‘Globalizing the Local and Localizing the Global’: An Analysis of Transformations in India
BY BHAVANI ARABANDI
India has gone through many transformations since its independence from British colonization in 1947. Significant among them has been a change in economic policies. Initially, India promoted a mixed economy: an uneasy combination of Soviet-styled socialism and Gandhi’s dream of self-sufficiency. Nascent industries were protected by the state, and foreign competition was limited through the imposition of high tariffs on imports. However, when threatened by a debt crisis in the early 1990s, a changed political leadership opened India’s borders to multinational corporations seeking investment opportunities. Liberalization and privatization of the economy ushered in globalization that enabled a growth in opportunity structures, especially for the middle and upper middle classes, who, with their English education and technical skills, were able to find employment opportunities.
In most Western nations, the middle class developed as an aspect of the industrial revolution. In India, however, the modern middle class is largely a British construction. As part of the colonization of India, the British sought to create an educated class of people comparable to the English middle class, capable of assisting in the administration of the country. As Misra has argued, “…[the] ideas and institutions of a middle-class social order were imported into India. They did not grow from within. They were implanted in the country without a comparable development in its economy and social institutions.”1
In contemporary India, once again the impetus for the growth and expansion of the new middle class came from the state’s liberalization program. This new middle class is rapidly increasing in size, participating in the global consumer culture, and adopting “Westernization” with seeming ease. No longer can middle-class identity be constructed solely in economic terms, but now includes occupation and lifestyle choices. According to Lakha, lifestyle choices, English education, and consumption of “high-status global commodities” differentiates this new middle class not only from the old middle class but also from the lower classes and the rural middle class in India today.2 Consistent with these changes, India seems poised to move from the stability associated with the traditional caste system to mobility within a class system, as globalization and the consumer culture appear to be reorganizing caste, class, and status systems in both urban and rural areas in India.
A related arena of observable transformation is in gender identities. With the shift toward nuclear families, increasingly educated middle- and upper-middle-class women are found participating in the economy in ways that lead to their growing economic independence and involvement in family decision making.3 Interestingly, while these changes have not led to an overt challenge of dominant patriarchal norms, the “…‘New Indian Woman’ has, at the very least, strategized and negotiated [emphasis in original] her position to a more comfortable one within the dominant structure.”4 But this has also had implications for increased consumerism as the extra income brought in by working women is used to purchase items such as household appliances that promise to free them from the drudgery of housework. Further, other aspects of this “Westernization and modernization” are new views of women’s bodies, which now are being sculpted to reflect global beauty standards, as opposed to those of traditional India that favored full-figured women.
The context of globalization, thus, has not been free of ambiguities and contradictions. While there is euphoria in the popular press about the increased employment opportunities and choices of consumer goods and services in the market, the benefits seem to accrue primarily to the upper castes that dominate the middle and upper middle classes. The lower castes that disproportionately form the lower classes continue to be “underprivileged” with the shift from a “subsistence economy to a diversified and commercialized one.”5 Only a very small section of the Indian population can take advantage of this with their education and class positions. In the cultural context “…the preference [is] for local television programmes with modern themes rather than wholesale acceptance of foreign programmes…[and] the fusion of Indian fashion with Western fashion in women’s clothing,”6 among other things, which articulates modernization without compromising the unique Indian identity. Further, there are indications that Indian nationalists are uncomfortable with the idea of globalization and seek to reassert a national Indian identity. And finally, there is the inclination for the middle class to be engaged in caste and religious discussions that are all a part of the larger Indian identity.
Clearly, this means that globalization in India is not an exclusively top-down process. While Indians participate in the globalizing economy, they also “localize the global” in the choices they make. Thus, there is a transformation taking place in India, one that, remarkably, is “globalizing the local, and localizing the global.”
Bhavani Arabandi is adjunct professor in George Mason’s Department of Sociology and Anthropology (http://anthropology.gmu.edu/) and a doctoral candidate in sociology at the University of Virginia. Her research interests focus on globalization, the middle class, consumerism, and development.
- Misra, B. B. 1961. The Indian middle classes: Their growth in modern times. London: Oxford University Press:11. [↩]
- Lakha, Salim. 1999. The state, globalisation and Indian middle-class identity. In Michael Pinches (ed) Culture and privilege in capitalist Asia. New York: Routledge. [↩]
- Venkatesh, Alladi. 1994b. Gender identity in the Indian context: A sociocultural construction of the female consumer in Janeen A. Costa (ed) Gender issues and consumer behavior. Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications. [↩]
- Munshi, Shoma. 1998. Wife/mother/daughter-in-law: Multiple avatars of homemaker in 1990s Indian advertising. Media, Society and Culture, 20: 587 [↩]
- Banerjee, Nirmala. 2002. Between the devil and the deep sea: Shrinking options for women in contemporary India in Karin Kapa dia (ed) The violence of development: The politics of identity, gender and social inequalities in India. New York: Zed Books: 59. [↩]
- Ibid. supra note 2 [↩]
