Think of it as Harvard's Indian summer. Earlier this month, the industrialist Anand Mahindra donated $10 million to support the teaching of the humanities at his alma mater, the largest gift to the program in the university's 374-year history. Barely two weeks later, the $70 billion salt-to-steel Tata Group plonked down $50 million for Harvard Business School, the biggest international donation since the school's founding.
In the not too distant future, then, Harvard students will likely grapple with Homer and Shakespeare at the newly renamed Mahindra Humanities Center. For others, the first brush with HBS's famous case study method may well be at a new building named Tata Hall.
In a status-conscious society with a yen for education, it's hardly surprising that economic growth has released a gusher of giving toward the Ivy League. In recent years, Indian corporate largesse has also benefited, among others, Yale, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania. But these gifts also illustrate a broader phenomenon: India's growing soft power.
The most obvious signs are hard to miss. In recent years, Bollywood-themed dances have invaded wedding celebrations from Sydney to San Francisco. In Britain, curry houses employ more than 100,000 people and generate about £3.5 billion ($5.5 billion) of business each year. And if Yoga Journal is to be believed, an estimated 15.8 million Americans can tell a corpse pose from a downward-facing dog. Indian-born CEOs head such iconic global companies as PepsiCo, Citigroup and MasterCard. In the arts, reports of Indian writers scooping up literary prizes and directors helming big ticket-movies in Hollywood have almost become commonplace.
The contrast with Asia's other giant is striking. In the 21 years since the image of a solitary protestor's heroic attempt to halt a column of tanks near Tiananmen Square seared itself into the world's imagination, China has strived to associate itself with development rather than repression. For many people, the 2008 Beijing Olympics—with their dazzling buildings and clockwork efficiency—symbolized the fruition of that effort.
But the Games also underscored just how much China's ongoing image makeover depends on the government rather than on private initiative. The imposing Chinese pavilion at the Shanghai Expo, the 300-odd Confucius Institutes promoting Chinese language and culture around the world, traveling museum exhibits extolling the 15th century seafarer Admiral Zheng He, lavish aid packages for resource-rich African countries and China Central Television's ambitious global footprint all tell the same tale.
Scholars and journalists alike tend to make much of China's vaunted "charm offensive." It turns out, however, that when it comes to winning hearts and minds—at least democratic hearts and minds—China's top down state-led model is not much of a match for India's decentralized private effort.
In terms of goodwill, India bests China in both Western and Eastern democracies. For instance, according to a poll released last month by the Chicago Council on Global Affairs, Americans place India in the same ballpark as long-term allies South Korea and Israel. China elicits only about as much warmth as Venezuela and Mexico.
A recent BBC World Service poll of 28 countries says more or less the same thing. On average, more than half of Americans, Britons and Canadians feel "mainly positive" about India; only about one in six feel "mainly negative." With China the numbers are reversed. Barely one in three from the Anglophone countries feel mostly positive about the Middle Kingdom; for more than four in 10 the emotions evoked are negative. Similarly, more Japanese, Indonesians and South Koreans feel positively than negatively toward India; with China it's the opposite.
To be sure, we shouldn't read too much into these figures. For many people, India is probably more likeable in part because it's not nearly as threatening as a powerful, well-organized China. And East Asian hostility toward China likely reflects a certain amount of historical animosity. Moreover, in many of the surveyed parts of Africa and the Islamic world where democratic traditions are weak or nonexistent, India lags China in popularity and, presumably, influence.
Nonetheless, against the backdrop of a prolonged bout of self-flagellation brought on by the recently concluded Delhi Commonwealth Games, India ought to reflect on some of its strengths as well. For one, the country's shambolic democracy may drive the educated middle classes to despair, but it also appears to buy India a reservoir of goodwill around the world.
Second, the legacy of the colonial experience, though painful in many ways, has also proved to be a blessing. As an English speaking democracy, in soft power terms India punches above its economic weight.
And finally, the economic freedom unleashed two decades ago has done more to enhance India's standing in the world than the four decades of finger-stabbing moralizing that preceded it. If you don't believe this, all you need to do is visit a certain university in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Mr. Dhume, a columnist for WSJ.com, is writing a book about the new Indian middle class. Follow him on Twitter @dhume01.
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