The New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization

The New India

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The New India Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization Kanishka Chowdhury

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THE NEW INDIA

Copyright © Kanishka Chowdhury, 2011. All rights reserved. First published in 2011 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin’s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010. Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978–0–230–10951–3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Chowdhury, Kanishka, 1963– The new India : citizenship, subjectivity, and economic liberalization / Kanishka Chowdhury. p. cm. ISBN 978–0–230–10951–3 (alk. paper) 1. India—Economic policy—1991– 2. Free enterprise—India. 3. Citizenship—India. I. Title. HC435.3.C585 2010 954.05⬘2—dc22

2010027366

A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Newgen Imaging Systems (P) Ltd., Chennai, India. First edition: February 2011 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.

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CON T E N T S

List of Figures

vii

Acknowledgments

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Introduction One Going Global: Texts and Contexts in the New India Two Polemics and Promises: Constructing the Consumer Citizen Three The Prompter’s Whisper: The National Imaginary and the Cosmopolitan Subject in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and The Hungry Tide Four Transnational Transgressions: Reading the Gendered Subject in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham Five “Who Will Build Our Taj Mahal?” Urban Displacement, Spatial Politics, and the Resistant Subject Afterword

1 23

183 211

Notes

215

Works Cited

227

Index

239

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59

107

145

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F IGU R E S

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 5.1 5.2 A.1 A.2

Rosedale NRI South City Emaar MGF Fair and Lovely ad, Father and Daughter Fair and Lovely ad, “What a face” The market The first building Lake Market, 2009 Those outside the terms of the debate

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90 92 93 99 100 199 205 212 213

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AC K NOW L E DGM E N T S

In the spring of 2004 I was teaching at the University of Glasgow when I started writing down some ideas that later evolved into an essay on neoliberalism, religious nationalism, and the state. It was election season in India, and I was fascinated by the then-ruling Bharatiya Janata Party’s “Shining India” advertising campaign. The BJP’s effort both to construct a Hindu nation and to woo international capital renewed my curiosity about a subject that had been of interest to me since the Reagan years: how right-wing governments integrate capital, religion, and nation and attempt to manage the contradictions unleashed by these forces. As it turned out, the BJP was resoundingly defeated by an alliance of the Left and the Congress Party that summer. The electorate, contrary to media predictions, was not taken in by the “Shining India” campaign. In the next six years, returning to India each year from the United States, I realized that the narrative of Shining India had not been abandoned with the entrance of the new government. As I saw evidence of the monuments of “progress” (shopping malls, apartment blocks, foreign goods) in the various Indian cities I visited, it became evident to me that a systematic effort was being made to construct a specific kind of citizen to inhabit this shining paradise. This person was supposedly empowered through his or her ability to consume as a “free” agent. Meanwhile, as politicians and the mainstream media tried to focus attention on the growth rate, inequality persisted, and anxieties simmered regarding globalization, economic injustice, and religious and caste tensions. Interested in the intersections of political economy and culture, I began to see contradictions between the idea of a powerful consuming subject and the persistent inequities and constraints on groups in India. I saw such contradictions in the books, films, advertisements, and media images that were produced during this time. It was also instructive to

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Acknowledgments

look back at the 1990s, when liberalization was formalized, and to notice the patterns and dissonances leading into the present. As I worked, I was fortunate enough to read some of the best books written about what transpired in India after economic liberalization: Aijaz Ahmad’s Lineages of the Present: Ideological and Political Genealogies of Contemporary South Asia, Leela Fernandes’s India’s New Middle Class: Democratic Politics in an Era of Economic Reform, Jayati Ghosh and C. P. Chandrasekhar’s The Market that Failed: A Decade of Neoliberal Economic Reforms in India, Barbara Harriss-White’s India Working: Essays on Society and Economy, Amitava Kumar’s Passport Photos, Aditya Nigam and Nivedita Menon’s Power and Contestation: India Since 1989, K. N. Panikkar’s An Agenda for Cultural Action and Other Essays, Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India, P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought: Stories from India’s Poorest Districts, and Sumit Sarkar’s Beyond Nationalist Frames: Post-Modernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History, to mention just a few. These writers’ insights were formative in helping me articulate my own positions. I also found the writings of many other scholars and activists indispensible in shaping my understanding of the various political and economic questions that face contemporary India, and, while I cannot mention all of these writings here, I have cited them when relevant in the book itself. Some of my colleagues—Young-ok An, Heather Bouwman, Padmaja Challakere, Carmela Garritano, Todd Lawrence, Amy Muse, Andy Scheiber, and Marty Warren—read sections of this book in early versions, and their critical input and encouragement were invaluable at a time when the idea of “a book” still felt quite hazy. In addition, I would like to offer my gratitude to an extended community of scholars, especially to those at the summer MLG-ICS sessions, the fall South Asian Studies conferences in Madison, Wisconsin, and the spring Left Forum sessions in New York. Thanks to those scholars for their encouragement, support, and feedback over the years. Their comments helped me to recognize and to address many of the more complex theoretical questions related to my topic. I am also grateful to Leela Fernandes, my outside reviewer, for her helpful suggestions and thoughtful comments. Thanks, also, to Priyamvada Gopal and Arvind Rajagopal for their encouragent and support. I would like to extend a special word of thanks to my teachers in graduate school, especially those who were a formative inf luence in my thinking about the ways in which culture and politics come together. I owe a particular debt to Jim Berlin, Tim Brennan, Shaun Hughes, Vincent Leitch, and Aparajita Sagar. Thanks particularly to Tim, whose

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work continues to be a source of inspiration. I also want to thank my fellow students—now colleagues—in postcolonial and cultural studies for their intellectual companionship, especially during those years when the idea of an academic profession seemed rather distant and ineffable: Ken Brewer, Bill Covey, Ross Dawson, Nalini Iyer, Asha Sen, S. Shankar, and Joya Uraizee. A book does not get written without financial help. Thanks to the University of St. Thomas for a sabbatical leave during 2006–07, a sabbatical assistance grant, and a research assistance Maxi-grant. Thanks also to the Department of English for a Luann Dummer course release and to Dr. Marisa Kelly, Dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, for a Special Projects Award. I am grateful, too, for 2009–10 federal stimulus funds that supported research help and assisted me in completing the manuscript. My chair, Andy Scheiber, went out of his way to find extra resources to help me complete the final manuscript, a gesture that I appreciate. I want to offer a special thanks to my research assistant, Fernando Sánchez. His hard work and relentless attention to detail in the final stages of the book were invaluable. I’m grateful to him for helping me prepare the manuscript during a particularly busy year. I want to express affectionate thanks to my friends in India who have always offered wisdom, laughter, and warm hospitality. Thanks to Rakesh and Nandini for generously providing a home in Bangalore, to Raj and Saroni for their cordial welcome in Delhi, and to my Kolkata friends, Ronny and Aparna, Shanu and Shuma, Pratap and Arundhati: the warmth of your friendship has always made me feel that in some ways I never really left. I am grateful to all those who were able to assist me with my research in India: thanks to the journalists and scholars, Sanjay Kumar at Lokniti in Delhi, Rudrangshu Mukherjee at the Telegraph (Kolkata), and Aditya Nigam at the Center for the Study of Developing Societies (Delhi) for helpful conversations and references. I appreciate, too, the research help that I received at the Center for the Study of Culture and Society (Bangalore), the Center for Studies in Social Sciences (Kolkata), the Seagull Media and Resource Center (Kolkata), the Jawaharlal Nehru University Library (New Delhi), and the Nehru Memorial Library (New Delhi). A special thanks to Tapan Sardar for accompanying me on my first visit to Lake Market and for taking a number of wonderful photographs, which unfortunately I was unable to use but which documented an important moment in the market's history. And, thanks, of course, to the vendors who trusted me with their stories.

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Acknowledgments

To my editor at Palgrave Macmillan, Farideh Koohi-Kamali, many thanks for your patience, your f lexibility, and your interest in my work. Thanks, also, to Robyn Curtis, editorial assistant at Palgrave, for being such an immense help during the publication of this manuscript. To Joel Breuklander, production assistant at Palgrave, thanks for facilitating the production process. A special word of thanks to Will deRooy, my copyeditor, for his excellent editing. I want to thank good friends in St. Paul for encouragement and stimulating conversations: Alexis, Amy, Andy, Bartek, Brett, Carmela, Cathy, Doug, Erika, Joan, John, Jonelle, Lon, Lucia, Mary-Anne, Mary Lou, Michael, Nik, Padmaja, Pam, Ray, Sarah, Todd, Tom, U. B., and Young. Special thanks to Mary-Anne and Michael for their ceaseless affection, to Andy and Mary Lou for warmth and solidarity, to Todd and Lucia for laughter, cookouts, and seminars, to Padmaja and U. B. for a home away from home, to Young for her empathy with thoughts about home and exile, and to Carmela and Bartek for their generosity and example as scholars. I am particularly grateful to Erika and John for years of soul-sustaining friendship. You never doubted that this book would one day see the light of day. Thanks, also, to friends Kirsty, Mike, Parvati, and Rob in Britain. Conversations with you helped me clarify my thoughts and plans. To Pat and Clarence, a special thanks for years of support and unquestioning belief. I owe an immense debt of gratitude to my mother, Manjusree, my sister, Behula, and my niece, Inaya. I can hardly express how much your love and support have sustained me all these years. Without you, all of this would be fairly meaningless. Profound thanks to my mother for believing in the first place; for providing a home filled with love, sustenance, and warmth; and for engaging in passionate debates about politics. To my sister, heartfelt thanks for your example of academic excellence and your years of unwavering faith in my work; and to my niece, thanks for your affection, laughter, and companionship. And, finally, this book is for Susan. You read every page of this book, helping me clarify and sharpen my ideas. Thank you for letting me see that there was a book somewhere in the midst of what sometimes appeared to be an unrelated jumble of ideas. It would never have seen print without your incisive comments and your constant support. I count on your wisdom more than you know. Your steadfast belief in my work made me pick up the pieces every time I felt like letting go. Your love, affection, and intellectual companionship over the years made this book possible.

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Introduction

Even as India, the largest democracy in the world, is being trumpeted as an emerging economic superpower, a majority of its citizens continue to endure the legacies of colonialism and the policies of ruling governments that primarily protect the interests of the privileged classes. Since Rajiv Gandhi’s Indian National Congress Party government initiated economic “reforms” in the 1980s, Indian ruling parties have continued these reforms, adopting measures that have furthered such interests. They have “liberalized” the economy, meaning that largely deregulated foreign investment has been zealously pursued; public sector industries and financial institutions have been denationalized; the pool of reserve labor has been made available to multinational companies; large-scale social programs, especially in the agricultural sector, have been curtailed; and the public sector has been cut off from state budgetary support. These measures are generally in keeping with similar neoliberal policies that have been instituted across the globe in developing countries as conditions for incorporation into the global capitalist economy.1 Since 1991, when liberalization was officially adopted as the reigning economic doctrine, coalition governments, mostly under the leadership of the Congress Party and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), have governed the country. Although the Congress Party was responsible for initiating a series of economic reforms to liberalize the Indian economy, these reforms were also enthusiastically advocated by the BJP during its terms in office (1998–1999 and 1999–2004). The BJP’s election loss in 2004 to the Congress-Party-led coalition did little to halt the juggernaut of liberalization, though it did serve as a significant reminder of the Indian electorate’s disquiet at economic reforms that benefited only a small section of the population. Despite some resistance from a substantial Left segment of the coalition, Prime Minister Manmohan

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The New India

Singh, who was the finance minister in 1991 when reforms were instituted, has continued on the path of “reforming” the Indian economy. Under the Congress Party’s auspices in the last few years, the project of liberalization has been pursued with even greater determination. Liberalization has been announced as the magic formula for the reduction of poverty and for economic and social progress. In support of its policies, the party has loudly declared its so-called successes over the last few years. The figures, it claims, speak for themselves: In 2010, foreign reserves were over $280 billion (compared to around $6 billion in 1991), growth rates for 2010 were predicted to be 8 percent (compared to below 5 percent in the pre-liberalization years), the Bombay Stock Exchange Sensitive Index (Sensex) was over the sixteen-thousand mark by mid-2010 (in July 1990, it stood at one thousand points), and foreign investment went from $5.5 billion in 2005 to over $20 billion by 2009.2 These are not just indications of India’s economic strength, claim the party economic experts; they are proof that the nation has gone global and has become an equal participant and shareholder in the global quest for wealth.3 Based on such figures, the corporate power brokers, the media, and a majority of politicians have declared a new era: the era of the “New India.” This is a brand that is being marketed with great enthusiasm, supported by myriad advertising slogans. Even the Western media has endorsed this brand. In 2007, Newsweek in the United States and the Observer in Britain published favorable cover stories on the New India. Of course, the attempt to “sell” a version of India is not merely about promoting the so-called new economic achievements cited in the previous paragraph; it also reveals a class project, disguised as “development,” to eradicate all remains of the old. The “old” in a neoliberal world is characterized by any sign of a socialized economy, any sign of a substantial commitment to public expenditure or to the government regulation of business. Thus the branding of the New India is intended in large measure to assure foreign investors and financial organizers that India is “on the right track” and has jumped on the global corporate bandwagon. Quite simply, such national branding is the way for developing countries like India to become part of the “global community.” While propagating the New India brand, corporate and state interests also attempt to elide the grim realities—especially the poverty and inequities—that confront the vast majority of India’s people. The government is less inclined, for instance, to report that structural inequities at the national level are at critical levels. In 2009, India was ranked at 134 on the UN Human Development Index. Poor people in India

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3

are worse off than they are in the Palestinian Occupied Territories or in Namibia or Botswana.4 Female literacy is barely at 50 percent; rural poverty is over 30 percent (accounting for over 220 million people); and life expectancy at birth is between 65 and 67 years.5 More importantly, various inequities based on caste, class, and gender remain embedded in the social system, and the gap between the rich and the poor, even according to the Asian Development Bank, has widened to a threatening level. Liberalization, rather than easing the suffering of the poor, has contributed to a dramatic evisceration of measures to ease their lot. This evisceration includes a reduction in public subsidies, the forcible displacement of agrarian populations, the hiring of noncontract laborers, and the erosion of industrial jobs. Meanwhile, a small minority continues to amass huge wealth, and a middle class is offered a range of consumer goods even as its foothold on the class ladder becomes ever more precarious. One reason for this growing insecurity, of course, is that although real wages continue to stagnate, this middle class is encouraged to consume goods and services through increased access to loans and credit. Nevertheless, the consuming power of this credit-fueled class is significantly greater than it has been in the past, and along with a construction boom and an inf lux of foreign exchange, the growth rate has been artificially bloated. Continuing structural inequities, and an increasing fall in subsidies for the underprivileged, however, have created an India where the ironies of an incorporation into the global are only too evident: Pepsi and Coca-Cola vie for market share while over 21 percent of communicable diseases are linked to unsafe drinking water; cable television advertising a range of consumer products is widely available, but 44 percent of Indian households have no electricity.6 Medical tourism is a rising industry, attracting over one hundred thousand foreign visitors every year, yet “over 20 million Indians are pushed below the poverty line every year because of the effect of out-of-pocket spending on health care” (Deogaonkar). The contradictions accompanying India’s new global status are too many to recount, and they are the features of the New India that seldom form part of the brand image. The New Indian Subject This book, The New India: Citizenship, Subjectivity, and Economic Liberalization, focuses on this new, “liberalized” India during the sixteen-year period from June 1991, when the Congress Party officially

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initiated a policy of economic liberalization, to the spring of 2007, a specific moment of disruption in this celebratory narrative of the new: a protest at which fourteen villagers were killed in a police firing in the village of Nandigram in West Bengal while rallying against the land acquisition policy by the state government. Although the Nandigram incident mirrored a similar event in January 2006 (when 16 adivasis were killed in a police firing in Kalinganagar, Orissa) while resisting the forcible acquisition of their land for a Tata Steel plant, the former episode was distinctive because it took place under the aegis of the Left government in West Bengal, drawing outrage and condemnation from many of the ruling party’s traditional supporters. These years, however, are distinctive not merely because of the implementation of economic reforms and the multiple acts of resistance to these reforms but also because they were characterized by significant shifts in the political, social, and cultural landscape of the nation. Indeed, some might argue that in the sixty years since independence these years were the most transformative, with the exception of the enormous changes in the five to ten years following independence and partition.7 Major events of the period include the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December 1992, the Bombay blasts in March 1993, the atomic explosions of 1998, the increased militarization of Kashmir in the 1990s, the Kargil conf lict in 1999, the Gujarat massacres in 2002, the resounding electoral defeat of the BJP in 2004, the rise in Maoist insurrection movements in 2005–06, and the Nandigram uprising in January 2007. In this sixteen-year phase, conf licting ideologies of nation, diaspora, religion, capital, and consumerism collided and coalesced as the country tried to shape a new postcolonial identity. A central part of this struggle, I argue, involved an attempt by the state and the corporate media to construct a new Indian citizen, one who was integral to a larger effort to narrate a new, liberalized nation. Alongside, and in response to these hegemonic claims about a new Indian subject, various artists, activists, and ordinary Indians put forward alternative visions of an Indian subject. Of course, these cultural constructions of the subject must be seen in connection with the actual amendment of citizenship laws, such as the 2003 law to create an “Overseas Citizenship of India” (OCI) or the issuing of the Person of Indian Origin (PIO) card. The relationships between these two “forms” of citizenship are critical. For instance, the dilution of the juridical definition of the “national” citizen affects the cultural construction of the subject. It instills this cultural process with greater urgency and makes the desire to define Indianness more

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immediate; likewise, cultural constructions of the subject provide an alibi for the state’s attempt to solidify a variety of laws that reaffirm the transnational benefits of upper-class citizens and marginalize those at lower end of the class spectrum; the focus on the metropolitan subject in hegemonic texts, for example, allows the state to further silence and marginalize the rural worker. These relationships and contradictions mark the entire project of subject construction, and my work attempts to shed some light on the precise nature of these relationships and contradictions in particular cultural forms and political contexts and to understand the most significant negotiations and claims from multiple perspectives to frame this Indian subject. In part, my examination of contemporary cultural production is placed in the context of a continual, contestatory process of shaping a national imaginary and a national subject, and this reading highlights post-independence anxiety about the formation and legitimacy of the Indian nation-state. Furthermore, I argue that these constructions of the national have to be understood within the larger framework of global capital. The cultural narratives I have chosen to analyze—literary fiction and nonfiction, film, political advertisements, media images, and the performance of public space—are particularly illuminating, as they represent a range of expressions that are circulated in multiple venues and consumed by various audiences. By studying the ways in which the rituals and forms of this new Indian subject were produced, distributed, posed, and performed during this period—as a result of and in conjunction with the economic reforms that herald new ways of thinking about the nation—I work to trace the complex intersections between culture and political economy in the “new” India. Moreover, by examining the idea of a global Indian subject, I attempt to illuminate the intersections and divergences of the national and the global in the construction of this “new” nation. The New Indian Subject and Public Culture A starting point in my study, however, is to explain more precisely why these questions and concerns are often engaged most productively in the realm of culture.8 One argument for a close reading of cultural texts during this period is that under globalization, above all, the materiality of culture (culture as commodity) has been enhanced, which has made it especially fruitful to analyze cultural expressions as a means of understanding changing social relations. The terrain of culture offers

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immensely rich possibilities for the student of the New India. If the project of capital accumulation under liberalization is inevitably linked to existing and changing social structures, then culture is an arena in which this process of contestation and accommodation, ref lected in attempts to create a new Indian subject, continues to be central. I am persuaded by Raymond Williams’s still-relevant argument that “as government . . . increasingly rests for real power on a modern economic system, older social purposes become vestigial, and whether expressed or implied, the maintenance of the economic system becomes the main factual purpose of all social activity” (188). In Williams’s view, “[p]olitics and culture become deeply affected by this dominant pattern, and ways of thinking derived from the economic market . . . become increasingly evident” (188). Williams’s words are aptly suited to the ways in which culture and politics intersect with economic changes in India, particularly in an understanding of the conf luence of and conf lict between vestigial and modern modes of production. In the spirit of Williams’s emphasis on the economic and in an effort to resist recent moves in cultural studies that focus primarily on the distribution and consumption of culture and posit the immateriality of labor, I want to emphasize that culture is a product of labor and cannot be understood outside the context of the production process. Likewise, the politics of representation and cultural practices are intertwined in the dynamics of a class society, which relies on labor to produce those cultural commodities that are the object of my analysis. Specifically, in post-liberalization India, the boom in cultural expressions arises on the backs of the millions who are responsible for carrying the bricks that build a “shining” India. Even as I pay attention to the patterns of distribution and consumption of cultural commodities, and to the multiple representations of the new Indian subject, my analysis can be meaningful only if I am mindful of the ways in which the labor process is made invisible or elided in creating this subject. Consequently, my analysis is informed by a reading of the labor process as it is represented in texts, as well as by the stories of those who actually produce these texts (such as those displaced by the privatization of space, for instance). My examination of the new Indian subject focuses not on the juridical prescriptions regarding political citizenship, but rather on the political and cultural performance of citizenship—that is, how the citizen-subject is constituted through social relations, and how this subject comes into being through the public circulation of texts. My primary interest, then, is in this public, cultural idea of the subject. I uncover how various ideas of the subject are constructed, received, and

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7

negotiated in the everyday context of the social and economic life of Indians. My argument is that these constructions of the Indian subject as public texts cannot be understood merely as signifiers of social control or of resistance to such control but must also be seen as narratives that, to some extent, refuse to stay within the conceived boundaries of their producers (even though the production process—where labor is used and erased in the process of putting up a billboard or in producing a film—as I mentioned earlier, must itself be taken into account). As Fredric Jameson suggests, cultural works are characterized by the dialectic of containment and resistance, of reification and utopia. Jameson’s point is that consumers are not simply manipulated nor are they merely clever readers of texts, who can “see through” attempts to manipulate their desires and anxieties (“Reification”). This dialectic animates the process of reading texts and is particularly relevant for an understanding of the Indian “public,” especially as the New India remains fundamentally unstable, encompassing a myriad of social forces and political conf licts that leave the cultural text and the subject always in process. The narratives I analyze span a range of cultural production and are part of an array of texts that constitute public culture in the New India. However, at a time when cultural production is increasingly imbricated in transnational economic relations, public culture cannot be understood purely in a closed, national context but must be appraised within a global logic of circulating commodities. Thus, any notion of an “Indian” public culture must also include attention to issues of class, gender, and religion across both national and transnational contexts. The texts I analyze are all implicated in global structures of meaning, even if the target audience is often intended to be primarily a local one. A transnational view of culture informing my own has been put forward by Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge in the first chapter of Consuming Modernity: Public Culture in a South Asian World, “Public Modernity in India.” Appadurai and Breckenridge identify the term “public culture” as a “zone of public debate” (5). In their estimation, this “zone cannot be understood apart from the general processes of globalization”: the contestatory character of public culture has much to do with the tensions and contradictions between national sites and transnational cultural processes. These tensions generate arenas where other registers of culture encounter, interrogate, and contest one another in new and unexpected ways. . . . This zone of contestation

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The New India and mutual cannibalization—in which national, mass, and folk culture provide both mill and grist for one another—is at the very heart of public modernity in India. (5)

Here, Appadurai and Breckenridge identify the multiple and contestatory ways in which cultural forms come to life in India; however, given the lack of recent examples, and the number and variety of cultural forms and the many ways in which they emerge and interact, gaps necessarily remain in these writers’ work. They themselves acknowledge that they do not address “the major question of how the new visual fields [they] have discussed, the ‘nationalist realisms’ they often mediate and the new capabilities to consume, [have] interact[ed] with the emergence of the Hindu right in India in the past decade,” nor do they discuss “how the new forms of public modernity with which [they] are concerned interact with the present crisis of secularism in countries like India” (13). The authors also focus on a “new cosmopolitanism” that, for them, is linked primarily to their conclusion that “the imagination has emerged as a new force in social life, largely as a result of the spread of electronic media, in the context of rapid f lows of resources, images, and persons across national boundaries” (10–14). Categorizing the new cosmopolitanism principally in terms of consumption and the growth of the “imagination,” however, elides the political economy of cultural texts, restricting them to a modernity outside the logic of capital accumulation. Purpose and Methodology This book is in part intended to address some of the gaps in Appadurai and Breckenridge’s project and to further emphasize that culture is not only a contestatory site where many different texts collide but also an arena that is deeply intertwined in the political economy of the state. My reading of cultural narratives, then, is grounded in the notion that these narratives cannot be separated from the profound effects of economic reforms in the New India. Indeed, in some cases, the narratives are constructed precisely to manage these effects. Certainly, there have been recent works focusing on an analysis of cultural texts in the New India, such as William Mazzarella’s Shoveling Smoke: Advertising and Globalization in Contemporary India (2003) and Arvind Rajagopal’s Politics after Television: Hindu Nationalism and the Reshaping of the Public in India (2001), that connect their understanding of these texts to the

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9

context of economic reforms. Both writers scrutinize local cultural practices, analyzing them within the framework of larger shifts in the global economy. My analyses engage in a similar dialectical process and consistently link considerations of public modernity in the local context of the New India to the constraints and demands of global capital, not just to “transnational cultural processes.” Indeed, one important contribution of this book is to demonstrate the multiple ways in which questions surrounding modernity, secularism, fundamentalism, citizenship, and ideas about the public interact with the movement and control of capital and labor. My approach departs from the predominant postcolonial analyses of recent years, which are best represented by the following trends: an attention to a localized micro-politics where class analysis is just one more node of difference; an emphasis on the politics of deterritorialization, where the actions of scattered, decentered groups take precedence over ideas linked to collective action, class conf lict, and class struggle; a reassessment or refusal of the categories of wage labor and surplus value in favor of concepts such as “immaterial labor”; and, finally, a disinclination to regard global capital as a totality.9 The applications of these post-Marxist critical models often relegate questions of class and labor to the background, effectively depoliticizing the terrain of culture. I recognize, along with Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus, that “there are mediations, to be sure,” that prevent any transparent understanding of culture, “but there are (irreducibly) relations between ‘the economic’ and ‘the cultural,’ nevertheless, which are simultaneously multiplied and rendered more elusive as capital permeates more and more aspects of our existence” (5). It is these relations that I uncover, analyzing the construction of the new Indian subject, who resides at the intersection of these economic and cultural formations. Certainly, in the Indian context, capital has permeated “more and more aspects” of society, and because the New India remains a country seriously divided along class lines, many of the Marxist categories for an analysis of social relations that have been cast aside by a large segment of contemporary postcolonial scholars are particularly relevant. Marxist theories of capital accumulation and crisis, for instance, can illuminate an analysis of the New India. While I make class analysis central, a significant portion of my study focuses on issues of nation, gender, caste, and religion, to name a few, that complicate economic categories. Subject formation is not merely a ref lection of the antagonism between labor and capital, but at the same time constructions of the subject cannot be analyzed outside the framework of capitalist social relations. This methodological

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The New India

approach, if nothing else, “compels postcolonial studies to join the economic conversation” (Brennan, “The Economic” 111). My arguments and analyses in this book also complicate some of the more typical binaries that come up in discussions of contemporary India. For instance, even as I acknowledge the importance of the cultural and political questions raised by Appadurai and Breckenridge, I alter the focus of these questions—contesting the notion, for example, that there is a “crisis of secularism” and arguing instead that the Indian state, though the putative guarantor of secularism, has consistently interacted and continues to cooperate strategically with the forces of the Hindu right. Communalism and secularism, then, are not oppositional forces but are simultaneously at play in the dialectical process of political adjustment. As Achin Vanaik has argued, Hindu nationalism and communalism, which tend to be viewed as “completely antithetical to Indian democracy and nationhood,” in fact “can actually be supportive of democracy and nationhood in its own contradictory way” (Painful Transition 149). I would add to Vanaik’s insight that in the age of the New India, the circulation and accumulation of global capital are equally important factors in determining the ways in which we read the traditional communalism/secularism binary. Both categories are enmeshed in ideas related to the nation and to ways in which economic and political struggles are negotiated. Some of the texts that I examine ref lect and refract some of these struggles to contain and promote differing notions of religious and secular identities even as they defer or embrace the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation. I argue that the dominance of the religious text over the last sixteen years, instead of being a primary focus, should be seen as the supplementary text within the larger context of the increasing dominance of capital. Narratives that are coded in religious terms, then, may be concerned primarily with class conf lict and the management of that conf lict. However, I argue, too, that religious tensions cannot be wished away purely through an economic set of determinations. I show, for instance, how much of the fundamentalist, nationalist text in India is about a longing for a lost unity or a past “purity” that putatively existed before partition. The BJP’s attempt to create a new national (Hindu) subject can be read partially as an effort to rewrite the history of the subcontinent. For example, the BJP states as one of its primary positions that it rejects the “two-nation theory on the basis of which our Motherland was tragically partitioned in 1947” (Vision Document 2004).10 Partition, as that anxious trace, remains a factor that lies within the nationalist proclamations of the BJP. Similar claims and their corresponding

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11

reproductions can be seen in a range of Indian cultural narratives, as I demonstrate in later analyses. Taking into account such complex social formations and political intersections, the arguments and analyses in this book address the following questions, which I believe are vital to an understanding of recent attempts to narrate a new Indian subject in the realm of culture: how have constructions of the new Indian subject been deployed, commodified, distributed, and consumed in the age of late capital? Are the prevailing conceptual parameters of late capital and globalization adequate for our understanding of this new subject? How have the sometimes opposing texts of nation, religion, and capital acted as conf licting or contradictory agents for the construction of this subject? How do diverse cultural texts challenge, subvert, and accommodate the dominant subject-citizen model thrown up by capital, nation, and religion? How must we read the various longings for nation or for global “respect” attached to this subject across the fault lines of nation and diaspora? Since I examine diverse cultural forms, I believe my analyses highlight the tensions and nuances that are inevitably a part of imagining and narrating the “new” Indian subject. As I mentioned earlier, I attempt in my analyses to trace the tenuous dialectic between containment and resistance, reification and utopia, rather than merely highlighting dominant and resistant views of the subject. Consequently, in this book, I examine different cultural forms and enunciations of the new Indian subject, exploring the many ways in which cultural expressions challenge, collude with, and contest versions of the national subject. My effort here is not meant to suggest that there is some easy trajectory of meaning that, once uncovered, will reveal all of the many shades, or indeed the “authentic” character, of the new Indian subject. Nor am I suggesting that there is a “real” Indian subject that can be counterpoised against this constructed, new subject. Rather, I bring together political economy and culture in a serious and substantial way so as to provide a materialist reading of the Indian subject in the neoliberal age. What Jameson has said about the emergent moment of postmodernism as a historically specific instance is similarly relevant for the contemporary Indian subject. He views “[the] spatial peculiarities of postmodernism as symptoms and expressions of a new and historically original dilemma, one that involves our insertion as individual subjects into a multidimensional set of radically discontinuous realities, whose frames range from the still surviving spaces of bourgeois private life all the way to the unimaginable decentering of global capital

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The New India

itself ” (Postmodernism, 413). Jameson was, of course, alluding primarily to a Western subject, but in many ways the Indian subject in the age of liberalization is similarly confronted with a “new and historically original dilemma” (413). In the following chapters, then, I explore this dilemma, attempting to unravel the way culture and politics draw upon each other—sustain, enrich, and destabilize each other. I employ a dialectical materialist model suited to the complexity of such relationships. This is not merely an ideological gesture but a methodological practice that has roots in some of the finest works in the field of contemporary postcolonial studies (see previous endnote). The material context of the present informs my analysis of cultural texts. Jameson points out that “capitalism, and the modern age, is a period in which, with the extinction of the sacred and the ‘spiritual,’ the deep underlying materiality of all things has finally risen dripping and convulsive into the light of day; and it is clear that culture itself is one of those things whose fundamental materiality is now for us not merely evident but quite inescapable” (Postmodernism 67). A methodological approach that acknowledges this “fundamental materiality” can best highlight intersections between the political, the economic, and the cultural. “Culture,” then, is not an exclusive site on which fantastical imaginings of the nation and the new Indian subject are projected by a myriad of forces but a contested zone where the notion of culture itself is recast by the material. Who or What Is This New Indian Subject? The new Indian subject resists any absolute definitions, mirroring many of the attendant tensions over nation, capital, gender, caste, and class in the New India. While those people in favor of economic reforms seize on an upwardly mobile middle-class citizen as the exemplary subject, efforts to redefine and shape an alternative subject are also emerging from oppositional forces, such as the writers, artists, and activists that I examine in this book. Many of their efforts to pose a resistant subject attempt to position him or her outside the dominant lines of nation, class privilege, or religion. Also, all these attempts at subject construction are “new,” insofar as every political moment creates historically specific responses. Let me offer a couple of examples. An increasing factor in developing a national consumer subject is the NRI (non-resident Indian). Elite groups in the Indian diaspora, primarily in the US and the UK, have links to

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Introduction

13

dominant groups within India and have started playing a major role in national politics. Their presence and their interests are not dissimilar to those elite groups in India who advocate liberalization: those in the diaspora, too, desire an unfettered capitalism along with a reinforcement of so-called traditional values, represented by religion and nation. Because of their ability to harness capital and foreign exchange, these groups have a disproportionate access to political power. In 2003, the Indian government responded to NRIs’ increasing financial contributions and inf luence by passing a citizenship bill that offers a “Person of Indian Origin” status to citizens of specific countries, notably Australia, New Zealand, and nations in North America and Western Europe. This increasing prominence of the (Western) NRI subject, especially since the mid-1990s, has effectively blurred the inside/outside gap between nation and diaspora—both in cultural and in financial terms. Consequently, even though this elite subject is far removed from the realities of middle-class life, the dominant view of the new Indian subject, an idealized middle-class national citizen produced by the inf lux of capital, is often a ref lection of his (the subject is usually defined as male) successful diasporic cousin. Likewise, cultural representations of the NRI subject, particularly in Mumbai cinema, usually connect this subject to the homeland, which represents a site for unfulfilled longing (e.g., Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge, 1995) and a place of purity, untainted by Western values (e.g., Swades, 2004). India as a political entity and the Indian “national” are simultaneously liminal and fixed in these incarnations of “homeland.” The intersections of these sometimes competing and colluding narratives between class and religion, nation and diaspora are ref lected in the idea of the new Indian middle-class citizen. Another example of an emerging subjectivity is the effort to define a gendered subject. While representations of the new Indian woman are generally constructed by dominant forces to suggest an empowered, consuming middle-class subject, one who is also able to shine in her “traditional” roles as wife and mother, oppositional artists and feminist activists attempt to recuperate this subject as an active agent of her own history. Often this effort is constituted by struggles on multiple fronts. Perhaps the point can be illustrated brief ly by examining a range of responses to a beauty pageant in Bangalore in 1996. A coalition of activists consisting of intellectuals, writers, and artists found themselves articulating a position that was opposed to both the corporate organizers of the pageant, who saw women merely as objects for consumption and as potential customers, and the right-wing Hindu organization

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The New India

(Vishwa Hindu Parishad) that decried the corruption of Indian womanhood it viewed as inherent in the pageant. These activists presented themselves as agents of change, as advocates for women’s rights. In formulating their oppositional position to both the corporate organizers and the religious organization, the activists were trying to bring attention to the multiple, continuing forms of gender oppression, especially to various forms of violence against women, that were entirely outside the interests of either of these groups. The activists were also speaking out against the state government’s unprincipled collaboration with the organizers of the pageant, the Amitabh Bachchan Corporation. They argued that the pageant was primarily intended to allow multinational corporations to enter the Indian market. Indeed, some of the companies that were sponsoring the pageant were directly supported by the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.11 The struggles over the varying views of the new Indian woman, in this instance, are another example of the tensions that erupt along the multiple fault lines of capital, nation, and religion as the new Indian subject is shaped. As I have implied above, the new Indian subject has to be read within the framework of these intersecting forces. My study, then, is not limited to a fixed idea of “India” but takes into account the context of the totality of the movement of global capital. An attention to the effects of transnational capital as a nexus of social relations is particularly important in a country where traditional interactions within communities and between classes are rapidly changing following the increased entrance of unregulated capital. Since the state has promoted and accelerated economic reforms, it has set in motion a series of changes that have affected social relations. Needless to say, attempts to construct a consumer, global subject are connected to these changing social relations. The New Indian Subject and the Indian Polity I read these constructions of the new Indian subject not only within the context of political economy but also with an attention to the Indian polity. I argue that ongoing efforts to shape a new Indian subject highlight continuing postcolonial anxiety about identity and nation. Certainly, these attempts and these concerns have existed since independence, but my study demonstrates the complex and distinct ways in which the Indian ruling classes are negotiating the intersections of nation, capital, and religion in the age of liberalization. Constructing the New India and narrating the new Indian does not merely consist

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Introduction

15

in the enactment of laws but involves a “performance.” Anna Tsing has argued in the context of the Indonesian example that performance is “simultaneously economic performance and dramatic performance. . . . The dependence on spectacle is . . . a regular feature of the search for financial capital. . . . [P]rofit must be imagined before it can be extracted” (118). Yet, wherever it occurs, this performance, this reimagining, cannot be enacted, sustained, nor asserted with any degree of autonomy or control. In the last fifteen years, dramatic performance to create a “shining” new India has existed in congruence with economic reforms, but many of India’s citizens have clearly remained unconvinced by these efforts.12 And any attempt to understand versions of the new Indian subject must consider the situations and resistant acts of those citizens on the margins of this discourse, the invisible “others” who constitute the greater portion of the Indian population. Several forms of resistance to the state have persisted, and most are intended to address social inequities that are a direct result of these reforms. The participants in these movements are active political subjects who are entirely outside the New India brand (landless farmers from Chengara in Kerala to Nandigram in West Bengal, displaced industrial workers, urban street vendors, adivasis [tribal groups], and political resistance groups such as the Maoists).13 There are, of course, other forms of resistance to the state, such as acts of upper-caste violence, most prominently displayed in 1990 in response to the proposed government policies of reserving jobs and university positions for Dalits and Other Backward Classes (OBCs), and while the scale of those protests has not been replicated, upper-caste violence, especially in rural areas, remains a permanent source of terror for Dalits and OBCs. These actions, however, are about maintaining caste and class interests rather than about forcing the state to meet its obligations to its citizens.14 What I am suggesting is that, on the one hand, the nature of the economic reforms coupled with attempts by the state to delineate a specific kind of new India and new Indian have generated various forms of resistance. Quite simply, disinvestment in agriculture, the erosion of government programs, the lack of real employment, and the increase in income inequality have found expression in the intensification of social tensions and conf licts. On the other hand, these acts of resistance have had a direct effect on the efforts by the state and the proponents of the New India brand to construct a new Indian subject. Thus I am arguing that class-based insurgencies have to be part of our framework for understanding the ways in which citizenship, nation, and state are being

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The New India

redefined and that, likewise, these insurgencies must be seen in light of the state’s attempt to enact economic and dramatic performance. Both the BJP and the Congress Party have tried to minimize these disruptions and marginalize those who are outside the New India brand by constructing a new Indian subject based on an idealized middle-class identity: the parties manage class dissent by selling consumerism along with Hindu nationalism to the middle classes; meanwhile, the lower classes are subjugated by hostile and sometimes violent policies targeted at the poor and placated by a coded assimilation into the national project via religion. This strategy was used with great effectiveness by the BJP in the mid-1990s. As I demonstrate in chapter 2, the party’s construction of this new Indian subject reveals that economic liberalization, privatization, fundamentalism, and nationalism are converging and contesting texts, not contradictory ones. Nation and religion, in this instance, are part of an ongoing dialectic that counters and corresponds with the uncritical celebration of capitalism, globalism, and liberalization, supplementing and contradicting these forces.15 What is especially important to mention here, however, is that the ruling party or the corporate media, because of ongoing political conf licts, cannot completely manage the various circulating discourses about nation, faith, or capital, and I would suggest that, as a result, ambiguity and tension surface in the way the new Indian subject is posed in dominant cultural narratives. The narratives I examine in chapter 2 reveal hegemonic attempts to manage the crisis of statehood and impose a fixity of nation and subject, a fixity that is withheld by multiple, supplementary cultural articulations. Meanwhile, what we see ref lected in oppositional cultural narratives such as Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land or Deepa Mehta’s Fire are anxious disclaimers about the Indian subjects’ cultural identity and purity. In my discussion of these and other texts in chapters 3 and 4, I argue that these so-called resistant narratives, in their attempt to position an oppositional cosmopolitan or secular subject in the national project, often reinsert these subjects into the same global capitalist process that is inextricably linked to fundamentalism and nationalism in the first place. This reinsertion often holds true whether this oppositional subject is based on discourses connected to a globalized notion of gendered human rights and justice or to an earlier, Nehruvian secular socialism. In the case of the narratives that I examine in chapters 3 and 4, calls for equality, justice, and individual rights, embodied in the figures of the Indian subject, need to be seen in the light of their connection to the dictates of the market economy. The concept of rights, I would argue,

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Introduction

17

is constantly shifting within different economic moments and interests; assertions of individuality, particularly, have to be measured against their positions in relation to the interests of the market. For instance, a middle-class citizens’ “rights” group appealing on environmental and hygienic grounds for the demolition of an urban slum is also impeding the rights of the poor, their right to survive. What I am suggesting, then, is that cultural narratives about nation, religion, and globalism have to be read as occupying an interstitial space between competing, but not necessarily antagonistic, ideologies. As all of the analyses later in the book suggest, the text of global capital inevitably intrudes even as efforts to erase or manage it become more marked. Placing the New India in a Global Context Thus the purity of the nation space, be it religious or cultural, often serves not as an end in itself but as a ref lection of the ironic attempt to garner national pride in the service of global capital. A central ideological marker of the brand image “New India,” therefore, is a trumpeting of the importance of the global, especially a promotion of India’s willing incorporation into the global capitalist market. Consequently, in order to comprehend the economic rationale for India’s “going global,” and the ideological logic of constructing a global Indian subject, this study situates economic “reforms” within the dynamics of late capital. After all, liberalization, as articulated by the ruling parties in India, has not taken place in a vacuum. The economic policies adopted by India’s ruling class are closely connected to adjustments in global capital under the aegis of f lexible accumulation, as described by David Harvey. Harvey argues that one of the features of the current age is a “continuation and proliferation of accumulation practices which Marx had treated as ‘primitive’ or ‘original’ during the rise of capitalism” (Spaces of Global Capitalism 43). These elements would include, among other things, “the commodification and privatization of land and the forceful expulsion of peasant populations,” the “conversion of various forms of property rights (common, collective, state, etc.) into exclusive property rights,” the “monetization of exchange and taxation,” and the “use of the credit system as a radical means of accumulation by dispossession” (Spaces of Global Capitalism 43). In the case of India, all of these elements are in place as the state has colluded with the enforcers of international monetary organizations, such as the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank, to pave the way for an unregulated and extended

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The New India

exploitation of the country’s resources. The struggle to create an Indian subject thus has to be read in the context of this global totality. For the elite class, both in India and abroad, India’s rise as a world power is inevitably linked to its thorough assimilation into the global capitalist system. One form of subjectivity is defined by privileged membership in the global class system. Meanwhile, for a majority of Indians who are removed from the benefits of liberalization, subjectivity evolves from a combination of assimilation, adaptation, and resistance to this global neoliberal system. Beginning in the mid-1990s with the rise in cable television, the government and its corporate backers have f looded the media with images and documents in favor of liberalization. Their arguments are very much in keeping with the general neoliberal “development” dogmas: that the so-called discipline of the market would replace state corruption and nepotism while increasing efficiency; that the accumulation of wealth and the rising growth rate would gradually eliminate poverty; that India’s position in the world market would provide advantages that would benefit the entire population; and that the inf lux of foreign investment would create jobs.16 These propositions have been linked to the creation of a privatized, global subject who would be the beneficiary of this New India. The so-called discipline of the market, however, has also ensured the exploitation and disenfranchisement of various other citizens. Market discipline, for instance, would dictate that all state regulations and controls be abolished in favor of a deregulated economy; that private capital be given access to all areas of the economy and trade; that employers have the power to hire and fire workers at will; and that trade and currency exchange rules be set up by owners and politicians. These policies have further marginalized those people (farmers and industrial workers, for instance) who were already on the margins of the economy and whose interests are irrelevant to the global neoliberal logic. Subjectivity thus has to be read within the context of existing regimes of capital accumulation, and any study of cultural texts in this environment of capitalist excess must likewise take into account the text’s position as global commodity. So-called Indian films and novels, for instance, circulate in the context of the enormous reach of today’s global media. Indian writers such as Vikram Seth attain huge contracts from Western publishing houses; Indian popular cinema is reaching a far wider audience than it ever did before; and the Indian diaspora is in some ways determining how “Indian” culture gets produced and circulated in the global context. These global factors are particularly

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Introduction

19

relevant in our understanding of the new Indian subject since the construction of this subject is imbricated in global circuits of meaning. Overview of the Argument Chapter 1 focuses on a precise examination of the various contexts of the economic reforms in “the New India.” I explore the many meanings of the New India during a sixteen-year period, 1991 to 2007, and investigate how the new Indian citizen has been constructed during this time. This discussion not only grounds my later evaluations of the creative and critical spaces between opposition, celebration, and assimilation but also informs my estimates of the prospects for resistance to hegemonic claims for nationhood and liberalization and prepares the reader for specific analyses of the new Indian subject in cultural texts. In chapter 2, I explore the construction of the most common of these new Indian citizens, the consumer subject. In this incarnation, the citizen is constructed both as an individual who has the choice to consume within the terms of the free market economy and as a national subject—an heir to a glorious cultural tradition. Thus, this citizen is connected to the global economy but is also rooted in the idea of the national. In this chapter, I examine the Vision Document 2004 put out by the then-ruling party, the BJP, in anticipation of the 2004 general elections. By scrutinizing the dominant narratives of homeland, progress, Hindutva, and national security, which were vital to the BJP’s imagining of the nation, I highlight the document’s attempt to contain the crisis of the contesting ideologies of nation, capital, and faith. Similar tensions surface in contemporary advertising, and I examine selected images over five years (spanning the rule of two different political parties), images that reveal unceasing attempts to unite globalism, consumerism, and nationalism. As I focus on the construction of the modern, “new” Indian subject, I show that in an effort to elide the contradictions of capital, advertisers resort to imaginings of India that paradoxically lay bare these very same contradictions and highlight the fragmented, contingent nature of this subject. Of particular interest are the ways in which corporations and the state borrow images from each other to construct this national, consuming subject. Chapter 3 examines representations of the cosmopolitan subject, a potentially liberatory figure who resists the designation of the subject as consumer by rooting his or her identity in a humanist tradition marked

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The New India

by collaboration, accommodation, and convergence. This subject, in direct opposition to nativist calls by fundamentalists and nationalists, “transcends” the narrow limitations of nation, religion, and space and is captured most effectively in the work of one of India’s foremost writers in English, Amitav Ghosh, especially in an early text, In an Antique Land (1991), and a more recent one, The Hungry Tide (2004). However, as I argue in the chapter, the supposedly oppositional subjects that Ghosh constructs are also characterized by alliances to a romantic cosmopolitan project that is inevitably co-opted by the global reach of capital. Ghosh cannot escape the historical reach of capital, even as he struggles to posit a concerted form of resistance to the current incarnations of globalization. In a sense, neither he nor his characters can contain the crisis of late capitalism. Their notions of agency, historicity, and nation, while challenging the neoliberal vision of the “New” India, participate in imaginings that are fantastical and, in the end, complementary to the forces they oppose. Ghosh’s work, though, serves as an example of a creative engagement with the contradictory forces unleashed by globalization, and it provides an important forum for considering the possibilities for an alternative civic identity in the New India. Chapter 4 also analyzes attempts to pose subjects in opposition to corporate and state constructions of the new Indian. In this case, I examine the female characters constructed by three feminist diasporic filmmakers (Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta, and Mira Nair). The gendered subject they construct can, in their view, forge a new gendered identity on her own terms. I look at their films’ depictions of class, gender, nation, and feminist agency within the context of the politics of uneven development and at the implications of such depictions for the transnational circulation of culture. While the films celebrate a liberal feminism, I argue that they inevitably collude with the forces of global capital: the filmmakers construct a version of a “liberated” Indian female subject who is caught between performing as a halfarticulated nationalist agent—signifying loss—and acting as a diasporic individual whose emancipatory desires are governed by the terms of consumer capitalism. Chapter 5 examines a different formulation of an oppositional subject from either the diasporic films or Ghosh’s narratives, exploring the quotidian resistance activities and commercial practices of a group of market vendors in Kolkata.17 These vendors, resistant subjects, are in the process of being displaced from a civic market that has existed for many decades in South Kolkata. Private developers have purchased the property on which the market is located, and, aided by the state

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Introduction

21

government, they are building a shopping mall to cater to the city’s middle and elite classes. This chapter examines the politics of dispossession that characterize this transformation, a process that is symptomatic of much larger, even seismic, changes in the social landscape of the city. As I examine the ruling government’s investment in particular forms of symbolic and spectacular capital, I expose the rituals of consumption that are creating both a new type of civic space and new notions of citizenship. I also provide an alternate view of citizenship and civic space by analyzing testimonies from the market vendors who have struggled to maintain their livelihood. In an afterword I brief ly address the immediate consequences of the Congress Party’s win in the May 2009 elections and the relative eclipse of the BJP and parties on the left. I consider how the new Indian subject may evolve in the midst of a triumphal call to accelerate “reforms,” and I comment on the continuing destruction of civic space in Kolkata as both a symbol of a larger disruption in the New India as well as a catalyst for resistance.

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CH A P T E R

ON E

Going Global: Texts and Contexts in the New India

This book is rooted in the claim that culture is a significant site for negotiations about social relations, and that it is only through an acknowledgment of the reach and function of capital, and an understanding of its ability to accommodate and adjust to changing economic conditions, that we can develop a more politically effective form of cultural analysis. In my introduction, I also suggest that the analysis of the constitution of subjectivity or citizenship is a particularly fruitful way of studying the intersections of capital and culture in the New India. These insights govern my discussion in this chapter—and in the rest of the book—of contemporary cultural production and subject formation in India. In this chapter, I examine the specific social and economic conditions that have prevailed in the New India, with its rapid incorporation into the global capitalist economy, and I outline what I believe are the primary issues to consider when examining cultural forms and subject formation in the New India: class, nation, secularism, crisis, and the geography of underdevelopment. These issues inform the analyses of cultural texts in the rest of the book, analyses that weave together the texts of the national and the global, the cultural and the economic. In this chapter, I also demonstrate the connections between these issues, clarifying the contradictions and negotiations that are immanent to any social formation. I pay special attention to one contradiction in the social formation, which is the emphasis on the “new” in subject formation. I explore how the implications of representing and constructing the new Indian subject within the context of a larger global transmission of culture can help us understand the fetishization of the

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new in the neoliberal imaginary. Expanding on this point, I argue that the repetition of newness, as designated in the brand “New India,” is ever present and rhetorically deployed to justify the class project of liberalization. However, as I demonstrate in my analysis of the “new,” the simultaneous erasure and affirmation of a competing myth of the “old” unsettles hegemonic constructions of the nation and the subject, and attention to these processes of erasure, affirmation, and disruption illuminates constructions of subjectivity. Before I discuss any of these issues in detail or even offer specifics about the social and economic conditions prevailing in the New India, let me first clarify why any study of culture has to be woven into an understanding of class politics and economic formations— and note brief ly that postcolonial analyses of specifically Indian cultural forms have neglected to include sufficient attention to political economy.1 Anjan Chakrabarti and Stephen Cullenburg are even more forthright in their criticism. In the conclusion to their study on transition and development in India, they point out that “postcolonial studies are seriously aff licted by the drawback of currently being restricted to the realm of culture.” The “space of the economic,” they claim, “has rarely been touched in this literature.” According to these writers, this is an “enormous gap that needs to be filled, especially against the background of the present situation of the deepening process of globalization” (287). They point to important questions that remain unanswered in their study: “What does the penetration of international capital do to a country’s class structure? In what ways does it change the combined and uneven existence of class structures?” Equally important, they suggest, is this question: “In what way are [the] changes in the financial structures (as is apparently taking place in India due to the liberalization policies) likely to affect the class structure in question?” (287–88). Chakrabarti and Cullenburg’s questions about class structure are a fundamental point of entry into my analysis of cultural texts. That means not only acknowledging that cultural analysis is incomplete outside the purview of these structural issues, it also means recognizing that the cultural performance of citizenship brings to the surface crucial, contested class issues in contemporary India, helping us address some of these neglected questions. In short, culture is a potentially rich site for analysis precisely because class processes and conf licts are being negotiated in multiple ways on this terrain. For instance, the cultural interpellation of the “global” through advertisements is one way to see how “the combined and uneven existence of class structures” is changing as a result of liberalization (see my discussion in Chapter 2).

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Of course, understanding class identity within the context of “the combined and uneven existence of class structures” is complicated by the contradictory nature of class identity under neoliberal capitalism. Jean and John Comaroff ’s characterization of these “experiential” contradictions is particularly helpful: the fact that it [capitalism] appears both to include and to marginalize in unanticipated ways; to produce desire and expectation on a global scale, yet to decrease the certainty of work or the security of persons; to magnify class differences but to undercut class consciousness; above all, to offer up vast, almost instantaneous riches to those who master its spectral technologies—and, simultaneously, to threaten the very existence of those who do not. (8)2 In addition to exacerbating these particularly class-based differences, “The emergence of consumption as a privileged site for the fabrication of self and society, of culture and identity, is closely tied to the changing status of work under contemporary conditions” (Comaroff and Comaroff 9). Deemphasizing labor or the realm of production and the concomitant emphasis on consumption is a defining element of hegemonic constructions of citizenship, and the focus on consumption “intensif[ies] the abstractions inherent in capital itself: to separate labor power from its human context, to replace society with the market, to build a universe out of aggregated transactions” (Comaroff and Comaroff 14). This increasing tendency for capital to reify social relations separates the economic text from the sphere of class struggle. For instance, policy makers in India declare, economic transformations are not a concerted attempt to regularize specific ways to accumulate and distribute wealth, but a result of a country’s need to compete with global forces, to earn global respect, and to lift the Indian people out of poverty. An important way to naturalize this class project is to construct new notions of citizenship, and the struggles to define a citizen aligned to these interests thus become central in the battle for constructing a new national imaginary. Many of these struggles, of course, take place on the political and juridical plain. Rules regarding citizenship, questions about minority rights, and laws concerning public lands and taxation rates are an integral part of circumscribing citizenship. Indeed, these regulatory measures are as much about creating a “legitimate” citizen as they are about excluding, categorizing, and dispossessing those who are deliberately left out of the national narrative. However, establishing citizenship is,

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of course, not merely a juridical enactment; many of the struggles to affirm a national identity take place in the domain of culture, an arena of contested ideas, which ref lects the unsettled nature of real economic “reforms.” After all, the cultural sphere is never entirely under the control of one reigning ideology; instead, it is a sphere characterized by ferment and the unresolved and the oppositional. By paying attention to this sphere of dissent and affirmation in India, a complex picture of the New India and the new Indian subject emerges. It is also instructive to remember Antonio Gramsci’s argument that considerations about the “terrain of culture” need to be connected to an understanding of the structural framework of civil society. Civil society, in Gramsci’s estimation, is the realm in which a social group exercises political, cultural, and social hegemony and the means by which the economy is regulated. Although Gramsci differentiates between civil society and political society wherein laws and state control are enacted, he maintains that the lines between the two are always blurred. This insight is important to us because we can look at cultural narratives not only as a powerful element of civil society, but also as involved in the process of regulating economies, justifying economic reforms, and attempting to resolve social and economic contradictions. In the case of neoliberal India, where local economies have suddenly been transformed by an inf lux of money and products, cultural narratives play a formative role in translating these changes. Metropolitan areas, especially, have seen changes that have been quite rapid (for example, the proliferation of Western-style shopping malls and suburban housing complexes). This new, consumer society is represented in images and narratives, especially visible in billboard and print advertising that f launt the advantages of liberalization. The corporate media, because of its allegiance to the politics of liberalization, has become a primary source for the circulation of these images. However, these texts are circulating in an economy of signs that makes these images fundamentally unstable. In a country such as India, where there are vastly disparate sources, avenues, and audiences for these messages, it is difficult to establish any continuity between the image itself and the various meanings it generates. Thus civil society, as Gramsci saw it, was also a site for resistance, a point from which notions of citizenship, for instance, may be recast or reformed (for a detailed, contextualized discussion of selected pro-liberalization narratives in the New India, see chapter 2). In order to comprehend the trajectory of the new Indian citizen as she or he begins to take shape, it is necessary to retrace a few of the

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political developments that frame the construction of this subject. This subject comes into being at a time when notions about caste, class, national and religious identity are particularly in f lux. To understand this new Indian subject and forms of resistance to it, one must consider the context of the rise of Hindu nationalism; thus, a significant portion of my discussion in this chapter will focus on the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) and its use of public culture to posit a particular national identity and subject. The narratives generated by this party have been written large upon the national landscape over the last twenty years. Indeed, their inf luence, arguably beginning with the destruction of the Babri Mosque in December 1992, continuing up to the BJP’s election defeat in 2004, spans almost the entire length of my study. The Hindu nationalists’ tale, identified as Hindutva, is a classic example of a cultural narrative that attempts to reintegrate or reimagine the national formation and the national subject. This is not the place to trace the historical origins of Hindutva and the changes and shifts in its expressions over the last twenty years, but suffice it to say, in the words of Thomas Hansen, that Hindu nationalism has “emerged and taken shape neither in the political system as such nor in the religious field, but in the broader realm of what we may call public culture” (4). Hansen argues that the BJP desires “to transform Indian public culture into a sovereign, disciplined national culture rooted in what is claimed to be a superior ancient Hindu past, and to impose a corporatist and disciplined social and political organization upon society” (4). This idea of national culture is tied to an implied threat from the Other, usually manifested in terms of religious identity, and a resolute faith in liberalization and “progress.” The heroic subject of this narrative is a Hindu, upper-caste male who is able to preserve India’s cultural heritage while at the same time increase the nation’s standing in the world. The emphasis on national culture is a particularly important part of the BJP platform and was in evidence in Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee’s frequent invocation of Hindutva. In a speech in 2003, soon after the electoral victory in Gujarat, Vajpayee maintained that Hindutva presented a viraat darshan (an all-encompassing view of human life).3 He claimed that “Hindutva is liberal, liberating, and brooks no illwill, hatred or violence among different communities on any ground.” According to Vajpayee, Hindutva was “that which makes us capable of meeting the challenges of the modern world, not one that is stuck in the past; that which is reform-minded” (“Hindutva” 6). In this speech, Vajpayee deployed that dual potential of national culture: Hindutva

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invokes the past but embraces reform and progress—tradition and liberalization in wonderful harmony! Likewise, the Hindutva subject must also be a syncretic combination of the forces of cultural tradition and economic progress. It is no coincidence, then, to see Vajpayee’s religio-nationalist rhetoric echoed by the captains of industry, whose allegiances to the project of liberalization are far more overt. Consider Mukesh Ambani, chairman of Reliance Industries, the largest industrial conglomerate in India, commenting on the economic future of India at roughly the same time as Vajpayee’s speech: “Countries have to wake up to the new challenges brought about by full and ubiquitous connectivity. This requires an acceptance of new forms of citizenship.” For Ambani, the requirements of global capital combine seamlessly with the claims of territorial nationalism: “From outsourcing and strategic alliances in business to fighting communicable diseases and terrorism across borders, partnership will be a way of life in a globally networked society” (124). Both disease and terrorism are presented as cross-cultural threats to the nation (note the emphasis on borders), whereas business alliances and the outsourcing of labor, both transcending the national space, are acceptable because they are encoded in the financial logic of late capital. Ambani’s investment in this system is left in no doubt as he expresses hopes that the government will “fully unshackle economic activity from the chains of excessive regulation” (124). The new can be born only by a recantation of the old, a topic that I will discuss in greater length later in this chapter. It is tempting to assume that Vajpayee and Ambani hired the same writers, so closely are their ideas linked, but fundamentally they are connected by their attempt to reimagine India as a resurgent nation and the Indian subject as embracing a new code of citizenship. The claims for nation, capital, and religion are interrelated in their comments, and their calls for a new form of citizenship, not coincidentally, converge with the larger goals of liberalization. The authoritarianism implicit in these messages also emerges: citizens must not be stuck to the past, and they must accept new forms of citizenship. No alternatives are possible. In these leaders’ estimation, civic identity cannot account for difference; it is an identity that must bend to the homogeneous logic of the global. As I have argued, this battle to establish a certain kind of subject is not just being fought on the economic plane, where real acts of legislation and public policy change are transforming the lives of India’s citizens. It is also being staged in the cultural arena, which, in the age

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of increased media inf luence, has become an important site for narrating this subject as well. Thus Vajpayee and Ambani, while ref lecting on the changing national formation and the national subject, are also commenting on the role of the public sphere as the site for these changes. Their designation of public culture, however, is severely limited and does not embrace the complexity of that concept or the multiple conjunctures that shape it. Indeed, the sphere of public culture consists of manifold forms of textual production and consumption. It is also a sphere that accommodates varying forms of resistance and consent in everyday life. Furthermore, in an age of accelerated cultural production and transmission, there are also frequent collusions and redefinitions of what is seen as popular and elite culture, as well as a re-evaluation and a realignment of the categories of the “dominant,” the “residual,” and the “emergent” (Raymond Williams’s terms). Let us now cast our eyes over one of the conf licts fundamental in determining the ways in which battles over the new Indian subject are being shaped. The New India: Competing Myths India’s assimilation into the neoliberal global model has acquired a distinctive brand identity: the New India. Along with this designation comes the ideal citizen for this neoliberal nation: the new Indian. These terms announcing arrival, rupture, and an entrepreneurial energy are increasingly being naturalized in the public sphere. In order to understand the complexity of this process, it is necessary to ref lect on the evolution and deployment of the so-called “new.” How does this newness cast its magical gleam across the Indian landscape? Apparently, a first step is to create a new imaginary consisting of phantasmic images and utopian dreams, linked to a globalized world of privatized comfort, luxurious ease, and seemingly endless opportunities, especially in the urban areas where the majority of the wealthy reside. Then the commodity is enshrined as the symbol of hope, radiating its image from the various billboards that are an inextricable part of the cityscape. The local melts into the global as the allure of commodities evidently brings the previously unattainable glamour of the Western world closer, shrinking the gap between the real and the imaginary. Finally, glittering urban malls and department stores, protected by private security guards, offer the world of commodities even as they seal off millions who live in the very same city.

