Global India and the Production of Moral Subjects

This chapter examines how Global India is temporally and provisionally fixed by specific discourses of morality across four apparently discrepant nodes: conceptions of Resurgent India circulated via a government campaign and in popular discourse, moral panics surrounding the celebration of Valentine’s Day in India, representations of Global India in a Hindi film, and interviews with a working-class Sikh American woman in the San Francisco Bay Area. Each of these nodes suggests how subjects, variably situated along axes of class, religion, and gender, participate in the construction of Global India. The juxtaposition of these apparently disparate nodes underscores their overlaps as well as disjunctures to demonstrate that, instead of consolidating or reifying India, these constructions of Global India in fact unsettle substantialist notions of India and Indian culture and the presumptions of a single diasporic identity through moments of affective and temporal disconnect.