Globalization on the Ground: New Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India

Globalization on the Ground

Globalization on the Ground Media and the Transformation of Culture, Class, and Gender in India

Steve Derné

Copyright © Steve Derné, 2008 All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. First published in 2008 by SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd B-1/ I-1 Mohan Cooperative Industrial Area Mathura Road, New Delhi 110 044, India SAGE Publications Inc 2455 Teller Road Thousand Oaks, California 91320, USA SAGE Publications Ltd 1 Oliver’s Yard, 55 City Road London EC1Y 1SP, United Kingdom SAGE Publications Asia-Pacific Pte Ltd 33 Pekin Street #02-01 Far East Square Singapore 048763 Published by Vivek Mehra for SAGE Publications India Pvt Ltd, typeset in 10.5/12.7 pt Adobe GaramondPro by Excellent Laser Typesetters, Delhi and printed at Chaman Enterprises, New Delhi. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Derné, Steve, 1960– Globalization on the ground: media and the transformation of culture, class, and gender in India/by Steve Derné. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. 1. Middle class men—India—Attitudes. 2. Middle class—India—Attitudes. 3. Middle class—India—Social conditions. 4. Sociology, Urban—India. I. Title HT690.I4D47 ISBN:

305.38'96220954—dc22

2008

978-81-7829-826-9 (HB)

The SAGE Team: Elina Majumdar, Maneet Singh, Amrita Saha and Trinankur Banerjee

2008015636

Contents

Preface Acknowledgements

7 13

1. Introduction

15

2. Culture, Structure, and Psyche: Understanding Globalization and Cultural Change

58

3. Making the Transnational Middle Class in India

90

4. Cultural Continuities and Active Resistance: Gender and the Making of the Indian Middle Class

127

5. Changing Cultural Orientations

162

6. Globalizing Gender Culture

173

7. Conclusion

200

Epilogue: The Effects of Economic and Cultural Changes, 2001–07 References Index About the Author

212 219 232 244

Preface

When I returned in 2001 to the Indian city of Banaras for the first time in 14 years, I immediately saw signs of the city’s increasing global connections. In 1987, making a long-distance phone call meant trudging out to the telegraph office, where one often had to sleep for hours on the hard chairs waiting for a trunk line to Delhi. By 2001, some parts of the city had Internet service on every block and connections were usually trouble-free. At Rs 30 an hour (less than US$ 1), an Internet connection was cheaper than a moderately priced movie ticket, and not much more than the cost of an air letter to the USA. An hour’s connection via Internet in 2001 was cheaper than a short long-distance phone call to Delhi had been just 14 years earlier. Only one Hollywood film played in Banaras over the 15 months that I lived in the city from 1986 to 1987, and it failed to attract large audiences to the minor, dusty, back-alley theatre in which it ran for just a week. Fourteen years later, Hollywood films played in well-appointed theatres in runs that sometimes lasted for months. In 1986 and 1987, state-run television programming still enjoyed a monopoly. During those years, the serialized rendering of the religious epic Ramayana was just beginning to attract substantial audiences to television. The men whom I interviewed in 1987 described watching the serial with reverence befitting a sacred performance. By 2001, dozens of satellite channels, from CNN to MTV, had become available. While, in 1987, even rich Banarasis could not access cable television, by 2001 even some non-élites were cable subscribers. In 1987, India was such a closed economy that only Indian-made watches, cars, and scooters were readily available. By 2001, economic liberalization, which had begun in earnest in 1991, produced shelves stocked

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with Barbie dolls, cellular phones, and global brands (like Nike, Benetton, and DKNY). On city streets, Western icons like tennis players Anna Kournikova and Pete Sampras, pop singer Mariah Carey, and many others appeared on posters celebrating Western products like Reebok shoes. Certainly, Banaras had always encountered transnational flows. By 1987, tourists from around the world had long been visiting the sacred city along the river Ganges, music shops sold pirated Madonna and Michael Jackson cassette tapes, and pirated videocassettes of Hollywood films were available to the tiny number of people with VCRs. But the volume and speed of transnational connections increased markedly over the course of the 1990s. When I returned to the smaller north Indian city of Dehra Dun in 2001, a decade after having worked there in 1991, I encountered a media and consumer landscape transformed by economic and cultural globalization. In 1991, the Indian government intensified a policy of economic liberalization which stimulated the availability of Western consumer goods, American films, and satellite television in India. But when I worked there in the summer of 1991, Dehra Dun had yet to experience these changes. While the number of middle class homes with television sets was expanding, televisions were still relatively rare and state-run programming on a single channel was the only offering. The biggest television hits were still the weekly Hindi film and the program devoted to Hindi film song-and-dance scenes. Just a decade later, dozens of cable channels were available and nearly 70 percent of the non-élite, non-English speaking men whom I interviewed had at least some access to cable television. In the summer of 1991, no Hollywood film played in Dehra Dun’s cinema halls, but over several months in 2001 the main offerings at the city’s two most élite theatres were Hollywood action films and films aiming at softcore titillation that had been dubbed in Hindi. As in Banaras, cellular phones, Mariah Carey CDs, and Benetton clothing were being sold in Dehra Dun’s shops. Certainly, Dehra Dun, like Banaras, has a long history of global connections. For decades, the city’s Doon School has attracted élite students, some of whom travel abroad. Even in 1991, posters of Samantha Fox, a Western sex symbol, were commonly sold in Dehra Dun’s streets. But the volume and speed of global movements increased to unprecedented levels over the decade of the 1990s.

PREFACE

9

The studies I conducted in Dehra Dun and Banaras prior to the economic and cultural globalization of the early 1990s showed that most Indian men shared a collectivist orientation which was reflected in a commitment to joint-family living and arranged marriages. The uppercaste, non-élite middle class men whom I interviewed in Banaras in 1987 voiced nearly universal support for arranged marriages, joint-family living, restrictions on women’s movements outside the home, and male dominance within the home. Most of these men saw male dominance in the home as a distinctive feature of Indianness. Most also embraced a collectivist orientation which focuses on following the guidance of elders in a family. The mostly young and unmarried male filmgoers whom I interviewed in Dehra Dun in 1991 voiced similar support for arranged marriages and restrictions on women’s movement outside the home, even as they watched Hindi films which celebrated love marriages and women’s freedom of movement. These men explicitly distanced themselves from cinematic celebrations of love, saying that such love would be unworkable in the joint-family situation, and praised heroines’ commitment to family duties. As I continued to present this research at academic conferences through the late 1990s, I began to hear of changes in Indian men’s gender arrangements and cultural orientations. Conference-goers (often of élite background in India) spoke of the increasing number of Indians who reject arranged marriages and limitations on women. “Everything has changed,” one global Indian academic told me at the Conference on South Asia in Madison, Wisconsin, USA, in 1999. “Everyone has Barbie, now,” she added as an illustration of these changes. Articles in the English-language press (which are, of course, directed at the 5 percent of Indians who speak English) asserted that such changes were taking place. These articles described men as doing housework and childcare (Chandran 1996: 70), work which the men whom I interviewed between 1986 and 1991 saw as an exclusively female task. The English-language press described men as comfortable with women bosses (ibid.: 70), while the men whom I had earlier interviewed were strongly attached to male dominance in the workforce. Men and women were said to accept dating as a common part of life even for young teens (Jain 1998), while the men whom I interviewed saw dating as impossible. Some in the mainstream press attributed such new attitudes to the greater availability of Hollywood productions on cable (Jain 1998),

10 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

in theatres (Ray 1998), and to changes in Hindi films, which increasingly celebrated urban Westernized lifestyles and consumerism, and which showed heroines in clothing styles (like miniskirts) which in previous eras would have been rejected as excessively revealing (Chakravarti 1998; Chopra 1997). Indeed, Hollywood productions and the Hindi films that are influenced by them have celebrated consumerism, individualism, and greater freedom for women, which would be unacceptable by older standards of morality. Yet, it was difficult to estimate from press reports the extent to which gender culture was being transformed by new possibilities presented by the opportunities associated with economic flows and contacts with transnational people and media. The English-language press relies on a readership of educated, high-income people who are most able to take advantage of the opportunities associated with globalization. Each time I had previously returned to South Asia (in 1987 after five years away, and in 1991 after four years away), many reports of change that I had heard from media reports or from Indian friends based in the USA had proved to be exaggerated. It seemed significant to me that the same English-language press that spoke of change also described simultaneous and widespread resistance to cultural change—especially where it related to women’s modesty and family orientation. When Valentine’s Day celebrations grew in popularity because of cable music channels such as MTV and Channel V, supporters of both the Congress and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vowed to ban such celebrations. Bal Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena, asserted that such celebrations were part of an exhibitionist American culture, while activists from the Congress party burned Valentine’s Day cards, claiming that the cards were opposed to Indian traditions. In Delhi, activists attacked couples in hotels and restaurants, forcing them to flee, while in Kanpur they blackened the faces of hundreds of couples who were celebrating Valentine’s Day (India Abroad 2000a). In Kanpur, the youth wing of the BJP succeeded in persuading the principal of a Kanpur college to bar college women from wearing jeans and skirts, an action which was protested so violently by some women that the college was forced to close for two days (India Abroad 2000b). Protesters have also targeted a Xena episode and the Hindi films Fire and Hey Ram as well as other media productions for allegedly defaming Hinduism (India Abroad 1998, 2000b; Tsering 1999).

PREFACE

11

As scholars recognized the transformed cultural landscape associated with accelerating transnational global flows of people, media, and economy, they began to suggest that people’s lives would be transformed as well. Arjun Appadurai (1996) famously suggested that people around the world can now imagine a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before, disrupting people’s sense of the givenness of their culture. Yet, we have surprisingly few studies that actually try to examine how people’s culture and social life have been transformed by globalization. In 2001, I gathered data to try to understand how economic and cultural globalization had transformed cultural understandings, class and gender systems, and family institutions in India by replicating a study I had conducted there a decade before. It was the year 1991 in which economic liberalization and cultural globalization began in earnest in India, but when I did my research in the summer of 1991, the landscape of the city of Dehra Dun in which I worked had not yet been radically transformed. So, in 1991, none of the men I interviewed had cable television or had seen a Hollywood film, while a decade later a solid majority enjoyed transnational media products. The ability to make a systematic comparison between men’s gender culture in these two eras offers a unique opportunity to understand the effects of globalization. My main aim is to examine the effects of globalization on common Indians. I soon discovered that while the lives of élite Indians were transformed by the new opportunities associated with economic liberalization, the lives of non-élite Indians were characterized more by continuities than by changes. This suggested that the effects of purely cultural globalization were relatively minor as long as economic and family structures were not simultaneously transformed. By examining changes associated with globalization in India, this book ends up improving our understanding of the causal dynamics associated with cultural change. In the process, I try to offer an improved sociological theory of culture. In addition, the book tries to better understand the operations of class and gender dynamics in a global environment. The empirical basis of this study is the comparison of interviews with 32 young film-going men that I conducted in 2001 with 22 similar interviews conducted in 1991, as well as with my more extensive research conducted in 1987. I believe that many studies of transformation in India have overlooked men like those I interviewed—men of modest means and limited English-language skills who have more

12 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

comforts than the poor but who have not been able to take off with the global economy. This book begins with a comparison of my 1991 and 2001 interviews, but draws on other research to describe the effects of globalization on more affluent Indians and on women, and to confirm that my findings have a broader applicability among people of the class I interviewed, a class I will come to call the “locally-oriented middle class.” Readers will be interested in how Indians have responded to ongoing globalization in the years since I conducted this study. The main contribution of this book, though, is to use a comparison of changes in one locality to improve our theoretical understanding of the effects of globalization more generally. This book argues that globalization’s primary effects on people occur through new economic opportunities rather than through new cultural imaginations, and suggests, then, that further changes would follow from continuing changes in economic opportunities.

Acknowledgements

I wrote this book in 2002 while I was a Rockefeller fellow at the Office of Women’s Research at the University of Hawaii Manoa. The University of Hawaii offered just the environment to complete this work. The soft breeze and smell of flowers pervaded my life as I analyzed the 2001 data. My biweekly hula lessons infused me with the energy to write this book. The Women’s Studies Program, Department of Sociology, International Cultural Studies Program, South Asian Studies Program, and East-West Center welcomed me, and offered opportunities to present and discuss my work. I am especially grateful to Guobin Yang and Geoff White for discussions about cultural theory; S. Charusheela, Kalindi Vora, Monica Ghosh, Arindam Chakrabarti, and Miriam Sharma for discussions about changes in India, and Kathy Ferguson, Meda Chesney-Lind, Terry Greenfield, Ruth Gordon, and Mire Koikari for discussions of feminist theory. I thank them, as well, for making the University of Hawaii such a congenial place to work. I am grateful to the Rockefeller Foundation for the fellowship that allowed me to write this book. Noreen Young and Konrad Ng were capable administrators who facilitated my work in Hawaii. David Gordon, Doug Harke, and Goria Dingledein helped facilitate the fellowship from my home base. I am grateful to SUNY–Geneseo for granting me leave to study as a Rockefeller fellow in Spring 2002, and for granting me sabbatical to conduct research in India in Spring 2001. A number of small grants from the College Senate helped pay for important costs associated with my work. I am grateful to the American Institute of Indian Studies for supporting both my 1991 and 2001 research in India. Thanks also go to the US Department of Education for Foreign-language and Area Studies

14 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

fellowships that supported my study of Hindi and for a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation fellowship that first gave me the opportunity to work in India. I am grateful to the Department of Sociology at Delhi University for acting as my academic affiliation in 1986–87, 1991, and 2001. André Béteille (1986–87), Veena Das (in 1991) and Radhika Chopra (in 2001) were helpful sponsors. The comments of department members at a seminar I gave in 2001 were especially useful. The research could not have been completed without the research assistance of Narendra Sethi, who helped me conduct and translate interviews in Dehra Dun in 2001 (as he did in 1991). His sensitivity was essential in recruiting many respondents, and his gentle voice seemed to provide respondents assurance and comfort. His keen knowledge of Hindi and English made translation of interviews a breeze. I have been helped by audiences at meetings of the Conference on South Asia, the American Anthropological Association, and the American Sociological Association. I am especially grateful to Claude Fischer, editor of Contexts, for comments that helped me revise a related essay. The comments helped me revise this book, as well. I am grateful for the substantial contribution by the SAGE team especially my Commissioning Editor, Elina Majumdar, and the Editor in charge of the project, Maneet Singh. Thanks are also due to Diya Dutta, Kajal Basu, Amrita Saha and Trinankur Banerjee for their help in the production process. The SAGE team helped with translations, caught factual errors, and suggested the need for important clarifications. Thanks to Arlie Hochschild, Ann Swidler, and Gerald Berreman for their consistent support over the years. Their work is always important, their encouragement is always there, and they always offer important commentary that has helped me rethink my claims. I thank Lisa Jadwin and our cats Bert, Ernie, and Elmo for putting up with my absences from Rochester, New York, USA.

1

Introduction

Trained at Harvard Business School, Gurcharan Das, former CEO of Procter & Gamble India, is today a consultant for both government and industry in India. An ardent advocate of globalization, Das (2001: 213) refers to the middle of 1991 as the “golden summer” when the Indian economy finally opened to international trade and the global economy. Following Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination by a terrorist bomb in May 1991, a wave of sympathy carried the Congress party to victory. P.V. Narasimha Rao, the new prime minister, inherited a financial crisis that strengthened the hand of the advocates of globalization. With only two weeks of foreign exchange reserves left in July 1991, the Rao government accepted a structural adjustment loan from the International Monetary Fund (IMF), the terms of which demanded a devaluation of the Indian rupee, the lifting of most restrictions on foreign investment, and the elimination of licensing requirements in all but a few industries. For a businessman like Das (ibid.: xii), this “golden summer” opened up the economy, giving rise to a “rebirth of dreams” which had been buried in the “licensing blues” of the 1960s and the 1970s. Das regards “the economic revolution that Narasimha Rao launched in the middle of 1991” as perhaps “more important than the political revolution that Jawaharlal Nehru initiated in 1947” (ibid.: 213). Like Das, many commentators—especially those allied with global capitalism—optimistically see India as transformed by globalization. To those who benefit from the global economy, the changes are obvious: international business has been able to access new markets and exploit new productive resources; Indians who can market products or skills in the global economy have improved their fortunes; and, catering to those with resources and skills, local media highlight the changing lives of those

16 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

who can take advantage of new global opportunities. But what have been the changes on the ground in India, especially for ordinary Indians in the urban areas? During Das’s “golden summer of 1991”, I was interviewing non-élite young men in and around theatres in a small city in north India. Few of those men had any access to television, and even when they did, it was only to the single state-run channel. None of these men had seen even one Hollywood film because of foreign exchange restrictions which kept foreign films out of India. While many of these men had the education and the opportunities that offered them more hope than to most young Indians, they nonetheless often felt that they had only limited economic options. The men whom I interviewed remained attached to family arrangements that oppressed women and offered young men and women little choice about whom to marry. To understand how cultural and economic globalization affected the lives of ordinary Indians like these young men, I returned in 2001 to replicate the study I had conducted a decade earlier. The economic liberalization of that “golden summer” had radically transformed the media landscape, providing young people with new cultural resources. With the end of foreign exchange restrictions, Hollywood films flooded Indian theatres. With the end of regulations, cable television operators expanded to meet the needs of advertisers who wanted to reach the newly-available market. In 1991, while none of the men whom I had interviewed had seen cable television or Hollywood films, by 2001 more than two-thirds of them sought out global media. But, like 95 percent of Indians, the men whom I interviewed spoke little English and lacked skills that they could market in the international economy. Often college-educated, these men continued to face limited economic opportunities, even as the global media were increasing expectations and desires for consumption. While scholars are beginning to understand how globalization has transformed the lives of affluent English-speaking Indians, who have skills that allow them to hitch their dreams to the global economy, we know surprisingly little about how globalization has changed the lives of ordinary middle class Indians for whom globalization has not radically transformed opportunity. This book identifies the changes, but also the striking continuities, in the lives of non-élite, urban Indian men. In some ways culture, class, family, and gender were significantly transformed, but in many ways transformations were only modest and

INTRODUCTION

17

continuities were of the greatest significance. Globalization has increased consumerism and layered new meanings on top of the old ones that Indians continue to use to understand class and gender hierarchies. But despite new media messages about family life, globalization has failed to transform the gender and family arrangements of the ordinary middle class Indians who have been unable to take off with the global economy. While my focus is on non-élite urban Indian men, I try to provide a fuller picture of globalization in India by also considering the much larger effect of globalization on the lives of affluent urban Indians. Using secondary literature, I am also able to identify some of the changes in urban women’s lives. I regret that because of limited data, this book has little to say about changes in the lives of the poor or those living in rural India. This book has several aims, its fundamental one being to better understand the processes of globalization by examining its actual effects on the ground in urban India. Second, by considering continuities and transformations resulting from economic and cultural globalization, the book aims to improve our theoretical understanding of culture. The revolutions, transformations, and continuities in culture, class, family, and gender in urban India in the face of globalization suggest that purely cultural changes have little effect on social arrangements. Cultural globalization in India has had only limited effects on social practices because the underlying social structural realities that root these practices have not been simultaneously transformed. The book argues that because of the fit that tends to develop between social structures, cultural understandings, and the psychological orientations that support them, purely cultural changes have quite modest effects. The book shows that institutional arrangements ground cultural understandings and psychological processes, suggesting that theorists like Appadurai are wrong to argue that new transnational cultural flows have made culture “less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation” (Appadurai 1996: 44). Studying the effects of globalization, then, provides a key understanding of the relationships between social structures, cultural meanings, and psychological orientations. Third, the book contributes to a better understanding of gender by focusing on the persistence of gender arrangements in the face of globalization. I use “gender arrangements” to refer to societal arrangements

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that structure gender and family relations. The division of labor and authority in families and differential access to jobs and to public spaces are aspects of gender arrangements that privilege men over women, while the organization of households into nuclear units or more complex, multi-generational units and the means of organizing marriages are other aspects of gender arrangements. The book pays particular attention to gender culture—the ideas that support gender arrangements. The fact that Indian men tend to embrace aspects of cultural globalization that are consistent with their existing relations of power over women shows that the powerful can selectively use the cultural resources offered by globalization to increase their own power. Fourth, the book shows how the dynamics of today’s global economy requires a rethinking of theories of class structure. Affluent Indians who travel abroad and own automobiles see themselves as middle class, but so do Indians who own scooters and televisions and can barely dream of the lifestyles of the affluent. Following Weber, this book assumes that the middle classes are engaged in a project of constructing themselves in opposition to their class ‘others’—usually through demonstrating discernment, taste, or moral uprightness (Liechty 2003). Today, affluent Indians call themselves middle class: they see themselves on a global stage placed between the Indian poor and the consuming classes in Europe and North America. Many ordinary Indians of more modest means also see themselves as a middle class that exists between the Indian élite who drive automobiles and travel abroad and poor Indians who live on their day-to-day earnings. The book explores how the cultural projects of the affluent and the ordinary middle classes are influenced by globalization. The affluent advertise their cosmopolitanism in opposition to the vulgar tastes and gender arrangements of the poorer Indians. Ordinary middle class Indians focus both on their cosmopolitan discernment to define themselves in opposition to the poor and on an Indianness rooted in sexual propriety and appropriate gender arrangements to define themselves in opposition to the “vulgar” Indian élite. The book proposes that classes today are (a) based more on shared patterns of consumption than on shared positions in a productive system; (b) more and more rooted in transnational contexts rather than bounded by nations; and (c) are often defined as much by class-specific gender relations as by their positioning within economic structures.

INTRODUCTION

19

By exploring transformations and continuities in India since Das’s “golden summer of 1991”, this book seeks to better understand the processes of globalization and the role of culture in social change. In addition, the book focuses on how globalization may force us to rethink our understandings of class and gender. I begin this introduction by identifying the fundamental features of globalization today, describing what we know about its sources and consequences, and identifying important questions that press for answers. I then identify the macrodynamics of globalization that have affected India since 1991. I next describe the two studies in Dehra Dun, India, which are the modest empirical bases that launch my analysis, and also identify the global dynamics that transformed the cultural landscape of Dehra Dun in the interim between the studies. I identify my study’s focus on non-élite middle class Indians as an important feature of my work that should improve our understanding of globalization. I end the introduction with a brief outline of the book.

Globalization Today, the speed and volume at which people, products, media, information, production, and financing move around the globe continues to increase beyond previous levels. It appears that this globalization is drastically transforming society, culture, economics, and politics around the world. Understanding globalization’s consequences has, therefore, become a pressing concern for sociologists, anthropologists, economists, and other social scientists. Social theorists seem to agree that all areas of contemporary social life are increasingly characterized by global movements and interconnectedness. To identify the distinctive features of globalization, I want to highlight both the content and character of global movements and interconnections. What are the aspects of social life that are increasingly interconnected and moving? What are the distinctive ways in which these movements occur today? In their influential discussion of globalization, Held et al. highlight the “worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life” (emphasis mine) (Held et al. 1999: 2). Arjun Appadurai’s (1996: 27) influential discussion of the global flows of “ethnoscapes”,

20 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

“mediascapes”, “technoscapes”, “financescapes”, and “ideoscapes” provides a useful reference for identifying those movements and connections that seem most consequential for this study. First, the world is increasingly characterized by transnational flows of people. Appadurai uses the term “ethnoscape” to describe the “landscape of persons who constitute the shifting world in which we live: tourists, immigrants, refugees, guest workers, and other moving groups and individuals” (Appadurai 1996: 27). It constitutes an essential feature of today’s world. The stays of migrants are increasingly intermittent rather than permanent as many continue to move back and forth across borders (Cohen 1997: 54, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 52–53). More and more Indians move to Europe, North America, or Southeast Asia and continue to return to India. As a result of these movements, more and more Indians know (or know of ) someone who moves in cosmopolitan worlds. Mass media heightens ordinary Indians’ awareness of transnational movements. Advertising billboards trumpet computer courses that will help young men find jobs in the USA’s Silicon Valley (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 172). Since 1991, a string of hit Hindi films has focused on NonResident Indians (NRIs) living abroad.1 Even when the focus is on Indians in India, Hindi films today routinely portray Indians’ easy movement beyond India’s borders: heroes and heroines honeymoon in Europe and the business or education of heroes takes them abroad.2 In some films that aim at the urban poor, the focalizing male character tries to find a way to find opportunities overseas.3 Thus, as Appadurai reports, “more persons and groups deal with the realities of having to move or the fantasies of wanting to move” (Appadurai 1996: 34). More and more Indians think “not just of moving to Poona or Madras but of moving to Dubai and Houston” (ibid.: 28). Second, the world is increasingly characterized by cultural globalization, the transnational flow of mass media around the world. Appadurai calls attention to the “closely related landscapes of images” represented by “mediascapes and ideoscapes” (Appadurai 1996: 35). Many social scientists focus especially on how transnational movements of television and film generate the desire for cultural icons, imagery, and styles developed in the Western mass media (Corcoran 1998: 3–7, cited by Richards and French 2000: 15). In India today, Hollywood movies, which have been dubbed into Hindi, play in Indian theatres throughout the country. American

INTRODUCTION

21

soap operas, MTV, and satellite news channels like CNN are an important part of cable television programming in India. Partly as a result of this, ideas such as “freedom” and “modernity” flow from place to place. Appadurai argues that along with “contacts with, news of, and rumors about” local people who travel to faraway worlds, the growth of transnational mass mediation has meant that “more persons in more parts of the world consider a wider set of possible lives than they ever did before” (Appadurai 1996: 53). One of the main themes of this book is to consider whether and how these expanded resources of the imagination have transformed family institutions, gender practices, leisure choices, social styles, and cultural understandings in India. Third, aspects of the economy including products, production, and financing increasingly flow around the world. Appadurai’s discussion of “financescapes” and “technoscapes” refers to this aspect of economic globalization. Production increasingly flows to sites of comparative advantage: for instance, computer firms situate themselves in Hyderabad because of the availability of relatively cheap computer programmers. Finance capital increasingly flows across borders in pursuit of profit, so much so that much investment in India is driven by the needs of capital in the USA. Goods produced all over the world find their way to local markets, and Indians can purchase cellular phones, automobiles, and Barbie dolls produced elsewhere. This book considers how Indians respond to the availability of new goods in ways that shape class and gender identity and how the ways in which different Indians are situated within the new structural possibilities, presented by economic globalization, in turn shape the stances individuals take toward the new imagined possibilities presented by cultural globalization. My focus on economic globalization, cultural globalization, and the global movements of people selectively highlights aspects of globalization that are important for this study. There are, of course, many other elements of globalization. Like the demographic, cultural, and economic factors that are my focus here, governmental functions have also become increasingly global. With trade associations like the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), regional governments like the European Union (EU), and international trade regulators like the World Trade Organization (WTO), more and more of the regulatory functions previously held by national governments are being shifted to global entities. As nations come to depend on “help” from the IMF and the World Bank

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at crucial times, these international agencies play an increasing role in shaping the policies and priorities of national governments, as happened with India’s foreign exchange crisis in 1991. Thus, the globalization of government functions has been a key factor that has contributed to India’s economic liberalization since 1991. Despite the apparent increase in transnational cultural flows, some scholars emphasize that there have long been global movements of people, media, and economic systems. Held et al. (1996) are right to argue that today’s globalization crosses regions and continents, but even this does not define the uniqueness of the global interconnections in recent decades. With exploration and colonization, Europeans moved around the world. The slave trade and indenture moved Africans to the Americas and Indians to the Pacific Islands. Emigration from the colonies to Britain transformed the UK’s ethnic landscape. The economic system of capitalism introduced by the colonizers often transformed economic systems in the places they colonized. In the colonial era, the introduction of consumer goods like mass-produced shoes and textiles transformed local economies by ruining indigenous industries. Goods have long moved around the world: at teatime during the British Empire, the English added sugar grown in Fiji by indentured laborers from India to tea made from leaves grown in Sri Lanka by laborers from India. The English language and the books and movies that use it have long had a worldwide influence. What, then, is substantively different about the global movements in the last decades of the 20th century? First, today’s globalization is characterized by what Held et al. refer to as a “speeding up of global interactions and processes as the development of worldwide systems of transport and communication increases the potential velocity of the global diffusion of ideas, goods, information, capital and people” (authors’ emphasis retained) (Held et al. 1999: 15). People have always moved— but in 1817, it took the lieutenant governor of a colonialist trading settlement in Sumatra five months to reach his post from Falmouth (Collis 1966: 122–23). Today, one can fly non-stop from Chicago to New Delhi. The said lieutenant governor did not hear for seven months that a political ally had died in London (ibid.: 83). Today, the Internet and satellite telephone connections allow realtime communication of news around the globe. The movement of products from production to market has been similarly speeded up.

INTRODUCTION

23

Manuel Castells (2000), Arjun Appadurai (1996) and other commentators focus especially on the speed with which global finances move. “The disposition of global capital” is “now a more mysterious, rapid and difficult landscape to follow than ever before, as currency markets, national stock exchanges, and commodity speculations move megamonies through national turnstiles at blinding speed” (Appadurai 1996: 34–35). For Castells “new information and communication technologies based on micro-electronics, telecommunications and network-oriented computer software” “have provided the infrastructure” (Castells 2000: 52–53) of the new economy. Castells emphasizes that while the “internationalisation of economic activities is certainly not new,” the “technological infrastructure” that allows for “unprecedented speed and complexity in the management of the economy” is new and is the distinctive feature of our economic system today. David Harvey’s (1989) focus on “time-space compression” as a feature of globalization describes the speeding up that characterizes today’s global movement. Second, the volume of interconnectedness has greatly increased. As Held et al. put it, “connections across frontiers are not just occasional . . . , but . . . are regularized such that there is a detectable intensification or growing magnitude of interconnectedness” (Held et al. 1999: 15, authors’ emphasis deleted). More and more people travel from place to place. More and more production depends on global connections, as essential components of any product are produced at various locations around the world. Less and less of the media that individuals consume is produced locally. Global movement is not new, but the volume of movement is unprecedented. The volume and speed of global flows has intensified what Held et al. refer to as the “deepening enmeshment of the local and global such that the impact of distant events is magnified while even the most local developments may come to have enormous global consequences” (Held et al. 1999: 15, authors’ emphasis retained). When Indonesian stocks appeared to be a good market opportunity, investment capital poured into Indonesia with great speed and volume. When the perception of the Indonesian economy changed, global investment capital flowed out with a rapidity and volume that devastated the local economy. Had global finances been a smaller part of Indonesian investment, or had the finances flowed less quickly, the disruption might have been minimized.

24 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

Our world, then, is characterized by globalization—the increased (and increasing) speed and volume of global movements of people, products, media, information, production, and financing. While this book focuses on identifying the consequences of globalization for local systems of culture, class, gender, and family in India, it is worth identifying briefly two of the most fundamental causes of globalization. As already mentioned, Castells sees new technologies as vitally important in generating the unprecedented speed and scope in the management of the economy which allows for the easy movement of production, financing, and products across borders. Also, of course, new technologies of air travel allow the speedy movement of people from one part of the globe to another. Even in the 20th century, colonial administrators in South and Southeast Asia only got leave to return to Europe once every five years (while those in the Pacific only got leave once every six years). Today’s often regular back-and-forth movements of NRIs between North America or Europe and India would be unthinkable without the technology of air travel. Satellite transmission of images and sounds is similarly vital in allowing transnational media flows. Without satellites, USA Today or International Herald Tribune would not reach India on the day of their publication. Nor would images of the Super Bowl or President Clinton’s admission of an affair with Monica Lewinsky be seen in real time not just in the USA or India but in Laos and Fiji as well.4 As James Clifford puts it, we now live amidst the possibilities of a “to-andfro made possible by modern technologies of transport, communication and labor migration. Airplanes, telephones, tape cassettes, camcorders and mobile job markets reduce distances and facilitate two-way traffic, legal and illegal, between the world’s places” (Clifford 1997: 247; see also Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 4; Talalay 2000). Technology facilitates globalization, but the imperatives of global capitalism are its motivating force. Economic globalization is fundamentally shaped by the profit motive. Corporations shift production to lower the cost of production. Investors move capital to find the most profitable investment. Corporations move products to reach every possible consumer. But demographic and cultural globalizations are similarly driven by global capital’s profit motives. Airlines seek to fill seats and drive up demand by enticing travelers from around the world. Film studios seek to sell their films in the largest possible number of markets. Media corporations seek to deliver the largest possible number of viewers to advertisers.

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Leslie Sklair focuses on the “profit-driven culture ideology of consumerism” through which “the globalization of the capitalist system reproduces itself ” (Sklair 2001: 6). To thrive, Sklair argues, global capitalism must “persuade us that the meaning and value of our lives are to be found principally in what we possess.” Global culture, then, results from transnational capitalist efforts to shape desires and create needs, opening up new areas for capital accumulation. Coming to terms with the effects of globalization has, of course, been a fundamental aim of recent scholarship. Consistent with Sklair’s approach, many scholars rightly see globalization as spreading consumerist cultures across the globe. The transnational movement of consumerism is often seen, in turn, as having a substantial effect on local identities and cultures. Consistent with the transnational media corporations’ aim of reaching consumers around the world, the most fundamental effects of globalization is attracting more and more people to consumer lifestyles (Mankekar 1998: 32; Thussu 2000). Based on his study on the effects of globalization in Nepal, Mark Liechty concludes that for more and more people around the world, “modernity is an experience, first and foremost, of life in emerging local consumer societies, an experience tied to the steady encroachment of global capitalism and its cultural logics into ever more communities and ever more domains of life (Liechty 2001: 34). While most observers agree that globalization has spread consumerism around the world, the implications and extent of this transformation are debated. At first, scholars emphasized that globalization was homogenizing people’s experiences and eroding identity. Some scholars argued that as people around the world are attracted to cultural icons, styles, and meanings generated in cosmopolitan centers, cultures have become disconnected, disembedded or deterritorialized, rather than being closely tied to time and place (Beynon and Dunkerley 2000b: 13; Perry 1998). Thus when blacks in UK are attracted to the USA’s National Basketball Association or Indians are attracted to Barbie or Britney Spears, cultural products are disconnected from their point of origin. Globalization pulls culture apart from place (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 11). Some argued that the attraction to cosmopolitan consumer styles and icons produced by cultural globalization was becoming an important source of identity, which is supplanting identity rooted in class or nation. Baudrillard (1983) was among the first to theorize that consumption is

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increasingly important in defining people’s consciousness and identities. Some believe that people around the world now form communities based on supra-national allegiances rooted in consumption. Such allegiances are seen in global clubs supporting Manchester United in football or celebrating pop stars like Madonna (Beynon and Dunkerley 2000b: 14; Golding 1994, cited by Richards and French 2000: 14–15). John Beynon and David Dunkerley offer a good summary of the point of view that sees consumer identities as even supplanting identities rooted in nation and class: Transnational, transcultural aspirational clusters, based on what people would like to be rather than what they are, come into existence as a result of commercial lifestyling and are more ‘real’ to people today than the surviving vestiges of class solidarity. Indeed, the two great traditional markers of collective identity, nation and class, are seen to be disintegrating under the onslaught of global media. (Beynon and Dunkerley 2000b: 15)

Sociologists like Hebdige (1989: 90–91), anthropologists like Gordon Mathews (2000: 9), and media scholars like Michael Richards (2000: 29) all suggest that “identity proffered through the market” is steadily eroding national and class identity. In addition to spreading styles of consumption that become a basis of identity, cultural globalization also facilitates transnational movements of discourses that affect people’s lives around the world. Liechty argues that “parallel to, though largely subsumed within,” the spread of consumerist materialism is a “subdiscourse or rhetoric of freedom, equality, independence and empowerment associated with modernity” (Liechty 2001: 34). The spread of ideas like freedom, he argues, have played a crucial role in shaping people’s sense of themselves as modern. Other scholars emphasize the effects of the circulation of discourses on gender. R.W. Connell (1998: 10–11) and Arjun Appadurai (1996: 45) both show, for instance, that international media “circulate Western definitions of authoritative masculinity” and “desirable femininity” that often serve to extend fantasies of male dominance. In thinking about how cultural globalization spreads consumerism, consumer ideology, and discourses associated with freedom and male dominance, some scholars at first theorized that globalization would produce global cultural homogeneity. In Samoa in 1999, a recentlygraduated Danish backpacker who had been traveling around the world

INTRODUCTION

27

told me that there were two things that one would find everywhere— McDonald’s and reggae. As Leslie Sklair shows, this is precisely the global vision of today’s transnational corporations: “Whatever else might change or however social systems might diverge . . . people would all agree on one principle, namely the desirability of consuming more and more goods and services. In the words of a senior corporate executive, responsible for some of the world’s most successful brands: ‘Once television is there, people of whatever shade, culture or origin want roughly the same things’” (Sklair 2001: 255). Since the logic of global capitalism is to produce unified consumer markets, it is no surprise that early accounts of globalization feared cultural homogenization. But most recent approaches identify several reasons why globalization has not produced homogenization. First, the effects of globalization are mediated by local interests and actors. Local cable operators decide how much emphasis to give to transnational media. Local cinema hall owners decide whether to screen Hollywood films. Local capitalists who form alliances with transnational capital play a role in shaping production. Local merchants decide what to stock on their shelves. Second, transnational messages and images are interpreted locally. Cosmopolitan cultures disconnected from their places of origin are “reterritorialized” in particular locales (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 12, 15–16). Beynon and Dunkerley stress “the ability of consumers to indigenize products to serve their own cultural interest” (Beynon and Dunkerley 2000b: 29). Describing the situation in India, Brosius and Butcher argue that “local audiences do not necessarily identify with global images on offer” (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 14). So, some Indian viewers of the television soap opera Santa Barbara might aspire to live the lifestyle depicted on screen, while others reject such a lifestyle as inconsistent with Indian culture. When transnational media offers enticing, but unavailable, possibilities, the effect of cultural globalization often leads to confusion and uncertainty (Tomlinson 1991, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 53–55). Third, locals often respond to globalization by highlighting local identities. Featherstone argues that rather than producing “greater tolerance and cosmopolitanism”, “increased cultural flows” which “increase familiarity with ‘the other’” just as often lead to ‘a disturbing sense of engulfment and immersion’ (Featherstone 1993: 102, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 100–02). People often respond to the “threat of

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cultural disorder” by retreating into the “security of ethnicity”, religion or tradition. Thus, as globalization heightens awareness of how local cultures contrast with the global images presented from the outside (Richards and French 2000), the result is sometimes a revival of local cultures, often in the form of religious movements (Held et al. 1999: 369; Tomlinson 1991, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 53– 55). The efforts of Islamic groups to highlight their opposition to an exhibitionist, consumerist American culture is most in the news today, but similar processes are occurring among many groups around the world. Thus, while some in India may respond to globalization by embracing supranational identities rooted in cosmopolitan consumption, others may respond by emphasizing distinctive national identities. Scholars increasingly recognize that the effects of globalization are uneven and are mediated by class and gender. People’s encounter with global flows and connections is vitally shaped by class. On the one hand, as Massey describes it, are those who are “doing the moving and the communicating and who are in some way in a position of control in relation to it—the jet-setters, the ones sending and receiving the faxes and the e-mail, holding international conference calls, the ones distributing the films, controlling the news, organizing the investments and the international currency transactions” (Massey 1994, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 58–60). Then, there are those who may do a “lot of physical moving, but who are not ‘in charge’ of the process in the same way.” Refugees are an example of this group. Finally, there are those people “who are simply on the receiving end of time-space compression” (Massey 1994: 58–59). Thus, some Indians caught in local circumstances cannot afford a movie because structural adjustment has increased the price of food, while others now watch dubbed American films which suddenly appear at a local cinema. The voluntary rapid movement over long distances that supposedly characterizes the contemporary world is strictly applicable to only a relatively few, privileged people (Inda and Rosaldo 2002: 4; Morley 2000: 13; Tomlinson 1999: 9, as excerpted in Beynon and Dunkerley 2000a: 53–55). While less often recognized, perhaps, gender too shapes access to cultural globalization. Morley argues that once we take mobility as a defining characteristic of the contemporary world, we must “pose the question of why (and with what degrees of freedom) particular people stay at home” (Morley 2000: 12–13). Historically, women have often

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been precluded from movement because of their restrictions to the home (Wolf 1985, cited by Morley 2000: 67–68). Enloe argues that “in many societies being feminine has been defined as sticking close to home— masculinity, by contrast, has been the passport for travel. . . . A principal difference between women and men in countless societies has been the license to travel away from a place thought of as ‘home’” (Enloe 1989: 29). While recent hit Hindi films focusing on the NRI experience show both men and women in cosmopolitan spaces, by highlighting the threats women face in these spaces (Mankekar 1999b), they often end up associating men with transnational movement and women with local rootedness, a theme I explore in Chapter 6. Just as women and men may have differential access to mobility, so they may have differential access to transnational media flows. Abraham’s (2001) study of low-income, college-going men and women in Bombay, and Liechty’s (2001) study of the interactions of Nepalis with today’s consumerist culture, show that boys and men tend to watch foreign pornographic videos, while girls and women do not. These films, which are foreign imports and depict foreigners, have shaped the sexual desires of many men, thereby impinging on women’s lives, a theme which I explore in Chapter 6. Of course, the fact that the experience of globalization is shaped by class and gender does not imply that those with less access to globalization are not influenced by it. Morley argues, for instance, that “while many people remain local and many are ‘kept in place’ by structures of oppression of various forms, the experience which is most truly global is perhaps that of the experience of locality being undercut by the penetration of global forces and networks” (Morley 2000: 14). As Tomlinson points out, the “paradigmatic experience of global modernity for most people . . . is that of staying in one place but experiencing the ‘displacement’ that global modernity brings to them” (Tomlinson 1999: 9, 119, 150, cited by Morley 2000: 15). Thus, even if they do not themselves have access to pornographic films brought in by transnational cultural flows, Nepali women are probably correct in recognizing that having watched “blue films”, men “begin to look at” women in a new and sexually threatening way, which impinges on their lives (Liechty 2001: 46). While we have a good understanding of the nature of globalization, the forces that generate it, and the pressures it exerts, existing scholarship leaves important questions unanswered. While Appadurai may be

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right that globalization may make people aware of a greater range of possible lives, we do not know enough about how different groups of people use these new meanings. While some scholars assert that market identity increasingly usurps other forms of identity, it is clear that national, class, and gender identities often remain salient. The contradictory and discontinuous effects of globalization pose a number of questions that this study aims to answer. First, what are the social and cultural factors that determine whether globalization transforms local practices or is fiercely resisted? Why, for instance, does a relentless celebration of love in the transnational media and the local media influenced by it fail to move many ordinary Indians to reject arranged marriages? Why do transnational notions of beauty and the transnational celebration of consumerism have a much stronger effect on ordinary Indians than other new ideas? Why has the content of the transnational media transformed some aspects of Hindi film but not others? Second, how do the new possibilities introduced by transnational cultural flows interact with national, gender, and class identities? Gordon Mathews (2000) and others argue that supra-national, consumption-based consumer affiliations are core identities, but this study suggests that people often use the new imagined resources presented by cultural globalization to re-envision the meaning of nation, class, and gender. Why do certain groups embrace cosmopolitan identities while others remain focused on local identity? Are some identities, like gender, more resilient than others? How are transnational flows transforming, rather than superseding, class identity?

Globalization in India Until the 1980s, India pursued autonomous economic development with limited global entanglements. Refusing to deal with the World Bank, India relied on loans from the USSR to assist in developing public sector enterprises in infrastructure, oil exploration and refining, and other fields. Local capitalists welcomed these developments because the state limited foreign competition. Foreign exchange restrictions limited imports. Licensing, limitations on foreign equity stakes, the reservation of key industries for the public sector, and tariffs and quotas all limited foreign investment.

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In the mid-1980s, the Rajiv Gandhi administration tentatively began a process of economic liberalization. When increased spending and the oil price rise associated with the 1991 Gulf War led to the crisis of foreign exchange reserves, the Indian government, with just two weeks of foreign exchange reserves left, turned to the IMF for a bailout. The conditions associated with the structural adjustment loans of 1991 ended India’s path of swadeshi (self-reliance) that had been urged by nationalist leaders like Gandhi and Nehru (see Sharma 1996; ShurmerSmith 2000 on these economic transformations). Seeing new opportunities, the Indian élite now welcomed economic liberalization required by the structural adjustment loan. Still, economic liberalization also reflects the financial power of the West. As the trade secretary under US President Ronald Reagan put it, “debt is the crowbar with which we wrench open economies” (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 21). In response to the IMF’s demands, the government ended licensing for all but 18 industries, reduced the number of procedures required for multinational investment, and increased the permitted equity stake of multinational firms in Indian enterprises. In the summer of 1991, the rupee was suddenly and drastically devalued and most foreign exchange controls were lifted (see Mankekar 1999b: 744; Sharma 1996: 304–05; Shurmer-Smith 2000: 21–25). Five years later, annual imports had more than doubled, exports had more than tripled, and foreign capital investment had more than quintupled (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 22, 25). The IMF, a transnational government entity, had played a key role in ushering in economic globalization. Satya Sharma describes the results of the changes that have “come about slowly” since “around mid-1991”: Foreign multinationals have come to India in a big way. Even fast-food businesses have ‘discovered’ India, the second largest market in the world after China. Kentucky Fried Chicken [and] Pizza Hut . . . are beginning to crop up in larger centers. Pepsi and Coca-Cola, long banned from India, are waging big advertising wars in the country. Automobile companies, American, Japanese and European, are making inroads into India in collaboration with local capitalists. In short, India has become a part of the global capitalist economy (Sharma 1996: 301, 305).

Honda merged with Bajaj, India’s leading scooter manufacturer, and Coca-Cola took over Thums-Up (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 25). India’s

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experience with economic globalization is, in many ways, typical. What was unique about India was that it held to the path of planning and self-reliance longer than most poor countries—and that economic and governmental globalization began so abruptly. Cultural globalization followed economic liberalization, as cable television offerings suddenly competed with state-run television and Hollywood films competed with local Hindi films. Until 1991, Indian television and film constituted one of the world’s most protected media markets. State-run Doordarshan television was all that was available and foreign exchange restrictions (and Indian tastes) effectively limited the availability of foreign films. The deregulation and privatization of television transformed the media landscape. Fueled by the desires of advertisers to reach the newly-open Indian market, the number of television channels grew exponentially from one state-run channel in 1991 to more than 70 in 1999. In October 1991, Hong-Kong based STAR TV, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation, introduced a package of MTV, BBC, Prime Sports, and Star Plus (a general entertainment program in English) into India. Fueled especially by interest in the first Gulf War and events in the Soviet Union in 1991, interest in cable television expanded rapidly among the English-fluent urban élite. In October 1992, Zee TV introduced a cable television package focusing more on Hindi-language programming, which expanded cable viewing beyond the narrow confines of the affluent classes. The expansion of cable TV was exponential. In 1991, it reached 300,000 homes; in 1994 it reached 12 million homes; in 1999, it reached 24 million homes. Major cities today have more than 25 channels providing round-the-clock programming in English and Hindi and other regional Indian languages.5 In addition, more and more people have televisions: one readership survey estimated, for instance, that the percentage of the urban population with access to television increased from 9 percent in 1990 to 74 percent in 1995 (Varma 1998: 178).6 As elsewhere, liberalization and deregulation of the media using the principles of “more market” and “less state” ended up transforming the local mass media (Hamelink 1997: 96, cited by Richards and French 2000: 15–16). The growth of global media should be no surprise given the interests of transnational corporations in exploiting a huge market that was just opening. India was attractive to transnational broadcasters, who hooked themselves into India’s expanding cable network because of its growing

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economy and consuming class, and a consumer market newly available to foreign products. By 1999, advertising spending in India was US$ 2 billion, making it among the top 20 countries in the world (Thussu 2000). While its growth has not been as phenomenal as that of cable TV, Hollywood films, which were introduced into the Indian market in a big way in the 1990s, have played a role in transforming India’s media landscape. It is no surprise, of course, that the Hollywood film industry was attracted to India, given the country’s ability to support the world’s largest film industry. While foreign exchange restrictions had long limited the ability of Hollywood films to compete in the Indian market, Hollywood films were also limited by the Indians’ lack of enthusiasm for foreign films which lacked essential components like songs and fights (Derné 2000a: 10–11; Thomas 1995: 161–62). As foreign exchange restrictions eased with economic liberalization, Pretty Woman became successful in Bombay and other metropolitan centers in 1991. By the mid-1990s, Hollywood films were being dubbed in Hindi and the dubbed version of Jurassic Park was a success in Indian cities. In 1995, 20th Century Fox was hopeful that the share of Hollywood films would rise from its level of 7 percent of the market (Gupta 1998: 69). Today, dubbed foreign films are widely screened in Indian cities.7 While economic and cultural globalization has transformed India’s media landscape, like elsewhere, this transformation has been mediated by local interests, sensibilities, and resistance. Small-scale cable operators with rudimentary technology found that they could make a profit by hooking up as few as 200 homes (Mishra 1999; Page and Crawley 2001: 89–90). 8 Thousands of small-scale operators chose programming to meet local demands (Page and Crawley 2001: 89–93).9 STAR TV’s use of English-language programming limited its appeal, and cable television became widespread only when Zee TV (introduced a year later in October 1992) focused on local-language programming. Despite cosmopolitan offerings, Indian-language film programming and programming featuring popular Indian film songs continued to be the greatest successes of cable television (Gupta 1998; Page and Crawley 2001: 89). Styles, images, and themes apparent in newly available satellite television and Hollywood movies have, in some ways, transformed local film and television productions. While The Bold and the Beautiful may be watched by only a small percentage of the Indian population, Hindi

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films and Indian serials on both state-run Doordarshan and on private channels are heavily influenced by the content and representational styles of the American soaps. Entire genres are adopted wholesale. Thus, the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire (Kaun Banega Crorepati) was a big cable TV hit. Hindi films increasingly celebrate urban Westernized lifestyles and consumerism, and which show heroines in clothing styles (like miniskirts) that in previous eras would have been rejected as excessively revealing (Chakravarti 1998; Chopra 1997). But, in other ways, there are important continuities between the films of the 1980s and those of the 1990s and beyond. One central aim of this book is to consider not only how much Hollywood films and cable television might have played a role in transforming the content of Hindi films but also why Hindi films have resisted transformation in many ways. Even as cultural globalization is transforming India’s media landscape, there is resistance to the new cultural flows. When Valentine’s Day celebrations grew in popularity because of cable music channels MTV and Channel V, supporters of both the opposition Congress party and the ruling Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) vowed to ban such celebrations. Bal Thackeray, chief of the Shiv Sena, asserted that such celebrations were part of an exhibitionist American culture, while activists from the Congress party burned Valentine’s Day cards, claiming that the cards were contrary to Indian traditions (India Abroad 2000a: 43). Protesters have also targeted cable TV programs and other media productions for allegedly defaming Hinduism or corrupting Indian values (India Abroad 1998: 8, 2000b: 6; John 1998; Tsering 1999). Activists have tried to restrict the flow of satellite television into India by, for instance, bringing litigation against STAR TV for screening obscene movies (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 14). While transnational cultural flows are expanding, some nevertheless resist their impact. The limited diffusion of economic and cultural globalization in India also suggests that the impact of globalization has been anything but unified. While many trumpet the rise of a consuming class in India, most Indians do not benefit from the new consumer goods and transnational opportunities of an expanding economy. In a country of about one billion people (2000), there are still only about 50 million televisions. Only about 197 million Indians own wristwatches (Gupta 2000: 7). For the 80 percent who do not own a watch, economic globalization has not meant new opportunities.

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Cable television has greatly expanded, but as of 1998 it still reached only 12 percent of the population (Brosius and Butcher 1999b: 310), and less than 2 percent of Zee TV viewers lived in the rural areas (Thussu 2000: 307). The reach of Hollywood films has expanded greatly, but they still constitute less than 10 percent of the market, and many viewers choose not to watch these films. The great majority of those who view foreign films also watch Indian films. Our understanding of the effects of globalization must carefully consider the differential exposure to global influences and the fact that local media continue to be important.