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And no brand is complete without the element of promise. When the privileged classes appear in their cars, anxious to purchase those products that proclaim—finally—that India has arrived, that the new India is on the march, we see the fulfillment of the promise of “progress.” Affirming this belief are not just the goods on the shelves, but the omnipresent slogans heralding a new India: “India Poised,” “the New India,” and “Brand India.” The national label: insubstantial, insufficient, imprecise, and yet all the more alluring precisely because of its insubstantiality. We must act, we must “do,” says one newspaper advertisement. According to the creators of this slogan, the word “do” in the advertisement is part of the larger word “dominate.” India is poised, declares the Times of India (Bose). Poised for what? one wonders. Amitabh Bachchan, the national film icon, and one of the best-selling brands in India, proclaims in an advertisement for that same newspaper that there are two Indias, one “straining at the leash,” while the other is the leash. Implicit in the celebrations of the new are the condemnations of the so-called old. This shadow of the old India, which symbolizes the ever-deferred promise of wealth and global respect, is countered with the new India, a neoliberal fantasy of wealth and opportunity. This duality of the old and the new is an important ideological trope employed by advocates of neoliberalism. In order to establish the famous point made by Thatcher (that “there is no alternative” to neoliberal capitalism), a necessary accompaniment of the new economic order is to link the “old” to an antiquated and outdated economic system. What constitutes the old, according to the lords of liberalization, in a postcolonial economy such as India’s? On the one hand, any institution or law, such as a regulatory commission or a system of tariffs, that is seen as a barrier to the accumulation of wealth and the free f low of international capital; on the other, the specter of workers’ and agricultural laborers’ rights, or public investment or expenditure. Over the last twenty years, an unprecedented combination of dispossession, legislation, and intimidation has been set in motion to abolish these remnants of the “old.” This destructive element of the New India is seldom acknowledged in the Western media. Instead, we are constantly introduced to the wonders of the New India. For instance, only rarely does an article such as “The Myth of the New India,” by Indian journalist and writer Pankaj Mishra, appear in the New York Times. In this piece, Mishra argues that the “increasingly common, business-centric view of India suppresses more facts than it reveals.” According to Mishra, despite India’s status as an emergent “world leader in information technology

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and business outsourcing,” its “$728 per capita gross domestic product is just slightly higher than that of sub-Saharan Africa” and “nearly 380 million Indians still live on less than a dollar a day.” These contrasts are unremarkable for almost anyone who has studied the effects of liberalization in India over the last twenty years. What is surprising is to see such open skepticism on the pages of a newspaper that is an unabashed propaganda machine for neoliberalism. Of course, Mishra’s questioning of the myth of the New India is juxtaposed with the seemingly endless columns written by the New York Times’ resident New India advocate, Thomas Friedman, for whom India is the shining jewel in the neoliberal crown.4 Certainly the Friedman line has become the most common position echoed in different sections of the mainstream press since the Indian government’s deregulation of the economy in the early 1990s. A more recent example of the familiar binary of the old and the new can be seen in a book-length study of India, In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India by Edward Luce.5 Luce, a British journalist who headed the Financial Times office in New Delhi, cannot get beyond the usual dichotomies that characterize India’s image in the West. The book cover, for instance, features a Rajasthani man in an orange turban speaking on a cell phone. In the background looms the face of a camel. Deploying a tired metaphor for the convergence of the traditional and the modern, Luce shows himself at home with this binary of the old and the new. Unlike the BJP’s use of the old, such as invoking tradition as a source of strength to bolster what may appear to be a mere acquiescence to modernity and the new, Luce relies on familiar Orientalist notions. In a chapter titled “Global and Medieval,” he evokes the “schizophrenia” of the “modern and booming service sector” alongside the “unending vista of rural India, of yoked bullocks plowing the fields in the same manner they have for three thousand years” (25). For Luce, the precolonial India that encompassed many global cultures and established many linkages does not exist. The three-thousand-year-old India, by definition, is not “global.” For Luce, what makes India global now is the statistic that in 2000 there were three million mobile phone users, while in 2005 two and a half million users were being added each month (35). He quotes Nandan Nilekani, the CEO of Infosys, approvingly: “ ‘We cannot modernize the Indian economy—or Indian society—unless we urbanize more rapidly and urbanize better than we have done so far’ ” (57). For Luce, modernity, urbanization, and progress are all untainted ends, not requiring any qualifications. There is apparently no need to question the wisdom

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or the ethics of an economic policy that is more invested in creating a market for cars and cellular phones for 25 percent of its population than in providing cheap fertilizers and drinking water for the vast majority of its citizens who live in rural areas. Luce, like most advocates of neoliberal policies, is convinced that the state is the source of most of India’s problems and that it further exacerbates divisions based on caste, class, or religion; private enterprise, on the other hand, is “subject to global competition,” and companies “are increasingly likely to select their employees on the basis of merit and not blood ties” (335). “The reforms of 1991 have benefited India,” concludes Luce (335). Further “progress” lies in opening up India’s banking and insurance industries to foreign capital. India, after all, “has nothing to fear from further financial liberalization” (340). India must “reform its labor laws” (340), since, for Luce, a trade union “speaks for its members, not for the poor” (341). All of these laws and collectives are remnants of the old and thus must be removed to make way for the new. Luce forwards the ideological work of neoliberalism, trumpeting the party line that reforms are ultimately meant to be for the good of the poor. Perhaps it is just economic chance that so few have acquired such enormous wealth in the process of improving the lot of the poor. Luce is not hesitant to seek solutions in the familiar call to privatize public resources: “both water and power should be priced simply and fairly. Many Indians still believe water and electricity should be provided for free or a nominal cost. But somebody, somewhere always pays” (343). A “simple” argument for privatization of essential resources! In a neoliberal world, no rights are guaranteed, especially for the poor. Everyone must pay! Of course, those who pay are typically those who are least able to pay or those who have little access to resources. Luce and Friedman are fairly typical representatives of Western views of the New India, and this desire to position India within a larger global framework of “progress” on the part of the American media reached its peak during U.S. President George W. Bush’s March 2006 visit to India. While some of the leaders’ conversations were about the proposed nuclear agreement between the two nations, many in the Western media also took the opportunity to hypothesize about the socalled New India.6 The March 6, 2006, cover of Newsweek read “The New India,” and the lead story, “India Rising,” was penned by Fareed Zakaria. Time magazine, not to be left out, the same week featured an article by Alex Perry, “The New India, and the Old One.” The week before, acclaimed broadcast journalist Charlie Rose had done a series

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of interviews from India for his PBS show. His week-long program was headlined by the Business Wire thus: “Charlie Rose conducts conversations with people shaping the new India.” Although Rose interviewed a couple of journalists and activist and actress Shabana Azmi, he focused on India’s elite: along with India’s Prime Minister, Manmohan Singh, he was in conversation with as many as five CEOs—leaders of some of India’s most prominent companies. Of course, Thomas Friedman continued penning his paeans to the New India, as did a battalion of Indian journalists and “experts.” What, then, was this “New India” that was the subject of all this media attention? For many of these journalists and “experts,” the New India was the classic capitalist coming-of-age story. India had finally cast off the shackles of protectionism and nationalism (read: socialism) to embrace a free-wheeling capitalist economy. Privatization, deregulation, unfettered foreign investment, and all the other sacred cows of neoliberalism had been embraced by the New India. A process that had been initiated by the Congress Party government during Rajiv Gandhi’s government in the late 1980s, solidified by the same party from 1991 to 1996, elevated to state policy by the BJP, and furthered by the current Congress government under neoliberal economist Manmohan Singh had according to the pundits, finally yielded results and the nation itself was close to reaching its full potential. While many of these commentators were willing to pay lip service to the existing inequities in India, they remained so elated by the glimmering shopping malls and rising paychecks of the executive classes that the poor were thrust into the realm of the residual—annoying remnants of the old India. Alex Perry, for instance, writing for Time magazine, claimed that “Today, there is old India and new India. One is epitomized by the surging chaos that fascinated generations of backpackers and travel writers. The other is the efficient center of outsourcing and IT [information technology] that thrills today’s investment bankers.” For Zakaria, the “India of poverty and disease” is contained in the New India, but there is “something new. You can feel the change even in the midst of the slums.” What is new, as far as Zakaria is concerned, is that there are a “vast and growing number of entrepreneurs who want to make money. And somehow they find a way to do it, overcoming the obstacles, bypassing the bureaucracy.” The inequities of old India, according to Zakaria, were a result of a “shackled and overregulated private sector” and because “in the 1970s India became more socialist.” Now, however, Zakaria is happy to learn that every week “you read of a set of regulations that have been eased or permissions that have been eliminated.”

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Another noteworthy quality of the New India, Zakaria proclaims, is that it has developed a positive relationship with the United States, the “most powerful country in history.” Of course, such comments are not limited to the popular media. India experts such as Stephen Cohen, for instance, who once referred to India as a “large, exotic basket case,” in India: Emerging Power hopes that India can combine economic growth and political democracy. Yet, a few paragraphs later, he praises “India’s active membership in the WTO,” assuming that “this would accelerate the liberalization of the Indian economy and could have a major impact on the rate of Indian development. It would also give American firms greater access to the Indian market” (317). So much for political democracy! Commentators in India have been no less vocal about the New India. Manjeet Kripalani in Business Week praises the Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE) in Mumbai, a “business incubator where ideas from IIT [Indian Institute for Technology] Bombay students, professors, and alumni can be developed and commercialized.” Like his Western counterparts, Kripalani juxtaposes the old and the New India. Apparently, in order to get to SINE, “You have to voyage through old India to arrive in the new India.” Old India is characterized by a “partially built bridge,” “scooter taxis,” “pedestrians,” and “perspiring policemen.” New India, on the other hand, is removed from “the noise of the street” and can be found in a “serene, tree-lined, airy campus.” This linear account, constructed in the form of a journey, is very much in keeping with the narrative of progress. Of course, this narrative of progress is not merely an economic one; it includes claims for political democracy and secularism. The narrative of the “new” is not only about technological innovations and ostentatious prosperity; it is also supposedly connected to a greater, secular vision of a modern nation. Thus left-leaning commentators in India are not immune to its allure. Harish Khare, for instance, writing in the leftist newspaper, the Hindu, criticizes the BJP for attempting to invoke communal passions, and he hypothesizes that the BJP will fail because “Indian nationalism is self-assured, equanimous, and globally engaged.” India’s adoption of a “new agenda of growth, development, globalization” has, according to Khare, created a “new India that does not want to be distracted by claims made in the name of medieval passions.” Shashi Tharoor—writer, former United Nations UnderSecretary General, and in 2009, elected a Member of Parliament from Thiruvanthapuram, Kerala—joins in this crescendo of praise for the new, announcing a “brave new India”: a “land that throws out the

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intruders of Kargil, that acquires Europe’s largest steel conglomerate in the face of the taunts about ‘monkey money,’ that exports more films abroad than it imports, that challenges the traditional assumption of superiority by others, that wins Booker Prizes and Miss Universe contests” (8). This strange combination of “achievements,” all significantly aligned to a competitive relationship with the West, is apparently positioned within an idea of a neutral nationalism. Although writers such as Tharoor would disassociate their celebration of the New India with the reactionary declarations of the BJP, much of this discourse regarding a New India had come to the fore in a concentrated way during the years of the BJP government, exemplified most colorfully during the party’s “Shining India” advertisement campaign in the months preceding the parliamentary elections of 2004. Much like Tharoor’s assertions about a “brave new India,” as early as 1999, after winning the parliamentary elections, the BJP candidate for prime minister, Atal Bihari Vajpayee, had proclaimed in an address to the nation that his government was “pledged to the emergence of a ‘new’ India in the new century.” The top four agenda items for this New India were to “speed up economic reforms,” to “introduce new laws for the financial sector reforms,” to aim for “speedier restructuring and disinvestment of Public Sector Units,” and to “promote investment, including foreign direct investment.” Here was fundamentalism in action, except that it was neoliberal fundamentalism. In the next five years, little attention was paid to some of the other promises that were made about primary education, safe drinking water, and non-discrimination, but these four agenda items were pursued with ruthless determination. By 2003, Arun Shourie, the Minister for Disinvestment, wrote a series of articles, published in the Indian Express, where he praised the information technology industry—which was notoriously private, under-regulated, and foreign-investment driven—and announced that the young people driving this industry “had changed the world’s perception of India.” “It’s not just a country of snake charmers,” he declared, apparently an allusion to the timeless Western imaginings of an old India. This worship of the “new,” however, was not without its pitfalls. All the shining monuments to liberalization could not hide the desperate poverty that enveloped a huge swath of the population in the BJP-ruled nation. One of the most significant political statements of opposition came on May 13, 2004. Indian voters sent a startling, but not wholly unexpected, message to the ruling BJP and its National Democratic Alliance (NDA) allies. Contrary to media expectations

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and the predictions of the pollsters, the BJP was dramatically defeated by the Congress Party and its allies. More significantly, parties on the Left, including the two major communist parties, garnered sixty-one seats, a record number for them in any general election since independence in 1947. These results were even more dramatic since the BJP had expended millions of dollars on a slick advertising campaign in an effort to paint itself as the party of national unity and strength. Clearly, the f lashy images of “Shining India” had had limited impact, and given the success of the Left parties, a significant portion of the population seemed to be responding primarily to the BJP’s reckless infatuation with liberalization and their craven acquiescence to the forces of multinational capital. Under the BJP government formed in 1999, middle-class spending boomed and an elite few amassed enormous wealth, while millions of ordinary people, especially in rural areas, paid the price for a large-scale disinvestment in social programs. On May 13, 2004, many of these otherwise silenced citizens responded by electing a government whose election slogan was “Congress ka hath, aam aadmi ka saath” (“The Congress Party, friend of the common man”). Reactions from the business elite and the foreign press to the mandate of these forgotten citizens were predictable. Could it be that the “new” was going to be replaced by a return to the “old” ways of conducting business? The Indian Stock Exchange fell by 330 points, the steepest single-day fall in seven years, as panicked investors expressed anxiety about the Congress Party government’s degree of commitment to the policies of liberalization. Prabhu Chawla, writing in India Today, worried about the “red” threat: “The comrades, her [Sonia Gandhi’s—president of the Indian National Congress Party] true loyalists, continue to see the bogey of imperialism in the marketplace; the red version of swadeshi [sic] is certain to damage the reforms agenda” (9). The New York Times, which seven months earlier had announced, “Sizzling Economy Revitalizes India,” now was concerned that “reforms” would be curtailed. Perhaps the ordinary Indian had a say, after all, in whether “an acceleration of the transformation seem[ed] inevitable” (Waldman A6). The avatars of the new India were thrown into disarray. Would the demands from the poor overturn the magical moment of capital accumulation? Would the specter of the old overpower the new? As is now widely acknowledged, none of these fears were justified. Singh’s government, despite giving lip service to the rights of the poor, continued on the same path. This was no surprise for those who saw a clear indication of the government’s intentions by the party’s

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nomination of Singh as the prime minister. Indeed, the same voices that had reacted with such anxiety soon after the elections began to sound reassured once again. The stock exchange began its slow climb back up. The defeat of the BJP government in the 2004 parliamentary elections, then, did not see the disappearance of this category, the “New India.” Manmohan Singh’s government, in spite of promising that “the new government’s emphasis would be on a model for social and economic development that provides opportunities for the poor to participate in the development process” was very soon going down the same road as the previous government (Singh “PM’s Address”). The prime minister’s address at a meeting of the PM’s Council on Trade and Industry on December 4, 2004, in New Delhi indicated a significant announcement of intention. Singh concluded that “it is of utmost importance that we create an enabling environment that rewards creativity, risk-taking and the spirit of enterprise and adventure.” Once again, the language of the new was attached to an Indian who was the entrepreneurial subject: “To promote new investment, to generate higher growth in incomes and employment, we must unleash the full potential of individual initiative and enterprise. We must provide a new stimulus to the ‘animal spirits’ of our entrepreneurs. We must create a social, political and economic environment in which budding entrepreneurs can realize their dreams.” The millions of Indians who were not “budding entrepreneurs” would be taken care of because Singh’s “government believes that processes of wealth creation are essential for us to meet our commitment to eradicating poverty.” Meanwhile, the government will provide the infrastructure “so that India becomes the home of multinational corporations of the future.” Two years later, during a visit to Cambridge University in October 2006, Singh announced in a talk focusing on “inclusive globalization” that “[t]he dismantling of state control has unshackled economic forces. . . . The age of freedom is also the age of economic growth. Prometheus has truly been unbound. . . . In my own country, the economic reforms we initiated in the early 1990s have made our economy more competitive. Indian business is responding to new market opportunities. India’s growth is underpinned by a vibrant and growing entrepreneurial class.” The same day, addressing a group of prominent Indians, he declared, “A new India is emerging,” and he enjoined them to participate in “this great adventure of creativity and enterprise in whatever way you can.” Even these few examples of the use of the phrase “the New India” make one point fairly apparent. The New India is continually generated

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as a designation for a nation that has almost come into being, enshrined within the universalizing parameters of global capitalism. By complying with the dictates of global neoliberalism, India can complete the transformation into the new, eradicate any traces of the old, and join the global community in this universal quest for wealth creation and the accumulation of capital. There are, of course, the obligatory acknowledgments about poverty and existing inequities, and there is an effort to link the forces of the free market with the fulfillment of political democracy or secularism. None of these moves, however, are atypical. These are now the familiar markers of neoliberalism, as I will argue in the rest of the book. An obvious point to be made here is that despite the fact that the accumulation of wealth and the growing gap between the rich and the poor have become the dominant logic of the New India, postcolonial India—the “old” India—was also characterized by similar inequities in wealth. Postcolonial India has always favored the rich; gender, class, and caste privileges were carefully protected even under the so-called socialist egalitarian principles of Nehru’s vision. After all, the Congress Party preserved most of the existing hierarchies of the British Empire and expanded on them by empowering a specific class of individuals, leaving the underclass, Adivasis, religious minorities, Dalits (once known as “untouchables”), and women on the margins of postcolonial India. Ever since independence, the Congress Party, with its mix of cronyism and its ties to the big industrial houses, had maintained a friendly policy toward Indian capitalists. Slogans such as Indira Gandhi’s “Garibi Hatao” (“Eradicate Poverty”) that advocated wealth distribution and Nehru’s state-funded projects, notwithstanding, India was never “socialist” in the way characterized by commentators today or implied by the caricature of the “old” in the discourse recorded above. Indeed, Congress governments under Nehru and Indira Gandhi were actively anti-communist and were quick to pressure and dismiss Marxist governments when they were elected in regional elections. A more accurate historical assessment is that the legacy of decolonization and Nehru’s alliances with the non-aligned movement meant that India was effectively connected to the larger politics of anticolonialism and to the Soviet Union during the years of cold war. While the link with the former was rooted to some extent in Nehru’s own faith in a “third way,” a relationship with the latter was more a matter of political expediency rather than any ideological belief in creating a socialist state.7 Thus evocations of the old have very little to do with actually existing socialism but more with sustaining and expanding an already-

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existing class structure. This is not to suggest that the only thing “new” about the New India is purely an acceleration of a small minority’s accumulation of wealth; as I will argue in this book, class structures in the New India are evolving in both surprising and predictable ways. What is important to ask, however, is what is so “new” about the forms of dispossession and identity formation at this moment in time. What, indeed, is so distinctive about the nature of wealth “creation” in the last fifteen to twenty years, and why is it necessary to create a citizen who represents the values of the New India? One suggestion comes from Aditya Nigam. What may be significant about the period 1990–92, according to Nigam, was that it was a “moment of rupture,” with a constellation around three events: “the anti-Mondal agitations, the structural adjustment programmes, and the demolition of the Babri Masjid” (97). The “argument against reservations,” claims Nigam, merged “in the late 1980s, with the argument of individual merit and accomplishment, pushed forward by the logic of free-market reforms,” and the “argument against reservations became an aspect of the argument for free and unbound labour markets and against protection” (125). This was also an argument against the rights that minorities were guaranteed by the state. In a “free” society, went the argument, why were such protections necessary? Another way to delineate the differences is to point out that for the first thirty years or so of independence, India protected many of its primary services, such as banking and insurance, and nationalized many of its natural resources, such as coal. It was only after Rajiv Gandhi was elected with a huge mandate after his mother’s assassination in 1984 that official state policy began to shift more obviously toward privatization and an encouragement of foreign direct investment. This national policy, of course, was linked to the global ascension of neoliberalism under Reagan and Thatcher. Rajiv Gandhi, at forty, was India’s youngest ever prime minister and projected an image of “progress” and modernity. His government was instrumental in beginning the process of loosening import controls and deregulating industry and other economic activities. Moreover, it is in this period (1984 onward) that the idea of a consumer subject begins to be formed, as more goods and services become widely available. As Nigam puts it, “In material/ economic terms, two developments mark the decade of the 1980s. It was a period of high-growth, based on the pent-up consumerist urges of the middle-class sections of the population, who had by then come into their own. . . . This entire development became possible due to the availability of credit, even to the lower rungs of the middle-class”

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(123). It was this middle-class Indian who increasingly came to be the dominant subject of this period. It was in 1991, however, that the mass process of privatization of land and industries, the selling off of public state enterprises, the entrance of huge amounts of foreign investment, the passing of classist and antilabor legislation, and the decrease in public subsidies and expenditures commenced in serious measure, ostensibly in response to a balance of payments crisis.8 However, these transformations in the economy— and here is where the distinctive effects of the new economic reforms begin to take shape—have created massive inequalities at a scale not seen since independence. These facts are extensively documented.9 In the first forty years of independence, because of strict economic laws regarding the import of foreign goods and finance and a commitment to public expenditure and investment, the Indian government had at least paid lip service to the notion of equality. Indeed, national political debates, television and radio programming, and funding for many “development projects” frequently revolved around the alleviation of poverty. In the New India even that cursory commitment is not necessary. Consequently, there are ways in which the “new” has unsettled existing economic and social tendencies in postcolonial India, but my discussion of the contesting ideologies of the old and the new suggests that this juxtaposition offers us some interesting ways to understand subject formation in the New India. For instance, why is the “old” being denied, elided, or kept in abeyance in this celebratory discourse of the New India? What makes the calls for a New India distinctive within this specific neoliberal context? How is this discourse regarding the new produced in order to construct a particular national imaginary? I would suggest that the category, the “New India,” can only exist and be validated through its supplement, the “old” India. In short, the new can only exist alongside a denunciation of the old. This process is enabled through an act of creative sublimation. First, there is a need to assert the fact that the New India has bloomed almost magically as a result of liberalization. There is no moment of transition between the old and the new. This economic leap, this possibility of acquiring immediate wealth, can then signify the immense possibilities of the New India and can suggest that it could erupt out of the shadow of the old without any costs or consequences to the nation and its many citizens. Perhaps this point is best demonstrated by Kripalani’s journey to the SINE campus, where the “unpleasant” aspects of old India can be left behind with ease. It is, after all, only a short journey that takes

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one from the disrepair and the chaos of the old to the new, where the architects of the New India busily ply their trade in the serenity of a lush campus. Clearly, then, poverty is only a remnant of the old India and is in no way related to the new economic reforms. In this move, the old functions as a category that has been transcended by the economic ingenuity of India’s citizens. It is as if there is no historical link between that which came before and that which now is. Second, as in any act of sublimation, there is an anxious disavowal of that which is unacceptable—in this case the continuing presence of the old India—in every gesture of affirmation of the New India. But the old India, characterized by “crowds,” “noise,” “poverty,” “socialism,” and “state-funded projects,” is a specter that cannot be entirely extinguished. It is the text that constantly intrudes upon the new. When Manmohan Singh alludes to the need for “a more inclusive globalization,” or Zakaria refers to the changes that can be felt “even in the midst of slums,” we are confronted with a ghost that continues to haunt the new. Consequently, the narratives of the “new” are replete with anxious affirmations through figures and statistics. Arun Shourie’s article, for instance, is primarily a cataloging of economic “achievements.” As per the requirements of the global neoliberal mantras, these achievements always focus on rising growth rates, the volume of foreign reserves, and increasing corporate wealth and opportunities. However, the specter of the old will not yield even here, as Shourie decries the “whining” by those who are not fully appreciative of the gains of the new. He makes no allusion to the reasons for the “whining,” but it is obviously a reference to those critics who see these “achievements” as having very little to do with the welfare of the majority of the country’s citizens. Once again, affirmation and disavowal lie side by side. Shourie’s and others’ repeated claims about “progress” and “wealth” are necessary not merely to deny the old, but also to erase the turbulence that is a part of a transition economy. What government and corporate figures, for instance, try to suppress are the many contradictions that exist in the margins of the “official” economy. Consider, for example, Barbara Harriss-White’s point that “[a]pproximately 83 per cent of the population work wholly in the informal sector . . . : 92 per cent of women workers, 80 per cent of men” (India Working 5). She estimates that this sector accounts for “60 per cent of net domestic product, 68 per cent of income and 60 per cent of savings” (India Working 5). How, then, does the neoliberal, universalizing thrust of corporate capital negotiate this so-called marginal, “old” economy? It is precisely the need to extinguish such economic questions that makes it so important for Shourie

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and his ilk to draw a sharp distinction between the old and the new. These moves, however, cannot elide the fact that a considerable section of the economy of the “new” remains lodged in the old. Third, and in some ways a contradistinction from the previously mentioned act of disavowal, there is a need to keep alive features of the old as a way to demonstrate its deficiencies in relation to the new. This latent text serves a purpose as a constant reminder of what the new is attempting to put in its place. In the final chapter of this book, in which I examine the privatization of space, I stress more precisely the attempt by the media to use this contrast to highlight how the new is an infinitely superior alternative. A good example of such a strategy is also the Times of India’s previously mentioned image of the two Indias, one straining at the leash, while the other is the leash. In this instance, this residual idea of a preexisting nation, then, is what drives and gives shape to the new. These assertions of the New India, as we have seen, primarily focus on the narrative of economic and social progress, but any discussion of the new since 1991 necessarily involves questions about nation, gender, caste, class, and religion. It is on these terrains that the contradictions regarding the new begin to multiply. The different deployments of the new do not erase some fundamental questions about the political, social, and cultural questions facing the nation. As Appadurai and Breckenridge remind us, “what is distinctive about any particular society is not the fact or extent of its modernity, but rather its distinctive debates about modernity, the historical and cultural trajectories that shape its appropriation of the means of modernity, and the cultural sociology (principally of class and state) that determines who gets to play with modernity and what defines the rules of the game” (16). In the case of contemporary India, likewise, the debates and terms of modernity are constantly being reshaped. In order to analyze the reinvention of the contemporary Indian subject, it is necessary to pay attention to some of these debates and to trace the contradictions shaping the New India. The following questions can help us formulate our analysis. How does the national subject come into being even as the national incorporates and blurs into the transnational? How, at a time of economic disjuncture and f lux, do hegemonic forces pose a stable economic subject within the framework of commodity capitalism? How should we read these hegemonic constructions of the subject within the contradictory moments of resistance—especially since neoliberalism is a class project, rewarding the few at the expense of the many? In the realm of the political, how do ruling governments

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pose a New India, so accommodating to the demands of Western firms and so accessible to unregulated foreign investment, while still retaining claims to national sovereignty? In the social arena, is it possible for the patriarchal and the high-caste authority of the Indian state, along with the myriad religious and social practices of the family unit, to negotiate the unpredictable consequences of unfettered consumption? Likewise, if the framers of a New India loosen the social bonds of the old through the rise of so-called entrepreneurial innovation, can they continue to maintain control over an increasingly fractionalized population? Finally, how should we analyze the different versions of secularism deployed by the state to regulate, manage, or cohere with the many communal stirrings during the last twenty years? It is with these questions in mind that I now turn to what I suggest are the five essential contrasting and contesting social, economic, and political issues that can further our understanding of the new Indian subject as depicted in cultural production in the New India. The New Indian Subject in the Age of Globalization My discussion begins with an attention to a fundamental ideological project of the New India, which is an attempt to designate a specific class subject. In this context, Gramsci’s notion of culture as a site for class coalitions, assertions of hegemony, and historical reshapings of the class subject are invaluable for understanding the complexity of the sphere of public culture that gives shape to this subject. Indeed, it is particularly important, given the rapid attempt to assimilate the Indian subject within the network of global capital, that we give consideration to the new ways in which class is both erased and emphasized in the realm of public culture. First, a crucial factor in this discussion is to take into account the separation between the urban and the rural, especially in a largely agricultural country such as India. This point is especially important because the new citizen, whether in its hegemonic or oppositional counterpoint, tends to be defined as a metropolitan subject. Additionally, the politics of economic access, kinship rules, gender and caste divisions, and literacy must all be factors when one evokes the “modern,” metropolitan class subject. The new Indian subject, then, must be analyzed in the light of all these intersecting elements. Second, the new Indian subject must be understood in regard to his or her relationship to the emergent nation-state. How, indeed, does this

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subject correspond to or counteract the hegemonic force of the state? In its oppositional mode, does the subject necessarily define himself or herself against the nation-state or is it possible to occupy a position that accommodates the structure of the nation but also asserts an agency that reshapes the fundamental nature of the state? Third, I question the frequently evoked communalism-secularism binary and contest the popular notion that there is a “crisis of secularism” in contemporary India. The new Indian, defined as both secular and singular, then, has to be read within this more complex, contradictory framing of the secular. Fourth, I argue that crisis, both as a symptom of global capitalism and as an indicator of a social process that cannot be exactly calibrated, especially in the face of continuing insurgencies and resistance movements, is a constitutive part of subject formation. In short, the new Indian subject is prone to constant reinvention in the face of present and unpredictable forms of future crisis. Finally, rather than using a broad, neutral concept such as the “global order” or globalization, I propose to examine public modernity within the politically specific context of late capital and the geography of underdevelopment. Specifically, how are claims to citizenship negotiated in the face of the increasing demands and contradictions of global capital? Class In a perceptive discussion regarding the tendency under neoliberal capitalism to further reify social relations, Jean and John Comaroff point to the consequences of such forms of abstraction: “class comes to be understood, in both popular and scholarly discourse, as yet another personal trait or lifestyle choice. Which is why it, like citizenship, is measured increasingly by the capacity to transact and consume; why politics is treated as a matter of individual or group entitlement; why social wrongs are transposed into an issue of ‘rights’ ” (15–16). This insight leads the Comaroffs to attempt to “explain why, in the millennial age, class has become displaced and refracted in the way that it has” (16). In the Indian context, the sudden inf lux of readily available commodity goods has created a context in which class divisions remain starkly evident but within an egalitarian imaginary in which commodities equalize social differences; in short, commodity goods have painted an artificial sheen of wealth over the dull everyday reality of structural poverty.10 Leela Fernandes points out that “meanings attached to such commodities weave together narratives of nationhood

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and development with the production of middle-class identity,” and “[t]he aesthetic promise of the use value of newly available commodities . . . provides a critical rationale for the accumulation of foreign capital within the Indian nation-state” (“Rethinking” 154). In this way, class politics is cast into the background, creating “a new public culture, one that . . . centers on the culture of consumption; such newly available commodities, in effect, serve as signifiers that assimilate globalization to the Indian nation-state” (Fernandes, “Rethinking” 149–51). The culture of the commodity is further buoyed by acceding to the neoliberal fetish of the growth rate. According to the mainstream economic experts, a burgeoning growth rate suggests that poverty is being alleviated, pushing aside the need to focus on class divisions. However, as Jayati Ghosh has argued, “high economic growth does not necessarily lead to high growth of employment, especially of jobs of more desirable forms.” Despite an “increase in managerial salaries and profits . . . average real wages have declined across most activities. For the majority of those seeking work, there has been a tendency to fall back on forms of work (including self-employment) that do not offer a decent wage and involve poor working conditions” (110–11). Thus increasing growth rates, in reality, have little to do with the continuing effects of uneven class structures. Chakrabarti and Cullenburg support this view, explaining that “the seemingly uniform liberalization policies are producing complex changes in society by producing a chain of differentiated and uneven effects on class structure” (238).11 Indeed, class-specific matters refuse to recede into the background and are further enhanced by the context of the social formation that exists in India.12 On the one hand, the burgeoning urban middle classes number between 250 million and 300 million, which is a large number by most standards. Even though there are huge disparities of income within this group, citizens of the metropolis and the larger towns are seen as the thriving face of the new India. They receive most of the media attention, and they are the central target for corporate and political advertisements. On the other hand, this number is only about 25 to 30 percent of the population. A majority of India’s population reside in hundreds of mofussil (district) towns, villages, and tribal areas, and many of them are illiterate, impoverished, and in poor health.13 And here it might be worthwhile to add that the grievances of the rural subject, especially women, Muslims, Adivasis, and Dalits, do not lie exclusively within the capital and labor antagonism (Harriss-White, “India’s Informal Economy” 276). Their subject position opens them up to a whole range of discriminatory policies. Non-metropolitan areas

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and their residents thus form an uneasy distraction from the New India. They are remnants of the old that must be managed, the detritus of a “third world” past that must be rationalized into the narrative of economic growth. Consequently, if the new India is about constructing a specific urban form of subjectivity, then the (in)visible non-metropolitan subject must be part of any critical examination of the images of the new India. An attention, in general, to the invisible subject is fundamental in any discussion of class because it reveals the structural crisis at the heart of liberalization. Chakrabarti and Cullenburg describe this crisis in greater detail: It is difficult to imagine how the surplus population, constituting mostly the illiterate 40 percent of the population, will meet the challenge (of staying on the cutting edge of competition). The other source of employment for this potentially displaced populace is working in the unorganized sector in jobs such as hawking, selling food, and so on. This avenue does not look attractive in the long run since globalization is putting a severe strain on the unorganized sector (directly through competition or indirectly through the process of displacement, that is, primitive capital accumulation), and also since it is difficult to imagine how so many people could be absorbed into this sector. (258) Consequently, existing class structures in India will continue to emphasize the contradictions of liberalization, and the productive process, the site of labor and surplus production, cannot be entirely wished away even in a haze of consumption and commodity fetishism. Subject formation will then have to be studied on the fault lines of these contradictory class conditions. The Crisis of the Nation-State Aijaz Ahmad has commented “that ‘nation,’ like class, is a process, which is made and re-made, a thousand times over, and, more than process, ‘nation’ is a terrain of struggle which condenses all social struggles, so that every organised force in society attempts to endow it with specific meanings and attributes” (“Fascism” 48). It is difficult to discuss the rise of the new Indian subject without understanding the emergence of this subject within the context of the neoliberal nation-state. How

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have existing as well as emergent class formations within the nation created a fertile ground for this subject? How do contesting versions of the nation, both in its Hindutva and its secular incarnations, cohere with its incorporation into global capitalism? There is no single catalyst in the period of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, preceding the rise of liberalization, that will provide an exemplary logic for India’s assimilation into the global neoliberal order. Instead, what we do have is a series of local crises—the increasing militarization of Kashmir (1989), the anti-Mandal reservation riots (1990), and the destruction of the Babri Mosque (1992)—in conjunction with prevailing global crises—the conf lict in the Persian Gulf (1990–91), the fall of the Soviet Union (1991), and the growing demands of the International Monetary agencies—as catalysts for transformations in the nation-state, and all of these factors were inevitably connected to a rise of the Hindu right. Rather than assuming a straightforward causal trajectory for the evolution of the neoliberal nation-state, then, I argue that what was unique about its formation in the early 1990s is that, in lieu of a leftist intervention, the time was ripe for a rightist redefinition of the state as internal and external pressures mounted. So, for instance, the Hindu right came to prominence at about the same time as liberalization was being heralded in India, partly because political and economic conditions were available to create a platform to exploit crisis at both ends of the national spectrum. Because the BJP had strong roots in an upper-caste (diasporic) business community, it could pose a nationalism that was able to supplement the requirements of global capital. It could also use the cloak of religion to appeal to an insecure middle class and an underprivileged majority to exploit the financial and social crisis engendered by liberalization. The emergence of Hindu nationalism on the fault lines of these global and local shifts is not merely a result of crisis in the legitimacy of the state but also a sign of the ongoing struggle within the state to mobilize a variety of class alliances, using the mask of nation and religion. The crisis of the nation-state, then, can be measured in very different ways: for the ruling class, crisis is represented by insurgency and resistance movements and the presence of a few remaining regulations against unfettered multinational capital, both of which inhibit the f low and accumulation of capital; for the middle class, crisis comes in the shape of continuing financial insecurity and indebtedness in the face of an increasing rise in the cost of living and the inability of the state to provide basic services (electricity and water, for instance); and for 75 percent of India’s population, crisis signifies the failure of the state

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to provide fundamental economic, political, and civil rights and access to jobs and resources. Indeed, if anything, the state’s primary role now appears to be to aid in the private accumulation of capital. My readings of the new Indian subject are informed by these variable structural relationships that constitute the role and the position of the citizen in the nation-state. The Myth of Secularism Emphasizing the rise of the Right in the previous section is not meant to suggest that the BJP single-handedly transformed the polity or the notion of the Indian subject. Any discussion of “religion” in contemporary India has to be understood within the larger narrative of class politics, so even though the liberal Left in India and the Western media have focused primarily on the BJP’s insidious and violent manipulation of religious nationalism, positing the Congress Party as a contrasting secular force, the designation of a singular fundamentalist force incorrectly presupposes a clearly defined secular alternative. Instead of constructing a fundamentalist/secular binary in the public sphere, then, it is important to understand that cultural narratives, irrespective of their point of origin, are caught up in the circuits of global capital and in the religio-national imaginary. How these two forces contest and interact must surely inform our understanding of the intriguing narratives that shape the New India. Barbara Harriss-White makes the case that “In India religious affiliation can be found to govern the creation and protection of rent, the acquisition of skills and contacts, the rationing of finance, the establishment and defence of collective reputation, the circulation of information, the norms that regulate the inheritance and management of property, and those that prescribe the subordination of women” (India Working 243). She argues that “because capital accumulation relies on social structures of accumulation, the effect of liberalisation is not to abolish or transform those in which markets are embedded, but to encourage them to rework themselves as economic institutions and to persist” (India Working 245). Thus, structural adjustments and the social insecurity fostered by these differences will only exacerbate divisions based on gender, caste, and religion that have always been used as tools of capital accumulation. According to Harriss-White, “Caste and religion are . . . emerging as structures that may generate exclusive, networked forms of accumulation and corporatist forms of economic

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regulation, and that tend to operate to control labour to the advantage of capital” (India Working 245, emphasis in original). The BJP’s religious agenda, for instance, projected in its attempt to “reclaim” the Ayodhya Mosque as Hindu territory and calling for cultural purification, is only part of its attempt to reimagine India. A larger reimagining is linked to a disavowal of Nehruvian state capitalism, parodied as state socialism, and to an assertion of what the BJP sees as “Swadeshi capitalism,” a perfect blending of economic “reform,” globalization, and cultural nationalism. Also disguised in the BJP’s call for national purity is the systematic persecution of those who are at the bottom of the class ladder. In its five years in charge, the BJP successfully managed to remove state subsidies for farmers, repress trade union activities, and turn a blind eye to state oppression of not only Muslims but also Dalits. All of these measures were implemented even as the battle in the public sphere was characterized as largely one between the secular and Hindu nationalists. By dictating the terms of the debate in the public sphere, the class agenda of the party was skillfully disguised, yet its ideological force was unmistakable: Crafting a range of appeals that converged in the single-issue temple campaign, Hindu nationalism promised a pro-business government combined with strong nationalist discipline, in a solution whose hostility to the poor and to the minorities may actually have enhanced its credibility with large sections of the middle classes. Hindu nationalism worked at two levels, on the one hand offering the cultural and ideological accompaniment to liberalization for middle and upper classes, and at the same time translating it into a religio-mythic narrative that would win popular consent. (Rajagopal 33–34) What makes the BJP’s position singular is that it constructed religious identity as an essential part of its electoral platform and legitimized and valorized it as never before. Of course, one does well to remember that the Congress Party has strategically used religion as a political tool during the last sixty years, and despite its overt rejection of the “religio-mythic narrative” it has adopted the legacy of the BJP, combining nationalism and liberalization as harmonious bedfellows.14 Consequently, when we read cultural narratives circulating in the public sphere, we must attend carefully to the valorization of secularism, just as we do when condemning affirmations of religious nationalism. Rajeswari Sunder

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Rajan and Anuradha Dingwaney Needham in their edited collection The Crisis of Secularism in India, for instance, have argued that “the justification of ‘equal’ citizenship can too easily pass into a demand for uniformity, and secularism can move quickly from its basis in arguments about national unification to legitimizing the state’s regulation of ‘difference’ ” (8). As they point out, “Secularism has been defined by and embedded in not only . . . calculations of electoral politics but in a complex of related issues having to do with shifting modalities of caste relations, subcontinental and international politics, the major economic restructuring beginning in the 1980s, and most of all the rise to power of Hindu political parties” (16). It is therefore critical for us to connect arguments in favor of secularism to existing narratives of the state and to view the longer history of the secular citizen. Nivedita Menon similarly argues that it is difficult to “reimagine secularism today without coming to terms with the violent histories of subordination and repression that have produced the secular citizen. . . . The highly centralized, capital-intensive, and high-technology-based development models adopted by the Indian elites requires the homogeneous subject constructed by the discourse of citizenship” (132). Menon’s point is that not only are the “two sentiments—pro-globalization and pro-secularism—perfectly compatible with each other,” it may well be argued that secularism, with its alliance to a particular vision of modernity and progress, reinforces globalization narratives (135). This is not to imply that the debates about secularism or fundamentalism can or should be reduced to economic factors but to “stress that many, though not all, ‘non-class’ and multi-class’ or ‘sectoral’ conf licts do contain significant and specific class aspirations which should not be ignored because of the ‘broader’ character of these conf licts and which, indeed, go some way toward explaining how they emerged in the first place” (Vanaik, The Painful Transition 68). We may then say that the new Indian subject is clearly not just a class subject or a subject in whom only national-religious longings are invested, but one who occupies a contested and conf licting ideological space. Crisis Management One of my principal arguments regarding the analysis of culture is that in the age of late capital, the potential for crisis remains omnipresent. As Ernest Mandel has argued, one feature of late capitalist economy is

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“the assumption that private and state regulation of the economy have managed to eliminate or suspend the internal economic contradictions of this mode of production” (524). Barbara Harriss-White makes a compelling case that embedded markets in India, especially as they are ref lected in small town informal economies, are resistant to the unembedded and more f luid markets of global capital. “Can the deeply embedded markets” in India “co-exist with an entirely unembedded capitalism enthroned at the apex of the national economy or f loating around the entire globe?” she asks (India Working 43). Her question points to the contradictions that arise out of the conf licting needs and value systems of these competing economies that have to be resolved in order for the BJP, the Congress Party, and the corporate power brokers to celebrate the New India brand. Thus the lords of liberalization must create a “performance,” such as their “Shining India” campaign, in an attempt to manage these moments of crisis. Nowhere is performance as necessary and as fraught with potential success and failure as in the realm of culture.15 This dramatic performance depends on acts of conjuring, yet “conjuring is always culturally specific, creating a magic show of peculiar meanings, symbols, and practices . . . [and] is supposed to call up a world more dreamlike and sweeter than anything that exists; magic, rather than strict description, calls capital” (Tsing 118–20). The evocation of magic is primarily intended for two audiences: the international corporate class and the national bourgeoisie. The magical aspects of liberalization must be continuously reasserted, because the old India cannot be expunged from the national narrative. These assertions are manifested in many ways, including the fantastical recreation of “public” space or through the fetishization of consumer products such as the mobile phone or the Nano automobile. Ultimately, however, these performances cannot be limited to the realm of the fantastical but must become enshrined through the actual rituals of citizenship. Of course, the BJP was enormously skillful in creating magic through strategic calls to modernity as well as tradition. For the ruling classes, the conjunction of an ascetic yet violent form of Hindu fundamentalism and a global, consumerist, capitalist ideology can offer the following promise: “It can, if controlled, enhance national integration and it is an attractive, if partial and short-to-medium term answer to the system’s problem of legitimacy” (Vanaik 146). It is precisely the temporary feature of this performance that keeps alive the potential for crisis. Moreover, performance is limited by the f luid class allegiances

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of the ruling parties. The BJP’s attempt to mobilize the peasantry, for instance, had limited success since their capitalist ethos, loosely disguised as the tools of modernity and development, were directly counter to the interests of the peasantry. The BJP had nothing to offer the farmer, unlike the urban middle classes, for whom “Shining India” promised consumer comforts. Liberalization, in conjunction with International Monetary Fund (IMF)-dictated adjustment programs, had caused a large-scale disinvestment in agriculture, resulting in widespread devastation within the farming community. The farmers’ 2004 vote was a rejection not only of the BJP but also of the terms of the project of modernity. Because liberalization is at its heart a project that fetishizes an exported version of modernity, crisis often takes the form of a challenge to this version of modernity. Modernity, then, is a constantly evolving and unstable symbolic marker that can be evoked and redefined at different moments and sites. However, as the 2004 elections demonstrate and as the potential for future crisis ensures, no one party can completely control the debate about modernity even if it tries to determine the rules of the game. Thus when the BJP attained power, its investment in the temple building project on the site of the Babri Mosque was reduced while antagonistic movements against Pakistan were increased. Meanwhile, the middle and upper classes were given tax breaks and provided the “magic” of commodity culture. However, the harnessing of the circuits of commodity power . . . entailed a certain vulnerability to the rhythms of market cycles, and the need to bolster demand by keeping alive the political purposes of Hindutva. . . . Liberalization could proceed with its re-organization of public and private spaces in ways that were articulated to the Hindu nationalists’ political project but not necessarily identical with it. Late capitalism’s attempts to revitalize itself thus demonstrated an eruption of the contradictions of community onto the stage of capital, and an effort to harness these contradictions in furthering accumulation. (Rajagopal 71) Rajagopal correctly points to the links between commodity capital, the public sphere, and the latent crisis within capitalism, but the issue of accumulation raises the question of global links to the national economy. Clearly, economic patterns in India are connected to the worldwide acceleration of the accumulation process. Similarly, current ideological conjunctures in India are also affected by capital’s attempts

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to resolve crisis. Samir Amin has suggested that the management of capitalist crisis leads to political conf lict. He argues that management through the market is utopian, that the real management of capitalism requires “market plus state”, that the conf lict between globalized economic space and the fragmentation of spaces for political and social management is unbearable, and that it must lead to a renewal of nationalisms and social struggles, which will challenge the utopian globalization pursued during the crisis. (Capitalism 39) We can see the relevance of Amin’s analysis in the Indian context, although it is necessary to remember that the existing social structure is a factor in the way that capitalism develops in that location. The international mobility of capital, although a determining inf luence, cannot transcend the local variations that shape capital growth and accumulation. My examination of the new Indian subject as constructed in cultural texts thus combines an understanding of the social structure of contemporary India and the context of transformations within the crisis tendencies of global capital. The interactions of global and local, as well as manifestations of capital and current global asymmetries, make it “important to situate all cultural works and forms in their specificity, with reference to their conditions of production and circulation at their point of origin as well as in wider circles” (Bartolovich 14). My analysis of a hegemonic narrative (such as the Vision Document of the BJP published in the spring of 2004) points to the continuous efforts to manage dissent, to integrate antagonisms and conf licts into a fixed, stable narrative. I argue that these attempts are part of a larger conf lict within capitalism in which bourgeois economists and policy makers confidently explain crisis as temporary and manageable, soon to be integrated and subdued by the existing social order. Oppositional cultural artists and activists, on the other hand, are often engaged in equally fantastical imaginings of the nation, partly because their resolution of crisis in the form of an oppositional new Indian subject does not free these subjects from being implicated in the workings of global capital. There are, of course, resistant subjects who aim at the root of crisis and try to imagine a citizen who would not be subject to the crisis tendencies of capital. In any case, since crisis is inevitable, and since political agency is often reified in cultural texts, critical work must uncover the traces of crisis that are elided or repressed in a range of narratives.

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The New India The Geography of Underdevelopment

Capitalism has always been a global system, relying on expansion to bring about further accumulation. In the narrative of Western capitalism, primitive accumulation is seen as the starting point of capital accumulation. The seizing of the commons, in Marx’s memorable words, “is written in the annals of mankind in letters of blood and fire” (The Genesis of Capital 9). But this process never ends. As Marx puts it, The capitalist system pre-supposes the complete separation of the labourers from all property and the means by which they can realize their labour. As soon as capitalist production is once on its own legs, it not only maintains this separation, but reproduces it on a continually extending scale. . . . The so-called primitive accumulation, therefore, is nothing else than the historical process of divorcing the producer from the means of production. (The Genesis of Capital 8–9) This historical process, the beginning of the enclosure of the commons, is strikingly similar to the transformation taking place in India in the last fifteen years: “Capitalist adjustments through taxation and other policies all employ the power of the State, the concentrated and organized force of society, to hasten, hot-house fashion, the process of transformation of the feudal mode of production into the capitalist mode, and to shorten the transition. Force is the midwife of every old society pregnant with a new one” (47). As we know, this national process soon became a global, imperial one, culminating in the late nineteenth century when imperialist nations divided the spoils of accumulation, often through protracted conf licts on the battlefield. In the present, of course, international agencies such as the World Bank and the IMF “can divide the world into maps that make visible the irreducibly abstract quality of geography” (Spivak, “Cultural Talks” 337). Indeed, globalization today may be viewed as representing this continual process of differentiating the world along the lines of unequal development and misallocation of resources. A significant change, however, in the age of globalization is that financial centers of capital are more dispersed, and the postcolonial elite increasingly have a significant stake in the circulation of wealth. The demise of industrial capital in the West and the rise of the service sector economy in the third world have also ensured a dramatic redistribution of national authority. As capital travels the globe searching for ever cheaper means

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of production, social arrangements in developing societies are increasingly disrupted. Structural adjustment programs, for instance, have caused widespread depopulation of rural areas, forcing a displaced peasantry into the exploitative cycle of a transnational sweatshop economy. After all, “f lexible accumulation depends precisely on capitalism’s laying hold of ‘traditional’ social formations that have not been leveled by modernity either in terms of labor relations or the political nation; in these encounters, capitalism ‘respects’ those forms even if for exploitative aims” (Lowe and Lloyd 15). However, the larger impact of globalization on a national economy is always mixed, and this is especially true in the case of economies such as India’s, which reproduces “in varying forms and proportions a combination of past and present modes of production, or more precisely, of varying past and successive stages of the present mode of production” (Mandel 23). Trotsky alluded to something similar as early as 1908 when speaking of Russia’s development: “The development of historically backward nations leads necessarily to a peculiar combination of different stages in the historic process.” Trotsky referred to this combination as “the law of combined development—by which we mean a drawing together of different stages of the journey, a combining of different steps, an amalgam of archaic with more contemporary forms” (4–6). India’s current position as an interstitial economy, an economy that contains traces of varying economic models, is particularly distinctive. Although by and large a capitalist bourgeois democracy, the Indian socioeconomic stage consists of a cast drawn from feudalism, bourgeois nationalist ideology, leftist transformative socialist programs, and laissez-faire globalism. This combination creates a far more unstable conjunction than the architects of the New India would have us believe. Barbara Harriss-White, for instance, sounds warning bells that may well disrupt the rosy economic scenarios of limitless prosperity that are currently being constructed by Indian and Western economists: Liberalisation involves an assumption on the part of employers that India’s comparative advantage lies in the indisputably low cost of labour. But India’s large reserves of cheap labour cannot constitute the foundations of a modern, globally competitive economy. Not only does such a strategy entail the suppression of political and trade union rights for the majority of wage-earners, and the deliberate fragmentation of the labour force, but it also presumes a poorly educated, semiliterate (and poorly nourished) mass of labourers. Such a workforce will not provide the necessary mass

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demand for the goods and services produced by a modern economy integrated into the global system. (India Working 42) This conjunction of economies, devastating in human terms, makes these discontinuous realities particularly visible and also exerts unique pressures on those attempting to form a stable identity for the national subject. As the parameters of class, caste, gender, and nation shift within the different markers of wage labor let loose by liberalization, the new Indian subject remains unsettled. Because this new subject is partially defined in the realm of culture, an attention to the geography of uneven development is important: by the logic of dispersed accumulation, culture is no longer tied to a specific site and often circulates outside a fixed context. Frequent and accelerated transnational exchanges have radically transformed the way culture is produced, distributed, and consumed. These geopolitical effects on culture then have significant consequences on the sites in which the new Indian subject is negotiated and on the cultural forms that gain precedence. For instance, the idea of a national subject is inevitably defined on and against the notion of a global, Westernized subject. In short, it is important to stress the difficulty of understanding cultural production “without considering how processes operating primarily at other scales (transnational migratory currents, interest rate f luctuations, shifts in terms of trade, relocations of industrial activity, environmental changes, etc.) impinge upon them” (Harvey, Spaces of Hope 80). Our task of reading culture, then, must proceed in conjunction with the processes of political economy. The new Indian subject is defined by his or her relation to the shifting modes of production in the new economy, as well as marked as subject through cultural processes within this very same economy. Can these antagonisms be contained? Can the global be embedded in the local? How is this process negotiated? If liberalization is to succeed, then to some extent the local has to become a part of the global. How can institutions deeply rooted in caste, class, and gender politics—particularly active in a large section of the non-metropolitan economy—become active participants in this transformative change? If this dialectic is kept alive, is there a space for resistance, a space for the articulation of alternatives that can be posed in reaction to the assertion of local and global interests? Clearly it is to the benefit of both global and local capital to collaborate in a unified project of wealth accumulation, but if there are continual contradictions between these forces, the project of liberalization and subject construction will be in f lux.

