Ruchira Ganguly-Scrase

Globalisation and the Middle Classes in India: The Social and Cultural Impact of Neoliberal Reforms

1. Globalisation, Structural Adjustment and the Middle Classes in India 2. Victims of Consumerism? Consumption and Household Survival 3. Gender, Empowerment and Liberalisation 4. Discourses of Global Efficiency and the Dynamics of New Workplace Culture 5. Culture of Power: The Hegemony of English in a Globalising India 6. Globalised Media: Television and Its Impact on Middle Class Morals, Culture and Identity 7. Conclusion: Indian Middle Class Lives in the Era of Neoliberal Globalisation

Minority women and the experiences of migration

Abstract This article addresses the theme of minority relations and the intensification of gender oppression. We adopt a comparative perspective to examine women’s experiences of migration in two diverse locations. The recent focus on difference in feminist writing renders problematic such comparative enterprises through the contemporary concern with questioning the universality of the category “woman.” However, we suggest that the concept has been deconstructed to the point that it raises the possibility that feminism becomes an inadequate theory and methodology for explaining the status of women. Through a comparative analysis of minority women in different social and cultural contexts, we explore this dilemma for feminism. We examine how gender relations reconfigure in reconstituted relations of class, race, and ethnicity and emphasize the necessity of recognizing both the dynamics of migrating feminisms and the centrality of gender in structuring power relations in diverse contexts.

Who wins? Who loses? And who even knows? Responses to economic liberalisation and cultural globalisation in India

T HE GLOBALISATION OF THE INDIAN ECONOMY HAS DRAMATICALLY influenced social life in that country. While the state has mounted policies of economic liberalisation, claiming that the policies will ultimately benefit the entire population, a number of social scientists have argued that marginalised groups will be adversely affected. In particular, they have emphasised problems such as uneven regional development, wage disparities and increased levels of inequality. Unquestionably, economic liberalisation has not benefited the very poor. Yet, what of the lower income segment of salaried workers? How have they fared over the past eight years and what do they think of the rapid social and cultural changes in India as we head toward the new millennium?

Globalisation and its discontents: An Indian response

Abstract Based on recent ethnographic research among salaried workers and their families in West Bengal, India this paper examines the lived experiences of people in lower‐middle class households under a globalising Indian economy. The major finding from this study reveals that there is a stark contradiction between the rhetoric and reality of globalisation, economic liberalisation and structural adjustment programs for the lower middle classes. The vast majority of my informants have not benefited economically over the past nine years, since the implementation of structural adjustment programs and the New Economic Policy (NEP) of 1991. However, while they remain doubtful about the long‐term benefits of the NEP and liberalisation they positively evaluate many aspects of cultural globalisation. This paper focuses on their ambivalence towards globalisation, and examines their criticisms and their simultaneous and paradoxical espousal of the government rhetoric of work place restructuring and global competitiveness.

The Gendering of Identity: Minority Women in Comparative Perspective

This paper explores the centrality of gender in the construction of minority identities. We adopt a comparative perspective to analyze its significance in the contexts of internal and international migration within the Asia-Pacific region, the former being within contiguous parts of West Bengal, India by the Rabi Das and the latter from the mountains of Laos to Tasmania, Australia by Hmong refugees. In both cases, gender relations are fundamental to the process of identity construction. Nevertheless, the histories of minority status and the strategies adopted by men and women as they construct, re-construct and resist identities vary in the two diverse contexts. We focus on exploring the role of womens resistance and pro-active involvement in the restructuring of identity. Through an analysis of the intersection of ethnicity, gender and class in the construction of minority identities we highlight the need to firstly, avoid essentialist ways of defining gender and ethnic identity, and secondly to examine structural constraints and agency among minority women.