Rickey Kej and the case for classical music as India’s soft-power export

At 06:52 UTC on 17 June 2026, The Indian Express published a short, pointed interview on its culture vertical, Expresso, with the Bengaluru-based composer Rickey Kej. The hook, repeated almost word for word in the headline, is a claim the global music industry has spent two decades arguing the other way: that it is classical musicians, not streaming-era pop stars, who break cultural barriers.

That inversion is worth taking seriously. Kej is not a peripheral figure making the case from outside the system. He has collected three Grammy Awards, served two stints on the United Nations’ 17 Sustainable Development Goals advocacy circuit, and built a career explicitly around the proposition that a sitar-led or veena-led record can move listeners in São Paulo, Lagos and Berlin as readily as a Bollywood playback track. The argument is empirical, not sentimental: classical forms carry harmonic and rhythmic structures that translate across linguistic frontiers, where vernacular pop is, by design, tethered to a specific lyric and idiom.

What Kej actually said

In the Expresso interview Kej pushes back on the assumption that only contemporary popular music travels. The classical musician, he argues, “breaks cultural barriers” precisely because the grammar of the form — raga, tala, the long arc of a composition — is not language-dependent. A Konnakol vocal percussion line, a bansuri phrase, a mridangam cycle, all of these function as a kind of pre-linguistic scaffolding that a foreign ear can latch onto before the lyrics arrive. By contrast, a pop song is, in his telling, a finished cultural artefact: it tells you what to feel in a specific language, and if you do not speak that language, you are borrowing emotion on credit.

The framing has a corollary he is careful to draw. The people who can actually do that cross-border work are almost always the ones who have spent a decade inside the guru-shishya system, who have internalised the form well enough to bend it. Pop stardom is, structurally, a domestic industry. Classical musicianship is, structurally, export-ready. India, Kej suggests, is under-using that asset.

The counter-narrative from the streaming era

The pushback writes itself. The numbers from the global recorded-music industry in 2024 and 2025 — published variously by the IFPI, Music Ally and the Confederation of Indian Industry’s media-entertainment reports — run in the opposite direction. The fastest-growing cross-border listenership sits with non-English pop and hip-hop. South Korean acts, Latin trap, Afrobeats and a small cluster of Indian playback singers have moved tens of millions of monthly listeners on Spotify and YouTube Music precisely because the platform rewards tracks that are short, hooky and emotionally legible in any language. Classical music, by the IFPI’s own categorisation, is a flat or shrinking share of global streams.

There is also a domestic-industry objection that deserves air. Bollywood and Tollywood have spent forty years building the distribution rails — film, television, radio, satellite, and now short-video — that make a song travel. Classical musicians have none of that infrastructure. To argue, as Kej does implicitly, that India should pivot cultural diplomacy away from its commercial-music machine and toward its concert-hall tradition is to argue for a much smaller, slower and more state-supported pipeline. That is a real cost, and the people who point it out are not wrong about the economics.

The structural frame, in plain terms

What Kej is really talking about is a classic soft-power problem dressed in a music-industry vocabulary. The currency of soft power is not novelty; it is durability. A pop hit lands and decays. A raga or a tihai — the layered rhythmic cadence that closes a Carnatic kriti — lodges in the listener’s ear and re-appears, recognisable, years later. The United States understood this in the Cold War, when it routed jazz, modern dance and abstract expressionism through the State Department rather than through the Billboard Hot 100. The argument is not that classical music is better than pop. It is that the two do different diplomatic work, and the work classical does is the harder, longer, and more state-relevant one.

The harder version of the same point is that India’s cultural diplomacy in 2026 is being negotiated in a more crowded marketplace than at any point since Independence. Beijing, Seoul, Lagos and Riyadh are all running versions of the same export play. The Ministry of External Affairs’ cultural budget has grown, but the marginal rupee is still being spent disproportionately on Bollywood showcases, yoga days and cuisine pavilions. The case Kej is making — that classical forms are a more efficient diplomatic instrument per dollar spent — is, on the evidence, a reasonable one. It is not a self-evident one.

What remains uncertain

Two things are unresolved. First, the Expresso interview is a short, on-camera conversation, not a policy paper; Kej’s framing there is necessarily compressed. The claim that classical musicians uniquely “break cultural barriers” is a working thesis, not a measured finding. There is no counter-evidence in the interview from streaming-data analysts, musicologists or cultural-attache officials, and this publication has not located an independent study that ranks classical against pop on cross-border listener retention. The sources do not specify the methodology by which one would test the claim, and Kej himself does not offer one.

Second, the question of who pays for the pipeline Kej is implicitly asking the state to build is a live political question. Classical music in India is overwhelmingly upper-caste, urban and Brahminical in its social composition — a fact that the Hindustani and Carnatic worlds have been forced to confront over the last decade as scholarship on caste and music has matured. A serious classical-led cultural-export programme would have to grapple with that, and the interview does not address it.

Stakes

If Kej is right, India is leaving a comparative advantage on the table at a moment when the global market for non-Western classical traditions is wider than it has been since the 1960s. If he is wrong, the case is still useful — as a corrective to the assumption that cultural diplomacy and streaming-chart performance are the same thing. The third possibility, that the question is undecidable from the available evidence and the right answer is to fund both, is the one the state will probably land on.

How this publication framed it: where the wire ran Kej as a profile, Monexus read the same interview as a soft-power argument and tested it against the streaming-era counter-evidence the Expresso piece does not engage with.

Wire provenance

This editorial synthesis draws on the following public wire/social posts:

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rickey_Kej
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Carnatic_music
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soft_power