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By Sanjay Srivastava Small-town India's new middle class is negotiating globalisation and modernity in much more meaningful ways than the metropolitan middle class, says Sanjay Srivastava's new book
Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India
By Sanjay Srivastava
Routledge, 2007
Rs 795 “The tyranny of uniformity which has been unleashed by liberalisation is a grave threat to human diversity,” Ashok Vajpeyi, distinguished writer and editor, observed at a recent seminar in Delhi. Uniformity of dress, of food, of entertainment. Even of language. “Culture is being flattened,” he said. “We are all losing our capacity to sing our own songs, dance our own dances.” Diversity itself is being flattened. At another seminar writer Githa Hariharan discussed the Scheherazade story, the story that was told for a thousand and one nights. She has found the same story existing in Greece, Western Europe, China, India. The same story, told in different ways. Same and yet different. The point Hariharan was making is that there are universal motifs, and despite those universal motifs, there is diversity. But in India’s version of globalisation, she thinks, there is only one motif – The Market. And that market is using sameness to allow the big to swallow up the small – the small voice, the local language, the local tradition, the small entrepreneur. These are thoughts troubling everyone today. Is diversity indeed being flattened? Is globalisation fuelling a social revolution, and if it is, is that revolution a desirable one? Is it creating a metropolitan middle class that believes only in unbridled consumption and is losing its sense of values? Is it creating, on the other hand, a backlash of fundamentalism? Is it responsible for the completely confused culture reflected in India’s TV soaps with their sexy, scheming, grasping sirens and simultaneously pativrata bahus? What exactly is this middle class identity that millions of Indians are striving for? Is it more than the sum total of what that class consumes? Most importantly, can there be such a thing as controllable modernity and manageable consumption? To these now-tired questions anthropologist Sanjay Srivastava, of the School of Communication and Creative Arts at Deakin University, Melbourne, provides some reassuring and fresh answers in a new book titled Passionate Modernity: Sexuality, Class and Consumption in India. The book examines the middle class in globalising India through the lens of the ‘friendship magazines’ of the Hindi heartland and popular women’s magazines in non-English languages (Grhalakshmi, Grhashobha, Meri Saheli, each with circulations of 3 to 5 million), the footpath pornography and the sex clinics that index the mobile and displaced populations of the metropolitan city, and of course Indian cinema and advertising. Significantly, the middle class that Srivastava examines is the real middle class of Middle India, of places such as Bhatinda, Sonbhadra and Khandwa, not the visible middle class of the metros and mini-metros that the mainstream media peddles and that might in fact have a longer monopoly on the title ‘middle class’. In fact, Srivastava points out, there is no monolithic empirical middle class, “conjured into existence” by economic and cultural liberalisation and transported simultaneously into some sort of social revolution. Do you become middle class by virtue of earning over Rs 45,000 or over Rs 90,000 annually? Do you become middle class by eating at KFC, shopping at Big Bazaar, seeing a film at a multiplex or living in a second-rate construction called Malibu? And even if you do, if you are one of those “caught in the interstices of working-class and middle class” can you ever really make it into middle classness? Or, like the aristocracy, do you have to be born into the middle class? Srivastava believes that consumption is a meaningful site of identity. The struggle of the working-class to become the ‘globalised’ middle class cannot but be played out through the struggle to possess the consumer goods that are the signifiers of middle class identity. In the pages of Srivastava’s book that struggle is most tellingly reflected in the popular women’s magazines in Hindi.
