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Liberalization's Children: Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing India
Author(s): Ritty A. Lukose (Author)
- Publisher: Duke University Press Books
- Publication Date: 13 Nov. 2009
- Language: English
- Print length: 304 pages
- ISBN-10: 0822345501
- ISBN-13: 9780822345503
Book Description
Moving beyond elite figurations of globalizing Indian youth, Lukose draws on ethnographic research to examine how non-elite college students in the southern state of Kerala mediate region, nation, and globe. Kerala sits at the crossroads of development and globalization. Held up as a model of left-inspired development, it has also been transformed through an extensive and largely non-elite transnational circulation of labor, money, and commodities to the Persian Gulf and elsewhere. Focusing on fashion, romance, student politics, and education, Lukose carefully tracks how gender, caste, and class, as well as colonial and postcolonial legacies of culture and power, affect how students navigate their roles as citizens and consumers. She explores how mass-mediation and an expanding commodity culture have differentially incorporated young people into the structures and aspirational logics of globalization.
Editorial Reviews
Review
“Ritty Lukose’s
Liberalization’s Children is an excellent ethnographic exploration of the cultural politics of globalization in post-liberalization Kerala. . . . Liberalization’s Children offers a fascinating account of the ways in which globalized discourses and practices are enacted and resisted at the local level in Kerala. It is well-written, being clear and accessible without compromising on intellectual quality or ethnographic richness. It is a significant contribution to scholarship on globalization, gender, consumption, and India, and is particularly relevant for scholars who wish to understand globalization as local, non-dominant, or youth experience.” – Lavanya Murali Proctor, Anthropological Quarterly“
Liberalization’s Children is a well situated ethnography that beautifully illuminates the contradictions of liberalization on small town youth in a country in the global South. . . . Liberalization’s Children is an important and timely book at exactly the intersections of gender, class, culture and location that scholarship on globalization should welcome.” – Raka Ray, Contemporary Sociology“
Liberalization’s Children challenges many assumptions that often underlie the above-mentioned incomprehensibility in the context of college student life. . . . Besides the many interesting leads that the chapters of Liberalization’s Children offer, it may perhaps be of considerable interest for us to explore the contexts and experiences of these students who strive against the tide to reconstruct activism as youthful and pleasurable, to see to what extent, and in what altered sense, they may be called the children of liberalization.” – J. Devika, Seminar Magazine“Lukose’s writing provides us with an extraordinary combination of vivid images interwoven with a reality embedded on the firm ground of undergraduate college and hostel life in a small town in Kerala. The book seeks to go beyond conventional understandings of education as that perfect transformatory space leading to social and economic development. Instead, it opens up the ways in which we can seek to examine the linkages between education and young people’s lives in a rapidly developing and changing society through an understanding of the dreams, aspirations, and everyday lives of youth.” – Meenakshi Thapan,
American Ethnologist“Ritty Lukose offers a provocative, insightful, and well-written account of the experiences of young women and men in a private, lower-caste, coeducational college in southern Kerala that truly sets the standard for ethnographic studies of globalization.” – Charis Boutieri,
American Anthropologist“
Liberalization’s Children is a fascinating exploration of key contemporary issues in India with relevance for other non-Western contexts. Ritty A. Lukose investigates the formation of gendered identities in Kerala in relation to nationalist constructions of femininity and masculinity as well as the pulls of migration to West Asia and North America. Her achievement is to provide a useful mapping of the continuity with older forms of gendering alongside the disruptions caused by the developments of the 1990s. She does this by showing how the axes of difference emerging from colonial and post-colonial modernities underpin the apparently new experiences of globalization.”—Tejaswini Niranjana, author of Mobilizing India: Women, Music, and Migration between India and Trinidad“This pioneering book expands the anthropology of a crucial part of India, a state with a complex agrarian history, an active communist movement, and remarkable achievements in literacy and social consciousness. Engaging with college-age youth in this part of the world, Ritty A. Lukose provides a remarkable account of the dreams and struggles of young adults as they seek to negotiate gender, caste, and globalization in a new century. Her book will be of great interest to students of youth cultures, education, globalization, and South Asia.”—
