Prabhu Chawla
NEW DELHI: In the gilded corridors of New Delhi’s diplomatic spectacle at Bharat Mandpam, Prime Minister Narendra Modi once again transformed a bilateral encounter into a master class of personalised statecraft.
Russian President Vladimir Putin stood in front of the Prime Minister on the opening day of the 18th BRICS Summit when Modi leaned forward and placed in his hands a Russian rendering of the Thirukkural. Those 1,330 Tamil couplets on ethics, virtue, governance, love and the proper conduct of life arrived not as a footnote. It was a yet another marvellous movement in a 12-year symphony of embrace and offering. The tight hug that has become Modi’s signature has now found its intellectual companion in booklomacy. It’s a prepense pairing of physical warmth with Hindu civilisational weight.
Books have seldom altered the arc of treaties. Interests write the fine print, not verses. Yet Modi has demonstrated that objects made in Indian village workshops and printed in Indian languages can carry scholarship into foreign palaces. Indira Gandhi first sent handicrafts abroad decades ago, guided by protocol officers working quietly. Modi has made the ritual public and personal, choreographing each handover so that the photograph becomes part of the visit’s memory for posterity.
Timeline, motivation
The choices of books as gifts trace a clear timeline and motivation. In December 2024 in Moscow, Modi gave Putin a Russian translation of the Bhagavad Gita, invoking St Petersburg’s old appetite for Sanskrit thought. In Bishkek in 2019, he presented Kyrgyz President Sadyr Japarov, the late economist’s Bibek Debroy’s 10-volume English Mahabharata, an epic of statecraft placed beside Kyrgyzstan’s own Manas cycle.In 2023, during his Washington visit, Modi gave President Joe Biden a first edition of The Ten Principal Upanishads, translated by Purohit Swami and WB Yeats, because Yeats himself had once been captivated by these Vedic texts.
To Elon Musk’s family, he offered a set of books which included Tagore’s Crescent Moon, RK Narayan’s stories of ordinary Indian life, and an illustrated Panchatantra. Modi expanded his literary gifting to include much more history and Indian diversity. Devotional and scientific texts followed a similar pattern. Slovak parliamentarians received the Charaka Samhita and Sushruta Samhita, ancient treatises on the body. Kazakhstan’s then-President Nursultan Nazarbayev was given a set representing India’s plural faiths: the Guru Granth Sahib, Jain and Buddhist manuscripts, and a Persian-language Ramayana.
Even the craft gifts followed the same chronology and character. At the 2022 G20 in Bali, Biden received Kangra miniature paintings in the shringar, or romantic, style; Britain’s Rishi Sunak received Mata ni Pachedi, sacred cloth painted by Gujarat’s Waghri community; Australia’s Anthony Albanese received a Pithora ritual painting from Rathwa artisans; and Italy’s Giorgia Meloni received double-ikat Patan Patola silk in a Sadeli mosaic box.
Compulsive idea-smith
At the 2022 G7 summit, Modi gave Biden a gulabi meenakari brooch and cufflinks, pink enamelwork on Varanasi silver; he gave Germany’s Olaf Scholz a nickel-coated Marodi brass vessel from Moradabad; and he gave France’s Emmanuel Macron attar perfume flasks wrapped in Lucknow zardozi embroidery and stitched in French tricolour threads. During the 2023 American State visit, Biden received a sandalwood chest from Jaipur containing a silver Ganesha idol and ceremonial items from Punjab, Jharkhand and Uttarakhand, while First Lady Jill Biden received a lab-grown green diamond set in Kashmiri papier-mâché.
Since Modi is a compulsive idea-smith, he added regional variety during a few visits. Meloni received Assam’s golden Muga silk; Dutch officials received Jaipur blue pottery; Norwegians received Odisha silver filigree boats; Iceland’s Prime Minister received a replica of Tenzing Norgay’s 1953 Everest ice axe; and the UAE received Kesar mangoes and Manipur’s black Chak-hao rice. Canada’s Mark Carney received a Bihari brass Bodhi tree, and Mexico’s President received a Warli tribal drawing from Maharashtra.
Books have seldom altered the arc of treaties. Interests write the fine print, not verses. Yet Modi has demonstrated that objects made in Indian village workshops and printed in Indian languages can carry scholarship into foreign palaces.
Each object mapped India’s regions onto its diplomacy. Other global leaders give gifts to visiting dignitaries as well. But the grammar of the gesture differs sharply from Modi’s. American Presidents typically give gifts drawn from home: a pair of cowboy boots, a leather-bound biography of Lincoln, a piece of American crystal, or a framed photograph signed by the President. These gifts are simple, mass-producible and largely interchangeable from one visit to the next. British royal protocol favours a similar understatement. A gift from the sovereign is typically a signed photograph in a silver frame. The object is deliberately modest, so the relationship, not the item, carries the weight.
Evoking curiosity debate
Chinese State visits favour matched pairs and porcelain instead. These gifts are chosen by protocol committees for their symmetry. They are rarely explained afterward, since the State speaks rather than the leader. Gulf monarchs favour extravagance, measured in carats and horses. Their gifts signal abundance rather than making an argument.
Modi’s method inverts this discretion entirely. Where other statecraft treats the gift as incidental, he treats it as both a statement and a message. He and his aides pick up gifts with enough specificity that they invoke curiosity and debate. A silver-framed photograph conveys hardly anything. But a Russian Thirukkural or an English Mahabharata provokes the recipient, with everyone watching, to sit with an idea for a moment.
Modi’s gifts are built around the guests’ own biography – Yeats for Upanishad, the Manas epic for the Mahabharata, a mountaineering memory for the ice axe. Where other traditions bury the exchange in archival footnotes, Modi amplifies for massive visibility, ensuring the object’s afterlife is public rather than curatorial. He has created a new style of diplomacy. In this style, the gift is not a courtesy; it is the message itself.
Gifts as strategy
Earlier leaders treated cultural gifts as decoration. Modi treats them as strategy. He uses handicrafts and ancient texts to project a picture of India. This is a picture of a civilisation older than the modern State. It is also a picture that, in Modi’s telling, will outlast the modern State. Each book he gives carries more than literary value. A Thirukkural or a Mahabharata also carries a quiet political message. That message is rooted in cultural nationalism. It is wrapped inside the language of normal diplomatic protocol.
The hug offers warmth in the moment. The gift offers a longer-lasting claim. That claim is that Indian heritage is not confined to the past. It is a living force in the present. Modi wants world leaders to hold this idea in their hands, not just hear about it in a speech. By fusing golden tradition with strategy so precisely, he has changed what a diplomatic gift can do. It now dictates a worldview.
Where other statecraft treats the gift as incidental, he treats it as both a statement and a message. He and his aides pick up gifts with enough specificity that they invoke curiosity and debate