Srivastava describes two photographs in an issue of Meri Saheli. In the first picture there’s a middle-aged woman sitting on a mock throne in a five-star hotel in Kathmandu, wearing a tiara and being presented an award. In the second picture, three women in western garb are dancing around a table piled with Tupperware, one of them playfully wearing a Tupperware food container on her head. These are housewives at an annual Tupperware Convention. Many of them had never been to a five-star hotel before. Many of them had never danced in public before. Most of them had never traveled abroad before. All of them looked very happy and fulfilled. But surely these joyous Tupperware Queens are the victims of the market motif that is crushing them through the sieve of sameness? No, says Srivastava, look at it another way and see that in fact they are being liberated. The shiny plastic Tupperware container is the Indian woman’s alignment with icons of another world. “Inspired by foreign ideas, made in faraway places, having traveled through national and transnational routes to arrive locally, desired and possessed by strangers who value it in a similar way to the self, the commodity is a mediator between the home one cannot leave and the world one desires.” It is a process of making the self, breaking down barriers between the household space and public space, giving women the agency that the women’s movement has always advocated. The narrative of the self “might be completed only through a holistic project that includes a number of contexts of transformation: ingesting exotic material, satiating prohibited desires and exchanging opinions with unknown persons”. Thus, Meri Saheli’s suggested exotic menu for a kitty party is carrot soup, mango mousse, veg tacos and baby pizzas. Thus, these women’s magazines take the public discussion of sexuality away from the English-speaking modernising elites for the very first time, rivaling any Femina or Cosmopolitan in their discussion of prohibited desires. For even if a woman cannot purchase the goods that mark the middle class status, she can transform her own body to fit the image. The choice of Hema Malini as editor of Meri Saheli is significant, Srivastava says. She is the dream girl of the New Woman too. She is the independent, glamorous, sexy actress and simultaneously the icon of domestic fulfillment (she has been forgiven the transgression of disrupting another’s domesticity), and the upholder of Hindu traditions (through her support of the BJP, alas).
Srivastava’s thesis is that globalisation is not creating an unadulterated world of fantasy. On the contrary modernity is being processed in meaningful ways to create “a sphere whose appeal lies in its judicious use of ‘fantasy’, ‘desire’, ‘negotiation’ and ‘constraint’ as tropes of simultaneous engagement with the economies of the market, the state and the household”. A magazine like Grhalakshmi is consciously striving for that negotiation between “new” thinking on female sexuality and the traditional role of women within the family. Chitra Phularia, its associate editor, is quoted as saying, “Grhalakshmi is not about revolt…Women don’t want to break families but they do want to speak up and have their own thinking.” They do want to be sexy – for their husbands. They want to move from street to home, from luxury hotel to domestic bed, from apple toss to alu mutter. Seen this way, the juxtaposition in the pages of these women’s magazines -- and equally in the TV soaps -- of calendar art Hindu goddesses and reiterations of the rituals of Diwali and Karwa Chauth with recipes for California Lunch Salad, advice on clitoral massage and comments on the unfair burden of virginity on women, is not as bewildering as it first seems, and certainly not as laughable as many derisive big-city critics make it out to be. “This is not quite feminism as we know it, but a self-making that we too frequently dismiss out of a theoretical Protestantism that assumes a politicised ‘us’ whose identities do not rely on consumption practices, versus a passive other that makes meanings out of the ‘false consciousness’ of consuming practices.” It is an assertive, expressive, demanding modernity, but simultaneously a retractable, controlled, negotiated modernity. And there lies the most telling difference. This New Woman with her Tupperware/Grhalakshmi sexuality has the ability to manoeuvre between constraints, rather than be stymied by them as she was earlier. She keeps what she wants from her immediate environment and culture. She throws out what she doesn’t like. She absorbs what she thinks is worth absorbing. Compare her with the ‘westernised’ group that has had a longer claim on the term middle class and Grhalakshmi comes out the winner. Because the ‘old’ middle class ‘westernised’ woman is on a straight-line trajectory over which she has no control. She cannot put the brakes on. She cannot loop back at will and come back home. It’s the Grhalakshmi woman who can be at home in the world. Thus it is she who is truly in the middle. Truly the empowered. Far from allowing her culture to be flattened by globalisation, she is negotiating it on her own terms, singing her songs and telling her stories her own way. InfoChange News & Features, March 2007
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