondents to six Bollywood films, the remainder of this seeks to interrogate the ways in which perceptions of India were expressed, before and after viewing these films.

Responses to Bollywood in Manila

As the most distant ASEAN state from India, both geographically and culturally, the Philippines provided a useful case study in the long-distance potentials of Indian soft power in Asia. Lacking the physical proximity of Sri Lanka or Myanmar, the more visible historical legacy of Indian culture in Thailand or Indonesia or the more recent colonial linkages of Malaysia and Singapore, there would appear to be an evident lack of cultural proximity between the two states. Here, two millennia of exchange with India have been powerfully interrupted by 350 years of Spanish and American rule that re-oriented the archipelago towards the Pacific. Nonetheless, the common outward orientation and investment in the economic and political rebalancing of the region by both Indian and the Philippines are suggestive of deepening ties. In recent years, there has been increasing co-operation between the two countries in the IT field with Indian companies like WIPRO developing operations in the Philippines and growing links in pharmaceuticals and medicine (Santarita, 2011). At the subjective level, the popular image of India in the Philippines is shaped by the social standing of the local Indian community. The established Indian diaspora in the Philippines has two major components. First of all, there is a small but affluent trading caste of Sindhis (approximately 8,000 in number) who have established a commercial network in Metro Manila since colonial times which connects not only to India but also to their counterparts in Hong Kong and Jakarta (Santarita, 2015; Thapan, 2002). Second, there is a much larger community of Punjabis (approximately 51,000) who tend to specialise in informal money lending to the general population (Santarita, 2008, 2015). This practice is known as ‘5–6’, due to the standard 20% interest rate levied.

It is the money-lending profession from which most popular stereotypes of Indians are derived, signified by the vernacular term ‘Bumbay’, and the image of a turbaned man collecting payments on a motorbike (Cabanes, 2014). Beyond this basic stereotype, the series of focus groups conducted in 2015 in Manila demonstrated that the general awareness of India was relatively low across all social strata. India tended to be strongly associated with issues of development and poverty and was explicitly compared to social development challenges in the Philippines. Exposure to Indian films (Dil Chahta Hai and Three Idiots, Don) during the focus group exercises appeared to both widen and challenge the underlying assumptions held about India.

It's not how India is usually depicted. It's not the slum wasteland. Trash in the streets. Almost poverty porn. But then the opening scene, beautiful hills, really great cinematography, so modern. It did justice to India.

It's like Manila, the urban slums or villages, far far in the provinces where there are militants. All those unrealistic depictions that do not do the country justice. I guess for the Filipino audience it's more normal. Oh, it's India, we accept that. Because we assume India as slums. Because we come from that kind of experience as well.

Responses to Bollywood in Northern Thailand

Following the study in Manila in July 2015, the second phase of fieldwork took place in October 2015 in Chiang Mai and Chiang Rai, two cities in the northern provinces of Thailand. At some distance from the capital, the cultural context in this region is very different from the metropolitan centre of Bangkok. Of the two, Chiang Mai has grown to be a substantive urban centre over the past century with a major tourist industry and unofficial standing as the ‘second city’ of the kingdom. By contrast, Chiang Rai remains characteristic of a provincial city serving a large agricultural district. Both cities lie within a region with strong historical links to the Shan State area of Myanmar, and they are widely known for being home to a substantial population of tribal communities. Although there are many migrants and refugees from Myanmar living in the two districts, there is no substantial population in this area of Indian descent. Nonetheless, the cultural relationship between Thailand and India has deep historical roots in the Buddhist faith and the royal tradition. Chiang Mai has longstanding links to India via the textile trade and has in recent years become a favoured destination for ‘Wedding tourism’ excursions from India. Trade links provide some reflection of Thailand's consistency as a supporter of India's association with ASEAN. Indian TV serials and films are widely available here via broadcast, but they do not enjoy a high profile within the contemporary mediascape.

