Book review: Shannon Philip. 2022. Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities,Gender Relations and Violence in the Postcolony

With Becoming Young Men in a New India, Shannon Philip has written an ethnographic masterpiece that marks a definite turn in the study of contemporary South Asian masculinities. Rooted in the pioneering work of Sanjay Srivastava and others, the field has traditionally approached its subject(s) from the margins, understanding masculinity by examining the boundaries of what it means and feels like being a man. Consequently, we came to understand South Asian men by looking at gay movements, at queer love, at practices and identities that defy conventional gender norms—and looked back at these convention from the outside. This literature has achieved a first very important milestone: to conceive of men and masculinity as cultural constructs, as experiences and performances of gender, worthy of study in their own right, rather than treating them as quasi- biological defaults against which women and female realities are to be measured. It demonstrated how history, class, caste, and popular culture shape men and (re)produce masculinity, and in the process destabilised unhelpful gender binaries. However, much like understanding the nation exclusively by studying its borderlands, this well-established approach has its limits. For one, it tends to miss the plentiful cultural production, aesthetic specificity and structural reproduction that happens in the centre. It also tends to omit and disparage the voices of those who identify with—or, in their experience, ‘naturally’ find themselves located in—this centre.

Shannon Philip overcomes these shortcomings by ethnographically re-centring the experience, voice, practices, and ideas of heterosexual, urban ‘middle class’ and upper caste Hindu men in Delhi: it arguably does not get more empirically or normatively ‘mainstream’ than that. These are men who uphold and reproduce patriarchy, value ‘traditional’ gender assumptions and performances, reworked for neoliberal, even ‘woke’ times and weave them into their practices of ‘roaming, grooming and protecting’ (p. 10). They abhor queerness, aspire to become male breadwinners, with a job, a girlfriend, ultimately a wife and a clear place in a rapidly changing ‘new India’. By re-centring these men and their gendered performances, as well as their relation to other men and to the women in their lives, Shannon Philip does the whole field of masculinity studies a tremendous service, building on and complementing but ultimately transcending queer-centric approaches.

The men in the contemporary urban milieu of Delhi he works with are steeped in class and gender privilege and at the same time experience considerable anxieties, narrowing economic opportunity and overwhelming cultural pressure. In this context, young men remain ‘left to their illusions, [and thus] keep stretching and strengthening them [the illusions, including gendered ones] until they can stand as a wall between them and the indifference of the world’ as Snigdha Poonam wrote in Dreamers: How Young Indians are Changing the World (2018: 27). In ambiguity stretched into ambivalence, alienation, and shattered aspiration to adhere to excessively binary illusions (of old and new, success and failure, male and female), mainstream masculinity rests on and reproduces the physical, structural, and epistemic violence of patriarchy. While being loyal and empathic to his subjects, Shannon Philip analytically never loses sight of their implication in the violence they exert on themselves and their bodies, on other (namely queer) men, and on women. This is the second big achievement of Becoming Young Men in a New India.

Following a concise introduction, the main part of the book comes in five chapters. In ‘Becoming a “New” Indian Man’, Philip locates his ethnography in contemporary urban middle-class, upper-caste, Hindu Delhi. In ‘Making Masculine Bodies’, he traces how this context, and its norms, becomes embodied by the men he works with, examining the violent regimes of disciplining with which they steel themselves and their physique for the competition on job and marriage markets alike. In ‘Desexing Men and Hypersexing Women’, we see the seeds of his arguments about the violent consequences of a thoroughly heterosexual, patriarchal masculinity—a theme linked back to the particular space of Delhi in ‘Urbanisation and the Gendering of a Smart City’, and further explicated in the final chapter, ‘Men’s Violence and Women’s Safety’. The book’s conclusion titled ‘Fragilities of a New Indian Man’ spells out the main threads of inquiry and wider implications.

Throughout, Becoming Young Men in a New India is conceptually and theoretically rigorous, empirically grounded, and empathetic, and written in clear and accessible prose. It is a stunning achievement for a first book and will become an essential reference and turning point in the study of South Asian men and masculinities, theorising the link between male neoliberal subjectivities and gendered violence in the postcolony from the ‘centre’ of its subject(s).