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Moreover, even though I am borrowing the binary language of globalization—the local versus the global—in which this conf lict is often posed, the antagonism I am describing is vastly more complex. What is at stake here is a system of values and political agency entrenched in notions of caste, gender, class, and nation that have to be constantly renegotiated in light of the disruptive power of metropolitan capital. It is especially fruitful, then, to analyze the images and narratives of the new Indian subject while the liminal force of consumer capital casts a surreal light on the everyday, a space where the social antagonisms of class, caste, and gender collide consistently and with increasingly overt resonance. My discussion in this chapter has focused on setting the context for an understanding of varied constructions of the new Indian subject, but any such discussion would be incomplete without attention to the oppositional currents that are a part of the New India. Postcolonial India, after all, has had a rich heritage of protest movements, many of which were launched outside the parameters of the parliamentary parties on the Left. Some examples would be the “grassroots movements launched by the non-traditional Left—Chipko, the miners [sic] struggle in Chhattisgarh, the Ryot Coolie Sangham in Andhra Pradesh, the Satyagraha led by the peasants [sic] movement in Kanakpura in Karnataka against the mining of granite, the Jharkand Mutki Morcha” (Kothari, qtd. in Nigam 90). Along with these are the famous rebellions in Telangana (1946–51) and Tebhaga (1946–47 and 1948–49), and the textile strike in Bombay led by Datta Samant (in 1982). As Aditya Nigam points out, many of these struggles were in some ways an “interrogation of the development paradigm” (117). Within the folds of parliamentary democracy, as well, there have been significant points of resistance: the elections of communist governments in Kerala (in 1957) and West Bengal (in 1977) and the defeat of Indira Gandhi’s government in 1977 are notable examples of these moments. Where, though, is the existing space for resistance and revolution, one might ask? Will the new Indian subject only ref lect the ambiguities of the global age and be subsumed by the logic of transnational capital? Looking closely at the diversity and the range of resistance activities in India, whether cultural or political, we see the potential for a resistant subject, even as neoliberal globalization erodes communities and collectivities. Certainly if the struggles in Kalahandi, Kalinganagar, and Nandigram are any indication, the resistant subject is active and engaged. Moreover, as evidenced by the movements mentioned above, the elements of a vibrant culture of resistance and revolution have always

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existed in India, and neoliberal globalization may change the character of resistance without dimming its f lame. In fact, if such globalization aids in demolishing the boundaries between the high and the low, the local and the global, the popular and the marginal, new spaces for social realignment may become increasingly available through a network of political alliances, both at the grassroots and the transnational levels. Thus, even as the struggles against globalization and state control seem insurmountable, one must historicize the prospect for political and cultural resistance. Current resistance movements have to be seen within the context of decolonization and the immense social changes since independence. After all, postcolonial India is probably one of the few instances in which a newly independent country with such high levels of illiteracy and poverty has continued to function as a democracy. It is also a nation that, despite being left almost penniless by two hundred years of British rule and an inherited parliamentary system run by a postcolonial elite, has successfully redistributed some land to a landless peasantry and built up an industrial base. Moreover, a strong memory of decolonization, the active presence of leftist parties, and a deep-rooted tradition of mass mobilization movements keep alive a potent and vibrant oppositional tradition, and this tradition is certainly visible in the field of culture. Particularly inspiring are those artists who have emerged, organically as it were, directly from social movements such as the ones mentioned above. Although the cultural documents emerging from these struggles remain unknown to most people outside India, they show that artists continue to negotiate the disruptions opened up by globalization. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 will highlight the work of artists and ordinary Indians who are attempting to create a new Indian subject in a redefined “New India.” I have tried in this chapter to set the context for us to evaluate this process of redefinition. Let me summarize these contexts. Any redefinition of the Indian subject in contemporary India has to take into account the following points: the rapid proletarianization of the agrarian dispossessed; the state’s ill-considered adherence to the project of liberalization that ruthlessly privatizes public resources and land and undercuts the interests of the poor; the intersections of religious and national texts with the text of political economy; and, finally, the disruptive nature of global capital and its tendency for crisis and planned underdevelopment.

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CH A P T E R

T WO

Polemics and Promises: Constructing the Consumer Citizen

The Neoliberal Citizen Speaking to Women’s Own magazine on October 31, 1987, at a moment of ascendancy for the neoliberal world order, Margaret Thatcher uttered words that have since become the creed of neoliberal regimes: “there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and women, and their families. And no government can do anything except through people, and people must look to themselves first” (Deer). This privatized view of the individual as an entity cut off from any collective identity has since attained its own force as the reigning logic of citizenship in the neoliberal world. The individual “free” agent, the active subject, who more than ever is defined by the sum of “his” choices, is starkly contrasted to any collective identity—unless that identity is safely locked inside the marker of the national.1 Pierre Bourdieu has elaborated on the symbolic force of discourses valorizing the private individual and the accompanying efforts to destroy the idea of social collectives: it is a “strong discourse” which is so strong and hard to fight because it has behind it all the powers of a world of power relations which it helps to make as it is, in particular by orienting the economic choices of those who dominate economic relations and so adding its own—specifically symbolic— force to those power relations. In the name of the scientific program of knowledge, converted into a political programme of action, an immense

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political operation is being pursued, aimed at creating the conditions for realizing and operating of the “theory”; a programme of methodical destruction of collectives (neo-classical economics recognizes only individuals, whether it is dealing with companies, trade unions or families). (Acts of Resistance 95–96 emphasis in original) This destruction of the collective, as Bourdieu argues, has existed in alliance with attempts to create a civic identity based on the supposed “rights” of the individual and was part of the larger Reagan/Thatcher project to “roll back socialism” in the United Kingdom and to advance economic liberalization in the United States. Colin Leys points out that one side of the New Right’s goal was to attack [socialism’s] domestic base in the labour movement through anti-union measures and higher unemployment, privatisation and reduced taxes on capital. The other side was to end controls over capital movements and reduce trade barriers, exposing the domestic workforce to competition from lower-paid workers in countries with weaker regulatory regimes—at the same time making it hard, if not impossible, for any future government to reverse these changes. (12) Leys highlights Thatcher’s methodical attempt to dismantle the organized labor movement, making it clear that the idea ref lected in this attempt was not that governments were unable to “do anything except through people,” but that any notion of “the people” was systematically subordinated to the needs of private capital. A primary goal of this and other projects of liberalization, then, is to control and discipline labor even more rigidly. The neoliberal regime of accumulation requires that the state adjust and adapt to the international needs of capital. Thus, as Neil Smith claims, “national states are reframing themselves as purer, territorially rooted economic actors in and of the market, rather than external complements to it” (“New Globalism, New Urbanism” 87). What this more f lexible role of the state means for our understanding of contemporary capitalism is that the “connections between capital and the state, social reproduction and social control have been drastically altered” (82). This “transformation,” according to Smith, is “being expressed most vividly through an altered geography of social relations” (82). This “altered geography of social relations” has many dimensions, working differently at various class levels. Within the Thatcherite

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universe—and subsequently—this change in social relations was meant to protect and promote the class interests of aff luent citizens, but, perhaps more importantly, the new class relations were furthered by positing a specific kind of neoliberal citizen. This citizen is typically a member of the middle class or of the aspiring working class. The members of Thatcher’s new, aspiring class were those who did not need government entitlements. They were “responsible” citizens who earned their own keep. Meanwhile, people who just lived “off the dole” were informed sanctimoniously that it was their hardworking neighbor “who [was] supplying [the dole]:” “If you can earn your own living then really you have a duty to do it and you will feel very much better!” (Deer). In Thatcher’s world—and in more recent manifestations of neoliberalism—the private, earning individual, a member of the industrious middle class or the upwardly mobile working class, is in stark contrast to those who expect the government to invest in public programs. Thus the material logic of the acquisitive age carries symbolic weight; it is a tale based on protecting the class interests of those in power, but equally importantly, it is a narrative that constructs an aspiring middle-class citizen who is vested with moral authority. The citizen is coded into an ethos of responsibility and commitment to the nation even as that commitment serves the interests of multinational capital. The morality of the earning, responsible citizen, then, is not merely a value-laden imperative for the national project but is linked to the needs of capital. Citizenship under neoliberal rules is not about rights that collective struggle has forced the state to honor, nor even about civic responsibilities such as voting, but about economic responsibilities that accompany the act of earning “your own living.” Within this logic, employment, housing, and education are easily accessible to those who are willing to work for them. The relationship between responsibility and consumption is a complex one. The neoliberal citizen is a responsible earner; thus he has the “right” to consume. Consumption is his reward. Conversely, this capacity to consume also gives him the mantle of responsibility. He is a direct contributor to the economy.2 The notion of a citizen who has been enfranchised to demand that the state honor his or her political rights is reduced in the neoliberal formulation to the responsibility to earn and the “right” to consume. Consumption is ultimately also the extent of the citizen’s rights, but enshrined in this right is an apparent passport to a world of possibilities previously rooted in traditional upper-class privilege. These possibilities include increased access to specially demarcated private spaces and commodities and an unregulated

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imperative to acquire wealth and accumulate credit. Because this world of possibilities seemingly corresponds to and represents the lifestyle of a transnational class, middle-class subjects are offered still another form of supposed enfranchisement: they are encouraged to believe that their tastes, fashions, and desires link them to a privileged global citizenship. Although this form of citizenship has been an important element of capitalist societies in the West since the Thatcher/Reagan years, over the last ten to fifteen years, it has also become the model of citizenship in the postcolonial world, especially in countries such as India that have seen dramatic economic changes. It is well worth mentioning, however, that even though I am describing the construction of a citizen in specific historical contexts, citizenship in the modern state has always been used as a way to organize social relations. Rituals of citizenship, after all, are not just a question of an individual’s relationship to the state. Instead, “it is a more total relationship, inf luenced by identity, social positioning, cultural assumptions, institutional practices and a sense of belonging” (Yuval Davis 4, qtd. in Rajan 1). Philip Corrigan and Derek Sayer point out that the state produces citizens in specific ways: “as citizens, voters, taxpayers, ratepayers, jurors, parents, consumers, homeowners—individuals” (qtd. in Rajan 2). Since neoliberal globalization enhances these relations in transitional postcolonial economies by promoting the unfettered entrance of Western capital and the ready availability of consumer goods, it becomes important to examine the distinctive ways in which social relations and notions of citizenship and identity are changing in these economies. Aihwa Ong has put forward an important way to consider citizenship in a developing country in the globalized age. She argues that in the era of globalization, individuals as well as governments develop a f lexible notion of citizenship and sovereignty as strategies to accumulate capital and power. “Flexible citizenship” refers to the cultural logics of capitalist accumulation, travel, and displacement that induce subjects to respond f luidly and opportunistically to changing political-economic conditions. . . . These logics and practices are produced within particular structures of meaning about family, gender, nationality, class mobility, and social power. (6) Although Ong grounds her work in the study of Chinese transnational subjects who are, for instance, able to possess two passports, this notion

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of f lexibility is also appropriate for an Indian context, where both the economy and the nation are in f lux. Certainly, as Ong claims, and as I will demonstrate in my analysis of the new Indian citizen, capital and access to it have become central to the notion of civic identity. It is apparent that access to capital is limited to a very small section of the population in most postcolonial societies, so in these societies the middle-class subject is incorporated into neoliberalism through “his” right to consume.3 How, though, is this link between consumption and citizenship constructed and maintained? One way to address this question is to return to the imperative of capital in the neoliberal age. Capital accumulation at the global level has to be sustained through increasing and accelerated levels of expansion and consumption. A goal of the neoliberal revolution in the third world, then, is to convert economies that have traditionally been characterized by the consumption of essential goods, the promotion of nationalized savings schemes, and the restriction of imported goods, for instance, into neoliberal economies based on increased consumption and debt, deregulation of banks, and a trade structure determined by global capital. While the latter two transformative goals may be met with the implementation of structural adjustments, the conversion of a population schooled in different economic principles—meeting basic needs rather than purchasing non-essential goods (and even incurring debt to do so)—cannot be accomplished by purely legislative means. The ideal of citizenship, then, has to be partially defined through the ideological promotion of regimes of consumption and debt. At the structural level, the neoliberal state enacts a familiar regime of new rules and regulations concerning, for instance, work, investment, and housing. A “mobile” labor economy is created in which some upper-level executives make enormous sums of money while the majority languish in disposable service-economy jobs; laws are enacted that make bank loans and credit accessible to a large segment of the population; a retail and housing boom make new homes and consumer goods more widely available. Accompanying the changes in the economy are attempts in the cultural realm to bring a consuming subject into being. The state apparatus and the corporate media relentlessly drive home the message of consumption through advertising and political messages, and they link purchasing power with the attainment of a social status rooted in a global consumer identity. However, in a country such as India, with a carefully cultivated national identity, this global self has to be linked to the idea of that identity. There are several reasons that this link must be reinforced.

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First, political ties to the nation have been cemented through the tradition of decolonization and the veneration of national heroes such as Gandhi and Nehru in the last sixty years. Secondly, the state has continually reinforced the idea of nation. For instance, nationalism has been employed as a way to counter factionalism within the nation. In addition, nationalism has been reinforced through India’s many conf licts with neighboring Pakistan. Finally, the state, despite its many failures to redress inequities, has been the traditional “provider” of essentials such as food and fuel subsidies. Thus politicians and advertisers have to allay any concerns or anxieties of the middle-class subject who may fear that rapid economic change may unsettle both the nation and his or her own economic and psychological well-being. One of my goals in this chapter is to demonstrate how this process of combining the national and the global is constituted, enabled, and negotiated on the terrain of culture. I also intend to show how the establishment of an intensified commodity economy changes notions of citizenship. In the first chapter, I tried to underline the specific economic reforms that have contributed to the creation of the New India. I argued that accompanying these economic changes have been ideas regarding citizenship that are specific to this age. Many of these ideas are emerging from a combination of government initiatives and corporate marketing strategies that are designed to promote and legitimize the process of liberalization.4 Throughout the mid-1990s, with the liberalization process in full swing, it was in the field of public culture that we saw some of the most complex, if gradual, negotiations to construct a narrative that was at once boldly assertive but also wrapped up in an intricate and often contradictory logic to justify economic policies. Since then, actual economic reforms, such as disinvestment in the social, the privatization of land and resources, a violent pattern of dispossessing the poor, and increased deregulation of modes of capital acquisition and capital transfer have been accompanied by a systematic process to create a new type of consumer and a new notion of citizenship, which at its heart is a class project. Constructing the New Indian Citizen In this chapter I examine the various ways in which the notion of a consumer subject is being constructed in contemporary India, and how attempts to form and/or represent this subject have a direct bearing on the creation of a new Indian citizen. It’s particularly important to

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examine these attempts because even though the Indian media and the ruling political parties passionately celebrate the birth of a “New India,” which, in their view, is characterized by a robust growth rate and the success of economic liberalization, a majority of the country’s citizens continue to remain outside the social and economic parameters of this “success.”5 This obvious reality is a necessary supplement that informs any sound understanding of the attempts to call up a “New India,” creating an omnipresent and destabilizing counternarrative. Recent efforts to revive a politics of nationalism (the atomic explosions in 1998, or the “Shining India” campaign by the BJP in 2004, discussed below) can be seen as an attempt to alleviate some of the anxieties associated with economic liberalization and to distract the vast majority of the people from continuing and newly emergent inequalities.6 National narratives, then, are often aligned uneasily with the promotion of global market forces. The collusion and disjuncture between these narratives and forces have led to an intricate dance on the part of the media and the government in an attempt to articulate a new form of citizenship. A “new” Indian is constructed and projected in the cultural arena through the use of images and narratives rooted in potentially contradictory notions of the global and the national. Examining this interplay is essential in order to deepen our understanding of the complex struggles over forms of identity and self in contemporary India. Let us now take a brief look at the intricate layers of this ideological project and attempt to address those issues that are specific to this idea of a new Indian subject. I must note, however, that I am not posing these particular forms of neoliberal subjectivity as false constructions in contrast to some notion of an authentic Indian subject or a real “national life” or “national culture.” All of these categories are, of course, endlessly evolving, dynamic concepts that are part of the ongoing contestations regarding identity. The continual meshing of regional loyalties, religion, caste, gender, and class politics make any claims for an Indian identity fraught with contradictions. What I am suggesting instead is that there is something significant about the establishment of particular forms of subjectivity at this current conjuncture. I should make one additional clarification. I do not want to make the reductionist argument that this new form of citizenship is only about creating a consuming subject, one who will contribute to and participate in the neoliberal project of capital acquisition. Clearly, constructions of citizenship negotiate tensions regarding all sorts of claims rooted in ideas of the nation, and in the case of India these claims are usually imbricated in ways that position caste, gender, and religion

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within the larger narrative of the nation. Indeed, one element of the specific form of subjectivity that I will examine in this chapter is the need to assuage an enduring postcolonial anxiety about the legacy of colonization, to assert a nationhood that is permanently deferred, as India is still on the lower rungs of the ladder of development in the global sense of progress. Constructing this particular form of the new Indian citizen, then, serves at least two possible ends: it weds citizens to the prospect of a resurgent national identity, and it attaches the middleclass Indian citizen to a universalized globalism, constituting a membership in an international club. For the purpose of this analysis, I will concentrate on examining a “Vision Document” from the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) written in 2004; commercial advertising images on billboards and on television since 1999, when the BJP came to power; and a special issue on “youth in India” in an English-language national magazine. Let me explain in some detail the rationale for my choices and note some of the limitations governing these choices; first, I will discuss the inclusion of both political and commercial texts. One reason to explore both state and corporate attempts to construct a consuming subject is to point out the intersections of and the differences between market and state constructions of the subject. My analysis will demonstrate potential sites of conf lict in these different constructions and explore how these constructions are positioned in relation to the larger politics of caste, gender, and class. I will also consider whether or not an entirely new form of civic identity is being created in an attempt to produce a certain sort of citizen/consumer. Does the fetish of the “new,” for instance, elide or build on previous ideas of political citizenship? It is important to address such questions in order to interrogate the various ways in which the “national” is being rewritten in the age of globalization. Clearly, too, all of these issues have to be addressed in light of the tensions that are inherent in the dialectical play between the needs of capital and the needs of the state. In the age of neoliberal globalization, where commercial enterprises rely on the state to regulate financial transactions, it may seem safe to conclude that the state is merely a vassal of the corporate economy, that national images may be used merely to sell economic reforms. However, while such a reading can be accurate in describing some developed societies, a postcolonial state such as India is often steeped in an ideology of the nation and the “national” mode of development. The presence of the “national” means that the relationship between the needs of capital and the needs of the state is necessarily an unstable one. Thus Matthew Sparke’s question about “how

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citizenship is being reimagined, recodified, and, therefore, remade in an era when laissez-faire, free-market capitalism has become globally dominant” is especially relevant for India (255). Second, my choice of texts highlights the effects of economic reforms in India in areas that have become particularly important to the task of creating a new consumer subject. So, for instance, I focus on representations of the subject as connected to home, since these representations are now ubiquitous in Indian cities, where most middle-class citizens reside. These representations are also some of the most prominent ideological markers that have produced pressures on and incentives for middle-class Indian consumers during this process of transformation. The marker of home is also connected to the creation of a debt economy and the recent impetus for the pattern of debt and ownership that has been common in the West. Home and automobile loans, for example, are now available in ways that have completely changed the terms of ownership. Many middle-class Indians now pay Equal Monthly Installments (EMIs) that include a mortgage and installment payment of other loans. Young Indians, unlike their counterparts a decade or two ago, who would have bought cars only if they could have afforded the full price, are now purchasing these items on credit. Automobile loans are now widely available, as are home loans, although interest rates continue to be very high by Western standards (12% for first-year auto loans and over 10% for home loans). Moreover, the use of credit for smaller, non-essential purchases, including spending on travel, entertainment, and dining out, is encouraged by the various banks and companies that offer credit cards. These offers have soared, and although the actual number of cards in circulation (less than twenty-five million in 2007) is small by global standards, more and more consumers have access to some form of credit. The availability of credit has brought the promise—if not the reality—of ownership to the middle class as never before. Neoliberal citizenship is of course as much about the possibility of class empowerment through ownership and consumption as about the actual attainment of these goals. The construction of the Indian national subject is increasingly linked to the idea of class privilege that comes with these consumption patterns. In contemporary India, attempts to construct a consumer subject are directly connected to the construction of this “new” middle-class, metropolitan citizen, but as Leela Fernandes points out, what has become known as the “new” middle class “is not ‘new’ in terms of its structural or social basis. . . . Rather, its newness refers to a process of production of a distinctive social and political identity that represents and lays

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claim to the benefits of liberalization” (India’s New Middle Class xviii). In some ways, then, citizenship and national identity in the New India are constantly reshaped within an evolving and dialectical relationship, especially in relocating citizens’ roles in consuming goods and in the acquisition of wealth. This dialectical reading is important, for it emphasizes that there is no simple cause-and-effect relationship in which the economy merely drives the circulation of cultural representations posing a specific citizen identity. Let me also be clear about the specific middle-class subject that is the focus of my analysis. Prior to the implementation of liberalization, the middle class generally constituted a category of people who had a monthly family income anywhere from Rs.5,000 to Rs.25,000. Their occupations ranged from teachers and small business owners to government officers and artists. Liberalization has made this class category far more f luid. As incomes and costs have soared and more and more young Indians have entered the service economy, it is possible that some “middle-class” families may be earning as much as Rs.50,000 a month while a significant number are struggling to get by on a few thousand rupees a month. The image-makers, of course, do not focus on the nuances of this category but proclaim that the middle class comprises over 250 million people, all of whom are potential consumers and participants in a commodity economy. The image-makers include in this vastly complex category the elite classes (about 5 percent of the population), who are the main beneficiaries of liberalization.7 The reality is that a majority of this group are precariously situated in real financial terms. Much of their purchasing power, as I have argued, is attained only through credit. As the cost of necessities such as food, housing, transportation, and utilities (electricity, gas, and water) rise, less and less money is available for the products that are the supposed incentives of a commodity economy. Yet the narratives of consumption consistently represent the middle-class subject as one who has access to a world that is in reality open only to that top 5 percent. Rather than assume a specific middle-class subject, then, my analysis of the narratives will focus on what Fernandes calls the “production of a distinctive social and political identity” (xviii). Clearly, the process by which meanings about citizenship come into being is a complex one. The relationship between a particular representation and what end that representation might fulfill, for instance, is always informed by actually existing political realities. Thus, it is important to make the case that hegemonic attempts at constructing a particular kind of middle-class citizen are sometimes countered by

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these very same subjects, depending on the context of their economic opportunities, and on factors such as gender, caste, region, and religion. Moreover, these ideas are contested politically and socially by those subjects who are outside of this middle-class narrative, whether through the actions of the revolutionary Maoist insurgents in the rural areas who cast a spotlight on the disinherited rural citizen or in the resistance of the urban street vendors—forgotten citizens—who fight against efforts to introduce giant retail chain stores and supermarkets. These oppositional efforts continually challenge existing rituals that govern the rules of citizenship. This contested, dialectical process of naming a citizen is especially discernible when we turn our attention to the realm of culture. In general, then, the analysis that follows will highlight some of these underlying anxieties about the liberalization process. One function of these images and narratives that f launt the “advantages” of liberalization is to win consent for the ruling class’s project, and my analysis will explore that function. Such a reading of these texts, however, will have to incorporate an understanding of the complex interplay of the ideological markers of gender, caste, religion, and nation, as well as an acknowledgement of the multiple acts of refusal and assimilation that are part of this ideological process. Naturally, these contradictions are never entirely resolved, and an examination of these narratives and representations yields meanings that are always unstable, open to multiple readings. The process of constructing this middle-class consuming subject, then, is continual and contested. A few words are also necessary to justify my focus on advertisements. I believe that commercial and state advertisements play a crucial role in expressing and justifying the liberalization agenda; however, I also acknowledge that such a focus is accompanied by some limitations. First, let me articulate a few features of advertisements that make them important to the neoliberal agenda. For one thing, advertising in all its forms has worked to sell the benefits of the new economy, “awakening” people across the middle-class spectrum to the attractions of a lifestyle based on conspicuous consumption. This lifestyle is almost always rooted in upper-class, Western, and urban practices, promoting a curious mix of the global and the local. One ideological task of these advertisements is in line with state efforts to convey the Thatcherite message that there is no alternative: without liberalization, India will remain a poor, “third world” nation. Indeed, both commercial and state marketers imply liberalization is necessary to lift people out of poverty. Another message of the marketers, specifically targeted at a

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country that has been left out of the global narrative of capitalist progress, suggests that economic reform will bring wealth and, along with it, power and respect in the global arena. Many of the images I analyze focus on this element of the global. So, for instance, it is not uncommon to see images in which the local is enhanced by an accession to the global, or political policy statements that argue that the entrance of foreign capital will strengthen the nation. Thus, as I will demonstrate, a complex and often contradictory process of negotiating the global and the local is carried out through many of these images. Another feature of advertising images is that they trade on the seductive promise of material wealth. As the political machinery promotes the acquisition of wealth, the media provides the imagery necessary for an audience waiting to live out this dream. Moreover, since a majority of these texts are primarily targeted at the consumption of the middle and upper classes, the implicit message underlining these images is that the rewards for accepting and supporting liberalization policies are many and that they come in the form of material goods and access to a lifestyle that is equal to the most privileged in the global economy. A key implication is that in gaining access to this lifestyle, the middle classes, unlike previous generations, do not have to leave India. They can enjoy all the comforts of home (class privileges, such as domestic servants) even while being detached from all the deficiencies of home (such as pollution and poverty). This seductive message, wrapped in images of home and wealth, as we shall see, often includes another coded text: the comforting notion that these privileges can be enjoyed guiltlessly despite continuing evidence of both poverty and social unrest. Meanwhile, the political machinery confirms this global-luxury-at-home message, consistently persuading middle- and upper-class consumers that liberalization will address both problems. Liberalization will lift many boats and help people to come out of poverty; technology, the state, and the presence of corporate investment will create jobs and opportunities. Increased prosperity will, in turn, lead to a more peaceful society. Prosperous and aspiring consumers are further comforted with the promise that until the masses are lifted out of poverty, a rigorous state and corporate apparatus will protect middle- and upper-class interests. This promise is promoted on billboards across urban areas, and its proof can be seen everywhere. Gated communities, for instance, are slowly becoming a norm in the New India. The palaces of consumption—the posh department stores and shopping malls—are all protected by phalanxes of security guards.8

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Advertising images in India, moreover, are interesting precisely because they demonstrate the tension between, say, the promises signified by the goods in a Western-style department store and the reality of life in the streets outside, as well as the inherent contradictions in these promises. For instance, many advertisements are for products that may well be out of the reach of most consumers (such as Piaget watches or imported Scotch) or products that are not common items in most Indian households (such as microwaves or washing machines). In short, advertising executives must manage the differences between the promises of the consumer nation and the reality of most people’s lives. Moreover, their images must create a national narrative that will be palatable and believable to a number of consumers even while attempting to allay the fears that accompany the erosion of traditional forms of social transactions. As Fernandes puts it, Languages of commodities and of consumption provide a potentially accessible array of cultural registers that suggest a possibility of access and participation in this new middle-class model of the Indian nation. It is this paradoxical pairing of exclusion/difference and inclusion/universality that constitutes the hegemonic boundaries of the new middle class and characterizes the politics of this group with a continual sense of ambiguity. (35) The new commodity represents all that is possible under liberalization, so commodities attain a fantastical allure in which the nation space itself is being recreated. The ubiquitous foreign brand, ironically, is the best example of a nation that is finally able to fulfill its promise as an economic power on the world stage. Material progress is ref lected in the materiality of the commodity itself. “Visual representations,” argues Fernandes, “of newly available commodities . . . allow us to view the ways in which meanings attached to such commodities weave together narratives of nationhood and development with the creation of middle class identity” (41). An advertisement for a new apartment building promises the consumer safety and security, as well as sending the implicit message that ownership of an apartment indicates that the viewer has attained middle-class status and respectability. Moreover, as Fernandes claims, commodity consumption has taken the form of a kind of public language that holds a promise of potential access to new middle class membership that may otherwise seem too easily foreclosed by

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the linguistic politics of English. This language of class has been coded into narratives of lifestyle that rework existing status distinctions and mediate the anxieties and tensions of social differentiation that stem from restrictions on this promise of access. (71) Fernandes’s point about facility in the English language as a form of exclusion is especially valid since educational opportunities are not readily available for class mobility. Thus, as Fernandes argues, the commodity stands in place of economic equality. I would add that the economic and social anxieties and tensions that Fernandes mentions remain unresolved in these texts and, moreover, that the politics of inclusion and exclusion operate simultaneously—indeed, that one is dependent upon the other. Even as these images try to mediate and manage existing tensions, they further them. In my analysis of specific images, I want to point to one of the characteristic elements of these advertising campaigns: how the Indian self mysteriously remains pure while becoming at one with the rest of the global economy through adherence to Western norms. After all, adhering to these norms and membership in the consuming middle class, as Fernandes points out, does not depend “simply on the purchase of particular commodities or brands. Rather, it rests on the creation of a distinctive lifestyle associated with a broader set of social practices” (73). Also, as Derya Özkan and Robert Foster argue, “[t]he consumer citizen in this era of globalization is no longer an unidentified beneficiary of standardized mass consumption, but instead a supposedly active subject who reclaims a civic identity through unique tastes and consumer choices” (“Consumer Citizenship”). The process by which this “supposedly active subject” is created is obviously not without its limitations, and the extent to which this process is successful depends upon the context in which the subject consumes. So, for instance, media messages reinforce the attractions of dining at Pizza Hut at the local mall rather than in a restaurant serving Indian food. A middle-class family may well spend much more at the chain, but the pattern of consumption in the former instance, advertisements suggest, links the diners to the global middle class. Of course, one has to acknowledge the generational element when discussing consumption patterns. While young, middle-class Indians may readily accept foreign brands, the “strategy of nationalizing foreign products” may soften the older generations’ sense of lack and alienation (Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class 42). Taking the culinary example further, pizza with a tandoori chicken topping might be marketed to the older generation,

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thus fusing the global and the traditional. However, the real-life context of all these consumers is that for a family of four, an outing to Pizza Hut will cost over Rs.1,000, which is conceivably up to 10 percent of a middle-class family’s monthly income. That price tag places this dinner excursion outside the reach of most middle-class Indians. These existing contradictions make it necessary for advertisers to assert one essential element of the neoliberal dream: the affective valorization of individual needs and desires, what Tony Blair’s guru Anthony Giddens has referred to as a “democracy of emotions.” In Indian society, however, where kinship bonds continue to play an important role in determining social relations, this privatized aspect of the dream has to be negotiated with a degree of finesse, and this negotiation is often unsuccessful. For instance, it remains a common practice in many Indian households for the entire family, spanning three generations, to sit around the television set in the evenings. In this situation, privileging the private individual in TV advertisements is often a difficult proposition. So far I have concentrated on providing a rationale for examining advertisements; however, since I concentrate on examining Englishlanguage advertisements primarily viewed in metropolitan centers, I must acknowledge the limitations of my sample. My analysis does not, for instance, consider advertisements in the vernacular, in regional magazines, on radio, or on billboards in small towns in India. My conclusions are thus limited to the middle-class subject as he or she is constructed in a particular class-based urban context. I am arguing, however, that the new consumer subject is being constructed precisely in this political and cultural terrain of class and space, so even though my sample excludes the marginalized other, it is this outside, the repressed other of this exclusive citizen that informs my reading of the new consumer subject. Let me now turn to the overarching text, the union of the local and the global, which positions this new consumer subject. As I mentioned earlier, one way in which this idea is promoted is through notions such as f lexible citizenship, which is linked with the transnational capitalist economy. As Sparke argues, although transnational mobility is linked to a very small percentage of the population, “the processes of producing and disciplining national subjects are being increasingly morphed into processes and disciplinary strategies that support the production and circulation of more mobile transnational subjects” (Sparke 271). Inclusion within the global economy, Sparke claims, “becomes more and more about having capital or thinking of territory and belonging

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in terms of capital” (260). Ultimately, according to Sparke, “the neoliberal vision aims at linking this realm of emergent economic citizenship directly with the realms of political and social citizenship” (266). Although this link is not fully developed in India, it is increasingly the case for the middle-class subject, whose class position is tenuous at best, to be incorporated within the terms of this melded citizenship so that the promise of access to capital aligns him or her to the political interests of the transnational ruling class. This transnational class in the case of India includes both those upperclass Indian citizens who do business and can travel outside the confines of the nation-state and those in the diaspora, the non-resident Indians (NRIs) who can now seek greater access to the privileges offered by the home nation. The Indian state grants these privileged few the status of transnational citizenship, with all the benefits arising from this position: long-term, multiple-entry visas for non-Indian citizens and open entry for PIO (Person of Indian Origin) and OCI (Overseas Citizenship of India) card holders, unregulated travel, the ability to move capital, and access to specialized housing and bank accounts. The NRI/PIO/OCI is also offered a set of promises and privileges about the “homeland.” There, he or she may increasingly find the comforts of the West, such as private housing estates and luxury goods, along with the nostalgic traces of “home,” such as language, family, and culturally familiar fare, and economically friendly private property rights that guarantee generously low tax rates and other investment incentives.9 Like his NRI counterpart, the Indian citizen, although somewhat more limited by travel restrictions, has access to the global economy through transnational business connections and the availability of commodities that his Western cousins also possess. Thus, access to capital, accompanied by the right to consume, determines these transnational subjects, and that right is integral to understanding ways in which citizenship is being recast in the neoliberal age. Of course, this ability to move across national boundaries does not in any way elide the prominence of the nation-state in developing countries, both as an apparatus that grants certain citizenship rights and as a site with an aura of authenticity. Indeed, it is the nation-state that promotes a new kind of nationalism that incorporates the global with the national. In their discussion of neoliberal consumption in Turkey, Özkan and Foster point to the intersection of civic identity and consumption as being a vital component of the new nationalism that is also aligned with transnational capital: “neoliberal nationalism promotes the integration of the national economy with the global marketplace;

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and it seeks the signs of this integration in the sphere of consumption.” According to Özkan and Foster, [t]he current discourse of consumer citizenship . . . promotes an outward looking process of nation making. This process puts less stress on defining markets and identities in terms of bounded territorial units and more stress on asserting membership in an unbounded commercial arena of world class consumption. Consumerism, with its dominant values of personal freedom and choice, thus becomes the main vehicle for realizing national citizenship. The nation is called into being through a complicated process of integrating the local and the global. It attains autonomy, paradoxically, only in relation to the global, and the middle-class citizen as “free” agent realizes this point most prominently through his or her access to consumer goods. Interestingly, the arena of “world class consumption” is primarily accessible to the transnational elite, but it is the middleclass subject who is being positioned as a potential consumer of this lifestyle. Consumerism, then, is not merely about acquiring products but is a passport to the world. The nation and the middle-class subject acquire legitimacy by being linked to a larger international market. As I argued in my example about Pizza Hut, just any consumption will not do; in countries such as Turkey and India, having access to Western products that represent a distinctive Western lifestyle is part of “being” this new, global citizen. Özkan and Foster refer to this form of consumption as “consumer cosmopolitanism.” In their estimation, nationalism and cosmopolitanism are two sides of the same coin: consumer citizenship defined by positive nationalism resembles a consumerist cosmopolitanism that seeks to transcend older modes of modernity and citizenship. Consumerist cosmopolitanism promotes a global civic identity that is not bound by any national territory and that, moreover, gives one the “freedom” to adopt any tradition and to incorporate it within one’s personal consumption habits. In developing nations, the ideological message claims, consumption revives and expands the nation, while foreign direct investment (FDI) and transnational business links legitimize the nation within the global community. Thus growth rates and FDI statistics are constantly

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trumpeted by developing nations such as India as signs of “progress.” In this way, consumerism in the neoliberal age, according to Özkan and Foster, “promises to reconcile the global and the local—to render them commensurable—by dissolving categorical distinctions between East and West.” Of course, what Özkan and Foster do not dwell on is that this seemingly benign process elides the continuing transfer of wealth from the East to the West, keeping alive such material, categorical distinctions. Özkan and Foster argue that this “image of consumerist cosmopolitanism” is a “substitute for old-fashioned nationalisms” represented by principles of sovereignty and economic autonomy, nationalisms considered outdated and incongruous with the aims of nations that want to join the global economy. In the case of India, weighed down by stereotypical images of poverty and “backwardness,” “the image of global locality provides a solution. It promises to banish the specter of provinciality and to assert economic and cultural membership in the new world order.” However, this effort to affirm a national identity while embracing the foreign other is a project fraught with tension; in addition, forms of deterritorialization, which is the hallmark of globalization, are, as we know, accompanied by means of reterritorialization. The state and other ideological apparatuses cannot negotiate and stabilize all the forces that are unleashed by economic liberalization; therefore, forms of reterritorialization, new means of articulating the nation and of representing the population, come into play. In the case of India, the vast presence of the dispossessed and marginalized communities, particularly in non-metropolitan regions, makes such a redefinition of citizenship not without friction. Moreover, there is a whole legacy of national identity grounded in the struggle against colonialism, in the historical framework of Nehru and Gandhi’s vision of an independent India that cannot be wished away. The process of constructing a new form of consumer citizenship is thus a lot less predictable than the vision offered by Özkan and Foster. My contention is that this effort to construct a new Indian citizen is far from complete; indeed the process itself brings to the surface the many tensions that constitute the multiple narratives and formations of the subject in the age of globalization. If postcolonial identity is an identity always constructed within the shadow of Western economic dominance, then an economically determined nationalism is one way to assert identity. This new Indian identity, however, does not mirror the economic nationalism of the Nehru years, which was rooted in a nationalist developmental politics

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of non-aligned third worldism. Instead, it embraces a “nationalism” that is based on a competitive and collaborative alliance with Western capitalism. In this narrative, not only will Indian businesses be equal partners with Western capital, but on occasion, as in Tata’s acquisition of Corus, an 18.2-million-ton Anglo-Dutch steel-maker purchased for US$8.1 billion, they will also outwit and outbid Western firms.10 At a more basic level, primary evidence of a resurgent economic “nationalism” is visible in the form of an explosion of consumer goods like high-end electronics and designer clothes. The narrative of nationalist progress is represented by the widespread availability of these goods (they are now readily available even in small towns), which signifies that now, in contrast to the years of austerity since independence, the nation is on the move. This form of economic nationalism also makes the myth of class mobility seem real to those who are outside the national narrative. The new Indian in non-metropolitan areas can ostensibly surmount certain class and caste barriers through the ownership of consumer goods: products such as mobile phones, which are increasingly used by a wide swath of the population—from CEOs to vegetable deliverymen—can provide membership in a national community of consumers, a group traditionally associated with the middleclass metropolitan population. For the middle classes, many of whom are also upper caste and view with suspicion what they perceive to be the increasing demands of the Other Backward Classes (OBC), the Dalits, and the underprivileged, the process of subject formation through consumption is somewhat different. In their case, consumer goods serve as a palliative for the unfulfilled longings rooted in class and caste privilege, partially allaying the anxieties that come about as a result of an incorporation into a global regime of capitalism and the increasing factionalism within the nation. In short, these goods are a way to “empower” the middle classes through a regime of “rights” rooted in consumerism. Of course, these rights can only be measured in relation to the political privileges granted to these classes; thus, in their case, consumerism in itself is not enough. Their access to consumer goods must be enhanced by changes in the tax laws, by access to public resources and land, and through a stricter policing of labor, “minorities,” and the poor. As I argued in the previous chapter, the constellation of the anti-reservation movement and the liberalization of the economy in the early 1990s created the ideal climate for the production of this new middleclass Indian subject. Advocates for liberalization took this opportunity to highlight the apparent negative effects of a “rewards” system

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controlled by the government and to condemn reservations as strictures against the “freedom” of market reforms. The anti-reservation movement, then, was an essential step in the construction of the new Indian subject. It perpetuated the Thatcherite myth that the ideal citizen is the bourgeois self-subject who is able to use available technology and freemarket opportunities to acquire wealth, often—ironically—through indebtedness, and thereby transcend the limitations of caste, class, gender, or nation. However, not coincidentally, this imaginary subject, the ideal citizen, is often represented and imagined as male, upper caste (certainly not a Dalit), and of metropolitan origin. The much-heralded masses of the postcolonial moment, the people, have been erased from the neoliberal landscape, although they are occasionally called up during election campaigns. As I have argued, this elision has happened at both the economic and cultural level. Draconian laws that further disempower the poor have been accompanied by specific cultural rewritings to refigure the past. Later in this chapter, I will examine the Bharatiya Janata Party’s Vision Document as a way to highlight more specifically how these shifts have been negotiated on the terrain of culture. Certainly a revised civic identity is not possible without a shift in the mythic narratives and figures of the nation. Consider, for instance, the talismanic figures of Nehru and Gandhi. Both embody forms of citizenship that have residual prominence in India. Nehru continues to represent a secular progressivism, while Gandhi stands in for nonviolence (ahimsa) and an ascetic integrity. I would suggest that both of these icons, whose deification has always been problematic, have been recast into figures whose qualities mimic those of the new consumer subject. Nehru as the quintessential secular modernist formerly represented a certain form of third-world nationalism that was at once global yet rooted in an ethos of developmental nationalism. A version of this nationalism has now been linked to the global market in such a way that “global Indianness involves producing self-respect at the national level while simultaneously claiming recognition on the world stage” (Mazzarella 37–38, in Özkan and Foster). According to the avatars of neoliberalism in India, Nehru’s wish for an independent, globally recognized India has finally been realized through its incorporation into the market economy. Gandhi’s legacy, likewise, can be managed in such a way that “honesty” and “integrity” become free-market values juxtaposed against government inefficiency and corruption.11 Of course, when necessary, these icons can also represent ideas that have “failed” and are no longer valid for the new economy. Nehru is deemed a “failed

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socialist,” while Gandhi’s faith in village life and in indigenous development are written off as hopelessly anachronistic. All of these shifts and attempts at cultural rewriting, however, point to the tenuous nature of the economic and political project of creating a new India and a new Indian citizen. This is especially so because, despite the consumer boom or the increase in the growth rate, structural inequities are visible for all to see. Thus the attempt to construct a particular kind of middle-class citizen must be measured against the economic realities of India and the realization that the formation of class identity is not a seamless process. Citizenship formation remains an incomplete practice since, despite existing and new privileges, attempts to create a new class identity point to “the fissures” that exist “between hegemonic representations of new middle-class identity and the contradictory socioeconomic realities of those who both constitute and aspire to this group” (Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class xix). It is “precisely such fissures,” Leela Fernandes claims, “that produce the anxieties, responses, and practices that constitute the daily substance of contemporary democratic politics” (xix). I agree with Fernandes that matters of class, while not the only factors, are undoubtedly the most important elements in this construction of the new Indian. Narrating the New Indian Subject In this section of the chapter, I want to focus on specific examples of constructing the consumer subject. I will look at a variety of forums (an election document, billboards, a special feature on youth in India in a national magazine, and television advertising) so as to highlight the relative effectiveness of these images, depending on the context of their circulation. There are, after all, many avenues in which these texts circulate. For instance, it needs to be said that in the case of print advertising, the readers of English-language publications (such as India Today and the Times of India) tend to be on the upper rungs of the class ladder, while magazines and newspapers in the regional languages (such as Bengali, Hindi, Marathi, or Tamil) generally draw readers whose financial status is far less secure (teachers, government employees, the self-employed, etc.). In the case of television, although the percentages of viewers are still small, audiences have grown incrementally over the last fifteen years and encompass a wider swath of the population. The large-scale availability of cable television, especially in the metropolitan areas, also ensures that millions of people have access to media images,

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many of which are geared to produce a specific form of subjectivity in the viewing audience, encouraging them to be consumers, to be loyal to a particular form of ideological positioning. My examination of a range of narratives will bring to the surface many of the issues that I have already discussed. First, I will analyze a Vision Document published by the BJP on the eve of the 2004 parliamentary elections, when almost all of the media predicted that the party would be swept back to power. The BJP’s efforts to link the consuming subject to the nation through coded religious appeals are particularly interesting for what they reveal about the tensions linking class, faith, and nation. Having highlighted this link, I will then examine selected advertising images that represent a vital component of constructing the new Indian subject: the notions of home and space and their association with a sense of privilege and class position. I also analyze a magazine special feature on youth in India, contrasting the magazine’s examination and advertisement of “youth culture” with that of Lokniti, a non-profit organization research program located in Delhi. Finally, by paying attention to the realm of television advertising, I consider ways in which the local and the global are negotiated in constructions of the new Indian woman. Although it is tempting to view these images purely for their extrinsic value, advocating particular lifestyles, I would like to suggest that the images are wrapped up in their own contradictions, exemplifying some of the anxieties associated with the neoliberal project. Additionally, these images point to the multiple ways in which citizenship is being constructed in the new India. In positing a version of the new Indian subject, these images are at once recasting a specific national identity— one linked to a transnational upper class—and undermining any continuous, stable sense of self. My broad argument is that these images destabilize the promises of the neoliberal dream even as they attempt to fulfill it. Specifically, an exploration of these images will involve the analysis of narratives built upon the following elements that are the cornerstones of neoliberal promise: property, wealth, and commodity. In my examination of these elements, I will attempt to demonstrate the ways in which the consumer subject is constructed. The BJP’s Construction of the Swadeshi Consumer The 2004 Vision Document is an excellent example of the multiple ways in which the BJP has reinvented itself in the last sixteen years. A key

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goal here is to complicate the popular notion that the party is defined primarily by its extremist and xenophobic positions on cultural nationalism and Hindutva. Although these positions have certainly helped define the party, and though they have usually been foregrounded in discussions on their role in Indian politics, it would be safe to say that the BJP’s evolving positions on liberalization and economic reforms are equally important and form a dialectical relationship with its more prominent cultural positions. Examining the relationship can help us understand aspects of the larger project to redefine the Indian polity and the Indian citizen in the age of liberalization, as well as help us comprehend the intricate negotiations between the local and the global, between nationalism and globalization, and between class and religious agency. A significant portion of the BJP’s agenda, of course, is to recreate a specifically Indian subject. It is this element that I want to focus on: the BJP’s construction of this Indian subject in the context of its stance on economic reforms. Specifically, I hope to demonstrate that this making of the new Indian is as much a class project as it is a cultural one and that the class dimensions of this project have become progressively more pronounced as the party has acquired legitimacy as a mainstream force (at one point, gaining a parliamentary majority). The party’s stance on foreign capital, for instance, underwent a significant change between 1992 (when the BJP had no seats in parliament) and the eve of the elections in 2004, in which the party was largely favored to win. I would argue that this evolution was not the mere result of political expediency but also displayed a fundamental anxiety to rearticulate a national subject along religious lines even as that subject became increasingly irrelevant. In some ways, the BJP’s more overt promotion of liberalization during its 1999–2004 leadership of government should come as no surprise since, even early on, the party was deeply embroiled in business interests; it is no coincidence that the present superstar of the BJP, Gujarat’s Prime Minister Narender Modi, is as courted by the top industrialists of the country as he is valued by the cultural right wing of the party. However, because the class dimensions of the BJP project have been overshadowed by its overtly xenophobic cultural stance, I will brief ly outline the evolution of the BJP’s position over the last sixteen years, illuminating these class dimensions, before I analyze the party’s 2004 Vision Document. What the BJP did in the late 1980s was to make religion and nation essential parts of its electoral platform, thus legitimizing and valorizing them as never before and moving both of these topics to center stage. In addition, as the BJP became the dominant party, it linked this

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nationalism to a global, consumerist, capitalist ideology. The BJP’s idea of a New India was thus increasingly characterized by a delicate balance between a celebration of economic liberalization and a puritanical and violent form of nationalist fundamentalism. During its five-year rule (1999–2004), one version of the party—the front offered to the world—was represented by the benign face of Prime Minister Atal Bihari Vajpayee. Vajpayee was tagged as “the great unifier” by India Today, leading a booming India, an India of technology and entente, and an aspiring global superpower. Meanwhile, the party’s other incarnation, L. K. Advani, the BJP ideologue, placated those who were invested in the principles of Hindutva and nationalism. These two guises were not discrete; in fact, they were an essential arrangement, weaving and interweaving allying and apparently antagonistic narratives. As Uma Chakravarti has pointed out, the Hindu brigade has shown that their political strategies can be “amazingly f lexible” and that they “have a great capacity for redeploying tradition selectively, and innovatively, to forge new meanings” (266). In short, the BJP’s market dictates and its social and political positions are inseparable. I am not, however, suggesting that these negotiations are part of a simple causal chain. While there is undoubtedly an element of truth in views such as Chakravarti’s that the rise of the Hindu right had its origins in “a crisis of the legitimacy of the state” (244), I do not assume such a unilinear trajectory or a crisis rooted in the “national.” Let me explain the complex negotiations and contradictions that were at the center of the BJP’s ascension to power. As the BJP came into its own as a political party in the early 1990s, it was, at least publicly, highly critical of the Congress Party’s advocacy of the policies of liberalization. Global organizations such as the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank that were embraced by the ruling party were criticized as the avatars of foreign domination, compromising India’s sovereignty. Even as the BJP was deeply immersed in its cultural wars, most colorfully displayed in the Rath Yatra to Ayodha, it was in the process of constructing a specific economic agenda that purported to oppose economic liberalization. Indeed, the destruction of the Babri Mosque and the communal riots that followed perhaps made it even more important for the party to articulate an economic vision so that it would be seen not purely as an extremist unit, but as a legitimate party seeking to redress both cultural and economic injustices. From the very beginning, the party tried to link cultural pride and economic justice, connecting these goals to a restoration of national sovereignty. The anti-Mondal agitations also

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gave the party a means by which to tap into upper-caste discontent. Here was a party that not only reasserted Hindu pride at a time when factionalism within the Indian nation was rising (the Bombay blasts in early 1993 only confirmed the BJP’s message that Muslim extremism was a radical threat to India’s security) but also defended the upper castes’ historical “rights” and privileges. Thus the development of its economic program has to be understood in light of the seismic events of the early 1990s. The party’s stated economic platform was an extension of its cultural position, one based on the notion of Swadeshi. As early as 1992, shortly after the Congress Party’s policies of liberalization were put into effect, the BJP defined, in the party manifesto, its version of the concept: By Swadeshi one means that the local resources and talents have the full scope for development in the national interest and the benefits there from should primarily f low to the people. Integration into a global economy should not mean obliteration of national identity and predominant sway of powerful economic forces from the outside. (BJP, Economic Policy Statement 8; my emphasis) In short, even in the early stages of the economic reforms, the BJP was not critical of liberalization, but instead advocated a policy of internal liberalization that would preempt the process of a larger integration into the global economy. This position became even clearer as it was elaborated on the eve of the BJP’s first accession to power as part of a coalition party in 1998. According to the party manifesto released that year, India should engage in “rapid large-scale internal liberalization, but calibrated globalization so that the Indian industry gets a period of seven to ten years for substantial integration with the global economy” (Vote BJP 11). Throughout this process, the BJP said, national interests must be prioritized: “India must move carefully and gradually towards integration with the global economy and even as it so does, it must act in a manner that suits its national interest . . . the objective will be to protect the national economy and national interest like all nations do and not to indulge in economic isolationism” (Vote BJP 11). In this period, the attempt to reassert the national in the face of global pressure to integrate and to open the Indian economy continues to be a characteristic element of the party’s electoral strategy. Somehow India would embrace the global, but only on its own terms. The contradictions evident in this process, of course, are never discussed.

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On the surface, it may appear that the audience for these documents is primarily a national one, representing urban-middle-class and business interests. However, in reality, a significant element of the party’s dance between the global and the national is about addressing a diverse audience. Let me mention a few important segments of this audience here. One segment is the Hindu upper-caste, middle-class community that has to be wooed by an assertion of cultural nationalism and Hindu supremacy that also claims to protect their economic interests and offers them a balm for their larger insecurities regarding the state of the nation; they also have to be convinced that even though a businessfriendly environment will prevail, their financial wellbeing will not be compromised by the entrance of foreign capital. Another group, a larger diasporic Indian community, will also have to be persuaded that the Indian nation will not shut them out but will offer them both an economic and a cultural haven. They will be allowed to invest their capital in this newly regulated economy; in return, they will be given all the privileges of a vicarious cultural citizenship. Still another group, the internal right wing, such as the Rashtriya Seva Sangh (RSS) forces, which were essential to the agenda of cultural revitalization, especially in the early years of the BJP, must be comforted by the explicit adherence to Hindu nationalism. Any involvement with the global has to reaffirm India’s position as “the world’s oldest cradle of civilization” and India’s role in saving the world from “the gathering civilizational crisis” (BJP, Vote BJP 2). Ironically, it was the BJP that precipitated a crisis when it first formed a coalition government in 1998, authorizing the atomic blasts in Pokhran. The blasts, predictably, brought international criticism and economic sanctions. While the party was projecting an overtly nationalist image, however, it was enacting some radical economic reforms favorable to foreign multinational interests, none perhaps as significant as opening up the insurance industry to private enterprise. As Baldev Raj Nayar points out, “the assertion of nationalism through the nuclear tests quickened the pace of government approval of foreign investment proposals in an endeavour to compensate for the fall in official aid f lows and to strengthen the business lobby abroad against the sanctions” (249). Yet, foreign investments had been welcomed even earlier. In fact, soon after taking power, before the atomic tests, Finance Minister Jaswant Singh had assured multinationals that they had “nothing to fear” and that the party would “deepen, broaden and accelerate reforms” (qtd. in Nayar 248). Indeed, the party subsequently implemented the radical measure of allowing foreign companies to invest in the insurance

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industry at an astonishingly “high level of 40 per cent equity” (Nayar 251). This was a position the BJP had adamantly opposed while in opposition. The BJP was, in effect, playing the cards of nation and capital for different groups. While national pride soared in the days following the nuclear weapons tests, the BJP was simultaneously admitting foreign capital into what were then protected, nationalized industries. By March 2001, “the government lifted quantitative restrictions (QRs) on the import of almost all products ranging from consumer items to agricultural and capital goods” (Lakha 86). The Western powers, despite their unease with the nuclear drum-beating, were placated by these moves. They saw a state that, despite its military posturing, was quite happy to allow foreign capital into hitherto-protected economic spheres. Thus the BJP’s Vision Document of 2004, primarily a document stating the party’s platform for the coming elections, has to be seen in the light of this increasingly overt adoption and acceleration of economic reforms after the BJP became the party in power. My analysis of this document will focus on the multiple ways in which the BJP attempts to create a citizen subject in whom contrasting and competing notions of class, caste, gender, and religion are projected. I will demonstrate that although the document purports to pose an inclusive subject, the BJP’s version of the Indian subject is primarily a middle- or upper-middleclass, high-caste Hindu male. He is a nationalist, proud of his Hindu culture, and a supporter of economic reform. An interesting feature of the document is the blurring of this subject’s adherence to a nationalist identity and religious insularity with his advocacy for liberalization and globalism. A close reading of this document reveals many of the contradictions in the BJP project and illuminates the complexities of constructing a consumer subject. One of the twenty-five “highlights” of this document is a “further broadening and deepening of economic reforms,” though these will be “based on a self-reliant approach” (Vision Document 2). Along with this goal is the more ambiguous aim to “[enrich] our human resources . . . and [to turn] our young population into a huge opportunity in the era of globalization” (2). One wonders whose opportunity this process is enhancing. Throughout the document there are calls to assert national pride and a claim that “India is poised for a great leap forward” (4). According to the framers of the document, “the two main issues of Election 2004 are good governance and accelerated all-round development” (6, my emphasis). Anything that smacks of “underdevelopment” is characterized as “negativism.” The document claims that unlike past

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governments, the “BJP is committed to making India a Developed Nation and a Great Power on the global stage” (6). Development is not defined in terms of the benefits it offers for the people—benefits that would actually improve the quality of their lives—but rather as a means to gain global power and respect. Once again this power and development will emerge from a commitment to “Swadeshi, the philosophy of India First, and to the path of self-reliance. Swadeshi means faith in indigenous institutions and a strong belief that the future of India must be secured by Indians themselves” (8). This can be achieved by “further reforming our economy” and by the “banishment of poverty by increasing our national wealth” (9). The cause-and-effect relationship between reform and national enrichment, of course, is never explained, but here the BJP echoes the reigning credo of neoliberalism: a reformed economy—one that embraces global capital—is a successful one. However, the document is unable to elide the anxieties at the heart of this project. So, for instance, even while baldly suggesting that “wealth creation should be applauded and encouraged,” it is quickly asserted that “conspicuous consumption goes against the cultural ethos of India” (10). Likewise, the fundamental tension between encouraging the minimally regulated accumulation of wealth and criticizing existing economic inequities exists throughout the document as issues of “social welfare,” “justice,” and “the alleviation of poverty” are acknowledged, even as the interests of capital remain in the forefront. The section on “poverty alleviation,” for example, calls for “more private investment in backward and rural areas,” for “deepen[ing] rural markets,” for “self-employment,” and for “distribution of surplus-land and making the rural poor partners in the development of wasteland” (12–13). Despite the promising sound of “distribution of surplus land,” all of these statements of course include code words for increased privatization and a recasting of rural livelihoods to suit the “development” interests of corporations. If there remains any doubt in readers’ minds about the party’s commitment to the interests of capital, the document makes clear that the government will create conditions that will meet the “low cost capital needs of businesses . . . and, above all” will provide “maximum government facilitation with minimum government interference” (14, my emphasis). Somehow the interests of the poor are to be supported even while the government is steadfastly retreating from any regulation of the accumulation of wealth. The unabashed support for economic reform also requires the construction of a particular kind of Indian citizen. The BJP is best known

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for promoting the interests of Hindu, upper-caste men, but once again, I am going to focus on the often overlapping class elements of this new subject as a way to highlight its economic dimensions. For instance, one way the BJP proposes to address the employment problem is to enhance the “employability of students and youth, and create an aptitude for self-employment and entrepreneurship” (17). This “aptitude” or natural inclination for “self-employment and entrepreneurship” reinforces the government’s separation from any responsibility to actually provide the conditions for people to acquire jobs. Also, the class elements of this enterprise are evident, since it is not the children of the upper classes who will have to acquire this aptitude. This aptitude, once acquired, opens the path for economic opportunity. Education policies, thus, will aim to anchor citizens “strongly in human values and Indian culture, reinforc[ing] their patriotism, and equip[ping] them to explore opportunities both in India and abroad” (18). Here, there is an assertion of an interesting combination of the national and the global. On the one hand, a narrow culturalist agenda will apparently be enforced, so that Indian students will be provided an education that will rectify “biases in history education, increasing the cultural content in syllabi, and restoring the neglected focus on character-building” (18). On the other hand, citizens will “explore opportunities both in India and abroad” (18). The class exclusivity of “exploring” opportunities abroad does not need further elaboration. The class dimension is reinforced because the citizen of the new economy, despite being linked by the so-called eternal qualities of “Indianness, Bharatiya and Hindutva” (7) has to be part of a neoliberal landscape comprised of a “democracy of stakeholders” (17). Since “less than 2 per cent of Indians are retail investors . . . the base of investment in equities must be broadened” (17). Democracy is explicitly linked to the interests of the market, and individuals must put their faith in the new culture of investment that is directly linked to democracy. In this form of “democracy,” government must step aside to “free” the individual. Indeed, the “principal aspect of Congress misrule” was to cause “the government to enter every sphere of our national life, excessively enlarging the ordinary citizen’s interface with the public authority. The overload of the government has led to inefficiency, harassment, and corruption” (21). The BJP will, instead, “make the government’s principal role that of a facilitator and creator of the necessary environment for the creative energies of the people to find full expression” and to remove “all non-financial barriers to economic growth” (22). The effort here is to construct a citizen whose national and cultural identities

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are never at odds with his or her own economic interests or the interests of the market. Swadeshi is a veil that covers the class-specific attempt to redefine citizenship so that a consuming, “free” subject is empowered to become part of the larger global project of the accumulation of wealth. As Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd put it in another context, in India, we see a “fetishized version of tradition through which a distinct people is to be interpellated by the nation-state. State nationalism then seeks to mask the contradictions that reemerge between formal political independence and economic dependence (the contradictions of neocolonialism) and to contain the excess of alternatives released by the decolonizing forces of which it was a part” (9–10). In India, a rich tradition of decolonization and the presence of leftist movements rooted in class-based resistance to capitalist dictates are alternatives that have to be countered by appealing to fetishized, depoliticized traditions. What these calls for traditions and culture mask is, of course, a specific class project that poses a privatized notion of citizenship. The wedding of tradition to the enhancement of these new forms of neocolonialism requires “new forms of political subjectivity” (Lowe and Lloyd 13), and unlike the claims of the document for inclusiveness (farmers, students, entrepreneurs, etc), the class specificity of the project implies that “[n]ew middle class identities and practices have begun to reconstitute the meaning and boundaries of citizenship by reproducing and intensifying exclusions based on hierarchies such as caste, religion, and gender” (Fernandes, India’s New Middle Class 187). In this scenario, the “middle class consumer-citizen is in effect the new ‘common man,’ victimized both by a corrupt and ineffective political system on the one hand and the supposedly privileged and protected poor and working classes on the other” (187). The BJP’s 2004 Vision Document places the new citizen subject very much within this context of exclusivity. Indeed, as is evident in the passages I have cited, the agenda of economic reform is the super template upon which other interests are superimposed and contested. However, the document poses a fragmented and contradictory citizen subject and ultimately cannot eliminate the tensions that are a part of this project. The document is unable to reconcile the conf licting interests between the local and the global, the poor and the rich, the Hindu upper-caste, middle-class male and the many marginalized communities. This document demonstrates that creating the new Indian citizen is a tenuous process, especially given both the BJP’s subsequent failure to win the 2004 elections, and the existing data that shows that a large swath of the middle-class population remain skeptical about the so-called gains of liberalizing economic reforms.12

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Homes and Space The BJP’s attempt to create a new Indian subject, one who is both attached to the nation and linked to global privileges, is echoed and contradicted in the commercial images that have f looded the media landscape. I want to examine a few of these images and ref lect on some of the parallels and dissonances between these state and corporate efforts at subject formation. Let me begin with the most visible sign of liberalization: the construction boom that has seen thousands of luxury apartment buildings, gated communities, and exclusive shopping malls rise up all over metropolitan India, even in smaller cities like Ghaziabad and Raipur. Many of these buildings are located in city outskirts and are being constructed on agricultural land seized from farmers who had lived off these lands for generations. These farmers are usually provided a pittance for their loss, while the government extracts huge profits selling their land to building promoters and other developers. On their land the wealthy now live, guaranteed a comfortable existence, secure in their gated communities. Quite often, as in Noida (in Uttar Pradesh) and Gurgaon (in Haryana), entire townships have been transformed into shopping centers and luxury office and housing complexes. As these buildings have sprouted over the last ten years, billboard advertisements have similarly proliferated, promising a life of ease and luxury in new housing complexes. Indeed, such housing is one of the more overt symbols of the class project of neoliberalism. The new housing colonies represent a new kind of “home,” one that is no longer a mere abode but an emblematic signifier for success, family life, and individual gain. The most persistent soporific for the targeted upper-middle-class citizens is to convince them of the need for “perfect homes,” homes that take them away from all the pressures of modern life. The homes advertised on urban billboards are depicted as oases in the desert. Their location, in the outskirts of cities, is touted as a safe haven away from the hustle and bustle of urban life. Offering every luxury for the resident, including proximity to schools and shopping malls, these homes are, of course, much more than brick and mortar. They are edifices around which a neoliberal dream has been constructed, and a direct passport to the global. Thus they are not merely habitations; they offer a lifestyle that, in the mind of the Indian consumer, closely resembles the one enjoyed by their aff luent NRI cousins and residents in the North. Indeed, many of these developments are directly marketed to visiting non-resident Indians with the suggestion that they can enjoy exactly the same standard of living

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in their native country but with a national, uniquely Indian f lavor. In advertisements and on webpages, not only do these homes promise to provide comfort and a lifestyle that emulates one enjoyed by a transnational upper middle class, they also seem to offer a haven from the unseemly detritus that is part of the urban landscape. The poor, the landless, the homeless, those whose very presence is a reminder that India continues to be a poor country, ranking 134th on the Human Development Index, are of course absent (United Nations, 145). The faces we see on the billboards are those of the radiant, aff luent, and Westernized minority. Consider this billboard image placed in the lively office and shopping area of Camac Street in South Kolkata in 2006 (see fig. 2.1). The presence of major upscale department stores (Westside, Pantaloons), the British Embassy, airline offices, and restaurants, and proximity to an upper-middle-class commercial hub, Park Street, makes this billboard a perfect site for advertising high-end items. The depiction of a young, attractive NRI woman against the backdrop of plush apartment housing may seem unremarkable at first glance.

