Haka, Kalaripayattu, and the soft-power contest India is not having

On 12 July 2026, an explainer from The Indian Express walked readers through the history and significance of the Maori haka, then drew an explicit line from the New Zealand ritual to India's Kalaripayattu, Silambam and Thang-Ta, asking why the country has not packaged its own martial-heritage traditions with the same consistency Wellington has built around the All Blacks.

The premise of the explainer is a diplomatic one dressed as a quiz. India has a richer, older, and more internally diverse catalogue of codified combat forms than almost any country on earth. New Zealand has a single, internationally legible ritual. That asymmetry, the column argues, is a soft-power asymmetry India could close if it chose to.

What the haka actually does for Wellington

The haka is a ceremonial challenge performed before rugby fixtures, at state funerals, and on diplomatic visits. According to the Indian Express explainer, its modern diplomatic utility is the product of decades of deliberate New Zealand statecraft: the form is taught in schools, performed by the armed forces, and broadcast into hundreds of millions of living rooms every time the All Blacks play. The haka has become a portable national signature, recognisable in markets where no New Zealand diplomat is posted.

For a country of roughly five million people, that is a remarkable return on a single cultural asset. Wellington has effectively turned a perennially touring sports team into an itinerant cultural embassy.

The Indian inventory is wider, and older

The Indian Express piece sets Kalaripayattu, the Kerala martial art often dated to the 11th century or earlier; Silambam, a Tamil staff-and-weapon tradition referenced in Sangam literature; and Thang-Ta, the Meitei sword-and-spear form from Manipur, alongside the haka for direct comparison. Each carries living lineages, regional institutions, and documented histories.

Where the haka has a single choreography performed in broadly consistent form, India has a federation of regional traditions that compete for attention rather than consolidating into one flagship. The explainer does not make a strong claim that any one form should be elevated above the others. It does make a quieter, sharper claim: that the failure to elevate any of them is itself a policy choice with a cost.

Why the structural read matters

Looked at from outside the cultural frame, the gap is not about the intrinsic appeal of the forms. Kalaripayattu schools in Kerala already host international students; Silambam demonstrations feature at diaspora events in Malaysia, Singapore and the Gulf. The bottleneck is amplification and coordination. A country that runs the International Day of Yoga through 170-plus missions does not lack the diplomatic plumbing. What it lacks, the explainer implies, is a single, transmissible, short-form asset that can travel the way the haka travels: three minutes, no translation required.

There is a wider geopolitical read here that the Indian Express piece gestures at without naming. Soft-power inventories in the Indo-Pacific are being audited. Tokyo curates its martial heritage as national brand. Seoul has turned taekwondo into a UN-recognised discipline. Beijing has built wushu festivals around Belt and Road stops. India, by contrast, tends to outsource cultural diplomacy to its film industry and its yoga calendar, both of which are enormous but neither of which carries the percussive, embodied claim that a warrior tradition makes.

What to watch next

The honest caveat: the explainer is a primer, not a policy document. It does not name a ministry, propose a budget, or commit to a flagship form. Whether New Delhi treats martial-heritage consolidation as a near-term priority or as a long-tail cultural question will be visible in the next round of ICCR programming and in the cultural annexes of bilateral visits. A first useful signal would be a single Indian martial form featured, on a recurring basis, at a major overseas sporting fixture, the way the haka leads every All Blacks test.

Until then, the explainer lands as an invitation the relevant ministries have not yet accepted.

Desk note: Monexus frames this as a soft-power audit rather than a culture piece. The Indian Express explainer is the only source for the specific forms named; readers looking for primary documentation on Kalaripayattu or the haka should consult academic and New Zealand government archives.