Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational ClassAppropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a “global Indianness” by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of “Indian” norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and the “good” Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it means to be Indian. Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India’s high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though, global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family. |
Contents
Introduction On Background | 1 |
1 Privilege Situating Indias Transnational Class | 25 |
2 GlobalIndian Cultural Politics in the IT Workplace | 53 |
3 Merit Ideologies of Achievement in the KnowledgeEconomy | 87 |
4 Individuals Narratives of Embedded Selves | 115 |
5 Family Gendered Balance and the Everyday Production of the Nation | 145 |
6 Religion When the Private Is Transnational | 173 |
Conclusion Apolitical Politics | 199 |
Notes | 207 |
Bibliography | 215 |
| 227 | |
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Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class Smitha Radhakrishnan No preview available - 2011 |
Common terms and phrases
Aarti American apartheid appropriate difference articulated background Bangalore become beliefs belonging to India call center workers career caste context corporate cross-cultural cultural streamlining Devika discourses Durban elite employees empowerment engineers everyday experience explained feel firm gendered global economy Hindu Hindu nationalism Hinduism husband important India Shining India's transnational class Indian culture Indian family Indian IT professionals Indian women Inditech individual industry Infosys Infoworld kind knowledge economy lifestyle lives Malini Mamta marriage married ment merit meritocracy middle-class mobility moral move multinational Mumbai narrative nation norms parents political position practices privilege produce profes professional IT women professional women Raneshni religious respectable femininity role sector sense Shilpa Shubha Silicon Valley sionals Sneha social South Africa South African Indians specific sphere story symbolic symbolic capital things tion transnational Indian understand United values woman women I interviewed workplace