Introduction

The labels ‘new India’ and ‘new Indian’ are now commonplace. Businesses hawking products or journalists and social commentators reporting on contemporary India use the label lavishly. There is a new India, which is different from what it was before, an unstated ‘old India’. Presumably there is also a new Indian, who is assumed to enjoy the fruits of a modern, industrial, dynamic India, neither bound by the past nor by provincial thinking. India and Indians are now modern and global. A street advertisement in the up-andcoming Salt Lake residential area outside Kolkata shows high–rise apartment buildings and makes no bones about exhorting passers-by to ‘live like the world does’, an oblique reference to the nouveau riche, whose financial standing is seen as no different from that of the citizens of affluent countries.

What reads like a caricature has been repeatedly reported by the popular and business press, nationally and internationally. The New York Times has made liberal use of the prefix ‘new’ to describe India, as in ‘the high life of young, exuberant New India’ (Sengupta 2008). The new India refers to the country's stirring middle class, its new-found wealth, changing consumption patterns that mimic Western lifestyles, and India's technological sophistication (Simmons and Kahn 2009a, 2009b).