Indo-Chic: The Cultural Politics of Consumption in Post-Liberalization India (original) (raw)

'Canned Culture!', screams a cover headline from one of India's leading weeklies. 'After burgers, Cielos and cellulars, it's time for cultural consumerism' (Outlook, April 9, 1997). If one needed any more testimony to India's coming-of-age as a late capitalist society, the emergence of a nascent culture industry as reflected by this headline and others like it-the cover story is entitled 'The Merchandising of Culture'-is an important indicator that India has 'arrived' on the international economic-political scene; and none the worse for wear after its almost half a century of Nehruvian 'socialism', either. Under the watchful eye of the IMF/World Bank, India began to liberalize and 'reintegrate' into the world economy in 1991-92, but it is only recently that the ideology of global-local capitalism has managed to construct the level of hegemony 1 that allows a globally-oriented capitalist consumer culture to truly manifest itself in Indian society. This cultural consumerism has resulted in a curious phenomenon: whereas formerly India was integrated into the global culture 2 industry as a 'producer/exporter' of cultural commodities-or the raw material for what became cultural commodities in the West 3-in the form of exotica, it is also increasingly their consumer-or at least a certain class of emerging capitalist elites is: 'yuppies' with disposable incomes unlike any experienced by previous generations of largely austere socialist India. This is heralded by a change in how India and its inhabitants are now 'imagined' or represented on the world stage, but one which includes vestiges of past

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