Studying the Effects of Cultural Globalization in India Since the end of the 1980s, scholars had become aware that globalization represented a revolutionary change in the world in which we live. Yet, surprisingly few studies have considered how transnational cultural flows actually transform local culture—which is one reason why so many questions remain. This study attempts to understand how economic and cultural globalization has transformed culture, class, gender, and family of ordinary middle class men in India through a systematic comparison of important aspects of these systems on the cusp of transformation in 1991 and, again, 10 years later. As my account of globalization in India suggests, 1991 was the year that economic and cultural globalization began in earnest in India. That year, just after the rupee was drastically devalued, I conducted a study of non-élite middle class men’s reception of Hindi films in Dehra Dun. Ten years later, after cable television, Hollywood movies, and the growth of consumerism had in many ways transformed the cultural landscape of India, I replicated that study. A comparison of Hindi films, Hindi film culture, non-élite middle class men’s film-going, and these men’s responses to questions about Hindi films and about family in the two periods allows me to identify the ways in which globalization transformed cultural orientations, imaginations of class and gender, and family and gender arrangements. This comparison also allows me to identify continuities in Indian society and to explore the reasons why some areas of life were transformed and others remained unchanged. I am able to consider

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how new imagined resources sometimes transformed the meanings associated with class, gender, and family systems, while often leaving important social practices unchanged. DATA SOURCES

To understand the effects of the changing media landscape, this study largely relies on four sorts of evidence.10 First, I use a textual analysis of Hindi films popular in the two periods to identify changes and continuities in Hindi film content. I analyze the biggest-hit films that played in the five years prior to the sudden advent of globalization in 1991 and the biggest-hit films following the sudden transformation. I also analyze the films that played during the 1991 and the 2001 fieldwork stints in India. Although the hit films are useful in identifying the themes that appealed to the largest audiences, even run-of-the mill films often play to large audiences during the first weeks of their release: by focusing on those that played during my fieldwork, I am able to improve content analysis by discussing audience reactions in theatres. Second, I use a textual analysis of fan magazines in the two periods to identify the important aspects of Hindi-film culture. Indian films have sparked a large amount of commentary in fan magazines and popular journalism. Researchers of popular-culture reception have begun to consider popular journalism and fan magazines to complement their interviews and content analysis of film and other media (Derné 2000a: 13; Harrington and Bielby 1995; Uberoi 1998). In India, fan magazines are an important way by which film-goers learn about lifestyles portrayed on film (Appadurai 1996: 102; Derné 2000a: 13; Virdi 1997). In addition, they often provide access to a range of stances taken toward film representations. 11 Comparing Hindi film content and Hindi film culture before and after the advent of cultural and economic globalization helps me identify continuities and changes in the gender culture and basic cultural orientations of ordinary middle class Indians who are the primary viewers of Hindi films. Third, the study relies on a comparison of participant observation with film-goers in Dehra Dun that I conducted both in 1991 and 2001. Each day, over the course of three months in each year, I hung around the eight movie houses in Dehra Dun, participating in film-going rituals and watching people watch films, noting when they laughed, when they

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sang along, and what dialogues they knew. A comparison of film-going in the two eras provides some insight into how economic and cultural globalization has influenced people’s use of cinema. Focusing on continuities in film-going sensibilities helps me identify how persistent filmgoing practices correspond to persistent structural realities. Identifying differences in film-going practices suggests how cultural globalization has transformed film-going sensibilities. Fourth, I compare interviews I conducted with film-going men in 1991 and 2001. In both years, I approached men in and around movie halls.12 I asked them to tell me about their favorite films, their favorite heroes, and their favorite heroines. In both years, I asked men about love marriages celebrated in particular Hindi films. Men’s discussion of their favorite heroes and heroines gave me particular insights into their gender culture, while my questions about filmi love marriages revealed attitudes about family arrangements. Since the bulk of the Hindi film audience consists of young men, it is not surprising that the bulk of the men whom I interviewed were young and unmarried. In 1991, 91 percent (20/22) of the men whom I interviewed were in their teens or 20s and 86 percent (19/22) were unmarried. In 2001, 94 percent (30/32) of the men I interviewed were in their teens or 20s and 84 percent (27/32) were unmarried. While most of the men I interviewed were Hindu, I also interviewed some Muslims and Sikhs and one Christian.13 The over-representation of young men in my sample usefully captures those who might be most influenced by the global media since the young are big consumers of television and movies. As anthropologist Edward LiPuma rightly notes, an understanding of changes in thinking and ways of being should focus especially on “those who are coming of age”, who are often, after all, in the throes of “forging their identity” (LiPuma 2000: 63). A focus on men in their teens and 20s in each era allows me to see whether new global possibilities and imaginaries have had an effect on men’s basic orientations toward family, class, and individual autonomy as they enter adulthood. While the number of interviews is too small and not sufficiently random to reveal small changes in the prevalence of attitudes over the decade or differences between different sorts of men who see films, the interview data nonetheless suggest significant continuity between 1991 and 2001. Men were equally likely to express distrust of love marriages. They liked particular films, heroes, and heroines for similar reasons. These findings

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are consistent with my participant-observation data, which reveals similar continuities in the ethos of film-going and my consideration of Hindi films and Hindi film culture, both of which show striking continuities. I was in Dehra Dun a decade after my earlier observations, but audiences seemed to enjoy film-going for similar reasons and to interact with on-screen images in similar ways. While comparing responses to the questions about Hindi film love marriage in the two years suggested that cultural globalization did not appear to be prompting many men to reject arranged marriages, these responses also revealed some of the ways that transnational cultural flows were subtly transforming the meanings men attached to arranged marriages and the usual gender hierarchy.

Emphasizing Non-élite Indians’ Encounter with Globalization One distinctive feature of this study is its focus on non-élites. My emphasis on how globalization affects ordinary middle class Indians is particularly useful because academics, policymakers, and élite organs of public opinion often focus on the experiences of the affluent élite. THE ÉLITE BIAS IN UNDERSTANDING GLOBALIZATION IN INDIA

Following economic liberalization, there has been increasing discourse about the rise of the so-called middle class in India. The Englishlanguage Indian press now commonly refers to a growing so-called middle class that passionately aspires to consumer goods, even luxury goods— and advertising aims at this class. It is no surprise, of course, that Englishlanguage media, from India Today to Stardust to The Times of India would focus on groups with disposable incomes who have money to spend on the scooters and automobiles commonly advertised in these magazines— especially now that Indian markets have opened up for transnational corporations with the money to advertise in these print media. As I discuss in Chapter 3, Indian films today are less likely to depict the struggles of the urban poor (with whom its main audience would easily identify). Instead, more and more Hindi films depict an affluent world of jet travel and automobiles that is beyond the scope of most ordinary Indians’ aspirations. As the government emphasizes economic

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liberalization, there is an increased cultural focus on the consuming classes. In the 1980s, even advertisements for Bajaj scooters in the Englishlanguage India Today showed rural dhoti-wearing sardars carrying a charpai over a dirt track. By 2001, even advertisements in film theatres for scooters showed suit-and-tie wearing riders carrying briefcases. Mary John’s description of changes in condom advertising is telling. Earlier advertisements for Nirodh condoms “were part of an apparatus for addressing the problem of poverty, understood to be the problem of an underdeveloped nation” (John 1998: 386–87). As “the [so-called] middle classes” have come to constitute “a clear cultural reference point”, Kamasutra condom advertising focuses not on reducing family size, but instead signifies “the right to pleasure of this class.”14 Figures of up to 350 million middle class Indians (which sometimes originate on the Internet) are repeated in both academic and non-academic discourse.15 Such figures contribute to the diffuse trend to see India’s “middle class” as constituted by a large group of persons, each of whom has extensive opportunities for consumption. This discourse, focusing on affluent consumers, has played a role in economic liberalization and, more generally, economic policies. Delhi sociologist Dipankar Gupta argues that a focus on affluent consumers now drives much of Indian economic policy: In this era, trade unions have been laid low and, along with it, the emphasis on production and producers as the main planks of economic thought and policy making. In their place, the consumer has stepped in and become pivotal in all calculations. If the customer wants a product, it must be available, even if the social costs are high. Economic restrictions and trade policies that earlier determined what will be produced, and how, are now looked at with distaste (Gupta 2000: 78).

The sole focus is now on “what consumers want. It is no longer material if this brings about unemployment, greater economic dependency, or lack of trade union privileges” (Gupta 2000: 78.) As Gupta argues, this “consumerist globalised approach” detracts our attention from “considerations the disprivileged and for the downtrodden” in India (ibid.: 81). As a result, production is geared to meet “the demands of the privileged classes” (ibid.: 82). Thus, India has specialized hospitals, but a poor national healthcare system (ibid.: 82). It has élite educational institutions, but lacks basics in many rural areas. Air travel has become easier and more comfortable and

40 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

the railways have introduced more comfortable expresses between élite centers, but roads in the rural areas remain in poor condition.16 The normalization of the consumptive experiences of the affluent in India has become a common part of academic discourse as academics from India and abroad now use the term “middle class” to discuss an English-speaking, suit-boot wearing, world-traveling élite. Shoma Munshi says that the “global lifestyles of the urban middle classes, in India today”, which she claims number over 250 million, are not just “imagined” but very real ones. Large numbers of them have some close family member living overseas, either studying, working, or in business. A substantial number of urban, middle and upper middle class Indians also travel overseas at least once a year, whether on vacation or on work. Maintenance of ties with friends and family overseas has been strengthened by the new information and communication technologies (like email, or being able to watch the same television programs) which allow the possibility of time and space to collapse by their sheer speed and at times, simultaneity of transmission (Munshi 2001c: 81).

Puri describes her interviews (all of which were conducted in English) with college-age, college-going readers of English-language romance novels as a study of “middle class women” (Puri 1997). These examples could be much multiplied (Fernandes 2000; John 1998) and I do not intend to single these authors out for criticism. Rather, I mean to suggest the extent and unquestioned normalcy of an academic discourse that refers to English-speaking, urban, consuming élite as a “middle class”. The image of India focuses more now on the Mercedes-driving, tie-wearing New Delhi-ite and less on the poor man who works and lives on a footpath, where he earns a living using a charcoal-powered iron to press the shirts of the Mercedes-driving élite. We focus more on the Dehra Dun-ite talking on a cellular phone as he waits to find his “VIP” seat from which he will watch a popular Hindi film featuring a business executive who travels back and forth between Europe and India and who solves his wife’s infertility by paying millions of rupees to a surrogate mother, and less on the destitute female beggar who tries to get the VIP’s attention as he talks on the cellular phone.17 We often now have an image of India that focuses on the world-traveling, email-using, consumer of Western lifestyles—and we tend to call these people “middle class.” As my discussion above suggests, the so-called middle class world actually applies to very few Indians. While Puri calls the English-language

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romance readers whom she interviewed in English “middle class,” perhaps 5 percent of the population speaks English well18 and, according to the 2001 Census, nearly 35 percent of the population is still illiterate (Khanna 2001: 18). While estimates of a middle class that aspires for consumer goods reaches 350 million, only about 200 million people (20 percent of the population) own wristwatches (Gupta 2000: 7). Just 6 percent of households have a scooter, 9 percent have a refrigerator, and 26 percent have a cassette recorder (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 28). In the urban areas, only 20 percent of the population has access to toilets; in rural areas, just 1 percent (India Today 2002a). The number of people who travel abroad every year may be substantial, but it is a minuscule percentage of the population. Pamela Shurmer-Smith rightly argues that when figures of 300 million are used to describe the Indian middle class, this actually refers to “people who constitute a possible market for things like radios, rather than expensive consumer durables” (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 29). The discursive use of “middle class” to describe an urban, English-speaking élite does not accurately reflect its position in the population. In Chapter 3, I argue that the urban élite uses consumption to define its class standing and describes itself as middle class partly because it sees itself between the poor Indian masses and the richer cosmopolitan middle classes of Europe and North America. What I want to emphasize here is that the academic and cultural focus on a consuming élite as defining India today obscures the lives of non-élite Indians. Even though they have benefited from globalization, affluent Indians maintain their lifestyles because of the labor of poor Indians. At a macro level, cheap labor is one of India’s comparative advantages in the international economy. Dipankar Gupta argues, moreover, that affluent Indians can pursue a “rich lifestyle . . . primarily because cheap labour is still plentiful” (Gupta 2000: 9; see also Shurmer-Smith 2000; Varma 1998: 184). For Gupta, the 1.6 million high-income Indians depend on the support of millions of poor people. A fulltime live-in servant may cost less per month than the cost of a single (if deluxe) pizza (ShurmerSmith 2000: 32).19 In rich countries, convenience foods, including packaged flour, ground spices, and readymade bread (not to mention frozen dinners), help provide a middle class lifestyle, but in India, low-paid servants save the wealthy from the drudgery associated with food preparation (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 50). In rich countries, clothes- and dish-washing machines do the

42 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

work that low-paid servants provide in India. Gupta argues that because the affluent depend on the availability of low-wage labor for middle class lifestyles, they have no interest in the “general middle classing of society” (Gupta 2000: 9). Since they can afford the private education that gives their children a better chance at the unreserved places at specialized Indian universities, the affluent have little interest in improving standards in government schools (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 37). The (mis)understanding of academics of the effects of globalization has been, I think, unduly influenced by contacts with affluent Indians who often benefit from globalization and rely on the low-paid labor of the urban poor. Conference-goers include Indians who are in a position to become transnational academics. They travel back and forth between India and Europe or North America and have seen how their family’s lifestyles have advanced in recent years. Academics read English-language magazines and newspapers which try to reach the Indian diaspora and/or the 5 percent of the population that speaks English well. These publications, of course, focus on providing advertisers with readers who have the discretionary income to buy consumer products. Reliance on transnational research assistants may give foreign scholars a biased view of globalization’s effect. The implications of using privileged research assistants have, of course, long been known. Gerald Berreman (1972) found that while working in a Himalayan village, the mere presence of a Brahmin research assistant discouraged untouchables from openly presenting their ideas, a fact which only became clear when the Brahmin research assistant became ill and was replaced with a Muslim one. Berreman (1971: 25) describes how when he recounted to low-caste people an explanation of caste which focused on the ritual superiority of Brahmins, “they laughed, and one of them said, ‘You have been talking to Brahmans’” (ibid.: 25). Miriam Sharma, who also necessarily relied on a Brahmin research assistant to help her with research that included interviewing lower-caste individuals, also became “aware of the discrepancies of some of [the assistant’s] translations and even general interpretations” (Sharma 1978: 15–16). She concludes that the assistant’s “own attachments, personalities, and feelings” affected the “information he passed on to her” (Sharma 1978: 15–16). As a result of relying on Brahminical sources, for years we suffered from what Berreman calls a “Brahmannical View of Caste” that failed to recognize the opposition of those who were disadvantaged by the caste system (see also Bremen 1985; Derné 1990).

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Those of us who do not speak Hindi fluently rely on research assistants who are able to speak both Hindi and English.20 More and more of the people whom we hire as assistants have increasing transnational connections—and may also be hopeful that our connections represent a source of patronage.21 Like most English-speaking, educated Indians who can act as a translator, the capable assistant who helped me in 2001 regarded life in India as greatly improved by the economic liberalization that has improved access to consumer goods. While my research assistant was very helpful in conveying my research to many respondents, I also found that he sometimes discouraged me from interviewing the poorer Indians whom we met in theatres. “Why waste the [audio] tape and the paper [on which we translate the interviews]?” he would ask. Since there are several levels of ticket prices and different areas in which people wait to enter the (more expensive) balcony and the (least expensive) floor seats, I was able to push us in the direction of interviewing some of the less affluent Indians—but it is still possible that I interviewed more film-going men with enough income to support a cable connection than accurately reflects the broader film-going population.22 While my assistant’s gentleness was often very effective in encouraging the respondents to speak openly, the presence of a scooter-riding, watch-wearing, occasionally jeans-wearing research assistant may have nevertheless had a chilling effect on the responses of some of the less affluent film-goers who could not aspire to such consumer items. While my assistant did a superb job of translation despite being a busy man, I occasionally saw a reluctance to translate aspects of interviews that were inconsistent with some of his own beliefs about changes in India.23 Like Sharma, I usually had enough of an understanding of the statements to press for a full translation. I was lucky to have had an excellent research assistant who understood my aims well, but even in this case my need for help from a multilingual person may have introduced subtle biases into the work. Our reliance on transnational research assistants may, then, push us towards developing a “Westoxicated View of Globalization.”24 THIS STUDY’S FOCUS ON NON-ÉLITES

An important feature of this study is my focus on the effects of globalization on non-élite, non-cosmopolitan urban Indians, whom I usually call

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the ordinary middle class, the non-élite middle class or, more theoretically, the “locally-oriented middle class.” With the growing availability of global goods, Indian cities clogged with cars, prestigious housing developments and five-star hotels, many commentators see a huge affluent population in India. Yet as Rao and Natarajan conclude, the “so-called middle class is a myth” (Rao and Natarajan 1996: 209). Less than one half of 1 percent of the country’s households makes an annual income more than Rs 1 million (less than US$ 25,000). Income figures are unreliable, but the best estimate is that, in 1996, only about 2.9 percent of households earned more than Rs 96,000 annually (around US$ 2,150.)25 Given the unreliable income figures and the complications of both the urban–rural divide and the differences between life in the metropoles and the other cities, this discussion of lifestyles of different classes and their relative numbers is necessarily a broad estimate. It is based largely on my interpretation of the various figures presented by Shurmer-Smith (2000). Affluent English speakers, constituting perhaps the top 10 percent of the urban population, call themselves middle class, perhaps (as I argue in Chapter 3) thinking of themselves as “middle class” on a global scale, situated between the Indian poor (whose work supports their lifestyle) and the better-off consumers in the Western countries. This affluent class is the primary market for expensive consumer durables like cars. Attracted to global products, the affluent might dine at a Pizza Hut or buy Nike shoes rather than patronizing local establishments and producers. They buy Benetton, DKNY, or Levi’s brand clothing rather than rely on tailors to copy the latest fashions. Affluent households usually employ at least one fulltime servant and avoid shoddy public services by sending children to private English-language schools, using private medical clinics, and arranging private backup supplies to protect against disruption of water or power. They avoid routine fear of crime by living in gated colonies and avoid the crush of Indian railways by traveling in the air-conditioned class or by air. Often possessing a college degree and a good job, ordinary middle class Indians lack the English-language skills and the global connections which would allow them to take off with the global economy. Gupta argues that there is a: huge divide between those who call themselves ‘middle class’ (quite erroneously) and the rest. The middle class upwards strata actually constitutes the

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elite of Indian society. . . . [This elite sector stands out] because those below them live in such desperately unenviable conditions. Frayed white-collar families struggle and save to buy a scooter; those who belong to the dirty white collar sector are in debt up [to] their ears trying to marry off their daughters or to give their children a halfway decent education (Gupta 2000: 60).

Earning Rs 45,000–96,000 (US$ 1,000–2,150) annually, ordinary middle class Indians constitute 16 percent of households India-wide, perhaps 40 percent of the urban population. They work as clerks, police officers, teachers, government transportation workers, and so on. They buy few “global” products, preferring the Rs 50 restaurant meal to the Rs 300 Pizza Hut meal, the Rs 300 Indian-made shoe to the Rs 3,000 Nike. They may be able to afford a scooter, television, and perhaps a refrigerator and will try to send their children to private English-language schools, although the quality may not be good. The ordinary middle class that constitutes nearly 40 percent of the urban population is the primary focus of this study. Gupta is right to emphasize that “once we go below this segment of the population the situation is really quite abysmal. Chasing after buses, cycling for miles to work, pulling rickshaws, slogging in sweat shops, and it just keeps getting worse” (Gupta 2000: 60) (53 percent of Indian households earn less than Rs 22,500 [about US$ 500] annually). Seeing the desperate conditions of the poor, the non-élite middle classes worry about “erosion of real income, impoverished retirement and, more than anything, the job prospects of their children” (ibid.: 60). As ShurmerSmith rightly argues, the ordinary middle class feels insecure, “acutely aware of the” widening gulf between themselves and the more privileged and worried about the threat “against real impoverishment and the loss of the few advantages they have” (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 52). Despite the discourses in Western scholarship and the Englishlanguage media that identify the consuming élites as middle class, the people whom I call the ordinary middle class also see themselves as India’s middle class. Dickey’s (2002: 218) research in Madurai and Saavala’s (2001: 302–03) research in Hyderabad shows that ordinary middle class people use vernacular Tamil and Telugu expressions to refer to themselves as India’s “middle class”—below the position of the “great people” who drive automobiles and travel to foreign places, but well above the position of those who live in the slum areas, cycle miles to work, and survive on day-to-day earnings.26 Their positive notion of their middle-class status centers on

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having a pukka (concrete) house in a neighborhood with other middle class people, and on possessing non-economic signs of middle-classness such as “cleanliness, [a] neat way of dressing, [and] healthy appearance” (Saavala 2001: 303). I interviewed the ordinary middle class that is between the urban poor and the affluent, consuming classes. In doing so, I am privileging the non-élites’ own indigenous understandings of class while contesting the discourse that identifies the top 3 percent of the population as India’s middle class. I studied ordinary middle class Indians by examining Hindi films— one of ordinary Indians’ main forms of entertainment27—and by interviewing ordinary middle class men. Most of the men whom I interviewed had reasonable jobs or job prospects but did not speak any (or very much) English. Their families often owned scooters or televisions, but they could barely dream of automobiles or traveling abroad. The ordinary middle class Indians whom I interviewed included successful laborers, lower-middle class people, people with professional or administrative posts, the successful self-employed, and students aspiring to middle class jobs. Eight (25 percent) of the 32 men whom I interviewed in 2001 were successful laborers, half of them with rural connections.28 The success of these laborers is apparent in the fact that three-fourths of these men had televisions in their homes. Three (9 percent) of the 32 men whom I interviewed in 2001 had non-laborer, lower-middle class jobs: one worked as a driver for a state board, another as a traveling salesman, and yet another as a peon in an architecture firm. All these men owned a television; two of the three had cable television. Three (9 percent) of the men whom I interviewed were successfully self-employed: one as a mechanic, another as a tailor, and the third as an anchor for a musical group. Two of these three men had television and cable. Two (6 percent) of the men whom I interviewed had good middle class jobs: the first as a civil draftsman and the second as a clerk in a government agency. Fifteen (47 percent) of the young men whom I interviewed were students, all of whom were seeking good middle class jobs. (I also interviewed one unemployed recent graduate.) Five of these students were doing postgraduate studies and the others were undergraduate students. Most of their parents were in non-élite upper-middle class jobs (for instance, bank manager, army officer), but some farmed in rural areas. My earlier research in Dehra Dun was with people of similar class standing.29

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I did not select my interviewees in a systematically random fashion— I approached men at the range of theatres, showing a range of shows, and at waiting areas for the various classes of theatre tickets. Since 1991, two theatres had closed in Dehra Dun and one which had been shut in 1991 had reopened, leaving five theatres showing Hindi films and dubbed Hollywood films, and an additional two theatres showing Indian-made pornographic films. One of the theatres that had closed—the Orient— had catered largely to the urban poor. It had been the cheapest and least comfortable theatre in town. The closure of the Orient reflects the decreased availability of going to the theatre as a leisure activity for poorest Indians. While in 1991 ticket prices in Dehra Dun ranged from Rs 3 to Rs 10 (about 12–40 cents),30 by 2001 the range of ticket prices had increased to Rs 20 to Rs 55 (about 45 cents to about US$ 1.25). Even though regular “cut rate” showings of B-grade fare and revivals aimed to attract less well-off Indians, more and more Indians may be unable to afford India’s least expensive entertainment. I interviewed men who arrived on motorcycle at the most comfortable theatres in town to watch Hollywood films from the most expensive balcony seats. But I also interviewed laborers who attended cut-rate revivals of big hits or enjoyed the day’s biggest social or fighting-and-killing films from the cheapest seats. At the social films aiming for the broadest audiences, I interviewed frontbenchers purchasing the cheapest Rs 20 seats, more affluent men who bought Rs 25 seats, and balcony-walé who bought Rs 35 seats to watch a film in relative comfort. While fewer poor Indians may attend films today, the men whom I interviewed broadly represent the ordinary middle class male audience of Hindi films and are roughly comparable to the men whom I interviewed a decade previously (see Derné 2000a: 19–25). This study focuses on the effects of globalization on family institutions, cultural orientations, and imagination of class and gender systems on the ordinary middle classes who cannot participate fully in the cosmopolitan worlds opened up by globalization. While globalization has tremendously transformed life possibilities for the affluent Indians who speak English well, the effects on ordinary middle class Indians have been more modest. This study emphasizes how ongoing structural realities have limited the effects of globalization on ordinary Indians, but also notes the ways in which globalization has nonetheless transformed the way ordinary Indians orient themselves culturally and understand the meanings attached to class and gender categories.

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Globalization in Dehra Dun Over the decade since 1991, opportunities for affluent Dehra Dun-ites have increased. In 2001, I met many more Dehra Dun English speakers who were working in telecommunications or computer programming. I met many more English speakers with relatives working in the USA. In 2001, I met Dehra Dun-ites with automobiles, computers, cellular phones, and home appliances. But economic liberalization had not had the same effect on the opportunities of the non-élite whom I met in Dehra Dun. While economic liberalization has improved opportunities for affluent Indians, for ordinary Indians the local employment market, oriented to local production and wages, remains the source of most jobs. Although some of the students whom I met were hopeful, most of the non-cosmopolitan middle class people did not have vastly improved job prospects. And for the poor, economic liberalization’s devaluation of the rupee and limitation on subsidies of basic food items had increased the costs of many essentials from food to fuel, often worsening their condition.31 While the effect of economic liberalization on most Indians’ job prospects was limited, the cultural globalization that took place in the 10 years between the two studies dramatically changed the cultural landscape for even non-élite Indians. In 1991, no Hollywood films were screened in the three months that I worked in the city, but in 2001, dubbed Hollywood films were the main fare at the city’s two most élite theatres.32 While the two élite theatres showed an exclusive fare of dubbed films during my fieldwork, they probably will continue to show Hindi films as well. Previews of upcoming Hindi films continued to play during my fieldwork. In addition, these élite theatres had screened the biggest Hindi film hits of 2000, Mohabbatein and Kaho Na Pyar Hai. Audiences could watch Hollywood films about adventurers traversing dangerous snowy peaks (Vertical Limit), B-grade films aiming at sexual titillation (like Yeh Kaisi Chahat [This Sort of Desire], a dubbed version of the low-budget Hollywood film Sexual Intent) and action films with spectacular special effects like Arnold Schwarzenegger’s Arnold Ka Mukabla (Arnold’s Confrontation, a dubbed version of Hollywood’s The Sixth Day). While in 1991, none of the men whom I asked had seen Hollywood films,33 nearly 60 percent of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 had watched such films.34

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I generally asked whether a respondent had seen “American” films, and then, if the respondent appeared to need further prompting, followed up by asking about “Hollywood” films or “foreign” (videshi) films. Occasionally, my research assistant prompted respondents by asking about Mission Impossible 2, Godzilla, or The Mask. While some of these men claimed to see very few foreign films because they disliked them or lacked cable television, nearly half of them enjoyed dubbed films as part of regular film consumption.35 In addition, one man, who claimed to see “few” American films, said that he enjoyed the picturization of Godzilla and Jurassic Park. While American films may not be a regular part of his diet of film consumption, he brings the percentage of men who enjoy at least some American films to 50 percent (16/32). Certainly, none of the men whom I interviewed considered seeing films in English. “They wouldn’t make sense” unless they are dubbed into Hindi, one man told me. But the dubbed version of Mission Impossible 2 and Godzilla were part of many film-goers shared experiences36— and 22 percent (7/32) of the men I interviewed were so charmed by foreign films that they claimed to see very few Hindi films. While exaggerated,37 the claim that they saw few Hindi films nonetheless suggests the important attraction of the newly-available Hollywood films for a number of young Indian men. Perhaps more important than the growing popularity and availability of American films was the growing access to television, especially cable television. In 1991, few of the men whom I interviewed had access to television, and even those who had televisions were limited to state-run Doordarshan programming (as satellite television was completely unavailable). In 1991, Doordarshan’s hits were family serials, serialized Hindu mythologies, and (biggest of all) a weekly Hindi film and a weekly program devoted to Hindi film songs. By 2001, television had rapidly expanded so that nearly 88 percent (28/32) of the men whom I interviewed had access to television.38 The expansion of cable TV was revolutionary. While none of the men whom I interviewed in 1991 had access to cable TV, by 2001 about 69 percent (22/32) had at least some access to cable television.39 Like the effects of economic liberalization, the exposure to cultural globalization is uneven. While about half of the film-going men whom I interviewed in 2001 made foreign films a regular part of their film-going

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pleasure, 40 percent (13/32) had not seen even one Hollywood film.40 As one man said, “I want no business with such films.” The consumption of Hollywood films appears to be linked to class. None of the eight laborers whom I interviewed in 2001 made Hollywood films a regular part of their film-going experiences and only two had seen even one Hollywood film.41 Of the three lower-middle class people whom I interviewed, only one made Hollywood films a part of his regular film-going.42 By contrast, all five of the professional and self-employed men whom I interviewed had seen Hollywood films, and all but one of these men made Hollywood films a regular part of their film-going experiences. It is difficult to tell whether poorer Indian men’s limited consumption of Hollywood films represents a preference for Hindi films or a lack of opportunity to see Hollywood films. Dubbed films, after all, tend to play at the more comfortable (and more expensive theatres) and do not screen at the “cut rate” which is becoming increasingly common for some of the Hindi film offerings. Less likely to have as much access to cable television as the better off, poorer Indians may not develop the same taste for American films as those who have access to such films on cable television in their homes. However, it is important to emphasize that class does not fully determine the consumption of Hollywood films. One-quarter of the laborers whom I interviewed had, in fact, at least sampled foreign films. More interesting, some of the better off Indians seemed to enjoy Hindi films to the exclusion of foreign films. Most of those with less than gradeschool education avoided Hollywood films43, but five of the 15 college students whom I interviewed also avoided watching foreign films in theatres. Even some of the ordinary middle classes in the somewhat cosmopolitan city of Dehra Dun had not expanded their tastes beyond indigenously-produced Hindi films.

This Modest Study in the Broader Context The empirical bases of the comparison I use to anchor an understanding of globalization is quite modest. But the implications of my systematic comparison of the gender culture of young, non-élite male film-goers in one north Indian city in 1991 and 2001, based on brief interviews, is nonetheless significant.

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Most importantly, because I had completed a study in 1991 on the eve of globalization, my 2001 study allowed me to make a systematic comparison between two eras—one in which access to cosmopolitan media was limited, and a later era in which transnational flows had revolutionized the “mediascape”. Even if the locale, the regional city of Dehra Dun, is not broadly representative, the data offer a good case study of the effects of social change. Still Dehra Dun may be nonetheless a good locale to understand the effects of cultural globalization in north Indian cities (beyond the largest metropoles, more generally). While a regional city, Dehra Dun has attracted migrants from throughout north India: some of those I interviewed were from as far away as the state of Bihar. Like other regional cities, Dehra Dun has attracted migrants—especially students—from nearby rural areas, and some of those I interviewed had a rural background. Indeed, the secondary survey data I cite indicate that the continuities and transformations in non-élite men’s gender culture have parallels that exist beyond Dehra Dun. Dehra Dun is a relatively cosmopolitan place where one might expect the effects of transnational cultural flows to be, indeed, more significant than other cities (again excluding the largest metropoles such as Delhi). The fact that the effects of cultural globalization that I identified were quite modest in a cosmopolitan city like Dehra Dun suggests that (at least in the relative short-term) the consequences of cultural globalization may be quite limited. Finally, I try, in this book, to widen my discussion of the effects of globalization by using secondary literature to discuss changes in the gender culture of both women and affluent Indians. This discussion of changes in the thinking of affluent Indians and women highlights the importance I place on social structures in rooting cultural understandings. This consideration of affluent Indians and women contributes to my argument that cultural globalization is unlikely to generate major changes unless accompanied by simultaneous transformation of social structures.

Outline Chapter 2 develops a theory of the fit between culture, structure, and psyche. In developing this theory, I introduce readers to central elements of culture and social structure in India that are the focus of this book.

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Chapter 3 considers how globalization has made affluent Indians think of themselves as a “transnational middle class.” Cultural and economic globalization has incited consumerism among the affluent who come to see themselves as having more in common with consumers around the world than with their compatriots in India. For the affluent, a cosmopolitan identity rooted in consuming certain goods has greater salience than national identity rooted in Indianness. In developing this argument, I suggest the need to rethink class analysis in light of the changes brought about by globalization. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 shift the focus to the non-élite middle classes that are the empirical focus of this study. In Chapter 4, I consider how the failure of globalization to transform the structural conditions of non-élite Indians has limited its effect on family and gender arrangements. Nonélite middle class Indians not only distance themselves from cosmopolitan arrangements celebrated in transnational media forms, but sometimes also engage in outright resistance to globalization. I suggest that unlike affluent English speakers, ordinary Indians continue to have a strong Indian identity, which is often rooted in particular gender arrangements. While Chapter 4 focuses on continuities in ordinary Indians’ lives in the face of globalization, Chapter 5 considers how globalization has changed the meanings that non-élite middle class Indians use to understand their lives. While globalization has had only modest effects on how non-élite middle class Indians live, it has had somewhat greater effect on their cultural understanding of how they live. The increase in individualism may portend greater changes in the future. Chapter 6 considers how globalization has added additional layers of meaning onto oppressive gender arrangements in India. I suggest that globalization has generally failed to disrupt existing gender structures and meanings. Instead, it has introduced new meanings which have introduced new bases of, and justifications for, women’s subordinate position. Chapter 7 highlights how the book improves our understanding of the processes of globalization, the dynamics of culture, the persistence of gender, and the workings of social class in today’s global economy.

Notes 01. See, for example, Mankekar 1999b; Uberoi 1998. Some of these hit films included Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes (1997), and Kaho Na Pyar Hai (2000).

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02. These tropes are so common that they hardly need documenting. Films that include honeymoons in Europe run from Chandni (1989) through Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001). Films that reference Indian men’s business or education in Europe or North America run from Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) through Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001). 03. Zahareela, a film made years earlier, was so B-grade that it remained in the can until the slowing of releases in 2001 due to the Gujarat earthquake and the scandals surrounding film financing. It showed at cut-rate prices in Dehra Dun to an audience of the urban poor. The focalizing character and former hero Mithun Chakraborty was scammed in his efforts to get abroad. 04. On my way to India in 2001, I noted that the Super Bowl was playing on the televisions in the departure lounge in Vientiane, Laos. In Lautoka, Fiji, in 1998, I watched President Clinton’s admission about his affair in a bar crowded with both locals and expatriates. 05. This paragraph draws on Gupta 1998, Munshi 2001c, Rao 1998, Sharma 1996, Skinner et al. 1998, and Thussu 2000. 06. The percentage of urban people with access to television in their own homes was 60 percent—the other 14 percent have access to television outside their own home (Varma 1998: 178). 07. I often use terms like “Hollywood films” to refer to the cosmopolitan, non-Indian movies that have become available. It might, of course, be more accurate to speak of foreign movies to refer to the cosmopolitan films—which include Jackie Chan movies—that have made their way to India. Still, it is significant that films like Crouching Tiger and the Jackie Chan movies have become available and popular in India via American distribution systems because of their popularity in Western centers. My respondents, moreover, usually use terms like “Hollywood films”, “American films” and “foreign films” to refer to the range of non-Indian films that have become available. 08. In 1994, Bombay had 3,000 registered cable operators. Even after some years of consolidation, Pune had 1,800 cable operators in 1998 (Page and Crawley 2001: 90). 09. For many years, small-scale cable operators were the only ones making money from cable. The large cable programming networks were trying, instead, to get a foothold in the Indian market (Page and Crawley 2001: 90). 10. For a fuller discussion of the four sorts of evidence that I used, see Derné 2000a: 10–14. (The 2001 study replicated the methodologies of the 1991 study.) 11. I have also used newspaper accounts of changes in India and resistance to these changes. Following Akhil Gupta, I do not see newspaper reports as having a “privileged relation to the truth of social life”, but I do believe that they can be usefully analyzed as a “major discursive form through which daily life is narrativized and collectivities imagined” (cited by Mankekar 1997: 28). 12. While the interviews were not systematically random, I approached men who were purchasing expensive balcony tickets and cheap floor tickets at all of the theatres in Dehra Dun and at showings of hit films and run-of-the-mill films, fightingand-killing films and love stories, Hindi films and English language films. The rate of refusals was low. In both years, I conducted the interviews with the help of a

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13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18.

19.

20.

journalist for a regional Hindi newspaper. The interviews were conducted in Hindi and took about 30 minutes. The taped interviews were conducted in public in and around cinema halls. See Derné (2000a: 13–14) for further description of the interview process. The same method (even the same research assistant) was used in 2001. In 1991, 82 percent (18/22) of the men I interviewed were Hindu, two were Muslim, and two were Sikh. In 2001, 81 percent (26/32) men I interviewed were Hindu, five were Muslim, and one was Christian. Nirodh means “protection” in Hindi, while the Kamasutra refers to an ancient text famous for its focus on sexual pleasure. Sharma says we “hear now of the ‘middle class bulge’” in India, its population estimated anywhere from 100 million to 200 million, all aspiring passionately for consumer goods, some even for luxury goods” (Sharma 1996: 299). Munshi (2001c) cites an internet source (Internet 1999) to describe India’s “large middle class as numbering over 250 million”. Fernandes similarly argues that “the early decades of economic policy in post-independence India were focused on the development of large scale industrial units . . . rather than on the production of consumer oriented commodities” (Fernandes 2000: 613). This focus, she suggests, was “linked to a political culture which was constituted by public discourses on the need for the advancement of the rural poor” (ibid.: 613). Like Gupta, Fernandes similarly suggests that the economic reforms introduced by Rajiv Gandhi were rooted in a “vision” that “substantially rested on the role of the [so-called] middle classes. His vision was encapsulated in concrete economic policies that began to loosen up import regulations to allow an expansion of consumer goods (such as automobiles and washing machines), that could cater to middle- and upper-middle class tastes” (ibid.: 613). Thus, “public political discourses” have shifted “away from a focus on poverty reduction” toward a “growing public culture of consumption” (ibid.: 614). I witnessed both of these incidents in 2001. I witnessed the former again during a brief visit to Delhi in 2007. Shurmer-Smith (2000: 14) estimates that 2 percent of the population speaks English well. Page and Crawley (2001: 77) estimate that 5 percent of the population speaks English well. None of the men whom I interviewed in 2001, most of whom were affluent enough to have cable television in their homes, spoke English well. The 1991 Census reports that 8 percent of Hindi-speakers spoke English as a second language and another 3 percent knew it as a third language (Thussu 2000: 299). The above estimates suggest that perhaps half of these people who claim to speak English as a second or a third language speak it well. Shurmer-Smith reports that “a live-in maid earns about Rs 300 a month, plus her food and accommodation” (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 32). When I was in Dehra Dun in 2001, a live-in maid could still be had for about Rs 300, but I could order a small Domino’s pizza (with mushrooms) for about Rs 110. Of course, the price of a deluxe pizza could exceed Rs 300 (less than US$ 7). Even foreigners who speak Hindi reasonably well still need to include research assistants for ethical reasons. We must, of course, obtain the informed consent of those whom we interview. Given the elliptical, indirect ways that respondents sometimes

INTRODUCTION

21.

22.

23.

24.

25.

26.

55

express their reluctance to be interviewed, I have found it necessary to employ assistants to be sure that respondents fully consent to the interview. (I also do not speak Hindi well enough to fully understand respondents” statements—and have occasionally made grave mistakes in translation—which highlights the need to tape interviews.) Gupta rightly argues that the élite “thrives on connections, family and patronage. . . . Instead of pursuing individualism as the [so-called] Western middle class did, the Indian middle class is an ardent advocate of privilege. . . . A good patron is one who can break rules. . . . A patron can help to bypass queues, bend regulations, and allow nepotism to thrive against all stated legal statutes” (Gupta 2000: 9–10). Since I used the same procedures and the same assistant in 1991 and 2001, the biases would have pushed in the same direction in both the years. This suggests that the two groups of people are broadly comparable, allowing me to examine the effects of globalization between the two eras. At the end of many interviews, my assistant asked some questions about the desirability of increasing equality in India. He, for instance, asked about the widening difference in ticket prices between the cheap floor seats and the comfortable balcony seats. His own view was that there should be increasing equality in social arrangements. In many ways, these questions were the project of the research assistant— and they were questions that I did not mind coming at the end of the interview. But I noticed that he occasionally was brief in translating the statements of individuals who emphasized views opposed to his own. Some respondents indicated, for instance, that the shareef (upstanding) people would not want to come to theatres if they had to mix with lower sorts of people (neeché log), but my research assistant sometimes had to be prodded to translate such statements. (Of course, the statements were not essential and occurred at the end of a lengthy translation process. In addition, I understood enough to press for a translation. Nonetheless, his reluctance may suggest a bias in favor of the view that globalization is helping all Indians.) The term is introduced by Gupta (2000) who characterizes the affluent in India as “westoxicated” rather than westernized. Rather than emphasizing respect for others, commitment to democracy, or universalistic values which imply respect for achievement over birth, the affluent have become focused on “superficial consumerist display of commodities and fads produced in the West” (Gupta 2000: 11). Focused on “fads, blue jeans, BMWs, or discotheques” (ibid.: 14), the westoxicated élite has benefited from globalization which has greatly expanded the available commodities. Global products have replaced locally-produced wind-up HMT watches and boxy 1940s-style Ambassador automobiles, which were the only watches and cars available through the 1980s. For Gupta, globalization has not much changed the ways of thinking of the affluent Indians who use “western clothes, mannerisms and lifestyles” to reassert traditional privilege “with more contemporary artifacts” (ibid.: 13). I have calculated this from estimates given by Shurmer-Smith 2000: 31. Admittedly, income figures are notoriously unreliable in India, but there is no doubt that the market for BMWs and Mercedes-Benz cars is extremely low. Mark Liechty (2003: 65) found a similar indigenous version of middle classness among non-élites in Kathmandu, Nepal. One 25-year-old whom he interviewed

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27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32.

33. 34.

35.

said that “if they have a car and a beautiful bungalow, then they’re upper-class. . . . And if they have a motor bike and a house of their own, and, well, if things are going easily, that’s middle class. Lower-class people, they are the ones who if they don’t earn today, they don’t eat tomorrow.” While, as Shurmer-Smith (2000: 54) argues, the lower middle class is the biggest market for Hindi films, it is important to realize that both the poor and the affluent sees films as well. Two of these men migrated from India’s poorest state, Bihar, and a third migrated to Dehra Dun from its rural hinterland. One other man commutes to work each day from a village outside Dehra Dun. In 1991, 36 percent (8/22) of the men whom I interviewed were lower middle class or laborers (compared to 34 percent in 2001). In 1991, 23 percent (5/22) of men whom I interviewed were successfully self-employed or working in good service jobs (compared to 16 percent in 2001). In 1991, about 41 percent (9/22) of the men whom I interviewed were aspiring to middle class jobs as students or unemployed persons (compared to 50 percent in 2001). While all of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 were non-élite, one of the successful self-employed men whom I interviewed in 1991 spoke English well and had been abroad. I was in India during the summer of 1991 just after the rupee was suddenly and drastically devalued from roughly Rs 14 to the US dollar to Rs 24 to the US dollar. So, translating the Rs 3–10 price range into dollar terms may understate the longrun cost of a theatre ticket. Still, there is no doubt that the cost of theatre tickets increased over the course of the decade. Both urban and rural poverty have increased in the first decade of economic liberalization (Dev 2000; Oza 2001: 1074n. 15; Varma 1998: 192). One owner of another theatre told me, however, that the emphasis on dubbed films in the élite theatres was partly due to the lack of good Hindi film releases. Both he and the Indian press noted that the delay of the big film Chori Chori Chupke Chupke— because of allegations of illicit financing—had had a chilling effect on the number of releases. The Indian press noted as well that the earthquake in Gujarat had delayed important releases because Gujarat was such an important market for Hindi films (Screen 2001: 6). It is worth noting, though, that in 1991, when the film industry delayed the flow of releases to protest the government’s action which increased the price of raw film stock, Dehra Dun’s theatre owners did not then substitute dubbed films to fill the absence of Hindi film releases. I only asked the first dozen men I interviewed. After I discovered that not one had seen a Hollywood film, I stopped asking the question. Fifty-nine percent (19/32) had watched at least a few dubbed films and over 62 percent (20/32) had seen at least one dubbed film. (15 men claimed to enjoy many Hollywood films, four said that they saw “very few” Hollywood films and one said that he had seen one dubbed film which he disliked). For 47 percent of the men (15/32), dubbed Hollywood films were clearly part of their regular film consumption. Seven claimed to be mostly or exclusively interested in Hollywood films and to see very few Hindi films, and another eight men (all of whom were interviewed at theatres showing Hindi films) said they enjoyed Hollywood films as well as Hindi films and described a number of Hollywood films they liked.

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36. At least one of these two films was mentioned by 12 of the 32 film-goers I interviewed. Of course, many others may have also seen these films. Occasionally, my research assistant referred to MI 2 as he prompted a respondent about whether he had seen any Hollywood films. These respondents were usually at least aware of the film. Thus, it seems likely that most respondents had at least heard of some popular Hollywood films. 37. All but one of the men, who claimed to watch American films exclusively, clearly saw and enjoyed more Hindi films than they liked to admit. One of these men had seen the hit film Kaho Na Pyar Hai six times, and two others had seen it at least three times. A fourth man, who claimed to have seen the film just once, enjoyed singing the film’s hit song. Two others could name a number of Hindi films and Hindi-film heroes and heroines whom they particularly liked. One of these two men also clearly enjoyed the preview for a Hindi-film—which we watched together—before an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, saying that he could see why I liked Hindi films so much, as he too was entranced by the dancing in the preview. 38. Five men had no televisions in their homes, but one of them seemed to watch TV regularly at a friend’s house. Another two men lacked television at the hostels in which they were staying to complete their undergraduate education, but had had television and cable at their parents’ homes. 39. Twenty of the 32 men I interviewed had cable in their homes. In addition, two students staying in hostels in Dehra Dun had cable at their parents’ homes. Of the five men with TV but no cable, three commuted to Dehra Dun from a rural area that had no cable connections. 40. About 10 percent said that they had seen “very few” Hollywood films. 41. Four of these men worked in construction, one was a whitewasher, two worked in manufacturing, and one operated a cycle stand. 42. The lower middle class men included a peon in an architecture firm, a traveling salesman, and a driver for a state agency. One of these men had never seen an American film and the third saw very few such films. 43. Only one of those with less than grade-school education said that he had seen an American film.

2

Culture, Structure, and Psyche Understanding Globalization and Cultural Change

Following Richard Shweder’s (1991: 73) insights, this chapter suggests that culture, social structure, and psyche jointly, dialectically, and dynamically make each other up. A correspondence, or fit, tends to develop between cultural meanings, social institutions, and aspects of the psyche such as emotions and self-conceptions. This “fit” between cultural orientations, social structures, and psyche militates against easy social changes. Given the mutually reinforcing character of culture, structure, and psyche, it is difficult to assign causal priority to these elements. But by identifying those locations from which newly introduced cultural ideas have transformed life in India and those locations from which Indians have resisted these transformations, this book suggests that it is social structure that has the greatest causal priority. This book shows that when existing cultural meanings are supported by social institutions and reinforced by psychological orientation, newly introduced cultural ideas usually do not transform people’s imaginations. I see institutions as central in rooting cultural understandings and emotional orientations. Ann Swidler comes to a similar conclusion, arguing that cultural “consistencies across individuals come less from common inculcation by cultural authorities than from the common dilemmas institutional life poses in a given society. Not shared indoctrination but shared life-structuring institutions create the basis for a

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common culture” (Swidler 2001: 176). Anthropologists Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1997: 190–91) have taken issue with the importance Swidler places on institutions. Contesting Swidler’s argument that the institution of marriage structures the cultures of love in the USA, Strauss and Quinn insist that it is ideas of love that structure institutions of marriage. By showing that purely cultural innovations in understandings of love and marriage have a limited effect in the absence of simultaneous changes in social institutions, this book confirms the fundamental importance of social structure. Highlighting the centrality of institutions, this book shows that cultural globalization has been resisted (or ignored) when underlying social structures and institutions have not been simultaneously transformed. Hindi films have long celebrated consumerism, but until economic liberalization opened up the Indian markets, consumerism did not take root in the consciousness of many Indians. Hindi films have long celebrated love marriages, but until opportunities for free interactions between unmarried men and women increase and young people develop more economic independence, love marriages are unlikely to grow substantially. Indeed, the strong resistance apparent in yearly and widespread protests of Valentine’s Day celebrations suggests that newly available imaginations are strongly at odds with the structural reality of arranged marriages and the psychic orientation that love between spouses should be subordinate to respect for family authorities. This chapter introduces a theory of the fit between culture, structure, and psyche. In doing so, I describe the fundamental cultural and institutional features of Indian society that are the focus of this book. I describe institutions of family and economy in India, and the basic emotions and cultural meanings and orientations which fit these structural realities. I highlight how affluent Indians and ordinary middle class Indians are located differently within the economic institutions that have been transformed by globalization, and how affluent Indians and ordinary middle class Indians live in different institutional matrices of family.

Social Structure I use social structure in an older sociological sense that focuses on how society is organized. In this usage, culture refers to meanings, norms,

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and values, while structure refers to social organization.1 The 1960s and 1970s culture-of-poverty debates reflected this usage. Some saw the position of the American poor as reflecting particular cultural norms and values that opposed achievement, while others believed that poverty reflected differential structural opportunities in education and work institutions that limited possibilities for achievement. Social structure or social institutions refer to how society is organized to meet necessary social functions. A social structure is made up of a system of positions and a system of rewards and opportunities associated with positions. Economic structures are defined by the productive roles that exist in society, the rewards associated with these roles, and the means of assigning people to those roles. Some people make decisions about what is produced and how things are produced; some people manage and organize production; some people labor to produce goods. Some positions are well-compensated, while others provide limited rewards. Economic structures also organize how people are assigned different roles. Family connections, race, gender, and educational achievements are among the factors that can be important in assigning economic roles in different institutional contexts. Family structure can similarly be described as a system of positions. In family, some people do more housework and childcare than others; some individuals do more work aimed at earning income or producing goods; some positions involve more control, power and prestige, while others are subject to the control of others. As with the economy, structural factors such as gender and age play an important role in assigning people to different positions in the family. Of course, the coherence and homogeneity of institutional arrangements varies. Institutions represent patterns of individual behavior. Sometimes, these patterns reflect unified, coherent arrangements. At other times, institutions represent a more heterogeneous mix of possibilities. As divorce has become part of the way the institution of marriage works in the USA, single-parent households and households of a second (or third) marriage that include children from previous marriages have become part of the repertoire of institutional possibilities. Despite the widening of institutional possibilities in the USA, family institutions still limit possibilities. An adult son in his 40s living with his parents is not an easy institutional possibility. While same-sex partnerships can be enduring,

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and, in some cases, admit the possibility of limited legal recognition in every state in the USA same-sex marriage is still precluded by law. My focus on how social structures and institutions can be analytically separated from the cultural meanings that support them goes somewhat against the grain of recent theorizing. Social theorists with diverse orientations emphasize what I would consider cultural components of social structures. Bourdieu, for instance, identifies structures as having a double existence: structures exist not just in the material world of institutions but are internalized in the “conduct, thought, feelings, and judgments” of social agents (Bourdieu 1992: 7, 18). For Bourdieu (1992: 12–13), constant exposure to particular social structures instills structured dispositions in individuals that internalize the necessities of the social environment. Recognizing the problems separating culture and external structures, Bourdieu usefully calls attention to mutual relations between external and internal structures (ibid.: 16).2 Indeed, many sociologists today (Sewell 1992) see culture as constituting social structures. For Bourdieu, “symbolic systems,” which are themselves social products, centrally “contribute to making”(Bourdieu 1992: 14) the social world. Randall Collins is right to argue that sociological descriptions of social structures and institutions “are only abstractions from the behavior of individuals” (Collins 1981: 989). “The structures never do anything; it is only persons in real situations who act” (Collins 1987: 195). Thus, most definitions of social structure or social institutions emphasize the “rules,” “shared meanings,” or “norms” that support them (Parsons 1951: 39). So, Giddens defines structure as “rules and resources, recursively implicated in the reproduction of social systems” (Giddens 1984: 377). Sewell emphasizes that “structures are not the patterned social practices that make up social systems, but the principles that pattern these practices” (Sewell 1992: 6). As Fligstein puts it: institutions are rules and shared meanings (implying that people are aware of them or that they can be consciously known) that define social relationships, help define who occupies what position in those relationships, and guide interaction by giving actors cognitive frames or sets of meanings to interpret the behavior of others (Fligstein 2001: 108).

This focus correctly emphasizes that it is through following certain cultural rules, whether voluntarily or due to coercion, that social structures or institutions are produced and reproduced.

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Despite the importance of focusing on the interrelations between cultural meanings and social structures, I argue, following Lyn Spillman (2002: 5, 1996, 1995) and many others, that it is still helpful to distinguish social structures from the processes of meaning-making that may play a role in creating and reproducing them. While both the material and the mental may be structured and interrelated, it is still useful to distinguish between the two, and the terms “structure” or “institution” and “culture” remain a good way of doing so. As Spillman (2002: 5) points out, it is useful to study class consciousness separately from class structure, organizational culture separately from organizational forms. While social structures may ultimately be rooted in the meaningful conduct of individuals that produce and reproduce the institution, individual actors still face an institution as an external social structural reality. Thus, Weber explored the meanings that gave rise to capitalism, while still recognizing that contemporary individuals contend with an economy structured according to capitalist principles.3 Even if the institution of arranged marriages is merely the aggregation of the meaningful conduct of individuals, individual actors still face the structural reality of living in a world in which marriages tend to be arranged by the parents of the bride and groom. That the rules or norms that individuals follow in producing and reproducing institutions are sometimes institutionalized in law highlights the external and constraining power of social structures. Swidler emphasizes that institutions are not simply “well-established, stable sets of purposes and rules” but that these guidelines are “backed by sanctions” (Swidler 1995: 319, as excerpted in Spillman 2002) which are often reflected in law. Same-sex partnerships can remake families, but legal institutions limit the ease with and extent to which this can occur. When divorce is legally difficult to accomplish, it is not well institutionalized in society and may not appear to be an easy institutional possibility for individuals. Laws that restrict foreign exchange or limit equity stakes of foreign companies constrain the behavior of individuals which, when aggregated, constitutes the economy. Certainly, many sorts of social structures are not institutionalized in law, but highlighting such legal sanctions is useful to emphasize how institutions may appear to actors as an external constraint. For this study, the key aspect of social institutions or social structures is that they are experienced by individuals as external and constraining

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(Calhoun et al. 2002: 133; Fligstein 2001: 107; Parsons 1951). Institutions are obdurate, external realities, which constrain individuals (see Giddens 1984: 236, 239). Much social theory today rightly emphasizes that institutions enable individuals as well as constrain them (Bourdieu 1992; Sewell 1992: 27; Swidler 1995: 319), but the external institution still structures possibilities. While individual actors face an institution as an external constraint, that constraint does not determine individual behavior. Individuals can still work around or through an institution, but individuals usually cannot act as if the institutions they face do not exist. Living with the institution of love marriages, Americans are enabled to pursue a range of choices, but there is no institutionalized way for American parents to arrange children’s marriages or young Americans to seek an arranged marriage. Living with the institution of arranged marriages, Indians may try to insist that they meet their spouse before marriage is finalized, or even that their parents arrange a marriage with the person of their choosing, but most Indians lack the institutional structures that would facilitate marrying for love. Most Indians lack structural opportunities to become close to someone of the opposite sex, or to develop the economic independence that would facilitate bucking parental guidance. Even when people buck institutional constraints, they must nonetheless contend with institutional arrangements (Derné 1994a, 1995: Chapter 7). American parents may try to influence a daughter’s choice of spouse, but they are constrained by the institution that structures marriage according to the participants’ choice (rather than the choice of the parents). American parents cannot easily argue that the daughter should marry according to their wishes out of duty or obligation, but must instead suggest that the daughter would herself benefit by marrying according to the parents’ wishes and should herself choose to do so (Derné 1995: 137–38; Varenne 1977). Utopian Americans who buck the institution of marriage between two people by pursuing “nonmonogamous polyfidelity” in “Best-Friend Identity Clusters (BFICs)” must consciously come to terms with the American institution of oneon-one marriage. In justifying BFICs to themselves and others, they have to address the American institution of one-on-one love and expose it as a myth. Facing the Indian institution of arranged marriages (and the negative consequences of marrying for love), most Indians who marry for love present the marriage as an arranged one by seeking parental consent

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and embracing the ritual public display of marriage with pandits (priests) and a showy baraat (wedding procession) (Derné 1995: 122–37). Even as they marry for love, they must contend with the obdurate structural reality that most marriages are arranged. ECONOMY AND FAMILY IN INDIA

This book is centrally concerned with the institutions of family and economy in India. This chapter illustrates a theory linking structure, culture, and psyche by describing how the institutional aspects of economy and family in India correspond with particular cultural meanings and psychic orientations. One central argument of the book is that these institutional arrangements are crucial in shaping the response to globalization. Globalization, I argue, has the greatest effect on those who are institutionally positioned in ways to take advantage of changes in the economy. For the ordinary middle classes, persistent, institutionalized patterns in family and the economy have limited the impact of cultural and economic globalization. This section highlights how affluent Indians and non-élite middle class Indians are situated with respect to the family and economic institutions that are most significant for this study. Since 1991, the economic structure in India has been transformed by economic liberalization. Foreign exchange restrictions have lessened, the regulatory demands placed on foreign investment have decreased, the potential equity stake of foreign investors has increased, local markets have opened up to foreign competition, regulations and licensing have decreased, and the public sector controls a smaller part of the economy. These legal changes and changed structural realities altered the rules that shaped the behavior of both individual and corporate economic actors. When aggregated, the new individual economic actions that responded to these realities changed the economy, increasing the availability of foreign goods, making pricing of goods more sensitive to non-local forces of supply and demand, and gearing production more to the demands of the international market. The class position of individuals strongly affects whether the globalization of the economy has transformed their opportunities. Indians with income, education and English-language skills are situated in ways that provide increased employment opportunities. For them, the increased

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number of corporations oriented toward the international market has increased the number of high-paying jobs that are available. As a result, cities like Bangalore and Hyderabad have emerged as centers for the production of computer software. Enticed by high salaries abroad, many Indian computer programmers do contract work in the USA and Europe, where they make much more money than they could have in India (even though they make much less than other programmers in the West) (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 26). With decreased foreign exchange restrictions, opportunities for training abroad have expanded for those with money. The changing economic structure has also provided affluent Indians with greater opportunities for consuming a more diverse array of consumer goods. Before liberalization, few international products were available on the open market. There were waiting lists for consumer durables like cars, scooters, TVs, air-conditioning units, and refrigerators. Trips abroad were often necessary to procure consumer items like VCRs. Now, most of these goods are legally available in the market to those with the cash to buy them (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 33). Ordinary middle class Indians are positioned within the transformed economy in ways that have not increased opportunities. While the position of the affluent has improved, the rest of the class structure remains largely unchanged. A similar percentage of workers continue to toil in agriculture, manufacturing, and primary industry (Shurmer-Smith 2000). For those without much income or education, especially those who lack English-language fluency, the local employment market, oriented to local production, remains the source of most jobs. Indeed, the decline in public sector enterprises has diminished employment opportunities for women and lower-caste Indians, who face pervasive caste and gender discrimination in the private sphere (Saavala 2001: 306–07; ShurmerSmith 2000). While some consumer goods, including televisions, are increasingly available to the non-élite middle class in India, economic globalization has often harmed the consumption possibilities of the nonélite. Of perhaps the greatest importance, the structural adjustment policies necessitated in 1991 cut government subsidies on agricultural inputs, raising food prices (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 22). Now, basic items are also exposed to price fluctuations caused by the non-local market. As more refrigerators, generators, and air-conditioners become legally available, their prices have declined since the 1980s. But the prices of basics such as food have often increased.

