In 1991, the Indian state’s new economic policies led to a greater role of the market. A public discourse that had till then been defined by self-reliance, equity and austerity had to be refashioned. The Indian middle class learnt that ‘thrift’ was not a virtue, and ‘shopping was legitimate pleasure’.

This period witnessed other significant developments: the rise of Hindutva; assertion of marginalised castes; and increasing institutionalisation of feminism. The book details how consumerism, combined with ideas of individualism, empowerment and choice in a contemporary public culture, paved the way for an instant, feel-good, and then aggressive nationalism.

Refashioning India maps this process through a compilation of the author’s works, written at different points in time from the early 1990s, through the next two decades up to mid-2017.

The chapters offer detailed studies of advertisements; everyday details in the English-language print media; the communicative abundance of television; the dangers of instant access and unequal ignorance; and the dynamics of a transformed public sphere.

Refashioning India provides a chronicle of contemporary India, written by an author who is as much a participant member as an observer of everyday life in a changing India.

Maitrayee Chaudhuri is Professor of Sociology, Centre for the Study of Social Systems, School of Social Sciences, Jawaharlal Nehru University.

Publisher’s Acknowledgements
List of Abbreviations
List of Images
Acknowledgements

Chapter 1     Introduction

Chapter 2     Citizens, Workers, Emblems of Culture: An Analysis of the First Plan Document on Women

Chapter 3     Gender in the Making of the Indian Nation-State

Chapter 4     Gender and Advertisements: The Rhetoric of Globalisation

Chapter 5     ‘Feminism’ in Print Media

Chapter 6     A Question of Choice: Advertisements, Media, and Democracy

Chapter 7     The Family and its Representation: From Indology to Market Research

Chapter 8     Nationalism is not What it Used to be: Can Feminism be any Different?

Chapter 9     The Indian Media and its Transformed Public

Chapter 10   Gender, Media, and Popular Culture in a Global India

Chapter 11   National and Global Media Discourse after ‘Nirbhaya’: Instant Access and Unequal Knowledge

Chapter 12   The 2014 General Elections and Afterwards: A Churning Public Discourse and the New Hegemony

 Bibliography
Index