Resistance is Futile

Resistance is Futile

By Ben Woodruff

     Inderpal Grewal looks specifically at the middle class Indian people and their treatment among geopolitical interest groups. The impact of power on the lives of real people living in the United States and India is a very important. This impact specifically on Indians was the common theme through the chapters. The neoliberal view of Indians created “subjects gendered, classed, and radicalized in specific ways” (3) is the underlying thread. Grewal looked at rhetoric of feminism and how that impacted the view of the Indian women in a transnational framework.

     Grewal did not ignore the role of global commerce on this analysis. Grewel used the terms connectivities and collectiviies to explain how the separation of the production from the consumption alienates labor. It goes deeper than that though because the idea of how citizenship and the impact of the inherent inequality of who can become a citizen show that unevenness will propagate in this neoliberal system. 

     One obvious use of the model is the discussion of Mattel’s Barbie. Mattel did not chose to sell a more traditional looking Indian Barbie but instead sold the white Barbie from the United States. This Barbie was simply wearing the sari associated with India and so served to separate the Western view from the Indian reality. This was compounded by the Non-Resident Indian category created by the Indian government. This meant that the Non-Resident Indian (NRI) saw their lives reflected in the "white" Barbies found in the hotels and airport shops and so see themselves as markedly different than the Indians living in India. 

     This was very telling to me particularly. The dominant culture, that of the United States, has large impacts globally. In this case it fractured the view of what it meant to be "Indian" for those that lived outside of India.