The term ‘globalization’ resists attempts at narrow definition. Although discourses on the subject appear to relate to something ‘happening out there’ (Harriss 2001), its meanings are so diverse that a single definition proves elusive. However Baricco (2002) suggests that despite problems both of definition and understanding, we nevertheless have little difficulty in being for it or against it.

This can generate strange worlds. Ulf Hannerz cites the example of the winning song in a 1987 national song contest in Sweden, which excited strong protests not because it was a calypso sung by a Finn but because for some people its refrain, ‘Four Bugg [a brand of chewing-gum] and a Coca-Cola’, represented ‘cultural imperialism’, a ‘cocacolonization of the world’ (Hannerz 1989). Thus globalization may be understood as a euphemism for US imperialism (Harriss 2001), while various cultural hybrids might go unnoticed. This aspect of globalization is generally condemned. Other aspects – for instance, the need for universal cultural values – are often seen as desirable without a contradiction being perceived. Thus in the issue of Economic and Political Weekly containing Harriss's critique of the effects of economic globalization, we also find a debate about the right to disregard national sovereignty in order to safeguard monuments which ‘are part of a cultural heritage of humankind as a whole’ – in this case, the Bamiyan Buddhas (Hensman 2001). Reactions therefore vary according to what is globalized.

This chapter focuses on the processes by which a rural labour force in Tamil Nadu, South India, is recruited to produce for a global company. The intensification of global sourcing by networked enterprises has led to the mobilization of rural workers across the world to produce for the export market. However, little is known about the manner in which such enterprises subcontract work or about the ways in which rural labourers come to produce for a global commodity chain (Cox 1997: 11). This chapter aims to explore two sides of this issue.

Firstly, it examines the process by which the production of rag rugs for IKEA is subcontracted to weavers in a rural area of Tamil Nadu. It explores the ways in which caste, gender and kinship are central to the generation of a network of rural weavers at the tail end of a commodity chain.

Secondly, it focuses on the rural workers themselves: the opportunities that are available to them, and their decisions to weave or not to weave. It is suggested that the choices made by rural workers have to be understood in the context of local constraints imposed by highly fragmented labour markets and prevailing sexual divisions of labour. It is argued that in the area under consideration the rural labour markets are firmly segmented due to particular caste occupations, perceptions of work, gendered ideologies of skill, and sexual divisions of labour.

Introduction: A Problematic Category

Over the last decade, globalization has become the great shorthand description for a vast variety of social and economic processes in almost every part of the world. It is deployed to explain phenomena as diverse, often contradictory, and in a few instances also long-lived, as poverty, unemployment, environmental degradation, decline in public health and education, reduction in social spending and welfare measures, caste-based, religious or other forms of social violence, terrorism, the recrudescence of nationalism, and the loss of national sovereignty to market forces and international institutions. It is a ‘hegemonic category’ in that, although used in a staggering variety of ways and for diverse ends, both protagonists and critics alike usually take the term for granted and its meaning as self-evident. Three quite recent scholarly volumes on globalization open identically by describing the term either as a ‘catchword’ or a ‘cliché’ or both.

Yet scholars in the humanities and the social sciences feel irresistibly drawn to it: according to A. G. Hopkins, justifying his own venture into the area, and deprecating the reluctance of historians to even ‘recognize the subject’, ‘the analysis of the origins, nature, and consequences of globalization [is] (…) currently the most important single debate in the social sciences’.

According to a widely cited definition, globalization refers to the ‘widening, deepening, and speeding up of worldwide interconnectedness in all aspects of contemporary social life, the cultural to the criminal, the financial to the spiritual’.

March 2000, Kolhapur, Maharashtra, western India. It is noon on Saturday and the school day has just ended at the Vidyapeeth Marathi Shakha primary school, one of the oldest and most reputable Marathi-medium institutions in this southern town. We are in the teachers' room. The new Congress government in the regional state has just announced its decision to introduce compulsory English from Class I onwards. Ms Kalloli, the school principal, who has always publicly expressed her pride in her ‘Indian culture’ (Bhartiya sanskruti), is strongly opposed to such a measure. She is vehemently discussing the government's intention with her staff. I have known Kalloli Bai well for over two years. She is a strong-willed lady in her early fifties and is often rather outspoken. Yet never have I seen her behave so passionately. Her face is red with anger, her hair flying loose as she gestures forcefully in the course of her diatribe vituperating against what she sees as the new government's ‘populist policy’.

A few days later, when we meet again, Kalloli Bai takes up the topic afresh on her own initiative. Although she has cooled down by now, she makes no secret of how dear to her heart the issue of language is, shaking her head in negation: ‘No, it is definitely not good. It should not be done.’

To say that globalization has become the global cliché of our time has itself turned into a cliché in academic writing on the subject. By the end of the twentieth century, however, most social scientists, including anthropologists, acknowledged that globalization is a genuinely important topic of enquiry and that – despite its often ill-defined, catch-all connotations – it does label a distinctive transformative process that appears to have taken hold in many parts of the contemporary world, including India.