Arjun Appadurai, author of Fear of Small Numbers: An Essay on the Geography of Anger“
Liberalization’s Children challenges many assumptions that often underlie the above-mentioned incomprehensibility in the context of college student life. . . . Besides the many interesting leads that the chapters of Liberalization’s Children offer, it may perhaps be of considerable interest for us to explore the contexts and experiences of these students who strive against the tide to reconstruct activism as youthful and pleasurable, to see to what extent, and in what altered sense, they may be called the children of liberalization.” — J. Devika ― Seminar Magazine“
Liberalization’s Children is a well situated ethnography that beautifully illuminates the contradictions of liberalization on small town youth in a country in the global South. . . . Liberalization’s Children is an important and timely book at exactly the intersections of gender, class, culture and location that scholarship on globalization should welcome.” — Raka Ray ― Contemporary Sociology“Lukose’s writing provides us with an extraordinary combination of vivid images interwoven with a reality embedded on the firm ground of undergraduate college and hostel life in a small town in Kerala. The book seeks to go beyond conventional understandings of education as that perfect transformatory space leading to social and economic development. Instead, it opens up the ways in which we can seek to examine the linkages between education and young people’s lives in a rapidly developing and changing society through an understanding of the dreams, aspirations, and everyday lives of youth.” — Meenakshi Thapan ―
American Ethnologist“Ritty A. Lukose provides a remarkable account of the dreams and struggles of youth adults as they seek to negotiate gender, caste, and globalization in a new century. . . . The book is well written and will be welcomed by the students, teachers and others interested in anthropology, South Asian studies, and gender studies.” ―
Educational Book Review“Ritty Lukose’s
Liberalization’s Children is an excellent ethnographic exploration of the cultural politics of globalization in post-liberalization Kerala. . . . Liberalization’s Children offers a fascinating account of the ways in which globalized discourses and practices are enacted and resisted at the local level in Kerala. It is well-written, being clear and accessible without compromising on intellectual quality or ethnographic richness. It is a significant contribution to scholarship on globalization, gender, consumption, and India, and is particularly relevant for scholars who wish to understand globalization as local, non-dominant, or youth experience.” — Lavanya Murali Proctor ― Anthropological Quarterly“While offering a detailed critical analysis of Kerala as a model in social development and a successful educational system, the book not only provides important insights into the politics of globalization (or liberalization, as it is more commonly construed in India); Lukose also presents a comprehensive tracing of the evolution of gendered identities under the influences of colonial, postcolonial, capitalist, and traditional forces. . . . The publication is a timely one and makes an important interdisciplinary contribution to research literature in fields such as educational anthropology, sociology, economics, culture studies, gender studies, political science, and international education.” — Amita Gupta ―
Comparative Education ReviewFrom the Back Cover
About the Author
Ritty Lukose is Associate Professor in the Gallatin School of Individualized Study at New York University.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Liberalization’s Children
Gender, Youth, and Consumer Citizenship in Globalizing IndiaBy RITTY A. LUKOSE
Duke University Press
Copyright © 2009 DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4550-3
Contents
Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………..ixINTRODUCTION Liberalization’s Children-Nation, Generation, and Globalization…………………11 Locating Kerala, Between Development and Globalization……………………………………232 Fashioning Gender and Consumption………………………………………………………543 Romancing the Public………………………………………………………………….964 Politics, Privatization, and Citizenship………………………………………………..1325 Education, Caste, and the Secular………………………………………………………163EPILOGUE Consumer Citizenship in the Era of Globalization………………………………….200Notes…………………………………………………………………………………207Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………..239Index…………………………………………………………………………………265
Chapter One
Locating Kerala, Between Development and Globalization
Both popular and scholarly discourses, within India and on the global stage, have overwhelmingly understood the region-state of Kerala as an exception. Here, K. M. George, the editor of an anthology of short stories written by women from Kerala, describes the unique “customs” and “manners” making up the living “museum” that is the Indian state of Kerala.