Figure 2.1

Rosedale NRI

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However, there are some important points in this image regarding ideas of citizenship. For instance, the slogan, “Touch Your Origin,” is obviously intended for an audience of NRIs, expressing a typical desire for a specific, Indian home, but the depiction of a tower block suggests a globalized “everywhere,” which might be in Hong Kong, in the US, or in Dubai. The local and the global intermingle in this image. The web address and the toll-free US telephone number confirm that these apartments are for an exclusive clientele. A quick visit to the website provides a glimpse of the “home” that is being created: “Home is a dream” was the basis on which these projects are being built. The project pegged at 100 million US dollars aims to match international standards. The main objective behind creating these landmarks is to provide the residents of Kolkata a home that is free of noise and air pollution, a place where they can rejuvenate themselves and spend some ref lective moments in peace and tranquility. After all, according to Alferd [sic] Lord Tennyson, “Home is where the heart is.” (“Rosedale: Touch Your Origins”) This privatized space of “peace and tranquility” is, of course, more than just a home. It is a way to create a new kind of consumer citizen who is very much like his counterpart in the West. He is at once of the city, and free of its constraints. Yet, meaning cannot be contained within the image and spills out into the surrounding space. Since, obviously, the majority of people viewing this image are not NRIs, what does this image, which so obviously excludes the Indian citizen (“homes by NRIs for NRIs”), say about citizenship? And what does the use of a Tennyson quotation to evoke an Indian homeland say about the ironies of globalization? I would propose that within this configuration of home and the NRI, the Indian citizen is an unsettled signifier. The presence of a glamorous other simultaneously suggests to the resident citizens both a realization and a postponement of the neoliberal dream. A small minority may view this image as an evocation of a possibility, but since this dream of global comfort is out of reach for the vast majority of those viewing the image, the advertisement underlines the enormous class divide that is part of the struggle to construct a new Indian. Another 2006 billboard advertisement in Kolkata, at the same location, also makes this point clear (see fig. 2.2). In the graphic, a cluster of cartoonish high-rise buildings are surrounded by slogans, and indeed the text of the advertisements appears more prominent than the

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Figure 2.2 South City

buildings themselves; it is almost as though the buildings are irrelevant. It is what they signify that matters. South City wants its residents to “live the way the world does,” and one way to realize this ideal is to make sure that their consumption needs are readily satisfiable: with “schools, shopping malls, clubs, theatres.” In fact, the graphic, though small, depicts a “slice” of a world, with buildings on a sloping horizon: South City is simultaneously a piece of the global pie and a “mini” world in itself, offering a fantasy of the “best” of the actual world. An overt claim, too, is that the actual city—Kolkata—is peripheral, perhaps unnecessary, and remote. As in the previous example, no reference is made to the actual metropolis. The ephemeral “New Town” and “South City” are of the city and yet outside of it, just as these abodes are of the West but also situated within a sanitized local context. What is suggested in these texts is that the new Indian can have the life of his or her Western counterparts and be sheltered from all the unpleasant elements of Indian urban life. Of course, noise and pollution are not all that is being banished from this space. More importantly, it is the people, those unwashed masses, who are being cast off. After all, how

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can the new Indian really be like his Western counterpart, if he or she is reminded at every turn that he lives in a nation of predominantly poor people? One way to erase the people is to constantly call up the global. Consider this 2007 advertisement on a billboard in central New Delhi that announces a housing complex, Palm Springs, developed by Emaar MGF (see fig. 2.3). The site of this billboard is an exclusive area of Delhi, a city where poor people continue to be displaced by the demolition of their homes. The projected Spanish-villa-type homes accompany the corporate logo, “Creating a New India.” The company home page clarifies what this New India is about: Emaar MGF is looking at building new-age integrated townships and communities that will bring about a lifestyle change in India. These townships planned across the country will include apartments, residential plots, town houses and villas along with convenient shopping complexes, landscaped parks, civic facilities & amenities. Residents of these townships will also have access to world class facilities such as medical care, education and recreation. In addition to this, each of these communities will have Strip Malls with a wide mix of entertainment and branded retails, which will give a vibrant zing to a world class ambience of suburban living. (“Emaar MGF: Creating a New India”) The New India apparently is all about providing the new Indian with the “world class ambience of suburban living.” Once again, the local is simultaneously affirmed and denied through “world class facilities” and a “lifestyle change.” As in the building projects in Kolkata, the national can be pronounced only through an act of disavowal. Like the Rosedale homes outside Kolkata, these homes are located outside the city, in Gurgaon, which is now a Delhi suburb. This image is characterized as much by what it says as what it leaves unsaid. What does

Figure 2.3

Emaar MGF

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one make of the strange dissonance of selling a Southern California lifestyle in a tropical country? The Spanish-style villas and the name “Palm Springs” are bringing “the global way of life” to India. Setting aside the question of what sort of “globality” a Southern California suburban lifestyle represents, globality here, as before, can apparently be achieved with a material transaction that never has to turn its back on home. Ironically, then, the New India here positions the new Indian in a way that leaves the subject homeless in quite a different way—in f lux, grounded in and by space, but also outside of it. Youth and Community Another obvious and potent group for subject formation is of course the much-valued youth demographic. Just as the BJP’s Vision Document 2004 trumpets the idealism, patriotism, and entrepreneurial “spirit” of this group, the corporate media constructs similarly idealized youth figures, celebrating the so-called skills and energies of this group. For this portion of my analysis, I will examine a special 2007 issue of a leading national magazine, India Today, to highlight one example of the media’s construction and representation of Indian youth in the Englishlanguage print media. This issue makes the claim that “young Indians, with everything except time, are taming technology and redefining home entertainment with their mobile phones, laptops, and TV screens” (Rajkhowa 45). The article, accompanied by glossy photographs of young, attractive, urban, upper-middle-class men and women, goes on to say that as “540 million Indians between the age of 18 and 34 take charge of a new, globalised India, they are seeing a never-before boom in careers” (45). Of course, the writer never seeks to provide any accompanying evidence of this so-called career boom, nor is there any attempt to acknowledge the crisis of unemployment—including youth unemployment—that is the reality of contemporary India.13 This omission is not a surprise, especially given the tone of the main editorial. The current group of youngsters, according to the editor, Aroon Purie, is “the first generation that has been born or grown up in relative aff luence. They have never known scarcity. . . . What’s more, by 2015 nearly 60 per cent of Indians will have been born post-reforms—they will carry none of the legacy their parents did.” Yet this erasure of history has not apparently “altered their essential Indianness” (1). The amazing statement that half a billion Indians, people born mostly in the 1980s, have “never known scarcity” perhaps offers some indication of

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the ideological mindset of a section of the respected mainstream media. Even if one accepts the upper-middle-class demographic assumed but not articulated in this article, one would need to acknowledge that these young people face significant obstacles to success. For instance, competition has increased markedly for places in the Indian colleges and universities that qualify young people for professional careers, and graduates of even the most prestigious institutions can find it difficult to secure entry-level positions in their field. In offering the hope that history or the negatively weighted legacy of their parents will be swept aside by the forces of liberalization, the editor mimics a gesture that is characteristic of neoliberal ideology. Even though Francis Fukuyama may now be less sure of his claims about the “end of history,” Aroon Purie is convinced that liberalization has wiped the slate clean. In providing “evidence” for its conclusions, the magazine cites a poll based on 2,846 respondents, all of whom are located in metropolitan areas. The poll is replete with personalized, consumer-oriented details about the young Indian subject. Questions are confined to issues about money, work, technology, sexual choices, leisure practices, faith, and the media, and while these are serious issues, they are treated frivolously as mere lifestyle “choices.” Forty-five percent of the respondents strongly agree with the statement that “money is a very important source of happiness” (Dravid 72). Meanwhile, 65 percent “agree that a person’s physique makes him or her fashionable” (68). Apparently 70 percent own a cell phone, and 52 percent are willing to take a loan in order to buy a house. The magazine is also at pains to suggest that young people are generally traditional (84 percent of women want to live with their in-laws after marriage; 90 percent think women should not smoke) but at the same time globally connected: 50 percent have access to the Internet, either at home or through cyber cafes (49). Nowhere in this mishmash of “information” are there any questions or conclusions regarding war and militarism, the environment, social injustice, or the ethics of wealth accumulation. Liberalization and its benefits for the young are already assumed realities. It is instructive to contrast the findings of this poll with the conclusions of a more neutral polling organization, Lokniti.14 In a poll funded by the Hindu-CNN-IBN in 2007, more attention was paid to the class dynamics of young Indians. Unlike the India Today poll, responses for this State of the Nation Survey were gathered from “833 locations across the country,” ref lecting the “social profile of the rest of society” (Yadav and Kumar, “The Youth” 12). This statement is, of course, intended as a critique of exclusive polls such as the previous

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one that focus on privileged classes in urban areas, and it means that the respondents included Hindus, Muslims, Dalits, and Adivasis. Rather than making frivolous overgeneralizations, Yogendra Yadav and Sanjay Kumar draw on the relative sophistication of the design of the study to reach their conclusions, the most obvious being that the “urban/rural divide, class, gender, caste and community” are important determinants in the respondents’ attitudes toward social and economic questions (12). In contrast to the India Today poll and its glossy references to Indians’ “taming technology,” the authors here conclude that “[o]nly one out of six Indian youth has a personal mobile phone or a two-wheeler—possibly the two most coveted consumer goods. Only three per cent have an internet connection at home” (12). Purie’s celebratory comments on the loss of an earlier generation’s legacy seem to be realized, but with no cause for celebration: “Forty percent failed to identify the year in which India became independent. And threefourths had not heard of the Emergency” (12). In general, the findings demonstrate that class “conditions aspirations.” These aspirations may also be connected to the young Indian’s relations to the nation. For instance, “the rural and urban poor reject giving up citizenship more strongly. The urban well-to-do is more prepared to do so” (12). What makes this poll somewhat persuasive is not merely its more inclusive design; the responses also highlight some of the social contradictions that counter the pat declarations of the India Today poll. For instance, even though a majority of respondents “think India will remain united, secular, and emerge as a superpower . . . nearly two-thirds are anxious about their employment and career” (12). The anxieties of young Indians are rarely ref lected in the media images of the new Indian that are seen all over the country. However, these images are as much about suppressing those anxieties as about conjuring up a fantasy of a way of life. The bright, cheerful, fair, upper-caste, and upper-class subjects of advertisements and the India Today feature are a fragment of the neoliberal imaginary. The advocates of the new Indian subject reiterate that the citizen is now remade in a new light, outside the forces of history, embracing the national and the global in an attempt to live in the everlasting present. Television and Gender While media and political images of the new Indian citizen predominantly pose a male subject, the en-gendering of the New Indian Woman

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is also an important element in the construction of the neoliberal imaginary. After all, neoliberalism’s logic of equating individual advancement with capitalist regimes of accumulation means that, when women are considered at all, a whole narrative has to be constructed around their apparent emancipation. Neoliberal television advertisements link a superficial idea of emancipation to the commodity economy in a way that goes beyond mere access to commodities. After all, as the retail and service economy brings middle-class women into low-paying jobs, and as housewives themselves are responsible for considerable spending, women have to be convinced, in general, about the benefits of the new economy and encouraged to buy various commodities. While I will not pause here to address the many ramifications of the political economy of women’s roles in contemporary India (I will discuss these ramifications in greater detail in chapter 4), I will mention that as the informal economy continues to boom, women remain unprotected by labor laws and other government regulations. Furthermore, as public subsidies have been reduced, more and more women have borne the burden of supporting their households, especially in rural India where this responsibility is ever increasing. Many rural women have been forced into wage labor as a result of their displacement from agricultural land. Advertising, of course, fails to represent these difficulties, covering up contradictions, and television (especially its advertisements) can play a vital role in enhancing the neoliberal rituals of consumption. Television viewers have greatly increased in the last ten years. According to recent figures, “sixty percent of Indian households, approximately 119 million, have a television, and 42 percent of these have cable service” (Kamdar 57). Add to these numbers the fact that the state’s denationalization of the television industry has vastly increased the number of commercial channels. On-air advertising time and advertising revenue have reached astronomical proportions.15 As television viewers and television advertising have increased, television programming and advertising have increasingly become a site for the representation of a new middle-class identity. As M. Madhava Prasad puts it, “television is increasingly offering to the consumer a site of economic representation, one in which the subject finds him/herself invoked as the member of a class” (119). This class identity is affixed to a transnational self firmly based on the consumption of brand items. However, even as identity becomes transnational, a national self has to be reasserted, so television introduces viewers to “both the patterns of commonly shared cultures of a pan-India and the multiple landscapes

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of difference, defined and dissected as it were according to age, gender and class” (Scrase 332). Thus, like the BJP’s Vision Document 2004, the billboard advertisements, and the India Today poll, television in India simultaneously announces the inauguration of a global culture even as it anxiously reasserts an “authentic” national identity that is sacrosanct and seemingly inviolable. In television advertisements, these conf licts between tradition and modernity and between nationalism and globalization are sometimes negotiated around female gender roles, establishing a particular form of gender identity. As Shoma Munshi puts it, “advertisers have appropriated the discourses of traditional femininity on the one hand and liberating feminist discourses on the other and threaded them around discourses of consumerism. Once channelled through the ideologies of the marketplace, the potentially threatening force of feminism becomes somewhat tamed, being closely linked as it is, to consumerism” (573). According to Munshi, “[a]stutely incorporating both the ideologies of feminism and femininity within consumerist discourses, [advertisers] have synthesized them into a post-feminist image of the ‘New Indian Woman’ ” (586). This ideological project is particularly necessary in Indian social contexts where women have historically been marginalized and deprived of economic opportunities. Not only is it necessary to recreate a notion of the “emancipated” female subject, it is also important to construct a whole set of “needs” that will contribute to the formation of this supposedly liberated subject. Nowhere are these needs more clearly constructed than in television programming and advertising. Fernandes argues that economic reforms and their effects on middle-class consumption “have led to a need for re-fashioning at the individual and collective level, and it seems that television images are providing some of the material and methods which both ref lect and fulfill this need” (93). Increasingly available, television, both as commodity and as a means of promoting the commodity economy, contributes to this re-fashioning. Tejaswini Niranjana has commented on “the intersection of the new electronic media with the state, technology and multinational capital.” She argues that the “particular definition of national . . . and gender identities or the training in consumerism made available by high-tech advertising would not have been possible without the enormously powerful conjuncture of a state power and a technology underwritten by global capital” (“Introduction” 6). It is often the interests of global corporations, after all, that are being underwritten by Indian television; however, as I have argued throughout this chapter, the national and the global are often caught up in

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their own contradictory positions, never quite resolving the tensions that characterize their intersections. These tensions can be illustrated by examining a couple of advertisements that attempt to construct the “new Indian woman,” a subject that can somehow bridge the national and the global. Let us consider two television advertisements for “Fair and Lovely” skin cream, a staple product for many years. The valuing of fair skin is of course not a new phenomenon in India; what is new is how it is now attached to a specific kind of new woman. A Hindi television advertisement for the cream shows a young, middle-class woman, accompanied by her father, both dressed in traditional clothing, arriving at a “modern beauty company,” where they are turned away by a snobbish receptionist in Western dress (see fig. 2.4). As the woman and her father leave the salon, the receptionist scornfully declares that in order for a woman “like that” to become beautiful, she must leave the age of the Vedas, implying that only modernity can release this woman from the shackles of her dark complexion. The father, furious that his daughter and his culture are the objects of such scorn, returns home with his daughter and unlocks a traditionally carved wooden chest that holds all the Ayurvedic age-old remedies that are available to whiten the skin. The chest is a symbol for the powers

Figure 2.4

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Fair and Lovely ad, Father and Daughter

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rooted in national traditions, which will aid the young woman in her confrontations with modernity. Significantly, it is a man, the father, who unlocks the chest and hands her this magical remedy. Soon a transformed, lighter young woman strides confidently by herself, returning to the salon where she attracts the attention of a young man who can only say, “What a face!” She is then shown alighting from a private jet to be met by f lashes from photographers’ cameras (see fig. 2.5). In this representation, the traditional Indian product ostensibly trumps the “modern,” notwithstanding the inevitable tensions between multinational capital and national tradition. After all, Fair and Lovely is produced by Unilever, a multinational company. The connections and contradictions between class, capital, and nation are also evident in other ways. As I mentioned, the Indian woman who arrives at the salon with her father appears to hail from a middle-class family. However, the magic of the commodity automatically elevates the woman’s class status even as it strips away one traditional marker of her class, caste, and Indian identity—her dark skin. The newly fair and lovely woman now wears an elegant but casual “Indo-Western” ensemble. She sports white (Western) trousers and a close-fitting, modern kurta with a short chiffon dupatta worn in the modern style: thrown over one shoulder. The modesty of her previous attire and demeanor has vanished. Initially, in her visit to the salon,

Figure 2.5

Fair and Lovely ad, “What a face”

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she appeared reserved and demure in public, cocooning herself in the pallu of her sari; now, emerging from the aircraft, she descends confidently to the small crowd of photographers and admirers, head high and shoulders back, and her kurta’s scooped neck and split hem reveal the contours of her bosom and hips. The f lowing dupatta is a mere accessory, trailing elegantly behind her but concealing nothing. The hybrid nature of this attire is of course worth noting, as it signals that the new Indian woman embraces globalization without leaving valuable Indian traditions behind. The advertisement closes, in fact, with a shot of the father and daughter seated together at home on the swing—a shot mirroring the advertisement’s opening shot and differing only in the young woman’s transformed appearance and attire. Tradition here is not opposed to modernity; it persists. Indeed, it is a supplement that aligns the new Indian woman with her interests, especially in terms of access to status, fame, wealth, and admiration from men. Other points are worth mentioning in relation to this advertisement. For instance, there are irresolvable tensions between the power the woman gains in this transformation and her increased vulnerability. She ostensibly achieves a certain independence, gains freedom of movement, and asserts her sexuality, but she simultaneously increases her exposure to the male gaze. A mixed audience that includes parents of young women might find the late image of the woman—alone, independent, faced with a life in an “unprotected” environment— somewhat unsettling. It is precisely the need to allay such anxieties that the final shot reunites the woman with her father. Interestingly, in one respect, the traditional and the modern representation of the woman match: the advertisement reaffirms the regressive notion that for an Indian woman, a curvaceous body and light, conventionally attractive facial features are the keys to success. Thus, although the tradition/modernity binary is deployed quite frequently in advertising images, it is a binary that sometimes enhances the contradictions that are part of creating the image of the new Indian woman. With many global companies now tapping into and creating a large market for beauty products like Fair and Lovely, these contradictions have become particularly pronounced. In a recent article in the New York Times, Heather Timmons, ignoring the complex global ties of “local” companies, points out that in India, “Avon, L’Oréal, Ponds, Garnier, the Body Shop and Jolen are selling lightening products and all of them face fierce competition from a local giant Fair and Lovely, a Unilever product that has

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dominated the market for decades” (C5). Timmons adds that “In a sign of the times, the company’s ads [Fair and Lovely’s] show lighter skin conferring a different advantage: helping a woman land a job normally held by men. . . . ‘Fair and Lovely: The Power of Beauty,’ is the tagline of the company’s newest ad” (C5). This point is borne out in another television advertisement for this product, which shows a young woman who is an aspiring cricket commentator. She recalls practicing while at school, at cricket matches, and while watching televised matches, apparently unsuccessful in her goal (the game itself is represented as an entirely male preserve), until her sister replaces the television remote that she is using as a microphone with a tube of Fair and Lovely cream. Soon she successfully auditions for a network and is hired to break into the world of cricket broadcasting, which is also a traditionally male preserve. The message is clear: with a little help from the right product, women now can have access to new economic opportunities in traditionally male-dominated fields. Moreover, in a sign of the modern age, it is implied that women do not seek to acquire fair skin merely to find suitable husbands. Now they apparently do it for self-advancement, though the admiring gaze of men is still highlighted in the advertisement. In these advertisements, we see an intermingling of the traditional with the new. The choice of cricket is also significant because it is at once the most “Indian” of sports, as well as increasingly a global multimillion-dollar media event. In this global world, a woman must continue to be fair and thus beautiful—the two are unfailingly linked—in order to succeed, but the terms of her success are more in tune with the ethos of neoliberal self-advancement. She uses her beauty to achieve individual goals. As Shoma Munshi points out, “[i]n interpellating the users of these products as ‘new’ women, advertisements provide an appealing self-image and social identity for women, and circulate a normative model of goals and ideals to be pursued in the quest for an ‘Indian modernity’ ” (578). These “normative” models, however, assume that the category of “newness” is already complete and always stable rather than in continual tension with existing identity formations. Further troubling the binaries of the traditional and the new, the national and the global, the newer global companies have recruited homegrown talent to sell their products. The ubiquitous Aishwarya Rai and Sonam Kapur are the face of L’Oréal, and company executives are quick to point out that they are not creating a market, but instead tapping into an existing one. As Timmons reports, Didier Villanueva,

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the country manager for L’Oréal India, feels that the “idea of ‘glowing fairness’ has nothing to do with colonialism, or idealization of European looks. . . . ‘It’s as old as India,’ he said, and ‘deeply rooted in the culture’ ” (C5). “L’Oréal’s super-high-end Vichy line . . . the main advertising image in Asia shows a woman unzipping her blemished, darker face to reveal a light, even-toned one within” (Timmons C5). Apparent in these different advertisements are various forms of interpellation for the new Indian woman. The struggles between these companies signify a range of attempts at subject formation. In my readings of the representations of the new Indian woman, I have attempted to unravel the layers of subjectivity based on class, caste, and a globalized notion of the feminine. One way toward a deeper understanding of the issues involved is to consider the ways in which femininity becomes a transaction to suit different commercial and ideological ends. So, for instance, in order to allay middle-class anxieties about sexual liberation, advertisers take recourse in forms of “tradition” that are reassuring to a wide array of citizens and consumers, such as in the Fair and Lovely advertisements. On the other hand, they are also interested in creating a need for products that are becoming readily available, so calls for self-empowerment, advancement, and “choices” have to be negotiated in the language of the new economy. We see similar struggles in the BJP’s Vision Document and in the images focusing on home; however, it is the gendered subject that invokes some of the greatest tensions in attempting to reconcile the contradictory pulls of class, capital, culture, and nation. Of course, accompanying all the images of self-advancement for women are the realities of gender politics in the media that never quite transcend the realm of the exploitative. If the new economy has created more “opportunities” for women, the objectified, overtly sexualized female body has become much more of a regular element in the selling of products. Scantily clad models, a rarity in the age before liberalization, now sell everything from cars to fast-food products. In the new economy, women’s empowerment is inextricably linked with the commodification of women’s bodies. In attempting to construct the new Indian woman, however, certain tensions refuse to be reconciled. For instance, the conf lict between domesticity and opportunity remains unresolved, as does the desire to embrace tradition and the national in concert with modernity and the global. Since modernity is equated with economic gain and an enhanced class status, there is also an effort by advertisers to suppress a

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latent fear that such changes could create a woman who challenges the structure of the patriarchal family. In the first Fair and Lovely advertisement discussed above, for instance, in the final frame, the “new” woman is with her father once again, despite her ascension to stardom. This reassertion with tradition is ever more pertinent since the new economic reforms have created a booming service economy, which requires a greater supply of labor; women are increasingly entering the labor market and becoming a vital part of domestic financial arrangements. These changes, especially at the lower end of the class ladder, where women’s incomes are crucial for a family’s financial security, have opened up ways to trouble ideas of domesticity and tradition. Studying these images allow us a glimpse at this new subject, one whose f luidity, despite the claims of the dominant culture, defies easy definition. Conclusion By examining a range of texts, I have tried to point out varying efforts within the dominant ideology to construct a new Indian citizen. Clearly, this is a process that is far from complete and is constantly open to the shifting vectors of class, caste, and gender. It is my suggestion that this process is perpetually tenuous and unstable, partially because of the persistent resistance to the program of economic reforms, which presents a constant oppositional other to the hegemonic constructions of citizen, but also because the link between consumption and citizenship breaks down as class privilege remains elusive for a majority of Indians. Moreover, the ongoing tension between the assertion of nation and the functional colonization by Western capital poses an irresolvable problem. Within this dialectic of the dominant and the resistant, subjectivity is constantly shifting, disrupting attempts to construct a singular notion of citizenship. However, as Fernandes reminds us, this process remains important because The emergence of a new middle class model of consumer-citizenship points us to an understanding of the ways in which economic liberalization has resulted in an expansion of political space for the urban middle class to redefine the terms of democratic politics. In other words, the political assertion of this middle class unfolds through everyday discursive, cultural, spatial, and organizational practices that seek to define the terms of citizenship

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and, implicitly, of Indian democracy within the sphere of civil society. (189) What must be stressed is that this middle-class “redefinition” of citizenship functions in conjunction with the continuing dispossession of India’s poor. The specter of “society” that Thatcher so feared cannot be eliminated from the privatized imaginary in which the new Indian subject is placed.

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CH A P T E R

T H R E E

The Prompter’s Whisper: The National Imaginary and the Cosmopolitan Subject in Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land and The Hungry Tide

In March of 2001, Indian writer Amitav Ghosh withdrew his novel The Glass Palace from the list of contenders for the ₤10,000 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize. Ghosh’s letter to Sandra Vince, the Prizes Manager of the Commonwealth Foundation, eloquently stated his reasons for withdrawing his nomination: So far as I can determine, The Glass Palace is eligible for the Commonwealth Prize partly because it was written in English and partly because I happen to belong to a region that was once conquered and ruled by Imperial Britain. Of the many reasons why a book’s merits may be recognized these seem to me to be the least persuasive. . . . I feel that I would be betraying the spirit of my book if I were to allow it to be incorporated within that particular memorialization of Empire that passes under the rubric of “the Commonwealth.” (“Ghosh Letter”) In refusing to be considered for a prize that has had among its notable winners postcolonial literary stalwarts such as Peter Carey, Earl Lovelace, Rohinton Mistry, and Vikram Seth, Ghosh stakes out a position that is distinctive in a number of ways. First, he makes a direct link between the historical injustices of colonialism and present-day forms of cultural imperialism ref lected in the practices of Western literary

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institutions. Secondly, he lays bare the fundamental hypocrisy of the funders of the prize, the Commonwealth Foundation, an organization that claims to promote “democracy” and yet continues to assert the global hegemony of English. Finally, he places center-stage the connections between politics and writing, links that are routinely elided in the upper echelons of literary competitions.1 Of course, most readers of Ghosh would not be surprised by his thoughtful anticolonial stance. In over twenty years of writing, he has consistently commented on and fashioned narratives out of the violence of the colonial encounter and the severe forms of disjuncture that have come out of a relationship based on inequity and injustice. He has been no less harsh about the failures of postcolonial India in works such as Countdown, in which he critiques the country’s aspirations to be a nuclear power. Trained as a social anthropologist at Oxford, Ghosh arrived on the postcolonial literary stage in the mid-1980s along with a slew of new Indian writers. A generation born during the heady years after independence, the group included Upamanyu Chatterjee, Salman Rushdie, I. Allan Sealy, Vikram Seth, and Shashi Tharoor, among others. All of them wrote in English, and unlike an earlier generation of writers, these young writers rapidly acquired an international literary reputation as a result of their historical place within a larger transnational circuit of writers who were literary innovators and whose works fitted broadly into a cosmopolitan aesthetic of storytelling as pastiche.2 Ghosh, however, is not so easily located within this group. Although trained at the elite New Delhi college St. Stephens, and though a holder of an Oxford degree, he is also a member of the culturally eclectic Bengali bourgeoisie. As the first, and in some ways the most ardent, inheritors of British traditions, the Bengali middle class has had a historically ambivalent relationship with British culture. Nowhere is this ambivalence more apparent than in the figures of the Bengali Renaissance of the nineteenth century. Many of the notable figures during this time, such as Bankim Chandra Chatterjee, Michael Madhusudhan Dutt, Raja Rammohun Roy, Debandranath Tagore, and his son, Rabindranath Tagore, were direct beneficiaries of British rule. Some possessed large tracts of property; others, like Roy, were deeply critical of their own Hindu traditions, while Dutt was a convert to Christianity. However, despite their allegiance to and engagement with the terms of British modernity and “progress,” many of them were also committed anticolonials. They were, in modern parlance, cosmopolitans insofar as they drew on eclectic literary, cultural, and political traditions, were dedicated to some notion of an indigenous

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participatory democracy, rejected orthodox religious dictates, and believed in a civic society based on rational, Enlightenment values. Ghosh has written about this moment of cultural rebirth in Bengal, specifically in the context of his own lineage as a novelist in contemporary times. In his essay “The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase,” he cites the example of the nineteenth-century Bengali writer Bankim Chandra Chatterjee as a way to argue that the novelist is always a cosmopolitan. A young Ghosh absorbed the aura of a transliterary tradition that manifested itself symbolically in the bookcase of his grandfather. As Ghosh puts it, “it is the very vastness and cosmopolitanism of the fictional bookcase that requires novelists to locate themselves in relation to it, that demands of their work that it carry marks to establish their location” (“The March of the Novel” 119). Chatterjee’s cosmopolitanism, however, did not prevent him from being a committed nationalist, deeply immersed in the politics of anticolonialism. Ghosh’s anticolonial credentials, likewise, are well marked, especially in works such as In an Antique Land, where he indicts the violence of Western colonialism for disrupting the world of accommodations that was the life of the Indian Ocean communities prior to the arrival of the European powers. We also see the dark shadow of colonialism falling on the lives of his protagonists in novels such as The Shadow Lines, The Calcutta Chromosome, and The Glass Palace. Unlike his nationalist literary predecessors, however, Ghosh, living in the age of neoliberal capitalism, has a more ambiguous relation to the nation-state than Chatterjee and his contemporaries. For Ghosh, the postcolonial nationstate is implicated in the politics of communalism and in the suppression of difference. Indeed, majoritarian claims to nation and religious orthodoxy are often linked in his works. This is a theme that has been a consistent element of Ghosh’s writings from his first novel, The Circle of Reason, to his most recent essays and The Sea of Poppies. His protagonists are often homeless wanderers, cosmopolitan subjects (Zindi and Alu in The Circle of Reason, Ila in The Shadow Lines, Rajkumar in The Glass Palace, and Piya in The Hungry Tide, for example), who have to seek connections outside the bounds of nation or faith. However, even as Ghosh seeks to destabilize the modernist text of violence and appropriation that is the legacy of colonialism, he is also inevitably embedded in the cosmopolitan politics of a secular modernism, a project that is connected to the nationalist project of decolonization.3 A further complication arises as a result of Ghosh’s belief in a transnational civic space that may override the restrictions imposed by nations. These spaces are often inhabited by wanderers, border-

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crossers, and transgressors, searching for unconventional “homes” and alliances with other nomads. It would appear that Ghosh views this space as an oppositional sphere, perhaps one that is even outside the circuits of predatory global capital, but as I will attempt to demonstrate in my reading of In an Antique Land and The Hungry Tide, such a sphere may be overwhelmed by the force of its own contradictions. Indeed, in imagining such a space, Ghosh may unwittingly find himself allied with the goals of neoliberal globalization, an economic and cultural order that he deplores. Adherents of neoliberal globalization, after all, are constantly promoting the desirability of erasing national and cultural boundaries and regularly encouraging national subjects to become “global citizens.”4 In examining these two works, I will argue that Ghosh’s ambivalence regarding the nation-state and his advocacy of a transnational civic space as well as a cosmopolitan subject as oppositional alternatives to counter the politics of nationalism and contemporary capitalism, exemplified in the new India, results in a fundamental instability in his texts, preventing Ghosh from fully formulating an effective aesthetics of resistance that can move beyond a syncretic transnational idealism, keeping intact the reigning logic of neoliberal capitalism. Cosmopolitanism Now Let me begin by attempting to place Ghosh within the larger global network of cosmopolitan writers. In his historically specific analysis of cosmopolitanism, At Home in the World, Timothy Brennan argues that, in its contemporary incarnation, cosmopolitanism has become “less an analytical category than a normative projection, complementing at once celebratory claims and despairing recognitions” (1–2). Brennan identifies the stock-in-trade claims of this new cosmopolitanism thus: “the death of the nation-state, transculturation (rather than a merely one-sided assimilation), cultural hybridity (rather than a simplistic contrast between the foreign and the indigenous), and a postmodernity (as in the view that consumption is politically exciting, viable, and wholly one’s own)” (2). In a way, Brennan claims, “the [cosmopolitan] thirdworld writer who attains a certain fame plays an intermediary role, the role of ushering-in, critiquing the West, usually in acceptable ways, citing strange names, retelling hidden histories, and doing all this pedagogically” (41). According to Brennan, this new form of cosmopolitanism is particularly hostile to the legacy of decolonization, a legacy

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that problematized and highlighted the unequal dichotomies between the colonizer and the colonized. In a more recent work, Wars of Position, Brennan traces the historical appearance of this concept more precisely: “the proliferation of writing on the theme [cosmopolitanism] is a direct result of the fall of communism, and the groundwork of the concept was provided by cultural approaches to globalization that appeared in social science/humanities crossover journals of the early 1990s—especially Theory, Culture, and Society and Public Culture” (213). Of course, these journals are published in the West, and in effect the critical and creative language of cosmopolitanism is English, and the successful writers are able to craft a vocabulary that is accessible yet imbued with difference. Brennan’s view is supported by Bishnupriya Ghosh’s reading of literary cosmopolitics in her book When Borne Across: Literary Cosmopolitics in the Contemporary Indian Novel. Alluding specifically to Indian writers, Ghosh argues that these writers practice a sort of “global English” that “fracture[s] any prevailing standardized literary English,” but at the “same time, the writers facilitate new passages to India in their wide cosmopolitan address, making the most of the excitement over different Global Englishes” (48). Like Brennan, Bishnupriya Ghosh places the cosmopolitan writer within a larger framework of economic and cultural practices that privilege both difference and access to this difference. I would argue that Amitav Ghosh rests somewhere in between Brennan’s and Bishnupriya Ghosh’s designation of the cosmopolitan writer. While his use of Global English certainly places him in that sphere of postmodernity identified by these critics, Ghosh’s subject matter is often outside the realm of predictable literary material and location. For instance, he frequently writes about “unfashionable” areas of the world that are outside the framework of Western interests (cultural, economic, and political), such as Bangladesh, Burma, Cambodia, and rural Egypt. He is probably one of the few cosmopolitan writers who is far better known and more widely read in his country of origin than in the West. Unlike those of his Indian compatriots Anita Desai, Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, and Vikram Seth, Ghosh’s books are seldom highlighted in literary magazines. As a writer who is seriously engaged in recovering indigenous histories, he often supports his work with extensive research and a lived knowledge of the vernacular traditions of the area. Yet, as an Indian living in the United States, and as someone who is part of a larger geopolitical hierarchy of English-language writers, he is connected to a privileged network of diasporic cosmopolitan intellectuals.

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Before placing Ghosh within this privileged transliterary tradition, it may be wise to understand how cosmopolitanism acquired its present meaning. Currently our analysis of cosmopolitanism has to be posed against two contending contemporary realities. On the one hand, we live in a world where the United States acts as global judge, jury, and executioner and blithely equates consumer capitalism with the language of universal human rights. To secure these “rights,” the US, as we have seen, acts unilaterally and lethally against any nation or entity that impedes its accumulation of wealth or inhibits its exertion of power. On the other hand, global capitalism in some ways resembles the world that Lenin wrote about in the year preceding the First World War. Wealthy nations are increasingly locked in battles for resources, territory, and cheap labor. Looking back at Lenin’s definition of imperialism, one finds that the richer countries continue to divide the spoils, and imperial wanderings across the globe—albeit through proxy agencies in many cases—are as numerous as ever. Of course, these days the so-called lesser-developed nations are active, if lesser participants, in the global plunder. In this scenario, the US, rather than being the node of imperial activity, is one other element in international transactions, which are always prone to crisis. Both theories of the present, however, do not alter the fact that the international bourgeoisie are dependent on each other in a way that confounds the claims of nation and single-state hegemony. Cosmopolitan writers and critics respond to these contending realities in multiple ways, demonstrating, in my view, their uneasy accommodations to the forces of global power and capital. One stream of “cosmo-criticism” (I use this term for the critics who fall into the school described by Brennan) has been fairly unrelenting in the last fifteen years. Although each critic has his or her distinctive points of entry, critics as diverse as Arjun Appadurai, Anthony Appiah, Homi Bhabha, Paul Gilroy, and Bruce Robbins have expressed a distaste for the excesses of global capital, but they have also signaled an acceptance of a world where the politics of collective solidarities or of class or nation-based resistance movements are seen more and more as anachronistic. Certainly, the two great anticapitalist traditions of the twentieth century—socialism and leftist decolonization movements, both obviously linked in many cases—are not given any serious consideration as means of resistance in the present. This is particularly true for those scholars and writers who have disavowed the postcolonial nationalist legacy that came out of the decolonization movements beginning roughly with the independence of South Asia in 1947. The oppositional potential of nationalism has been dismissed in large part

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because of the revanchist longings of some nation-states as well as the sad history of many postcolonial nations who have continued to suppress their minority populations with the brutality that they learned at the feet of their colonizers. The success of decolonization movements, especially those that advocated an alternative to neo-colonial capitalism, however, is often ignored in this rush to condemn the failures of nationalism. Unfortunately, these same scholars see such “failures” as proof of the intrinsic limitation of nationalism rather than as part of a historical consequence of the progress of capitalism, especially its evolving ability to forestall revolutionary movements through both violent and nonviolent means. For many of these critics, nationalism as a historical counter to imperialism in our times has thus been replaced with a longing for a benign cosmopolitanism, very often having little to do with the anticapitalist ethos that powered so many decolonization struggles. Indeed, cosmopolitanism is often posed as an alternative to a collective politics emerging from a macro-narrative of any kind, be it based in nation, race, or region. Within this framework, real political resistance to capitalism is replaced by micro-accommodations and gestures of “sly civility” within a capitalist economy. Opposition, then, is confined to localized micro-moments, articulated in forms of subversive adaptation rather than active resistance rooted in the transformative politics of land or wealth redistribution. In their more celebratory moments, some of these critics are convinced that global capitalism has unleashed forces of heterogeneity and creativity that can somehow override the horrible inequities of neoliberal globalization. The mirror image of capitalist excess, according to some of these critics, can be cultural creativity, a world where musicians, writers, and artists are suddenly rid of the chains of tradition, which are burst asunder by the “revolutionary” impulses of globalization. For these critics, the ideal counter to capitalist globalization, then, is the creation of an international civil society and post-national subjects that come together in the magical moment of a borderless world. This is not the internationalist vision of, say, the Third International or of pan-Africanism, both of which, within the critical framework of these artists and critics, were limited by their adherence to some essential identity rooted in class or race. This newly defined civil society is a space, instead, where the ugliness of imperial hegemony and violence is often disavowed even as the language of universal human rights located in free-market ideology is picked up and used for a cosmopolitanism that lauds democracy and free speech. So, cosmopolitanism now is at an impasse: on the one hand, the onslaught of globalization and its

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homogenizing forces has produced an urgency among many intellectuals to conceptualize an international civil society. On the other hand, the call for this society, often embedded in existing structural inequities, has contributed to the erasure of an internationalist anticapitalist tradition, based in decolonization movements, and an unacknowledged acceptance of the ethic of a free-market economy. To some extent, cosmopolitanism has always had a vexed heritage. While this is not the place to trace the lengthy history of cosmopolitanism, it is instructive to understand that in its modern context cosmopolitanism has been conceptualized in very different ways. I want to pay particular attention to its resonance within Marxist thought since many contemporary cosmo-critics position themselves within a leftist tradition. One form of cosmopolitanism in this tradition was seen as a counter to bourgeois nationalism. In this sense, it was a revolutionary notion. Marx made it amply clear that it was only the bourgeoisie that had its own national interests. As famously stated in the Manifesto, the workingman had no country. Since the working people were against the bourgeois nation, they were in a sense cosmopolitan, but this was a communistic cosmopolitanism, which Engels in “The Festival of Nations” distinguishes from “the hypocritical, private-egotistical cosmopolitanism of free trade” (3). As Engels put it: the bourgeoisie in each country has its own special interests, and since these interests are the most important to it, it can never transcend nationality. . . . But the proletarians in all countries have one and the same interest, one and the same enemy, and one and the same struggle. The great mass of proletarians are, by their very nature, free from national prejudices and their whole disposition and movement is essentially humanitarian, anti-nationalist. Only the proletarians can destroy nationality, only the awakening proletariat can bring about fraternisation between the different nations. (6) However, Marx and Engels also understood that the proletariat’s struggle was national insofar as it meant that “the proletariat must first of all acquire political supremacy, must rise to be the leading class of the nation, must constitute itself the nation” (Marx and Engels 488, emphasis in original). In this sense, the proletariat is “national, though not in the bourgeois sense of the word” (488). It is precisely this revolutionary potential of the (inter)national that is often elided in contemporary discussions of cosmopolitanism. According to Marx and Engels, the

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proletariat knew ultimately that its struggle had to be fought at the national level, but that its victory and survival were dependent upon an internationalist solidarity movement. The international bourgeoisie, on the other hand, had a very different idea of cosmopolitanism. In Marx’s letter of 1879 to Nikolai Danielson, he discusses the railway industry and points out how the construction of that industry created an internationalization of capital: “They gave in one word an impetus never before suspected to the concentration of capital and also to the accelerated and immensely enlarged cosmopolitan activity of loanable capital, thus embracing the whole world in a network of financial swindling and mutual indebtedness, the capitalist form of ‘international brotherhood’ ” (317, emphasis in original) Thus cosmopolitanism had very different resonances when associated with the workings of (inter)national capital. The bourgeoisie realized that the accumulation of capital was always an international enterprise, deeply rooted in the interactions between so-called national economies. This duality of cosmopolitanism was explored in great detail by Antonio Gramsci, and perhaps it is instructive to contemplate his definition, especially since it is to him that so many postcolonial intellectuals turn in order to explore some of their central questions regarding the intersection of politics and culture. Gramsci was critical of an Italian cosmopolitanism, which for him was merely a replication of the cosmopolitanism of the Italians’ European counterparts. Gramsci provides a brief history of the concept which, according to him, is class-bound and imitative at its roots: “It is necessary to start with the Roman Empire, which produced the first concentration of ‘cosmopolitan’—that is to say, ‘imperial’—intellectuals, then move on to the Christian times, when the organisation of clergy under the Popes gave to the heredity of imperial intellectual cosmopolitanism the form of a European caste system” (qtd. in Ahmad, “Fascism,” 53). Aijaz Ahmad clarifies Gramsci’s notion of cosmopolitanism thus: “that conduct and outlook of the intellectuals which separates them from the life and aspirations of the common people” (“Fascism” 53). It is this elitist cosmopolitanism or the “distance between the language of intellectuals and the language of the common people” that Ahmad hazards “might have contributed to the failure of the intellectuals even of the Left to construct what Gramsci was to call a ‘national-popular’ culture” (“Fascism” 54). Gramsci was equally skeptical of “the so-called ‘internationalism’ of the Italian people, which is linked to the concept of ‘subversivism.’ In reality, this is a kind of vague ‘cosmopolitanism’, related to certain identifiable historical phenomena: to the cosmopolitanism

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and the universalism of the Catholic Middle Ages, centered on Italy and preserved through the absence of any Italian ‘political and national history’ ” (274). Gramsci’s critique here points to the elitist impulses of cosmopolitanism and to its attempt to leap outside the political. In discounting the national, it discounted the people. As Gramsci would have it, “little understanding of the state means little class consciousness” (275). This revolutionary insight into the origins of cosmopolitanism is an important gloss for our understanding of contemporary forms of postcolonial cosmopolitanism. Gramsci’s incisive critique of cosmopolitanism, I would suggest, is instructive, especially as many of the celebratory claims in the present regarding cosmopolitan identity and culture are often torn from their immediate political context. Certainly cosmopolitanism has to be considered in its complex interplay with existing neoliberal ethics. My reading of Ghosh’s works attempts to position his work within these larger political forces and convergences, considering the multiple accommodations and refusals that are possible within the context of these forces. In an Antique Land: Transcending a “Mere Exchange of Coinage” It is with these concerns in mind that we can now turn to Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land. Ghosh, over twenty years of writing, has always been acutely aware of the political realities that shape the movement of people across the global landscape. In his very first novel, The Circle of Reason, he describes with poetic acuity what happens “wherever money and its attendant arms have chosen to descend on peoples unprepared for its onslaughts” (189). In subsequent works such as The Shadow Lines and The Glass Palace, we witness the violent aftershocks of colonialism, and in an extended essay such as Countdown, he painstakingly exposes the poverty of imagination that characterizes the vainglorious claims of an Indian government that defines “progress” through the production of nuclear weapons. His works are also drawn together by a consistent attempt to recover an alternate epistemological tradition, one hidden behind the veil of colonialist or nationalist knowledge. Nowhere is this project more powerfully articulated than In an Antique Land, and it is in this text that we also see the contradictory dialectical pull between history and memory, social relations and individual desires, commodity traffic and cultural exchange, and cosmopolitan subjectivities and national and religious identities.

