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Globalizing India

Perspectives from Below

Wimbledon Publishing Company

INTRODUCTION

Jackie Assayag and C. J. Fuller

To say that globalization has become the global cliché of our time has itself turned into a cliché in academic writing on the subject. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most social scientists, including anthropologists, acknowledged that globalization is a genuinely important topic of enquiry and that – despite its often ill-defined, catch-all connotations – it does label a distinctive transformative process that appears to have taken hold in many parts of the contemporary world, including India.

Definitions of globalization abound, but paraphrasing Held and his co-authors (1999: 14–15), we may initially define it as the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness, a spatio-temporal process of change that links local or national social relations and networks with worldwide, global ones and thereby transforms 'the organization of human affairs'. A particularly important aspect is the 'deepening enmeshment of the local and global', so that distant events may have more and more local significance, and vice versa (ibid.: 15). This aspect is one to which anthropologists can particularly contribute, and introducing their volume on the anthropology of globalization, Inda and Rosaldo point out that anthropology 'is most concerned with the articulation of the global and the local' (2002: 4), with how globalization interacts with particular societies and cultures, and how ordinary people themselves experience and understand the process.

In discussing the local and global, however, several pitfalls should be avoided. Obviously, no human being can be in more than one place at a time, and even if some people today really are 'hybrid' transnationalists, the vast majority of the world's population are not, because they continue to live and work in one locality only – and commonly do so for all or most of their lives. Secondly, and related to the last point, global interconnectedness is extremely uneven. At one extreme, some groups of people in some places engaged in some kinds of activity – international bankers, for instance – are globally linked with each other, whereas at the other extreme, many other groups – notably those formed by the marginalized poor – tend to be very isolated. Indeed, their marginalization, and hence their disconnection from even locally existing networks of people and resources, may be increasing as a direct consequence of 'structural adjustment' policies or other developments that are part of economic globalization.

Thirdly, and of more general relevance to the studies in this book, reified distinctions between 'local places' and 'global forces' need to be avoided, so that, as Tsing observes, we are not misled by 'globalist fantasies'. Instead, we must recognize that 'the cultural processes of all "place" making and all "force" making are both local and global – that is, both socially and culturally particular and productive of widely spreading interactions' (Tsing 2002: 477). Thus the local and global – and, a fortiori, the national, regional or other spatial levels – are always enmeshed or entangled, not separate and preformed, because they are always mutually constituted vis-à-vis each other through social relationships and cultural patterns.

As Inda and Rosaldo observe (2002: 4), most academic work on globalization is about large-scale economic, political and cultural processes, and the anthropological literature, though growing, is still fairly limited. Certainly this is true for India, where pronouncements about globalization in general are far more plentiful than detailed documentation about 'the different meanings and consequences that [it] may have for social groups located differently along the axes of caste, class, gender, ethnicity, nationality and so on' (Deshpande 2003: 155). On the whole, too, as Deshpande observes, even when the globalization literature mentions the need for such details, it still 'continues with business as usual' (ibid.: 156), so that the 'grass-roots' view from below – the 'folk understandings of the global, and the practices with which they are intertwined' (Tsing 2002: 469) – remain mostly neglected. Interrupting the usual business is the first objective of this book, which is designed to present a selection of ethnography that explores different aspects of globalization from below, and in so doing sheds light on the relationship between the different spatial levels on which globalizing processes unfold. The book opens with an essay on the history of globalization in India that supplies a context for the mostly contemporary material discussed in the subsequent chapters.

