Beyond Soft Power: Dharma, Civilisational Memory and India’s Buddhist Engagement with Southeast Asia

Mainstream international relations (IR) scholarship overwhelmingly interprets India’s cultural engagement with Southeast Asia through Joseph Nye’s soft power lens, a framework designed for competitive, state-centric cultural projection. This article argues that such an approach fundamentally misreads a civilisational relationship stretching back over two millennia. Drawing on Assmann’s cultural memory theory; Pollock’s concept of the Sanskrit cosmopolis; and the decolonial interventions of Mignolo, Quijano and Ndlovu-Gatsheni, the article advances civilisational memory as an alternative analytical category for understanding India’s Buddhist diplomacy. Dharma, conceptualised not as religion but as a universal, practice-oriented moral-directive principle, is shown to constitute the epistemic ground of this civilisational bond. Two extended case studies, India’s archaeological restoration of the Ta Prohm temple complex in Cambodia and the revival of Nalanda University as an ASEAN-supported knowledge institution, demonstrate how contemporary diplomatic practice re-activates, rather than manufactures, shared civilisational memory. The article’s principal theoretical contribution is the concept of Dharma Setu (bridge of Dharma), a historically constituted, non-competitive and pluralistic mode of cultural engagement that operates through civilisational resonance rather than strategic attraction. Dharma Setu is operationalised through four core propositions and distinguished systematically from Nye’s soft power, Bourdieu’s cultural capital and Gramsci’s cultural hegemony. The article thereby contributes to the decolonisation of IR by articulating a conceptual framework grounded in Global South intellectual traditions.