Masculinity, Consumerism and the Post-National Indian City: Streets, Neighbourhoods, Home (Economic Histories of Indian States)

Imagining the city as a series of interconnected spaces, the book explores how several such connections – between the home and the street, family and public spaces, religious and non-religious contexts, for example – relate to the topic of masculinity. How do men – elite, subaltern, consumers, 'heads' of the family, members of 'Hindu fundamentalist' organisations, readers of pulp fiction and 'footpath pornography', those who admire the 'strong' political leader – move between these spaces, define them and are defined by them? Urbanisation in India is a vibrant site of an extraordinary cultural, social and economic churn, a context of both the consolidation of masculine identities as well as anxieties regarding their place in the city. The book suggests that sustained and in-depth engagements with specific historical and social contexts avoids tendencies to imagine cities as nodes of comparison that frequently generates universal models of urbanism. "Drawing upon historical analysis, ethnographic research and analyses of popular culture, this book brings together two topics that have great bearing on contemporary Indian life but have rarely been discussed within the same analytical framework, namely the cultures of masculinity and those of the city. This book explores relationships between masculinity and urban life through an interdisciplinary and multi-sited approach. The contexts include elite nationalist imaginations of the city and modernity; the manner in which working class men negotiate the city as a site of desire and aspirations of social mobility; masculinity and religion; sexualised visions of the city in popular-culture texts - such as Hindi language pulp fiction - that circulate as quotidian fantasies of the city as a site of thrill, danger and the 'necessity' of men's control over women; and representations of the political leader as a global masculine type who will lead a previously emasculated nation to future economic and cultural glory"-- Provided by publisher