Kerala … a narrow strip of land on the south-west coast of India, lying between the Western Ghats and the Arabian Sea … has been among the most vibrant and problematic states in the Indian Union…. Perhaps one reason for this is the combination of high literacy and low per capita income, making the people conscious of their claims for a minimum standard of life…. Kerala appears to be a place of paradoxes: the land is fertile, but the people are poor, the percentage of literacy is the highest in India (now 100 per cent), but one comes across the most orthodox and superstitious people along with the most modern and revolutionary kind. The land is very beautiful and so are its people. Its lovely lagoons and backwaters, and its colourful landscape continue to charm tourists. Kerala, very much a part of India, nonetheless has its own distinctive sub-culture with its special customs and manners. (1993, 1)
The author emphasizes the traditional matrilocal, matrilineal system of inheritance among the dominant Nair caste, the history of a particularly oppressive caste structure, and high rates of literacy among women. He also speaks of Kerala’s “composite cosmopolitan” culture, with 50 percent of the population being members of the dominant Hindu community and an unusually high percentage of minorities comprising the rest: 21 percent are Christian, 19 percent Muslim, and 10 percent tribals (ibid., 1-4).
George nicely captures the multiple tropes of popular and scholarly commentary across the decades on Kerala, which run the gamut from matrilineality to the “revolutionary zeal” of this communist “bastion” to its tropical beauty to its high levels of literacy. When taken together, these tropes constitute a discourse about Kerala’s exceptionalism. Moreover, a range of actors consciously deploy these tropes to construct a specifically regional identity: the Kerala state government does so for tourism purposes; policymakers and development practitioners at the state, national, and international levels do so when trying to explain the state’s social and economic development; and scholars and journalists do so when they comment on the region. While this discourse has many registers, it is noteworthy that they oscillate between the idea of Kerala as a space of exotic “tradition,” marked as exceptional by its tropical beauty, unique matrilineal kinship patterns, and rigid caste system, and Kerala as uniquely “modern” and revolutionary, indexed as exceptional by high levels of literacy and its communist traditions. For example, brochures published by the state tourism board will juxtapose images of Kerala women in traditionally coded saris lighting traditional lamps with text that proclaims Kerala to be the “most advanced” state in India, with “100% literacy” (Sreekumar 2007).
Specifically, one important thread within the construction of Kerala as exceptional is the trope of development, in which the so-called Kerala Model of Development is held up as an example for other parts of the world. This literature narrates a heroic story of a progressive march from “tradition” to “modernity.” Education is crucial to the idea of Kerala as a development success story, particularly the education of girls and women. However, rather than a “black box” that produces various development indicators like “literacy” or “low maternal mortality,” as I discuss later, education and its gendering are a contested cultural project where the historical forces of colonial and postcolonial modernity, development, and globalization meet in order to shape the life trajectories of youth.
