Magna Indica: What a Rising India Means for Global Culture & Commerce

Winston Churchill believed India was doomed. A beastly nation filled with beastly people that was destined to Balkanize. Ethnicity, language, caste, religion, class, all these identities raced across the map of India in a white-hot fervor divvying up this new quasi-country into fiefdoms and fractures, rocking India’s stability onto the brink of collapse. Yet India stayed true. India today has now become the largest country in human history. More people live in the Republic of India today than in the empires of Great Britain, Rome, Genghis Khan, and just recently the People’s Republic of China.

But what good is all that ruckus in the bedroom if India and especially Indians are poor? Only recently have many Indians gotten running water, electricity, permanent housing, asphalt roads, and even toilets. While the government was meeting these physical basics, a digital basic was met by the private sector. Mukesh Ambani’s wily bet on low-cost mobile data and internet through his telecom service, Jio, has paid off massively. Indians now have a voice, and like Indian culture itself, it is very loud.

The Shopkeeper’s Lingua Franca

The greatest legacy of the British Raj is its language. That Anglo-Saxon tongue born on a damp, foggy green isle, English has been evangelized across the Earth. Perhaps with no greater zeal have a people taken it onto themselves like those of post-colonial India. Like Sanskrit of yore, English has become the language of elites and upward mobility in India. English is access. It grants one of the greatest libraries of knowledge ever created. More vast than the Library of Alexandria, more deeper than the tomes of Nalanda. English is opportunity. Ambition and hope for a better future drive India’s passion for it. From Amazon Prime shows about rich Delhi urbanites to food tour YouTube videos in Mumbai streets, the English language has found its way into every vernacular.

India hosts the 2nd highest number of English speakers in the world. And that number is only growing. Balaji Srinivasan, a technology investor and entrepreneur, notes how India will soon become the plurality of English speakers on the internet. The arc of the Anglophone is bending towards India. Discussions about Indian culture, ideas, and politics will spread across the English-speaking world through the sheer volume of traffic Indians drive. Indians will reclaim and challenge Western notions about already popular Indian-origin ideas such as yoga, meditation, etc… Foreigners will increasingly wonder what Brahmins and Telugus are, what the controversy over Netflix’s umpteenth gritty, sepia-saturated Indian crime show is, or why lifelong celibate Mr. Narendra Modi is so popular amongst the ladies.

As Indians take over the (English) internet, English speakers and creators will have to begin catering to Indians, not vice versa. This is the Revenge of the YouTube Tutor. A cream of the country, the size of a small European country and just as fluent in English, is now present in India. Along with them, hundreds of millions are joining a burgeoning middle-class savvy in English words and an English web. It’s that “web” where clicks and coins will be exchanged between India and the rest of the Anglophone world. And if there is one thing that is accelerating English adoption as well as Anglophone investment in India, it’s technology.

From Tech Support to Tech Czar

You know his name is not “Rob” when you call him to fix your slow Wi-Fi, but you find yourself wondering how these fellows got on the other end of the line in the first place. India’s IT Revolution is an anomaly. One of the biggest reasons for it is probably due to the fact that it was a rare industry where the notoriously dysfunctional government and Byzantine bureaucracy did not really involve itself early on. Even more surprising is that once the government did involve itself recently, it has been a net addition with the creation of technology such as Aadhar and India Stack, giving them access to banking, digital payments, direct welfare, and various other life-changing technologies. The luck of being emergent, escaping the prying eye of the government in the past, and having visionary leadership in the present presents a bright future ahead for the Indian tech sector.

25% of the world’s workforce will soon be based out of India. Beyond simply consuming content online for Indians, we are also going to have a production of content by Indians. This is where English becomes a weapon. With the rise of AI, a lot of English-speaking training data will have a tinge of garam masala to it. Digital production out of India, already ubiquitous in areas such as animation, education, and FinTech will simply scale to greater heights. A local industry like medical tourism in India may soon span the globe with telemedicine. Already countries adjacent to the Indian Ocean are replicating old monsoon trade routes with the integration of Indian digital payment systems such as UPI. By combining conversation and code, India is aiming for this next decade to become its Techade.

Much of this though hinges on a golden generation emerging in India. Indian millennials and Gen Z contain a network of digitally native, English-speaking, globally connected individuals who are hungry. They are the energy that people who visit India today remark about. Detached from older notions of “chalta hai,” a general feeling of apathy and stagnancy, young Indians gaze at the world through Instagram Reels and Twitter threads asking themselves “Why can’t India succeed like that?” The Indian diaspora has achieved great success, especially in a superpower like America. More and more brown faces are becoming visible in what many Indians thought was a white nation, and those brown faces are leading. It shows there may not be something inherently wrong with India and Indians. Given the right tools and opportunity, an Indian can wildly prosper. The young Indian looks for improvement. They look for solutions. They aspire.

Mile Sur Mera Tumhara

But what is the “voice” of this emerging India? And no I am not talking about Arijit Singh or Neha Kakkar, I am speaking of what tenor captures the median melody of Indian opinion.

For a long time, the Indian voice heard in the West came from those who either spoke English at home or put a microphone in front of those they chose. Yet there was an imbalance in this audio. These out-of-earshot elites bellowed from a long away left. The pitch of the proletariat has been notably absent. But since 2014, this tune has changed. While the BJP blew the conch of Hindutva, the internet has allowed an Indian orchestra to join in.

One of the last people you want to get into a fight online with is an Indian. And in truth, they have every right to be so prickly. For the past decade, and probably even more, coverage of India has been near apocalyptic. However, in the past year, we’ve seen a noticeable change in sentiment. Perhaps due to the threat of China or long-term economic reforms and infrastructure drives attaining fruition, coverage of India is in many ways on the upswing. But people hold grudges. A decade of unfair critique and doomsaying isn’t forgiven with a few kind headlines.

The proletariat of the past is now becoming an aspirant middle class. Hundreds of millions of Indians have risen out of poverty in the past 15 years. As they ascend the hierarchy of Maslow, fights over basics such as electricity and water give way to fights over culture and identity. The aspirant Indian is very different in outlook versus the bourgeoise journalist whose sole aim is to philander through and pander to a catalog of Western magazines and opinions.

And this is the crux of the difference. How these aspirant Indians view their history, their epics, their religion, their politics, their culture, etc… will be exported and debated across the world. These views are quite distinct from those of most Indian elites, which the West has grown accustomed to. The elite Indian view India as nearly irredeemable unless they mimic the ways of the West. The aspirant believes in the inherent spirit of India, assimilating the modes of modernity (technology, English) with a timeless tradition (Dharma, native Indian idiosyncrasies). The elite believes India began in 1947. The aspirant believes India is immemorial. The elite views Dharma as poverty. The aspirant views Dharma as power.

These debates will increasingly take up more space in the digital public square. The problems of India will come more to the fore, as will its successes. That prickly, combative nature of Indians I talked about before will have to ease into self-assurance. Much of this temperance and maturity relies on that emerging generation of Indians I lauded prior. Former President of India, APJ Abdul Kalam famously said “Strength respects strength and not weakness.” Strength means a strong economy, a vibrant cultural rootedness, and an openness to modernity. And it’s only the youth of India who can build the country enough to deliver and flex that strength.