Appropriately Indian: Gender and Culture in a New Transnational Class

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.

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments ix Introduction: On Background 1 1. Privilege: Situating India's Transnational Class 25 2. Global/Indian: Cultural Politics in the IT Workplace 53 3. Merit: Ideologies of Achievement in the Knowledge Economy 87 4. Individuals: Narratives of Embedded Slaves 115 5. Family: Gendered "Balance" and the Everyday Production of the Nation 145 6. Religion: When the Private is Transnational 173 Conclusion: Apolitical Politics 199 Notes 207 Bibliography 215 Index 227

About the Author :
Smitha Radhakrishnan is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Wellesley College.

Review :
"With her soberly critical ethnographic eye, Smitha Radhakrishnan proves a delightfully judicious guide to what happens when class and culture get transnationally stretched. Refusing both the hype that surrounds the world of India's global IT class and a simple ideology critique, she gives us a vivid portrait of everyday lives lived at a leading edge of globalization." William T. S. Mazzarella, University of Chicago "Appropriately Indian is a wonderful book, which provides crucial background about India's rising image in the world and at home. Smitha Radhakrishnan covers notions of caste, class, and prestige, as well as the transnational character of the privileged knowledge workers she discusses. At the same time, she does not portray these professionals only in terms of privilege. Her intimate descriptions of people's lives are full of dilemmas and heartaches. The passages on traditional marriage expectations and modern individualistic drives are particularly illuminating." A. Aneesh, author of Virtual Migration: The Programming of Globalization "Radhakrishnan presents an ethnographic profile of Indian information-technology professionals, arguing that these workers are defining a 'global Indianness' that is distinctively Asian yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. Female workers, she says, have been particularly nfluential in shaping global Indian norms." Survival