Definitions of globalization abound, but paraphrasing Held and his co-authors (1999: 14–15), we may initially define it as the widening, deepening and speeding up of global interconnectedness, a spatio-temporal process of change that links local or national social relations and networks with worldwide, global ones and thereby transforms ‘the organization of human affairs’. A particularly important aspect is the ‘deepening enmeshment of the local and global’, so that distant events may have more and more local significance, and vice versa (ibid.: 15). This aspect is one to which anthropologists can particularly contribute, and introducing their volume on the anthropology of globalization, Inda and Rosaldo point out that anthropology ‘is most concerned with the articulation of the global and the local’ (2002: 4), with how globalization interacts with particular societies and cultures, and how ordinary people themselves experience and understand the process.

This chapter examines the relationship between gender and globalization. It highlights the way in which education and aspirations for upward mobility, brought about by changing labour markets, have altered understandings of parenting and the division of work among women belonging to middle-class households in two Calcutta neighbourhoods.

Changes related to new forms of employment have influenced formal education in Calcutta and in turn modified the way middle-class women are involved in the daily work of raising children and running a household at different stages. Although mothers have contributed to schooling for generations, the emphasis on employment in multinational companies has brought about a shift in educational strategies towards private English-language education. This is increasingly seen as a precondition for occupational choices offered in the ‘global’ market, which demands the reorganization of parenting practices and the division of labour in the household.

When globalization is discussed with reference to the middle-class family or the ‘domestic sphere’, the politics of economic liberalization are held responsible for the widespread emergence of specific types of domestic organization in the context of consumerism and urbanisation among the new middle classes (Jamieson 1998; Giddens 1999). It is assumed that specific notions regarding the separation of a private and a public sphere, the nuclearisation of households, marital relations, and child-rearing practices are adopted in the process. The macro-politics of markets are held responsible for a more homogeneous pattern of household organization worldwide.

South India

Siddeshvara village in Bidar district, Karnataka, contained about 600 households and 4,000 inhabitants in 1997. Its cramped houses, made of a mixture of straw, stones and mortar, are linked by narrow lanes which are filled with water, rubbish, excrement and cow dung during the monsoon. The Siddeshvara temple overlooks the houses. A new statue recently installed by the members of the dominant caste of Virashaiva-Lingayats marks the entrance to the village. The climate is dry, there is little or no irrigation, harvests are disappointing, the local government is inefficient, and the state apparatus appears to be indifferent.

Shivaraj Mainalle lived in Siddeshvara. He was some 40 years old and the father of five children, the youngest of whom was in the primary school in the fifth standard. He owned 1.28 hectares of land and farmed 3.6 hectares as a tenant (lavani). In 1995– 97, he lost all his harvests because of parasitical worms and the vagaries of the weather. His debt to the local cooperative bank had risen to 24,000 rupees at the end of 1997 and he owed 80,000 rupees to a private moneylender in the village. The purchase of pesticides alone cost him more than 20,000 rupees. Notwithstanding this period of distress, his moneylender demanded his due.

For the film producers and distributors of Bombay (Mumbai), the foreign territories (or ‘the Overseas’) are not an abstract entity but an active field of transactions made up of unequally profitable areas. Called ‘the sixth territory’ on the distribution map, the Overseas are in fact a conglomerate of distant and fragmented spaces. If the Middle East, Africa and the traditional locations of the Indian diaspora have been among the privileged destinations for Indian film prints for many years, it seems that several elements altered the film production game significantly at the turn of the twenty-first century and considerably modified the status of the Overseas in the minds of Indian producers.

After the debacle of his film Trimurti (1995), the film director Subhash Ghai declared that he was making his next film Pardesh (shot partly in the United States, partly in Mysore) for the diaspora and that the latter was a more secure market than India itself. In spite of a more limited audience, the diaspora was offering incomparable profits and paradoxically seemed, to many filmmakers, to be more receptive and easier to reach than the local audience. The producers often used the rhetoric of globalization to justify strategic attempts to redirect their efforts towards this distant public, presented in the film press as an Eldorado to escape the crisis of local taste variability. This reorientation also seemed quite safe for many film professionals because it did not imply a major redefinition of their narrative conventions.

Sports and Subalternity

Subalternity, in this collection, has been interpreted in its widest possible sense. As defined twenty years ago by Ranajit Guha, the concept appears narrow and limited by its origins in Marxist theory (Guha 1982: 1–7). As it has been used over the last two decades it has taken on a broader meaning so that the ‘subaltern’ is the dominated party in any power relationship and the study of subalternity is of relationships characterised by ‘dominance without hegemony’. The importance of the concept of subalternity lies in its recognition of the ‘autonomous domain’ of the subaltern agent or agents. While dominated, the subaltern is not entirely obliterated and retains values, ideas and modes of action that are not prescribed by the dominant and which can draw upon beliefs and experiences exclusive to the individual or group. In other words the subaltern always has the potential to oppose or resist the dominant as he or she may draw upon alternative values and ideas and can refer back to different experiences and behavioural expectations. As such the position of the dominant group is often a precarious de facto arrangement rather than a generally accepted de jure agreement (Ludden 2002; Chaturvedi 2000).

