Abstract
Until the late 1990s, Hindi cinema predominantly represented the non-resident Indian (NRI) as a challenging figure, sometimes shady, always ambivalent and dangerously unfaithful towards the Indian motherland and values. Films like Purab Aur Pachhim (East and West, 1970, dir. Manoj Kumar) narrated stories of cultural amnesia and loss of values; we see Indians who have become ‘Westerners’, entangled in corruption and vulgarity, at discomfort with their inherited ‘Indianness’. Several ‘conversion’ scenes depict how the hero, a young patriotic man by the name of Bharat (India), leaves his motherland India with a bleeding heart, to study, in order to improve his country’s fate and uplift it from the stigma of backwardness. He softly convinces the ‘lost souls’ to ‘return’ to their ‘roots’ and mother-culture. Although this is an example of extreme forms of both auto-Orientalism and Occidentalism and the polemical, if not even racist, polarisation thereof, the fact that Indians with more than two ‘homes’ and ‘home-countries’, with a substantial exposure towards globalisation, demands of the world market and Western education have not always been recognised as important pillars of India’s progress, is a key backdrop to the book reviewed here.
With economic liberalisation, and what is often referred to as ‘India shining’, the figure of the NRI metamorphosed into a cultural ambassador and catalyst of ‘new’ India’s growing power, visibility and respect in ‘First World’ countries. The IT professional became the archetype of this success story, clad in a halo of confidence like our film hero Bharat and yet, equipped with different tools and competencies, aspirations and anxieties. The new Indian ‘flexible citizen’ (Ong 1999) reminds us of another classic film hero Raj Kapoor’s vagabond in the blockbuster Shree 420 (1955), who on the way into the big city, which was then the world, sings of his Japanese shoes, English trousers, but an Indian (Hindustani) heart.
Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class is a very relevant study of interest to scholars and students from across the Humanities. Based on more than 130 qualitative interviews and three years of research in India and the USA, the book, appropriately filled with examples of the rich empirical material, revolves around the multi-sitedness of transnational identities and their accompanying bundle of often mind-blowing possibilities for code-switching or the shaping and grooming of identities. Sociologist Smitha Radhakrishnan has collated qualitative data and analyses from three sites: India (Bangalore and Mumbai), South Africa (Durban, from earlier research) and the USA (Silicon Valley). There is not much left of the romantic and ‘lost’ souls featured in the films of early pre-Independence India as she tells stories of highly confident and privileged Indians in their 20s and 30s. Their lives are certainly nomadic but not comparable with the simple vagabond of the 1950s, or the cultural missionary of the 1970s in the films mentioned earlier. Her informants are ambitious IT professionals, ‘transnational knowledge workers’ who have been crucial for the shaping of the image of ‘global Indianness’. Radhakrishnan sees them engaged in what she calls ‘cultural streamlining’, that is, the transformation of ‘diverse practices constituting “Indian culture” into appropriate difference—a generic, transferable set of “Indian” cultural norms that are palatable to Western cosmopolitan culture’ (pp. 3–4). The ‘suitable’ difference mentioned is particularly relevant as it enables the use of codes, narratives and performances of self-distinction and conspicuous consumption in order to powerfully assert the agents’ place in a field of discourse. Radhakrishnan explores her informants in different contexts and layers through which she turns the portraits of transnationals into a thick description of contemporary India, here and abroad: the definition of privilege (Chapter 1), the cultural politics in the workplace (Chapter 2), the idea of merit as ideology of achievement (Chapter 3), narratives of individuality (Chapter 4), family and nationality (Chapter 5) and private religion (Chapter 6). She taps into a rich, increasingly popular and yet still fairly under-researched field of South Asian transnational mobility and identity, globality and locality, cosmopolitanism and nationhood. Moreover, gender and work, consumption and lifestyle feature centrally in the worlds of those economically and physically mobile individuals. All of these throw up important challenges for social and cultural studies: can we still afford to talk of contained, or container cultures when a certain ‘class’ of people has access to and can select from geographically and culturally multiple roots, loyalties and aspirations? How do we challenge our own, often still highly Eurocentric concepts (and the methods that come along), such as, ‘indigeneity’, ‘authenticity’ or ‘origin’, when identities are increasingly transcultural? According to Radhakrishnan, class is a means of increasing and legitimising mobility, and her informants are particularly careful to preserve, improve or defend their position on top of the ladder of the educated and privileged middle class. Their way of constructing a notion of global Indianness is exactly that: a means of distinction at a time when (English) education and knowledge economy seem to be the key to success, mobility and lifestyle. Gender plays a crucial role in this book since Radhakrishnan considers professional women as key bearers of cultural innovations of IT professionals and ‘authentically Indian’ culture, as transformers or stabilisers of social norms. Thus, to Radhakrishnan, the (female) IT professionals create and reshape the contours of Indian culture for a new generation (p. 12), depending on where and how they are emplaced and moving. She points out that ‘Indianness’ shapes up differently according to the place and the symbolic capital through which it is constituted, and that there are quite substantial differences when South Africa, the USA or India are considered. Besides, she argues, the state of being transnational should be seen as an additional ‘location’, as a connection and relationship between different places that must not only be compared but seen in its translocal complexity.
Radhakrishnan defines her key concept, ‘cultural streamlining’, of which ‘Indian culture’ is an intrinsic part, as ‘the process of simplifying a dizzying diversity of cultural practices into a stable, transferable, modular set of norms and beliefs that can move quickly and easily through space’ (p. 21). I wonder whether it always works in such a linear, static and seemingly uniform way. Globalisation and agency ethnographies have shown that diversification of cultural processes happens when concepts and people move transnationally and transculturally, and that it is the multi-sited entanglements and shifts, not ‘essences’, that could matter for a better understanding of ‘glocalisation’. Simultaneously, the book reveals a remarkably strong resistance to defining alternatives to ‘Indianness’. Despite the ‘cultural innovations’ that Radhakrishnan sees generated by India’s transnational class and IT professionals, they seem to remain surprisingly conservative and consider themselves as a self-orientalising and highly gendered moral community. So underlining the extreme mobility, efficiency and privilege, the transnational is an avatar of ‘provincialised’ cosmopolitanism. And behind the veil of safety and confidence lies a darker space of high risk and uncertainty. It is these different qualities of negotiation that make Appropriately Indian a useful reading and an example of self-critical and innovative thinking and research.