ABSTRACT India’s rise as the world’s largest democracy and its challenge to the Western-defined global order have attracted significant scholarly, political, and media attention. Using Anderson and Prelli’s pentadic cartography to enhance discursive analysis in international relations, this paper looks at journalist Maithreyi Seetharaman’s interview with Subrahmanyam Jaishankar, India’s External Affairs Minister at the GLOBSEC Forum in Bratislava, Slovakia. Depicting three interlocking maps of the symbolic landscape of the interview, we highlight the use of Seetharaman and Jaishankar’s scene-act ratio, situating India’s actions in its geopolitical contexts. Jaishankar’s dual use of materialist and idealist discourses presents India as both a reactive agent influenced by external circumstances and a proactive agent with its own distinct goals and ethical considerations. This approach offers a comprehensive understanding of international politics, balancing dominant empirical narratives in IR and emphasising a complex interplay of motives that drive state behaviour. Through this case study, we advocate for a broader application of pentadic cartography in international relations to uncover the deeper meanings and contexts that shape state actions, providing a richer, more textured understanding of geopolitics, global diplomacy and state interaction.