‘Presentable’: the body and neoliberal subjecthood in contemporary India

Abstract

The opening up of the Indian economy through a series of neoliberal reforms since 1991 ushered in processes of globalization that have led to a rapidly changing socio-cultural environment in India. Economic growth, globalizing discourses, and new consumer choices have driven desires for new global-yet-Indian identities. An emerging consumer agency has allowed for the embodiment and performance of these identities at the site of the body, even as new spaces of consumption have necessitated new bodily dispositions and practices. In this paper, I focus on how access to new commodities and discourses has affected understandings of the modern Indian body. In particular, I concentrate on appearance and the notion of exercising consumer agency to be ‘presentable’ as a lens through which to examine broader aspects of the body in the creation of neoliberal subjects in India.

Keywords:

• the body
• consumption
• India
• neoliberalism
• globalization
• subjectivity

Acknowledgements

I am deeply grateful to my informants for their gracious participation. I also thank Drs. Mimi Nichter, Mark Nichter, and Sulabha Pathak for their inputs and critical reading of the manuscript.

Notes

1. Approved by the Institutional Review Board of the University of Arizona.

2. All informant and organization names are pseudonyms, except where indicated otherwise.

3. In fact, I was surprised that female informants repeatedly said that height (or lack of it) was not really a factor in their decisions regarding weeding out prospective spouses; overwhelmingly, being overweight or having a potbelly were the major appearance-related negatives when considering a partner through the arranged marriage process.

4. Anna, a fashion journalist, even told me that among those in fashion circles, an obsession with fairness was seen as a sign of provinciality.

5. Sonali said about wearing Bengal cotton saris to her information technology workplace, ‘A crisp Bengal cotton sari is so classy. It's power dressing, man!’ Her saris were work appropriate, and at the same time, no one seeing her in them could mistake her as provincial or frumpy.

6. See also Marcel Mauss's (1973) ‘techniques of the body,’ which are ‘the ways in which from society to society men know how to use their bodies’ (p. 70), which Bourdieu drew from in his work on the habitus.

7. Fairness in particular has always been prized in this regard.

8. Name used with permission.

9. As mentioned before, scholars of South Asia have detailed a new visibility for the urban middle classes in post-liberalization India, especially as agents of the nation on the world stage (Fernandes, 2000a; McGuire, 2011; Radhakrishnan, 2011). Even as marketers targeted the ‘exploding Indian middle class’ through the identity of the global Indian, the urban ‘Indian middle class’ came to represent the nation in national discourse.

10. As several South Asianists have pointed out, pinning down what constitutes the middle class, especially in post-liberalization India, is notoriously difficult (Beteille, 2001; Fernandes, 2000b, 2006; Fernandes & Heller, 2006; Mazzarella, 2005; McGuire, 2011; Radhakrishnan, 2009). The ‘Indian Middle Class’ is not an economic bracket but rather a powerful discursive and performative socioeconomic category. Practices of consumption are critical to the performance of middle classness; Leela Fernandes (2006) remarks that ‘a range of representational practices centered around particular characteristics of consumption, style, and social distinction’ (p. 141) announce middle-class status. I follow Beteille (2001) and the opinions of most of my informants in defining middle-class status as comprising non-manual employment, ease with spoken English, and some measure of formal education.

11. Access and availability were also important in this regard. Most informants saw products in malls or stores and then decided to experiment with them, particularly based on the looks displayed on mannequins, posters, or advice from sales staff. Finding the clothes or products that they observed in English-language programming in locations around them rendered those products or that styling more relevant and applicable to their own lives.

12. It is telling that informants often referred to people who they deemed to be not presentable as ‘behenji [North Indian term for older sister],’ ‘auntyji,’ ‘uncle,’ ‘amma [South Indian term for mother],’ ‘mami [aunt],’ or ‘Govinda [a portly actor from the early 1990s famous for playing unsophisticated, rural characters].’ All these terms not only reference provinciality, but they also index a generational divide; being of the older generation automatically connotes frumpiness, a lack of sophistication, and a lack of presentability.

13. Or, in his words, ‘advanced liberal’.

Additional information

Funding

A research scholarship from the School of Anthropology, University of Arizona, helped offset the costs of the research presented in this paper.