'Global Indians' and the knowledge economy: Gender and the making of a middle-class nation

As the global political economy shifts to emphasize an economy of specialized knowledge, the success of the technology sector in postcolonial nations raises important questions about how an emerging knowledge economy influences broader national and cultural meanings. Among "new" middle class professionals who support the knowledge economy, new definitions of national and cultural belonging are actively reshaped and recreated. In India, the explosion of the information technology (IT) industry in the last decade has created an upwardly mobile urban middle class whose high visibility in the media has altered the image of the nation. No longer a poor nation, steeped in poverty and superstition, India's knowledge professionals have helped to transform India's image into that of an emerging, globally competitive knowledge economy. Commonly portrayed in the media through iconic representations of professional Indian women working in IT, this 'new' India is replete with gendered, middle-class meanings. In these media images, a professional Indian woman projects an identity that is both "global" and distinctly "Indian," symbolizing the progress of the nation.;This project unravels how a progressive India is made concrete through a lived sense of a "global Indian" identification, clearly articulated in the narrations of professional IT women. Global Indianness helps to consolidate the ideology of the knowledge economy as a viable development discourse for India, and gains legitimacy through its compatibility with the "core values" of national culture, particularly with regard to family. In the IT workplace, class and regional differences within India are homogenized into a broad sense of cultural nationalism, made compatible with the global character of the IT industry. Global Indianness is furthermore powerfully influenced by, and produced in conversation with, an upwardly mobile Indian diaspora working in IT. Drawing from interviews conducted in India, South Africa, and California, this study addresses questions of globalization by focusing on individual articulations, highlighting the centrality of gender and class in constructing a contemporary cultural nationalism. To address these issues, I elaborate upon theoretical debates on the knowledge economy, the postcolonial literature on gender and nation, and an emerging empirical literature on the "new" middle class of India.