Book review: Shannon Philip,Becoming Young Men in a New India: Masculinities,Gender Relations and Violence in the Post Colony

When I first started my doctoral fieldwork on sexuality education (Chowkhani, 2024) and adolescent masculinities back in 2013 in Mumbai, I often encountered young, English-speaking upper-middle-class men who seemed concerned about women’s safety and blamed other men for instances of sexual violence. Yet they hid a degree of misogyny within themselves that I could not entirely fathom. After reading about Urban Smart Strivers in Shannon Philip’s Becoming Young Men in a New India (2022), I now have a language to explain the apparent contradictions that I encountered among such young men 10 years ago, and that contradiction is at the heart of Philip’s book.

Becoming Young Men in a New India focuses on a cohort of eight young, urban, middle-class men, between the ages of 20 and 27, in New Delhi who Shannon Philip calls the Urban Smart Strivers, or the ‘new’ Indian men in a ‘new’ India. They are caught between the apparent contradictions of tradition and modernity, forcing them to simultaneously inhabit the worlds of the heteronormative Hindu upper-caste family while being consumer citizens of a post-liberalisation India. What is striking is that the contradictory worlds of tradition and modernity that these men inhabit mirror the world of the new Indian woman, who is expected to be traditional yet modern, best exemplified through matrimonial advertisements, but the similarities stop there.

The gendered subjectivities of these Urban Smart Strivers are fashioned through specific forms of leisure such as ‘ghoomna’ or roaming around in the city, especially in expensive cars and sometimes bikes. They lay claim to the city through a classed masculinity, excluding both the urban poor and the middle-class woman. Any woman who dares cross the boundaries of her designated space in the city, for instance, being in the general compartment of the metro and not in the ladies’ compartment, has to face consequences. The Urban Smart Strivers’ understanding of the city coincides with new India’s understanding of the smart city as a space that can only be rendered smart and safe for women and middle-class men through the erasure of slums and the urban poor.

Philip examines how this class-based masculinity and smartness are built through consumption and grooming practices, from visiting clubs, malls, restaurants and gyms. This form of consumption allows them to essentially differentiate themselves from country bumpkins and mark themselves out as the true recipients of new India. The gym becomes a social space away from home to build a commodified body as a mark of distinction, moral responsibility and respectability. Only certain kinds of male bodies are desirable: hairless, fair or ‘top-heavy’ (Philip); they become undesirable the moment they are dark, poor or effeminate. What seems missing here is a discussion of the similarities and differences between the discourses of male and female hairless bodies, since hair removal is much debated within feminist scholarship. ¹

The most important discussion in the book is the one pertaining to the Urban Smart Strivers’ complex relationship with women and gender violence. The young men enjoy having a girlfriend, seen as sign of modernity and distinction, distinguishing them from the villagers; it is a way for these young men to become the new Indian man. Yet, these men publicly prioritise friendships with men over their relationships with women, while privately missing their girlfriends. While discussing this book in class, my students pointed out how this paradox had entered social media as well. ² The men also value their brotherhood since they perceive men to be more useful, especially in instances of physical fights. Women, on the other hand, because of their inability to access public spaces are seen unhelpful in case of an emergency, contributing to the crucial undervaluing of women.

The Urban Smart Strivers’ perception of sexual violence and the enactment of their masculinity seem to be at odds. They demand death for rapists, perceive these men as evil and want to fight for women’s safety, all the while engaging in teasing women, making unwanted sexual advances towards them and denying them their rights in public space. The hallmark of being a new man means to be able to fight for women’s safety and be women’s protectors without realising that it is precisely the culture of urban youth masculinity, with its act of roaming the streets in cars and bikes and restricting women, which produces unsafe spaces for women in public. Being protectors for the Urban Smart Strivers is a sign of modernity and not backwardness. Their masculinity is predicated on being able to protect women (essentially their own women), effectively leading to not challenge but merely repackage patriarchal masculinities. Philip misses explaining how this latter point is at the heart of the idea that the rape of a woman is essentially a loss of masculinity for men within her family/community. Following on this, Philip notes how for the new Indian man, respect and aggression go hand in hand, with the new patriarchy being more sophisticated and modern. Yet, it reproduces the age-old division of the good girl and the slut, where the protection of the good girl and the entitlement over the body of the slut both arise from the same masculine sense of entitlement. The book points to how the Urban Smart Strivers fail to relate to women outside the restricted binary of the good girl and slut.

Since the book employs, as Philip says, a queer feminist reading of the new Indian man, it is able to shed light on certain aspects of male and female sexuality that would not have been visible from a solely feminist lens. Philip notes that male bodies are desexed, especially in the homosocial bond between the men. Publicly touching, feeling each other’s bodies and using the same urinal are not sexualised acts; rather, they are part of the bonding between the Urban Smart Strivers. Female bodies, on the other hand, are hypersexualised, and male sexual desire is reserved only for women in this strongly heteronormative world. The smartness of these young men is also predicated upon their class positions, hetero-sexuality and distance from effeminacy.

In unpacking the contradictions of being a new Indian man vis-a-vis tradition, modernity, consumerism and women, the book shows how there is a remaking of patriarchal ideas under the guise of respect and protection of women. He concludes by stating that because of this discourse of protectionism, including men in campaigns to ending violence against women will not always work because that will simply reproduce the repackaged patriarchy, leaving it unchallenged. Philip notes that it would rather be necessary to look into what it means to be a man and woman.