The India Story

The world is fascinated by India, even as it struggles to access it.

Indian culture travels far beyond its borders. Yoga studios flourish in European capitals. Ayurveda fills wellness shelves across the West. Indian flavours, aesthetics, and philosophies are embedded into global fashion, food, and hospitality. India as an idea is everywhere.

India as a destination is not.

Despite its geographic scale and cultural density, India accounts for roughly 1.5 percent of global international tourist arrivals. In 2024, the country welcomed fewer than ten million foreign visitors, still below pre pandemic levels, even as domestic tourism surged dramatically into the hundreds of millions of trips annually. This imbalance is not incidental. It reflects how India moves with ease inwardly, and with friction outwardly.

This gap is about access.

A Country That Travels Inward

India’s tourism economy is overwhelmingly domestic. Cities and regions thrive on internal movement, from pilgrimages and weddings to food trails and leisure travel. This internal circulation is one of India’s great strengths.

International tourism, however, remains concentrated in a narrow set of destinations. Rajasthan, Goa, Kerala, and a handful of heritage sites continue to absorb a disproportionate share of foreign arrivals. Even in these regions, recent growth has been driven more by Indian travellers than by sustained international engagement.

What this reveals is not a lack of appeal, but a lack of orientation.

Tourism narratives in India are still largely site driven. Visitors are offered destinations rather than frameworks. They arrive at monuments, beaches, or backwaters without clear pathways into the living culture that surrounds them. Food systems, regional music, contemporary art practices, everyday rituals, and local histories remain largely unmediated.

India offers abundance. What it unintentionally withholds is legibility.

When Culture Is Translated It Travels

The irony is that Indian culture translates exceptionally well when it is curated with intention.

Brands like Inde Wild demonstrate how Indian nostalgia, ritual, and ingredient knowledge can be shaped into a global language without being diluted. The brand does not exoticise India. It edits it. Familiar cultural references are refined into forms that global audiences can understand, trust, and adopt.

Similarly, Subko has shown how Indian origin stories can sit comfortably within contemporary global culture. By foregrounding craft, sourcing, and aesthetic restraint, it positions Indian coffee and chocolate not as novelty, but as quality. These brands succeed not because India is simplified, but because it is translated thoughtfully.

The lesson here is clear. India does not lack cultural capital. It lacks structures of translation.

Food as Cultural Infrastructure

Globally, food has emerged as one of the most powerful gateways into culture. It is immediate, sensory, and disarming. Countries that perform well in tourism understand cuisine not merely as hospitality, but as strategy.

India’s food culture is among the most diverse in the world. It is also one of the least formally mediated for international audiences. Regional cuisines remain deeply contextual, seasonal, and orally transmitted. This is a cultural strength, but a structural limitation.

Outside of a few metropolitan centres, there is little institutional support for documenting, narrating, and exporting India’s food systems with depth. As a result, Indian food is often encountered abroad as a flattened category, detached from geography and history.

When food is treated seriously, it becomes cultural infrastructure. When it is left to chance, it becomes anecdote.

Access Is the Quiet Constraint

International interest in India remains high. Journalists, cultural curators, chefs, and travellers continue to express curiosity. Where friction emerges is not in intent, but in process.

Tourism promotion, cultural policy, media access, and visa frameworks are distributed across multiple bodies and jurisdictions. Institutions exist, but they are rarely experienced as a coherent system by outsiders. For first time visitors and storytellers, the country can feel opaque, rich but difficult to navigate deeply.

This opacity shapes the stories that get told. Engagement becomes brief rather than sustained. Regions surface momentarily in global consciousness and then fade without continuity.

Ease, in this context, is not indulgence. It is infrastructure.

What India Leaves Untapped

Tourism already contributes meaningfully to India’s economy. Its larger value, however, lies in soft power. Cultural tourism shapes perception. It influences how a country is understood, trusted, and remembered.

India has exported culture for decades. What it has not done is host it strategically.

As a result, much of the value generated by Indian culture in wellness, food, design, and lifestyle accrues outside the country, embedded in global brands and experiences that borrow from India while operating elsewhere.

In a world increasingly shaped by narrative, this matters.

A Necessary Shift

If Part One of this story is about diagnosis, the next is about possibility.

The question is no longer whether India has culture. That is beyond doubt. The question is whether India is willing to design access to it without simplifying it, and to trust that complexity does not need protection through opacity.

Making India Accessible Without Diluting It

Accessibility is often misunderstood as dilution. In cultural contexts, the opposite is true. What is inaccessible is rarely understood in its fullness. What is accessible has the opportunity to be engaged with deeply.

Making India accessible does not mean flattening its traditions or mass producing experience. It means designing pathways that allow people to orient themselves without stripping away nuance.

Access is not about removing complexity. It is about offering entry points.

From Attractions to Pathways

Countries that translate culture well do not rely solely on landmarks. They design pathways. Visitors are guided not just to places, but through stories.

India’s tourism model has largely prioritised destinations over movement. What is missing are connective narratives that allow a visitor to move from food to geography, from craft to history, from ritual to everyday life.

Seasonal storytelling, regional food trails, and thematic cultural routes offer ways to experience India as a living system rather than a checklist. These are not new ideas. What is required is coherence.

Food as the First Language of Access

For many visitors, food is the first and most intimate encounter with a place. Meals shape perception long before museums or monuments do.

When food is contextualised, explained, and situated within geography and season, it becomes an education. Menus become maps. Kitchens become classrooms. Markets become archives.

India’s culinary landscape is uniquely positioned for this kind of engagement. What it needs is institutional recognition that food is not a byproduct of tourism, but one of its most powerful engines.

The Role of the Cultural Interpreter

Access requires interpreters. Every culture that travels well invests in people who translate it for others.

These interpreters are not only guides or officials. They are chefs, writers, artists, designers, hosts, and curators who understand both context and audience. They do not simplify culture. They frame it.

India has no shortage of such individuals. What it lacks is consistent support for their role as cultural infrastructure.

Coherence Without Bureaucracy

Successful cultural destinations are rarely the result of over regulation. They are the result of alignment.

This means coherence across tourism, culture, media access, and storytelling. It means long term narrative stewardship rather than episodic campaigns. It means recognising that culture compounds when it is allowed to accumulate rather than constantly reset.

Accessibility, in this sense, is a form of confidence.

A Different Kind of Arrival

India does not need louder campaigns or grander spectacle. It does not need to protect its complexity by hiding it.

It needs to trust that the world can meet it where it is, if invited properly.

The India story already exists.

The task now is to make it accessible, on its own terms, without diluting its depth.