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Non-élite young men who are frustrated with their lack of opportunities have long constituted the biggest market for Hindi films (Derné 2000a; Shurmer-Smith 2000: 54). The many continuities in Hindi film pleasures in the decade since 1991’s economic liberalization are rooted in the unchanged economic conditions of the non-élite. The rest of this book describes continuities in Hindi films, which continue to offer refreshing reversals of structural realities, and to celebrate the male dominance that so many viewers are attracted to as compensation for lack of economic opportunities. There are similar institutional continuities in the family arrangements of the non-élite middle classes, who continue to embrace arranged marriages, joint-family living, and a gendered division of labor in the home. Non-élite Indians have long married according to the wishes of their parents (Derné 2000a: 84–88). It appears, moreover, that the globalization of recent years has had little effect on the institution of arranged marriages for non-élites (Abraham 2001: 49; Basu 1999; Gupta 2000: 49–50; Pathak 1994: 48, 59; Shurmer-Smith 2000: 48; Uberoi 1998: 307). Abraham (2001: 149–50) found, for instance, that the lowincome, college-going, English-speaking boys and girls whom she interviewed in Bombay in 1996–98 continued to prefer arranged marriages. While living in a metropolitan center and speaking English well, the young women continued to condemn love marriages for making brides vulnerable in their marital homes, while the young men worried that love marriages would cause problems of adjustment with their own parents. Like the non-élite men whom I interviewed before the intensification of globalization in Banaras in 1987 and Dehra Dun in 1991, they rejected love marriages as likely to fail. Similar continuities are apparent in the Indian institution of jointfamily living. Indian men have long contended that the ideal state of affairs is for a young man to live harmoniously under one roof with his wife, parents, and brothers, and that such a life would be full of love and happiness (Derné 1995, 2000a: 25). Certainly, women often do not share this commitment, and many family households do not reflect this pattern. But most couples live with the husband’s parents or brothers in the early years of married life, even if they eventually form a nuclear family as their children grow (Derné 1995). In India today, joint-family living continues in the early married lives of most young non-élite couples (Kishwar 1994: 11; Shah 1996, cited by John 1998; Wadley 2002: 20).

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Indian men continue to want a gendered division of labor in which women are responsible for all housework and childcare.4 Rather than tempering this commitment, economic and cultural globalization seem to have increased anxieties about identity that have only intensified nonélite men’s commitment to a gendered division of labor. Non-élite men have long worried that providing their daughters with education much beyond high school would jeopardize their marriage prospects, since the fathers of sons want daughters-in-law who will toil in the home and believe that educated women would be unwilling to do so (Derné 1994b). Facing the institutional reality of women’s exclusive responsibility for household labor, ordinary middle class fathers discourage daughters from getting an education that might disrupt the institutionalized gender division of labor. The limited economic opportunities for ordinary middle class women, the structural realities associated with women’s work in the family, and the structural realities that guide how parents of grooms choose brides for their sons mean that women of the non-élite middle classes remain unlikely to work outside the home (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 47). Women in lower middle class homes often still do much of the household work that is done by servants in the homes of the affluent (ibid.: 50). Subsequent chapters show how institutional continuities in Indian families are a source of key continuities in Hindi films even in the face of a changed cultural landscape. Hindi films have long addressed tensions inherent in the institution of arranged marriages, arousing anxieties that parents may not have their children’s best interests at heart in arranging their marriages, while simultaneously relieving these very anxieties by suggesting that arranged marriages are the best path to happiness (Derné 2000a: 168). Similarly, Hindi films continue to help viewers handle anxieties associated with the gendered division of labor and joint-family living. Here my emphasis on identifying arranged marriages, jointfamily living, and a gendered division of labor as a persistent part of the institutional landscape of the non-élite in India aims to demonstrate that these practices play a key part in rooting cultural meanings and psychic orientations. It is worth noting that the élite classes are less attached to these family structures. While most affluent Indians continue to embrace arranged marriages, love marriages are becoming more common (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 41). Economic independence is one structural fact that makes love marriages and nuclear family living a more realistic possibility for

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affluent young couples (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 39; Varma 1998: 167). Affluent women’s structural opportunities for earning high incomes may similarly be altering the gender division of labor for élite Indians. If women in affluent households can get good paying jobs, they often do so, employing servants to do the housework. Affluent women, then, are more likely to work outside the home than non-élite middle class women (Shurmer-Smith 2000; Standing 1991). INTERESTS AND INSTITUTIONAL PERSISTENCE

Of course, institutions position some people in ways that advance their interests, and these people, in turn, often work to support these institutions. It is not merely norms and meanings that support institutions, but the interested actions of those who benefit from them. One reason that economic globalization may have failed to increase opportunities for the non-élite is that the élite know that their relative comfort continues to depend on cheap labor in India. At a personal level, the ability to hire lowwage servants to cook and clean is necessary to maintain affluent lifestyles. At a collective level, India’s comparative advantage remains the cheap labor that can attract investment from elsewhere. Thus, as Gupta argues, the élites have no interest in the “general middle-classing of society” (Gupta 2000: 9). Despite economic globalization and the increasing celebration of consumption, the economic structure that severely disadvantages the non-élite of society persists, partly because the affluent benefit from it. One reason that cultural globalization may not have transformed most non-élite Indian families is that men’s relative comfort depends on the existing family arrangements. Joint families often provide important practical support in a country without large government programs of social security, unemployment compensation, and old-age benefits (Derné 2000b: 335). Men often see joint families as providing practical support as brothers and sisters-in-law can divide responsibilities in a joint household (Derné 1995: 42). In many contexts, joint-family living is a sign of honor, which men regard as essential for economic success (Derné 1995; Wadley 2002). Wadley (2002: 19) suggests that for many non-élites, new economic opportunities in cities actually support joint-family living as temporary migrants leave wives and children with their families in the villages. Thus, the self-interested action of those who benefit from joint families contributes to their institutional persistence.

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While economic interests support joint-family living, men’s perception of their own gendered interests also leads them to act in ways that reproduce family institutions (Derné 1994c, 1995: Chapter 2). In 1987, one 28-year-old man whom I interviewed contrasted his happy situation with that of the man whose wife was in the paid labor force: My wife remains at home doing all kinds of service, adorning the house, the door and herself . . . when I come home and see the beauty, I become very happy. [But if the wife works outside], there is daily quarrel. The husband comes into the house and knows that his wife has gone outside to earn. The tired husband makes his own tea. He does everything by his own hands. He even has to make his own tea!

Men commonly complained that if wives were in the paid labor force, the wives would have so much pride that they would not be able to properly love their husbands and other family members (Derné 1995: 28–30). What is less obvious than their attachment to the gender division of labor is that men are also attached to arranged marriages and joint-family living partly for selfish reasons (Derné 1995: 17–19; see also Wadley 2002). They believe, for instance, that in the joint family, their parents can exert control over their wives. Even while they are away at work, they think that their parents can watch over their wives and prevent them from going outside the home. They believe that with an arranged marriage, the parents of the wife and the parents of the husband would be able to get together to put pressure on the wife to ensure that she follow her husband’s orders. As one 33-year-old told me in 1987, “If the marriage is through the parents, and we live in a joint family, the influence of [the wife’s] father, [the husband’s] father, and the whole joint family is on the woman. The woman is kept down a little from all sides.” Institutional arrangements in non-élite families are reinforced by the self-interested actions of the men who benefit from these arrangements. Indeed, the primary uneasiness that men feel about globalization centers on their concern that it might lead women to abandon the family duties that men so often see as a source of their own comfort (Derné 2000a: 27–30). Even in 1987, a 28-year-old complained that the women of the day had a craze (phitur) for moving around, attending parties, and being independent. This man attributed the progressive (pragatisheel) ways of thinking that make women want to work outside the home to being driven by materialism. He condemned any paid work women do

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as worthless (vyarth) because it spoils their families. Especially sickened by market relations entering the home, he complained that “no maid servant is full of motherliness (matrtav). Maids work to get a salary and then leave the child behind.” Men are uneasy about globalization because they fear that it threatens family arrangements, which they believe work in their own interests.5 Men’s interests often drive micro-level interactions that make up the social structure (Derné 1994c, 1995: Chapter 2). Attached to the gender division of labor in the home, men tell their wives not to go outside the home alone, and try to marry their sons to women who will work diligently in the home. Concerned about arranging their daughters’ marriages, parents discourage daughters from getting too much education or pursuing careers that will brand them as too independent to perform the work of a daughter-in-law in her husband’s family (Derné 1994b). Wanting to control their wives, men embrace arranged marriages and joint-family living. This focus on the interests of those with the ability to shape institutions suggests how interests (which are rooted in structural realities) drive the interactions that reproduce social structure. One of the implications of this book’s consideration of cultural globalization is that cultural changes that are independent of changes that transform the interests of powerful people often have little effect on transforming social structures.

Culture While structure refers to how society is organized, culture refers to the meanings people use to understand their social world. Culture consists of a range of symbolic vehicles that convey meaning, including beliefs, worldviews, values, stories, sayings, rituals, movies, religious performances, and works of literature. People use meanings to both understand their world and to convey these understandings to others (see Derné 1995: 9; Spillman 2002: 4–9; Swidler 1986: 273; 2001: 12–13). The notion that sets of meanings are shared, coherent, or consistent within a common group or society has been thoroughly critiqued (Spillman 2002: 7; Stromberg 1981: 545). Nor are meanings a clear guide to action: individuals often know cultural meanings without embracing them; they regard some as authoritative guides to action and

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others as meaningless entertainment, and they interpret existing symbols and stories in diverse ways (DiMaggio 1987: 448; Stromberg 1986; Swidler 2001: 1519). Yet, even as individuals are able to use and manipulate meanings, their actions are still oriented by the meanings they receive. Individuals use culture, as Clifford Geertz puts it, “to orient themselves in a world otherwise opaque” (Geertz [1966] 1973: 363), to make sense of the world they see around them. As C. Wright Mills argues, culture is the “lens” (Mills [1959] 1963) through which people see the world. Certainly, people actively contest meanings, and social movements struggle to change meanings (Lichterman 1996; Williams 1995). But the Durkheimian insight that ways of thinking are external to the individual is also correct. “The church member finds the beliefs and practices of his [or her] religious life ready-made at birth” (Durkheim [1895] 1938: 1–2). Individuals use symbols, stories, and sayings that they themselves did not invent. While individuals sometimes contest and reinterpret—and, indeed, invent—such symbols, stories, and sayings, they still draw on a common repertoire of cultural meanings. Thus, the utopian American who embraces non-monogamous polyfidelity by living in a BFIC also lives with the American cultural celebration of romantic love and must counter that repertoire of cultural meaning to justify his or her lifestyle. Indians who marry for love live with the cultural understanding that love marriages cause destructive conflict between husband and wife. Even if they reject this cultural understanding, Indians must come to terms with it by suggesting reasons why their love marriage might not fall into this trap (Derné 1995: 128–34). Cultural meanings do not determine conduct, but when they are widely held, individuals usually must come to terms with them to explain their own unconventional actions. I distinguish between two broad sorts of cultural meanings (Derné 1995: 9–11). First, cultural components of a cultural repertoire or toolkit help people understand particular social practices, such as arranged marriages and love marriages, joint-family living and nuclear-family living, gendered divisions of labor and shared earning and housework, open economies and closed economies. These sorts of meanings are conveyed in stories, values, worldviews, myths, etc. Second, frameworks for understanding action (see Derné 1994b, 1995) are used to understand action in general. These frameworks help individuals understand any act a person encounters. Individuals must attribute motives to the actions they see

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around them (even if the actions are not part of a familiar social practice). Some frameworks for understanding action may emphasize selfish motives, while others emphasize family obligations; some frameworks focus on individual choices, while others focus on social imperatives. CULTURAL COMPONENTS THAT GIVE MEANING TO FAMILY INSTITUTIONS

The toolkit of the ordinary middle class men whom I interviewed includes a range of cultural components that they use to understand family institutions like arranged marriages, joint-family living, and a gendered division of labor. Most of the non-élite men whom I interviewed prior to the 1990s’ growth of globalization used a moral vocabulary that focused on the importance of honor and tradition to understand family arrangements. “The tradition” of arranged marriages, one man told me, “is the Hindustani tradition. . . . It is right and good. . . . As long as there are Hindustani people in the real sense, the tradition will run.” By contrast, many men told me that love marriages were very dishonoring and were looked at by society with “bad eyes.” They understood the practice of joint-family living as a “tradition” that should be continued since it had “been running from the beginning”. Men say, moreover, that the joint-family protects a man’s honor (izzat) and esteem (maan) by letting everyone know to what khaandaan (family lineage) a person belongs. Similarly, men often regard restricting women to the home as essential to protect family honor. “To talk with any other male is harmful to our prestige (pratishtha),” one man told me. Detailed cultural components give meaning to each institutional arrangement that most men embrace—for instance, the institution of arranged marriages is supported by cultural stories describing the reasons why love marriages fail (Derné 1995: 45–53). The men whom I interviewed tell of young men, blinded by raw emotion, who are less able than sober elders to choose an appropriate spouse. They tell stories of how love marriages break because they reflect an unstable, volatile, equal relationship between husband and wife that is not appropriately controlled by social pressures. “Love marriages often break,” one man told me. Neither husband nor wife “considers himself or herself less than the other one. . . . There is no pressure from the family. . . . All these things lead to destruction.”

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Similar stories support joint-family living by warning of the struggles that those who live in nuclear families face, or by telling tales of wives (and husbands) who act inappropriately without joint-family control. Other stories support the gendered division of labor by warning that wives in the paid labor force often neglect family duties. “When a woman earns something,” one man told me, “she has the pride that ‘I am also something.’ For this reason, she cannot give so much love (prem), and cannot see things with the same eye with which she saw things before she started earning.” Men’s stories of how educated women neglect their responsibilities in the home similarly support restrictions on women’s movements outside the home. “I get up early in the morning and recite Ramayana,” one man told me. “How would it be if the girl got up and started singing English poems?” For this man, the educated woman who is so attached to Western culture and her singing English poems could never have the appropriate “feeling (bhavna) of adjusting in the family” and might thus fail to “rise before her mother-in-law and successfully complete all of the arrangements for the house” (Derné 1994b: 92–96, 1995: 28–30). These cultural meanings support the structures of family life described earlier in the chapter. They provide a way for people to make sense of the institutional worlds that they face, while simultaneously motivating the actions that serve to reproduce these structures. Like interests, these meanings drive the actions that reproduce the patterns that constitute the social structure. Of course, it is important to note that this cultural repertoire is not unified and uncontested. A range of alternative understandings offers alternative ways of seeing social practices. Men have long separated from joint families headed by brothers or parents. A plethora of stories give meaning to such practices. People often talk of family conflicts that divide brothers. One 35-year-old man who separated from his brothers spoke of the “daily quarrels” of joint-family living: “I have [set up a separate household] so that I will be separated from these problems.” Even in the 1980s, the men whom I interviewed understood that the changing times sometimes demanded separation from joint families (Derné 1995: 84–85, 131–35). Men’s cultural toolkit even offers positive stories that might support love marriages. People tell stories, for instance, about how love marriages might succeed if the young couple appropriately seeks parental consent, marries within caste, and embraces

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the proper Hindu rituals. Some hold that love marriages might succeed if people are from the modern or privileged sectors of society (Derné 1995: 122–35). But the cultural components that might be used to support love marriages are less legitimate, familiar, and rich than the understandings that support arranged marriages. What is important to emphasize is that the cultural components available in a toolkit can be used to support diverse (but not infinite)6 lines of action. Since women are positioned differently in joint families, they tend to develop alternative cultural understandings of family (see Derné 1994d: 300, 2000b: 338–40). Frequently faced with greater burdens and less autonomy in joint families, young women often have an incentive to disrupt joint families. Thus, women’s folk songs stress that joint-family living breeds discord and that faith in elders may lead to disaster (Raheja and Gold 1994: 112–13). Disadvantaged by the gender division of labor in the home, women enjoy folk songs that portray independent and powerful women in a positive light, rejecting the focus on wifely submission in her husband’s home (ibid.: 132). Women find positive meanings in romance-novel stories of independent women (Parameswaran 1997; Puri 1997: 442) and in Hindi film stories of heroines who are confident and able to hold their own with anyone (Dissanayake and Sahai 1992: 102). The cultural meanings that support social structures, then, are not likely to be shared by those who are disadvantaged by these structures. This highlights how cultural meanings probably arise precisely because they support the interested actions of individuals—and these individual interests are defined precisely by the way these individuals are placed within a social structure. SOCIAL FRAMEWORKS FOR UNDERSTANDING ACTION

Among the orientational requirements that every cultural apparatus must fulfill (Geertz [1966] 1973: 363) is some understanding of what motivates people’s actions. A growing body of anthropological studies of ethnopsychology—indigenous understandings of the psyche and of mental processes—demonstrate the rich variety of cultural conceptions of human motivations (Heelas and Lock 1981; Lutz 1988; White and Kirkpatrick 1985). Actions can be understood, for instance, as driven by gods or spirits, by respect for elders, by spells cast by witches, by

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“substances” in the village soil (Daniel 1984), or by the self based on individual interests and desires. Nevertheless, two general types of understanding are fundamental (see Heelas 1981b). According to one understanding, actions are chosen by individuals themselves, while through the lens of a second understanding, actions seem to be driven by forces outside the individual. Bellah et al.’s (1985) discussion of “languages”—distinct vocabularies attached to discourse—points to the individualistic understanding of action that is dominant among white middle class American men today. Bellah et al. argue that most Americans are limited by a “language of radical individual autonomy” and “cannot think about themselves or others except as arbitrary centers of volition” (Bellah et al. 1985: 81). The American understanding, they argue, focuses on “the autonomous individual, presumed able to choose the roles he [or she] will play and the commitments he [or she] will make, not on the basis of higher truths, but according to the criterion of life-effectiveness as the individual judges it” (ibid. 1985: 47; see also Heelas 1981a: 4; Shweder 1991; Swidler 1986: 276; Varenne 1977). By contrast, the non-élite Indian men whom I interviewed in the 1980s have a collectivist understanding that holds that action is driven by social pressures from an individual’s social group (Derné 1995: 38–65; see also Kakar 1981; Roland 1988; Shweder 1991). Men see proper behavior as appropriately dictated by social pressures. Rather than focusing on individual morals or commitments as the guide to correct action, men tend to focus on the appropriate pressures from society. “We have to move under whatever is the family’s society,” one 32-year-old told me in 1987. “Whatever customs are there in the society of Brahmins, we move according to those customs.” In understanding how they manage not to act on their own inappropriate sexual urges, unmarried men emphasize that they are being controlled by parents. One 24-year-old told me that he would never “run behind the back of girls” because of his “emotional calculation” that his “parents are above” him. In understanding the inappropriate actions of others, men focus not on variant individual dispositions but on the breakdown of group control. Men believe that college women act inappropriately because their parents are not there to control them. They believe that love marriages almost inevitably break down because a young man and woman who marry for love have rejected the appropriate guidance of parents.

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When understanding actions that are inconsistent with existing social patterns, men do not emphasize individual variations, but the actions of people driven by different social groups. For instance, men explain why some fathers choose to introduce their son to a potential bride before setting a marriage by pointing to these fathers’ class and caste, rather than to their individual decision-making process. They refer to the class and caste of fathers, rather than to their individual choices. Men do not see women who work outside the home as motivated by their own choice (or the choices of parents who provided education) but as reflecting the castes or economic groups to which these women belong. Frameworks for understanding action are not ways of acting, but ways of understanding or perceiving actions. Social groups have an important influence on actions of middle class American men even though these men are unlikely to recognize that influence. In their accounts of their own success, for instance, middle class American men emphasize their own individual efforts, ignoring the contributions of family and neighbors, which are often just as essential (Bellah et al. 1985: 82; Varenne 1977: 28–29). At a more general level, the imperative that Americans be self-reliant and make decisions on their own is itself not chosen by the individual, but is imposed by society (Bellah et al. 1985; Dumont [1966] 1980: 9–10; Varenne 1977: 47–48). Similarly, individual interests play an important part in driving the actions of individual Indian men though they may see even their most self-interested actions as directed by the received authority of caste and family. An individualistic understanding of action does not imply greater individual autonomy, just as a collectivist understanding does not imply stronger group control. Culture is not behavior, and indigenous ethnopsychologies are not a completely accurate description of psychological motivations (see Ewing 1991: 132–34). Second languages which give voice to the opposite pole of human experience also exist in all cultural systems. While middle class American men’s framework for understanding action focuses on individual volition, this focus is sometimes tempered by “second languages” often rooted in Biblical and republican traditions (Bellah et al. 1985; Derné 1995) which allow for a discourse based on shared commitments to communities. Similarly, because total passivity or powerlessness runs counter to the human experience of being able to act in the world (Heelas 1981b: 47), various second languages that recognize the importance of the

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individual complement the dominant Indian first language that sees action as driven by forces external to the individual (Derné 1995: 84– 103, 2000a: 88–111, 164–67; Mines 1988). The Indian Constitution makes individuals important bearers of rights and obligations (Béteille 1983). The spiritual realm is another arena in which Indians can emphasize “particular proclivities of a person” (Roland 1988: 228). Individual competitions, such as wrestling, contest the dominant focus on group membership (Alter 1992). In Hindi films, uniquely powerful action heroes successfully fight injustice and fans emphasize the “specialness” of individual stars. Both Hindi films and popular theatre celebrate challenges to parental authority as heroes and heroines marry against the wishes of their parents or rebel against unjust political, economic, and family powers. The act of filmgoing as a time when young people can be separated from their family emphasizes their autonomy. Perhaps as a result of such cultural help, many men focus on their own individual sensual desires in relationships with their wives (Derné 1995: 90–93). People may be less familiar with their culture’s second languages. They may have less facility using the vocabulary of second languages, which may be less rich than the dominant first language. So, as Sudhir Kakar puts it, even though Indians are often “more individual . . . than they realize,” the “cultural highlighting” (Kakar 1981: 275) of the group makes it difficult for them to recognize their individual autonomy. While Indian men experience individual desires and inclinations, they may still use the first language of group control to talk about these desires. Bellah et al. similarly argue that because of the American “first language of individualism,” Americans “have difficulty articulating the richness of their commitments” (Bellah et al. 1985: 20–21) to others. While second languages allow people who share the dominant framework for understanding action to express aspects of human experience that are contrary to their first language, there are other groups in both the USA and India who do not embrace the dominant framework as their primary orientation. American women, for instance, think much more in terms of relationships to others than in terms of the isolated individual that dominates the thought of American men (Bellah et al. 1985: 111; Gilligan 1982). African-Americans, recognizing how their life-chances are limited by forces outside themselves, are more likely to emphasize collective strategies for advancement than are European-Americans, who focus

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more on individual volition (Stack 1974; Weis 1990). While members of the American middle class focus on success through individual initiative, members of the American working class may focus more on advancement through adherence to external authority (Carnoy and Levine 1985). Similarly, lower-caste Indians may have an individualistic rather than a collectivist understanding of the world (see Appadurai 1986: 751–52; Khare 1984). They understand the social roles that constrain them as something imposed on them by the efforts of the powerful, rather than as a legitimate part of the social order. While upper-caste Indian men try to advance their position by strengthening their families, Indian women, often isolated and subjugated in their husbands’ households, may try to advance their own position by persuading their husbands or sons to separate from the joint family, breaking up the larger groups that men prefer to hold together (Bennett 1983; Raheja and Gold 1994). Erin Moore (1995: 290) found that because joint families often do not work to women’s interest, their moral reasoning relies more on “personal interests” than the voice of authority on which men rely.

Linking Culture and Structure A correspondence develops between institutional structures and the cultural components that support them. Institutions that position people within these structures in particular ways create interests that attract people to cultural meanings that support actions they want to take. Facing the institutional reality of joint-family living, arranged marriages, and a gender division of labor in the home, people who have to, or want to, live in these structures produce stories, values, and other elements of culture that make these structures meaningful. When people act on these meanings by living in a joint family, practicing arranged marriages, and dividing labor in the home, they reproduce those macro-level structures. But since family institutions not only help individuals, but also simultaneously disadvantage them, alternative meanings develop. Since joint-family living may prevent a man from attaining desired closeness with his wife, he may come to understand the joint family as the cause of hardship and strife. A man may see that parents do not always have their children’s best interests at heart in arranging a marriage, and he may come to understand love marriages as desirable. Women, because they

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are disadvantaged by these family institutions, often develop and embrace contrasting cultural components that emphasize conjugal love over joint-family living and women’s independence over a strict division in the household. Thus, the same structures that situate actors in ways that make them generate meanings that reproduce these structures situate other actors in ways that lead them to develop alternative meanings, which challenge these structures. Less obviously, joint-family living structures interact in ways that generate the collectivist framework for understanding action.7 Durkheim suggested that a social group can only make its influence felt when “it is in action” and it is only in action when the “individuals who compose it are assembled together and act in common” (Durkheim [1912] 1915: 465). By putting individuals together where they can act in common, joint families may increase the awareness of a group. A sense of interdependence may be shaped by joint families that appear to work for a common good. This sense of depending on others may be similarly shaped by the institution of arranged marriages, which leads individuals to learn that they must rely on others in their choice of a spouse. By increasing the availability of caretakers, joint-family institutions may also create a sense of interdependence by prolonging a child’s dependence on others. The greater focus of Indian women on individualism may similarly be related to how family institutions structure their experiences (see Derné 2000b). Women, who are expected to leave their parents’ home to live with their husbands, develop a greater sense of themselves as separate from family. Indian “women’s personhood is unique,” Sarah Lamb argues, “in that their ties are disjoined and then remade, while men’s ties are extended and enduring” (Lamb 1997: 289–90). A grown man will remain in his parents’ community: by the time of a boy’s marriage, he will have undergone many more rituals tying him to that community than will be performed for the girl (Lamb 1997: 290–91). Since she must shift her allegiance from one group to another, a woman may be more likely to develop a sense of independence from any particular group. Women may focus on independence and self-reliance precisely because they do not have the same sense of group protection that men do: growing up, girls may see a sister go to her husband’s house and later hear her complain of the loss of freedom and respect that greeted her there. In short, Indian family institutions structure men’s experiences in ways that lead them to embrace a collectivist understanding of action. Placed

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differently in families, women’s experiences tend to provide them with a contradictory set of meanings. When deeply held, the collectivist framework for understanding action bolsters the institutions of joint-family living and arranged marriages, which play such a vital role in generating that collectivist understanding. Because men see appropriate action as guided by the group, they willingly embrace arranged marriages, believing that the group can make a better decision than an isolated individual. Given the American understanding that action is best chosen by the individual based on his or her own desires, individuals want to choose their own spouse. But given the Indian understanding that actions are best guided by family, most Indians embrace arranged marriages. Similarly, because men see appropriate action as guided by social pressures, they choose to live in joint families to facilitate such guidance (Derné 1995: 42–44). As one newly married man told me, “I wouldn’t want to do even the smallest bit of work without asking my father.” By contrast, many Indian men are uneasy with the thought of living separately and making decisions on their own (Derné 1995: 44–45). One 26-year-old told me in 1987, for instance, that the person forced to live alone “will either do bad things or commit suicide. But living jointly, one can pass one’s life.” Given their individualistic understanding of action, American men are happy living separately and making their own decisions. But because Indian men usually see action as rightly driven by group guidance, they often prefer to live in joint families that can provide that guidance. Despite the fit between family structure and cultural understandings, the second languages of individual autonomy and the diversity of family arrangements are longstanding—and are, in fact, generated by tensions in family institutions. Individual actors have long had cultural and institutional resources that could be used to buck institutional patterns. Given the existence of these resources, new cultural meanings are unlikely to create change unless external forces also disrupt institutional structures which support a collectivist cultural orientation.

Psyche8 The resilience of the Indian family structure and collectivist cultural understanding is even stronger because the two have also rooted themselves in

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the psychic orientations of Indians. Unlike Bourdieu, I separate structure from psyche, but the difference is a matter of terminology: my argument is consistent with Bourdieu’s (1992: 7, 12–13, 18) focus on how social structures have a material existence that is also internalized into dispositions that reflect the necessities of the material environment. Consistent with the collectivist framework for understanding action, Indian men’s emotional repertoire emphasizes fear as a good, moral emotion that prompts correct behavior, while regarding love as a potentially dangerous emotion that might prompt dangerously individualistic actions. This psychic orientation is intensified by men’s attachment to a family structure which includes joint-family living and arranged marriages. In the context of joint families, social fear is an emotion which prompts respect for elders, while love is a dangerous emotion that might split families apart. In the context of arranged marriages, fear of parents prompts correct behavior. While Indians hope that love between husband and wife develops, they believe that this emotion is not a solid basis for marriage. When deeply rooted, these emotional repertoires play a role in motivating actions that reproduce the enduring aspects of Indian family structure, like joint-family living and arranged marriages. COLLECTIVIST ORIENTATION AND EMOTION IN INDIAN FAMILIES

It is increasingly recognized that emotions are not biological universals but are culturally and socially shaped (Derné 1994d; Hochschild 1983; Lutz 1988; Shweder 1991). Indian men tend to see social fear as a good, moral emotion because the collectivist framework for understanding action sees action as rightly shaped by the guidance of others. Lacking a focus on the individual, men see love as duty-based and extended toward many in the family. Recognizing love as a potentially individualistic emotion that emphasizes another’s special qualities, men tend to see love as a possibly dangerous emotion that should always be tempered by fear of society. Catherine Lutz found that the Micronesian Ifaluk people see the person “as first and foremost a social creature and only secondarily and in a limited way, an autonomous individual” (Lutz 1988: 88). Given this framework for understanding action, the Ifaluk see “fear” as “what keeps people good” (ibid.: 88). Indian men’s collectivist understanding of

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action similarly implies an understanding of fear as a moral emotion that is the foundation of good behavior (Derné 1994d, 1995: 72–73). A 54-year-old told me in 1987 that people “are only educated from doing wrong by the fear of society (samaaj ke dar).” Another man said that arranged marriages run because of the “fear (dar) of society,” while another said that the “fear (dar) of public shame” is what makes arranged marriages successful. Another man connected social fears in a family to the love that holds a family together: The family remains united, he said, because “everyone in the family fears [bhaybhit] to do something to each other. They yield [manana] to each other, love [paraspar prem rahana] each other and fear [darna, bhaybhit rahana] each other. A 24-year-old man whom I interviewed in 1987 distrusted his own sexual urges, saying that if he didn’t live with his parents, he couldn’t help but “run behind the back of girls.” By living with his parents, this young man is comforted to have “the emotional calculation [bhavatmak hisab] that my parents are above me. There is somebody to guide me and I am under somebody.” The collectivist framework that sees action as correctly driven by family pressures leads men to value the social fear that prompts people (including themselves) to be driven by such pressures. Since Indian men see people as driven by social groups, they put relatively little emphasis on an individual’s personal traits. Hence, the idea of love as directed toward a special, unique individual makes little sense (Derné 1994d, 1995: 72–74; see also Kurtz 1992: 254). Thus, when I asked husbands (in 1987) to tell me about their wives’ special qualities, the most common response was that she “has no special qualities.” Some men described their love for their wives as based on their duties rather than on a wife’s special qualities. One man used the analogy of a parent’s love for the child. “I will love (pyaar) my child,” he said, no matter what the child’s qualities. “It should also be this way with the wife. Whether she is good or bad . . ., she is a member of the family and for the sake of the relationship we certainly love (mohabbat) her.” The collectivist framework that de-emphasizes personal characteristics and emphasizes embeddedness in a web of relationships pushes one toward seeing love as rooted in a duty attached to a role rather than in a person’s special characteristics. Indian men de-emphasize the individual, so love is not for an exclusive individual but is owed to many in a family. Men often describe the pleasures of joint-family living by focusing on what one young

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unmarried man called the “love (prem)” that one gets “from every member of the family.” Men commonly emphasize that a woman’s love should not be directed toward her husband alone but toward many in her family. A married 47-year-old man told me in 1987, for instance, that a wife should “live in love (pyaar-mohabbat se rahana) with her husband, mother-in-law and father-in-law, and with other people, too.” This man emphasized that a woman should love not just her own children but those of other men in the family as well. As one unmarried 24-year-old put it, a wife should “love (prem karna) everyone in the house.” The cultural emphasis on being guided by social groups leads most men to emphasize that love is dangerous if it becomes too focused on one individual or aspect of life. The danger is that an exclusive love which is not balanced with love for other family members will get out of hand. Phoolchand Mishra, a married 28-year-old, focused on how an overemphasis on sexual attraction is dangerous: If the husband and wife love (chaahat) each other because of sex, then they may neglect their elders. But if the reason for the deepness of their relationship is not the sexual relationship, then it is less possible to have this type of corruption of neglecting elders because the mentality of human beings doesn’t remain restricted to one place. It keeps reflecting everywhere. [Emphasis added.]

For Phoolchand, “love (chaahat) should be for everyone—not for some special person.” Like many Indian men who focus on appropriate behavior as guided by social pressure, Phoolchand saw love as dangerous when it becomes too focused on one person, instead of being extended to everyone in a family. The sociocentric cultural emphasis similarly leads men to see love as safe only when it is tempered by social fear. Men see love as a dangerously individualistic emotion that might tempt them away from the benevolent guidance of social pressure from a wise family. Men fear that love may pull unmarried men away from their responsibilities to their families. The unmarried 25-year-old Prem Singh described the “hobby of sex” as an addiction: The man who will lose himself in sex can forget the roles he has to play, as in any intoxication. If you drink wine and you’ve got 100 rupees, then you will go straight to the wine shop—whether there is food in the house or not. The same process runs with the worshipper of sex. His mind will not be peaceful because he will always be entangled in women.

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Although Prem’s marriage had been arranged, he still felt the pull of love: Because I have joy within me, I am not sure if I can control myself. I may become entangled with the love [English word] of somebody. If I meet a girl and love [English word] happens between us, I cannot stop meeting her. I will meet her.

Prem lamented these sexual urges as destructive to his “power of thinking and understanding,” but described these urges as checked only by the fear of his family. He said that because he lives with his parents he knows that “there is somebody to guide me and I am under somebody.” The cultural focus on social pressures as rightly guiding action leads men to be wary of love that is not tempered by social fear. The construction of social fear as a good, moral emotion—and love as potentially dangerous unless duty-based, extended toward many in the family, and tempered by social fear—is, in many ways, rooted in a collectivist orientation that is wary of individual desires and that values guidance by social pressure. But men also develop these emotional paradigms as they build strategies around family institutions. SOCIAL STRUCTURE AND THE CONSTRUCTION OF EMOTIONAL PARADIGMS

In working to keep joint families together, men develop an elaborate emotional paradigm that describes the dangers of unbounded love between men and women. Men are attached to joint-family living, but the joint-family structure which subordinates young wives by making them do the most burdensome household tasks creates a persistent dilemma. Men want to live in a joint family with their parents, but they also become close to wives who often want them to separate from their parents. In developing strategies for facing this structurally persistent dilemma, men repeatedly focus on the imperative that love be tempered by social fear and directed toward many in the family, constituting and reconstituting the dominant culture of emotion. Since men are concerned with the threat that women pose to jointfamily living, they often warn each other of the dangers of closeness between husband and wife, elaborating a paradigmatic scenario of a wife cultivating her husband’s love in order to manipulate him. Men

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repeatedly remind each other that a wife may tear a family apart by seducing her husband. The warning of a married 35-year-old whom I interviewed in 1987 is typical: When four brothers marry, four women come from four houses. They are of separate natures. They will be from separate environments. They will want to separate. They will put pressure on their husbands, saying, ‘You should separate from the family. I do not like living in a crowd.’

Another married man in his 30s similarly reiterated a cautionary tale about how fighting among women might cause a family to break: One woman will tell the other to cook. The other will say, ‘No, you cook.’ The first one says, ‘I have to go outside to do some work’ and the others say it also. They complain to their husbands. Before marriage, brothers are completely one. But after marriage, a man’s wife attacks his mind. If he lives with his wife 24 hours a day, a man will never be able to understand whether it is his brother’s fault or not.

As another married man put it, women “create fights between brothers and talk in such a way that mutual tension is born. Without this [talk of wives], there is no tension between brothers.” Men continually talk, then, about the threat that attachment to one’s wife poses to the joint-family lifestyle that they value. To ensure that the love for a wife does not get the upper hand, men continually caution each other against becoming too close to their wives. They tell each other that a husband must always ignore his wife’s complaints in order to protect the joint family. One man cautioned, for instance: Since wives have come from separate places, they cannot adjust among themselves. If we five brothers do not pay attention to their talk, then the joint family can work for a long time. But if we constantly listen to our wives talk, then the family will not manage to run very long.

Another married man warned that “if one obeys one’s wife’s talk, it will create tension and fighting, and one will become separate.” Another man cautioned that the “family will be harmed” if the husband “listens to his wife’s talk.” The emotional culture which holds that love must reflect in many directions, and that love between husband and wife must always be tempered by social fear, arises through men’s telling of cautionary tales that they hope will protect the joint family.

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Men similarly create discourses around the institution of arranged marriages that focus on love as potentially dangerous. Young men may feel the pulls of love, but in the institutional context of arranged marriages, such men are warned—and warn themselves—that such feelings can never be the basis of marriage. An unmarried film-goer whom I interviewed in 1991 told me, for instance: Most love marriages are not successful because as long as you have mutual love (pyaar) you will want to marry and you will want to remain in that true way of mutual love. But after the marriage it cannot be obtained in the familial situation. Most girls think that the boy will love the girl the way he loved her (pyaar karma) before marrying her, but that can never be. (see Derné 2000a: 84–88 for other examples)

When the reality of feelings between young men and women comes face to face with the obdurate family structure in which marriages are arranged by parents, men often conjure up the scenario of an uncontrollable love that could never be the basis of marriage. According to a married man in his 30s: Love marriages often break. The thing is that neither one considers himself less than the other one. They become stubborn. If they both are stubborn, then the marriage will spoil. One of them has to yield. But often this doesn’t happen in love marriages, because the couple doesn’t live under pressure.

As they construct strategies around obdurate family structures, men develop emotional dispositions that maintain these structures. EMOTIONS AND THE REPRODUCTION OF SOCIAL STRUCTURE

Generated by a collectivist cultural orientation and the strategies men build around Indian family institutions, these emotional paradigms, in turn, motivate actions that reproduce those structures. Men who find social fear comforting want to live in a joint family where they can be continually subjected to the pressures that prompt that fear. Husbands who see love as based more on duty than a wife’s special characteristics, or who see love as only appropriate when it is reflected in many directions within a joint family, will check powerful love for their wives that might lead them to separate from a joint family.

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A man who focuses on the dangers of unbounded love will be less likely to buck social pressure and marry for love. The Indian family structure, in short, creates emotional dispositions that reproduce those very structures.

Culture, Structure, and Psyche There is a fit, then, between a sociocentric cultural orientation, family structures of joint-family living and arranged marriages, and emotional paradigms that celebrate fear and caution of unbounded love. Culture, structure, and psyche reinforce each other. In addition, real interests and specific cultural understandings that arise due to structural arrangements provide further mortar, contributing to the persistence of these structures. By benefiting particular categories of people, family structures create interests that motivate agents to act in ways that contribute to maintaining existing structures. Given their interests and the specific cultural understandings that support joint families and arranged marriage, men are motivated to act in ways that reproduce these structures. The cultural orientations, material interests, and psychological dispositions that support the structural edifice reinforce each other, creating resistance to change. This book shows that in the context of a solid fit between culture, structure, and psyche, new ideas introduced by cultural globalization have a limited independent effect. The transnational celebration of love has had little effect, for instance, on the institution of arranged marriage, given the sociocentric cultural orientation, a psychological disposition that makes men wary of love, men’s interests in maintaining control of their wives, and obdurate economic and family structures that support arranged marriages. The transnational celebration of women’s movement outside the home has similarly had little effect on ordinary middle class men’s resistance to such movement, given men’s interests in restricting such movement to support both their own leisure in the home and economic structures, which have not changed to increase non-élite women’s opportunities. Transnational media celebrations of individualism have had little effect on non-élite men’s collectivist orientation, because the social structures that support this deep-seated orientation have not been transformed.

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This book suggests that cultural globalization transforms life in India only when new ideas can be layered on top of obdurate social realities, or when simultaneous changes in social structures make new ideas workable and, hence, meaningful. This book also suggests that the biggest changes introduced by globalization come more from the transformation of India’s economy rather than from the influx of new media. The next chapter argues that because opportunities of affluent Indians have been radically transformed by economic liberalization, changes in the lives of the English-speaking élite have been profound. Since economic globalization has transformed their opportunities, affluent Indians have experimented with the alternative family arrangements celebrated in the transnational media. With their economic opportunities having increased, affluent Indians have embraced the consumerism and individualism celebrated in the transnational media. Changed structural realities that place affluent Indians on an international stage have given them a global horizon. Seeing themselves in the global arena, affluent Indians have become a transnational middle class, existing between the poor in India and consumers in Europe and North America. Given their new location in a global economy, affluent Indians increasingly root their global orientation in cosmopolitan consumption and cosmopolitan gender arrangements.

Notes 01. As Sewell (1992: 3) puts it, this older usage saw structure as “hard” or “material” while “culture” was seen as “soft” or “mental.” 02. Giddens takes a similar position, arguing that “the same structural characteristics participate in the subject (the actor) as in the object (society). Structure forms ‘personality’ and ‘society’” simultaneously—but in neither case exhaustively (Giddens 1979, as excerpted in Calhoun et al. 2002: 238).” 03. Weber ([1904–05] 1930: 69) sees the growth of capitalism as caused by a “new spirit” that had “set to work”. But contemporary workers may not attribute “meaning” to “their restless activity” (ibid.: 70). For contemporary workers, “business with its continuous work has become a necessary part of their lives” (ibid.: 70). The worker who “does not adapt his [or her] manner of life to the conditions of capitalist success must go under” (ibid.: 72). Weber focused on the motivated meaningful conduct that generated capitalism, while recognizing that workers today face a capitalist economy as a structural reality. 04. On the era prior to 1991, see Channa 1997: 31; Derné 1994b, 1994c, 1995: Chapter. 2; Sharma and Vanjani 1993: 30.

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05. Men similarly see globalization as a threat to joint-family living and arranged marriages. They fear that it is because of parents’ new consumerism that parents sometimes focus more on dowry than on their sons’ interests. They also fear that it is the new consumerism that leads to the selfishness that disrupts joint families (Derné 2000a: 27–30). 06. In most men’s toolkit, there are few stories available to support same-sex marriage or living in a family headed by one’s sister. Some people in India may have access to stories supporting such practices, but they are rare. 07. This paragraph briefly summarizes Derné 1995: 158–63 and Derné 2000b. Others who make similar points include Kakar 1981; Kurtz 1992; Seymour 1993. 08. This section is based on Derné 1994d, 1995: Chapter 9.

3

Making the Transnational Middle Class in India

Fast, air-conditioned trains that now connect urban centers in India appeal to affluent Indians because of their speed and comfort, and because they enable the affluent to avoid non-élite crowds that pack the Indian railways. In the spring of 2001, two college-going women on a fast train connecting Dehra Dun and New Delhi openly flirted in English with a young college-going man. All three wore jeans and Western-style shirts; not one Hindi word passed between them in a half-hour of banter. They passed copies of Cosmopolitan and Time magazines back and forth to each other. After asking the young man about his education and family, one young woman asked the man if he was flirting with her. “Are you pulling my leg?” the young man replied. “What do you want me to pull?” countered the woman provocatively. On learning the man was from Bombay, the young woman asked him whether he knew the film stars Jackie Shroff and Hrithik Roshan. “They’re personal friends,” the man replied. The woman commented on the man’s consuming ability: “Do you have a car? Will you take me for a ride?” The orientation was American rather than British: the young man joked about using “zee” rather than “zed”. “I have an American accent, now,” he said. While initiating this encounter, the young woman still joked about men appropriately having more stature than women. “Stand up”, she said. On seeing the results, she remarked, “It’s OK. You are taller than me.”

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This encounter, the likes of which I had never observed in India before,1 suggests important imaginings and desires of the affluent English-speakers who call themselves middle class. Discussions of automobiles and the back-and-forth passing of Cosmopolitan magazine indicate an increased focus on consumption. The wearing of jeans—by women as well as by men—indicates an embrace of Western fashion. The woman’s open flirtation reflects a diminished celebration of women’s modesty and—perhaps—some loosening of gender roles. Speaking English exclusively, using Americanisms, and enjoying transnational magazines suggest an orientation toward movement beyond India. At the same time, the discussion of Indian film stars and the woman’s assumption that she should be shorter than a male companion suggests continuities with Indian traditions. The ordinary middle class Indians whom I met in and around theatres in Dehra Dun had not embraced the new imaginings and desires of the English-speaking élite I observed on the train. They continued to speak in Hindi, rather than English. While they desired consumer items, especially fashion and televisions, they knew that cars were beyond their reach. While non-élite middle class men often wore jeans, non-élite women almost always wore Indian-style clothing. Mostly embracing arranged marriages, the ordinary middle class men whom I interviewed tended to reject open flirtation between men and women as having little to do with their actual lives. This chapter examines the effects of globalization on affluent Indians, and it also considers how globalization is shaping the imagination of affluent Indian life held by élites and non-élites alike. First, I focus on the importance of the film and global media in defining the affluent as a middle class and normalizing their position in Indian society. Second, I argue that films and the global media are part of a process that associates élite status with transnational movement. Third, I argue that films and the global media have played a role in inciting the desire of the affluent for consumption, while the globalization of the economy has facilitated the ability of affluent Indians to meet these desires. I argue that for affluent Indians, consumption is an increasingly strong basis of identity. Fourth, I consider the extent to which globalization is exerting pressures that might contribute to transforming the affluent Indians’ gender arrangements. I especially note how films and the global media play a part in constructing gender arrangements that facilitate consumption.

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I conclude the chapter by discussing how class identity needs to be newly theorized in a globalizing economy. This chapter’s focus on affluent Indians suggests that class identity is increasingly rooted in consumption as much as in production, and that class is increasingly transnational. Affluent Indians often see themselves as having more in common with people living abroad—who have similar abilities to consume—than they do with ordinary Indians. While there has been some discussion of how globalization is producing a transnational capitalist class (Sklair 2001), not enough attention has been given to the production of a transnational middle class that comprises the primary consumers who fuel the capitalist system.

Normalizing Élite Experience Increasingly, discourses in India focus on the consuming classes. From independence until the late 1970s, the producing classes were at center stage in the imaginations of India. Despite limited effectiveness, government policies tended to focus on improving the lot of working Indians. Government controls kept prices of food staples down. The needs of the laboring classes were central to arguments in favor of the large government sector and the policies pursued in governmental enterprises. The needs of a developing nation were seen to trump the needs of the consuming classes. Hence, tariffs, licensing, and foreign exchange restrictions, which were seen as improving the lot of Indian workers, trumped the desires of Indian consumers to have access to cheaper, better quality foreign products. But today, as I noted in the introduction, economic policies are aimed at the consuming classes. As Dipankar Gupta argues, the sole focus now is on what the consumer wants, irrespective of whether this brings about unemployment, weakens trade unions, or increases India’s economic dependence. This is because the primary imagination of India for policymakers, élites, and even non-élite Indians now focuses on the consuming classes. The focus on the consumption of transnational commodities also serves to signify India’s participation in the valued global economy. As Fernandes argues, “images of the consumption of newly available commodities serve as signifiers that assimilate globalization to the

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Indian nation-state” (Fernandes 2000: 613). Drawing on interviews with the élite middle classes, Fernandes concludes that “visual signs of wealth” have come to be “the new symbols of national progress in India” (ibid.: 614). Participation in the cosmopolitan fashion industry is one symbol of India’s participation in the global economy. Rupal Oza points out, for instance, that India’s staging of the 1996 Miss World pageant provided the State and domestic capital “an international opportunity to “showcase” [a] new, liberalized India to the world” (Oza 2001: 1067). The focus on the attraction of affluent Indians to cosmopolitan fashion shows India participating on par with other States in the global economy. Advertising, television programming, and Hindi films all play a role in constructing the experiences of the élite consuming classes as the norm in India.2 Advertising in magazines, movie theatres, and on television is crucial. With the opening of the Indian economy, advertisers flooded into India to seduce a previously unavailable market. Less than 10 percent of Indian households own a refrigerator, but that still constitutes a market of 100 million people with discretionary spending. Scooter advertisements, which often screen prior to Hindi films, now commonly picture the suit-boot-wearing businessman who commutes to work rather than the rural householder, whom the advertising of the previous decades showed as using a scooter to haul an old-fashioned charpai (string bed) across a village. Advertising in magazines and on television, especially cable television, focuses on an exclusively élite world of cars, carpeting, air-conditioning, and travel abroad that is distant from the lives of most Indians. A 1995 content analysis of 200 episodes of the most popular television serials found that 80 percent of both male and female characters “belonged to the upper stratum of society” (Varma 1998: 178). Showing the élite world and hiding the world of ordinary Indians normalizes the élite experience. Since Hindi films still comprise the primary entertainment of ordinary Indians, it is interesting that they, too, normalize élite worlds, suggesting that non-élites, too, may come to see India as primarily constituted by the consuming classes. The new Hindi film emphasis on the consuming élite represents a shift from the “Five-Year-Plan-Heroes” (Srivastava 2001: 241) of the 1950s, the angry-young-man films of the 1970s and the 1980s, as well as love stories in earlier eras, all of which kept the honorable Indian producers as a central part of the picture.

