"Appropriately Indian" is an ethnographic analysis of the class of
information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of
globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of
India's labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate
the country's economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of
what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian
professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South
Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers
create a "global Indianness" by transforming the diversity of
Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of "Indian"
norms. Female information technology professionals are particularly
influential. By reconfiguring notions of respectable femininity and
the "good" Indian family, they are reshaping ideas about what it
means to be Indian.
Radhakrishnan explains how this transnational class creates an
Indian culture that is self-consciously distinct from Western
culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. She
describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to
India's high-tech workers, who often claim ordinary middle-class
backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper caste. They are
also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this
elite class practice a decontextualized version of Hinduism, and
they absorb the ideas and values that circulate through both Indian
and non-Indian multinational corporations. Ultimately, though,
global Indianness is rooted and configured in the gendered sphere
of home and family.
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