Sports invite subalternity. In the first place this is because sports, especially those organized games of the modern period, are all about contest and competition in which victory or defeat are the anticipated outcomes of the exercise.

Football, the State and the Stateless in the Modern High Himalayas

It was with those few words that the Jesuit missionary Ippolito Desideri filed the first sports report from Tibet early in the 18th century. Nearly three hundred years later a delighted striker for the exile Tibetan football team, Tenzin Dargyal, was quoted as saying that despite their 4-1 defeat by Greenland ‘I have never been so happy in my life’. His team had actually gained an early lead when Lobsang Norbu had scored in the 11th minute of the game. But Tenzin emphasised that ‘We're not playing for winning or losing. We're playing for the Tibetan people’ (www.friends-of-tibet.org.nz/news/july_2001).

Introduction

In June 2003 Manipur beat Bengal 2-0 in the 11th Women's National Football Championship to clinch the title. The newspapers reported it as a straightforward affair. Manithombi Devi and Sakhitombi Devi were the goalscorers in the 5th and the 50th minutes and while The Hindu newspaper noted that ‘in Alpana Seal Bengal had a gifted midfielder who single-handedly tried to control the proceedings’ (The Hindu 25/06/2003) overall it felt that this was ‘to no avail against the nimble-footed Manipuris’. Indeed, a little research shows that Manipur had strolled the competition. Over the course of the four games in the competition they had scored nine goals and conceded only once. A longer perspective still on this game further reinforces the impression that Manipur were deserved champions. Since the competition began they had won nine of the eleven trophies and had beaten Bengal in the final in each of those nine victories. 2003 was their sixth Championship in a row and was perhaps their most remarkable. The date of the competition clashed with the Asian Football Confederation's Women's Championships and eleven Manipuri players had travelled to Thailand with the Indian international squad. Many of the Manipuri team were thereforerelative newcomers and A. Sakhitombi Devi, the hero of the final who set up the first goal and scored the second, was making her debut for the state team.

Introduction

V. S. Naipaul once wrote of his native Trinidad that ‘we were a society with no heroes, except cricketers’. In other times and other places too it is sportsmen who have often most fully embodied the hopes of the lowly and dispossessed. Naipaul's sentiments would be recognized by blacks in the Chicago ghetto, who honour no hero other than Michael Jordan, and by mulattos in the slums of Buenos Aires who are devotees of the deity Diego Maradona. They would also have been appreciated by an Indian not generally known for his interest in sport, Dr B. R. Ambedkar. As an Untouchable boy placed by the accident of birth at the bottom of the Hindu hierarchy Ambedkar, the future draughtsman of the Indian Constitution, took as his hero a slow left-arm bowler named Palwankar Baloo. Year after year Baloo dominated the Bombay Quadrangular which was the showcase cricketing tournament of India at that time. He was one of the first great Indian cricketers and among the earliest public figures to emerge from the ranks of the Untouchables. Now almost wholly forgotten, Palwankar Baloo commanded enormous respect inside and outside his community during his lifetime. Consider thus a little, thirty-page biography published in Poona in 1959 as part of a series of Marathi tracts with the running title ‘Kahintari Navech Kara!’ or ‘Do Something Distinctive!’ Priced at half-a-rupee these booklets were aimed at school and college kids presumed to be in search of role models.

Introduction

In the well-known Bhagavad Gita section of India's Mahabharata epic, Krishna elaborates a view of duty and action intended to convince Arjuna that, as a member of the warrior caste (ksatriya), he must overcome all his doubts and take up arms, even against his relatives. As anyone familiar with either the Mahabharata or India's second great epic, the Ramayana, knows martial techniques have existed on the South Asian subcontinent since antiquity. Both epics are filled with scenes describing how the princely heroes obtain and use their humanly or divinely acquired skills and powers to defeat their enemies: by training in martial techniques under the tutelage of great gurus like the brahmin master Drona, by practicing austerities and meditation techniques which give the martial master access to subtle powers to be used in combat, and/or by receiving a gift or a boon of divine, magical powers from a god. On the one hand, there is Bhima who depends on his brute strength to crush his foes, while on the other, we find the ‘unsurpassable’ Arjuna making use of his more subtle accomplishments in single point focus or his powers acquired through meditation.

Among practitioners and teachers of kalarippayattu, the martial art of Kerala on the southwestern coast of India, some, like Higgins Masters of the P.B. Kalari in Trissur, model their practice on Bhima, emphasizing kalarippayattu's practical empty hand techniques of attack, defence, locks and throws.