The Indian diaspora counts 32 million people spread across all continents. This figure alone tells us little. But add to it automatic translation, which now allows a Tamil film to circulate in Swahili or Brazilian Portuguese without a human subtitler, and you have something unprecedented: a cultural industry that frees itself from traditional diplomatic channels to reach audiences that geography had kept at a distance.

The Indian Economic Survey 2025-2026 set it down in black and white: creative industries are now an official pillar of the national economy, integrated under the concept of the “Orange Economy.” This is not mere rhetoric from a five-year plan. It is the belated recognition of a phenomenon that markets had already registered, and that academic research is documenting with increasing precision.

The Essentials

  • The Indian diaspora of 32 million people constitutes a network of spontaneous cultural diffusion that no public policy could have built at this cost
  • The Indian Economic Survey 2025-2026 officially integrates creative industries into the national macroeconomic framework under the “Orange Economy” label
  • AI-assisted translation opens to Tamil and Bengali content markets inaccessible to manual subtitling
  • South Korea built a deliberate soft power infrastructure from the 2000s onward; India follows an inverse trajectory, organic first, then institutional
  • The open question is political: when platform algorithms decide the visibility of content, states lose part of the control over their own image abroad

Bollywood Is No Longer India’s Only Face

For decades, exported Indian culture was synonymous with Bollywood: Hindi-language films, Mumbai stars, narratives of marriage and destiny. This frame was both reductive and convenient. It made it possible to speak of “Indian cultural influence” as a homogeneous, manageable, quantifiable entity.

This frame is now outdated. A study published in 2026 in Frontiers in Communication, titled From home screens to homeland: a narrative review of soft power, diasporic connections, Indian identity, and video streaming platforms, documents a more complex reality: the links between Indian soft power, diaspora, and streaming platforms draw a new geography of cultural diffusion. Telugu cinema, Tamil series, Bengali music — productions that, ten years ago, barely crossed the linguistic borders of their region of origin — today reach audiences in sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, and Southeast Asia.

The mechanism is simple to describe, difficult to reproduce by decree: the combination of a dense diaspora and global streaming platforms creates network effects that tourism offices and film co-production agreements could not generate. An Indian in Durban shares an episode of a Tamil series with her South African colleagues. The platform, which records the engagement, pushes it to other users in the same geographic zone. The algorithm does the rest.

This is not cultural diplomacy. It is organic diffusion, accelerated by tools that governments do not control.

South Korea Took the Opposite Path, and Both Models Coexist

The Korean trajectory is different, and the gap deserves to be understood. Seoul built its cultural influence deliberately. After the 1997-1998 Asian financial crisis, the Korean government decided to make content industries a pillar of economic diversification. The Ministry of Culture created support funds for the music and television industry. Quotas were instituted on national broadcasters to protect and develop local productions. The KOCCA agency, founded in 2009, systematized the export of content.

The result is documented: in 2022, Korean cultural content exports reached a record high of 13.2 billion dollars according to the Korean Ministry of Culture, a figure multiplied by six in twenty years. “Parasite,” “Squid Game,” BTS — these names have become journalistic shorthand to designate the phenomenon, but they mask the depth of the infrastructure that made them possible. The Korean economic model is itself under tension between Washington and Beijing; cultural soft power is one of the rare dimensions where Seoul has managed to build real autonomy.

India, meanwhile, did not follow this planned path. Bollywood has always operated without massive public subsidies. Regional cinema even more so. What is changing today is that the Modi government is beginning retroactively to recognize the value of what was built without it — hence the inclusion in the Economic Survey. The question is whether this recognition will lead to coherent policy, or will remain a label without substance.

AI Translation Changes the Rules of Cultural Diffusion

Manual subtitling has long been the bottleneck for non-English-language content. A Tamil film could be excellent, popular in India, and remain invisible in Ghana or Colombia for lack of translators trained in both languages. This lock is starting to give way.

Automated translation and dubbing tools, trained on increasingly vast corpora, now make it possible to produce subtitled or dubbed versions at a fraction of the previous cost and time. Netflix and Amazon Prime have deployed these tools as a priority in their high-growth markets. Indian platforms like Zee5 or MX Player use them to extend their reach beyond English-speaking zones.

The change is not merely quantitative. It is qualitative. Previously, only content with an audience large enough to justify an investment in translation accessed the international market. AI translation lowers this threshold to the point of making viable the diffusion of niche content — a series about traditional fishing in Kerala, a Bengali musical — in markets that would never have been targeted by a traditional distributor.

This is precisely the dynamic that communication research published in Frontiers in Communication in 2026 highlights: technology does not merely accelerate existing flows, it creates new flows between cultures that had no established channel of exchange. AI thus transforms organizations that know how to prepare to capture these new opportunities — and Asian cultural industries seem to have understood this before their Western counterparts.

Pakistan and Invisible Diffusion

The Pakistani angle is the least expected, and perhaps most instructive. Independent Pakistani music — the Coke Studio movement in particular — has experienced unprecedented international diffusion since 2022, carried almost exclusively by social networks and streaming platforms. Artists like Arooj Aftab, Grammy Award winner in 2022, have reached global audiences without a national cultural export infrastructure worthy of the name.