Given these discourses of exceptionalism, how can Kerala be a site through which we can understand Indian and global modernity? It is not my intention to nest the region within the nation and then within the world, as standard spatial imaginaries of social scales and globalization would have it. As a region, Kerala’s experiences of globalization are powerfully mediated simultaneously by the shifting context of India’s economic liberalization and through a highly regionally specific trajectory of development and migration. For example, Kerala’s development experience must be contextualized at the intersection between a regionally specific history of leftist radicalism that took on an overwhelmingly developmentalist form because of how this history intersected with a Nehruvian and nationalist vision of state-centric development; the figure of midnight’s children must be understood at the crossroads between region and nation. Similarly, constructions of liberalization’s children assumes a 1990s metropolitan location as the prime example of globalization in India, and discussions of the latter have been dominated by studies of Delhi, Mumbai, and Bangalore. Kerala’s experiences of a global flow in labor, commodities, and capital, primarily to the Persian Gulf but also to other parts of the world, are long, expansive, and intense and they predate the liberalization of the Indian economy in the early 1990s. However, this does not, in a straightforward way, make Kerala an exception. The contemporary economic, cultural, and political manifestations of international migration within Kerala intersect with this national moment of liberalization without being reducible to it. The rise of Hindu nationalism during the 1990s and its manifestations in Kerala have provided new conditions in which the politics of gender, caste, and class is tied to transnational migration and its impact. Further, while a regionally specific trajectory of international migration started in the early 1970s, the expansion of consumption and mass media that underlies the cultural politics of globalization I discuss owes much to the nationally driven economic reforms of the early 1990s. Finally, the politics of gender, class, and caste as it intersects with the largely male and subaltern migration circuit to the Gulf is linked to the nationally coded figure of the Non-Resident Indian (NRI), a figuration of consumer identity in the aftermaths of a liberalization tied to a more professional, upper-class emigration to the first world.
Attention to this flexible articulation among region, nation, and world enables critical attention to complex processes of place making generated within processes of globalization over the last century. A close reading of the historical discourses and debates over Kerala, then, offer a map and a context for understanding more recent transformations.
Modeling Kerala
The construction of Kerala as a model for development can be traced to the mid-1970s with the publication of a report by the United Nations (CDS 1975). Its macrolevel data did confirm that Kerala exhibited low per capita income with high levels of unemployment and poverty, typical of poor regions in third world countries with a weak industrial base. However, it also reported that Kerala had high levels of literacy and life expectancy and low levels of fertility and infant and adult mortality, at rates that were more typical of highly industrialized regions of the first world (Parayil 2000; Franke and Chasin 1992; Jerey 1993). The report proposed an exceptional development profile for Kerala, centering on a high physical quality-of-life index across a wide spectrum of the population, notably including women and girls. However, this was coupled with low levels of income and economic growth.
This development profile became prominent within international development discourse as it was inserted into a polarized and ongoing debate among global policymakers and scholars of international development about the best way to achieve a higher standard of living for the poor of the third world (Parayil and Sreekumar 2003; Jeffrey 1993). On one side of the debate, the major view asserts that industrialization will generate economic growth that will eventually “trickle down” and raise the standard of living for the general population. This model of development argues, in other words, for rapid capitalist industrialization. On the other side, critics hold that development in the third world requires a highly centralized and planned process that will ensure better living conditions for the poor; this model of development argues for socialist transformation with varying degrees of importance given to industrialization. Both positions cite different aspects of Kerala’s development experience for their own purposes. For those critical of capitalist industrialization, the prominence of the communist movement makes Kerala an exemplary instance of what could be achieved in the third world through socialist-inspired mobilizations without full-scale revolution. Others hold up Kerala as an example of what is possible without a socialist revolution in the immediate present with very little expenditure on the part of wealthier nations and international donor agencies (Ratclie 1978; Morris 1979).
No one has done more to highlight Kerala’s development experience at the international level than the Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen, whose views fall somewhere in the middle of this spectrum. With various colleagues, Sen has made the Kerala experience important as an argument for his “capabilities” approach to development (1990, 1995, 1997, 1999). Eschewing an economic model that measures development solely through per capita income and economic growth, Sen has instead highlighted what he calls “human capabilities.” Constituting a universal standard, the production and nurture of these capabilities are linked to political freedom and social goods such as education, health care, and protection from hunger. Distinguishing between wealth and development, Sen has found the low per capita income levels and high quality-of-life indicators of Kerala important for laying out his vision of development. So important is Sen to the prominence of Kerala’s development experience that when he was feted in various forums in the capital city Thiruvananthapuram in 2000, the Kerala governor and the chancellor of the university stated that “by honoring you, Amartya Sen, we are honoring ourselves.”
