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i
Decolonizing Psychology
ii
Mark Freeman
Series Editor
Decolonizing
Psychology
Globalization, Social Justice, and Indian
Youth Identities
Sunil Bhatia
1
iv
1
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers
the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education
by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University
Press in the UK and certain other countries.
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Printed by WebCom, Inc., Canada
v
I am here because they were there for me when I took my first steps
and many leaps of faith along the way.
vi
vi
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments ix
Introduction xiii
References 287
Index 307
vi
ix
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
There are many people who have supported the remarkable journey of this
book. I am especially indebted to Mark Freeman, the series editor for explo-
rations in narrative psychology. He showed great faith in the book project
and his unwavering support, brilliance, and keen editorial insights made the
book stronger and authentic. I am particularly grateful for his wise mentoring
and the advice that I should give more space to the stories of participants in
the book.
Abby Gross, the senior editor, played a vital role in overseeing the proj-
ect. My special thanks to her for having confidence in the project right from
the beginning and providing crucial input during various phases of the man-
uscript. It has been an absolute delight to work with the assistant editor,
Courtney MCCaroll—who very smoothly shepherded the various stages of
the production of the book. I also want to thank the four anonymous review-
ers who provided thoughtful, extensive, and constructive feedback on the
book proposal and manuscript.
Notwithstanding their contributions, any errors in the book are mine alone.
The heart and soul of this book is anchored in the study of lives and with-
out my participants’ willingness to share their life stories and perspectives,
this book would have lost its moorings. I am forever indebted to the youth,
families, parents, professionals, and many other people from various cultural
and class backgrounds in India who embraced this project, gave me their time
and spent many hours talking to me about their lives.
I am grateful to Nisha Kagal and Pushpa Darekar for doing such a thorough
job with transcribing all the interviews.
Michelle Fine and the faculty and students at the critical social-personality
psychology program at CUNY have provided an intellectual home to me for
exploring many of the key ideas that found their way in the book. The four col-
loquium talks that I gave at the critical psychology program eventually became
woven in the threads of the different chapters. In particular, Michelle’s stead-
fast support has been extremely valuable to my growth as a scholar. I owe
x
her a debt of gratitude for inspiring me to imagine a more humane and social
justice oriented psychology.
The American Psychological Association’s Division 24, Society for
Theoretical and Philosophical Psychology, Dialogical Self Conference,
Narrative Study of Lives and Personology group, and Society for Qualitative
Inquiry in Psychology have served as important generative spaces for my
scholarship. The numerous colleagues I have met in these spaces have contrib-
uted immensely to my growth as a theorist and scholar.
The seeds of this project were born out of many conversations I had with
Ram Mahalingam. He encouraged me to write this book even before I had
written a single chapter. My sincere thanks for his rock-solid backing over
the years and giving critical feedback on the manuscript and just being there
for me.
Michelle Mamberg’s compassionate and vigorous reading of the manu-
script was such a gift especially when I was stuck in my writing. Her unfalter-
ing encouragement and warmth was an important source of reassurance and
motivation for me to plod along. My heartfelt thanks to her for taking on the
role of being one of the trusted outside readers.
I feel very fortunate to have a circle of supportive and amazing colleagues
in the Department of Human Development and Education at Bolles House
at Connecticut College. I owe a special thanks to Michelle Dunlap, Jenny
Fredericks, Mike James, Loren Marulis, Donna Graham, Sandy Grande,
Lauren Anderson, Dana Wright and Charlie Cocores. It has been a joy to work
with such a special group of people who have fostered an excellent spirit of
inquiry, collaboration, and reflection in the work space. My conversations
with colleagues at Bolles House have served as a graceful reminder to me that
the work of social justice and decolonization is a long struggle that is com-
posed of many moments of resistance, collaboration, and re-imagination.
Their commitment to social justice, human development and education is
awe-inspiring.
The Center for the Comparative Study of Race and Ethnicity (CCSRE) at
Connecticut College has also given me a community to critically engage with
issues of social justice, racial inequality, and social difference. I am especially
thankful to Sandy Grande for her solidarity, radical vision of justice, and for
introducing me to the history of decolonization from indigenous perspectives.
I want to specially thank Jefferson Singer for his continuous support and
for inviting me to be a part of the broader community of scholars in the per-
sonology and narrative group.
I am grateful to Donna Graham for her exceptional service to the depart-
ment and for assistance with this project. There are times when I have given
her an assignment and she has completed it quickly and asked, “Is there
anything else I can help with.” Her positive demeanor, generous and caring
[x] Acknowledgments
xi
attitude and a thoroughly professional outlook has made Bolles House such
an inviting place to work.
