Of love and labor: Women workers, modernity and changing gender relations in Bangalore, India

In this dissertation, I describe the economic practices undertaken by unmarried working class south Indian women in orienting themselves toward nagareekthana, a contemporary south Indian modernity. Nagareekthana describes a modern Indian-ness that idealizes commodity consumption and encapsulates a simultaneous orientation toward tradition and modernity, and local, national, and global hegemonies. Through ethnographic fieldwork conducted with unmarried women working in export-oriented garment factories in Bangalore, India, between 2000 and 2003, I discuss how nagareekthana is fundamentally gendered, and fosters the development of new feminine and class identities among women factory workers as producers, consumers, and marriageable daughters.;While their presence as "cheap labor" in export-oriented factory work is integral to how planners, investors, and corporations conceive of India's competitive advantage in the global economy, they do not simply provide the labor for economic growth. Rather, I argue, the meanings and implications of factory employment and their experiences and aspirations as wage-earning women are intimately bound up with the very transformation of the Indian economy. Through their engaging in labor, women workers gamer the material, cultural, and social resources to engage in practices and desires associated with the modern consumer economy, such as consumption, urban residence, romance, and mobility.;Women workers are torn between at least two sets of discourses about gender: modern femininity and filial obligation. I will show how the tensions between the two ideals center on decisions about spending (personal consumption and family contributions), friendships (with peers, as well as family ties), and marriage (love versus dowry/arranged). These tensions are particularly heightened around the modern convention of dowry, a new patriarchal requirement of marriage in south India. Working daughters find that dowry allows them to combine nagareeka ideals and dutifulness in ways that reinforce their subordination and channel their resources toward bolstering male privilege and mobility.;A central objective of this dissertation is to elucidate ways in which multiple ideologies and systems of value transform modes of gender. Examining women workers' economic practices and identities deepens our understanding of the opportunities and limits of modernity and the cultural politics of globalization and economic restructuring in India.