India, July 17 -- New Delhi's outreach to Dhaka to help with the restoration of the ancestral property of cinema legend Satyajit Ray in Mymensingh is a step in the right direction. The property that once belonged to Ray's grandfather, Upendra Kishor Ray Chowdhury, an important cultural figure of the Bengal Renaissance, had fallen into disrepair after years of neglect under the custodianship of the Bangladesh government. As the ministry of external affairs said, "it would be preferable to reconsider the demolition and examine options for its repair and reconstruction as a museum of literature and a symbol of the shared culture of India and Bangladesh". Ray, or the Ray family legacy, is an important part of the Indian subcontinent's cultural history, a transnational inheritance that transcends national boundaries. Bangladesh, a nation born in the name of its linguistic heritage, should not let that legacy wither away. India's proactive stance on this issue is also welcome because New Delhi must view itself as the custodian of the pre-1947 cultural inheritance of the subcontinent. It must offer both funds and technical expertise to its neighbours for the preservation of ancient sites as well as cultural/historical spaces associated with modern times, without being restricted by the post-1947 borders. Sites associated with Rabindranath Tagore, Mahatma Gandhi, Khan Abdul Ghaffar Khan, and cultural figures who migrated after Partition should be conserved and memorialised to invoke the common historical, political, and cultural inheritance. New Delhi has done such work in Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, the Maldives and Nepal in recent times. The MEA has invested in at least 20 heritage projects across 15 countries, many of them in Southeast Asia, offering grants and expertise from the Archaeological Survey of India, in the past decade. This is a way of extending Indian soft power and expanding India's outreach beyond the transactional sphere of business and economy; in fact, it can run parallel to or complement the hard diplomacy centered on national security. The outreach centred on Ray, if pursued with the right intent, may help in inducing a thaw in the frozen India-Bangladesh ties....