Unhappily for India, the US has just elected what may be the most anti-trade administration and Congress since the Depression. A free-trade pact between the US and India would enrich both, but it is unlikely that Obama will pursue any such thing — and New Delhi’s irresolute handling of the ASEAN free-trade agreement suggests that there are limitations on their end, too. India will naturally resist being reduced to a mere counterweight — to China, to Pakistan — and, after decades of lectures about its “potential”, it finally has the strength to legitimately set its own course.

Strange, then, that India still seeks vindication in the West. An Indian who makes it big in America makes it Very Big Indeed, but saying that an American rock band is “big in Japan” is a joke at their expense. And though Republicans loved the idea of bestowing the Bharat Ratna on George W. Bush, American filmmakers still go to Asian markets seeking profits, not love. Even so, there is something to be made of this moment. Cultural currency is capital — limited, to be sure, but capital nonetheless — and America’s intensifying interest in India is an asset waiting to be used.

Our nations have shared interests when it comes to such familiar issues as trade and terrorism, but there is more to international relations than interests, defined narrowly and politically. Americans watching Slumdog Millionaire may marvel at the sensory assault that is Bombay street life and recoil from the squalor of the Juhu slums, but they must also experience a sense, perhaps uncomfortable, of recognition. Multiethnic, multilingual, marked both by fierce entrepreneurial energy and economic anxiety, with both gods and gangs competing for turf, India is a foreign nation that’s not so foreign. For reasons of ethnicity and history, and above all language, Americans tend to identify with declining, sparsely populated countries such as the UK and Canada. But the facts on the ground are different: India is the second most populous nation on the Earth, and the US is the third. We both have ruling classes that speak English and underclasses that don’t. It is not in the future but in the present that our challenges should be recognised as more alike than different. Yes, India is still poor — for how much longer? Yes, America is surpassingly rich — for how much longer? It’s not only young Indian chaiwallahs mooning away in dead-end jobs, dreaming of winning a million on a game show. Americans may not know the word crorepati, but they will. The word is in our hearts, if not on our tongues.

... contd.