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Sanjay Srivastava (2001: 241) usefully argues that the Hindi films of the 1950s and the 1960s constructed “Five-Year-Plan-Heroes” who were shown to be members of the élite classes, but who nonetheless worked as doctors, scientists, or engineers whose work aimed at helping working Indians by building roads and dams or improving the health of the nation.3 The angry-young-man hero of the 1970s and 1980s, immortalized in the many portrayals by Amitabh Bachchan, focused on the moral working class man as the center of Indian life. The hero of these films is of the subordinate classes, and fights to provide justice to the poor— justice that is not provided by the legitimate institutions of society. The 1970s hero is poor or working class but often rises to an improved station without losing moral superiority (Derné 2000a: Chapter 4; Kazmi 1998). Even in the love stories of the late 1980s and the early 1990s, which focused more on heroes of an élite background, the honorable poor were also at center stage. In the superhit film Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985), the hero is the son of an élite family, but his beloved is a poor village girl whose honor and dignity is contrasted with the hero’s father’s greedy unconcern for others. Without care for his workers, the hero’s businessman father burns down his own factory to collect insurance money and has no concern for the pollution of the Ganga that his operations cause (Derné 2000a: Chapter 3). In the superhit film Maine Pyar Kiya (1989), the hero studies in America and his father is a business mogul. But, again, the film does not lose sight of the moral center of India—its working class. The heroine’s father is an honorable rural laborer. The élite hero’s father’s greed for money prevents him from being concerned with others. Despite his son’s authentic love for the heroine, the hero’s father tries to marry the hero to the daughter of a business ally. When the hero is denied his father’s support, he must prove himself by laboring as an ordinary Indian to win the heroine’s love (Derné 2000a: Chapter 6). While these hit love stories featured affluent heroes, they criticized affluent lives that neglected the needs of the poor. In the 1990s, the focus of Hindi films shifted decisively towards the lives of the consuming élite. This is widely recognized to have intensified with the 1994 hit film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (HAHK), which ushered in a wave of films that were perceived as “clean” by audiences precisely because of their depiction of the ease of affluent lifestyles (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 26; Kazmi 1999: 144; Uberoi 1998: 314). Patricia Uberoi

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points out that HAHK, like more recent films, “endorses glamorous lifestyles and effortless guileless consumption” (Uberoi 1998: 314). Rachel Dwyer argues the “absence of poverty and of servants”4 characteristic of recent movies presents a world in which “everyone is rich, usually way beyond any means of possible earned income”5 (see also Inden 1999: 59; Kazmi 1999: 159–60). In the string of successful films that depict the lives of NRIs living abroad “the foreign setting functions to naturalize this affluence.”6 Other 1990s films set in India similarly normalize the consuming experience of the élite. The 1997 superhit film Dil To Pagal Hai shows a nearly all-élite world. The heroine (played by Madhuri Dixit) is from an élite family and is engaged to a man whose business regularly takes him to Europe. The hero (played by Shah Rukh Khan) is a successful entertainer with his own posh city flat, which, as Ronald Inden points out, “could be anywhere (but more likely in Manhattan than in Mumbai)” (Inden 1999: 60). The hero’s female friend (who is also the heroine’s honorable rival), played by Karisma Kapoor, easily travels back and forth to Europe where her mother lives. Shopping for transnational goods weighs large in the film: the Karisma Kapoor character outfits the hero in Levi’s-brand jeans at a posh store, and it is here (in the dressing room) that he first runs into the heroine. In the superhit film Kaho Na Pyar Hai (2000), the heroine’s rich father can buy his daughter an automobile as a birthday present and arrange for her to cruise on a luxury ship to beautiful islands. Unusual in today’s films, the hero of Kaho Na Pyar Hai is of modest means, but he quickly finds himself hired to entertain on the luxury cruise ship. It is notable that this hero-of-modest-means is killed before the interval and the distraught heroine falls in love for a lookalike élite (Hrithik Roshan in a double role) who drives cars, wears suits, and resides in New Zealand, for which country the heroine eventually abandons India. Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (CCCC ), the most successful film of my 2001 fieldwork, opens with the focalizing family being featured on the Indian television version of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. The hero of the film does business in India, Europe, and Malaysia, honeymoons in Switzerland, and is so well known in Delhi and Bombay that he is treated with awe everywhere he goes. My discussion of the most successful films since Maine Pyar Kiya should not suggest that this increasing focus on the élite classes has been limited to hit films. In run-of-the-mill films,

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too, suits-and-ties, automobiles, business abroad, and honeymoons in Europe are represented as the lifestyles of the focalizing characters. On screen, élite lives no longer intersect as regularly with the lives of the poor. More rarely is villainy presented as a greedy desire for money that overweighs family obligations, as was common in the 1970s and the 1980s (Derné 2000a: Chapter 6; Thomas 1995). Rarer still are depictions of honorable (if poor) servants. In love stories, it is equally rare to find either the hero or the heroine from a poor background.7 Hindi films, then, contribute to the process of normalizing the élite situation in India.8 Policymakers and the élites now see affluent life as central, as is reflected in the use of the term “middle class” to refer to an élite segment of the population. The English-speakers with whom I talk in Delhi often describe “everything” as changed. As one Indian woman whom I met at a conference in the USA put it in 2000, “everyone has Barbie, now.” And for the élite, changes have been great. Opportunities for both consumption and employment have expanded almost fantastically. Increasingly, though, affluent Indians only see their own world. Shurmer-Smith describes talking to an 11-year-old who said that the British system’s school-leaving age of 16 would be impossible in India “where everyone had to go on being educated until after their Master’s degree” (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 37). When Shurmer-Smith reminded the boy that lots of people in India never went to school at all, he looked scornful at [her] naivety and sniffed, “That is an altogether different matter!” The Hindi films that are the primary entertainment of the non-élite may also make élite life loom large in the imagination of ordinary Indians. In 2001, I conducted interviews at the élite theatres in town (one of which showed Hollywood fare dubbed in Hindi) and also at the theatres which catered more to the urban poor by showing second-run films (like the previous year’s hit love story Mohabbatein) at cut-rate, or low-budget films (like the Mithun-starrer Zahareela) at a reduced price. A decade previously, the lower-middle classes who enjoyed films at the latter sorts of theatres were eager to talk to me. In 1991, the lower-middle class would enthusiastically discuss their attachment to their favorite heroes, who often played characters associated with the subordinate classes. In 1991, the now-defunct Orient theatre, which had catered to the urban poor, often showed Bachchan’s classic angry-young-man films in revival, so this is perhaps why the poorer Indians felt empowered to speak.

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By 2001, though, it had become clear that the biggest films were depicting élite life. In addition, the film world itself might be seen as catering more to the élite—the low-budget theatre in town had shut down, ticket prices had risen, and film-world discussions focused less on appealing to the “masses.” More often than in 1991, I encountered resistance on the part of poorer Indians whom I approached for an interview. A 17-year-old laborer who lived alone in the city away from his parents in the village urged me to “go ask at Chayadeep” (where the day’s biggest hit, CCCC, was playing) “to learn about Hindi films. The Chayadeepwalé 9 can talk to you.” While the young man’s resistance could have been based on a desire not to be disrupted from the anticipation of the four-hour pleasure of seeing Mohabbatein in revival, it might also reflect the man’s sense that it is the élite classes who are important in India today.

Indian Élites as a Transnational Middle Class Not only does élite life loom large in the imagination of Indians today, but Indians also increasingly see élite life as middle class life. As I noted in the first chapter, recent years have witnessed an increasing discourse on the growth of the consuming middle class in India. English-language publications from India Today to Stardust refer to those who wear modern fashion, move about in automobiles and travel abroad as middle class. Even Western academics use the term “middle class” to refer to the 5 percent of Indians who speak English well, or the 6 percent of households with income that allows them to purchase a scooter. The use of the term middle class may be effective because the reference for affluent Indians is not India but the globe. The affluent may see themselves as “middle class” on a transnational scale. Indian élites may see themselves as situated between the consuming middle classes in the USA and Europe, for whom automobiles are regular purchases rather than once-in-a-generation outlays, and the mass of the Indian poor and ordinary middle classes for whom an automobile is a distant dream. Both changing structural realities and changing cultural imaginations serve to orient the élite to the transnational stage. As India’s economy opened, transnational firms saw the opportunity to lower their costs by

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using Indians to work as computer programmers and operate customerservice phone banks. More and more Indians were able to find work abroad or for transnational firms operating in India. As foreign exchange restrictions have lessened, Western universities have increasingly recruited Indian students (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 173). With the newly-available possibilities, the affluent have come to value overseas education precisely because it is expensive and it is overseas (ibid.: 173). The imagination of such possibilities for the élite may have increased even more greatly than the realities. In Hyderabad, many aspiring computer programmers hang out in cafes waiting for high-paying transnational jobs, often receiving funds from family members working abroad rather than taking relatively low-paying jobs in India. Mass media play a role in highlighting the possibilities of transnational work. One magazine advertisement describes how computer training could mean that “two years from now 19-yearold Vijay will be driving his own car. . . on the other side of the globe” (ibid.: 36). The reader may see the advertising depiction’s of jeanswearing “Vijay” sitting on his motorcycle in front of his obviously Indian house as existing between the status of the Indian poor and the automobile-driving life that is on offer in “Silicon Valley, California,” the place the advertisement trumpets as Vijay’s destination.10 This suggests as well that the élite status of the so-called middle class in India is defined by transnational movement. The English-language magazine advertising that depicts airplane travel and the aspiration of movement to Silicon Valley, California, contributes to this growing imaginary of the Indian élite, but Hindi films play a role as well. A string of hit Hindi films since the mid-1990s have focused on NRIs living abroad (Mankekar 1999b; Uberoi 1998).11 Equally importantly, Hindi films now routinely portray Indians’ easy movement beyond India’s borders: heroes and heroines, for instance, honeymoon in Europe. In film after film, a hero’s business or education routinely takes him abroad.12 In contrast to the 1950s’ and 1960s’ Five-Year-Plan engineer/scientist/doctor hero and the 1970s’ and 1980s’ angry-young-man hero, transnational movement is a fundamental feature of the hero of recent years. Coupled with structural realities and other cultural products, films play a role as defining the Indian élite by transnational movement and placing the imagination of the élite on a transnational scale. It is this placement of the élite on the transnational field that allows élites to see themselves as a “middle class.”

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Inciting Consumption Affluent Indians see the opportunity for cosmopolitan consumption as the primary benefit of globalization. The élite middle class people whom Fernandes interviewed saw “new choice of commodities as a central indicator of the benefits of economic liberalization” (Fernandes 2000: 614). They talked about how, previously, access to goods was limited to those who had the financial means to travel abroad to purchase them. But, today, as one person told her, “abroad is now in India”, a statement that shows that affluent Indians’ “aspirations of consumption” can “now take place within India’s borders” (Fernandes 2000: 614). The people whom she interviewed in 1998 also saw the new cultural support of consumption as crucial. Referring to the desire for cellular phones and holiday homes, the editor of a print magazine told Fernandes that previously “people would feel a sense of guilt—that in a nation like this a kind of vulgar exhibition of wealth is contradictory to Indian values. I think now consumerism has become an Indian value” (ibid.: 614). While the opening of markets has perhaps been most essential in encouraging consumerism, films, television serials, and advertising, all of which glamorize international standards of consumption, also played an important role in inciting affluent Indians’ desire to consume. Purnima Mankekar, who was doing fieldwork in India just as global media and advertising began to flood in, provides a useful account of the role that television has played in expanding “consumerist desires” through the “portrayal of ‘modern’ middle class lifestyles” (Mankekar 1999a: 9). She analyzes advertisements that “titillated the consumerist desires of viewing subjects by introducing them to a range of goods that promised to make their lives more modern, more exciting, more middle class” (ibid.: 76). One of her informants describes a friend with a “good income” who was “very happy” and had a beautiful flat, “just like the one we saw in the paint ad” on television. Since the informant had not visited her friend’s house, Mankekar is right to argue that the “advertisement” represented “the benefits of a ‘good income’” to her informant (ibid.: 88). For this person, class became associated with the consumption that it implied. While Hindi films have been participating for many years in this process of encouraging consumerist desires, in earlier years the consumption of foreign goods was presented as desirable but difficult to achieve. In the 1985 superhit film Ram Teri Ganga Maili, the élite hero’s uncle,

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who has returned from a foreign trip, presents the hero with an “alpine hat—from Switzerland!—a leather jacket—from France!”, and a Polaroid camera, the novel operation of which he explains excitedly. In the days of licensing and regulation, such items were novelties, the result of a foreign trip. But in films today, consumption is routine. In the 1997 superhit film Dil To Pagal Hai, the Karisma Kapoor character takes the hero to a boutique to equip him with fashionable clothing, but for the hero the availability of such clothing has become so routine that he is unhappy about the time the shopping takes. “Never come shopping with a girl,” he complains to a friend. In the films of the 1990s, the highlighting of Western brands had become commonplace, from the Levi’s logo the hero walks past on his way to the dressing room in the Dil To Pagal Hai scene described above, to singing heroes who performed in front of Pepsi signs in films like Kaho Na Pyar Hai. Fashion and beauty, which are increasingly shaped by international standards, are among the most important consumer desires. As Leslie Sklair and others have pointed out, “global capitalism thrives by persuading us that the meaning and value of our lives are to be found principally in what we possess” and this starts with “fashion and style” (Sklair 2001: 6). Thus, English-language Hindi film fan magazines, which cater to the English speaking-élite, routinely advertise cosmopolitan fashions for men and women.13 Advertising aims to incite men’s desire for “Italian look” trousers (Cineblitz March 2001), “Rich look” shirts (ibid. March 2001), watches worn by transnational endorsers like Pete Sampras (Movie Mag International 14 March 2001), shoes that will attract female admirers (ibid. March 2001), cosmopolitan Benetton shirting (Stardust March 2001), and “cargo pants with multiple pockets” to accommodate “loose change”, “sun glasses”, a “cell phone”, or “pocket refreshments” like “gums and mints” (Movie Mag International March 2001). Cargo pants are desirable because they allow the wearer to equip himself with a range of consumer goods. Adapting the fashions of satellite TV to give films a hip feel, filmmakers increasingly show heroines in jeans and short skirts. While standards of female modesty in films have been steadily loosening over the years, the recent changes constitute a real departure. The most popular films from the 1970s through the early 1990s contrasted traditionally modest Indian heroines, who were portrayed as devoted to family obligations, with “Westernized” Indian women who were portrayed as immodest,

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sexually forward, and more focused on money than family duties (see Derné 2000a: Chapter 6; Thomas 1995). In these films, Indian clothing, which is presented as modest—saris and salwar-kameezes—are the markers of a traditionally Indian devotion to family duty. Prior to the 1990s, heroines tried to gain popularity by emphasizing their unwillingness to wear miniskirts or revealing clothes. Fan magazines criticized Indian heroines for wearing revealing clothes that identified them more with Western icons like Madonna than with appropriate Indian womanhood. The men whom I interviewed in 1991 emphasized that Indian heroines should reject Western-style clothing, saying that Indian traditions and culture demand salwar-kameezes and saris, and that rejecting such clothing showed a lack of understanding of family duties (Derné 2000a: Chapter 6). Today’s films celebrate miniskirts and jeans so much that the contrast between a modest heroine and an excessively Westernized anti-heroine who wears revealing clothes is much less common. As I argue below, with the emphasis on glamorous heroines, the smoking, drinking vamp whose non-Indianness and promiscuity were highlighted by her Western clothing has disappeared from the Hindi film scene. Given international standards of beauty, the well-rounded, voluptuous heroines that characterized Hindi films through the 1980s have been replaced by an emphasis on thinness (see Munshi 2001c: 83, 85) which can be attained through the purchase of gym memberships and dieting aids. The thin bodies of the heroines of the 2000 hit film Mohabbatein look like those of the stars of the American serial Friends. The top 1970s heroine, the curvy Sridevi, fits an older Indian standard, which is rejected by the taut Karisma Kapoor or Kajol of the 1990s. While in earlier eras, English-language fan magazines referred to Sridevi as “thunder thighs” without too much disapproval, fan magazines today routinely praise heroines’ weight loss, indicating the rise of a new regime of female beauty. Describing Shamita Shetty’s workout regime, one fan magazine praises the heroine for turning herself from the “once-upon-atime pleasantly plump person to the toned-to-almost-perfection personality” (Sai 2001a: 54). The magazine quotes the heroine as saying that she has become a “health freak” who has to “spend hours in the gym work[ing] out like crazy” and even then must “avoid stuff like fries and chocolates” which would just end up on her “hips and multiply”. (ibid.: 54). Another film magazine praises the heroine Rani Mukherjee

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for making herself “yummy-licious” by losing “oodles of weight” through an “exercise program and Spartan diet” (Filmfare 2001a: 16). It is notable that such comments appear largely in English-language fan magazines catering to the more affluent Hindi film viewer. Susan Parulekar’s fieldwork with affluent Bombay women from 1997 through 2001 shows that élite women increasingly pursue these new standards of beauty through consumption, and that, indeed, women’s pursuit of transnational standards of beauty have become a key aspect of élite identity. Élite boutiques, beauty parlors, and fitness centers are proliferating. In central Dehra Dun, the main hoarding for the “Vaibhav Women Beauty World” emphasizes that it now acts as a “slimming and coaching center.”15 That the advertising is in English suggests, of course, that most of the beauty center’s clientele are members of the English-speaking élite. As Shoma Munshi (2001c: 86) notes, fitness centers are quite new in India. In previous eras, “well-fed bodies” were “testimony to the fact that the person came from a well-to-do family” (Munshi 2001c: 86). Agreeing with Ghosh (1999b, cited by Munshi 2001c), Munshi argues that the “professional body” has arrived—a body that can be produced through working out, plastic surgery, and the use of fashion and cosmetics. Parulekar reports that in Bombay, modeling has become a hobby for élite women who pay US$ 100 or more for photo shoots. Mary John (1998: 375) similarly reports that college-level beauty contests have become “hugely popular events” in Delhi, which attract the participation of many women. She describes how advertising that caters to élite Delhi women highlights “beauty treatments and weight loss programs” (John 1998: 375). She notes that these advertisements often highlight “imported services such as bleaches and perms” (ibid: 375). Clothing styles, too, increasingly follow Western standards, as élites wear jeans and short skirts rather than saris and salwar-kameezes. Page and Crawley report that the 17 to 18-year-olds whom they interviewed in Ahmedabad “were openly enthusiastic about TV fashions” (Page and Crawley 2001: 150). One young woman said that she only watched music channels for “the hairstyles, the shoes, the clothes.” As in Malaysia (Chin 1998: 185), Nepal (Liechty 2003) and elsewhere, the appearance of new media and new opportunities associated with globalization has incited new consumer desires—especially for fashion—among the affluent members of society.

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Élite Identity Rooted in Consumption Consistent with the arguments of a number of commentators on the effects of globalization,16 élite identity appears to be more and more rooted in cosmopolitan consumption. Consumption, as Mathews puts it, becomes a way of advertising one’s “cosmopolitan discernment” (Mathews 2000: 21). By consuming Pepsi rather than the local Thums Up!, or Domino’s Pizza rather than a roadside samosa (at a cost—in the case of the Pizza, which might be 35 times higher),17 one presents oneself as a cosmopolitan, transnational mover who is oriented globally rather than locally. By wearing jeans rather than a dhoti, one presents oneself as oriented toward the transnational world. Media scholars Page and Crawley argue that advertising aims to transform India’s caste society into a society in which people “are defined by consumption” (Page and Crawley 2001: 143). Thompson (1992, cited by Beynon and Dunkerley 2000: 6) rightly suggests that for those who can afford it, shopping becomes more than purchasing goods. Rather, “shoppers feel that through the act of shopping they are buying into. . . a more exciting, sensual world” (Thompson 1992, cited by Beynon and Dunkerley 2000). If advertisers are successful, consumption becomes a stronger, more affect-laden basis of shared identity than the dreary commonality of a shared position in a productive system. How much more exciting to talk of one’s shared love of Nike or Ally McBeal than to talk of one’s shared toils for a transnational firm! As Golding argues, globalization has meant that people more and more identify with “supra-national cultural affiliations” (Golding 1994, cited by Richards and French 2000: 15) rather than those of nation or class. The orientation toward consuming the same goods that are consumed by other cosmopolitans in Europe, North America, or elsewhere suggests, as other commentators have argued, that national identity is being eroded by an identity rooted in consumption.18 The élite Indian who prefers Pepsi and Pizza Hut may see himself or herself as having more in common with the Western consumer than with the non-élite Indian who can only afford locally-produced goods (see Page and Crawley 2001: 146). Shoma Munshi reports that many Indians take pride in the string of Indian beauties who have triumphed in international beauty pageants as evidence that “our own girls” can “hold their own against the best from the rest of the world” (Munshi 2001c: 89).19 According to Mary John (1998: 379), these victories have even been the source of nationalist

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fervor. But this pride in victory is pride in an ability to compete according to non-Indian, transnational standards of beauty. One of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 told me that since Indian women “are working out, they are getting smaller and looking more like American women,” even surpassing American women in beauty. By embracing what are seen as cosmopolitan sensibilities, identity is increasingly transnational rather than rooted in national groupings. As more and more affluent Indians embrace individualism, group identity may be declining altogether. Hindi films have long celebrated larger than life individuals. Viewers have long identified with their favorite hero’s special qualities (Derné 2000a: Chapter 5). But for the affluent today, increased income and increased opportunities for consumption associated with globalization have allowed the élite to more than ever pursue their own styles through the fashions they choose. As Page and Crawley (2001: 140–41) put it, personal choice is increasingly “a new ideology” for the affluent—an ideology that has been especially promoted by global media. According to marketing consultant Rama Bijapurkar, Indians have responded to economic liberalization by emphasizing “freedom of choice” (ibid.: 140). Page and Crawley report that among the “Englisheducated middle class [whom they interviewed], there is wide appreciation for the extension of choice” (ibid.: 147) and the role of satellite television in bringing it to them. An identity rooted in consumption increasingly focuses on showing off allegedly special and individual tastes that distinguish individuals from one another. As the nation declines in affluent Indians’ identity, their group identity lessens altogether. Transnational sensibilities appear increasingly important in rooting gender identities of the élite. The importance of transnational standards of masculinity (and femininity) will be discussed more fully in Chapter 6. Here, I want to note that élite standards of masculinity and femininity are rooted in transnational consumption. By adhering to these standards, élites confirm both their éliteness and their gender identity. In the 1980s, advertisements for Bajaj scooters that appeared in the English language newsweekly India Today—a magazine read by English speakers— celebrated Indianness. Describing “Hamara [our] Bajaj” as providing “value for money for years”, this series of print advertisements featured a traditionally-dressed Muslim man painting his scooter, smiling Sikh children riding on the back of a Bajaj piloted by their father, and two rural men using their Bajaj to carry a string charpai along a dirt track. In 2002,

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a motorcycle advertisement for Bajaj’s “definitely male” Pulsar graces the same privileged spot in India Today. There are no images of turbans, string beds, dirt tracks, or white kurtas. Indeed, only the vehicle is shown— there are no images of India at all. Instead, the advertisement focuses on a “design team at Bajaj” that “conceptualized and built the robust looking Pulsar, which at a glance would have you agreeing it’s definitely male.” The man who purchases the Pulsar may confirm not just his cosmopolitan status, but his masculinity as well. The affluent woman who makes modeling a hobby and tries to achieve a cosmopolitan look by purchasing cosmetics, fashionable clothes, and health club memberships similarly uses consumption to confirm not just cosmopolitan standing, but a femininity defined by transnational standards. Thus, women’s successful pursuit of transnational standards of beauty is emerging as a key part of élite identity. Parulekar found that the taut female body has become a locus of éliteness for Mumbaites, while Liechty similarly argues that among Kathmandu women, “fashion has become one of the main material components of middle class status” (Liechty 2001: 35).20 Adherence to transnational standards of masculinity and femininity themselves become the key markers of affluent status in India.

Making Women Consumers When I interviewed urban men in the 1980s, they told me that men, children, or older women did the marketing so that younger women in their teens, 20s, and 30s could be restricted to the home (Derné 1995). As Maria Mies (1986) and others argue, capitalism depends on the “housewifization” of women. Capitalism profits when women are defined as housewives: when it is assumed that a woman depends on a man for income, the employer need not pay her a living wage (Mies 1986: 116). But capitalism also needs housewives to engage in the consumption that is the engine for the economy (Mies 1986: 120–26). And fashion is a central aspect of the impulse to consume. As Liechty argues, commercial interests always “target middle class women as the primary objects of fashion in films, magazines, fashion shows, etc” (Liechty 2001: 36). As Munshi (2001c: 82) argues, the growth of consumerist culture everywhere emphasizes women as active consumers. Thus, John reports

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that advertising in India today often addresses women as “active and vital consumers in their own right” (John 1998: 379). Munshi argues that while the 1960s and 1970s advertising which aimed at the élite class focused on women as homemakers, advertising today emphasizes “glamour, sexuality and appearance” (Munshi 2001c: 82). So, with the growth of a consumer economy and culture, advertising incites women to be consumers—especially consumers of fashion and glamour. While advertising and television are central, Hindi films, too, participate in the process of creating consumption as an important role for women in India today. In 1985’s Ram Teri Ganga Maili, it is the traveling uncle who introduces his nephew to transnational goods that he has brought from Europe, but in 1997’s Dil To Pagal Hai, it is the Karisma Kapoor character who drags the hero to a boutique to outfit him in stylish clothing. Perhaps one can trace the widely recognized (Ghosh 1999a: 238) decline of the vamp in Hindi films to the capitalist imperative that it is no longer discrediting to want to consume Western fashions. Previously, wearing Western fashions were partly a marker for greed and non-Indian sexual promiscuity, but now such consumption is presented as honorable. Until the early 1990s, the hero and heroine’s love might be threatened by an anti-heroine vamp. While the heroine was portrayed as modest, family-oriented, and dressed in Indian dress like saris or salwar-kameezes, the anti-heroine was presented as greedy, neglecting family responsibilities, and decked out in immodest Western clothes. The anti-heroine would try to seduce the hero—often in a greedy attempt to grab the company of the hero (or his family) for herself (or her own allies) (Derné 2000a: Chapter 6). Since the early 1990s, films have shown a hero and heroine’s love which may be threatened by another woman—but that woman is not presented as an anti-heroine. Dil To Pagal Hai opens with the heroine’s certainty that there is someone somewhere who was made for her—a soulmate. The hero (played by Shah Rukh Khan) has a close friendship with another woman, Nisha (played by Karisma Kapoor). Unlike an anti-heroine, Nisha is not greedy but honestly loves the hero. Unlike in previous films, the heroine, Pooja (played by Madhuri Dixit), is not attached to Indian modesty. Like Nisha, she works out at a gym to develop her body and wears revealing Western clothes such as leotards. So, while a love story may portray a competitor to the heroine, the two are no

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longer opposed types. The competitor is not a villain. Indeed, the heroine in Dil To Pagal Hai respects the Karisma Kapoor character, and the film’s conclusion suggests that the Karisma Kapoor character will also find true love. Sometimes, indeed, today’s films portray excessively sexual, greedy women who are redeemed by being remade as consumers. In Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, the biggest hit film of my 2001 fieldwork in India,21 the hero and heroine marry but are unable to conceive a child. To provide progeny, the heroine, Priya (played by Rani Mukherjee), convinces the hero, Raj (played by Salman Khan), to find a woman to hire as a surrogate mother. The hero approaches Madhu (played by Priety Zinta), who is a dancer in a nightclub. Priya first attracted Raj with her sexy (but noncommercial) dancing at a wedding they both attended, but Madhu dances in a nightclub for money. When Madhu learns that she is to be paid lakhs (one lakh = 1,00,000) of rupees to act as a surrogate mother, she throws the money up in the air in delight (provoking laughter from the audience). Willing to prostitute herself (which is what she believes the hero is asking before she learns of the plan to bear his child), Madhu is focused exclusively on sex and money—the sign of an excessively Western antiheroine in earlier films. But in the most important way, she is not Western enough—she is not a skilled consumer but suffers from crass tastes. CCCC redeems Madhu by introducing her to the magical world of commodities. When Raj, himself a wealthy business executive, first takes her to his luxury hotel room, Madhu mistakes a television remote for a cellular phone. She is happy to discover cable television and its cartoon channel, the delights of which she had not previously encountered. When Raj criticizes Madhu’s fashion, she asks him why he does not like her body. Raj says that her body is fine—but she should get clothes to cover it. It is not enough, then, to create the Western body—one must also embrace an appropriate dress code. The appropriate dress may be Western—Raj does not outfit Madhu in salwar-kameezes or saris—but the appropriate fashion nonetheless must cover the body more than the tawdry clothing of a dancing girl. Indeed, Madhu cannot enter the utopia of consumption without developing a cosmopolitan refinement and fashion sense. Raj gives Madhu money to shop for more appropriate clothing at a boutique, but she has difficulty when a sales clerk speaks to her in English, not Hindi. When she catches the attention of the boutique’s manager, he tosses her out on the street because of her crass appearance.

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Discounting her handbag full of rupees, the manager insists that the boutique is only for shareef (honorable) people. Refinement, in addition to money, is needed to become élite. Only when Raj appears with Madhu will sales clerks help her exchange her tawdry appearance for sleek Western fashions that make her shareef (honorable). Later, Raj weans her away from smoking and alcohol, teaches her to use a knife and fork (rather than eat, village-style, with her hands), and introduces her to hairstyling salons. The vamp’s excessive modernity is rooted in an inappropriate focus on money and sex. In shifting attention from the acquisition of money (and men) to the appropriate consumption of élite items, the former anti-heroine is redeemed as a good consumer of the products of the West. Madhu is redeemed by her ability to reject uncouth tastes for the consumption patterns appropriate to the mother of a rich man’s child. In films like CCCC, the heroine and the “vamp” of earlier decades meld together.22 As Madhu learns to be a consumer and avoid the temptations of alcohol, she becomes like a second heroine. When Priya (Raj’s wife) first meets Madhu right before the film’s interval, the salwar-kameezwearing Priya and Madhu in her Western dress lock hands and raise them in triumph, causing raucous applause from the audience. In Europe (where Raj has taken the two women on a business trip), they ride together happily in automobiles, even as Raj steals a kiss from Madhu to the delight of the audience. Both wear Western clothing (like jeans and New York Yankees caps) on such rides. Madhu has second thoughts about giving up her child, but ultimately hands him to Priya, saying “You are now a mother.” The audience whistles as the two hug. In Dil To Pagal Hai, too, the Madhuri Dixit character and the Karisma Kapoor character are never in open conflict over the hero. Ultimately, each supports the other, even though only one can marry him. In these recent films, then, not only has the vamp left the scene, but she eventually reconciles with—indeed, melds with—the heroine, valorizing the modern woman’s consumption and sexuality (although not her acquisitiveness and promiscuity). The men whom I interviewed in 1991 were titillated by the sexy dancing of anti-heroines, but they always said that they disliked heroines who exposed too much. But male viewers seem to like the second heroines of films like Dil To Pagal Hai and CCCC. The actresses who took these roles— Karisma Kapoor and Preity Zinta—are often legitimate heroines.

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During the nightclub scenes in which the Preity Zinta character (Madhu) dances provocatively, audiences responded with deafening wolf whistles. Yet, two of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 named Preity Zinta as their favorite heroine (while a third man named another actress who plays similar roles). In 1991, the Hindi film world’s celebration of women’s modesty was so strong that it is difficult to imagine that an actress playing a prostitute-turned-surrogate mother would be named by any man as a favorite heroine. In short, film-going men do not regard a modern, consuming Madhu as a disliked anti-heroine. Instead, consumption has become an essential part of the femininity of the élite classes in India. The denigration of the sexuality of anti-heroines is, moreover, inconsistent with the new focus on consumption. As John suggests, recruiting “the new middle class woman as a ‘consuming subject’ of local/global products” cannot take place without “her sexualization as an actively desiring subject” (John 1998: 382). The transnational advertising that urges consumption by the so-called middle class women of India is combined with a validation of these women’s desires. In previous eras, such desires threatened women’s Indianness. The new imperatives of the global economy focus, instead, on how such desires are essential to becoming middle class. CCCC highlights women’s role in consumption. Despite Raj’s efforts, Priya still sees Madhu’s crass background. Priya thanks Raj for training Madhu, but announces that she will continue the training. She, then, takes Priya to a supermarket. When Raj meets Madhu and sees the amount of goods purchased, he comments that Priya must have been doing the shopping, but Madhu is impressed with the goods as well. It appears, moreover, that an emphasis on women’s role as consumers appears to be a common result of globalization around the world. Christine Chin (1998, 1996) shows, for instance, that the State in Malaysia works to advance the interests of capital by facilitating the import of foreign domestic workers precisely to free “middle class” women to engage in consumptive activities outside the home.

Changing Gender Arrangements Media influenced by transnational standards increasingly present women as consumers with independence who work outside the home. This

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occurs not just on cable television and in American films but in Hindi films as well. In Dil To Pagal Hai, for instance, the Karisma Kapoor character is an independent woman who makes up her own mind to travel back and forth between London and India. She introduces the hero to the pleasures of consumption. Media influenced by transnational standards increasingly emphasize love rather than parental choice as a basis for marriage, and present relationships between husband and wife which are not tempered by competing joint-family demands. While this is most clear in American television serials and Hollywood films, a similar trend has emerged in Hindi films. Hindi films have, of course, long celebrated love marriages in stories that tell of rebellions against parents, but in recent years, there has been an emerging trend in which these films make the young people’s choice even more central. First, in some hit films (for example, Dil To Pagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai), parental opposition to choice is not an issue. Here, the focus is more on finding the right lover. Second, in some hit films (for example, Dil To Pagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai), it is largely a young people’s world. In previous films, the larger (and usually joint) family loomed large. But in some films today, “kids” move about in their own world and their seniors rarely appear. Third, some films today (for example, Dil To Pagal Hai and Kuch Kuch Hota Hai) focus on the love story to the exclusion of other masala (mixed spices) elements such as fighting and killing. In earlier decades, all Hindi films were referred to as masala films because they would mix comedy, music, spectacle, beautiful scenery, love and romance, and fighting and killing into one concoction (Ahmad 1992; Derné 2000a: Chapter 3; Thomas 1985). In some hit films today, the love story is so much the focus that there is no fighting and killing. I do not, however, want to emphasize that these types of films have taken over the Hindi market. Certainly, in many hit films, parental opposition still looms large (for example, Kaho Na Pyar Hai, Mohabbatein, and many others). In many hit films, the larger joint family (rather than a young people’s world) is the main terrain (for example, Hum Saath Saath Hain, and CCCC). In many films, fighting-and-killing storylines are still combined with romance (for example, Kaho Na Pyar Hai). But the emergence of films that focus more on finding the right love rather than on overcoming parental opposition, on the young people’s world

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of choice rather than living with a larger joint family, and more exclusively on romance rather violent rebellion is a distinctive trend. Along with American films and serials, these films push in the direction of making love marriages and nuclear-family living more legitimate. Have there been changes in the family institutions and gender arrangements of élite groups in India that may be influenced by these changes in the cultural arena? There is strong evidence that élite women who embrace Western fashions are playing an increasing role as consumers. Munshi and Parulekar’s fieldwork provides good evidence that élite women are enthusiastically pursuing Western standards of beauty by buying cosmetics and other beauty aids, joining gyms, and arranging photo shoots. Page and Crawley’s (2001: 160) interviews with cosmetic-shop staff in Banaras reveal that lipstick sales have increased dramatically since the early 1990s. The dressshop proprietors they spoke to indicated that demand for jeans had soared along with other fashion styles celebrated in recent Hindi films. In Dehra Dun in 2001, boutiques with Western brand-name clothes had become quite extensive, and a variety of enterprises advertised slimming and beauty-making techniques. Accounts in the English-language media aimed at the élite and a number of impressionistic accounts by social scientists suggest that there may also be a move away from arranged marriages, joint-family living, and a strict gender division of labor in the home. Articles in the mainstream press describe dating as becoming common for young teens (Jain 1998; Sengupta 2001a). Reports suggest that the marketing of Valentine’s Day, associated with economic liberalization, has increased a focus on romantic love. One advertising campaign manager describes Valentine’s Day as increasing young people’s focus on choice of partner (Sengupta 2001a). Nandini Sundar, a Delhi sociologist, describes the Valentine’s Day rage as occurring as card manufacturs promote their products. In doing so, she argues, manufacturers promote the idea of love (Sengupta 2001a). Another Delhi sociologist, J.P.S. Uberoi, argues that Valentine’s Day celebrations are part of a transition that is making “the idea of romance” “more legitimate now” (Sengupta 2001a). So, press reports suggest that despite protests, “young romantics” celebrate Valentine’s Day “by flooding to restaurants, cinema theatres and shopping plazas” (Sengupta 2001b). The generally sober observer Pamela Shurmer-Smith (2000: 39–41) emphasizes that while arranged marriage remains the norm, love

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marriages are increasingly common in élite families.23 Sociologist Jyoti Puri found that of the 101 élite Bombay college-going female readers of English-language romance novels whom she surveyed, 98 “believed that a girl should marry out of choice” (Puri 1997: 438).24 Puri’s work suggests a growing possibility of love marriages among the élite classes in India. But one should not interpret her questionnaires distributed to 16–22-year-old readers of romance novels to suggest that 98 percent of élite classes will marry for love. Media scholar Melissa Butcher’s focus group interviews with 15–20-year-olds in Delhi and elsewhere in 1996– 97 found that those from the “consuming classes” “with a high level of education and/or professional development” “expressed a declining adherence to the ritual of arranged marriage” (Butcher 2003: 41–41, 129). Certainly, we lack systematic data that we would like, but the reports we do have suggest some increase in the acceptance of love matches among the most affluent Indians. Shurmer-Smith also suggests a growth in nuclear-family living among the élite because the generous salaries of their jobs allow an easier setting up of separate households, and often require mobility.25 She emphasizes that élite women’s ability to get good paying jobs has contributed to an increase in their participation in the paid labor force.26 It appears, moreover, that among the élite youth, women are rejecting being restricted to the home. Cyrus Broacha, an MTV VJ who traveled across India from campus to campus, says that TV has made young women more free. Even outside the metropoles, Broacha reports, college women are enthusiastic to speak, to snatch the microphone from him (Page and Crawley 2001: 150). Media researchers report that many young women throughout India desire to participate in the musical talent shows that now run on Zee TV. One principal of a Maharashtra school says that girls sometimes join colleges with the desire to appear in musical shows (ibid.: 143). While these reports may seem trivial, they do suggest an increased willingness on the part of élite women to participate in events outside the home. While it seems clear that élite women are increasingly active consumers who embrace Western fashions and standards of beauty and want more and more to participate in events outside the home, it remains difficult to estimate the extent to which joint-family living, arranged marriages, and a focus on women’s domestic duties are declining among the élite. While we have some impressionistic accounts of these changes, there is

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little at this time that is sufficiently systematic to estimate the extent of such changes.

Local Mediation of Global Processes This chapter argues that the processes unleashed by economic and cultural globalization are remaking affluent Indians’ class identity and ordinary Indians’ imagination of these classes, and may be reshaping gender and family arrangements of élites as well. But it is important to emphasize that these global forces are mediated by local interests and concerns.27 Local Hindi films have been transformed. They celebrate new styles and standards of female beauty. They no longer emphasize a vamp who is denigrated as Westernized. More and more, they celebrate young people’s choice of partner and women’s greater economic freedom. The influence of Hollywood is often direct. Bollywood fashion designers say that they use Hollywood fashion that they see on The Bold and the Beautiful to give films a glamorous, hip, glossy feel (Chopra 1997). Scriptwriters say that producers sometimes provide “video cassettes of the latest American releases” and tell writers to “watch them and make something like that” (Chhaya 1991; Chopra 1997). Despite the impetus of transnational media, these changes have nonetheless been introduced by local Indian filmmakers. These filmmakers have been influenced by the growing availability of Hollywood films and American television serials and (perhaps) by changes in their élite lives, but nonetheless it is Indian filmmakers who have been making these changes. Satellite television has been even more influential than Hindi films in inciting consumerism and presenting alternative gender arrangements. It may appear that with satellite television, the effects of globalization are more direct. After all, it is American serials like Santa Barbara that have had great influence. Yet, while American programming has been successful, local programming was essential to satellite television’s growth. In 1991, the Murdoch News Corporation introduced STAR TV, a package of MTV, BBC, Prime Sports, and Star Plus (a general entertainment program in English) in India. But it was Zee TV, introduced a year later, which found success with a formula of Hindi-language serials, Hindi films, and programs of Hindi film songs (Gupta 1998; Thussu 2000: 297).

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As Page and Crawley put it, Zee TV’s programming of the “popular culture of the Bombay film industry” “provided the momentum to the penetration of cable” (Page and Crawley 2001: 89). Even transnational programming is now dubbed in Hindi (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 20). MTV’s experience similarly shows the imperative that programming be localized. Music video channels like Channel V became successful only with the introduction of Indian Video Jockeys (VJs) and Indian music (Butcher 1999). When MTV reentered the Indian market in 1996, it at first announced that Hindi film songs would not be played, and that the channel would retain its international identity. But it found that to be successful, it had to introduce local songs. As a result, 70 percent of the MTV playlist today consists of Indian pop and Hindi film songs, and there are 12 local Indian presenters (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 20). Just as Hindi films have been shaped by the filmmakers’ experience with transnational media, so indigenous cable serials, which continue to be the most popular, are influenced by American serials. Gupta points out that “while The Bold and the Beautiful may be watched by only a small percentage of the Indian population, the Indian soaps on both Doordarshan and on private channels are heavily influenced by the content and representational styles of the American soaps” (Gupta 1998: 72). Entire genres from Zee TV’s High Life (patterned on Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous) to Star Plus’ Kaun Banega Crorepati (Who Wants to be a Millionaire) are adapted from American models to Indian conditions (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 13; Gupta 1998: 72). While the influence of transnational media is clear, it is local actors who reinterpret transnational productions for local tastes. Similarly, while cable television screens non-Indian programming, local entrepreneurs who set up the cottage industry of cable enterprises spread the new serials and the popularity of cable television. (Mishra 1999; Page and Crawley 2001: 89). Global media has played a role in making the transnational middle class in India, but local actors played a central role in indigenizing global media’s images and messages and disseminating them throughout India.

Satellite TV and a Changing Economy I have tried to be cautious in arguing no more than that films contributed to changing the lives of élites in India. Since they are the primary

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entertainment of ordinary Indians, Hindi films have probably had a greater influence on these groups than they have had on the Englishspeaking élites. Thus, it may be that the most important effect of Hindi films is on non-élites’ imaginings of élite lives. In affluent circles, cable television has probably played a more profound role in inciting consumer desires. While the proprietors of clothing shops recognize that the styles of Hindi film stars shape the purchases of consumers, they mainly see advertising and cable as stimulating their business (Page and Crawley 2001: 159). Page and Crawley’s (2001: 149– 50) discussion with 17- and 18-year-old female students at an élite Bombay college revealed that most of them spoke English at home and watched English-language television programs. None of the group reported watching state-run Doordarshan over-the-air television and many cited Ally McBeal as someone they could “relate to very well” (in the words of one student). Similar discussions with 12- and 13-year-old students at élite Bombay schools showed a similar preference for British comedies, American sports, and Hollywood television serials like The X Files (Page and Crawley 2001: 147–48). While Hindi films often present a loosening of Indian gender arrangements, this focus is undoubtedly stronger in satellite television. Following satellite channels, television serials present more sexual openness than Hindi films. Serials commonly examine issues like divorce and extramarital relationships, which are uncommon in Hindi films, and they are much more likely than Hindi films to focus on women in the paid labor force (Page and Crawley 2001: 166). In Hindi films, lovers often reconcile with extended patriarchal families, but in serials there is a greater focus on living outside of joint-family contexts (ibid.: 152–53). The Hindi film heroine may marry for love and wear Western clothing, but Ally McBeal or one of the characters in Friends have even more independence. While changes in Hindi films may contribute to the process of inciting consumerism or shifting the gender relations of affluent Indians, foreign television serials and indigenous serials influenced by them have probably had even greater effects. Moreover, one should not overestimate the effects of purely cultural change. At the center of changes in the lives of affluent Indians are structural changes in the economy. Expanded economic opportunities brought about by participating in trans-local labor markets provided the income that allowed people to act on consumer desires. The decline of foreign

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exchange restrictions made more goods available. As Rama Bijapurkar puts it, the liberalization of the Indian economy was a macro-event which transformed Indian culture. For Bijapurkar, “the structural reality of more consumer choices is what generated the cultural emphasis on freedom of choice” (quoted by Page and Crawley 2001: 141). The new economic opportunities provided by a global economy made social arrangements like love marriages or nuclear family-living economically viable. The new economy that opened up new jobs for affluent women played a role in expanding élite women’s participation in the paid labor force. While films and other globally-influenced media contributed to the creation of cultural imaginations supporting these changes, the structural changes are what allowed people to act on these imaginations. The importance of the new structural opportunities is highlighted by the fact that so many ordinary Indians reject the messages of television serials. Page and Crawley (2001: 166) report, for instance, that while affluent urban women often identified with television heroines who cope with divorce, sexual harassment, rape, and abortion, ordinary women outside cities tended to describe television serials as presenting an “unreal and perverted picture of women.” Working class women voiced strong objections to the “misbehavior of the young women in the serials.” While students in élite Bombay colleges enjoyed television depictions of women who became sexually involved with their bosses, the story line did not go down as well with students elsewhere, who complained that serials gave the wrong message by encouraging extra-marital affairs (ibid.: 155–56). The importance of the new structural opportunities in facilitating change is also highlighted when one remembers that the “new” messages and images of Hindi films have, in fact, been part of Indian culture for a long time, but have typically been rejected as fantasy with little to teach about how to live. Because human experience is contradictory, cultures are not consistent, coherent wholes. Rather, each culture develops “second languages” which recognize human experiences that are opposed to the more easily recognized experiences which are captured by the richer “first language” with which people are more familiar (Bellah et al. 1985; Derné 1995: Chapter 5: 60–62, 2000b). While Indian culture has long emphasized adherence to family duty and group pressures, this very focus allows people to imagine the opposite—individuals who are free from constraint. A focus on social duty to a family allows one to imagine its opposite—individual freedom and marital love. In all societies, people

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experience both individual autonomy and the guidance and control of groups. So, cultures tend to give expression to both poles of human experience. In India, the focus has very much been on group dictates, but second languages, which are less rich, legitimate and familiar nonetheless have long given voice to the desire for individual autonomy (Derné 1995: Chapter 5, 2000b: 165–67). Indian popular theatre (Hansen 1992) and women’s oral traditions (Raheja and Gold 1994) reveal the strength of a second language embracing equality between men and women, individual autonomy, and love over family duty. But without transformed structural possibilities, not very many people embraced these “second languages”. Hindi films have long celebrated individual autonomy and love over family duty, but relatively few men rebel by marrying against their parents’ wishes, precisely because of the structural realities they face. Of course, some men marry for love and many more separate from their parents, and films may play a role in inciting this desire for autonomy (Derné 1995: Chapters 5, 7, 2000a: Chapter 5). But the quest for autonomy often occurs only when men have established themselves as economically independent—that is only when the structural realities of their situation facilitate greater independence (Derné 1995: Chapter 8; Mines 1988). My interviews with film-goers in 1991 demonstrate that most men rejected Hindi films’ celebration of love marriages and of love as having priority over duties to the joint family (Derné 2000a: 84–88). While films provided an enjoyed and exciting liminal escape from dayto-day realities, they did not tend to transform the lives of the filmgoers. The film-going men whom I interviewed in 1991 tended to be guided by their very real fears rather than by the fantastic celebrations of love that they saw on the screen. Young film-goers who were not yet well established in their careers relied on parental support and had, therefore, a hard time imagining forsaking this support to marry against their parents’ wishes. There were few structures, moreover, that facilitated the interaction of young unmarried men and women that would allow young film-goers to develop a desire to marry for love. Thus, while the new messages of transnational media may play a role in transforming the live of affluent Indians, we should always keep sight of the structural realities that have facilitated these new lives. The next chapter focuses on how the non-élite film-goers whom I interviewed in 2001 also reject contemporary messages of transnational media,

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highlighting that such media messages have little effect without a change in the underlying structural realities. Indeed, we should not forget that the new cultural imaginations presented in Hindi film, satellite television, and advertising are themselves based on underlying economic changes. The decline of regulations and the loosening of foreign exchange restrictions were what allowed the growth of satellite television and Hollywood films. The opening up of the markets fired up the economic engine of advertising that made cable television viable.

The Transnational Middle Class in a Globalizing Economy Only recently has class analysis begun to address how a globalizing economy is fundamentally altering the class system. Most notably, Leslie Sklair (2001) has analyzed the emergence of a transnational capitalist class that works to advance the interests of transnational corporations (TNCs). Because, “those who run the TNCs cannot achieve their ends alone,” the class includes “globalizing bureaucrats, politicians and professionals” that the corporations need to carry out their work (Sklair 2001: 295). This group remains a “capitalist class” for Sklair because it continues to direct or control the major forms of capital. This group comprises a distinctly transnational class because “they operate across state borders to further the interests of global capital” (ibid.: 295). Ostensibly, Sklair (ibid.: 295) embraces the basic Marxian analysis of class, arguing that TNC executives, globalizing bureaucrats, politicians, and professionals share a similar “relationship to the means of production, distribution, and exchange,” but he—perhaps unwittingly (and, I think, correctly)—focuses attention on how transnational capitalists pursue the interests of TNCs despite the various ways they are related to the system of production. While the transnational capitalist class has an interest in promoting open markets and ensuring cheap labor, Sklair (2001: 6) is right to focus attention on how this class also has a strong interest in promoting the “culture ideology of consumerism” which is central to the reproduction of the global capitalist system. Sklair suggests that the transnational

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capitalist class’ main aim is “sustaining global capitalism based on mass . . . consumerism forever. . . . Whatever else might change or however social systems might diverge . . . people would all agree on one principle, namely the desirability of consuming more and more goods and services” (Sklair 2001: 255). “The prime culture-ideology task of global capitalism,” Sklair argues, “is to ensure that as many people as possible consume as much as possible by inculcating beliefs about the intrinsic value of consumption as a ‘good thing’ and the key component of the ‘good life’” (ibid.: 11). The transnational capitalist class, of course, wants to create more than just the desire to consume: it wants to create the desire of everyone around the world to consume the same products. “Once television is there,” the CEO of Heinz opined, “people of whatever shade, culture or origin want roughly the same things” (ibid.: 255). While Sklair emphasized the creation of a transnational capitalist class, there has so far been insufficient attention paid to how globalization is shaping other classes. But in inciting consumption, the transnational capitalist class ends up creating the transnational middle class described in this chapter. This transnational middle class is oriented to cosmopolitan consumption and makes up the primary consumers fueling the capitalist system. Most theories of class followed Marx in focusing on a person’s position in a productive system. But my study, along with other recent ethnographic studies of class in poor countries exposed to global markets, suggests the importance of the Weberian focus on how the middle classes are made by defining themselves in opposition to class ‘others’ through cultural practices associated with consumption. Mark Liechty’s analysis of the development of the middle class in Kathmandu, Nepal, follows Weber in emphasizing two key aspects of the middle class. Middle classes, Liechty emphasizes, construct their identity “in opposition to its class others, above and below” (Liechty 2003: 15). In addition, because the contributions of the middle classes to production often do not seem obvious, they stake claims to identity through discernment, which is often focused on consumption. He argues that the middle classes distance themselves both from “mere laboring” and “mere wealth,” staking their identity on “its accomplishments and refinement, moral discourses that it pursues largely through its privileged access to goods and services (from education to fashions) in the free market” (ibid.: 17). For Liechty, “cultures of consumerism” are part of the cultural process “through which

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an emerging middle class actually creates itself as a sociocultural identity” (ibid.: 7). In the middle class world, Liechty (2003: 15) argues, identity is based more on what you have than on what you do. Several features define the transnational middle class in India. First, the transnational middle class defines itself in opposition to class others on a global field. Affluent Indians, whose opportunities for consumption and employment are now shaped by global markets, increasingly constitute a transnational middle class that holds the space between the poor in India and the consuming classes in North America and Europe. These élites are constantly reminded of the lifestyles of the consuming classes in rich societies, yet they also know that their own élite status, and India’s comparative advantage in the international economy, is based on the low-wage Indian poor. Affluent Indians show themselves to be a transnational middle class by consuming products that advertise the emulation of the lifestyles of cosmopolitan consumers in Europe and North America while distinguishing themselves from the vulgar tastes and arrangements of poor Indians. Since the class identifies with cosmopolitan consumers around the world, it is a transnational class for whom national identity is relatively unimportant. In working to create similar global consumers around the world, the transnational capitalist class binds people together by shared attachment to a middle class lifestyle in spite of language, religious, and national differences. Second, transnational middle class identity is rooted more in shared consumption than in a shared relationship to the productive system. People advertise themselves as cosmopolitan by showing discerning tastes, especially in fashion, but also in consuming goods. Often, the discernment being advertised focuses on particular ways of being male and female. So, the transnational man shows his maleness and his cosmopolitanism through his attachment to products (like the Pulsar motorcycle) which are associated with male strength. The transnational woman shows her femaleness and her cosmopolitanism through attachment to transnational standards of beauty, like a thin body and up-to-date fashion. In trying to unify consumers around the world, the transnational capitalist class helps create this orientation, especially through media and advertising. Third, transnational middle class identity is rooted in cosmopolitan gender arrangements which give women freedom as consumers. One way that the most affluent Indians advertise their cosmopolitan status is

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by easing attachment to distinctively Indian gender arrangements. While relatively few affluent Indians have embraced love marriages, some affluent Indian women work outside the home and many more affluent Indians live in nuclear families. Most women in the transnational middle class move more freely outside the home—certainly, as they shop in élite boutiques. These gender arrangements emulate those of the consuming classes in Europe and North America and distance themselves from the local arrangements of poorer Indians. The transnational middle class often defines itself in terms of women’s attachment to shopping and pursuit of cosmopolitan standards of beauty. As Mark Liechty (2003: 253–54) argues, “consumption is the cultural labor of the middle class”, and it is important that women are the primary consumers. Theorists like Maria Mies (1986) are correct to see “housewifization” as a fundamental basis of capitalist profit, and it is certainly through transnational capitalist class efforts that so many transnational middle class Indians have come to see women as cosmopolitan consumers.28 This analysis suggests that a globalizing economic system has produced not just a transnational capitalist class, but a transnational middle class as well. The transnational capitalist class shares the common aim of promoting a consuming ideology around the world. When it is successful, the transnational capitalist class produces a transnational middle class that finds its identity by defining itself in comparison to class ‘others’ on a global stage, advertises cosmopolitan discernment through consumption, and embraces distinctively cosmopolitan gender arrangements. Media help members of the transnational middle class see themselves as having more in common with other consumers around the world than with others in their own country. While people in the transnational middle class commonly have positions in the global economy that provide good incomes, media help root their identity more in consumption. Through the prompting of advertising initiated by the transnational capitalist class, the transnational middle class increasingly finds its identity in distinctively cosmopolitan gender arrangements which give women increasing freedom to act as consumers. In short, the globalization of the economy suggests the need to fundamentally rethink our analysis of class identity. While I have drawn especially on the insightful work of Mark Liechty (2003), there are important differences in our approaches. (Indeed, I did

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not read Liechty’s work on “making middle class culture in a new consumer society” until after I had completed a draft of this chapter.) Liechty’s analysis is helpful in confirming my analysis of focusing on consumption as a key cultural practice in the making of class identity today. His analysis of how the middle classes define themselves in opposition to class ‘others’ is also helpful in confirming my analysis. But in focusing on the cultural practices of the middle class itself, Liechty under-emphasizes the role of the transnational capitalist class in prompting these practices. In focusing on cultural practices, Liechty unduly de-emphasizes structural positioning. My analysis certainly emphasizes cultural factors, but I see structural factors as important as well: affluent Indians today are more and more located on a global field. Their jobs are high-paying precisely because they produce for a global market. Their lifestyles can aspire to those of the consuming classes in the rich countries precisely because global goods are more and more available. A more serious difference between our approaches is that Liechty fails to distinguish between the transnational middle class that I describe in this chapter and the ordinary middle classes that I focus on in the rest of the book. Liechty explicitly suggests that Weber would have better focused on “a middle class” rather than a set of “middle classes” (Liechty 2003: 13) between labor and capital. Provided new global opportunities, the transnational middle class that I describe in this chapter sees itself on a global field located between the Indian poor and the consuming classes in Europe and North America. Lacking these new global opportunities, the ordinary middle classes I describe in the next chapter see themselves as on a purely local stage, between the Indian poor and the affluent ‘great’ people in India who drive automobiles and travel abroad. While the transnational middle class I describe in this chapter is oriented globally and embraces cosmopolitan gender arrangements to advertise its discernment, the ordinary middle classes are oriented locally and reject such gender arrangements as a threat to Indianness. Liechty, it turns out, focuses not on the transnational middle class I describe in this chapter but the ordinary middle classes who define themselves in opposition to the vulgar poor, and the promiscuity and excessive consumerism they attribute to the sorts of affluent people I described here. Liechty is right that we need to focus more on consumption and on how groups are positioned globally to understand class today. But we must also focus on distinctive gender arrangements and the role of the most

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élite transnational capitalist class in producing class arrangements. Additionally, we must apply the focus on consumption and global location to understand not just a middle class, but a range of middle classes today.

