Gender, media, and modernity: The making of the ‘new Indian woman’ in liberalising India

Years later, during her fellowship at the Poynter Institute for Media Studies in the US in 2017, she found herself surrounded by people reclaiming their stories through memoir. “Growing up in India, the way we learn English means we rarely write in the first person,” Meera explains. “So it was freeing to be able to write about your family and yourself.” That sense of liberation runs deeply through her essays.

Drawing from journals she kept between 1997 and 2008, Meera invites readers to reflect on what the ‘new Indian woman’ represented in a rapidly neoliberalising India.

I

Growing up, Meera looked forward to the quiet afternoons after school, when she was allowed to watch Small Wonder on Star TV. “I hated homework and I hated having to go to school,” she recalls in her book, adding, “Small Wonder allowed me to dream of a different life in a foreign land where I didn’t have to wear uniforms and I could take magnets to school. The mother and father in the TV show were always cheerful while mine were tired and serious”.

The norms that governed her community were often at odds with her own aspirations. “Tamil Nadars were fiercely endogamous and married within their religion and caste for centuries. Meanwhile, I wanted to live in a novel, to create a magical life of my own,” she writes.

II

Economic reforms introduced in the mid-1980s under Rajiv Gandhi led to the liberalisation of state controls. To address a looming fiscal crisis, Gandhi’s 1985 budget reduced income, corporate and wealth taxes, cut import duties, eliminated licensing, and provided tax breaks to exporters, among other relaxations.

“One of the consequences of the reforms implemented by the mid-1980s was the emergence of a consumer goods economy,” notes academic Rupal Oza in The Making of Neoliberal India: Nationalism, Gender, and the Paradoxes of Globalization (2012). The new policies allowed India to import technology for producing consumer goods and assemble products domestically at lower labour costs.

By 1988, Meera’s house was among the 27 million in India that had television sets, a rise from 6.8 million in 1985. Oza describes this surge as emblematic of a rising middle class brought to the forefront by liberalisation.

As middle-class Indian pockets grew deeper, families had more disposable income to spend, as reflected in the growth in ownership of television sets, two-wheelers, refrigerators and washing machines, writes author Shrayana Bhattacharya in Desperately Seeking Shah Rukh (2021).

Yet, Oza cautions: “The middle classes in India are notoriously difficult to define and classify primarily because the difference between the lower middle class and the upper middle class is significant… In the absence of accurate and reliable demographic numbers, the middle classes have often been defined as the petty bourgeoisie of traders, small businessmen, and those in service occupations — especially in government jobs…”

III

Meera’s family was among the very few that belonged to the stratum of the Indian middle class in Sivakasi. “What one would witness in Sivakasi,” Meera says in her interview, “was a stark divide — either working-class poverty or immense wealth. Every family owned a business, and that business was usually a fireworks factory, a match factory, or a printing press. You could visit Sivakasi today, and it would probably look exactly the same as it did forty years ago: the same families are rich, and the same families are poor.”

Yet, one of the things Meera vividly recalls about her childhood was the spurt of media. “One of the most liberating things about the ‘90s was the media,” she said. “We weren’t allowed to do much. Honestly, the quarters we lived in at boarding school were so small and suffocating. So, in that tiny world of ours, music became predominant. We listened to a lot of Britney Spears and the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls were huge!”

Spice Girls (Wikipedia)

Her eyes gleam with excitement as she speaks about them. “There was all this imagery of young girls in the media, and it felt like – that’s who I want to be.”

Explaining her difficult relationship with mathematics, Meera writes: “The only place where my shame around maths lifted was in music class…Instead, when I went to bed at night, I began to dream up situations in which I was successful. I imagined that I’d be popular in college because I was a musician. I dreamed up smart boyfriends who’d dote on me, even though I was bad at maths…”

IV

These dreams weren’t those of Meera alone. Scholars note that the new consumer lifestyle fuelled popular imagination with aspirations. “The consumption lifestyle was bolstered by advertisements, newspapers, magazines, and television programs that filled the popular imagination with attitudes reflecting the new modern middle classes,” notes Oza. They saw their dreams of joining the ranks of global consumers finally turn true.

Within this changing landscape, gender roles were redefined. Indian women came to embody the nation’s modernity, and the figure of the “new liberal Indian woman.” Oza explains in her work that “the emergence of the “new liberal Indian woman” as the self-assured, independent, rich, and fashionable woman during this time became the mimetic trope of the nation in globalization.” In contrast to the idealised Bharatiya nari, the new-age women were confident, urban, and outspoken.

