Macaulay's (Cyber) Children: The Cultural Politics of Outsourcing in India

This article explores how globalization is shaping the aspirations and identities of the Indian middle class and in particular those employed by the outsourcing industry. While these aspirations do not have a clearly defined object, they cluster around an idea of the West as the locus of modernity.The West's mystique derives, no doubt as it did in the colonial period, from the fact that it is the author of dramatic change. But this also prompts a certain anxiety among the middle class that such change is somehow corrupting. Drawing on in-depth interviews and ethnographic fieldwork in India, I argue that globalization does not herald an era of unprecedented personal freedom, a belated modernity, nor does it signify a crisis of the `traditional' Indian family. It is an Indian morality play where the pleasure principle clashes with the demands of custom and obligation, where kama (pleasure) and dharma (duty) meet in uneasy suspension.