In particular, Sen and others persistently bring to light Kerala’s achievements on behalf of women and girls. More than any other aspect of Kerala’s development profile, the indicators of female literacy, health, and educational levels are understood to be most noteworthy, particularly given the vulnerability of women and girls within the third world more generally. And, indeed, these indicators are impressive. Female literacy in Kerala, as of the 2000 census, is 87 percent, while that of India is 54 percent, and girls outnumber boys at every level of education (Parayil and Sreekumar 2003). As Sen notes, “The distinction of Kerala is particularly striking in the field of gender equality” (1997, 13). Although considerable attention is devoted to health indicators as well-Kerala has one of the lowest rates of population growth in the third world and a sex ratio that favors females (the only state in India with such a ratio)-indicators of female literacy and education are seen to be more important because they are understood as causative links with multiplier effects (Sreekumar 2007; Parayil 2000).
Since independence from Britain, the dominant approach of national development has worked from the highly centralized, planned, state-centric Nehruvian view, modeled on the Soviet experience. Yet this approach has always been in contest with (and has sometimes overlapped with) a more grassroots, locally based, small-scale model of development, the vision of India’s other great nationalist leader, M. K. Gandhi (Khilnani 1999). Precolonial and postcolonial political and social histories, which encompass state-centric and grassroots mobilizations, have shaped a state-centric development planning regime in Kerala, as they have in other states. Much literature and debate about Kerala centers on picking and choosing from various elements of this complex historical context to explain the state’s development profile.
An important theme in scholarly explanations for Kerala’s development experience is the role of a politicized, public-minded citizenry in demanding concessions from the state. Robin Jeffrey argues that the “shaping of a new public world” and the “opening out of politics-the growth of a readiness among ‘ordinary people’ to try to influence decisions” was the key factor in bringing about what is now called “the Kerala model” (1993, 1). Robert Franke and Barbara Chasin discuss the importance of “people’s movements” and “political mobilization” led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist), or CPI (M)-the dominant leftist party in the region-in demanding a better quality of life (1992). Similarly, Sen emphasizes the importance of what he calls “public action” and public mobilization in Kerala’s development experience (1999).
Debates also focus on how exactly a politicized public comes into being and begins putting pressure on the state. In the literature on Kerala’s development experience, some emphasize the role of the “enlightened” and “modernizing” nineteenth-century rulers of the princely states of Tiruvitamkoor and Kochi, two of the three regions that were brought together to form the Kerala state in 1956. For example, Sen argues that those rulers responded to British colonialism and an increased missionary presence by expanding educational opportunities across caste groups in 1817 (1990). Sen sees the spread of literacy through the early expansion of educational opportunities as crucial for the development of a population able to articulate demands and mobilize publicly.
In a somewhat more diuse way, Sen and others also highlight the matrilineal past of the dominant Hindu Nair caste in the region (Sen 1990; Jeffrey 1993). Asserting that this matrilineal history indicates that society positively appreciated women’s rights and positions and gave women material means for survival, such scholars often link matrilineality and the high rates of female literacy that distinguish the Kerala development experience. Others also point to a long tradition of contact with the “outside world” through trade and religious practices, which created an openness to new ideas and a pluralistic culture with large minority populations. The Christian community, in particular, which dates back to the first century, took advantage of missionary educational efforts during the British colonial period to create a vigorous and expansive educational infrastructure (Franke and Chasin 1992; Jeffrey 1993). All of these arguments take the spread of education and the creation of a literate population as the foundation of a public citizenry willing and able to demand the expansion of social rights, such as education and health care, from the state.
Others offer more contemporary explanations of Kerala’s exceptionalism, rooted in the state’s modern social and political history. Arguing that high rates of education and literacy per se do not automatically lead to an active citizenry, they emphasize the interaction between vigorous caste-based social reform movements and the communist left.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from Liberalization’s Childrenby RITTY A. LUKOSE Copyright © 2009 by DUKE UNIVERSITY PRESS. Excerpted by permission.
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