This case illustrates a truth that soft power theorists struggle to integrate: cultural diffusion can occur despite the state, sometimes against it. Islamabad did not pilot the international expansion of Coke Studio. The restrictions imposed on Pakistani artists by Indian authorities since 2016 even created a paradoxical situation: cut off from the neighboring Indian market, these artists sought other circuits, and some found audiences in London, New York, and Melbourne.

Geopolitics closed one door. Technology opened others.

What Platforms Decide in Place of States

The central paradox of this new age of Asian cultural soft power is this: states recognize the importance of their cultural industries at the precise moment when they lose some control over distribution circuits.

Netflix decides which Korean series are offered to which markets. Spotify decides which Pakistani artists appear in global playlists. YouTube decides which Tamil videos are pushed to Brazilian users. These decisions are algorithmic — they respond to logics of engagement, retention, and advertising monetization, not diplomatic objectives.

For states, the situation is uncomfortable. India can inscribe the “Orange Economy” in its Economic Survey, but it does not control Netflix’s recommendations in Ghana. South Korea can fund KOCCA, but it does not master Spotify’s curation in Europe. Cultural diffusion, which was once an instrument of foreign policy that governments could direct (Voice of America, the Alliance française, the Goethe Institutes), is now largely delegated to private operators headquartered in Los Angeles, Seattle, or New York.

This does not mean public action is pointless. Studies documenting the Korean phenomenon show that investment in creator training, protection of the domestic market, and co-production agreements with other countries remain real levers. South Korea did not create BTS by decree, but it created the conditions — financial, educational, industrial — in which phenomena like BTS become possible.

The question is whether India, confronted with already massive but poorly coordinated cultural diffusion, will choose to build comparable infrastructure, or whether it will bet on the organic character of its expansion as a competitive advantage in itself.

The Orange Economy as an Economic Bet, Not Just Cultural

The Indian Economic Survey 2025-2026 does not categorize creative industries under “cultural diplomacy.” It integrates them into the national macroeconomic framework as a sector with high growth and employment potential. This is an important shift in perspective.

The Orange Economy — a term coined by Colombian economists Felipe Buitrago and Iván Duque to designate the set of industries based on intellectual property and creativity — represents according to estimates from the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) about 3% of global GDP, with growth rates above average in countries that invest in the sector. In India, estimates vary considerably depending on what is included in the scope, but the film, music, video game, and digital media industries together represent several tens of billions of dollars in annual activity.

What is new with official recognition in 2026 is the ambition for coherent policy. Tax measures, training funds, co-production agreements with other emerging countries — the support architecture that South Korea put in place from the 2000s onward could serve as a model. With one crucial difference: India is starting from an already considerable, heterogeneous, and unaccustomed-to-public-oversight creative industry. Building policy on such a diffuse sector is as much a governance challenge as an economic issue.

The world was watching Hollywood lose ground. It was watching less attentively what was rising on the other side. South Asia and South Korea are not merely producing content for their own markets: they are manufacturing the aesthetic reference points, emotional codes, and narratives that hundreds of millions of people consume daily, often without knowing exactly where these contents come from.

What this phenomenon poses as a question is not cultural in the narrow sense. It is a question of sovereignty and political economy: in a world where private platforms distribute collective imaginaries, what role remains for states to orient, protect, or amplify their cultural production? The Korean answer — public infrastructure, training, domestic market protection — is not universally transposable. The Indian answer is still being written.

Sources

  1. Frontiers in Communication, “From home screens to homeland: a narrative review of soft power, diasporic connections, Indian identity, and video streaming platforms” (May 7, 2026) — https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/communication/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2026.1751937/full
  2. Indian Economic Survey 2025-2026 — Government of India, Ministry of Finance (annual publication)
  3. Ministry of Culture, Sports and Tourism, South Korea — data on Korean cultural content exports (2022 annual report)
  4. UNCTAD — Report on the Global Creative Economy (UNCTAD Creative Economy publications)
  5. Felipe Buitrago Restrepo & Iván Duque Márquez, The Orange Economy, Inter-American Development Bank, 2013
  6. Korea Herald — Record Korean cultural exports at 13.2 billion dollars (2022) — https://www.koreaherald.com/article/10011173
  7. Grammy.com — Arooj Aftab, Grammy Award 2022 — https://www.grammy.com/news/best-global-music-performance-arooj-aftab-2022-grammys
  8. KOCCA — Official source (founded May 2009) — https://www.kocca.kr/img/foreign/file/DirectoryBook.pdf
  9. UNCTAD Creative Economy Outlook 2022 — 3.1% of global GDP — https://unctad.org/system/files/official-document/ditctsce2022d1_overview_en.pdf
  10. Economic Survey 2025-26 / Orange Economy India — https://www.impriindia.com/insights/policy-update/orange-economy-creativity-as-a-driver-of-economic-growth-in-india/
  11. FICCI-EY 2025 — Indian M&E sector at 29.4 billion dollars in 2024 — https://variety.com/2025/film/news/digital-ahead-india-media-entertainment-sector-29-billion-1236349601/
  12. Le Petit Journal — Indian diaspora, 32 million people (Indian government figure) — https://lepetitjournal.com/bombay/actualites/diaspora-indienne-plus-importante-monde-368483