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Ghosh’s In an Antique Land (referred to as IAAL from here forward) grew out of the research conducted for his doctorate in Social Anthropology from Oxford University. The narrative focuses on two distinct transnational moments. The first is an autobiographical account of Ghosh’s doctoral fieldwork in the Egyptian villages of Lataifa and Nashawy during the 1980s. The second concerns the story of Bomma, an Indian slave and apparent companion of a Jewish merchant from Tunisia, Abraham Ben Yiju, who arrives in India in 1130. Ghosh’s attempt to trace the story of this slave is juxtaposed with his own life in the Egyptian villages in the present. As he discovers the world of the Indian Ocean in the twelfth century, a world of accommodation and cosmopolitan alliances, free of present-day religious and national differences, he is confronted with the erosion of precisely those values in a contemporary landscape marked by division and war, a world where religion and nation cast an ugly shadow over any attempt to construct a secular, cosmopolitan identity. To a large extent, the text works to recast and rehabilitate a lost world external to Europe and imperialist domination. In demonstrating that a world existed outside the cycle of violence and exploitation, Ghosh performs an important task: he recovers an original history that establishes the existence of a cosmopolitan, secular society that thrived and f lourished until the cruel intervention of European barbarity, thus effectively reversing imperialist mythologies that are sustained to this day. In writing a history of the time, he challenges centuries of Orientalist social histories that argued that the pre-European world was without light, without history; As Inderpal Grewal observes, in this text, Ghosh sought to produce a new map of the Old World as the world without Europe. Moving away from the contest between a “West” and the “no-West,” the text created a world where the West was either nonexistent or irrelevant and where the focus was the relationship between two “non-Western” regions. The book proposed a new field whose history and geography could be examined from medieval times to the present in the service of an idealized, nonEurocentric, postcolonial cosmopolitanism. (50) It is this connection between the medieval and the modern that is also an important part of Ghosh’s project. Even as Ghosh deplores the erosion of pre-modern civilities, he finds many traces of the past in the cultural practices, religious traditions, and folk rituals existing across the many divides. In “defiance of the enforcers of History,” he realizes

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that “the threads that connected people over centuries have not been entirely unravelled” (342). Ghosh’s creative act of recovery can be seen as aligned with a specific intellectual project inaugurated in the early 1980s, the Subaltern Studies project. Indeed, he had published an excerpt from IAAL, “The Slave of Ms. H.6,” in a volume of the Subaltern Studies series.5 The Subaltern Studies collective, started by a group of Indian historians, identified their project as one exposing the dramatic poverty of an elitist historiography (colonialist and nationalist) that “fails to acknowledge, far less interpret, the contribution made by the people on their own, that is, independently of the elite” (Guha, “On Some Aspects” 39, emphasis in original). What the Subaltern Studies project attempted to resurrect was the politics of the people and all that has been repressed, silenced, and excluded from the pages of colonial history. As Gayatri Spivak puts it, the project was meant to bring “hegemonic historiography to a crisis” (“Subaltern Studies” 4). More specifically, as expressed by Ranajit Guha, one of the main initiators of the group, the group’s mission was “to confront the philosophically certified ‘higher morality’ of World-history with its politics by asking some difficult questions about the morality of colonizers claiming to be authorized historians of lands and people they have themselves put under a colonial yoke. . . . What concerns us . . . is the representation of the colonial past held in thrall by a narrowly defined politics of statism” (History 5). According to Guha, colonialist knowledge has “had the effect of replacing the indigenous narratologies of precolonial times with ones that are typically modern and Western” (History 5). The collective’s work is thus to set the historical record straight. Ghosh is very much an inheritor of this tradition, and at first glance he seems to meet this goal both in method and in content. IAAL’s thirty-seven-page bibliography, for instance, lists eclectic sources, many of which are nonEuropean in their provenance. Several references are in Persian and Arabic, including citations of the records of twelfth-century travelers, historians, and artists. Commenting on Ghosh’s published work in the Subaltern Studies series, Robert Dixon claims that “[l]ike the work of the Subaltern Studies scholars, and unlike the work of other diasporic Indians such as Spivak and Bhabha, these texts seem almost wilfully to avoid European theoretical models, grounding their method in rigorous elaboration of archival and field research which offers itself as a series of ‘extended metaphors’ for allegorical interpretation” (26, italics in original). While such a claim mistakenly privileges archival research and places Ghosh outside a network of privilege, Dixon does correctly

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identify Ghosh’s conscious attempt to take on the terms of dominant Western historiography. Ghosh’s goal is a formidable one. To write such a revisionist history is to counter centuries of imperialist historiographies. The point is not merely to destabilize these authoritarian narratives, but to demystify an intellectual lineage that has systematically denied precolonial subjects any form of humanity. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in his work Provincializing Europe, points out that “Europe” remains the sovereign, theoretical subject of all histories, including the ones we call “Indian,” “Chinese,” “Kenyan,” and so on. There is a peculiar way in which all these histories tend to become variations on a master narrative that could be called “the history of Europe.” In this sense, “Indian” history is in a position of subalternity; one can only articulate subaltern subject positions in the name of this history. (27) Imperialist history for Ghosh is a distinct contributor to the exploitation of the peoples of this region. He “simultaneously calls into question the ‘truth’ of historical knowledge and links the production of that knowledge to the expansion of European colonialism; History, therefore, is revealed to be the history of appropriation” (Mondal 22). As Ghosh himself puts it, it is a narrative constructed by “enforcers of History” to “suit the patterns of the Western academy” (IAAL 342). Thus, much of IAAL is about the researcher Ghosh’s actual visits to depositories of knowledge. In comparing the present-day decaying site of the Geniza of the Synagogue of Ben Ezra in modern-day Cairo, looted of all its contents, with the libraries in Cambridge and Philadelphia, where many of the documents of the medieval Geniza “ended up,” Ghosh provides a lesson in cultural imperialism. Those who usurp knowledge change the course of history. Few realize this point as well as the historian who sets out to recover history. Grewal sees it as a problem that “Ghosh’s historical connection was only possible through Europe and, of course, ‘America’ as the repository of the documents that made this history possible” (55). Needless to say, however, the presence of archival sources in the imperialist centers does not reduce Ghosh’s claim; indeed, it affirms the point that the representational histories of the non-West have been seized by the West. Recuperation will always be a vexed exercise for a postcolonial intellectual. That is one legacy of colonialism. The text is thus “a lament for the world we have lost.” “Such loss” Ghosh “blames on the levelling force of colonial ‘History’, which

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appears throughout the book, in its Hegelian incarnation, as an intervention or rupture that ‘cancels’ the heterogeneity of non-western pasts and in so doing, grievously homogenises the present” (Gandhi 67). In reconstructing a “lost past,” Ghosh is also condemning the legacy of imperialism, which in his eyes has led to the erosion of the values of community, cooperation, and cosmopolitan subjects and alliances. My examination of IAAL will highlight Ghosh’s skilful rejoinder to imperial history. I will also explore Ghosh’s attempt to position medieval cosmopolitanism and its subject as a counter to contemporary discourses of globalization and its attendant claims of cosmopolitanism. Finally, I will demonstrate how Ghosh’s longing for a past of syncretic cosmopolitanism, a present of a transnational civil society, and the hope for a transcendent cosmopolitan subject echo some of the dominant texts of contemporary capital, problematizing the terms of his own critique of imperialism and neoliberal globalization. Undoubtedly, IAAL is an effective—even a scathing—indictment of violent imperial practices, but in countering imperial forces with a precolonial Eden where the accumulation of wealth was somehow accomplished with a general transcontinental sensibility but without violence, Ghosh constructs a history that itself elides the processes of wealth creation. Commenting on the arrival of the Europeans in Egypt, Ghosh describes a late-eighteenth-century world that had long been corrupted by earlier imperial intrusions: “The Indian Ocean trade, and the culture that supported it had long been destroyed by European navies. Transcontinental trade was no longer a shared enterprise; the merchant shipping of the high seas was now entirely controlled by the naval powers of Europe” (80–81). The European incursion in the Indian Ocean was horrific in its scale, but most significant for Ghosh was its contrast to an earlier order: “In all the centuries in which it had f lourished and grown, no state or king or ruling power had ever before tried to gain control of the Indian Ocean trade by force of arms” (287). The Portuguese forces’ defeat of a united coalition signified for Ghosh a truism of history, that the “determination of a small, united band of soldiers triumphed easily over the rich confusions that accompany a culture of accommodation and compromise” (288). Centers of culture such as Mangalore on India’s Malabar Coast were destroyed when their wealth attracted the “much less welcome attention of the European maritime and colonial powers and it was in the course of the struggles that ensued that Mangalore came to lose virtually every trace of its extraordinary past” (245). The coming of Vasco da Gama in 1498 signaled the end: “Within a few years of that day the death knell

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had been struck for the world that had brought Bomma, Ben Yiju, and Ashu together, and another age had begun in which the crossing of their paths would seem so unlikely that its very possibility would all but disappear from human memory” (286). All along, even as Ghosh describes the scale and nature of the Europeans’ destruction of precolonial life, he is at pains to identify the richness of all that was lost. But let us brief ly take a look at the pre-European medieval world that Ghosh describes. Ironically, the protagonists of this extraordinary past and more benign social arrangement are a master, Ben Yiju, and his slave, Bomma. Of course, as many works have demonstrated, the scope, nature, and pattern of transatlantic European slavery was very different from anything that existed previously in Africa, Asia, or South America, so my purpose here is not to contest Ghosh’s historical claim that the master-slave relationship was more equitable than what came after. Instead, I want to concentrate on Ghosh’s deployment of cosmopolitan tropes to create a world of precolonial difference and cosmopolitan subjects. Consider, then, Ghosh’s statement about slavery in the medieval age: “the elements of slavery in the ties that bound an apprentice to a master craftsman, an accountant to a merchant, would have appeared, perhaps, not as demeaning bonds, but rather as links that were in some small way ennobling—human connections, pledges of commitment, in relationships that could just as well have been a matter of a mere exchange of coinage” (263). Ghosh is making a number of claims here, implying that the world of the commercial, the “mere exchange of coinage,” ought not to affect what one might call true human relations. However, is it possible to avoid the fact that the exchange of coinage is, in fact, a social relation? Wealth and privilege, after all, do determine the parameters of social relations, even of this medieval world. Indeed, the very fact that the traces of the nameless slave, in contrast to the record of his master’s life, have almost disappeared makes it evident that slaves were the anonymous travelers, both in their own time as well as in ours. His master, on the other hand, was faced, as Ghosh admits, with “the opportunities afforded by the Eastern trade” which “must have seemed irresistible to the young Ben Yiju, reared as he was in a community that had made a speciality of it” (154). This characterization seems to touch upon the lines of privilege that created such opportunities, yet Ghosh falls into a more contemporary form of bourgeois meritocracy by claiming that “it needs to be noted that if Ben Yiju succeeded in finding ready acceptance within the society of wealthy merchants of Aden, despite his comparatively humble standing as a young apprentice

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trader, it must have been largely because of his individual gifts” (158). Not only does Ghosh emphasize the individual qualities of Ben Yiju, he is also at pains to stress Ben Yiju’s cosmopolitan credentials. Unlike the crass raiders of the West in later years, Yiju was a “man of many accomplishments, a distinguished calligrapher, scholar and poet” (19). He was, however, no mere cosmopolitan scholar. He was clearly good at his trade, for “Ben Yiju . . . returned to Egypt having amassed great wealth in India” (19). Whatever Ben Yiju’s individual gifts and business pursuits, he is portrayed as a benevolent master, and indeed the records cited regarding his relation with his slave mostly support such a view. In examples like these, though, Ghosh paints a picture of a world of social relations characterized primarily by acts of accommodation, outside of a network of wealth creation and accumulation, and in doing so falls prey to a more modern ideal of cosmopolitanism. Ghosh posits the medieval world, a world not determined by the “mere exchange of coinage,” as the true cosmopolitan world, unlike the present one that is dogged by violent divisions and xenophobic claims based on nation and religion. Bomma’s medieval world is richly created by Ghosh as a vital, cosmopolitan society that puts to shame current notions of cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Western reviewers find this the most compelling element of the book. Clifford Geertz, for instance, in his review of the book, marvels at a world which is a “mobile, polyglot and virtually borderless region which no one owned and no one dominated,” a world in which people from various communities were “more or less getting along, or getting by, within broad and general rules for communication, propriety and the conduct of business. It was, we might say, a sort of multicultural bazaar” (30). Geertz’s characterization of a world that “no one owned and no one dominated” is certainly worth further examination. Ghosh informs his reader early in the text that “by Ben Yiju’s time Fustat (a couple of miles south of modern-day Cairo) had long since become the largest island in the emerging archipelago of Masr: the juncture of some of the most important trade routes in the known world and the nucleus of one of the richest and most cosmopolitan cities on earth” (38). We meet Ben Yiju’s business associates in Aden, Yusufibn Abraham and Khalafibn Ishaq, both of whose fortunes were “founded on the trade between India and the Middle East but their part in it was that of brokers and financiers rather than travelling merchants” (157). And, of course, the reason for this conjunction of cosmopolitanism and wealth was the trade that took place in the channels of the Indian Ocean. Although Ghosh is clearly trying to differentiate a precapitalist trading system from the

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violent mercantilism of European capitalism, there is no escaping the fact that even the idyllic cosmopolitanism of medieval trade is dependent upon the movement of goods, commodities, and capital, and it is a trade through which a few people amass huge amounts of wealth. As Grewal puts it, the “movement of goods and finance were integral to transnational connectivities, though it is difficult, in this current phase of globalization, to think of trade as either benign or emptied of colonial power relations” (58). The point of course is not so much whether we can “think” of trade in this way, but rather whether commercial trade is ever outside the circuits of power relations. Ghosh demonstrates his awe of this wide-ranging cosmopolitan world and its subjects by giving the example of Abu Said Halfon, “a wealthy merchant, scholar and patron of literature [whose papers] bear witness to a pattern of movement so f luent and far-ranging that they make the journeys of later medieval travelers, such as Marco Polo and Ibn Battuta, seem unremarkable in comparison” (157). Across the seas, among India’s “luxuriant diversities” (283), Calicut was even more “cosmopolitan” than its neighbor to the north, Mangalore: it “appears to have housed an even larger and more diverse merchant community. . . . The lifestyle of these merchants was so sumptuous that even sophisticated travellers and courtiers, accustomed to the refinements of great royal courts, were taken by surprise upon being admitted to their circle” (243). Interestingly, in most of these descriptions, it is hard not to notice the connection between wealth and the acquisition of culture. Indeed, Ben Yiju’s business world can be described in the language of the multinational CEOs of our world today: “In matters of business, Ben Yiju’s networks appear to have been wholly indifferent to the many boundaries that are today thought to mark social, religious and geographical divisions” (286). Geertz’s description of a world without ownership seems open to dispute at this point. In IAAL, the cosmopolitan values of the medieval world are often juxtaposed against the decay and the dissolution of the present one. Here, for instance, is Ghosh’s description of present-day Masr in a Cairo quarter: “The last skeletal remains of the city whose markets once traded in the best the world could offer lie a little further along the path: the outlines of a few foundations and some brick walls and arches, pushing through pools of oily slime, clawing at the earth. In the distance shanties grow in tiers upon the ruins” (39). Ghosh conveys the sense of decay and modern contamination in evocative phrases such as “oily slime” and “skeletal remains,” and in a later description, he alludes to the “the scraggy geometry of Cairo’s skyline” (39). But

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perhaps for him the most damaging changes are not the ones visible to the eye; they are the ones that have transformed human relations. Throughout the book, what comes across to the reader is the immense distance that separates peoples in the present, a distance marked by religion, nation, class, and region. Nowhere is this demonstrated more poignantly than in the passage in which Ghosh and the village imam are reduced to arguing about the superiority of their respective cultures, based on which nation has a larger cache of arms and is closer to the West in terms of its mastery of technology. At this point, Ghosh can only declaim ruefully that we participated in our own final defeat, in the dissolution of the centuries of dialogue that had linked us: we had demonstrated the irreversible triumph of the language that has usurped all others in which people once discussed their differences. We had acknowledged that it was no longer possible to speak, as Ben Yiju or his Slave, or any one of the thousands of travellers who had crossed the Indian Ocean in the Middle Ages might have done. . . . I felt myself a conspirator in the betrayal of the history that had led me to Nashawy; a witness in the extermination of a world of accommodations that I had believed to be still alive, and, in some tiny measure, still retrievable. (236–37) Ghosh’s dismay is understandable, given that postcolonial nations dictated by their elites have enthusiastically acceded to the narrative of “progress,” whereby nations ascend the ladder of development and attain respectability by becoming more like the West.6 This is even truer in the age of globalization, when global membership is measured by a country’s ability and willingness to be a part of a Western corporate hierarchy that determines national policy. Ghosh’s critique of the ladder of development paradigm, however, also represents his clear condemnation of nationalism, a natural offshoot of the “development” game. He relegates nationalism to a catalogue of ideologies that have suppressed the true cosmopolitanism of the medieval age. Indeed, suspicion of nation runs through all of Ghosh’s work, most strongly in The Shadow Lines, a novel in which colonial cartography is rightly identified as the source of much of the human misery that stretches its tentacles into the present and disrupts human relations. As Ghosh himself puts it: “Many of my books, if not all my books, have been really centered on families. To me, the family is the central unit, because it’s not about the nation, you know? Families can actually span nations. . . . I think

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the reason why you see so many Indian books essentially centered on the family is precisely because the nation is not, as it were, the central imaginative unit” (Aldama 89). Certainly stories about families are not limited to being “national allegories,” and they can “span nations,” but it is hard to imagine that these family histories are not interwoven into competing national narratives. Ghosh’s ambivalence toward the nation-state signifies the complexity of his cosmopolitanism. Like many postcolonial intellectuals, he is aware that modernism is a mixed bag. It provides room for the Enlightenment values of egalitarianism and for a civic society based on participatory democracy, and, yet, as a postcolonial subject, Ghosh is also aware that he was never allowed to dictate the terms of this process of modernity. In fact, his protagonists—Alu, Zindi, Ila, Tridib, Antar, Rajkumar, Piya, and many others—are all caught up in their efforts to redefine the modernist narratives of nation and citizenship that are so much a part of their lives. Moreover, these characters also inhabit worlds that often evoke a past that has eroded as a result of modernist intrusions. In Ghosh’s estimation, many of these cultures and traditions had already achieved modernity’s egalitarian goals without its cycle of violence and exploitation. Ghosh’s objection is a laudable one, for he realizes that under the guise of modernity and, more recently, democracy, the West has historically justified conquest and colonization. More generally, Ghosh’s larger claim is that postcolonial subjects have inherited the ideology of nation that has transformed precolonial cosmopolitanism into a present-day xenophobic insularity. This point is forcefully reinforced when Ghosh attempts to visit the tomb of Sidi Abu-Hasira, a saintly figure who was venerated by Muslims and Jews. Upon his arrival at the site, Ghosh is interrogated by a suspicious official who is confounded by the fact that an Indian who is neither Jewish nor Muslim should be interested in the tomb of a Jewish holy man in Egypt. Ghosh’s own surprise at the official’s reaction is measured against his realization that “the remains of those small, indistinguishable, intertwined histories, Indian and Egyptian, Muslim and Jewish, Hindu and Muslim, had been partitioned long ago. Nothing remained in Egypt now to effectively challenge his disbelief: not a single one, for instance, of the documents of the Geniza. It was then that I began realizing how much success the partitioning of the past had achieved” (IAAL 339–40). And this process of forgetting has been aided and abetted by the Western academy. When Ghosh is in the US looking for material on Sidi Abu-Hasira, he is unable to find any information “under subject headings such as ‘religion’ and ‘Judaism’ ” (IAAL 342).

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It is only as he turns to the shelves marked ‘anthropology’ and ‘folklore’ that he is able to find a reference. Once again, the “enforcers of History” had determined the distance between “myth” and “reality.” Amitav Ghosh’s pre-modern cosmopolitanism, a world of accommodations, is clearly juxtaposed against the modernist text of violence and appropriation that is the legacy of colonialism. Ghosh sees little hope in nationalism since the ugly face of communalism and xenophobia continue to be the mirror image of nationalism. However, in making this move, Ghosh effectively erases the liberatory text of decolonization and the possibility of alternative nationalisms as a counter to the imperialist goals of contemporary globalization.7 He has nothing to confront contemporary globalization with other than these pre-modern longings. Ghosh is caught in an impasse. On the one hand, like the narrator in The Shadow Lines, he wants to embrace the modernist, secular vision represented in his uncle Tridib, but the modern with its accompanying legacies of communalism and colonialism is also a ghost that must be banished. In the end, Ghosh “is seeking a syncretism that is an anti-humanist, postmodern recognition of difference and is also at the same time a humanist secular ideal as articulated by a secular nationalism which is humanist and modernist” (Mondal 30, emphasis in original). And it is this syncretic world that many of Ghosh’s cosmopolitan subjects seek, harboring identities that are f luid yet which position them in a world governed by rigid boundaries as incapable of action. One way Ghosh is able to address such paradoxes in his own position is by confronting his role as historian and storyteller. Here again, it is worthwhile to recall the mission of the Subaltern Studies historians. What Ghosh can do, in Guha’s injunction to the historian, is not participate in the “mediation” of a “past consciousness by one conditioned by the present” (“The Prose” 77). Moreover, he must recognize both that recovering the past involves distortion and that he must “acknowledge such distortion as parametric—as a datum that determines the form of the exercise itself, and to stop pretending that it can fully grasp a past consciousness and reconstitute it” (77, emphasis in original). Several critics have pointed out Ghosh’s success in fulfilling this charge. Robert Dixon sees Ghosh’s project as an “exemplary instance of what Spivak calls ‘strategic essentialism’ ” (35), the ability to “strategically use an implied recovery of ‘presence’ while at the same time forever retreating into a post-structuralist lexicon of textual traces” (29). Claire Chambers argues that “Ghosh indicates that knowledge of the Other can only ever be partial, subjective, and historically conditioned” (2), while Padmini Mongia points out the dialogic

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nature of Ghosh’s storytelling: “No passive consumer of a well-crafted story, the reader of Ghosh’s In an Antique Land must pause to ref lect on the conjectural nature of stories and find her pleasure in the interaction between the tale and its tenuous telling” (82). This form of selfconscious storytelling in the eyes of these critics may put to rest Said’s original question in Orientalism: how does one represent a culture in a non-manipulative way and without turning its peoples into objects of curiosity and wonder? A specific strategy by which Ghosh evades the anthropologist’s trap is by turning himself into an object of study. Chambers, in fact, argues that Ghosh is “anthropologized by locals rather than the other way round; his language, customs, and cultural practices are defamiliarized by the contempt and incredulity of his supposed subjects of study” (6). Indeed, there are many instances in the text when Ghosh’s beliefs and cultural practices are ridiculed, most notably Hindu non-circumcision and the practice of cremating the dead. However, I would argue that the privileged gaze of the anthropologist is reasserted through the lens of the cosmopolitan writer who is often startled or dismayed by the limitations of those whom he encounters. For instance, Ghosh cannot hide his disquiet at the absolute sense of identity expressed by his neighbors: “I would go up to my room alone and listen to the call of the muezzin and try to think of how it must feel to know that on that very day, as the sun travelled around the earth, millions and millions of people in every corner of the globe had turned to face the same point, and said exactly the same words of prayer, with exactly the same prostrations as oneself ” (76). He is no less intrigued by the “eccentricity” of insularity: “Zaghoul and Khamees were eccentrics in most things, and in nothing so much as this, that for them the world outside was still replete with the wonders of the unknown” (174). Ghosh is also candid about his realization that “for my own part, it was precisely the absoluteness of time and the discreteness of epochs that I always had trouble in imagining” (201). In a sense, he is most dismayed by the lack of a certain element of cosmopolitanism in the villagers, by their inability to see beyond their own world. When Nabeel, a young boy in the village, comments on the fact that Ghosh is about to make a single cup of tea for himself, suggesting that “it must make [him] think of all the people [he] left at home,” Ghosh is struck by the fact that “it was the first time that anyone in Lataifa or Nashawy had attempted an enterprise similar to mine—to enter my imagination and look at my situation as it might appear to me” (152). Here we do not have what Chambers claims is a reverse anthropology. Rather, it is a reaffirmation of the cosmopolitan

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subject, the anthropologist-writer who, unlike those he writes about, can transcend space and other limitations in a true expression of intercultural understanding. Ghosh’s text is about the loss of this cultural connection between peoples; it is an act of mourning for a world that was, a mourning shaped by a humanist belief in a version of a transcendent citizen-subject. It is a cosmopolitanism that is not very interested in a revolutionary reimagining of contemporary postcolonial societies. Although his denunciation of Western knowledge formations is a worthwhile and necessary endeavor, his idealization of the past is also limiting. Aijaz Ahmad, drawing from Gramsci, alludes to the class complicity of intellectuals who are “unwilling to undertake the tasks of a revolutionary restructuring of society and polity, and thus make a modern nation, [and who] would necessarily over-valorise the monuments of the past” ( “Fascism” 48, emphasis in original). Clearly, Ahmad’s comments do not characterize Ghosh’s enterprise; Ahmad is referring to a different breed of intellectuals who are invested in a form of cultural nationalism grounded in religious and ethnic identity. Ghosh is working precisely against this complicity by contesting fascist-nationalist versions of the past; paradoxically, however, by being invested in “correct” interpretations of the past, he leaves very little to be said about contemporary transformations. As a result, the terrain of the present is almost given over. Ghosh’s emphasis on religious interactions and accommodations posed against fundamentalist identities also reinforces the secular-fundamentalist binary. As Ahmad suggests, Once “religion” has been defined as the essential terrain for contestations of hegemony, this terrain is then necessarily defined by the reactionary forces and the progressive forces are compelled not only to adopt reactive and defensive positions but also to prune down their own projects of a revolutionary re-structuring of material life, which is the only means through which a firm basis for long-term moral regeneration of society can be obtained. (“Fascism” 62) In Ghosh’s defense, it is important to emphasize that he is not seeking a “revolutionary restructuring of material life,” and perhaps his most extended response to a critique such as Ahmad’s comes in an essay, “The Fundamentalist Challenge,” written in 1995. In this essay, Ghosh argues, unlike Western commentators such as Benjamin Barber, Thomas Friedman, or Samuel Huntington, who

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posit West/East, modernism/feudalism, democracy/authoritarianism binaries as explanatory frameworks for contemporary conf licts, that the new fundamentalisms “are not a repudiation of but a means of laying claim to the modern world” (122). Indeed, Ghosh comments that “religious extremism today has very little to do with matters of doctrine or faith, that its real texts are borrowed from sociology, demography, political science, and so on” (135). Ghosh is absolutely right in pointing out the fallacy of the binary of religious extremists versus Western reason, but aren’t the texts he lists also articles of faith, and aren’t these the same texts that inspire those who seek a transnational civil society? Ghosh recognizes that religious extremism is a “form of dissent,” an “inexpressible critique of the political and moral economy of today’s world” (136). In an eloquent passage he explains the causes of this dissent: “It is simply not conceivable that the majority of human beings will ever willingly give their assent to the idea that the search for profit should be the sole or central organizing principle of society” (137). He calls for a “need to recreate, expand, and re-imagine the space for articulate, humane, and creative dissent” to counter religious extremism; however, he does not offer a suitable form of dissent to oppose the profit-based economy that he also critiques, other than finding refuge in “pre-postmodernist currents” that assure him that “matters of the spirit” will survive (137). Perhaps a Gramscian critique is apposite at this point: “Intellectual and moral reform has to be linked with a programme of economic reform—indeed the programme of economic reform is precisely the concrete form in which every intellectual and moral reform presents itself ” (Gramsci 133). What then are we left with at the end of IAAL? It is at once a lament, an act of loving re-creation, a humorous consideration of the ties that bind people of different faiths and cultures, an impassioned denunciation of Western capitalism, and a leap of the imagination. It is perhaps in this last quality that the strengths and weaknesses of the book reside. In imagining a world that was or might have been, Ghosh offers a glimpse of a social life that reveals the possibilities of the human spirit. In imagining a future where wanderers, migrants, and immigrants disappear into the “anonymity of History,” he presents little hope for renewed cosmopolitan connections.8 Finally, in imagining a cosmopolitan subject who can transcend the “mere exchange of coinage,” he provides a corrective for hegemonic notions of the new Indian subject who is defined by state, capital, and religion, but he creates a subject who remains both elusive and paradoxically implicated in all these identity categories.

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If in IAAL, Ghosh travels down the road toward posing an ideal cosmopolitan subject, in The Hungry Tide (2005), written fourteen years later, he returns to pursue and affirm with renewed passion and deliberation many of those cosmopolitan principles that were raised in the earlier text. Arguably, the fourteen years after the publication of IAAL compose one of the most decisive periods in post-independence India. In this time, the nation ensconced itself firmly into the neoliberal regime of capital accumulation. For instance, as a result of the imposition of punitive fiscal policies that drastically cut agricultural subsidies and forced farmers to “compete” in the international market and buy commodities at exorbitant prices, millions of rural Indians lost their land and now face hunger and ruin. In the midst of this process, and specifically relevant to THT, the government acted aggressively and methodically to displace millions of people, forcing them to sell their land for a pittance. Their land was then sold to private developers to build housing and facilities for the upwardly mobile class and for new business developments.9 What we have, effectively, is a massive rite of dispossession on a scale that has seldom been seen since the days of the partition. I would like to place THT as a text that marks precisely this neoliberal moment of the fourteen years since IAAL.10 Although the central event in the novel—the forcible removal of thousands of people from the island of Morichjhãpi, in the Sundarbans—is set in 1979, a period preceding the official inauguration of liberalization, the actual event, I believe, can be read as a grim foretelling of the “New India”: liberalization as characterized by such sweeping acts of state-sponsored dispossession.11 Since the main narrative is set in the present, and in part depicts the consequences of the Morichjhãpi events on the characters’ lives, it can be argued that Ghosh is demonstrating the long historical reach of such government policies. In THT Ghosh revives many of the themes that he investigated in IAAL and reaffirms his commitment to a humanist, secular cosmopolitanism that valorizes the power of human interactions, transcending surface differences among people. Once again, he uses his erudite exploration of folk traditions, modern science, historical detail, and etymological nuances to capture a world that is haunted by beauty yet forever under the shadow of historical and elemental forces. The novel, like the previous text, is a strong indictment of the forces of global

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capital and the machinations of the postcolonial nation-state, yet it also demonstrates Ghosh’s ambivalence toward the forces of contemporary globalization. Even as he condemns the destructive reach of capital and state, he seeks refuge in a vision of a world that cannot exceed and escape these very same circuits of power. We are thus left with a familiar impasse. On the one hand, Ghosh’s commitment to a just and egalitarian society is perhaps even more pronounced in this novel. Although here there is no clear source of exploitation and disruption, such as the European maritime powers in the earlier text, he is able to identify the tangled web of transnational and postcolonial corruption, righteousness, and greed that condemns the poorest and the most vulnerable to a life of deprivation and fear. The loudest cry in the novel is the one uttered by the dispossessed: “ ‘Amra kara? Bastuhara.’ Who are we? We are the dispossessed” (211, emphasis in original). Ghosh links the events of 1979, along with more recent infractions of the state, to present a globalized world that continues to perpetuate systems of oppression that were put in place by the colonial masters. Those who were the most exploited subjects of imperial rule (farmers, the landless, the wage laborer) remain locked in the iron cages of structural inequality. Historical injustices, as in IAAL, cast a long shadow over present inequities. On the other hand, even as Ghosh condemns the globalized forces of inequity that turn a blind eye to the travails of the poor, the novel ends with the possibility of renewal enabled by global organizations and transnational subjects. The technology of the global age, embodied in resources such as the Global Positioning System and the Internet, are responsible for bringing the possibility for research and “development” to the settlements in the Sundarbans, and it is Piya, the transnational subject, who is the bearer of this hope. Somehow this network of internal and transnational environmental and non-governmental groups will provide the finance and the resources that will contribute to the well-being of the community. Once again, Ghosh envisions an international cosmopolitan network of cooperation and altruism that can somehow override the destructive impulses of its mirror image, global capitalism. It is this contradiction that I want to explore in my analysis of the novel, keeping in mind my premise in this chapter: that Ghosh is inevitably caught in a dialectic of resistance to and collusion with the forces of global capital that is forever at play, forever unresolved. This is the reality that Ghosh represses even as he considers the possibility of change and renewal in the New India and the hope for the formation of a new, cosmopolitan Indian subject.

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THT, unlike some of Ghosh’s other works, such as The Circle of Reason or The Shadow Lines, is set in a specific and limited place, the Sundarbans: a mangrove forest located in the state of West Bengal (India) and in Bangladesh.12 The novel captures, with rare detail and beauty, the lives of the residents of these island communities, but the narrative revolves around two visitors to these islands. One is Piya, an American cetologist (of Indian ancestry) who arrives on the islands in order to study the behavior patterns of Orcaella brevirostris, or the Irrawaddy dolphin. On her journey, she encounters Kanai, a Delhibased entrepreneur who is on his way to Lusibari (one of the islands) at the request of his aunt, Nilima. Nilima has found a diary addressed to Kanai in which her late husband, Nirmal, recorded his account of the Morichjhãpi insurrection and his final days on that island. Fokir is a local fisherman who rescues Piya from drowning and becomes her guide and companion. As the lives of these three intersect, the narrative is punctuated with excerpts from Nirmal’s diary. Here we learn about Nirmal’s revolutionary ideals; his relationship with Kusum, a young woman who belongs to a group of landless migrants who are forcibly removed from Morichjhãpi; and his growing dedication to their cause. All along, Nirmal also provides a riveting history of the islands, cataloguing the struggles and hopes of the many residents who lived and perished since the days of British rule. Although the novel’s main characters arguably are the Sundarbans and those who live on them, we see them mostly through the eyes of the Western outsider, Piya, and, to some extent, of the postcolonial urban professional, as represented in the character Kanai. It is in the portrayal of these two characters and their viewpoints that Ghosh provides his most trenchant critique of a world that produces existing global inequities, but it is also in these characters that Ghosh presents some hope for salvation. I will argue it is in this contradictory notion of the global subject that we find an iteration of that cosmopolitanism that wavers between hope and anxiety. Ghosh’s depiction of the insufficiency and the power of language, his scathing critique of the epistemic failure of Western reason, his fervent faith in the possibility of interactions between people that transcend place, class, and language are themes that mark much of what he was trying to accomplish in IAAL, and they resonate in most of his work, but in THT some elements are given even more emphasis: that the global in the contemporary world can be a force of renewal; that the destructive forces of contemporary globalization can be tempered by a cooperative cosmopolitanism; that there can be a resolution of nature and the human through a borderless

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world of technology and through an appreciation of nature’s restorative and destructive powers. Paradoxically, what underscores this sense of the global and the ambivalence of belonging in a world of arbitrary borders and separations is an attention to the specificity of place. Let us brief ly consider the significance of this point. This ambivalence and multiplicity are perhaps best ref lected in Ghosh’s evocative portrayal of the Sundarbans themselves: “The waters of rivers and sea did not intermingle evenly in this part of the delta; rather, they interpenetrated each other, creating hundreds of different ecological niches, with streams of fresh water running along the f loors of some channels, creating variations of salinity and turbidity” (104). The Sundarbans are in every sense liminal territory. This liminality is expressed in many ways. Geopolitically, they lie in the borderlands between India and Bangladesh, boundaries created by the arbitrary dictates of the British colonial masters and postcolonial antagonisms. The mangrove forests are also part of a delta that leads to the sea, and the inextricable combination of salt and fresh water results in the remarkable presence of many unique life-forms. The boundary between land and water is even more tenuous. The jhawar and the bhata (the f lood and the ebb) see the water rise and fall as it inundates the land. The islands cling on to a precarious existence, always at the mercy of the encroaching waters, the hungry tide. All of these natural features are enhanced by the colorful multiplicity of culture on the islands. This is a space in which languages, religions, and histories intersect, a fact captured eloquently in Nirmal’s account in his diary: The mud banks of the tide country are shaped not only by rivers of silt, but also by rivers of language: Bengali, English, Arabic, Hindi, Arakanese and who knows what else? Flowing into one another they create a proliferation of small worlds that hang suspended in the flow. And so it dawned on me: the tide country’s faith is something like one of its great mohonas, a meeting not just of many rivers, but a roundabout people can use to pass in many directions—from country to country and even between faiths and religions. (205, italics in original) Symbolically, then, the Sundarbans are not dissimilar to the world of the medieval Indian Ocean that Ghosh found so attractive in IAAL. Here, again, there is an ecumenical meeting ground and interactions between different histories and faiths. Ghosh takes delight in uncovering the multiple layers of these hybrid pasts that bear living traces in the present.

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Even the most Hindu of ceremonies recounted in THT, a puja (ritual prayer) for the forest goddess, Bon Bibi, has its roots in “Arabia” and Islam. The Glory of Bon Bibi was “the story of the tiger goddess [that] did not begin either in the heavens or on the banks of the Ganga, like the mythological tales with which he [Kanai] was familiar. Instead, the opening scene was set in a city in Arabia and the backdrop was painted with mosques and minarets” (85). Likewise the word “badabon” (the name for Nilima’s organization, meaning “mangrove”) is a composite of Arabic, Bengali, and Sanskrit: “It is as though the word itself were an island, born of the meeting of two great rivers of language—just as the tide country is begotten of the Ganga’s union with the Brahmaputra” (69). These are natural conf luences, fully recognized by those that dwell in the Sundarbans, and removed from the inheritors of nationalist modernity. Ghosh enhances the distance between the middle-class intellectual Nirmal and those that continue to be a part of the hybrid histories of the region: “I was amazed. I’d thought I was going to a Hindu puja. Imagine my astonishment at hearing these Arabic invocations. Yet the rhythm of the recitation was undoubtedly that of a puja” (204, italics in original). Of course, Ghosh is making a larger point about this distance. Nirmal as the urban, leftist, nationalist radical is cut off from the folk traditions of the people, but what is even more significant here is Nirmal’s surprise at the religious blending that the people of the Sundarbans seem to take for granted. One of the more powerful points of critique in the novel is the failure of the nation-state and those who are its guardians. The state is both oppressive and ineffective. Nirmal finds his true calling as a radical revolutionary only after he takes a position against the state, aligning himself with the landless people of Morichjhãpi. Ghosh also makes a similar distinction between the acquisitive desires of the colonial powers and those individuals who are motivated by a powerful ideal. Colonial hubris is represented by the British overseers who plan a port in Canning to rival those in Hong Kong and Singapore, ignoring the dangers of building a port directly in the path of oncoming storms. Predictably, the port is destroyed when the first storm arrives on its shores. Ghosh juxtaposes this act of state ineptitude and colonial arrogance with the cosmopolitan idealism of the individual philanthropist. Much like his Indian Ocean merchant counterparts in IAAL, Scotsman Daniel Hamilton had an interest in a world that was vast and varied. His vision of the Sundarbans was very different from the British policy makers. Nirmal explains that “[w]hat [Hamilton] wanted was to build a new society, a new kind of country. It would be a country

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run by cooperatives, he said. Here people wouldn’t exploit each other and everyone would have a share in the land” (45). This utopian community never came to be, but as Nirmal describes it, Hamilton’s vision echoes the one captured by the young Marx in The German Ideology:13 “It was a dream, Kanai,” said Nirmal. “What he wanted was no different from what dreamers have always wanted. He wanted to build a place where no one would exploit anyone and people would live together without petty social distinctions and differences. He dreamed of a place where men and women would be farmers in the morning, poets in the afternoon and carpenters in the evening.” (46) The landless migrants who occupy Morichjhãpi live out this dream in the few brief moments on their time on the island, but their dreams can never be realized because of a violent act of state intervention.14 What, then, are the links between the natural or cultural symbols that Ghosh employs in the novel and the f laws and dreams of the people who inhabit or are connected to the islands? As in IAAL, Ghosh valorizes a hybrid, idealized, cosmopolitan subject, who is characterized by his ability and desire (other than Piya, the subject is usually male) to transcend or overcome the boundaries that are mostly constructed by colonialism and its postcolonial inheritors. Ghosh privileges this transnational subject because he is allied to the “natural” contours of a world that in its topography and its cultural traditions is always already complex and multi-layered. Those who betray the principles of this complex world and its traditions and attempt to dominate nature are characterized additionally by their single-minded attachment to state, religion, or capital. Consequently, Ghosh continues to highlight the failure of the state to protect its citizens and pursues his vision of a cosmopolitan future through the interactions of individuals and organs outside the state. Although the forces of nature wreak havoc in the world of the Sundarbans, it is ultimately the machinations of the state that make it a hostile one for revolutionaries and dreamers. All those who come to an untimely death—Fokir, Kusum, and Nirmal—are dreamers. Indeed, like Tridib in The Shadow Lines, they are unable to survive the brutalities of state and faith. The survivors—Nilima, Piya, Moyna, and Kanai—are the practical ones, the reformers, who will “get something done.” It would be an oversimplification to claim that Ghosh sets up a neat dichotomy between reason and spirit, reform and revolution here,

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especially since these four characters are not depicted as exemplary models for the new age. However, they do represent a certain blend of cosmopolitan idealism that finds favor with Ghosh. Let us look at each character brief ly. Piya, the child of Indian migrants, is effectively without a fixed place she can call home. Although born in the US, she wanders the world in search of the Orcaella. As she puts it, “[f ]or me, home is where the Orcaella are” (329). When we first encounter her, she is uneasy in the midst of strangers because “she had no more idea of what her own place was in the great scheme of things than she did of theirs—and it was exactly this, she knew, that occasioned their behavior” (31). Her attraction to Fokir, an untutored fisherman, is partly a result of the fact that they are both unmoored, both drawn to being on the water, both avoiding a settled life of social responsibilities. However, these surface similarities, somewhat incredulously, allow them to ignore divisions of class, language, gender, or geopolitical privilege as they collaborate in their search for the dolphin. Embodied in their relationship is the ultimate possibility of a cosmopolitanism that transcends the differences that tie them down. When Piya first arrives on Fokir’s boat, she is touched by his instinctive empathy for her: “It was not just that he had thought to create a space for her; it was as if he had chosen to include her in some simple, practiced family ritual, found a way to let her know that despite the inescapable muteness of their exchanges she was a person to him and not, as it were, a representative of a species, a faceless, tongueless foreigner” (60). As they continue in their individual tasks, she tracking the migratory patterns of dolphins, and he casting his net for crab and fish, each is perfectly comfortable in his or her separate zone. Ghosh presents a relationship in which, even though “one of the tasks required the input of geostationary satellites while the other depended on bits of shark bone and broken tile,” it “proved possible for two such different people to pursue their own ends simultaneously—people who could not exchange a word with each other and had no idea of what was going on in one another’s head” (118). Piya, however, is unable to escape entirely from her Western assumptions and prejudices. She attempts to repay Fokir’s generosity with a large sum of money; she refuses to eat the food that he cooks, preferring her energy bars; she is horrified by his indifference when a captured tiger is brutally killed by the villagers. However, the connection that is created when Fokir literally breathes life into her, saving her from the murky waters of the river, is sustained until the end when Fokir saves her from a violent

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death. In the final passages of the book, when they are tied together in an effort to survive a storm, “it was as if the storm had given them what life could not; it had fused them together and made them one” (321). Their bond, Ghosh proposes, is almost an elemental one, transcending the “man-made” differences of contemporary life. Yet, Piya herself is a child of privilege, and in making such a proposition Ghosh minimizes the immense gaps, further exacerbated by contemporary globalization, that separate the two. Moreover, Piya is clearly the one who benefits from this relationship. Is this fundamental inequality somehow neutralized by Piya’s “good intentions”? Is Fokir merely a foil for Piya’s own emergence into global subjectivity? Is Ghosh’s vision of an enabling cosmopolitanism ultimately a proposition that can only be sustained through a disavowal of a modern civic identity? Perhaps these questions can be addressed by brief ly examining the character Kanai, Fokir’s rival for Piya’s affections, who embodies an entirely different kind of global subject. In many ways, he is the complete opposite of Piya, characterized by his grasping materialism and utilitarian views about the world. He is the neoliberal global citizen, the new Indian subject of the media images, whose life, work, and values are completely in sync with the patterns of the new economy. He is the face of the New India: “Kanai was the founder and chief executive of a small but thriving business. He ran an agency of translators and interpreters that specialized in serving the expatriate communities of New Delhi: foreign diplomats, aid workers, charitable organizations, multinationals and the like” (17). As a member of the privileged middle class, Kanai is, in Piya’s eyes, “an example of a certain kind of Indian male, overbearing, vain, self-centered—yet, for all that, not unlikable” (163). He is driven by ambition and is attracted to Fokir’s wife, Moyna, in whom he sees a like-minded individual: “It reassured him to be able to think, ‘What I want for myself is no different from what everybody wants, no matter how rich or poor; everyone who has drive, any energy wants to get on in the world’ ” (183). In some ways, he is no different from the colonialists of old, imbued with the same capitalist spirit of Sir Daniel Hamilton, who was raised in Scotland where “his teachers taught him that life’s most important lesson is ‘labor conquers everything,’ even rocks and stones if need be—even mud” (42). Stuck in this utilitarian mindset, Kanai is unable to understand the rewards of Piya’s work as a cetologist partly because he cannot comprehend an exercise that is not intrinsically a commercial transaction. As he observes Piya’s silent dedication to her task, he realizes that “[h]e had almost forgotten what it was like to look at something so ardently—an

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immaterial thing, not a commodity nor a convenience nor an object of erotic interest” (222). For Ghosh, Kanai represents a certain form of glib cosmopolitan privilege, which is in contrast to the silent human empathy that Piya and Fokir are able to express. We see a familiar dichotomy here. Ghosh is discounting the cosmopolitanism secured through capital for a more transcendent link, located in the world of the natural (such as the delta) and the cultural. Like the river Ganges, which has a subterranean life, human connections, in Ghosh’s estimation, are cemented through a network of barely visible but intricate links rooted in history, culture, and shared values. In this respect, language is a vital component, both reinforcing difference and enabling community. While Piya and Fokir communicate outside the bounds of language, Ghosh demonstrates how the new elite uses language as a weapon. Translation, which is Kanai’s art, is purely a means of income and a way to sediment existing global inequities. He describes his occupation with careless ease: “I provide translators for all kinds of organizations: businesses, embassies, the media, aid organizations—in short, anyone who can pay. . . . Recently we started a speech-training operation, to do accent modification for people who work in call centers. It’s become the fastest-growing part of the business” (165–66). He is “the interpreter, the messenger, the amanuensis” (269), but all in the interest of profit. Kanai’s genteel exterior, however, is dramatically disrupted when he is at his most vulnerable. Stuck in the unforgiving mud of the mangrove swamp, he lashes out at Fokir. Suddenly we see “the master’s suspicion of the menial; the pride of caste; the townsman’s mistrust of the rustic; the city’s antagonism toward the village. He had thought he had cleansed himself of these sediments of the past . . . but they had only been compacted into an explosive and highly volatile reserve” (269). The true face of the neoliberal cosmopolitan, Ghosh seems to suggest, is one entrenched in age-old prejudices. Here is Ghosh’s sharpest indictment of the “new India,” represented in its elite, caught between the atavistic hatreds of the past and the rapacious desire for wealth in the present. The subject of these prejudices, Fokir, is a very different kind of translator, as is Piya. They can interpret the “natural” and the “human” in ways that are outside Kanai’s understanding. They are equally attuned to reading the surface of the water as they are to interpreting the expressions that pass over each other’s faces. After all, Piya imagines that it was “better in a way, more honest that they could not speak. . . . For if you compared it to the ways in which the dolphins’ echoes mirrored the world, speech was only a bag of tricks that fooled you into believing

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that you could see through the eyes of another human being” (132). It is significant that Piya relies on technology for her research, while Fokir, in Piya’s words, has access to “local funds of knowledge,” magically discerning the migratory paths of the dolphins and the treacherous currents of the river (28). Perhaps Ghosh is suggesting that such a union between modern and indigenous knowledge may be possible in order to serve the greater good. Ghosh clearly portrays their relationship as a sign of hope, of cosmopolitan transcendence that can overcome the “mere exchange of coinage” and petty differences enforced through the divisions of language, caste, location, and class. This idealistic relation, however, cannot entirely override the boundaries constructed by the lines of global privilege. It is a relationship riddled with contradictions. Piya has the means to hire Fokir for his services and pay him a sum that is a fortune for his family. Her entire research is based on Fokir’s knowledge of the river. Indeed, it is clear that Piya benefits in numerous ways from her relationship with Fokir. He is the source of knowledge, he offers her emotional companionship, and he is a translator of all that is foreign for Piya. Fokir, on the other hand, profits financially, but he also pays dearly for his association with Piya.15 We are asked to believe that both figures represent some form of purity—Piya the world of pure research and Fokir the world of nature—but these representations cannot be sustained outside the commercial dictates to which they are both bound. Moreover, such binaries in themselves perpetuate certain gendered notions of the woman as privileged class subject who can come to knowledge only through her association with the untutored, marginalized, but wise male figure. The symbolic moment when Fokir sacrifices his own life in order to shield Piya is fraught with irony. He leaves behind his wife and child, who depend on him, in order to protect a stranger. Is this the only end that is possible? Does Fokir have to die because his transgression, his affection for Piya, cannot be realized? Does Ghosh implicitly acknowledge that their relationship cannot really transcend the barriers of class and privilege? Is it for the same reason that the other relationship against class lines, that between Kusum and Nirmal, is destroyed? In Ghosh’s cosmopolitan imaginary, ultimately there seems to be little room for such interactions. Indeed, a somewhat more harsh assessment of Piya is that she is no different from the Western organizations that use local resources and knowledge to further their own ends. A more sympathetic reading could suggest that Piya is inextricably tied to Fokir through the work that she will continue in his name, and the resources that she brings to the village will ultimately benefit the larger

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community. However, the inescapable fact is that Fokir has to be sacrificed for this end. It is certainly possible to claim that Fokir’s death is a narrative, symbolic strategy that merely allows Ghosh to expand on the trope of loss and renewal that runs through the novel. However, I would suggest that Fokir’s death is a symptom of a larger problem in the narrative, a problem that is forever kept unresolved because of the privileged subjectivity of Piya. My point, in short, is that Fokir is never allowed an interior life; he is forever represented through the eyes of others, especially Piya’s. The reader is not allowed to view him as a historical agent, unlike, say, Nirmal, Kanai, or Piya. He is, instead, a projection of middle-class anxieties and desires. This point is best demonstrated when we see Fokir through Piya’s eyes. I offer two examples. The first is when she alludes to Fokir’s unique gifts: “I’ve never met anyone with such an incredible instinct. It’s as if he can see right into the river’s heart” (221); in another instance, the narrator explains Piya’s attraction to Fokir: “There was something about him that was utterly unformed, and it was this very quality that drew her to him: she craved it the same way that a potter’s hand might crave the resistance of unshaped clay” (263). Although such a desire highlights the unequal terms of their relationship, in each case, Fokir’s humanity is expressly viewed through Piya’s eyes. The absence of Fokir’s interior life and agency in the text does not preclude the fact that Ghosh is as serious in representing the subaltern history of Fokir and the island residents as he is in tracking down the missing slave, Bomma. But IAAL is fundamentally not a text about Bomma, nor is THT about Fokir. Both texts, in fact, point to a fundamental problem in representing the other outside the terms of the privileged observer. Ghosh, the cosmopolitan writer, is locked in a struggle to represent the voiceless and demonstrating the impossibility of doing so. Unable to resolve this crisis, Ghosh inevitably marginalizes his subaltern subjects, bringing to the foreground the dominant subject and the privileged narrative voice. He is likewise unwilling to grant agency to the collective voice, privileging instead the middle-class observer, albeit a f lawed one. I believe this can best be seen in Ghosh’s ambivalence toward organized politics and the role of the state. In his cosmopolitan imagination, the links between a Ben Yiju and a Bomma and those between Fokir and Piya are what offer hope for renewal rather than collective political resistance or state action. The state, as I have argued, is consistently viewed as a failed political entity, while collective action or organized

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resistance, though noteworthy, is not presented by Ghosh as a real solution to systemic inequities. I do not, however, want my critique of Ghosh’s inability to grant agency to the subaltern subject or his unwillingness to acknowledge the revolutionary potential of collective action to erase the fact that my primary claim about this novel, as I stated earlier, is that it is a scathing indictment of the systematic and violent acts of statesponsored dispossession. Ghosh recounts the lives of people who “in Bangladesh . . . had been among the poorest of rural people, oppressed and exploited both by Muslim communalists and by Hindus of the upper castes” (98–99). One of the reasons that the Morichjhãpi rebellion is suppressed with such ruthlessness is because of what it represented for those in power: “It was universally agreed that the significance of Morichjhãpi extended far beyond the island itself. Was it possible that in Morichjhãpi had been planted the seeds of what might become, if not a Dalit nation, then at least a safe haven, a true place of true freedom for the country’s most oppressed?” (159). It is this fear of a greater movement, the fear that the dispossessed may demand their rights, which overrides any ostensible concern for the tigers’ habitat. Ghosh suggests that the West is complicit in this process, aiding and abetting in this act of state-sponsored dispossession in the name of environmental preservation. Ghosh captures, in the words of Kusum, both the inequities of a globalism where the poor are the ones who always pay the price for preservation or “progress,” and the complicity of the global elite in perpetuating this crisis: Who are these people, I wondered, who love animals so much that they are willing to kill us for them? Do they know what is being done in their names? Where do they live, these people? Do they have children, do they have mothers, fathers? As I thought of these things, it seemed to me that this whole world had become a place of animals, and our fault, our crime, was that we were human beings, trying to live as human beings always have, from the water, and the soil. (216–17, italics in original) Ghosh aligns himself with the people’s struggles, and the act of writing as recovery is a vital part of this alliance. Nirmal’s diary and Kanai’s dedication to “write the story of Nirmal’s notebook—how it came into my hands, what was in it, and how it was lost” (329) is ultimately a testament to a writer’s ability to give voice to history’s voiceless. Nirmal, quoting the poet, Rainer Maria Rilke may as well be speaking for

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Ghosh when he says, “[t]his is the time for what can be said. Here is its country. Speak and testify . . .” (227). Ghosh’s faith in this act of creative recovery is echoed by Nirmal in his final words to Kanai, recorded in his diary: “I feel certain you will have a greater claim to the world’s ear than I ever had. Maybe you will know what to do with it. I have always trusted the young. Your generation will, I know, be richer in ideals, less cynical, less selfish than mine” (230, italics in original). Nirmal, of course, could not have anticipated that twentyfive years later a new generation in neoliberal India would be very far from that laudatory description. Ghosh writes these words with a sense of sad irony, but he offers some solutions that underline the contradictions that cut through his project in this novel and highlight his difficult position as a writer who derives hope from a certain version of cosmopolitanism. Since the government seems indifferent and harsh, and collective action ineffective, Ghosh leaves us with a difficult compromise regarding resistance to the current regime of globalization. This concession is highlighted in the concluding chapter. Some months have elapsed since the storm. Piya returns from Kolkata with the news that her e-mail requests to the global community have borne fruit. She has raised enough money through a chain letter so that Fokir’s family can buy a new home and his son can attend college in the future. Moreover, she has “had several offers of funding from conservation and environmental groups” for her conservation work, but she wants to work with Nilima’s organization so that the “burden of conservation” is not placed on “those who can least afford it” (327). She is also able to stay on in the country because “environmental groups in New Delhi . . . will intervene with the government” (328). She wants to recruit Moyna, Fokir’s wife as a helper and teach her English and learn Bengali from her. Finally, she can continue her research because her data has been stored in her mobile Global Positioning System, which has survived the storm. There are some important points to be made here in locating Ghosh’s response within the larger circuit of resistance to the injustices of globalization. One is the privileging of non-governmental organizations (NGOs). National governments, it appears, cannot be trusted to protect the interests of the dispossessed or sustain the delicate ecological balance of the Sundarbans. It is the stateless “conservation and environmental groups” that will perform that task. The state, embodied in all its functionaries, from the petty forest guard to the visiting politician, is depicted as corrupt and craven. It is clear that it will not

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tolerate any dissent, and its legacy of broken promises is evidence of a larger betrayal of the people. Ghosh may be implicitly commenting on the neoliberal state and its complicity with global capital, but in presenting the NGOs as a solution, he avoids confronting the fact that many of these of organizations are similarly implicated in global financial systems.16 A second point is that the solution to these injustices does not in lie in conventional leftist politics, especially not those connected to organized party organs. After all, it is the Communist Party of India (Marxist), the government in power in 1979, that is responsible for evicting or murdering the settlers. The insufficiency of radical politics is further emphasized by Nirmal’s inability to act in the face of injustice: “Nirmal, overwhelmed, read and reread Lenin’s pamphlet [What Is to Be Done?] without being able to find any definite answers. Nilima, ever practical, began to talk to women who gathered at the wells and ponds” (67). Notwithstanding the parodic elements attached to Nirmal’s attempts, Ghosh is clearly making a point about the ineffectiveness of theoretical and, one might add, European models of resistance for the current situation. The failure of a certain idea of revolution is reinforced when Nirmal casts aside his alliances with the ruling party and deliberately aligns himself with the settlers. The revolutionaries, though, are defeated, leaving behind the reformists, the Nilimas and the Piyas, to carry on their task of the long revolution. A final point to be made here is regarding Ghosh’s view of technology. Technology in its myriad forms is seen in a positive light. The Internet and the Global Positioning System make the task of sustaining development possible, and although Piya loses all her equipment during the storm, she is able to save her information on her hand-held monitor. There is also a symbolic significance in the fact that disparate regions of the world may be united through satellite technology. Yet, Ghosh fails to acknowledge sufficiently that these same, beneficial resources are imbricated in an elaborate global system of dispossession. Technology enables the West to drain resources from poorer countries (in the form of patents for indigenous plants, for example) as well as to provide the solutions that Ghosh offers at the end of the novel. Aijaz Ahmad has wondered “how the celebration of a postcolonial, transnational, electronically produced cultural hybridity is to be squared with th[e] systematic decay of countries and continents, and with decreasing chances for substantial proportions of the global population to obtain conditions of bare survival, let alone electronic literacy and gadgetry” (In Theory 12–13). Electronic literacy is not the solution for global

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inequities. Indeed, it is often a palliative, def lecting attention from the larger structural inequities between the North and the South. Both IAAL and THT underline some of the complexities of Ghosh’s project. He is scrupulous in recovering subaltern histories and in attempting to represent the voiceless. His ability to bring to the surface the unseen, to illuminate the connections between human histories and cultures is unmatched among contemporary writers. In excavating native, pre- or non-European traditions, he is a worthy follower of the postcolonial tradition of crafting alternative histories and narratives. In demonstrating that a humane, secular non-Western global existed in pre- or non-capitalist forms, he provides a fitting riposte to the Friedmans and the Huntingtons who proclaim the superiority of the West. Finally, in expressing his outrage about the exploitative practices of the state and capital, he is an effective critic of colonialism and its cultural and economic inheritor, contemporary corporate globalization. However, as I have argued, his critique is also caught up in the limitations of his own cosmopolitan idealism. He sees no redemptive power in the state; his faith in cross-cultural interactions across the lines of class, religion, and location are not linked to a parallel critique of capitalism; his attempt to recover subaltern consciousness is hampered by his investment in his middle-class, Westernized protagonists (Piya, and even Ghosh himself in IAAL). All of this is to say that Ghosh is an exemplary writer who exposes the inequities and contradictions of the New India, yet he is caught up in the very system that he critiques. His cosmopolitan subject, then, is a construct that can resist hegemonic notions of the consumer, national subject, but only within a space that keeps the New India alive.

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CH A P T E R

FOU R

Transnational Transgressions: Reading the Gendered Subject in Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham

In February 2007, a popular magazine, the Week, devoted an entire issue to the “new woman.” In this issue, the reader discovers that the new economy has empowered women to take control of their social and economic lives. A number of professional women speak about the rapid changes that have occurred in women’s roles since liberalization was formalized. In the lead article, Nikita Doval confidently asserts that “today the glass ceiling has been shattered and women are accepted as equals in the working world” (22). One indicator of women’s new power is, apparently, that they are “looking at investment options” (28). Meghna Gulzar, a filmmaker, claims that “gender is no longer an issue, at least in my workplace.” Gender, according to Gulzar, was “thrown out of the window a long time back” (27). Shareen Bhaan, a television journalist, tells us that the “battle for women today is an internal one” since the “vibrant new economy has given women in India a new deal” (44). Political empowerment and bourgeois individualism seem to be conf lated by many of these women. Harshikaa Udasi claims that these new Indian women “think aloud. They assert their opinions. And they do as they will” (33). Donna Catherine Masih, a model and a representative of the new woman, defines independence in the same article thus: “As an independent woman I think it is my prerogative to indulge my every whim and fancy and pamper myself silly. If I don’t do it then who will?”

