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Hindi cinema and Hindi-language television have historically occupied a significant position within Indian media culture, shaping national imaginaries and circulating India’s cultural soft power through theatrical exhibition and broadcast television. Though it has been one of the most popular forms of Indian screen culture; Indian cinema in its entirety, has maintained a sustained global presence—from the international recognition of Bengali cinema through filmmakers such as Satyajit Ray, particularly with Pather Panchali (1955), to the contemporary global circulation of regionally rooted blockbusters such as RRR (Rajamouli, 2022) and Kantara (Shetty, 2022), signalling the continuing international prominence of Indian screen cultures across linguistic and industrial contexts. This paper examines how contemporary Hindi web series and OTT cinema reconfigure India’s long-standing soft power legacy by extending it into the domain of streaming diplomacy. While recent pan-Indian and transnational films—such as Baahubali (Rajamouli, 2015), RRR , and All We Imagine as Light (Kapadia, 2024) continue to play a significant role in reshaping India’s global cultural presence through theatrical circulation and international festival circuits, this study deliberately narrows its focus to Hindi screen culture . It argues that this transformation is marked by the adoption of technical, aesthetic, and narrative strategies aligned with western, platform-driven production cultures, while simultaneously revising earlier Hindi screen traditions grounded in popular aesthetics and cultural specificity. Rather than emerging solely from creative innovation, these shifts are shaped by the structural pressures of platform capitalism, algorithmic governance, and market-oriented regimes of global visibility that increasingly mediate how India is projected on international platforms. Through textual analysis of Call Me Bae (D’Cunha, 2024) and Ctrl (Motwane, 2024), the paper explores how selective Hindi-language OTT texts focus individuality, postfeminist subjectivities, and anxieties surrounding social media, artificial intelligence, and digitally mediated intimacy. These narratives mark a departure from the collectivist ethos, melodramatic modes, and culturally embedded formats historically associated with Hindi cinema and television, even as they retain recognisably ‘ desi ’ narrative frames to ensure local resonance. Hindi screen culture has long been approached through a critical lens, often characterised as ahistorical, escapist, excessively melodramatic, and shaped by fragmented modes of production. However, the emergence of streaming platforms has significantly reoriented this landscape. OTT ecosystems have enabled greater narrative risk, more coherent production logics, and the sustained exploration of niche themes that were previously marginal within mainstream Hindi cinema and television. Freed from the constraints of box-office imperatives and broadcast scheduling, Hindi web series and OTT films increasingly engage with globally resonant concerns—such as gender politics, digital labour, surveillance, and urban precarity—while remaining embedded in local cultural idioms. In this sense, streaming does not simply correct earlier limitations of Hindi screen culture; it reorganises its aesthetic and ideological priorities, allowing melodrama and spectacle to be reworked into longer, more reflexive, and internationally legible forms of storytelling. Situating these developments within the framework of streaming diplomacy, the paper argues that Hindi-language OTT content continues to generate media-driven soft power by enabling culturally specific stories to circulate globally through platform infrastructures. The international recognition of Delhi Crime (Mehta, 2019), which won the International Emmy Award in 2020, demonstrates how Hindi-centric narratives can achieve global legitimacy. Its circulation alongside globally successful platform originals such as Stranger Things (Duffer Brothers, 2016) and Dark (Odar and Friese, 2017–2020) enhances visibility while subtly regulating form and content through platform norms. The paper concludes that Hindi OTT cinema and web series constitute an ambivalent cultural space in which India’s soft power is amplified and new representational possibilities particularly around gender, individuality, and digital life emerge, even as creative practices remain shaped by platform imperatives and global market logics.