Conclusion This chapter suggests that economic and cultural globalization may be transforming the lives of affluent Indians who are most able to participate in the new economic opportunities brought about by economic liberalization. Affluent Indians embrace a new sort of consumerism. Certainly, the affluent have always used consumption (as, for instance, in marriage ceremonies and dowries) to advertise wealth, but now they use consumption to advertise cosmopolitan discernment and taste. While the change is probably less far-reaching, globalization has also influenced the gender arrangements of affluent Indians. For some affluent Indians, new economic opportunities have made nuclear-family living and love marriages more of an economic possibility, but for nearly all, new opportunities for consumption have fueled women’s greater freedom of movement in public. This chapter suggests as well that the imaginations of élite lives presented in the transnational media may shape the understanding of what it means to be élite in India. Both élites and non-élites may increasingly see élite status as rooted in consumption and transnational movement. These orientations may, moreover, associate élites more with élites in other countries than with their own compatriots in India, diminishing the hold of national identity. Films play a role in this process, but undoubtedly the growth of satellite television has had at least as much of an effect. While transnational cultural flows influence these processes, we must keep in mind that these processes are mediated by local actors, from local filmmakers to local cable operators. While it may appear that cultural globalization is an important engine of change, we must always keep in mind that changing structural conditions is what allows these new understandings and desires to grip the imagination of people in India. Indeed, the next chapter’s consideration of globalization’s failure to radically transform the lives of ordinary Indians suggests that changing structural realities constitute the main engine of the changes brought

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about by globalization. Since their structural worlds have not been fundamentally transformed, ordinary Indians find pleasures in Hindi films that are similar to those of previous decades. Although the men I interviewed often have cable television and enjoy Hollywood films, these global media have not fundamentally transformed the lives of ordinary Indians. Non-élite Indians have been less able to participate in cosmopolitan consumption and national identity continues to loom large (and is, indeed, a basis of collective resistance to globalization). Despite productive positions that have commonalities with those of other non-élites around the world, non-élite Indians have not developed a transnational identity that parallels the class identity of the transnational capitalist class and the transnational middle class described in this chapter.

Notes 01. I spent most of my time in Banaras, Dehra Dun, and Delhi, and have never been to the cosmopolitan center of Bombay. I lived in India for about 21 months, between 1986 and 2001. 02. It was only after completing a draft of this section that I discovered the work of Leela Fernandes who similarly argues that “media images produce a vision of the Indian nation based on an idealized depiction of the urban middle classes and new patterns of commodity consumption” (Fernandes 2000: 612). 03. Fernandes similarly argues that in the early decades of independence, the strength of a “political culture which was constituted by public discourses on the need for advancement of the rural poor” was apparent in forms ranging from “the speeches of politicians to popular films”. “The urban middle classes were,” she argues, “relatively invisible in this visual political culture” (Fernandes 2000: 613). 04. As Kazmi (1999: 159) notes, the servant in HAHK is “virtually a family member” who is called “son” by the family patriarch. Kazmi emphasizes how the source of the rich’s “ill-gotten wealth” and the dire straights of the poor are hidden by films like HAHK. 05. These quotations are cited by Uberoi (1998: 314) as a personal communication. 06. The quote is a personal communication by Rachel Dwyer cited by Uberoi (1998: 314). See also Inden (1999); Kazmi (1999: 159–60). 07. There are, of course, exceptions, but these are increasingly rare and marginalized. A mainstream hero in the 1980s and the early 1990s, Mithun Chakraborty today portrays fighting-and-killing anti-heroes who are poor. But the films in which he stars today are low-budget and attract small audiences (for example, Zahareela). 08. See also Gupta (2000); Shurmer-Smith (2000); Varma (1998: 194). 09. He is referring to those who are seeing films at the Chayadeep theatre. 10. English-language Hindi film fan magazines now routinely include advertisements of luggage, so necessary to the life of mobile global citizens.

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11. Some of these hit films included Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (1995), Pardes (1997), and Kaho Na Pyar Hain (2000). 12. Those familiar with Hindi films will recognize these as tropes that are so common that they hardly need documenting. Films that include honeymoons in Europe run from Chandni (1989) through Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001). Films that reference Indian men’s business or education in Europe or North America run from Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) and Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) through Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain (1999), and Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001), to name just a few. 13. Such advertising is notably absent from Hindi-language fan magazines. 14. While the title of the magazine highlights its international character (perhaps to appeal to the transnational middle class) it is “for sale in India only”. 15. At other hoardings in town, the same establishment instead emphasizes more traditional specialties in “make up”, “yoga and meditation”, “bridel [sic] mehndi,” “hair problem”, and “skin problem”. 16. This literature is discussed in Chapter 1. See especially Baudrillard (1983); Hebdige (1989); Mathews (2000); Richards (2000). 17. Because Coke now owns Thums-Up!, Pepsi only costs about three times as much as the cost of Thums Up!. 18. This literature is discussed in Chapter 1. See especially Mathews (2000); Richards (2000). 19. Social scientist Anjali Monteiro similarly reports that these victories have been a source of national pride (interview quoted by Page and Crawley 2001: 142). 20. Chin (1998: 185) shows similar dynamics in Malaysia. 21. The film played to sold-out houses in Dehra Dun. While not as big hits as Kabhi Khushi Kabhi Gham or Lagaan, which played after my departure from India, the press describes CCCC as a hit that “fast recovered the Rs 30 million per territory investment for distributors” (Vijayakar 2002a). 22. Shohini Ghosh rightly sees the “blurring of distinction between the ‘bad’ vamp (Westernized, sexy and promiscuous) and the ‘good’ heroine (chaste and virtuous)” as a “major representational shift” (Ghosh 1999a: 238). She rightly traces this transformation to 1993’s Khalnayak, which featured the hit song “Choli Ke Peechey Kya Hai?” (What’s Behind my Blouse?). 23. Anthropologist Satya Sharma (1996: 311) similarly reports a rise in dating and a related decline in arranged marriages among the élite. 24. I report this finding because it suggests the growing possibility of love marriages in élite families. But I do so reluctantly because the findings could be misinterpreted. Puri’s finding that 98 percent of a sample of Bombay readers of English-language romance believe a “girl should marry for choice” does not reflect the preference of most élite Indian women. Puri’s (1997) questionnaire survey of Bombay college women who self-identify as readers of English-language romances may have accessed an extremely élite group (which she describes as middle class). But it seems more likely to me that these questionnaire results indicate a desire for a love marriage more than an expectation of achieving them. Forty percent of the women report having to read romances on the sly because their family prohibits their habit (Puri 1997: 439), suggesting they are a long way from rebelling against the cultural norm that

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25. 26.

27. 28.

marriages ought to be arranged by the parents. Parameshwar’s (1997) survey of English-language romance readers found little support for love marriages. Puri’s (1999) more recent work on narratives of élite Delhi women suggests, moreover, that women’s discussion of love marriages and arranged marriages often includes much ambiguity. Puri does not report what percentage of these women want love marriages, focusing instead on how these women describe “the meaning of marriage in ways that are neither traditional nor Western, that are neither easily categorized as ‘love’ nor ‘arranged marriages’” (Puri 1999: 139). Thus, two of 20 marriageable-age women discussed planning an immanent love marriage, but these “narratives” were “driven with the practical considerations typically associated with ‘arranged marriages’.” Many women aimed at finding a husband whom they can get to know and discussed the drawbacks and benefits of both love marriages and arranged marriages in attaining this goal (ibid.: 141). These urban women have “convent education,” have the “ability to converse in English” (ibid.: x), and hold jobs that include those of flight attendant and film star. Focusing on the women’s self identification, she describes the sample as “middle class” (and sometimes uppermiddle class). She was not interested in a sample that revealed “typical middle-class Indian women’s” “typical answers to questions”, but conducted the interviews mostly in English and used a snowball method of sampling through “personal networks” (ibid.: 19). Communications scholar Shoma Munshi (2001c: 83) similarly reports a decline in joint-family living among the élite. Social scientists Shoma Munshi (2001c: 83) and Satya Sharma (1996: 311) similarly argue that élite women are increasingly in the paid labor force. Marketing consultant Bijapurkar believes that television has played a part in making it acceptable for élite women to work outside the home “even if the numbers have not grown substantially over the past ten years.” The serials, she says, say “that it is ok to walk out on your husband and get involved with a married man and have a child out of wedlock . . . and yet the feeling towards the protagonist is overall positive. . . . The audience is not rejecting the serial” (Page and Crawley 2001: 167). This has often been recognized by students of globalization (Richards and French 2000: 14). Christine Chin’s (1998) study of foreign female domestic workers in Malaysia similarly shows the capitalist interest in producing housewives as consumers. In concert with transnational capital, the Malaysian state encourages the import of Filipino domestic workers so that more Malaysians can live in nuclear families. Living in nuclear families, Malaysians rely more on the market than the extended family to meet basic needs. Filipino domestic workers in these households allow women to take public roles in consuming. Chin shows that this nuclear family form that relies on foreign domestic servants is seen as crucial to middle class status in Malaysia.

4

Cultural Continuities and Active Resistance Gender and the Making of the Indian Middle Class

Attracted to images of new affluence as India enters the global economy, 22-year-old Amit left his village to study at a Dehra Dun university with the hope of landing a high-paying job. Fashionably dressed, he waits with a diverse crowd (that includes people of humble means) to get one of the cheaper seats at the Dehra Dun theatre showing Chori Chori Chupke Chupke, the most respectable Hindi film that was screened during the period of my 2001 fieldwork. Fancying himself a connoisseur of Western fashion, he comments that the “fashion in films impresses me. We should,” he says, “update and change our style.” Amit enjoys seeing films for entertainment (manoranjan). He especially enjoyed the hit Hindi film Kaho Na Pyar Hai because of the physique and dancing of the film’s powerful hero (Hrithik Roshan) who played an émigré to New Zealand. On cable, he enjoys watching Arnold Schwarzenegger films and National Basketball Association games beamed to India from the USA. These media preferences seem to suggest a global orientation as well as an attraction to male strength and power. Yet, Amit also seems attached to gender arrangements that he sees as distinctively Indian. He says that he will only watch a Hindi film if he has heard that it is a “good family movie”. Hum Saath Saath Hain, a straightforward celebration of joint-family life, is one of his favorite films.

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Currently staying in Dehra Dun for his studies, Amit describes leading a happy joint-family life in a Kumaon hill village with his mother, retired army father, a sister, two brothers, and bhabhis (brothers’ wives). Although the cosmopolitan media he likes often celebrates love marriages, he firmly believes that “love marriages are only successful in films.” Love marriages, he says, wrongly distance boys from their parents. While seeing himself as a cosmopolitan connoisseur of fashion and identifying with the Kaho Na Pyar Hai hero who emigrated abroad, this young student, like many others, is nonetheless uneasy about how new cultural influences might affect the Indian gender arrangements that he likes. “I want an arranged marriage,” Amit says, “but I fear that Fashion Television,1 MTV, and [music] Channel V are affecting the desires of the younger generation.” The last chapter suggested that transnational cultural flows have played a role in creating a transnational middle class in India which is oriented toward cosmopolitan worlds outside India. This class defines itself by movement and the consumption of cosmopolitan goods. It appears that the gender arrangements of the transnational middle class examined in the last chapter may be shifting so that more women participate in the paid labor force (bringing in more money for consumption), and more women move freely outside the home often to engage in consumption. Global media play a role in encouraging dating by members of the transnational middle class, who see themselves as guided by cosmopolitan standards, while better economic opportunities for the affluent make nuclear-family living and love marriages a more realistic possibility. We must always keep in mind that the effects of globalization are mediated by class.2 For the educated English-speaking élite, the speeding up and increasing volume of global movement have increased possibilities and opportunities. But ordinary Indians like Amit are mostly at the receiving end3 of globalization. The transnational movement of media makes Amit (and other middle class Indians) more aware of cosmopolitan lifestyles—and Amit is attracted to external signs of cosmopolitan status such as fashion. But Amit is neither affluent nor globally connected; he does not speak English well; the university he attends is not prestigious; and while his father’s army career provides a good standard of living, it does not provide transnational connections. Amit is highly educated, having nearly finished his university program, but his limited English-language skills and lack of élite

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connections (which he shares with other ordinary middle class Indians) limit his ability to hitch his dreams to the global economy and pursue a fully cosmopolitan lifestyle. Awareness of the utopia of consumption partly brought about by global media has not fully transformed Amit’s desires and identity. Rather, his desires about gender and family remain most strongly influenced by local Indian cultures to which he remains strongly attached. While affluent Indians now embrace cosmopolitan identity over Indianness, Amit’s Indianness is central to his identity. Like the economic situation he finds himself in, the enduring family structures that Amit confronts also play a part in limiting cultural globalization’s effect on him and other non-élite middle class Indians like him. Like most non-élite middle class Indians, Amit lives in a world in which dating can still fundamentally harm parents’ ability to arrange a daughter’s marriage.4 He lives in a world in which job opportunities for women of his class are not good enough to be of much help in pushing toward the utopia of consumption. He encounters a world in which parents closely watch any contacts between unmarried men and women.5 Given these structural realities, the celebration of greater independence for young couples in global media does not make much sense to Amit. Like most non-élites, Amit dismisses the celebration in films of love marriages as fantasies with no connections to his daily reality. For Amit, as for many ordinary Indian men, gender and family arrangements that subordinate women are fundamental to their Indianness. Amit wears fashionable clothes and is attracted to powerful male figures that he encounters in the transnational media. What makes him uneasy is global media, which seems to encourage the breakdown of family arrangements that benefit men like him and which he sees as distinctively Indian. When ordinary Indians resist globalization, they often focus on perceived threats to Indian family life. This chapter focuses on continuities in non-élite Indian culture despite a media landscape that has been transformed by globalization and that appears to offer new cultural understandings and resources. First, I argue that for young men whose lives remain constrained by limited opportunities, films still provide an escape from day-to-day realities, but do not transform most men’s understandings of those day-to-day realities. Despite the messages of transnational media, ordinary middle class men continue to be attached to arranged marriages and a strict

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division of labor in the home. Second, I argue that even as they highlight non-Indian cosmopolitan identities which ordinary Indians cannot successfully pursue, films end up awakening anxieties about identity that films themselves resolve by bolstering the Indian identities of non-élite viewers. Third, I emphasize that the consuming appeal of cosmopolitan identities makes ordinary middle class men pursue aspects of those identities (like fashion) wherever they can, rooting their own Indianness in women’s adherence to standards of femininity that men see as distinctively Indian. Fourth, I suggest that because ordinary Indians remain attached to their Indian identity, they sometimes actively resist cultural globalization, but this resistance focuses especially—although not exclusively—on challenges to gender arrangements. Finally, I suggest how the cultural practices I describe in this chapter contribute to making a locally-oriented middle class more rooted in Indian identity, and to focusing on different class ‘others’ than the transnational middle class that I described in the previous chapter. This chapter emphasizes how class-based structural realities of economy and family which non-élites face limit the ways in which cultural globalization transforms their lives and understandings. Subsequent chapters show, however, that globalization is also bringing about some important changes in non-élite middle class culture. Chapter 5 shows that while globalization has not fundamentally transformed gender and family arrangements of ordinary Indians, it has transformed some of the meanings that ordinary Indians attach to these arrangements. Chapter 6 shows that cultural globalization is providing new layers of meanings that further strengthen an already oppressive gender culture—as in Amit’s attraction to cosmopolitan action films and global sports that show male violence.

Escape from Day-to-Day Realities Like the non-élite middle class men whom I interviewed in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 65), the men whom I interviewed in Dehra Dun in 2001 enjoyed Hindi film-going as an escape from their day-to-day lives. Men said that they watch films for entertainment (manoranjan), to fondle their hearts (dil ko bahalaana) (in Amit’s words) or for mauj-masti—a difficult-to-translate term that might best be glossed by joi de vivre or a

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delighted state of passion.6 As one 25-year-old put it, “our hearts get satisfaction from films.” One reason that film-going refreshes is that it provides a time outside of normal family and work responsibilities (Derné 2000a: 62–66). Filmgoing is a liminal, antistructural time of relative anonymity in which men feel free to shout, laugh, and whistle without concern about how they are seen by others. As in 1991, men make bawdy comments and clap and whistle with abandon when Hindi film heroines dance. They continue to shout their approval when the heroes beat up the villains, to laugh at comedic elements, and sing along with hit music. They continue to enjoy close connections with male friends away from the eyes of family. The ritual of escape provided by film-going may be one reason so many men continue to say that they enjoy all the films they see. “I love them all,” says one married 25-year-old laborer who lives with his wife and children along with one brother. “What’s not to like?” The ongoing desire to escape from day-to-day realities reflects the fact that structural realities have not changed. Most men still face limited opportunities or work under demanding bosses. Most still live in households that include more than two adults. Film-going is an escape from usual lives in which autonomy is limited by family and economy. The ongoing structural realities of tight family connections and limited job opportunities continue to lead filmmakers to present fantastic reversals of existing hierarchies and arrangements, which excite viewers, even if they do not transform their ways of thinking about the usual realities. While love stories today are the biggest hits and get most of the attention from the media and fans, fighting-and-killing films that emphasize a hero’s rebellion against unjust authority continue to play to enthusiastic male audiences.7 The audiences for fighting-and-killing films usually do not include many women. While women might make up one-quarter of the balcony audience at some showings of a film like Officer—one of the more successful fighting-and-killing films of my 2001 fieldwork—systematic counts sometimes showed an overwhelming male audience: leaving one afternoon show of Officer were 485 men and just 12 women. Waiting for another afternoon show were 175 men and 15 women. The audiences that watched showings of Zahareela, a less popular, low-budget fightingand-killing film, were even more overwhelmingly male. The audience for one showing consisted of 368 men and 11 women, while the audience

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for another showing consisted of 294 men and 12 women. In 1991, fighting-and-killing films similarly attracted an overwhelmingly male audience (Derné 2000a: 37). As in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 66–75), audiences in 2001 responded enthusiastically to such rebellions. At showings of 2001’s Officer, the audience would applaud with abandon when the hero grabbed the face of his supervisor. At showings of low-budget Mithun Chakraborty-starrers like Zahareela and Bhairav, audiences would shout when Mithun slammed an affluent Indian’s head into a table. Even in love stories, reversals of usual power dynamics are important elements. In the big 2000 hit film Kaho Na Pyar Hai the hero’s rise from humble origins is an important appeal. Rebellions against family authorities and the presentation of a world in which men and women interact more freely continue to be the central appeals of Hindi films. As they did in the previous decades (Derné 2000a: 91–96), film love stories continue to celebrate individual autonomy that allows a young couple to live independent of parental support. In films like Dil To Pagal Hai (DTPH) and CCCC, the hero’s ability to live without parental help has become so normalized that it does not even appear to be a struggle. In earlier films (for example, Maine Pyar Kiya), the hero might be a business executive, but he often needed to kowtow to a father who ultimately controlled the company. But in recent films like DTPH and CCCC, the hero’s position of financial independence is unquestioned. While in some films (like DTPH and CCCC), parental opposition to love is not an issue, the young couple’s rebellious defiance of family authorities remains central in some hit films (like 2000’s biggest hit film, Kaho Na Pyar Hai). Sexy song sequences remain (Derné 2000a: 57–59) an important attraction for ordinary men who often lack other outlets for sexual energies that films themselves incite. In 2001 (as in 1991 [Derné 2000a: 147–49]), men enjoy whistling and shouting during sexy song sequences. In fighting-and-killing films like Officer, deafening and numerous whistles greeted a scene showing the bikini-clad heroine emerging from the ocean. Whistling, clapping, and shouting only intensified as the heroine began to swing her hips in the dance scene that followed. In love stories like CCCC, deafening whistles accompanied the heroine’s dancing in a honeymoon scene. The male audience response to CCCC’s scene in which the hero first encounters the dancing girl whom he hires to be a surrogate mother was even more raucous. The scene quickly became so anticipated that

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the whistles began even before the scene came on the screen. Whistles intensified as the audience saw the heroine’s hat that read “Sexy” (in English). As she shook her hips on screen, the response went so wild that the seats seemed to shake, especially in the front sections of the auditorium. Nine (28 percent) of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 named particular heroines as their favorites because of their “beauty”, figure, or dancing skills, often talking wide-eyed about their attraction to their favorite heroines’ beauty. Audiences continue to enjoy film themes that turn the world that they know upside-down, offering vicarious escape from day-to-day realities. In Hindi films, young adults have financial independence, reject parental authority, and marry according to their own wishes. Film heroes rise to wealth from humble origins and the powerless struggle with the powerful. Young people pursue their passion and seek their own mates. The usually strict limits on sexual exploration are lifted. As long as the structures of Indian society limit the possibilities of autonomy for most young people, placing them in tightly watched family and work environments, Hindi films will probably continue to provide the fantasy of escape from the worlds in which most Indians live.

Attachment to Existing Family Arrangements in a Globalizing World The advent of globalization has intensified the celebration of autonomy and individual choice. The idea that young people’s love for each other should be the basis for marriage is reasserted by cable television’s American serials that show young people in pursuit of the “right one”. Hollywood films show men and women falling in love outside of parental dictates. Influenced by global media, Hindi films now focus more on a search for the right partner rather than on overcoming parental opposition. The 1997 big hit film Dil To Pagal Hai famously opens with the heroine voicing her certainty that “someone somewhere was made for me and that I’ll meet him.” The hero scoffs at the “nonsense” of a “soulmate”, but the heroine remains firm: “When I meet my soulmate, I will recognize him. He will speak to me and give me a sign and my heart will realize . . . this is love.” In the increasingly cosmopolitan media world, love as a basis for marriage becomes more and more a celebrated goal.

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Yet, despite the transformed media landscape and the increased celebration of cosmopolitan lifestyles, the men whom I interviewed in 2001 remain as committed to arranged marriages as the men whom I interviewed in 1987 and 1991 (Derné 2000a: 84–88). In 2001, men still see films as a fantasy that provides no guidance about how they should marry. Pramod, a 20-year-old Scheduled Caste laborer with little schooling, talked with me as he waited to watch the love story CCCC. Pramod enjoys Doordarshan television serials but does not have cable television and does not watch American films. His favorite film is Kaho Na Pyar Hai, which he only watched twice because he did not want his craze (chaska) for it to diminish. Although Kaho Na Pyar Hai celebrates a heroine’s decision to abandon her parents (and India) to follow her love for the hero (to New Zealand), Pramod remains committed to arranged marriages: “Love marriages are only successful in movies. They’re only a story. I’ll marry according to my parents’ wishes. As a devoted son, I wouldn’t go against my parents’ wishes when it comes to marriage.” Vinod, an unmarried 22-year-old laborer from the depressed state of Bihar, enjoys Hindi film love stories, especially those starring Shah Rukh Khan. A high school graduate, Vinod also enjoys cable television’s Zee TV. But, like Pramod, Vinod remains committed to arranged marriages: “Love marriages are only stories in films. In real life they are not possible. I haven’t given a thought to marriage, but I know I’ll marry according to my parents’ wishes.” This mantra was voiced by the range of ordinary middle class men whom I interviewed. Virendra, 22, is a Jat Hindu in a postgraduate engineering program. His family is headed by his father who is a local Superintendent of Police and Virendra’s stay-at-home mother. While Vinod and Pramod bought cheap Hindi film tickets, Virendra was buying an expensive balcony ticket when I interviewed him. Virendra likes to copy the “smart (sunder) dress” of his favorite heroes. He likes Hindi film love stories like Kuch Kuch Hota Hai and CCCC, yet he, too, remains committed to arranged marriages: “In reality, [love marriages] are not successful. . . . In actual life, a love marriage is not possible. I’ll marry with my parents’ wishes.” Another 19-year-old upper-caste Hindu student living in a joint-family headed by a father with a good service job similarly said that while the films he likes are “love stories, it wouldn’t be possible in real life.” Although his favorite film, Mohabbatein, features a schoolteacher who encourages his students to pursue love, this student remains certain that

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“any girl I could find for myself would not be as good as the girl my parents will find for me.” These comments show that despite cultural globalization, men continue to prefer arranged marriages, dismissing film love stories as just fantasy. Despite a decade of cultural globalization celebrating cosmopolitan lifestyles, the percentage of men who support love marriages has not increased. In 1991, 68 percent (15/22) of the men whom I interviewed voiced an on-balance disapproval of love marriages, while in 2001, 66 percent (21/32) indicated similar disapproval. The percentage of men voicing an unqualified support of love marriages also changed little in a decade: in 1991, 14 percent (3/22) approved of love marriages without qualification, while in 2001, 19 percent (6/32) voiced unqualified support of love marriages. In affluent circles (and in the media that cater to them), there is a widespread belief that globalization has encouraged dating and love marriages. But my study’s systematic comparison showing little change in ordinary middle class Indians’ attitudes toward marriage is confirmed by a number of other studies. Geographically extensive evidence of the sort we would like is lacking, but most sober commentators (Gupta 2000: 49–50; Shurmer-Smith 2000; Uberoi 1998: 307) see little increase in love marriages, and the few systematic studies we do have suggest that even those with more economic opportunities and exposure to the transnational media than the people whom I interviewed continue to voice little support for love marriages. A mid-1990s study showed that 68 percent of urban college students—a group that is perhaps most exposed to transnational celebration of cosmopolitan lifestyles—said they wanted to have their parents arrange their marriage (Pathak 1994: 48, 59). Page and Crawley’s (2001: 176) 1998–99 survey of 15- to 34-yearolds in Delhi, Bombay, Kanpur, and Lucknow found that 65 percent tried to obey their elders “even if it hurts.” Leena Abraham’s (2001) 1996–98 study of urban college students showed similar results. While she interviewed low-income youth, their English-speaking skills and residence in Bombay, India’s most cosmopolitan metropolis, suggest more exposure to cosmopolitan flows than the men I interviewed. Abraham (2001: 149–51) found that “a majority of both college men and women” thought that love marriages were unsuccessful, while arranged marriages were successful. Students “preferred an arranged marriage for its stability and security” (Abraham 2001: 149–51).

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College men, especially, focused on how love marriages might lead to “conflicts within the family”, believing that a love marriage put a young man in a dilemma about “whether to listen to his mother or to his wife”. These unmarried men continued to believe that “‘love’ and ‘marriage’ do not go together” (Abraham 2001: 149–51). As one young man put it, “love is only with the opposite sex and marriage is with the whole family” (ibid.: 149–51). Like the men whom I interviewed in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, the college men Abraham interviewed still saw the need for the love between husband and wife to be tempered by the demands of joint-family life. Without a change in the structural realities of family life or economy, a decade of cosmopolitan celebration of love has apparently done little to change men’s views. While transnational media have intensified favorable images of independent women who often work in the paid economy, ordinary middle class men seem no less attached to gender arrangements which limit women’s public activities and freedom. Men continue to enjoy cinema halls as a largely male arena in which they can enjoy homosocial bonding. As in 1991, men are the primary consumers of fighting-and-killing films, and even at screenings of the more respected social films (where women might make up a full third of the balcony audience), there are few women in the cheap floor seats. Men continue to enjoy bonding in this all-male world (see Derné 2000a: 159–60 on my 1991 study). In 2001 (as in 1991), they shout out to greet friends both in the hall and while waiting outside. Men enjoy putting arms around each other or playfully batting each other. They joke, dance, and roughhouse together. Young men often hold hands and put their arms around each other; they push tightly together when fighting to buy tickets. Homosocial joking continues to be a loved part of most films. At screenings of the fightingand-killing film Officer, the antics between the hero and a joking male servant were much loved by the audience. When the hero told his servant, “You’re acting like a dancing girl, get over here with tea,” audiences responded with whistles. When the servant gets jealous of the hero’s relationship with the heroine, he goes on a drinking binge, which leads the hero to nurture the servant. Again, many members of the audience whistled as the hero put his drunken servant to bed, taking off his servant’s socks and trying to take off his pants. Anyone familiar with fighting-andkilling Hindi films of this period will recognize the almost formulaic nature of such homosocial antics (see Derné 2000a: 159–60 for earlier examples).

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Some men seem to enjoy their exclusive use of cinema hall public spaces, while emphasizing how this contrasts with women’s home-based lives. Tahsin, a married 25-year-old, describes his compelling attraction (chaska) for Hindi films as so strong that he used to see at least one movie a day. Even now, he says, he sees at least two movies a week. When I asked him why he does not bring his wife of seven years to the movies, he proudly relates that she is not very interested in film-going. She does not like the “seductive dresses of the heroines,” Tahsin says. She is so “home loving” (gharelu), he says admiringly, that “she even objects to seeing movies with her own husband.” For Tahsin, the cinema hall is a place that men enjoy, while women should remain at home. Tahsin does not watch television at home much. “It’s for women and children,” he says. Men’s discussion of their favorite heroines continues to show a focus on women’s home responsibilities. Tahsin does not like many of today’s heroines, saying that they expose too much of their bodies. For Tahsin, women should not show themselves off outside the home. Tahsin’s favorite heroine is Kajol because of her innocence (bholapan), he says. Unworldliness is what men like Tahsin want in their favorite heroines. A 25-year-old who likes STAR TV and American films like Titanic and Godzilla similarly told me that Aishwarya Rai was his favorite Hindi film heroine because of her generosity. He referred to her widely-reported willingness to donate her eyes to science after her death. This focus on the heroine’s “generosity” shows that he likes women who want to sacrifice for the broader society. My subsequent discussion of ordinary middle class men’s continued preference for heroines’ modesty provides further evidence of men’s attachment to gender arrangements that restrict women’s freedom in public spaces, while emphasizing women’s home-based responsibilities. Other local surveys show ordinary middle class men’s ongoing attachment to gender arrangements that make women primarily responsible for home duties. Abraham’s (2001: 142) interviews with English-speaking, low-income college-going men in Bombay reveal attitudes about women that are very similar to the attitudes of men whom I interviewed from the mid-1980s through the early 1990s. She quoted men as saying that a “girl should be simple”, “should be ghareloo [home loving]”,8 “should be of understanding and compromising nature” and “should respect elders” (Abraham 2001: 142) (emphasis mine). Men tend to see a compromising nature as essential for balancing the competing demands of joint-family

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living. Mankekar found that “aspirations to upward mobility” of the lower-middle class men and women she interviewed “were frequently expressed in terms of a greater preoccupation with female modesty and respectability and, in many cases, an increased surveillance of women’s sexuality” (Mankekar 2004: 411) (emphasis mine). The 15- to 20-yearolds whom Butcher interviewed in 1997–98 similarly reported that “Indian culture” means that Indian women are “better than others” because of their modest dress and the limitations on their freedom (Butcher 2003: 116–17, 128, 216). This attachment to women’s restriction to the home, of course, reflects the structural realities of ordinary middle class Indian families that I outlined Chapter 2. In the early years of married life, couples often live in joint households where respect for elders and compromising attitudes toward competing demands are required. Lacking élite connections and strong English-language skills, ordinary middle class women often could not provide income from paid work that would be sufficient to make up for the loss of their unpaid work within the home. In addition, of course, men’s interest in maintaining gender arrangements which provide their own comfort also press them to want to keep the existing arrangements despite the celebrations of women’s independence that they see in Hindi films, and especially in Hollywood films and the American television programming shown on cable television. Given that the audience for most Hindi films continues to consist of non-élite viewers who live in a world of joint families and arranged marriages, it is not surprising that films continue to help resolve persistent tensions ordinary Indians may feel about these institutions. Men have long wanted arranged marriages because they believe that parents have the experience to soberly look at a potential bride’s family background, and because they believe that those who marry against their parents’ wishes sacrifice essential parental and social support (Derné 1995: 45–57). But men have also long recognized dilemmas associated with arranged marriages. They see that husband and wife are not always well-matched and fear that fathers may be more concerned with getting a big dowry than ensuring their sons’ happiness (Derné 1994b: 87, 1995: 117–19). Women, of course, face similar anxieties about marrying someone whom they have never met (Parameswaran 1997)—anxieties that continue to be reflected in Hindi film fan magazine advice columns in 2001 just as they were in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 26).9

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As they did in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 168), films continue to both arouse and relieve tensions men may feel about arranged marriages. The 2001 hit film CCCC opens with a wedding at which both the hero and heroine are guests. Audience applause is raucous at the hero’s dancing, which soon attracts the notice of the heroine. The electricity between the hero and the heroine is palpable—as is apparent in the audience’s whistling and applause—but because of a misunderstanding, the hero assumes that the heroine is already married and does not pursue her. The hero’s grandfather badly wants a great grandson and pressures the hero to marry. In showing the hero’s reluctance, CCCC reminds viewers of the anxieties they may feel about the practice of arranged marriages. When the hero finally agrees to marry, he learns that his father was insightful enough to arrange that he marry the heroine whom he had met at the wedding party. When he appears at the engagement and sees the heroine, the hero assumes she is unavailable and wrongly believes that his father has arranged that he marry the unattractive woman who accompanies the heroine. His obvious (and humorous) discomfort arouses anxieties an audience might feel about an arranged marriage. When it dawns on the hero that it is the heroine whom he is to marry, he shares a knowing smile of relief with the heroine, as the audience screams its delight. The screams at this recognition have yet to die down before the subsequent wedding scene appears on the screen. While men may be concerned that an arranged marriage might not net an appropriate bride, films continue to show that parents really do know best. While many films celebrate love marriages, films never show an arranged marriage of a hero or heroine that fails. Of course, in presenting the hero (and the heroine) as having loving families that care about their welfare, CCCC (like other films)10 similarly alleviates concerns about joint-family living. Films like CCCC and many others depict happy joint-family life in which parents care about their sons. Women who often fear mistreatment in their husbands’ home are comforted by films like CCCC, which show the heroine happily living as a respected bahu (daughter-in-law) in her husband’s joint family. Throughout CCCC, her husband’s elders show love and respect for their bahu, suggesting that films comfort women about the lives they may face in a home headed by parents-in-law11—a theme that has long been common in Hindi films.

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Relieving Tensions Associated with Attraction to Cosmopolitan Lifestyles Vinod, the young laborer from Bihar who enjoys cable television but regards love marriages as impossible in real life, is quite attracted to the cosmopolitan lifestyles that he sees on television. Like some of the men whom I interviewed in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 117–18), Vinod sees Hindi films as offering valuable lessons about cosmopolitan lifestyles. “Having come from the village,” he says, “I am learning the ways of city life by watching films.” While two other men mentioned that they learned about how to live from films today, many more said that they liked the fashions that they saw on the screen. Many others praised their favorite heroes for their style. Indeed, through film-going and satellite television, many men have become attracted to styles that originate in Hollywood. Increasingly, filmmakers are using Hollywood fashions they see on The Bold and the Beautiful and Beverly Hills 90210 to give films a glamorous, hip, glossy feel (Chopra 1997). Throughout the 1990s, Hindi films exaggerated Western name-brand clothing (for example, Levi’s, DKNY) worn by heroes and heroines. Indian film fan magazines heighten Indian film fans’ awareness of, and fascination with, lifestyles associated with the West (Appadurai 1996: 102). Magazines with names like Stardust and Tinseltown include all sorts of non-Indian expressions such as “abracadabra,” “razzmatazz,” and “ooh la la”. Fan magazines include sections on American films and show Indian heroes and heroines in name-brand clothing like DKNY, Nike and Levi’s, while fan-magazine advertisements trumpet global brands-name and feature Indians in brand-name clothing. As was the case in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 118), the attraction to cosmopolitan lifestyles is especially apparent in male film-goers’ attraction to cosmopolitan fashion. Jeans and clothing with English messages were prominent in men’s apparel in 2001. Reflecting the opening of the economy, “Nike,” “McDonalds”, and “Reebok” were more commonly printed on clothes than the American flags or English slogans, which were most prominent in 1991. Most ordinary middle class men cannot afford to buy cosmopolitan name-brands, but instead wear jeans that local tailors design as copies of global fashions.12 As they did in earlier eras, film-goers continue to enjoy “promenading in public with no other

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purpose than to show off ” (Alter 1992: 242), and cinema halls continue to be surrounded by hairstyling salons for gentlemen. While films celebrate cosmopolitan lifestyles, they continue to help Indian men handle the ambivalence they may feel about their attachment to seemingly alien ways of living by celebrating family relations that are emphasized as distinctively Indian. Films continue to show heroes who are guided by emotion and family obligation, although they move about in cosmopolitan worlds oriented to money. They continue to show Indian heroines who are devoted to home-based duties despite their cosmopolitan fashion. Men continue to identify their Indianness with following family duties, allowing them to more comfortably embrace elements of the global world—such as cosmopolitan clothing styles and working in a bureaucratic economy—that would otherwise seem opposed to Indian traditions (see also Mankekar 2004: 418). My analysis of the most popular Indian films from the late 1970s to the early 1990s (Derné 2000a: Chapter 6) shows that heroes and heroines mediate between the dangers of excessive traditionalism and excessive cosmopolitanism. Films tended to contrast heroes’ cosmopolitan fashion and their successes in the economic realm with poor villagers whose traditionalism limited their economic opportunities and sense of style.13 In addition, heroes’ orientation to family was contrasted with the too-cosmopolitan villains’ greediness and orientation to selfish interest over family obligations. The emotion and restrained sexuality of the heroes contrasted with the out-of-control sexuality of the toocosmopolitan villains. In 2001, film-going men continued to identify with film heroes whose emotion and family obligation tempered the greediness and out-ofcontrol sexuality that so often are identified with the West. As in the earlier decades, films show the modernity of heroes as tempered with controlled sexuality and respect for family obligations. In CCCC, for instance, the young hero is a business executive, but he freely admits that he has difficulty concentrating on business when he is thinking about his wife’s problems: he willingly sacrifices a million-dollar deal in order to fend off a businessman who tries to rape the woman he hired as a surrogate mother. Unlike the businessman-rapist (who was an old childhood friend), the hero’s sexuality is so controlled that his love for his wife makes it difficult for him to impregnate the woman whom he hired as a surrogate mother. Although the hero is an ultramodern business executive,

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he is so committed to the Hindu rituals devoted to an unborn child that he and his wife go through many humorous machinations (often facilitated by a traditional use of the veil) to ensure that the rituals be directed at the surrogate mother—and not the heroine (who is feigning pregnancy). Men seem to continue to be attracted to the emotions and commitment to family obligations of the heroes. One unmarried 22-year-old postgraduate commerce student said that Shah Rukh Khan was his favorite hero because of the way he showed emotion in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai. In describing how the Shah Rukh character’s daughter Anjali read a letter from her deceased mother (the hero’s wife), this man showed genuine emotion in thinking of how much Shah Rukh cared for his wife and family. He especially liked Kuch Kuch Hota Hai because “it is a family film”. Umesh, a 26-year-old Punjabi Hindu who works as a civil draftsman and who has just had his marriage arranged, similarly shows an attraction to men’s emotion and family responsibilities in describing his favorite heroes. He likes Amitabh Bachchan and Dilip Kumar because they provided the message that “one should be trustworthy and selfless and accountable in relationships. These heroes,” he said, “acted with real emotion.” As I show below, recent films continue to emphasize the willingness of heroes to sacrifice their own desires for family duties. My earlier analysis of the most popular Indian films from the late 1970s to the early 1990s (Derné 2000a: 119–25)14 describes how heroines mediate between the excesses of traditional and of cosmopolitan lifestyles. Unlike too-traditional characters, heroines often have independence in employment or in pursuit of relationships with men. Unlike too-traditional characters, they are not subservient to their husbands; instead heroines end up close to the men they love. Unlike too-cosmopolitan antiheroines, heroines do not use sex for selfish motives. Unlike too-cosmopolitan women, their focus is not on money but family. In these films, the heroine’s modest clothing is a sign of her emphasis on family duties. In the course of the 1990s, the push of films toward cosmopolitanism and consumerism has been so strong that heroines now wear fashions that would have been unacceptably Westernized and revealing in previous decades. Film-world discourse often uses the term “millennium woman” to describe a woman with a cosmopolitan sense of style who rejects excessive constraints on her movement and freedom. Yet, despite

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this celebration of cosmopolitan fashion and rejection of limitations on women’s movement, the imperative that heroines be committed to family duty remains strong in Hindi films—probably because so many ordinary Indians find such a commitment fundamental to their idea of Indianness. In the 1997 superhit film Dil To Pagal Hai, consumerist cosmopolitanism reigns. The images are of Pepsi, Levis, and automobiles. Both Pooja (the heroine played by Madhuri Dixit) and Nisha (the hero’s friend and the heroine’s competitor, played by Karisma Kapoor) wear clothes that would have been excessively revealing according to earlier standards. Family resistance is not central in pushing the story forward. Dil To Pagal Hai presents a young people’s world largely unimpeded by elders: Nisha’s family is in Europe, Rahul (the hero, played by Shah Rukh Khan) lives an independent existence as a popular singer and dancer with his own flat, and Pooja lives with a family that does not interfere with her choices. Pooja’s respected dance teacher (who represents one of her elders) tells her that she should pursue her love (mohabbat) because it is something that only happens once. Unlike most love stories from previous decades, the story revolves around the couple’s discovery that they love each other, rather than centering on overcoming parental opposition. In Dil To Pagal Hai, the couple does not realize their love until the last third of the film, while in most 1970s and 1980s love stories the hero and heroine are well in love and facing parental opposition by the interval (for example, Maine Pyar Kiya, Ram Teri Ganga Maili and Dil). While celebrating cosmopolitan fashion and individual pursuit of love and normalizing family arrangements that do not restrict young people, Dil To Pagal Hai nonetheless celebrates the heroine’s commitment to family duties. Nisha, the Karisma Kapoor character, is neither an antiheroine nor a vamp, but she is still shown in ways that emphasize the Indianness and commitment to family duties of her competitor, Pooja, the Madhuri Dixit character who is the film’s heroine. Both are dancers, but Nisha dances as a professional to make money, while dancing was Pooja’s hobby. Nisha is separated from her family, who live in London, while Pooja lives with family members in India. Lacking traditional feminine skills, Nisha orders Chinese food, while Pooja cooks Indian food when visiting her dance instructor. Nisha openly pursues the hero, while the shy Pooja is pursued by him. Both Nisha and Pooja wear revealing clothes—Pooja sometimes dances in a leotard, while Nisha often dances in Western-style

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outfits—but Pooja is also comfortable dancing with ghungroos on her ankles in traditional Indian clothing when she visits her traditional dance instructor. Nisha, unlike Pooja, drinks tequila, which puts her in a compromising position with the hero. This focus on looseness and lack of modesty as a sign of a lack of commitment to family values reflects an earlier era. Yet it is especially important that the Karisma Kapoor character is neither denigrated nor criticized. Perhaps the Madhuri Dixit character is more right for the hero because she can more easily move in both the cosmopolitan and the Indian worlds. The fact that hit film after hit film continue to focus on the heroines’ commitment to family duties shows its importance to Hindi film audiences. In CCCC, for instance, it is the heroine’s concern with providing her grandfather-in-law with progeny that drives her desire to find a surrogate mother after she herself miscarries and is subsequently unable to have children. The hero suggests that the happy couple look into adoption, but she talks of how the hero’s grandfather envisions a greatgrandson that looks just like the hero. It is her commitment to the imperatives of her husband’s family that drives her desire to find a surrogate mother. While Madhu, the surrogate mother (played by Preity Zinta), is not an antiheroine, she continues to contrast in important ways with Priya (the heroine played by Rani Mukherjee). Madhu is presented as part of a “Western” world run by money—a world in which (as one Delhi columnist puts it) “people are known to rent a womb like they rent a car or a room in a motel” (Shamim 2001). While Priya wants a child for her husband’s family, Madhu becomes pregnant (renting her womb) for money.15 This theme was recognized in some Indian reviews of the film. One reviewer says that the Madhu character could never have known that “it would be not for money that she would fulfill her part of the bargain but for a more basic instinct called love” (Shamim 2001). While both Priya and Madhu are sexy dancers, Priya dances on appropriate occasions like weddings and honeymoons, while Madhu dances for pay in a nightclub. Priya is part of a large family (on both her parents and her husband’s side) while Madhu is presented as having no family at all. As I note in the last chapter, Priya is traditional but is nonetheless a good consumer who uses her wealth to buy the appropriate “millennium” fashions. In CCCC, an attraction to cosmopolitan lifestyles is not presented as opposed to a traditional family orientation. Priya is a millennium woman

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who also has her husband’s family at heart. It is worth noting as well that the fashion celebrated in CCCC is sometimes presented as modest. Madhu’s crass appearance initially prevented her from entering the utopia of consumption as élite boutique managers denied her entrance despite her money. But she was shopping for such clothing precisely because Raj told her that to have his child she must first find appropriate clothing to cover her body. Patricia Uberoi’s (1998) and Purnima Mankekar’s (1999b) independent analyses of the 1995 hit film Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge (DDLJ ) highlight this new emphasis on combining (rather than contrasting) cosmopolitan consumerism and commitment to family (see also Mankekar 2004: 423). Uberoi (1998: 308) notices that recent films focusing on NRIs (non-resident Indians) challenge the typical filmic polarization between “the émigré or foreign returned Indian” who has lost Indian values and the steadfast Indianness of the ones who remain behind. Uberoi suggests that like earlier films, DDLJ shows Indian family values to be the “crucial markers of Indianness,” but indicates that now the Indian family system is “portable” (Uberoi 1998: 308–09). “It can remain firm . . . even when all else changes” (ibid.: 308–09). Despite the cosmopolitanism that even involves residing abroad, commitment to Indian values can be maintained. Mankekar sees DDLJ as presenting the West as a “site of rampant sexuality and promiscuity” (Mankekar 1999b: 737) but nonetheless emphasizing that Indians can maintain the usual family values that distinguish them as Indian. Mankekar points out that the heroine “neither drinks nor smokes” and “respects and obeys her father” so much that “she submits to him at every step” (ibid.: 737). Mankekar (1999b: 739) emphasizes that although the hero lives in London, he shows himself to be a true Indian by respecting the heroine’s honor when drunkenness would have allowed him to take advantage of her. Even though the hero is an NRI who bucks the system of arranged marriages by pursuing the heroine to India, he would not consider eloping without the heroine’s parents’ consent—even in the face of strong parental opposition (Uberoi 1998: 313). Enraged at the hero’s pursuit of the heroine, her father refuses consent, but the hero insists that he will marry the heroine only in the “right” way, that is, with her father’s approval (ibid.: 313). Thus, for both hero and heroine, commitment to following family hierarchies remains important.

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The director of DDLJ says that he was guided by the idea that no matter how much in love they may be, a young Indian man and woman would also be guided by their love for their parents: I’d be quite troubled by watching those love stories in which the boy and girl elope. I’d wonder how can they just cut themselves off from their parents who’ve done so much for them? . . . I wanted to say that if your love is strong enough, your parents will be convinced about your love ultimately (cited by Uberoi 1998: 312).

The director believes that audiences react to the fact that lovers are “willing to sacrifice their own feelings for their families” (cited by Uberoi 1998: 309). In Indian fan magazines, Shah Rukh Khan, DDLJ’s hero, endorses the importance of this theme by noting that he, too, did not consider eloping with his off-screen wife: The thought of running away from home never crossed our minds. . . . I just couldn’t get myself to say that I loved their daughter. That, I thought, was a stupid thing to say. . . because I could never love their daughter as much as they loved her. They had given birth to and brought up Gauri. . . . My love would never be a substitute for their love (cited by Uberoi 1998: 321).

Audiences’ longstanding attraction to heroes and heroines who balance a love for each other with their other responsibilities is apparent in the statement of a 28-year-old whom I interviewed in 1987: The hero and heroine love each other, but they also love the whole society. The hero and heroine don’t forget their obligations to others. Their love for each other does not minimize their love for the whole society. Their feelings are not limited to each other. The hero likes the society as much as he likes the heroine. By contrast, the villain is evil because he likes the heroine’s fleshy beauty alone. He has no concern for the beauty of society.

So, while heroes and heroines embrace cosmopolitan fashion, Indian family values remain a star of even recent films. As Shoma Munshi puts it, film stars: are practiced in the ways of the west, and at the same time retain their Indian values. . . . Karisma Kapoor has a perfectly sculpted body and wears designer tops, but tears up divorce papers in Raja Hindustani. . . . Mahima Chaudhury may have reached Las Vegas but refuses to sleep with her fiancé . . . till they are married in Pardes. . . . The Oxford educated Rani Mukherjee returns in mini skirts and can pluck the strings of guitar, but can equally well sing . . . a devotional hymn in Kuch Kuch Hota Hai (Munshi 2001c: 90).

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The notion that cosmopolitanism can be combined with attachment to Indian family traditions is confirmed by fan magazine discussions of heroines’ adherence to traditional family arrangements. As in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 140–41), fan magazines present heroines as usually marrying according to their parents’ wishes. Hindi film heroines represent cosmopolitan lifestyles: their high-paid, high-flying jobs allow them great independence and they are shown in cosmopolitan fashion. Yet, the imperative that an Indian woman follows the usual gender arrangements is so strong that heroines continue to trumpet their commitment to these arrangements as guiding their off-screen lives. When one gossip columnist suggested that as a “millennium woman” the heroine Shilpa Shetty would probably “never let her father” make such a life-making decision as whom she should marry, the heroine “frowned” and voiced her disagreement: I’m a millennium woman and I’d like to believe that if I felt as strongly as [my on-screen character] felt for [her love], I’d never marry someone else. But if my parents really insisted on an arranged match . . . I would give in. I know my parents are the only people in the world who would never hurt or harm me intentionally. Whatever they chose for me would be right and in that respect I’m a lot like [a character I play] (Bhattacharya 2001: 2).

Renowned for her thin figure and exposing in films, Shilpa Shetty says that, for her, “marriage is for keeps” and that she would “never walk out of a marriage.” If her husband tried to divorce her, she might let him go, she says, but “not easily.” She even implies—as heroines have throughout the two decades I have followed the Hindi film world—that after her marriage, she would give up her career. When asked whether she would want a husband who would “let” her “continue working after marriage,” she refers to the “limited” “life span of a glamorous heroine,” and says that she would not want to put chalk in her hair—implying that at the time of marriage, her career would recede to the background. Another gossip columnist praises the glamorous heroine Manisha Koirala for marrying a boy chosen by her family (apne parivaarwallon ki pasand ka ladka). The gossip columnist highlights the wisdom of the strategy, noting that Koirala had had a number of affairs, not one of which had been successful. The columnist suggests that Koirala’s success in films may have prevented her from a happy marriage. “Perhaps now that her films aren’t successful,” the columnist muses, “her marriage will be”

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(Filmi Kaliyan 2001b: 19). Thus, even work outside the home is presented as something heroines abandon to ultimately be successful in marriage. In fan magazines, heroines also describe themselves as liking the usual gender arrangements in which men protect women. In Stardust (March 2001), perhaps the most cosmopolitan film fan magazine, Sushmita Sen praises the hero Sanjay Dutt’s violent assault on a media person who had approached her. Although the incident had been criticized in the press, the heroine says that “Sunjay Dutt would not be a gentleman, trust me, if he waited for the security guys to do something when somebody grabbed my arm” (Samant 2001). So, even Hindi film heroines who seem very involved in cosmopolitan worlds choose to present themselves to the public as devoted to the existing gender arrangements.16 Hindi films and Hindi film-world discourses suggest, then, that a strong attraction to cosmopolitanism—even on the part of women— need not threaten Indianness. Films encourage men and women to be cosmopolitan, but highlight that there is a distinctively Indian kind of cosmopolitanism which appropriately focuses on family duties, female modesty, and sexual control. Films ease men’s anxieties about cosmopolitanism by suggesting that even cosmopolitan Indian women are committed to the family arrangements toward which male viewers are especially attracted.