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(36). An ability to indulge one’s personal “whims,” then, is considered by some to be the measure of advancement and equality. The entire feature on women’s issues is “supported” by f lash polls about work, relationships, wealth, and leisure. Of course, judging by this report, the new woman is an entirely metropolitan, middle-class phenomenon. No mention is made of unequal wages, gender discrimination, caste and religious injustice, housing expenses, or the enormous rise in the cost of living. All that we need to know is that the “new woman”—a consumer, an empowered free agent, and an equal of men—has arrived on the scene. In this narrative, if there are advances in women’s social positions, they certainly are not a result of the struggles of women through decades of activism. Instead, it is unfettered capitalism that has created the opportunities that have come their way via the economic reforms, and like the brave new consumer subjects of liberalization, these new Indian women have ascended to their rightful place. It is perhaps easy to dismiss these pronouncements as overt examples of corporate media propaganda. However, to do so would ignore an important element of the struggle to define the gendered subject in the New India. While the remarks in a popular magazine may indicate a Pollyannish streak that is restricted to a small section of the population, the language of female empowerment and self-fulfillment employed in the magazine has become more naturalized in the years following the implementation of economic reforms. The emergence of the new Indian woman, to some extent, disrupts a narrative of the nation that requires a compliant and subservient gendered subject, but this subject, I argue, is also reinserted into a patriarchal paradigm that serves the interests of the neoliberal economy. In order to explore the contradictory narratives of the new Indian woman, both as transgressor of “national traditions” and willing subject of neoliberalism, I turn to the world of film and the representation of the new Indian woman in the work of three of the most prominent women filmmakers in the South Asian diaspora: Gurinder Chadha, Deepa Mehta, and Mira Nair. Examining three films, one by each of these filmmakers, I analyze their depictions of a gendered subject in an extended transnational India. The filmmakers’ diasporic locations (England, Canada, and the United States) contribute an important element to my analysis. As I have argued in chapter 2, the new Indian subject is defined partly in relation to his cousin in the West. This primarily masculine subject becomes the naturalized face of an extended nation. Feminist filmmakers from the diaspora intervene in this masculine narrative in several ways. They pose an oppositional feminist subject to counter a limited, masculine

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national subject; as transnational filmmakers, they extend ideas about gender, religion, and class within a global context; and their transnational status also opens up contesting questions about audience and reception. However, as my analysis will demonstrate, these filmmakers can potentially replicate existing binaries about tradition and modernity and notions about empowerment and sexuality that mimic many of the pronouncements that we see on the pages of the Week. These binaries and notions necessarily form the context of my analysis here, since, as I have worked to demonstrate in this book, the production of the Indian subject is always implicated in global circuits of meaning and in the global circulation of capital. The discourse of “rights,” for instance, so prevalent in the global neoliberal imaginary is a crucial factor in the way we understand the so-called national construction of the new Indian woman. The production of the new Indian woman, then, whether it is gracing the pages of a popular magazine or emerging from the work of feminist filmmakers, is a site of multiple contradictions. Contextualizing the New Indian Woman It is appropriate to begin this discussion on the terrain of rights, since all three of the films speak implicitly to the question of women’s rights in a nation that sees women far behind in the areas of education, jobs, health, housing, and, of course, protection from violence at every level. However, as I have argued in chapters 2 and 3, neoliberalism’s moral supplement is the narrative of human rights. Neoliberalism has traditionally argued for the division between economics and politics, positioning questions of labor, for instance, in the domain of rights rather in the realm of exploitative social and economic relations. As Nancy Naples puts it, “A key dimension of neoliberalism is the framing of social, political and economic issues in terms of ‘human rights’ ” (“Challenges” 267). These rights are seldom viewed as problems central to a capitalist economy. Instead, they are mostly relegated to the realm of civil society, where ultimately they are limited to an individual’s “right” to attain the power to become a consumer subject.1 Linking the individual subject to a seemingly universalized economic landscape, neoliberalism attempts to construct an international female subject who will produce and consume for the global economy. What this framing of the issue of rights, then, avoids are relations of labor. Certainly it is impossible to discuss gender and sexuality in neoliberal times outside the context of women’s historical position in

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relation to the existing modes of production. Let us consider the basic facts about the consequences of globally dictated neoliberal reform for women in developing countries. According to Naples, neoliberal policies contribute to “women’s unpaid household and caretaking labor as a direct consequence of the decline in the public provisioning or welfare supports” (“Changing the Terms” 12). In general, as Manisha Desai points out, the gendered effects of Structural Adjustment Programs are stark. Desai claims that “there has been an increase in women’s employment in the informal sector, where workers receive no protections from unemployment, no benefits, and wages below poverty level” (17). A full “71 percent of women work in the less visible informal sector,” where they lack such protections and “where they prepare products for sale in the market, [do] domestic service, and work . . . for subcontractors” (19). Desai also points out that “The IMF and the World Bank institute structural adjustment policies while UN agencies promote legal and cultural changes that would allow women access to the new market forces” (32). However, she argues, such action “misses the gendered nature of most economic policies” (32). These global findings are also true of the conditions under which women labor in India. According to Barbara Harriss-White, “Indian women’s participation in the labor force remains low at just 36 percent, compared to 84 percent of men. . . . [India is ranked] as one of the 10 worst countries in the world in terms of the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity.” Moreover, “because of prenatal sex selection and aborting of female fetuses, the sex ratio increasingly favors men: in 2001, 108 boys were born per 100 girls; in 2007, 120 boys were born per 100 girls” (India Working 214). The reality of most Indian women’s lives is a galaxy away from that represented on the pages of the Week: now casual wage labour relations dominate small holder agriculture. Hired labour is now 60–70 per cent of all labour input to agriculture. Women have not been marginalized. On the contrary, women have come to dominate the labour input into agriculture and provide over half of all farm labour, largely as casual wage workers. Despite significantly lower wage rates, they contribute more to household incomes than do men. (Harris-White, “Gender” 172, emphasis in original) The central message that capitalism preaches, that the universal reach of the commodity economy will wipe out social differences, is negated by such realities. As Lisa Lowe and David Lloyd have argued, “Making

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use of the structures of patriarchal societies and its modes of gender discipline to maximize its exploitation of ‘docile’ female labor, transnational capital simultaneously undermines the reproduction of patriarchy by moving women from one sphere of gendered social control to another” (21). In short, a glance at the labor situation in the New India makes it evident that the new economic policies have exacerbated the feminization of poverty. There is an increasing exploitation of female labour in agriculture in order to keep down the costs of production. The accumulating classes are segmenting the casual labour market along gender lines, allotting women to agriculture and men to the non-farm economy. We can also see markets remaining embedded in (the product of ) gender relations and ideologies to the extent that the best paid segments of work are captured by men. (Derné 173) And women fare no better in the non-farm economy: “Gender differences in wage rates in the non-farm economy greatly exceed those in agriculture. The labour process, though increasingly differentiated, is still strongly segmented by gender. Women earn less than men, even for joint tasks that may be performed by either sex and irrespective of their productivity” (Derné 173). This reality contrasts sharply with the economic position of the upper-middle-class female subjects, women who are now part of the neoliberal dream of consumption and advancement. They are increasingly targeted as potential consumers in the New India. The unmarried woman as a symbol of modernity is linked to a global community through images of transnational desire: cell phones, designer clothing, and “beauty products,” for example. The married woman is also a significant part of the new, consuming middle class. In this narrative, she now represents a form of womanhood that balances both tradition and modernity. This woman is still the embodiment of piety and devotion to family, but she is also one who is a consumer of commodities for herself and for the family unit. Modernity for the new Indian woman is accessible through the consumption of goods. Like her counterpart in the West, she too can enjoy the fantasy of consumer-driven independence. It is in this environment of class contradictions that the work of the filmmakers must be seen. What is clear is that women are being represented in a specific way in India, and often the battles over

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these representations (as in the beauty pageant in Bangalore, which I described in the introduction) demonstrate the complexities of posing a specific kind of citizen-subject, especially within a larger global context. Leela Fernandes argues that “globalization in the Indian context has not led to a form of deterritorialization but instead has produced a form of reterritorialization which centers around the politicization of gender and sexuality in contemporary India” (“Rethinking” 149). This form of reterritorialization, in her words, is initiated “through forms of socio-spatial reorganization which occur within the nation-state rather than merely at its official territorial borders and build on and produce internal social inequalities” (150). According to Fernandes, “The ‘cartographic anxiety’ of the postcolonial nation-state produces a link between the protection of the territorial borders of the nation and the protection of women” (150). Woman, then, becomes the site on which potential conf licts are positioned, negotiated, and brought to crisis: The potential disruption [caused by globalization] is managed through a remapping of the nation’s boundaries through a politics of gender which centers around conf licts over the preservation of the purity of women’s sexuality, a process which once again conf lates the preservation of nationness with the protection of women. This form of gendered politics signifies a form of reterritorialization of the nation; the borders of the national body politic are, then, policed through the regulation of women’s bodies. (Fernandes 157) Fernandes’s description aptly describes the connection between the regulation of women’s bodies and the construction of nation; however, this regulation has to be negotiated against the relentless nature of the commodity economy, one in which the new Indian woman as consumer subject is immersed. The paradoxical role of the new Indian woman is ref lected in the cultural work of the filmmakers, and the contradictions of the commodity form “emerge along the fault lines between the exigencies of capitalist production and the cultural forms directly or indirectly engaged by those disciplines of production” (Lowe and Lloyd 23). One of the prime contradictions in depicting the new Indian women appears on the contested notions of sexuality. All three of the filmmakers respond to the traditional limitations of sexuality and regulation, as defined by Fernandes, by constructing women as free sexual agents, as desiring subjects, but in doing so, they often decontextualize the body

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as a site of economic control and depict sexuality as one other form of individual expression. Much as in the discussion of rights, sexuality becomes privatized. Instead of sexuality being recognized as an element in an intricate text involving economics, politics, and social control, it becomes a singular act of individual expression or performance. This de-historicized depiction of sexuality is of no surprise since “transnational and multicultural filmmakers such as Mehta, Nair, and Chadha hold the distinct advantage of producing films that will be most accessible to cross-cultural viewers” ( J. Desai 212). According to Jigna Desai, “it is the focusing on issues of gender and sexuality that has produced commercial successes in the past five years” (212). Desai points out that the political assertions made in these films are generally within a liberal framework. She argues that “much of the feminist work in these films seeks to supplement the victimization of women . . . with representation of women’s agency as they seek to invert these overdetermining dominant narratives. Writing against narratives of victimhood, the films target narratives of sexual agency to multiple audiences simultaneously, including one that is Eurocentric liberal feminist” (212). Constructing the new Indian woman, in this context, means defining agency, to some extent, within the terms of a global narrative of acceptable feminism. Defining the Global Text It is to this issue of the global that I now turn, as it is important to clarify subject production within the context of transnational crossings. In a 2001 article, “Globalization, Desire, and the Politics of Representation,” R. Radhakrishnan asks, “What is the attraction of globality, and why is its rhetoric so seductively irresistible?” (315). Indeed, even as Thomas Friedman of the New York Times posits globalization as the solution to poverty in the “third world” and Fredric Jameson designates it as the new, multinational stage of capitalism, it is becoming increasingly clear that globalization and its effects have become contested yet omnipresent texts in any discussion of cultural politics. While this chapter will not go over the ground covered in previous chapters, I will brief ly reiterate my desire to reject a static definition of globalization. Instead, I borrow David Harvey’s suggestion that we shift our language from “globalization” to “uneven geographical development” (Spaces of Global 57). In short, as I have already suggested, I will not view globalization as a “brand new” phenomenon but instead see it as a more dramatic form

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of reterritorialization and multiplicity within a new regime of capital accumulation. This approach eschews the reductive economic postnationalism that is so much a part of current critical practice but embraces the productive theoretical possibilities that arise out of a consideration of uneven development within the totality of capital accumulation. The nation-state and its attendant identity politics, in this formulation, are not removed from the equation; instead, they are problematized as categories within a larger framework of global politics. Thus, in the spirit of reterritorialization, while we cannot read cultural texts as if they were grounded in an original place or time, we must acknowledge that the texts of the nation and national identity remain important elements in the transnational negotiation of meaning. Clearly, cultural texts, particularly film, in the last twenty years are being produced, distributed, and received in different ways and in different contexts. As Ann Cvetkovich and Doug Kellner put it in 1997, “Culture is an especially complex and contested terrain today as global cultures permeate local ones and new configurations emerge that synthesize both poles, providing contradictory forces of neocolonization and resistance, global homogenization and new local hybrid forms and identities” (8). A transnational mode of analysis, then, must acknowledge the range of textual readings and patterns of distribution and highlight the dramatic ways in which texts are shaped by economic and political processes. An artist’s political, economic, and cultural resources, for instance, may not be limited by national boundaries, and her work may be interpreted and ideologically marked in multifarious ways. A Hindi film espousing Hindu nationalism and produced in Mumbai could be financed by money from the United Arab Emirates and distributed among South Asian communities in the United Kingdom, the United States, Singapore, and South Africa. Needless to say, viewers in Birmingham, Newark, Singapore, and Cape Town consume the film differently, and the meanings generated by the nationalist narrative are repeated, revised, or rejected in their unique contexts. Various postcolonial critics have already proposed a transnational mode of analysis as perhaps the only legitimate way of reading texts; however, these theories often elide the political economy of reading texts that should be taken into account in applying such analytical methods. The urge toward cosmopolitanism that permeates the critical traditions discussed in chapter 3 is ref lected in the work of theorists such as Arjun Appadurai, Homi Bhabha, and Paul Gilroy. These critics regard claims for a “national” identity or expressions of national longings with understandable suspicion. “Nations,” for these critics,

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are transcultural, liminal sites. A more nuanced, political critique of nation comes from Gayatri Spivak, who sees the nation as replicating capitalist, patriarchal norms. Unlike the other critics, she also positions her critique of nation within a larger capitalist global economy. In her analysis of the work of Bengali writer Mahasweta Devi, for instance, Spivak points out that “when the world is divided into North and South, the World Bank has no barrier to its division of that world into a map that is as fantastic as it is real. This constantly changing map draws economic rather than national boundaries, as f luid as the spectacular dynamics of international capital” (“Translator’s Preface” 274). Although critics such as Spivak have been scrupulous in their attention to the materiality of oppression within the specific contexts of global capitalism and have criticized the poststructuralist silence on imperialism, many postnational theories often collide with and become part of the general poststructuralist embrace of deferral, displacement, and difference. Moreover, the validation of the conceptual sacred cow, a “new transnational culture,” often ignores the profoundly unequal relations between nations and the fact that much of this culture is produced in the metropolitan centers. Amitava Kumar appropriately points to this tendency in his appraisal of the circulation of “Indian” culture: “More and more cultural production marked as ‘Indian’ emerges from the diasporic nation that is largely constituted in the metropolitan centers of the West” (194). Further, he argues that “our criteria for critical assessment will have to shift” in response to this change (194). In that spirit, then, I would like to propose that critics bring back a greater focus on the ways in which unequal relations between nations within the totality of global capital affect the production and distribution of cultural meaning. Such a radical transnational analysis acknowledges the fact that transnational linkages inf luence every level of social existence. Thus the effects and configurations of practices at those levels are varied and historically specific. The theories of cultural homogenization that accompany analyses of cultural f lows cannot acknowledge these historicized effects and transformations at various levels. (Grewal and Kaplan 13) Applying a historically specific critique, while paying attention to the uneven distribution of wealth and resources, takes us away from a decontextualized transnational analysis that merely celebrates disjuncture and difference. Film and music are particularly potent texts for this

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radical transnational analysis, since they are consumed and circulated more widely than, say, a literary text; moreover, the high financial stakes that usually accompany popular film productions ensure that this medium is deeply imbricated in the circuits of global culture and capital. In order to demonstrate the necessity and the relevance of a radical transnational mode of analysis, I will examine Mira Nair’s Kama Sutra, Deepa Mehta’s Fire, and Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham, reading their films in the context of their attempts to frame an oppositional subject, their own versions of a new Indian woman. I argue that their efforts to frame such an emergent subject are complicated by the politics of transnational production, distribution, and consumption. Transnational Indian Film Currently, the best-known directors of Indian origin in the West (aside from M. Night Shyamalan, of course, and Shekhar Kapur, who directed Hollywood’s Elizabeth and whose Bandit Queen was widely circulated) are Deepa Mehta and Mira Nair, both University of Delhi graduates. They have charted different routes in their positions among the more recognizable diasporic directors. Mira Nair made her name with Salaam Bombay (1988) and has reached her widest audiences with Mississippi Masala (1991) and, more recently, Monsoon Wedding (2001), Vanity Fair (2004), The Namesake (2006), and Amelia (2009).2 Deepa Mehta, who resides in Canada, made some initial forays into television (including directing two episodes of Young Indiana Jones), but really received serious attention after the release of her trilogy Fire (1996), Earth (1998), and Water (2005). Gurinder Chadha is among the most commercially successful directors in Britain. Her two most recognized films are Bend It Like Beckham (2002) and Bride and Prejudice (2004). It is instructive to juxtapose my analysis of Kama Sutra and Fire, because both films, released at roughly the same time, bring to the surface some fundamental issues regarding the transnational creation of a subject, as well as questions overtly connected to the intersections of state, religion, and gender. Bend It Like Beckham, on the other hand, as a celebratory populist narrative located in Britain, raises a different set of concerns about the ways in which the national subject is constructed within discontinuous ideas about the extended nation. However, as I will demonstrate in my analysis of the film, subject construction in that film brings to the surface similarly important points about the position of the new Indian woman.

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Let us return now to the time of 1996/1997. With the release of Nair’s Kama Sutra and Mehta’s Fire the destinies of both directors converged, and their films were immediately embroiled in a host of controversies in their homeland. Fire was boycotted by the Shiv Sena (the right wing of the Hindu nationalist party), ostensibly because of its depiction of a lesbian relationship, and had to be withdrawn from theaters in Mumbai. Interestingly, the Indian film censor board had approved the film without demanding any cuts. Kama Sutra, on the other hand, had been censored because of objections to the nudity and sexuality portrayed in the film. The erotic scenes between the two women in the film, for instance, were totally removed. In the US, however, the two films, screened primarily in art-house theaters in metropolitan areas, were accompanied by a sophisticated and aggressive marketing effort and were also reviewed quite favorably in film journals. Fire was first shown at the New York Film Festival and went on to receive numerous international prizes. The contrasting reception of these films within their different cultural contexts raises many questions about the transnational production, dissemination, and consumption of so-called Indian, especially gender, identity. The different receptions and the “meanings” generated by these films were clearly a result of the larger political and economic moments out of which these films emerged. For example, the arrival of these films in India at a time of growing cultural nationalism promoted by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) marked them provocatively as alien (mis)representations of Indian culture. The films’ frank depiction of sexuality, the directors’ highlighting of gender discrimination, and the “foreign” credentials of both directors provided sufficient ammunition for Hindu revivalists to decry the films and their directors. For these politically motivated zealots, Mehta and Nair became incarnations of the forces that were hostile to Hinduism and to Indian “womanhood.” In the cultural battle to maintain a sacred, strong, and traditional India, women once again were made to bear the burden of representational purity. The directors’ narratives disrupted the BJP’s utopian vision, one that presented an uncorrupted Hindu nation, a Ram Raj that rescues Indians from all forms of modernist, secular contamination. Meanwhile, however, this vision of woman has to be counterposed against another form of utopianism promoted by the ruling Indian political party (in May 1996, the BJP won the parliamentary elections for the first time, although the party did not receive an overall majority), one whose most dramatic version is presented on television in the form of products that are accompanied by lifestyles that are completely

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unavailable to millions of viewers. As Rustom Bharucha points out, “this inaccessible, yet visually immediate world of commodities, is possibly the most cruel utopia that could be inf licted on a people whose poverty has increased in almost direct proportion to the seduction of capital engineered by the media and its corporate allies” (168). Echoing the contradictions of the Vision Document 2004 described in chapter 2, state-sponsored religious fundamentalism, in its reactions to the films, revels in its obscurantist mythologies, while simultaneously allying with the forces of multinational capital to exploit Indian labor and resources. Stuart Hall describes a parallel situation in an American context: “The voice of infinite pleasurable consumption and what I call ‘exotic cuisine’ and, on the other hand, the voice of the moral majority, the more fundamental and traditional conservative ideas. They are not coming out of different places, they are coming out of the same place” (32). As I have shown in chapter 2, large-scale economic restructuring, privatization, and cuts in social spending accompanied pious calls to “authenticity” or “Hinduism,” both of which were dispensable and applicable in different guises and at different moments. It is easy within this context to position Nair and Mehta as lone crusaders for secularism and women’s rights against the forces of reaction and conservatism. Their films can act as points of resistance, and their cause can be lauded by progressives everywhere. The East-West binary that sustains so much of the critical discourse about the nonWestern world once again is repeated.3 The stage is set for the classic struggle between art and censorship, free speech and fundamentalism, women’s rights and patriarchy, tradition and individual freedom, and of course, Eastern autocracy and Western liberalism and democracy. However, these dualisms only serve to obscure some of the more troubling questions that arise as cultural texts circulate in a global economy dominated by transnational corporations whose profits and benefits are shared alike by atavistic nationalists, global and local capitalists, and the avowedly secular, liberal cosmopolitan artist. Since none of these categories are discrete or stable, and as ideas and texts cross social, political, and geographical borders, both imagined and real, these texts are immersed in multiple contradictions and made and remade in multifarious ways. In this light, it is useful to see how these filmmakers, both of whom are settled in the West, are translating Indian culture and Indian subjects—especially female subjects—for their Western consumers, and indeed how these cultural products are received in India and in the West. I would like to suggest that in the case of these two films,

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India and Indians as cultural commodities are simultaneously frozen and displaced as they encounter different audiences, thus confirming the ultimate instability of these cultural products. A reductive dismissal of these films would be to announce that Nair and Mehta are primarily marketing Indian culture in a form that is palatable to Western viewers. Clearly, both directors are savvy marketers who realize the value of exoticizing the East, but Kumar warns us against that predictable move: The split nature of [Fire’s] reception, its divided locations and locutions, foreground the issue of who gets to speak for whom. If, in other words, we do not see the film simply performing for the Western gaze, then we can allow that in Fire, Deepa Mehta is able to performatively stage the play of gendered and sexual identities. In this reading, the filmmaker’s position doesn’t seek or demand authenticity. (194) In seeking to critique the framework and the political assumptions of these films, moreover, I am not going to seek refuge in any a priori claims to authenticity. Clearly, those who call for authenticity are not only relying on their own mythical versions of India, but are sometimes doing so precisely to reproduce class and gender hierarchies. My readings of Kama Sutra and Fire, then, are not based on the assumption that there is a correct image of an India and an inner truth of the gendered subject, which when restored will result in an appropriate and accurate representation. Instead, I would like to suggest that it is more fruitful to ask the following questions: What does it mean to construct a gendered subject in a transnational economy? How is this subject positioned in different viewing communities? What are the viewing rituals through which this subject comes to us as a commodity that is already shaped? Whose interests does a particular form of representation serve? Finally, how are questions of nation, gender, and class negotiated by the filmmakers given the diasporic context of their films’ production and consumption? The answers to some of these questions reside in the blank spaces of the two films that simultaneously celebrate difference while eliding otherness. An insight from Homi Bhabha is particularly valuable here: according to Bhabha, “the anti-nationalist, ambivalent nation-space becomes the crossroads to a new transnational culture. The ‘other’ is never outside or beyond us; it emerges forcefully, within cultural discourse, when we think we speak most intimately and indigenously

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‘between ourselves’ ” (“Narrating the Nation” 4). Bhabha’s insight, however, leaves out the fact that the other emerges forcefully within a specific socioeconomic context; for instance, the repressed other in these films has to be read through the dynamics of transnational multicultural politics. Difference, in this context, is a commodity that has to be managed by the filmmakers’ representations. Kobena Mercer explains this point with characteristic force: The outward face of globalisation installed an ideology of corporate internationalism whose cumulative effect was to sublate the discourse of multiculturalism. Cultural difference was acknowledged and made highly visible as the sign of a ‘progressive’ disposition, but radical difference was gradually detached from the political or moral claims made in its name. (54) A radical transnational analysis, then, has to be understood within the context of a “global market of multicultural commodity fetishism” (57). Consequently, the point is not to seek out and highlight the inaccuracies in the films; what is after all at stake here is the complicated notion of ethnography, an ethnography informed by the construction of a cultural difference that is easily marketable. Rey Chow, in her investigation of contemporary Chinese film and its reception in the US, has this to say about the exoticization of Chinese culture in the West: If ethnography is indeed autoethnography—ethnography of the self and the subject—then the perspective of the formerly ethnographized supplements it irrevocably with the understanding that being-looked-at-ness, rather than the act of looking constitutes the primary event in cross-cultural representation. (180) Chow continues by arguing for a new ethnography: “a new ethnography is possible only when we turn our attention to the subjective origins of ethnography as it is practiced by those who were previously ethnographized and who have, in the postcolonial age, taken up the active task of ethnographizing their own cultures” (180). This reformulation of ethnography destroys the operational premise of the world divided into viewing subject and viewed object; the looker and the looked at are no more safely distinguishable entities. What happens, then, with Nair and Mehta’s fictional representation of India is a

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dismantling of classical anthropological dualities into a more complex enterprise of looking that demolishes and constructs the other even as it replicates forms of dominant viewing. Current practices of dominant viewing are aided by circulating images of India and the non-Western world. Indian culture, for instance, arrives in the West as always already formed, as concretized through its imaginary historical origins. Difference has been prefigured to constitute the categorized other. As Edward Said once said in another context, India in the West belongs irrevocably to an “imaginative geography and history which helps the mind to intensify its own sense of itself by dramatizing the difference between what is close to it and what is far away. . . . It has acquired an imaginative or figurative value that we can name or feel” (Orientalism 55). An analysis of the two films will demonstrate that Nair and Mehta participate in this process, presenting a version of India in empty homogeneous time: an undifferentiated India in the sixteenth century in Kama Sutra and a contemporary New Delhi shorn of its sociopolitical realities in Fire. I will argue, moreover, that the filmmakers’ celebration of a liberal feminist subject inevitably erases and simplifies complex issues of gender, class, and nation, especially as the subject crosses political and geographical borders. I Nair’s Kama Sutra, set in sixteenth-century India, tells the story of two girls, Maya and Tara, who grow up as servant and princess. Maya, a servant in Tara’s royal household, has never had new clothes; she has always worn Tara’s castoffs. On the night before Tara’s wedding Maya offers herself to Tara’s betrothed as a way to avenge her second-class status and to hand Tara a used item in the form of her husband. Tara’s brother, Prince Bikram, happens to witness the seduction. When Maya refuses his offer of marriage, Bikram spitefully informs his mother of Maya’s actions. Enraged, the queen drives Maya away, but Maya finds refuge in the home of Rasa, a courtesan who trains women in the art of love. Maya becomes a muse for Jai Kumar, the royal sculptor, who falls for her but then rejects her; abandoned once more, Maya becomes the courtesan for the king Raj Singh, Tara’s husband. As the kingdom falls into disrepair because of the debauched king’s excesses, Jai Kumar once again returns to his lover. The king discovers the lovers and has Jai Kumar executed. In the concluding scenes, the Persian armies ride into the kingdom while Maya walks away, alone once more.

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Kama Sutra, despite relatively lukewarm praise from Western critics, brought out the Orientalist ethos that usually accompanies the release of such films in the West. Lawrence Terenzi of Film Nation evokes this ethos quite eloquently: “Nair parts the veils and leads us into the forbidden realm of the harem, where these women live silhouetted in fine silks and lush colors—reds, burgundies, purples—and sensuality and languor are so overwhelming they can erase time and leave the undisciplined mired in stupefied inaction” (1). Roger Ebert calls it a “lush, voluptuous tale” and applauds Declan Quinn’s cinematography, which places the women in “painterly compositions that have a sensuous quality of their own” (2). In the New York Times, Janet Maslin describes Nair’s film in the type of richly evocative language normally reserved for exotic objects of fine art: “in a visually lovely film that summons an alluring impression of her native India, Ms. Nair concentrates so deeply on sensual detail that the audience can almost smell the incense wafting from the screen. Shining silks, brilliant colors, Sufi music, intricately adorned bodies and languid movements all conspire to create a seductive mood. The film’s atmosphere becomes so palpably inviting, in fact, that its story seems only an afterthought.” Tom Keogh points out that “Mehta’s larger goal—demystifying India—is powerfully, unsettlingly realized” (“Fire Movie Reviews”). He goes on to extol the “majestic” and “mythic” qualities of the film and calls up the usual affective descriptions of the subcontinent: the film, according to Keogh, succeeds in evoking “primeval earthiness.” He praises it for being “fantastic,” “ecstatic,” and, of course, a “celebration of exoticism and metaphysics.” Kathleen Murphy, in Film Comment, swoons that “few films . . . project as much pleasure in the sublimely formed landscapes of a woman’s body, or generate sexual frisson by savoring a prehensile foot—embroidered with elaborate patterns—as adept in bedplay as any hand” (1996). I focus on these Western reviews because the primary audience for this film is clearly meant to be a Western, metropolitan one. The many references to the mystique and the mystery of the Indian landscape and its people, words evoking the exoticism and visual pleasures of a faraway land are not dissimilar to the age-old incantations of the East and the Indian subcontinent. These magical moments are particularly captured for the critics by the cinematography and the visual aesthetics of the film. Nair has discussed the elaborate arrangements that were made to capture the visual details of the film. Hundreds of laborers were used to clean soot-ridden palaces and to transport props such as date palm trees. Indeed, nothing is missing for the Western

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viewer.4 All the stereotypes that already exist in the viewer’s mind are repeated on the screen: exotic jewels, decorated elephants, ornate costumes, erotic sculptures, brocade cushions, bejeweled palaces—all presented in colors that would make David Lean f lush with pleasure. The film’s visual excesses are not merely symptomatic of a cinematography that finds innocent pleasure in colors and landscapes, however; they clearly point to one with an ideology of its own. India is presented in terms that are both palatable and recognizable. Nair concentrates on the erotic carvings of the temples in painstaking detail (never mind that the Khajurao carvings are far away from the Rajasthan forts in which the rest of the film is set); the camera lingers on lush sunsets, the ubiquitous elephant decorated to the hilt, crowds in intricate and colorful costumes, and, of course, the exquisite finery in which the major characters are constantly dressed. There is a particular moment that captures the visual ideology of the film. In a scene set at the school for courtesans, colorfully adorned, scantily clad women dancers enact the many poses from the original Kama Sutra while Rasa, the teacher, recites banal proverbs from the text. These dancers are then frozen and images from the temple carvings are superimposed over their forms; the dancers become what they ultimately are: passive representations of sexual possibilities in the Western imagination. They are dehumanized stone figures whose lives are only relevant as objects of the Western gaze. This visual moment communicates the “essence” of what the Western viewer expects: the past coming alive in the form of women as objects of erotic stimulation. In fact, the title of the film is deliberately chosen, in my estimation, to satisfy the voyeuristic Western viewer for whom the text of the Kama Sutra already signifies sexual plenitude and exotic excess. Although the film presents these women as free spirits pursuing the art of pleasure, as subjects they are parodic types meant for Western consumption. The India that Nair offers us is not very different from the India in brochures that one may find in any travel office in Manhattan. It is an India that is undifferentiated, fantastic and exotic. Truly, the Western gaze has been made absolute and as Nietzsche once said, the world has been fabled. For Nair, visual excess translates into a commodity that is known only too well to the Western eye. Yes, they can say, India is a wondrous, mysterious land where passions rule and where democratic government is an impossibility because the quest for pleasure is at the heart of Indian culture. Never mind that the India of the sixteenth century was a dramatically different India, never mind that the sixteenth century was probably one of the most turbulent periods of Indian

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history, which saw major shifts in power and changes in social structure. For Nair, in fact, the sixteenth century only serves an aesthetic purpose: “I set it arbitrarily in the sixteenth century, only because I love the architecture. . . . I don’t have any evidence to say that the third century Kama Sutra was actually taught to kids in the sixteenth century” (Terenzi 3). So, what ends does this uncritical romanticization and exoticization of the past serve? Is Nair merely doing what Western designers have done in the last few decades: appropriating and marketing an exotic commodity for contemporary consumption? Kumar makes a persuasive case for the contemporariness of the film, in spite of, or perhaps because of, its being set in the sixteenth century: Nair’s effort is current, in spite of its being situated in the sixteenth century, because unlike her last film set in India, Salaam Bombay, her latest effort makes that part of the globe attractive once again to Americans. . . . Just as America’s super-technological revolution has benefited enormously from the cheaply produced intellectual capital imported from places like India, is Nair, I wonder, one of those who might be described as a part of the imported ThirdWorld cultural capital, whose goal is to make the rest of the world alluring for American finance? And vice versa? (183–84) The past, then, becomes a landscape that can be called up for different ideological reasons, and for the metropolitan audience, in the end, the past is almost irrelevant as a text. What matters is that the past is accessible as a text and that it simultaneously confirms and denies contemporary representations of the East. India as a modern nation is erased by the continuous, colonialist text of history: despotic, selfindulgent rulers; chaotic, primitive, and unstable forms of government; cowering subjects; reason and efficiency supplanted by desire and excess. Note the frequency with which third world nations are described in the above terms in contemporary Western discourse. The India in Kama Sutra is not the India of philosophers, astronomers, and mathematicians, nor is it the world’s largest democracy; instead, more conveniently, Nair gives us a phantasmic text that elides the West’s role in the exploitation of India’s labor and resources. Individual destinies dominate the politico-historical text, and subjectivity and desire become the governing passions of the film. The other, less overt espousal of subjectivity, of course, is the class and gender politics of both films (Kama Sutra and Fire); I would suggest

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that class becomes the transparent subtext of these films in the director’s attempt to highlight gender politics. In Kama Sutra there is a completely implausible situation in which the daughter of a king and a servant girl are constantly together and have lessons from the same teachers in dance. The premise for this situation comes from an Urdu short story, “Hand-Me-Downs” by Wajida Tabassum. In the original story, class relations are clearly demonstrated in the way the servant child, Chamki, is distinguished from the daughter of the master. Indeed, Chamki’s mother was a wet nurse for the master’s daughter, and it is precisely her indebtedness to the household that is emphasized by Tabassum. The class politics are highlighted, for instance, when Chamki remonstrates her mother not so much for accepting the handme-downs, but for expressing such joy at receiving them: “Ammavi, it is one thing to take such gifts because we have little choice, but please don’t feel so happy when you take them” (Tabassum 39). Maya, the servant girl in Kama Sutra, on the other hand, is offered marriage by the prince and can haughtily refuse him and seek her fortunes elsewhere. In this supposedly sixteenth-century landscape, she never has to suffer the deprivations of poverty; indeed, no one seems to suffer from any lack; citizens of every class are dressed in gloriously colorful attire, and the poor are notable by their absence. One wonders what happens to those who, unlike Maya, are not able to trade their bodies for economic security. Indeed, we never encounter families or communities whose lives are disrupted by the vagaries of a rapacious king—an oddity, one must say, in a film that draws its inspiration from a story that is explicitly about class and has as its protagonists a queen and a maid. The gender politics of the film, on the other hand, are highlighted by Nair in her comments on the film. According to Nair, “Maya, the courtesan, is empowered by two things: one, she has merely serviced the king, who has no power over her; two, she has achieved a state of transcendence with Jai, her true love. . . . Then there is Tara (the queen), who also eventually transcends the neglect that has driven her to despair by learning the skills taught in the Kama Sutra. . . . When he tumbles down, she can become the State herself, and take the mantle of power” (Terenzi 3). It is a bit hard to believe in Maya’s empowerment as she walks away, alone, at the end of the film. Alpana Sharma argues that a “new subject” emerges at the end of the film, one whose “character is not merely destroyed but remade” (96). Sharma cites Maya’s words at the end of the film as a signal for this renewal: “Knowing love, I will allow all things to come and go, to be as supple as the wind, and take everything that comes with great courage. As Rasa would say, life is

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right in any case. My heart is as open as the sky” (Sharma 96). This comment merely affirms the transcendent self, one that can somehow evade and erase the social and the economic text. As the conquering Persian armies march in, the notion that somehow “life is right in any case” is laughable. It is equally difficult to grasp the possibility of transcendence for a woman whose security (unlike Nair’s claims) specifically depends on the whims of her monarch. The message, though, is clear. Nair’s new woman is one for whom self-expression, above all, is the mark of a redemptive, triumphant agent. Tara, likewise, is left bereft at the end of the film. The chances of her attaining the throne as the Shah marches in are about as good as Maya’s becoming the kingdom’s prime minister. Both women, after all, are reduced to the sum total of their sexual skills, while the men, in true Hollywood fashion, wrestle for Maya’s affections. Nair believes that she has produced a radical portrait of women because they are able to affirm their sexual self; she claims, in an interview, that the film is “about women who are not afraid to express themselves sexually” (Braun). However, the only self they affirm is within the terms of masculine desire. The women in this film are presented as objects of desire; not coincidentally, they appear completely nude while the men are not required to show frontal nudity. The possibility of emancipation for the women in this film consists of their capacity to manipulate desire and to “master” sexual skills. Nair’s ideological faith in individuals “transcending” their social and economic conditions ref lects her own position as a cosmopolitan, international filmmaker.5 So far I have tried to place this film within a transnational context, but what of its immediate relevance in India, particularly in relation to the film’s representation of women? The censors’ cuts indicate that any depiction of women’s sexuality (outside of the objectified body of women that is a staple in popular Indian films) continues to be a forbidden subject. Nair’s ire at the censors was understandable, although her generous interpretation of the female subjects’ roles in the film is worth mentioning: “It is absolute hypocrisy to say that India is not ready for this. It’s just a visceral reaction to f lesh. Sex that is repressed becomes taboo, pernicious, and twisted. . . . These women [in the film] empower themselves. It is a narrative tale of sexual politics, back before the Mughals came. I try to marry Eros with the divine” (qtd. in McGirk). She goes on to add that “Men generally feel threatened by this movie. . . . The women are so knowing” (qtd. in McGirk). Nair positions herself and her subjects as transgressors against Indian male orthodoxy and hypocrisy. Ignoring the reductive and ahistorical

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characteristics of her female subjects, she celebrates the neoliberal myths of empowerment and self-fulfillment (“knowing” women). Nair’s Indian woman, although she lives in pre-Mughal times, is meant to be a stand-in for the new Indian woman. This empowered woman is one who defines herself in opposition to the traditional male values espoused by the contemporary Indian state. Like her medieval counterpart, the modern Indian woman should seek comfort from these women who are able to explore their sexuality and seek their true selves outside the male domain. Yet there is nothing in the film to address the hard questions of violence, injustice, and poverty that many women have to face. Like the voices in the Week, Nair’s subjects are outside history. The general response in India to the film confirmed the film’s irrelevance. Audiences’ reactions were lukewarm. The film initially drew large crowds, but as the Indian Express describes the first screening, “for approximately three hours” there were “cat calls, boos and jeers at the first day first show of Mira Nair’s labour of love” (Unnithan). In the end, Nair’s construction of the “knowing woman” is doomed to exist as a voiceless agent within the larger discourse of transnational commodity exchange. It arrives marked as overdetermined product, circulates as sexualized commodity, and solidifies the already rigid categories of gender, religion, and nation. Meanwhile, the figure of Indian woman as complex agent located within a specific historical context, as in the pages of the Week, is erased from the existing political and discursive framework. II Deepa Mehta’s Fire, like Nair’s Kama Sutra, came accompanied with its transnational baggage and with the director’s comments about the film’s attempt to subvert the traditional role of women in Indian society. Although it provoked a much stronger response from fundamentalist groups in India than did Kama Sutra, the film was released without any cuts by the censor board, other than a recommendation that one of the protagonist’s names, Sita, be changed to Nita. The film also arrived at a time when the BJP and its acolytes, the Shiv Sena, were on the ascendency. The presence of Shabana Azmi, one of India’s foremost actors—an activist, a Muslim, and a member of the upper house of parliament, the Rajya Sabha—among the cast further inf lamed the Hindu activists. Unlike Kama Sutra, however, Fire played to packed theaters in its first three weeks (before the protests began),

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and actual audience and critics’ reactions were mostly favorable. It was mainly the right-wing-orchestrated protests that drew press attention. Their claims—that the lesbian relationship depicted in the film was against Hindu, Indian values and that such relationships endangered the institution of marriage—were met with counterprotests and with a general sense of disparagement. Many of the counterdemonstrations were phrased in the language of liberal democracy and in favor of the right to free expression. However, several theaters pulled the film because of threats of violence. Ultimately Mehta and some other Indian filmmakers and actors, such as Mahesh Bhatt and Dilip Kumar, had to file a petition to the Indian Supreme Court to protect the film from disruptions. Its reception in the West was quite different. According to reports from the New York Film Festival where Fire was first screened in 1996, the film received a standing ovation. One wonders whom the audience consisted of and what exactly they were applauding. The film garnered praise from a number of critics, even though Lawrence Van Gelder of the New York Times found its “feminist messages . . . dated by American standards” (C16), thus implying that American women had transcended “third world” concerns and that there were no connections between their relative levels of oppression. Gloria Steinem declared it a “landmark film” (qtd. in Desai, “Homo on the Range”) Mehta’s own appraisal of the politics of Fire is spelled out in her interview with Bapsi Sidwa in the pages of Ms. According to Mehta, “Fire came out of that tug-of-war between traditional values and women’s desire for independence” (Sidhwa 77). Mehta claims that “Fire is all about . . . tolerance. . . . When I made Fire, I didn’t have an Indian audience in mind; I didn’t have a Western audience in mind” (Sidhwa 78). Are we really to believe that Mehta plans and distributes her film in a cultural void? Why then is it important to claim that Gloria Steinem approved of the film or to hypothesize about the apparently simple reasons for its ban in India: “I got this wonderful line about why it was banned: ‘Fire is immoral. It will give our women ideas.’ Of course we have ideas. We aren’t puppets” (Sidhwa 78). Mehta’s comments ignore the long tradition of women’s resistance movements in India. The advocates of these movements have insisted—unlike Mehta—on the complex chain of political and economic factors that underwrite women’s subordination. The banal feminism that accompanies the ideology of this film, on the other hand, suggests that all women have to do in order to attain liberation is to follow their desire and resist traditional practices.

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Let us now look at some of the key representational moments in Fire. Within the first five minutes of Fire the audience is offered a view of India’s most recognizable image in the West: the Taj Mahal. The story line is quickly established: Sita has married Jatin in an obviously prearranged marriage; Jatin already shows signs of being uninterested in his newly acquired bride and demonstrates little enthusiasm for this perennially romantic global spot. They return after their honeymoon to their house in New Delhi, which they share with Jatin’s elder brother, Ashok, and his wife, Radha. Living with the family is the brothers’ mother, Biji, who has been left unable to speak by a stroke, and Mundu, the servant who seems to be an integral member of the family. Both brothers are only partially interested in their wives; Ashok has chosen celibacy and Gandhian self-denial, spending his time praying at the feet of a guru who imparts wisdom to his f lock; Jatin operates a video rental business (which rents pornographic videos on the side) and is having an affair with a Chinese woman, Julie.6 The devoted wife, Radha, tends to her mother-in-law, comforts her sister-in-law, and cooks food at the family takeaway. Gradually, an emotional and physical bond develops between the two sisters-inlaw due to the absence and callousness of their husbands. Meanwhile, Radha surprises Mundu one day while he is masturbating in front of the television in the presence of the mute mother. He is disciplined and gets his revenge by informing the older brother about the sister-inlaws’ relationship. Ashok bursts in on them as they are together in bed and, in a rage, threatens to throw them out of the house. Sita leaves, with a promise from Radha to join her. In an encounter between the husband and wife, Radha’s sari catches on fire and Ashok refuses to come to her aid. She eventually extinguishes the f lames and meets Sita at their rendezvous, a Muslim shrine. Fire is an ideal text for a transnational analysis. It is a film that simultaneously challenges traditional norms but also reaffirms age-old notions about Indian society, marketing a version of India that is both familiar and comforting for the Western viewer. Kumar puts it well: The difference that Fire reproduces is the India familiar to the Western media-watching eye—the monumentalized, mythical past persisting as the image of the Taj and, as its underside the updated sati symbol, a woman on fire. The Western viewer consumes this difference without in any way feeling responsible for it. This is voyeurism. . . . Fire does not warn us to examine the limits and pitfalls of easy sympathy. (194)

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Let us first examine the class politics of Fire, which offers a portrait of a bourgeois household in urban India. The family business allows the families to live comfortably, to employ a full-time servant, to own gadgets; moreover, the family can afford to limit the women to the domestic sphere, an increasingly uncommon phenomenon in contemporary metropolitan India. Indeed, they have enough money for the older brother, Ashok, to donate to his guru. Financial issues are seldom discussed in the household, and the older brother regularly doles out sums of money to his wife and brother. Paradoxically, however, the household relies only on one servant and he is expected to work at the family takeout and look after the elderly mother. Mundu the servant, the sole representative of the lower classes in the film, wields enormous power and is set up as a manipulative and craven figure. In an effort to show solidarity along gender lines in the relationship between the sisters-in-law, Mehta trivializes the class relations that exist in the household. Mundu is presented as being entirely without scruples; not only does he masturbate in the presence of the matriarch, he also spies on the sisters-in-law. The lack of sexual fulfillment and the projection of sexual desire (the principal characters are united by their denial or celebration of sexual desire) become the symptomatic variants in the household. The vagaries of predatory capitalism and the economic concerns of everyday life, on the other hand, play a minor role in disrupting the lives of the family members. The Indian family once again occupies an ahistorical space where ungoverned passions are the only causes for the disruption of the domestic space. Women’s subordination results from a failure of relationship rather than as a part of a complex chain of sociopolitical relations where woman as commodity is exchanged and possessed. Desire, as in Kama Sutra, becomes something that can be satisfied purely at an individual level, and fulfilling that desire is a step toward attaining liberation. The accumulation and expression of desire constitutes the attainment of freedom. In the context of the new consumerism that is sweeping across India with middle-class families vying for possession of products, Mehta’s views about desire have unsettling implications: “Fire is a film about desire. You have to ask yourself, ‘What do I want?’ We’ve all been taught to go for what we need. I say it’s more important to go for what we want” (Sidhwa 79). This is a philosophy that mirrors the one I describe in chapter 2 and that advertisers use in constructing the consumer subject. Indeed, the binaries that Mehta sets up ref lect her interest in individual aspirations rather than in any consciousness of women’s role

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within the context of political and social restrictions. Radha and Sita’s relationship is founded on the failure of heterosexual love. One brother is spiritually wedded to his swami and espouses celibacy, while the other one spends almost all his time with his mistress and celebrates promiscuity. Are we supposed to infer that if only the husbands had paid their wives more attention, all the problems constituting women’s roles in Indian households would disappear? The women, moreover, seem to view their liberation in exclusively male/Western terms. The symbols of liberation, for instance, are always Western. Sita’s rebellion against social conventions is represented by her donning a pair of jeans, turning on some generic Indi-pop “dance” music, and pretending to smoke a cigarette. Mehta describes Sita as “modern India, desiring independence over tradition” (Sidhwa 77). Modern India is apparently mere mimicry of the West. Gayatri Gopinath, however, rejects this theory and argues that Sita’s change in dress is an act of cross-dressing that allows her to temporarily claim male freedom and privilege; but that, I argue, is precisely the problem with this recuperative act. All these items of liberation belong to her husband; women’s rebellion is already defined within the terms of masculine desires and the commodity economy. As the relationship between the two women matures, the struggles are mostly cast along the following lines: desire versus denial, the individual versus the family structure, tradition versus modernity, choice versus duty. Apparently all of these dualities are transcended when the two women decide to walk away from their husbands. Interestingly, their rejection of Hindu norms is not followed by an escape into a space outside the strictures of religion. The place of refuge is a Muslim shrine. Perhaps the possibility of liberation would have been greater if Mehta had not presented the women as completely asocial beings. In the social framework that is presented in the film, for instance, the family household never has any visitors; neighbors or relatives never drop in; indeed, the newly married couple is not greeted by any of their friends or neighbors when they return from their honeymoon. This absence of an extended community is absolutely contrary to the social context within which Indian middle-class households function. The household is completely isolated from the outside world and there seem to be no resources available to the women, especially from another community of women (a common element in Indian social systems). The only other women in the film are mere stereotypical vessels for Mehta. Biji, the grandmother, is literally mute and can only shake her bell in frustration, while Julie the Chinese hairdresser is presented as a

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conniving, opportunistic, sexualized woman whose only interest is to travel to Hong Kong and acquire an American boyfriend. This attention to a narrow individual consciousness and a visual aesthetic that promotes a safe, Western voyeurism is evident from the formal elements in the film. Aesthetically or formally, this ideology is emphasized by moments such as in the second shot of the film, for instance, which focuses on a doorway where a man and woman stand. As the woman walks away, the camera follows her, panning right until suddenly through an open arch, the audience sees it: the Taj Mahal. One can almost hear the contented sigh of the Western viewer as the most common symbol of India appears on the screen in all its resplendent glory. Curiously enough, the grounds of the monument are singularly devoid of people—as, later, are the streets of New Delhi. It appears that this psychosexual social drama takes place only within the confines of the home; the social landscape and a larger community are completely erased. What we have of Indian urban life, instead, are the usual “decorative” shots: Long shots of women’s colorful saris f luttering in the breeze and sustained takes of street processions. Delhi is mostly seen from the roof of the family’s house. Indeed, the position of the camera suggests that the city exists in order to be seen. The film remains faithful to a straightforward chronology and in its selection of shots constantly focuses on the individual. The camera follows the characters in their lives, and the women, often seen through the eye of Mundu, the servant, become disembodied sexual subjects of melodrama. In the case of Nair and Mehta, of course, the representation and marketing of Indian identity raise particularly critical issues because it forces viewers to consider issues of gender and sexuality, which has provoked a particularly contentious debate between so-called third world feminists and their Anglo-American counterparts. This is not the place to trace that debate, but Chandra Mohanty has made some useful comments on how the homogenized third world woman is seen by the West: [The] average third-world woman leads an essentially truncated life based on her feminine gender (read: sexually constrained) and being ‘third world’ (read: ignorant, poor, uneducated, traditionbound, religious, family-oriented, victimized, etc.). This, I suggest, is in contrast to the (implicit) self-representation of western women as educated, modern, as having control over their own bodies and sexualities, and the ‘freedom’ to make their own decisions. (199–200)

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Mohanty argues that in their haste to recover the oppressed subject, these critics “[assume] an ahistorical, universal unity among women based on a generalized notion of their subordination . . . Men exploit, women are exploited. Such simplistic formulations are both historically reductive; they are also ineffectual in designing strategies to combat oppressions” (207). Mehta and Nair, diasporic feminists, reinscribe these formulations in their depictions of the lives of Indian women. Moreover, they bury the “well-known fact that the worst victims of the recent exacerbation of the international division of labor are women. They are the true surplus army of labor in the current conjecture. In their case, patriarchal social relations contribute to their production as the new focus of super-exploitation” (Spivak, “Scattered Speculations” 124). There is no real attempt by either of these directors to frame women’s experiences within the context of the division of labor. Moreover, the easy assertion of feminist sovereignty in the two films ignores the specificity of women’s lives within the context of multiple social, cultural, and religious factors. Mohanty’s and Spivak’s critiques are important because they point to the works of feminists whose intentions—like Nair’s and Mehta’s—are to recover the figure of woman, to grant her agency, and to point to the structural forms of patriarchy that imprison her; but it is precisely this act of rescue when translated across the international continuum of pan-feminism that erases the subject-position of a Maya or a Sita. Spivak, in her examination of the discourse on sati, argues that: [i]mperialism’s image as the establisher of the good society is marked by the espousal of the woman as object of protection from her own kind . . . Between patriarchy and imperialism, subject-constitution and object-formation, the figure of the woman disappears, not into pristine nothingness, but into a violent shuttling which is the displaced figuration of the ‘third-world woman’ caught between tradition and modernization. (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 299–306) As Nair and Mehta recover the oppressed third world woman and transgress patriarchal boundaries, as in the recuperative discourses on the victims of sati, the figure of woman in their texts disappears. The nonWestern female subject is once again fetishized as victim, ultimately recoverable only within the terms of the Western individual subject. In the end, what we are discussing here is not merely a form of transference or translation, but the East and representative Indian woman as

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a marketable, mass commodity. As third world cultures continue the Fanonian struggle for a national culture that will emerge out of the everyday struggles of its peoples, in the West these cultures continue to be used as ways to market the East as exotic, chaotic, despotic, and ultimately incapable of democratic forms of government. This form of marketing usually has a couple of consequences. One is, as Spivak puts it, a “benevolent first-world appropriation and reinscription of the Third World as an Other.” She identifies this trend as “the founding characteristic of much third-worldism in the U.S. human sciences today” (“Can the Subaltern Speak?” 289). The other, less benevolent effect is what Said described as Orientalism’s acquisition of the Orient: “it domesticated this knowledge (of the Orient) to the West, filtering it through regulatory codes, classifications, specimen cases, periodical reviews, dictionaries, grammars . . . translations, all of which together formed a simulacrum of the Orient and reproduced it materially in the West, for the West” (Orientalism 166). Indeed, as multiculturalism and trading of texts become even more frequent and pronounced, the urgency of a radical transnational analysis is highlighted. Mehta and Nair represent that class of artists who are aligned with the forces of feminism and equality, but their advocacy of the politics of “rights” and self-expression also implicates them in the colonial violence from which neoliberalism emerges. Moreover, they are enmeshed in the alliance between the forces of global capital that are lauded by the BJP and the financiers who sponsor films that exoticize the non-West.7 As they attempt to pose a liberated female subject, they have to be conscious of the fact that this subject is simultaneously victim, hero, transgressor, and compliant agent. These figures disrupt national narratives even as they reassert hegemonic norms. III It may seem inappropriate to link Gurinder Chadha’s Bend It Like Beckham (BLB) with the preceding two films. After all, Chadha’s film, with its celebration of populist multiculturalism enmeshed within the tradition of the Bollywood marriage film and the Western romantic comedy, had a predictably favorable reception. The film, as its director described it, was “made for the multiplexes” and reached box office heights in India and Britain (the film went on to gross over $75 million worldwide). There was little controversy about the subject material in the film. Chitra Mahesh’s comments in the Hindu, a reputable national newspaper, were indicative of the “innocence” of the film:

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“If ever there is a film that is positive, realistic and yet delightful, then it has to be Dream Production’s latest venture directed by Gurinder Chadha (“Bhaji On The Beach,” “What’s Cooking”). Light hearted, without taking away the considerable substance in terms of values, attitudes and the love for sport, the film just goes to prove that there are ways to be convincing and honest. It is really about the bending of rules, social paradigms and lives—all to finally curl that ball, bending it like Beckham, through the goalpost of ambition.” Yet, as I will argue, bending the ball through “the goalpost of ambition” invests the film in constructing a female subject that is implicated in the neoliberal narrative of rights and self-expression just as much as in the more overt efforts of Nair and Mehta. In Britain itself, the film arrived at a propitious moment. Coming on the heels of Tony Blair’s second electoral victory and the inauguration of the “Cool Britannia” slogan, Gurinder Chadha’s paean to multicultural Britain BLB needs to be read within the intricate and ever-shifting dynamics of class, nation, and gender. When the film was released in 2002, Britain’s much promoted multicultural identity was particularly frayed after a series of racially charged events over the last five years. The murder of David Lawrence in 1998, the racial conf licts in the North (Bradford, Burnley, and Oldham) in 2001, the increasing profiling of minorities since 9/11, and the undiluted support of Blair for Bush’s proposed war on Iraq had severely dented Blair’s celebration of neoliberal multiculturalism. The arrival of BLB acted as much-needed celebratory ballast to a prime minister whose policies had done little to stall the social damage begun by Thatcher.8 Certainly, when Blair was first elected in 1997, a liberal postfeminism was very much a part of the Blair “change.” As Justine Ashby points out, “The fit between postfeminism and New Labour was certainly a potentially snug one; both were couched in the language of modernization and renewed self-confidence and have often been understood as a repudiation of a stuffier, more politicized past” (128). This version of postfeminism was already in the air with the arrival of the Spice Girls and their language of “girl power.” Sarah Projansky describes this form of feminism as “(hetero) sex-positive postfeminism . . . a feminism focused on individuality and independence” (67). Indeed, I will argue that the film, with its attention to a globalized multiculturalism and its validation of a privatized and individualized future, posits consumption and self-expression as the only route to a liberating gendered existence. By eliding the politics of sexuality, by asserting heteronormative “ideals,” and by erasing the complexities of race, poverty, and class at the altar of “gender” choice,

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even as it promotes equality and liberation, the film collapses under the weight of its own contradictions. Jess ( Jesminder) Bhamra is an eighteen-year-old Sikh girl growing up in Hounslow (West London). Her family’s class position is in some ways typical of many of the Indian families living in West London. The father works long hours, assumedly in a low-paying job, in Heathrow airport, as does the older daughter. However, the family seems to suffer no financial want (they drive a Mercedes-Benz, the parents are planning an extravagant wedding celebration for their elder daughter, and they seem to have no shortage of cash for multiple purchases), and they rarely discuss money matters, though they accede to Jess’s demands when she announces that she wants to work at a department store. Class is entirely marginalized in the film. There seems to be little want within the Asian community. In keeping with the neoliberal Blairite doctrine, the film celebrates the individual success story. Jess can achieve success either by following her dreams and leaving for the US or through a marriage alliance. Her elder sister, Pinky, “chooses” the second option. She is about to be engaged, and it is evident that Pinky’s in-laws are far more prosperous and thus Pinky is a potential candidate for class mobility through marriage. Unlike her sister, who is depicted as one interested in all the stereotypically girlish pursuits of shopping, gossiping, and obsessing with boys, Jess is a tomboy. She also has a secret. Jess worships England captain David Beckham and plays football (soccer) with her friends in the park. She is extremely skilled at the game. Despite never being coached or being part of a team, she is just naturally better than all the boys. One day, as she plays with her friends, she is seen by a white English girl, Juliette ( Jules) Paxton, who is so impressed by Jess’s skills that she asks her to try out for her team, the Hounslow Harriers. The coach of the Harriers is Joe, an embittered player who cannot play the sport anymore because of a knee injury. He is immediately impressed by Jess and asks her to join the team. As she begins to play for the Harriers, her mother spies her one day playing with the boys in the park and forbids her from playing anymore. Her mother wants her to learn to be a traditional Indian housewife, while her father, bitter about his exclusion from all-white cricket clubs in his youth, feels that sport offers no hope for Indians. Jess then creates an elaborate ruse with the help of her friend Jules, and pretending to work at the HMV store, she sneaks away to play for the Harriers. Her friendship with Jules grows stronger, and one day Pinky’s prospective in-laws see Jess laughing with Jules.

