PaRCha - JNU - AISA material - 2007 ID-18184
.
descriptive concept and an object of analysis can be traced back to Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), but with the crucial shift noted in Meluccis formulation: the industry is now much more global than ever before. To postulate the industry as a global system is not to make a simplistic statement about hegemony and homogenization that seem attendant on current uses of the term globalization with regard to culture; rather it is a recognition that although its local manifestations are heterogeneous, they are nodes in an ever-more complex economy of desire which is global in its orientation and effects (Appadurai 1990). The New York Times article cited above brings up many of the issues I will attempt to address within this paper, including the importance of India as an emerging market and the increasing role of the diaspora in fashioning Indian identities both at home and abroad. Indeed, the proliferation and circulation of these cultural artefacts points out that the new Imagined India (Inden 1990)7 is indisputably chic, both at home and abroad. What .
SOAS Literary Review (2), July 2000 .
4 .
is happening here? How can we explain this metamorphosis which retains vestiges and which plays on important aspects of the older Orientalist representations of India as the exotic Other, particularly since the most avid consumers are a certain class of Indians themselves? Part of the answer of course lies in the vagaries of the global cultural industry and Indo-chic can be seen as only the latest trend in an economy of planned obsolescence characteristic of late capitalism. Another part of it lies, as I have hinted, at the new role of India as a significant emerging market on the global scene and this, in fact, is what the Times article concludes. The aspect that I find most fascinating is the importance of this New Orientalism to the identity formation of the new young urban class in India,8 particularly the relationship between class habitus and taste as it explains the construction of a new aesthete within and by this class (Bourdieu 1984). Note that I am talking about a new class (or, it can be argued, class fragment/faction) which does not exactly map on to the generic middle class which researchers on modern India are so fond of evoking and which is the darling of everyone from political scientists explaining the stability of Indian democracy to market researchers interested in emerging markets. This class of young professionals is very different from the generic Indian middle class because it is a new phenomenon (definitely a product of liberalization), both demographically young and urban in location, selfconsciously cosmopolitan in orientation .
.
PaRCha - JNU - AISA material - 2007 ID-18184
.
descriptive concept and an object of analysis can be traced back to Adorno and Horkheimer (1972), but with the crucial shift noted in Meluccis formulation: the industry is now much more global than ever before. To postulate the industry as a global system is not to make a simplistic statement about hegemony and homogenization that seem attendant on current uses of the term globalization with regard to culture; rather it is a recognition that although its local manifestations are heterogeneous, they are nodes in an ever-more complex economy of desire which is global in its orientation and effects (Appadurai 1990). The New York Times article cited above brings up many of the issues I will attempt to address within this paper, including the importance of India as an emerging market and the increasing role of the diaspora in fashioning Indian identities both at home and abroad. Indeed, the proliferation and circulation of these cultural artefacts points out that the new Imagined India (Inden 1990)7 is indisputably chic, both at home and abroad. What .
SOAS Literary Review (2), July 2000 .
4 .
is happening here? How can we explain this metamorphosis which retains vestiges and which plays on important aspects of the older Orientalist representations of India as the exotic Other, particularly since the most avid consumers are a certain class of Indians themselves? Part of the answer of course lies in the vagaries of the global cultural industry and Indo-chic can be seen as only the latest trend in an economy of planned obsolescence characteristic of late capitalism. Another part of it lies, as I have hinted, at the new role of India as a significant emerging market on the global scene and this, in fact, is what the Times article concludes. The aspect that I find most fascinating is the importance of this New Orientalism to the identity formation of the new young urban class in India,8 particularly the relationship between class habitus and taste as it explains the construction of a new aesthete within and by this class (Bourdieu 1984). Note that I am talking about a new class (or, it can be argued, class fragment/faction) which does not exactly map on to the generic middle class which researchers on modern India are so fond of evoking and which is the darling of everyone from political scientists explaining the stability of Indian democracy to market researchers interested in emerging markets. This class of young professionals is very different from the generic Indian middle class because it is a new phenomenon (definitely a product of liberalization), both demographically young and urban in location, selfconsciously cosmopolitan in orientation .
.