Durham: Duke University Press, 2015. xiv, 301 pp. (Illustrations.) US$26.95, paper. ISBN 978-0-8223-5836-7.
Feminist anthropologist Purnima Mankekar’s primary objective in this terrific book is to “explore how our assumptions about India and about cultural change are stirred up—unsettled—in contexts of neoliberalism and the circulation of transnational public cultures” (190). Though the result is not solely a critique of Hindutva, her interviews in New Delhi and in the United States demonstrate her conviction that “intellectual work and political solidarity must always go hand-in-hand” (x). Her fascinating study focuses on the upwardly mobile beneficiaries of globalization in Delhi—as does Rana Dasgupta’s popular Capital: The Eruption of Delhi (Penguin, 2014), to which this volume compares quite favorably—and to upwardly mobile South Asians in Silicon Valley. But equal time is devoted to the less successful aspirants in Delhi and Silicon Valley who seem inescapably emplaced in situations of desperate stasis—individuals who “navigate and inhabit parallel, often discrepant, social worlds” (224). The volume pays a great deal of attention to class distinctions, race perceptions, and gender roles, and to how these play out in the creation and maintenance of nationalistic affect. Although the study is written in accessible prose, recounting conversations with particular individuals in their local contexts before concluding with broad complex abstractions, Mankekar (who conducted much of the investigation while teaching at Stanford, and who now serves in the Departments of Gender Studies and Asian American Studies at UCLA) engages throughout with engrossing ongoing debates in social theory.
Earlier versions of large portions of the book’s chapters have appeared in journals over the years, going back as far as 1994, but they are effectively organized here to make a compelling and unified argument that builds on her earlier Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation (Duke UP, 1994). Mankekar does a close reading of several popular Bollywood classics and television programs, with particular attention given to Dilwale Dulhaniya Le Jayenge (1995), Bunty aur Babli (2005), and Kabhi Khushi Kabhie Gham (2001). Such media serve to reconceptualize “Indianness,” building on the shifts in nationalist affect of the 1990s to portray a “New India” that is not tethered to territorial location. This is in contrast to earlier films like Purab aur Paschim (1970) that warned against the dangers of losing one’s Indianness by living abroad. More recent films, intent on yoking non-resident Indians to a resurgent India, portray protagonists who may adopt western appearance and swagger, but who seek occasions to reaffirm their cultural purity. These films affirm a masculinity that is affluent, cosmopolitan, modern, and militantly heterosexual. Viewers abroad get the message that one does not once-and-for-all leave home: they carry India in their hearts—and therefore must be true to what is “most” Indian and homogeneously Hindu. Her Sikh and Muslim informants protest that such exclusion reinscribes the marginalization that they have felt all their lives in India, a marginalization that many of them also find in the diasporic communities of Silicon Valley.
Mankekar’s chapter on the Indian grocery stores in Sunnyvale portrays them as sensoria of homely smells and sounds that reaffirm ties to India for some shoppers, but that underscore for some others the clean break they prefer to embrace. These are locations that remind some working-class immigrants that they are not, in fact, part of the wonderful success story of the middle- or upper-middle class entrepreneur and computer executive narrativized by the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP). Mankekar is intent on reading these local stores as disrupters of the notion of the “real” India, demonstrating a complex range of affects that are held in productive tension: variously “spaces of surveillance, solidarity, ambivalence, and/or hostility” (105).
A chapter on transnational Hindi television, and especially on soap operas of the 1980s and 1990s, focuses on working-class informants in Delhi to discuss the effects generated by the commodities portrayed and the erotics intertwined in that portrayal, with some worried that earlier representations of “Indianness” prompted self-sacrifice, and newer ones seem to valorize helping oneself to these goods. As has been observed in many other regions of the world—see, for example, Carmela Garritano’s African Video Movies and Global Desires (Ohio UP, 2013)—such television and film productions open the eyes of all classes to the lifestyles of the wealthy, their mobility and acquisitions. This is seen as particularly unsettling by those who worry about overt expressions of women’s erotic desires in Indian society, especially with an increasing focus on self-expression rather than group identity.
These familiar observations lead to the book’s highly suggestive final chapters on global India and the production of moral subjects, and on the role of impersonation, mobility, emplacement, and aspiration in call centres in India. Mankekar analyzes the BJP’s appropriation of swadeshi(Gandhian self-rule) in its campaign for self-reliance, recording her informants’ protest against being “oppressed” in “their own lands” by the non-Hindus. Such individuals (in Delhi, but also in Silicon Valley) recommend a detoxification of India (the rejection as cultural contamination of celebrations in India of Valentine’s Day, and the valorization of the “new Hindu woman” who should be morally self-disciplined). By these lights, “tradition indexes futurity rather than the past” (172) by providing a blueprint for “how to live in the future as moral subjects of Global India” (172). This requires “the containment of erotic desire, deference to parental authority, and the reinscription of conventional gender roles” (180): goals, Mankekar shows, even for those who had never been to India itself.
Mankekar concludes this India-centred study with an analysis of the reaction in the United States to 9/11, suggesting that “regimes of affect and temporality enabled the creation of a national community. . . predicated on the marginalization and demonization of racial and cultural Others” (230), and thereby foregrounding the allegorical significance of her study for the “unsettling” of other patriotisms. The book is highly recommended.
John C. Hawley
Santa Clara University, Santa Clara, USA
pp. 181-183