Popular magazines such as Femina, first published in 1959, re-launched in 1992 with the phrase: “for the woman of substance.” Simultaneously, international publications such as Elle and Cosmopolitan started their India editions.

Cover of the first number of Femina January 1, 1901 (Wikipedia)

Yet, much of this unfolded without eroding women’s traditional roles. “Efforts to sustain the patriarchal order within changing domestic arrangements required a shift whereby the new working woman was ‘figured as the professional career woman, often juggling work with the domestic responsibilities of ‘home and family, ’” writes Oza.

Citing a 1998 study conducted by the Indian government on time use, Bhattacharya writes, “The results echoed previous analyses [1977], finding that men had eight more hours each week for sleep, leisure and recreation. These findings have been consistent across time and place in India.”

V

Later in the book, Meera describes her new life in Chennai, where she got accepted to a women’s college. “The city was nothing like the valley. Cars and motorcycles thundered across the main road.” Among the joys she witnessed was her access to the works of Arundhati Roy, Vandana Shiva, and Jhumpa Lahiri, “and the world cracked open in front of me. Suddenly, in the 2000s, I noticed women everywhere. They were doctors and journalists and writers and artists. I knew they had always been there, but haunted by my own ghosts, I’d never noticed them before. Now, I felt possessed by the hope of womanhood.”

VI

The editor of Femina, Satya Saran, as cited by Oza, said that the new phrase targeted India’s “new woman”: “We realized that the Indian woman had changed, and there were so many new influences in her life, there was television, there was satellite television, all these foreign junkets she went on and the fact that there are more professionals in the field today …”

Yet, in India, safeguarding its ‘national culture,’ not all professions were encouraged. Women were expected to join respectable middle-class public service professions, such as medicine and engineering, but not smoke or drink. While women’s participation in waged labour was celebrated, they were to limit themselves within India’s model of modernity.

In her book, Bhattacharya finds that six out of ten women in urban India are employed by the service sector. “Within services, women work across a range of occupations. A third of all urban working women are professionals within institutions, private sector jobs or government administration.” However, she later adds that elite and middle-class women in the workforce are often left to negotiate with circumstances. “Managing work and family life becomes too heavy a burden to bear alone…The fact that men at our workplaces are paid much more than us for doing the same jobs, while treating us as somehow less serious, less willing to work hard, only serves to make it easier for us to quit. We, willingly or grudgingly, retreat into part-time, flexible arrangements at best, or, more likely, abandon the workplace altogether”.

“Thus,” notes Oza, “while Indian borders must be open to economic investment, Western value systems, seen as corrupting influences, must be policed and even censored.”

VII

The striking difference between Meera’s life in Sivakasi and Chennai was rooted in the uneven development that took place in India during the 1990s.

Globalisation in India had created a divided society: on one side was a growing global consumer market, and on the other were increasing inequalities made worse by rising prices of basic goods. “The growing disparities coupled with the retreat of the state began to generate frustration among citizen groups at the inability to reach either the corporate owners or the state for a redressal of inequity,” observes Oza.

Between 1994 and 1997, while economic indicators showed 6-7 percent GDP growth, Oza notes that other indicators of stability, such as foodgrain production and the consumer price index, presented a different scenario. She notes, “The Alternative Economic Survey (Delhi Science Forum 1997) reported that, despite good monsoons, food grain production during the eighth plan (1992-97) fell below the rate of population growth, which meant that large sections of the population went hungry. Along with this was steady inflation that raised the prices of food at a higher rate than other commodities”.

In 1997, the year that marked 50 years of independent India, economist Amartya Sen commented in the Frontline that India had faired only “moderately well” and that social inequity remained widespread. “These staggering social inequities,” Oza writes, “were further exacerbated after 1991 when the state withdrew its commitment to basic infrastructure development and social services.”

 VIII

In the epilogue of the book, Meera recalls her visit to Sivakasi in 2018. “I was struck by how little had changed. I grew up in the 90s, in a newly liberalised India that was different from my mother’s time, yet the discrimination and challenges that I faced were no different from generations of women before me.”

Her book is thus an effort to document experiences that compelled her to question her place in the world —  a struggle familiar to many women coming of age in neoliberal India.