Held et al. distinguish three broad schools of thought about globalization, which they label 'hyperglobalists', 'sceptics' and 'transformationalists' (1999: 2). For hyperglobalists, contemporary globalization is an entirely new epoch mainly defined by global market capitalism and the consequent weakening of the nation-state. Sceptics, by contrast, contend that globalization is an exaggerated myth, because economic integration across the world today is not unprecedented and is probably less than it was in the late nineteenth century; nor are nation-states actually in decline. For transformationalists – among whom Held et al. effectively include themselves – contemporary globalization is genuinely new, but it is a 'long-term historical process which is inscribed with contradictions and which is significantly shaped by conjunctural factors' (ibid: 7); as they recognize, world history has seen a series of earlier phases of globalization (ibid.: 414–24), and the long-term history of globalization, punctuated by reduced integration during phases of deglobalization, has been carefully and critically examined in recent historical scholarship (Hopkins 2002). Moreover, contemporary globalization must be seen as 'a highly differentiated phenomenon' (Held et al. 1999: 27), partly because (as already noted above) 'global interconnectedness is not experienced by all peoples or communities to the same extent or even in the same way' (ibid.: 28). There are, in other words, multiple forms of globalization, just as, with comparable but not identical empirical and conceptual problems, there are multiple forms of modernity.

Among commentators, activists and public intellectuals in India, hyperglobalists are prominent, although they vehemently disagree about whether globalization is good or bad. For well-disposed optimists, like the business commentator Gurcharan Das, whose views typify those now expressed throughout the Indian business press, information technology and globalization can transform India in the twenty-first century, and he concludes: 'Never before in recorded history have so many people been in a position to rise so quickly' (2002: 357). For hostile pessimists, like the journalist P. Sainath (2000), whose perspective represents much radical and left-wing opinion, globalization is the manifestation of 'market fundamentalism', an assault on democracy and the harbinger of worsening inequality. Both Das and Sainath grossly overstate their case, but they are not at all unusual. Anthropologists, on the other hand, tend to be professionally resistant to the sweeping generalizations of hyperglobalism, as all the writers in this book certainly are. Assayag in particular explores the flaws in one version of radical hyperglobalist thought pertaining to agriculture and biotechnology, a particular bête noire for anti-globalization protestors.

On the whole, anthropologists, in common with historians, tend to be sceptics or transformationalists, although not all the contributors to this book are of one mind and some are more sceptical than others. To some extent, our divergence reflects different theoretical perspectives, but it is also related to the different kinds of evidence that we discuss. From the outset, the main objective of the research project was empirical investigation of a variety of cases that are, at least on the face of it, examples of contemporary globalization – of new entanglements between the global and the local in the economic, agricultural, educational, linguistic, cultural and religious domains. Our principal task, therefore, was and is ethnographic: to collect and present evidence about how very diverse groups of Indians imagine globalization, real or apparent, and how they think and act in relation to its different aspects in different parts of the country. At the same time, though, we wanted to explore critically the extent to which developments that are ostensibly manifestations of globalization are actually driven endogenously by local, regional or national forces, which have often been in place since the colonial period or even earlier.

Also important are 'the resilient but unspectacular continuities present in every specific context' (Deshpande 2003: 153), which ought to be studied precisely to counteract the bias towards evidence of rapid change characteristic of the globalization literature (ibid.: 155). All the anthropologists contributing to this book had considerable previous experience of the people and places they discuss, which greatly helped them in detecting stability and slow continuity, as well as quicker change. The tendency to ascribe to globalization all manner of changes, real or imaginary, that have little to do with it is undoubtedly most prevalent in hyperglobalism. Nevertheless, misleading generalization is a constant danger in 'macro' studies that pay insufficient attention either to ethnographic particularities or to changes and continuities that exist below the global level on a local, regional or national scale. In the field of globalization, anthropologists have no monopoly on truth, but they do have a valuable role to play in counterbalancing large-scale generalizations – often too reliant on evidence about the modern west – with the documented experiences of ordinary men and women in all parts of the world.

Globalization in India

In India, it is generally agreed, globalization becomes a significant process in the late 1980s or early 1990s. In 1985 Rajiv Gandhi's government started to liberalize the economy by removing some controls, restrictions and high taxes that had long been part of the Nehruvian planned economy. In 1991 Manmohan Singh, the finance minister in Narasimha Rao's government, initiated a more determined policy of liberalization and dismantlement of state control, so that during the 1990s, for better or for worse (and opinion varies sharply), India was increasingly integrated into the global economy – at the lumbering pace of an elephant rather than with the spring of an Asian tiger. Thus, for example, foreign direct investment increased, barriers to foreign trade were reduced, growing numbers of Indians began to work for global enterprises – from outsourced textile production to software engineering – and a huge range of 'foreign' consumer goods, from Coca-Cola to Mercedes-Benz cars, went on sale throughout the country, though mainly for consumption by the well-off middle class.

