Alongside the expert on native children, the colonial reformatory produced the native child, or at any rate, a widening set of arguments about its boundaries, content and varieties. Childhood was partially delinked from age, and constructed with reference to a ‘nature’ that was revealed by encounters with the judicial system and articulated in terms of plasticity and hardness. By interrogating nature, child-correction professionals sought to differentiate the plastic child (that might be detained) from the hardened adult (that must be rejected or released). The hardness or plasticity of nature was reflected in the inmate's natal society, in the crime itself, in the punishment, in the response to punishment, in sexual behaviour and in the juvenile body. Between child and adult, in the 1920s as in the 1860s, there existed not so much a line as a process — a zone of discipline, investigation and uncertainty. The reformatory, along with experimental concepts such as adolescence and precocity, lay within this gap of productive uncertainty.

As a penal institution, the juvenile reformatory was of course a part of the ‘carceral archipelago’ of colonial India. Its inmates entered not only as children but also as criminals. The two categories are closely related — Nasaw has pointed out that the pedagogical focus of modern child-saving requires the construction of children as delinquents.

Let us next turn to states in East Asia, or to be more precise, to the states of China and Japan. Just as in Europe, there is no doubting the formidable power of these entities. Indeed, the power of East Asian rulers was one of the things that most impressed the Europeans who visited this part of the world in the sixteenth century. The emperors of China and Japan, Jesuit missionaries and Dutch sea-captains reported, ruled like tyrants and everyone was forced to obey their commands. For the Europeans the kowtow – the practice of prostrating oneself flat on the ground before the ruler – became the symbol of what in the nineteenth century was known as ‘Oriental despotism’. In the twentieth century this image of East Asia as governed by omnipotent rulers was only strengthened as Japan subjected its citizens to fascism and much of the rest of Asia to imperialist rule, and as China was taken over by a dictatorship with totalitarian ambitions.

And yet these impressions were quite mistaken. For one thing, authority in the East Asian context was typically understood in personalized rather than in institutionalized terms. In both China and Japan people were seen as connected with each other through long chains of hierarchical relationships stretching from the bottom of society to the very top. These relationships were organized according to particularistic rather than universal rules.

In 1912, the government of Bombay decided to send Mohabat Khan, the twelve-year-old Nawab of Junagadh, to school in England for a year and a half. The decision set off a small firestorm of criticism in India as well as in England. The boy's mother, Asha Bibi, had not been consulted in the decision. In a series of petitions to British authorities at every level — the political agent, the Governor of Bombay, the Viceroy, the Secretary of State for India and the King — Asha Bibi demanded that her son be returned to her. Sections of the English press took up her cause; the Nation called the episode ‘kidnapping by order’. Nevertheless, the decision stood. The Nation's editors were dismissed by old India hands as naïve about the realities of imperial government and colonial society, and Asha Bibi was labelled a hysterical woman who did not understand her son's best interests.

The Mohabat Khan affair was emblematic of the larger conflict over the upbringing of the children of the princes. The new child-rearing schemes were welcomed by many Indians, including the princes themselves. The latter, in particular, recognized that this education increased their ability to move vertically and horizontally within the empire at a time when they were in some danger of becoming irrelevant. They embraced the ideological goals of colonial education, and the opportunities it provided for the reinvention of the Indian prince.

Expertise and experiments, rather than reformed children, were the prized products of the colonial reformatory. Not long after the initiation of the reformatory project in India, a curious assortment of career jailors, modernizing bureaucrats, native authority figures, women social workers, capitalists and religious colonizers had gathered under the umbrella of juvenile reform. As a group, they were similar to the ‘voluntary empire’ that Patricia Barton has identified in early twentieth-century entrepreneurial oversight, but not identical or coterminous, being much more closely affiliated with the state. Simultaneously, the increasing significance and authority of the ‘professional’ had expanded and complicated the qualifications that were required of the supervisors of institutionalized children. Under the circumstances, expertise and authority were not stable in their disciplinary, racial, geographical and gendered locations. They were contested continuously between ‘qualified’ professional and ‘unqualified’ worker, expert and expert, scientist and bureaucrat, birth parent and surrogate parent, European and native, metropolitan specialist and colonial improviser, institutional patriarch and female interloper.

This instability increased in the closing years of the nineteenth century as middle-class Indians became more assertive in the reformatory, because these men (and eventually women) brought with them their peculiar political imperatives.

In India in 1876, the colonial government passed the Reformatory Schools Act, providing a common structure of guidelines and rules to a mechanism of juvenile delinquency that had been taking shape in the provinces since mid-century. In the same decade, British educators and administrators in the princely states established the institutions that became known as the Chiefs' Colleges. Linking these apparently disparate episodes is the child: the criminalized child from the margins of native society, the effete child of the decadent aristocracy, and always, in the shadows, the European child that might serve as model, measure and foil. These childhoods emerged at a particular moment in the encounter between a western-European metropole, its imperial agents and people who would be described by Kipling as ‘half devil and half child’. Reformatories and boarding schools enabled experiments with the relationship between the devil and the child, and raised questions about whether devilry and childhood could co-exist. From the outset, as such, colonial child-saving developed as an ‘investigative modality’.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the dominant metropolitan assumptions about childhood were its plasticity and its innocence. These assumptions were hardly uniform, being contingent upon the location of the child on the metropolitan map of class, gender, race and urban/rural geography. Some children — the poor, the delinquent, the Irish, the gypsy, the girl, the homosexual, the ‘precocious’, the adolescent — were either more plastic and innocent, or less so, than others; germs of instability were ingrained in the Victorian child.

Every society has to decide on the degree of reforms it may accept by opening itself to others. It is a choice that is greeted with more or less optimism and anxiety depending on cultural and historical circumstances.When the balance is tilted in favour of anxiety, what might at other times have been considered an opportunity worth seizing begins to take on the character of threat or inescapable fate. And when it comes to discussions of globalization, however sophisticated they might appear, much of what is written is simply a reflection of the deepening sense of unease felt with this sort of dilemma.

There can be few other domains in which such anxiety is so palpable as the domain of agriculture; where what is presented as defence of tradition may be easily confused with the invention of new identities, new natural species and new definitions of place. This may be partly due to the curious fact that even the greatest enthusiasts of hybridity in other domains of culture seem considerably less willing to embrace this doctrine when it comes to the issue of what they eat. But it no doubt has even more to do with the actual inability to decide, in all sincerity, what is the most desirable path for developing countries: to stick to the policy of localism, the defence of traditional agricultural practices, and self-subsistence, or to recognize the limitations of such a strategy, concurring with Amartya Sen's view that ‘food self-sufficiency is a peculiarly obtuse way of thinking about food security’ (2002).

The first of the two epigraphs above is the masthead on the website of Hinduism Today, a magazine published in Hawaii since 1979, which enjoys a wide readership among overseas Hindus, especially in the United States. Using the standard modern phrase sanatana dharma or ‘eternal religion’ to refer to Hinduism, the epigraph is a striking example of how Hinduism may be proclaimed as a genuine global or world religion, flourishing as never before. The second epigraph comes from the website of a religious trust in Chennai (Madras) and it announces the Vedic Heritage Teaching Programme (VHTP), which was designed in America but is also being promoted in India. The epigraph, which equates ‘Indian’ culture with the ostensibly Vedic Hindu religious tradition, expresses a profound anxiety that westernization may soon lead to its extinction.

Optimistic confidence about global Hinduism and pessimistic concern about Hindu Indian culture are obviously antithetical. Nevertheless, they belong to the same discourse of globalized Hinduism and highlight a crucial ambiguity that runs through it.

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.