International Convention of Asia Scholars (ICAS)

Reportedly over half the Indian population is below the age of twenty-five, making India one of the youngest nations in the world. The rapid globalization and liberalization of India’s economy over the past decade has been linked to this generational shift. Young people in India today are often characterized as guiltless consumers with boundless ambition, unfettered by the political anxieties about national identity and nation-building that burdened previous generations in the wake of independence. In LIBERALIZATION’S CHILDREN Ritty Lukose examines the dynamic relationship between youth, consumerism, and politics in a globalized India in order to show how notions of social membership are being refashioned by consumer practices. Drawing from her ethnographic research at a low-caste college in the southern state of Kerala, Lukose focuses on how India’s liberalization—and the subsequent cultural emphasis on its burgeoning middle class—has impacted class, caste, gender, and regional differences in the country. Lukose pays particular attention to low-caste youth who are fully engaged in the structures of consumerism and globalization, yet who find themselves at the margins of its middle-class articulations. She looks at the attitudes and activities of these students—from fashion to romance to campus politics—to understand how the process of liberalization is experienced not just in a global-local framework, but as a complex phenomenon that arises within and across nations.

The book begins with an exploration of Kerala’s place within India’s liberalizing trend. In the 1990s Kerala became the focus of economic and educational reform. Although largely regarded as a development success story, the ongoing migration from Kerala to the Persian Gulf and the growing influence of multinational corporations has made globalization into a highly contested term in the region. The next four chapters consider the sites in which the students navigate their identities as both consumers and citizens. Throughout, Lukose focuses on how anxieties about globalization often surface in gendered ways, particularly around the place of women in the public sphere and within consumer culture. In a chapter on controversies over women’s fashions and the Miss Kerala pageant, Lukose examines how women participate as consumer citizens within the spaces of public life. Looking at dating practices among the college youth, the next chapter shows how modern romance, particularly for women, has focused on questions of choice and agency in a way that reflects discourses of consumerism. The final two chapters focus on the politics of education at the college. Here Lukose examines the masculinist political culture within student politics and how secularist anti-caste movements at the school have clashed with Hindu nationalist sentiment.