This research project was partially funded from Peggy Sheridan Community
Learning Grants from the Holleran Center of Public Policy and Community
Action and R.F. Johnson Grants. Specifically, the Sheridan Community
Learning Grants have been very valuable in allowing me to conduct ethno-
graphic field work in India. I want to thank Jennifer Fredericks, Tracee Reiser
and Rebecca McCue for providing the structural support for undertaking com-
munity based research.
This book was a result of transnational relationships and connections.
There were key people in Pune who had my back and they went out of their
way to make sure my project moved forward.
Meenakshi Iyer played a pivotal role in assisting me in launching the pilot
project and connecting me to her network of friends and colleagues in the
Pune IT sector. My special thanks to Reena Bonagiri for introducing me to her
dozens of families and friends who were willing and eager to engage in conver-
sations about globalization and identity. Suparna Karpe was my gatekeeper
to Meridian College who helped me in setting up interviews with faculty and
staff and and the students. Rahul Bajaj, Poonam Mercandante, and Poonam
Aurora opened up the world of call centers for me taught me important les-
sons about about the culture of outsourcing and business processing offices.
My friends, Nagraj Vedadri, Shankar Gaonkar, and Ravi Jathar were impor-
tant interlocutors for me as they were able to narrate complicated and varied
stories of cultural change and identity formation in India. The India of their
youth was in the distant past and they had lived through two decades of neo-
liberalization that had profoundly impacted their lives. Their perspective on
neoliberal globalization in India was tremendously useful in formulating the
arguments in the book.
My friendship with Rohidas Shetty has been a source of fulfilment and per-
sonal transformation. Over the years, his generosity, equanimity, and wisdom
have brought immense joy. Unbeknownst to him, many of our conversations
over our evening walks on Dhole Patil Road have found a place in the book.
Pratima Joshi has also profoundly influenced my thinking about social ine-
quality and urban poverty in India. Her leadership on providing sanitation to
the urban working-class residents in India through her non-profit, Shelter
Associates, is nothing short of a local revolution. Her message and commit-
ment to this cause has inspired to me to follow in her footsteps. Pratima’s
dedicated colleagues and social workers were very helpful in connecting me to
the youth and families in Panchsheel Basti. I thank them for trusting me with
their legacy.
I am thankful to the National Academy of Psychology in India for inviting
me to give a keynote talk that was based on this book at their conference at IIT
Acknowledgments [ xi ]
xi
[ xii ] Acknowledgments
xi
INTRODUCTION
I have been an eyewitness to a changing India ever since 1990 when I left
to pursue my doctorate in psychology at Clark University in Worcester,
Massachusetts. Every other year, I would return home to Pune city in the state
of Maharashtra in India—a city that was changing beyond recognition. The
cumulative effect of these changes is difficult to describe because, to a large
extent, I was revisiting the familiarity of home. I usually felt I was returning
to a recognizable cultural space, but in 2003, I recall being struck by the steady
onslaught of globalization on the local spaces in Pune. The buildings and land-
marks from my college days were slowly giving way to new office buildings,
sprawling residential apartments, and shopping malls. At that time, I could
see cultural fissures and breaks in patterns that previously seemed familiar
and ordinary. With every visit to Pune, I realized that “my story” was not just
solely born out of my first-hand experiences with globalization as a social phe-
nomenon, but it was part of a larger story of identity and cultural change that
was unfolding in India. My narrative was embedded in a host of other sto-
ries about colonization, postcolonial India, social class inequality, excessive
wealth, and consumption—none of which I fully understood. I heard numer-
ous accounts from my family and friends about how they were reconstructing
their identities in the face of enormous change.
During the past decade, the most significant transformation I witnessed in
India was not the outrageous surge of new malls or the increase in the num-
ber of cars on the road. Rather, what I witnessed was a shift in how segments
of middle-and upper-class urban Indians were imagining and reimagining
their identities. I also noticed that the jarring juxtaposition of desperate pov-
erty growing steadily alongside affluent malls did not seem to rankle their
sensibilities. The young and old repeatedly affirmed this to me in a fusion of
Hindi and English that colloquially is characterized as Hinglish: “Abhi, there
is future here, na? (“Now, there is future here, no?”), “Zyada opportunities
hai” (“There are more opportunities here”), and “Nai baaba, there are openings
here now so why go abroad?” A popular Pepsi commercial launched in India in
the late 1990s, “Yeh Dil Maange More!” (“The Heart Wants More!”), captured
xvi
the mood of the times. Middle-class families were rushing to buy apartments,
cars, and motorcycles on bank loans as their purchasing power was exponen-
tially increasing due to their higher salaries. The sites of self-making were
everywhere.