Indian Family Arrangements, Women’s Modesty, and Indian Identity My discussion suggests that both film heroes and film heroines tend to demonstrate their fundamental Indianness by commitment to family duties. Filmgoers like these portrayals because it helps them handle ambivalence about cosmopolitan ways by seeing that they need not threaten Indianness, which is fundamentally rooted in family arrangements. But it also appears that women’s commitment to family duties is more important in films than men’s is.17 The decline of the vamp and the declining cinematic association of immodest fashion with women’s rejection of family duties has not ended ordinary middle class men’s attachment to women’s modesty. The association of immodesty with the rejection of family duties is too strong in many men’s minds, and the unease about how globalization might threaten

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existing gender arrangements is too pressing—especially given men’s attachment to gender arrangements that provide them comfort and power. Even as films increasingly present heroines in revealing clothing, Hindi film fan magazines continually quote heroines as opposing “exposure”, much as they did in previous decades (Derné 2000a: 125–27). In response to a question about her “views on exposing”, one heroine replied that she did “not wish to achieve fame via this route” and would, thus, “only accept clean films”. Following the established mantra (Vijayakar 2001a: C27) she emphasized that she remained “against vulgarity of any sort” (Vedpathak 2001: 73). After top heroine Aishwarya Rai reportedly walked out of a film because her then boyfriend, the hero Salman Khan, was “dead against” “a red-hot kissing scene,” the cosmopolitan Hindi film magazine Stardust queried her replacement about why she had “changed her policy” against exposure. “As far as I know, there is no kissing scene in the film,” the heroine replied, maintaining her commitment to modesty (Jaffer 2001: 77). “I was told,” the actress said, that Aishwarya Rai had “opted out of the film on account of date problems”(ibid: 77). Even Shamita Shetty, a heroine famous for her exposure in the 2000 hit film Mohabbatein, presents herself as appropriately modest. She recognizes that a “big deal” was made about how “all of us girls showed a lot in Mohabbatein.” Even as she justifies this by saying that “everyone’s wearing those kind of clothes out there” and that “most roles are written with exposure in mind,” she still says that she is not a “bare and dare all” heroine. Having been “labelled ‘kiss girl’ thanks to the passionate screen smooch she indulged in in Mohabbatein” she now insists she will not do it again. “I’m not comfortable with the idea of kissing,” she says, and “wouldn’t like to be viewed as the girl who kisses in her films” (Sai 2001a). The association between cosmopolitan clothing and rejection of Indianness and family responsibilities is so strong that heroines who want to move up the ladder of success continue to find it necessary to present themselves as appropriately modest (and Indian). The failure of the heroines of Mohabbatein to become big stars illustrates the ongoing importance of heroines’ modesty. One of the two biggest hits of 2000, Mohabbatein focuses on three young couples falling in love against the backdrop of the conflict between a patriarchal school principal (played by Amitabh Bachchan), who opposed youthful love, and a schoolteacher (played by Shah Rukh Khan) who encouraged his young charges to pursue love. Unlike the heroines of the 1980s and the

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1990s, the young heroines in the hit film appear ultramodern, wearing jeans, Christian crosses, and tank tops. They dance and pursue their lovers with abandon. While the heroines were not denigrated in the film, the imperative of modesty may have hindered their subsequent careers. “We were all under this impression,” Shamita Shetty recounted, that because of the film’s success “we’d be flooded with offers, but that didn’t happen. The film did well, we were liked, but that’s it” (Sai 2001a: 54). It appears that a film can be a hit with heroines who dress in ultracosmopolitan clothes and pursue love with abandon, but the focus on women’s modesty remains so strong that exposing too much still limits the ability of heroines to succeed in the Hindi film world.18 It is notable as well that the Shah Rukh Khan character’s love is shown in Indian-style clothing. The Shah Rukh character had truly loved the Bachchan character’s daughter, but was unable to fulfill that love because of the Bachchan character’s opposition. She appears (in flashbacks and as a spirit) in Indian clothing like salwar-kameez. The men whom I interviewed, moreover, seem committed to heroines’ modesty. While the media often tagged Karisma Kapoor (Gupta 2001) as the number one heroine of the day, none of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 named her as their favorite. From the outset of her career, Karisma has taken roles in which she wears revealing outfits. One man whom I interviewed in 1991 said that he liked her 1991 debut film, Prem Qaidi, because Karisma was “not at all modest (sharmili)”—even dancing in a swimsuit (Derné 2000a: 148). In 1997’s Dil To Pagal Hai, as I note above, she plays the heroine’s foil who might have been considered a vamp in earlier eras. Yet, given Karisma Kapoor’s important roles and the discussion of her in the film press, I thought that she would probably be recognized as the top heroine of Hindi cinema when the top spot opened with Madhuri Dixit’s marriage.19 But I should have listened to my Indian-American students who denigrated Karisma for exposing too much. The fact that not one of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 mentioned Karisma as their favorite is one indication of the importance men continue to place on modesty as a sign of the commitment to family duties that men want and expect in Indian women. As in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 127–29), the men whom I interviewed in 2001 continued to say that they like heroines whose modesty signals their commitment to family duty. Thus, the married 25-year-old Tahsin, who does not like heroines who expose too much, likes Kajol because of her

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innocence, which for Tahsin suggests a protected lack of knowledge that comes from remaining at home. What men seem to like in heroines is a concern for others. It appears, then, that ordinary middle class Indian men may handle their ambivalences about attraction to cosmopolitan lifestyles by heartily embracing existing gender arrangements that they see as distinctively Indian. While men are attracted to cosmopolitan media and fashion, these media nonetheless appear to challenge men’s notions of Indianness and the appropriate gender arrangements. Men handle this attraction to cosmopolitan lifestyles by emphasizing oppressive gender roles as fundamental aspects of their Indianness. In particular, men tend to identify public cosmopolitan spaces as masculine preserves, while focusing on women’s domestic responsibilities as essential to Indian identity. Anxieties about cosmopolitanism introduced by globalization lead many men to reassert local gender arrangements. Given this ongoing attachment to women’s modesty and Indian attire as a sign of their commitment to family duties, it should come as no surprise that ordinary middle class women have not embraced cosmopolitan fashion to the same extent that men have. When they go to the cinema hall, men wear jeans and t-shirts and caps with Western namebrands, but non élite women in Dehra Dun almost all wear saris and salwar-kameezes. At all of the films that I saw in Dehra Dun in 2001, it was rare for there to be even a few women (excepting Tibetans)20 in jeans. Instead, the great majority of non-élite women still wear Indian-style clothing.21 While affluent men and women may embrace cosmopolitan fashion, it appears that the attachment to Indian modesty as a sign of women’s attachment to gender arrangements is so strong that most ordinary middle class women remain attracted to Indian fashions.

Resistance Virendra, the prosperous 22-year-old postgraduate engineering student with cable television, is committed to Indian gender arrangements. He wants an arranged marriage and enjoys living in a joint-family headed by his father who works as a police-officer and mother, who works at home. He likes cosmopolitan styles, naming Salman Khan his favorite hero because of his “smart dressing”. But he is uneasy about the influence of

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cosmopolitan media. He avoids American films, having seen only one, and he also claims to avoid the cable television his family has at home. He says that he sees few Hindi films now because he does not like the sexy look that so many heroines give their characters. He complains that Dehra Dun has changed because of satellite television. “Satellite TV,” he says “is making the younger people too mature. During my earlier years, I didn’t know what kids know today.” Umesh, the Hindu civil draftsman whose marriage has just been arranged, believes that Hindi films should teach “how a sister and brother should relate or how an ideal son should relate to his parents.” Yet, he likes Hollywood movies like Mission Impossible 2 and enjoys watching STAR TV and Channel V in the joint household in which he lives. While Umesh is attracted to the new global media, he also claims to be disturbed by programs that “give the message that fathers should booze with their sons and a brother should allow his sister to go with her boyfriend to watch a movie. These are not good things,” he says. “They’re not possible in real life, so they shouldn’t be shown on television.” Sanjay, a prosperous unmarried 30-year-old who lives in a joint family that includes his parents, brothers, and bhabhis, enjoys the suspense serials he sees on late-night Zee TV and especially likes American movies for showing things “as they actually are.” Well dressed, he says that he sees Hindi films “for a bit of fashion.” Yet, even Sanjay finds it pathetic that “young people” only care about how the hero and heroine look, rather than the “message” that they should learn from the role the hero and heroine play. Butcher reports that the young students she interviewed similarly complained that too many youth “change their appearance” due to “models in [television] ads,” bringing “a lot of problems on themselves” (Butcher 2003: 165). One high school student complained that rapes occurred which copied a movie shown on STAR TV. Mankekar (2004: 417) similarly reports that the lower middle class men and women she interviewed were excited by satellite television, but also felt “anxiety” about the perceived “threat” that television programs like The Bold and the Beautiful would “erode” or “contaminate” the “purity” of “Indian culture”. Such concerns about how global media images might disrupt local gender arrangements that are often seen as the basis of Indian national or religious traditions have been the source of protests against globalization. Resistance to cultural change often focuses on threats to existing

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family arrangements. For many years now, regular protests have greeted Valentine’s Day celebrations (India Abroad 2000a; Sengupta 2001b). Observers believe that Valentine’s Day has grown in popularity because of Hindi film love stories of the early 1990s, but especially because of cable channels like MTV and Channel V and economic liberalization that spurred the Valentine’s Day Card industry (India Abroad 2000a; Sengupta 2001a). In protesting Valentine’s Day, activists in Delhi attacked couples in restaurants and forced them to flee. Activists in Kanpur blackened the faces of hundreds of couples celebrating Valentine’s Day. Elsewhere activists have burned Valentine’s Day cards (India Abroad 2000a) or thrown stones at shops selling such cards (Sengupta 2001b). Protestors are uneasy with Valentine’s Day’s celebration of love that would threaten the institution of arranged marriages and the basis of jointfamily living. Discotheques, another institution that seems to push young people toward love, have been similarly protested for “spoiling the minds of youth” (India Abroad 1999). Protests have also targeted women’s embrace of cosmopolitan fashion. Kanpur youth associated with the Hindu fundamentalist BJP persuaded the principal of a local college to bar college women from wearing jeans and skirts, an action which was protested so violently by other women that the college was forced to close for two days (India Abroad 2000b). More recently, a Pune college responded to a rape on campus by barring women from wearing revealing clothes (India-West 2002a). Perhaps most notably, a range of groups that included farmers, students, and trade unionists from around the country protested the 1996 staging of the Miss World pageant in the Indian city of Bangalore as a threat to Indian womanhood (Fernandes 2000: 625; Oza 2001: 1067) . Many élite women participate in beauty contests to claim cosmopolitan identity, and others take a cosmopolitan pride in India’s victories. But many non-élites are threatened by Indian women’s apparent embrace of cosmopolitan fashion and standards of beauty. The reason why immodest clothing and immodest exposure in these competitions threatens so many non-élites is that women’s modesty is a sign of women’s commitment to family duties that so many men value. The concern that it is the transnational media that are the source of trouble is apparent in the fact that so many protests target this aspect of globalization. While protestors have targeted transnational media that supposedly defame Hinduism (India Abroad 1998, 2000b; Tsering 1999),

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more often protestors are concerned with those transnational media that threaten Indian family traditions.22 Protesters have been upset by film awards given to heroines who display their “semi-nude bodies” (Vijayakar 2002b). Groups affiliated with the Hindu fundamentalist BJP protest sexual media representations, including contraception advertisements, revealing clothing of female newscasters, and advertisements that depict a woman in a billowing skirt (Brosius and Butcher 1999a: 14; Fernandes 2001: 158, 2000: 624; Ghosh 1999a: 234; India-West 2002b). Protesters have sometimes succeeded in stopping cable serials that they find offensive (John 1998: 368). The focus has been especially on the “obscenity associated with satellite and cable television” (Oza 2001: 1072). Rupal Oza notes that protest rhetoric prominently features “women and children” as “most in need of protection against the corrupting influences of new media” (ibid.: 1072). It is worth noting, as well, that private protests may parallel the public ones. Mankekar (2004: 412, 413) reports that husbands complain about how television is encouraging “extravagant habits” in wives and daughters. At least some husbands who worry that cable television would encourage their wives to become independent have tried to keep their wives from watching particular serials (Page and Crawley 2001: 167). In focusing on resistance against globalization’s disruption of gender arrangements, I do not mean to imply the absence of other protests. Facing free markets and global competition, farmers have protested India’s negotiations with the World Trade Organization (India-West 2001). Nonélites have protested the price rises that they associate with globalization (Dalrymple 1998: 179). Ongoing (if sporadic) protests against multinational fast food giants like Kentucky Fried Chicken (KFC), McDonald’s, and Pizza Hut (ibid.: 169–72) reflect unease with consumerism, the loss of India’s self-sufficiency, and the disruption of India’s traditions. Slogans have denounced KFC’s “non-veg23 poison”, while praising good old masala dosas (Dalrymple 1998: 169). Attacks on Pizza Hut denounce the restaurant chain’s refusal to translate menus into local script (ibid.: 170). Some political leaders describe these protests as targeting “foreign restaurants” as “symbols of disparity between rich and poor” which they believe have been brought in by “the entry of multinationals into India” (ibid.: 179). Despite the significance of these protests against globalization, it is also appears that diverse anxieties generated by globalization get focused on concern about changes in gender and family. One Indian who

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communicated to a mainstream English-language newspaper (via email) recognized “positive influences of Western culture” like “patriotism, hard work, and fearlessness,” but noted that much that is bad about the West can be found in Valentine’s Day celebrations: “The way that Valentine’s Day is celebrated makes it a celebration of materialism,” he wrote (Acharya 2001). Believing that Valentine’s Day symbolizes the fact that “in the West, unlike in India, love and sex have become synonyms,” he criticizes the celebration as contributing to “the ugly practice of dating” (ibid.). This writer is certainly concerned about changes in Indian families, but he sees Valentine’s Day as demonstrating an alien materialism as well. Oza argues that the protests against the Miss World pageant similarly crystallize a range of concerns—“opposition to imperialism, resentment against the retreating role of the state, high inflation, threatened Indian culture, and an anxiety with the ‘foreign’” (Oza 2001: 1067). While other protests are also important, it remains significant that so much protest against globalization is concerned with the alleged effect on marriage and family.24

Making a Locally-oriented Indian Middle Class Limited to local production and consumption, the ordinary middle class I describe in this chapter is located on a local field between poor Indians who struggle to survive each day and the affluent Indians who aspire to a utopia of cosmopolitan consumption. By wearing fashionable clothing, members of this class distance themselves from the poor by showing that they have cosmopolitan discernment and income for discretionary purchases. But by showing their attachment to traditional gender arrangements and protesting Valentine’s Day celebrations and other practices of affluent Indians, they advertise their sober work ethic and their Indianness. The class analysis I used in the previous chapter to describe the transnational middle class can also be usefully applied to the Indian middle class I describe in this chapter. First, class now operates on a global scale. The class described in this chapter is a distinctively Indian middle class precisely because the opportunities for employment and consumption are oriented toward the Indian market. The horizons of the class are local, and so this class focuses on its position between the Indian poor and the affluent Indians I described in the previous chapter. Because of

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this local horizon, identity remains rooted in Indianness rather than in cosmopolitanism. Second, the Indian middle class identity described in this chapter is displayed in consumption. Buying televisions and other non-essentials separates the Indian middle class from the Indian poor. Distinguishing itself from affluent Indians, the Indian middle class shows women’s modesty in rejecting revealing fashion, and shows sobriety in its limited cosmopolitan consumption. Third, the Indian middle class roots its identity in gender arrangements—and, again, the focus is on local, Indian gender arrangements. The Indian middle class’s local orientation focuses especially on distinctive gender arrangements, especially attachment to arranged marriages and restrictions on women’s movements outside the home. Poor Indian women often must work outside the home, so restricting women’s movements distinguishes the Indian middle class from the Indian poor. Since affluent women are often seen as moving freely in offices or élite shopping malls, restrictions on women also distinguish the locally-oriented middle class from the affluent. Urban legends of élite Bombay women using chauffeured cars to look for sex in nefarious neighborhoods and élite women running naked through their own neighborhoods (reported by Parulekar [n.d.] in 1998 and 2000) reflect the locally-oriented Indian middle class’ efforts to distance themselves from affluent Indians who they indict for supposedly rejecting Indian sexual sobriety under excessive foreign influence. The locally-oriented Indian middle class I describe in this chapter has concerns that parallel those of the Kathmandu middle class Liechty (2003) describes. Like the Indian middle class, the Kathmandu middle class’s Liechty describes “adopts modernity as a means of distinguishing itself from those below and morally critiques modernity as a means of separating itself from the national élite” (Liechty 2001: 67). Like the Kathmandu middle class described by Liechty (2003: 70–73), the locally-oriented Indian middle class Indians I describe here define themselves in opposition to the national élite by focusing on that élite’s excessive consumerism and sexual excess which push away from indigenous values. Like the Kathmandu middle class Liechty (2003: 74–81) describes, the locallyoriented Indian middle class I describe here is attracted to cosmopolitan fashion, but criticizes excessive focus on fashion which they associate with women’s promiscuity. By consuming fashion, locally-oriented middle

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classes in both Nepal and India distinguish themselves from “the vulgarity of those ‘below’ them,” but by upholding “the moral canons of sexual” practice, they also distinguish themselves from those “‘above who have sold out to the morally bankrupt lifestyles of affluence, pleasure and foreignness” (Liechty 2003: 84).

Conclusion Non-élite middle class people continue to face limited opportunities in the global economy. Since their economic opportunities have not greatly expanded, their ability to succeed in a consumerist world is limited. Their ability to act independent of family support remains circumscribed, and the benefits of women’s paid labor often do not provide entrance to the utopia of consumption. The family arrangements ordinary middle class men are faced with continue to limit interactions between unmarried men and women. Yet, ordinary Indians live in a world in which transnational cultural flows celebrate a consumer paradise and greater independence for women and for young couples. Certainly, ordinary middle class male viewers are sometimes attracted to this vision. But their inability to act according to it leads to anxieties. Unable to participate fully in the utopia of cosmopolitan consumption, ordinary Indian men tend to emphasize Indian identity. But because ordinary Indian men are attracted to aspects of cosmopolitan identity that they can pursue—from fashion to drinking Pepsi—ordinary men tend to find their Indianness in women’s attachment to gender roles that men see as distinctively Indian. Indian women’s commitment to family duties emerges as an important basis of ordinary Indian men’s own Indianness. Indeed, partly because ordinary Indian men cannot successfully achieve the affluent lifestyles that loom large today, they find compensation in existing gender arrangements that work as a source of status, comfort, and power in their lives. Unable to pursue new possibilities brought about by globalization, ordinary middle class men focus even more on reserving public pleasures and privileges for themselves. Men, then, become especially uneasy with globalization when they feel that it threatens the gender arrangements that are a source of their status and comfort. This is why resistance to globalization so often targets cable television and Hollywood films for allegedly threatening Indian family arrangements.

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The structural realities they face have not changed greatly, and ordinary middle class Indian men tend to reject the new possibilities celebrated by transnational media flows. They especially reject new gender arrangements presented in the global media. Despite the new possibilities presented in the cosmopolitan media, most men remain attached to arranged marriages and continue to want women to be restricted to the home. This suggests that the effects of purely cultural globalization are limited as long as economic and family possibilities are not simultaneously transformed. Affluent Indians embrace cosmopolitan celebrations of consumerism because economic liberalization has expanded their opportunities for employment and consumption. For the affluent, challenges to arranged marriages and joint-family living introduced by the transnational media make sense because new institutional possibilities allow more young couples to support themselves. The affluent embrace work by women when women have the skills to earn good incomes. But because their institutional possibilities have not greatly changed, ordinary men’s ideas about family have been unaffected by newly available cable television and Hollywood movies.

Notes 01. FTV is a newly introduced (and actively protested) cable channel that features scantily clad women modeling cosmopolitan fashions. 02. I discuss some of this literature in Chapter 1. See especially Massey 1994; Morley 2000: 13; Tomlinson 1999, cited by Morley 2000. 03. This conceptualization draws on Massey 1994. 04. See, for example Abraham (2001); Derné (1994b); Parameswaran (1997). Abraham’s (2001: 151) 1996–98 study of English-speaking, low-income college students in the metropole of Bombay revealed, for instance, that college men still regard “good character” and virginity as essential in any women whom they might marry. The college women whom she interviewed doubted that anyone would marry a woman who had kissed or held hands with another man (Abraham 2001: 154). College women described how their parents warn them to avoid even talking with boys and many expressed fear of the social consequences of being seen talking with boys (ibid.: 140). 05. The ordinary middle class men whom I interviewed in 1987 reported that interactions between unmarried men and women were closely watched. Parents warned daughters about any interactions with men outside of the household (Derné 1994b). While interactions are now freer in the élite world, non-élites still find the pos-sibilities

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06.

07.

08. 09.

10.

11.

12.

13. 14. 15.

for interaction limited. Abraham’s (2001: 137) 1996–98 study of English-speaking, low-income college students in the metropole of Bombay revealed “considerable segregation of boys and girls in [non-élite] colleges as compared to the élite colleges” (Abraham 2001: 137). The girls whom she interviewed reported being carefully watched by “family elders, teachers, relatives, neighbors and family friends” (ibid.: 141). They reported that parents told them to stay away from boys, avoid talking with boys, and avoid laughing with boys (ibid.: 140). Dictionary definitions for mauz list whim, caprice, luxury, and delight, while the definitions for masti list intoxication, joi de vivre, passionateness, sexual excitement, carelessness, wantonness, joyous radiance or frolicsomeness. Fighting-and-killing films are rarely hits, usually playing for just one to three weeks. But at Dehra Dun cinema halls, they continue to attract big audiences for these short runs. Abraham translates ghareloo as “homely”. As in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 82–83), advice columns in Hindi film fan magazines continued to respond to questions from those who had fallen in love by reminding readers of the problems associated with love marriages. They continued to respond to questions about difficulties associated with arranged marriages by urging readers to work to make the marriage work. One advice columnist told a reader whose husband’s behavior toward her was not right (theek) that she should be “patient” and “not take a decision to divorce quickly”. “With a little patience, it will work and your husband will be OK (theek). A divorce should only be considered if it is the last way” (upadhyay) (Filmi Kaliyan 2001a: 83). In another case, the advice columnist suggested that if a husband pursues other women after marriage it is the “fault” of the wife because of her own inability to tie her husband to herself. Rather than thinking of divorce, the advice columnist urges the reader to examine her own behavior, and then work harder to satisfy her husband (Filmi Kaliyan 2001a: 83). (The magazine seems [from its advertisements] to aim at female film fans.) HAHK and DDLJ are examples of superhit films that recreate “an idealized world of the happy joint family” without the usual “strife and tension” associated with jointfamily living (Varma 1998: 167). When Priya (the heroine) tells Madhu (the surrogate mother) about her happy jointfamily life, Madhu (who herself is unmarried and living alone) voices the common view that mothers-in-law are monsters. Priya assures her that she is treated with love. Three tailors described this to me in 2001. See also Shurmer-Smith 2000. In Kathmandu, Nepal, too, cosmopolitan readymade name-brand clothing is bought by the affluent, while ordinary middle class Nepalis arrange to have tailors copy such clothing (Liechty 2003: 131). They were also sometimes contrasted with bumbling priests who were presented as out-of-touch with the times. Other scholars have made similar claims. See Mies 1988: 139; Roland 1988: 153; Thomas 1985, 1995; Uberoi 1998: 308. Indeed, as part of Madhu’s redemption, she rejects her earlier focus on money. Having fallen in love with her newborn (and with the hero), she heads to the railway station leaving the money behind. When the heroine arrives and asks for her baby, Madhu in turn asks the heroine to give up her husband. After the heroine slaps her,

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16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21.

22.

Madhu realizes what she has to do. She heads to the hospital and hands the baby to the heroine telling her, “You’re a mother, now” and the two hug. Shoma Munshi (2001c: 89) shows how similar discourses about the Indian winners of international beauty contests root the victors’ Indianness in distinctive gender arrangements. The Indian press, she relates, repeatedly emphasizes “how ‘modern’ the girls have become” and how they can “hold their own against the best from the rest of the world” (Munshi 2001c: 89). But the focus of indigenous discourse is on how “our girls” have not forgotten the importance of “traditional Indian values.” Although workouts, training, and beauty makeovers are presented as part of their success, the winners focus on how their parents have been “responsible for their mindset” (ibid.: 89). Mankekar (1999b) reads Hindi films similarly. She rightly sees both heroes and heroines as showing their Indianness in their dutifulness to family obligations. But she is also right to recognize that the “locus of anxieties” is “emblematized in the figure of the westernized NRI woman.” “The sexual purity of Indian women,” she argues, is “iconic of the purity of national culture” (Mankekar 1999b: 739). Even Mohabbatein, a film with ultramodern heroes and heroines, nevertheless makes reference to the importance of modesty. When one of the heroines is thrown into a pool by a boyfriend, the hero who is courting her wades into the pool and covers her with his coat. After carrying her out of the pool, he takes the coat off and says, looking at her short dress, “You’re not the Sanjana I knew from childhood.” He takes down her hair, wraps his coat around her waist, covering her short skirt, and says, “This is the Sanju I knew.” Another young hero who dances with an even more ultramodern heroine covers her head at the end of one of their sexy dances. While the big hit Mohabbatein showed heroines in more revealing clothing than ever before, even this film gave some voice to the imperative that Indian women should be modest. Throughout most of the 1990s, Madhuri Dixit was indisputably the top heroine in Hindi films. With her marriage, however, she quickly fell from the top spot. I was surprised that none of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 mentioned her as their favorite heroine, but this only demonstrates the strength of the imperative that heroines (unlike heroes) remain single in their private lives. Hindus and Muslims nearly always wore saris, salwar-kameezes or burkas. There is a substantial Tibetan population in Dehra Dun. Tibetan women more often wore jeans to theatres. Wherever I was seated in theatres, I noticed that almost all ethnic Indian women were wearing saris, salwar-kameezes, burkas, or school uniforms. A few systematic counts reflected this prevalence. Thus, 15 of 16 women leaving a showing of Officer were wearing saris, salwar-kameezes, burkas, or school uniforms, while 44 of 48 women departing from a showing of CCCC were similarly dressed in Indian attire. These systematic counts of whole audiences leaving theatres were confirmed by impressions from the areas in which I was seated, demonstrating that only very few ethnic Indians wear jeans or pants to films. My observations in Delhi, Dehra Dun, and Banaras in 2001 similarly show that most women continue to choose Indian attire for their day-to-day public actions. There has been of course a long history of protesting Hindi films that seem to threaten either Indian religions or Indian family traditions (see Derné 2000a: 44–45).

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23. “Non-veg” is a common Indian term for non-vegetarian food. 24. In focusing on reasons for non-élite resistance to cultural globalization, I do not mean to imply that such resistance takes place without influence and orchestration by some élites. Political parties, notably the Hindu fundamentalist BJP, but also the Congress party, have been involved in orchestrating protests against Valentine’s Day (India Abroad 2000a; Sengupta 2001a). Local BJP organs have been involved in organizing struggles to bar women from wearing jeans in local colleges (India Abroad 2000b). The BJP also spearheaded protests against the staging of the 1996 Miss World pageant in India, charging that it was a “show of obscenity” “against Indian culture” (Oza 2001: 1079). Politicians, themselves part of the English-speaking élite, play a role in voicing frustrations with global intrusions in ways that the non-élites recognize. Bal Thackeray, head of the Shiv Sena, a group affiliated with the BJP, has perhaps been most influential in pushing non-élites to see their ills through a lens that highlights cultural intrusion. In urging India to burn Valentine’s Day cards, Thackeray critiques the influence of an “exhibitionist American culture” in India (India Abroad 2000a). Despite this élite influence, it is nonetheless also the case that concerns about the effects of global media on Indian family arrangements resonates with ordinary middle class Indians because cosmopolitan messages are at odds with the world in which non-élites live and often want to live. In focusing on the protests of non-élite men, I do not mean to neglect women’s resistance to globalization. As I discuss in Chapter 6, women have been especially involved in resistance that reflects unease with new portrayals of gender and beauty in transnational media. Women have been at the forefront of protests against India’s embrace of beauty pageants and against global media’s portrayals of women. While men are uneasy about these global media because they threaten existing gender arrangements, women are often uneasy about them because they introduce new layers of meaning that contribute to women’s subordination in India.

5

Changing Cultural Orientations

Non-élite men resist meanings that appear to threaten gender and family arrangements that they have an interest in maintaining. They are not guided by apparently alien messages that are inconsistent with the structural realities in which they live. Global media show women working in the paid labor force, but because of their interests in existing gender arrangements, ordinary middle class men resist transnational messages. Global media increasingly celebrate love marriages and independence from family authorities, but ordinary middle class men’s structural realities do not provide the possibility of acting on these messages: these men tend to regard these media messages as fantasies with no connection to their daily lives. Transnational cultural flows affect local culture only when new meanings can be layered on top of existing structural realities. While cultural globalization may not independently affect structural arrangements, it may affect the meanings people attach to those arrangements. The next chapter focuses on how transnational media may be altering men’s gender culture by intensifying their commitment to male dominance. Rejecting global media messages that are inconsistent with existing gender arrangements, men are attracted to those messages which provide new or intensified ideological justifications for male privilege. This chapter suggests that global media may have introduced a modest intensification of the legitimacy and appeal of individualism as a way for non-élite men to understand the world. Intensified attraction to individualism has not led non-élite men to buck obdurate social realities: even if they emphasize individual choices more than they once did, this

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emphasis is not applied to choosing a marriage partner since existing institutions continue to restrict interactions between unmarried men and women and the economy continues to provide insufficient independence for non-élite young people. A greater focus on individual autonomy does not lead men to reject joint-family living as long as economic structures do not provide sufficient structural opportunities for such independence. However, even though it has not much changed actions, global media’s emphasis on choice and personal freedom may have strengthened the cultural orientation that emphasizes individualism. This chapter is brief because most of my findings mainly reveal continuities in non-élite arrangements and culture. Yet, the changes I identify here are potentially significant if they intensify and end up altering fundamental orientations and motives.

Cultural Orientations in India In Chapter 2, I emphasized that Indian men’s ethnopsychology has long tended to see the world through a sociocentric lens: their ethnopsychology has tended to explain people’s actions by focusing on the groups to which they belong rather than the personal characteristics of the individual. Men have tended to see it as proper that people be guided by family authorities and be suspicious of actions which individuals embark on without familial guidance. But I also emphasize that Indians have long had “second languages” which emphasize the individual. Both being nurtured by others and being able to act on one’s own are universals of human experiences that all cultures recognize in some way. Indians have long seen attachment between siblings or between husbands and wives as an arena in which individuality might be expressed. While they are an important resource, second languages are less rich, legitimate, and familiar than the dominant first language. Even before the advent of globalization, films and film-going have been arenas that give expression to individualism and individual desires (Derné 2000a: Chapter 5). In 2001, as in 1991, film-going provides space for the individual by allowing the male filmgoer to escape from the authority of home and work. In 2001, as in 1991 (Derné 2000a: 92– 93), filmgoers and film culture focus on individual stars. Like the men

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whom I interviewed in 1991, the men I interviewed in 2001 talk about their favorite heroes as having special qualities: one likes Ajay Devgan because of his particularly sweet style and dialogue; another likes Hrithik Roshan because of his particular laughing smile; many say Salman Khan’s body is unique. When their heroes first appear on the screen in any film (and sometimes when their names appear on the credits), whistling and shouting can be intense. Film themes, of course, continue to assert individualism and choice: action heroes fight alone against injustice; young lovers struggle against the odds. Film-going continues to be a way that Indian men have developed a taste for, and familiarity with, individual autonomy. It has long been one of the privileged arenas of the second language of individualism in Indian culture, which develops a taste for autonomy in young men. Films continue (Derné 2000a: 117–18) to push some men to develop an attraction to fashion and consumerism as a way of expressing individuality. Quite a few of the men whom I interviewed emphasized fashion as a reason that a particular hero was a favorite.

Globalization and Individualism One might expect that economic and cultural globalization would push in ways that might advance this existing focus on the individual. Through cable television and American movies, global media push toward invigorating, intensifying, and legitimizing a focus on the individual over the collectivity. Advertising emphasizes choice. American serials and Hollywood movies show young people choosing their own spouses. Hollywood movies show larger-than-life action figures who struggle against injustice. Influenced by global media forms, Hindi films increasingly show young people’s autonomy as an accepted fact of life rather than a struggle. While Indians have long denigrated Hindi films (Derné 2000a: 37– 41), they have tended to see Hollywood films as more substantial, increasing the legitimacy of their messages. One of the men I interviewed said that he liked American films because “they show things as they actually are.” Several men praised the “financial infrastructure” of American films for allowing a better product. Another man said that Hindi

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filmmakers should make good films like Titanic: the greater worth attached to Hindi films might push toward a greater tendency to accept their messages. More important, economic globalization has actually increased people’s choices. Chapter 3 argues that affluent Indians embrace the ideology of personal choice because opportunities to consume have increased greatly. Non-élites do not experience the increased job opportunities that élites do. Nor do the non-élites have the range of consumptive choices that economic liberalization has opened up for the élites. Nevertheless, the new availability of foreign brands of clothing and food has provided somewhat greater choice to non-élites as well. The last chapter suggested that cultural globalization and the opening of the economy have, in fact, introduced a new attraction to consumerism into ordinary middle class culture—and this is perhaps the most prominent way in which new individualism is expressed. One selfemployed man whom I interviewed was proud to own a motorcycle and hoped to be able to buy an automobile within five years. Many of the men whom I interviewed enjoyed wearing cosmopolitan fashions and were happy with consumer items like televisions. The ordinary middle class men whom I interviewed in 2001 often praised their favorite heroes’ fashion, a focus which is reflected in the jeans and brand-name logos that they showed off as they promenaded in public around cinema halls. Many men’s clothing—from Nike hats to McDonald’s jackets— advertised attachment to consumer items. This focus on consumerism trickles far down the class hierarchy, as is seen in the desire for the ubiquitous Coca-Cola (Shurmer-Smith 2000: 33), and certainly affects women as well as men. Sanjay Srivastava shows that the advertising in cheap Hindi footpath pornography introduces male readers to “contemporary commodity culture” (Srivastava 2001: 233). Srivastava shows that advertisements in footpath pornography lead ordinary men to desire a “fantasy culture of modernity” (believing, for instance, that a course might help them “speak English in 50 days.”) (Srivastava 2001: 233). Purnima Mankekar’s (2004: 411) interviews with lower-middle class women similarly show attraction to advertised commodities, even when they cannot afford them. “We may never be able to afford them,” one said, “but who knows. And in any case, what is wrong in wondering” (Mankekar 2004: 411).

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Strengthening Individualism A comparison of men’s reasoning about whether a love marriage or an arranged marriage is appropriate suggests that such global influences may indeed be strengthening the second language of individualism as a cultural orientation of non-élite men. While individualism has not led to a decreased preference for arranged marriages, it has led to subtle shifts in how men understand appropriate means of marrying. First, the percentage of men who categorically disapprove of love marriages declined significantly. In 1991, 22 percent (7/22) of the men I interviewed simply disapproved of love marriages as wrong or improper, saying things like “the love marriage is not a good way,” “I say it’s wrong”, or “a love marriage is dishonorable”. In 2001, none of the men whom I interviewed offered such a categorical disapproval of love marriages. The percentage of men who offered an on-balance disapproval of love marriages was almost identical in the two years (68 percent in 1991, 66 percent in 2001). Yet, in 2001, men did not dismiss love marriages outof-hand, but instead called them unworkable, not possible in actual life, or only existing in stories.1 Perhaps the intensifying celebration of love and choice pushes against a categorical rejection of love marriages. There are now so many positive representations of love matches that a simple rejection of them as “wrong” may no longer be a viable cultural position. So, while men’s on-balance assessment of arranged marriages has not changed much, there may be greater recognition of the validity of love marriage as a choice that some people might make. Second, in describing the exceptional love marriage that might succeed, men increasingly focus on the characteristics of individuals choosing such love marriages rather than on the groups to which these individuals belong. An important feature of Indians’ collectivist culture is a focus on an individual’s social group as the best way of understanding an individual’s character (Derné 1995: 38–40, 53–55). Thus, when they witness actions they regard as improper, Indians tend to explain these actions by considering the group to which an individual belongs. In choosing a spouse for a child, parents see the potential spouse’s family as the most important determinant of the potential spouse’s character. To understand love marriages or women’s paid labor, Indians who reject such arrangements tended to focus on the nature of the family that such

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individuals come from, saying, for instance that people “from educated families” “like it if their wife works” or “try to do love marriages”. In 2001 (but very rarely in 1991), some men said instead that a person’s individual characteristics could facilitate a love marriage’s success. Tahsin, the married 25-year-old who enjoys the public space of theatre but is glad that his wife would rather stay at home, is happy that he had an arranged marriage. But Tahsin describes love marriages as “possible if a person has money and backbone. It depends on the person,” A married 22year-old Hindu father who drives a truck for a state agency is happy that he had an arranged marriage, but nonetheless says the “success of love marriages depends on the person. Love marriages,” he says, “are successful with certain persons and in certain places.” Umesh, the 26-year-old civil draftsman who likes films that provide a message that “one should be trustworthy and selfless and accountable in relationships” opposes television programming that “gives the message” that a “brother should allow his sister to go with her boyfriend to watch a movie.” He says that these television messages are “not a good thing,” and is concerned that people of an “immature age” could be “swayed by emotion,”, “spoiling their life and also ruining the future for the girl [they love].” But he still says that he is “not against love marriages.” Rather, Umesh contends that a man who has achieved his own “self-standing should opt for a love marriage.” In 2001, six of the seven people who discussed why some love marriages might succeed focused on the individual characteristics of the people embarking on these marriages. In 1991, only one of the eight people who discussed why some love marriages might succeed focused on such individual characteristics. While the percentage of men who offer an onbalance disapproval of love marriages has not changed, men are more likely to evaluate the possibility of a love marriage’s success based on particular characteristics of the individuals involved. This suggests, of course, that the intensifying cultural celebration of choice may lead more non-élite men to focus on individual choices as they orient themselves in the world—even as they continue to reject the possibility of such choices for themselves. Third, in describing why love marriages tend to fail, men are less likely to cite parental and societal opposition. In 1991, 27 percent (6/22) of the men whom I interviewed focused on obstacles from parents or society in explaining why love marriages should be avoided. They said,

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“The consent of the parents is important,” “parental consent is needed” or “a love marriage might be good, but society would never allow it.” This sort of reasoning makes sense within a collectivist cultural orientation that sees people as rightly guided by social pressures and that distrusts individuals who act on their own desires (Derné 1995: 45–56). After a decade of intensifying celebration of individuals pursuing their own desires, none of the men whom I interviewed in 2001 referred to parental or social opposition as a reason that love marriages would be best avoided. While structures have not changed to open the possibilities of young people’s independence in ways that would allow them to buck social pressure to accept an arranged marriage, the intensified cultural celebration of individual choice may make a conscious emphasis on social pressure to explain one’s willingness to marry according to one’s parents’ wishes less legitimate. Because there has been little structural transformation in the opportunities of non-élite men, new imaginations associated with cultural globalization have not prompted young men to abandon arranged marriages. Nor have these new imaginations prompted non-élite men to change their on-balance assessment of the best way to marry. But the emphasis on choices and freedom in global media may have played a role in decreasing men’s emphasis on the importance of following social pressures as an explanation for appropriate behavior. Fourth, while the percentage of men who offer an on-balance disapproval of love marriages has not changed much, there appears to be less hostility to love marriages and some acceptance of a wider range of possibilities—at least, in principle. While eight of the men whom I interviewed in 1991 voiced the idea that some love marriages might succeed, these men usually dismissed successful love marriages as extremely unlikely. Two said, for instance, that only five in 100 love marriages might succeed. One man who thought that boys engage in love marriages “for amusement” reasoned that if a love marriage could avoid being “onesided”, it might be workable. But this man clearly thought such success unlikely. In 1991, when men admitted that some love marriages might succeed, they had little idea of what a successful love match might look like. Their reasoning was thin. Four men said that “some love marriages might work” but simply held that they did not want one for themselves. One man said that some love marriages were good and some were bad, but refused to elaborate.

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But in 2001, love marriages appeared to be more of a considered possibility that someone might actually pursue. As I note above, six men in 2001 discussed individual characteristics that might allow a love marriage to succeed, usually focusing on a boy’s independence and moral worth. Two men focused on their own individual characteristics as they themselves considered the possibility of marrying for love. A 20-year-old self-employed Hindu mechanic living in a joint family with his mother, brothers, and one bhabhi said, for instance, that his “confidence and self-determination” might allow him to marry for love. A 22-year-old Muslim postgraduate commerce student living in a joint family insisted that he intended to pursue a love marriage. He said that because he would “select a bride with thought and understanding,” his marriage would surely succeed.2 (Of course, it remains to be seen whether these two men will manage to marry for love—neither has ever had a girlfriend, and the commerce student admits that only about 20 percent of love marriages might succeed.) While, for many, structural possibilities have not changed in ways that might allow a serious consideration of turning away from the usual way marriages are arranged, the intensified cultural celebration of choice and love influenced by global media may be providing more elaborate, rich, and familiar ways of considering the possibility of a love marriage. Thus, while cultural globalization may not have had much influence on ordinary middle class Indian men’s behavior, it may be strengthening a legitimate second language that emphasizes individual desires. While it appears that there may be a modest increase in the richness, familiarity, and legitimacy of second languages that emphasize individual volition and choice over group guidance, I do not want to overestimate this change. As I have emphasized elsewhere, Indian films have long been one of the many cultural arenas that give voice to second languages celebrating the individual (Derné 2000a: 165–67). Transnational cultural flows and economic liberalization that change real possibilities may be strengthening these second languages, but they did not create them. One must simultaneously keep in mind the ongoing importance of collectivist cultural understandings. Non-élite men continue to enjoy films like CCCC and Hum Saath Saath Hain that present happy jointfamily life. They continue to stress Indian heroes and heroines’ commitment to family duties over their own desires. Sunil Khilani points out

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that “rising consumerism” in recent years did not “fuel an individualistic hedonism nor breed liberal individuals” (Khilnani 1997: 186). Rather, he argues that as in the hit film Hum Aapke Hain Kaun!, consumerism “was experienced as an opportunity to sample the pleasures of modernity within collective units like the family” (my emphasis) (ibid.: 186). Ramu, a 20-year-old Brahmin medical student whom I interviewed, describes himself as in love with an 18-year-old student. He enjoys a range of American movies and says that he will marry his girlfriend. But Ramu does not see movies with his girlfriend and has not told his parents (with whom he lives in a joint family) that he has one. He speaks with bravado that he will marry for love, and says that he will try to convince his parents to consent to the marriage.3 But he also says that he loves his parents enough (kaafi pyaar) that if they refused their consent, he would go through an arranged marriage according to their wishes. Referring to the hit KKHH, he says that he would be able to love his wife even after loving a girlfriend, just as the hero of that film was able to fall in love again after his wife’s death. His focus on how any love he might feel for his girlfriend should not jeopardize his love for his parents is, of course, consistent both with the priority that recent films like DDLJ give to family connections over two individuals’ love for each other and with the collectivist orientation I described in Chapter 2. For this young man, his love for a woman should not jeopardize his essential Indianness by tempting him away from commitment to family duties. Ramu is attracted to new possibilities of love and choice which might be intensified by global media.4 But he also falls back on the usual emphasis on following parental authorities. So, while global media may be increasing the richness, familiarity, and legitimacy of languages that emphasize the individual, collectivist cultural understandings remain salient as well. But it is also possible that small shifts away from collectivism in some non-élite Indians’ basic orientation might lead to other changes in thinking and behavior. The modest changes described in this chapter may have more widespread effects in future years—especially if the changes broaden and intensify and are fueled by new structural possibilities. At this point, a second language of individualism seems to be strengthening, although collectivism remains salient. The shift toward greater individualism among the non-élite men whom I interviewed is neither broadbased nor thoroughgoing, but such changes may intensify in future years.

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Conclusion New meanings, then, are layered on top of existing structural arrangements. A new focus on the individual, perhaps generated by new economic possibilities and/or new cultural imaginations, has not led to new ideas about how one should marry. But it has changed the meanings men use to understand how one should marry. While the focus on the individual has not led to a focus on individual choice in marriage, it has decreased the focus on social pressure as the reason men give for objecting to love marriages. The focus on the individual may have also generated reasoning that emphasizes individual characteristics (rather than group ones) that make the exceptional love marriage succeed. The increased celebration of love has not led to much increase in the number of men who believe that they will marry for love, but it has decreased the hostility that men express towards love marriages. This suggests that non-élite Indians accommodate new meanings introduced by cultural globalization to obdurate structural realities they face. They use an individualist orientation to understand love marriages and arranged marriages in new ways, but the orientation does not change their overall assessment of marriage arrangements—precisely because institutional possibilities have not greatly changed. The last chapter suggested that non-élite men rejected global media meanings which were inconsistent with the gender arrangements they had an interest in maintaining. Without changes in non-élites’ structural possibilities, men’s attachment to proper family arrangements has remained unchanged. The next chapter shows a continuity in men’s gender culture, but highlights how cultural globalization may layer new meanings on top of the existing gender arrangements. These new meanings bolster and intensify male dominance, providing new avenues for its operation.

Notes 01. In 1991, men also cited these reasons for their opposition to love marriages. 02. This young man had other individualistic attitudes as well. He did not criticize cable television, believing that it was “up to the viewer to grasp what he [or she] sees on television.” He was not too concerned with the movement from salwar-kameezes

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to cosmopolitan fashion like jeans, saying that “while the costumes have changed, there will be no hassles if the person is self-determined.” 03. Ramu had cogent reasons for believing that he might marry for love, but I got the sense that there was a great deal of bravado in his talk. My research assistant felt, instead, that Ramu was speaking in earnest of a sober and serious desire to marry for love. 04. It is also worth noting that because this young medical student is pursuing a highpaying profession, he may be more hopeful about the possibility for independence than many of the other men whom I interviewed. Although Ramu was buying a cheap movie ticket, seemed to be rooted in a prosperous world. His father is a bank manager and an uncle is a university lecturer. That he lives in Allahabad but is stationed in Dehra Dun for university studies may suggest greater movement and cosmopolitanism than many of the men I interviewed. Unlike most men, he mentioned a long list of American films that he enjoyed, and he claimed to have watched some of them in English (rather than dubbed in Hindi). His greater cosmopolitan possibilities may be an important background factor that leads him to believe he might marry for love.

6

Globalizing Gender Culture

In Chapter 4, I argued that because of obdurate social realities and men’s interests in maintaining existing gender arrangements, new imaginations of gender and family introduced through cultural globalization have been largely rejected by non-élite men. Yet, these same men embrace other imaginations of gender introduced through global media flows because they can be combined with existing gender arrangements. Men often have an interest in maintaining gender arrangements that provide them with status and comfort. Often, men may not be able to imagine alternative family arrangements such as marrying for love as a real possibility because the structural realities they face seem too ingrained. But global media—and the Hindi films that are influenced by them—may introduce or intensify other gendered meanings that can be layered on top of existing family arrangements and gender culture. This chapter explores how cultural globalization may be remaking the gender culture of ordinary middle class men. I begin the chapter by describing continuities in Indians’ oppressive gender culture in the face of global media. As they did previously, Hindi films continue to show men as active and women as passive. They continue to show women as existing for men’s pleasure. They continue to celebrate male violence and to promote a controlling gaze that limits women’s opportunities. Second, I argue that the cosmopolitanism and transnational movement celebrated by global media and Hindi films introduces a new dimension of privilege that men layer on top of existing gender hierarchies. Chapter 3 argued that Hindi films portray privilege in terms of

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transnational movement. Today’s heroes move back and forth between India and Europe for business, education, and pleasure. Even non-élite men may now associate such movement with privilege. Seeing the world through the lens of a gender culture which emphasizes women’s restriction to the home, non-élite men see such transnational movement as a distinctively male privilege. Thus, the awareness of new possibilities provides a new basis which men add on to the existing dimensions of male privilege. As a result, increasingly valued transnational movement may come to be associated with masculinity while increasingly devalued rootedness comes to be associated with femininity. Here, non-élite men interpret the new possibilities introduced by cultural globalization within the existing frameworks in which they live. While the affluent Indians whom I discuss in Chapter 3 see both men and women as moving in cosmopolitan worlds, ordinary middle class men tend to associate maleness with cosmopolitanism and femaleness with local Indianness. Third, I emphasize that global media may have intensified central aspects of male dominance. The flows of global media have intensified images of male violence. The Hollywood films that are most liked are “action” films that show violent heroes. Men often like these films more than the “fighting-and-killing” Hindi films—which were previously the only action option available—because they see these foreign films as “more realistic”. Hollywood films—because they are Hollywood films—are not as denigrated as Hindi films are, and men may find it easier to appropriate these films’ celebration of male violence. The wave of global media that has flowed into India has made men and women live more and more in a world of images of male violence, which intensifies the association of maleness with such violence. In addition, non-Indian pornographic and semi-pornographic films, which now circulate as rental videos and play in more and more theatres and on cable television, may be intensifying men’s objectification of women. Indian feminists (like Western academics) rightly identify sexual objectification as a cornerstone of male dominance. Men are, of course, partly attracted to these objectifications because they are consistent with the existing gender arrangements that they value, but the fact that these images originate in the West may allow men to identify themselves as cosmopolitan through their intensified objectification of women.

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Fourth, I suggest that new standards of male and female beauty which have been revolutionized by cultural globalization introduce new means of male dominance. Influenced by Hollywood action films, Hindi films have moved away from heroes with soft, pudgy, smooth bodies to the muscled heroes of today. The association of masculinity with muscled fighting bodies intensifies the association of masculinity with violence. Similarly, influenced by global media, images of female beauty are moving toward thinness produced through dieting and working out. In Chapter 3, I described how more and more affluent men and women may be rejecting voluptuous, well-rounded standards of femininity for the taut, disciplined bodies celebrated in the transnational media. Many affluent women turn to the market to produce such bodies through gym memberships and beauty aids. I argue there that in embracing transnational standards of beauty, affluent Indians focus on cosmopolitan identities rather than Indian ones. But transnational standards of female beauty have also affected non-élite men, who now are more attracted to thinness over roundedness. In considering new standards of beauty introduced by cultural globalization, this chapter suggests how cultural globalization may be introducing new methods of male dominance. The role of cultural globalization in intensifying male dominance is seen in women’s various protests against global media. While some have suggested that cultural globalization might introduce new imaginations that would improve the status of women, this chapter suggests, instead, that it has provided non-élite Indian men with new cultural resources that they layer on top of existing meanings to intensify or further justify existing gender privilege. Thus, new meanings introduced by globalization are most likely to be actually used in shaping social life by those who already have power and privilege. Cultural globalization, then, ends up providing additional resources that already privileged men use to solidify their position.

Continuities in Constructing Gender Culture Like global media around the world, Hindi films mediate between cosmopolitanism and local concerns. On the one hand, filmmakers are influenced by cable television, Hollywood films, and other transnational

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media and so introduce cosmopolitan themes and fashions into their films. Love marriages, transnational movement, and Western fashion are all celebrated, even normalized. But, on the other hand, filmmakers must address an audience whose realities have not changed. Thus, filmmakers simultaneously reconstitute existing cultural realities. Filmmakers today continue to alleviate concerns about joint-family living and arranged marriages that so much of their audience faces as obdurate social realities by showing caring joint-family authorities who look out for their children’s happiness (Chapter 4). Knowing their audience’s anxieties about alien cosmopolitanism, they show cosmopolitan consumption and attitudes to be consistent with adherence to family duties (Chapter 4). Filmmakers similarly continue to reinforce an oppressive gender culture as they always have. Filmmakers’ construction of men as active and women as passive, of men as looking and of women as the object of the gaze, and of men as aggressive and women as needing male protection is strikingly similar to the era that preceded the advent of globalization. As in the previous eras, these cinematic messages are consistent with other broad cultural discourses. While cinematic messages are centrally important in shaping young men’s behavior, films should not be privileged as the only socializing agent. Since cinematic conventions are so similar to those of a decade prior, here I only briefly sketch some of these ongoing dynamics (see Derné 2000a: Chapter 7, 1999; Derné and Jadwin 2000). First, filmmakers continue to present men as active and women as passive. Notably, filmmakers tend to present men as initiating romance, while presenting women as passive objects of male interest—a presentation that encourages the harassment of women, which limits their opportunities in the public sphere (Dasgupta and Hegde 1988; Derné 2000a: 157–59). In films like Dil To Pagal Hai, the Madhuri Dixit heroine character wins the hero precisely because she does not pursue him as actively as her rival, the Karisma Kapoor character who plays his colleague and friend. In the 2000 hit film Mohabbatein, the young heroes pursue the heroines so aggressively that it often causes the heroines visible discomfort. The young heroines often ask to be released by the heroes, a request the young heroes often refuse. In one raucous Holi dance in Mohabbatein, the heroes capture and carry away the heroines. So common are such scenes that the active, pursuing male hero seems almost as unvarying as in fights and song-and-dance sequences.

