Communicating India’s Soft Power
Buddha to Bollywood by Daya Thussu.
Global Public Diplomacy Series, Palgrave/Macmillan, New York, 230 Pages, October 2013
ISBN: 9781137027887. Order online at www.palgrave.com
In recent years, India has emerged as a major economic and political power: on the basis of purchasing-power parity, it was the world’s third largest economy in 2013. Yet the country’s cultural influence outside India has not been adequately analyzed in academic discourses. As the world’s largest democracy with a vibrant and pluralist media system, India offers an excellent case study of the power of culture and communication in the age of mediated international relations. This book, a pioneering attempt, from an international communication/media perspective, is aimed to fill the existing gap in scholarship in this area. The discussion of India’s rising soft power is located within a historical context, thus problematizing the notion of Soft Power itself.
About the Author
Daya Kishan Thussu is Professor of International Communication and the Co-Director of the India Media Centre at the University of Westminster in London. With a PhD in International Relations from Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi, he is the founder and Managing Editor of the Sage journal Global Media and Communication. Among his key publications are: Media and Terrorism: Global Perspectives (Sage, 2012); Internationalizing Media Studies (Routledge, 2009); News as Entertainment: The Rise of Global Infotainment (Sage, 2007); Media on the Move: Global Flow and Contra-Flow (Routledge, 2007); International Communication – Continuity and Change, third edition (Bloomsbury Academic, forthcoming); and Electronic Empires – Global Media and Local Resistance (Arnold, 1998).