In 2008, I purchased a copy of the first issue of Vogue magazine that was
launched in India for the emerging middle-and upper-class segments of urban
Indians who were brand conscious and had the money to consume expensive
luxuries. The first 50 pages of the Indian Vogue magazine were not different
from those of the American Vogue. There were slick and glossy advertise-
ments for Gucci, Lancôme, Tudor, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana, Audi, Salvatore
Ferragano, Ganjam Jewelers, and Tommy Hilfiger. What was different about
this inaugural issue was that the editor of Vogue had asked each of the Indian
and foreign contributors to answer the following question: “If India were a
woman, how would you dress her?” Shobha De (2007), a well-known chroni-
cler of gossip and the social lives of celebrities in India, answered the question,
“I would dress her in a sari . . . of course! But give her a look, a more contem-
porary spin, using accessories that say ‘today’ ” (p. 50). What did “today” or
the “contemporary spin” mean in this context? “Contemporary” and “today”
referred to an India that was viewed as becoming modern, advanced, and
global. Lucinda Chambers (2007), the fashion director of the British Vogue,
was more detailed in her answer as it incorporated many of the old tropes of
Orientalist language. She wrote,
I see India as a woman who perhaps is the first generation of her family to go
to university. She has a job; she is earning money that she can spend on her-
self. She is newly confident and happy. She is international but hasn’t lost touch
with what is wonderful in her background. She would dress in an individual,
charming and quirky way, mixing the modern, such as Miu Miu, Westwood, with
Sabyasachi Mukherjee and Comme, with some pieces from her grandmother’s
wardrobe. Nothing mannered or studied about her; she is spontaneous and spir-
ited and that is reflected in her clothes. (p. 53)
[ xiv ] Introduction
xv
Dasgupta wants to transform India into a blank slate so her colonial history
could be erased and she could overcome her traditional views about sexual
identity. Once India had been undressed, stripped of her historical baggage,
Dasgupta would then portray India as someone who is not afraid to display
her sexuality. In their answers, other contributors described India as a woman
who is exotic, colorful, independent, vibrant, multicultural, and as someone
who would be wearing a “Kingfisher blue sari, with threads of gold . . . with
Manolo Blahnik shoes . . . Chanel leather bag and Jackie O black sunglasses”
(Haddi, 2007, p. 53).
These contributors were capturing the desires of upper-class urban, edu-
cated, English-speaking wealthy Indians, who in the first place had the finan-
cial background and the cultural capital to afford the luxuries and objects that
were displayed in the magazine. These descriptions also reflected their indi-
vidual fantasies of India and the desires of a certain class of people to see India
as being on the world stage. They wanted to “undress” India so her excess bag-
gage of tradition, poverty, and colonial history could be obliterated, and India
could then be given a makeover as though it were a lifeless mannequin, devoid
of people, history, politics, and culture.
In 2007, a single copy of Vogue cost approximately Rs. 100 or $2—a sum
that approximately 200 million Indians earn daily by mostly engaging in work
that requires physical labor. The Vogue India edition includes another article,
titled “The Burden of Wealth,” that gives tips to Indians on how to spend and
invest their money. The author of the article, Alex Kuruvilla (2007), states that
whether you “love it or loathe it, this is the new India” (p. 148). Everywhere
you go in this new India, he writes, people are talking about their increasing
wealth and extraordinary spending. Kuruvilla observes that since liberaliza-
tion reforms in 1991, India has added 25,000 millionaires and 36 billionaires.
He further states that the post-liberalization, educated, Indian youth have
come into new money and are uncertain about how to spend their wealth.
Introduction [ xv ]
xvi
Furthermore, he elaborates that those Indians who have become rich should
not hesitate to publicly flaunt their newly acquired wealth by having lavish
dinner parties and “intimate gatherings in boutique hotels along the Turkish
Rivera” (p. 150).
Kuruvilla (2007) also writes that India is living in a gilded age, and the
newly rich should learn from philanthropists in the United States (e.g.,
Warren Buffett and Bill Gates) and should champion social causes and make
government largely irrelevant during times of prosperity. Vogue was unabash-
edly pushing for the handing over of large portions of the Indian government
to privatization and corporate power. How to undress India and give her a pol-
ished corporate makeover had become one of the preoccupations of the elite,
and they were using their financial and cultural clout to construct and display
new forms of Indianness.