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Of course, Hindi films only contribute to a much wider cultural emphasis on men as aggressive and uncontrollable and women as passive and compromising (Abraham 2001: 134). Influenced by these cultural messages, boys often begin “touching” and “pushing” girls in crowded places from a young age, often believing that girls like such advances (Abraham 2001: 138; Puri 1999: 87–90). The affluent Delhi women whom Puri interviewed describe “being slapped on the bottoms, being touched on the breasts, being whistled at, being deliberately brushed against, [and] receiving catcalls or sexually suggestive comments” (Puri 1999: 87) as routine events from their early teens. Consistent with the cultural emphasis on female passivity, women usually do not resist such unwanted advances, even though they are usually not just offended but feel seriously threatened (Abraham 2001: 138; Derné 2000a: 155–56; Puri 1999: 75). Hindi films continue to play a part in stimulating men’s aggressive behavior toward women, which keeps women from using public spaces as freely as men, limiting their opportunities. Second, filmmakers continue to position men to look and women to exhibit “to-be-looked-at-ness”, which similarly encourages behavior that limits women’s opportunities (Derné 2000a: 147–49).1 Hindi films position, within the narrative, male viewers to gaze at onscreen women by making women the object of both the camera’s gaze and the gaze of men, a technique that is so common that it, too, is almost as ubiquitous as fights and song-and-dance. In CCCC, the hero approaches the dancing girl as a potential surrogate mother, but becomes spellbound when he sees her sexy dancing. Purnima Mankekar similarly says of DDLJ that the “voluptuous body” of the heroine “is made the object of [the viewer’s] gaze through the first half ” (Mankekar 1999b: 752). Again, this manipulation of the gaze is ubiquitous, appearing in nearly all films. Influenced by what the camera positions men to see, film-going men continue to like particular heroines because of their beauty, sexiness, or dancing ability.2 As in previous eras, male filmgoers whistle, clap, and yell at onscreen women whom filmmakers position as the object of the gaze. At the screenings of the fighting-and-killing film Officer in 2001, the hall was often filled with deafening whistles as the heroine emerged from the ocean in a bathing suit. Members of the overwhelmingly male audience at such screenings also consistently whistled and clapped as the heroine swayed her hips as she walked to a table at which she would eat a meal. At screenings of CCCC, men in the more

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mixed audiences—which included men and women—began whistling in anticipation of the scene in which the hero approaches the potential surrogate mother at a nightclub. The hall was repeatedly rocked by tremendous, deafening whistles during this scene as the dancer swayed her butt for the audience. “Oh, oh, oh,” men often shouted when they finally saw her face. I saw such examples of a rowdy male response to onscreen women being made the object of the gaze at all film screenings I attended. The instances I report above are just a few of the most raucous examples of many other similar responses at the same films. Like films’ normalization of female passivity, the cinematic encouragement of the male gaze continues to limit women’s free participation in public. To avoid being ogled by men, women have had to limit participation in the public sphere (see Derné 2000a: 149 for a summary). Radhika Parameshwaran’s (1997) interviews with unmarried women in their 20s reveals, for instance, that “being constantly watched and surveyed by men in public” leads to a “feeling of resentment.” Women reported that they even avoided a soda in a restaurant because men “stare at you and make comments.” Women’s need to protect themselves from the gaze often makes them less able to act as effectively as men can in the public sphere. Films are one of the cultural dynamics that incite men’s desire to harass women. Third, films continue to present men as powerful protectors and women as constantly threatened (see Derné 2000a: 150–58 on the era prior to globalization). A hero’s protection of women who are threatened is still an important theme of fighting-and-killing films which continue to play to large, mostly male, audiences even though the biggest money is in romances. In films like Officer and Zahareela, which played in Dehra Dun in 2001, the main theme is of a hero protecting a heroine, wife, or sister who is continually threatened outside the home. (In some instances, the heroine may fall in love with the hero precisely because of this protection.) The centrality of this theme in Officer is apparent in the hoardings which celebrate the hero as “The Protector.” While less central, the elaboration of threats against women continues in the more popular romances as well. In CCCC, for instance, the hero’s business partner tries to rape the woman acting as the surrogate mother of the hero’s child. While the surrogate mother is an independent woman, she nonetheless needs the hero’s protection to avoid being raped. In Mohabbatein, one of the young heroes rescues a young heroine who is

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thrown into a swimming pool by a suitor. In film worlds, women who are under constant threat continue to need good men for protection.3 Like other cultural arenas in India, films remind women of the threats that keep many of them from participating freely in public spaces without male protection, even as they incite men’s desire for sexual aggression. As Sanjay Srivastava (2007) argued, cinematic celebration of male strength is emphasized by the timbre of male and female voices. Hindi film heroes always have deep voices, while heroines’ voices are painfully high to Western ears. Dubbed Hollywood films highlight the essential nature of this convention. To the Westerner, the Hindi spoken by the Hollywood hero is impossibly deep, while the Hindi-language voice of the Hollywood heroine is impossibly high. Srivastava focuses especially on the timbre of Lata Mangeshkar’s voice to explain her tremendous success as a playback singer in Hindi films. Critics report that Lata’s agile light voice with its piercing upper extension is so familiar; Srivastava argues, that it has become “the ultimate measure of sweetness in a woman’s voice.” It has become so common that “it soon became difficult to imagine a female voice that is not Lata Mangeshkar’s” (quoted in Manuel 1993: 53, as cited by Srivastava 2007). Srivastava rightly suggests that: at the same time that women’s bodies became visible in public spaces via films, their presence was ‘thinned’ through the expressive timbre granted to them. The heroines for whom Lata provided the singing voice may well have been prancing around hill-sides and streets while performing a song-sequence, but this gesture which otherwise threatened male dominance of these spaces, was domesticated through the timbre and tonality which marked their presence. (Srivastava 2007).

Despite the increasing presence of Hollywood films and cable offerings which sometimes present alternative gender orders, Hindi films continue to contribute to male dominance by normalizing an oppressive gender order. They continue to be part of the socializing process that attaches men to the conventions associated with these oppressive arrangements. By celebrating male aggression, showing the harms attached to being made the object of a male gaze, and dramatizing the threats that women face outside the home, films play a part in limiting women’s effective use of the public space: as long as women need to be concerned with male aggression and threats outside the home, they are less free than men in their use of public space.

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Layering New Meanings on Existing Gender Culture: Transnational Heroes But the new imaginations introduced by cultural globalization are also layering new meanings on top of the existing gender arrangements. As transnational movement is increasingly valued, Hindi films contribute to a process that makes transnational movement a distinctively male prerogative. Films today emphasize that the dangers women face in public spaces are intensified in the transnational arena. Thus, films contribute to a process of reserving increasingly valued transnational terrain for men. As I argued in Chapter 3, the 1950s’ and 1960s’ Five-Year-Plan Heroes, whose technical expertise was aimed at building the nation, were supplanted in the 1970s and 1980s by the angry-young-man hero who valorized the discontent of the producing classes. Since the advent of globalization, a new hero has emerged on the scene—a consuming hero for whom transnational movement is a distinctive feature. Today’s Transnational Hero often moves easily beyond India’s borders. Many hit Hindi films since the mid-1990s have emphasized the situation of NRIs, and most Hindi films now routinely portray heroes who move easily in the global sphere. In film after film, a hero’s business, education, or honeymoon takes him abroad.4 In CCCC, for instance, the hero is a global Indian executive whose business takes him and his family to Europe. Fan magazines often describe the jetsetting lives of screen stars. One fan magazine described six months of “jet-setting” in one film hero’s life. After filming in Mauritius, he shops and visits his girlfriend in London, helps launch a film in America, and (after a brief return to India) flies to Switzerland to shoot a honeymoon scene (Sai 2001b: 32). While today’s heroes easily move in transnational spaces, films often highlight the dangers that these spaces pose for Indian women, reserving transnational movement as an arena for male freedom. Films focusing on the situation of NRIs continue to present the West as the “site of rampant sexuality and promiscuity” (Mankekar 1999b: 736; Uberoi 1998). To maintain their Indianness, film heroes and heroines need to resist these temptations. NRI heroines obey family hierarchies and avoid liquor, while NRI heroes do not take sexual advantage of women and respect their obligations to their parents (Mankekar 1999b: 737–39; Uberoi 1998). Purnima Mankekar rightly argues that these films portray

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the West as a “place where cultural purity and authenticity can be maintained,” while emphasizing that the rampant sexuality of Westerners in these films puts “the purity of NRI women . . . always at risk” (Mankekar 1999b: 737). “The West is a place where the virginity of Indian women is under constant threat” and (in films) NRI men protect Indian women from these assaults (ibid.: 737–39). Living in Europe without his joint family, the hero of CCCC struggles alone to keep men from raping the woman he has hired as a surrogate mother. While these films focus on NRI women who are able to maintain their Indianness, their effect is to emphasize the unacceptable risks that NRI women face in transnational spaces. As transnational movement is increasingly valued, global spaces are more and more defined as distinctively masculine spaces which threaten the purity of women who are the distinctive bearers of Indianness. Mankekar argues that in these films “the Indian nation . . . is where Indian women’s sexual purity may be preserved. Indeed, the sexual purity of Indian women becomes iconomic of the purity of the national culture” (Mankekar 1999b: 739). The threats and temptations that women face in Western settings are, then, far more consequential than threats and temptations that men themselves face. The longtime cinematic emphasis on male protection and female vulnerability in the public sphere is extended to the global arena, reserving the highly valued transnational sphere as a locale of male privilege. As a number of theorists have argued, the increasing value placed on global spaces often ends up associating these spaces with masculinity, while local spaces come to be associated with the feminine (Gupta and Ferguson 1997: 7, as cited by Morley 2000). As Enloe puts it, “being feminine” is often defined as “sticking close to home” while “masculinity” is a “passport for travel” (Enloe 1989: 21). The rise of the transnational hero reinforces the ways that Hindi films have long contributed to male dominance, which I identified earlier in this chapter. If men are the ones that move, it reinforces the image that men are active and women are passive; even when onscreen heroines move, they do so, like the hero’s entourage in CCCC, because of the hero’s business or entertainment needs. By emphasizing the threat that women face in the global arena, films that focus on transnational heroes emphasize women’s need for protection from male threats.

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Intensifying the Association of Maleness with Aggression The cultural association of maleness with violent aggression has, of course, long been an important cornerstone of male dominance. Fighting-andkilling films continue to celebrate such male violence. Members of the male audience continue to clap and shout when heroes beat up their opponents. Indeed, men seem to enjoy watching aggressive violence of all kinds. In theatres, men even respond enthusiastically to violence committed by onscreen villains—which may be one reason why villains develop their own following. Today, cable television and foreign movies appear to be intensifying the attraction to violent masculinities. Nearly 60 percent (11/19) of the men I interviewed who watch foreign films regularly say that they do so because of the excellent action sequences in these films. Men talk of Jackie Chan or Arnold Schwarzenegger as favorite heroes because of their fighting ability. They say they like American films like Gladiator or Godzilla because the action appears more realistic than in Hindi films. As I sat watching the previews before one screening of an Arnold Schwarzenegger film, one of the men I interviewed smiled broadly on seeing Jackie Chan. “Jackie’s a good fighter,” he said with a grin. Ramu, the 20-year-old Brahmin medical student who wants to marry for love, says that he likes watching Hollywood action movies because the Hollywood industry has the backbone to make the action more exciting and realistic. Indian men appear to be attracted to violent masculinities portrayed in non-Indian media. Anand Patwardhan’s 1995 documentary film, Father, Son, Holy War shows boys, teenagers, and young men in Bombay who are attracted to Arnold Schwarzenegger’s bodybuilding. Patwardhan shows one 25-year-old man saying that he was “inspired” by watching videocassettes of “Arnold’s movies”. Saying that he was attracted to the “body builder and winner of seven Olympic titles,” the young man described how he “started to exercise until” he became an “expert”. Patwardhan shows adolescent Bombay boys’ attraction to World Wrestling Federation (WWF) characters. In one scene, boys in a room decorated with posters of Hit Man watch this WWF hero on cable television. Boys smile, make faces, roughhouse, and imitate the headlocks they see on television. “That’s Hit Man, the World Wrestling Federation

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wrestler,” one says. “He hits hard. He’s good.” One boy who had another boy in a headlock says that “only boys” wrestle “because boys are heroes.” Pressed by the interviewer, the adolescent says he does not play with girls “because girls wear saris, because girls are a calamity, because girls make too much fuss, because girls are girls and boys are boys.” In another scene, boys react enthusiastically to WWF wrestler Macho Man Randy Savage, who makes a local appearance to promote WWF on local cable. Boys chant “We want Macho; we want Macho” in anticipation of the hero’s arrival. “Macho, Macho, Macho,” they chant as he comes into the promotional tent. One boy says that he likes “Macho Man because he’s strong and tough. And, also, he’s macho.” The boy says that he would like to be like Macho Man because he is “quite dangerous and well known all over the world and fights quite well.” Many men apparently find it easy to identify with violent masculinity, celebrated in transnational cultural forms. Many adolescents identify with Hit Man—even though (or perhaps because) he wears wrestling briefs made of a stylized American flag. Thus, transnational cultural forms may extend and exacerbate men’s attachment to violent forms of male dominance. The increased realism men find in the foreign media’s presentation of male violence may increase their attachment to male strength and violence as an actual possibility. The violence in Hindi films has long been presented as a fantasy, clearly separating it from the day-to-day world. The special effects were both wildly unbelievable (like heroes jumping incredible heights to the tops of buildings) and crude (accomplishing the jump upward by reversing a film of a hero jumping down). “By exaggerating the violence out of all proportions,” Ashis Nandy (1989: 48–49) argues, Hindi films create the “overall impression” of a “fairy tale” or “comic strip” (see also Derné 2000a: 64; Dickey 1993: 69 on Tamil films). By contrast, many cable television events, from violent American sports to WWF wrestling, appear to be actual social realities—and, indeed, one of the appeals of the cosmopolitan media is that it appears plausible, lifelike, almost real (Gitlin 2002: 22). Some of the men whom I interviewed believe that the violence they see is common in foreign societies, with which they have no real experience.5 Several men commented that they liked foreign films precisely because the world they present appeared authentic due to their realistic special effects. The cable television and movie preferences of Sanjay, a prosperous unmarried 30-year-old, suggest a strong attraction to media that emphasize male violence and

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villainy.6 For Sanjay, American films are especially pleasing because, he says, they “show things the way they actually are [actual hota hai].”7 The intensified male violence in the transnational media appears to be intensifying Hind films’ focus on male strength. I argue below that Hindi film heroes increasingly sport buffed, muscled bodies that highlight male power. An important, if minor, trend is the number of recent Hindi films which lack a true hero. The all-male audience whom I observed watching these films often reacts with enthusiasm to depictions of male strength—even when it is wielded by a villain. In several films (like Zahareela [Venomous]), former hero Mithun Chakraborty, who was much-loved in the Hindi belt for his fighting-and-killing roles, now plays roles that are wholly villainous. Male audiences nonetheless respond enthusiastically when he pushes an enemy’s head through a table or breaks a chair over an enemy’s head. The male audience’s identification was perhaps the strongest when the Mithun character was sexually violent. Men clapped and whistled as the Mithun character forced a woman to dance for his pleasure. They whistled when (in a dream), one of the heroines appears as a rape victim in the Mithun character’s bed. They whistled and clapped again when the title song (which emphasized Mithun’s venom) opened with the Mithun character smiling lecherously. In past action films, audiences always responded with enthusiasm when the villain was killed (see Derné 2000a: 73). Yet, when the Mithun character is finally killed at the end of the movie (as the genre dictates he must), there was little applause. Instead, the all-male audience seemed to most enjoy Mithun’s villainous joy at harassing and even raping women. Mithun, now a washed-up former hero, has begun specializing in playing such roles for low-budget films, another of which (Bhairav) also played in Dehra Dun in 2001. But the more mainstream film Kasoor (which introduced the much-hyped Canadian-born beauty queen Lisa Ray) also lacked a hero. While the lack of a hero limits such films’ appeal,8 male audiences that watch these films are attracted to these films’ violence— especially, it appears, if the violence is directed against women. Rather than successfully introducing new cultural blueprints, cultural globalization may more often offer new resources that intensify the attraction to existing cultural meanings. The intensified celebration of male violence influenced by the foreign media serves to reinforce the ways that popular culture has long contributed to male dominance in India. The

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intensified association of masculinity and violence only reemphasizes that men are active while women are passive. The greater violence serves to emphasize that, even more than in the past, women are vulnerable to such assaults and so should limit their public actions.

Foreign Pornography Cultural globalization has brought more foreign pornography to India. In 1991, two cheap theatres showed Indian-made pornographic films carrying an A (Adult-only) rating. In 2001, these theatres continued to operate, but one of the two most prestigious theatres in town also now routinely showed dubbed foreign films which carried the A-rating reserved for pornography. Low-budget and dubbed in Hindi, these foreign films aimed at softcore titillation, as Indian censors bar all nudity. The foreign pedigree and prestigious venue attracted good audiences that included ordinary middle class men and male adolescents (as age restrictions were not enforced).9 More hardcore foreign pornography (or “blue films”) has also become available. Boys now watch these films in video halls with their peers (Abraham 2001: 139). Mainstream film magazines increasingly carry advertising for phone sex.10 Abraham’s 1996–98 study of Englishspeaking, low-income college students in the metropole of Bombay revealed, for instance, that while girls did not have access to pornography, more than half of the male students had seen pornographic films (Abraham 2001: 144). Pornographic films, she concludes, are “the main source of information for many boys on matters concerning sex.” While girls lacked a terminology for sexual acts, pornography provided boys a complex language—much of it (for example, “dog-shot”, “taking in mouth”) in English. The emphasis on English-language terminology, of course, highlights the influence of newly available pornography. It appears, moreover, that these pictures are leading to conceptions of sex that men lacked previously.11 Catharine MacKinnon rightly argues that the construction of women as existing for men’s pleasure is a fundamental part of male dominance: So many distinctive features of women’s status as second class—the restriction and constraint and contortion, the servility and the display, the selfmutilation and requisite presentations of self as a beautiful thing, the enforced

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passivity, the humiliation—are made into the content of sex for women. Being a thing for sexual use is fundamental to it. (MacKinnon 1989: 130. Emphasis mine).

A woman, she says, is “identified as one whose sexuality exists for someone else” (MacKinnon 1989: 118). She argues that this “sexual objectification” is “the primary process of the subjection of women” (ibid.: 124). Hindi films have long played a role in this construction of sex in India (Derné 2000a: 149–50). The theme especially comes through in the dance scenes. The sensitive hero of the pre-globalization superhit film Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) guided his beloved in dancing for his pleasure in a number of sexy rooftop dances. The skimpy dress the heroine wore prompted the hero to gaze spellbound, causing a look of pain on the heroine’s face. Prior to globalization, ubiquitous fantasy dance sequences made usually-modest heroines wear jeans or shorts to please their beloveds. The message continues to come through in recent films as well. In fighting-and-killing films, villains try to victimize women for their own pleasure—often to the delight of males in the audience— while in social films, heroines often focus on pleasing the hero. In CCCC, for instance, the heroine’s desire to provide her in-laws with a grandson is what leads her to insist that he find a surrogate mother to give birth to a child. The availability of foreign pornographic films has intensified the emphasis on women’s “to-be-looked-at-ness” (Mulvey 1975 [1988]) and the construction of women as existing for men’s pleasure. Thus, at screenings of A-films in Dehra Dun, the wholly-male audience whistled its enthusiasm at any scene suggesting sex. “Oh, oh, oh,” men would shout as a female character in a dubbed film took off a sweater (revealing a shirt underneath).12 The cultural emphasis on men as active and women as passive, on men as positioned to look and women as positioned to be looked-at, and on the imperative that women act for men’s pleasure has been intensified by the newly-available transnational cultural resources. Dr Neelam Gore, of a Pune-based women’s organization, reports that because of pornography, more and more women complain that men demand sex more often—often in ways that women see as “perverse” (Page and Crawley 2001: 168).13 Mark Liechty’s (2001) pathbreaking study of the effects of newly-available cosmopolitan pornography reveals dynamics in Kathmandu, Nepal, that may also be taking place in urban India.

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Liechty found that men’s use of foreign pornography intensifies the demands that they make on women. Women complain that husbands bring pornographic videos home, expecting that their wives will “supply the sexual gratification demanded by a new electronic commercial means of sexual arousal” (Liechty 2001: 43–44). One woman commented on the sexual aggression induced by foreign pornography: I mean, while watching these films, in what a bad manner [men] think of others! Even their own sisters they begin to look at in this way! This is what they do once they have become like that. (quoted by Liechty 2001: 46)

Liechty found that Nepali women who “condemned the contents of pornographic videos based on their own identities as individuals and Nepalis” nonetheless believed that the videos portrayed a valid sexuality for “other women” or people from “other places” (Liechty 2001: 48). Women, Liechty says, understand “the images of women in ‘blue films’ to be not merely male fantasies, but the realities of some other place” (ibid.: 46). “For the tourists,14 maybe it’s good,” one Nepali woman said (ibid.: 48). If it was not good for them, “why would they make them?” she asks (ibid.: 46). Liechty argues that the fact that pornographic videos are “foreign imports depicting foreigners” allows women to distance themselves from pornographic sexuality but “at the expense of granting reality. . . to the sexual culture of the ‘blue film’” (ibid.: 48–49). In addition, any “critical perspective” on pornography is “neutralized” because of pornography’s association with the cult of “imported ‘modern’ consumer goods” like VCRs and televisions and the lifestyle associated with them (ibid.: 49). Moreover, Nepali women themselves tend to see foreign women as “free” and “modern” because of the value attached to foreign places and lifestyles, thus “surrendering the concept of ‘freedom’” to an “alien reality” that they themselves want to avoid because of the sexual objectification it entails (ibid.: 48–49). Cultural globalization, then, often provides new meanings that become additional resources that strengthen the hands of men. Abraham’s study of low-income college students found that while foreign pornography had given boys a sense that they had knowledge of sexual practices, girls often felt that they did not “know that much” about sex (Abraham 2001: 147). In contrast to boys, girls have only a “severely limited vocabulary to describe body parts or sex” (ibid.: 145). Abraham found that many girls were “unaware of the penetrative aspect of intercourse” (ibid.: 147).

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From “their expressions of surprise and doubt,” Abraham concludes that they were “not feigning ignorance” (Abraham 2001: 17).15 Not only do boys have more information, but girls see boys as more informed. One girl who said that she had no proper understanding of sex said that, by contrast, “boys know all this” (ibid.: 147). Often with new access to foreign pornography, men are incited to increasingly objectify women. Liechty suggests that valued modernity often becomes associated with “free” lifestyles which men associate with the objectification of women (Liechty 2001: 46–49). Rather than offering alternative resources for the disadvantaged, cultural globalization ends up providing new meanings that already privileged men act on to further advance their position.

Changing Body Ideals for Men and Women Raj, a 20-year-old Hindu student whose father is a Dehra Dun shopkeeper, is attracted to Western fashion. He wears jeans and a silk shirt to an afternoon screening of a dubbed Arnold Schwarzenegger film, which he watches with three or four student friends who are living in a hostel. He laughs and jokes with these friends, enjoying a day of leisure. Raj says he only likes American films and is derisive of my own taste for Hindi films. “It’s American films that I like,” he says. When I mention the popular CCCC, he calls it a “stupid story,” and claims that he has not seen it. Cable television and foreign films have introduced new standards of beauty in India. A more voluptuous female standard of beauty is being replaced by the ultra-thin model currently popular in the USA. Similarly, a fleshier standard of male beauty is being replaced by a more muscled look. As I noted in Chapter 3, India’s victories in recent beauty contests have prompted feelings of national pride (John 1998: 379; Munshi 2001c: 89). Raj wants to know if I, too, find that Indian women have become more beautiful than American women. Yet, Raj makes this judgment using a new cosmopolitan standard of beauty. “Indian women are more beautiful and they’re looking more American now,” Raj says. Referring to the exercise regimes that produce the new bodies, Raj says that Indian beauties have “gotten smaller from working out, while the heroes are getting bigger from working out.” The new standards of beauty, which were introduced through cable television and foreign films and have been adopted by local media products like Hindi films, end up contributing

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to male dominance by intensifying the focus on male strength and female weakness. In Chapter 3, I emphasized new standards of beauty that some affluent women pursue through exercise and dieting. As I noted in Chapter 3, the standards of female beauty in mainstream Hindi films are deeply influenced by global media’s celebration of female thinness, which is now everywhere (Munshi 2001c: 83, 86). On the streets of Dehra Dun, hoardings advertising Adidas shoes show Anna Kournikova, while others advertising music cassettes picture Mariah Carey in a colorful bikini. A blonde Barbie is prominently featured at Barkat Singh’s downtown Dehra Dun shop. The heroines of today’s hit Hindi films are as thin as the stars of the American serial Friends. The taut Karisma Kapoor, Kajol, Rani Mukherjee, or Aishwarya Rai of the 1990s have replaced the most popular 1980s heroines like the curvy Sridevi, who fit an older standard of Hindi beauty. Indeed, when Madhuri Dixit, the top 1990s heroine,16 came on the scene in the mid-1980s, she was “summarily dismissed by both the audiences and the industry as being too thin” (as one celebratory fan retrospectively recalls [Raheja and Kothari 1996: 139]). By contrast, today’s fan magazines routinely praise heroines’ weight loss, indicating the rise of a new regime of female beauty. So, Filmfare praises one heroine for becoming “yummy-licious” after losing “oodles of weight” with a “Spartan diet and exercise program,” (Filmfare 2001a) and comments that “the world” is always interested in knowing how another heroine accomplished the “weight loss” that was newly apparent when she appeared at a film event (Filmfare 2001b). Fan magazines routinely question stars about the diet and exercise regimes that allow them to lose weight (Sai 2001a: 54), questions which support the “low calorie” drinks and other diet aids which the magazines advertise. In Chapter 3, I argued that affluent women now seek to meet these beauty standards, but some non-élite women may do so as well. Even non-élite women may be influenced by advertising in Hindi-language film fan magazines which now commonly advertise books that offer a “ladies slimming course” (English written in Hindi [devnagri script]).17 These Hindi-language film fan magazines, which aim at literate nonEnglish speakers, have a largely local allegiance. They only rarely carry advertisements for global products like Nike shoes, or that use foreign endorsers like Pete Sampras. The fact that the new standard of beauty is

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a foreign one is emphasized by the fact that advertisements encouraging “slimming” uses the English word transliterated into Hindi. But the fact that a focus on slimming has entered such locally-oriented magazines shows the widespread influence of the new standard of beauty. The new emphasis on transnational standards of female beauty has, of course, been partly driven by industries that want to instill consumer desires for everything from makeup and fashion to diet drinks and patronage of health clubs (Ghosh 1999a: 22; Munshi 2001c: 87). But the effects on women are particularly harmful. As elsewhere, some women who are influenced by the new standards often end up suffering from physical problems like bulimia and anorexia (Basu 1997: 2, cited by Parulekar n.d.). But perhaps more important, the emphasis on thinness as the new standard of female beauty intensifies the belief that women are vulnerable and depend on men for protection. A thin woman seems less able to fight off a brute than a more substantial woman. When one of Mohabbatein’s young heroines is thrown in a pool, her drenched thin body can be easily carried out by the young, buff hero. She looks embarrassed and vulnerable, but relieved that a hero was nearby to help her. Perhaps the thinness of the new heroines (coupled with the buffness of the new heroes) is one reason that the sometimes humorous scenes showing gender reversals in which women fight strongly, so common in earlier eras (Derné 2000a: 73–75), appear to have declined as a standard element of the masala film mix. Indian feminists’ longstanding protests against the objectification of women in the mass media (Gandhi and Shah 1992: 68–69, 75; Manushi 1981) have intensified in recent years, with protests against the staging of the Miss World contest in Bangalore being among the most visible (John 1998: 368–69), showing that many Indian women recognize how the new images of beauty harm women’s interests. The increasingly muscled and strong ideal male body further intensifies the focus on female vulnerability and the need to rely on male strength. In contrast to the muscular, lean gods of Western art, Hindu imagery has depicted “rounded masculine gods with incipient breasts (Kakar 1995, cited by Chodorow 1999: 119). Anuradha Kapur describes the characteristic iconography of Ram, the most-revered Hindu male deity, as “soft, smooth bodied” and “almost pudgy” (Kapur 1993: 75, cited by Jain 2001: 199). Ram in traditional iconography is “smiling . . ., benign, and above all gentle and tranquil” (ibid.) One artist for the respected Amar Chitra

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Katha mythological comic series said that a god’s body should be “gentle and beautiful. . . . There won’t be any muscles” (Jain 2001: 203). Through the 1980s, it was not uncommon for Hindi film heroes (for example, Rishi Kapoor and Shammi Kapoor) to fit this ideal. The “Five-YearPlan” hero was “generally” “smooth,” “fair,” and “romantic”, having more brains and heart than brawn” (ibid.: 214). One Tamil film hero recounts that he soon “realized that keeping a muscular body won’t be nice, particularly for a character like [the Hindu deity] Krishna. The body must look fine but not muscular” (ibid.: 203).18 Foreign movies and serials introduced a muscled look—notably through the films of Arnold Schwarzenegger—which has increasingly become the standard of male beauty. Contemporary analysts note that recent religious iconography now shows Ram as a muscularized God (Jain 2001, Kapur 1993; Pinney 1997, as cited by Jain 2001). The new ideal is clear throughout the Hindi film world. Film stars, fan magazines, and the popular Indian press all comment on the strong bodies of male actors. Since the early 1990s, fan magazines have included spreads featuring heroes’ new strong bodies (Jain 1991: 32; Movie Mag International 2001). The top hero, Salman Khan, is renowned for his broad chest, which is often featured in fan magazines. One recent issue of a Hindi-language fan magazine featured four articles on Salman that were illustrated with five photos of his shirtless chest (Muvi Chitrahaar 2001). Fan magazines praise heroes for their strength and height, for winning “muscle contests”, and for working out and dieting to achieve muscular bodies (D’Souza 2001: 16; Movie Mag International 2001: 46, 49). In fan magazines, heroes often comment that the need to develop muscular bodies results from new global standards. The hero Bobby Deol comments that while “in the past, it wasn’t a big thing,” “today physique plays a really important part in an actor’s career because audiences have changed” (quoted by D’Souza 2001: 15). Teenagers, whom Deol says “form the major chunk of the audience, are greatly influenced by the West and the West, as you know, has always been into fitness” (quoted by D’Souza 2001:15). Another hero comments that “15 years ago” heroes “went around with paunches,” but adds that “today if we don’t have cuts on our stomach people will spit on us” (Sai, 2001b: 32). Male filmgoers like the new muscled look (as they have since the early 1990s [Derné 2000a: 133]). Two of the men whom I interviewed said that Salman Khan was their favorite hero and mentioned his muscled

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body as a key attraction. When I asked a 20-year-old construction worker why Salman was his favorite hero, he replied that, “you’ve seen his bare body, haven’t you?” One 20-year-old student told me that he especially enjoyed looking at side heroes,19 who, he said, often have beautiful bodies, too. More than one-third of the men I interviewed who gave reasons for liking a particular hero focused on body, dancing skills, or fighting ability.20 More telling, men continue to enjoy watching their favorite heroes fight and dance on screen (Derné 2000a: 159–60). At screenings of CCCC, the male audience consistently responded with deafening whistles when Salman Khan first appeared on the screen in a raucous dance. At screenings of Officer, the mostly male audience drowned out the movie with screams and whistles whenever the hero engaged in a fight. Audience preferences and the film magazines’ focus on heroes as “hunks” (Movie Mag International 2001: 50) are incited by camera angles which make heroes the object of the gaze. While men exhibit “tobe-looked-at-ness”, it does not have the same debilitating effect as it does for women, since what men are exposing is male power (Derné 2000a: 161–64; Derné and Jadwin 2000). While wet saris and form-fitting clothes expose breasts and legs, men expose “biceps” and “muscles”, to cite the words often used in fan magazines (Derné 2000a: 163; Filmi Kaliyan 1991; Jain 1991: 32; Kalarikal 1992; Movie Mag International 2001: 50; Stardust 1991: 61). Heroes use these muscles to defeat villains—and, as I note below, to protect (and threaten) film heroines. Hindi-language fan magazine discourse about “muscles” most often transliterates the English word into Hindi (Derné 2000a; Jain 2001: 203). The Amar Chitra Katha artist who speaks about whether to draw muscles in gods uses the English word “muscles” in the midst of a Hindi conversation (Jain 2001: 203). The use of English highlights the foreign origin of the new standard of beauty. It shows, as Kajri Jain concludes, the “relatively recent entry of muscularity as we know it into discourses of the male body” (ibid.: 203).21 While the causes of men’s attachment to male violence is beyond the scope of this book, it’s worth noting that men are attracted cinematic emphasis on muscled male bodies, which has been at least partly brought about by cultural globalization. Men may focus on these new images precisely because it intensifies the cultural focus on male violence that makes women vulnerable and dependent on men. The ubiquitous fight scenes of heroes have more salience, now that they are more muscled.

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As in previous eras,22 today’s films (from CCCC and Mohabbatein to Officer) continue to show rapes and attempted rapes—and some filmmakers see cinematic rapes as essential to a film’s success (Khanzada 1991). While films criticize the villains who try to force the heroines to be their lovers, camera angles continue to position the male viewer to see the imprisoned heroine from the villain’s perspective. Hints of force continue even in the consenting relationships of the hero and the heroine (Derné 2000a: 150–54). Fan magazine discourses about muscled heroes’ violence heighten the connection between desirable masculinity and violence against women. Film fan magazines often repeated the tale of an irate Salman Khan storming the home of his then girlfriend, heroine Aishwarya Rai, and hurling assaults at her (Filmi Pariyan 2001; Vijayakar 2001b). Fan magazines repeatedly describe Salman Khan as successfully demanding that his then girlfriend (and also a top heroine) not work in films with other heroes (Filmi Pariyan 2001: 43). In an article praising Salman Khan’s emotional fidelity, the fan magazine Stardust admits that Salman may possess “the unforgiving quality of physically assaulting his women” (Varde 2001: 24). In another article, Stardust quotes a heroine who praises the hero Sanjay Dutt for protecting her by pushing away intruding paparazzi. According to the heroine, Sanjay Dutt acted as any “gentleman” would by “pushing away” someone who grabbed her arm—even though security guards were standing nearby (Samant 2001). The centrality of such stories in film magazine discourses highlights the centrality of the image of the muscled man who can use violence to either attack or protect women. This discourse, of course, highlights women’s vulnerability and reliance on male protection. It is difficult to know how much films and film culture push men to workout to develop muscles. Anand Patwardhan’s 1995 documentary film shows a young man who says that his bodybuilding was inspired by watching videocassettes of “Arnold’s movies.” Page and Crawley report that in one Maharashtra town, the “idolising of film stars” has led to a “new interest in physical development” which has generated a number of “health clubs and karate classes . . ., something quite new to the culture of the town” (Page and Crawley 2001: 161). As in earlier eras, in 2001 film magazines continue to advertise guns and other weapons, judo and karate lessons, and potions to increase men’s height and strength (Derné 2000a: 133n. 18). In 2001, 70 percent of the Hindi-language

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fan magazines that I examined included such advertising.23 In Dehra Dun in 2001, street hoardings advertised a “mega mass” supplement to help men build a “Hercules”-like body of muscles. While few, if any, of the men whom I interviewed showed signs of building such bodies, they, too, may be influenced by cinematic messages that heighten their association of maleness with strength. The new bodies intensify the association of men with activity and women with passivity, of men with aggression and of women with the need for protection.

Women’s Resistance to the Global Gender Order Indian feminist groups have, of course, long targeted media portrayals that use women’s sexuality as a commodity, suggesting the role that these portrayals play in maintaining male dominance. Even prior to globalization, protests of Hindi films and media advertisements were not uncommon (Derné 2000a: 150; Gandhi and Shah 1992: 68–75; Ghosh 1999a: 237; Manushi 1981). Such protests have continued as women’s groups have petitioned courts and regulators to halt “obscenity and vulgarity” in film songs which encourage “eve teasing” (sexual harassment) (Ghosh 1999a: 239). On International Women’s Day in 2001, Lucknow University students scraped vulgar movie posters from hostel walls, painting slogans supporting women’s empowerment. The women targeted the posters because they believed them to be a major source of sexual harassment24 charging that men passed “lewd remarks” “inspired by the posters” (The Times of India 2001). More and more, women direct their protests against depictions in the global media. In 1996, progressive Delhi women’s organizations filed writ petitions in court, charging that satellite and cable television companies violated federal law prohibiting the “indecent representation of women” (Oza 2001: 1072–73; see also Ghosh 1999a: 239 on other petitions). Women’s groups allied with the BJP made similar protests. Pramilla Nesargi, a BJP Member of Parliament (MP) affiliated with women’s groups, criticized the government for allowing MTV into India, claiming that the result had been a 100 percent increase in sex crimes as men who watched MTV committed rapes and murders. “No woman,” she said,

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“is safe in our India” as a consequence of foreign media. Due to foreign media, she asserts, “eve-teasing is happening every day” (quoted by Dalrymple 1998: 182). While some progressive women’s groups that protested India’s 1996 staging of the Miss World pageant focused on how the pageant encouraged the entry of multinational corporations into India (Oza 2001: 1079), they also critiqued the pageant as encouraging the commodification of women, promoting the “sex trade” (ibid.: 1081), and encouraging sexual harassment (Ghosh 1999a: 248). Progressive women’s organizations charged that it was harmful for Indians to be admired for hosting a show that they described as “almost pornographic” (Oza 2001: 1081). The women’s organizations allied with the BJP focused, of course, on how the pageant was a “show of obscenity” “against Indian culture” (ibid.: 1079). Pramilla Nesargi charged, for instance, that “when children see Miss World they will always be wanting to see all women in swimwear only” and there will consequently be a “100 percent increase in sex crime” (quoted by Dalrymple 1998: 182). Undoubtedly, sexual harassment and rape have long been one of the primary mechanisms of male dominance in India, but the widespread protest against the transnational media’s depiction of women by women activists from both ends of the political spectrum is nonetheless important evidence that suggests that cultural globalization often intensifies women’s oppression.

Conclusion Globalization has not changed structural realities in ways that improve women’s position: Job opportunities have not much expanded for nonélite women and men’s authority in the home remains the norm. Nonélite men whose limited economic opportunities prevent them from aspiring to celebrated cosmopolitan lifestyles by hitching their dreams to the global economy continue to emphasize male privilege as one of the few privileges available to them. As Appadurai argues, communities of men who feel embattled are often attracted to fantasies of male dominance that are prevalent in film industries (Appadurai 1996: 45). Films, Appadurai argues, “reflect and refine gendered violence at home and in the streets as young men (in particular) are swayed by the macho politics

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of self-assertion in contexts where they are frequently denied real agency” (Appadurai 1996: 45). Men are attracted to newly-available cosmopolitan celebrations of male power, privilege, and aggression precisely because they are consistent with the existing gender hierarchies. Men find the newly-available cultural meanings appealing because they can be layered on top of existing gender hierarchies. Dreaming of monopolizing transnational mobility that is newly valued in India gives men a fresh sense of their privilege as men. The seemingly realistic portrayals of male strength in cosmopolitan media heighten men’s attraction to the privileges that they already enjoy, while foreign pornography offers seemingly exciting new dimensions of male privilege. It is for these reasons that women on both ends of the political spectrum often protest cultural globalization. Transnational cultural flows sometimes depict new possibilities for women. But because these new possibilities are inconsistent with structural opportunities in non-élite families and with the interests of nonélite men, such men tend to resist the messages that celebrate new possibilities (Chapter 4). But cosmopolitan cultural flows also provide fresh celebrations of male dominance and aggression that non-élite men enthusiastically embrace, because these celebrations are consistent with existing interests and stable structural realities. Rather than destabilizing the existing order, then, cultural globalization often merely provides new cultural resources that already powerful people can use to further advance their own interests. As Connell argues, the “emerging global order” is not a “hotbed of gender progressivism” (Connell 1998: 17). Rather, by challenging men’s power, global forces often lead men to “reaffirm local gender orthodoxies and hierarchies” (ibid.: 17, emphasis in original). It appears as well that cultural globalization also gives men new ideas about how to act out oppressive gender hierarchies.

Notes 01. See film theorist Laura Mulvey’s 1975 [1988] classic account of the “gaze”. Here, I only discuss one aspect of the relatively complex gaze induced by Indian cinema. Films often continue to contrast traditionally Indian heroines who should be protected from the gaze with the more shameless Westernized women who are legitimately exposed to it. In addition, films also make male bodies the object of the gaze.

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02.

03.

04.

05.

06.

07.

Thus, Mulvey’s classic account perhaps focuses too exclusively on gender identity without recognizing the dynamics associated with national identity. In addition, she perhaps focuses too much on the unidirectional aspect of the gaze. Nonetheless, the cinematic encouragement of a controlling male gaze plays an important role in the maintenance of male dominance in India (Derné 2000a Chapters 7, 8; Derné and Jadwin 2000). In 1991, half of those who identified a favorite heroine were attracted to her dancing, body, or beauty. In 2001, about one-third of the men who identified a favorite heroine similarly mentioned a heroine’s beauty or body when explaining what makes them like their favorite heroines. In 2001, 21 men identified a favorite heroine (while 11 men would not name a favorite). Of these, seven men mentioned their attraction to their favorite’s dancing, body, or beauty. (On the 1991 data, see Derné 2000a: 148n. 3). Puri’s interviews with élite middle class women in Delhi show that the harassment that women face leads them to “distinguish between male roles as sexual aggressors and protectors” (Puri 1999: 85). Films are one of the cultural products that push men to take on these roles. Those familiar with Hindi films will recognize these as tropes that are so common that they hardly need documenting. Films that include honeymoons in Europe run from Chandni (1989) through Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001). Films that reference Indian men’s business or education in Europe or North America run from Ram Teri Ganga Maili (1985) and Maine Pyar Kiya (1989) through Dil To Pagal Hai (1997), Hum Aapke Dil Mein Rehte Hain (1999), and Chori Chori Chupke Chupke (2001), to name just a few. This focus on how viewers come to see cultural presentations become more real than actual social realities is, of course, emphasized by Baudrillard (1983) and other recent social theorists. He says, for instance, that he enjoys horror serials that he watches on cable television. His favorite Bollywood films are what he calls “suspense” films like Kasoor, Dar, Dhundh. One of his favorites—Kasoor—is one of the recent films I discuss as lacking a true hero. Sanjay’s favorite hero is Shah Rukh Khan—and he especially likes what he sees as the “negative role” that Shah Rukh played as a villain in Anjaam. Fewer men mention the ability to fight well as the reason they like particular heroes. Although love stories were the biggest successes in the film world at the time, 50 percent of the men whom I interviewed in 1991 identified excellent fighting as an important reason for liking particular films or particular heroes. In 2001, this percentage declined significantly—only one man mentioned the ability to fight as the reason a Hindi film hero was his favorite, and several others referred to their attraction to Salman Khan’s body, which is, of course, characterized by a powerful chest that allows him to beat up villains. It is possible that this percentage has declined precisely because of the new attraction to global heroes like Arnold Schwarzenegger: Those who prefer fighting and killing films may be more attracted to foreign films than to mainstream Hindi-film love stories, and, so, may be less likely to mention fighting-and-killing Hindi-film-heroes. But in one way the decline appears a bit anomalous because men continue to react enthusiastically in theatres when heroes beat up the villains.

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08. For the first time in 2002, a thriller which lacked a hero (Raaz) became a genuine success. The Indian media attributed the film’s success to the integration of hit music into the formula (Vijayakar 2002c). 09. An example of the low-budget Hollywood film playing to good audiences at Dehra Dun’s Krishna Palace was Yeh Kaisi Chahat (What Sort of Desire), a dubbed version of Sexual Intent, an English-language film. Many adolescent men attended, largely in the cheap seats, which were often more than half full. 10. About one-third of fan magazines include this advertising. Three of the 10 Hindilanguage fan magazines I systematically examined included such advertising, while two of the six English-language Hindi film fan magazines that I systematically examined included advertising for phone sex. One half-page ad in the Englishlanguage magazine Showtime (March 2001) promised, for instance, that “lonely”, “pretty girls” were “waiting for your call now”. On another line, the phone sex user could hear “secret confessions from naughty girls”. 11. Most of the unmarried men whom I interviewed in Banaras in 1986 and 1987 indicated that they knew little about sex (Derné 2000a: 144). “I have not married, so what can I say [about married life]?” one man asked me rhetorically. For other discussions of young men’s limited information about sex in previous decades, see also Kapur 1987; Sharma and Vanjani 1993: 36. 12. The scene was probably not intended to be provocative for Western audiences. But in the context of the expectation of a woman existing for a man’s pleasure, the audience enjoyed the titillation. 13. Women’s response to pornography is not unified. The affluent English-speaking Delhi women whom Puri (1999: 123–27) interviewed enjoy watching “blue” pictures on video and cable. Despite their pleasures, pornography may play a role in inciting men’s public sexual aggression that these women find threatening and injurious (Puri 1999: 75). 14. Liechty describes “tourists” as a “generic term used for Caucasian Westerners” (Liechty 2001: 46). 15. As Abraham notes, other studies showing the traumatic nature of women’s first experience of intercourse suggest that they “had not expected penetration as part of it” (Abraham 2001: 147, citing George 1997; see also Gandhi and Shah 1992: 62; Kapur 1987; Sharma and Vanjani 1993: 39, 58n. 20.). 16. On Madhuri‘s popularity in the 1990s, see Derné 2000a: 130n. 14 17. This ad, or a similar ad, appeared in the majority of Hindi-language film fan magazines that I examined (Chitralekha 2001, Filmi Pariyaan 2001, Rangbhumi April 2001). 18. Jain rightly sees the 1970s action film hero Amitabh Bachchan as a transitional figure. He is not the “soft, smooth hero of the Hindi cinema’s ‘social’ melodrama.” “Tall, angular, with a trademark deep voice,” Bachchan still “cannot be described as muscular” in the same way as the “muscle-bound, singlet-wearing, body-building film heroes of the post [economic] liberalisation period” (Jain 2001: 216, 220). 19. Side heroes refer to sidekicks and other associates of the featured hero. The names of the actors who play these “side heroes” are not usually known by filmgoing audiences. 20. Four men said that they liked their favorite heroes’ bodies. Four men said that they liked their favorite heroes’ dancing abilities. One man said that he liked his favorite

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21.

22.

23.

24.

hero’s fighting ability. Only 25 men gave a reason for liking a favorite hero. (Three men refused to name a favorite hero, saying that they liked American films. Three men said they liked all heroes and could not single out any one. Three men gave unclear reasoning when describing why a particular hero was their favorite. [For instance, one man replied, “What can I say?” when asked why he liked Akshay Kumar, who is, incidentally, famed for his muscled body]). Of course, male strength has long been emphasized—but the new body type is novel. Joseph Alter (1992: 57) shows, for instance, how wrestlers are at pains to distinguish their bulky bodies from the muscled bodies of body builders and Hindi film stars (see also Jain 2001: 206). As Jain shows, it is the wrestler image that has had the most influence on earlier images of male strength (for example, Hanuman) in religious iconography (Jain 2001: 206). See Derné 2000a: 151; Kakar 1989: 33. Dasgupta and Hegde’s (1988: 211–12) systematic sample of films from the 1970s and 1980s demonstrated that 70 percent of Hindi films show “mistreatment” of women, which includes sexual harassment, physical battery, assault, rape, and homicide (Dasgupta and Hegde 1998: 211–12). Seven of the 10 Hindi-language fan magazine issues that I systematically examined included such advertising. (Two of the magazines which did not have such advertising seemed to be mostly aimed at women.) By contrast, only one of the six Englishlanguage Hindi film fan magazines that I examined included such advertising (although another one of these had an advertisement for a fitness program for the over-35 male). The article refers to such harassment as “eve-teasing”, the Indo-English term which Puri (1999: 87) rightly argues is better characterized as “sexual aggression”.

7

Conclusion

Since 1991, India has experienced rapid globalization. With the opening up of the economy, transnational firms provided new opportunities, and more production was geared to the global market. For the first time, transnational consumer goods became widely available. As advertisers and the global media tried to reach new markets, the media landscape was radically transformed. Satellite television’s reach expanded exponentially and foreign films became widely available for the first time. While cultural globalization was largely driven by transnational agents, local Indians played a role as well. Local Indians set up the network of cable television operations; local theatre-owners chose to book foreign films; and local filmmakers and producers of television serials made indigenous products which were influenced by the newly-available transnational media. What have been the effects of globalization on the lives of common Indians? How has globalization shaped gender and class dynamics in India? What have we learned about the effects of globalization? How has our understanding of the effects of globalization improved our theoretical understanding of culture?

Globalizing Gender Culture Arjun Appadurai famously suggested that global movements of people and media allow people to imagine a wider range of possible lives than they ever did before (Appadurai 1996: 53). This book shows that a wide range of Indians are attracted to new consumer possibilities. But it turns out that for most ordinary Indian men, the exposure to alternative

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gender arrangements has often only been a source of anxiety. Unable to successfully aspire to the utopia of consumption celebrated in the global media, ordinary middle class men remain attached to gender hierarchy as one of the few privileges open to them. The global media’s celebration of alternatives only leads these men to reiterate their attachment to local gender arrangements. It appears, moreover, that this local celebration of an oppressive gender arrangement which is constructed as traditional is a common response to the new possibilities and anxieties created by globalization. Zimmer-Tamakoshi reports, for instance, that in Papua New Guinea, the “nationalist” men who identify with broader notions of nation and participate in a translocal economy “condemn women for striking out in modern directions . . . that many have permitted themselves” (ZimmerTamakoshi 1993: 61–62). Although they have embraced city living and participation in a wider economy, these men celebrate traditional Papuan women whom they construct as “chaste and selfless”, criticizing women who live in cities as “sexually promiscuous”, “Westernized”, and “living in selfish abundance” (ibid.: 1993: 61–62). Aihwa Ong similarly focuses on how overseas Chinese men handle the “anxiety engendered” by high divorce rates and the large number of women in the paid labor force by developing “twinned ideologies of feminine domesticity and masculine public life” (Ong 1999: 152). Overseas Chinese, lacking a territorially-based nationality, yet influenced by transnational media produced by ethnic Chinese, identify “family and female self sacrifice” as “symbols of national unity” (ibid.: 154, 162). Indian men in Fiji (who are the descendants of indentured laborers and make up more than 40 percent of the population) are attracted to the transnational media and Western culture and dream of lives abroad. But they are similarly uneasy about the effects of globalization on Indian gender arrangements and, therefore, focus on the perpetuation of these arrangements as an essential aspect of Indianness. Fiji Indian men, whom I interviewed in 1998 (see Derné 2002), also seem to associate their own Indianness with women’s adherence to oppressive gender roles. One 50year-old Fiji Indian told me, “If we have women’s rights [the woman] will be on top and the man will be on the bottom. [In] the Indian community the woman must obey her husband.” This man wanted male dominance and saw it as a distinctive trait of Indian culture. A joke published in Pacific Quest, a college yearbook of the Fiji Indian

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Students Association similarly associated excessive Westernization with a reversal of the usual gender hierarchy under the title “Declaration of Indepencence [sic].” The joke focuses on a couple who “emigrated to the United States”—a prime symbol of modernity. The joke continues that they emigrated: with one dream—to become citizens. [Through] much red tape and years of study they were patient and hopeful. Then one day the husband rushed into the kitchen with the long awaited good news, ‘Lizzy!’ he shouted. ‘At last we are Americans!’ ‘Fine,’ replied the wife, tying her apron around him. ‘Now you wash the dishes (see Derné 2002: 160).’

As in India, then, Fiji Indian men, wear Western clothes, watch Xena, and dream of living in the USA, but to remain Indian they focus on their attraction to traditionally modest women who faithfully meet religious and family duties. A man only abandons his fundamental Indianness if his wife makes him do the dishes. The last chapter suggests, moreover, that the messages from the transnational media that ordinary men embrace are those that can be layered on top of existing gender hierarchies. Men are not influenced by the transnational media’s depictions of women’s independence, but they enthusiastically enjoy transnational celebrations of male violence. Attracted to the idea of global movement, men focus on denying such movements to women. Some find new means of male dominance in newly available foreign pornography. Rather than destabilizing the existing order, cultural globalization usually ends up providing new cultural resources that already powerful men can use to further advance their own interests. This may be why so many women have protested globalization— they believe that gender images in the transnational media only further their oppression. Mark Liechty (2001) describes how women in Kathmandu, Nepal, believe that globalization harms women. One woman described how new ideologies of freedom of choice, which have been promoted by a new consumer culture, lead women to feel more unsafe on the street. One woman told Liechty (2001: 35) that she feels unsafe on the street because boys now think that they are “free” and, so, “think that to do anything is OK. That’s why the girls have to look out for ourselves.” For many women, the spread of global culture appears to be the spread of intensified male dominance.

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Rethinking Class Ethnographies of class identity in South Asia in the face of globalization suggest the need to rethink class in order to emphasize that it operates on a global field, is more and more rooted in consumption, and is associated with particular gender arrangements. Most theories of class followed Marx in focusing on a person’s position in a productive system. But my study, along with other recent ethnographic studies of class in South Asia (Liechty 2003; Dickey 2002; and Saavala 2001) and Southeast Asia (Chin 1998), suggests the importance of the Weberian focus on how class identity is made through cultural practices associated with consumption that middle classes use to define themselves in opposition to class others. This study compares India’s transnational middle class that aspires to lifestyles of the consuming classes in rich countries and a locallyoriented Indian middle class which is still limited by locally-oriented employment and which defines itself as distinctively Indian. Middle class efforts to define itself in opposition to class ‘others’ now takes place on a global field. Affluent Indians whose opportunities for consumption and employment are now shaped by global markets increasingly constitute a transnational middle class that holds the space between the poor in India and the consuming classes in North America and Europe. Because the locally-oriented middle class is still limited by local markets for consumption and employment, it focuses on a local field, defining itself in opposition to the affluent Indians who appear excessively influenced by foreign culture and poor Indians who live on day-to-day earnings. Middle class identity is more and more rooted in consumption. Certainly, the economic possibilities for consumption are rooted in employment, but the relation of middle class jobs to the production process is ambiguous. Uneasy about its status, middle class people use consumption to advertise taste and discernment. The transnational middle class embraces cosmopolitan fashion to identify itself with the consuming élites in the rich countries. The locally-oriented Indian middle class embraces cosmopolitan consumption like men’s fashion, and consumer goods like televisions, to distinguish itself from the Indian poor, but it identifies itself in opposition to the vulgar and excessive consumerism that it associates with affluent Indians, whom it connects with the intrusion of foreign cultures.

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Distinctive middle class identities are also increasingly rooted in gender arrangements. Transnational middle class Indians highlight their cosmopolitanism by embracing cosmopolitan gender arrangements that ease women’s restrictions outside the home, allowing women freedom of consumption. But locally-oriented middle class Indians bolster their Indian identity by rejecting cosmopolitan challenges to local gender arrangements. Many have protested cosmopolitan practices, such as Valentine’s Day celebrations and beauty pageants, which they associate with an unwanted foreign influence in India. The divergent cultural practices of the middle classes in India reflect divergent structural positions in the global economy. Affluent Indians have been influenced by transnational capitalists’ efforts to incite their consumption. Given new opportunities by globalization and reacting to new media, affluent Indians have come to see themselves as operating on a global stage. But since the lives of ordinary middle class Indians have not been greatly transformed, they continue to work to justify their status within Indian horizons. Chin’s (1998) ethnography of the Malaysian middle class, Dickey’s (2002) ethnography of the Tamil middle class, Saavala’s (2001) ethnography of the Telugu middle class, and Liechty’s (2003) ethnography of the Kathmandu middle class all demonstrate this focus on defining identity in opposition to class ‘others’ through consuming cosmopolitan goods and embracing certain gender arrangements. It is significant that this emerging rethinking of class analysis came out of ethnographic data which focuses on cultural meanings. None of these accounts appeared to be limited by theoretical assumptions rooted in traditional Marxist analysis. These accounts, along with my own, suggest that to understand class dynamics today, we must direct attention to global dynamics and the importance of constructing identity in opposition to class ‘others’ by advertising discernment through consumption and embracing particular gender relations.

