NOTES 1. Several writers have offered trenchant critiques of neoliberalism in the last several years. Key early works include Samir Amin’s Capitalism in the Age of Globalization: The Management of Contemporary Society (1997) and The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World (2004) and Giovanni Arrighi’s The Long Twentieth Century: Money, Power, and the Origins of Our Times (1994). More recent texts of note include Walden Bello’s Deglobalization: Ideas for a New World Economy (2005), David Harvey’s A Brief Guide to Neoliberalism (2005) and The New Imperialism (2003), Doug Henwood’s After the New Economy: The Binge and the Hangover That Won’t Go Away (2005), and Neil Smith’s The Endgame of Globalization (2005). 2. The most recent figures for foreign reserves are available at the following site: http://rbidocs. rbi.org.in/rdocs/Publications/PDFs/HYMFE040810.pdf. The growth rates can be accessed at http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-11135197. Sensex numbers can be found at http:// www.bseindia.com/histdata/hindices2.asp, and foreign investment data is available at http:// dipp.nic.in/fdi_statistics/india_FDI_December2009.pdf. 3. Of course, the global economic recession that was finally acknowledged in 2008 has resulted in a few more reservations about liberalization, although the Congress Party’s 2009 electoral victory and the left’s decline in the polls have been seen by the ruling party as a mandate for accelerating the pace of economic reforms. 4. P. Sainath’s Everybody Loves a Good Drought is an invaluable resource, documenting the huge gaps between the metropolitan elite and the rural poor in the New India. 5. These figures are based on the most recent statistics. The statistics on rural poverty can be found in World Bank figures from 2005: <http://www.ruralpovertyportal.org/web/guest/ country/home/tags/india>. 6. For the figures on access to electricity, see Vijay Modi’s “Improving Electricity Services in Rural India.” 7. During this period, the traumatic partition of the subcontinent was followed by a war with Pakistan. The next few years saw some tumultuous changes as a result of Nehru’s develop- ment policies. 8. Much has been written about the “cultural turn” in the humanities, so I will not recount that debate. I would agree with Jameson that with the universalization of capitalism, the distinc- tion between culture and economics has collapsed, but with the codicil that in a transition economy such as the one in contemporary India, the effects of the universal commodity form and the international division of labor, especially as they apply in rural India, are not entirely conterminous with those in more homogenized Western societies. 9. There are of course notable exceptions to this general trend. I will mention just a few relevant titles that have been published in the last fifteen years: Aijaz Ahmad’s In Theory: Classes, Nations, Literatures (1992), Crystal Bartolovich and Neil Lazarus’s edited anthology 216 Notes Marxism, Modernity and Postcolonial Studies (2002), Timothy Brennan’s At Home in the World: Cosmopolitanism Now (1997), Neil Larsen’s Determinations: Essays on Theory, Narrative and Nation in the Americas (2001), Neil Lazarus’s Nationalism and Cultural Practice in the Postcolonial World (1999), Benita Parry’s Postcolonial Studies: A Materialist Critique (2004), Edward Said’s Culture and Imperialism (1994), and Gayatri Spivak’s Outside in the Teaching Machine (1993) and A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a History of the Vanishing Present (1999). 10. This political narrative is echoed in the world of the secular, popular cinema. Vijay Mishra, the cultural critic, argues that in popular cinema, narratives of the nation may be about the “general psychic repression of the unspeakable moment in recent Indian history: India’s par- tition” (218). He claims that “Bombay cinema disavows fundamentalism even as it repro- duces images that work on the logic of a [Hindu] fundamentalist binary” (230). According to Mishra, “cinema has confirmed the kinds of spectatorial identification with the need for a redemptive history against the demonic Muslim” (233). 11. A complete account of the events leading up to the protests, including documents produced by a group of intellectuals articulating their positions, can be found on the Centre for the Study of Developing Societies (CSDS) website. The archive can be accessed at <http:// www.cscsarchive.org:8081/MediaArchive/audience.nsf/(docid)/2335FA6E5FB3065D652 5694000457ACB?OpenDocument>. 