
The Hallyu Ascendancy and India’s Soft Power Ceiling: A Geocultural Analysis for India-South Korea Bilateral Relations
The Korean wave, etymologically known as the hallyu, refers to the soft power of the Korean popular culture that originated in Southeast Asia, first in mainland China and eventually spreading across Asia in the late 1990s. The transnational cultural influence of the K-wave in the postmodern era is one of a kind due to the decisive yet dominant nature of ‘compressed modernity’. South Korea experienced a century's worth of economic growth-led cultural influence within the span of a few decades. The phenomenon of ‘Miracle on the Han River’ transformed a war-ravaged South Korea that was one of the 25 poorest countries in the world in the 1960s into an advanced economy built on technology and innovation, with the help of the International Development Association of the World Bank.






