While it is undoubtedly true that the IT (information technology) revolution and other forms of globalisation have drastically transformed our life-world and its patterns of production and consumption in recent decades, we are still largely heirs to the Great Transformation of the 19th century, write Christophe Jaffrelot and Peter van der Veer in ‘Patterns of Middle Class Consumption in India and China’ (www.sagepublications.com).
A major aspect of that transformation is an increased rate of urbanisation, they explain. “Many of the consumption patterns that now define our lives originated in the global urban centres in the 19th and early 20th centuries, and in Europe they are captured in the literary imagination of Baudelaire in Paris, Henry James in London and Robert Musil in Vienna.”
City and the economy of fantasy
In societies that still have a majority of population living in rural areas, the city is a place that disrupts feudal arrangements and well-established obstacles to self-expression and is foremost a place of unlimited visibility of consumption, the authors describe. “This is even true, to an extent, for an economy of fantasy in which the urban poor participate.”
Compared to China, the authors find India to be more resistant in many ways to global consumer culture in the fields of sexuality and music. This is perhaps because under colonial conditions Indian culture became a site of resistance against foreign oppression, they suggest. “While China has suffered from imperialism too, it has never been colonised. Its modernisation project was in the hands of native leaders.”
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