The series of comments in Vogue reveal that the Indian nation was prob-
lematically imagined through the pathology of schizophrenia, tropes of
Orientalism, elitism, and through a gendered, objectified, and sexualized
discourse. In addition, the contributors were also reinforcing the point that
globalization and the new accumulation of wealth had made India modern,
brand-conscious, and ready for a Western makeover. The views of the con-
tributors who highlighted the arrival of a global India in the 21st century were
not some isolated and exclusive opinions expressed only by international and
Indian writers of the Indian fashion magazine world. Rather, several urban
Indian youth from middle-and upper-class families to whom I spoke expressed
similar sentiments about India that echoed those of the Vogue writers. The
English-speaking youth that I spoke to expressed an ambition to become rich,
powerful, and make India a “world-class” nation.
There were many complex and varied stories of globalization that were cir-
culating around in the public imagination. Several of the people I interviewed
in Pune viewed their encounters with globalization through their respective
social class locations. The middle-class families may not have had the financial
capacity to celebrate their birthdays in the hotels along the Turkish Rivera,
but they were reimagining the nation as a global player, a superpower, and a
modern country of vast talents, and they wanted to make India like Singapore
and London.
[ xvi ] Introduction
xvi
Introduction [ xvii ]
xvi
shops, sites, playgrounds, theaters, and cafés. These landmarks evoked pow-
erful memories of the past. Café Delite near my college, where I spent many
hours laagoing adda (hanging out) with friends and doing time-pass, was now
replaced with a residential and commercial building.2 Empire Theatre, where
I saw many English and Hindi matinees while skipping school and college, was
now a three-star hotel. The Chowpatty food stalls, where my friends and I use
to go for late-night street food—for butter-laden Pav-Bhaji (spicy mashed veg-
etable mix eaten with toasted hamburger buns sautéed in butter) and for cold
sugar cane juice on sweaty summer afternoons—was now a small mall called
Shoppers Stop.
Many of the young participants whom I interviewed for the material for this
book were witness to these remarkable changes, yet unlike me, they seemed
defiantly buoyant and did not grumble much about the changes around them.
To them and many others, Pune was bubbling with future prospects, bril-
liantly glowing in the aftermath of new call centers, multinational offshore
business processing offices (BPOs), and IT parks, as well as the many high-
class restaurants, bars, and multiplex theaters that showed slick Bollywood
films. The urban middle-and upper-class youth would complain about the
traffic, overpopulation, crowds, and interruptions to electricity, but the cul-
tural changes were interpreted as ushering in a new India that was perceived
as shedding its old traditional garb and stepping into a new cultural attire.
Their positive outlook was reflected in the idea that globalization and moder-
nity had come to them. They did not have to go anywhere to feel modern. These
participants told me “we don’t have to go abroad, we have opportunities here.”
One of the most common statements I heard from friends and family mem-
bers was “idhar, sab milta hai” (“we get everything here now”). Prior to the
economic reforms of 1991, the market for foreign products and brands was
highly regulated in India. Foreign products/goods or, in local slang, “imported
maal” were now available to everyone—provided one had the financial means
to buy them. Foreign jeans, electronics, liquor, perfume, cars, wine, gourmet
cheese, and other foods were now available in malls and American-style gro-
cery stores. For many young, educated urban Indians, these commodities sig-
nified the arrival of a global India.
I was lamenting the fact that my list of familiar signposts and landmarks
that were torn down had grown longer with every return trip. My friends
who had stayed in Pune and were living through the sociocultural changes
that globalization had wrought also seemed despondent about the rapid
pace of urban development. They had become the voice of the older gener-
ation that they had once derided. One of my college friends, Raj,3 sounded
alarmed: “You know, in Bangalore, you won’t believe . . . in the call center in
the morning, they have found condoms! This is the new India. The India of
condoms.”
[ xviii ] Introduction
xi
Introduction [ xix ]
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Language: Finnish
Kirj.
Romain Rolland
Suomennos
*****
Hän palasi Intiaan 1891. Surullinen paluu. Hänen äitinsä oli juuri
kuollut, ja uutinen oli häneltä salattu. Hänestä tuli asianajaja
Bombayn ylioikeuteen. Muutamia vuosia myöhemmin hän oli kieltävä
tämän toimensa, jonka hän tuomitsi epämoraaliseksi. Jopa hän tätä
tointa hoitaessaan pidätti itselleen oikeuden olla jatkamatta asiaa,
jos hänestä siinä ilmeni vääryyttä.
*****
*****