Analytische Theorie Der Organischen Entwicklung (1894)

Appropriately Indian is an ethnographic analysis of the elite class of information technology professionals at the symbolic helm of globalizing India. Comprising a small but prestigious segment of India’s labor force, these transnational knowledge workers dominate the country’s economic and cultural scene, as do their notions of what it means to be Indian. Drawing on the stories of Indian technology professionals in Mumbai, Bangalore, Silicon Valley, and South Africa, Smitha Radhakrishnan explains how these high-tech workers create a global Indianness by transforming the diversity of Indian cultural practices into a generic, mobile set of Indian norms. The Indian culture they create is self-consciously distinct from Western culture, yet compatible with Western cosmopolitan lifestyles. Radhakrishnan describes the material and symbolic privileges that accrue to India’s transnational technology professionals, who often claim ordinary middle-class backgrounds, but are overwhelmingly urban and upper-caste. They are also distinctly apolitical and individualistic. Members of this elite class ground Indianness in family relationships, notions of respectable femininity, and the practice of a decontextualized version of Hinduism. Their expectations of proper Indianness are influenced by the ideas and values that circulate through multinational corporations (Indian and non-Indian), but global Indianness is ultimately rooted and configured in the gendered sphere of home and family, making professional women key arbiters of the new Indian culture.