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Mistaking the androgynous Jules for a boy, the parents break off the engagement. Meanwhile, even as the tie between the girls evolves, Jess and Joe become increasingly attached to each other. During a clandestine trip to Hamburg with the Harriers, Jules realizes that the two are attracted to each other and breaks off her friendship with Jess. Meanwhile, Jess’s parents discover her ruse to travel to Hamburg, and they forbid her from playing with the team. As the final game approaches, Pinky’s engagement with her fiancé is reestablished. The Harriers title game happens to fall on the night of the wedding. Despite Joe’s pleas to Jess’s father, Jess is forbidden to play in the title game. On the day of the wedding, however, Jess’s father finally relents. Jess rushes to the field and scores the winning goal. An American scout watching the girls offers them football scholarships to Santa Clara. Jess presents her case to her parents. Her father is eventually persuaded, and Jess and Jules head off to the US, with Joe and Jess promising to wait for each other. Chadha’s film effectively normalizes a British identity within a framework that completely excludes the white English male subject. The main characters are an Indian girl, an English girl, and an Irish man. This is the British nation viewed by its marginal subjects. Those most English and male of sports—cricket and football—are also recast in a more inclusive light. In Blair’s Britain, modernity is multicultural. However, it is a modernity that does not require White Britain to make any adjustments; it is the tradition-bound Indians who must move toward the center, which is apparently neutral and universal. In a pivotal scene at the end of the film, Jess’s father makes the decision that his daughter will pursue her dreams. Letting go his resentment about the discrimination he faced in the past, he says, “I don’t want her to make the mistakes her father made; I want her to fight. I want her to win.” It is not entirely clear what mistakes he made or whether he has stopped facing discrimination as a British Asian, but Jess can transcend all of these matters. Indeed, the concluding scene of the film, after the two girls have left for the US, shows Joe and Jess’s father playing cricket on the suburban green. The historically marginalized are now made British by their incorporation into this most English of games. In Blair’s Britain, the past, with its systematic discrimination, racism, and poverty, has been forgotten and forgiven, and the present, with its continuing injustices, is ignored. This point is particularly significant since at about the same time as the film’s release in “the local elections in England on 2 May 2002, sixty-seven BNP candidates polled 30,998

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votes in 26 local authority districts. The average BNP share of the vote was 16%” (Great Britain 3). The f labby multiculturalism of the film is further weighed down by its stereotypical gender representations. For a film that attempts to advocate liberation for young girls, it is interesting to explore the representations of the mothers in the film. Both mothers are resistant to the girls’ sporting interests and are insistent in their attempt to limit them to traditional feminine categories. Julie’s mother wants her to buy push-up bras and date boys, while Jess’s mother wants her to learn cooking and other domestic skills. It is left to their fathers to encourage them in their sporting pursuits. Women are the main sources of perpetuated gender oppression, and there is never any explanation offered for their actions. Heteronormativity is continually reinforced in the film, and any suggestion that Jess and Jules may be lesbians is denied by their attraction to Joe. This insistence on their heterosexuality is particularly emphatic as some of the most joyous moments of the film are the times that Jess and Jules share. In fact, on one occasion both girls enact the rituals of a forbidden date, taking the underground into the city, shopping (an activity that Jess previously dreaded), and stopping at a pub for a drink. In the background, we hear the song “Independence Day” by Melanie Chisholm (Sporty Spice). When Jess is introduced to Mel, the team captain, in the locker room, Mel indicates that she is happy at Jess’s addition to the team because “Jules needs some decent service.” Despite this somewhat arch comment, however, the locker room is an avowedly heterosexual space. In the girls’ locker room, all references to sexual escapades are limited to relationships with boys. There is never a hint that any of the girls is engaged in anything other than heterosexual relationships. As per the rules of liberal multiculturalism, homosexuality is tolerated, as long as it remains in the margins. Overt homophobia, represented by Jules’s mother, Paula, is an occasion for humor and ridicule, but the humor comes precisely from the fact the viewer is fully aware that Paula’s fears are misguided. The viewer can laugh at Paula’s homophobia and at Jess’s relatives, who all seem unaware that same-sex relations exist, and yet be reassured by the heterosexual unions (including the joyful celebrations at Pinky’s wedding) that are at the center of the film. Women, it appears, can push against patriarchal boundaries and restrictions and yet fulfill the roles that have been written for them. The only openly gay character in the film, Jess’s friend Tony (played by Ameet Chana) is domesticated within the rituals of heterosexual union. Gayatri Gopinath suggests that the film “renders its brand of

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liberal feminism palatable through a strategic containment of queer female sexuality” (Impossible Desires 128). Indeed, she adds, “the film predicates its feminist assertion of girl power on the containment of the specter of lesbianism that women’s sports invariably conjure up . . . ultimately reassur[ing] viewers that football loving girls are indeed properly heterosexual by . . . using the gay male figure as the ‘real’ queer character in the film” (129). According to Gopinath, this gesture of removing the queer desires of female characters and transplanting them to a marginal male character is similar to the narrative move made in the traditional Bollywood film. In this heteronormative universe, race is similarly reduced to a historical burden that can be shrugged off. Racism is manifest only in one act of name-calling during a football match and in Jess’s father’s distant memory of being excluded from a local cricket team when he first arrived in Britain. At a time of systemic injustices tied to employment, housing, education, and health, the complete erasure of race is a distinctive marker for the politics of the film. Perhaps no moment better encapsulates the racial politics of the film than a moment that seems entirely devoid of irony: Joe claims to “understand” the racism that Jess faces because as an Irishman he too has experienced racism. Racism is thus f lattened into some ahistorical, universal experience, mostly embodied in acts of intolerance. The Black British subject is also closed off from other black communities. Jess has little to do with the black girls on the team. The black captain of the team, Mel, is reduced to an oversexualized object. When we first encounter her, she strips off her shirt in the locker room, holding up a tampon. Later, Jess’s friends refer to Mel’s breasts, confirming her status as an object. Mel’s marginal presence in the film is also highlighted by the fact that there is no sense of a larger black community. Instead, the dichotomy of tradition and modernity is again brought out of the neoliberal cupboard. Tradition is represented by “Indian” values and customs, while the English are the bearers of modernity. There is no question that Jules’s parents would ever stand in the way of her following her dreams. Community values, represented by Jess’s family, are by their very nature conservative and are reduced to strictures, traditions, and outmoded practices that only get in the way of personal advancement. In the postfeminist world of the film, tradition, represented by the community, is always already in place to hold back a woman’s chances for self-advancement. As Jules puts it to Jess, “if you give up football now, what are you gonna have to give up next?” As in the films by Mehta and Nair, empowerment comes from defying the

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rules of the community. Little attention is given to the community as a possible source of strength. The conclusion of the film furthers this perspective. Even though the film celebrates multicultural Britain, true liberation can be found only through departure. The US, and California in particular, despite the universalizing effects of globalization, remains the proverbial land of plenty. The film concludes with Jess and Jules’s departure for Santa Clara, California. As Jasbir Puar and Amit Rai argue, the US becomes “the site of salvation for racial others: unlike Britain, the United States promises for Jess an acceptance of her brownness . . . [and] epitomizes the phantasmic space of racial harmony and multiculturalism” (75). This point is particularly ironic given the intensification of racism in the US since 2001, especially in documented acts against people with brown skin (Prashad, “The Green Menace”). On a comparative note, it is interesting that all three films end in the protagonists’ departures into an idealized space removed from social norms and stigmas. It is fairly easy to read Chadha’s film as a hybrid cultural product, one drawing from genre films that are familiar to a global audience. Indeed, its success is almost assured, marked as it is with the name of one of the most saleable and safe commodities in the sporting world. Even the soundtrack is a combination of tracks that are globally recognizable rather than pieces with specific local resonance. Victoria Beckham, Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, Curtis Mayfield, Bally Sagoo, and the ubiquitous “Nessun Dorma” are thrown together in a consumable hybrid of global pop: The importance of a film like Bend It Like Beckham lies in how the too easily celebrated hybrid-diasporic-nationalist utopia produced through the film’s aesthetic and soundtrack functions with the multicultural representation of divergent and intersecting histories of hegemonic struggles in Britain to produce a narrative desire for an outside space of sexual and racial freedom beyond the nation and beyond race. (Puar and Rai 76) Chadha, despite her claims to locate the narrative in a specific time and place, is clearly creating and marketing a global product, one that is as easily recognizable in London as it is in Mumbai, Singapore, and Tokyo. On the surface, the film celebrates itself as a sanitized product that, unlike Mehta’s and Nair’s films, has very little that is transgressive in its content, its characters, or its aesthetic. However, my interest in this film lies in its textual performance of a feminist subject, its

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depiction of this idealized “outside space,” and in exploring how that subject functions in relation to Mehta’s and Nair’s constructions of subjectivity in the context of the New India. I am arguing that, as a text, this film participated in the continuing construction of the new Indian woman, posing her as both modern subject and bearer of the Indian tradition. Much like the subjects in the Fair and Lovely commercials described in chapter 2, Jess is able to break the glass ceiling of gendered restrictions, yet she also represents the sphere of safe domesticity. She is subordinate to her father’s authority; despite her attraction to Joe, there is no indication that she has sexual relations with him; her bond to her family is constantly stressed in the film and it is understood that in spite of her potentially rebellious acts, she is fully aware of her responsibilities to her family. Unlike the protagonists in the Nair and Mehta films, Jess is then only a transgressor within the parameters of parental authority. She does not violate the space of the nuclear family, as do Sita and Radha, nor is she left to a life of solitude like Maya. Yet, her political positioning at the end of the film is similar to these other characters. She is the bearer of her own destiny, propelled by her own desires rather than subject to the forces of history or tradition. In this regard, she is similar to the representations of the new Indian woman, who despite the continuing inequalities of nation, state, caste, and religion can fulfill her aspirations. These aspirations in the case of Jess are allied to the possibility of material success in the land of opportunity, and even though the protagonists in the other two films are left without any real material prospects, there is no suggestion that material discomfort will be a factor in their futures. As Radha puts it to her husband in Fire, “without desire, there is no point in living.” Desire is the predominant trope for release from traditional constraints, and this call for desire is entirely appropriate for the consumer-subject portrayed in the pages of the Week for whom, similarly, the fulfillment of desire is not about any transformative social change but embodied in an individualized quest for personal nourishment. The mythology of “progress” that is hinted at in the commercials I analyzed in chapter 2 and the statements in the Week are only possible if the subjects, as in the films I analyzed, are prepared to step outside of history. I began this chapter by saying that my intention was not merely to critique Nair’s, Mehta’s, and Chadha’s representations of female subjects, but to point out the slippages and disruptions that take place as cultural texts travel, especially as they find their final resting site in the Western metropolis. I would suggest that even as we read these

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transnational cultural productions, we have to remain vigilant about the conditions of their production and the extent to which they are examples of the visual looking-at-ness that characterizes such ethnographies. Moreover, “without an analysis of transnational scattered hegemonies that reveal themselves in gender relations, feminist movements will remain isolated and prone to reproducing the universalizing gestures of dominant Western cultures” (Grewal and Kaplan 17). While we can celebrate the arrival of such filmmakers as Nair, Mehta, and Chadha, offering as they do a much needed perspective on the complex lives of Indians, and for challenging the constrictive boundaries of patriarchy, we have to be careful not to be seduced by a nostalgic and undifferentiated representation of women’s experiences. It is particularly tempting to embrace these works precisely because they enrage the right people on the home front: fundamentalists, selfinterested politicians, and self-appointed moralists; however, transgressions within one context can become unproblematic celebrations of difference within another. Cultural productions never occupy an absolute, static space of meaning, but when they undergo transnational crossings we have to be particularly aware of the interplay of longing and nostalgia, nation and diaspora, fundamentalism and liberation, democracy and difference; in the end, these texts have to be interrogated with particular attention to the social and economic disjunctures and shifts that take place as culture moves from one site to another and undergoes changes in meaning in the process of that movement. Part of my effort in this chapter has been to suggest that so-called national ideas about citizenship are linked to this transnational circulation of texts. The question of gender in the context of the New India is particularly potent because representations of women are inevitably connected to hegemonic ideas about the nation. Moreover, the figure of woman in the New India is simultaneously representative of an unchanging nation space, untainted by the perceived ills of globalization and modernity as well as the seemingly limitless possibilities of self-expression and liberation that are so much a part of neoliberal dogma. As I have tried to demonstrate in my analysis of the three films and their reception, women’s agency and their complex positioning within the ever-shifting structures of capitalism and patriarchy disappear as subjectivity is constructed along existing binaries of tradition and modernity, desire and repression, liberation and limitation. For a truly oppositional form of subjectivity, perhaps these filmmakers could have turned to the many women who are deciding citizenship on their own terms, such as those women who continue to protest Union

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Carbide’s criminal acts in Bhopal, Dalit women seeking land rights in Andhra Pradesh, women fighting deforestation in Uttarkhand, or women fighting dispossession in the villages of Bengal. It is to a specific story of resistance that I now turn to demonstrate how some Indians are forging their own notions of citizenship even as the neoliberal citizen is becoming the naturalized version of citizenship.

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CH A P T E R

F I V E

“Who Will Build Our Taj Mahal?” Urban Displacement, Spatial Politics, and the Resistant Subject

Globalization is a must. —Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, Chief Minister, West Bengal Nowhere, unless perhaps in dreams, can the phenomenon of the boundary be experienced in a more originary way than in cities. —Walter Benjamin In a famous passage from The Communist Manifesto, Marx and Engels identify the global ambitions of the bourgeoisie with characteristic aplomb: “The need of a constantly expansive market chases the bourgeoisie over the whole surface of the globe. It must nestle everywhere, settle everything, and establish connexions everywhere. . . . All oldestablished national industries have been destroyed or are daily being destroyed” (476). If such expansive and destructive policies are inherent to the logic of capital, as Marx and Engels suggest, then the accumulation of capital is inevitably linked to a variety of spatial disruptions. Indeed, Marx’s writings on primitive accumulation were informed by his analysis of English society and his attention to the gradual enclosure of the Commons. Spatial disruptions and increased class antagonisms are similarly an integral part of contemporary capitalism, masquerading in its benign universalist designation, globalization. Nowhere are these disruptions as marked as in the dispossession of agricultural land in the developing world and the consequences of that

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dispossession on the “underdeveloped” city of the global South. Serving as the locus for the rural dispossessed and the inf lux of unregulated capital, the “third world” metropolis is particularly susceptible to the effects of structural adjustment and financial speculation, characteristic features of contemporary globalization.1 Other factors such as cheap real estate and a large volume of available labor make the third world metropolis especially vulnerable to the machinations of global capital. As global capital poses strict guidelines for the investment of capital and the expenditure of public funds in the developing metropolis, the state often provides a political basis for the expropriation and privatization of public resources and spaces. Laws governing land ownership and land distribution, as well as labor laws, are frequently thrust aside in the quest for capital investment. Of course, the privatization of space is not only about the maximum utilization of land and labor but also about the social control of an increasingly marginalized and resistant population. The underdeveloped third world city thus displays in more extreme forms the larger global struggle over limited resources and the capitalist need for expansion and accumulation. In an effort to highlight the implications of some of these spatial struggles, I will investigate in this chapter the ongoing remapping of the urban landscape in Kolkata, India. Paying attention to a specific urban project—the construction of a shopping mall on the site of a formerly vibrant civic market in South Kolkata—I will examine the production of urban space as the territory of “liberalization.” In this chapter, I will argue that Kolkata’s position on the margins of global capital results in an overdetermined allegiance to the reproduction of space as an arena both for urban privilege and for the social control of marginalized populations. The conf licts over the site of my study, Lake Market, function as a symptom of the larger struggles as well as accommodations between the ends of capital and state. I will consider these conf licts in part through the narratives and texts of those who have the most to lose in the process of liberalization. I will present the observations of the current vendors of the market, introducing them as a counterpoint to the narrative of progress constructed by the state and the private developers of the shopping mall. I argue that what is at stake here in the interstices of the triumphant narratives of globalization is not just specific livelihoods and forms of solidarity, but an exchange relation that has for some time resisted the unceasing encroachment of commodity capitalism. I will suggest that the remapping and privatization of urban space is also an attempt to create consuming middle-class citizens, ones closer to their Western counterparts, much as I described in chapter 2.

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In highlighting changes in existing social relations, my goal is not to romanticize some archaic notion of a pre-liberalization economy, but rather to intervene in the triumphalist narrative of globalization. My conclusion will also point to potential ways that the privatization of space may have limited success within the existing regime of capital accumulation, focusing particularly on methods by which a resistant subject, engaged in collective acts of solidarity, may yet undermine the interactions of foreign and local capital and forestall the devastating effects of the localized application of neoliberal economics. Globalization and Urbanization Since I have discussed the many trajectories of globalization at different points in the book, I will only reiterate the elements that are particularly important for this chapter: modes of f lexible accumulation, whereby capital adapts, accommodates, expands, and f lees according to the resources available for economic exploitation; the privatization of public land and resources, eliminating in the process industries, programs, or laws that benefit large sections of the population; the exploitation and marginalization of working populations, especially those landless agricultural laborers who have been displaced by the disinvestment in small-scale agriculture; and the ceaseless overproduction of commodity goods, marked most prominently by the inf lux of luxury goods into “third world” markets. While most of these practices have become routine in Western economies, naturalized through the Thatcher/Reagan years, the consequences of such economic practices are particularly severe for postcolonial nations because their limited commitment to their largely rural and economically underprivileged citizens is compromised by an adherence to these policies. These policies are of course encouraged and inf licted by international lending agencies such as the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund, which serve the interests of corporations and the G8 nations, offering loans and imposing draconian restrictions on faltering and dependent national economies. Not only is a country typically bound up in a vicious circle of debt, but the terms of loans are also accompanied by stringent demands made on national and state governments to “free up” those resources like land, water, and electricity that are the property of the nation. Thus, profitable public sector industries are often sold off for a pittance, and legislation is enacted to make land available for multinational speculation and corporate “development.” How these

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spaces are utilized, then, is a significant feature of contemporary globalization. Moreover, the production of these spaces ref lects not only to some degree the class inf lections of postcolonial societies, but also these economies’ inextricable links to the demands of global capital. As David Harvey explains: Spatial practices in any society abound in subtleties and complexities. Since they are not innocent in respect to the accumulation of capital and the reproduction of class relations under capitalism, they are a permanent arena for social conf lict and struggle. Those who have the power to command and produce space possess a vital instrumentality for the reproduction and enhancement of their own power. (“Flexible Accumulation” 366) Although Harvey argues that these effects are visible in any society, it is the developing nations within the ethic of neoliberal economics that often see the most damaging effects of these spatial practices. In order to fully understand the successful integration of neoliberal logic within developing and partially nationalized economies, particular attention has to be given to the dynamics of spectacular accumulation. Anna Tsing uses the term “spectacular accumulation” in order to refer to capitalists’ tendency to sell potential and promise rather than an actual product. In these cases, “economic performance is conjured dramatically” (Tsing 142). According to Tsing, “Dramatic performance is prerequisite of their economic performance” (118). While this sort of “drama” has been a notable feature of expansionist capitalism throughout its history, the element of dramatic performance is an especially important text of neoliberalism, relying as it does on the elusive promise of ever-improving technology and of rapidly circulating fictitious capital. In order to accommodate the needs of contemporary capital, one of the strategies is to create new social wants and needs, organizing consumption so that it becomes rationalized with respect to the accumulation process. Consumption patterns in the “third world,” then, emulate conspicuous consumption patterns of industrialized societies. These patterns are more in tune with the demands of multinational capital than they are with the needs of the national economy. Moreover, as I argued in chapter 2, commodity goods (especially luxury goods within a third world economy that in the immediate postcolonial era practiced a measure of import controls) come accompanied with a promise: they represent the potential for access to global wealth. The commodity itself attains a fetishistic quality, whereby the consumer is

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offered the “possibility of economic performance.” These luxury commodities, moreover, as Pierre Bourdieu once put it, represent symbolic capital, “attesting to the taste and distinction of the owner.” According to Bourdieu, “the act of buying [these goods] connects to the pleasure of the spectacle in secured places, safe from violence or political agitation” (Distinction 376). Nowhere is this “pleasure of the spectacle in secured places” more sanctified than in the “underdeveloped” city, where class antagonisms and divisions are usually more sharply drawn than in the Western metropolis. The city, then, is a vital arena for the crafting of global dreams as well as the accumulation of capital. It is here that the worst excesses of globalization are often most perceptible, because limited space is appropriated at the cost of a majority of the cities’ populations.2 The effects of globalization are visible for all to see: the shining monuments to global capital—the office buildings, the shopping malls, and the luxury hotels. Right alongside are the bustees, the slums, and pavement dwellings, which house those who serve the few that are touched by the divine grace of capital.3 Saskia Sassen has argued that “Global cities are the sites of the over-valorization of corporate capital and the further devalorization of disadvantaged actors, both firms and workers” (162). The global city is constructed to feed the requirements of the international business class who suck it dry of its resources, utilizing precious and scarce state services and assets that are diverted from other areas: “it is a city whose space consists of airports, top-level business districts, top-of-the-line hotels and restaurants—a sort of urban glamour zone, the new hyperspace of international business” (169). Indeed, within the agenda of liberalization, these “glamour zones” are constructed literally on the detritus of dying national industries. In Mumbai, for instance, shining new developments are being constructed where the highly successful textile mills used to stand. Because these mills were supported through public subsidies, state law decreed that if the mills were ever sold, a portion of the land should be reserved for public use. Instead, since the 1980s, “the mill owners converted their properties into lucrative ventures and managed, in 2001, to tweak [the] municipal law that required them to set aside a third of the land for public use. In the end, the law stipulated that only a small fraction be set aside” (Sengupta, “Dispute Tears” A3)., The Indian Supreme Court, in addition, has sided with the developers, allowing construction of shopping malls and office buildings to continue. In place of the famed Phoenix Mills there now stands the up-market High Street Phoenix mall. Such spatial practices not only

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dispossess the citizens of Mumbai of public land and wealth but also exacerbate existing disparities of wealth. Recently, Narendra Nayar’s group, a business lobby called Bombay First, “armed with a report prepared by the consulting firm McKinsey & Company,” called “for a radical $40 billion makeover of the city: clearing slums, and building a new subway, public toilets and an airport tarmac without shanties on the margins. Titled Vision Mumbai, the report dangled the prospect of transforming the city into a Shanghai on the Arabian Sea” (Sengupta, “Dispute Tears” A3).4 In India this form of urban development, concentrating on attracting and serving the needs of a global capitalist class, has taken on a furious urgency ever since liberalization policies were put into effect in 1991. Major metropolitan areas such as Mumbai, the financial center, and Delhi, the economic capital, of course, were always internationalized cities, attracting wealth and investment from different quarters. But Kolkata, though a mega city, cultural center, and one-time colonial capital, was shunned because of its history of labor activism and its lack of precisely the economic infrastructure that is the lifeline of global business. Only ten years ago, global businesses were fond of referring to Kolkata as lacking a favorable business climate. Currently, even though the city continues to lag behind many of India’s major urban centers as a center for national and global businesses, the ruling government welcomes large corporations, marking a transition to the mode of spectacular accumulation. Because of its marginal status as a global city, globalization in Kolkata comes accompanied with a furious yet fragile energy. As such, the disruptive moments of liberalization in Kolkata represent both the liminal and the excessive reaches of global change. Neoliberal Economics and Parliamentary Marxism in Kolkata It is necessary to provide a brief history of Kolkata’s political and labor history in the last twenty-five years in order to clarify the singularity of the current conjuncture of economic and social forces there. In 1977, after many years of political unrest and rule by an authoritarian rightcentrist government aligned to the governing Congress Party at the center, a Left Front alliance, headed by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), swept to power in the state of West Bengal. In the last thirty years, despite repeated attempts by opposition parties to regain control,

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this party has been re-elected several times. Much of the support for the government has come from voters in rural areas, where the CPI(M) has put into effect limited land reform policies. These land reforms have included, as Ananya Roy points out, “land ceilings and redistribution, as well as tenancy reforms, mainly in the form of sharecropping rights” (14). These reforms have been limited, though; there exists the “persistent poverty of the rural landless” (Roy 14). Many of those without land have been forced to migrate to the metropolis to look for work, joining impoverished migrants and refugees from neighboring states who barely eke out a living. Due to lack of housing, resources, jobs, and infrastructure, more than a third of the city’s population continues to live in the slums. Obviously, the origins of Kolkata’s problems do not rest with the present government. As a colonial city, Kolkata was the capital of Britain’s Indian empire and was developed primarily to suit the interests of the ruling class. The core part of the city mainly functioned as a non-industrial service sector economy. Industries and the docks were located far from the core of the city. According to Sanjoy Chakravorty, in 1835 “industry began in the Calcutta region, but not in the city: the first jute mill was established in Rishra, a suburb. . . . Other jute mills were established (usually) along the west bank of the river, towards the north of the city. Thus industry in Calcutta began in the suburbs and continued to locate in the suburbs through another 100 years of colonial rule and 50 years of independence” (59–61). The city itself was divided into British and “native” sections. Since independence, those spatially drawn class lines have remained the same. The north side of the city (Burrabazar), which was the “native” quarter, is still avoided by the wealthier citizens, while a majority of the southern regions of the city (south of Park Street up to Lake Gardens and west to Alipore), formerly a more select area, house the upper and uppermiddle classes. The city was hit hard by the partition of 1947. Vast jutegrowing regions ended up in East Pakistan; millions of people migrated across the border into the city; finally, the Freight Equalization Policy of 1956, which equalized prices of essential items, had an adverse affect on the eastern region, the center of coal and steel production. Added to these developments was the second wave of immigration of refugees that took place in 1970–71 during the crisis that led to the creation of Bangladesh in 1971 (Chakravorty 61). The CPI(M) thus inherited a city that was in decline due to a combination of factors: the lack of new industries in the area surrounding the city; a political climate poisoned by the systematic persecution

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of leftist revolutionary forces; a decaying infrastructure that had been constructed by the British purely to meet the commercial and residential interests of the wealthy; and a postcolonial civil society that was controlled by a combination of old-world British company cronyism and a corrupt municipal bureaucracy. The government, realizing that its political base lay in the rural areas, concentrated on implementing programs in these areas, while investment in the city remained mostly static. Although there were substantial pockets of support for the party in the city, segments of the middle classes and businesspeople viewed the party as hostile to their interests. While it is true that organized labor and strict land development laws were perceived as detrimental to business interests, mainstream elements in the party were never entirely disinclined to attract capital investments or strike at the city’s poorer residents.5 Indeed, after the liberalization reforms were implemented on the national level, party officials began to court foreign and national firms with greater determination. With the inauguration of the new chief minister, Buddhadeb Bhattacharjee, in 2001, all so-called socialist pretenses were cast aside in an attempt to attract capital and to pander to the urban middle and upper-middle classes, who had never been firm supporters of the party. In demonstrating their adherence to the politics of liberalization, party leaders declared that their main goals were for Kolkata to become a “center of large scale production of petrochemicals, leather, pharmaceutical, metallurgical and engineering items within the Southeast Asia region, and to compete globally in the electronics field” (Chakravorty 72–73). The Left Front’s allegiance to liberalization policies has taken two primary forms. One is the development of “high-tech, high-income planned enclaves on the eastern edge of the city, and planned industrial enclaves further south, resulting in the creation of a considerably larger agglomerative field, or metro-region” (Chakravorty 73). The government’s investment in Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), in fact, is the showpiece of the administration’s adoption of liberalization.6 Of the many incentives that have been offered to investors and are described in the West Bengal Industrial Development Corporation’s document of 2001 are the “availability of built-up space and land.” The government has also promised to make available plots for “new ITES projects at the highly subsidized rate of about Rs. 40 lakh per acre (less than $100,000), which is 15–20 per cent of the prevailing market price” (“West Bengal’s New Policy,” 2)7 The obvious result of such policies has been the displacement of squatters and slum residents from these areas. Ananya Roy, in City Requiem, Calcutta, has written about the

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liminal reaches of the city where this struggle over the spatial politics of liberalization is taking place. According to Roy: [the] processes of peasant migration and urban liberalization literally intersect at the edges of the city. It is here that impoverished migrants have been able to stake informal claims to shelter. And it is here that there is a f lurry of middle-class housing developments, on agricultural land, many sponsored by the Left Front itself. This rural-urban interface is the territoriality of liberalization, the space within which the regime is remaking itself. . . . [The] moment of liberalization has not only manifested itself at the level of the urban—in the city as spectacle—but has also taken hold in particular, historicized interstices within the urban. . . . In Calcutta, the space of liberalization . . . is the volatile land transactions occurring at its less visible margins. Here, as rural and urban regulatory contexts bump and collide, a new regime of spatial regulation and social discipline takes hold. (10, 17) Accompanying these developments in the margins of the city are the structural changes in the city proper. The most distinctive face of the changes is evident in the huge building boom in the city. The cityscape is witnessing an enormous surge of building developments: immaculate new apartment complexes are springing up in the southern and eastern fringes of the city, as well as in the central areas; shopping malls and consumer outlet stores are being constructed in these same areas to provide entertainment outlets for the residents; freeways are being built to connect commercial areas. About “35 percent of the small scale investment (up to $150 million each) is in the Calcutta metropolitan area; a substantial proportion of this investment is in the city in the service sector (office, complexes, theme parks, transportation), and a large proportion is in manufacturing in the industrial suburbs” (Chakravorty 64). These projects are often supported by public finances—road surfacing, sewer systems, water supplies, and electricity (all of which are in short supply in a densely populated, underfunded city like Kolkata) are maintained by the city, while the lion’s share of the profits is collected by the corporations who are being given enormous financial incentives to bring their industries to the city. The obsession with providing better infrastructure, of course, is rarely translated into supplying drinking water or better sanitation facilities to the millions of people who need them. In fact, even fewer services are being provided for those who need them the most.

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Chakravorty describes this recent pattern of resource allocation, explaining that “in keeping with the new liberalization philosophy, these new projects are to have significant cost recovery or surplus generation components. The CMDA [Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority], in response, has moved away from its acknowledged expertise in slum improvement to housing, new area development, and building commercial facilities” (64). Its budget for slum improvement has gone from about 25 percent of the entire budget to 1.7 percent under the new programs while housing, new area development, and commercial facilities are budgeted at over 46 percent (64). Development, within the ethics of neoliberal economics, amounts to shining new buildings like the City Center shopping center in the eastern part of the city and new roads connecting the airport to luxury hotels, such as Sonar Bangla and the Taj Bengal. However, the dramatic cityscape cannot hide the plight of the underprivileged. Inequities in wealth are sharply defined; a huge landless population in the thousands continues to migrate to the city; and the middle classes are gradually being priced out of the housing market. Developers have captured real estate and elevated land values while protecting property rights for the wealthy and maintaining political control over the poor. Roy argues that “the Left’s newfound agenda of urban developmentalism can be read as an attempt to recover the ‘public’ from the pablik, reinscribing space as middle-class and subject to civic control” (City Requiem 11).8 As if to confirm the state government’s capitulation to the forces of globalization, a 2004 article in the New York Times, triumphantly titled “Communists from India Seek the Help of Capitalists,” announced that Chief Minister Bhattacharjee had hired “a team of consultants from the American firm McKinsey & Company to help attract foreign investors.9 He has convinced local Marxist labor unions to end nearly constant strikes that paralyzed the city. He also has encouraged investors to open glistening American-style malls, where young middle-class Indians buy Levi’s jeans and Nike sneakers” (Rohde A3). So transparent are the government’s methods that even Kolkata’s business-friendly newspaper the Telegraph admits that the development drive is also taking its toll on the lives of the industrial workers and the peasants. No matter whether they are getting their wages or other dues regularly, the workers are being told not to protest too much and not to strike work so that potential investors do not get the wrong signal. The farmers are being told to sell their land to facilitate development plans—a complete

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turnaround from the time when the party distributed land to the landless. (Chakrabarti 19) Clearly, development politics in the new West Bengal can be captured in the spatial practices of the new government. Limited land is being expropriated from the poor while large swaths of land are being literally handed over to global companies or to housing projects. Of course, as the Nandigram episode and the earlier opposition to Tata’s attempted acquisition of land in Singur indicate, none of these moves is taking place without significant opposition from those most directly affected by these spatial practices. Nevertheless, Kolkata as global city is being packaged and developed as a haven for high-tech industries and their employees. Included in this package, of course, are not only the economic infrastructure to support business interests but also a social infrastructure to support the tastes and preferences of the upper-middle-class-income earners of those industries. In the package of incentives promoted by the West Bengal government for the high-earning elite, for instance, is a category listed as “availability of social infrastructure.” Within this category are the city’s many elite clubs (Tollygunge Club, Calcutta Club), new hotels (Taj Bengal, Hyatt Regency), schools (La Martiniere, St. Xavier’s) and new, private hospitals, but nowhere perhaps is the allure and the privatization of social space or “infrastructure” more pronounced than in the spectacle of the shopping mall. Shopping Malls in the New Kolkata The shopping mall boom admittedly is only one representation of the fruits of globalization, but malls have come to represent all that is touted by advocates of globalization: as resplendent new buildings packed with consumer goods, they symbolize private spaces that offer entertainment and luxury products and shield consumers from the vicissitudes of the world outside. Consumers can be driven past the guards, and they can then take elevators directly to the f loor of their choice. Once the doors of the elevator open, consumers are transported into a hyperreal world. All around them are Western retail names: Nike, Reebok, Samsonite, Arrow, Lee, Wrangler, and so on. Most malls also include multiplex theaters and food courts. Even though the price of almost every item is well out of the reach of most middle-class consumers, the new economy operates under the premise that people will spend whether they

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can afford to or not. Indeed, in spite of the hardships wrought by a higher cost of living, the middle classes, buoyed by low- interest loans, an inf lux of consumer goods, and the promise of globalization relentlessly heralded by the media, continue to visit these malls. Certainly, developers see malls as offering a potential for huge profits. The first shopping mall in India (Crossroads in Mumbai) opened in 1999. By 2004, Knight Frank, a real estate consultancy outfit, asserted “no less than 25 million square feet of organized retail space [would] come up across the country by 2005. By one estimate, 300 malls are already under construction countrywide” (Bist). Five years after Crossroads, as expected, “the biggest mall-construction activity [was] taking place . . . in Mumbai, the country’s financial and business capital. In all, 25 malls [were] under construction, each measuring anything between 90,000 and 600,000 square feet. A hefty Rs 4 billion (US$ 87 million) [was] being pumped into these projects by 20 investors” (Bist). By 2009, there were almost 600 shopping malls in India. What is not mentioned in this report is that these malls were not springing up on uninhabited land. These constructions were displacing populations and wiping out habitations and civic markets that had survived for decades. In Kolkata, the first mega mall to open was the Forum in South Kolkata in January 2003, followed in June 2004 by the City Centre in Salt Lake, an area in the eastern outskirts of the city. According to 2005 reports, “at least five new malls are slated to come up in the eastern part of the city in the near future and each one will be between 400,000 sq ft and 450,000 sq ft. Two others are being developed in other parts of the city. About Rs.100 crore [1 billion rupees, $25 million] will be invested in each one” (Tulal VI). By 2010, as many as twelve malls may be operating in the city. Not satisfied with the allpurpose mall, “Kolkata is getting its specialized malls too. The Aerens Group, which boast of the Gold Souk chain of specialty jewellery malls and the Wedding Spuk chain of wedding mall, also plans to foray into the city” (Tulal VI). These shopping malls not only promote the conspicuous consumption of luxury goods but are also part of a larger strategy to change the landscape of the city. In this disjunctive landscape, f lyovers will link points of residence, work, consumption, and leisure, somehow bypassing the city that exists in the real. In the imagination of the business leaders and the media, the fantasy of this “cosmopolitan Kolkata” is encompassed by “a retail expansion of five mega shopping malls.” The pro-liberalization Kolkata newspaper, the Telegraph, joins the chorus, heralding in 2005 the new ethic of consumption with unrestrained glee: “a real estate boom of 60 residential complexes . . . mobile

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[cellular phones] connections soar 548%, PC sales log an astronomical 493% growth, AC [air conditioning] sales register a 338% increase” (Purohit I). We are never told what an infinitesimally small percentage of the city’s population is actually participating in this “growth.” We are never told how many of these consumer goods and services are being bought on credit, nor are we told how low the initial percentages were, thus accounting for these numbers. Of course, neither is there any mention of how much of this growth is actually enhancing the wealth of a larger urban community. At least two major points are worth making about the significance of shopping malls. First: malls in cities such as Kolkata are disruptive sites, often in complete disharmony with their surroundings. They are exclusive enclaves, with their own parking garages and security guards. Also, the buildings themselves are the new temples in India, heterotopic sites, causing dislocation and alienation. They are often carved out of existing, heterogeneously mapped neighborhoods where spaces are occupied for multiple purposes. Unlike the streets outside, where classes intermingle or shops spill out into the street, the boundaries of the mall are strictly defined and marked. As representations of modernity and globalization, they redefine traditional notions of the public sphere, offering a space designed primarily as a site for consumption. This leads to my second point: malls inaugurate a markedly different ethic of consumption and exchange. Obviously, globalization relies on creating a new mentality toward consumption. As I have argued, a new, globalized generation has to be constructed and schooled into a “naturalized” consumption economy, one relying on the possession of commodities to provide a global sense of self. According to Arjun Appadurai and Carol Breckenridge, “India’s burgeoning public sphere is neither entirely benign nor entirely democratic. Like other forms of politics, it involves the marginalization of those who cannot afford the price of entry into this world and those who prefer to remain outside it” (10). Consumption, Appadurai and Breckenridge claim, is “an activity that simultaneously captures the distinctive disciplines of modernity and draws attention to new forms of expenditure and social identity” and is also connected to “new forms of class politics and national narrative” (5). But what is it about shopping malls, specifically, that bring about “new forms of expenditure and social identity”? One way to address this question is to recognize that what we are witnessing in the construction of these new spaces for consumption is a reassertion of an exchange economy rooted in the commodity as fetish object. Marx reminds us in

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Grundrisse that the “rise of exchange (commerce) as an independent function torn away from the exchangers corresponds to the rise of exchange value as an independent entity, as money, torn away from products” (149). The circulation of money and the factor of consumption as an end in itself create a structure where the “social character of activity, as well as the social form of the product, and the share of the individuals in production . . . appear as something alien and objective, confronting the individuals not as their relation to one another but as their subordination to relations which exist independently of them” (157). Consumption practices in the shopping mall thrive on the alienation effect: commodity and exchange value reign supreme. The economy of a civic market, in contrast, undercuts the practices of the Western exchange system. The notion of a fixed “retail” price is constantly undermined. The relationship between the seller and the buyer is open and negotiable, and interaction between the two is required in order for an exchange to be completed. Sometimes the seller has the upper hand; sometimes the buyer does. The commodity is never a mere fetish; both seller and buyer often engage in discussions about the economic and political exigencies that determine the value of an object. For instance, a vendor may claim that the price of onions has risen due to recent f loods; the customer may then comment on the current government’s lack of political foresight and his or her own straitened circumstances. In such cases, consumption is firmly affixed to larger political and economic relations. Of course, the elimination of this conversation in the space of the mall, where prices are fixed and exchange is a function independent of exchangers, also means the erosion of a vernacular tradition. Most sellers and buyers in Kolkata’s civic markets operate in Bengali, the language of the metropolis. In Kolkata’s shopping malls, in contrast, ludicrous though it may be, Bengali shoppers, salespeople, and cashiers carry out their transactions in English. Thus the economy of the shopping mall not only excludes those without strong English-speaking skills but also constructs a vastly different consuming subject, altering existing norms of citizenship. The class element is further reinforced as customers in malls are required to be dressed in an appropriate, class-defined way, unlike their counterparts in the civic markets. Furthermore, all those who do not belong due to their class status (porters, roadside sellers) are excluded from the premises. Moreover, there comes into being within this exchange economy a specific connection between commodification and space. Perhaps no one has written more persuasively about this connection than Henri Lefebvre. According to Lefebvre, in his landmark work The Production

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of Space, “Things and products . . . use their own language, the language of things and products, to tout the satisfaction they can supply and the needs they can meet; they use it too to lie, to dissimulate not only the amount of social labour that they contain, not only the productive labour that they embody, but also the social relationships of exploitation and domination on which they are founded” (80). For Lefebvre, things “set themselves up as absolutes. Products and the circuits they establish (in space) are fetishized and so become more ‘real’ than reality itself—that is, than productive activity itself, which they thus take over” (81). Lefebvre, of course, was drawing from Marx, but it is his insight that “space is not a thing but a rather a set of relations between things (objects and products)” that is of interest to us (83). Encased in this relation between things is a different concept of spatial or public culture between the mall and the public space outside. For instance, the physical space of shopping malls is in direct contrast to the openended space of a civic market. Space within the shopping mall is firmly demarcated, with security guards as gatekeepers regulating who may enter specific spaces. Boundaries are firmly observed, even in terms of a division of labor. In the shopping mall, the first person the customer encounters upon entering a store is a security guard, who then points the customer to a bag-check person. Before the actual purchase has been made, the customer has often encountered several other employees, including a salesperson and a cashier. Contrast these restrictions and demarcations with the open and chaotic nature of a civic market. In the open civic market, the fruit seller, the f lower seller, and the vegetable seller spill over each other’s boundaries. Lines are observed and crossed according to the context of the transaction. Crucially, the seller may also be a buyer, crossing lines to purchase items from his neighbor. This form of spatial crossing is hardly possible in the shopping mall, where few of the salespeople are able to afford the available products, thus erasing another element of a social relationship. Civic markets are located in a way that allows all areas to be accessible; malls, on the other hand, are characterized by windowless walls, sanitized entirely from the outside environment. Although traditional shopping areas such as New Market in Kolkata, South Extension or Karol Bagh in Delhi, or Brigade Road in Bangalore continue to draw large crowds, shopping malls are gradually replacing these public spaces. Paying close attention to the erosion of one of these spaces can help us move one step further in understanding the dynamics of class and consumption that are being altered along spatial lines, as well as the rituals of citizenship and oppositions to these rituals.

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In its Metro section on January 7, 2005, the Telegraph announced with great anticipation in the article “Mall of Southern Delight” that in 2006 “south Calcuttans are in for an exciting bonus. In a first-of-its-kind collaboration with a private partner, the Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC) has embarked on a project to turn the dilapidated Lake Market into a swanky Lake Mall” (Saha 21). Two photographs accompany the article: one is of a projected Lake Mall, under the title “Tomorrow.”10 This nighttime image is of a spectacular, imaginary complex six or seven stories high. On the walls are advertisements for Bollywood films, mobile phones, motorcycles, watches, and various other products. Prominent among the company logos displayed are Barnes and Noble and Baskin Robbins. In this fantastic cityscape, Kolkata has been transformed into a global city. Indeed, based on the artist’s imagination, this city could almost be part of any Western metropolis. Curiously enough, in the background appear several illuminated high-rise buildings, added somewhat mysteriously to the landscape; the streets—in a city of fourteen million—are practically devoid of people (with only six or seven figures barely visible); three foreign-made cars are parked right next to the mall. Contrasted with this image is one titled “Today.” In this photograph, captured in the hazy Kolkata winter daylight, we see a rickshaw puller and people strolling in the foreground. In the background we see a vague image of shops and vendors. The existing market building clearly appears in need of a new coat of paint. Being conveyed by this not-so-subtle contrast, of course, are not just two different cityscapes but a magical transformation in which Kolkata can be emptied of its people, shorn of its workers, and, most importantly, removed from a local context: the sari-clad women, the ubiquitous Indian-made Ambassador taxi, the street signs in Bengali visible in the “Today” photograph have all disappeared in the vision of “Tomorrow.” The contrast is aptly summed up by the two descriptions: “Today: Shabby, unorganised clusters of stalls languishing in squalor and chaos. Tomorrow: Glittering interiors, glass-curtain frontage, fully-automated lifts, modern brands and multiplex, food court and virtual games” (Saha 21). The journalist’s ornate prose displays not just the inherited f lourishes of a colonial education system but also faith in the fantasy of “the new” that globalization promises. Interestingly, of course, no mention is made of the people who currently sell their wares in the market

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or of those who frequent the market. What are their stories? What effects will the “development” likely have on them? Lake Market currently occupies a plum spot in South Kolkata, nestled between several residential areas. Although many of the shoppers are from middleclass families who inhabit homes in the neighborhood, the market also attracts middle-class shoppers from locations such as Alipore, which is a more prosperous area of the city. Lake Market’s central location obviously makes this a piece of real estate with high profit potential. The market itself occupies a large area, consisting of shops within a walled market as well as spaces for vendors who sell their wares outside on the sidewalk. It is a market known best for its fish sellers and for its large selection of vegetables and fruits, as well as for its confectioners. Many of the vendors have sold their wares here for generations. The market itself was established in the 1940s, and existing relationships between most shoppers and sellers have been sustained over many years. Despite the Telegraph reporter’s negative descriptions of the market, it serves as a vibrant center for the community (see fig. 5.1). It will be replaced by a six-story mall. According to a news report, “the first three f loors will house mega stores, super-stores and hyper-marts. The fourth f loor will have a food court, restaurants, cafeteria, pool tables, gyms and a

Figure 5.1

The market

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play area for children. The fifth and the sixth will house a four-screen multiplex” (“Stone Placed”). The scheme to build the Lake Mall was announced as early as 1991. The mayor of Kolkata, Subrata Mukherjee, had initially been reluctant to grant spaces in the new building to the vendors, whom he referred to as mere “licensees.” However, a 2005 report claims that “the 500-odd shopkeepers and vendors in Lake Market will be provided space in the swank mall free,” but then cites the Lake Bazar Samjukta Babsayee Samity, a committee of mayoral council members, as alleging “that the rehabilitation of around 50 fish vendors is yet to be worked out” (“Stone Placed”). A partial demolition of the market had taken place and the construction of the first building had already begun in August 2003. When I visited Lake Market in January 2005, effects of the coming change were already visible. The market of the fish sellers, for instance, had been destroyed, and they had been moved into a makeshift area. My conversation with the vendors revealed stories that have been drowned by the din accompanying the fanfare of liberalization. In their stories, we see a subject of the New India, who, despite the increasing efforts to marginalize this subject, continues to insist on an inclusive notion of citizenship. Their stories are the stories of the many millions whose lives and occupations are disposable within the ethic of neoliberalism. The Resistant Subject My attempt to present the voices of the Lake Market vendors, of course, is not without its own problems. It is important to acknowledge that my position is hardly a disinterested one. I grew up in Kolkata, and over the last ten years in my frequent visits to the metropolis, I have witnessed the changing landscape of the city. However, even as buildings and malls rise up and consumer goods f lood into the city, the poor and the displaced continue to struggle for their basic needs. As a transplanted Indian and a middle-class academic who lives in the West, my own narrative is inevitably a (mis)informed version of people’s lives. Vinay Gidwani argues, “representations that come to count as ‘value’ in the northern academy involve textual and territorial displacement from the subjects and subject matter re-presented [sic]. The researcher-producer is a representative who is necessarily dislocated from the subjects he claims to represent” (243). Even if my outsider status were not an issue, my class position in India would be. My conversations with the vendors at Lake Market are mediated through my own class privilege and

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my position as a person with at least limited access to power. I recount their stories here, knowing full well that the act of retelling is linked to the complex strands of privilege and loss that follows my own locations between the Western academy and “home,” between solidarity and complicity. The narratives recounted in this chapter were mostly collected in January 2005. I focus on this initial, contradictory moment of the resettlement period since, at that point, the vendors evinced great uncertainty about their futures even while the newspaper report in the Telegraph chose to represent the mall as an “exciting bonus” for “south Calcuttans” (Saha 21). I have subsequently returned to the market every year until January 2010. During this time, the space of the market has been constantly evolving, leaving my conclusions partial. In 2005, my first conversation was with a fruit seller whose family had been in the same spot for sixty years, just inside the entrance to the market. Although he was surrounded by a bounty of fruit and vegetables, he commented that sales were down. A brief exchange revealed that when the first intimations had come that the vendors were to be relocated, they had resisted. But he seemed unwilling to say too much. Tensions surfaced when a neighboring vendor mentioned the fights and troubles that had taken place when eviction notices had been served. The fruit seller tried to deny this, angrily reprimanding the other man. Clearly he was nervous about talking to a stranger about the “troubles.” This, too, was the face of liberalization that the newspapers seldom reported: the collusion between state and private enterprise, silencing the voices of the displaced. A vegetable seller occupying a much larger space nearby seemed determined to be positive about the change. “It’s for the best; things will improve,” he said. He appeared to have the facts about the mall at his fingertips: how many cars could be parked in the basement, the exact area that the mall would occupy; however, even his optimism was tempered by his recognition that the vendors would probably get only about 65 percent of the space that they had at the moment. He was sitting in his father’s stall, a spot that his father or he himself had occupied since the 1950s. Opposite him sat another vegetable seller, whose family had also sold at that spot since the 1950s. He did not share his partner’s enthusiasm, saying instead that he was doubtful about the promises for adequate space and compensation that were being made by the municipal corporation. I found a craftsman’s shop next to a vacant space from which many vendors had already been displaced. The craftsman, whose family had been working in the market for generations, showed me some of his

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wares and proudly said that he had not been to any art school but that he created patterns from his imagination. While we talked, he continued to work, painting elaborate patterns on earthenware vessels. His helper had also worked in the same shop for fifty years. The craftsman’s family had previously kept a number of stalls elsewhere in the market, but he was now down to just two spaces: the shop and an adjacent storage space. While the craftsman quietly concentrated on his work, his helper spoke bitterly about the new building, adding that he doubted whether they would have a lot of room in the new building. His neighbor, a vegetable seller, sat in a spot that he claimed had been in his family for as long as the market had been in existence. He himself had only been minding the stall for ten years. He chatted with me, leaving his stall unattended for several minutes. Clearly he wasn’t expecting any customers. But perhaps the most poignant stories came from the fish sellers in the makeshift part of the market near the rear entrance. They had been displaced into an area that had formerly served as a large common latrine. Some of the sellers occupied corridors that were little more than walking paths. These areas were extremely filthy, and puddles of dirty water made them both unsanitary and dangerous. One of the sellers told me that a customer had slipped and fallen on her back “just the other day.” The conditions were hardly likely to draw even the most loyal customers into the market; consequently, sales had been down dramatically since the move. One fish seller in particular sat in a tiny spot (four feet long and three feet wide). The passageway for the buyers was barely a foot wide. One could see that customers would avoid this spot more than others. Next to him sat a fellow fish seller, who talked about the loans that he had taken out in order to survive. It was ten in the morning, and neither one had sold a single piece of fish since the early hours of the day. As I walked through the fish market, I saw many sellers just sitting by themselves. Very few shoppers were actually in the market. Many of the sellers were walking around because they had no business to attend to. One of the sellers had a historical analogy for the new mall: “The Taj Mahal is being built, but Shah Jahan will never live within its walls.” Like the emperor who was imprisoned by his son and could only look through the bars of his prison at the shining monument that he had built, these vendors were being dispossessed, seeing only in memory the market that they had built. Although many of these men asserted that they had been selling fish for generations, they argued that conditions had now become impossible. They reported paying large

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sums of money in rent, taxes, and electricity bills. Each of the fish sellers paid taxes that amounted to over Rs.6,000 a year ($140). Their monthly electricity bill and rent, one said, came to about Rs.350 ($8).11 These rates represented steep increases from previous years. Moreover, non-payment resulted in a fine, which then had compound interest charged on non-payment. I could not help wondering if the sellers were being deliberately priced out of their occupation. Quite often, the fish sellers said, they would have to buy large quantities of ice in order to preserve fish that would not sell. According to the seller, the combination of the closed-off roads, reduced parking, blocked entrance gates, and crowded and cramped spaces had turned away a number of regular customers. Because sales were so poor, most of the fish sellers reported having to put half of their stock on ice at the end of the day. These fish then would have to be sold at half price the next day. At least one of the vendors, an ice seller, seemed to be doing brisk business. He had been selling ice at the market for over thirty-five years. When asked how he was managing, he said, “Chole jatchey” (“I am surviving” or “Life goes on”). It was a common sentiment among many of the sellers, but talking to the two men who sat side-by-side selling their fish, that sentiment wore thin. Both were indebted to moneylenders (a familiar story). Even if they were assigned a spot in the new mall, it was hardly likely that they would be able to survive until that happened. Both sellers had been in the market for thirty years. Combine increased rent and higher electricity bills with fewer customers and sales, and you have a continuous, severe cycle of hardship. In the years that follow until the building is complete, what will be the fate of these vendors and their families? They have been holding on to their livelihood by a thread. The situation in the outdoor, pavement stalls was no better. Another vegetable seller, who had been selling his vegetables on the pavement for twenty-five to thirty years, did not pay any rent, but he had to pay a monthly bribe to the police of about Rs.100. Most of the other outdoor vendors, many of whom are women, paid about 10 percent of their sale to the police. The vegetable seller stressed that he did not expect to rent for free, but he felt the new complex should at least provide a space for those who would be unable to rent space inside the mall. He said progress should take the poor along and not leave them behind, declaring, “Aamader rekhe korun” (“Include us in your plans”). This is the advice that the gurus of globalization have refused to take—those who do not fit the profile of the new Indian citizen are seldom consulted for an opinion. He said that he had been raised in such a way that he could

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not rob or steal if he were displaced. There wasn’t much he could do, he said, and eight people relied on him as a source of income. He felt that outside sellers like him have contributed significantly to the growth of the market. Indeed, many of the buyers visit the market because of these sellers. “Aamader ki aasha ney?” (“Do we not hope, do we not have dreams?”) he asked. The seller next to him spoke of the habitual police abuse and violence that he had to endure. When I asked him what he would do if he were evicted, he could not keep the despair out of his voice. Both men said that their future lay in the education of their children. Where, though, would the money for that education come from if they were displaced? These two men continued at least to have dreams about their children’s future. The women who sat in rows opposite them had only a few meager vegetables, and their condition was much more dire. Many of them regularly commuted by train, carrying their few vegetables, always subject to the abuse of the police. A number of these small-scale sellers were from Canning in the South 24-Paraganas, a rural district to the south of the city. Like these women, the porters at the market are at the bottom of the vendor hierarchy. Many of them are migrants from Bihar, a neighboring state. One said that he had been working as a porter for eighteen years. Neither he nor his brother knew what they would do once the market closed down. No provisions had been made for them, as far as they knew. What was evident from my observation of Lake Market and in the stories of the vendors was something that the reporter from the Telegraph had not recounted. For instance, the anticipated completion date, autumn 2006, seemed spectacularly optimistic. The first building, which would house the fish sellers and which had been projected to be completed by early 2005, was nowhere near completion (see fig. 5.2). A pile of bricks lay in one spot, while the divided plots for the fish sellers were separated by rude constructions of brick and clay. A worker at the site said that it would be at least a couple of years before work would be completed on the mall. Meanwhile, many of the fish sellers who had barely been hanging on for seventeen months—since the demolition started in June 2003—were becoming more and more conscious that the promised move date of 2006 seemed open to infinite postponement. Also, my earlier conversation with the fish sellers made evident that none of them seemed to have been given any idea about the placement of their stalls once the relocation took place. The ones who were to be granted favorable positions would gain, while others would suffer.

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Figure 5.2 The first building

Most of the vendors I spoke to were in debt. This was the only way they managed to make ends meet. It is true that many of the sellers had been given some compensation for removal; however, several of those who had received compensation had vacated their spots unwillingly, fearing that they would be unable to survive until the erection of the new mall. Thus the old story of urban displacement was continuing. One seller mentioned that the maintenance and the fees would be a lot higher in the new building; effectively, he said, some people would be unable to make it and then would be forced to sell their spot. The pattern was not that hard to detect for some of the vendors: the smaller businesses would gradually be forced out by high rents, rates, and taxes. Even as the municipal corporation and their private promoters were promising better times, the mall was being constructed in such a way that few vendors would be able to survive the rigors of the new economy. The sellers at the market were going the same way as their counterparts have gone in so many countries across the globe. The construction of the shopping mall and the erosion of their way of life were about an exchange relationship informed by new spatial relations. The consumption of specific commodities in specific spaces has become the ticket to a new privatized global

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citizenship for the middle classes. The vendors are the disposable bodies to be cleared out of the way. In creating spaces for consumption, a new regime of social relations is being inaugurated, whereby a majority of the city’s population—both buyers and sellers—will be excluded. “Development projects,” in general, according to Amita Baviskar, “scripts its own success through the critical acts of defining disciplined subjects, and excluding unruly people and awkward places” (281). “ ‘Sustainable development,’ ” Baviskar proposes, “is a project out there for poor peasants to perform, even as other classes continue to increase their sphere of exploitation and consumption. . . . This is not to reify the state as Svengali, mesmerizing audiences through mass manipulation, but to suggest a looser, more contingent pattern of omissions and exclusions that converge to accomplish the project of rule” (306). Baviskar argues that the “project of legitimacy is not shaped by the state alone, but in collaboration with significant others, especially metropolitan audiences” (306). Certainly, the metropolitan classes invest these malls with symbolic capital. They are visible signs of “progress” and class validation. But the “unruly people” will not go gently. It is worth mentioning that almost all the vendors I spoke to were eager to talk. None of them refrained from giving me their names, and they proudly posed for photographs. In order to protect their identities, however, I have omitted their names and their photographs in these accounts. Most were extremely friendly and hoped that I would publicize their stories. Many said that all they wanted was justice and a chance to make a living. They were conscious of their own powerlessness. “Amra ki korbo?” (“What can we do?” or “Is it in our hands?”), several of them said when I asked them how they had reacted to the initial news. The vast majority were very well informed about the changes and the implications of these changes on their lives. They were, as Richard Johnson would put it, able to “produce accounts of who they [were], as conscious political agents, that is, constitute themselves politically” (69). Some spoke with great knowledge about exactly what the new arrangements were supposed to be, but almost every one said that the future was completely uncertain, that there were no guarantees. The narrative of urban displacement embodied in the construction of the Lake Mall mirrors, to some extent, similar stories in “third world” cities around the globe. In the guise of development and modernization, an elaborate act of dispossession is taking place, and this form of dispossession is ref lected in the class-based spatial practices of

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the globalization project. As the stories of the sellers in Lake Market demonstrate, more than mere livelihoods are being endangered. Local economies such as the one holding together the lives of the sellers in Lake Market are being eradicated while their scant dwellings are being sold off to build enterprise zones and housing for higher income groups. In an attempt to create a consuming global citizen, the economy itself is being tied to increasingly tenuous forms of development and global financing. To some extent, the continuing evolution of Kolkata as global city ref lects capitalism’s age-old agenda of creative destruction that has historically led to long-term problems, taking both economic and social forms. In addition, “[h]eightened inter-urban competition produces socially wasteful investments that contribute to rather than ameliorate the over-accumulation problem that lay behind the transition to f lexible accumulation in the first place. . . . Flexible accumulation, in short, is associated with a highly fragile patterning of urban investment and as well as increasing social and spatial polarization of urban class antagonisms” (Harvey, “Flexible Accumulation” 379). After all, the logic of f lexible accumulation is to abandon ship at the slightest hint of trouble. Among the many factors that lead to capital f light is the fact that major urban centers in India are going to experience increasing competition from smaller urban areas where similar kinds of commercial incentives are already being offered. Thus, West Bengal’s massive investment in becoming an international business center while abandoning a majority of its citizens does not bode well for the future. I am reminded of Henri Lefebvre’s words in a different context: “when backward countries move forward they produce ugliness, platitude and mediocrity as though that means progress” (Critique 44). In financial terms, the combination of overinvestment in social and business infrastructure tied to the whims of a global economy is unwise, to say the least. However, when you combine that investment with a decrease in social spending and spatial practices that result in large-scale dispossession, you create the conditions that lead to the possibility of mass upheaval. Indeed, as Harvey puts it in another context, “increasing class polarization (symbolized by the incredible surge in urban poverty surrounding islands of startling and conspicuous wealth) is inherently dangerous. . . . The few who ‘make it’ through informal sector activity cannot compensate for the multitude who won’t” (“Flexible Accumulation” 378). Certainly with Kolkata’s “increasing

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hardening of spatial boundaries between income, language, caste, and religious groups. . . . one could see increased spatial separation between rich and poor in the new enclaves” (Chakravorty 74). Furthermore, Kolkata has the dubious advantage of being the primary metropolis for the eastern region of India. In Chakravorty’s words, it is “the city of last resort for a largely rural population of over 300 million people” (74). While this position ensures a steady supply of reserve labor, it also provides a groundswell of discontent that inevitably accompanies the presence of millions of unemployed. And this discontent is not just limited to the vendors in Lake Market. In their research into lowermiddle-class households in West Bengal, Ganguly-Scrase and Scrase came up with the following conclusions: [E]conomic liberalization in India has a contradictory effect on the lower middle classes. Despite the greater availability of consumer goods in the market, and improved electronic entertainment and global information, many in the study were skeptical of the social benefits, ambiguous toward the supposed material rewards and government propaganda, and highly suspicious toward the idea that foreign investment will improve infrastructure development in West Bengal. (158) A combination of factors—a sharp drop in spending on sanitation and low-income housing, the subsidizing of businesses at the cost of local citizens, rural depopulation, an erosion of workers’ rights, and environmental neglect due to deregulation—threatens to unravel the phantasmagoric text of neoliberal globalization. It is no wonder that Ananya Roy describes the city of “New Communism” as a “project that is not complete or stable” (“The Gentleman’s City” 160). Kolkata, according to Roy, is “contested by those excluded or displaced; it must be serviced by those who must be excluded and displaced . . . It is then a city of crisis, of crisis that must be managed and regulated” (160). And yet the desires of the excluded and the displaced cannot ever be entirely managed. To some extent, what was being contested at the site of the Lake Mall was the battle over citizenship. Arguably, the vendors were standing up not just for their own livelihoods but also for a larger principle of inclusive citizenship: just because their needs and concerns did not match the dictates of the top-down program of liberalization, should their aspirations and livelihoods be cast aside? That was the implied question of many of the vendors. As the current government in West Bengal reels from the effects of the

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recent upheavals in Lalgarh, Singur, and Nandigram and from the increasing activities of the Maoist guerillas, they and their corporate partners might consider the merits of this question and realize that the shopping malls—the new Taj Mahals of neoliberal globalization— might be yet another catalyst for a similar upheaval if there is no room within their walls for all the country’s citizens.

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Afterword

A continually evolving topic such as the construction of the New Indian subject leaves any conclusions contingent on the far-reaching forces of historical change. The ruling Congress Party’s election win in May 2009 and the eclipse of their leftist partners have given the government carte blanche to pursue violent attempts to seize public lands, dispossessing millions of people in the process, especially Adivasis (tribal communities).1 As I write these words, the most prominent news coming out of India is the government’s increasing attacks on Maoists, who are now active in twenty states. Meanwhile, Forbes reports that the number of billionaires in India jumped from 27 in 2008 to 52 in 2009 (“India’s 100 Richest”). The relentless accumulation of wealth in the shadow of continuing deprivation and violence ensures that the resistant, revolutionary subject will not go away, whatever the extent of the government’s draconian policies. My visits to the Lake Market site over the last five years, in fact, have suggested at least a slim possibility of significant resistance even in the midst of the rubble of destroyed shops and livelihoods and even given the conf licts that too often emerge among people with their backs against the wall who find themselves competing for limited space and resources. Despite promises to complete the Lake Mall project in 2006, in 2009 the building was far from complete. The building in 2009 (see fig. A.1) did not show a significant change since 2005, although the main f loor of the building had accommodated some vendors, including a few fish sellers. Many of the vendors I spoke to during my first visit (in 2005) had, by 2009, been permanently displaced from the market; some had been offered money, while others had been pushed out. Early in 2009 I was unable to find the fish seller whom I had spoken to in 2005, as well as some of the other vendors who I had met during my first visit. In 2009, what continued to remain uncertain from the vendors’ point

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Figure A.1 Lake Market, 2009

of view was whether the rent would change, whether customers would keep coming, and whether developers would slowly try to squeeze them out. On the positive side, there had been a significant organizing among some of the vendors, whose cause had been taken up by Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU). Police harassment, according to some of the vendors, had decreased considerably. Although the vendors’ ability to organize demonstrates a consciousness beyond their own individual interests, it is necessary to mention that the vendors in Lake Market do not represent a grand, unified collective. Because of the vendors’ different positions within the market and their varying levels of compensation, they are not necessarily inclined to situate themselves in a unified political category. In fact, during one of my visits in 2009, a loud argument had broken out between two vendors about the space that they had been granted. Walking around the main f loor of the new building, I had noticed that many of the vendors who had returned had been granted much smaller or ill-located spots. A man in his late sixties, a seller of brooms and baskets, had said he had been at Lake Market since the beginning, over forty-five years.