In spite of the conceptual problems discussed by Assayag (2000), the rise of the mainly urban 'great Indian middle class', as Varma (1999) calls it, certainly is one of the most important developments associated with economic liberalization. Middle-class consumer demand is not only a significant stimulus for economic growth, it has also gone hand in hand with the rapid spread of consumerist ideology. Economic liberalization and the globalization of the Indian economy will almost certainly continue to speed up for the foreseeable future, although there are widely divergent views about the prospects for prosperity or poverty for different sections of the population in different parts of the country.

The political concomitants of these economic developments are complicated and sometimes paradoxical. In brief, economic liberalization has been accompanied by the rise of Hindu nationalism and the Bharatiya Janata Party, which looked set to expand its support steadily until its surprising defeat in the 2004 general election. As several scholars have shown (e.g. Corbridge and Harriss 2000; Hansen 1999; Rajagopal 2001), economic liberalization is significantly linked to the rise of Hindu nationalism. Rajagopal, for example, observes that: 'The Hindu nationalists' appeals echoed and reinforced those of an expanding market economy, both expressing the cultural and political assertion of newly rich classes' (2001: 42), especially the urban middle class. Hindu nationalism is plainly chauvinistic and anti-globalist in many ways, but it is also driven by the desire to make India into a modern nation – with its own nuclear bomb – so that it is 'recognized as [one of the] respected members of that elusive global "comity of nations"', the 'object of desire' for even parochial nationalists (Hansen 1999: 234).

Also important in many regions of India has been an intensification of caste-based politics and regional parties, which the BJP and the Congress have sought to accommodate. These regional political developments have multiple causes too complicated to discuss here, but some of them are directly linked to economic liberalization, such as the increased power of regional state governments over their own economies as intervention from New Delhi is reduced, or the complex ramifications of structural adjustment policies on local caste and class systems. If one thing is clear, though, it is that the modern, postcolonial, Indian nation-state is not about to wither away, as some hyperglobalist speculation suggests, so that any cogent analysis of how the local and global are enmeshed will also have to take into account the national and regional levels.

In tandem with economic liberalization and partly enabling it has been a rapid development of electronic communications technology, which is a crucial dimension of contemporary globalization in India. For anyone who knew the country more than 20 years ago, one of the most startling changes was the sudden appearance of public telephone booths in the late 1980s – and the discovery that the telephones often worked. As never before, it then became possible to dial a number for anywhere in India or overseas and expect to get through on an audible line. A working telephone system has now expanded enormously – even though many rural areas are still connected only minimally, if at all – and in most towns and cities connection to the Internet is now fairly easy. In some cities these developments have allowed a new information technology sector to grow very rapidly since the late 1990s, although we still have little hard data (as opposed to copious rhetoric) about the real economic and social effects of this growth.

Television is another modern technology that has grown quickly, so that it can now be received almost everywhere in the country. Since the early 1990s, privately-owned satellite channels have attracted large audiences at the expense of the state-owned Doordarshan channels. As studies in various parts of the world have shown, working telephones and numerous television channels – along with videotapes, computers and other electronic equipment – do not give rise to the global homogenization of cultures. So although these media and technologies, at one level, do enhance the interconnectedness of people and communities – locally, regionally and nationally, as well as globally – they simultaneously generate new appropriations, translations or mutations that in turn create new divisions and differences between people and communities. New forms of imagination continually convert global, cosmopolitan cultural forms into vernacular ones, and vice versa. Across India and its regions, and among the Indian diaspora overseas, therefore, the outcome is that cultural diversity is certainly not being eradicated by global uniformity, let alone by the 'Americanization' feared by some alarmed commentators.

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Excerpted from Globalizing India by Jackie Assayag. Copyright © 2005 Wimbledon Publishing Company. Excerpted by permission of Wimbledon Publishing Company.
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