Abstract
Widely reported incidents of sexual violence in Delhi and Mumbai, with subsequent orientalizing debates in Western media, heightens the need for a more detailed understanding of transforming gendered expectations in India. Belliappa’s book is an excellent contribution, problematizing India’s economic growth through the lens of gender and class, and building a case for how modernity is differently experienced in this context. The book highlights the contradictory consequences of modernity as a Eurocentric project that has been interrogated by both post-colonial and feminist scholars.
Belliappa focuses on Giddens’ ‘reflexive modernity’; a concept describing processes of individualization but not delineating how individuals actually manage those processes, nor how they are appropriated in lived reality, for example, by middle-class women working in India’s IT sector. This is the setting for Belliappa’s research that illustrates how reflexive modernity can be qualitatively different from that described by Giddens. In post-colonial spaces, modernity is inflected with contradictions of history, cultural encounter and inequalities, from which point reflexivity can simply highlight the lack of choice for women, or the ambivalent and evolving nature of some choices. The uncomplicated argument that modernity erodes tradition, enabling women to participate in self-actualization, can simply mask the ways in which ‘traditions’ such as respectability can be re-appropriated.
Such cultural discourses can exert pressure on individuals who can also resist and subvert them as Belliappa’s in-depth narrative analysis demonstrates through illustrating the complex relationships women maintain: the re-versioning of extended families, and challenging discourses of hierarchy and motherhood (although none of her participants apparently saw motherhood as optional). Her participants’ professional and personal identities were not always in conflict, with individual subjectivity rarely separated from that of the family. For example, some women chose to treat their in-laws with deference even though their salary maintained the household, weighing up these actions with the necessity to sustain good relations that enabled them to continue to work outside the home. Belliappa defines this as ‘relational reflexivity’ (p. 88), the ability to construct a sense of self in light of the relationship between self and others.
This idea of relational reflexivity moves social theory beyond simple equations of modernity with individualism, and tradition with collective obligations, for just as tradition is not uniformly oppressive, choice does not automatically lead to increased empowerment or independence. The IT sector is often celebrated for offering women more opportunities but there is also a reality that most work in back room or administrative functions, in more insecure roles, and that flexible human resources management still results in stress as women struggle to balance work and family. Belliappa’s participants are subject to the same managerial surveillance and pressures to succeed. This is where similarities in the experience of modernity are evident, as women in the global labour force struggle with frustration and guilt. One strategy adopted by the women in Belliappa’s study to manage these tensions is to rework the idea of what constitutes individuality through establishing obligations with other family members such as in-laws and parents. This reciprocity was required in the home in order for individuality to be expressed in the workplace. In this sense, ‘the vocabulary of individual choice and responsibility’ (p. 158) was also at times used to describe collective obligations.
More could be made in the book of these spatial practices, where the different roles expected of women are performed. There is also room to consider how the experience of the ambiguous public space between work and home impacts on both the desire for individuality and for protection within tradition (Shilpa Phadke’s work on loitering would be useful in this context). The global care chain is only referred to in passing, notably that many middle class women rely on working class labour (domestic help) to be able to manage the contradictions between home and work. However, the focus on the middle class is a welcome addition. This cohort has too often been referred to in homogenous terms and more ethnographic work like this is needed. The book highlights not only their financial but cultural diversity, taking into account the role of access to resources necessary for reflexive identity re-evaluation. Belliappa, in this instance, makes a clear distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ middle classes, and provides an analysis ‘which distances itself from both self-recrimination and self-congratulation’ (p. 10). Overall, this well-written and engaging book makes a strong contribution to the ‘decolonisation’ of social theory in Belliappa’s call for specificity, its description of the lived experiences of women in historical and cultural context, and its focus on their practices of negotiation and capacities to make sense of processes of cultural change.