Manu Joseph: India has a tariff on America’s huge cultural surplus

Imagine one nation controlling the power to distract the world. There is ChatGPT, Twitter, Instagram, Google, Gmail, Kindle, WhatsApp, Netflix and The New York Times, which occasionally laments a distracted world. I have knocked out most of them from my American phone, but still.

Also Read: Manu Joseph: America and the bearable loneliness of losing the West

There was a time when my work was more interesting than any distraction because a distraction then usually was just a doorbell ring or something of that quality. Today, the intrusion is probably more interesting than what I am trying to create. Also, what I create itself might be part of a future distraction on an American platform. This is not the only reason why it does not ‘feel’ as though the world doesn’t buy enough of America. In fact, it is a very small part.

There is a huge cultural and emotional imbalance between America and the rest, especially India, considering our size. We are very interested in America, but America has little interest in us. We are influenced by the US but cannot influence it. So, I wonder, considering this wide cultural deficit, which has surely benefitted America in material ways, is there a cultural tariff that India can impose? An abstract tariff to compensate? I don’t like the idea because who wants more restrictions on culture in the name of culture. But I’m just wondering if it is possible. Actually, there might be such a barrier already. Just that it is not very perceptible.

Also Read: Trump’s great tariff pause: What made him blink?

But it is not hard to perceive the cultural deficit. It is all around us. Acclaim in tech, science and the arts has to come from America for it to have any value. The Oscars are bigger than any Indian film award. There is no Indian honour Americans would rate higher than what their nation distributes. On occasion, a dubbed Marvel film can gross more in India than any mainstream Indian film. American heft not only hypes its artists, but also relegates Indians of similar talent to their shadows in their own country.

Bitcoin succeeded because we instinctively suspected, without evidence, that it was American. The notoriety of this crypto token was the intent of its mysterious creator or creators, only known as ‘Satoshi Nakamoto,’ that a government should not control currency. Yet, its intellectual appeal and commercial prospects came from our conviction that it was an American invention. 

We felt that way unconsciously because we have so often surrendered to US hype, which we can recognize from its sheer power. Could a group of anonymous Ethiopians, say, have created the idea of crypto? After all, conceptually it is just high maths, not high tech. Thus, even a suspicion of an American rebellion against America can influence the world.

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China pulled Quentin Tarantino’s Once Upon a Time in Hollywood from theatres. It is widely believed the reason was that the film lampooned Bruce Lee. If that is true, it is funny because China had never shown so much love for an American. That was what Bruce Lee was. He was born in America and was a citizen of British Hong Kong. American culture could pass off a highly westernized Bruce Lee as Chinese to the whole world, including China. Most of what comes to us as ‘world cinema’ or ‘world literature’ are just works that some impresarios in America have understood.

Even the popularity of yoga is a gift of the cultural deficit. India had forgotten yoga, as B.K.S. Iyengar noted in Light on Life. But when he taught it to the West and Americans took to it, yoga returned to India. So, it turns out, America can sell our own stuff to us.

Maybe America has a cultural surplus with the rest of the world not because of its economic heft, but because it is innately interesting. Maybe America got something right about human nature that no other civilization did. Maybe humanity was waiting for America—those half buns with cheese, trashy movies, music that is relatively new and the idea that greed is good, and also that greed is bad.

While countries might appear to be moving away from Western ideology, what every country wants other countries to be is more like the West. Many nations have tried to bridge the cultural surplus of America, misled by the nonsensical idea of ‘soft power.’ 

Also Read: There’s probably no such thing as soft power any longer

Sending some artists to dance or sing in a foreign land does nothing. Someone eating egg-fried rice in New York does not do anything for China. And someone in San Francisco watching melodramatic Korean serials does not improve South Korea’s ‘image.’ The success of curry or an Egyptian taxi-driver singing Hindi songs means nothing for India. True soft power is a cultural surplus.

In response, India does levy a cultural tariff. Naturally, it is unconscious, as an official ‘cultural tariff’ would be funny. It is in the form of an excessive love of a population for its own culture, led by its provincial elite who feel slighted by the Westernized elite. Many nations have shown this sort of resistance. 

America is responsible for two strands of nationalism in developing nations. The first arose when the rich of poor nations migrated, felt slighted by foreign elites and began to love ‘home’ in a way they had never loved before. The second is the cultural tariff, which results in some goons in Bangalore or Mumbai breaking signposts in English.

The author is a journalist, novelist, and the creator of the Netflix series, ‘Decoupled’.