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He had been given a spot on the main f loor of the new building, but he was confined to a secluded corner. It appeared unlikely that anyone would be able to find him, and the notion that he could survive on his meager earnings seemed highly improbable. Given the differences in the vendors’ locations and allotments, it was apparent why they may not always appear unified. What was also true, however, was that all the vendors I met had both a consciousness about their immediate political position and a sense of the larger political and economic context. A discussion about the market itself would segue into an indictment of the high prices of essential commodities or the political “troubles” in rural Bengal. Indeed, the struggles within the city have to be measured against the rebellious forces in Lalgarh, Nandigram, and Singur. The vendors are conscious of their role within a contested narrative in which ideas about democracy, agency, and plurality are being determined. I also found a more determined desire to resist. If all else fails, said one of the sidewalk vendors, “Biplabi korte hobe.” (“We will have to revolt.”) This language of resistance, of rebellion, indicated to me that the dispossession

Figure A.2 Those outside the terms of the debate

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was not going to take place without the vendors fighting back. The vendors’ struggles in Lake Market, in some senses, replicate other conf licts within the nation to forge a more inclusive, democratic notion of citizenship. These efforts may not always be successful, but it is also apparent that the resistant subject will not remain quiet while Brand India promotes its own version of the nation and of citizenship. As I walked through the bustling market with its many vendors and customers in the midst of the gaping, half-completed monument to the New India, I realized that whatever the state or its corporate partners might think about the new Indian subject, those outside the terms of the debate would not quietly go away (see fig. A.2).

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NOT E S

1. Several writers have offered trenchant critiques of neoliberalism in the last several years. Key early works include Samir Amin’s Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (1997) and The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (2004) and Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994). More recent texts of note include Walden Bello’s Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (2005), David Harvey’s A Brief Guide to Neoliberalism (2005) and The New Imperialism (2003), Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy: The Binge and the Hangover That Won’t Go Away (2005), and Neil Smith’s The Endgame of Globalization (2005). 2. The most recent figures for foreign reserves are available at the following site: http://rbidocs. rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/HYMFE040810.pdf. The growth rates can be accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11135197. Sensex numbers can be found at http:// www.bseindia.com/histdata/hindices2.asp, and foreign investment data is available at http:// dipp.nic.in/fdi_statistics/india_FDI_December2009.pdf. 3. Of course, the global economic recession that was finally acknowledged in 2008 has resulted in a few more reservations about liberalization, although the Congress Party’s 2009 electoral victory and the left’s decline in the polls have been seen by the ruling party as a mandate for accelerating the pace of economic reforms. 4. P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought is an invaluable resource, documenting the huge gaps between the metropolitan elite and the rural poor in the New India. 5. These figures are based on the most recent statistics. The statistics on rural poverty can be found in World Bank figures from 2005: . 6. For the figures on access to electricity, see Vijay Modi’s “Improving Electricity Services in Rural India.” 7. During this period, the traumatic partition of the subcontinent was followed by a war with Pakistan. The next few years saw some tumultuous changes as a result of Nehru’s development policies. 8. Much has been written about the “cultural turn” in the humanities, so I will not recount that debate. I would agree with Jameson that with the universalization of capitalism, the distinction between culture and economics has collapsed, but with the codicil that in a transition economy such as the one in contemporary India, the effects of the universal commodity form and the international division of labor, especially as they apply in rural India, are not entirely conterminous with those in more homogenized Western societies. 9. There are of course notable exceptions to this general trend. I will mention just a few relevant titles that have been published in the last fifteen years: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus’s edited anthology

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10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17.

Notes

Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002), Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997), Neil Larsen’s Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (2001), Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999), Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004), Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994), and Gayatri Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). This political narrative is echoed in the world of the secular, popular cinema. Vijay Mishra, the cultural critic, argues that in popular cinema, narratives of the nation may be about the “general psychic repression of the unspeakable moment in recent Indian history: India’s partition” (218). He claims that “Bombay cinema disavows fundamentalism even as it reproduces images that work on the logic of a [Hindu] fundamentalist binary” (230). According to Mishra, “cinema has confirmed the kinds of spectatorial identification with the need for a redemptive history against the demonic Muslim” (233). A complete account of the events leading up to the protests, including documents produced by a group of intellectuals articulating their positions, can be found on the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) website. The archive can be accessed at . The President of India, in his Republic Day address on January 26, 2000, could not ignore the contradictions of the economic ethos that was overpowering the nation. He pointed to the “unabashed vulgar indulgence in conspicuous consumption” as the root of many of the social problems in the country: “There is sullen resentment among the masses against their condition, often erupting in violent forms in several parts of the country . . . Many a social upheaval can be traced to the neglect of the lowest tier of society, whose discontent moves towards the path of violence. Dalits and tribals are the worst affected by all this. . . . Our giant factories rise out of squalor; our satellites shoot up from the midst of the hovels of the poor. . . . A decade of liberalisation has completely ignored the poor and needy. . . . The three-way fast lane of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation has neglected to provide ‘safe pedestrian crossings for the poor’ ” (“The President” 1). Of course, the ongoing conf licts and regional movements, such as in the Northeast and in Kashmir, where ordinary people and rebels continue to fight for greater autonomy, as well as a greater share of national resources, remain a constant reminder of the fragility of the union. To these acts must be added incidents of state-sponsored violence, most notoriously the communal violence unleashed in Gujarat against Muslims in 2002. Sumit Sarkar’s Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (2002) and Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam’s Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (2007) are excellent guides for understanding the interactions between these forces. Instead, quite the opposite has happened. The gap between the rich and the poor has increased; real employment remains elusive; and as for corruption, after economic reforms were instituted, as C. P. Chandrasekar and Jayati Ghosh point out, there was “an increase in the level of corruption, cronyism, and arbitrariness to unprecedented levels. . . . Precious natural resources, hitherto kept inside the public sector, were handed over for a pittance (and alleged ‘kickbacks’) to private firms with dubious objectives. . . . In short, the ‘discipline of the market’ proved to be a chimera” (38–39). Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata in 2000, to better approximate its Bengali pronunciation. It is one of the interesting ways in which state governments across the country have rooted themselves in a reductive link to a so-called tradition while simultaneously selling off or bartering its assets to foreign investors. Bombay has become Mumbai, Madras has become Chennai, and Bangalore is referred to by some as Bengaluru.

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Chapter 1 1. There are, of course, notable exceptions, especially among those who do not identify themselves within an Anglo-American postcolonial tradition. These would include critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Rustom Bharucha, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, K. N. Panikkar, and Sumit Sarkar. All of these critics have examined cultural forms with a special attention to questions of political economy. 2. In his Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Zygmunt Bauman points out the bare essentials of these class contradictions: “half of world trade and more than half of global investment benefit just twenty-two countries accommodating a mere 14 per cent of the world’s population, whereas the forty-nine poorest countries inhabited by 11 per cent of the world’s population receive between them only a 0.5 per cent share of the global product— just about the same as the combined income of the three wealthiest men of the planet. Ninety per cent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of just 1 per cent of the planet’s inhabitants” (6). 3. Shortly before this speech, the BJP had won a massive victory in the state of Gujarat. The significance of this victory was not lost on the BJP, coming as it did after the Godhra massacres of 2002. The state-sponsored pogrom in Gujarat, which saw the murder of three thousand Muslims, made visible the great lie of the reforms and progress. 4. Friedman’s position on neoliberalism is all too well known; thus, I will not elaborate on it here. Outside his many columns in the New York Times, his most comprehensive eulogy on the New India can be found in a recent book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twentyfirst Century. 5. There seems to be no dearth of appalling books about the New India. Leading the list is the patently offensive Think India by Vinay Rai and William Simon, a book written apparently for American businessmen that invites them to extract wealth from the country: “[i]n today’s world, national boundaries remain only for the weak-hearted. The great seekers of wealth look beyond boundaries and nationalities. India welcomes these seekers to its shores” (xv). 6. In an article in the New York Times, Saritha Rai summed up the issues discussed in a meeting of Indian and American CEOs, attended by Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “a need to dismantle Indian commercial barriers, the development of basic infrastructure, a strengthening of intellectual property rights and the building of special economic zones to foster joint ventures with American companies.” Each one of these “trade concerns” is for the benefit of American capital. This is the lay of the land in contemporary globalization. Even while praising India’s democratic traditions, trade talks are precisely about breaking down those traditions. Rai goes on to make a preposterous claim: “India’s thriving economy is lifting millions from poverty” (Rai, “Executives,” C6). What is more important, however, is to note that while the major coverage was about the nuclear agreement, the deals regarding “trade concerns,” which affected the economic well-being of millions of Indians, received scant attention. 7. Although postcolonial governments had implemented progressive land reform laws and provided subsidized food through the Public Distribution System, more than three-quarters of the economy had remained in the private sector. A genuine attempt at wealth distribution had never been attempted, and the major industrial houses such as Tata and Birla had increased their wealth greatly during the so-called nationalized phase of the economy. What instead marked the changes since 1991 was the significant internationalization of the economy. The new economic policies were characterized by a liberalization of foreign trade and import regulations and a massive deregulation of internal markets. As in other developing nations that were subject to the whims of international lending organizations, subsidies for agriculture were cut; income taxes were lowered; public sector units were sold off; industrial

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8.

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

Notes

workers lost many of their rights; and social welfare and poverty alleviation programs were dramatically reduced. Consequently, “out of a total labour force of some 340 million, only 9 million or less than 3 percent are unionized,” and “[t]he number of unemployed reached a staggering 34.85 million in 2002 and is expected to reach 40.47 million in 2007” (Vanaik, “Ironies”). This led to an agreement with the World Bank to carry out many changes in the economy. Of course, such an argument fits in well with the assertion “there is no alternative,” rather than suggesting that the cause and effect pattern of this crisis was connected to a larger adjustment with the forces of global capital. It is important to remember that although 1991 is the conventionally designated moment of official liberalization, precipitated by the budget of then Finance Minister Manmohan Singh, India had taken a large IMF loan in 1981. One measure of poverty that is often ignored by mainstream economists is the actual caloric intake of the population. By this measure, the reality is that in India the “annual absorption of foodgrains per head has fallen from 178 kg. in the three years ending in 1991, to 151 kg. by the three years ending in 2003” (Patnaik 224). P. Sainath also points out that “the absolute number of poor went up by almost 70 million” between 1990 and 1997. This in a phase when GDP growth had picked up.” He concludes that the “poor have not gained from the ‘reforms’ ” (Sainath 163). What mere statistics do not point out, moreover, is what a “Report of the Expert Group on the Estimation of Proportion and Number of Poor” (1989) indicated, i.e., the “items of social consumption such as basic education and health, drinking water supply, sanitation, environmental standards, etc” (349 qtd. in Sainath, Everybody) that determine who is poor. Even though the vast majority of Indians are small-scale utilitarian shoppers, meaning that most people buy toothpaste and bars of soap rather than non-essential items such as television sets, chocolates, or soft drinks, the market has been inundated with high-end luxury items. It is common for pro-development economists to cite an increasing “growth rate” as a way to demonstrate the supposed benefits of globalization to Southern economies. However, as the figure is a simple mean rather than median, it is possible for gross domestic product (GDP) to register a rise even when the wealth of a single owner of a single utility company increases. Thus rise in GDP may have very little to do with actual distribution of wealth. Moreover, “economic growth is based on a regime of capitalist accumulation that fosters conspicuous consumption and an ecologically damaging form of urbanization,” facts that are never mentioned by these same advocates of “growth” (Angotti 13). In Reading Capital, Althusser and Balibar define a social formation as “the complex structure in which more than one mode of production, or set of economic relations, may be combined” (14). In India, this social formation constitutes many tendencies. According to a survey conducted by the Hindustan Times-CNN-IBN, based on conversations with “7,681 people spread across 970 villages in 19 states of the country . . . only 3 per cent Indians had a fair idea of what economic reforms were all about.” Apparently “72 per cent of Indians were unaware of the economic changes that the country had been going through since 1991” (Yadav 13). One has only to see the history of the Congress Party’s ruthless manipulation of religious sentiments and constituents since independence to realize the continuing role of religion in determining state policy. After the Bangladesh war, for instance, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi was proclaimed a “Durga,” the Hindu goddess of destruction. Gandhi and the Congress Party made use of this category, often using religious symbols as a way to bolster her own position as leader. Later Indira Gandhi forged an alliance with the radical elements of the Akali Dal in Punjab in order to keep the regional party from acquiring power. It was those same radical forces, ironically, that ended up being responsible for her assassination. For a fascinating account of the historical significance of the rise of the Hindu right, see

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Aijaz Ahmad’s “On the Ruins of Ayodhya: Communalist Offensive and Recovery of the Secular.” 15. According to George Yudice, “Performativity is based on the assumption that the maintenance of the status quo (i.e., the reproduction of social hierarchies of race, gender, sexuality) is achieved by repeatedly performing norms” (47).

Chapter 2 1. Any discussion of citizenship has to engage the category of the “national,” and under neoliberalism, the national and the global exist in an uneasy dialectic. In Thatcher’s case, for instance, her attack on the trade unions was connected to the notion that they were controlled from the outside—that Arthur Scargill, for example, was a Soviet stooge. In this case, the national was employed to benefit the logic of the market. Likewise, the valorization of the individual citizen in Thatcher’s world view was intrinsically linked to the attack against political collectives, as they were manifested in trade unions, for instance. 2. After the events of 9/11, President George W. Bush and New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani famously illustrated this notion of consumption as citizens’ responsibility: they advised American citizens to go shopping. This was a way they could be patriotic; consumption was a national duty. 3. The paradigmatic neoliberal citizen is a male one, but the gendered subject has a specific role within the dictates of neoliberalism, as I will discuss more fully later in this chapter. 4. Consider the work of the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF). On its website, www. ibef.org, it describes its purpose thus: “the Foundation’s primary objective is to build positive economic perceptions of India globally. It aims to effectively present the India business perspective and leverage business partnerships in a globalising market-place.” In describing its “overall nation branding campaign for India,” it eulogizes the brand: “Achievements. Successes. Growing consuming class driving demand. Vibrant democracy. People who dare to dream. Indians and India have a story to tell. IBEF collects, collates and disseminates accurate, comprehensive and current information on India” (India Brand Equity Foundation). 5. There have been innumerable acts of resistance against the forcible acquisition of land, the removal of vendors from public spaces, and attempts to open multinational retail outlets in different states. Accompanying these acts are the organized Maoist movements and splinter movements across the nation. The specter of these manifold points of resistance belies the triumphalist rhetoric of the state. 6. A recent phenomenon that has attracted worldwide attention is the spate of farmer suicides. By conservative estimates, 150,000 Indian farmers committed suicide during the period 1997–2005 as a direct result of economic reforms. The New Economics Foundation has shown that global growth has not aided the poor. In the 1980s, for every $100 of world growth, the poorest 20 percent received $2.20; by 2001, they received only 60 cents. Clearly, neoliberal growth disproportionately benefits the rich and further impoverishes the poor. 7. India’s National Council of Applied Economic Research (NCAER) has defined the middle class as households with a disposable income of 200,000 to 1 million rupees ($4,380 to $21,890) a year in real 2000 terms. The upper end of that figure would apply to less than 5 percent of the population. 8. In a 2008 visit to a department store in Kolkata, for instance, during my wanderings through this store that occupied all of three f loors, I spotted at least a dozen security personnel. There were at most only four or five shoppers. Meanwhile, on the pavement outside, vendors were selling essentials at far lower prices. There has been a significant rise in

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9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14.

15.

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the private security business. The Times of India reports that there are now almost a million private security guards in India and that the private security industry is growing at about 25 percent a year. This in a country where there were barely half a dozen security companies in the 1970s. Of course, these new forms of citizenship are not merely put in place for the convenience of the overseas resident. These new regulations also make it easier for multinational companies in India to bring in and relocate “Indian” employees from abroad. Since these new “overseas citizens” can enter the country without visas and stay over extended periods of time, the companies are able to circumvent the complicated employment and travel regulations of the past. For instance, a subsidiary of Tata, Tata Tea, now “earns more than two-thirds of its revenue from first-world markets. Tata Tea has been systematically acquiring European and American beverage companies, beginning with UK-based Tetley in 2000” (Kamdar 10). The recent success of Rajkumar Hirani’s Lage Raho Munna Bhai (2006) is one popular instance of the “use” of Gandhi’s legacy in popular culture. The film’s hero, a notorious gangster, reverts to “Gandhigiri,” a means of peaceful resistance to seek solutions to the problems confronting him. But here Gandhi’s methods always have the threat of violence behind the peaceful front in order to meet the gangster’s ends. In the New India, peacemaking in itself is not enough to achieve results. In his analysis of a range of post-2004 election responses, K.C. Suri estimates that there was a “fundamental disconnect between the elite consensus on economic reforms and mass opinions on these questions” (“Economic Reforms”). “India’s labor force is growing at a rate of 2.5 per cent annually, but employment is growing at only 2.3 per cent. Thus, the country is faced with the challenge of not only absorbing new entrants to the job market (estimated at seven million people every year), but also clearing the backlog. Sixty per cent of India’s workforce is self-employed, many of who remain very poor. Nearly thirty per cent are casual workers (i.e. they work only when they are able to get jobs and remain unpaid for the rest of the days). Only about ten per cent are regular employees, of which two-fifths are employed by the public sector. More than ninety per cent of the labour force is employed in the ‘unorganised sector,’ that is, in sectors which don’t provide employees with the social security and other benefits of employment in the ‘organised sector’ ” (“Unemployment in India”). The State of the Nation Survey (CNN/IBN) was conducted by the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS). In January 2007, findings on a different but related issue were collected from “970 villages in 19 states of the country” (Yadav and Kumar, “Economic Reforms” 13). “A report from PricewaterhouseCoopers suggests that electronic-media revenues, including television, could nearly triple from $4.6 billion in 2005 to $12.8 by 2010.” India was expected to have 180 million television households by 2008 (Kamdar 57).

Chapter 3 1. Ghosh’s recent acceptance of the Dan David Prize bestowed upon him by the University of Tel Aviv has, of course, complicated his earlier position. For an impassioned discussion on this subject, see Kafila.org. 2. In At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now, Timothy Brennan lists some of these writers. They include Isabel Allende, Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa, Gabriel García Márquez, Bharati Mukherjee, V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Derek Walcott. 3. Pranav Jani has suggested that the contemporary binary between the cosmopolitan and the national does not necessarily apply to an earlier generation of Indian writers such as

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5.

6.

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9.

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Nayantara Sahgal, Kamala Markandaya, and Bhabani Bhattacharya, who struggled to retain a faith in the nationalist politics of decolonization even as they embraced a form of activist cosmopolitanism. Of course, such advocates generally regard this form of transnationalism as promoting the unregulated movement of capital and goods and greater choices for global consumers. Ghosh, clearly, is not suggesting this sort of transnationalism. However, proposing an alternative transnationalism within the boundaries of existing structural inequities is a project fraught with contradictions. I will discuss this point in greater detail later in the chapter. Ghosh mentions that he was “very happy they printed that piece.” “I was very proud to be included,” he recalls. He adds, “In a sense, they and I came out of a similar moment in the intellectual life of India and that’s really been the connection. The interesting thing is that, in India, historians aren’t really historians and writers aren’t really writers, there’s a kind of fuzziness about these things” (Silva and Tickell 217). Nowhere are the effects of these aspirations more tragic than in the arms race between India and Pakistan. Writing about the nuclear ambitions of these two countries in his essay Countdown, Ghosh points to the myopia that governs such aspirations: “the bomb is much more than a weapon and it concerns matters much larger than a mere defence policy. It is a great vessel filled with all the unfulfilled aspirations and thwarted dreams of the last fifty years—ambitions of a larger and grander place in the world, for a rearrangement of global power, for a re-birth of national pride” (18). Even while conceding Ghosh’s criticisms of the nation-state, it is important to retain the idea, particularly in the era of aggressive globalization, that national sovereignty is a democratic exercise, especially in determining the ownership and distribution of national resources. In Latin America, for example, in recent years, much of the discussion regarding natural resources and indigenous rights has been framed in national terms. In short, the national can still be deployed to oppose a neoliberal global order that seeks to break down national borders with desperate zeal. Ghosh is particularly proud of the reception of this work: “I feel very proud of In an Antique Land because to write, in the same book about Jews, Muslims, and Hindus, and to find a point of entry which wouldn’t automatically antagonize anyone is not an easy thing. The book is very popular in Egypt as well as Israel” (Silva and Tickell 216). A typical example of this rite of dispossession can be seen in the current efforts all over the country to create Special Economic Zones (SEZs) by displacing farmers from their agricultural land. One such instance is the West Bengal government’s proposal to acquire land for the Indonesian Salim group. The land in question is Uttarbhag in West Bengal’s South 24 Paraganas district. This particular episode is worth citing because “some are already comparing” the plight of the villagers “with that of the Bengali refugees settled, driven out and killed in the Sunderbans island of Morichjhãpi after the CPI(M) came to power in the state. ‘This government is planning to make a Morichjhãpi of Uttarbhag. They want to throw us into the Sunderbans and make us easy prey for tigers,’ Paritosh Dey, a fruit seller, says, his eyes fiery” (Bhattacharyya). Ghosh would probably have little sympathy for this statement. He has stated that he doesn’t see himself as “political.” In fact, he is on the record as saying, “I don’t think it is particularly interesting to write about politics” (Silva and Tickell 215). Supriya Chaudhuri provides a succinct account of the Morichjhãpi incident in her review of the novel: “In 1978 a group of refugees f led from the Dandakaranya camp in Madhya Pradesh and came to the island of Morichjhãpi in the Sundarbans with the intention of settling there. They cleared the land for agriculture, and began to fish and farm. But their presence there alarmed the Left Front ministry, who saw it as the first of a possibly endless series of encroachments on protected forest land, and the settlers were evicted in a brutal display of state power in May, 1979.”

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12. Although the Sundarbans is often thought of as merely a habitat for the tiger, it is also home to some of the poorest people in the state of West Bengal. It lacks “basic infrastructure such as electricity, drinking water and health centers.” Moreover, the “region is also referred to as ‘Kolkata’s servant’ (‘Kolkatar jhi’), due to the large number of people from this region working as servants in the houses of Kolkata’s aff luent” ( Jalais). 13. In a communist society, “nobody has one exclusive sphere of activity but each can become accomplished in any branch he wishes, society regulates the general production and thus makes it possible for me to do one thing today and another tomorrow, to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticise after dinner, just as I have in mind, without ever becoming hunter, fisherman, shepherd or critic” (Marx-Engels Reader 160). 14. Perhaps one of the finest accounts of the Morichjhãpi incident is Annu Jalais’s “Dwelling on Morichjhãpi: When Tigers Became ‘Citizens,’ Refugees ‘Tiger Food.’ ” Here she recounts the scale of the massacre: “in all 4,128 families who had come from Dandakaranya to find a place in West Bengal perished of cholera, starvation, disease, exhaustion, in transit while sent back to their camps, by drowning when their boats were scuttled by the police or shot to death in Kashipur, Kumirmari, and Morichjhãpi by police firings.” 15. We see a remarkably similar relationship depicted in Arundhati Roy’s The God of Small Things. In this novel, Roy depicts a doomed relationship between Ammu—a middle-class Syrian Christian—and Velutha—a Dalit. Velutha, like Fokir, is an impossibly virtuous character, representing “natural” forces, while Ammu, not unlike Piya, tries to break free from the conventions of gender and class. 16. There has been some pointed criticism of the work of NGOs in India, but one of the more troubling accusations is that the donors from the North determine the policies of these organizations. All too often, these donors decide what the priorities and needs of the “poor” are or should be. For more on the subject of NGOs, see Arundhati Roy’s “Public Power in the Age of Empire.”

Chapter 4 1. The recent popularization of micro-credit schemes and the promotion of women entrepreneurs fall within this discourse of rights. In this framework, women, rather than transforming the relations of production that oppress them, take up the tools of capitalism to address their poverty. 2. It is worth mentioning that Monsoon Wedding went on to become one of the highest-grossing foreign films in the United States. The film also garnered Nair a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival. 3. The clearest application of this binary in the most recent past, of course, is in the context of the Salman Rushdie affair; however, the controversy over the postponement of Deepa Mehta’s Water also brought to the forefront some of these binaries. Progressive organizations such as the World Socialist Web Site reduced the struggle to that between an artist and the forces of “extremism,” “fundamentalism,” and “communalism.” Those tags ensure that no serious analysis of the controversy is really necessary. The episode was also covered in the Nation, where Stuart Klawans called for support for Mehta. Klawans, despite his impeccable credentials as a thoughtful film critic, characterized the affair in a manner typical of the way these cultural “battles” in the “third world” are reported in the Western media. Klawans refers to Mehta as an “unarmed woman” who is persecuted by “a government, a political party and a religious organization.” 4. The politics of Western film companies using low-paid laborers to construct and clean these “exotic” sets raise many more questions about the transnational production of film. Clearly,

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6.

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Kama Sutra, as product, participates in the unequal cultural and economic transactions that routinely determine relations between wealthy countries and less developed ones. Nair, on being asked whether Hollywood is inaccessible to people of color, had this to say: “It’s not so much who you are, it’s what you’re choosing to do . . . the representations of our own color, our own reality on the international screen is the most important task we set ourselves. No one is going to hand me this opportunity—I create the opportunity to make such films. No one is going to hand it to me” (Melwani 3). Julie, the Chinese mistress, is not very different from her counterpart in the stock Bombay movie. The moll almost always is characterized by her difference from the pure heroine: she wears extravagant make-up, has a “Christian” name such as Rosie, and is sexually promiscuous, but often possesses a heart of gold. In an article on corporate values in the film industry, Subhash Jha quotes Mehta: “It’s the producer’s money at stake. So I try to see the market from his point of view as far as possible.” Water was financed by Ajay Virmani and David Hamilton, both Canada-based businessmen “who share a mutual love for Deepa’s cinema and look at movies as any other money-making venture” ( Jha 8). According to Chadha, Blair, in a letter to her, had written of Bend It Like Beckham, “We loved it, loved it, because this is my Britain.”

Chapter 5 1. I use the terms “underdeveloped” and “third world” with the understanding that these are terms coined by Western economists and policy makers. These are terms with long histories, and I use them partially to undermine the narrative of capitalist “progress” that determine their use. 2. Dunu Roy writes about this process in greater detail in the pages of the activist magazine Combat Law: “Large areas of habitation of India’s urban poor have been forcefully taken over by every government—regardless of political make-up. The groups of people affected are often the ones who have been employed in informal sectors or are self-employed in the tertiary services sector. Their displacement is as much to do with the space they live in as with the work they perform. The areas that they occupied are being transferred into larger private corporate entities such as commercial complexes and residential developments. These units are also often coupled with labour-replacing devices ranging from automatic tellers and computer-aided machines to vacuum cleaners and home delivery services, thus eliminating the work earlier done by the lower rungs of the urban population. While the driving force behind these changes is manifestly the new globalised economy, it is offered on an environmental platter of ‘cleanliness’ and ‘beautification’. In vicious combination these three trends are changing the urban landscape from ‘homes’ to ‘estate ownerships’ in the name of liberalisation, privatisation and globalisation.” 3. According to C. Chandramouli, “the basic characteristics of slums are—dilapidated and infirm housing structures, poor ventilation, acute over-crowding, faulty alignment of streets, inadequate lighting, paucity of safe drinking water, water logging during rains, absence of toilet facilities and non-availability of basic physical and social services. The living conditions in slums are usually unhygienic and contrary to all norms of planned urban growth and are an important factor in accelerating transmission of various air and water borne diseases” (82). A bustee, according to Chakravorty, is an “inferior slum. There are at least 2,000 bustees in Calcutta city, and in the metropolitan area the total bustee population was estimated to be 3 million” (76). Slum residents usually have some rights to the land, but “squatter” settlements have little or no rights to their piece of the soil.

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4. The ironies of this vision were hopelessly exposed during the July 2005 rains. According to reports, the downpours caused massive disruptions partly because “the storm drain system, much of it built a century ago, has been clogged with garbage. The shanties of the poor as well as the thrash of the rich, have blocked gutters and creeks. Mangrove swamps, which act as nature’s bathtub during the rainy season, have been built over. A river that once allowed storm water to be carried down to the Arabian Sea has since been pinched by the construction of a new road that is to connect a northern suburb to mid-town Mumbai” (Sengupta, “Torrential” A3). Such are the fruits of development. 5. In a much-publicized initiative in 1996, “Operation Sunshine,” fifty thousand hawkers were removed from the city’s main streets shortly before a visit by British Prime Minister John Major. 6. This, of course, is part of the urban competition syndrome, which is a significant element of liberalization. Information technology has been heralded as the pathway to the global future, offering immense possibilities for all of India’s citizens. However, the reality is more sobering. According to a report by the California-based research institute Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy, the “idea that the information technology boom in India benefits the poor is a myth.” Raj Patel, the report’s main author, reminds us that while “both the World Bank and the Indian government are keen to play up the success of the information technology industry and its role as a path to a new era of prosperity,” it is important to remember, “Information technology only contributes 2 percent of total GDP and employs fewer than one million people.” More than “230 million people are employed in the agricultural sector” in India, and they are “unlikely to benefit directly from the boom” (qtd. in Michael). 7. Among the many other “incentives” offered are the prospect of hiring “fresh graduates” at salaries that are 10–15 percent lower than in other metropolitan areas. Most importantly, however, ITES companies have been given special “Public Utility Service” provider status. This provision allows the following privileges: “permission for women to work at night, permission to run three shifts irrespective of national holidays, relaxation in building and zoning laws, exemption from zoning laws for purposes of regulations, exemption from statutory power cuts and exemption from purview of West Bengal Pollution Control Act.” Software Technology Parks of India—http://www.kol.stpi.in/advantages_in_bengal.html. Moreover, these companies are allowed self-certification in area such as the Minimum Wages Act, Contract Labour Act, Workmen’s Compensation Act, and Water and Air Pollution Act. In short, these companies are going to be allowed to regulate themselves in such areas as workers’ rights and environmental laws. IT and BPO (Business process outsourcing) employees will not be considered blue-collar workers and will not be compelled to join strikes. The government has prepared special IT stickers (similar to the ones doctors put on their cars) so that these cars can pass unhindered during strike situations. The West Bengal government has also removed IT from the Shops and Establishment Act so that these industries can work nonstop (S. Prasad 66). 8. The term pablik refers to a “street” collective that is often viewed as outside the sphere of social or state control. It captures the democratic spirit of the crowd, ungovernable and carnivalesque. 9. Organizations such as McKinsey & Company have been at the forefront of the many privatization projects around the world, providing the ideological economic logic for globalization. In its publication, the McKinsey Quarterly, the following “barriers” are identified as being detrimental to the growing Indian economy: “myriad regulations governing products and markets, distortions in the market for land, and widespread government ownership of businesses.” In short, any attempt to regulate private ownership is viewed by McKinsey & Company as a barrier to growth. The article goes on to claim that “India’s economy could be the fastest growing in the world—and the country’s citizens twice as well off—if its policy makers embraced a deeper, faster process of economic reform” (Di Lodovico et al.)

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10. Both photographs can be found in the “Mall of Southern Delight” article from January 17, 2005, and archived on the Telegraph’s website. As of August 6, 2010, the link to the article was . 11. Although these may seem like small amounts in Western terms, one must remember that in India 75 percent of the population live on under $2 per day; 42 percent live on under $1.25 per day.

Afterword 1. The seizure of tribal lands in Orissa for the construction of a steel plant by the Korean company Posco is just one example of this continuous rite of dispossession, although even in this instance, the people of the region have fought a spirited battle to retain their land against overwhelming odds.

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I N DE X

Advani, L. K., 82 Ahmad, Aijaz, 46, 115, 128, 143, 215, 217, 219 Ambani, Mukesh, 28, 29 Amin, Samir, 53, 215 Appadurai, Arjun, 112, 152 and Carol Breckenridge, 7, 8, 10, 42, 195 Arrighi, Giovanni, 215 Ashby, Justine, 173 Asian Development Bank, 3 Azmi, Shabana, 33 Babri Mosque (Masjid), 4, 27, 39, 47, 52, 82 Bachchan, Amitabh, 30 Corporation, 14 Bangalore, 13, 150, 197, 216 Bartolovich, Crystal, 53 and Neil Lazarus, 9, 215 Bauman, Zygmunt, 217 Baviskar, Amita, 206 Bello, Walden, 215 Bengal, 109, 181, 213 Bengali Renaissance, 108 Bhaan, Shareen, 145 Bhabha, Homi, 112, 118, 152, 157, 158 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 1, 31, 37, 217 and the Babri Mosque (Masjid), 4, 27, 39, 47, 52, 82

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embracing privatization, 16, 33, 86 in Gujarat, 27, 81, 216 and the new Indian citizen/subject, 4, 16, 19, 21, 27, 29, 53, 65, 80, 88, 89 promoting Hindutva, 19, 27, 28, 47, 52, 82, 87 and the Rashtriya Seva Sangh (RSS), 84 in relation to the middle class, 16, 36, 47, 84, 88, 89 and secularism, 10, 16, 34, 47–49, 117, 155, “shining India,” 6, 15, 35, 36, 51, 52, 65 swadeshi, 36, 49, 80, 83, 86, 88 and transnational productions, 80, 155, 165, 172 use of advertising, 35, 36 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 27, 28, 29, 35, 82 Vision Document, 10, 19, 53, 66, 78, 80, 81, 85, 88, 94, 98, 103, 156 Bharucha, Rustom, 156, 217 Bhatt, Mahesh, 166 Bhattacharjee, Buddhadeb, 183, 190, 192 Blair, Tony, 73, 173, 175, 223 Bollywood, 172, 177, 198 Bombay First, 188 Bombay Stock Exchange (Sensex), 2, 215 Bourdieu, Pierre, 59, 60, 187

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240

Index

bourgeois, 11, 53, 55, 78, 114, 121, 145, 168 bourgeoisie, 51, 108, 112, 114, 115, 183 Brennan, Timothy At Home in the World, 110, 216, 220 and cosmopolitanism, 111, 112 “The Economic Image,” 10 Wars of Position, 111 Britain, 2, 107, 154, 172, 173, 175, 177, 178, 189, 223 Bush, George W., 32, 173, 217, 219 Business Week, 34 Cairo, 119, 122, 123 Center for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS), 216, 220 Chadha, Gurinder, 20, 146, 151, 154, 173, 179, 180, 223 Bend it Like Beckham, 154, 172, 173, 175, 178, 223 Bride and Prejudice, 154 Chakrabarti, Anjan and Stephen Cullenburg, 24, 45, 46 Chakrabarti, Ashish, 193 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 119 Chakravarti, Uma, 82 Chakravorty, Sanjoy, 189, 190, 191, 192, 208, 223 Chambers, Claire, 126, 127 Chatterjee, Bankim Chandra, 108, 109 Chhattisgarh, 57 Chow, Rey, 118, 158 citizenship, 6, 84, 88, 105, 125, 197, 214 and the commodity, 64 and consumerism, 21, 25, 62, 63, 72, 75, 76, 104, 196, 197, 208, 214 cosmopolitanism, 125 crisis, 16 labor, 9, 25 New Indian citizen/subject, 24–28, 44, 50, 59, 61, 62, 65–69, 73, 76–80, 96, 105, 125, 200 Non-resident Indian (NRI), 91 Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), 4, 220

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Person of Indian Origin (PIO), 4, 13 privatization, 59, 88, 205, 206 transnational, 73, 74, 180 see also subjectivity Cohen, Stephen, 34 Comaroff, Jean and John, 25, 44 commodity, 7, 29, 44, 46, 52, 61, 68, 74, 116, 123, 130, 138, 148, 149, 150, 157, 158, 161, 162, 165, 168, 169, 172, 178, 186, 187, 195, 196, 205, 213, 215 advertising, 5, 19, 30, 45, 64, 69–73, 80, 96, 97, 98–101, 168 media, 5, 18, 42, 45, 63–65, 72, 80, 98, 138, 156 privatization, 6, 42, 64, 156, 184, 185 television, 18, 80 communism, 36, 38, 57, 111, 114, 192, 208, 222 Congress Party, 1, 33, 38, 49, 83, 188, 211, 215 advertising, 2, 3, 36, 80 bourgeois, 51 consumerism, 3, 16, 21, 51, 82 crisis, 16, 51, 82, 218 new Indian citizen/subject, 16, 21, 48, 214 privatization, 16 see also secularism consumer(s), 7, 12, 14, 19, 20, 62, 63, 66–72, 75, 77, 79, 80, 85, 89, 91, 95, 97, 103, 104, 127, 144, 146–50, 179, 186, 191, 221 bourgeois, 11, 53, 55, 78, 114, 121, 145, 168 privatization, 39, 64, 73, 88, 156, 193, 225 see also commodity, consumerism, consumption consumerism, 3, 4, 16, 19, 20, 26, 39, 51, 52, 57, 62, 63, 75–77, 82, 85, 96, 98, 112, 168, 193, 195, 200, 208 see also commodty, consumer(s), consumption

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Index consumption, 3, 6, 8, 13, 19, 21, 25, 29, 43–46, 61, 63, 67–77, 86, 92, 97, 98, 104, 110, 147, 149, 152–57, 161, 162, 173, 186, 194–97, 205, 206, 216–19, 222 Corrigan, Phillip and Derek Sayer, 62 Cosmopolitanism, 116, 124, 131 Bengal, 109, 181, 213 bourgeois, 115 citizenship, 20, 220, 221 consumerism, 75, 76, 123, 194 language of, 108, 109, 110, 112, 113 New Indian citizen/subject, 20, 121, 129 in the present, 8, 108, 110–14, 117, 122, 125, 156, 164 transnational, 120 see also Ghosh, Amitav crisis, 44, 50, 112, 118, 140, 141, 150, 189 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 10, 16, 19, 47, 51–53, 82, 84 Congress Party, 16, 51, 82, 218 economic liberalization, 16, 19, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 58, 82, 208, 218 New India, 8–10, 16, 19, 20, 23, 40, 46, 51, 58, 82, 94 Cvetkovich, Ann and Doug Kellner, 152 Dalits, 38, 45, 49, 77, 96, 216, 222 decolonization, 38, 58, 64, 88, 109, 110–14, 126, 221 decolonization movements, 112–14 Delhi, 80, 93, 132, 170, 188, 197 Desai, Jigna, 151, 166 Desai, Manisha, 148 diaspora, 4, 11, 12, 13, 18, 20, 47, 74, 84, 111, 118, 146, 153, 154, 157, 171, 178, 180 discrimination, 35, 146, 155, 175 Dixon, Robert, 118, 126 Doval, Nikita, 145 Dutt, Michael Madhusudhan, 108

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241

Ebert, Roger, 160 economic liberalization, 12–14, 49, 68, 76, 81, 83, 85, 130, 191, 200, 217 advertising, 2, 3, 19, 24, 26, 30, 35, 36, 45, 64, 69, 70, 71, 89, 103, 104 crisis, 16, 19, 40, 46, 47, 51, 52, 58, 82, 208, 218 labor, 1, 6, 18, 28, 30–32, 45, 46, 56, 60, 77, 104, 184, 187, 188, 190, 192, 208, 215, 218, 224 media, 2, 4, 16, 18, 26, 30–35, 45, 65, 70, 89, 95, 103, 146, 194 and privatization, 6, 16, 17, 32, 33, 39, 40, 42, 64, 86, 156, 184, 185, 193, 225 resistance to, 1, 4, 6, 18, 19, 26, 27, 47, 56, 69, 104, 184, 201 television, 3, 18, 40, 103–104, 145, 218 see also economic reforms economic reforms, 1–5, 8, 9, 12–21, 26–28, 32, 35–41, 49, 64, 66, 67, 70, 78, 81, 83–88, 94, 98, 104, 129, 135, 146, 148, 189, 190, 215–20, 225 see also economic liberalization Emaar MGF, 93 Engels, Friedrich, 114 English language, 66, 72, 79, 111 Fair and Lovely, 99–104, 179 feminism, 13, 20, 98, 146, 147, 151, 159, 166, 170, 171, 172, 177, 178, 180 see also women Fernandes, Leela, 44, 45, 67, 68, 71, 72, 79, 88, 98, 104, 150 fetishization, 23, 45, 46, 51, 52, 66, 88, 158, 171, 186, 195–97 Food First Institute for Food and Development Policy, 224 Foreign Direct Investment (FDI), 35, 39, 75, 215 Freight Equalization Policy, 189 Friedman, Thomas, 31, 32, 33, 128, 144, 151, 217 Fukuyama, Francis, 95

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242

Index

G8 nations, 185 Gandhi, Indira, 38, 57, 218 Gandhi, Leela, 120 Gandhi, Mahatma, 64, 76, 78, 79, 167 Gandhi, Rajiv, 1, 33, 39 Gandhi, Sonia, 36 Ganguly-Scrase, Ruchira, and Timothy J. Scrase, 208 Geertz, Clifford, 122, 123 Ghosh, Amitav In an Antique Land (IAAL), 16, 20, 109, 110, 116–23, 125, 127, 129–35, 140, 144, 221 Calcutta Chromosome, 109 The Circle of Reason, 109, 116, 132 and the Commonwealth Foundation, 107, 108 and cosmopolitanism, 16, 108–17, 120–44 Countdown, 108, 116, 221 The Glass Palace, 107, 109, 116 The Hungry Tide (THT), 20, 109, 110, 130, 132, 134, 140, 144 and language, 111–15, 123, 124, 132–39 and modernity, 108, 110, 111, 125, 134 and religion, 109, 116, 117, 122–25, 128, 129, 133–35, 144 The Sea of Poppies, 109 Shadow Lines, 109, 116, 124, 126, 132, 135 slavery, 117, 121, 122 and technology, 124, 131, 133, 139, 143 “The Testimony of My Grandfather’s Bookcase,” 109 and transnational civic space, 109, 110, 113, 120, 128, 129, 131, 135, 143 Ghosh, Bishnupriya, 111 Ghosh, Jayati, 45, 216 Giddens, Anthony, 73 Gidwani, Vinay, 200 Gilroy, Paul, 112, 152 the global, 3, 17, 29, 56–58, 64, 69, 70–103, 132, 133, 151, 219 see also globalization

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globalization, 34, 37, 49, 53, 54, 66, 81, 83, 101, 111, 120, 123–26, 132, 178, 180, 183, 203, 207, 209, 217, 218 citizenship, 6, 24, 44, 50, 59, 62, 72, 76, 84, 88, 105, 125, 196, 197, 208, 214, 220 consumerism, 7, 11, 20, 44–46, 62, 57, 72, 76, 85, 98, 144, 150, 186, 193–95, 208, 221, 225 labor, 5, 7, 41, 45, 46, 55, 137, 184, 187–88, 192, 198, 208 middle class, 45, 62, 72, 90, 98, 184, 192, 193 privatization, 58, 90, 151, 184, 185, 193, 225 resistance, 7, 11, 20, 44, 57, 58, 110, 113, 131, 142, 143, 144, 184 see also the global Gopinath, Gayatri, 169, 176, 177 Gramsci, Antonio, 26, 43, 115, 116, 128, 129 and Italian cosmopolitanism, 115, 116 Grewal, Inderpal, 117, 119, 123 and Caren Kaplan, 153, 180 Guha, Ranajit, 118, 126, 217 Gujarat, 27, 81, 216 massacre in, 4, 217 Gulzar, Meghna, 145 Hall, Stuart, 156 Hansen, Thomas, 27 Harriss-White, Barbara, 41, 45, 48, 51, 55, 148 Harvey, David, 17, 56, 151, 186, 207, 215 hegemony, 4, 5, 16, 19, 24–26, 42–44, 53, 68, 71, 79, 104, 108, 112, 113, 118, 128, 129, 144, 172, 178, 180 Henwood, Doug, 215 heteronormativity, 173, 176, 177 The Hindu, 34, 95, 172 Hinduism, 8, 10, 13, 14, 16, 27, 47, 49–51, 82–88, 96, 108, 125, 127, 134, 141, 152, 155, 156, 165, 166, 169, 218 Hindutva, 19, 27, 28, 47, 52, 82, 87 Hollywood, 154, 164, 223

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Index homophobia, 176 homosexuality, 155, 166, 176, 177 Human Development Index, 2, 90 India, independence of, 4, 5, 14, 36, 38–40, 58, 77, 88, 108, 130, 169, 189, 218 India Today, 36, 79, 82, 94, 95, 96, 98 Indian Express, 35, 165 Indian Stock Exchange, 36 Indian Supreme Court, 166, 187 Information Technology Enabled Services (ITES), 190, 224 International Monetary Fund (IMF), 14, 17, 52, 54, 82, 148, 185, 218 Jameson, Fredric, 7, 11, 12, 151, 215 Jani, Pranav, 220 Kanakpura, 57 Kargil, 4, 35 Kashmir, 4, 47, 216 Keogh, Tom, 160 Kerala, 15, 34, 57 Khare, Harish, 34 Kolkata (Calcutta), 93, 184, 190, 199, 224 Calcutta Metropolitan Development Authority (CMDA), 192 Calcutta Municipal Corporation (CMC), 198, 201, 205 Communist Party of India (CPI) [Marxist], 143, 189, 221 consumerism, 20–21, 91, 92, 191–97, 200, 208, 216–19, 222 globalization, 20, 90, 142, 188, 192–95, 198, 207, 208 public sphere, 29, 48, 49, 52, 195 South City, 92 see also Lake Mall, Lake Market Kripalani, Manjeet, 34, 40 Kumar, Amitava, 153, 157 Lake Mall, 198, 200, 206, 208, 211 Lake Market vendors in, 184, 196–208, 211–14, 219

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243

Latin America, 221 Lawrence, David, 173 Lean, David, 161 Lefebvre, Henri, 196, 197, 207 Left Front, 188, 190, 191, 221 Lenin, Vladimir, 112, 143 Lokniti, 80, 95 Lowe, Lisa and David Lloyd, 148, 150 Luce, Edward, 31, 32 Mandel, Ernest, 50, 55 Marx, Karl, 17, 114, 115, 183, 195, 197 The Communist Manifesto, 114, 183 and Friedrich Engels, 114, 183 The Genesis of Capital, 54 The German Ideology, 135 Grundrisse, 196 and the internationalization of capital, 115 Marxism, 9, 38, 114, 188, 192 masculinity, 146, 164, 169 Masih, Donna Catherine, 145 Maslin, Janet, 160 Mazzarella, William, 8, 78 McKinsey & Company, 188, 192, 224 Mehta, Deepa, 20, 146, 151, 156–58, 169–73, 177–80 Earth, 154 Fire, 16, 145, 154, 155, 159, 160, 162, 165–68, 179 Water, 15, 223 Young Indiana Jones, 154 Menon, Nivedita, 50 andAditya Nigam, 216 Mercer, Kobena, 158 middle class, 12, 13, 17, 39, 40, 60, 61, 67, 68, 105, 134, 140, 144, 169, 184, 191–93, 199, 200 advertising, 3, 36, 45, 64, 69–73, 79, 89, 90, 97–104, 168 BJP, 16, 36, 47, 84, 88, 89 media, 16, 45, 63, 72, 79, 89, 94–98, 103, 146, 222 television, 3, 73, 79, 97–100, 103, 104

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244

Index

middle class—Continued transnational, 62, 73, 74, 75, 90, 97, 146, 149, 222 Mishra, Pankaj, 30, 31 Mishra, Vijay, 216 Modi, Narender, 81 Modi, Vijay, 215 Mongia, Padmini, 26 Morichjhãpi, 130, 132, 134, 135, 141, 221, 222 Mughal(s), 164, 165 Mukherjee, Subrata, 200 Mumbai (Bombay), 4, 13, 34, 57, 83, 152, 155, 178, 187, 188, 194, 216, 223, 224 Munshi, Shoma, 98, 102 Muslim(s), 45, 96, 125, 141, 167, 169, 216, 221 and the BJP, 49, 83, 165, 217 Nair, Mira, 20, 146, 151, 156, 158, 164, 170–73, 177–80 Kama Sutra, 154, 155, 157, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163, 165, 168, 223 Mississippi Masala, 154 Monsoon Wedding, 154, 222 The Namesake, 154 Salaam Bombay, 154, 162 Vanity Fair, 154 Nandigram, 4, 15, 57, 193, 209, 213 Naples, Nancy, 147, 148 National Democratic Alliance (NDA), 35 Nayar, Baldev Raj, 84, 85 Nayar, Narendra, 188 Nehru, Jawaharlal, 16, 38, 49, 64, 76, 78, 215 neoliberalism, 2, 10, 24, 31, 33, 35, 38, 66, 76, 87, 91, 102, 174, 177, 209, 217, 221 bourgeois, 78 citizenship, 67, 74, 181, 219 commodity, 18, 30, 42, 44–46, 61, 64, 65, 69, 73, 74, 80, 96, 97, 116, 130, 138, 148, 149, 165, 172, 182–86, 215

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labor, 1, 18, 25, 30, 32, 41, 45, 46, 60, 63, 97, 137, 147–49, 192, 208, 215 middle class, 39, 40, 45, 47, 60–64, 69, 73, 74, 89, 95, 97, 146, 149, 192, 200 privatization, 18, 29, 32, 39, 40, 42, 58, 59, 73, 86, 173, 185 public sphere, 29, 48, 49, 52, 195 and resistance to, 1, 4, 6, 7, 11, 15, 18–21, 26–29, 42, 44, 47, 56–58, 69, 88, 104, 110–13, 131, 140–44, 152, 156, 166, 181, 184, 201, 211, 213, 219, 220 transnational, 5, 7, 9, 14, 20, 42, 55–58, 62, 73–75, 80, 90, 97, 108–10, 117, 120, 123, 129, 131, 135, 143, 146, 147, 149, 151–58, 164–67, 172, 180, 223 New Delhi, 31, 37, 93, 137, 142, 159, 167, 170 the New India, 12, 31, 33, 37, 38, 43, 48, 65, 68, 130, 146, 179, 180, 200, 214, 217 advertising, 2, 3, 19, 24, 26, 30, 35, 64, 70, 93 Bombay Stock Exchange (Sensex), 2, 215 crisis, 8, 9, 10, 16, 19, 20, 23, 40, 46, 51, 58, 82, 94 Indian Stock Exchange, 36 International Monetary Fund, 17, 82 labor, 6, 7, 9, 15, 18, 30, 32, 41, 46, 55, 137, 149, 220 and Maoist response to, 4, 15, 69, 209, 211, 219 privatization, 6, 16, 17, 18, 29, 32, 39, 40, 42, 58, 64 and resistance to, 4, 6, 7, 11, 15, 18–21, 26, 27, 29, 42, 57, 58, 131, 144, 201, 220 WTO, 34 see also shopping mall(s), World Bank new Indian citizen/subject, 23 BJP, 4, 16, 19, 21, 27, 48, 53, 65, 80, 88, 89 bourgeois, 11, 53, 55, 78, 145

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Index commodity, 5, 6, 19, 29, 44, 46, 63–65, 80, 96, 130, 138 consumerism, 4, 12, 14, 16, 19, 21, 26, 29, 43, 44, 46, 62–68, 79, 80, 88, 89, 95, 97, 104, 146 globalization, 5, 11, 44, 46, 50, 53–58, 76, 137, 203, 214 labor, 5, 6, 9, 15, 46, 56, 63, 104, 147, 204 middle class, 12, 16, 47, 63, 79, 88, 89, 97, 104, 146 neoliberalism, 11, 26, 29, 46, 57, 58, 63, 65, 76, 80, 89, 96, 137, 146 resistance, 4, 6, 11, 15, 19, 21, 26, 27, 29, 44, 56–58, 88, 104 transnational, 5, 9, 14, 56–58, 80, 129 New York film festival, 155, 166 New York Times, 30, 31, 36, 101, 151, 160, 166, 192, 217 Newsweek, 2, 32 Nigam, Aditya, 39, 57, 216 Nilekani, Nandan, 31 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 98 non-governmental organizations (NGOs), 131, 142, 143, 222 Non-resident Indian (NRI), 12, 13, 74, 89, 90, 91 The Observer, 2 Ong, Aihwa, 62, 63 Other Backward Classes (OBC), 15, 77 Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI), 4, 74, 220 Özkan, Derya and Robert Foster, 72, 74, 75, 76, 78 Pakistan, 52, 64, 189, 215, 221 Pan-Africanism, 113 Parry, Benita, 216 Perry, Alex, 32, 33 Person of Indian Origin (PIO), 4, 13, 74 Pizza Hut, 72, 73, 75 Pokhran, 84 Projansky, Sarah, 173

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245

public culture, 5, 7, 27, 29, 43, 45, 64, 197 Purie, Aroon, 94, 95, 96 Quinn, Declan, 160 racism, 175, 177, 178 Radhakrishnan, R., 151 Rajagopal, Arvind, 8, 49, 52 Rashtriya Seva Sangh (RSS), 84 Reagan, Ronald, 39, 60, 62, 185 reterritorialization, 150, 152 Rose, Charlie, 32, 33 Rosedale, 90, 91, 93 Roy, Ananya, 189, 190, 191, 192, 208 Roy, Arundhati, 111, 222 Roy, Dunu, 223 Said, Edward Culture and Imperialism, 216 Orientalism, 127, 159, 172 Sainath, P., 215, 218 Sarkar, Sumit, 216, 217 Sassen, Saskia, 187 secularism, 96, 144, 216 and communalism, 10, 43, 44 cosmopolitanism, 16, 117, 130, 156 crisis of, 8, 10, 23, 44 and democracy, 34, 38 economic liberalization, 48–50 and fundamentalism, 9, 48, 128 and Hindutva, 47, 49 modernism, 50, 78, 109, 126, 155 and socialism, 16 and women’s rights, 156 see also Hinduism Sena, Shiv, 155, 165 Seth, Vikram, 18, 107, 108, 111 sexuality, 95, 219 in advertising, 101, 103 in film, 147, 150, 151, 155, 157, 160, 161, 164, 165, 168, 170, 173, 176, 177, 179 shopping mall(s), 21, 26, 33, 70, 72, 89, 92, 184, 187, 191, 193–205, 209 see also Lake Mall

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246

Index

Shourie, Arun, 35, 41 Sidwa, Bapsi, 166 Singapore, 134, 152, 178 Singh, Jaswant, 84 Singh, Manmohan, 2, 33, 36, 37, 41, 218 Smith, Neil, 60, 215 socialism, 16, 33, 38, 41, 49, 55, 60, 79, 112, 190 Society for Innovation and Entrepreneurship (SINE), 34, 40 South Asia, 7, 146 independence of, 112 Sparke, Matthew, 66, 73, 74 Spivak, Gayatri, 54, 118, 126, 153, 171, 172, 216 Steinem, Gloria, 166 Subaltern Studies historians, 118, 126 project, 118 subjectivity, 13, 18, 23, 24, 46, 65, 66, 80, 88, 103, 104, 137, 140, 162, 179, 180 commodity, 46, 138, 162, 178 neoliberalism, 18, 24, 46, 65, 66, 137, 180 resistance, 18, 88, 104, 140, 181 see also citizenship Sunderbans, 131–34, 142, 221 Taj Mahal, 167, 170, 202, 209 Tata, 4, 77, 193, 217, 220 Telangana, 57 The Telegraph, 192, 194, 198, 199, 201, 204, 225 television (TV), 18, 40, 73, 145, 154, 167, 218, 220 and advertising, 3, 66, 79, 80, 155 and gender, 96–104 Tharoor, Shashi, 34, 35, 108 Thatcher, Margaret, 30, 39, 59, 60, 61, 62, 69, 78, 105, 173, 185, 219 the Third International, 113 Time magazine, 32, 33 The Times of India, 30, 42, 79, 220 Timmons, Heather, 101, 102, 103

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Trotsky, Leon, 55 Tsing, Anna, 15, 51, 186 Turkey, 74, 75 United Arab Emirates (UAE), 152 United Kingdom, 12, 60, 152, 220 United Nations, 2, 34, 90, 148 United States, 2, 12, 34, 60, 91, 111, 112, 125, 136, 146, 152, 155, 158, 174, 175, 178, 194, 222 Vajpayee, Atal Bihari, 27, 28, 29, 35, 82 Van Gelder, Lawrence, 166 Vanaik, Achin, 10, 50, 51, 218 The Week, 145, 147, 148, 165, 179 the West, 29, 34, 55, 67, 74, 76, 85, 90, 91, 92, 109, 110, 117, 118, 122, 125, 128, 141, 143, 144, 146, 149, 153, 154, 156, 158, 159, 179, 180, 184, 185, 187, 198, 215, 225 and capitalism, 54, 62, 75, 104, 129 firms in, 43, 77, 124, 139 and malls, 26, 71, 77, 193 and media, 2, 30, 32, 48, 157, 161, 166–72, 223 publishing houses in, 18, 111 and values, 13, 69, 72, 99, 100, 107, 111, 119, 129, 132, 136, 160–62, 196, 201 and view of India, 31, 32, 35 West Bengal, 4, 15, 57, 132, 183, 188, 190, 193, 207, 208, 221, 222, 224 Williams, Raymond, 6, 29 women and independence, 101, 145, 149, 166, 169, 173 and sexual liberation, 20, 98, 103, 166, 168, 169, 172, 174, 176, 178, 180 Women’s Own, 59 World Bank, 14, 18, 54, 82, 148, 153, 185, 215, 218, 224 Zakaria, Fareed, 32, 33, 34, 41

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