Three cohorts were engaged in the study, corresponding with the sample structure in the Philippines: Middle-aged professionals, college-educated youth and disadvantaged youth. Of the youth groups, the college-educated were in the equivalent of freshman class and thus slightly younger than their Filipino counterparts, while the second youth group was a female-only cohort from the tribal areas surrounding Chiang Rai. Amongst these groups, our initial survey indicated that the middle-aged group had generally seen some Indian films in the past, although only one member was a regular viewer. The college-educated youth group had little or no exposure to Indian media, while two-thirds of the rural youth group had watched Indian productions via TV, with around a quarter being regular viewers of TV dramas. The most commonly accessed Indian content was serials detailing the stories of the Buddha, with both the older and rural cohorts indicating that they enjoyed watching these productions, ‘because of the old influence of Buddhism. People like to see Indian movie series on the Buddha’. As a consequence, there was a strong link perceived between everyday life in India and religious devotion. Both of these groups were also strongly appreciative of the ‘strength’ of Indian culture which they saw as being reflected in the distinctive costumes seen in the films that were screened for them (Devdas, Ready and Ek Tha Tiger).

Before I only watched movies about the Buddha, Religious movie. That was my first time. But this one is more modern but still focused upon their traditions and way of life, like pray for the Buddha so it is a mixture of the culture and civilisation now. But in every society we have different levels of people but this movies only shows rich people this style of life but it is quite good. It's quite fun.

I haven't watched Indian movies for a long time, but we still see the tradition of India in the film but the story is more adapted to the real world at the present but Indian traditional rules and Indian beliefs is still very strong.

Grassroots reception and soft power

The respondents in this study draw our attention to the specificity of inter-cultural relationships as well as to the various ways in which the ‘global imagination’ of local audiences is shaped by the transnational flows across the region (see Athique, 2016; Canclini, 2014). The responses collected do appear to provide broad support for the premise that media exports are a positive contributor to cultural diplomacy. Notions of India as a ‘backward’ society were clearly revised in light of the films shown to participants, challenging existing preconceptions of the country and its people. It might be more worrying for proponents of India's soft power, perhaps, that the general perception of India in a region long assumed to culturally proximate tended to be dominated by the common stereotypes of poverty and violence against women (Tharoor, 2012). The shadow of Katherine Mayo has proved to be long indeed (Mayo, 1927). At some level, this reflects the relative dominance of Western media outlets that have played, and continue to play, a disproportionate role in establishing the visual geopolitics of the contemporary world. At another level, however, India's evident image problem has been compounded by the emergence of other Asian media exporters (notably Japan and, more recently, South Korea) who have been better able to capture the affluent and futuristic presentation of modernity to which much of Asia now aspires. If anything, India's deep historical influence tends to compound an association with the past rather than the future. Equally, it was clear that respect for India's cultural achievements does not preclude the possibility of prejudice against Indians. Nonetheless, we should be mindful of the longue duree: ASEAN publics appear to assume their own lead in the race towards Asia's future, but India may surprise them yet.

As was anticipated, the extant cultural geography exerted a critical influence on local reception and, as such, the two case studies included here necessarily constitute distinctive accounts of the reception of Indian films. Despite their apparent proximity, many respondents anticipated a cultural barrier to Indian narratives that contrasted with their easy familiarity with other media cultures. In that respect, these discussions brought to light the competing interaction of different media sources across the region, with the symbolic construction of modernity in everyday life being drawn amidst this competitive arena. What we can take from this is that the projection of soft power via media exports is essentially a global game that operates above the bilateral logics that have tended to shape India's cultural assumptions regarding its Asian neighbours. In various ways, these responses illustrate the evident complexities of inter-Asian media reception at the ‘grassroots’. As such, given the rapid expansion of media access across all levels of society in the region, perhaps the most salient point is that cultural diplomacy necessarily supersedes the elite domain where it conceived. In that respect, media exports do, can and likely will play an important role in shifting the storylines on modern India. Innovative media productions that are able to engage with common aspirations to freedom and affluence or, as with Three Idiots, able to speak to common frustrations and constraints offer significant potentials for stimulating Inter-Asian dialogues. While it is highly inadvisable that positive ‘influence’ should simply be assumed from a media presence, media exports are likely to play a substantive role in disrupting existing preconceptions and accelerating processes of civilisational exchange in a more densely mediated Asia.