12. The President of India, in his Republic Day address on January 26, 2000, could not ignore the contradictions of the economic ethos that was overpowering the nation. He pointed to the “unabashed vulgar indulgence in conspicuous consumption” as the root of many of the social problems in the country: “There is sullen resentment among the masses against their condition, often erupting in violent forms in several parts of the country . Many a social upheaval can be traced to the neglect of the lowest tier of society, whose discontent moves towards the path of violence. Dalits and tribals are the worst affected by all this. Our giant factories rise out of squalor; our satellites shoot up from the midst of the hovels of the poor. A decade of liberalisation has completely ignored the poor and needy. The three-way fast lane of liberalisation, privatisation, and globalisation has neglected to pro- vide ‘safe pedestrian crossings for the poor’ ” (“The President” 1). 13. Of course, the ongoing conflicts and regional movements, such as in the Northeast and in Kashmir, where ordinary people and rebels continue to fight for greater autonomy, as well as a greater share of national resources, remain a constant reminder of the fragility of the union. 14. To these acts must be added incidents of state-sponsored violence, most notoriously the communal violence unleashed in Gujarat against Muslims in 2002. 15. Sumit Sarkar’s Beyond Nationalist Frames: Postmodernism, Hindu Fundamentalism, History (2002) and Nivedita Menon and Aditya Nigam’s Power and Contestation: India Since 1989 (2007) are excellent guides for understanding the interactions between these forces. 16. Instead, quite the opposite has happened. The gap between the rich and the poor has increased; real employment remains elusive; and as for corruption, after economic reforms were instituted, as C. P. Chandrasekar and Jayati Ghosh point out, there was “an increase in the level of corruption, cronyism, and arbitrariness to unprecedented levels. Precious natural resources, hitherto kept inside the public sector, were handed over for a pittance (and alleged ‘kickbacks’) to private firms with dubious objectives. In short, the ‘discipline of the market’ proved to be a chimera” (38–39). 17. Calcutta was officially renamed Kolkata in 2000, to better approximate its Bengali pronun- ciation. It is one of the interesting ways in which state governments across the country have rooted themselves in a reductive link to a so-called tradition while simultaneously selling off or bartering its assets to foreign investors. Bombay has become Mumbai, Madras has become Chennai, and Bangalore is referred to by some as Bengaluru. Notes 217 Chapter 1 1. There are, of course, notable exceptions, especially among those who do not identify them- selves within an Anglo-American postcolonial tradition. These would include critics such as Aijaz Ahmad, Rustom Bharucha, Partha Chatterjee, Ranajit Guha, K. N. Panikkar, and Sumit Sarkar. All of these critics have examined cultural forms with a special attention to questions of political economy. 2. In his Liquid Times: Living in an Age of Uncertainty, Zygmunt Bauman points out the bare essentials of these class contradictions: “half of world trade and more than half of global investment benefit just twenty-two countries accommodating a mere 14 per cent of the world’s population, whereas the forty-nine poorest countries inhabited by 11 per cent of the world’s population receive between them only a 0.5 per cent share of the global product— just about the same as the combined income of the three wealthiest men of the planet. Ninety per cent of the total wealth of the planet remains in the hands of just 1 per cent of the planet’s inhabitants” (6). 3. Shortly before this speech, the BJP had won a massive victory in the state of Gujarat. The sig- nificance of this victory was not lost on the BJP, coming as it did after the Godhra massacres of 2002. The state-sponsored pogrom in Gujarat, which saw the murder of three thousand Muslims, made visible the great lie of the reforms and progress. 4. Friedman’s position on neoliberalism is all too well known; thus, I will not elaborate on it here. Outside his many columns in the New York Times, his most comprehensive eulogy on the New India can be found in a recent book, The World Is Flat: A Brief History of the Twenty- first Century. 5. There seems to be no dearth of appalling books about the New India. Leading the list is the patently offensive Think India by Vinay Rai and William Simon, a book written apparently for American businessmen that invites them to extract wealth from the country: “[i]n today’s world, national boundaries remain only for the weak-hearted. The great seekers of wealth look beyond boundaries and nationalities. India welcomes these seekers to its shores” (xv). 6. In an article in the New York Times, Saritha Rai summed up the issues discussed in a meeting of Indian and American CEOs, attended by Bush and U.S. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice: “a need to dismantle Indian commercial barriers, the development of basic infrastruc- ture, a strengthening of intellectual property rights and the building of special economic zones to foster joint ventures with American companies.” Each one of these “trade concerns” is for the benefit of American capital.