Globalization on the Ground As markets opened up and transnational media celebrated consumer lifestyles, many Indians—of diverse classes—experienced a rising desire for consumer goods. But, generally, the effects of globalization have varied by class. Even when it came to consumerism, affluent Indians

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aspired to consumer durables, including automobiles, and wanted fashion produced by the transnational media. Ordinary middle class Indians aspired to new styles of fashion, but usually relied on local tailors to produce them. While ordinary middle class Indians might have aspired to some global products such as Pepsi, they generally lacked the means to pursue the utopia of consumption. Indeed, the effects of globalization are largely class-specific. While affluent Indians may be responding to globalization by altering their gender arrangements and embracing a more cosmopolitan identity, ordinary middle class Indian men respond by reemphasizing existing gender arrangements and re-highlighting their non-cosmopolitan, local Indian identity. The divergent effects of globalization on class lines is most clearly seen when it comes to transformations in gender and family. While Indians of diverse classes now see global media products, new celebrations of women’s independence and young couples’ independence from parents have affected affluent Indians’ imagination of gender and family, but have had much less effect on ordinary middle class Indians. For the affluent, challenges to arranged marriages and joint-family living introduced by the transnational media make sense because new institutional possibilities allow more young couples to support themselves. Given the new focus on consumption, affluent women now usually move freely outside the home to shop and pursue a fashionable appearance. Some affluent women work in the paid labor force when they have the skills to earn good incomes. But because their institutional possibilities have not greatly changed, ordinary men’s ideas about family have been unaffected by newly-available cable television and Hollywood movies (which they watch in large numbers). Similar percentages of ordinary Indian men want to have their marriages arranged by their parents and want women to toil exclusively within the home. The effect of globalization on identity is similarly class-specific. Some theorists have argued that with globalization, cosmopolitan identities are increasingly replacing identities rooted in class or nation. Affluent Indians with new opportunities that allow them to enter the utopia of consumption have, indeed, come to see themselves more in terms of cosmopolitan consumption. They now see themselves as having more in common with other global consumers around the world than they do with ordinary Indians.

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But ordinary middle class men whose opportunities for employment and consumption have not greatly changed continue to embrace a strong Indian identity. The celebration of consumerism that they cannot dream of reaching leads many men to find status, power, and privilege in existing gender arrangements that they see as distinctively Indian. For many ordinary men, globalization appears to introduce anxieties and threats that lead them to emphasize an Indian identity that is rooted in particular gender arrangements. This, of course, suggests that the effects of globalization vary by gender. Certainly, in affluent circles, new thinking about marriage, family, and gender arrangements appears to be affecting both men and women. But among ordinary middle class Indians, men are more in control of global possibilities. Ordinary middle class men have been able to embrace fashion and limited consumerism, while anxieties caused by globalization have led them to reemphasize existing gender arrangements that they see as distinctively Indian. Thus, women continue to wear local fashion to cinema halls, while men sport cosmopolitan fashions. Ordinary middle class women are more often on the receiving end of new global ideas. Men who watch foreign pornography and foreign action films bring new desires into the home that may intensify women’s subordination. Some men, indeed, try to keep women from watching the transnational media that they believe will encourage women’s independence. Especially in ordinary middle class circles, globalization may be increasing possibilities and opportunities for men, while intensifying the limitations that women face. Perhaps the most important contribution of this study is to suggest that the fundamental effects of globalization come more through the transformation of economic structures than from the introduction of new cultural possibilities. The Indian media had long highlighted the desirability of consumerism, but until the Indian economy opened up to cosmopolitan products, this media celebration had little effect on Indian desires. Only when globalization changed the structural possibilities did consumerism take root. The indigenous Indian media had long celebrated independence from family, but until economic globalization offered new possibilities for educated, English-speaking men with skills that were valued in the global economy, Indians tended to reject media celebration of independence as mere fantasy.

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While cultural globalization makes affluent Indians and ordinary middle class Indians aware of cosmopolitan family and gender arrangements, globalization’s transformation of the objective possibilities of affluent Indians is what has led the affluent to be influenced by new imaginations. Ordinary middle class Indians who lack new job prospects which would support independence from parents or new consumptive possibilities for women are not influenced by alternative gender arrangements. Affluent Indians and ordinary middle class Indians are exposed to celebrations of cosmopolitanism, but the new possibilities that economic globalization has made available to affluent Indians has led them to identify more with cosmopolitan consumers around the world, while ordinary middle class Indians, for whom cosmopolitan possibilities remain limited, continue to emphasize their Indian identity. Indeed, these identities reflect different structural positions in the economy: affluent Indians are situated in global employment markets, while ordinary middle class Indians remain limited to local employment markets. A locally-oriented class identity reflects ordinary middle class Indians’ objective situation, while a globally-oriented class identity reflects the objective location of affluent Indians. In short, the primary changes introduced by globalization follow not from cultural globalization—new media and ideas—but from economic globalization—the new products and employment opportunities that have flowed into India from abroad. The effect of purely cultural globalization—the flow of new media into India from abroad—has been limited. Indians have only accepted new imaginations introduced by cultural globalization when actual possibilities have changed in ways that make these new imaginations workable, or when the new imaginations can be layered on top of existing social arrangements.

Implications for Culture Theory Ordinary middle class Indians’ response to cultural globalization confirms much of what we know about the dynamics of media reception. As is well known, social location shapes media reception (Derné 2000a; Press 1991; Shively 1992). Thus, affluent Indians are more likely to be attracted to global celebrations of alternative gender arrangements and cosmopoli-

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tan identities than ordinary middle class Indians. The study similarly confirms that broadbased social discourses have an important effect on popular-culture reception (see Derné 2000a: 172–73; Press 1994; Shively 1992: 727; Walters 1995). Ordinary middle class Indian men are exposed to a wide range of discourses cautioning against love marriages and, therefore, tend to reject cinematic celebrations of love marriages. Moving in more cosmopolitan circles with access to more cosmopolitan media, affluent Indians are more likely to be attracted to celebrations of love matches. The study confirms that broad cultural judgments about the respectability of cultural products influence viewer reception (Ang 1985; Derné 2000a: 173; Press 1994). Foreign films’ male violence or sexual titillation may have more influence on ordinary middle class men because foreign films are more respected than the Hindi films which have long celebrated male violence and engaged in sexual titillation. But the primary contribution of this study is to emphasize that shared culture arises more from a shared structural situation than from shared cultural inculcation. Appadurai is wrong to suggest that because of transnational cultural flows, culture has become “less what Pierre Bourdieu would have called a habitus (a tacit realm of reproducible practices and dispositions) and more an arena for conscious choice, justification, and representation” (Appadurai 1996: 44). While cultural globalization made people aware of a “wider set of possible lives” (ibid.: 52), because the social structures most Indians faced remained relatively stable, most Indians did not consider experimenting with new lifestyles. The transformations in culture that have accompanied globalization have been driven more by altered structural possibilities than by new cultural imaginations. Chapter 2 reviews how recent social theory sees culture and structure as making each other up. For Shweder, “psyche and culture, person and context . . . live together, require each other, and dynamically, dialectically and jointly make each other up” (Shweder 1991: 73). Bourdieu (1992) sees structures as having a material existence that is also internalized in the thought and judgments of individuals. Giddens (1984) and Fligstein (2001) see cultural rules as making up social institutions. Collins’ (1981) insight that all social structures are made up of the actions of individuals is, of course, correct. But recent theories emphasizing how structure and culture make each other up have sidestepped the problem of assigning causal priority.

CONCLUSION 209

Ann Swidler (2001), and Claudia Strauss and Naomi Quinn (1997) are among those who have addressed the relative causal influence of culture (shared meanings) and structure (objective situations). While Strauss and Quinn (1997) argue that it is ideas about love that shape institutions of marriage, Swidler concludes that institutions of marriage create situations that generate ideas about love. Thus, for Swidler the social structure of marriage in the USA is what makes the idea of a lasting love for a special person plausible. It is not, Strauss and Quinn argue, that this idea of love structures the institution of marriage. For Swidler, Americans recognize that their cultural view of love as permanent and aimed at a special person “poorly describes the uncertainty, ambiguity and impermanence of their own experiences of love,” but they continually return to this cultural view because it fits with the strategies the Americans build around the institution of marriage, which is certain, unambiguous and lasting. This book supports Swidler’s conclusion that cultural “consistencies across individuals come less from common inculcation by cultural authorities than from the common dilemmas institutional life poses in a given society” (Swidler 2001: 176). Thus, the imaginative possibilities introduced by cultural globalization have not changed ordinary middle class Indian men’s orientation to consumerism, marriage and family. Ordinary middle class men watch global media celebrations of consumerism, but their economic opportunities have not changed in ways that support thoroughgoing consumer orientation. They watch the global media celebrating individualism but do not fully embrace individualism because it is inconsistent with their need for family support in the early years of adulthood. They watch media celebrations of cosmopolitanism, but because their lives remain restricted to local employment markets and local circles, their identity remains firmly Indian. They watch and enjoy media celebrations of love marriages, but reject these celebrations as unrealistic guides to action. Given their limited economic opportunities, they need family support to their marriages. The family structures that limit interactions between unmarried men and women similarly make celebrations of love as a basis of marriage seem impossible. Yet, ordinary middle class men are, in fact, attracted to new global celebrations of male dominance precisely because these new cultural meanings are consistent with their attachment to existing gender arrangements

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that they like. The fact that ordinary middle class men have not been influenced by new meanings that are inconsistent with existing structural realities highlights that the shared culture of ordinary middle class men comes more from shared institutional lives than from shared indoctrination by a common culture. Likewise, the changes that have been introduced by globalization come more from changed structural realities than from newly-available cultural resources. The global media certainly celebrates consumerism, but the opening of markets which brought new products to India has been more important in driving the growth of consumerism in Indian society. In earlier decades, Indian films celebrated cosmopolitan products, but because they were unavailable, this cultural highlighting did not give rise to consumerism in many Indians. Only today, with global products being widely available, has consumerism spread. Global media celebrations of consumerism have not had as big an effect on ordinary middle class Indians, whose opportunities have not greatly changed, as they have with regard to affluent Indians. The affluent Indians’ new opportunities for income—rather than new imaginations of consumption—have been the primary reason for their greater attraction to consumerism. Similarly, Indians with skills and connections that allow them to tie into global employment markets have embraced new gender arrangements more because of the opportunities brought about by economic globalization than the new imaginations tied to transnational media flows. Affluent Indians embrace women’s greater public role as consumers more because of new possibilities for consumption than because of new celebrations of women’s independence. Affluent Indians sometimes embrace women’s paid labor more because they have opportunities that can help usher in the utopia of consumption than because of global media presentations of women in the public sphere. Some affluent Indians embrace love marriages and nuclear-family living more because of new opportunities for economic independence than because of newly-available cultural imaginations. Hindi films have, of course, for years celebrated love marriages without causing many Indians to depart from arranged marriages. Affluent Indians come to embrace cosmopolitan identities over Indianness more because new opportunities actually locate them in the global arena than because of media celebrations of cosmopolitanism.

CONCLUSION 211

The local media have long celebrated consumerism, women’s independence, and love marriages. Only when their structural opportunities changed did affluent Indians embrace these possibilities. Ordinary middle class Indians are exposed to the same global celebrations of consumerism, women’s public freedoms, love marriages, and cosmopolitan identity. But because globalization has not changed ordinary middle class Indians’ structural realities, they have tended to reject the meanings of cultural globalization. The divergent cultural practices of ordinary middle class Indians and transnational middle class Indians reflect structural realities more than cultural choices. Affluent Indians, who are, in fact, situated on a global stage, constitute a transnational middle class oriented toward cosmopolitan consumption which locates itself between the Indian poor and the consuming classes in Europe and North America. Ordinary middle class Indians embrace Indianness and define themselves in opposition to both the Indian poor and affluent Indians precisely because their field of employment and consumption is, in fact, rooted in India. In that sense, class identity, too, is rooted more in structural realities than in cultural imaginations. A fit tends to develop between social structures, cultural orientations, and psychic tendencies. The divergent responses of ordinary middle class Indians and Indians with the skills and connections that have allowed them to hitch their dreams to the global economy highlight that structural realities are the cornerstone of this relationship and are fundamental in shaping cultural imaginations.

Epilogue The Effects of Economic and Cultural Changes, 2001–07

In the fall of 2007, as this book was going to press, I was in Dehra Dun doing interviews to understand Indians’ conceptions of wellbeing. These interviews were not aimed at replicating my 1991 and 2001 studies, but at the time of this writing, I had interviewed 17 men aged 18–26—a group that parallels the bulk of film-goers whom I had interviewed in 1991 and 2001. With the aim of reflecting on the changes since 2001, I also did at least one participant-observation session in five of the seven theatres operating in Dehra Dun in 2007. In this epilogue, I consider the ongoing impact of the economic and cultural changes in Dehra Dun. This consideration of subsequent changes and continuities, 2001–07 confirms the primary significance of structural factors in rooting culture, class, and gender. The largest structural change between 2001 and 2007 is the improving economic position of the local middle class in Dehra Dun. At the national level, India has experienced robust economic growth and a surging stock market. Credit, nearly impossible for the local middle class to obtain in 1991, has greatly expanded. At the local level, in 2001 Dehra Dun was made the (temporary) capital of the newly-formed state of Uttarakhand, introducing more economic prosperity and growth into the region. The effect of this economic growth has been to improve the situation of the local middle class. With credit available, the age of homeownership has declined from the higher 40s to the mid-30s (Pioneer 2007a), and purchases of motorcycles and even automobiles has

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entered the possibilities of the local middle class. Thus, local middle class people may feel increasingly secure. For instance, my Dehra Dun research assistant, now working for a satellite news channel, is comfortable with his position in the Indian economy. Of the men whom I interviewed who had jobs tied to the local economy, only one retired individual expressed a lack of wellbeing stemming from his economic position (and his discontent stemmed more, I think, from having gifted his wealth to an ungrateful family). But the position of the poor has not changed much. Citing government reports, Uttarakhand’s Chief Minister B.C. Khanduri (2007) says that for the bottom 30 percent of the population, there has been no perceptible improvement in cereal and nutrient intake in both urban and rural areas. The improvement of middle class status has reached relatively few. Only 14 percent of India’s population earns more than Rs 8,000 per month (Indian Express 2007a). Only 24 people in 1,000 have personal computers and fewer than three in 1,000 have a broadband connection (Newsweek 2007). Especially significant is that infrastructural improvements have not reached many poor and rural Indians: 40 percent of India’s population still lacks access to electricity (Indian Express 2007b: 1) and two-thirds still lack access to toilets (Aiyar 2007). It appears to me that one effect of the improving position of the local middle class in India has been an acceleration of the sidelining of the producing classes in the cultural imagination of India. With the improving condition of the local middle class, theatre prices continue to increase and mainstream, big-money Hindi films increasingly present the situation of the more affluent classes and aim at audiences of more affluent Indians, especially in the metropoles and the diaspora. In Dehra Dun, audiences arrive on motorcycles or cars to openings of big-budget films like Om Shanti Om, sometimes paying up to Rs 1,000 for a black market ticket. Students at prestigious academies, often arriving on motorcycles, are the main audiences for youth-oriented films such as Goal and Jab We Met. There is less and less in the Hindi film world for less affluent Indians: while the Orient theatre has reopened, it has not been very successful attracting audiences to its main fare of low-budget Hollywood films dubbed in Hindi or low-budget Hindi films. Kanak theatre, with a budget price of Rs 20, was most successful in attracting poor filmgoers by showing low-budget old-style masala films (for example, Jang) or

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revivals of Amitabh Bachchan classics (for example, Sholay). The Sunday afternoon all-male audience that I observed watching the low-budget Mithun-starrer Jang still escaped the realities of day-to-day life: laughing at humor, cheering at fights, whistling as the heroine was tied up, clapping as women beat up men and, as they were beaten up, laughing and talking at onscreen banter, especially as an onscreen speaker took someone else down—participation that I rarely observed at films catering to middle class Indians or aspiring students. Nonetheless, poor or laboring Indians are increasingly absent in theatres—both on and off the screen—especially at screenings of the most popular Bollywood films. Pankaj Mishra (2006: 175) rightly observes that “small town audiences with their cut-price tickets and queues of eager young fans don’t matter as much as they used to” now that “bit profits come from . . . multiplexes of the big cities . . . and the NRI circuit.” Previously, Hindi films had to appeal to a broad, diverse audience (see Derné 2000a: 45–49) and filmmakers tried to reach the “masses” and the “classes” simultaneously (Ghai 1991: 6). Today, films appeal to narrower segments, and the number of cinema halls is declining (Indian Express 2007c).1 The declining breadth of Bollywood films’ appeal means there is one less thing to integrate less affluent Indians into the broader culture. With the improving position of the local middle class, the producing classes are less apparent in Hindi films and in Hindi film audiences, accelerating their marginalization in the popular imagination, which I described in chapter 3. Nor has there been much improvement in the structural conditions that disadvantage women in India. Indian women’s participation in the labor force remains low at just 36 percent, compared to 84 percent of men. Thus, the World Economic Forum ranks India as one of the 10 worst countries in the world in terms of the gender gap in economic participation and opportunity (Ramasubbu 2007). A UN agency reports that 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—a problem that is worse in the urban areas (Pioneer 2007b). As a result, perhaps, I did not observe very much that suggested substantial changes in gender arrangements between 2001 and 2007. Systematic counts in markets showed roughly 10 times as many men as women in public places, and that roughly 10 times as many women

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wear saris and salwar-kameezes rather than jeans and pants (although jeans and pants are now prevalent at some cinema hall screenings). A local middle- and upper-middle class housewarming party I attended had an exclusively male guest list and was gender-segregated: women were inside the home, while men remained outside, eating snacks, in a tented enclosure—a space not one woman entered during my several hours there. I heard preachers in gurudwaras railing against “micro-minis” and jeans for young women. While there are many women in the balcony seats in cinema halls that screen movies aimed at attracting large numbers of dating couples (for example, Jab We Met) or attracting middle class audiences (for example, Om Shanti Om), cheaper seats are still overwhelmingly filled with men. While I observed more young couples dating in cinema halls, and two of the men whom I interviewed (as of this date) were in, or had been in, a dating relationship with a woman, more often young people were having their marriages arranged. The largely working class audience at the Kanak theatre still responded enthusiastically to male violence, whistling as a heroine was tied up, or clapping as women were slapped or a villain displayed a revealing photo that he was using to blackmail a woman. More than 150 cases of eveteasing—public sexual harassment of and threats to women—are reported each month in Dehra Dun, and few of the perpetrators are brought to justice (Shukla 2007). While all the 52 men—whom I approached in public places or workplaces—agreed to be interviewed, only nine of the 18 women I asked were willing to be interviewed, perhaps reflecting the continuing threat to their reputation that could arise from being seen with unrelated men, a lack of ease in interacting with unrelated men due to often segregated schools and workplaces, and/or the continuing pressure of women’s disproportionate housework responsibilities. Finally, perhaps because economic opportunities for children of the local middle class remain uncertain (even as the economic position of those with local middle class jobs improve), and because joint-family living remains common, the sociocentric cultural orientation that I described in chapter 2 appears firm. As of this date (25 November 2007), I have interviewed 17 men aged 18–26 years in connection with a study of Indian conceptions of wellbeing. Eleven of them were raised largely in families that included more than one couple of their parents’ generation, or older. Five men in this age group were laborers or in jobs below local middle class status (for example, jaggery-seller, cook). While the other

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12 men in this age group were of local middle class background, a large number were students who had not yet themselves obtained middle class jobs. Perhaps because of their common joint-family background and the continued existence of economic insecurity, all but two of these men expressed views consistent with a cultural focus on group over individual that I described in chapter 2.2 Thus, a 19-year-old male Punjabi student, living in Dehra Dun for his studies, speaks English well, sports cosmopolitan fashion, and rides a motorcycle. Although embracing a consumer lifestyle, his discussion of wellbeing shows a strong sociocentric focus on others: when I asked him his purpose in life, he described his motto as to “enjoy living for others. Even while you do your own work, the taste in doing another person’s work is the best taste.” Snapping his fingers, he described how he immediately helps out his friends, even if they called him at 2 am. Growing up in a joint family that included his parents and his grandparents, and describing his family as facing economic insecurity despite his prosperity, this young man was living with the family and economic structures that support a sociocentric cultural focus, a connection I described in chapter 2. A 21-year-old working in Dehra Dun as a news reporter and pursuing a college degree, hails from a large family that he describes as fully joint. While he takes pride in his news reporting—and especially aims to combat premodern superstitions—his main purpose, he says, is to always help others: “I should never do any work that causes unhappiness to anyone. Any work I do should be selfless. I am not concerned about my own happiness. But whatever I am doing must deliver happiness to the person standing next to me.” An 18-year-old Scheduled Caste student from a large joint family with 30 members has come to Dehra Dun to study. While he describes the recognition of his personal academic achievement at an assembly as a source of wellbeing, his main cultural orientation is clearly sociocentric: when I ask him about his aim in life, he says that it would be easy to “enjoy the money sent by the parents, to be self-centered, and think about myself. But real happiness lies in fulfilling the dreams of my parents.” An 18-year-old who sells jaggery outside a theatre came to Dehra Dun at the age of 13, having only passed the 5th standard. His orientation to wellbeing also focuses on society rather than the self. When I ask him what wellbeing means, he says that he is only happy if everyone is

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happy. “When people talk well to each other, I gain happiness,” he says. He describes the festival period as good for sales, but still connects his happiness during this period to the joys of others: “A festival is associated with being happy with each other and greeting the customers with cheer. This leads me to experience happiness.” A 22-year-old student, in Dehra Dun for studies, lives in such a large joint family that he has to pause to count its members on his fingers. He describes watching Bollywood films as his hobby, yet doesn’t focus on individualistic joys, saying that “the meaning of wellbeing for me is to see my parents happy and make them happy because they’ve done a lot of things for me until now.” Continuities in structures of family living and economic opportunity militate against fundamental change in the sociocentric orientation I described in chapter 2. The Hindustan Times calls Dehra Dun one of India’s “new boom towns” (Parashar 2007). The seat of the state capital and possessing élite educational institutions, Dehra Dun has experienced more economic prosperity than other cities, rising with India’s economic growth. Still, even in this city, placed well to benefit from globalization and India’s economic growth, there are nonetheless significant continuities in the cultural orientation and gender culture of the young laborers and local middle class men whom I interviewed in the fall of 2007—continuities rooted in persistent economic and family structures that include gender arrangements that disadvantage women. This consideration of changes in Dehra Dun (2001–07) confirms this book’s focus on how changes only follow from globalization if social structures are transformed. The improving structural position of the local middle class has accelerated the cultural sidelining of the producing classes described in chapter 3, while perhaps decreasing some of the tension in local middle class men described in chapter 4. But the main feature I observed in 2007 was cultural continuity rooted in persistent structural realities. Thus, women’s limited economic opportunities, coupled with the static condition of the poor and the continuing economic uncertainty of the children of the local middle class, contribute to men’s embrace of a culture of male dominance despite contrary messages in the global media. Moreover, as long as economic opportunities remain limited and joint-family structures remain solid, the cultural orientation of most Indian men remains sociocentric, despite new media that celebrate individualism.

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Notes 01. While the number of cinema halls in Dehra Dun was stable between 1991 and 2007, the population has grown from about 2,00,000 to about 6,00,000 (Parashar 2007). 02. The two who did not express a sociocentric orientation also didn’t express a clear individualistic orientation. The interviews were not designed to capture the person’s cultural orientation.

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Index

A films. See Pornographic films Abraham, Leena, 29, 66, 135–37, 158–59n4, 159n5, 185, 187–88 Advertising, 33, 38, 39, 93, 102, 104–06, 185 and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 and consumerism, 27, 105–06, 115, 165 and fashion, 105–06, 115 and female beauty, 102, 189–90 and male violence, 193–94 and movement, 124n10 Advertisements in fan magazines, 100, 124n10, 125n13, 140, 193–94, 198n10, 199n23 Advice columns in fan magazines, 138, 159n9 Affect. See Emotion Affluent in India. See Élites in India Age of respondents, 37 Alley McBeal, 103, 115 Attitudes toward, 115 Alter, Joseph, 199n21 Amar Chitra Katha, 190–92 Angry Young Man Hero, 94, 98, 180 Anxieties: about arranged marriages, 138–39 about economy, 66 about globalization, 69–70, 148–49, 157–58, 200–02 about joint-family living, 139

about perceived changes in gender arrangements, 69–70, 73, 148–49, 152–58, 200–02 Appadurai, Arjun, 11, 17, 19–21, 26, 29, 195–96, 200, 208 Arranged marriages and collectivist framework for understanding action, 80 and male dominance, 69 as institution or social structure, 62, 63 attitudes toward, 9, 66–68, 72–76, 86, 111–12, 134–36, 138, 153 class and, 66–68 heroines preference for, 147–48 in fan magazines, 138 perceived threat from media, 153 prevalence of, 111–12 See also Love marriages BBC, 32 Bachchan, Amitabh, 94, 96, 142, 149, 198n18 Bajaj, 31, 39, 104–05 Banaras, 7–8 Bangalore, 65, 153 Barbie Dolls, 7, 9, 25, 96 Baudrillard, Jean, 25–26, 197n5 Beauty Transnational standards of, 103–05, 111, 113, 175, 188–94 Cosmetics, etc., 101–02, 111, 189–90

INDEX

See also Bodies, Heroes, Heroines, Fashion Beauty Pageants, 93, 103–04, 153–54, 160n16, 188 Bellah, Robert, 75, 77 Benetton, 7, 44, 100 Berreman, Gerald D., 42 Beynon, John, 26, 27 Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), 10, 34, 153, 154, 161n24, 194–95 Bijapurkar, Rama, 104 Bodies, 101–02, 175, 188–94 changes in ideal male body, 190–94 changes in ideal female body, 101–02, 104, 188–90 of wrestlers, 199n21 thin female body and women’s vulnerability, 190 strong male body and male dominance, 190–94 working out, dieting, etc., 101–02, 111, 188–90. See also gaze, Sexy scenes Bold and the Beautiful, 33, 113, 140, 153 Broacha, Cyrus, 112 Bourdieu, Pierre, 17, 61, 81, 208 Butcher, Melissa, 112, 138, 152 CNN 7, 21 Cable Television See Satellite Television Capitalism, 24–25, 27, 31–32, 88n3, 99, 105–06, 118 See also Multinational Corporations Carey, Mariah, 8, 189 Caste, 78 Castells, Manuel, 23–24 Chakraborty, Mithun, 53n3, 124n7, 132, 184 Chan, Jackie, 53n7, 182 Chandni, 53n2 Channel V, 10, 34, 114, 128, 153 Chaudhury, Mahima, 146 Chayadeep, 97

233

Chori Chori Chupke Chupke [CCCC], 53n2, 56n32, 95, 97, 107–10, 125n12, 125n21, 127, 132, 134, 139, 141–42, 144–45, 169, 177–78, 180–81, 186, 188 Chin, Chrisine, 102, 109, 126–27n28, 204 China, 201 Cinema halls, 47 Class, 38–47, 90–158, 203–04, 212–14 and family, 66–68 and film preferences, 50, 55n27 in films, 93–97 and globalization, 16, 18, 25–26, 28, 64–66, 90–123, 203–04, 207–08 in India, 34, 38–47 defined by consumption, 18, 92–99, 99–105, 119–20, 123, 203–04 defined transnationally, 18, 97–99, 120–23, 203–04 defined by gender, 18, 105–113, 120–23, 127–29, 133–39, 203–04 defined by media, 123 defined by structural position, 122, 128–29, 203–04 locals’ understandings of, 44–46 of respondents, 43–47 sidelining of poor in popular imagination, 38–40, 81, 92–97, 213–14 theories of, 18, 118–24 See Transnational Middle Class, Locally-oriented Middle Class Clifford, James, 24 Clinton, Bill, 24 Clothes. See Fashion Coca Cola, 31, 165 Collectivism and emotions, 81–84 and family structure, 79–80 in Indian culture, 9, 74–76, 163, 169–70, 215–17 ongoing importance of, 169–70, 215–17 rejection of, 76–78

234 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

Collectivist Framework for Understanding Action. See Collectivism Collins, Randall, 61, 208 Condoms, 39 Conference on South Asia, 9 Congress Party, 34, 161n24 See also Gandhi, Rajiv; Rao, P.V. Narasimha; Nehru, Jawharlal Consumerism, 10, 16, 25–27, 99–109, 165 and class, 151–52 and gender, 100–11, 120–21 and globalization, 17, 25–27, 97–109, 118–19, 123–24 and identity, 25–27, 29, 91, 99–109, 119–20 in India today, 92–93, 99–109 economic changes and, 115–16, 118 capitalism and, 21, 24–27, 31–33, 100, 118–19 media and, 91, 93–97, 99–109, 119, 140–41, 145–48 Consumption. See Consumerism Content Analysis, 36 Connell, R.W., 26, 196 Cosmopolitan, 90 Crawley, William, 103, 104, 111, 115, 116, 135, 193 Culture, 58–59, 70–80 and globalization, 17, 20–21, 25–27, 32–35 and individual actions, 71 and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 as inconsistent and divided, 70–71, 73 aspects of, 71–72 causal effects of, 58–59, 80, 87–88, 115–16, 158, 162, 171 defined, 70–71 interests and, 72–74, 76 relation to psyche and social structure, 17, 58–59, 61–62, 78–84, 87–88, 208–09, 211 sidelining of poor in popular imagination, 38–40, 81, 92–97, 213–14 theories of, 58–62, 70–72, 207–11

See Popular Culture Cultural Globalization, 17, 20–21, 25–27, 32–35, 87, 115–16 Limited effect of, 134–38, 158, 162, 171, 206–11 Cultural Repertoire, 71 DKNY, 140 Das, Gurcharan, 15 Dating, 9, 111 Class and, 66–68, 125n23 Dehra Dun advertisements for beauty aids, 102, 111, 194 boutiques in, 111 cinema halls in, 8, 47, 218n1 compared with other Indian cities, 50–51 filmgoing in, 47 globalization and, 8–9, 16, 48–50 Hollywood films playing in, 48, 56n32 in 2007, 212–17 interviews in, 36–37, 46–47 participant observation in, 36 Satellite TV in, 49–50 Deol, Bobby, 191 Devgan, Ajay, 164 Dickey, Sara, 45, 204 Dieting, 101–02 Dil To Pagal Hai, 95, 99, 106–08, 110, 125n12, 132, 133, 143–44, 150, 176 Dilwale Dulhania Le Jayenge [DDLJ], 52n1, 125n11, 145–46, 159n10, 170 Directors. See Filmmakers Doordarshan, 32, 49, 115 Dixit, Madhuri, 95, 106, 108, 143–44, 150, 160n19, 176, 189 Dunkerley, David, 26, 27 Durkheim, Emile, 71, 79 Dutt, Sanjay, 148, 193 Dwyer, Rachel, 95 Economic Liberalization, 7–8, 15–16, 30–32, 38–40, 48, 54n16, 64–66, 115–16, 118

INDEX

Economy defined, 60 in India, 15–16, 30–32, 39–46, 64–70, 115–16 Egocentric orientation. See individualism Élites in India, 38–42, 44 Bias in research, 38–43 Cultural emphasis on, 38–42 Globalization effect on, 65 Status as dependent on Indian poor, 41–42, 68 See Transnational Middle Class. See also Class Emotions, 81–87 attitudes toward, 72–74 relations to culture and social structure, 17, 81–87 theoretical approaches to, 81–82 See also fear, love, love marriages English Language and effects of globalization, 64–65 and transnational middle class, 90–91, 97, 115 and methodological bias, 42–43 competence in, 40–41, 44–45, 97, 54n18 Enloe, Cynthia, 29, 181 Ethnography. See Participant Observation, Methodology European Union (EU), 21 Eve teasing. See Sexual Harassment Extended Family. See Joint Famiy Exposure, 148–51 Family duty: as connected to women’s modesty, 154 as symbolized by women’s rejection of cosmopolitan fashion, 154 attitudes toward, 134–38, 141–48, 154, 169–70 in Hindi film, 141–48 See also Collectivism Family, 64–70, 72–74, 78–88 and emotions, 81–88 and frameworks for understanding action, 78–80

235

anxieties about, 138–39 as social structure, 138 changes in, 111–13, 120–22 alternative approaches to, 74, 78–80, 116–17 defined, 60 See also Joint Families, Arranged Marriages, Love Marriages Fan magazines, 36, 138, 140, 147–48, 190–93 Fashion, 10, 39, 91, 95, 99–108, 111, 113, 115, 127, 140–141, 146, 151–52, 160n20, 161n21 and class, 151–52 and gender, 206 protests against, 153 See also Consumerism, Modesty, Heroines Fashion Television, 128 Father, Son, Holy War, 182–83 Fear in Ifaluk culture, 81 in Indian culture, 81–84 Featherstone, Mike, 27 Female Identity, 104 Femininity Transnational standards of, 104–05 See also Female Identity, 178–79 Feminist opposition to films Fernandes, Leela, 92–93, 99, 54n16, 124n3 Fieldwork. See Participant Observation Fiji, 201–02 Film. See Hindi film Film magazines. See Fan magazines Film reviews Filmi Kaliyan Fire, 10 Filmgoing, 130–33, 136–37, 140–41, 163–64, 177–78 Filmmakers, 113, 146–48 “First languages”, 75–76 Five-Year Plan Hero, 94, 98, 180 Fligstein, Neil, 61 Frameworks for Understanding Action, 71–72, 74–78

236 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

And family structure, 79–80 Friends, 101, 189 Gandhi, Mohandas K., 31 Gandhi, Rajiv, 15, 31, 54n16 Gaze, 177–78, 196–97n1 Gender, 66–68, 173–96, 200–02 and alternative approaches to family, 74, 77–80 and class, 66–68 and consumerism, 91, 95, 100–11, 120–21 and frameworks for understanding action, 78–80 and Hindi filmgoing, 131–32, 136 and Indian Identity, 127–29, 133–39, 149–52, 160n16, 160n17 and mobility, 28–29 and male dominance in the home, 66–68, 136–38 anxieties about equality of, 69–70, 73, 200–02 arrangements, 17–18 as defined by mobility and lack of mobility, 173–74, 180–81 as focus of anxieties about globalization, 152–55 changes in, 105–13 changing presentation of in Hindi film, 100–02, 106–11 construction of in Hindi film, 175–79 continuities in, 129–30, 134–39, 152–55, 214–15 globalization and, 17–18, 20–21, 26, 28–29, 68–70, 91, 104–05, 120–22, 123–24, 152–55, 173–96, 200–02, 205–06 media and, 91, 99–110, 173–96 perceived threat to arrangements from media, 152–53 pornography and construction of, 29, 174, 185–88 See also Bodies, Women, Restrictions on Women’s Movement’s, Female Identity, Femininity, Gender Culture Male Dominance, Male

Identity, Masculinity, Violence against Women, Housewifization Gender Culture, 18, 72–74 See also Gender Geertz, Clifford, 71 Ghosh, Shohini, 125n22 Giddens, Anthony, 61, 88n2, 208 Globalization and class, 18, 25–26, 28, 64–65, 90–158, 203–05, 207–08 and consumerism, 17, 25–27, 97–109, 118–19, 123–24, 165, 204–06 and culture, 17, 20–21, 25–27, 32–35, and gender, 17–18, 20–21, 26, 28–29, 68–70, 104–05, 120–21, 180–96, 200–02, 206 and identity, 25–26, 29, 67, 103–06, 205–06 and individualism, 104, 162–71 and intensification of male dominance, 173–75, 180–96 and mass media, 20–21 and new meanings, 162–71, 173–75, 180–96, 202 and power, 28 anxieties about, 69–70, 89n5, 129 anxieties about effects on male dominance, 69–70, 128 anxieties about threat to Indian culture, 152–54 aspects of, 17, 19–24 causes of, 24–25 defined, 19–24 effects of, 7–8, 17, 25–29, 34–35, 97–109, 118–19, 123–24, 162, 180–96, 203–11, 217 in Banaras, 7–8 in Dehra Dun, 8–9, 16, 48–50, 212–15, 217 in India, 15–16, 30–35, 48–50 limited effect of, 134–38 local influences on, 27–28, 33–34, 113–14, 123 resistance to, 10, 34, 128, 130, 152–55, 161n24, 194–95

INDEX

structural changes caused by, 165 theories of, 10, 19–30 See also Cultural Globalization, Economic Liberalization, Satellite Television Goal, 213 Godzilla, 49 Gore, Neelam, 186 Group Guidance. See collectivism Gupta, Akhil, 53n11 Gupta, Dipankar, 39, 41–42, 44, 55n21, 55n24, 66, 68, 92 Gupta, Nilanjana, 114 Harassment of Women. See Sexual Harassment Harvey, David, 23 Hebdige, Dick, 26 Heinz, 27, 119 Held, David, 19, 22–23 Heroes and male strength, 127, 184, 199n21 Angry Young Man Hero, 94, 98, 180 as balancing modernity and family duty, 141–42 as balancing modernity and Indianness, 141–42 as balancing modernity and sober sexuality, 141–42 attraction to bodies of, 164, 191–92, 198–99n20 attraction to fashion of, 165 attraction to fighting of, 197n7 attraction to self sacrifice of, 146 attraction to special qualities of, 164 attraction to respect for family duty of, 142, 145–48, 169 bodies of, 190–94 changes in, 93–95, 190–94 fans’ favorites, 142, 164, 197n7 Five-Year Plan Heroes, 94, 98, 180 Transnational Heroes, 180–81 Heroines, and consumerism, 106–08

237

and preference for arranged marriages, 147–48 and preference for male priority, 147–48 and preference for male protection, 148 as balancing Indianness and modernity, 141–48 as balancing modernity and family duty, 141–48 as committed to modesty, 149–50 as objects of gaze, 177–78 attraction to balance of Indianness and modernity, 144–45 attraction to bodies of, 133, 197n2 attraction to beauty of, 133, 177, 197n2 attraction to dancing of, 133, 177, 197n2 attraction to modesty of, 148–51 attraction to self sacrifice of, 137–38 attraction to respect for family duty, 137–38, 144–48, 150–51, 169 bodies of, 188–90 changes in, 101–02, 188–90 fans’ favorites, 109, 133, 137–38, 177, 197n2 See also Bodies Hey Ram, 10 Hindi film as addressing anxieties about family life, 67, 138–39, 147–48 as addressing anxieties about arranged marriages, 138–39, 147–48 as addressing anxieties about globalization, 140–51 as addressing anxieties about joint-family life, 139 as balancing modernity with attachment to family duties, 140–48 as combining consumerism with attachment to family duties, 145–48, 169–70 as escape from day-to-day realities, 131–33

238 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

and alternative approaches to family, 74, 116–17 and association of élite with transnational movement, 91, 123 and construction of sexuality, 186 and idealized bodies, 188–94 and imagination of class, 91, 123 and consumerism, 94–97, 99–109, 145–48, 164 and fashion, 95, 99–109, 127, 140–47, 164 and gender, 173–81 and imagination of élite life, 91, 95–98, 115 and Indian identity, 130, 133–39, 149–52 and individualism, 77, 116–17, 132, 163–64 and male dominance, 135–38, 175–82, 184–85, 188–96 and male violence, 174, 184–85, 191–96 and sexual harassment, 176, 177, 215, 199n22 and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 and Valentine’s Day, 153 and women’s independence, 74 attitudes toward, 9–10, 152 attraction to cosmopolitan lifestyles in, 140 attraction to family duty in, 141–48, 150–51, 169 attraction to fighting and killing in, 110, 131–32, 124n7 attraction to men’s homosociality in, 136–37 attraction to reversals in, 131–33 attraction to rebellions in, 132–33 attraction to sexy songs in, 132–33 audiences, 46, 66, 131, 136, 161n21 images of women in, 100–02, 142–48 changes in, 9–10, 32–34, 38–39, 93–97, 99–102, 106–10, 113, 133, 188–94, 213–14

continuities in, 34, 129–51, 163–64, 173, 175–79 love stories in, 131, 142–48 modesty in, 100–02, 106–09, 148–51 method of content analysis of, 36 protests against, 161n22, 193 See also Filmgoing, Heroes, Heroines Hindi film magazines. See Fan magazines Hit Man, 182–83 Hollywood films attitudes toward, 9–10, 16, 48–50, 57n37, 164–65 and intensification of male violence, 174, 182–84, 195–96 class of viewers, 50 defined, 53n7 growth of, 7–8, 15–16, 20–21, 33–35, 48–50, 56n32, 56n34, 56n35, 57n30 Homosociality, 136–37 Honda, 31 Honor, 72–74 Housewifization, 105–09, 121 Housework, 9, 67 Hum Aapke Hain Kaun! (HAHK), 94–95, 124n4, 150n1, 170 Hum Saath Saath Hain, 110, 127–28, 169 Hyderabad, 45, 65 Iconography, 190–91 Identity, 25–26, 29 See also Locally-Oriented Middle Class, Transnational Middle Class, Female Identity, Male Identity, Consumerism and Identity Ifaluk, 81–82 India Today, 36, 38, 39, 97, 104–05 Indian film. See Hindi film Indian film industry. See Hindi film industry Indian identity and beauty pageants, 103–04 and gender, 127–30, 133–39, 141–52 and family duty, 141–52, 160n16, 160n17

INDEX

and Transnational Middle Class, 97–99, 120–22 and Locally-Oriented Middle Class and women’s adherence to restrictive gender roles, 148–52 Indianness. See Indian identity Individualism among Indian women, 78–80 among lower caste people, 78 and family structure, 79–80 globalization and, 162–71 growth of, 104, 162–71 in Indian culture, 76–78, 116–17 in American culture, 75, 77 media and, 104, 162–71 Institutions. See Social Structure International Monetary Fund (IMF), 15, 21, 31 Interviews, 11, 16, 36–38, 212 respondents’ characteristics, 37, 46–47, 56n28, 56n29 Jackson, Michael, 8 Jain, Kajri, 192, 198n18, 199n21 John, Mary, 39, 102, 103–06 Joint families and collectivist framework for understanding action, 80 and emotions, 81–87 and male dominance, 68–69 anxieties about, 139 attitudes toward, 9, 66–69, 73–74, 80–87 class and, 66–68 prevalence of, 66–68, 112, 126n25 Jab We Met, 213 Jang, 213–14 Jurassic Park, 33, 49 Kaho Na Pyar Hai, 48, 52n1, 95, 99, 110, 125n11, 127, 132, 134 Kajol, 101, 137, 150, 189 Kakar, Sudhir, 77 Kanak (Dehra Dun), 213 Kanpur, 10, 153 Kasoor, 184

239

Kathmandu. See Nepal Kaun Banega Crorepati, 34, 114 Kapoor, Karisma, 95, 100, 101, 106, 108, 110, 143, 146, 150, 189 Kapur, Anuradha, 190–91 Kentucky Fried Chicken, 31, 154 Khan, Salman, 107, 149, 152, 164, 191–93 Khan, Shah Rukh, 95, 106, 134, 142–44, 146, 149–50 Khanduri, B.C., 213 Khilani, Sunil, 169–70 Koirala, Manisha, 147–48 Kournikova, Anna, 8, 189 Krishna, 191 Kuch Kuch Hota Hai, 110, 142, 146, 170 Krishna Palace (Dehra Dun), 198n9 Kumar, Dilip, 142 Lamb, Sarah, 79 Languages, 75–78 See also Collectivism, Culture, Individualism, “First Languages”, “Second Languages”, English Language Lewinsky, Monica, 24 Liberalization. See Economic Liberalization Liechty, Mark, 25–26, 29, 55n26, 105, 119–24, 156–57, 186–87, 202 LiPuma, Edward, 37 Locally-Oriented Middle Class, 18, 43–46, 65–68, 122, 127–71, 203–04 as defined by consumption, 155–57, 203–04 as defined by gender arrangements, 127–30, 133–52, 155–58, 203–04 as defined by Indianness, 129–30, 133–51, 156, 157, 203–06 as defined on global scale, 155–57, 203–04 And consumerism, 145–48 Structural position of, 129–31, 155, 157

240 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

Love in India, 72–74, 82–87, 106, 110–11 in USA, 209 Love marriages attitudes toward, 66–68, 72–75, 86, 111–12, 128–29, 134–36, 166–69 growth of, 111–12, 125n23, 125n24 in Hindi film, 110–11 institutional possibility, 63–64 Lutz, Catherine, 81 MTV, 7, 10, 21, 34, 112–14, 128, 153, 194–95 MacKinnon, Catharine, 185–86 Macho Man, 183 Madison, Wisconsin, 9 Madonna, 8, 26, 101 Madurai, 45 Magazines. See Fan Magazines Maine Pyar Kiya, 53n2, 94, 125n12, 132, 143, 186 Malaysia, 102, 109, 126–27n28, 204 Male dominance and joint-family living, 68–69 and ideal male and female bodies, 188–94 and Indian identity, 135–39 construction of in Hindi film, 175–82, 184–85, 188–96 globalization as threatening, 68–70 globalization and new methods of, 173–96 men’s attachment to, 9, 68–70, 137–39, 148–49, 152–58, 173–74 the gaze and, 177–78 See also Gender, Sexuality, Rape, Sexual harassment; Male Violence Male gaze. See gaze Male violence Attraction to in media, 174, 182–85 Media and, 188–96 Manchester United Football, 26 Mangeshkar, Lata, 179 Mankekar, Purnima, 99, 138, 145, 152–54, 160n17, 165, 179–81

Marriage. See Arranged marriages; Family relationships; Love marriages, Joint families Marx, Karl, 118–19, 203 Masala Film, 110 Massey, Doreen, 28 Mathews, Gordon, 26, 29, 103 Mauj-Masti, 130–31, 159n6 Media and construction of class, 91 and constructions of gender, 99–110, 174–94 and consumerism, 91, 99–109, 118–19, 145–48 and globalization, 20–21 and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 protests against, 153–54, 194–95 See also Hindi film, Television, Satellite Television Methodology, 11–12, 16, 35–48, 50–51 Middle Class, 25–26, 29, 38–47, 90–158, 203–04 Discourses about, 38–42 Bias in Research, 38–43 Multiple middle classes, 122, 203–04 See also Class, Locally-oriented Middle Class, Transnational Middle Class Mies, Maria, 105, 121 Mills, C. Wright, 71 Mishra, Pankaj, 214 Miss World Pageant, 93, 153–55, 159n24, 190, 194–95 Mission Impossible, 2, 49, 152 Mobility and class, 91, 97–98 and gender, 29, 173–74, 180–81 and globalization, 19–27 as male privilege, 173–74, 180–81 global media and, 91 Mohabbatein, 48, 96, 101, 110, 134, 149–50, 160n18, 176, 178–79, 190 Modesty in Hindi film, 100–02, 106–09, 148–51, 160n18 Morley, David, 28–29

INDEX

Movie Houses. See Cinema Halls Mukherjee, Rani, 101–02, 107, 144–46, 189 Multinational Corporations, 21, 24–27, 31–33, 118 Mulvey, Laura, 196–97n1 Munshi, Shoma, 40, 54n15, 102, 103, 105–06, 111, 126n26, 146, 160n16 Murdoch, Rupert, 32, 113 Nandy, Ashis, 183 National Basketball Association, 25, 127 National identity, 25–29 See also Indian identity Nehru, Jawaharlal, 15, 31 Nepal, 25, 29, 119, 156–57, 186–87, 202 Nesargi, Pramilla, 194–95 Nike, 44, 45, 103, 140, 165, 189 Non-resident Indians (NRI) Hindi films about, 20, 29, 95, 98, 145–47, 180–81 North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), 21 Nuclear families growth of, 112 Officer, 131–32, 136, 177–78 Om Shanti Om, 213 Ong, Ahiwa, 201 Orient Theatre (Dehra Dun), 47, 96, 213 Overseas Chinese, 201 Oza, Rupal, 93, 154–55 Page, David, 103, 104, 111, 115, 116, 135, 193 Papua New Guinea, 201 Parameswaran, Radhika, 178 Pardes, 52n1, 125n11, 146 Participant Observation, 36–37 Parulekar, Susan, 102, 105, 111 Patwardhan, Anand, 182–83, 193 Pepsi, 31, 103, 143 Pizza Hut, 31, 44, 45, 154–55 Popular Culture reception of, 27–28, 116, 133, 207–11

241

Pornography, 29, 165, 185–88 and construction of sexuality, 185–88 and objectification of women, 174, 185–88 audiences for, 185 reception of, 185–88, 198n13 Prabhat, Dehra Dun Pretty Woman, 33 Producers. See Filmmakers Psyche, 80–87 Puri, Jyoti, 40–41, 112, 125–26n24, 177, 197n3 Prem Qaidi, 150 Psyche, 58–59 See emotions, love, love marriages Protests against fashion, 153 against globalization, 10, 34, 111–12, 128, 130, 152–55, 161n24, 194–95 against Hindi Film, 194, 161n22 against media, 152–54, 194–95 against Satellite, TV, 152–154, 194–95 against objectification of women, 190, 194–95 Quinn, Naomi, 59, 209 Ram Teri Ganga Maili, 94, 99–100, 106, 125n12, 143 Rai, Aishwarya, 137, 149, 189, 193 Raja Hindustani, 146 Ram, 190–91 Ramayana, 7 Rao, P.V. Narasimha, 15 Rape: and male protection in film, 178–79 in film, 193 perceived connection to global media, 152, 194 perceived connection to cosmopolitan fashion, 153 See also Male Violence Ray, Lisa, 184 Reagan, Ronald, 31 Reception, 27–28, 116, 133, 207–11

242 GLOBALIZATION ON THE GROUND

Reebok, 8, 140 Religion of respondents, 37, 54n13 Religious Iconography, 190–91 Representativeness, 37–38, 43, 47, 50–51, 53n12 Research Assistants, 42–43, 54n20, 55n22, 55n23 Respondents. See Interviews Restrictions on women’s movements attitudes toward, 9, 66–68, 73, 136–38 changes in, 112–13, 126n26 class and, 66–68, 112–13, 126n26 in Hindi-film world, 147–48 Richards, Michael, 26 Romance. See Love; Love Stories Romance Novels, 40–41, 74 Roshan, Hrithik, 90, 95, 127, 164 STAR TV, 12, 32, 34, 113 Sampras, Pete, 8, 100, 189 Santa Barbara, 27 Saavala, Minna, 47, 204 Satellite Television and fashion, 100, 113–14, 140–41 and gender, 115 and imagination of class, 91, 123 and intensification of male violence, 182–84, 195–96 and local operators, 33, 53n8, 53n9, 113–14 and new standards of beauty, 188–89 and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 attitudes toward, 9, 16, 34–35, 116, 152–53 growth of, 7, 15, 20–21, 32–35, 49–50, 57n39 perceived threat to Indian culture, 153 reception of, 116 resistance to, 152–54, 194–95 Savage, Randy, 183 Schwarzenegger, Arnold, 48, 127, 182, 191, 193 Second Languages, 76–78, 116–17, 163 See Languages

Sen, Sushmita, 148 Sewell, William, 61, 88n Sexual Harassment films’ role in prompting, 176, 177–78, 199n22, 215 prevalence of, 177, 215 Sexuality, 198n11, 198n15 Hindi films and construction of, 185 pornography and construction of, 185–88 Sharma, Miriam, 42 Sharma, Satya, 31, 54n15, 125n23, 126n26 Shetty, Shamita, 101–02, 149–50 Shetty, Shilpa, 147 Shroff, Jackie, 90 Shurmer-Smith, Pamela, 41–42, 44, 54n18, 54n19, 96, 111–12 Shweder, Richard, 58, 208 Sklair, Leslie, 25, 27, 100, 118–19 Social Films, 94–95, 127–28 Social Structure, 58–70 and class, 122 and changing gender arrangements, 114–18 and constraint, 63 and consumerism, 99, 114–18 and globalization, 165 causal effects of, 58–59, 115–16, 118, 158, 206–12, 217 defined, 59–60 interests and, 68–70, 84–87, 138 micro-level interactions and, 61, 68–70 relation to culture and psyche, 17, 61–62, 78–81, 84–88, 208–09, 211 theories of, 59–63 Sociocentric Orientation. See Collectivism Spears, Britney, 25 Spillman, Lynn, 62 Sridevi, 101, 189 Srivastava, Sanjay, 94, 166, 179 Stardust, 38, 97, 140, 148, 149, 193 Strauss, Claudia, 59, 209 Structure. See Social Structure

INDEX

Sunder, Nandini, 111 Swidler, Ann, 58–59, 209 Talent shows, 112 Technology, 24 Television, 7, 8, 27, 53n6, 57n38 See also Satellite Television and normalization of élite experience, 38–40, 81, 92–97 and consumerism, 118–19 Textual analysis. See Content analysis Theatre. See Cinema halls Ticket Prices, 47 Thackeray, Bal, 10, 24, 161n24 Thums Up, 31, 103 Times of India, 38 Tinseltown, 140 Tradition, 72–75 Transnational Capitalist Class, 118–19, 121 Transnational Heroes, 180–81 Transnational Middle Class, 18, 90–123, 203–04 and consumerism, 92–93, 99–109, 119–20, 203–04 and fashion, 91, 100–09, 111 and English language, 91, 115 and gender arrangements, 91, 109–13, 120–22, 203–04 and pursuit of beautiful bodies, 102–04 and structural position, 122, 203–04 transnational situation, 18, 97–99, 120–22, 203–04 Uberoi, J.P.S., 111 Uberoi, Patricia, 94–95, 145–46

243

Valentine’s Day, 10, 34, 111–12, 153–55, 161n24 Vamp decline of in Hindi film, 106–08, 113, 125n22 Vertical Limit, 48 Violence against women. See Male violence, Rape Voice, men’s and women’s in Hindi film, 179 Voyeurism. See Gaze Weber, Max, 18, 62, 119, 88n3 Westoxicated, 55n24 Who Wants to be a Millionaire, 34 Women. See Gender, Housewifization, Male dominance, Male Violence, Sexual harassment, Restrictions on Women’s Movements World Trade Organization (WTO), 21, 154 World Wrestling Federation, 182–84 Wrestlers, Indian, 199n21 X-rated films. See Pornographic Films Xena, 10 Yeh Kaisi Chahat, 48, 198n9 Zahareela, 96, 131–32, 178, 184, 53n3, 124n7 Zee TV, 32, 35, 112, 113–14, 152 Zimmer-Tamakoshi, Laura, 201 Zinta, Priety, 107–09, 144–45

About the Author

Steve Derné is Professor of Sociology at SUNY-Geneseo. His Culture in Action (1995) explores the interconnections between cultural orientations, family structures, and emotions in North India. His Movies, Masculinity and Modernity: An Ethnography of Men’s Filmgoing in India (2000) considers how film viewing shapes family, emotion, sexuality, and male dominance. He has just begun a study of conceptions of well being in India. He is the winner of the 1991 Stirling Award for outstanding paper in psychological anthropology. He is the winner of a 2004 Chancellor’s Award for Scholarly and Creative Activity. He has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Rockefeller Foundation, the U.S. Department of Education, the Fulbright Program, and the American Institute of Indian Studies.